Diggers (18 page)

The owner invited me into his home. His wife had been worried about her husband and grandchildren. She was a bit surprised to see me, but a few moments later I was drinking warm coffee, eating fresh apple cake and putting on my digging pants and vest. The clothes were a bit damp and smelled of mildew, but they helped me get into the digger's romantic mood.

The clock struck eight, but before going out into the yard where the sky was trying to flow into the ground, I called the Classicist.

“Wanna do some digging?” I asked him.

“You've got to be kidding. Nobody would even send a dog out into weather like this,” the Classicist mocked me. “Where are you?”

“In the forest?”

“What forest? What are you talking about?”

“OK, I won't say any more. I'll call you in half an hour, but be ready to get into your car. This is a once-in-a-lifetime.”

“Are you being serious, or are you fucking with me?”

“Call the Communicator and warn him...”

I told the Classicist approximately where I was and rang off.

The storm struck its full fury against my raincoat. The old man walked ahead of me with a flashlight, I walked behind him with my shovel and poker. We walked approximately 500 meters before turning off the road, through some bushes and into a small field. Judging from the old apple orchard that was on one side, there had been a farm here at one time. The old man pointed to a lonely fir tree. “That's where it should be.” The hill was approximately two and a half meters high.

I used my small field engineer's shovel to cut off the lower branches of the fir, and then I attacked the ground. The roots of the fir tree hindered the process. I dug approximately in the place where the old man thought that the entrance to the basement should be. After every five or six shovels of dirt I poked into the ground, hoping to find emptiness. When the hole was more than a meter deep, I was muddy from hand to foot. I wanted to start digging elsewhere, when the poker easily slipped through the remaining layer of earth.

“Found it!” I shouted, grabbing my mobile phone. “It's here! Come on over! I don't know what's here, but I dug up a hole,” I shouted.

“We're on our way,” the Classicist said slowly. “The Communicator says that this is idiotic, but he's here, too.”

It was around 9:30 in the evening. Imagine the storm and the water that was drenching all of me. All of us diggers are men, 30 years and older, but we're still kids at heart. The Communicator had been on his way home when he had stopped by the Classicist's house, and soon enough he had been on the phone to tell his wife that he would be home a little later. Later, Hm…??!!!

I asked the boys to bring a couple of bottles of brandy—my teeth were chattering. I needed new batteries for the flashlight, too. I stopped digging, though, because I wanted to share the motional moment with my friends. By the way, I may well have turned out to be the goat—maybe there was nothing down there at all. The old man and I tromped back to his house. I had two hours of free time.

“Pour us each a glass,” the gentleman told his wife. “Otherwise we'll catch cold.” He smiled and pulled off his coat. “You won't refuse?” I shook my head. “Maybe you want to warm up in the sauna?” I nodded. Do you even know what a real Latvian rural sauna is like? It's outstanding. The small log hut was a bit away from the house. Inside there was a fiery oven, and above it there were rocks that were heating up and heating the air. There was a lovely smell of smoke and ash that made me think back to my childhood. I remember one incident in particular. It was a winter evening, and I had been brought to see my grandparents in the countryside, just like the kids I had just given a ride to. It was a great adventure for me. We hitched up a horse to a sled and went off to the local sauna. I was wrapped up in a fur and sat right beside my grandfather, who was the man to end all men as far as I was concerned. The snow crunched under the tracks of the sled, the cold broke some of the branches of surrounding trees, and the horse brought the area back to life. I admired my mother's dad—he wasn't even afraid to ride through the forest at night! I wanted to be just like him.

While I was wandering around in 26-year-old history, the vodka I had been given poured into my stomach and warmed me up very nicely. I felt great and could not believe what was happening.

“Listen,” said the old man. “I'm going to take my tractor and drive out to meet them. They won't get through otherwise. You go warm up.”

The Christmas carol sounded somewhere deep inside my clothes.

“How's it going?” asked the Classicist.

“I'm fine. I'm in the sauna, waiting for you. There'll be a tractor at the side of the road, that's the owner of the farm. The tractor will pull your silly BMW through the mud, I think you won't make it otherwise.”

***

When the guests arrived, I was still in the sauna, throwing cold water on the hot stones to create a proper level of steam. When my friends saw my clothing in the antechamber, they also stripped and then stood before me as though freshly emerged from their mother's womb. Well, maybe a bit hairier.

“What the fuck are we doing here?” the Classicist could be seen through the steam, and he was smiling. “Are we going to be digging, or are we going to be relaxing here?”

