by Viktors Duks
By the way—I guess I’m talking about friends.
“Boys, I need materials.” We were in the Classicist’s car, and I interrupted my colleagues with this statement. “I need propaganda materials that were fed to the Latvians between 1939 and 1946—both Russian and German.”
“Why the hell do you need something like that?” the Classicist asked.
“I decided what I’ll write about. I want to bring together the nice and the useful. I have to write an annual paper.” I was so happy about this outstanding solution that soon enough I could join in the conversation of my battle mates.
“What kind of a book is this? It’s about tanks,” said the Communicator, having found a thin brochure in the Classicist’s car.
“It’s my son’s coloring book.”
“How’s he doing in school?” I asked.
“I think he’s going to be sick of it soon. They make him draw trees and bunny rabbits and kitty cats.”
We arrived at the agreed location, and Mario dove into the car.
“Let’s go down to the bar, I’m hungry.” Mario was starving.
This was a tradition for us—a second breakfast, some coffee, new legends and stories, information from the police and legends about diggers which do not differ at all from the fables which hunters and fishermen tell.
“Mario, when are you going to show us your collection?” I asked, thinking of weapons. “You know everything about us.”
“I buried that stuff deep underground,” our acquaintance smirked.
“You probably sprinkle weapon grease on your flowerbeds,” the Classicist said, chewing on some pastry.
“The Russian embassy, by the way, looked at our cassette and said that we had done an impressive job with those bones. They liked it a lot,” the Communicator changed the subject.
“What did you give them? Everything?” Mario smiled.
“Forget it,” the Classicist growled. “I censored the damn tape, erasing all of your stupid talk about the soup that you were going to cook with the bones from that boot. I also took out the way in which you sucked on your toothbrush so perfectly, as well as everything about our hotel.”
Mario said nothing, but his smile brought back our adventures at the Hilton. It wasn’t a bad couple of days.
Our further path led us down country roads, and after driving around and around we unwillingly drove into the yard of a peculiar farmer. I was here for the first time, but everyone else knew the farm and its people.
“What’s new?” Mario started the conversation. “Haven’t you found anything interesting that we could get?”
The Classicist was staring at two Soviet military helmets that were on the ground. I could tell that tears were forming in his eyes. The metal helmets were filled with a semi-rotted mixture which, mixed with rainwater, created a gross porridge.
“There’s a sword, but it’s from World War I. Do you need that?” The “interesting” farmer was offering us his wares. We walked into a half-collapsed barn.
“Could I buy those helmets from you,” the Classicist asked the farmer’s wife.
“These? No.”
“Why not?” the Classicist insisted.
“We’re going to nail poles to them and use them to scoop shit out of the outhouse pit.”
The Classicist was stunned and turned to me. “You old fat cow, what kind of shit have you got in that pit?” he whispered. Then, more loudly, “Listen, I’ll bring you two brand new buckets in place of those helmets, OK?”
“Why is this sword so short?” Mario piped up, turning the sword around in his hands.
“We broke off the end—it was easier to chop branches with it.”
What more could I say about this? A sword from the era of the Russian czar, with the Russian seal on the handle and depictions of a cross in a form which we had not seen before. To put it rudely, the damn thing had been castrated. These people had destroyed a valuable museum piece. They had thrown away the wheels of the most popular Russian machine gun, Maxim, and they had lost a machine gun from an airplane. While others were dealing with the situation, I took a look at a pile of firewood that was nearby. There I saw something I had needed for a long time—an iron box for bullets from Soviet times. I opened it easily and then closed it back up and left it where it was. The box was full of a grease that is used to oil up the wheels of wagons.
Finally it all ended well. We bought what we needed and left.
“Which part of their body where they thinking of when they broke that sword?” the Classicist grumbled.
“The main thing is not to show your enthusiasm about things in cases like this—then they screw up the price to the point where millionaires would get upset.”
“One idiot after another,” I said. “They should all be shot.” And what if—my God!—the professor refused to approve the topic for my paper?
The automobile stopped alongside a crater in which, according to information at our disposal, a tank was resting. I marked the place on the map. We would wait for the winter, when the water would freeze.
***
This is the day when my country celebrates its birthday.
The dark of an autumn evening covered Riga’s streets and people. Everyone was hurrying toward the Old City to see the president address the people, but Dita, Robert and I were driving in the opposite direction. I had received a card from the president on Independence Day, and so I didn’t need to celebrate any more. Actually, the card was sent to me by the president’s chancellery, because it is one of my clients. The Writer also got a card. The signature was artificial, but I didn’t care—I felt honored. What’s more, I had no desire to spend any part of this evening outside of the warmth of my own home.
“Daddy, how was it?” the question sounded from the back seat.
“Daddy got lost in the woods today.”
“Like Snow White?”
“Like a total idiot,” I thought but did not say the words. “Like several Snow Whites, my son.”
“Were you alone?”
