III
It is possible to present the image of a man in three anecdotes.
- Nietzsche
Anecdote 1 (Oblomov).
Oblomov sat in the Registration of Acts of Civil Status office chewing absentmindedly on a piece of his shirt. He was getting married. So far, he had been getting married for the past two and a half days. Although the line had not shrunk, the piece of it that was in front of him had gotten considerably smaller. Unaccountably, at least a third of those occupying it were mustachioed old ladies in bulky woollen stockings and headkerchiefs. Once in a while, two of them would start fighting, and Oblomov would become happy. It was as if the inexplicable old ladies were placed there so that he would be amused. Oblomov's melancholia would return when it occurred to him that evidently dying was as much an act of civil status as getting married. Every half-hour or so, Oblomov would faintly recall the disconcerting fact that he had not seen his bride-to-be since last Wednesday, when her father had taken him mushroom-picking. The old man had had a permanent frown that somehow came off as a grotesque grin; he swigged counterfeit Stolichnaya straight from the bottle and periodically emitted guttural noises, apparently to suggest camaraderie.
His fiancee worked in a glass office downtown with a long, much-behyphened number on the door. In order to begin looking for it, Oblomov had to pass two receptionists and two security desks (the company was of course Western). The company, which specialized in beef processing equipment, was afraid that a mafiosi or a terrorist would smuggle weapons of mass destruction into its headquarters. What the aborigines at the company knew and the bigwigs didn't was that the two large-jowled guards at the second desk--who each wore a velvet blazer with a flask in the front left inside pocket--were well-paid employees of Vas'ka Cueball. In a sense, Vas'ka was the company's competitor: he knew nothing about cows or robotic chopping arms, but he certainly knew a lot about processing meat. As long as it was the proper species, Vas'ka did whatever he wanted to his meat, and as a result was able to buy himself a new Land Rover every year. Oblomov did not care about this; what he wanted was to see his fiancee, but it always took nearly an hour to find her office and she was always on the phone. Their communication would be reduced to her gesticulating like a sinner in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Eventually, Oblomov would give up and go home. He rode the empty subway for an hour, fried some meat pies on a skillet, and stared at the dumpster outside his window until the sun set. There was a television set in his living room, but all it played was "Swan Lake." Whenever there was a commercial break, it would start over. Oblomov did not know what happened at the end of "Swan Lake."
Once, he realized that he had been living like this for a month. It was then that he had decided to get married.