The Last Hiccup (15 page)

He cleared his throat and looked expectantly at Vladimir.

Vladimir stared in wonder at his doctor. “But you didn't tell me how you came to be in this place,” Vladimir said. “Why have you been faking the hiccups? What became of Alexander?”

Sergei's eyes turned a slight shade of yellow.

“I haven't even told you the most outrageous part of all. Years after he stole you away, Alexander actually had the audacity to publish a paper on your condition. That insolent
zadnitsa
linked the symptom of incurable hiccups to the disease of mental illness. I knew this wasn't true. At least, I knew there was no way for him to verify that your hiccups and the malaise in your mind were inextricably linked. I rallied against his findings; I did everything in my power to discredit them. There was a flaw, you see, in Alexander's evaluation.” Sergei balled his fingers into a fist. “Not once in his paper did he mention that your hiccups continued while you slept. What careless work. Such inexact reporting from a medical professional purported to be the preeminent genius of his generation. I told everyone who would listen about Alexander's carelessness. I carried his paper with me and described its corrigendum to random passersby on the street. I showed doctors and nurses, entire committees full of medical practitioners. In the end, my outcry fell on deaf ears. Alexander's paper was well received. It won awards. A new condition had been discovered. They call it Vlad's Syndrome.”

Vladimir shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Suddenly, the reactions to his hiccups in the hospital corridors made sense.

“I knew the moment he published that paper that Alexander had to be punished. It became, to me, an inevitability,” Sergei said. “At first I might have been satisfied with his dismissal from the hospital, perhaps even a waning of the medical community's esteem for his genius. As time passed, I began to daydream of his banishment to some foreign, dark and dreary land where he spoke nothing of the language and after years of constant misery and loneliness, Alexander became a drunkard, reviled by a throng of scurvy-laden locals who treated him as nothing more than the common village idiot. Children would chase him with sticks and old ladies would hurl soggy, pestilence-ridden produce at him.

“Oh, if only I'd conjured up some underhanded scheme to disgrace my rival. I had it within me to design a tragic end to his omnipresent dignity. Yet each time I sat down to plot and conspire, to develop ruses and strategize demeaning predicaments in which to thrust that priggish fiend, a lethargy would envelop me. My lack of enthusiasm became my downfall.

“I began waiting for God or fate or destiny — any of these phantasmic forces — to strike Alexander down. Each morning when I rose and read the newspaper, I searched the obituaries for news that he'd been felled by a random flying hockey puck or perhaps that he'd died in some humiliating accident in a roach-infested hotel room involving a belt hung from the ceiling, a hermaphroditic prostitute and a live farm animal. No such news ever came. Instead, a year and a half ago, an announcement appeared in the newspaper. Alexander and Asenka were to be married. After years apart, they'd rekindled their old flame following a chance meeting at an event celebrating Stalin's signing of the non-aggression pact with Germany. I couldn't help but be distraught. I looked at my child wailing under the kitchen table — eight years old and still an imbecile — my devoted spouse who couldn't string three sentences together and her senile mother tottering about in the background.

“I knew then that Alexander had to be destroyed.

“There comes a moment in every man's life, my boy, when you realize that scheming — the very act of planning your vengeance — will only lead to a lifetime of scheming and bear absolutely nothing: no glory, no embarrassment of riches, no fruits of your labor. Only he who acts will reap what he has sown.

“I stormed from my apartment and traveled to the hospital. The hour approached noon as I arrived at the staff cafeteria. There, sitting smugly at the end of a table eating a lunch of dried figs and ham was my nemesis Alexander. A tempest formed in my brain, with swirling black clouds and bright streaks of light. I stomped over to the cutlery bin and grabbed the sharpest knife I could find. My mind erupted in chaos. The world lay dead and black. I walked over to Alexander and, without even announcing myself, stabbed him in the side of the neck. He fell to the ground and I leapt upon him. Over and over I stabbed him. Blood spurted in living streams of red. Alexander was helpless to defend himself. Quickly bystanders intervened and I was thrust off his quivering body. An emergency bell sounded and swarms of doctors ran in to try to save him. They were helpless. He was too far gone. My enemy — the beast who'd ruined my life and perpetually plagued my nightmares — had finally been vanquished.