The major holiday for commerce was approaching—I mean Christmas, of course. I knew what I would give the Classicist as a Christmas present—a compass.
In early October 1944, the German army moved across a swamp to take up defensive positions.
My car rolled off the highway and onto a sand road. The Classicist was sitting next to me and looking at a map. “Straight ahead, left, right!” My car followed all of the commands. Like a tank, it moved easily through deep and muddy ruts on the road, and then, like a crocodile, it crawled out of the muck. The idyllic silence of the forest was damaged by the noise from the engine. I should have taken a picture of the surprise in the eyes of the hunter who had not expected our arrival. He had been sitting there for several hours, waiting for an animal to shoot, and he had been listening to the footsteps of animals in the silence that surrounded him. And there we were.
“Hi,” I addressed the man through the open window. “We’re a bit lost. How do we get out of here?”
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and I wanted to fire back: “What the hell are you doing here?”
We did not get angry at each other. After all, we were all looking for the romantic aspects of being a man. The spheres of influence have to be divided up somehow, after all. In a magazine once I read an article a woman journalist had written about the romance of men. I wanted to get up from the toilet and yell, “What the heck do you understand about men and their romance? Can you enter the soul of a hunter and feel any part of the feeling that you get when an animal’s footsteps are heard in the forest? When the animal appears in front of your gun, and all that you have to do is pull the trigger and the animal will fall down? Or that the hunter then lowers his gun, because alongside the moose there is a little moose child? If the adult is killed, the young will die, and if the young dies, then the romance of the hunter will die, too.” I personally feel sorry for the animals that get killed. What could the woman journalist understand of men wh
o, after the first chords of flirtation, sit right down at the piano to play an energetic melody? In a moment of memory, I hear two women talking behind me: “He’s the dream of every woman.” In a place where the stench of whisky drowns out the scent of any woman, there is music. No. It’s not a professional pianist, it’s just a man—a man who knows what to do to ensure that the wonderful being in front of him is ready, nay—HAPPY to show him the lace that she put on under her dress before the party.
The dream of every digger tempted us into the world of pine and fir. Bunkers that had been built deep behind the front lines drew us deeper and deeper into the green thicket. We found several lines of defense as we moved further from civilization. The first defense line—that is what we needed. Only if we found the place where two armies had met eye to eye would we have any chance of finding that which our hearts were yearning.
“I think that this is from the First World War…”
“I do, too.” The question, not understood yet, forced the Classicist to agree with me. We concluded that the boys had been fighting in bunkers in which their fathers had fought a few decades earlier. “Men who brought home the treasures that are between their legs after the war.” I should write that thought down.
According to the military tactics and strategies of the early part of the twentieth century, the men had turned the field into an underground fortress. There were bunkers at various levels and raised areas—perfectly geometric formations. The moss of the forest had dressed all of this construction in green, and the sharp corners of sand constructions were now rounded and smooth. I felt sorrowful that other people could not see this beauty.
Luck had turned her back on us. We couldn’t find the place where the attack and the counterattack had come. We were convinced that we were in the place the documents had described, but where. I cannot find an answer to this question even three hours after I have stepped across the threshold of my home and sat down in front of my electronic document storage device.
The day turned into the afternoon, and the time had come to find our bearings. The autumn was promising to send darkness to this swampy forest in two hours’ time, and we wanted to leave the historical museum.
The Classicist and I tried to leave several times, but each time we ended up where we had started. We had to admit that we were lost. We waded through a swamp, we found ourselves between two ditches with muddy water. The further we went, the narrower was the band of earth between the two channels. It looked like we would not find our way back. I saw a large log that had fallen across one of the ditches. We crossed the log, but I was not sure of our direction—it could be tempting us even deeper into our mess. Fortunately we found ourselves in the same place again, for the fourth time.
“The forest spirits are guiding us,” said the Classicist, picking up his phone. “I’ll ask what you need to do to get rid of the spirits.” The digger realized that all efforts to get out of this place in a natural way had failed.
“We have to get out of this ring—we keep walking around and around. No matter which way we go, we end up back here.” In my subconscious I was already thinking about constructing a shelter for the night. We had to start building before night fell with its complete darkness.
“Mama! Mama, your son wants to come home! Can’t you feel me? He’s lost!” I cried, remembering the only person who always defended me at this time of seeming hopelessness. “Let’s go that way.” I pointed to the last direction in which we had not yet gone—the one we felt to be the least promising. Our feet sank into the soft moss, and the total silence rang in our ears. In ten minutes we found an overgrown forest path. Each path goes somewhere, no matter how long it takes to get there. This prediction came to pass—in a little while we were on a wider path. We were happy to see the tracks that a tractor had left on the sandy road.
After my wonderful adventures in the forest, I have spent two days in monotonous harmony with the laws of civilization. Ten minutes ago I opened my eyes to hurry up and carry out the obligations which society has put on me. I am trying to describe this gross situation even though my eyes have not really opened up the gates of my dreams. Monday. Reality explains why I feel so bad.
