Some Recollections Of A Grave Robber

Daniel Gavilovski Gets His Hands Dirty

Dear Republic,

This is very long but really great. Enjoy!

-ROL

SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF A GRAVE ROBBER

—And what they don't tell you is that the hookers who are legal, like in this country, the hookers who are legal like in this country are a much shittier customer experience than they are in the countries where selling sex is banned. Because she's not afraid of you. When the hooker is afraid of you she'll do anything to make you happy. You find her online, you message her, and you enter her bedroom. Well with that kind of atmosphere she'll do anything. In these brothels though there's cameras everywhere. There's no element of surprise, and there is no spontaneity. Christ, they won't even give you a kiss.

—Uh-huh.

On an unusually hot summer night I'm standing at Arrivals sharing cigarettes with this young man who is wearing camo pants and a cap bearing, if I remember right, some sort of Lithuanian military insignia on the front. We're waiting for an Uber. He, Jonas, had been to Germany one time before as part of a tour in an amateur orchestral ensemble. He played the tuba. We’ve been hired to participate in an archaeological excavation of the largest mass grave uncovered in Europe’s history.

—Have you worked with skeletons before?

—No, I say. Does it affect you?

—Nah, you get used to it quickly.

—That’s nice. I was worried.

—But sometimes I guess you do feel something. Like when you’re digging the dirt from the eye sockets. Like I did this back in Lithuania, I worked in a lab and when you’re digging the dirt from the eye sockets I guess sometimes I would remember like oh yeah this was a guy once, and he had eyes like me. I don’t know.

—Right.

—But mostly it’s like geology or something. You start seeing them as just rocks. Especially once they’re so old. Where are you from anyway?

—Ireland. But my parents are Russian.

—Russian? But uh--

Jonas suddenly looks very worried.

—But uh you’re not a…um, I dunno. And there’s a lot here in Germany but uh…well I don’t want to be rude. But there’s a lot of…vatniki.

—I’m not a vatnik.

—Oh thank God, says Jonas and he lights another cigarette. Jonas would later be very impressed by the cig dispensers which are stapled to walls across the city.

Our Uber arrives and opens the trunk.

—Are you Russians, the driver asks to my surprise.

—I am. He isn’t.

Jonas hides his bag between his knees which are now quivering.

—God this place is a shithole, says the driver. Nichivo yesli ya po kuryu?

—Po kuryi.

* * * * * * *

I am living in a modern apartment with vinyl flooring in a mid-sized German city, in a building inhabited mostly by Turks, Slavs, and Germans of a suspicious variety. When I first enter the place after having spent the night on a bench because neither Jonas nor I have a key and no one is awake to tell us our apartment number I choose the bed placed awkwardly in the living area next to a table and I’m glad I do because the bunk which Jonas has picked gets unbearably hot in the nights. I can’t stand hot nights. All my life I’ve slept with open windows even in winter. Into the room where Jonas resides are crammed three Lithuanians (I am the only non-Lithuanian of my roommates) like sardines into two bunk beds. Then there’s another gentleman a meter or so to my right side. The whole thing is a tiny space and it’s a marvel of Eastern European ingenuity to have turned a bachelor’s Ikea lebensraum into barracks for six grown men. There are two mini fridges which are always packed to the roof because we are all economizing by not eating out. One fridge is on the outside balcony which is carpeted in astroturf which remains wet long after a rain has passed, which means it’s tricky indeed to go outside to smoke a cigarette or grab a beer without getting your socks soaked. Any food that doesn’t belong in the fridge we keep in clear plastic containers so that the roaches don’t reach them, of which there are magnitudes. I never asked and never found out why exactly the toilet seat was fragmented and sitting in a pile behind the toilet but you come to realize how little you really need a toilet seat. This is a common motif of my time in Germany: there is little you can’t do without. I have two pairs of footwear for example, steel toed work boots provided by the company (these are for the job), and rubber lined brown faux loafers (these are for everything and every time else). Still, it’s annoying when I flush the toilet and, once in a while, for seemingly no reason, my fear and loathing bubbles up the sinkhole in the adjacent bathtub. I think it’s something to do with the piping, or maybe it’s the sand that invariably coats every nook and surface of the apartment and lines all the piping of that apartment forevermore, the way that milk lines your intestines before a night of teenage drinking. You can feel the medieval sand on your bare feet as you walk the Brazilian chipboard. Every day we import a seaside’s worth from the dig where the skeletons are drowned in the stuff. At the time of my arrival there have been around three thousand bodies exhumed and we discover maybe ten new ones every day. Men, women, children. The first thing that strikes you is that they are all colored a luminescent aqua-green, like the Statue of Liberty.

