Diggers

by Viktors Duks

  As soon as I saw the familiar road crossing, my brain switched to a completely new subject—how to get through the forest without getting lost. I had to find my comrades on my own. I understand the Classicist and myself, because we can get lost among four trees. I don’t understand the Communicator, Little Spirit, the Forest Guy and the Legend, though. How do they ever get out of there?

  Rattling down the rutted rural road, I spotted Little Spirit’s car, parked alongside our anti-Hilton. The car would not be pressed into duty as an all-terrain vehicle today—something that I could not promise to my own four-wheeled darling. It came out of the first ditch of mud and water without its exhaust pipe. I can’t figure this out—for a long time now everything that I’ve wanted has immediately come to pass. As soon as the tires of my car were engaging in their hopeless battle with the mud, I found myself thinking that it would be nice to be on a tractor. As if by the wave of a magician’s wand, my little Audi started to roar, and the tires spattered huge streams of mud all over the place, but they pulled me out of the hole, damn it.

  It’s a tractor now. A tractor. Guys, I’m almost there!

  While I was battling the mud, the sky above my head turned into a leaden mass. I felt that as soon as I shut off my car, the sky would fall on me.

  I shot out of the car, grabbed my long rubber boots out of the trunk (as usual, I had forgotten to dry them), along with my raincoat, a shovel and a one-meter prodding stick. I put some food and a couple of bottles of water into my backpack, still crusted over with sand and clay from previous excursions. The sky pressed down on my nerves and threatened to douse me the very moment that I stepped out of shelter.

  With complete geographic idiocy, I determined the approximate direction in which I would have to go, and I dove into the forest. The first drops of rain crashed into the trees. Soon the downpour was trying to poke holes in my raincoat. The green forest grass turned into a soft skating rink. I slowed down a bit, but my thoughts were miles ahead of me—”Faster, faster! The guys are in the bunker without you. You have to be there!”

  As long as the water was pouring out of the sky and creating a feeling of life around me, I felt safe that I was moving in the right direction. As soon as the rain stopped, I stopped, too. I took off my hood. I looked in one direction. Then I looked in the other direction. I could see nothing but the trees and my breath in the cold air. I pulled a compass out of my wet pocket. I was learning how to use a compass. I can’t say that I could put absolute faith in this device from the age of Columbus, but I trusted the little black arrow more than I trusted my own sense of direction. I went on.

  Like a ship running aground, I found myself facedown in a mass of mud. My freshly barbered hair was slathered, and my hands sank deep into the muck. I was on a carpet of fallen trees and water. You know how badly your toe hurts when you stub it against something that’s harder than the toe itself. The miserable little pile of human flesh (me) was sitting on the ground and trying to pat the injured toe through the rubber boots. What the hell was the point of having a manicure and a haircut? People are right when they say that there are little lies, there are big lies, there are statistics and then there are the fucking meteorologists. I watched TV last night. They were talking about BRIEF rain showers completely on the other side of Latvia, not here in the forest.

  At the end of this perilous journey, I managed to find my boys and bring them some food. Their English is not good enough to read anything of what I’ve written here. Thank God for that.

  We’d come into this part of the forest dozens of times from dozens of directions, and dozens of times we had ended up at one and the same hill. The spirit of the hill always was most generous with us. The Classicist and I had many conversations about the secrets of the hill. It drew us toward itself with an unseen force.

  When I found my friends, they had dug a deep hole, and in it I could see a part of a soldier’s skeleton.

  “He’s not alone in there,” the Classicist said. “There’ll be some amazing shit down there, I’m telling you.”

  “Who found him?”

  “The Forest Guy.”

  “What, can you smell these skeletons?” I asked the Forest Guy. “Did the metal detector find something?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” said the digger in a monotone voice. “I just came back here a couple of times. I liked this place for some reason.”

  “Listen,” I said to the Classicist. “We’ve been talking about this place, remember? Something mystical here?” I was excited.

  “I think that we should just dismantle the whole hill,” the Classicist answered, and he was taking the words right out of my mouth.

  Little Spirit was down in the bottom of the ditch, using his fingers to brush sand out of the eyeholes of the soldier’s skull. “I don’t understand this. There’s a big pile of bones here—ribs, arms. There are a few more arms here than one man should have.”

  The Communicator drew a new boundary around the ditch. “We have to make it bigger, we have to clean this up.”

  “Little Spirit, get him cleaned up,” the Classicist instructed. “And you, Mr. Artist, get busy with the camera.” That was directed at me.

  The Communicator, Furby and the Pilot expanded the diameter of the ditch. The Legend wandered off. Little Spirit used a small shovel to clean up the bones. Every time he found a skull, he rid it of tree roots and sand and straightened out any teeth that had come loose. Each shovelful of sand from the ditch revealed the horrible truth. The Classicist started putting down black plastic bags—one, two, three bags. Six bags. Eight bags. Ten bags. We ended up with 12 sets of remains in all.

