Diggers (2 page)

“Never mind,” says the Classicist quietly. “You can't always come up with a machine gun.”

Yeah, I forgot. A while back we found a German MG-42 machine gun. It's at my office, soaking in various liquids. What a beauty! If you saw
Saving Private Ryan
, you could see the shattering effectiveness of this gun at the very beginning.

***

It's 2000!

Fifty years have passed since the Latvian Legionnaires left their trenches in Kurzeme. Some disappeared into the forests, some went to the West, some others suffered their fate in the gulags of Siberia. Today I sat at the wheel of my roaring friend the automobile, and as fast as Latvia's traffic rules allowed me to go, I drove home from Latvia's seaside city. I was on the Kurzeme highway not as a digger, but as a company employee. My white shirt with ring around the collar, my knotted tie pulled down to half-chest—those were signs that the workday was over. I felt like a winner. Oh, how long I spent pretending that I'm some kind of super salesman, but how little it took to get the steely businessperson before me to turn into a gentle and tempting woman. She radiated such sex appeal that my hair almost stood on end.

“I have a proposal to make.” I sensed that the director of the company was working with one of my competitors and that she had absolutely no desire to work with mine. “Have you had lunch yet? If not, perhaps you would accompany me? I don't know where you can get a good meal around here.” I beamed. The woman agreed, and I could launch a new attack on her brain. My eyes focused underneath her white blouse to evaluate her fine white lingerie.

“Just a second…”—the businesswoman lifted her eyes from a steak that was so rare that the beef almost seemed to be breathing and focused her attention on a song that was playing in the background. “Sorry, I really love this song.” My eyes watched the face of the woman who was sitting before me.

***

It's 1997.

“Help me! Please compose some music for my company's advertising jingle! I'm in a hurry!” I rushed in to see my friend, upsetting the decibels of his sound recording student.

“Fuck, what are you talking about?” The musician was half-crazy. “We have a disk to put out! I need lyrics for a song, but you're here with your motherfucking advertising jingle!”

“Aigars, you know that I'm no poet. I write screenplays—for me. You understand, for me.”

“Viktors, I do understand, but please try to write some lyrics for this melody,” the Composer tried to calm me down. “We'll record the melody on a cassette right away, and later we'll talk about your jingle. Bye!”

A moment later I was standing on the other side of the studio door, stunned. I was still stunned when I got home.

“Robbie, let's go—father is pretending to be a poet today.” I heard this sentence from my better half all weekend long. Robbie is my son. My better half is my wife.

At the beginning of the week I went to the studio again and shyly presented the musician with my work.

“You felt the mood,” Aigars said, humming the melody along with the nightmarish words that I had produced. “What's the song called?”

“What?” The question caught me unprepared. “I don't know. Maybe ‘Shadow.' Maybe you want something else? I don't know—'Shadow.'”

It was very nice when the song was in the top three of the Latvian hit parade for several weeks in a row. What was the song about? My shadow. Quiet and obedient—a dark spot on a surface that proves I'm still alive. No matter how much a shadow might want to become a reflection of some other owner, it cannot. The shadow makes peace with this idea and walks along with me. When I put out my hand, so does it. When I have troubles, the shadow is the only one to understand me.

***

The last note of the song ended. The businesswoman recovered.

“Do you know who wrote the lyrics to this song?”

“No,” she replied, watching me slide my notebook toward her across the table.

“Here are the words. They were changed around a bit to fit the melody, and the last verse was omitted, but you are looking at a poet who in his entire life has written precisely one poem.”

Quietly, a bit humbly—I had found the right way. I had found my way to a woman's sense of romance, and when brought together with feelings and emotions, this road could allow me to achieve the impossible. I thought that she would always be my client. My heart was happy not because I had found a client, but because I had found someone who recognized my work.

“Did you write it for your wife?” she said quietly, after a long pause.

I simply nodded my agreement.

