The Last Hiccup (13 page)

Vladimir arrived in Moscow just as night settled in. Rather than procure accommodation, he wandered the cold streets alone and kept as far away from passersby as possible. He walked the Garden Ring, the circular avenue that wraps like a rubber band around the center of Moscow, several times until he grew tired and took refuge in a secluded spot behind the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre. The theater was a marvel to behold, a fusion of traditional Russian architecture with Ukrainian baroque elements imported from Central Europe. Built in 1824 after the ancient Petrovka Theatre had been brought down by fire, the Bolshoi Theatre had housed ballet and opera for over a century. Tonight the theater was premiering Boris Asafyev's musical reworking of
The Storm
, a play by Alexander Ostrovsky — a hulking ogre of a man, cruel but funny, and dead in 1886 of acute cardiac arrest. The crowd entering through the front doors was a mixture of theater critics, the genuinely curious, and traditional opera fans come to sneer in derision at Asafyev's modernist drama.
Vladimir ignored the crowd and dozed off gently against the theater's back wall.

Vladimir awoke the next morning at dawn to the repetitive clank of a sledgehammer. He stood up, observed the deluge of snow that had fallen while he slept and then peered through an open window. Six workers, maybe as many as eight, were removing bricks from a wall inside. Behind them were two soldiers with guns slung over their shoulders. An old woman carrying a parcel full of books was passing by, staying close to the theater wall to avoid the fresh accumulation of snow.

Vladimir tapped her on the shoulder. “What are they doing?” he said.

The woman brought her eyebrows together and cast him a curious look. “What?” she hollered.

Vladimir repeated his query.

“I'm quite hard of hearing,” the woman said. “You'll have to speak loudly.”

Vladimir pointed inside the open window. “What are they doing?” he said.

The gray-haired lady shuddered a weary sigh; weary for the morning's chill, weary for this dotard and his relentless look of confusion, weary for the new world in which the elderly were forced to sell their parents' books — family heirlooms every one of them — to pay for bread and poultry. She stood up on her toes to peer inside. “Hold my bag and I'll go ask,” she said. The old woman shoved her parcel into Vladimir's hands and, before he could stop her, she walked through an open doorway and right up to the soldiers. Vladimir ducked behind the wall while the old woman was inside. A minute passed before she returned.

“They're looking for Yakov's treasure,” she said, largely satisfied with herself.

“Who's Yakov?” Vladimir said.

“You are an uneducated one, aren't you?”

“Well, do you know who he is?” Vladimir said, and before he knew it, she was shuffling off through the doorway to talk to the soldiers again. Vladimir ducked down a second time, wary of drawing unwanted attention. Two minutes later the old woman returned.

“Yakov is Yakov Bruce,” she said. “Apparently he's been in all the news sheets recently. Yakov was an alchemist who practiced black magic back in the 1700s. The soldiers are searching for his books now. They say his books contain maps to locate treasures buried around Russia.”

“Is that true?” Vladimir said.

“I'm not sure. I can go ask if you like,” she said.

Vladimir put his hand on her shoulder. “No. That will be all right,” he said.

The old woman looked down at her parcel full of volumes bequeathed to her by birthright, those she would be forced to sell that morning to feed her starving family. “Now do an old lady a kindness and help me carry these. It won't be but a few blocks.”

Vladimir threw his bag over his shoulder and took one last look back at the theater. Here was Russia's present, chiseling away at its past. And beside it was Vladimir, nescient to both, so long had he been away. Vladimir had missed much. If a dozen revolutions had come and gone, he hadn't been informed. He assisted the elderly woman a total of seven city blocks — considerably more than she'd specified — before parting company with her outside of a shop specializing in antiques. He watched her storm inside and immediately begin berating the man at the front desk about the value and importance of her family's books. “Here I have a seminal work by Maximilian Voloshin!” she declared. “This volume contains the banned verses of Osip Mandelstam!”

The door slammed shut and Vladimir continued west in the direction of the hospital.

He stopped in the ankle-deep slush outside the hospital gates. When last he had passed through these rusted metal doors, he'd been stolen away in the middle of the night, a dense sleep precluding him from knowing he had even left. Returning on this winter's day, he was no longer that troubled young boy Alexander had been forced to deliver to Gog. For the first time that he could remember, Vladimir was excited. He was excited about starting his new life, excited to see Sergei and Alexander again. Vladimir walked through the light snowfall with a smile across his face, entered the hospital's front doors and marched up the stairs to the fifth floor, where the doctors' offices were located. Sergei's office was first. Vladimir stopped outside the door and checked his reflection in a shiny brass plaque on the wall. He bared his teeth in front of the memorial. He rubbed his finger across his incisors to ensure they were clean. He checked his breath for odor, straightened his jacket, removed his hat to reveal his newly shorn hair and knocked on the office door.

