by Viktors Duks
I knocked on the Classicist’s door at 5:45 in the morning. Fifteen minutes later we were driving toward the east of Latvia. We were lucky. The driver was the Classicist’s friend, Andrejs. Around nine o’clock we were at the police station in the town in question. The Communicator’s car drove up about half an hour later.
As we drove toward the forest, I kept thinking about those horrible insects called ticks. They can turn you into an idiot, in the direct sense of the word.
The hell with it—that was my slogan as I assembled the metal detector. The high area that, according to stories, was supposed to be a gold mine for a digger was located 200 meters away from where we had parked our cars.
And then I saw the previous day’s find. I don’t know how I can explain the emotions that the Classicist and I felt in a way that might make you, the reader, understand them even minimally. The find was a box of 45 mm artillery shells—a metal box that had preserved the shells perfectly. Just put ‘em in a gun and fire away. What can I say? The shells looked like they had been sent from the factory the previous day.
We walked around for a long time. Oh, the things that came up out of the ground—bullets, shells, slivers of metal and rusty old food cans. The gold rush aspects of the place dissipated like smoke—until the Classicist found an old German gas mask with all of the ancillary equipment. The name of the owner of the gas mask could be read on the cover. A great find! It was as though someone had waved a magic wand. The earth opened up and displayed its secrets to us. Little Spirit and Alexei emerged form some bushes, carrying a heavy metal object of cylindrical form with holes at both ends. Little Spirit asked me what it was, and I was proud of my knowledge.
“It’s an infantry mine, and you attached the detonator to one end, stuck the other end into the ground on a wooden pole, tightened the string and waited until some poor idiot got unlucky.”
Fighting with the mosquitoes, scratching my puffed up face and rubbing my ears, which seemed as big as an elephant’s, I tramped through the jungle. I had forgotten all about the ticks and yielded to the enchanting hospitality of the place I was in. I crawled in the grass, slithered through thick bushes and lay on the ground. Que sera sera.
I collected all of my strength and yelled, “HEY, GUYS!” Someone spoke near me—it was the Communicator, along with Little Spirit and Alexei. The boys were under some thick bushes and were digging around in the clay. There had been machine gun nest there years ago. Bullets and shells emerged from the hole, and we found the wings of a mine thrower’s mine. I did not have one in my collection, and we packed up it and a few other less important things.
“Here’s something!” called Little Spirit. “I’m doing well today. I guess we don’t need to be pulling out just fragments of metal from the ground!”
He had reason to be happy—a while later he was brushing sand off of a cylindrical iron container. It was the reserve barrel for an MG-34 machine gun—a very good find, well preserved and fairly uncommon.
***
There was a shocking report in the newspaper, complete with impressive photographs. People’s bones—a whole pile of bones—had been found in the forest. The Classicist, excited, called me and the Communicator.
***
July 25, 2000
The rain had not yet stopped. The sky was gray and heavy, forcing me to think about this day’s adventures. I stood on the balcony and smoked. I a cloud of tobacco smoke I fought with myself over a difficult question—why am I doing this, why I am digging into it? Why do I like to do things that others consider to be—let’s be honest—stupid? I write screenplays, and my greatest dream is to bring back those people to whom I’ve given so much of myself—people from whom I have undoubtedly taken just as much for myself. Nobody can ever understand HOW I want to make films. Are you stories about war? No. I’m too much of a coward to kill the hero I’ve created, or the hero’s friend—even on paper. But maybe I know too much about war to turn over 100 or 1,000 soldiers to the cannons without thinking about it. I could make up the most beautiful heroic deed for each of them, followed by death. Digging around and war? Am I covering myself with these things? I try to show or to participate in the real film of life. When I’m dirty with the earth or soaked to the skin, I watch my friends in action, and I’m already writing something in my head—the same thing that later I’ll be putting into the electronic memory. We’re each so different, maybe later I’ll describe each of my diggers. I’m not ready for that. But I can tell you already that each of them is a personality—a businessman, a farmer, a solider and me, the writer. I try to photograph in detail so that later the reader might understand each word that I have written exactly as I saw it.
