by Viktors Duks
“Matt, we will welcome you to Latvia’s forests and swamps.” We made it clear that we would be receiving him as a friend, not as a tourism agency, and he would not have to pay for the related services. The only thing I sent Matt was a statement about Latvia’s pricing policies when it comes to things like beer, whiskey and cigarettes. On the basis of these prices, our British friend could figure out how much bread and meat must cost.
For three months we were consumed with designing our route and thinking about our opportunities. We planned a program of culture and entertainment in case Matt showed up with his wife. This responsibility was put on the shoulders of the Classicist’s wife, Natalija. The strategic plan was drafted hour by hour.
After each e-mail from Matt, we changed arrival dates, routes and plans. I prepared a 14-minute film about us from our video archive. I’m almost scared to talk about that archive. Sometimes it seems that we’re preparing video for the police, for prosecutors and judges. They are slaves to the law, without human brains but with a perverse yearning to think of everyone as a criminal. Anyway, I asked a friend from my university days to lay a music track on my pictures, and then I sent the whole thing to England. The film served as the period at the end of a sentence—Matt watched it about 20 times. He showed it too all of his residents, and our English digger got so excited that he sent another letter to announce that he would be arriving in May and that he would be bringing his brother and two friends with him.
***
April 2001
We met regularly, and my friends tried to keep up my spirits. They told me that time would take care of everything and that everything that happens to us in life is for the best. Thanks to my friends, of course, but my soul was still howling like a wolf. I was ready to send all bookkeepers directly to the gas ovens.
“Viktors, you must not carry hatred for your wife or for her bookkeeper. You’ll destroy yourself.”
“Why can’t you understand?” I tried to object. “He came like a thief and stole my greatest treasure.”
“Still, hatred will not help you. You know that my wife left me, too. She came back six months later. I understand you. I took nerve and sleeping pills for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I took anti-depressants for dessert. I can’t imagine that your wife left you because of him. He’s nothing—at parties you can’t get him to say a word.”
“Now I’m starting to think that she didn’t care about anything that I was doing, she wanted something else. If she had once talked about the digging, the iron, the fucking bones—I’d understand, I’d calm down a little bit. But I have never given her an opportunity to be jealous. She never once mentioned my digging.”
My friend, like a guardian angel, flew down from Heaven and gave me the strength to keep living. It was a business day. He left his desk and invited me to lunch. When I thought about our meeting, I came to understand that if he—a handsome, rich and very wise man—lost his wife, then I must ask how my woman managed to tolerate me for so long.
On Friday morning, the Classicist called me at work to talk about the Englishmen who were coming.
“Let’s go out there tomorrow, check out the route that we’re going to show them. We can do some digging, too.”
“Sorry, but I can’t. I’m having a romantic meeting tonight, which might turn into merciless sex. The woman is like an overripe grape, all that she needs is a pair of hands to squeeze the juice out of her.” I was trying to be as romantic as possible in explaining this evening to the Classicist.
“Weeeeeelll,” my digger friend drawled. “You have to choose whether you’re going to be with us or with a woman.”
The heat of the flame on the candle caused wax to pour on the iron candelabra. Quiet music was playing. I took a straw between my lips and slowly started to draw a dizzying liquid from a fancy glass. I tried to be as tempting as possible. She appeared in the semi-darkness of the room. She drew closer, a bit shy, perhaps a bit afraid. It seemed that her silk dress was straining to hold in the great power that was emanating from this woman, flushed with love. The rhythm of my heart got mixed up, and my heart started to pound throughout my body. I took her hand.
“Did I tell you that the Classicist bought an original photo album with photographs of General Rommel—original photographs?”
“It can’t be! Will I be able to see them? How did the pictures get here to Latvia? The Desert Fox didn’t fight here, after all.” The girl was smiling.
“The most interesting thing is that if these really are the only copies that exist of these photographs, the Classicist will be able to see himself as being very, very rich.”