  The surface of the hill was maybe 2,000 square meters in size, and in 1945 it had been a defensive point in the war. It was crisscrossed with bunkers and fortifications. The ditch that we were looking at was the last resting place of Soviet soldiers. We all knew what had happened there. Most of the soldiers had been killed when the enemy overran that hill. The Nazis were under siege, the war was coming to an end, and only a complete idiot was still thinking that the fuehrer of the Third Reich would prevail. One of the skeletons was missing the bottom part of his leg. He had turned his face toward the wall of the bunker before dying. Believe me, when someone points a gun at you, you instinctively turn away so that you don’t have to see that terrible black hole from which the bullet will fly to end your life. Two of the skulls had holes that made it clear that the soldiers had been shot in the ear. Nearly all of the skulls, moreover, were seriously damaged. That can happen only if you get hit on the head full force with the butt of a gun. You may be thinking that perhaps the skulls were shattered because of a grenade, but in that case the skulls would have been reduced to little bits. In this case, bits of skull had been driven into the brains of the soldiers, and the brains had then decomposed into the black soil in which the dead men rested. I saw one skull that had perhaps been hit by a stone. There was a heavy rock between two piles of bones that fit neatly into my hand.

  People studying to be coroners would have had a field day at this site, as did the journalist who was with us this time. I can only imagine what kind of article he was composing. Ten of the soldiers were laid out in a row in the ditch, and the other two apparently were thrown into the ditch later. You can believe this story, or you can decide that I made it all up. The truth is known only by the Big Guy up in heaven.

  “Call the Director!” shouted the Classicist.

  “Get real,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. The Director works at night, he wants to rest. He’s not coming all the way out here, and he doesn’t even have the equipment.”

  “Go ahead and call him. I’ll get a friend of mine to drive him out here.”

  “This is enough for tonight, though,” said the Communicator. “Let’s get out of here. It’s going to be dark soon.”

  We covered up the bones with fir branches. Let the souls of the soldiers smell the fine scent of evergreen. Let them gaze up at the tops of the trees and the stars of the Un
iverse beyond.

  ***

  The next day.

  We tramped back into the forest, stretched out in a long line. The Director was at the back of the row. I have to say that on recent digging trips, I increasingly had to keep reminding the Director of his function in the process. “This is a great scene” is what he used to say, but recently he was more apt to say, “There’s nothing to film here. Give me that shovel, and I’ll dig for a while.” Now I looked back and saw the Director squatting down in the mud. His camera was on his knee, and his eyes were watching our departure.

  We recently got a surprising note from our digging colleagues in Russia. They’d found a medal on one of the soldiers. They submitted it to the authorities, and later they got a letter in which they were told that the soldier’s son was now the president of Ukraine!

  My son will be seven years old soon. His birth changed my whole life. A few days ago the two of us went to his school for the very first time. The little man sat down at his desk. His eyes darted from one corner of the room to another. I squatted down next to the little desk and piled up some notebooks and pencils. I suddenly understood how fast my little boy was growing up. The only thing that he could say was, “Daddy, I don’t want to go to school,” and two streams of tears rolled down his cheeks. My heart answered, “Oh, how I understand you, my little friend. Oh, how I understand you.”

  But a father can’t always tell the truth. “You have to go to school, Robert. Your daddy really loved school.”

  I probably blushed.

  Robert is with his mother today. I can just imagine how her bookkeeper is showing off for him. I called that asshole on the phone to tell him exactly what I thought about him, but in the end—FUCK! I ENDED UP FORGIVING HIM! I can’t believe it. I don’t have an enemy any more. Yeah, he’s a bookkeeper, and he has all of the equipment that any man has between his legs, but he’s not a bad man. I have to watch him now, and the time will come to demonstrate his role in my life. He can’t be allowed to think that life is an endless bed of roses.

  At the bottom of the ditch, we were increasingly seeing the contours of human skeletons. The Classicist hopped into the grave. “Let’s get them out.”

  The digger started to pick up the pieces of bone. “Put these on the third bag,” he said, trying to divide up the bones honestly. I hope that the souls of the dead will forgive us if we attached one man’s leg to another man’s hipbone. Never mind about the little bones—that was complete chaos.

  The Classicist kept on passing up the bones—this leg bone is for the fifth bag, this shinbone is for the seventh one. The ribs are for the tenth bag, and this half-rotted boot is for the fourth.

  “Can’t be. His foot isn’t that big,” I said.

  “OK, give the boot to the fifth one.”

  The grave stretched out under the roots of a big birch tree. The Communicator and Little Spirit dug a tunnel and dragged out the last bones. The Communicator was halfway into the tunnel when he yelled, “Guys, I found a medal! A medal!”

  It was a shiny medal for heroism, and the number 1200999 was clearly visible. We would turn the medal over to the Russian embassy, and the archives would provide us with a wealth of information about the man who carried the medal. Maybe that way we will learn the identities of the other men in the ditch. I can’t imagine where this adventure will take us next.

  The weekend was quickly expiring, just like film rolls off the spool. We picked up the heavy bags of bones and, silently, left the hill.

  END