“I stood in front of the teeming mass of my former colleagues, my arms constrained and the knife ripped from my hand. Looking into their accusing eyes, I knew they would never understand that I'd been forced to do this, how in truth I had no other choice. The lot of them seemed about to lynch me when I did the only thing I could think to do.

“I hiccupped.

“A few seconds passed and then I hiccupped again. And again, just as I'd watched you hiccup, Vladimir, all those years ago.

“Whispers started almost immediately amongst the crowd.

““Listen to him.'

“‘Do you hear that?'

“‘He has Vlad's Syndrome.'

“I kept hiccupping as the police came and arrested me. I sustained my ruse through a brief pretrial hearing during which a panel of psychologists determined that I did indeed have Vlad's Syndrome. Later, I continued my voluntary convulsions as they sealed me away in the psychiatric ward of what used to be my own hospital. I've kept hiccupping until this very day.”

“But isn't it difficult to pretend to hiccup every waking hour of the day?” Vladimir said.

“Difficult? It's nearly impossible! But I've done it.” Sergei nodded his head proudly. “I've fooled them all. Don't you see how brilliant it is?”

Vladimir shook his head.

“I've murdered my rival — a deceitful villain if ever there was one — and what's saved me from prison is the syndrome based on the lies he conjured up.”

Vladimir couldn't hide his shock. He didn't quite know what to say. Doctor Namestikov had always seemed sound of mind. As a child, Vladimir could never have known that Sergei's rivalry with Alexander was burgeoning into the realm of obsession. He looked across the table and saw the mania in Sergei's eyes. Just minutes ago they appeared lifeless and dull. Now they darted about the room in hurried glances, never settling too long in one place.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” Vladimir said.

Sergei recoiled in surprise. “Help me? Vladimir, I'm your doctor. I'm supposed to help you. Not the other way around.”

Vladimir looked past Sergei at the drab, bloodstained walls illuminated by the flickering light. Had there been a window anywhere in this room, it most assuredly would have been sealed by thick iron bars. Vladimir's focus shifted to Sergei's emaciated cheeks, his long gray hair and the crazed white whiskers gushing from his chin. Despite his weight loss, his belly had distended. Sergei's nostrils had permanently swelled.

“Is there someone I can call for you? Markus perhaps?” Vladimir said.

“Markus?” Sergei smiled a little as he remembered his old friend. “No, no. Things did not end well between the two of us. I wouldn't want to have him visit me here. It's dreadfully difficult to invite a friend over for tea in this place, Vladimir. They hide me away and keep me in these.” He held up his chains. “I'd rather not have Markus see me this way.”

“Perhaps he could help.”

Sergei nodded as though he agreed, but his eyes drifted in circles.

Vladimir leaned in close to whisper in Sergei's ear. “If you ask me to, I will get you out of here. This place isn't a real prison. I can break you out.”

Sergei appeared to be considering Vladimir's proposal. Vladimir sat across from him, his heart racing. In truth, he wasn't sure he could pull off such a feat. He waited on Sergei's answer with bated breath.

“No,” Sergei said. “I couldn't ask you to do that. I'm fine in here. I'll get the best of them yet, don't you worry.”

“Is there anything I can bring you?”

“No.”

“Some fruit maybe? A meal from a restaurant?”

“No.”

“Some canned plums, perhaps?”

“No.”

“A girl . . . you know, a prostitute?”

Sergei hesitated. “No. Thank you, but no.”

Footsteps sounded down the hall. Vladimir stood up from the table.

“Will you be back to visit?” Sergei said.

“I will. I'll speak to the nurse's aide about a visit next month.”

Vladimir said these words with conviction, but deep inside he wasn't sure. He'd survived a year in the wild and the lethal Waterfall of Ion. In the course of his twenty years, he'd been through a great deal. Despite his empathy for Sergei, Vladimir didn't know if he had the strength to see him again.

“Will you be leaving Moscow?” Sergei said.

“Yes,” Vladimir said. “I'm going to visit my mother. It's been far too many years. I hope she's still alive.”