A short, bald man with a walrus mustache and a hunch about his shoulders answered.

“Where's Dr. Namestikov?” Vladimir said.

The man had just taken a bite out of a creamy pastry and almost choked when he heard the first hiccup emerge from Vladimir's mouth.

“How long have you been hiccupping?” the man said.

“Twelve years.”

The man dropped his
vatrushka
and gave Vladimir a stunned look. He poked his head out into the hallway, shifted his eyes side to side and then retreated into the office. At the last moment he whispered in a hushed voice, “If anyone asks, I never saw you.” The man slammed the door shut and fastened the lock on the other side.

Puzzled, Vladimir headed down the hallway to find Alexander. He arrived at the location of the doctor's office to discover the door missing. A stack of brown boxes was piled chest-high inside. Vladimir peered past them to find even more boxes and, beyond that, a few shelves covered in a thin but discernable layer of dust. He examined the door frame for Doctor Afiniganov's name or any indication to prove Alexander had once taken residence here. There was none. Vladimir began to doubt his memory. He'd only ever been up to these offices twice before, both times to see Sergei. This might not even be the right floor.

Vladimir walked down the stairs in the direction of the administration office. He remembered every twist and turn of the hallways, every stain in the ceiling and missing chip of paint on the walls. The sides of the hallway were still covered in the crash marks of gurneys and strange, unexplained blotches of discoloration from long ago. Vladimir turned down a second hallway. Along the way he passed two patients and a nurse, each of whom cast him an inquisitive gaze. Whereas years ago the looks of others were characterized primarily by curiosity, sometimes even sympathy, these stares were layered with suspicion.

Something had changed.

Something was different here.

Vladimir approached the administration desk. Three large green chairs sat unoccupied behind the counter. He rang a small bell atop a stack of papers. The instant the bell rang, one of the chairs moved. Vladimir leaned forward. The middle chair was occupied by a slight woman with a mouse's face, her torso hidden in an oversize olive-colored blanket. She'd been fast asleep when he arrived and only after a half minute of Vladimir's repetitive yelping did she finally stir and begin to clear thick chunks of debris from her eyes.

A rustling of feet sounded from across the hall and a second woman came to the desk. This one was large, wide-eyed and fully awake. “Sir, how long have you been hiccupping?” the large woman said. “Sir, I'm asking you a question.” The mouse-like woman jumped to her feet. “He's not hiccupping. He's just pretending to hiccup to get a rise out of you. Isn't that right?” She flashed Vladimir a subtle glare that told him to go along with her.

Vladimir nodded and held his breath to keep the yelps in. The small woman walked around the counter and grabbed Vladimir by the elbow. “I'm going to take this funny man here out for a walk. I'll be back soon.” She pulled strongly on Vladimir's arm. Unsure quite what to do, Vladimir followed her lead and allowed the woman to drag him all the way outside through the exterior doors. Once out in the snow, the woman let go of his arm and took a long look at him.

“Vladimir?” she said. “Is it really you?”

“How do you know my name?”

“It's Ilvana. Ilvana Strekov. I'm a nurse's aide here at the hospital. I traveled with you and Doctor Afiniganov to Mongolia.”

A sudden recollection triggered in Vladimir's brain. The coach ride up and down the valley. The hulking Siberian oaf who carried him through the marsh. That messy puddle of drool he left in that frail woman's lap. Vladimir squinted and looked closely. He remembered a nurse trailing along toward the back of their procession as they approached Gog's residence. But he couldn't quite recall her features. Ten years had passed. Would this Ilvana have looked the same back then? Would she have had the same hardened wrinkles about her eyes, the same quill of white hair set in a bun atop her head?

“How do you know it's me?” he said.

“Well, you've grown into a young man — a handsome one, I might add.” She looked into his wide brown eyes and then down to his strong jaw and high cheekbones. “I would recognize your eyes anywhere,” she said. “Plus, there's . . .”

“The hiccupping . . .”

“Yes, the hiccupping. My God, Vladimir, have you been hiccupping all this time?”

“I have,” he said. “But it doesn't affect me anymore. I hardly notice it. I found peace standing in the Waterfall of Ion . . .” Vladimir was about to launch into a long, detailed account of the last ten years of his life when Ilvana Strekov grabbed him by the arm again and led him farther away from the building.

She shot a nervous glance at the hospital walls and whispered, “You can't be here. It's not safe. You don't know what they'll do if they find you.”

“But I came to see Doctor Namestikov and Doctor Afiniganov. I want to thank them for everything they did for me.”

