Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  After a while, Janek took his rusty knife from his bag and started to scrape away at the side of the shed, etching out the shape of the wings, then a beak. Owen wished he wouldn’t; it was starting to annoy him. Like a bloody calling card, as if he were leaving a trail for Czech savages to follow. The scratch and scratch and scratch grated on his nerves.

  When he had finished the carving, Janek sat and pulled out photographs to show Irena. Petr, his parents, Lukáš, Nicol. Irena nodded and asked questions that Owen didn’t understand. There was no mention of Kateřina.

  They were at a narrow brook near the hay store, lit by the moonlight that fell through the trees and slid over the wet stones like melting wax. Owen dipped the canister in to fill it then watched as Irena slipped her shoes off and stepped into the stream. The moonlight reflecting from it lapped around her calves.

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ he told her. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘Are you coming in?’

  ‘No.’

  She picked her way over the stones and then, bending down, scooped handfuls of water up over her face. Already, after only a day with her, it felt different. She would be the glue or the wedge between them, he thought; he just didn’t know which yet.

  ‘You shouldn’t call him “it”,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your child.’ Janek had called him ‘mala veverka’, but Owen, as his mother would have done, would call him Little Man.

  Irena took no notice.

  ‘I could die here,’ she suddenly said. Then she threw her arms out wide. ‘I am floating in the water,’ she shouted. ‘I am a little star.’

  He smiled and lifted his gaze as he took a sip from the canister.

  When he looked again Irena had her back to him and was undoing the knot of her headscarf. He was surprised that her head was completely shaved down to the scalp. She glanced over her shoulder and caught his eye.

  Was that almost a smile?

  The moonlight dripped from the leaves and washed the curvature of her skull with a soft coral glow, and the water around her ankles was flickering and in pieces.

  He lay beside the fire outside, the patch of material held between finger and thumb. He gently rubbed at it, his forefinger circling the thumb and the fabric, the feeling almost sensual as the material slid around, slowly warming as if, through the skin and knit of fibres, a connection was starting to ignite.

  He tried to find her voice tucked away somewhere inside his head, perhaps the sound of her saying his name, as if that might be a way of bringing her back to him. He caught wisps of her: the flurry of her dress, the hem billowing around an ankle as she passed by where he lay, his head in the grass; but she was gone before he could look up and see anything of her but the waft of material, the flash of an ankle, the sun bright upon her pale thin feet.

  He rested his head on his outstretched arm and held the square up to the fire. As his hand moved it this way and that, there were tiny pinpricks of light burning through; not accidental or moth-eaten holes but regular ones made by a blunt needle or even perhaps the point of a compass, a loop of them in the top right corner that, as he moved his fingers away, he saw marked the outline of a shape – a circle. No, not a circle. The pinpricks of flickering light shining through formed the outline of a heart.

  From the crest of the hill they had seen the road sweep in on a curve and then score a ruled line across the flatlands that swarmed with people as far as the eye could see – a river of them with no end and no beginning, coursing through the fields in an endless trudge of feet and turn of wheel and clump of weary hooves. They walked six or seven thick, and where there was a cart or some other obstruction, they surged around it, moving with a shared momentum. Hundreds. Thousands. And in among them: traps and wagons and carts and barrows, homemade trolleys piled with suitcases, bags, blankets, and children, even battle-beaten soldiers dressed in winter greatcoats, despite the vehement sun.

  They called out to Janek as they threaded their way through the throng, Owen almost careering into the back of a bike as a man wheeled it past, and then, turning to avoid it, falling over a child instead who was holding on to her sister’s hand, both of them clutching small bags. Someone shouted. Another child was crying. There were books scattered all over the road that people were tripping over, and a motorbike trying to get past. And in among it all, Janek’s head would appear in the bobbing crowd or at one side of a cart or another, there for a second and then gone.

  ‘Janek,’ Owen shouted. ‘Wait!’

  Irena had wanted to stay in the fields but Janek had already set off tramping down the hill, taking the baby with him, and now they were caught in it too.

  ‘Janek,’ Owen shouted. But the boy would not stop.

  When they finally caught up with him he had the baby balanced in one arm and was holding the photograph of his brother in the other hand, flashing it at an elderly couple with a suitcase carried between them, and then a pair of war-torn soldiers, their faces grey with dirt, and then a girl in a mink stole.

