Diggers (6 page)

***

A week later.

I dug in the aforementioned barn. I found nothing.

I drove around to study the area.

My Audi shook down a frozen country road that had been traveled by tractors.

I drove into another farmstead, told them where I was from, what I needed. They understood me quickly enough. The men were in the wood business, they had no time to talk, but they trusted me. We agreed to call one another, I need those people. One of them showed me a place where a Russian T-34 tank was supposedly buried at a depth of four meters, all shot up, without a tower. He told me something when I left that made me fall down on my ass. He had found 50 German helmets recently, preserved, almost new—sold ‘em for ten bucks apiece.

***

The next day

After the meeting, the Academician and I walked into a I to share information. I suggested that it might be good to propose to military academies that they hold their lectures on old battlefields where men fought during the first and second world wars—let them look at the differences between the trenches that were used during the two wars.

The Academician, who studied military science in America, says that the Americans are only interested in their own Civil War—they analyze it, study it. They don't give a damn about what happened in Europe. “They don't even know about the possibilities.” I can't calm down. “We'll give them a metal detector, let them go into the trenches—let ‘em find some souvenirs for themselves. They don't even know was a real piece of a military bomb looks like. It'll be a show—a walk through a minefield.” I was mocking them. “Next! Let's offer them a chance to help us lift up a tank. I can't believe that a young soldier might be uninterested in that. Just let him pay!”

When I went home I once again asked myself where the people are who are willing to finance Utopian searches for Noah's Ark—those who give money to find Atlantis or the spaceship of an alien in the depths of the ocean. I don't know.

***

March 21, 2000

I've honestly put in my time at the company. It's Tuesday, and I'm already abnormally tired. Why don't I tire out on Saturdays and Sundays?

My wife is once again late coming home from work, once again I was the one who picked up the boy from his kindergarten, once again I'm at the stove, preparing dinner from my spouse. It's SUPER, when you get down to it. While I fix my royal dinner, I have placed by butt on a footstool, picked up a thick book and dug myself deep into the memoirs of the Soviet Marshal Zhukov. I turn the pages and stir the food on the pan. After a minute the telephone receiver is stuck to my ear. It's the Communicator. I promised to talk to an old soldier and find out places in Russia where a great many Latvian Legionnaires fell and were buried. He and the Classicist are planning to go to Russia, where they'll be greeted by local diggers. Good boys. The Communicator, for his part, tells me about a lake in which there is supposedly a tank. The roast burns a bit. There's smoke in the room. I put down Zhukov's memoirs and focus on just one single thing. Otherwise you simply become uninteresting to the society that is around you. Take a look at software programmers and mathematicians—very interesting partners in conversation. I open up a book from which the spirit of heroic Legionnaires flows forth—the winter cold of Russia, the three-row piles of dead bodies. Two completely different books—one about the problems of the Red Army, the other about Legionnaires … oh, God, someone's calling again! This time it was the Academician—he wanted to emphasize heavy technology, or tanks. He knew all about tomorrow's meeting at the War Museum. And once again the question—where to get money for the expedition?

I put down the receiver and lock myself in the bathroom, and the telephone rings again. Can't they wait? Skvarceni was at the other end of the line. I asked about the lake and the tank. My colleague shot back that there is no tank, that the bottom of the lake is clean, that visibility is perfect and that the water is ridiculously cold. I, he continued, sent Finnish divers in there to train and to look at things while they're down there—things that shouldn't be there. You see? Another legend tested.

“Dad?” It's my young son. “Why are you in the hall with a naked butt?” Searching for an answer, I turned toward my son.

***

March 23, 2000

A few hours have passed during which I could understand the recent past. More precisely—that which happened yesterday. The things which are written will have been written in my head hundreds of times, edited right there in my brains.

At 4:00 AM the clock beeped. I was up in a moment. It seemed peculiar that on weekdays it's harder for me to get up.

At 6:00 I was at the Classicist's home in Riga. After a while the Communicator tossed a stone at the window. Everyone was there, everyone was ready to go to the heart of the Curland Cauldron.

“Take a look at what's happening outside, guys,” the Classicist, sitting at the steering wheel, grumbles. We watch raindrops moving on the windshield. It's sad. I think about how the raindrops will press through my two jackets and trickle down the pipeline of my rear end. We'll be wet to the bone.

“A bad start, a good finish,” I cheer up my battle mates. “That's how it always is.” Two hours later the Classicist's BMW stops at a trail that has been chopped out in the forest. Stories say that it's a legendary place. It is clear that after the fairly merciless battles which took place, some of the fallen soldiers remained lying right there. From the forest road to the battle site, you have to walk about 30 minutes. It would be nothing much if it weren't for the fairly swampy region that we're in. My boots get stuck into the mud from time to time, even as my eyes are searching out the next step. The weather has changed considerably, the sun is shining. As I said—bad start, good finish. As long as we're on the subject of a bad start, I want to announce to everyone that I forgot to bring a battery for my metal detector. After a bit, still in the car, I ad expressively (while the rain was still raining) that my probe also was left in my Audi. In truth, it was all the way it had to be. I had a video camera and an ordinary camera. You can't merge two things. The climax to the bad weather came when I slipped on a clay road, as a result of which I fell down on my back so hard that my undershirt was covered with clay, too. The Communicator used his shovel to get the mud off my bottom. The rain stopped right away.

So! Loaded down with all kinds of cameras, the men with their shovels and metal detector hop from one dry place to another, drawing closer to the first battlements. The Classicist turns on the metal director. After a few steps he finds something large under the ground. What is it?

“Writer! Camera!” The Classicist is in command. “Let's dig!”

