Legends

The bishop turned out to be a cheery little man with wide hips and narrow shoulders, giving him the appearance, in his crimson ankle-length robe and embroidered stole, of a church bell. The meeting took place in the vegetable garden behind the church. Two white storks peered down at the scene from the large nest on top of the bell tower. “Dates,” the bishop said, launching into a lecture he had obviously given before, “are handy pegs on which to hang history. Do you not agree with this observation, Mr. Kafkor?”

Martin, wincing from the pain in his ribs, used the tips of the white silk scarf silk tied around his neck to blot the perspiration on his forehead. “Uh-huh.”

The army officer thrust a pad and ball point pen into Martin’s hands. “You must take notes,” he whispered.

As Martin scribbled, the bishop paced between the furrows, the hem of his robe growing dirtier with each step, as he explained the history of Saint Gedymin. “It was Gedymin, as every schoolchild in Lithuania knows, who created Greater Lithuania, a vast duchy that stretched from the Black Sea to Moscow to the Baltic. He ruled over the empire from the capital he founded in Vilnius in the year of our Lord Jesus 1321. Sixty-five years later, in the year of our Lord 1386, Lithuanians, by the grace of God, adopted Catholicism as the state religion and, on the order of the grand duke, the entire population was baptized on the banks of the Neman. At which time it can be said that the last Lithuanian pagans vanished into the dustbin of history.”

“Did you get all that?” the army officer demanded.

“The first Catholic church,” the bishop plunged breathlessly on, “was built on this very site ten years after the mass baptism, and expanded”—he pointed to the bell tower and the jesse window and the two vaulted wings—“in the centuries that followed. The bones of Saint Gedymin, or what was left of him after the original crypt in Vilnius was desecrated by Tartar bandits, were consigned to the Catholic church at Zuzovka and remained here from early in the fourteenth century until Lithuania came under Russian domination in 1795. The Russians, being Eastern Orthodox, purloined the bones of the saint from the Catholic church and gave them to the Orthodox metropolitan, who had the Church of the Transfiguration built to house them. Despite our repeated petitions over the years, the bones remained in the possession of the Orthodox until a German army officer, retreating before a Russian offensive in 1944, stole the relics as he passed through Zuzovka.”

Hoping to cut short the story, Martin said, “It was Samat Ugor-Zhilov who discovered the Orthodox church possessed a collection of priceless Torah scrolls and commentaries, and offered to trade the bones of Saint Gedymin, which he had traced to an Orthodox church in Argentina, for the Jewish documents.”

The bishop danced a jig at the mention of Samat’s name. “But that is not it at all! That’s the fabricated story that this satanic Samat Ugor-Zhilov and the metropolitan would have the world believe. The truth is quite different.”

“Mark the truth in your notebook,” the army officer instructed Martin.

The bishop noticed the dirt that had accumulated on the hem of his robe and reached down to brush it off. “The television tells us that Samat Ugor-Zhilov, who is identified as a Russian philanthropist, returned the bones of Saint Gedymin in exchange for the Jewish Torah scrolls and commentaries held for safekeeping in the Orthodox church since the Great Patriotic War. The television goes on to say that all he asked for himself was a minuscule crucifix, fashioned from the wood of the so-called True Cross in the possession of the Orthodox church. The TV even showed a picture of the metropolitan handing to the so-called philanthropist the crucifix, which was the size of a pinky finger on a child. Samat thanked the metropolitan and said he would donate the crucifix, fashioned from the True Cross, to the Orthodox church in the village near Moscow where his mother still lived.”

Martin looked up from his note taking, his eyes burning with excitement. “Did he give the name of this village?”

The bishop shook his heavy head; his jowls continued to roll from side to side after his head had returned to an even keel. “No. What does it matter?” Without waiting for a response, he continued: “The real reason this Samat Ugor-Zhilov gave the saint’s bones to the Orthodox and not to its original Catholic custodians is opium.”

Martin, unnerved, looked up again. “Opium?”

“Opium,” the army officer repeated, tapping a forefinger on Martin’s pad. “Write the word, if you please.”