Diggers (7 page)

I was out in the forest. I visited Juris, who loves his alcohol—the guy who found those 50 German helmets. Finally I was standing above the T-34 tank. It was a meadow among ancient forests. The spring waters had not yet receded, and the meadow was pretty damp. I didn't get my sneakers full of water, but as soon as I dug a small hole, it filled up with water. I'll have to wait for the spring.

“One night my friend and I went out poaching, and we found that the Home Guard was waiting for us there. We stole away. I ran along one side of the forest, my friend ran along another. I fell into a bunker.”

My eyes lit up. “Where is it?”

“I can't find the place, it was night, but the bunker was full of weapons and ammunition.”

We walked around that pine forest for two hours, trying to find the mossy hole. Of course, we did not find it. Either he was engaging in false braggadocio, or he is simply an idiot. I took him home and went back to the old place. No photographing was possible—the wind blew the sky full of leaden clouds. I turned on the metal detector and tramped into the woods. I found the wings of an exploded mine and then a completely rusty German gas mask. When I got to the place where the pieces of the exploded tank were, I lifted a metal bar out of the ground and did not know what it was. I also found some pieces of armament and a fat rope. Nothing good, but my heart was happy anyway. Once again I was sorry that I had not brought along anything to slake my thirst. My tongue was stuck to my gums and began to crack, and the clock was calling me home.

***

End of April, beginning of May

The forests are getting green, the radio is warning me about ticks. How horrible! Last week I visited a Legionnaire and a national guerilla. Great guys! I really want to write about them. Lately I've been cleaning up my trophies—bullet shells, bullets and the like. I dug partly exploded mines back into the ground. They were pretty, but they were still alive, and I want to be the one who is alive.

***

May 5, 2000

At eight o'clock in the morning the Communicator got a call from Kurzeme—somebody who had information. At 8:15 the Communicator called the Classicist. At 8:30 the Classicist called me.

“Are you sitting down, boss?” he asked me.

“What is it?” He hadn't said good morning. He continued: “There are tanks. You can touch one with a stick, there are two others that we need a powerful metal detector for. We need to get to Kurzeme as quickly as possible. It would be great if we could do it on May 13th, I'll be back from a business trip then. Call the Communicator.”

I got through to the Communicator at 9:30. Everything was GREAT!

At ten o'clock I was at Skvarceni's office. I told him everything. His eyes lit up, his heart began to beat faster.

“Did I tell you that the Messerschmidt has been found?”

“Good morning,” I say. “Of course I don't know anything. Skvarceni was counterattacking against my tanks.

“It's in the water, it's in one piece.”

Sorry, I have to run—a client is here.

***

A few days later

The Informer has come from a distance. We're sitting in a bar at the bus station, I'm drinking something akin to coffee. The tank has been found, everything is OK, but there's one little problem. The Informer wants money for the information. He has seen somewhere that money is paid for such things. The “boy” is visibly excited—now he'd earn some money, now he'd be rich! I ask the Communicator whether he knows anyone who has received money for such information. The Communicator replies that it is foolishness—he doesn't know of any such case, and you'd have to be a fool to pay money for something you have not seen.

Something has to change here.

***

May 7, 2000

With a happy heart, I'm driving to the Communicator's hometown. Today is the day that my soldiers will be buried in a proper ceremony. My whole family is with me.

My mood worsens a bit. The reburial turns into a little political process. A grotesque former Communist leader spews out a speech that he's tried out in front of the mirror five times: “Fascism! Never here!” I lean over to my wife and whisper, “He's talking about the Italians—the Germans weren't mentioned there. Italy was a Fascist country.” The education of the politician? “Fascist Germany,” he says. My God! Germany was a Nazi country!

The nicest thing that I remember—the Russian ambassador. A smart, educated and diplomatic man. A nice guy. The only thing that the Classicist and I concluded was that the Communicator had done good work. He dug a deep hole. How odd. We dug them up, and now we're burying them. The Classicist went to Moscow to look at tanks in a museum. The Communicator and I decided to dig up Mario's bunkers.

The caskets in the center contain two aviators found and excavated by the Communicator.

Here I have to write about a fairly unpleasant subject. I have to do it, otherwise someone might get the wrong idea about us. I'll write childishly, but justly. We hate any organization, society or policy that is aimed at humiliating, destroying or conquering other nations or races. Why are we looking for the items of war? I do not know any other army that had as vivid, tasteful and stylish equipment, armament, insignia, order and discipline as the army of Nazi Germany. Today the armies of every large country in the world have borrowed something from the German soldier. In opposition to one army we put an ideology as stupid and worn out as Communism, with its army. The propaganda turned the men of the two armies in the right direction. Mercilessness and mercilessness. The Russian man. First of all, it is a Russian soldier, a warrior who deserves admiration. There is the old saying that a Russian soldier can cross in locations where a mountain goat would not tread. An outstanding and courageous soldier. His tanks put the fear of God into experienced German soldiers. What do you think? Can equipment that has been in a swamp for 50 years come back to live and drive in a modern parade? I'm sure about Russian equipment. The Communicator did it—he exchanged the oil, he charged the batteries, he turned on the giant machine and drove around in a circle.

Thanks to the sea of information that is crashing over society, there is increased interest in the Nazis, the Fascists and the Communists. People want to know who they were, where they began. Once again! Battlefields, mines, shrapnel, weapons—they all are witnesses to a terrible war, and they are becoming artworks of a very new kind. They're art that was created by war. Don't laugh. One cannot conceive of the things that happened to people and land that were torn apart by artillery and grenade explosions, but the stupidest thing that humanity has ever come up with is killing one another.