In a few minutes I take a picture of the cover disk of a Russian machine gun bullet. Everything that I see surprises me. Spent cartridges, military helmets, gun disks. We move to a higher place where some time ago the Communicator found a Red Army soldier. Amazingly enough, it was possible to identify him, and now he has his own grave, a gravestone with his name on it. Not far from that place, I spot a half-rotted soldier's boot and a severely rusted helmet. There are also spent and dismantled “tank fists,” artillery shells, hand grenades without detonators and other war trophies of unknown origin. It's hard to stand in place, we want to walk around everything, look at every bush, put the beep of the detector above every hole and ditch. I'm happy that I can shoot tape and take pictures. Not every director or cameraman has the right to such exclusive materials! The Classicist points to a white ball that's near a tree. It's the skull of a soldier. One cannot prove who it belongs to. The Communicator buries it shallowly and hacks a sign into the nearby tree so that we can later find the skull and bury it properly. We're happy that it's spring. In a month's time this place will become a raspberry field, which cannot be crossed. We walk, according to our own thinking, across the field between the front lines—something of a valley between two higher areas. The place is fairly watery, because under fallen tree trunks and last year's grass, there are countless little streams. They come together to form a fairly sizeable river. We're on the other side of the front line. Here there are no foxholes, no bomb damage to the ground. It looks like to large forces of men met here and, in the senselessness of the whole thing, tried to survive. German and Soviet ammunition and war materiel are so mixed together here that we cannot determine on whose side we are. Everything is here! Again a question? What's under the ground? The probe pokes through the ground. This is a fairly long object. The shovel digs the first level of earth, and there are just a bit more than ten centimeters to the find. After a moment we see a bit of a metal barrel. HERE IT IS! It's a Soviet-type gun. Well, not a gun—just what's left over from it. Just the basic body of it.

“Look at this,” I call to the Classicist, pointing to a rotted piece of leather. “I think it's from a German boot. Look!”

My eyes slide from the Classicist's shoulder to his fingertips, and then down the shaft of the metal detector to a puddle of water lying in a hole that has been torn out by an artillery shell. Sad to say, once again there is a round object under the clear water.

“A skull.” The Classicist didn't have to say that. It was clear anyway.

The Classicist lifts four ex-heads and several bones from the water. Perhaps the bones were thrown in there when foresters were working in this place. There are only four heads here. How many soldiers have we walked over today? At the edge of the ditch, among small fir trees, the Communicator digs a ditch, and that's going to be a grave. It's too bad, but we'll never be destined to find the other bones, and even if we find some of them, we'll never know whose they were. But now these men have probably gotten the first cross of their lives. Two sticks which the Communicator puts on the grave, one across the other.

While the Classicist studies the sender of the secretive signal, I watch the Signal Man. He has gone 20 meters away from us and is picking up a mortar mine. True—they're beautiful! Those mines are like a woman, beautiful, sexy, merciless and terribly dangerous. After a moment the Classicist shows up and finds other “women”—right in those places where I was putting my feet. We're not bringing these things home, so we take pictures of them all.

Time to go! Time to go home. We're tired, sleepy from the fresh spring air and the rays of the sun. I'm thirsty, I want to take my clothes off as soon as possible. We load up with our military trophies and go out to the road. What did I bring home? Two cannon shells, one disassembled cavalry mine, a bullet disk from a Soviet machine gun and many other things. The barrel of a German MG-42 machine gun, spent Faust cartridges and other things—these we left behind. Sorry, but we didn't have any free hands.

***

March 29, 2000

The Classicist and the Communicator went to see Mario. Of course, I had to work. Inside I felt that I had to be there, but never mind—it was all ahead of me. Mario had found an interesting forest. When the travelers got back, they told me that it was a swampy place, they had tortured themselves through the wetlands for most of the day. The tone with which the Classicist told me about this on the phone was enough to make me sigh quietly and then yell out loud like a bull that has been slaughtered. My colleague, with whom I share an office, tore her eyes away from her computer.

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I tell her. “My boys are out digging, but I'm here.”

“I see,” she drawled.

What else could she say? I tell all of my friends who go surfing or who tear down a snowy hill at a crazy speed on their skis—I tell them that their human weaknesses are foreign to me. What did they find? If you've seen
Saving Private Ryan
, then you remember that at the end, when the American boys blew up the German tank, they jumped on its remains. A machine gun began to fire at them from a house on the opposite corner. The bullets tore people in half. So! They found three of the shells from the ammunition of this machine gun.

Other times, when I look at something new to read, I become exasperated—it is never possible to learn everything so that you can say that you know everything, that you are a professional. Never! As soon as you want to praise yourself for perfect knowledge, history poses a question that makes you understand that you are in a swamp that sucks you in deeper and deeper when it comes to the question at hand. Then I am jealous of my brothers—how good they have it! They come home from work. Oh, yes—at work they simply work. Get in bed, read the newspapers, glance at a magazine. Your hand touches something hard in bed—the TV remote! Click, and the blue screen comes alive with something interesting. Isn't that wonderful? And then there's dinner and the woman—perhaps more than one woman for some of them.

For me? The Communicator calls me up and says it's all fine, Russia is waiting for us. The head of the diggers in the Pliskau Region will make a test dig, and if bones come up, those must be the remains of Legionnaires. Let's go get our boys. See you, girls. Bye, bye nightclubs and bars!

***

April 6, 2000

Nothing special has happened. The Classicist says that somewhere on the road to the east there's a guy who's selling a cannon that was used during the Swedish period (16-17 c). In an antique shop I bought the first part of the memoirs of a Latvian general. On Saturday I'm going to the forest—I'll take a few pictures. Last night I looked into my archives, now half a year old. I don't have time to arrange everything. I picked out two pictures of myself to hang on the wall. Then I put them back—one of them my wife would surely throw away.

***

April 8, 2000