“Strike while the iron is hot. Look at my barometer—it's just now starting to look like a normal dick. Let's warm up properly, and then off to the basement.”

We sat on the sauna bench and talked about our plans.

***

The storm and the rain would not let up for a single minute. We drove some sticks into the ground and tied our flashlights to them. We dug a hole that was big enough to let a person pass through. I cannot describe these emotions. Seconds before you find out the answer to a question like the one that we were facing, you want to make the moment last, because perhaps there will be disappointment. The Communicator tied a rope to a fat pine tree nearby, and I wrapped the other end under my arms. Slowly I was lowered into the black hole. There was a distance of about three meters to the floor of the basement. My eyes took in the room, and I can say honestly say that my jaw dropped to the ground. “Oh, my God,” I said, and with considerable difficulty, too. “Guys, this is the bomb!”

“What's the bomb? What do you see?” I heard voices from up above.

“Come on down.”

The flashlight revealed a sight I will never forget as long as I live. Wooden box after wooden box, each of a different size. In one corner a pile of weapons, shells, pieces of German machine guns, covers for Russian and German weapons. In wooden boxes that had been treated with tar we found small containers of medical bandages. I could scoop up piles of shiny bullets. I could hear my friends messing around with the weapons, releasing the safety, pulling the trigger. I heard the sound of a bayonet slipping out of its sheath and then slipping back in.

“Hit me! This has got to be a dream.” The Communicator obeyed me, kicking me in the butt as hard as he could.

When we emerged from the basement it was light outside.

“Classicist, do I look as shitty as you do?” I was dripping with muddy water, and my teeth were covered with sand. I could see the Classicist smirking. “If I'm anything like you, then we cannot go back to Riga like this.”

Actually, we could have turned up at Riga's central supermarket in this appearance and been laughable. We wouldn't care. The only thing that worried us was that now that we had found this astonishing treasure, any more hunting for rusted shells and weapons would also be laughable.

The Classicist asked me not to write about this day. Sorry, I couldn't help it. You know how I like to write.

Epilogue

This was a year from my life. We leave behind lots of riddles that have never been answered, so many tanks and airplanes that have sunk into deep swamps and lakes, so many stories and legends that there is not enough time or money in one single life to touch every secret with my fingers. I thought that I would be writing about the notes of men who collect military trophies, but my dreams did not come true. The real phrase for us is skull collectors. Some call us Nazis, others say that we're Communists. Why? Because we feel deep respect for the soldier? Maybe they cannot imagine that the boys of our country were dragged off to war and became men just like millions of other men, thinking only of how to find a woman to love. We respect the guys who were in the bunkers and in the muddy shitholes of war. I'm very proud of them.

I really hope that the adventures that are described here and the ones that will follow will someday be known by the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the Classicist, the Communicator, Skvarceni. “Yeah,” they'll say. “He was nuts. I'm just like him.”

I know that I will never publish this book in Latvia. I don't want to have to explain things to anyone. I've provided too much detail about the heroes who are my “bunker mates.”

I have a son. I'm going to try to give him enough to ensure that he will never pick up a real gun and pretend that he's a superhero at school. If you want to shoot a pistol, kid, Skvarceni will get it set up for you in a minute. You want to fire a Kalashnikov? You'll have one, you'll have a machine gun, I'll teach you to shoot a gun that was made in the seventeenth century.

Life is too short to enjoy all of the beauty it provides, but at the same time it is too long to make the same mistake hundreds of times and be sorry for it. I'll just write down these last few lines and then I'll go and try to save my marriage, ‘cause it's broken now. If I really wanted to explain where the culmination to my marriage was found, I would have to spend a lot of time telling you about the events in which my wife and I—two people who lived together for 14 years—were the heroes. Each of us would have our truth. I watched the movie
The Story of Us
, and I thought that it was probably about real events. I thought about my own marriage. I know that my hobby is not to blame here. I heard my wife's friends talking about me in admiring tones more than once, asking her to ask me to take them and their husbands on some of my trips. I have never said a bad word to anyone about my wife, and I'm not going to start now. She's my one and only, my dearest. My duty now is to get her to fall in love with me again. I'll do it, too.

In the summer of 1944, the Latvian Legion held off a Soviet force that was ten

times larger for a good, long time. The battles sometimes reached the Legionnaire foxholes, but each time the attempt to break through the lines was fought back. The ditches of the Legionnaires were so full of fallen Soviet soldiers that it became impossible to use them for fighting. During the night they filled in one ditch and dug another.

That's a story I read in a book, and I heard about it from eyewitnesses, and I'll write about it in the next book.

