The Last Hiccup (14 page)

Sergei Namestikov stood in the doorway, a shadow of the man he once was. His wrists and ankles were bound by chains. His once-proud mane of dark hair had all but disappeared, replaced by a circular bald patch atop his head and long, shaggy gray locks flowing down the back of his neck. Whereas once his face had maintained a close, clean shave, a beard had taken root at the tip of his chin, spurting forward in wild chunks of gray and white. He was wearing a bright blue hospital gown, the kind the patients wore in the psychiatric unit. It clung to his chest, where his bones formed a stepladder up to his neck. Down below, the gown was cut short at the thighs to reveal his bony white knees. Sergei had lost so much weight. Every few seconds, a hiccup emerged from his mouth.

Sergei raised his chained hands in exhilaration. “Vladdy, my boy! Is it really you?”

Vladimir was almost too stunned to speak. “Yes,” he said.

“Oh, how long I've waited to see your face again. I always knew you'd return.”

Sergei's eyes shifted.

He leaned in close.

“You haven't come here to kill me, have you?”

“No,” Vladimir said.

“Because they're sending someone to kill me — that's the rumor anyways.”

“Please,” Vladimir said, “you must tell me what happened. Why are you in here? Why are you hiccupping? Did I give you the hiccups?”

Sergei let out a wild laugh. “Of course not, my boy. You can't catch the hiccups from someone.” His laughter descended from uncontrolled hilarity into a slight, humorless gurgle and then disappeared altogether. For the first time since he entered the room, Sergei seemed to notice that Vladimir was still hiccupping. A sadness filled his expression. “So no one was able to cure you after all, were they?”

Vladimir took a seat at the table. He beckoned Sergei to join him. With great caution, the doctor sat down across from Vladimir.

“I found peace in my soul in the Waterfall of Ion . . .” Vladimir launched into a long, detailed account of the past ten years. From the carriage ride delivering him into the valley at the base of the great Burkhan Khaldun mountain, to the death of Tomchar under the waterfall, to Gog's silence and the path he forced Vladimir to walk every day, to the year he spent in the wild, culminating in his forced entry into the Waterfall of Ion — Vladimir lay the last decade bare before Sergei.

The doctor listened intently. When it was all done, Sergei's eyes turned red. He slammed his fist on the table. “That blasted Alexander!” Sergei hit the hard metal surface three times until Vladimir was forced to reach out and take his hand. Sergei leaned forward, their hands still linked, and whispered in Vladimir's ear. “I know I can trust you,” he said between hiccups. “You were like a son to me. You would never hurt me. You would never take their side, would you?”

“Never,” Vladimir said. “You helped me when I was a little boy. I'll never forget that. I would do anything for you.”

“Good,” Sergei said. He let go of Vladimir's hand. Sergei looked back down the hallway to ensure they were alone. He glanced under the table and shifted his eyes around the room. Finally satisfied, he looked Vladimir square in the eye. Sergei stopped hiccupping. Just like that. In a single instant, his hiccups disappeared, leaving Vladimir's convulsive yelps to fill the air alone.

Vladimir's eyes grew wide. “How did you do that?”

Sergei rubbed the long gray whiskers on his gaunt face. “I've been faking them this whole time.”

“For how long?”

“For eighteen months now — a full year and a half,” Sergei said.

Vladimir couldn't tell whether Sergei was proud of his accomplishment or heartbroken that it had come this far. “Why would you do that?” he said.

“Because of Alexander, that cad!” Sergei exclaimed. He slammed his fist again in anger.

Vladimir cast a brief glance at the open doorway. Ilvana still hadn't come back. “Please,” he said. “Explain everything to me. Start at the beginning.”

Sergei rubbed his eyes. They seemed to have aged a hundred years since Vladimir last saw them, their esteemed influence fading and leaving an unhinged turmoil in its place. Sergei heaved as though he might begin to convulse. He scraped his fingers along the sides of his face. “I will start, as you suggest, at the beginning,” he said.

“In the evening hours before Alexander stole you away from the hospital,” Sergei said, “I suffered both my greatest indignity and what would amount to the greatest triumph of my entire life. I caught Alexander in the arms of my wife. Technically she was my ex-wife, but that is no matter. She was my wife. We exchanged vows before a priest in a garden under cherry trees. She promised to love me until death do us part, in sickness and in health, in front of two hundred witnesses. My grandmother was there. Members of congress were invited. Several attended. What matter is it that years later we signed a piece of paper stating the marriage was null and void? We took vows in the name of Christ! And then to find her in Alexander's arms, to have her kiss his lips and dangle off him as though she were some new appendage he'd grown out of his kidney — what heights of humiliation was I expected to accept? What manner of man would I be if I stood by impotent and weepy-eyed as they cavorted shamelessly in front of me?

“I picked up a swirling mass of red, pink and purple wine and I dashed it upon her. Oh, Vladimir, I can't tell you what exhilaration it is to strip someone of their dignity after they've deliberately stolen yours.” For a single moment Sergei's eyes recaptured a little of their old shine. “I was dragged from that place and tossed in the street like a dog. Two thugs roughed me up in an alley. They left me to crawl to my car, bleeding and battered, with bruises all over my face. But I didn't care. They could have killed me then and there and I would have died happy.

“That evening I returned home and the first thing I did was give my maid Tatiana a stiff pounding from behind. Oh, don't look at me like that. The poor dear had pined for me for months. I had at her like an untamed beast and then collapsed in my bed, covered in sweat, blood and semen. Covered in life! As I penetrated my maid's large, supple entry, never could I have imagined that at that very moment, Alexander and his cronies were stealing you away. How appropriate it was for Alexander to do his dirty work in the basest of all hours, where criminals and drug addicts roam free and the meek and incredulous rule the dark of night.

