Double Easyread Large Edition

CHAPTER I It was nearly eight o''clock in the morning when the titular councillor1 Yakov Petrovich Goliadkin came to after a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes all the way. For some two minutes, however, he lay motionless on his bed, like a man who is not fully certain whether he is awake or still asleep, whether what is happening around him now is a reality or a continuation of the disordered reveries of his sleep. Soon, though, Mr. Goliadkin''s senses began to receive their usual everyday impressions more clearly and distinctly. The dirtyish green, sooty, and dusty walls of his little room, his mahogany chest of drawers, the imitation mahogany chairs, the red-painted table, the oilcloth Turkish sofa of a reddish color with little green flowers, and finally his clothes, hastily taken off the night before and thrown in a heap on the sofa, all gazed at him familiarly. Finally, the gray autumn day, dull and dirty, peeked into his room through the dim window so crossly and with such a sour grimace that Mr. Goliadkin could in no way doubt any longer that he was not in some far-off kingdom but in the city of Petersburg, in the capital, on Shestilavochnaya Street, on the fourth floor of a quite large tenement house, in his own apartment. Having made this important discovery, Mr. Goliadkin convulsively closed his eyes, as if regretting his recent dream and wishing to bring it back for a brief moment. But after a moment he leaped out of bed at a single bound, probably hitting finally upon the idea around which his scattered, not yet properly ordered thoughts had been turning. Having leaped out of bed, he ran at once to the small round mirror that stood on the chest of drawers. Though the sleepy, myopic, and rather bald-pated figure reflected in the mirror was precisely of such insignificant quality as to arrest decidedly no one''s exclusive attention at first sight, its owner evidently remained perfectly pleased with all he saw in the mirror. ''''What a thing it would be,'''' Mr. Goliadkin said half-aloud, ''''what a thing it would be if something was amiss with me today, if, for instance, something went wrong--a stray pimple popped out somehow or some other sort of unpleasantness occurred; however, so far it''s not bad; so far everything''s going well.'''' Very glad that everything was going well, Mr. Goliadkin put the mirror back in its former place, and, despite the fact that he was barefoot and still wearing the costume in which he was accustomed to go to bed, he rushed to the window and, with great concern, began searching with his eyes for something in the courtyard on which the windows of his apartment gave. Apparently whatever he was searching for in the yard also satisfied him completely; his face lit up with a self-satisfied smile. Then--though not without having first peeked behind the partition into the closet of his valet Petrushka and made sure that Petrushka was not in it-- he tiptoed to the desk, unlocked one of the drawers, rummaged about in the hindmost corner of that drawer, finally took out a shabby green wallet from under some old yellow papers and trash, opened it warily, and peeked carefully and with delight into its remotest secret pocket. Probably a wad of green, gray, blue, red, and multicolored bits of paper looked back quite affably and approvingly at Mr. Goliadkin: with a beaming face he placed the opened wallet on the table before him and rubbed his hands energetically as a sign of the greatest pleasure. Finally he took it out, his comforting wad of banknotes, and for the hundredth time--that is, counting only from yesterday--began to re-count them, painstakingly rubbing each leaf between his thumb and index finger. ''''Seven hundred and fifty roubles in banknotes!'''' he finished finally in a half-whisper. ''''Seven hundred and fifty roubles...a significant sum! An agreeable sum,'''' he went on in a voice trembling and slightly faint with pleasure, squeezing the wad in his hands and smiling sigDostoyevsky, Fyodor is the author of 'Double Easyread Large Edition', published 2005 under ISBN 9781400044702 and ISBN 1400044707.