Diggers by Viktors Duks

my dry lips clung to the end of the bottle. Oh, how good! I slept on the floor. Beside me somebody was snoring.
    â€œMario, 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.
    â€œB-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.
    â€œMan, 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.
    â€œWe’re going east tomorrow. The Communicator just called, he told me that nice things were coming out of the ground, a box...”
    â€œWhat’s in it?” I asked.
    â€œI’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