I spoke slowly and tempted the girl so that she would come closer to me.
***
The early winter morning of the next day.
FUCK! My elbow hurt, and it brought me back to reality. I was in a ditch where the bones of a German or perhaps a Russian soldier had been lying for 60 years. I looked up and saw a skull. It was either laughing at me or telling me thanks. I had made love at night and in the morning, and now I had turned it in for a cold and dark time of frozen feet and the company of men. You’re probably thinking that I’m completely nuts, but I can swear to God in saying that everyone should have the opportunity which I had last night—to touch a work of art that was created by God himself. At the same time, though, there was only one truth when it came to why I was out in the woods on that day. My heart cannot love two women at once. There are no women who regularly shave their underarms and legs, are fresh and lovely throughout the day and who know about General Rommel. None. Dita was like that, and even though she knew absolutely nothing about the general, my wife was very close to the ideal.
Holding my throbbing elbow, I quietly sat in the frozen trench and, whining, waited for a car to come by. The Communicator’s head appeared from the next ditch. He was smiling.
“Fuck, you all disappeared! As soon as the car got here, poof!—everyone was gone.”
There was no reason for us to hide, of course, but we’re sick of having to explain to everyone who we are and what we’re doing in the woods. It’s better to be a guerrilla. I wasn’t lucky that day. When I hopped into the ditch, my heel slid on a frozen piece of clay, and I landed flat on my back.
At the end of the day, the trunk of the Classicist’s car held the remains of four soldiers in four black garbage bags.
One of these Soviet soldiers, preparing to fire, had poured some shells into his helmet
May 2001
The Englishmen will be here in a week’s time.
The Communicator and Little Spirit are gathering food for the cows and the pigs for the coming winter. From morning to evening they’re out in their fields.
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m knocking on the Classicist’s door.
“You’ve become a male whore, haven’t you?” My friend is driving his BMW and mocking me.
“I have no idea how that happened. I was a great husband, but you know what? I feel that this is not the same sex that I had with my wife. I feel completely empty afterward. The conversation is short—”You want to make love?” If not, goodbye, if you change your mind, give me a call. I’m becoming a bit more romantic, though. I suggest dinner, and they all agree. When I say that it will be at my house, about half decline. The girls are fine, they’re perfect, but I don’t care. I guess we’re becoming old. At our age we can’t just fuck and feel good if there isn’t anything to talk about later.”
“About the war, for example. Haven’t you asked? Maybe they like history. There are all kinds of women.” The Classicist was still making fun of me. I allowed him to go on.
“Lots of interesting things happen to me anyway. Last Sunday I was just coming to after a very intense night, and I brought my son over to visit with me. Robert spends more time with me—he likes it. Fuck, Classicist, I’m not a bad father, am I?”
“So what happened?”
“Another girlfriend called. I loved what she said—’Viktors, I’m as tense a
s a guitar string. Let’s get together.’”
“And you?”
“What could I do? I told her my kid was with me. I couldn’t tell her that I felt like a cow that has just been milked. Stop smirking. I still feel guilty every time I have sex, as if I had done something to my wife.”
The Classicist stopped joking.
“Of course, the guilt is less and less each time,” I continued. “But still...”
While we were still discussing women, our car stopped at the edge of a forest path. The forest was slowly waking up from its winter hibernation, becoming thicker and thicker as the weeks went by. The diggers dressed in lighter clothing every time, even as the trees dressed themselves in thick green leaves. This is the best season for digging. It’s warm, there is no long grass on the ground, and—this is the main thing—there aren’t little winged cretins buzzing around. Mosquitoes—damn, how I hate you! Oh, and I also hate bookkeepers who are men.
