Legends

by Robert Littell

  The escaping scavengers stumbled across two guards playing backgammon in an ante chamber with razor-stropped one-edged Cossack sabers stacked in four old umbrella stands. Both of the guards lunged for their rifles but were clubbed to death before they could reach them. Snatching the two rifles, stuffing their pockets with bullets, Martin and Almagul led the scavengers, armed now with sabers, up a back staircase that led to the lobby. The single guard on duty there backed against a wall and raised his hands in surrender when he saw the scavengers; one of them walked up to him and split his skull open with a single stroke of his sword. On a gesture from Martin, the men spread out and burst through the several double doors into the auditorium. The fight was short and lethal. Furiously working the bolt of his rifle, hardly bothering to take aim, Martin—a pulse pounding in his temple, his trigger finger trembling—provided covering fire from the back of the auditorium as the escaping prisoners, brandishing the sabers over their heads and screaming savagely, charged down the aisles. The warlord, who had been holding court from the throne, cowered behind it as his guards, caught by surprise, desperately tried to fight off the attackers. Two of the prisoners were killed before they reached the stage; a third was shot in the face as he climbed onto it. When Martin’s bolt-action rifle jammed, he caught Lincoln’s voice roaring in his ear: Grab it by the barrel, for Christsake, use it as a club. Gripping the hot barrel with both hands, Martin joined the battle on the stage, clubbing wildly at the guards as they tried to fend off the blows with their rifles or their arms. When one of the guards stumbled, Martin pounced on him and pinned him down while a prisoner hacked off the guard’s hand holding the rifle. Breathing heavily, Martin stood up as another prisoner planted one foot on the neck of the fallen man and slit open his back, exposing his spine down to the coccyx. Gradually the prisoners, pushed by a ferocity that came from having nothing to lose and their lives to win, overpowered the guards who were still alive. The wounded guards, with blood gushing from ugly gashes, and the three who surrendered were hauled into the orchestra pit and decapitated with saber strokes to the napes of their necks. One headless man took several short steps before collapsing to the floor. Martin, sick to his stomach, watched the scavengers circle around the throne almost as if they were playing a harmless child’s game. Hamlet had pulled the square of thick theater curtain that had been used as a carpet over his head. The scavengers tore it away from his clutching hands and prodded the warlord to his feet with the points of their sabers. Wiping snot from his nose, Hamlet begged for mercy as the prisoners stripped away his canvas leggings and boots and gloves and goggles and marched him through the auditorium and lobby and out into the street.

  Picking his way barefoot through the gutter to avoid the fleas, Hamlet kept babbling in the strange language of the scavengers, but nobody paid the slightest attention to what he was saying. As the sun edged above the horizon, the group retraced the route Martin had taken into Kantubek, passing the ornate building with the mosaic in the lobby depicting the weight of the state. When they reached the motor pool hangar, aswirl in sand and dust, the scavengers found a roll of electric wire and lashed the warlord of Vozrozhdeniye Island to one of the gutted green trucks, his wrists bound over his head to the rusted frame of a window, his bare feet just reaching the drift of sand when he stood on his toes. The warlord whimpered something and Almagul, watching from the street, called out a translation for Martin.

  “He pleads with them not to leave him here where the rodents and fleas can get to him. He appeals to be shot.”

  “Ask him where Samat went when he left here,” Martin shouted.

  “I do not understand his answer,” Almagul called back. “He says something about the bones of a saint being returned to a church in Lithuania.”

  “Ask him if the church is in the village of Zuzovka near the frontier with Belarus.”

  “I think he has become mad. He tells only that Samat is a saint—he says this over and over.”

