Diggers (13 page)

I must also tell you how the Classicist tested the durability of his BMW. He drove down a road that should never be driven down, weaving around pine trees like a slalom skier. The black Beemer with windows just as black as its body performed heroically—it should be in the Guinness book. When the Classicist had finally knocked out his last light and torn off a bumper, we successfully found ourselves back on the highway.

***

September 15, 2000

I should also be in the Guinness book for what I did today. I walked the streets dressed in a Swedish military coat that was no less than 58 years old. My wife can keep quiet now. Next time she complains that I have too many new clothes, I will show her this coat with a seal from 1942.

***

September 18, 2000

There I was, sitting in a university lecture hall. Half an hour passed by before I started to understand what the professor was even talking about. He was diligent about his work. He used all kinds of strange words that made the subject even more incomprehensible to me. Later I understood that he was talking about communications science. I guess I haven't told you about the way I brought my study habits back to life. At the age of 32 I showed up at the university, took the entrance exams, went to look at the results and found that of 100 people who wanted to study, I was in the top ten. Fuck you, I thought to myself. You old goat. I've had enough business studies—in the future I'll be what they call a journalist.

When you find yourself listening to a monotonous monologue, your eyes tend to wander, don't they? Mine passed across the rows of students, past the professor, and out through the window. The last rays of the autumn sun were setting—just like the rays that we saw yesterday, in the forest, when the Classicist and I were messing around on former battlegrounds.

We stopped at a place that we had known about for sometime, it was in Kurzeme. We took two pairs of long rubber boots out of the trunk of the car. The stench of dampness and mold that shot out of those boots made us wince, and immediately we remembered that we had not dried the boots and the wool socks that were in them properly after our last excursion.

We tramped our way in to the woods, cursing the deep ruts that had been left in the path by the wheels of tractors and the vehicles of forest cutters. “A good forest cutter is a dead forest cutter,” the Classicist growled. He was right, though—those guys think about nothing other than felling the trees and taking them out of the forest.

We were looking for something that would allow us to find our way back home later. We chose Komsomol Hill—a place we had so dubbed when the Field Engineer and the Communicator had dug up the remains of a member of the Soviet Komsomol, the youth organization. Later we managed to find out the soldier's name and birth date. That was way back when. Today the Classicist and I were alone. This is the forest that I described previously—two armies with men who thought differently about the world's affairs met here and tried to survive. Some didn't make it.

We used the metal detector as we approached a bunker that had been dug up before. A more careful look revealed black bones to us. Our professional eyes soon enough saw that they were human bones.

“Let's pick them up,” I suggested. “We don't want to let the old boy lie around here.” The Classicist agreed.

I hopped into the hole and immediately started to sink in the soft clay and mud, waiting for my heels to hit against the bottom of the bunker. I took a shovel and poked it into the water. Feeling something down there, I tried to lift it out, along with a shovelful of clay.

“Put on your rubber gloves,” I told the Classicist. “I'll pass things to you and you check them out.”

Having put on his gloves, the Classicist got down on his knees and attacked the shit-like mass that had come out of the hole. First of all he found pieces of a soldier's skull. One piece had been shot through, and the hole was impressive. While my colleague sorted the junk that I had brought up, I kept shoveling. The black bones began to appear chaotically among the mud. There were a few personal effects—a broken plastic comb, a rotted bag for ammunition, a pair of torn up rubber boots—which allowed us to determine that the bones were those of a German soldier.

As I write these lines, I am thinking about forces that we cannot really ever comprehend or explain. I am not sure that I'm right, but I believe that when I had dug a little grave, put the bones in it and covered them up with moss and fir branches, a restless Soul called out, “Great! One of my former bodies is finally at rest!”

As we left, I picked up a piece of an exploded shell and put it into my backpack. This meant toting around another four kilograms of weight for the rest of the day.

We wandered. The Classicist marched in front, like Don Quixote. I trotted after him, feeling like...well, you know who I felt like.

We came across another bunker. The metal detector screamed happily at us. I cut through dry mud and clay.

“Thank God, it's not a fragment,” I said. “It's also not an explosive. It's a gun. Classicist, it's a gun—a machine gun! Look!” I was excited.

The Classicist peered into the ditch.

“A Russian machine gun!” he said, recognizing the gun from just the small piece of it that had been revealed. What is a Russian machine gun? If you saw
Private Ryan
you saw no such gun.

“Damn, its insides are gone,” I said sorrowfully, once I had gotten the gun out oft he ground and looked it over.

All that was left was the metal body of the gun—all of the mechanisms had been removed.

***

We kept going. We wandered around without any real goal in sight, and finally we found ourselves back at the point where we had started out.

OK, I'm still writing, so it should be clear to anyone that the story did not end there. Our legs carried us to a one-man bunker that was similar to the one that we had visited before. It looked identical. The hole was filled with a brownish substance that looked like diarrhea. Here, too, we saw bones.

“I can't understand this. If you want to dig or look for something, then dig, do what you have to do, but why do you have to scatter someone's bones around? I get the sense that those guys don't give a fuck about anything. They don't even have elementary courtesy.”

“I don't understand either,” the Classicist said, busy piling up the bones. “I don't understand.”

At the edge of the hole was a seriously damaged Soviet military helmet.

“You know, there's something else down there.” The metal detector had sounded again, and my colleague prepared to look for more trophies.

I jumped into the muddy water, and it came up to the top of my long rubber boots. I could feel cold water through the rubber. Once I hit bottom, I stuck the shovel into the water. Nothing new emerged—Germans, Russians and Latvians all have the same bones. Then, however, I came up with something that made my heart tremble for a moment. It was a sharp piece of wood, somewhat akin to a pencil.

