by Viktors Duks
We have gone all over Latvia, we have sought and found, we have dug and dug up. Who would think that in front of my very eyes, five kilometers from my house, there could be soldiers who were not registered anywhere.
There were two of us this time—me and my assistant. He doesn’t have a nickname, because his nickname changes all the time.
“Robert!” I called from the kitchen. “What?” I heard my boy’s voice amid the noises of a cartoon. “What are you today?”
“Action Man!” he responded right away.
My six-year-old assistant, Action Man, and I bounced down a rocky road to a farm that had the interesting name of Boots. We greeted the owner and went to the place where the “boys” were supposed to be. There was a little hillock at the side of the road. “This is approximately where the graves were,” the owner said. My first impression was not quite clear. I could never have thought that someone would be buried on the side of a hill like this. The owner showed a very precise location, and there was nothing else to do but get to work. I stuck my meter-long poker into the ground. While I was doing that, Action Man was holding the shovel. His nose was running in streams, and that was nothing important when compared to the overall feeling of the situation. My little guy is a good assistant. The cold wind was freezing his little fingers, and his cheeks were burning red, but he did not complain at all.
When I had stuck the poker into the ground a dozen times, I was beginning to get used to the density of the ground. At one place it seemed to me that the poker slid into the ground like a knife through butter—softly and with not much effort. I felt around the ground. Yes, there was something there. A different noise when hit by the poker—a clean and clear click. “Action Man! The shovel!” For a moment we had to debate over who would get the honor of the first dig.
The earth was not yet frozen and yielded easily. I felt that I was on the right path. After three more attacks I found the blackened leg bone of a human. This was the place. I was becoming a professional. I remembered something that the Classicist and the Communicator had told me about Russians after a trip to Russia. They use pokers like we do to determine very precisely whether they have touched stone, metal or bone. This time I erred only twice. Now the official bureaucratic apparatus of the diggers would come into play, and the “boys” would be found a new home.
***
The Classicist got an e-mail from diggers in Poland. The Classicist was away on business, so I started to correspond with these new friends. One day one of the Polish diggers—the Catholic, let’s call him—was at his computer, and I was at mine, and we sent each other a string of exciting letters, in which we gradually revealed our secrets. I asked whether he had any weapons, and he told me that such collections were prohibited by law in Poland. “Don’t fuck with me,” was the tone of my next letter. “You’re a digger like me. You’ll bring everything home, including a rotten old gun barrel.” “OK,” he wrote right back. “I have...”—and then there was a very impressive list of trophies. We continued our conversation the next day. “I have to write a paper for the university, but I spent the whole day yesterday reading your book,” the Catholic wrote. “Thanks for the invitation, but I’m not sure that I’ll be able to help you lift out the Messerschmidt, because I’m planning to go to America next year to brush up on my English.” I wished him luck.
***
December 19, 2000
They say that when the cannons are firing, the muses are silent. There was no need for me to be in my office—I had done everything that I had to do, and I had done it a month ago. Everyone was thinking only about Christmas and the events that surround it. My salesmen were whining about orders that had not been completed, and my lazy clients were ready to order Christmas cards and presents so that on December 21 they could remind their own clients that their companies respected them and would like to work with them in the new century, too. Life in my company had become impossible, and so I decided to take one more day of the vacation that I had not taken before.
We drove out to see the Forest Guy and the Legend. We left the capital city with a great delay, and two hours later we drove up to the Forest Guy’s farm.
“The Legend threw me out of the car and told me to wait for you,” the Forest Guy said, shaking my hand. “We’re going somewhere else.”
When we were in the Classicist’s noisy tank, he continued: “You know what I’ve been thinking about? I’ve been thinking that maybe I have some special abilities. The Legend and I were out in the forest, and wherever I pointed and he dug, we found a German. We collected all of them, each of them has a medal. That was three weeks ago. Then the Legend told me that he wanted to find a mine thrower. I told him that he would find one the next week. Sure enough, one week later the Legend found two mine throwers outside an old and collapsed home. The Russians had done their job there—the Germans had been fought back. There was even a mine in the barrel of one of the mine throwers.”
“How many Germans did you find?” I wanted to know more about the soldiers.
“I guess there’s about five,” the Forest Guy said after a pause. Then he continued, in a monotone: “There’s another one, but we can’t get him, the hole is full of water, and it looks like he was sitting in the bunker. We found his helmet, and his head was still in it. We stuck our hands into the water as far as we could and found his medals. We’ll have to wait for warmer weather to get him out.”
A narrow and bumpy road brought us closer to the Legend. We drove down a hill and then the front end of the car lifted to climb up to the next surface, and then we spotted the Legend’s car. The Classicist flashed his lights, and the Legend stopped. He was dressed in overalls and was smiling widely. He had wet knees, and his boots were covered in mud.
“We came to see you,” announced the Communicator.
