The Last Hiccup (16 page)

Ultimately, the answer to his mysterious disappearance came from the dead man himself. Three years after he went missing, at a time in which Vladimir was already living with Gog in Mongolia, Ilga's husband sent her a parcel from Florence, Italy. The parcel contained monies in Russian funds and a terse, passionless letter stating that he had started a new family with a woman he'd met during the course of duty and the sum contained in the parcel would bring to a close their relationship as husband and wife. The amount was by no means insignificant but not particularly monumental either. No return address was given.

Ilga fell into a great depression. Her health steadily declined over the years. Her arthritis spread from her wrists to the rest of her body. For five years now she'd used a cane to walk. At first, Ilga hadn't visited Vladimir because Sergei was adamant that the presence of relatives would cause unexpected delays in her son's treatment. As one year turned into the next and the hospital stopped replying to her letters, Ilga longed to see her son. But the constant pain in her joints had grown to where even the simple act of walking was excruciating and she had come to fear the fire-like spark that ignited each time she stretched her feet.

“I haven't hardly felt the pain since you came home, Vladdy,” she said.

Vladimir knew this wasn't true. He could see Ilga's teeth clench when she smiled and how she did everything she could to avoid wincing in front of her son. Her posture — the way she sat and moved and spoke — betrayed the severity of her condition. Vladimir couldn't help but wonder how things might have been different if he had stayed. How much of her ailment was caused by the anguish of him leaving? How would she look and feel now if Vladimir had never left?

He placed his face in his hands and swallowed hard. His fingers slid above his hairline and pressed against his scalp. He looked down into his lap and then up to meet Ilga's gaze.

“I will take care of you now, Mother. I won't leave you again,” Vladimir said.

Ilga smiled and cried. Together the two of them feasted in celebration on a dinner of
lenivye golubtsy
and slightly sour milk.

The next morning, Vladimir headed to the piers in Igarka to find himself gainful employment. He initially planned on working on a fishing vessel or perhaps at the docks, but the Yenisey River had almost frozen over and within a few weeks it would be closed to travel. Igarka was still quite a small town. Vladimir lived in a time long before the installation of the renowned permafrost museum or even the unsuccessful attempt to connect Igarka to the Russian railway network at Salekhard. The only occupations available to an uneducated man of his age were fisherman or logger. His hand forced, Vladimir applied at two of the three sawmills. The first sawmill foreman, a lofty beast with a short-cropped mustache and a round nose, broke into a fit of laughter when Vladimir told him that he'd been hiccupping for twelve years. He called in his friends to listen and they too made good fun out of his misfortune.

The second foreman — also with a short-cropped mustache, but much slighter in stature and with a pointed nose that tilted skyward — took pity on Vladimir and offered him a job cleaning up in the mill. Within a few hours of work, Vladimir noticed a rat scurrying behind a crate in the loading dock. The foreman told Vladimir they'd had a vermin problem for well over a year. “Those parasites bring in nothing but disease,” the foreman said. “One of my men even died last winter from an infection caused by a rodent bite.”

That evening, Vladimir waited until the last worker had left the sawmill before producing a small hatchet and a plastic bag. He turned out all of the lights in the mill and climbed atop a large tree stump. Vladimir closed his eyes and listened. It was just like in the jungle. He heard the rats shuffling their tiny feet. He felt their movement, sensed their presence behind walls and underneath the machinery.

They were everywhere.

And they were going to die.

When the foreman arrived the next morning, his sawmill was shrouded in quiet. The machines weren't running and his workers were nowhere to be found. He checked both levels before walking out to the dock. A throng of gaping onlookers were gathered in the back. The foreman asked what happened and in return he received an assembly line of horrified, cavernous stares. The foreman pushed his way to the front of the crowd. Standing before the assembled mass was a shirtless Vladimir. His hand held the bloody hatchet. His breath was short. Beside him a pile of dead rats was stacked waist-high; hundreds of them, killed in all manner of ways — decapitation, suffocation, split right through. Vladimir stood motionless, his expression blank. Every 3.7 seconds a hiccup emerged from his mouth.

A chill echoed down the foreman's spine. He took off his jacket and placed it on Vladimir's shoulders. “Let's get you out of the cold,” he said. The man ordered one of the workers to escort Vladimir to the office and get him some warm milk. “And as to the rest of you,” he said, his words fostering greater conviction as he spoke, “there is something to be learned from this young man. He took initiative. And he very well may have saved one of your lives today.” The foreman headed back into the mill, leaving behind a speechless crowd and a pile of slaughtered rodents.

After two weeks, Vladimir had established a routine. He worked at the mill Monday through Saturday. The foreman arranged for a coworker who traveled by dogsled to pick Vladimir up every morning and transport him back to his sleepy village in the evenings as well. Sundays were spent doing odd jobs around the house and playing
svoyi koziri
, a two-person game of cards, with his mother. Since he had arrived, Ilga seemed to be in fine spirits and with each passing day her condition showed slight signs of improvement. On the second Friday following his homecoming, Vladimir received his first wages from the sawmill. The foreman threw in a little bit extra as compensation for exterminating the rats. Vladimir beamed with pride when the stack of bills was placed in his one hand and a cluster of coins in the other. It was the first time he had ever made his own money. Including what Gog had left him, Vladimir had enough money to support his mother through the winter. His mind swirled with all the good things he could do with his wages. He could buy Ilga a car so she no longer had to rely on the goodwill of her neighbors to bring food and supplies. One day he might even be able to convince her to travel to the large cities in the southwest and seek proper treatment for her swollen joints.

