Diggers (4 page)

I go back.

Entering a farmhouse, I turn over the equipment to an acquaintance. I go back to the forest. I don't really understand what I'm going to be doing there. I have a shovel, but what good is a shovel if I can't “see” what is under the ground. I dig around a bit stupidly for a while, and then, sweaty, I leave.

“So?” I ask the Electrician.

“It's fine. Something is sounding in the headphones all the time,” he tells me.

Without further comment, the machine flies into the car, I follow it, and soon I am on the highway again. I go back.

I'm in a hurry. The winter darkness will settle over the forest soon. I turn on the apparatus. The sound is terrible. I adjust the frequency, the sound is a bit quieter now, but it is still disgusting. I fly among the fir trees like a bullet. The horrible squeaking turns into music, the squeaking turns into a buzz. I move the detector away from the moss, and the sound is quieter. It's here! As soon as I point the detector in another direction, the beep becomes louder. My knees sink into the soft carpet of moss, I stick my metal bayonet into the earth. Something big? I scrape back the moss, and it turns out that the piece of metal is larger than my imagination. It's part of a tank. I try to lift it out to move it to a safer place. There are more wires around me than an electronic cyborg has. I lift the iron, I cannot pick up the metal detector, I pick up the metal detector, I don't have a free hand for the piece of tank. Straining, pushing my way through the bushes, I carry a 15-kilogram piece of armament, with the metal detector being pulled along in the wires.

A view for a dollar.

***

February 19, 2000.

A Saturday. The family is preparing to go to the movies. I feel so “unhappy” that I have no alternative but to go and visit Skvarceni in Riga (I call him that not because he loves the real Skvarceni, but because of his face, which bears scars that remind us of his youthful military adventures in Afghanistan). Amazingly, he is ready, he knows, he shivers like a hunting dog. “Today we'll run Captain Nemo down into the lake, let him look for the tank”

“What are you thinking? It's winter! There's ice. The water's cold!”

I cast an understanding look at my wife and answer: “I'm not going in myself.”

“Oh.”

Oh, my naive woman. I keep quiet, I can't really talk back to her, because I promised that I would not be bringing home any more rusted metal. But how can I not bring it home, if pieces of exploded mortar “look” at me so prettily?

That's it. My wife and boy go to see
Stuart Little
. I feel gross with respect to them, but generally speaking, my thoughts are already in the lake.

***

The road leads to one of Latvia's largest cities, but we stopped somewhere along the way. We turned down a forest road and, in a column of three cars that were bouncing across frozen bits of earth—just as in freestyle driving—we drove toward the lake.

We were there. It was an ideal winter's day—it was relatively warm, I was dressed properly. My calves weren't cold either, because I had on my long rubber boots.

We stood at the shore and listened to what the Knower was telling us. As always—there was definitely a tank in there, almost at the shore. Actually, there was no shore, it was just a snake-infested swamp. Little by little we found out that more than one man could stand on the ice.

The axe hit the floor of the ice, and Skvarceni mightily chopped out a hole that was one meter by one meter. Soon water was splashing everywhere. We had to take a picture. From the middle of the lake I looked at the shore, where Captain Nemo was pulling on his rubber gear. I was restless—on the way here he had found that he had not brought along his warm trousers. You can make do without those, but if it turned out that he had also not … last time he announced that he had not brought his water gear.

The chopping was done. When I pushed on one end of the square of ice, the other rose up. Skvarceni put a crowbar under the other end and, with some effort, we took the piece of ice out. The hole was ready.

\

Nemo (the Crab) searches for a tank.

I helped Nemo to put on his gloves. Skvarceni wrapped the rope around him, and Nemo disappeared into the icy water. Every once in a while we saw air bubbles floating under the ice. Nemo was still breathing.

“Here's a greeting from the Germans, guys.” Nemo pulled off his mask and brought a German soldier's gas mask out of the water. Our hearts leaped—it was there!

“It was there by itself, down there,” said the diver. “I haven't seen a tank yet.”

“Come on out. We'll look with the metal detector.”

“Oh, fine. You couldn't do that before?” Nemo crawled out of the hole like a seal. I helped him take off the ropes.

“Open it up,” Nemo turned his back on his girlfriend and asked me to open the zipper of his water suit. He shouldn't have done that. In a moment we would be dressing him up again, I would take his picture, in his mask he would smile at the camera and get back in the water. And then he would jump out of the water like a dolphin and, remembering everyone—man and woman—he would wait for the last drop of water to drip down between his buttocks.

Nemo disappeared under the water again. We followed his bubbles. He was swimming back.

“I can't get any further—I get stuck between the ice and the mud.”

Of course, he did not see any tank, but when he came back for the last time, so did some kind of oil product. That is a leading indicator that there is something hidden down there.

***

February 20, 2000

The morning starts according to yesterday's script. My family goes to the movies again—they didn't get there yesterday. I pick up Skvarceni along the way and we go to see the Classicist. Today's plan is to find and look at a filtration camp for prisoners of war. Moroccan the Terrible, known by the people as Adamsons, was held there. He was quite a guy. We drive all around and finally drive into a farmstead. From there we go on foot. Where? Well, somewhere over there, along the railroad tracks. The trunk of the car opens up. We put on our boots, assemble the metal detectors, take everything that we will need and move toward the forest. The sun is out, but our cheeks are battered by the wind. It's winter, after all.