As Vladimir spoke, Ilvana's eyelids started to droop. She faltered a little on her feet. Before her eyes closed fully, Vladimir touched her on the shoulder.

“Doctor Afiniganov is dead!” Ilvana shouted, startling herself awake. She moved in close. “Alexander died a year and a half ago.”

“What about Doctor Namestikov?”

“He's here.”

“Then may I see him?”

“It's not that easy.”

“Is this about the war? About the Germans?”

She shook her head. “It has nothing to do with that.”

“Please, I must see him. He was like a father to me. I can wait if his schedule's full.”

Ilvana stole another wary glance back at the building and then whispered in Vladimir's ear. “I will arrange for you to see him. Return here, to this very spot, at midnight tonight. I'll be waiting by the doors. I promise to do everything in my power to ensure that you speak with Doctor Namestikov in person. He can explain the rest to you. But you must swear to me that you won't speak to a single living soul until that time — not at the hospital or in a restaurant or even on the street. You must stay out of sight and most definitely out of earshot. Do you understand?”

Vladimir nodded.

“Good. Then I will see you tonight.”

With those words, Ilvana Strekov stole her way back into the building, leaving Vladimir to stand outside in the cold and the snow.

That evening he would return to discover the shock of his life.

Fourteen hours after he had left the premises, Vladimir found himself back in the exact same spot where Ilvana had left him. Hiccupping and hungry, he waited in the snow, an utterly conspicuous figure standing alone with a shoulder bag containing all of his worldly possessions. Forty minutes passed and Vladimir was starting to believe that Ilvana would never arrive. Finally, he heard a loud thump from the other side of the door where the nurse's aide was to emerge. He waited for some kind of signal for him to approach — a second thump, the rap of knuckles against aluminum, Ilvana's voice maybe. When a full minute passed and still Vladimir had heard nothing, he approached the entranceway.

The door was slightly ajar. Vladimir pulled on the handle and out flopped the unconscious body of Ilvana Strekov. The poor thing had fallen asleep against the inside of the doorway, her hand still attached to the key in the door handle. Vladimir tapped her gently on the cheek. When she didn't respond, he shook her, softly at first and then vigorously, until she woke up.

“What happened?” Ilvana said.

“You tell me.”

Ilvana stood up. She wiped the snow off of her elbow. “I must have dozed off,” she said. “The doctor is waiting for you.”

With deliberate stealth, Ilvana — now fully awake — hurried Vladimir through a series of corridors and stairwells. After her brief respite against the doorway, she appeared to be an entirely different person. Determined. Knowledgeable about the path the two of them should follow. They exited the main building and hurried across a shadowy courtyard before entering a second building using a set of keys the nurse's aide kept in her uniform pocket.

The moment they walked through this door, Vladimir was overwhelmed by a flush of thick, gloomy air. In a single breath, he inhaled a blood-splatter collage of torment, fear and lunacy. His stomach retched. Vladimir felt light-headed. His knees wobbled slightly. Ilvana grabbed his elbow and ushered Vladimir up a flight of stairs and down another corridor, this one resembling the aftermath of a battle scene, gross with the stench of urine and filled with agonized screams originating from closed doors on either side. Two passed-out bodies littered the hallway. Ilvana stopped at an apparently random door. With the terror of this place building around her, she fumbled before inserting the key in the hole. Finally she pulled Vladimir inside and closed the door.

They'd entered a small room consisting of two chairs, a single table and a flickering light bulb dangling precariously from a frayed wire overhead. The barren walls contained no window. The room was like a prison cell with white walls instead of bars. Ilvana motioned for Vladimir to sit in one of the chairs and then hurried off through a door at the end of the room. In her haste, she left the door ajar. Vladimir could hear her speaking with someone down the hall. After a few seconds, the voices stopped. Vladimir was waiting in his chair when the most curious noise emerged from beyond the doorway. Someone was hiccupping.

The hiccups sounded all wrong to Vladimir. The volume of each yelp varied from convulsion to convulsion. Moreover, the interval between each hiccup was inconsistent. Vladimir could have set a metronome by the sound of his. Every 3.7 seconds, another hiccup was destined to shoot forth from his mouth. This sound echoing down the hallway was regular, there was no doubt. But upon close inspection, miniscule discrepancies in their duration and spacing revealed that these hiccups lacked the steadiness of Vladimir's own. There was something else they lacked, something entirely crucial that a casual observer might not notice but that Vladimir found patently obvious — urgency. These hiccups lacked the pressing, critical need to escape the dark cell from which they came.

A series of hushed whispers sounded. They were growing closer. Then a single set of footsteps clambered down the hall, accompanied strangely by the jangle of chains. A face appeared in the doorway. It was one Vladimir would have known anywhere. But it had changed forever.