Diggers (8 page)

All in all, we have lived peacefully for the last few weeks. The quiet has been deceptive—only five days pass, and a long column of cars will leave Riga for Kurzeme. It seems that this will be one of the largest expeditions that we have ever had.

***

June 3, 2000

Now that the expedition is behind us, I try to write my first memories into the computer. The only thing that still reminds me of those days is the dirt behind my nails, which I could not get rid of, even sitting in the tub yesterday. Oh, and my muscles hurt, how they hurt! I hauled a 200-kilogram pump and found that I still have muscles.

The start was shitty! The end was good! That's how it happened. I opened my eyes at 6:45. Fifteen minutes later I had to be at the Statoil on the Jurmala highway, but I was 40 kilometers away from the gas station. Oh, how I hated myself. Luckily, Mario was next to me, calming me down a little bit. I was late by 47 minutes in the end. Me—the guy who's always early for the date. I hate it when someone has to wait for me! Why did I oversleep? I sat with Mario in the kitchen, we drank whiskey and talked about our stuff. As a result we only went to bed at four o'clock in the morning.

Our destination is the Curland Cauldron. Our plan is to pump out the bunkers, dig up a flyer and look for potential sites for the future.

It's a true expedition. We have three girls from the press and four people from the Environmental Film Studio with us. In two days' time I never did count up how many we were—let's assume that there were between ten and 15 people.

I won't get into the details, I'll start at the place where our caravan moved off the gravel road and rolled into a meadow. The road ended there, to tell the truth. We drove about 150 meters into the meadow and stopped for our first discussion.

Now, while writing and thinking about the two days I spent with these “crazy people” of various ages, I found out many new things. To put it more precisely, my suspicions were confirmed. The world is based on the crazies, the hotheads with their logical thinking, and there is nothing that can't be done—you just have to do it. Everything will happen then.

“Forget this! Let's go!” Anatolijs said this and got into his Niva, behind which he was hauling a trailer with the 200-kilogram pump.

He drove on the road, which, in truth, was one only in name. A tractor with proper treads would drive it without problems, but a Niva? Of course it got stuck. The rear wheels stirred up a porridge of clay and water, while the front was firmly embedded on a harder hill of clay. The Communicator, and amazing arranger of work, got all of the guys to know what they needed to do in just a few minutes' time—where to go, what to push. We picked up one edge of the Niva, stuck wood under it, and for the rest of the kilometer I guess we all pushed the car to the place where our car could no longer enter. Mario pointed out a precise direction. He is amazingly good at orienting himself in a strange environment. The first scouting expedition, including me, carried our stuff and a can of gasoline. Coming back we met guys with the heavy pump. Crazy people! That can't be told in a story, it can't be described with a pen. A forest in which everything grows, starting with raspberry plants and bushes and ending with large, fat and small trees, among which fallen tree trunks lie horizontally. How far can four grown men carry a pump in one go? Ten meters, fifteen, maybe twenty. Then you have to change hands, or—even better, replace the people. Seven of us carried the thing. It was heavy, but we got to the bunker—tripping, falling, hissing, but we got there.

After half an hour, when the Communicator and his colleague had fixed the ignition, which we had shaken up while toting the device, the pump went to work. It did well. The Classicist and I trod into the forest. A director, soundman and cameraman followed us. A comical sight—you go, on your heels there's a cameraman, a soundman and a director. They were almost on our heels. The Classicist announces that the camera's battery is dead. SUPER! I say nothing—I'm the one who left almost the main piece of equipment at home. The camera remained in my hall, and I was doubly angry about it.

“The metal detector quit,” the Classicist announces quietly. No sound at all.

At the beginning of the season! An outrage!

Four confused eyes stared at the silent machine. There was still my machine, though, and we could work with it.