I'm only 32 years old, and my greatest discovery is still head of me. I hope that it will be the path to my wife's heart.

The Next Year

June 2001

The snake, half a meter long, was twisted around the handle of the pail from which I had just dumped ten liters of swamp water and peat moss. I looked at it for a while and then grabbed it by one end and removed it from the bucket.

“Guys, look! Aren't these the intestines of a flier?” I said to my colleagues, who were bailing water out of the hole. Their conversation and the splash of water fell silent for a moment. The diggers looked at me. The Classicist, standing at the other end of the ditch, agreed with me. “Those are his intestines.” The Communicator, holding the intestines in his hands, put it more vividly: “He's divided up into molecules here.”

This is the first time in six months that I'm sitting here and typing. I'm continuing to describe my adventures—things that very few people know. Each time I tell this story, my audience is enormously surprised and amazed. I've scribbled down so many notes, and now I'm trying to bring back to mind when, where and (this is most important) how I got over the greatest test in my entire life. I hope that fate is not planning to play another trick on me.

I'm sitting here and thinking just like a historian who is describing the past in a way which favors new policies and those who shape them. If I take my private life out of this diary, then everything that I felt and described before will be a farce, it will be dishonest. Let it stay the way that I wrote it down in the first place.

I open my eyes on a weekend morning, and they are a bit damp. I've been 33—the age of Christ—for two whole days.

I load up the contents of my refrigerator into a backpack, and 30 minutes later I'm in my car, driving through the cold fog of the morning. I'm going to see the Classicist. It's Saturday morning, and I'm listening to a new CD. I realize that when I get back to work on Monday, I will be so “rested” that I will consider the workweek to be a form of rehabilitation.

The Classicist greeted me as always, dressed in Russian army camouflage and a green and black vest with many, many pockets. The Classicist and his classical style. My style? Let that wait for a while. Today we're heading east, where we're going to lift a Soviet army destroyer out of a swamp. I'm thinking of a burning airplane that falls through the tops of the trees, breaks up into pieces, and rams into the swamp, taking the branches of the trees and the life of its pilot into the depths. A touching but merciless image.

“The Communicator called last night and told me to bring some bullets and a Mosina (a Soviet gun). He got it someplace and we'll be able to do some shooting.”

“Fuck,” I grumbled. “They called me, too. I had just got rid of my birthday guests, I didn't know and understand anything. I could hardly keep the bed from spinning around the room when I lay down.”

“How much did you drink?”

“Not a lot, maybe half a liter of vodka. Well, maybe a little bit more. You know that I try to control myself when I have to drive somewhere.”

The Pilot—that's what I call him—jumped into the Classicist's BMW. He used to be an army airplane technician, and today we really, really need him.

Two hours later, with 45 minutes spent rocking and rolling down an unpaved country road, we drove into the yard of a farm. There was an alley of century-old oak trees, and we saw an old rural sauna with a pond. The owner had allowed the Communicator and his team to set up camp. The first diggers had already arrived the previous night. We call the Communicator the Communicator because he is always the first to arrive and to undertake communication with the locals. To put it in a few words, he tells people what a digger is, why he is a digger, and how they can become diggers. Everything seemed peachy keen, but then I saw the place where I was going to put my 33-year-old bones. Oh, we've spent the night in many places, none of which could be described as a Hilton, but this place could be called nothing but an anti-hotel. No name. The sauna was a dark space, ten square meters in size, and that's where the diggers had spent their first night. The Communicator slept on a long wooden bench, Little Spirit and Furby slept on the floor, but our three younger members—the Communicator's son Toms, a friend of his, and a guy we call Nautilius—slept on an old sofa. This was the lifestyle of the homeless, and the situation was made all the more indicative by the table in the middle of the room. It was clear that just guys were here. There were empty cans, some pickles, sausages and onions. Perhaps you wouldn't like that, but my heart took a happy leap. I like being with these guys. I want to express my thanks to them for being there when both ends of the bridge that is my life collapsed. I was not alone. They gave me spiritual treasure, they provided me with hope and they helped me to dream about the future. Now I was in one of those dreams.

It was romance that made me come to this place, that made me go away from a woman who was in love. Still, my habit of sleeping in a soft and nicely scented bed took the upper hand. Shit, I thought—it's good that the sauna is already full. I'm going to sleep in a tent.

A thundering tractor with an attached wagon drove up to the start line. Before our arrival the farmers had carted cow shit out to the fields in the wagon, and now it was loaded up with a water pump, shovels, long picks and everything else that is needed to raise a destroyer from a swamp—us, too.