Sergei's hiccups returned the moment Ilvana Strekov appeared at the door. He stood up and embraced Vladimir. His former patient could feel the skeletal outline of the doctor's ribs.

It was time to go.

“
Schastlivo ostavat'sya
,” Vladimir said.

“Keep well,” Sergei said, his voice cut with gravel.

Walking in small steps to facilitate his chains, Sergei stopped at the doorway and braced his arms against the entrance as though he were about to be pulled into an eddying whirlpool on the other side. He cast Vladimir a final desperate look. Then he disappeared.

Ilvana and Vladimir stole quietly through vacant halls with Vladimir restraining his hiccups as best he could until they returned to the same spot in the courtyard where they'd met. She handed him a small rectangular package covered in brown paper and insisted he open it after he left. Vladimir tucked the package into the satchel containing all his belongings. An icy winter rain was blowing sideways in the wind. Careful not to step outside, Ilvana poked her head ever so slightly through the crack in the doorway.

“I'm curious,” Vladimir said. “When I first arrived, Doctor Namestikov asked me whether I was here to kill him. Why would he say such a thing? Is there any truth to this?”

“The doctor has been very sick, Vladimir. You can't trust in what he says,” the nurse's aide said. “Now listen to me very carefully. You can't stay in Moscow. You most definitely must stay away from the hospital. If anyone hears your hiccups, they'll lock you away just as they did Doctor Namestikov. You don't want that, Vladimir. Go back to your village. Live your life. Stay away from here until the end of the war. No good can come from you meddling in the doctor's affairs.”

She went to shut the door. Vladimir stuck his foot in the entranceway to stop it from closing. He grabbed Ilvana by the wrist. “Promise that you will contact me if the doctor's condition changes,” he said. “Please, I beg of you, if anything happens — send a telegram to the main post office in Igarka.”

“I must go.” Ilvana struggled to yank her arm free of Vladimir's grasp.

“Promise me.”

“I'll scream,” she said.

Vladimir let go and Ilvana Strekov recoiled into the hospital. The door closed between them. The last Vladimir saw of the woman, she was hurrying past a distant window with tears streaming down her face.

Vladimir turned and walked in the winter rain. At the hospital gates he reached into his satchel and pulled out the rectangular object Ilvana had given him. He tore the brown paper away. Wrapped in a piece of string were dozens of letters his mother had sent to him over the years. Still sealed, the envelopes had never been opened. Vladimir could picture his mother rocking on her chair in the sitting room, wearing her blue dress with the floral print around the collar. All these years, she'd been trying to reach him. She might think he's dead, or worse perhaps she thought he'd received her letters and didn't want to reply. A scattering of lights were on in the hospital windows at this hour. The building looked lifeless and frozen, brick and mortar and glass and nothing else. This wasn't Vladimir's home. Moscow wasn't where he was meant to be. He tucked the letters into his bag, turned from the hospital and began walking toward the train station.

For the first time in twelve years, Vladimir was headed home.

The snowdrifts in Igarka ranged from ankle-deep to waist-high. Vladimir marched through the interminable fields of white for almost two hours before he finally saw the old schoolhouse. It hadn't changed in twelve years. Small and dilapidated with endless passages of snow on all sides, it looked the part of a tiny ship foundering at sea with nary any land in sight. Vladimir stopped outside and thought of that mammoth man the Professor — how he always seemed to breathe through flared nostrils and the crisp, terse way his words flew out of his mouth. Vladimir walked up to the entranceway and stepped on his toes to peer through a tall window. He even considered knocking on the schoolhouse door, if only to see what a dozen years had done to the man. In the end, he decided against it. After all, what would he say? What had he ever had to say to that ill-tempered disciplinarian?

