Diggers (9 page)

“It's an infantry mine, and you attached the detonator to one end, stuck the other end into the ground on a wooden pole, tightened the string and waited until some poor idiot got unlucky.”

Fighting with the mosquitoes, scratching my puffed up face and rubbing my ears, which seemed as big as an elephant's, I tramped through the jungle. I had forgotten all about the ticks and yielded to the enchanting hospitality of the place I was in. I crawled in the grass, slithered through thick bushes and lay on the ground. Que sera sera.

I collected all of my strength and yelled, “HEY, GUYS!” Someone spoke near me—it was the Communicator, along with Little Spirit and Alexei. The boys were under some thick bushes and were digging around in the clay. There had been machine gun nest there years ago. Bullets and shells emerged from the hole, and we found the wings of a mine thrower's mine. I did not have one in my collection, and we packed up it and a few other less important things.

“Here's something!” called Little Spirit. “I'm doing well today. I guess we don't need to be pulling out just fragments of metal from the ground!”

He had reason to be happy—a while later he was brushing sand off of a cylindrical iron container. It was the reserve barrel for an MG-34 machine gun—a very good find, well preserved and fairly uncommon.

***

There was a shocking report in the newspaper, complete with impressive photographs. People's bones—a whole pile of bones—had been found in the forest. The Classicist, excited, called me and the Communicator.

***

July 25, 2000

The rain had not yet stopped. The sky was gray and heavy, forcing me to think about this day's adventures. I stood on the balcony and smoked. I a cloud of tobacco smoke I fought with myself over a difficult question—why am I doing this, why I am digging into it? Why do I like to do things that others consider to be—let's be honest—stupid? I write screenplays, and my greatest dream is to bring back those people to whom I've given so much of myself—people from whom I have undoubtedly taken just as much for myself. Nobody can ever understand HOW I want to make films. Are you stories about war? No. I'm too much of a coward to kill the hero I've created, or the hero's friend—even on paper. But maybe I know too much about war to turn over 100 or 1,000 soldiers to the cannons without thinking about it. I could make up the most beautiful heroic deed for each of them, followed by death. Digging around and war? Am I covering myself with these things? I try to show or to participate in the real film of life. When I'm dirty with the earth or soaked to the skin, I watch my friends in action, and I'm already writing something in my head—the same thing that later I'll be putting into the electronic memory. We're each so different, maybe later I'll describe each of my diggers. I'm not ready for that. But I can tell you already that each of them is a personality—a businessman, a farmer, a solider and me, the writer. I try to photograph in detail so that later the reader might understand each word that I have written exactly as I saw it.

And more … I started to write a film about war, a film about the Latvian Legionnaires. I feel the Legionnaires in my bones, and I simply cannot fail to write about them. Four years have passed since I completed my film about the riflemen. I remember the evening when I wrote The End on the paper. I can't describe that feeling. I don't even know why I'm telling you this—maybe someday you'll read it, but maybe I'm just trying to unburden myself to someone.

Now—what happened today? Driving around large puddles of mud, by Audi slowly showed the way to the Classicist's BMW. It had been raining without pause for several days.

“If I don't dig some, I'll go crazy.” That's what the Classicist said at the middle of the week.

He didn't have to tell me twice. We were ready to dig anywhere—as long as pieces of metal came out of the earth. As we shook our way down the stony rural road, the Classicist called me.

“The Communicator says that he's not going into the forest today.”

“What do you mean, he won't? Tell him that I brought boots for him,” I replied, making fun of the Communicator.

We arrived at a grown-over forest path. We changed our clothes quickly and pushed our way into the depths of the forest. As I listened to the squeaking of my “friend,” we inspected the old wartime foxholes.

“Doesn't somebody want to look for some mushrooms?” I don't remember which of us, but somebody started to talk about mushrooms.

“You'd have to be a complete idiot to be in the forest picking mushrooms in weather like this. The question arises—to whom can we be compared? Fine,” I continued, “let's keep going a bit further. The forest is cleaner there, and the defensive lines have bee preserved perfectly.”

Two German soldiers lay at the end of this trench. The helmet of one of them is on the cover of the book.

I came to understand that the place between my raincoat and my semi-long boots was so wet that water was beginning to pour from my trousers into my boots. I'll admit that this bothered me—until I suggested that the Classicist check out a fairly grown-over foxhole that was on the opposite side of the road.

“Maybe we'll at least find a machine gun,” I joked.

“Maybe a military helmet,” added the Classicist, “with a skull inside it—wouldn't that be even better?” We were each in our own dreams, and we were laughing at ourselves.

The Communicator and I were already on our way back to our cars to move to another battle precinct. We were tired of digging up large and small fragments of artillery shells.

“You guys, come over here,” called the Classicist.

“Another fragment,” I muttered unwillingly, and the Communicator and I walked over to the Classicist.

“Look at this!” The Classicist had stuck the end of the metal detector into the ground. “It's not something little.” The metal detector was slowly moved along an imagined axis.

“It is over here … and here it is not,” the detector's song got stronger in one place, fell silent in another.

“We'll have to dig it up, what else is there?”

I stuck my knife into the soft earth, trying to hear the sound of metal on metal.

“I can't reach it, it's somewhere deeper,” I started to get hotter about it. The shovel struck the ground, the rain soaked our already soaked bodies, but the secret discovery made us forget that we were damp.