  Hamlet Achba could be heard ranting incoherently as the four surviving prisoners and Martin and Almagul made their way along the track that ran through the dunes to the beached boat. At one point Martin stopped to look back at Hamlet. He was about to start up the dunes toward the warlord when he heard Dante’s wild Irish cackle in his ear. Don’t you know the bible instructs victims how to survive emotionally? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning, laddie. When Martin hesitated, Dante sighed in despair. Aye, you’re a weak-kneed excuse for a man. Martin had to agree. Nodding grimly, he turned and stumbled down the hill to join the others on the beach. The men rinsed the blood off their bodies in the sea and tugged the boat off the sand and climbed aboard. Almagul started the outboard, sending the white flamingoes scattering into the air. She backed the boat until the water was deep enough to swing it around and head at full throttle toward the mainland. While Almagul distributed watermelon and goat cheese from the hamper, Martin gazed back at the ghost town of Kantubek, growing smaller and smaller until it finally vanished into the tulle-like haze that thickened as the sun stepped higher in the east.

  The solemn timeserver behind the counter at the central post office in Nukus had never before placed a call out of the country and needed to read the appropriate chapter in a manual before she could figure out the various codes and how to charge for the communication. On the third attempt she finally got through to a place she had never heard of—the borough of Brooklyn—and punched the chess timer that she used to measure the duration of calls.

  “Stella, that you?” Martin called into the phone in the open booth while the half dozen people queuing for pension checks looked on in wonderment at someone dispatching his voice across Europe and the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America and receiving an answer within a fraction of a second.

  “Did you catch up with Samat?”

  “I missed him but it couldn’t have been by much. The basketball court was blackened by exhaust.”

  “You okay, Martin?”

  “I am now. It was touch and go for a while.”

  “What does a basketball court have to do with Samat?”

  “It had a white circle painted on it, which means it’d been turned into a helicopter pad. Unlike me, Samat travels first class. I come chugging after him in open boats with outboard motors. How you making out with your new front tooth?”

  “I decided you were right about the old chipped tooth—it had a certain charm even if it did make me look breakable. I don’t recognize the person looking back at me in the mirror.”

  “You can always chip the new tooth.”

  “Very funny. Martin, don’t get angry but you are tracking down Samat, aren’t you?”

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. The fact is I hardly know you—I don’t think you’re a serial killer or anything like that, but you could be a serial liar. You could be phoning me from Hoboken and making the rest up.”

  “I’m phoning you from a post office in Uzbekistan. The woman who put the call through had never called out of the country before.”

  “I want to believe you. I really do. But the people you used to work for—you know whom I mean—sent a lady psychiatrist around yesterday. Her name was Bernice Treffler. She said she’d treated you after you were laid off.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “She said—oh, Martin …”

  “Spit it out.”

  “She said you were off your rocker. Are you? Off your rocker, Martin?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Stella exploded. “What kind of an answer is that, for God’s sake? Either you are or you aren’t. There’s no middle ground.”

  “It’s more complicated than you think. There is a middle ground. I’m not insane, but there are things I can’t remember.”

  “What kind of things?”

  The timeserver watching the chess clock muttered something to Almagul, who came over to tug at Martin’s sleeve. “She sa
ys this is going to cost you the wages of a year.”

  Martin waved the girl away. “Somewhere along the way,” he told Stella, “I lost track of which of the several skins I lived in was the real me.”

  He could hear Stella groan into the phone. “Oh, God, I should have known it was too good to be true.”

  “Stella, listen. What I have wrong with me isn’t fatal, either for me or for us.”

  “Us?”

  “Us is what we’re both worried about, isn’t it?”

  “Wow! I admit there are moments when you sound as if you could be off your rocker. Then there are other moments when you sound perfectly sane to me.”

  “I am imperfectly sane.”

  Stella started laughing. “I can live with imperfection—”

  Suddenly the line went dead in Martin’s ear. “Stella? Stella, are you still there?” He called to Almagul, “Tell her the line’s been cut.”

  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?”

  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 pa
rted 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.”

  Before he could say more, floodlight blinded Martin. Squinting, he made out the figure of a television cameraman advancing across the floor of the church. The light fixed to the heavy camera on his shoulder bored into the feretory set in a wall to one side of the pulpit. One of the young priests undid a padlock and swung open a thick glass door as the cameraman zoomed in on the velvet cushion with what looked like a bleached pelvis bone and femur nestled in it. Martin noticed a splinter of weathered wood, roughly the thickness and length of a forearm, set into a niche lined with gold cloth inside the feretory.