Vladimir turned and walked away from the schoolhouse and never gave the Professor another thought. He couldn't have known that at that very moment thousands of kilometers west in a tiny one-bedroom apartment overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Urie Kochuokova was rubbing a circle of red paint on his nose and slipping into a jumpsuit dotted with a rainbow of colors, preparing to entertain a group of young children by twisting balloons into the shapes of squirrels and receiving an absurd number of pies in the face. Six years earlier the Professor had left his comfortable position as sole educator in the village for a career as a diplomat in Moscow, only to have every manner of vocational door slammed shut in his face. His dreams shattered, Urie Kochuokova had every intention of living out the rest of his days as a cantankerous old fart, spewing bile and decrying anything and everything that made others happy. On his fifty-third birthday, he purchased two jugs of vodka and staggered up to his apartment to drink himself to sleep. He consumed three quarters of one jug and an eighth of the other before passing out with his head in the kitchen sink. The Professor awoke the next morning to discover he had become an entirely different person. Whether his brain had been damaged or the gods had spoken to him, he didn't know, but in a stunning turnabout, the effects of that one night hard at the drink made him less volatile and more amiable than he'd ever been. He found himself prone to unpredictable fits of giggles. In the market, at the doctor's office, at his work and play, Urie Kochuokova saw only the joy in life. He married a lovely — though slightly pudgy — Norwegian woman and now spent six days a week performing professionally as
Борис Клоун
(Boris the Clown), renowned for his ability to contort his giant frame into unbelievably comical positions and, most importantly, to bring smiles to the faces of small children.

Past the schoolhouse and through the tall pine trees, Vladimir entered his sleepy village. A well of emotion overcame him when he saw the roof of his mother's house again. During the long journey to Igarka, Vladimir had sat in the train staring at the stack of unopened letters. He hesitated. He had what amounted to a third-grade education and didn't trust his ability to read what was inside. Twelve years ago, Sergei had been too concerned with curing Vladimir's hiccups to worry about tutoring the boy, and Gog, had he shown any desire to share his knowledge, was a poor grammarian himself. Vladimir had struggled to read even the simple note and map Gog left behind after his death.

The mechanics of Vladimir's thoughts, for so long fixated on the structure of words said aloud, were a kaleidoscope of symmetrical patterns — bright blues and iridescent oranges, sharp corners and spheres, lies told without malice and truths irrefutable. He had never been trained to arrange his emotions into orderly sentences. His thoughts compartmentalized into primordial urges — love, laugh, rage, kill. These words on a page, how others constructed their thoughts, were distinctly foreign to him.

On the train, Vladimir had summoned his resolve and opened the first letter, dated three days after he had left home. From what he could decipher, Ilga wrote about how greatly she missed her son and how much she loved him. Vladimir opened the next letter and the next. Their content was all the same. His mother would tell him how much she missed him. She would complain that Doctor Namestikov insisted she delay any visits for fear of setting back his patient's progress. Then she would tell Vladimir she loved him and sign
Mama
beside a small drawing of a heart. Over time, a disturbing trend emerged. About a year after Vladimir departed, Ilga's penmanship started to falter. Her words meandered. The characters lay scattered across the page, evidence of Ilga's shaking hand. With each passing year, Ilga's letters became less frequent and more difficult to understand, until eventually they became indecipherable altogether. The last letter was dated twelve months ago.

Vladimir approached his mother's house slowly. A thick layer of snow rested above a series of beveled icicles dangling from the roof. The entire structure looked smaller than it had when he was a child. Vladimir knocked on the front door. He knocked again and there was no answer. Gently, Vladimir tried the doorknob. The antique hinges creaked. “Hello?” he called. “Hello, Mother? It's me, Vladimir.”

The living room looked unlived in. In the far corner, a three-stringed balalaika made of marbled wood lay against the wall. A bowl of decaying pears sat on the coffee table. Everything in the room was breathless and dead, as if just minutes ago the balalaika had been playing a cheery folk song while the pears danced in delight, only to have their merriment eradicated suddenly and tragically, leaving only sadness behind. It was cold inside, more so than out in the elements. Vladimir called for his mother. He walked into the kitchen and down the hall to her room. She wasn't there. Vladimir checked the bathroom and looked out the door into the backyard before heading down the hall to his old room. There, lying in a pile of blankets on Vladimir's old bed was his mother, Ilga. She absolutely dwarfed the child-sized mattress. Her legs dangled off the end and her torso filled its width. Ilga's face was bloated from years of alcohol abuse and her hair — always a matter of pride with the woman — had grown long, tattered and gray. A large pair of fox fur earmuffs covered either side of her head. She was clutching a small blue blanket and shivering in the cold.