And more … I started to write a film about war, a film about the Latvian Legionnaires. I feel the Legionnaires in my bones, and I simply cannot fail to write about them. Four years have passed since I completed my film about the riflemen. I remember the evening when I wrote The End on the paper. I can’t describe that feeling. I don’t even know why I’m telling you this—maybe someday you’ll read it, but maybe I’m just trying to unburden myself to someone.
Now—what happened today? Driving around large puddles of mud, by Audi slowly showed the way to the Classicist’s BMW. It had been raining without pause for several days.
“If I don’t dig some, I’ll go crazy.” That’s what the Classicist said at the middle of the week.
He didn’t have to tell me twice. We were ready to dig anywhere—as long as pieces of metal came out of the earth. As we shook our way down the stony rural road, the Classicist called me.
“The Communicator says that he’s not going into the forest today.”
“What do you mean, he won’t? Tell him that I brought boots for him,” I replied, making fun of the Communicator.
We arrived at a grown-over forest path. We changed our clothes quickly and pushed our way into the depths of the forest. As I listened to the squeaking of my “friend,” we inspected the old wartime foxholes.
“Doesn’t somebody want to look for some mushrooms?” I don’t remember which of us, but somebody started to talk about mushrooms.
“You’d have to be a complete idiot to be in the forest picking mushrooms in weather like this. The question arises—to whom can we be compared? Fine,” I continued, “let’s keep going a bit further. The forest is cleaner there, and the defensive lines have bee preserved perfectly.”
Two German soldiers lay at the end of this trench. The helmet of one of them is on the cover of the book.
I came to understand that the place between my raincoat and my semi-long boots was so wet that water was beginning to pour from my trousers into my boots. I’ll admit that this bothered me—until I suggested that the Classicist check out a fairly grown-over foxhole that was on the opposite side of the road.
“Maybe we’ll at least find a machine gun,” I joked.
“Maybe a military helmet,” added the Classicist, “with a skull inside it—wouldn’t that be even better?” We were each in our own dreams, and we were laughing at ourselves.
The Communicator and I were already on our way back to our cars to move to another battle precinct. We were tired of digging up large and small fragments of artillery shells.
“You guys, come over here,” called the Classicist.
“Another fragment,” I muttered unwillingly, and the Communicator and I walked over to the Classicist.
“Look at this!” The Classicist had stuck the end of the metal detector into the ground. “It’s not something little.” The metal detector was slowly moved along an imagined axis.
“It is over here … and here it is not,” the detector’s song got stronger in one place, fell silent in another.
“We’ll have to dig it up, what else is there?”
I stuck my knife into the soft earth, trying to hear the sound of metal on metal.
“I can’t reach it, it’s somewhere deeper,” I started to get hotter about it. The shovel struck the ground, the rain
soaked our already soaked bodies, but the secret discovery made us forget that we were damp.
“Come and dig, Communicator, I want a cigarette.” My soaked fingers slid into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette pack that had suffered mightily from the water.
Centimeter by centimeter we got closer to our secret. We saw a bit of the find at the bottom of the hole. Three pairs of eyes looked questioningly into the ditch.
“It’s an MG—man, it’s really an MG German machine gun,” the Classicist’s eyes sparkled. “Look—the barrel and the trigger. Hang on, I’ll go get some beers.”
“Maybe we could eat something?” I asked.
“Forget eating! Later!” A bottle of beer was pressed into my hand.
I won’t write down what the Classicist said, but I can say that he was just as happy as the two others who were standing next to him. The Communicator kept digging.
“Nope, it’s a Russian machine gun,” the Communicator pulled a badly rusted gun out of the ditch.
“What difference?” I asked.
“Wait a minute—in that case, where’s the disk. Communicator, look for carefully.” The Classicist was beaming. “And where are the legs of the machine gun?”