  ‘This man,’ Janek said, thrusting the photograph into their faces. ‘Tady toho muže . . . Neviděli jste? Haben Sie ihn gesehen? Please. Please, he is Petr Sokol.’

  He turned his attention to a younger woman carrying a satchel, with clothes draped over her arm that were still on their hangers. Then another with three children gathered close, herding them like sheep. Then a woman with thin ankles clumping in soldiers’ boots. He kept trying, turning in circles, as the crowd on the road peeled around him. He held the photograph in front of them. ‘Tady, toho muže. Dieser Mann.’ But none answered. A tired-looking soldier with a dachshund in his arms gave it a cursory glance.

  ‘Leave it, Janek,’ Owen said, trying to pull him away.

  The boy shoved him off and grabbed a woman’s arm as she tried to slip past, holding the picture up to her.

  ‘Podívej se na to!’ he shouted. ‘Look at it!’

  The woman pushed him away.

  The lucky ones had carts, stacked with belongings and as many people as they could, children spilling out over the sides, holding sticks to the wheels so that they made a steady clicking as the tips hit the turning spokes. Others simply sat, holding something precious to them as the wheels groaned through the dirt. There were prams with children and prams without, piled up with other things. One woman pulled a sledge that kept tipping, everything scattering, cases and books and rusting saucepans, a lid freewheeling towards the ditch. Most, though, had nothing but the clothes they walked in, sometimes not even shoes but rags tied and knotted around their calloused feet.

  As they moved westward, Janek seemed intent on trying everyone, the photograph of Petr still clutched in his hand. He disappeared for hours sometimes, pushing through the crowds, and only occasionally coming back with other news that he had unearthed. Irena translated as best she could: the road would take them to the Americans. All of Germany had been taken. The British were further north. There were camps everywhere with people in; hundreds, thousands, no one knew. They had seen terrible things. Some on the road had been liberated. Others were fleeing something. When they got to a town where the Americans were, Janek reported, there would be food, so much food, he said. The Americans were feeding everyone, putting everyone up, and giving them chocolate, cigarettes and clothes. Some were even going to America, he said; they were putting the lucky ones on aeroplanes and flying them to New York. These were the things that some had said. Others said that none of it was true. It was just crazy talk.

  ‘Where are we going then?’ said Owen. ‘Has anyone said where the road actually goes?’

  Janek didn’t know. No one did. They all just wanted to get away from the Russians. The war might be over but the Red Army, they had heard, was still coming.

  Owen couldn’t help but laugh. ‘You mean no one knows where the road goes?’

  ‘Leipzig,’ Irena said.

  ‘And how do you know?’

  She hitched the
baby further up in her arms. ‘I know this road,’ she said.

  He was barely conscious of the people around him any more, his mind tumbling deeper and deeper into his own thoughts. Only occasionally did a sight catch his eye: a girl with the head of a small cat poking out through the zip of a bag; a man with an accordion bumping against his waist, so that with every step it made a wheeze, giving sound to his puffing breath. Then, further ahead, he spotted a man with a sawn-off rifle for a leg, the end of the barrel digging into the dirt, the rest of it disappearing up a cut-off trouser leg. As they caught up, the man met Owen’s eye and said a few words.

  Irena smiled. ‘He says, you must not worry. It is not loaded. It is the gun that blew his leg off. Now it is new leg.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what my father would make of that,’ Owen told her.

  ‘Your father?’ She looked confused.

  It came back to him, just as things sometimes did in the night – a memory wrapped within a dream or dream within a memory. He was walking down the corridors of a hospital, his feet clipping the tiles as he tried to keep up with his father.

  Our bodies are made up of bits and pieces, his father was saying. Most of the time everything works just fine. But sometimes something breaks and then it has to be mended. And if it can’t be mended, well then, we take it out.

  Like a watch or a wireless or the workings of a motorcar.

  Then Owen’s father was at an operating table, a throng of nurses around him trying to hold a man down, while Owen’s father shouted: For God’s sake, he’s not an eel! All I said was hold him. And then with a bloody arm in his grip, his father started to saw, and despite the strap of leather in the man’s mouth, the poor wretch screamed and gagged as the blade crunched through the bone.