Yes, Vladimir had great plans for his money. But first he would feast. He had worked hard for two weeks and felt he'd earned himself a reward. Vladimir eschewed his ride home and headed over to the local alehouse for dinner. The tavern was a lively place, with sawmill workers and locals sharing tall glasses of beer and mingling with their friends. Full families, mothers and fathers, great aunts and their assorted offspring were enjoying meals in booths set up against the far wall, and next to the bar a husband-and-wife singing duo were performing an old Scandinavian folk song, the wife's voice high and pretty, the husband accompanying her on the accordion, his voice low and full of gravel. Vladimir tried his best to muffle his hiccups when he entered the pub. He walked through the clusters of people holding tall glasses of imperial stout and found an unoccupied booth toward the back.

His waitress, a pretty young thing not yet sixteen years old but with an ample, partially exposed bosom and long hair in curls, took his order. Vladimir ordered a glass of
Medovukha
and searched the menu. He could barely read some of the words.

“Is there a special?” he said.

“Yes. Would you like to hear about it?”

“No,” Vladimir said. “Whatever it is, I'm sure it's very good. I'll have the special, please.”

The evening's special turned out to be a green goulash with sautéed turnips. Vladimir dug in ravenously. He ate as though he'd been hungry for years. When he finished his meal, he ordered a glass of imperial stout and leaned back in his seat, comfortable and satiated. The singers had taken a break from performing and the chatter picked up in the alehouse. A hotly contested game of
gorodki
found a winner in the far corner. Vladimir was absently running his hand along the edge of his glass and dreaming of his newfound, modest wealth when he saw a vision out of the corner of his eye. It was that angelic little girl from long ago.

Vladimir would have recognized her anywhere. Ileana Berezovsky had grown up, of course. No longer was she that long-haired child with the slight shoulders and small hands. She was a woman now. Her hair was blond and short, curled just behind her ears, and she was wearing purple mascara — a sign of the times, perhaps? Vladimir wasn't quite sure. But her features remained the same. She still had that tiny nose: pert and perfectly square on her face. Her eyes were as wide and beautiful as they'd always been. When she turned to speak with the waitress, Vladimir saw the profile of her heart-shaped lips, the ones that had enchanted him so long ago. After all this time she was still flawless and pure. Ileana was sitting amongst a crowd of seven — four men and three women — at a seat just a few meters away.

Vladimir couldn't help himself. He slid out of his booth and walked straight over to their table. He stood in front of Ileana, speechless and in utter adoration, hiccupping every 3.7 seconds.

Ileana looked up at him with those wide eyes. “Hello,” she said.

Vladimir felt a flush of emotion in his chest. He tried to speak, only the words refused to leave his mouth. So he did the next best thing. He gazed upon her. He took in her every feature. He memorized the minutiae of her entire being, for if he were ever to be forced back into the Mongolian wild, with chaotic thoughts plaguing his troubled mind, he would have something new to hold on to.

Somehow Vladimir failed to notice the enormous thug with his arm around her.

The man stared Vladimir straight in the eye. “Who in the hell are you?” he said.

Vladimir glanced briefly at him and then turned his gaze back to Ileana. He couldn't move. He felt no other sensations — not the cold air seeping in through a crack in the nearby window nor the loud voices coming from all around the bar. He breathed in fully and deeply. At last, after more than a decade of existing in ambrosial fragments in the corners of Vladimir's memory, that precious aroma made its way back to him. It was very faint and Vladimir had to decipher it from a mélange of other aromas floating through the air. But it was there. There was no denying it. Through the primordial odor of ripened cheese emanating from the floorboards and the ghastly gray-smelling cloud of smoke hovering in the air, beyond the baked pike perch and meat pies, the dried sweat in the patrons' armpits and the exhaust of dozens of mouths wet with a miscellany of sour wine and tangy Russian beer, Vladimir located that precious fragrance he remembered from his childhood — caramel and peaches outside on a spring day. It had been so long that he'd begun to believe he'd fashioned that smell out of nothingness. Here it existed as an irrefutable truth. Vladimir inhaled again and again. He filtered out the rubbish and drank in only Ileana's pure scent.

The colossal brute beside Ileana yelled at Vladimir. “What the devil do you think you're doing!?”

The other patrons, some sixty-three souls, reared their heads. The tavern fell suddenly quiet, leaving the hypnotic pulse of Vladimir's hiccups as the only sound.

The man stood up to face him.

Vladimir opened his eyes. He recognized this man at last. It was Pavel Discarov, the boy who had mercilessly whipped spitballs at young Vladimir's head in the schoolhouse. He was the one who had carried Ileana's books back and forth from school, the one with those shifty eyes, neither passionate nor cruel, yet somehow impossibly devious and dumb. The body around them had matured, but those eyes remained the same. Apparently he'd been carrying Ileana's books for her all these years.

A look of realization came over Discarov.

“It's really you, isn't it?” He turned to one of his companions. “I told you the rumors were true. Everyone, may I introduce you to Vladimir, the amazing hiccupping boy. Where have you been all these years, Vlad? Have you been hiccupping all this time?”

Vladimir tried to hold in his next hiccup but it came out all the same, only with added — regrettable — vigor.

“Ileana,” Discarov said. “This
dolboy'eb sukin syn
has been hiccupping for ten years. What's that been like for you, Vladimir? Does it help you with the ladies? Does it tickle their short, curly hairs?” he said to the raucous laughter of his friends. Discarov sat down and took a sip from his beer with a look of great satisfaction in his eyes.

Ileana was the only one not laughing. “Vladimir,” she said, “is that really you?”

“Oh, it's the hiccupping boy, all right,” Discarov said. “He sounds like a donkey to me. Ee-haw. Ee-haw.”