Diggers (11 page)

We drove along with Mario, and I scanned the forest from which any minute now we would be bringing out piles of antiques. I imagined how I found restore the weapons, clean them. I guess I dreamed a bit too much. The result was terrible. We found three large aspen trees. We dug up nails, shards of metal, an exploded charge—but no weapons. We cut down thorny branches of raspberry bush and nettle, we tramped across the grass—we found no weapons. I remained alone, the others went to look at some bunkers. I tried to concentrate, I tried to be the old man. I yelled “Abracadabra!” and “Open Sesame!” but nothing happened. I could have shit myself, and that wouldn't have helped either.

At that moment the Classicist called me up on my mobile phone: “You wanna come see the box that we're digging up?” They were 50 meters from me, and he wanted me to see them lift out the box and open it. Progress!

The Classicist and Communicator were digging around in a field. There was lots of clay, and I saw a very rusted brown metal box. My first thought was quite pessimistic. We had dug up many boxes, but most of them had been empty.

“It's not empty, there's something in there,” the Communicator reported happily.

Mario whistled for us from the yard of his farm, looking for us. I whistled back, and then yelled through the forest for Mario to bring his video camera. The Communicator and Classicist finally wrested the box out of the ground. The Communicator took a small shovel and a knife and went to work. When the box had been cleaned somewhat of the rust, I turned on the video camera. It is nice to know now that I was ready to catch the moment when the cover was lifted. A beautiful scene opened up to our eyes—in the box there were 12 beautiful, well-oiled PAK artillery shells. Oh, I was sorry that they were explosive—we would have to disarm them before they could be put in our collections. I was ready to be patient, though. We had two boxes already!

***

July 24, 2000

Even if I have not written a line during all of this time, that does not mean that I have been lazy for even a moment.

Hundreds of times I had heard my friends and acquaintances talk about the beautiful nature of Latvia—the sandy caves, the old castles, the little dream cottage somewhere far away from the big city, relaxation by a lake or river. All of that fell under the heading Travel Latvia! I guess I'll start with the Saturday and Sunday when the Classicist and I decided to travel Latvia with our families. I think that the Classicist's wife thought that this was a normal process, but my better half did not. Apparently we have lived together long enough for her to see things in me that my mouth does not speak. The only thing I told her that we would be driving a long way, that we would live alongside the cleanest lake in Latvia (I did not mention that there were two military airplanes in the lake), that we would be camping, that the Classicist would make barbecue, and that on the way we would look at some historical buildings. I didn't say anything about digging.

Off we went. Some people go to look at rivers, mountains and lakes, while we showed our wives what a World War I cement bunker looks like. Actually, I was looking at one of them myself for the first time. The bunkers were far form the road, among densely packed trees. This was a place where nettles reached to your armpits, where your feet caught under roots. I doubt whether anything of the sort has been preserved elsewhere in Europe. We looked at two completely different bunkers. One was at the place where Germany had ended its “victory march” to Russia. This is the place where the army choked, and after that the soldiers cared just as little about the war as did the czar's soldiers on the opposite shore of the river. After we looked at the bunker we drove a bit further—people had told me about other underground fortifications.

“I am not going any further,” my wife announced and opened a women's magazine. On the second approach access to the objects was simpler—they were on the edge of a field. The second set of bunkers, as far as I could see, had been meant for warehousing—warehousing of munitions, to be precise. Why? There were no firing apertures in the bunker, but they were very appropriate for fortifications.

Toward the evening we got very close to the border between Russia and Lithuania. My friend Alvils greeted us. We had a wonderful evening and night. Our cottages were on the shore of a large lake. The flames from our campfire chased away the blackness of the night. The Classicist threaded pieces of meat on spits, and our laughter brought a quiet corner of Latvia back to life. Alvils fired up his outdoor sauna for us, and my son burned his hand a bit on the sauna's oven. We went to bed very late at night.