This forest is our friend, we’re sure of that. It’s give us so much in the way of good times that I’m all but prepared to eat its soil. Over the last few weeks we’ve been behaving very well so as not to anger the gods of digging. A week ago we reburied 38 soldiers, with full honors—wreaths of flowers and a clergyman in attendance. The Communicator and Little Spirit dug a grave that was nine meters long. The Communicator was amazingly calm in conducting this ceremony. The military attaches from Russia and Belarus were on hand, along with embassy employees, and a digger showed all of them where to stand, where to place their wreaths and where to carry the coffins. You see, it’s our hobby—to dig up corpses and then to rebury them.
When it came to our mission on this particular day, we were happy that the Classicist had “dug up” the fact that there had been a nine-day battle at this location, with two Soviet army brigades encircled by the opposing force. Elsewhere we learned that only 300 soldiers fought their way out of the forest, while 6,000 died there. That was so that we would have something to do half a century later. In truth, I didn’t really believe that there were so many men.
The metal detector the Classicist was toting around gave its first beep over a one-man trench. My shovel hit the earth. The soft clay stuck to the shovel and didn’t want to shake loose—almost every time I had to scrape it off with my hands. After a considerable battle with this stew, I finally saw something. It was hard to say what it was, but clearly—thank God!—it wasn’t a small piece of metal, nor was it a piece of ammunition. The Classicist took over for me.
Eventually we dug down to the point where we could see the top of something that was oval in shape. It was a soldier’s helmet. My friend and I had the same thought—perhaps the bearer of the helmet was still underneath it.
“You know what? I don’t really feel like messing around with bones today,” the Classicist whined.
“I don’t either, but we have to take a look. Of course, we forgot the fucking camera at home today.”
“The batteries weren’t charged anyway. You know as well as I do that when we don’t have the camera, we find all kinds of miracles in the ground—stuff that you can’t really explain to anyone else so that they believe it.”
“Oh, stop it—I’m getting annoyed. Get that hat out of there. I’ll just take a few pictures.”
I was in command. I held the camera with my fingertips so as not to get mud all over it.
The muddy hands of my friend appeared over the edge of the ditch, bearing a muddy Soviet army helmet. It was the first time in our digging history that we had found an object in such good shape—at least 85% of the original paint was still on the “bucket.” The price of our find would be even greater thanks to the fact that the soldier had scraped a five-point star into his helmet. On one side someone had painted the letter K. We couldn’t figure out what it could have meant—perhaps the soldier was called Konstantin. We didn’t find him. That was good, because otherwise we would not have been able to take his helmet away from him.
I didn’t ask whether the Classicist needed this particular object. He gets excited about two things—tanks and iron helmets with which soldiers from various countries and at various times have tried to protect their brains. I like the Classicist for this.
A digger will never stop telling you that in a previous life he might well have been a tank driver and that he burned up in the tank. He’s a fool. In the Classicist’s case, he was a soldier in the German army in his previous life. Why? Let me explain. He gets terribly excited when he spots a German military helmet. He gets gooseflesh. Can you imagine? If not, then I can. He was a soldier. He was slowly being approached by a Russian T-34 tank. The soldier grabbed his gun and crawled out of the foxhole. Either he didn’t get a shot off or he missed, but the tank’s treads rode over his helmet—and, of course, his head.
I often think about what I was in a previous life. When I go to bed I ask the kingdom of dreams to show me that I was a military nurse or a female doctor, one with lots and lots of men around. What would my friends say about that? What shame!
Anyway, I’m off the subject. We didn’t find anything interesting. We trod out of the forest, bone tired.
As we left, the Classicist switched on his metal detector again and climbed up on a hill.
Once again my shovel was tearing through the moss and chopping through densely grown tree roots. We replaced each other from time to time, and then we found a piece of wood that looked peculiar in terms of its shape and color. Some sixth sense told me not to see the wood as yet another tree root that must be destroyed with a sharp shovel. It was a German, an automatic gun. All of the wooden parts were in perfect condition, as if the weapon had been buried yesterday. Tell me, how can I explain this to you? How can I describe the wide-open eyes of the two of us who spotted that gun, the happiness on our faces? We could have cried for joy. The brown clay had preserved the beautiful gun like a mother protects its child. We were like midwives—old, professional midwives who showed that child the light of day.