“I’ve had enough today,” said the Legend. “I’m not challenging fate. Enough for me—look!” He took a German MG-34 machine gun out of the trunk. “I told you that we should look at that road further from the bunkers,” he told the Forest Guy. “It wasn’t even in a bunker—it was under the moss at the side of the road. On your way back you guys have to stop at my house, we can have a chat.” The Legend waved, jumped in his car and was gone.
“Last week I told him that he would be finding a machine gun on Tuesday, and today is Tuesday. How odd,” the Forest Guy was going on again with his monologue. “When I dig in a place, I dig it all up, I check everything. The Legend checks one place, another place—he knows where stuff is buried, but he finds only fragments and wires. I keep telling him that we’re revealing our sites for other diggers. They come. They see that someone has already worked in a place, and as a result of that they find things which we really deserve ourselves.”
***
The Forest Guy was our compass as we moved toward the wrecked farm today. It was the first day of winter, and a thin layer of snow covered the land and the trees. The earth was a bit frozen, and the leaves of trees and last summer’s grass crinkled under our boots, making the same sound that you get when you bite into a piece of toast. We were five kilometers down the road when we spotted a clearing with some bushes and the ruined leftovers of what had once been a house. It had been a farm, someone had once lived here. A bit further on there was a livestock barn and an outbuilding. All that was left was a few pieces of wall, made from fieldstones. The scar of a long bunker stretched through the yard, and one end of the bunker was right at the place where the door to the house had once been. We spotted an old telephone cable and thought that perhaps someone had organized a military field headquarters here.
“I did a bit of digging around here a while back. You don’t really need a metal detector at all—there’s metal everywhere,” the Forest Guy said, pointing to a place where someone had been digging. An old German gasoline can was sitting at the side of the hole, along with a few shells and other pieces of military detritus.
We dug to our heart’s content. Occasionally our hearts leaped, but
in the end we didn’t really find much that was of any worth. I found one thing to put in my backpack, but we left behind a German soldier’s water canteen. The period before Christmas is different from the rest of the year in that the day is too short and the night is too long. There had to be weapons there somewhere—they simply had to be there, but it was getting dark, and we had to make our way out of the forest. When we got back into the car I felt so content that my head fell back against the headrest, my jaw dropped open, and I quickly fell asleep, letting the driver take me to the next place we had to go.
***
“So, how did it go?” The Legend was coming through the gate of his own farm. I rubbed my sleepy eyes and crawled out of the back seat of the Classicist’s car. The cold and dark of winter were horrible, and I woke right up.
“We didn’t find anything,” the Communicator said.
The Legend took us to look at his trophy shed. Words fail me if I try to explain this museum. It looks ugly, but it brings collectors and trophy buyers from all around the world, drawing them in like a magnet. Their fingers tremble while they look at the treasures, and then they offer a price. Sometimes they ask the Legend to let them borrow something so that they can make copies and then sell them in America as if they were the real thing. Near the door of the shed there was a machine gun, which looked like a drug addict that had just received its hit—only this time it was brake oil. The mechanisms were slowly coming back to life. The Legend unfolded the legs, he made the springs work again and opened up the cover. It was like he was bringing a dead man back to life.
“What are you going to do with it?” the Classicist asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll mess around with it for a while. Eventually I’ll get tired of it.”
“Offer it to me first. I’ll take it, here and now. Just tell me the price.”
Agreement was reached. The Classicist and the Legend had conducted a Christmas deal.
“In St. Petersburg they make such great copies that you can never tell the difference,” the Legend lectured. “I can differentiate between real medals and fake ones, though—that’s not a problem.” Listening to the master digger I felt proud. We’re the ones who touch the trophies first. Later, when we trade them for other things or sell them, they become bare, without history, without the smell of moss and earth. The Classicist has a cooking pot from a Japanese soldier in World War II. The Field Engineer got the pot from a Latvian Legionnaire who had been in a Siberian concentration camp with some Japanese soldiers. When his Japanese friend died, he presented the pot to his Latvian buddy. From the Field Engineer, the pot ended up in the Classicist’s collection. Mario, for his part, has an old German bayonet. A Russian volunteer who had fought with the Germans had walked into a farm and had wanted to get some honey out of the owner’s beehives. The bees wouldn’t let him, though, attacking with such ferocity that he was forced to retreat. The soldier left his belt and bayonet behind while he was running away.
“When I found the Russian gun...” the Legend was continuing his story, but we were stretched out on the sofa in his living room. We were drinking coffee and being treated with cheese sandwiches that the Legend’s wife had prepared. “I came home, assembled it, put in some bullets—I wanted to see if it still worked. It didn’t at first, but then I fiddled around with the mechanism, waited until all of my neighbors were sitting at their TV sets for the evening news, pointed the gun at the ceiling of the shed and let go. Some dust fell off the ceiling, but I was happy. So, what’s new with you?”
I exchanged a glance with the Classicist. We were both thinking about our cellar. The time was not right to tell the Legend about it, though, apologies to him. “We were in a few World War I places. We successfully dug up a garbage dump,” the Classicist smirked.
