Diggers (12 page)

“It's an artillery shell—shot but not exploded.”

“You didn't bring it up?” the Banker asked.

“Never. I don't mess around with these things.”

The Banker's fingers tightened around the metal detector. “We should take a look at it.”

Like a trained dog, the metal detector caught up with all kinds of military metal that had long been hidden from human eyes. Before the Classicist arrived we dug up a field engineer's shovel and a Russian carbine key. Mentioning this junk does not do any honor to me or the Banker, by the way.

When the Classicist got out of his car, I imagined that the thousands of biting mosquitoes that were flocking around us yelled in tiny mosquito voices: “Hey, girls! Fresh meat!” (For your information—the mosquitoes that bite, buzz and whore around are all female. Male mosquitoes do not need the blood of human beings.)

We spent the rest of the time lifting fragments of artillery and aviation bombs out of the ground. It was not very promising. We moved further, behind what had then been the front lines. The mosquitoes followed us, of course. My colleagues found nothing of use, but I brought home an artillery shell that had exploded in a most interesting way. I don't have the strength to describe it. By the way, Skvarceni called five minutes ago, while I was writing. The tone of his voice suggested that he had something interesting to tell. He was talking about old German army headquarters documents.

***

The water was splashing its melody. I was sitting in the bathtub, and my wife was sitting between my legs and resting her head on my chest. I was playing around with the wonders that God had given her. In my 30 years I have not yet really found the place in us men that makes us yearn for, enjoy and worship the body of a woman. I don't want to go nuts over a question that nobody can answer—let's assume that it's nature. Somewhere far away (well, on the other side of the bathroom door), my friend the mobile phone rang. After a few moments I heard small feet running past the bathroom.

“Daddy and mommy are sitting in the bathtub.”

The unknown caller had received a detailed and specific description of the existing situation. I know that my son never lies and knows the words for everything. I kept my right hand on my wife's breast but took the mobile phone with my left hand.

“My boys found a bunker in the woods—the door is closed and locked with a key.”

“Let's go...on Tuesday, OK? But from what period is it?” I asked. “Will they be able to find it again?”

“I don't know. The boys said that we would have to wander around the forest and look for a while, but we'd find it. I believe them. They brought me a PPS machine gun.”

We agreed to make contact later and arrange a meeting.

***

September 6, 2000

Mario disappeared. I couldn't reach him on the phone, he gave no sign of his own.

***

At 11:30 PM, unbelievably tired and dirty, I stepped into my house. Having rinsed off the dirt of the day, I stood before the mirror and looked at myself properly, the aim being to find a tiny, bloodsucking insect, and to find it alive. As though I were paging through the leaves of a book, I went through the hair under my arms and on my head. Then I looked down, between my legs, and—happy with the result, I took the last position for the review. Yes! Once again I found out how genial Kurt Vonnegut's descriptions were. If you don't understand what I'm talking about here, read
Slaughterhouse
. Knowing that my body was clean of the poison of various insects, I quietly crawled over to my sleeping wife.

“Baby, your pussycat is home,” I said, but got no answer. “Your pussycat did a big job today.” My wife was still silent. “Your pussycat found a bomber today. Tell your pussycat, ‘Pussycat, you're the best man in the world.'”

“Pussycat, you're an idiot,” said my beloved, somewhere between dreams and reality.

I smiled and tried to remember the events that I should have been amazed about.

The day had started at 4:00 AM.

Damn! Forgive me! I went to sleep!

***

I spent last weekend at the home of my wife's brother. For certain security reasons, he is holding my collection. He also has a house that seems to have been created specifically so that I can work on restoring my old junk. That is what I was doing. First I restored the shell cover from an old Soviet machine gun—it was similar to a discus. I told you before about the trip on which we found the machine gun and the two German soldiers. When I picked up the shell cover, one side was heavier than the other, which suggested to me that there were still shells in it. My aim was to open up the disk so that it could be used as a museum exhibit of sorts. I was quite the jeweler, I'm proud to say, although I used a heavy hammer and screwdriver in my work. What did I see? Shells, fairly well preserved, and a spring. I opened the disk and immediately found the tragic answer to the question of why the two German soldiers had abandoned the machine gun. Why didn't they fire all of the bullets? The answer was simple—the spring had broken. Two German soldiers died because of a silly little spring. The silly little spring, for its part, saved the lives of other soldiers.

