by Viktors Duks
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
I was out in the forest. I visited Juris, who loves his alcohol—the guy who found those 50 German helmets. Finally I was standing above the T-34 tank. It was a meadow among ancient forests. The spring waters had not yet receded, and the meadow was pretty damp. I didn’t get my sneakers full of water, but as soon as I dug a small hole, it filled up with water. I’ll have to wait for the spring.
“One night my friend and I went out poaching, and we found that the Home Guard was waiting for us there. We stole away. I ran along one side of the forest, my friend ran along another. I fell into a bunker.”
My eyes lit up. “Where is it?”
“I can’t find the place, it was night, but the bunker was full of weapons and ammunition.”
We walked around that pine forest for two hours, trying to find the mossy hole. Of course, we did not find it. Either he was engaging in false braggadocio, or he is simply an idiot. I took him home and went back to the old place. No photographing was possible—the wind blew the sky full of leaden clouds. I turned on the metal detector and tramped into the woods. I found the wings of an exploded mine and then a completely rusty German gas mask. When I got to the place where the pieces of the exploded tank were, I lifted a metal bar out of the ground and did not know what it was. I also found some pieces of armament and a fat rope. Nothing good, but my heart was happy anyway. Once again I was sorry that I had not brought along anything to slake my thirst. My tongue was stuck to my gums and began to crack, and the clock was calling me home.
***
End of April, beginning of May
The forests are getting green, the radio is warning me about ticks. How horrible! Last week I visited a Legionnaire and a national guerilla. Great guys! I really want to write about them. Lately I’ve been cleaning up my trophies—bullet shells, bullets and the like. I dug partly exploded mines back into the ground. They were pretty, but they were still alive, and I want to be the one who is alive.
***
May 5, 2000
At eight o’clock in the morning the Communicator got a call from Kurzeme—somebody who had information. At 8:15 the Communicator called the Classicist. At 8:30 the Classicist called me.
“Are you sitting down, boss?” he asked me.
“What is it?” He hadn’t said good morning. He continued: “There are tanks. You can touch one with a stick, there are two others that we need a powerful metal detector for. We need to get to Kurzeme as quickly as possible. It would be great if we could do it on May 13th, I’ll be back from a business trip then. Call the Communicator.”
I got through to the Communicator at 9:30. Everything was GREAT!
At ten o’clock I was at Skvarceni’s office. I told him everything. His eyes lit up, his heart began to beat faster.
“Did I tell you that the Messerschmidt has been found?”
“Good morning,” I say. “Of course I don’t know anything. Skvarceni was counterattacking against my tanks.
“It’s in the water, it’s in one piece.”
Sorry, I have to run—a client is here.
***
A few days later
The Informer has come from a distance. We’re sitting in a bar at the bus station, I’m drinking something akin to coffee. The tank has been found, everything is OK, but there’s one little problem. The Informer wants money for the information. He has seen somewhere that money is paid for such things. The “boy” is visibly excited—now he’d earn some money, now he’d be rich! I ask the Communicator whether he knows anyone who has received money for such information. The Communicator replies that it is foolishness—he doesn’t know of any such case, and you’d have to be a fool to pay money for something you have not seen.
Something has to change here.
***
May 7, 2000
With a happy heart, I’m driving to the Communicator’s hometown. Today is the day that my soldiers will be buried in a proper ceremony. My whole family is with me.
My mood worsens a bit. The reburial turns into a little political process. A grotesque former Communist leader spews out a speech that he’s tried out in front of the mirror five times: “Fascism! Never here!” I lean over to my wife and whisper, “He’s talking about the Italians—the Germans weren’t mentioned there. Italy was a Fascist country.” The education of the politician? “Fascist Germany,” he says. My God! Germany was a Nazi country!
The nicest thing that I remember—the Russian ambassador. A smart, educated and diplomatic man. A nice guy. The only thing that the Classicist and I concluded was that the Communicator had done good work. He dug a deep hole. How odd. We dug them up, and now we’re burying them. The Classicist went to Moscow to look at tanks in a museum. The Communicator and I decided to dig up Mario’s bunkers.
The caskets in the center contain two aviators found and excavated by the Communicator.
Here I have to write about a fairly unpleasant subject. I have to do it, otherwise someone might get the wrong idea about us. I’ll write childishly, but justly. We hate any organization, society or policy that is aimed at humiliating, destroying or conquering other nations or races. Why are we looking for the items of war? I do not know any other army that had as vivid, tasteful and stylish equipment, armament, insignia, order and discipline as the army of Nazi Germany. Today the armies of every large country in the world have borrowed something from the German soldier. In opposition to one army we put an ideology as stupid and worn out as Communism, with its army. The propaganda turned the men of the two armies in the right direction. Mercilessness and mercilessness. The Russian man. First of all, it is a Russian soldier, a warrior who deserves admiration. There is the old saying that a Russian soldier can cross in locations where a mountain goat would not tread. An outstanding and courageous soldier. His tanks put the fear of God into experienced German soldiers. What do you think? Can equipment that has been in a swamp for 50 years come back to live and drive in a modern parade? I’m sure about Russian equipment. The Communicator did it—he exchanged the oil, he charged the batteries, he turned on the giant m
achine and drove around in a circle.
Thanks to the sea of information that is crashing over society, there is increased interest in the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists. People want to know who they were, where they began. Once again! Battlefields, mines, shrapnel, weapons—they all are witnesses to a terrible war, and they are becoming artworks of a very new kind. They’re art that was created by war. Don’t laugh. One cannot conceive of the things that happened to people and land that were torn apart by artillery and grenade explosions, but the stupidest thing that humanity has ever come up with is killing one another.
Digging, searching—in the end it represents a flight from stereotypes and the development of new emotions. They are emotions with the taste of adrenaline. We collect war items. Our words are collected by the state’s security services...
***
May 13, 2000
By the way, the Classicist tried mightily to come back from Russia for this expedition.
A bit of a hangover. Last night I went to my son’s “university.” The director of the institution and my son’s teachers invited us to a parent’s ball for the kindergarten. The students had rented out their school to their mamas and papas. We enjoyed all of the things that this little castle of light could provide. I thought that we would stay for an hour and then go home, but we ended up leaving only after six hours—with difficulty, too. My wife and I were greeted at home by Mario, who was spending the night at my house so that we could go to Kurzeme in the morning. The digger was like a nursemaid to my boy. At four in the morning I found him sitting in a pear tree with a book in his hands—about the war, of course.