A few minutes passed, and the disk of the machine gun once again saw the light of day.
“Don’t just stand there, keep looking,” I encouraged the searcher. “Gentlemen, if you permit me, I’ll try to clean it up, and then let’s draw lots to see who gets it.”
“I have one already. You can draw lots,” the Classicist said, refusing his rights.
The Classicist kept feeling around.
“There’s something else there—something big.”
Once again the end of the knife could not reach the object that was causing the detector to go off. I grabbed the shovel and stuck it into the ground. From time to time I stepped aside, allowing my colleagues to put the detector’s tip into the ground again. What a nice sound! The detector was squealing like a hog being led to slaughter.
“Dig!” The Classicist was pouring oil on my fire of curiosity. The tip of the shovel touched metal. I put the shovel aside, squatted down and stuck my arm into the hole. It was deep—as deep as my arm is long. I could operate only with touch.
“It’s not an explosive,” I paused. “It’s an edge … it’s a military helmet. German! Absolutely German!”
The Classicist drew out a long and juicy “Oh, shiiiiiiiiiit.” I was sorry that I had not brought my camera or my video equipment. Today we had only one camera, and that was much better than nothing. As much as I could, I put the trophies on film for eternity. The Communicator meanwhile had gone down to the swamp and was now back, the machine gun all washed up. We were lucky today. It had stopped raining—at least we thought so. We had managed to forget what it’s like when there’s nothing falling from the sky.
Two meters down, along the same axis, the Communicator was energetically digging into the ground again . I took my turn, too. Once again metal on metal. I crawled into the ditch and scraped around the trophy a bit with my fingers. It can’t be—another gun barrel? There’s on sense in describing it in detail, a few minutes later the Communicator lifted the legs of a machine gun out of the earth, asking a question—well, I don’t remember who exactly asked the question.
“What the hell is this? The legs are over here, but the gun is over there?”
“You’re asking me?” the Classicist turned his face to me. I guess I was the one who asked the first question.
Protecting the tips of our cigarettes with our hands, the Communicator and I looked at the place where the foxhole had approached the forest path—the place where a bit earlier the Classicist had found a new and secret discovery with his squeaking detector.
“Dig, dig,” I called.
“Now I hit something—hit it hard,” the Classicist complained. “I thought that it was still very deep, but … it’s a helmet. Another one! German!”
The digger’s hand sunk into the hole, and we, the smokers, awaited information from underground.
“It’s with the skull still in it, guys—look!”
I went to the digger and saw that he was holding a human tooth.
“He’s lying here with his helmet.”
While my colleagues freed the soldier from the earth and the roots of plants, I stepped some 20 meters away and found a German grenade—what the people used to call the “little egg.” It was rusted and without anything that could make it dangerous. I went on.
“So, Artist,” said the Classicist. “Take a picture. Look—the boy’s got golden teeth. It would be a sin not to do it. The pictures will be of use if we need to explain to the Germans that this soldier is an Aryan.”
“It’s my first one. My first one! I found him myself,” the Classicist celebrated.
“Well, if we’re this far along, we’ll have to dig him up.”
I fell quiet and looked at the Communicator, who was standing at the edge of the ditch and gazing at the ex-soldier. The Germans were dealing with their own, but they would never come after just one or two, and they would certainly not be crawling into old foxholes to look for the ones that were lost. They had precise maps with notations where mass graves were located. If we left the soldier there, then he would clearly be here for a long, long time.
“Let’s dig,” the Classicist commanded and climbed into the ditch. The script—as always. The Communicator took bones out of the hole, and the Classicist arranged them on plastic bags that we spread out on the ground. Me? I took the bones from the one and passed them along to the other. Once, when I had picked up another group of bones, I found some bone fragments that looked like they were from a skull. “Just a second,” I said, confused. “The first one is whole—he’s still got his helmet on.”
“Here comes the second one,” announced my colleague. “He had gold teeth, too—but man, he got it in the head!”