Vladimir sat down next to her. “Mother?”

She didn't answer. Ilga's eyes were open. She appeared to be immersed in a lingering, motionless daydream.

Vladimir touched her shoulder.

Ilga looked up at her son. Her eyes grew wide. “Vladdy?” she said, still shivering.

Vladimir went to respond when Ilga shielded her face with her hands.

“No, this cannot be. You are the creature who haunts my dreams. You aren't real.”

Vladimir took her hands. He wasn't sure whether Ilga could hear him through the fox fur. “It's really me. I'm not a boy anymore. I've become a man. I'm sorry I was gone so long, but now I'm here to take care of you.”

Ilga sat up on the bed. She took Vladimir's face in her hands and rubbed her fingers along his jawline. A moment of pure elation overcame her. She smiled and tears flooded her eyes. Ilga wrapped her arms around Vladimir. “Oh, Vladdy,” she said. “How I've dreamed of this day.”

Vladimir removed his mother's earmuffs and felt the joy emanate from her like the rays of a small red sun.

It would not last the passing of 3.7 seconds.

Vladimir hiccupped.

Ilga recoiled from his embrace. “Vladimir?” she said. “Did they not cure you?”

“No, Mother. I still have the hiccups,” he said.

“Oh God, no!” she cried. Ilga stood up, only to swoon back down. She burst into tears and started ranting hysterically. Vladimir tried to pacify her, but with each successive hiccup, she grew more and more frantic until eventually she collapsed back into bed in the exact position Vladimir had found her. This time Ilga fell into a deep sleep.

Vladimir placed a blanket over her shoulders and spent the next hour chopping wood in the backyard. He lit a fire in the central kitchen hearth and searched for something to cook. In the icebox were several leaves of cabbage. Vladimir boiled the cabbage and poured a stiff glass of vodka, then waited beside the bed for Ilga to awake. When she finally came to, a drowsy Ilga had regained her composure. Vladimir fed her the vodka. She gulped it down in one cathartic swig. The alcohol seemed to assuage her further and Ilga wanted to hold her son. Vladimir sat on the side of the bed with Ilga's arms wrapped tightly around his shoulders for nearly an hour. When Ilga finally let go, she followed Vladimir into the kitchen, where they sat down opposite one another at the table.

Vladimir gave a detailed account of the twelve years he'd been gone. Ilga seemed only to hear bits and pieces of what he said. When he finished, she told Vladimir that he had been on a great adventure and that he was special. Somehow she managed to ignore everything Vladimir told her about the wickedness that had once occupied his soul and the torturous nights he had spent storming aimlessly through the woods in Mongolia. She heard only that Vladimir was a great hunter and a traveler and marveled at what a handsome young man he'd grown up to be. Ilga even found it in herself to ignore his hiccups. It was like she convinced herself that each convulsive yelp wasn't really happening.

Somewhat reluctantly, Ilga in turn recounted what happened at home while Vladimir was away. Six months after Vladimir had gone to stay in Moscow, Ilga received word via the post that Vladimir's soldier father had gone missing somewhere near the Uzbekistan border. Initially, the Red Army declared him a missing soldier and stated that were he still to be a missing person in one year's time, he would be declared legally dead and Ilga would receive compensation from the government in the form of a lump-sum payment and a small amount paid per annum. Twelve months later, the first payment didn't arrive. In its stead, Ilga received a letter from the Committee for State Security stating that her husband's status had been redefined as Absent Without Leave. No money would be coming from the government. Ilga, upset over Vladimir's sudden affliction and herself developing the beginnings of severe arthritis in her hips and wrists, was powerless to dispute the Kremlin's declaration. She refused to accept that her husband was an army deserter. He would never abandon his country, let alone his wife and child. Ilga had held out hope that her husband would be discovered alive, perhaps as a prisoner of war. Later she prayed that they would find him dead, amongst a pile of rotting corpses or in a mass grave if need be, if only to assure her that he had been devout and valorous to the end.