Finally we reach a cement wall that has been scarred by bullets—God knows whose bullets. The wall is about ten meters long and runs parallel to the railroad tracks. That was a place from which stones were put into train cars. Prisoners worked in the quarries. But where are the barracks? Where is anything to indicate that prisoners of war sat here 60 years ago? We walked all around—we were in the forest, in the clearing. We used our metal detectors in the meadow and the swamp. Nothing. We see nothing, but we know that we are in the right place. We have to find the place that old soldiers told us about—the soldiers who had the “luck” to be captured by the Russians. I don't know how much of what I've heard is true, but I was told that in the camp the men helped each other to tear the gold fillings out of their teeth, to say nothing of rings, gold and silver crosses and military medals. The men hid these things so that the Russians wouldn't take them by force.

In the evening we drive back.

Skvarceni carries two bottles of wine and two glasses out of a store. Just two. I'm not offered any. I'm driving.

***

Early March

The day is finally here—our homepage is put into the vast reaches of the Internet. This is something that we have been waiting for and that we created together. We want to show our image. The Classicist sent his wife to take computer courses. Natalija was heroic, and now our group has a fully vested PR official.

***

March 8, 2000

The Classicist, the Communicator and I go to look at a tank some 100 kilometers from Riga. The sharp sun of the spring has dried the road. The Classicist's BMW, rocking gently, brings us toward our find.

I have the honor of presenting my discovery. We listened to an old boy I interviewed yesterday. My jaw muscles relaxed when I was listening for the first time, and now that the cassette is spewing out the conversation for the third time, I watch my battle mates and see that they are taking what they hear to heart.

My military service began in Riga in the first days of the war. I was 16 years old. My father asked me to go for some gasoline in the car. When I was driving home, the Red Army stopped me at the Interior Ministry and announced that I had to drive them to Pskov. That is a city near the Latvian-Russian border. The German army was rapidly approaching Riga. What did I do? I calculated that I would be back tomorrow, and I was supposed to go to a party with some friends, and this trip would make an interesting story for them—especially the girls. I went. I returned after four years—four long years during which I grew up and became a soldier who was tempered by battle.

What happened to me in Pskov? They took my car away and made me walk home. It was warm, and there was no problem in moving down the highway toward Riga. There was one problem, though—I was hungry. At the side of the road I spotted a Russian officer with his family, and they were having their lunch. I sat down on the opposite side of the road and started at them stupidly. They probably noticed that I was drooling, and after a while they asked me to join them. The officer addressed me in Russian, which was a language that I did not know. I did, however, speak Polish very well. He told me that there was no point in going to Riga, because the Germans were already there. The Russian officer proposed that I go with him. It turned out that he was the commander of an aviation brigade. I became the mascot of the brigade. I already told you that I was a good driver. My job was to deliver ammunition and to help in preparing the airplanes. There was a training airplane there, and like any boy, I wanted to fly. They let me, although the first few times, of course, I flew with a pilot. After a while they let me fly myself, and then later the instructor let me land by myself. I had real trouble with the Russian language. I was being taught navigation and topography, and I kept saying that I understood everything, when in fact I understood nothing. When the commander saw that I had learned to fly very well, he proposed that I become a mailman. That meant my having a two-panel airplane. It wasn't really an airplane, anyone could have landed it on the roof of a barn. My duty was to carry letters to army headquarters. I looked down at the ground to orient myself. I flew for a while, and then I saw the kinds of planes that other pilots had. I was almost offended—in what way was I worse than any of them? After one discussion of that type, the commander told me: “The hell with you! Take my plane and show me what you can do with it!” That can only happen in Russia during war. I didn't have to be told twice. I showed everything that I knew up in the air, and I landed the commander's plane as if I were a major pilot. I received praise and my airplane.

The first air battle. Hmm. There were two of us—the commander and me. We flew out of the clouds and attacked 18 German bombers that were being escorted by destroyers. I had to stay on the tail of the commander so that the enemy would not shoot at his plane from the back. I was cannon fodder. I did everything that I had been taught. I flew below the bombers and then attacked them rapidly. You may not believe me, but I shot a German plane out of the sky in my very first air battle.

When I returned to the airfield, I thought that I was the best pilot in the world. I was 16 years old—16!

One of the pilots from the bomber brigade had been taken as a prisoner. He was a professional German pilot with a wealth of battle experience. He asked to see the asshole who had shot him down. They all pointed at me. The German asked that the Russians stop mocking him by showing him a child. I did not look like a real man. My uniform was too big, and I looked like a clothes hanger with clothes on it. The translator told my story to the German, and he had to believe. The German put out his hand—”Congratulations!” We shook hands. The German took a pipe out of his pocket and handed it to me. “My father gave this to me. It was my talisman, but I don't need it any more. Take it. It's yours.” I did. Then I got in trouble with the KGB. “Why did you shake hands with a Fascist?” the investigator asked me. I told him that the loser always puts out his hand to the winner—that's something I had read in books about behavior on the battlefield. Then it became known that I was not yet 18, I was not allowed to fight. It was not enough. The KGB man found out that I had not sworn fealty and that I had no right to sit down at the controls of an airplane, let alone fly and participate in battles. So how did it end? The commander and the director of the political division agreed with the special services. I was born in 1925, but they added a little line to the five, and there it was—I was born in 1923. Theoretically I became two years older in a single day. I swore my oath and became a soldier.