Diggers (14 page)

Evening was falling and dinner was approaching, and it was clear that I had to settle in to the Hilton quickly so that I could spend the rest of the evening in debauchery. Someone was lighting a campfire out in the yard, and I was trying to blow up a rubber mattress to sleep on later. The Classicist had decided to bed down on the next mattress over. We were going to be sleeping in a row, so to speak.

We spent the whole evening, late into the night, sitting around the fire, cooking sausages and chowing down on beer. One of the main topics of discussion was the war, along with digging and our future plans. We laughed about lots of things, I don't remember any of them, and it isn't really important. These were all my colleagues, my friends and acquaintances. Our talk could stay among us.

The room in the Hilton was filled with snoring for a while, and then the snoring turned into comprehensible speech, which is to say that a new day had dawned. I was still in my sleeping bag, battling all of the things men must battle in the morning. My first words were addressed to the Classicist: “Does your wife sleep in one bed with you, or somewhere else?”

“In the same bed,” the Classicist said, peering at me suspiciously.

“She must be pretending to sleep. I can't imagine how someone can fall asleep next to you.”

“Shut up,” I heard several voices. “If you could hear how you snore!”

“How could I have been snoring? I couldn't even fall asleep!” I had to defend myself, although secretly I agreed with my colleagues. I snore beautifully.

We debated the issue for a while and decided on the perfect solution. The next night, in order not to hear the sleepy choir of dreams, we would all try to fall asleep as quickly as possible.

We turned to the plans of the day. First we had to handle the problem of our colleague Anatolijs, who had had a merry night, including a meeting with the traffic police. Secondly, we had to wait for a journalist from the TV station to arrive. Apparently the crew was planning to tag along with us into the forest to shoot video of skulls, bones and everything else that was left over from a soldier. Anatolijs went off to settle his affairs, and we didn't see him for the rest of the day.

***

We walked down familiar forest paths. The weather was good, which meant that it would be a good day to shoot video and take pictures.

We started by telling the TV people about military things. The Forest Dude went into great detail, talking about everything and anything, including military boots. “This here is a soldier's boot,” he would say, and the journalist would display commendable curiosity and interest.

The lecture delivered could basically be called “The Digger—Human or Idiot?” When it was over, the Classicist arrived with some black plastic bags. We started to “pick up” the soldiers. Having collected some scattered bones, we settled down by a large pile of bones. The Classicist would be putting together some skeletons. Mario and I hopped into the ditch, and soon after we started digging we found that there were more bones under the ground. The soles of two black boots were poking out at me. I politely cleared the dirt around them and called the Communicator to help me. After a few minutes he lifted out the remains of a rotted boot and, with it, the remains of a rotted soldier's foot. A broken leg bone was sticking out of the boot. Clearly the leg had been torn off by an explosion and then tossed into the ditch. Mario peeled away the remains of the boot as if it had been made from paper to look at the leg. When we asked him what the hell he was doing, he answered: “Well, I have to see if we have anything to cook our soup with today.” I was forced to explain to the TV journalist and the cameraman that this was just our idea of humor, and they shouldn't take us seriously.

Some of us continued to dig in the hole, others sat on the edge of the ditch and pawed through clods of clay, picking out fragments of bone and buttons from old clothing. The Soviet buttons all had stars on them, and so did almost everything else that Soviet soldiers used to carry. This helped us to determine which army the fallen men had belonged to. If there were buttons with stars, we knew that we were dealing with a Soviet officer.

“I think there are about eight different sets here,” the Classicist announced. He was squatting down, and he had been sorting all of the bones in piles. The big leg bones were on one black bag, arm bones were on another. “I can't determine anything in greater detail. My work is done here.”

