“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.”
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.
“And what is that morsel of wood?” he whispered to the metropolitan.
Alfonsas’s eyes turned hollow with wrath. “That is not wood,” he cried. “It is a fragment of the True Cross.” Overcome with emotion, the metropolitan turned away and, murmuring verses in Church Slavonic, prostrated himself on the great stones of the floor, under which corpses of metropolitans and monks were interred. Guided by a producer, the cameraman panned with his floodlight and lens onto Alfonsas and held it there while a very chic young woman spoke into a microphone in what Martin took to be BBC Lithuanian.
She broke off the interview abruptly when a roar from outside the church penetrated the thick walls. One of the priests, scampering up a ladder and peering through a slit high in a bartizan, called out, “Holy father, the battle has begun.” The metropolitan sprang to his feet and motioned for the glass door of the feretory to be shut and locked. Gripping his staff by the silver tip and resting the heavy jewel-encrusted handle on a shoulder, he planted himself in front of the holy relics of Saint Gedymin. “Over my dead body,” he cried. He fixed Martin with his dark beady eyes. “Bear witness,” he instructed him, “to the perversity of the papists who falsely claim the relics of our saint.”
The cameraman cut the floodlight and the television reporters darted toward the narrow door in the back of the church. The metropolitan cried out when he saw them tugging free the crossbar—too late. The door burst open on its hinges and a mob of shrieking peasants stormed into the church. Flailing away with his heavy staff, the metropolitan defended the feretory until someone stabbed his thigh with the prongs of a pitchfork and the peasants wrestled his staff away. Martin backed up against a wall and raised his hands over his head but some deranged peasants with wild beards and wild eyes closed in on him and began punching him in the rib cage until he doubled over and sank onto the floor. Through the sea of peasants milling around, he could make out one of them raising a heavy candlestick and shattering the glass window of the feretory. The pillow with the bones of the saint was removed and the peasant army, throwing open the great front door, spilled out of the church. A howl of triumph rose from the throats of the Catholics outside. Faint from the pain in his chest, Martin saw the metropolitan, on his knees in front of the feretory, sobbing like a baby.
Lithuanian police and an army unit, pouring into Zuzovka from the north aboard camouflage-painted armored busses, eventually succeeded in separating the warring communities, but not before two of the attacking Catholics and one of the young Orthodox priests had been clubbed to death and dozens on both sides injured. Their sirens jingling, ambulances arrived behind the police. Doctors and nurses scrambled across the battleground in front of the Orthodox church, treating broken bones and broken heads and hauling the more seriously hurt off on stretchers to the district hospital in Alytus. Martin’s rib cage was taped up by a male nurse, after which he was escorted by armed soldiers to the command post, set up in the gazebo, to be quizzed by an army colonel with waxed whiskers who seemed more interested in the impression he would make on television than the confrontation between the town’s Orthodox and Catholic communities. Looking appropriately grave, he finished giving an interview to the woman reporter from Vilnius and asked her when it would be broadcast, and then instructed an aide to phone his wife in Kaunas to make sure she caught him on TV. With the television crew off filming the wounded in the field, the officer turned to Martin and checked his identity papers. To be sure that the story the journalist named Kafkor filed (to the news service named on the laminated ID card) would take into consideration the Catholic side of the story—like the vast majority of Lithuanians the colonel was Catholic—he insisted on personally taking Martin in his jeep to talk with the bishop of the archdiocese, come all the way from Vilnius to support the local Catholic priests and the members of the diocese.