“When I arrived at the hospital the next day, my first action was to go to your bedside. I'd hardly slept, so great was my worry. I knew after that afternoon at Markus's office, there was something deep inside that you couldn't control. A darkness had crept into the innermost reaches of your soul. I had to find you, to speak to you, to reason with you, to care for you not as a physician, but as a father would. You weren't in your bed. I stormed through the hospital floor you'd called home for two years, searched every room, peered in every deserted crook and cranny. I summoned all available members of the staff and we divided into groups. When our search of the hospital revealed nothing, we stretched out into the streets. I had orderlies, nurses and police officers — every able body I could find — searching for you. It was no use. You were gone.

“Only as the day became night did I realize that Alexander was also nowhere to be found. You were missing and Alexander had taken an unexplained leave of absence for three weeks' time. This was no coincidence. I knew immediately what he'd done. I called an emergency meeting of the hospital's senior staff. They had to be made aware of Alexander's treason. Before these men, I gave an impassioned speech quoting both Bakunin and Chaadayev and thoroughly depicting the empirical evidence at hand. You can imagine the ache in my heart when my presentation fell on deaf ears. No one would believe me. Word of the incident at the ballroom had spread and my impeccable reputation was now entirely suspect. The hospital board members insisted that I stay home from work until I abandoned my obsession with Alexander's misdeeds.

“For weeks I languished in bed. The agony of it all was too much to bear. Alexander had robbed me of my wife, Asenka, and now he had stolen my son — perhaps not by blood, but in the innermost reaches of my heart, you were my child, Vladimir.

“When Alexander returned from his mysterious absence, I accosted him outside the hospital gates. Would you believe that he denied everything? He looked me straight in the eye and proclaimed he didn't have the foggiest notion of what had become of you. He conjured up an absurd story about having attended a conference in Yekaterinburg all this time. That duplicitous charlatan! I had it in my mind to do away with him right then and there with my bare hands. And I would have too if reason hadn't intervened. You see, as strong as I was in my better days, I knew deep inside that no matter how badly I wanted to tear him from limb to limb, it would've been exceedingly difficult for me to defeat Alexander in an evenhanded bout of fisticuffs. Instead, I returned to the hospital and lodged formal charges. I burst through the office of the police and told them to arrest Alexander Afiniganov for kidnapping. I took my complaints as far as the Kremlin.

“No one would believe me! They thought that I was in the wrong, that I was the evildoer! The incident at the Isirk Ballroom preceded me. My good name had been ruined.

“You see, Vladimir, it is my curse that I alone could perceive the iniquitous black fog of hypocrisy that coiled behind Alexander as he walked, the way it merged with dark corners in unlit rooms and interfered with the illumination of anything daring to resemble the truth. This curse destroyed me. The hospital grew tired of my constant accusations and fired me outright. Days after my medical career crumbled to dust, I learned that my maid was with child. She refused any suggestion to terminate the pregnancy and insisted on seeing the birth all the way through. Those four and a half minutes of pleasure — no not pleasure: the exorcism of my rage in which I thrashed Tatiana against the washbasin in her room — they were my undoing as much as anything that happened at the ballroom. I waited the full nine months until the baby was born, praying all the while for it to somehow look like my elderly driver Afin. No such miracle occurred. When this bastard child emerged, it was like looking into a mirror. The boy was mine. With great reluctance, after months of enduring Tatiana's pleas, I made an honest woman of her. We married in a simple civil ceremony on a Wednesday afternoon.

“Vladimir, I can't begin to understand the pain you've experienced. And nothing I've gone through could possibly compare. But can you imagine for just one moment what it's like to have loved someone as deeply as I loved Asenka, to have achieved a profound, intimate connection on all levels — emotional, spiritual, sexual — only to have your partner's love turn sour and ferment like a nasty boil left to fester in the sun? And then to be forced to spend your married days with some simple-minded imbecile who loves you unconditionally no matter how vicious you are? It is an unbearable truth in life that love thrives on stillness. What we are made to endure in the here and now is damned by the fading color of the past.”

Sergei had begun his diatribe with conviction, but with each word his bravado faded into hollow pathos. Sergei's voice — once strong and assertive — now flowed in waves; it soared to a crescendo, crashed and doubled over before fading like the tides. Unexpectedly, ferociously, it would rise again.

“Tatiana nursed the baby into a small child as my riches faded. For years my status at the hospital had protected me from the ills of Stalin's economic upheaval. After my dismissal, I was no longer immune. What's more, my outward display of indignation at the Kremlin caused my name to be placed on a list. Before dawn on a Tuesday morning in early spring, government agents stormed into my home. At gunpoint, they took possession of the house my father had left me. I was given a paltry sum and forced to move into a small apartment overlooking a meat-packing plant. Tatiana and our son came along, of course. To my great surprise, so did Tatiana's mother, a deaf elderly Ukrainian woman with an odorous foot fungus and two cats who trailed her every move. She lived in the walk-in closet in our apartment, cooked her meals on the radiator, and whenever one of her cats misbehaved, she would throw it off the balcony and then have the audacity to insist that I purchase a new one when the creature failed to survive the fall.

“Looking back with the keen eye of hindsight, my fall from grace began when Alexander won that prestigious golden plaque for finishing first in our class at Tomsk University. If I'd somehow bested him, if I'd managed in some way to eclipse his scholastic supremacy and miraculously won that plaque, my life would have turned out quite differently. I would have been the more revered doctor. I would have been invited to the Isirk Ballroom that night and had the pleasure of watching Alexander carried out by his boots. He would be sitting here in this damned asylum, not me!” Sergei waved his chained hands absently in the air. “But I never won that plaque. It never sat on the wall in my study. Life was simply that cruel.”