Diggers by Viktors Duks

addition to being a soldier, you are also an ordinary man.” When I left this place, I collected the iron bodies of four mines, a German armored helmet, and a small pot from a German soldier’s kit. The pot looked as though a tank had ridden over it—a bit thicker than paper. The Communicator looked fondly at an unexploded artillery shell and left it there. It was beautiful, but it was the size of a large piglet.
    On the way back to the road we were showered down by the rain again, and that put an end to our expedition. It did not, however, keep us from digging up a few well-preserved German army shells, as well as a piece of paper on which some had stuck a label from a German factory, dated 1944. I have it at home now.
    ***
    â€œDad, why do boys have to wash their dicks every night?” This outstanding question came from my son.
    â€œA boy, like a soldier, always has to be ready, so that he can fight at any time.” I explained too much. I knew what the next question was going to be.
    â€œFight who?”
    â€œWho?” I searched for the right answer. “Well … well, you know, when you get a bit older, you’ll understand. Get in the tub!”
    More than once I’ve found myself thinking that I should write down how it all began. Basically it’s clear. Something finds something else. Think of the old stone in the country that grows over with moss over the course of the years. That’s what happened with my diggers, too. I’ll start with myself, I guess.
    The time we call childhood had long since passed when I used a sharpened spear to poke around in large areas of what used to be front lines, and on the veranda of our house my cousin and I opened up a war museum. Then I found I had other interests, too. The period of my life started when I began to find out about women. A woman’s breasts, her rear end—this God-created miracle that messes us men’s minds and make them engage in heroics. Among other things, I came to understand why wars have been launched over women and why women have often ended war. In a word—this was a beginning to my school of life that was hard and complicated, but at the same time amazing and emotionally rich.
    As soon as I found out how a man is “affected” by the opposite sex and the benefits that this process can bring to society, I was drafted into the army. I won’t write separately about my army days—it’s a different story, and it would make a fine comedy. The army influenced me so much that for the next several years I wanted to hear nothing at all about war and the army.
    In the early 1990s, during the great changes that were happening, I wanted to learn more about what had happened to my grandmother’s two brothers. About the younger of these brothers it was said that the 19-year-old soldier who was drafted into the Latvian Legion drowned in the Baltic Sea, on his way from the Curland Cauldron to Germany. I started to search, and I proved the opposite. He fell in the battle for Curland in March of 1945. I also found out where he had been serving. There is no more detailed information about him.
    Around the same time I began to study the history of World War I, and I completed a screenplay. In late summer 1999, in the newspaper, I read an article that had with it a photograph of my now-colleague, Skvarceni. Thanks to the word Lucija that was engraved on a golden wedding ring, Skvarceni had found an old soldier’s wife. He had found the ring, in turn, when the Legionnaires were being reburied. I got to know Skvarceni.
    Around the same time, I saw on the TV news how the Communicator was trying to get two tanks out of a swamp. I felt sorry for myself for not being there. The Classicist didn’t think that way. He got in his car and drove right over there to meet the Communicator and to ask for his permission to touch a real battle tank. Around the same time, Mario was going on another one of his