“Come and dig, Communicator, I want a cigarette.” My soaked fingers slid into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette pack that had suffered mightily from the water.

Centimeter by centimeter we got closer to our secret. We saw a bit of the find at the bottom of the hole. Three pairs of eyes looked questioningly into the ditch.

“It's an MG—man, it's really an MG German machine gun,” the Classicist's eyes sparkled. “Look—the barrel and the trigger. Hang on, I'll go get some beers.”

“Maybe we could eat something?” I asked.

“Forget eating! Later!” A bottle of beer was pressed into my hand.

I won't write down what the Classicist said, but I can say that he was just as happy as the two others who were standing next to him. The Communicator kept digging.

“Nope, it's a Russian machine gun,” the Communicator pulled a badly rusted gun out of the ditch.

“What difference?” I asked.

“Wait a minute—in that case, where's the disk. Communicator, look for carefully.” The Classicist was beaming. “And where are the legs of the machine gun?”

A few minutes passed, and the disk of the machine gun once again saw the light of day.

“Don't just stand there, keep looking,” I encouraged the searcher. “Gentlemen, if you permit me, I'll try to clean it up, and then let's draw lots to see who gets it.”

“I have one already. You can draw lots,” the Classicist said, refusing his rights.

The Classicist kept feeling around.

“There's something else there—something big.”

Once again the end of the knife could not reach the object that was causing the detector to go off. I grabbed the shovel and stuck it into the ground. From time to time I stepped aside, allowing my colleagues to put the detector's tip into the ground again. What a nice sound! The detector was squealing like a hog being led to slaughter.

“Dig!” The Classicist was pouring oil on my fire of curiosity. The tip of the shovel touched metal. I put the shovel aside, squatted down and stuck my arm into the hole. It was deep—as deep as my arm is long. I could operate only with touch.

“It's not an explosive,” I paused. “It's an edge … it's a military helmet. German! Absolutely German!”

The Classicist drew out a long and juicy “Oh, shiiiiiiiiiit.” I was sorry that I had not brought my camera or my video equipment. Today we had only one camera, and that was much better than nothing. As much as I could, I put the trophies on film for eternity. The Communicator meanwhile had gone down to the swamp and was now back, the machine gun all washed up. We were lucky today. It had stopped raining—at least we thought so. We had managed to forget what it's like when there's nothing falling from the sky.

Two meters down, along the same axis, the Communicator was energetically digging into the ground again . I took my turn, too. Once again metal on metal. I crawled into the ditch and scraped around the trophy a bit with my fingers. It can't be—another gun barrel? There's on sense in describing it in detail, a few minutes later the Communicator lifted the legs of a machine gun out of the earth, asking a question—well, I don't remember who exactly asked the question.

“What the hell is this? The legs are over here, but the gun is over there?”

“You're asking me?” the Classicist turned his face to me. I guess I was the one who asked the first question.

Protecting the tips of our cigarettes with our hands, the Communicator and I looked at the place where the foxhole had approached the forest path—the place where a bit earlier the Classicist had found a new and secret discovery with his squeaking detector.

“Dig, dig,” I called.

“Now I hit something—hit it hard,” the Classicist complained. “I thought that it was still very deep, but … it's a helmet. Another one! German!”

The digger's hand sunk into the hole, and we, the smokers, awaited information from underground.

“It's with the skull still in it, guys—look!”

I went to the digger and saw that he was holding a human tooth.

“He's lying here with his helmet.”

While my colleagues freed the soldier from the earth and the roots of plants, I stepped some 20 meters away and found a German grenade—what the people used to call the “little egg.” It was rusted and without anything that could make it dangerous. I went on.

“So, Artist,” said the Classicist. “Take a picture. Look—the boy's got golden teeth. It would be a sin not to do it. The pictures will be of use if we need to explain to the Germans that this soldier is an Aryan.”

“It's my first one. My first one! I found him myself,” the Classicist celebrated.

“Well, if we're this far along, we'll have to dig him up.”

I fell quiet and looked at the Communicator, who was standing at the edge of the ditch and gazing at the ex-soldier. The Germans were dealing with their own, but they would never come after just one or two, and they would certainly not be crawling into old foxholes to look for the ones that were lost. They had precise maps with notations where mass graves were located. If we left the soldier there, then he would clearly be here for a long, long time.

“Let's dig,” the Classicist commanded and climbed into the ditch. The script—as always. The Communicator took bones out of the hole, and the Classicist arranged them on plastic bags that we spread out on the ground. Me? I took the bones from the one and passed them along to the other. Once, when I had picked up another group of bones, I found some bone fragments that looked like they were from a skull. “Just a second,” I said, confused. “The first one is whole—he's still got his helmet on.”

“Here comes the second one,” announced my colleague. “He had gold teeth, too—but man, he got it in the head!”

“Look,” the Classicist was showing me something. “He got hit so hard that the gold crown bent back.”

I know that some of you are asking what happened to the gold. God is my witness—the teeth were dumped into the black bags together with the bones. I hope that this gold will serve as a document that proves that the men really were from the German army. Military medals? I found one, completely rusted, and it fell apart in my hand. Other property? I got the sense that they had already been picked over by the Red Army and by the locals. Why? We didn't find any boots, no other items.