What did we find? One winged mine—the so-called sugar beet, as the people dubbed it—and approximately100 machine gun shells. After we dug around in the forest for a while, we went back. The bunker was pumped empty to the point where there was just a mess of water and clay at the very bottom. Anatolijs came crawling out from the ground in front of my eyes. His rubber suit and long rubber boots were so dirty that he looked like a big piece of clay. To the left of me—Professor, the scientific director of the War Museum, was pulling a rubber protective garment over his head. The boots were too small, so I offered him mine. Professor slid into the hole. The cameraman and soundman from the Environmental Film Studio tried to record this historic discovery. It didn't work—all that we heard from the dark hole was some grumbling. In a minute the cameraman was preparing to slide into the hole, too—there was nothing else to do. The camera—the expensive camera—was covered with a special cover.

“You're going in there, too?” I asked the Classicist.

“I guess I'll look at it on film,” the Classicist responded, and I completely agreed with him. There were no more clean rubber overalls, but crawling into the dirty ones would have been the same thing as to get into the hole as you were.

The first item on the expedition agenda was completed. The sun was far from setting, so it was decided that we would go to the unknown flyer and dig him out. It would have been fine if we had not been tortured by one thought—the pump had to be carried back! Weary from the sun and the fresh air we went back. Our fingers stretched straight by themselves from the heavy load, and at every meter our feet tripped across roots or fallen trees. We carried it. We wanted to howl when the last 20, the last ten, the last five meters were left. Then we were at the end. We loaded the pump onto the trailer, and then, scattered, we went back t the meeting place. Mario tried to play with a hand grenade, then he got scared and the Communicator continued the game. I don't know where they went off to.

Covered with dry clay, sweaty and tired (let me add that we were tired, but you get more tired sitting in an office; we were pleasantly weary), we got to our cars, which like sexy women were on the sunny meadow and offered themselves as the most pleasant calming effect. Oh, my darling! I opened the trunk of my car and pulled out food and mineral water. The carbonated water poured into my throat, and in a moment I felt it pass through my whole body. Time for a smoke! We set out a lunch table on the hood of the BMW. We ate fatty bacon, rye bread and onions, if you don't include modern gastronomic weaknesses of human beings—things like catsup and a few other things.

It was afternoon. Driving along the curvy and sandy rural roads, our caravan arrived at the place where the Soviet military airplane had crashed.

***

Covered up with years of earth, the ditch hid a great many small fragments of an airplane. It was hard to find anything that was larger than a man's hand. Digging around, we concluded that the airplane and its contents had burned after the crash. The poor pilot, we decided, had been torn to bits, so we forgot all about any attempt to locate his breastbones or his head. We looked for his medals with great effort, though. We found nothing. The boy would join the army of unknown dead soldiers.

Evening.

What kind of a finale can there be to an evening if there are ten guys who for a short while are left without women?

We decided to spend the night at the farm of one of the diggers. His mother and father greeted us like family—gave us the whole second floor. After cleaning up our dusty bodies in a very, very nice way, we lighted a fire, and after a while a pig that the Communicator had killed was roasting on it. Idyllic! And we had four liters of vodka. The pact that the Classicist and I had cooked up about being dry was completely forgotten this night. We were just happy.

Morning.

I opened my eyes.

I found with joy that some kind soul had put a full bottle of mineral water in front of my face. My shaking fingers opened the cork, my dry lips clung to the end of the bottle. Oh, how good! I slept on the floor. Beside me somebody was snoring.

“Mario, maybe you could shut up?” I thought.

Mario was sleeping next to me. I don't know why, but he kept trying to roll over on my inflatable mattress. Maybe he was thinking that his wife was next to him?

The door opened up. It was seven in the morning.

“B-b-boys, it's time to g-g-get up.” Anatolijs was in the doorway, his face slightly swollen. “Y-y-you asshole, you could at least have taken your pants off,” he continued, stuttering. He was smiling.

We smiled too when we saw the Communicator's innocent eyes—eyes which soon enough found that he had gotten into bed without taking off his clay-encrusted pants.

We straggled out of the house.