Seeking to get some video that would be appropriate for the evening news, the journalist poked his microphone at the Classicist and me. What did we talk about? Lots of good things—battles, soldiers, what's left of soldiers, life, and the stupidest thing that humankind has ever though of—war. The journalist asked about weapons, grenades and other interesting military materiel, but we shook our heads. “Those things are not of interest to us. Sure, there's stuff like that around here, but we don't care. If we wanted to look for things like that, we'd have found an atom bomb by now.”

“Man, if you had seen your face,” my colleagues teased me when I had finished talking to the microphone. “All of the parts of the criminal code which you have violated were written on your forehead!” Fine. You can accuse me of unlawful storage of weapons, but they're not really weapons any more, are they? They will never shoot again. You can accuse me of storing unlawful ammunition, my God—of course you can! But it will never be used again. This was the most difficult issue for us, but you have to admit that things like that give a bit of peppery heat to life, don't they?

The clear forest air and the autumn sun had made the journalist and the cameraman dizzy. They gathered up their things and disappeared among the bushes and the trees. Would they find their way home?

“OK,” someone said. “Now we can do some serious work. Otherwise we're just standing around like idiots, trying to decide what we can afford to say and we can't say.”

The day passed into the evening, and it was near the time that we had to get back out of the forest. We gathered around the bones and tried to reach agreement on what to do with them—how to put them in the bags, how to divide them up so that we didn't end up with a set of, say, five different soldier arms.

“Let's gather them up so that they're easy to carry,” the Communicator ordered.

I agreed. If the skeletons could not be assembled, if they were all mixed up in a big cocktail, that's how they should remain. Our goal was to get the bones out, to put them in caskets and to bury them in the presence of a clergyman.

Each of us had to tote two or three black plastic bags. We tied them together and threw them over our shoulders.

One after another, dead tired, we dragged ourselves out of the forest, and along with the whisper of leaves and moss I heard another sound—”click, click, click.” Can you imagine that sound? “Click, click, click.” That's the sound of old bones hitting each other. All of us heard that terrible noise.

Evening again. The stars were gradually appearing above our Hilton. The lady of the house showed us another water faucet which was much more active than the one which yielded up one liter of water every ten minutes. After all, we were in a hotel. We were so hungry that our teeth started to wither. That's logical—if a man doesn't eat, his body understands that it doesn't need any more teeth.

After a bit of discussion it was decided that we had to make soup. The hotel was not without its amenities—as I said, there was a stove in the house. It was brand new, and soon enough it was fired up. I took on the noble role of cook so as to avoid any idiotic incidents involving a lack of cuisine-based professionalism. I thought initially that I would have to boil some sticks to feed the hungry men, but then someone pulled out some packages of dehydrated soup and I forgot all about my initial plan. I ended up putting in some chicken, mushroom, crab, squid, beef and God knows what other kind of dried soup into the pot. It was all from China.

Everyone went to watch TV, hoping to see themselves. I said that if the TV news started talking about war, they should call me, the serving wench, too. We were not shown, however. Apparently the story was far too fine to waste on a Friday evening newscast. We would be watching at home the next night.

The Hilton filled up with a wonderful smell, and I supplemented the soup with the thick skin from some dried pork. Why? Well, we had eaten the pork itself for breakfast.

The soup was outstanding, at least I thought so, and after all that we had seen, each digger asked for seconds. The dinner really was tasty.

Late at night the Classicist, Mario, the Little Spirit and Einars went off to catch some crab in the river, but I went to bed. Of course, as soon as the crab hunters were back, I was wide-awake. I definitely did not want to find a crustacean in my sleeping bag.

It was dark and darker outside when we finally decided to sing the last digger's song for the evening. One, two, three—and the nighttime men's choir began its melodic and carefully nurtured snoring song. The song sounded out from all corners, some of us snored a solo, and those who found their dicks demanding that they be carried outside for a piss were plumb out of luck. Nobody could fall asleep in that racket for a second time. Well, a few could.

***

The next day

This time we entered the forest from a different side. The Classicist, Communicator and I struggled to remember where we had put the bones from the day before. Amazingly enough, we found all of them.

