by Viktors Duks
I woke up at eight o’clock in the morning. The Classicist was going crazy—we were supposed to leave two hours ago. I was ashamed. I had even turned off my mobile phone.
In the end it is all fine, we’re in Kurzeme—the place where my grandmother’s youngest brother was supposedly seen for the last time as a member of the Latvian Legion. Mario drives us toward the bunker.
We drove back and forth, three wrong roads. I was driving behind the Classicist’s car and eating the dust his tires were kicking up. I did not try to notice the dust, though, because in my mind I was already there—the quiet forest, where everything reminds me of my soldiers. Latvian boys fought here. The road became narrower and narrower, and then we were there. We could not leave our cars on the road. We had to drive into the meadow as far as possible and hide the vehicles among the bushes there. Our Audi and BMW were all-terrain vehicles already—no doubt about that. We drove across the 200 meters of no road with no problems, and then we were in a thicket of bushes.
We are trembling, we’re ready to run to the forest. Let’s get to the bunker, the foxholes, the iron as quickly as possible. Well, we can’t run, the heavy backpack is on my shoulders, while the shovel, stuck into the backpack vertically keeps catching on branches. We push our way through bushes and walk around the trunks of trees. Mario tries to find the road.
It should be here. It is here. Carefully hidden from the eyes of strangers, it is waiting for us. You could run over it ten times and never know that under a deep layer of moss and clay, there are fat tree trunks laid horizontally across a ditch, above which a fairly large fir tree has managed to take root. We look at the hole and are sorry. It is a small and vertical entrance to the place beneath the ground—and it is full of water.
“I drained it, but there was not time to finish the job and take a good look,” said Mario. He was here a year ago, and he spent two days doing nothing but lifting water out of the hole in buckets. We don’t have any buckets, and anyway there are too few of us to do the work.
“We need to bring someone with a video camera,” the Classicist says quietly. “We shouldn’t touch this bunker yet.”
“There was a soothsayer who told me that there, on the left, there is something that I didn’t notice, there has to be a hiding place there.”
Mario speaks, and the blood rushes into my brain. Only common sense keeps me from jumping into the muddy water.
Unbelievably enough, but it is a real residential bunker which, thanks to the clay in the ground and the water has preserved itself. We were a bit out of luck, but despite the fact that the bunker was full of water I took the Classicist’s camera out of the bag, took off the battery and tossed it into the black hole. It rolled slowly but beautifully into the hole and disappeared into the water. The Classicist was calm, but I felt guilty. We concluded that the Legionnaires did not want us poking around on that day. We are not particularly superstitious, but when it comes to these things, everything that we do and everything that we find depends on whether the soldiers who fell here want it to happen or do not. If they do not like what we are doing, we fail. Other times they shower us with gifts. One of the diggers slowly grows tired. An obvious springtime allergy has paralyzed the Classicist’s desire to look for anything. I can see that he was fighting his illness, and I understood his mood. Only Mario is still chopping away at the clay like an outstanding coal miner. What did we find? Around 100 Soviet shells, four grenades (not live, don’t worry), many empty boxes of bullets and an empty tank shell. I found a pretty piece of a cannonball. I had to laugh—an ordinary piece of metal, but it creates the nicest emotions in me.
12:30 AM—Mario and I are home.
***
May 27, 2000
Now I’m thinking about what else we could do to get everyone else to tell us that we’re nuts.
At seven o’clock on Saturday morning we arrived at the home of the Legionnaire Talivaldis. We put him in Skvarceni’s Jeep and drove to a city in Kurzeme. It is nothing special, but if an old man is without legs, one has to devote twice as much attention to him as to a person with all of his limbs.
We drove him there, and there he found the two “girls” who brought him food every night 55 years ago. After the capitulation Talivaldis lived in a bunker and hid from the KGB. They walked across his bunker three times while combing the forest, but they never found him. When the owner of the nearby farm was captured, Talivaldis left his bunker, and immediately he heard the command “Hands up!” “I couldn’t live there any more, I was afraid for the girls. They could have been shot because of me.” Yes, it was a minor event in the small town. We got to know the police chief, the deputy editor of the local newspaper. Necessary people. Of course, we found out the locations of a few more tanks.
When I got home, I started to prepare for my birthday celebration. My colleagues from work came to visit, all dressed up. I was still in my digging clothes, no time.
In truth we both drove the old Legionnaire to the place so that he could find the documents, medals and weapons he had buried there. It turned out that a tractor with a plough had crossed the place hundreds of times, it was impossible to find anything there. “You’ll admit, though, that the thing that we did today was much better than the thing we were going for,” Skvarceni asked me when we were alone. I nodded my head and said nothing. We knew that we had created a little holiday for the old man today, given him a trip that he would always remember.
All in all, we have lived peacefully for the last few weeks. The quiet has been deceptive—only five days pass, and a long column of cars will leave Riga for Kurzeme. It seems that this will be one of the largest expeditions that we have ever had.
