Legends

When Almagul translated, the time server reached out and punched the chess clock with her fist and began calculating the cost of the call on an abacus. When she had figured out the sum, she wrote it on a scrap of paper and held it up so everyone in the post office could tell their children about the deranged foreigner who had spent a fortune to dispatch his voice to a place on the far side of the Atlantic Ocean with the unlikely name of Brooklyn.

1997: MARTIN ODUM REACHES NO-WOMAN’S LAND

MARTIN ODUM PULLED THE LADA HE’D RENTED IN HRODNA, the last big burg in Belarus before the Lithuanian border, off the two-lane highway that had been repaved so many times, each layer piled on top of the previous one, it probably ranked, rising above the wetlands as it did, as an elevated highway. He killed the motor and strolled over to a mossy embankment above the Neman River, and urinated against a scorched oak that looked as if it had been struck by lightening. Martin had crossed the frontier at a dusty village, half of it in Belarus, the other half in Lithuania, with a tongue twister of a name. The young border guards, sunning themselves in deck chairs beside a low prefabricated building on the village’s dusty main street, had waved him past without so much as a glance at the Canadian passport made out in the name of one Jozef Kafkor. At regular intervals the route had been blocked by sheep and he’d had to honk his way through them. The last sign post he’d seen before he stopped to relieve his bladder had put his destination, the river town of Zuzovka, at eighteen kilometers; keeping track of the distance on the odometer, Martin reckoned it would be around the next bend in the Neman. Overhead, a highflying jetliner, its two white contrails drifting apart and thickening behind it, vanished into a fleecy mare’s-tail of a cloud. Moments later the distant drone of the motors reached Martin’s ears, leaving him with the impression that the noise was racing to catch up with the engines producing it.

How he ached to be on that plane, gazing down at the Baltic flat-lands as he headed toward home, toward Stella. How he ached to stop looking over his shoulder every time he stepped into a street; to put the quest for Samat behind him and go back to boring himself to death, a pastime his sometime Chinese girlfriend, Minh, had once described as suicide in slow motion.

Once he’d crossed the border into Lithuania, Martin noticed that the elevated highway had gradually filled with traffic heading in the direction of Zuzovka—there were open farm trucks and dilapidated school busses crammed with peasants, and scores of men in loose shirts and baggy trousers trudging along on foot. Curiously, all of them carried pitchforks or what Dante Pippen would have called shillelagh—sturdy cudgels with knobs on one end, fashioned from the thick branches of oaks. As Martin started back to his car now, two shaggy horses that looked as if they might have been on their way to the abattoir clopped past, hauling a wooden cart loaded with bricks. The old peasant perched high up in the driver’s seat gripped the reins casually in one hand and with the other touched two fingers to the visor of his cap in salute when Martin called out a greeting in broken Russian. The old man clucked his tongue at the horses, which didn’t need much coaxing to pull up.

Martin waved to the knots of men filling the road on their way toward Zuzovka and raised his hands, as if to ask: Where is everyone going?

The old man leaned over and spit eucalyptus juice onto the highway. Then, scrutinizing the foreigner through eyes with a suggestion of Mongolia in them, he allowed as how “Saint Gedymin has come back to Zuzovka.”

“Gedymin died six hundred years ago,” Martin remarked to himself.

The peasant, speaking slowly and articulating carefully as if he were instructing a child, said, “Gedymin’s bones, which the German invaders stole from our church, have by miracle been returned.”

From some remote corner of his brain Martin assembled Russian words into a sentence. “And how did the bones of the saint find their way back to Zuzovka?”

A cagey grin appeared on the old man’s weathered face. “How else would a saint travel except by private helicopter.”

“And how long ago did the helicopter bringing the bones of the saint arrive in Zuzovka?”