—There was a copper refinery here in the 19^th century. The waste trickled down into the soil and gave them that color. It’s called a patina.

This I’m informed by a girl in glasses and tattoos who has been here for a few months before me. Klara is Swedish and pretty in a bookish sort of way, and has an ass that’s round enough, which isn’t surprising since the job is physically intensive enough that a nice ass becomes a natural development. The Swedes are the second most common nationality on the dig after Lithuanians and after a while I grow quite fond of them, and psychologically begin to think of myself as one of them, ending up even resenting my Baltic neighbors. After Swedes there are a handful of Italians and then maybe two Germans.

All in all, archaeology in Europe is the best kept secret of our time. At any given moment in any country there are digs happening (though most of them don’t feature one of the largest mass burials uncovered), and the realities of the profession are such that recruiters either can’t or won’t check if you have all the necessary credentials, if you have a degree, or previous experience. If you don’t mind back-breaking labor which is equivalent to a construction gig but with lower pay then, well — I was going to say the pay can be good, but like I just said, it’s lower than that of a construction worker. Then again, construction workers don’t get flights paid for them.

—They’re not just bubonic plague, a lot of these are soldiers from the Thirty Years War. That’s right; there might be some Swedes here.

—Wow.

—Have you worked on a medieval site before?

—No, just Bronze Age.

—Was that interesting?

—No. Just rocks.

—So I hear!

I don’t want to give the impression that this is an operation of a massive scope. In fact, were you to stumble into this quarry of ours on a workday, and many did, including schizophrenics from the nearby mental ward, journalists, and simply curious passersby (tall fencing was later erected to prevent unwanted attention), if you were to stumble in then you’d hardly think it was an operation any more complex than a class exercise. There’s not a lot of us, and we are all fairly young. I don’t think there’s more than a person or two over thirty. There is an interesting thing that happens on a dig where individuals like this are thrown into a hotbed Massengrab and are given almost free rein and in 30 degree heat (86 Fahrenheit) to beat. Let me explain. My Swedes — I can’t help but forever think of them as “my Swedes”, especially since I ended up commanding some of them — are archaeologists. They’re well educated and eager, though a bit bereft of hope in the way that all zoomers are. Almost without exception the men are short, sometimes with bushy beards which make them seem like the Seven Dwarves. They’re nebbish, meek, have a modern American sense of humor, and are autistic about history. One girl whom I work with is a germaphobe. If you put me on the spot and asked me a worse career option to pursue as a hater of germs I could not give you an answer, and not only that but she is our tent’s only osteologist — that is, the only one officially qualified to point out which bone is which and so we often come to her to identify if a toe is a finger, or if a tibia is an ulna. But anyway, back to my point, Lithuanians on the other hand are a different story. If you’d like to for a second imagine what the archaeology industry of a nation that does not even have a developed tech sector is like, you’re probably not far off. A Lithuanian archaeologist is just about any sewer dwelling vagabond willing to shovel World War II corpses for a penny a pound. Interest in “history” is optional. Usually one takes up the job because he is strapped for cash, and has outdoors experience. They’re chain smokers and drinkers with mysterious scarred physiognomies and elusive backgrounds. What is required for this job is a strong stomach. But I don’t want to sound too harsh here; Between the two cohorts I know exactly who would win in a hole digging competition. Some funny skirmishes happen when you pit them together. But then, some peace on Earth as well: One time my colleague Sven was lecturing to thin air about how fifty-one percent of penises lean left and surly Benas, who has no ability for small talk and usually doesn’t so much as crack a smile, explodes into a raucous howl.