Digging, searching—in the end it represents a flight from stereotypes and the development of new emotions. They are emotions with the taste of adrenaline. We collect war items. Our words are collected by the state's security services...

***

May 13, 2000

By the way, the Classicist tried mightily to come back from Russia for this expedition.

A bit of a hangover. Last night I went to my son's “university.” The director of the institution and my son's teachers invited us to a parent's ball for the kindergarten. The students had rented out their school to their mamas and papas. We enjoyed all of the things that this little castle of light could provide. I thought that we would stay for an hour and then go home, but we ended up leaving only after six hours—with difficulty, too. My wife and I were greeted at home by Mario, who was spending the night at my house so that we could go to Kurzeme in the morning. The digger was like a nursemaid to my boy. At four in the morning I found him sitting in a pear tree with a book in his hands—about the war, of course.

I woke up at eight o'clock in the morning. The Classicist was going crazy—we were supposed to leave two hours ago. I was ashamed. I had even turned off my mobile phone.

In the end it is all fine, we're in Kurzeme—the place where my grandmother's youngest brother was supposedly seen for the last time as a member of the Latvian Legion. Mario drives us toward the bunker.

We drove back and forth, three wrong roads. I was driving behind the Classicist's car and eating the dust his tires were kicking up. I did not try to notice the dust, though, because in my mind I was already there—the quiet forest, where everything reminds me of my soldiers. Latvian boys fought here. The road became narrower and narrower, and then we were there. We could not leave our cars on the road. We had to drive into the meadow as far as possible and hide the vehicles among the bushes there. Our Audi and BMW were all-terrain vehicles already—no doubt about that. We drove across the 200 meters of no road with no problems, and then we were in a thicket of bushes.

We are trembling, we're ready to run to the forest. Let's get to the bunker, the foxholes, the iron as quickly as possible. Well, we can't run, the heavy backpack is on my shoulders, while the shovel, stuck into the backpack vertically keeps catching on branches. We push our way through bushes and walk around the trunks of trees. Mario tries to find the road.

It should be here. It is here. Carefully hidden from the eyes of strangers, it is waiting for us. You could run over it ten times and never know that under a deep layer of moss and clay, there are fat tree trunks laid horizontally across a ditch, above which a fairly large fir tree has managed to take root. We look at the hole and are sorry. It is a small and vertical entrance to the place beneath the ground—and it is full of water.

“I drained it, but there was not time to finish the job and take a good look,” said Mario. He was here a year ago, and he spent two days doing nothing but lifting water out of the hole in buckets. We don't have any buckets, and anyway there are too few of us to do the work.

“We need to bring someone with a video camera,” the Classicist says quietly. “We shouldn't touch this bunker yet.”

“There was a soothsayer who told me that there, on the left, there is something that I didn't notice, there has to be a hiding place there.”

Mario speaks, and the blood rushes into my brain. Only common sense keeps me from jumping into the muddy water.

Unbelievably enough, but it is a real residential bunker which, thanks to the clay in the ground and the water has preserved itself. We were a bit out of luck, but despite the fact that the bunker was full of water I took the Classicist's camera out of the bag, took off the battery and tossed it into the black hole. It rolled slowly but beautifully into the hole and disappeared into the water. The Classicist was calm, but I felt guilty. We concluded that the Legionnaires did not want us poking around on that day. We are not particularly superstitious, but when it comes to these things, everything that we do and everything that we find depends on whether the soldiers who fell here want it to happen or do not. If they do not like what we are doing, we fail. Other times they shower us with gifts. One of the diggers slowly grows tired. An obvious springtime allergy has paralyzed the Classicist's desire to look for anything. I can see that he was fighting his illness, and I understood his mood. Only Mario is still chopping away at the clay like an outstanding coal miner. What did we find? Around 100 Soviet shells, four grenades (not live, don't worry), many empty boxes of bullets and an empty tank shell. I found a pretty piece of a cannonball. I had to laugh—an ordinary piece of metal, but it creates the nicest emotions in me.

12:30 AM—Mario and I are home.

***

May 27, 2000

Now I'm thinking about what else we could do to get everyone else to tell us that we're nuts.

At seven o'clock on Saturday morning we arrived at the home of the Legionnaire Talivaldis. We put him in Skvarceni's Jeep and drove to a city in Kurzeme. It is nothing special, but if an old man is without legs, one has to devote twice as much attention to him as to a person with all of his limbs.

We drove him there, and there he found the two “girls” who brought him food every night 55 years ago. After the capitulation Talivaldis lived in a bunker and hid from the KGB. They walked across his bunker three times while combing the forest, but they never found him. When the owner of the nearby farm was captured, Talivaldis left his bunker, and immediately he heard the command “Hands up!” “I couldn't live there any more, I was afraid for the girls. They could have been shot because of me.” Yes, it was a minor event in the small town. We got to know the police chief, the deputy editor of the local newspaper. Necessary people. Of course, we found out the locations of a few more tanks.

When I got home, I started to prepare for my birthday celebration. My colleagues from work came to visit, all dressed up. I was still in my digging clothes, no time.

In truth we both drove the old Legionnaire to the place so that he could find the documents, medals and weapons he had buried there. It turned out that a tractor with a plough had crossed the place hundreds of times, it was impossible to find anything there. “You'll admit, though, that the thing that we did today was much better than the thing we were going for,” Skvarceni asked me when we were alone. I nodded my head and said nothing. We knew that we had created a little holiday for the old man today, given him a trip that he would always remember.