Legends

The peasant pointed his chin at the sky and shut his eyes as he ticked off the days on the fingers of a hand. “One day before today, the widow Potesta’s cow drowned in the Neman. Two days before today, Eidintas wound the cord attached to his bull around the palm of his right hand and then lost all of his fingers except for the thumb when the bull charged laundry hanging on a line. Three days before today, the wife of the drunken shepherd walked all the way to Zuzovka’s pharmacy to treat a broken nose, though she refused to identify the owner of the fist that had broken it.” Looking down at Martin, the peasant grinned. “Three days before today the helicopter brought the bones of the saint to Zuzovka.”

“And why are all the men heading toward town armed?”

“To join the Metropolitan Alfonsas and defend Gedymin from the Romish.”

The old man laughed at Martin’s ignorance as he clucked at the horses and snapped at them with the reins. Martin slipped behind the wheel of the Lada, started the motor and honked twice at the peasant as he pulled into the left lane and passed him. The old man, still laughing, again touched the visor of his cap with two fingers in salute, though this time there was more derision than politeness in the gesture.

Zuzovka, a sprawling market town with a tractor repair station next to the brightly painted wooden arch that marked the beginning of its long and wide and dusty main street, materialized around the next bend. The town’s two-story brick school sat on a patch of sandy land across from the tractor station; the school’s soccer pitch, like the basketball court on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, had been converted into a helicopter landing pad, with a great circle of whitewashed stones set out in the middle of the field blackened by engine exhaust. Martin had to slow to a crawl behind the line of open trucks and men afoot, all heading in the direction of the Orthodox Church situated on a dirt lane that angled off from the main street and ran across the wetlands to the muddy bank of the Neman.

Parking his car in front of a bakery with a sign on the door announcing that, due to Catholic threats to “liberate” Saint Gedymin, it would not open for business today, Martin melted into the throngs. He grabbed a teenage boy by the arm. “Gdye zhenshchini?” he asked. “Where are the women?”

“Zuzovka is a no-woman’s land,” the boy, grinning from ear to ear, shot back as he hurried after the others.

The peasants, joking among themselves about the Catholic skulls they would split open and the Catholic blood that would irrigate Orthodox soil, barely noticed the stranger among them. Dozens of rowboats were tied up at the rickety wooden docks along the river bank, and groups of armed men could be seen climbing the slope toward the church. A fire brigade band—the men dressed in knee-high boots and red parkas—was trumpeting martial aires from the iron gazebo in a fenced park across the lane. Drawing nearer to the church, Martin produced the laminated card that identified him as a wire service reporter and, brandishing it over his head, called out that he was a Canadian journalist. The crowd parted when several of the local notables—distinguishable from the farmers because they wore double-breasted suit jackets with their shirts buttoned up to the neck—instructed the peasants to let the foreign journalist through.

Hobbling along on his game leg, which had been acting up since he quit the Aral area, Martin shouldered through the several hundred ripe-smelling peasants toward the three onion domes, each topped with a rusted Orthodox cross. Two young Orthodox priests, dressed in sandals and black habits, waved him up the steps and into the church, and bolted its metal-studded wooden door behind him with a thick wooden crossbar thrust through iron staples and then embedded in niches chiseled into the stone walls on either side. The church reeked of incense and the smoke of beeswax candles and the dust and dankness of centuries and it took a moment for Martin’s eyes to make anything out in the misty dimness. The silver and gold in the icons on the sweating walls glinted as a tall bearded man dressed in a black habit, with chiseled features and a squared black miter atop his long black hair, approached. With each step he pounded the floor with the silver tip of a thick staff.

“Do you speak Canadian?” the priest demanded in English, planting himself in front of the visitor.

Martin nodded.

“I am the Metropolitan Alfonsas,” the priest thundered, “come from the district capital at Alytus to receive the bones of Saint Gedymin and defend the Church of the Transfiguration from the papists who connive to steal the holy relics from their rightful owners.”

“Uh-huh.”