I’m using a trowel to spoon sand from the inside of a crushed cranium. Craniums are the most delicate part. A lot of times they’ve imploded from the pressure, or fragmented like what you see at the bottom of a Pringles can. But even after 400 years this one retains a cap of hair. I’m so lucky they don’t smell, I think. If they smelled this would be so much worse. We brush down layer after layer, taking photos, sketching, and measuring each body in a pit that seems to be endlessly deep. In my tent there are a lot of children and sickly individuals. Basically you get acclimated to the sight of cadavers after a week or so. Jonas was right, I think, it’s like geology. But every once in a while you discover a creature so inhuman and twisted that it snaps you straight out of your trance. One day Benas uncovers a man with legs like parentheses and arms like spaghetti. He stops to admire his work with arms on his hips on the landing over the trench, and so do I and Sven, since, if one person does something usually the rest mirror it, involuntarily. Word spreads and soon a parade of colleagues from the other tents are sticking their heads in one after the other to see the “something” like it’s all a circus show.

—I hear you have something for me.

—Rickets. Not enough Vitamin D.

—How old do you think he was? Judging by the stature twelve or thirteen, no?

Poor guy can’t catch a break even in the afterlife.

Molesting corpses all day is not as psychologically unpleasant as you might suspect, but the malfunctions from doing it enter you quietly through the backdoor, in a trench coat, without your noticing. In the same way that working in construction predisposes you to a takeaway and a lazy beer after work, if an archaeologist does not acquire some sort of release (take that word in the broadest possible sense), then he’ll start to act out. Something becomes pent up in a man, and if he’s economizing then it’s even worse. The more we exist here the more we become antsy, quick to anger, irritated at the slightest triviality. One day I come home after having worked overtime and find a head of garlic on my bed. Like everyone here, I am highly territorial about my personal quarters precisely because we have so little of it. Privacy is non existent. If someone wishes to masturbate, even the bathroom is not exactly a fortress of solitude. That reminds me that one time I got the idea in my head to solicit the patronage of an older woman. I had no one in particular in mind, but, I think, why not? If not now, then when. If I had an older woman, preferably a wealthy and lonely one then not only could I have a place all to myself, but also I could quit this miserable lonely gig and focus on more important things. It’s hard to describe what opium just the possibility of a good fuck is when you’re neck-deep in a peasant’s hüfte. So on my day off I buy a tube of glue and print some A4 posters from a Turk. Seeking Patron and Lover it reads in bold font. Achtung: Ich Suche Liebhaberin und Mäzenin. Because devotion to my craft and vocation does not allow me the time to hold a normal job, I am looking for a woman to support me as I write. In exchange, I will have sex and accompany you socially. I make sure to stick them around the upper-crust hotels and the art galleries. As I’m doing this, to my surprise, I find that I’ve wandered into the city’s red light district. The cobblestone street is sandwiched by brothel after brothel after brothel illuminated by, yes, red light LEDs. Girls of all sorts are sticking their heads out; Brown girls, black girls, fat girls, duck-lipped girls, sad girls, happy girls, bouncers, empty windows. Something about me feels that “I’m on the clock,” so I do nothing more than admire the ladies like chimps in a zoo. One in particular catches my eye: a Slavic looking girl on floor three. It’s a full body window so I can see that she’s wearing black lingerie and a purple robe. She has her knuckles on her hüfte. There’s something mesmerizing about her, like she doesn’t belong here. I like your bob cut, I think. It’s a blonde bob cut and you have a round innocent face that, as far as I can see from down here, is unfixed. You know you’ve got a Marylin Monroe type of corpus? I’m staring at her for so long right now and she’s staring back. She gives a wink and a “come here” type of gesticulation and from the cobblestone I shrug my shoulders and with my posters walk away. But anyway, I’ve gotten away from the point. Like I was saying, I come home and there’s this head of garlic on my bed. Ordinarily I would not care or notice it but now it throws me into a fit of rage. I already know who did this.