...To continue. The morning was very early. I was at work at 5:45 in the morning, and I woke up the whole block while trying to wake up the guard. My working day ended in 15 minutes. In 20 minutes I was at the Classicist's house.

The cool autumn fog of the city was shattered by the BMW 750. We drove toward the Russian border. The Communicator joined us along the way. A bit later, so did Andrejs, who sold things at an antique shop. By the time we had managed to discuss everything that was new, we were at the home of the guy who was providing the information and who would be our guide today. He turned out to be an all right guy. He was ready to show us more than is really appropriate when you meet somebody for the first time.

“Stop here!” he suddenly ordered. The Classicist hit the brakes. “I want to show you something interesting—from the first war.”

If the first war, then the first war. Let's look. I was pessimistic, at least until I started to climb the hill.

The local digger took us to a hill that was covered with bushes and large trees. He showed us—and my jaw dropped. I have seen many bunkers, and I know the various styles, but this was simply unimaginable. The entire hill had been turned into a fortress. I stood on this silent herald of history and knew that it was mocking me: “You just wet your pants, didn't you, little man?” Yes, I had to tell it—there was no shortage of underground passageways, of cement bunkers. I learned about the underground passages later, but now I saw entrances, each two or three meters deep, I saw fragments of the bunkers that had been blown up. Were we upset about the fact that the fortress had been blown up? Well, yes and no. Of course, it would have been interesting to walk around the fortification system, to peek through the apertures—but then we wouldn't have found anything. It was better for us and our work that the entranceways were all collapsed. What's more, not all of the entrances were gone. The Classicist turned on his metal detector just for the hell of it, but in a few moments he turned it back off. There was metal everywhere. Go ahead and dig. What could be found? Everything—mostly barbed wire, ordinary wire, nails, fragments of artillery shells. Let me calm you down if you're up tight about this information—if you want to find just one rusty bayonet or firearm, you must first have to dig up hundreds of shards, pieces of barbed wires and nails. I found one nail, which I kept for my collection. Do you have a 30-centimeter nail from the First World War that was used to fasten together logs for fortifications? No, you don't. But I do.

This was an unplanned side trip, so we left the unbelievable place after digging around for an hour. We'll be back. Oh, I have to laugh at myself—”We'll be back!” Judging from everything, we hardly ever have time to go back anywhere.

“Guys, let's have something to eat. I understand you. You got up recently, but I've been up long enough to be ready for dinner.”

Nobody objected, and we set the table on the hood of the car. Some had a second breakfast, some had a lunch—I very definitely had my afternoon meal. What do we eat on these trips? There's always dried pork, bread and onions. I can afford to indulge some of my weaknesses on these trips. There are no clients, no women, and so we eat the onions as if they were apples.

“The hill over there is full of holes,” said the local farmer. “I've lived at the foot of the hill all my life, and when I was a kid I wandered through all kinds of underground passages with candles or a flashlight.”

We went back to the hill and heard the legend of the military warehouses. Today, however, we had different plans. We had to hurry up if we were to find the place where the airplane had gone down.

I'll skip the details. We found the place as soon as we had given up any hope of finding a ditch in a swampy forest in which a World War II plane could be found. We wandered around that damned swamp for an hour or even two. We jumped across ditches and pushed our way through bushes. The informer said that the hole had to be somewhere to the left of the farm, Andrejs was convinced it was to the right. The Classicist, the Communicator and I felt like cows that were wandering around stupidly—then behind one of them, then behind the other.

“Enough,” I finally said. “Let's go find the tank.”

When I got the old men out of the woods, I was happy. Five tired diggers tramped along the side of the woods to get back to their car. After 50 meters, four of them stopped. The informer turned toward the forest and, in a minute, began to speak.