Five minutes later I found a Russian gun somewhat higher up the hill, but its wooden parts were broken.
Thanks to the gods of the diggers! Thanks, Little Mole.
On the way home we didn’t talk about women any more. On the way, the Classicist called Natalija and told her to get out the video camera so that she could tape our triumphant return.
***
A week later.
For family reasons, Matt and Ken will be arriving tomorrow, but our first colleague from England is coming today.
The first part of the day was spent with jangling nerves. What if Chris and Chummy turned out to be worse than we had imagined? What would we do with them for four whole days?
No matter—we were all there when it came time to go to the airport. Along with me, there were the Classicist, Little Spirit, the Communicator and our translator, Natalija. The Classicist had given each of us a little something from his “museum.” One of us was wearing a Russian military helmet, someone else—a German helmet. The third man had a Latvian helmet, while I proudly wore a British one. It was similar to a dinner plate and looked very funny. We stood outside the passport office, smiling, and waited for someone to smile back. When they saw us, everyone smiled.
The Englishmen spotted us. We laughed and shook hands.
“Guys, I think these are very fine dudes,” I said happily. In Latvian, of course.
Now I have to chuckle about the fact that the Internet brought together a bunch of very different men—men who are all far older than 30 but who are still boys when it comes to adventure and childish foolishness. Chummy is actually called Lee, and he’s a doctor who mends broken bones. I could say that he is my brother, because his girlfriend dumped him recently, too. If you want to know how he felt, read the chapter about how I felt, and you’ll know.
Chris is a journalist and PR specialist. The Classicist, Chris and I all have sons who are about the same age. Little boys in England pose the same idiotic questions as little Latvians do.
“Daddy, w
hy do women need breasts?”
“Because, my son, they provided you with food when you were little. They’re also there so that I have something to play with.”
“Play with? How?”
SHIT! Now I can’t think of anything to say!
We ignored the issue of questions that can’t be answered. Sitting in a beer bar on the first evening, we found that we had once been enemies. The Englishmen had been trained to oppose communism, while we had been trained to oppose capitalism. Fucking politicians. If you’re one of them, I tell you—you’re an idiot, one of the idiots. Stubborn people who love themselves and are greedy for power.
***
The second day of the British adventure
In the morning I was at a university lecture when Little Spirit called me on the mobile phone.
“OK, we’re ready. OK? We’re going to go—we’re going to get Matt and Ken.” Little Spirit was stuttering.
I ran out of the room. “Little Spirit, what’s happening here? What’s happening? You’re still celebrating the arrival of the Englishmen? Fuck, you assholes! Matt’s going to be here. What will he say when he sees you this drunk?”
“V-v-v-vViktors, don’t worry about it. Those are normal guys, just like us.”
“Don’t tell me that you haven’t had any sleep tonight.” I was getting angry.
Little Spirit’s voice was calm. “Of course we slept. Two hours. Well, maybe one. The Communicator just got up. My sister is saying something nasty to him, but who cares?”
There was no point in going back to my lecture. I was upset. We could lose our reputation. I got into my petrol-guzzling car and was at the Classicist’s ten minutes later to complain.
My friend, like a professional actor, kept smiling while I was talking. He was showing Chummy and Chris his home museum.
The adventure started out with worries that proved to be pointless. At the very end I found that we men really are all as similar as two tears. Let me explain. On the last night, our column of cars rolled back into the capital city, and we decided to let our foreign friends spend some time on their own. We gave them a map that showed popular tourist destinations, souvenir stores and cultural monuments. They found one of the monuments. It was called Mirage, and underneath that word was Nightclub. They learned about the nightlife of Riga. Chris took out his video camera to tape the way that Ken was dancing around an iron bar. The doctor, when he got home, fell out of bed and slept on the floor until the morning. Matt never did find his way back to the hotel.