A week later I drove to Kuldiga by myself. A Latvian Legionnaire had written to me and said that he would like to present me with his memories. He was a very sincere little old man, and when I left, I promised that I would help to carry him to his place of eternal rest when the time came. He and his wife had no children, and his relatives were all long gone. He laughed that he had already written his obituary and that there would be only one wreath—from his wife. I thought about his words all the way back home: “I was on the front lines. There was no law to protect me there, I could kill—the more I killed, the more I would be praised. I could also be killed, and nobody would be punished for that. Nobody would care.”

***

August 3, 2000

What a rotten day—constant rain, and I'm at work. What could we worse?

I work, Skvarceni works, and now the Classicist is working, too. Let him work. God stand with him and help him to carry out the ideas that his colleague's brains have come up with. I know that he is thinking about his work more than some other times, but he is also mulling over our plans. How can that be? It's possible, I've seen it in myself. We waste a lot of time. All you have to do is arrange your ideas and your obligations. Never postpone your work for tomorrow with the idea that there is also the day after tomorrow. I know that this is very difficult to do sometimes, occasionally you simply have to force yourself to do things that you really don't want to do. Remember one smart thing—nobody is going to bring your heart's desire to you on a plate. Nobody.

We're waiting for the moment when the Businessman is “starving.” Then he'll be ready to dig up the pyramids of Egypt, if need be. The Classicist is a good businessman. Recently he was talking about the death of the factory he used to head—a factory that employed 2,000 people. It was a big, state-owned factory, and it was privatized. “For the three months that I was president there, I did many things. I paid wages to the workers, I completed all of the orders that were on file, and that was it. People came from the bank, there were bureaucrats from the state. One bastard bureaucrat later told a friend of mine that he had been offered so much that he could not refuse—a bribe for his signature on a document. If I had known that in advance, I would have acted differently.” I know the Classicist. He was not at fault for what had happened at the factory, but I could sense that he was taking it personally nonetheless.

Yesterday I called the Communicator. I found out once again that he is and always will be the Communicator. Somewhere from near the sea he had brought back the helmets of two Soviet soldiers. He had gotten to know some of the local diggers and found out that our competitors were following along in our footsteps. Competitors, competitors—people in it for the money, cretinous people who could think of nothing other than finding something and then selling it.

The police are the “friends” of the diggers. The Communicator told me that in Liepaja the police had cleaned out their homes, taken along not only rusty weapons, but also things that neither shoot nor explode—helmets, gas masks, and on and on. The boys didn't even have to write an explanation for the police. Things like this happen all the time—the police are assholes, complete jackasses. And then there was the story of one man. Like I said, Indiana Jones could learn a lot from us, but we, in turn, could learn a lot from this man. I don't know much about him right now, but if this man had gone looking for General Kolchak's gold in Russia, if he had wandered around Siberia for three months—well, in that case we should be writing a book about him, not about ourselves.

***

August 6, 2000

I don't really want to be writing right now. I have to write, though, so that you don't get the idea that Latvia is a place where you find a tank or an airplane, to say nothing about the bones of soldiers and their bunkers, on every step. The Classicist, Communicator, Professor and I had long been waiting for this day, when we could go into a field of nettles up to our armpits or wander across a swampy area. An old man had shown her grandson the place where a tank had sunk. Her neighbor, who we met as soon as we got to the place in question, told us the same thing. I didn't like something back then, the old lady said—it was somewhere over there, well, maybe over here. Asked where, she waved her hands in the air uncertainly—a road had been built, the swamp had been drained after the swamp. She was clearer about the location of a Soviet soldier's grave. It wasn't really a grave, it was a meadow, and we may have been standing right on the old Bolshevik's bones, but we found nothing. We dug and dug and dug and dug and used the Professor's metal detector, but nothing. We drove back home. Possibly there is a tank in there somewhere, but we don't have the equipment to see it.

***

August 13, 2000

After many phone calls, yesterday I finally became acquainted with the Field Engineer. I gave him some balloons and wished him a successful adventure. We decided to meet today.

The first thing I asked him: “So, how was it?”