I'm not sure what happened next. I decided to rest for a while and watch my friends from aside. I wanted to come to an understanding about the trauma that must have happened to each of us in childhood to lead us to this particular kind of activity. My ass sank into the soft forest moss, and my eyes fell upon a small depression in the ground that was grown over with grass. Not really hoping to find anything, I stuck my sharpened poker into the ground. I must have looked pretty silly—an adult man sitting on the ground and sticking a long, sharp nail into the earth. Suddenly the tip of the poker hit something hard. Hmm. What could it be? I stuck the poker into the ground a bit further away. Nothing. The object was small, but it was interesting. I dug up the dirt a little bit and stuck in my fingers to see what I had found. I was surprised. I thought initially that it was another boot—a piece of rotted leather emerged.

“Classicist, come here! I've found something interesting!” Just at the moment when he arrived, I pulled a Russian TT pistol out of the ground. I was beside myself.

“Film this!” I shouted.

“Are you sure I should?”

“Man, if they see what we've filmed before there's enough for a criminal case that will last for a lifetime already!”

The Classicist understood and turned the eye of the video camera in my direction.

“This really is something important,” said the Communicator, turning the pistol around in his hands. “And of course you're going to want to keep it,” Mario added stupidly. “Of course,” I answered. I felt like Cinderella when she arrived at the Prince's ball—everyone was envious of me. I wanted everyone to have that kind of digging joy, though, and so off we went. Out of sheer happiness I managed to lose my legendary shovel. When I realized that it was gone, it was far too late to look for it. Nobody could even remember where I had been seen last. We walked all around a swamp. The Classicist tore his boot on a stick, and I tore both of my boots on something. I decided that this place was taxing us and attributed everything that I had lost or ruined to the taxman. I had had a far too successful day to be upset.

We were alongside another bunker and decided to set up a small base camp here. The Classicist and Little Spirit dove into the hole and started to dig. The Writer (that's me) was satisfied with life, and so he helped out where he could.

The effort that the Classicist and Little Spirit invested in chopping through the dried mud paid off with some wonderful finds. Forget the ammunition, forget the well-preserved German shells—there were about 100 of them. I want to tell you about something that was said.

“I'm going to have a pistol too, gentlemen,” the Little Spirit's happy voice shouted from the hole. “A rocket pistol! German!”

It was clear that my friends had reached the Good Layer of digging.

“Oh shit, look at this!” This was the Classicist. “Grenade launcher grenades!”

Honest to God, they had found some German grenades. If I try to describe their appearance—well, men will get a hard-on after my story. The grenades were like women who know what they want and how to get it.

The story did not end there. A moment later we heard another happy cry.

“A grenade launcher! A German grenade launcher! Oh, fuuuuuuck!” Muddy hands brought another object out of the muck. Another human invention that can put a man into a wooden box.

I squatted down at the edge of the ditch. “I have to write a paper for political science, and I have to choose a topic—Communism, Fascism, Stalinism, Nazism or feminism. What do you think—what will I write about?”

“The only thing that you know a lot about is surely feminism,” the Classicist chuckled.

“I think so, too,” I said. Everyone laughed.

Blinded by the city lights, our automobiles arrived back in the capital city. It seemed like the sea of humanity and machinery would swallow us up, dissolve us in its bile and make us mess around in some part of society until shitting us back out at the end of the week. Then we would all be together again.

I met my wife. “God, she's beautiful!” Dizzied by the presence of a woman I drove home. On the way the Classicist called to report that he had seen my mug on TV a minute before.

With some difficulty, the Communicator made contact with the Legend. When the digger had explained all of our recent adventures, the Legend almost began to weep. This veteran of the art of digging had been pestered recently by Finnish collectors, as a result of which our friend had disconnected all of his telephones and cut off all links with the external world—including us. We were waiting for him, though. There is a lot that we can learn from the Legend, and he is a very good guy, to boot.