“Listen, maybe we should go in here. Five years ago it was very different here, and it was spring.”

“I'll wait for you here,” I said, and then changed my mind. “No, I'm coming, too.” Murphy's Law was in my head—if something interesting happens, I'm never there.

We passed through a thick stand of fir and then found a partly overgrown forest path. “This is the right one,” announced our informer.

A few minutes later I saw a big hole in the ground, six meters long and three meters wide, full of brownish swamp water. At the edge of the ditch there were long sticks of wood with metal hooks tied to their ends. People had apparently been trying to get pieces of the plane out of the hole. Rank amateurs! I grabbed one of the tools and sunk it into the brown water. Amazingly enough, the five-meter stick never did reach the bottom, but I did hit something hard. The Communicator pushed the same pole into the water, once again reaching the unknown object. He pressed down a bit, and was rewarded with a huge burst of bubbles in the water—bubbles that brought the stink of aviation fuel with them. We found a few objects which allowed us to determine what the plane was—a Soviet bomber. We would find out the precise identity of the plane when we brought some of the items that we found to the Aviator.

No matter what, but we're going to lift that plane out of the water. It seems that the Communicator even wants to do it this year?!

We drove back into Riga late in the evening, and I got into my own car. I put on some Clapton, and the lights of cars that were driving toward me seemed to be playing his melody. I drove home, tired, dirty and overjoyed. Why? Because I'm a digger!

***

“What, you think I can tell you the model of the airplane from this shit?” the Aviator sneered. “Well, let's see. I think it might be a destroyer. A Soviet one—the kind the Russians used in the Spanish war. Or maybe it's a PO-2 nighttime bomber.”

***

September 10, 2000

I got a good night's sleep—that's probably the only good thing I can say today. Everything else goes into the debit column—the amount of time we spent on the road, the money that we spent and the things that we got in return. Our target was fairly far to the west of Riga. I won't try to describe the trip in any detail, because that would not be very interesting. Instead I'll try to tell you about a fairly peculiar person, with whom the Classicist and I spent the entire day. I'll call him the Lonely Man. On the way home we tried to figure out who he was and from where people like that come. We shrugged, we couldn't answer.

The Lonely Man—a young man with fairly odd ideas about life and the political situation is the world. The Lonely Man goes into the forest and comes back three or four days later. He doesn't need a tent, and he doesn't know what a sleeping bag is. I think that all he eats during that time is a loaf of bread. At night he finds a ditch or a pile of straw. He spends the night under the stars, not worried about the fact that his bed is hard, damp or cold.

“Do you understand him?” the Classicist asked as soon as we were in our car and the shadow of the Lonely Man had disappeared back into the bushes.

“No. I can't imagine...if I had to stay somewhere around here overnight. Maybe a tent, a blanket of some kind. But this way? No, sorry. I don't understand him at all.”

“I guess we're getting too soft,” the Classicist chuckled.

There was something else that I couldn't understand either. The Lonely Man had taken us to places that were historically empty or just plain empty from the perspective of a digger. I'm not an idiot who jumps into every ditch that he sees and starts to dig. It is not enough for me to be told that there was a large force of soldiers here, so there must definitely be something here. Maybe the Lonely Man was trying to test us, and maybe later he would show us something more interesting than an empty forest and a bunch of bunkers long since explored by others. In the end we came to the conclusion that the Lonely Man had used us—we brought him to this place and left him alone. It wasn't all that bad, though. We brought home an old German helmet, a German water canteen that had been shot through, an empty Faustpatron tube, and many interesting shells. There is one thing that is worth mentioning about those shells, by the way. The Lonely Man brought us to a place where the Soviet armed forces used to liquidate unnecessary military equipment, mostly ammunition, after Hitler's capitulation. We were interested in one particular ditch from which shells were emerging. The hole had suffered quite a bit from former digs, of course, but we found all kinds of interesting examples of the things that can happen during a war. Perhaps you can imagine what an exploded shell looks like. I guess I already mentioned that we have become a bit too lazy to evaluate all of our trophies properly.