—Jonas, did you do this?

He’s on the balcony in a tank top and underwear, smoking a cigarette.

—Yeah… because-

—Well don’t do it again.

—I will if I want. You are always leaving your stuff. The butter you leave on the counter, he says. The garlic, he adds.

—PEOPLE LEAVE BUTTER ON THE COUNTER. SO IT’S SOFT AND SPREADABLE.

—There’s no space. I told you, there would be consequences, says Jonas.

—Ok so there’s no space so where do you want me to leave this — in the fridge? In the fridge? It’s garlic.

—I don’t know.

Now Jonas is hiding his face and gets out of the chair and walks into the kitchen to escape me.

—You don’t know? Well fucking think of something. Fucking think of something before you throw my garlic over where I sleep. Where am I meant to put it??

—Well I don’t know, it’s your food — why should I be responsible!

Then I’m so overcome with rage that I go back to the balcony, throw open the fridge door, and start taking out one by one the large bacterial yoghurt cartons which he buys and clogs the fridges with. They’re spatially overlarge for their caloric content and have an awkward shape so they’re impossible to stack.

—What are you doing?

Then I start throwing the cartons over the balcony and onto the pavement below.

—How’s this for space your fucking yoghurts? I yell. How’s this for space? You touch my garlic I touch your yoghurts! How’s this you fucking gimp?! You’re lucky I don’t throw them over your bed!

* * * * * * *

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to hear Wagner live. So on no particular occasion I find that a production of Tannhäuser is playing at the Nationaltheater in the not-too-distant Munich. The opera is playing on a Sunday so I book a ticket amounting to one week’s wages and on my day off take a well-deserved trip. Since this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I know one must dress up for a “night at the opera” I decide to buy a nice white shirt. Apart from that I’m dressed in the nicest clothes I own, which is my pair of jeans, and my brown shoes. The train there is inhumanly packed and there seems to be no air conditioning even though it’s a boiling summer day. There are Americans sitting on the steps leading between carriages, tanned Spaniards or maybe Portuguese leaning on seats, and a fridge-faced Asian lady in the seat next to me. Whatever happened to those Victorian compartment trains you see in Westerns, I think. Oh well, I have the Wagner to look forward to! I wouldn’t trade all the compartment trains in the world for a Wagner show.

The Nationaltheater was commissioned in 1810, four years after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, by King Maximilian I of Bavaria. Its plan was decided by competition, which was won by the young architect Karl von Fischer who, impressed with the Théâtre de l’Odéon in Paris, modeled the project in the style of French Neoclassicism. But Napoleon’s assault on Russia siphoned state finances, and the complex, with its Corinthian colonnades, was not to open until 1818.

It’s into this building’s grand foyer I’m stepping into, with its hanging chandelier above and an immaculate marble staircase to the left. I graze around for a while. All around are cohorts standing around and gossiping with champagne glasses in hand like bison at a watering hole — affluent physiognomies, mustached faces. At intermission I scan these faces methodically (when they notice me staring I quickly look away) in an effort to play a character who is so wealthy and bored that the whole thing of a Wagner opera is blasé. My parents would drag me here as a kid, see, I’ve involuntarily memorized the lines and frankly they’re unrefined, see. But still I feel like an alien. These people come from a different world than me. They’re born into money. Born into opera. Outside, they were parking Porches. I feel like a working class LARPer goddammit. I’m singlehandedly diluting the integrity of the conserved arts by my gracelessness, my provinciality, my inborn illiteracy, and, at the end of it all, my very presence. Just when my self-doubt starts to overflow a voice beckons me.

—Young man. Young man.

—Yeah?

A grey-haired man is leaning on the marble ledging and is hemmed by concubines dressed in exotica who are absolutely fixated on me.

—Why jeans, he says. If you are at opera, you must wear something, what is it, nice. It is an opera. It is Wagner. It is not a supermarket.

Some of his girls are breaking into giggles. He is holding a flute glass. Anyway, I say to him the first thing that comes to my mind which in retrospect does not make too much sense but at the time elicits the desired reaction and it’s this:

—I have to wear jeans because I’m a playwright.