***

The Communicator called on January 21. He, like I, really wanted to go out digging. All we could do was indulge our memories of the autumn. The forest, the quiet forest. Nobody around to run up and announce to you that a client was causing problems. Oh, how I longed for that place! The clicks and beeps of the metal detector—the question of what will be found under the ground. One cannot put that feeling down on paper, one cannot tell it as a story.

The Communicator's call disturbed my peace.

“We're going to see the Tukums Legend on Saturday,” he said, going on to repeat all kinds of legends and stories that he had heard. One got the impression that all of Latvia was covered with buried or sunken tanks.

***

January 22, 2000

I grabbed a bottle of brandy that I had bought the previous day from the kitchen. After all, you're not going to go visit a legend without something in your hand.

I got to the Classicist's house around 1:00 PM. The man who was organizing our search, Anatolijs, was already there. He is one of the few Russians in our group. Interestingly, a man who is a dedicated supporter of Russia's politics and ideology is helping us to dig up German soldiers and Latvian SS Legionnaires. We are men who support the Latvian state and the Latvian Legion with equal fervor, and we will work our hands down to the bone to pick up the pieces of a Red Army soldier. Superb!

Anatolijs went out and closed the door behind him. The Classicist closed the curtains at the windows and told me that he had something to show me.

“You cannot imagine how I suffered when I drilled the hole into the barrel of the gun,” the Classicist moaned. My fingers touched a German MP-40 machine gun. I could smell the oil of the gun as it settled, cold and heavy, into my hands.

“I have always said that in movies they throw the machine guns around like teaspoons, as if they weighed 150 grams.”

A gun barrel with a hole is the same thing as a man who has been castrated. We went to see the Legend.

“The Legend is out digging. He doesn't give a shit about the snow,” the Communicator said to prepare us.

“Did you see the old man at work?” The Classicist, apparently thinking about our last dig in early November, was probably remembering the same things that I was. Logically—why couldn't you dig in the winter if the ground was not frozen. For the Classicist and me, the trip was like a pilgrimage, the same as going to Tibet to talk to the Dalai Lama.

The digger greeted us. When I spotted this legend of diggers, I liked him right away. He was around 45 years old and had a kindly face. I ended up in his barn, but in popular books it would be called a museum. I was left with my mouth completely agape! Pieces of aluminum or tin shot through with bullet holes, soldiers' cooking pots with people's names and army units scratched into the surface, all kinds of military equipment. Oh, and there were all kinds of military helmets, stacked up in a corner one on top of another. And then there were medals and various other military decorations. All of the smaller items were arranged on wood boards or kept under glass. It was clear that soon there would be no more room in the little barn for the war trophies that the Legend had found.

We moved from the “exhibition hall” to the house, we sat down at a table, we uncorked the brandy, and then the talk began. The Legend's wife brought us coffee, and when she passed her husband, she patted his grayed head in a way that was funny but also loving and friendly. “Oh, my little man,” she murmured. Our translation: “How nice it is that you are not the only oddball.” When we were left alone, we started to talk about various idiots who were interfering with us. Then we turned to tanks and airplanes. Sometimes our eyes strayed to the television set, where there was a documentary, in German, about the war. It was all part of the process. As quickly as the bottle emptied—that's how quickly the time passed.

“Gentlemen, let me tell you something,” the Legend interrupted us. “One day I was out digging, and suddenly I saw—a leg bone! It was starting to get dark, so I covered up the spot and went home. In the morning I got ready, I took a flare gun, 100 grams of vodka—everything that I needed, in other words. I went back to the spot and spread out a blanket so that there would be a place to arrange the guy's bones. I dug. I found the other leg. And that was it. Just the legs.