“It's a mine!” It was a Soviet artillery mine that blew up when someone caught his foot on a wire that was stretched across the ground. I was looking at the harmless part of the device. I was wondering about what was happening at the other end—the end with the detonator.

The Classicist carefully removes a land mine from the clay.

Oh, yeah—of course I took the machine gun. Sorry, I forgot to tell you. We never leave things like that behind.

Anyway, the mine was without a detonator—thank God. Having been sunk into the mud for decades, the unique device looked as though it had been canned for all those years.

“Man, you're lucky!” said the Classicist. “I'd take something like that.”

“Finally I've got one!” I was delighted.

My emotions were heightened by the fact that the Classicist was happy about my find. The Classicist is the Classicist because he knows when he sees something good. I don't know how I overcame my stinginess, but after a long debate inside myself I was ready to present the set to him. A set—it may sound like this was the first time that we had ever found a mine. No, but it was the first iron robot mine with a wooden pole that was stuck into the ground. It was the pole that was the most interesting part of the mine for me. How long can a dead and mechanically processed piece of wood survive in the forest? Well, apparently for 60 years. That's how long it had been since the war.

“Listen, I have a question,” I said, just to annoy the Classicist.

“What?”

“Would you maybe like one just like this one—a full set?” I stuck my hand into the mud up to the below and found something similar to the previous find.

“Of course I would.”

“Well, hop in and pull it out,” I smiled, pulling my legs out of the muddy mess with some difficulty.

A cloud of tobacco smoke enveloped me. The Classicist looked too good not to take a picture.

“These have been amateurs before us,” the Classicist griped. “I don't know what they found, but how could they not find these things? Absolute amateurs.” In a short while he had pulled out three beautifully preserved mines from the hole, complete with their wooden poles.

The last scene played out similarly to the one at the previous bunker. “Finally,” said the Soul of a soldier that had long been looking for peace. “Finally I have a grave, too. Small, not with all of the bones, but it's mine anyway.”

The time had come to go back to the highway, for two reasons. First of all, Sancho Panza (that's me) was tired of carrying a backpack that weighed 20 kilograms. Secondly, it was getting dark in the forest. As we passed by “Machine Gun Hill,” however, we decided to stop for a couple of minutes. We ended up staying for half an hour. We had assigned names to many places in this former battlefield—Machine Gun Hill, Komsomol Hill, The Field Engineer's Place, and so on. That makes it easier for me to tell you about our adventures. Once, thinking about the events of the war, we concluded that on a hill that we were looking at there had once been a Soviet army unit. Things we dug up allowed us to understand that the defenders of the hill had been surprised by an attack from the sky or from German cannons. Perhaps the soldiers were having a smoke after lunch. Why do I think that? We found countless military pots. Secondly, there was a large and deep crater on the hill that could only have been made by a major explosion. In one of the bunkers we found the cover of a thermos bottle that someone had carried food in once. The Classicist continued to haul around his melodic mine detector. It started to buzz near a small depression in the earth, and then it got louder and louder and louder. My shovel hit the earth and brought out a chunk. I knelt down and stuck a poker into the ground. Soon the sharpened metal stick hit something solid. “It's something pretty big, and it's long,” I reported. The Classicist helped me scrape away the hardened clay so that we could get at our discovery more quickly. The earth was hard and did not want to give up its treasures. After a while, though, we saw an interesting piece of metal. My fingers touched the unknown. I don't remember now which of us yelled first—”Machine gun! Oh, my God! Another one!” I had another machine gun for my collection—the Classicist did not want one. This gun was just like the previous one, only it had all of its mechanisms in place.

***

A week later

I was staring at the water faucet. I was dirty, standing next to the white tub and waiting for the water to become ready to receive my body in its warm and bubbly environment. It looked like dishwashing liquid, and it occurred to me that I could use some dishwashing liquid to clean myself, too.

I had been waiting for this moment for two nights and three days. I had spent half a day at work and then announced to everyone that I was going out digging. That's exactly what I did, too. I hurried to the place where seven of my diggers were waiting, driving further and further away from the capital city. Soon the streams of automobiles were behind me and I was alone on the road.

The sun was below the horizon when I drove my car into the yard of the farm. There were two familiar cars ahead of me. I felt like Snow White when I crossed the threshold and found that no one was home. Apparently the Seven Dwarves were having a good time out in the forest and did not have the sense to come home. I opened another door that looked interesting, hoping that I could find a place to spend the night away from my family. Just as quickly, I closed the door back up again—it did not open up into a place that I was really yearning for. A semi-renovated room in which the floor had not been swept for years. There were cobwebs all over the ceiling. Obviously the family lived elsewhere. Another half hour passed before the Seven Dwarves came home, and it became clear to me that this was not exactly the Hilton. In fact, I quickly transformed into a person that most hoboes would envy—”I'd like to live like that, too,” they'd say. The Communicator came into the house and immediately went into the room that I had sealed off, hoping never to return there. If it were not for that room, I wouldn't have anything to tell you about. This Hilton was one large room with a new stove in one corner. On the floor were mattresses of unknown origin and of varied age. How many girls had become women on those mattresses, how many children had begun their lives there...who could know. Maybe many. Anyway, while I was trying to get to know everyone in the house, the Classicist went to the trunk of his car and pulled out a Faust shell tube. It was a notable find, I had to admit. My tube was not nearly as good.