“A garbage dump is a good thing—there can be all kinds of things inside it,” the Legend said, interested in the day when the Classicist, Skvarceni, Skvarceni’s wife and I spent a day at a place where bloody battles had once taken place. My colleague pulled a German officer’s whistle out of his pocket—a whistle that during World War I had been indispensable for communicating with soldiers. I could boast of having found a glass soldier’s bottle. The garbage dump from which these trophies came was right next to what had once been a major defensive line. We also mentioned our meeting with members of the Latvian Home Guard. When we got to the battleground, Skvarceni’s Jeep rolled up to a unit of soldiers who were preparing to play some war games. The commander—a large man—had spread a territorial map out on the hood of a car and was giving military instructions. They’re not our friends, to be sure, just very distant acquaintances, and that’s why we felt no compunction in talking to them so as to suck up as much information as humanly possible from their maps.
We walked several long kilometers before we found the garbage dump, and at one point we were even attacked. How did that happen? Well, we moved from one battle sector to another, and all around us we could see small units of soldiers. They were running around, crawling on the ground, hiding behind trees. From the side it looked pretty stupid—they looked like little fucking children. Of course, we made fun of these super commandos and looked for our digger’s dream. I was sitting up front with Skvarceni, while the Classicist and the driver’s wife were in the back. I had just put a cigarette in my mouth and was starting to light it when all of sudden there was a riot of gunfire all around us. The cigarette flew out of my mouth. Skvarceni managed to shout “Shit!” before bringing his Jeep to a halt. Our “heroic” Latvian soldiers appeared out the bushes, laughing their heads off. Their operation had succeeded—we were destroyed. Although we were dead, we managed to lift our middle fingers in their direction. The war games didn’t end with us, though. The next victim was a poor woman who had driven into the forest to let her dog have a proper romp. I am too modest to tell you what happened to the contents of the lady’s stomach when all of a sudden fifty soldiers emptied their blanks at her car. The next day she filed a complaint with the Defense Ministry.
“So what happened to the guardsmen?” the Legend asked.
“I think the commander was sacked.”
“What the hell where they thinking about? It was OK to shoot at us—for us it was an adventure, and the Writer will have something to write about, but what the fuck is the point of getting a woman all hysterical. Sometimes I cannot believe how dumb soldiers can be,” the Classicist said.
The time at the Legend’s house passed quickly, and it was time to go home to our families. I wanted to open up a new page in my electronic diary, you see.
***
An autumn storm was bending the trees and raindrops were beating down on the road with such force that I thought the concrete would break up. My automobile challenged the powerful gusts of wind. The lights broke through the fortress of darkness and pointed my way home. Another week had passed by, another week of my life history had been written, and my one-day business trip was written off the very second that I tossed my necktie into the back seat and cranked up Prince’s “Purple Rain.” I was in the heart of the Kurzeme fortress—the place where the Latvians made their last stand against the Soviet army during World War II. I drove past several people who were standing on the edge of the road and getting drenched. I braked 200 meters down the road, imagining myself in their place and thinking that I had spotted a couple of children. I reversed.
“Where are you going?” I opened the door and was slapped by the wet wind.
“Don’t worry about us—it’s just a little way, and we’re all wet. We’ll get your fancy car dirty.”
It was an old and wrinkled man who refused my help, but alongside there were two small and wet faces that didn’t say anything.
“Don’t be silly—this car has seen far worse. Get in.” I had not yet finished speaking when a boy and girl who were seven or eight years old had already clambered into the back seat. The old man sat down next to me. The car windows were immediately covered with a wet fog. I turned on the fans.
I learned that the parents of the kids had sent them to visit their grandparents over the weekend, but their car had broken down along the way. They had decided to walk the remaining eight or nine kilometers. I talked about my work and my yearning for military items. The old man asked many questions. How do I do it, where do I put the things that I find, why the hell am I digging in the first place, and what makes me look for soldiers who have been buried anonymously. At the end of my monologue I quoted the Classicist: “Maybe up there,” pointing up to Heaven, “somebody will record this as a good deed.” The old man kept his silence for a while, but the next thing that he said was like a bolt of lightning that split my head wide open. “You’re ready to dig right now? I see that you do good work.”
“I don’t have a metal detector. What do you think is there?”
“You don’t need a metal detector, I’ll show you where to dig. It’s an old basement with an entrance that has been dug over, and there’s a fir tree atop it. When the weather calms down, you’ll be able to study it.”
I will not lie by saying that I started to shiver. “The weather is nothing—it’s not all that bad, just a bit of wind and the rain.” The old man smirked. “As you wish.” We turned off the highway and onto a dark forest road. I kept thinking that the next puddle I drove into would be my last. My Audi (Tank) 80 slowly moved through the mud.
“When I was a boy nobody let me near that place, but you know how boys like stuff like that. Shortly before the end of the war, my father, my grandfather and my godfather—my dad and godfather were officers in the Latvian army, and they knew that the Russians would not leave them be. They were ready to go into the forest and keep fighting. I will show you the place where they stored things. I think that there are weapons there, or ammunition. They never made it—they were caught and killed somewhere in Siberia, I believe.”