—You are a playwright?

—Yes.

—I see. I am sorry.

In fact I’ve written absolutely nothing except for some diary entries in five months. It’s summer and summer is my best season. My worst season is winter. I buy myself a double gin and tonic to cheer myself up. Y’know what, I think. I’m no intruder. I’m the most valuable guest this venue could ask for. If anyone here knew who I truly was, they’d be starstruck and feel like spies in my presence. They’re the intruders! I’m an aesthete. I’m more cultured than these nobodies. They’re nobodies. All their life they’ve grown soft and flabby in their coddled milieu. Hell I’ll probably end up earning more money than them too. Are there any artists in the building? Any artists? I’ll earn more money than you too. You are a nematode — a nektonic lifeform — a statistical obligato. My thinking of this turn of phrase cheers me up and returns to me my confidence, and I feel content to graze the bars and the foyer clandestinely, unbothered and undisturbed. Thank God I have the freedom to dress so shabbily. One day it won’t be an option. I leave the gin and tonic half drank on a random tray. I don’t even need to finish it. I’ve sampled.

Tannhäuser itself lasts four and a half hours broken up by three short intermissions during which I get consistently drunker. My production is off to a great start because for the first ten or twenty or who knows how many minutes I’m treated to a procession of white girls naked from the waist up, nymphs with bows and arrows stretched all across the stage like vaudeville firing arrow after arrow to the zing of the strings sections. Each girl expertly and with precision contracts her dainty deltoids and FWING! FWING! FWING! sticks the wood in a giant Eyeball over the stage. They kneel down in a wave, backs to the audience, resting their bows on their lap and their ass on their heels. I imagine the suspension of bloodflow in a million cellular vessels, each hemisphere turning white around the heel, only for their liberation once the girl rises, heels on the ground, and once more cocks the bow. I am rapturous. Only briefly now and then does my trance break and I notice the guys opposite and in front of me. Sure is nice having a boner in your pants while all the while bearing the pretext of participating in high culture. The next scene is even better; the lustful warden Venus is a massive ugly obese creature, straight from a Cronenberg or a Brian Yuzna picture, dripping with lube and beckoning to noble Tannhäuser. He’s enraptured with her and they duet in what’s an affectingly gruesome sequence before he finally breaks free of her lair.

But soon the knight’s beloved is elegizing and I’m thinking this is going on for too long but I don’t want to check my phone because it might be rude. Now there is a triptych over stage bearing words like ‘hundert’, ‘Jahre,’ and ‘später’ approximately in that order and my eyes are drooping. What’s those words mean. Now it’s saying “Hunderttausend Jahre später” and then “eine Million Millionen Jahre später.” Oh I get it, these are years passing. Years later. This has an unfortunate effect on me tantamount to counting sheep. One Million Million Years Later. That’s a worthwhile technique, I think. Now Tannhäuser is glottalizing over a pedestal bearing the skull and bones of his beloved Elisabeth. Now they are turning to ash. Now I doze off and dream of the girl with a bob on floor three.

* * * * * * *

—Catch.

—Don’t throw it.

—Catch it.

—Don’t throw the femur, Benas. Ah! I told you not to throw it.

It’s been a month or so and when I first came here I was barely pretending to know what I was doing, but now there have been enough change-ups that I’m the person who’s known my tent the longest, and so I know the most about what’s going on, what to do next, and how to handle it. As de facto leader of the tent I have elected to have an early lunch.