***
June 3, 2000
Now that the expedition is behind us, I try to write my first memories into the computer. The only thing that still reminds me of those days is the dirt behind my nails, which I could not get rid of, even sitting in the tub yesterday. Oh, and my muscles hurt, how they hurt! I hauled a 200-kilogram pump and found that I still have muscles.
The start was shitty! The end was good! That’s how it happened. I opened my eyes at 6:45. Fifteen minutes later I had to be at the Statoil on the Jurmala highway, but I was 40 kilometers away from the gas station. Oh, how I hated myself. Luckily, Mario was next to me, calming me down a little bit. I was late by 47 minutes in the end. Me—the guy who’s always early for the date. I hate it when someone has to wait for me! Why did I oversleep? I sat with Mario in the kitchen, we drank whiskey and talked about our stuff. As a result we only went to bed at four o’clock in the morning.
Our destination is the Curland Cauldron. Our plan is to pump out the bunkers, dig up a flyer and look for potential sites for the future.
It’s a true expedition. We have three girls from the press and four people from the Environmental Film Studio with us. In two days’ time I never did count up how many we were—let’s assume that there were between ten and 15 people.
I won’t get into the details, I’ll start at the place where our caravan moved off the gravel road and rolled into a meadow. The road ended there, to tell the truth. We drove about 150 meters into the meadow and stopped for our first discussion.
Now, while writing and thinking about the two days I spent with these “crazy people” of various ages, I found out many new things. To put it more precisely, my suspicions were confirmed. The world is based on the crazies, the hotheads with their logical thinking, and there is nothing that can’t be done—you just have to do it. Everything will happen then.
“Forget this! Let’s go!” Anatolijs said this and got into his Niva, behind which he was hauling a trailer with the 200-kilogram pump.
He drove on the road, which, in truth, was one only in name. A tractor with proper treads would drive it without problems, but a Niva? Of course it got stuck. The rear wheels stirred up a porridge of clay and water, while the front was firmly embedded on a harder hill of clay. The Communicator, and amazing arranger of work, got all of the
guys to know what they needed to do in just a few minutes’ time—where to go, what to push. We picked up one edge of the Niva, stuck wood under it, and for the rest of the kilometer I guess we all pushed the car to the place where our car could no longer enter. Mario pointed out a precise direction. He is amazingly good at orienting himself in a strange environment. The first scouting expedition, including me, carried our stuff and a can of gasoline. Coming back we met guys with the heavy pump. Crazy people! That can’t be told in a story, it can’t be described with a pen. A forest in which everything grows, starting with raspberry plants and bushes and ending with large, fat and small trees, among which fallen tree trunks lie horizontally. How far can four grown men carry a pump in one go? Ten meters, fifteen, maybe twenty. Then you have to change hands, or—even better, replace the people. Seven of us carried the thing. It was heavy, but we got to the bunker—tripping, falling, hissing, but we got there.
After half an hour, when the Communicator and his colleague had fixed the ignition, which we had shaken up while toting the device, the pump went to work. It did well. The Classicist and I trod into the forest. A director, soundman and cameraman followed us. A comical sight—you go, on your heels there’s a cameraman, a soundman and a director. They were almost on our heels. The Classicist announces that the camera’s battery is dead. SUPER! I say nothing—I’m the one who left almost the main piece of equipment at home. The camera remained in my hall, and I was doubly angry about it.
“The metal detector quit,” the Classicist announces quietly. No sound at all.
At the beginning of the season! An outrage!
Four confused eyes stared at the silent machine. There was still my machine, though, and we could work with it.
What did we find? One winged mine—the so-called sugar beet, as the people dubbed it—and approximately100 machine gun shells. After we dug around in the forest for a while, we went back. The bunker was pumped empty to the point where there was just a mess of water and clay at the very bottom. Anatolijs came crawling out from the ground in front of my eyes. His rubber suit and long rubber boots were so dirty that he looked like a big piece of clay. To the left of me—Professor, the scientific director of the War Museum, was pulling a rubber protective garment over his head. The boots were too small, so I offered him mine. Professor slid into the hole. The cameraman and soundman from the Environmental Film Studio tried to record this historic discovery. It didn’t work—all that we heard from the dark hole was some grumbling. In a minute the cameraman was preparing to slide into the hole, too—there was nothing else to do. The camera—the expensive camera—was covered with a special cover.
“You’re going in there, too?” I asked the Classicist.
“I guess I’ll look at it on film,” the Classicist responded, and I completely agreed with him. There were no more clean rubber overalls, but crawling into the dirty ones would have been the same thing as to get into the hole as you were.
The first item on the expedition agenda was completed. The sun was far from setting, so it was decided that we would go to the unknown flyer and dig him out. It would have been fine if we had not been tortured by one thought—the pump had to be carried back! Weary from the sun and the fresh air we went back. Our fingers stretched straight by themselves from the heavy load, and at every meter our feet tripped across roots or fallen trees. We carried it. We wanted to howl when the last 20, the last ten, the last five meters were left. Then we were at the end. We loaded the pump onto the trailer, and then, scattered, we went back t the meeting place. Mario tried to play with a hand grenade, then he got scared and the Communicator continued the game. I don’t know where they went off to.