***

January 29, 2000

White snow covers the ground. We are standing at the edge of a field. A swampy forest is 50 meters ahead of us—an outstanding place to wait for an attacking enemy. There is no lack of foxholes, and all we can do is ask our third friend—the metal detector—to get to work in this fight against history. After just a few meters, unbelievably enough, we hear a strong signal from underground. The shovel digs through the frozen layer of earth. I lift out the first chunk of soil. The Classicist puts the metal detector into the hole. The signal is much more distinct than previously. The shovel digs and digs, and a large pile of sand appears.

“Let me dig for a while, take a rest.” I give the shovel to the Classicist.

Once again I have to be amazed at how powerful my partner's apparatus is. The ditch which the Classicist has dug is more than one meter deep, and once again this very nice noise, when two pieces of metal touch each other somewhere deep underground, and then you hear that lovely greeting of them rubbing against each other. There it is! Then, of course, the shovel is cast aside. I take a long, thin pole with a sharpened end and poke it into the ground around the mysterious piece of metal. I have bent deep into the ditch, and I feel that I cannot stay that way very long, because the blood is rushing to my head. Of course, just like any normal person, I summon up all of the saints who stand ready to help us at that particular moment in time. Deep in the ditch I see the wings of a mine from a mine thrower. It has been launched, but it has not exploded. Pause.

“We're not going to leave it in the ground, are we? At least let's see whether it's Russian or German.”

“Of course,” I agree. “We didn't come here to dig potatoes, after all.”

The moment is photographed for posterity. If we find more objects like this, we'll call out the bomb detonators and let them deal with it. After all, we're not about to bring a live mine home with us.

There are other places we haven't checked—maybe there's more stuff somewhere else? We move to a different part of the front lines.

Once again the forest. The forest is the best place to hide from prying eyes. Imagine if we were out in the open! The people who live nearby would probably call the police, and it would be very hard for us to explain to the uniformed bureaucrats that we are actually out in the forest in the middle of the winter to hunt for berries. That's not the point, though. We're in the forest. All around us is a dream situation for people who are hunters like us. Foxholes, shelters, holes from hand grenade explosions. What more could we possibly want? All that remains is to go to battle. The metal detector makes powerful noise, no matter where we are going. We find metal everywhere. Soon enough, however, we find that this is wire from an ammunition case, or perhaps it is wire that was used to strengthen the walls of bunkers. In places we find scraps of the famous Soviet bomb, but our collection does not need such stuff, so we leave it for the next generation. We will be back at this spot.

***

Today my son—he's five—asked me a question:

“Dad, did you find grandmother's brother?”

No, I reply.

“Was he a good guy or a bad guy?” I can't collect myself for an answer that he will understand, and then: “Dad, who shot him?”

I sit and think—which one was the bad guy. Grandmother's brother, who was 19 years old at that time and served in the Latvian Legion with the Germans, or my own grandfather, who at the same time and in the same place fought in the Soviet army? My grandfather was injured in the back on March 19, and the Legionnaire fell on March 23, leaving nothing behind—not even a small burial mound. Who was the bad guy? How can I tell this to my boy so that he might understand that they were both good, that neither of them wanted to fight?

Without receiving an answer, he runs off to play with things, which at that moment seem much more important to him.

After what you have read, you probably think that my son does nothing more than play with plastic guns and pretend that he is a movie superhero. Absolutely not. I have blocked Cartoon Network from my television. I cannot accept this violence that is being put into young children's minds. Can I doubt the professionalism of the marketing division of a TV channel? Sure I can. Absolutely. It is a crime what they are declaring. I spent six years working at large companies where the target audience was aged 0-12. I know perfectly well how much money can be earned if you gain a foothold in the brains of children. Those who are impotent denounce sex on the screen, pacifists decry war and violence, and so on and forth. But I seldom hear any complaints about Spiderman or Action Batman. I watch movies about war when my son is far off in dreamland, and I hope that God is allowing him to dream happy dreams. When it comes to superheroes, it would be hard for me to think of anything that my boy has not been yet. We recently watched a movie about Zorro, and I knew that he would be changing his image soon. Sure enough—he was Batman, but he changed into Zorro.