Free Diggers by Viktors Duks

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.
    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