Covered with dry clay, sweaty and tired (let me add that we were tired, but you get more tired sitting in an office; we were pleasantly weary), we got to our cars, which like sexy women were on the sunny meadow and offered themselves as the most pleasant calming effect. Oh, my darling! I opened the trunk of my car and pulled out food and mineral water. The carbonated water poured into my throat, and in a moment I felt it pass through my whole body. Time for a smoke! We set out a lunch table on the hood of the BMW. We ate fatty bacon, rye bread and onions, if you don’t include modern gastronomic weaknesses of human beings—things like catsup and a few other things.
It was afternoon. Driving along the curvy and sandy rural roads, our caravan arrived at the place where the Soviet military airplane had crashed.
***
Covered up with years of earth, the ditch hid a great many small fragments of an airplane. It was hard to find anything that was larger than a man’s hand. Digging around, we concluded that the airplane and its contents had burned after the crash. The poor pilot, we decided, had been torn to bits, so we forgot all about any attempt to locate his breastbones or his head. We looked for his medals with great effort, though. We found nothing. The boy would join the army of unknown dead soldiers.
Evening.
What kind of a finale can there be to an evening if there are ten guys who for a short while are left without women?
We decided to spend the night at the farm of one of the diggers. His mother and father greeted us like family—gave us the whole second floor. After cleaning up our dusty bodies in a very, very nice way, we lighted a fire, and after a while a pig that the Communicator had killed was roasting on it. Idyllic! And we had four liters of vodka. The pact that the Classicist and I had cooked up about being dry was completely forgotten this night. We were just happy.
Morning.
I opened my eyes.
I found with joy that some kind soul had put a full bottle of mineral water in front of my face. My shaking fingers opened the cork, my dry lips clung to the end of the bottle. Oh, how good! I slept on the floor. Beside me somebody was snoring.
“Mario, maybe you could shut up?” I thought.
Mario was sleeping next to me. I don’t know why, but he kept trying to roll over on my inflatable mattress. Maybe he was thinking that his wife was next to him?
The door opened up. It was seven in the morning.
“B-b-boys, it’s time to g-g-get up.” Anatolijs was in the doorway, his face slightly swollen. “Y-y-you asshole, you could at least have taken your pants off,” he continued, stuttering. He was smiling.
We smiled too when we saw the Communicator’s innocent eyes—eyes which soon enough found that he had gotten into bed without taking off his clay-encrusted pants.
We straggled out of the house.
Then I saw him. He sat as though he were posing for an artist. He sat under a large tree, the branches of which almost touched the ground, on a plank that ended in the middle of the small pond that was near the house. He was looking off into the distance—the place where the forest began beyond the grain fields and the forest, flowing together with the sky, shaped what we humans have dubbed the horizon. The person’s snout turned toward me. I say again—”snout.” That was all that was left of the Classicist’s head.
“Man, you cannot believe how my head hurts.”
I won’t go into detail, I’ll just say that half an hour later the Classicist was back on his feet. Two pain pills made the retreat of the alcohol easier.
We had had a pretty good party.
***
We drove around 50 kilometers, and got lost again. We were returning to the airplane that we had found earlier. After two hours of work we had dug up as much as we could, and there was no sense in looking for the pilot’s bones any more. The Classicist and a few of the diggers put the “boy” into a bag, and we set off for a grain field where, according to a local farmer, human bones were scattered about.
The information was precise. Once again a tractor had dug up the graves of some soldiers. The grain was quite high, but that didn’t stop us from getting into a row and looking the place over carefully. The result was terrible. The Classicist ended up carrying a full plastic shopping bag. We picked up the bones that were above ground, but each year soldiers are going to be coming up—like
the harvest.
***
June 21
Yesterday I went to visit the traffic police of the Riga District. There were two of them and one of me. They had two pistols, and I had a machine gun...at home. I try to understand the traffic police in some way. They protect the roads; that is their profession. They have the right to punish those who violate the law, and they are right when they catch the alcoholics. But nevertheless they are and will continue to be big assholes. Why do people want to use their power to humiliate others? I have a weapon, I am a policeman, I can do everything, and you are a little cockroach. I would not want to talk about it or describe it if the Classicist had not called me at that moment.
“We’re going east tomorrow. The Communicator just called, he told me that nice things were coming out of the ground, a box...”
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you later.”
I was left with a question about the secretive discovery. My heart was beating. Damn! They found it without me, and I wasn’t there to take a picture.
The Classicist is an owl by nature, and he always has a hard time getting up in the morning. On mornings when we are going to dig, there has not been a single time, however, when my arrival has coincided with the minute when the Classicist gets out of bed. Never. He’s always in full uniform and has a cup of coffee ready for me. I once heard someone say, “The world in which I live is a philosophy,” or someone else say, “My job is a whole philosophy.” I smirked and said bad things about the people who were making those statements. Now, however, I have to admit that the thing that we’re doing and the way in which we’re doing it—well, I don’t know what it is, but it sure is more than just a hobby.