Then I saw him. He sat as though he were posing for an artist. He sat under a large tree, the branches of which almost touched the ground, on a plank that ended in the middle of the small pond that was near the house. He was looking off into the distance—the place where the forest began beyond the grain fields and the forest, flowing together with the sky, shaped what we humans have dubbed the horizon. The person's snout turned toward me. I say again—”snout.” That was all that was left of the Classicist's head.

“Man, you cannot believe how my head hurts.”

I won't go into detail, I'll just say that half an hour later the Classicist was back on his feet. Two pain pills made the retreat of the alcohol easier.

We had had a pretty good party.

***

We drove around 50 kilometers, and got lost again. We were returning to the airplane that we had found earlier. After two hours of work we had dug up as much as we could, and there was no sense in looking for the pilot's bones any more. The Classicist and a few of the diggers put the “boy” into a bag, and we set off for a grain field where, according to a local farmer, human bones were scattered about.

The information was precise. Once again a tractor had dug up the graves of some soldiers. The grain was quite high, but that didn't stop us from getting into a row and looking the place over carefully. The result was terrible. The Classicist ended up carrying a full plastic shopping bag. We picked up the bones that were above ground, but each year soldiers are going to be coming up—like the harvest.

***

June 21

Yesterday I went to visit the traffic police of the Riga District. There were two of them and one of me. They had two pistols, and I had a machine gun...at home. I try to understand the traffic police in some way. They protect the roads; that is their profession. They have the right to punish those who violate the law, and they are right when they catch the alcoholics. But nevertheless they are and will continue to be big assholes. Why do people want to use their power to humiliate others? I have a weapon, I am a policeman, I can do everything, and you are a little cockroach. I would not want to talk about it or describe it if the Classicist had not called me at that moment.

“We're going east tomorrow. The Communicator just called, he told me that nice things were coming out of the ground, a box...”

“What's in it?” I asked.

“I'll tell you later.”

I was left with a question about the secretive discovery. My heart was beating. Damn! They found it without me, and I wasn't there to take a picture.

The Classicist is an owl by nature, and he always has a hard time getting up in the morning. On mornings when we are going to dig, there has not been a single time, however, when my arrival has coincided with the minute when the Classicist gets out of bed. Never. He's always in full uniform and has a cup of coffee ready for me. I once heard someone say, “The world in which I live is a philosophy,” or someone else say, “My job is a whole philosophy.” I smirked and said bad things about the people who were making those statements. Now, however, I have to admit that the thing that we're doing and the way in which we're doing it—well, I don't know what it is, but it sure is more than just a hobby.

I knocked on the Classicist's door at 5:45 in the morning. Fifteen minutes later we were driving toward the east of Latvia. We were lucky. The driver was the Classicist's friend, Andrejs. Around nine o'clock we were at the police station in the town in question. The Communicator's car drove up about half an hour later.

As we drove toward the forest, I kept thinking about those horrible insects called ticks. They can turn you into an idiot, in the direct sense of the word.

The hell with it—that was my slogan as I assembled the metal detector. The high area that, according to stories, was supposed to be a gold mine for a digger was located 200 meters away from where we had parked our cars.

And then I saw the previous day's find. I don't know how I can explain the emotions that the Classicist and I felt in a way that might make you, the reader, understand them even minimally. The find was a box of 45 mm artillery shells—a metal box that had preserved the shells perfectly. Just put ‘em in a gun and fire away. What can I say? The shells looked like they had been sent from the factory the previous day.

We walked around for a long time. Oh, the things that came up out of the ground—bullets, shells, slivers of metal and rusty old food cans. The gold rush aspects of the place dissipated like smoke—until the Classicist found an old German gas mask with all of the ancillary equipment. The name of the owner of the gas mask could be read on the cover. A great find! It was as though someone had waved a magic wand. The earth opened up and displayed its secrets to us. Little Spirit and Alexei emerged form some bushes, carrying a heavy metal object of cylindrical form with holes at both ends. Little Spirit asked me what it was, and I was proud of my knowledge.