Our teeth clattered as noisily as the chains of the tractor as we rattled down the rocky path. Eventually the shaking stopped as the tractor moved down a narrow forest path. We had to be careful, because around every corner there were tree branches that were ready to whip us upside the head if we didn't watch out.

***

December 31, 2000

I don't think that there has ever been anything that I have written which involved so much preparation in advance. I've prepared myself to sit down at the keyboard and to type the first words. If someone were here with me, he would note that “Viktors grabbed his head and pressed his fingers down on his eyelids.” I can't imagine what a surgeon who saw my heart at this moment would think.

“You're neither bad nor horrible, I've never said that, but I can't do this any more. I'm in love with someone else. Please forgive me.” This is the text that appeared on the screen of my mobile phone. I was coming from a store, and two big shopping bags were banging against my legs—a pork roast, fruit, candy and champagne. Champagne, which would pop its cork into the new century. I cannot describe the emotions that hit me at that moment—my soul, my thoughts and everything that was around me. I was on a bridge, and at 2:44 PM on December 31, 2000, both of its ends collapsed into the water. I got home and sat down on the floor. “What is it, Daddy?” I could hear our son, sounding like he was speaking from a great distance. “Nothing, nothing—let's go see your mother.”

A man is able to suffer great pain only if he has not subordinated his entire life to a single goal or single dream. A goal and a dream can pop like a soap bubble, and then there is nothing.

The tractor fell silent. The forest was quiet.

Dirty with cow shit, we jumped out of the wagon. Was I upset? Absolutely not. My soul had been trampled into the shit, and the waste from an unseen animal made my inner world visible—nothing more.

We lined up single file and walked down the path of the swamp. Little Spirit, the Communicator and the Classicist lugged the water pump with gritted teeth. It was actually two times lighter than the old one, but because of the soft surface of the swamp moss, it became heavier and heavier with every meter. The walk to the place where the airplane had fallen was not easy, but we all but ran. Those load bearers whose fingers refused to carry the weight any further did not have to ask anyone else to help. Our mutual understanding was like a unified organism.

The view that greeted me did not promise anything good. Of course, we did not see the airplane. It was a ditch, ten meters long, full of brownish water and hiding a horrible tragedy within itself.

“I'll tell you—I'll be fucked if we get anything out of there today,” the Classicist sighed in my ear.

“The main thing is the process, the process. The airplane is not ours. We've been sent in as professionals, we'll do it for free so that later the airplane can be set up outside of a casino and a greasy millionaire can piss on it.

“Don't mess around with me, asshole,” my friend hissed. I had touched his most sensitive spot. To be honest, I felt the same. Rich people had heard about us and about the Communicator's tanks, and over a glass of whisky they came up with a nightmarish vision about how they could make some money. They would build a new entertainment center and install a museum of military equipment therein. I don't know. Maybe it's not really a bad thing, but I think that this would demonstrate enormous disrespect against the pilot whose body was shattered along with the aluminum parts of his plane.

“The airplane is in small bits, and the nose is about five meters deep into the swamp. Those millionaires will shit themselves when they see a big pile of rubbish,” I smirked.

“We're not going to tell them anything. We have to find the pilot. He's here. We've already found an arm bone, his belt. Let them sponsor us,” the Classicist began to smile.

“We'll find a souvenir or two, won't we?” I was getting excited. We understood that we were dealing with true businessmen. They think nothing about the horrors of the war, about rusted metal, ammunition and real battle weapons. They'd like those things, sure, but the equipment is not deep in their hearts. These are men who will never feel the great sensation that occurs when you pull a rusty box with unknown contents out of the ground. Never.

Little Spirit turned on the pump. Its hose, like an elephant's trunk, disappeared into the water and began to suck out the brown liquid, like a vampire. The motor kept choking on the moss and the peat. Little Spirit kept the pump working with serious determination, making sure that it did not suck up anything too big. The rest of us went into the forest to find logs with which we could shore up the edges of the ditch. The Communicator used his chain saw to cut down the few trees that we could find in the swamp, just like a barber would work over someone who is almost bald. I don't mind saying that I'm afraid of chain saws. I saw a movie about a maniac who did terrible things with his saw.

***

December 31, 2000

The afternoon sky of New Year's Eve lit up with the first fireworks. They're supposed to bring luck, aren't they? Those who were impatient were running toward the new era. A new era appeared for them through the fireworks . For me—they caused time to stop. The sparkles gradually disappeared behind the darkened roofs of the city's houses. We sat in the car in silence. How romantic, what a devastating exterior. All we needed was a director and a cameraman.