It’s a hot, lazy day. Most of the crew has been transferred offsite because of some construction that’s meant to take place. The grave was discovered, after all, because a new high rise is being built. So, we’re taking it easy, cracking jokes. Jonas is down there in the trench corner browsing Instagram shorts with one hand and forking macaroni out of a lunchbox with the other next to a pair of toddlers who look to be embracing each other. I wish I had drawn it. Once you draw something you struggle to remember it. But it was a pretty image, and it’s one of those rare times I think to myself: it’s good to be alive. Torbjörn is whistling “You Never Give Me Your Money” while sprawled in the sand because it’s a bit cooler down in the trench. Overhead, every now and then, you can hear a plane pass by. I’m falling asleep with my cheek on my knuckle because it’s so hot, trying to read an article by Alexander Dugin. It’s about the necessity of Russia decoupling from Western ideals, and from Latin-based linguistics. Every nation has a right to cultural sovereignty, he’s writing. It’s alright, I think. A bit old. Sven has, unprompted, begun reciting the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise. Sven’s an endearing personality and good at making me laugh. When we first met and I told him that I’m from Ireland his first words to me were: is it pronounced Cú Kull-ainn or Cú Chuh-lainn?

—Actually, it’s Cú hull-ainn because in Irish a C and an H make that sound.

—Ahhh. Fascinating.

Every time Sven starts reciting his fun facts, Torbjörn, also under my command, looks as if he’s going to kill himself. Like another day when we’re de-anchoring a tent and carrying it to a new spot like the Amish do with their barns. It’s way too hot for this — this heatwave doesn’t let up. It’s midday and the sun is nuclear. And I don’t understand why I have to do this. I sure as hell didn’t sign up for this.

Suddenly Torbjörn scratches his calf on a rusty rebar sticking out of the ground and starts bleeding.

We look for a first aid box but find only some gauze and nothing else. Torbjörn is dismissive of the whole thing.

—It’s not a big deal. It’ll stop by itself, he says.

But I’m pissed off and there’s no boss around and I leave the site right there. What if Torbjörn catches tetanus or something? He has his whole life ahead of him. I go to find the nearest pharmacy and soon I’m panicking that they’ll bandage Tor’s leg dry which is just no good at all and I start running and by the time I find a shop I’m out of breath.

—Antiseptic?

—Ja.

—Is it good for open wounds?

I didn’t ask Sprechen sie Englisch first so she’s a bit disoriented.

—Oh uuuh. Ja. I mean uhh yes.

I pay, and back on site Torbjörn disinfects his gash and wraps it up neatlike. All is well.

—Thanks.

—No problem. See, now you won’t die of the Black Death.

But then is it a sin to admit that, after the fact, once we get back to work, all I could think was was it really necessary I spend €9.50 on that bottle? Why did I do that — no one gets sick anymore. This asshole wouldn’t even offer me food if I was a guest.

* * * * * * *

One day a storm blows in over the city. It starts with a light drizzle, but pretty soon we can’t hear each other talk over the clamor of rain. The tent’s roof inflates like a ferocious balloon, then subsides and inflates again, pulsating. One of the legs of our tent collapses into the recess, and me and Benas scramble to lift it out without falling in ourselves. The immense construction crane is spinning over our heads like the second hand of a clock. Then we hear a scream from the neighboring tent. The little Italian girl Gia is directing orders. Hold this bucket here! Sven, catch this leak! Don’t let the water touch the finds. But the rain is biblical and the back tarp is overflowing. All the rain is flowing down into our quarry from the adjacent roads and concrete.

—Shouldn’t we cover the bones with a tarp? I say.

—Sure. But what’s it gonna do?

Me and Sven are holding buckets over our heads and we exchange a look that’s like yep, here we are and Gia returns saying Tent 3B is in trouble and I run over with Jonas and that’s when I see it: a waterfall like Niagara is flooding my trench, enveloping every single biofact in mud, cutting the walls and crashing ledges of dirt into the deadly rapids below. No less than six feet of mud and shit filling the dig like a crockpot. Gia has run off God knows where and eventually all I hear is alright folks. That’s it. Day’s done. All that work — washed away in an instant.

—I’m thinking of switching vocations.

—Me too.

—I think I’m done.

The next night I booked the first flight out.

Daniel Gavilovski

is a Russian raised in Ireland. He is a playwright and essayist. In order to support himself he has been a warehouse sweeper, a sous chef in France, and an archaeologist in Germany where he helped lead an excavation on the largest mass grave uncovered in the history of Europe. He writes for Unreal Press who are soon releasing his first book — titled Carbon Pages.