“Fine. It's a Messerschmidt, in pretty good condition.”

“How deep?” I couldn't calm down.

“Five meters. I did not see a pilot in there, I got his hatch open. I didn't get to the wheels—looks like the tail end's a bit damaged.

“What's the visibility?”

“With a flashlight, you can see about a meter. I saw the propellers. It's interesting.”

We decided to continue the conversation after visiting a meeting of collectors. How did I feel there? I can't say that I really liked it. It was a big market with people who bought, people who bought what others had bought, and people who were simply messing around. There was the stink of old junk. Some people were selling antiques that they had produced at home the day before, while others thought up ridiculous prices for old pieces of garbage. The Field Engineer got into it—he was trading army insignia. I found Mario and had a good chat with him. All kinds of things happen in life, and sometimes you have to introduce two old acquaintances to one another. Today it was my honor to introduce Mario and the Banker to one another. They had met ten years before, it turned out. The Banker had been a police officer, and Mario had been a criminal.

Shit happens.

***

August 16, 2000

I was walking the streets of the city to relax for a bit, and the Classicist called.

“Either we're going to a whorehouse or we're going out on a dig,” the Classicist started. “But because I'm not interested in women you buy, let's go digging. My nerves are gone, things are happening—the administrator knows that if I get the factory back, he's going to prison.”

“No problem,” I tell him. “Let's go to the forest, let's dig. We should go back to the place where we were before—I know that there has to be something more there, I just know it.”

“You don't have to convince me. I'm always ready, and my equipment has been fixed.”

***

August 19, 2000

As soon as I pulled my camouflage vest with all of its pockets over my head, I was a proper digger. An hour later I pulled up to the Field Engineer's house, hearing angry dogs barking behind his fence.

“It's all fucked up,” the Field Engineer said, depressed. “I need a bearing for my car, and I can't go anywhere.”

“But the Banker is going, isn't he?”

“He'll be here in five minutes.”

I want to remind you of an unwritten law in the world of diggers. If a colleague comes to visit, you must present him with a gift. The Field Engineer presented me with something that surprised me then and surprises me now. It was a bullet shell through which another bullet had passed—and got stuck. If there were ever a competition for the most peculiar military object, this little assembly would get a prize.

I did not present anything to the Field Engineer, but I left him a booklet about Messerschmidts. The Field Engineer was surprised when I told him that there should be a camera somewhere in the wreck of the airplane, if it was the right model, of course. We didn't talk much about this subject, because the Banker soon arrived, and off we went into the secretive folds of history with all of its adventures. When we were close to the forest and the bunkers, the Classicist called. In his voice I could hear that his heart was beating in a way which suggested that the business negotiations would soon be over, and then he would be with us.

My much suffering car slowly rolled into the forest. Swaying across the pine needles on the floor of the forest, we drove closer and closer to the places where battles had been held years before. I turned off the engine, and it was quiet all around us. I could smell the fresh smell of the forest. What could possibly be better, you might ask. I'll tell you. To be at home, to stand at the stove and cook something, to wash the floor and the toilet—all of that would be acceptable. The forest was nicely warm, and I felt like I was in a large, closed room, a room in which there could be no wind, no rain. There was no wind. There was no rain. There were mosquitoes. I felt like an enormous and stupid whale set upon by hungry sharks. That was the big problem that we had to face on this expedition. The Banker fired up his metal detector, it beeped, and I flew into the bunker like a bullet. I dug my shovel into the ground, and the first piece of earth flew out of the bunker ditch. The signal suggested that there was something fairly large under the ground. I dug deeper and deeper, and then my shovel hit something else that was made of metal. I bent down to stick my arm into the dark hole and to feel for the form of the object. My fingers cautiously touched a rusted piece of metal. I could determine immediately that it was not a piece of metal from an artillery shell or an aviation bomb. The object was smooth and rounded. I tried to feel something more. As I ran my hand across the object, I found that it was cone-shaped. Now I knew for sure.