“Look,” the Classicist was showing me something. “He got hit so hard that the gold crown bent back.”
I know that some of you are asking what happened to the gold. God is my witness—the teeth were dumped into the black bags together with the bones. I hope that this gold will serve as a document that proves that the men really were from the German army. Military medals? I found one, completely rusted, and it fell apart in my hand. Other property? I got the sense that they had already been picked over by the Red Army and by the locals. Why? We didn’t find any boots, no other items.
These soldiers lay unburied and exposed to forest animals.
The evening was coming to an end. I went out on the balcony to drink my beer and to pull a few cubic meters of smoke into my lungs. A warm but damp evening encircled my flesh. It wasn’t cold—it was nice. On the right side of the balcony there is a 1927 Russian machine gun, which needs to be repaired, and there’s a German military helmet there, too. Something occurred to me—I don’t know how logical, but still—”War—it’s the beginning of a new history.”
Listen to me—I’m a ready Socrates!
***
June 29, 2000
Everything is in order. The story about the bones had been checked out, the necessary people had been found, and we—the Classicist, the Communicator and I—are in Kurzeme. I am taking a vacation day. We drove to the place with two sources of information—guys who promised to show us the precise place in the forest that had been described in the newspaper. We drove along the small dirt roads of Kurzeme, and I got the feeling that I knew the place. A few kilometers later we concluded that we were in that part of the former front lines where we had been in the spring—just five or six kilometers away.
“Gentlemen, are we taking something along for the rain?” the Classicist asked. He was already holding his raincoat.
“You dope—there won’t be any rain!” The men’s choir was unanimous on this, but I kept quiet, thoughtful. Of course a raincoat is something more to carry, and that can create serious problems later.
We pulled on our rubber
boots and tramped into the forest. It was cloudy, and the leaden sky mocked us, waiting for us to get as deep into the thicket as possible before starting to drip rain on our exposed clothes. That’s exactly what happened—it started to sprinkle. For a while the rain got stronger, then it stopped for a bit. Briefly put, the raindrops fell not only on our backs, where they were nicely absorbed into our clothing, but also on our nerves. Having tramped through the swampy forest, we entered the field of death. I have talked about the bones of soldiers dozens of times in my journal. Now I was sitting and pondering the issue of the level of detail that I should use in describing today’s activities. Maybe I should end with these words?
All around us—bones, rotted boots, pieces of belts and various military objects. Nobody was recognizable. I began to become a “bone collector.” I thought that the Communicator and Classicist would agree with this name. What is your hobby, a beautiful woman might ask me in starting her flirtation. I don’t know what she would say after that answer...
“I’m shocked,” the Communicator said, squatting next to the pile of soldier bones and picking through them.
“An awful lot,” the Classicist agreed.
“Enough. Let’s gather up the ‘boys’ and take them out of here,” I said “We have a sack, after all.”
“Look, we won’t accomplish anything here today. All of have to come here and dig everyone up properly.”
I did not object to the Communicator’s words. I would have been happier in digging around in the dirt if I were not being attacked by flying insects of various sizes. My back could feel the consequences of the rain. The third layer of clothing—the one closest to my skin—was already wet.
This is where the witnesses to the tragedy of the last world war are resting. There are bones—some covered with green moss, others rinsed completely white by the rain. I remember the story one Legionnaire told. “When we recovered our positions, I saw the body of a Red Army solder by a tree. In the last seconds of his life, he had been holding a photograph of his family, and his glassy eyes continued to gaze at his wife and three little children for a long time. At that time you cannot help but remember that in addition to being a soldier, you are also an ordinary man.” When I left this place, I collected the iron bodies of four mines, a German armored helmet, and a small pot from a German soldier’s kit. The pot looked as though a tank had ridden over it—a bit thicker than paper. The Communicator looked fondly at an unexploded artillery shell and left it there. It was beautiful, but it was the size of a large piglet.