I cannot force myself to start writing my paper for my Latvian language lessons. I sense that as soon as I open up a new Microsoft Word file, my jaws will clench and my throat will close up. Writing this damn paper for me was like forcing a Muslim to rewrite the Bible.
Monday turned out to be an excellent day, though. I guess it’s time to describe the place where I work. I work at a large company that prints books, business cards, T-shirts, pens, cups, signs which say WC and are put on bathroom doors and everything else that could be called...hmm, I can’t really think of the word. Never mind the details.
My day starts with the computer. I say hello to my e-mail. I look at all the stupid jokes my friends have sent, thinking about films and politely vulgar photographs. I forward things, and they move to the computer screens of my friends.
“What should we do with new client? We should give them a discount, they say that our prices are too high?”
“The price is too high? Do they sell their cars for nothing? Fuck them. No discounts,” I am hot while talking with my salesman.
“They could become our clients.”
“Clients? I’m not going to prostrate myself before them.” I remember the guy—what a cretin! A snob whose every word seemed to come from the Almighty. He “undressed” me, and I regressed from being a normal salesman to being a simple apprentice.
“Clients. Tell him to read Carnegie, some books on business ethics and then to fuck himself. You want me to tell him?”
“No, no. Don’t do that.”
“Good morning.” The nice words passed through the telephone wires and into the ears of a very nice girl. “I have a problem with the Latvian language—let me tell you the books that I need—Latvian language textbooks for the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades.”
“Seriously? You’re not kidding?” asked my future colleague, who was working at the National Library. Those are books that kids 11 and 12 use for their studies, but I can use them, too, to refresh my knowledge.
“Here’s another poker for you, it’s from hard metal and won’t bend when you stick it into the ground.”
“It’s great!” The middle-aged man who was our best craftsman brought up a one-meter sharpened poker with a sword-like handle from his basement workshops. “Thank you.”
“Call for you,” called my colleague. “Who is it?” I asked. “My wife?”
“Did you get my e-mail?” my bedmate snapped into my ear. “Take a look.” I looked at the blue screen, found the English word Subject and then the word Asshole. I had been long since promised myself that I would refuse any orders from my wife’s company. It’s a big auditing firm that seems to produce snob after snob. I could throw up thinking about them. The company had a very expressive and easily adjusted logo. In the new century, the company changed its logo, and I simply could not understand where the artist had gotten the colors that he used and what he had done to merge them together.
“Another call!”
“I’ll call you back,” I say goodbye to the wife and pick up the new call.
“It’s all copied. Come and get it,” said the girl from the library.
“I’m melting like a piece of ice when I’m with you,” I thought but did not say.
A Christmas carol starts to play quietly somewhere, and then it gets louder. Some of my colleagues get up from their desks and sing along. It’s my mobile phone, actually, and it’s the song that is played when one of the diggers calls.
“Wait, I’ll be right back,” I throw down one receiver and pick up another.
“You’ll shit yourself, man,” the Classicist said. “Andrejs called. He has a hunter who found six German soldiers in the forest, all in a row, each a full set. (A set is when the bones of a soldier have not been scattered, and the remains of their clothing and weapons allow the
m to be identified.) It’s possible that after the battle the boys were arranged for burial and then forgotten, or maybe the Russians chased the Germans out. I don’t know, but we have to go out there.”
“Oh, shit!” I grabbed my head and stared at my computer.
“What is it?” my colleague looked at me.
“What’s shit?” the Classicist asked at the other end of the line.
“That wasn’t meant for you,” I told him. “I’ll call you later.” I put down the phone and slapped myself. “I messed up the e-mail addresses and sent a rude film to a client—a woman, no less. I just met her yesterday. Shit! What would be your reaction?”
She hadn’t even opened her mouth when the computer beeped to ask me whether I want to look at a new e-mail. I pushed “Yes.”
“Very nice,” I read. “I was warned that you have a good sense of humor, but I’m no slouch. Take a look. Give me a call.”
It was not a film, but there were a few very erotic photographs.
“Hmmm,” I thought, going to drink my morning coffee at last.
The morning program was not yet over when I heard something new that nearly knocked me over. The documentary film studio called to warn me that in two days they would be releasing a film about the diggers. I was at the studio ten minutes later. “What did you make a movie about?”
“What do you mean, what did we make a movie about? It’s about you!”
“It’s not about the diggers, it’s about me. Fuck! Why not the Communicator or the Classicist?”
“We needed a central figure. We chose you.”
I had nothing more to say. “Can you change it?”
“It’s been finished.”
I can’t bring my own films back to life, but they’re already making movies about me! Shit!
***
November 26, 2000
The Lawyer announced himself a while ago. He had gone out to look at a piece of land on which he was planning to build a house and got to know the owner of the land. It was an old man who mentioned some burial grounds, adding that he was the only one who knew that between the corner of his house and the road there were the graves of three German soldiers.