  Come on, come on then, if you’re going to look, his father said. His head appeared for a moment from behind the others and he glared at Owen, a thin spattering of blood across his mask. I brought you here to watch, he said, not stand back there like a bloody plant pot.

  And then, between the legs of the nurses, the arm dropped into the bucket with a thud, but the fingers hooked over the rim as if the mechanism was still working and it would claw its way back out.

  As to what happened next, he was only aware of being lifted from the floor and his father saying: That’s it. You had your chance. I’m not bringing you again.

  Looking around him at the road and surrounding fields, Owen felt as if he were seated instead in a glass box, nothing quite real, as if he weren’t there at all.

  Perhaps I am not, he thought. Perhaps all of this is nothing but the final deluded imaginings of my dying brain. That is why so much is lost already. Every memory I have ever had will fall into the darkness because, in truth, I am not here at all. I am in a hospital. I am in a field. I am at the side of a bus stop lying on the pavement and quite still, yet within this body I am sliding under. I am sliding away.

  ‘What’s he said about his brother?’ he asked, striding to catch up with Irena. ‘Do you really think he’s in Germany? This Petr is a bit of a mystery, don’t you think?’

  ‘He will want something,’ she said.

  ‘Petr?’

  ‘Janek. People who give help always want something.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s like that.’

  She laughed. ‘Why do you think he is with you? With a war – especially with a war – everything must be paid for. Even help.’

  ‘I don’t see why we can’t just help each other,’ he said. ‘We’re all looking for someone. You, me, him, us. We’ll do it together, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Irena, appeasing him with a sigh. ‘Yes, perhaps it is that.’

  ‘He shot a man in the hand,’ said Owen. This was something else that had been plaguing him. ‘Another Czech, I think. In the hand. I mean, why would you do that? If you really had a grievance with someone, you’d shoot him dead, surely. I’ve seen him fire a gun.’ From the veranda of a house hitting the silver coils of a wind-chime. ‘I don’t think he missed his mark.’

  ‘Maybe he wanted this man to remember. Dead men don’t remember so much. But alive . . .’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Every day this man will look at this hand,’ she explained, holding her own hand out in front of her, fingers splayed, ‘and he will see Janek’s face and he will remember why it is ruined, why this boy shot him. Every day he will do this. Every day. Death is too good for some people. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Owen, feeling the softness of his own hand with his thumb, and then that twinge of pain again in his side, the wound that wasn’t there.

  It came to him suddenly in a rush, as the memory of his father had not long before. On the road to Leipzig he stopped, the refugees streaming around him. He pressed his hands over his face, his heart beating hard.

  Hello soldier. Want a lift?

  Yes. If he closed his eyes now he could see her: sitting beside Max in his brother’s Austin Eton, just as he had first encountered her, the curls of her short sun-bleached hair caught in a rolled-up headscarf.

  That smile. God, that smile.

  Hello soldier. Want a lift?

  I’m fine, thanks, he’d said, or something like that.

  Oh, don’t be so silly, she had remarked. Come on. She reached out of the car to shake his hand. Connie, by the way. Your brother’s useless.

  Christ, Max had complained, lifting his sunglasses. Give me a chance. He introduced them properly.

  Well, hello. Then she said: We can move the bags, can’t we, darling?

  Of course, said Max. Look, for Heaven’s sake, O, will you just get in?

  But Owen had been insistent. Better not, he thought.

  Can’t you just jump in? Max, darling, tell him.

  But sometimes, as Owen had learnt at Hawkers, you needed to get a slide rule and draw yourself a firm, hard line.

  Suit yourself, said Max. No dawdling though. I know what you’re like. He’ll be out here bloody hours, and I’m starving. Ma won’t want it getting cold.

  The tyres skidded. They pulled off with a blast of the horn.

  As the Austin Eton picked up speed, his stare fixed firmly on the back of her head. Turn around, he thought. Turn around.

  Then just before the bottle green car vanished around the corner, she had done exactly that.

  The Russians were at Schlieben and then Herzberg, it was said, and then Torgau, all the time getting closer, and then they were right in front of them, a dissolute group of them loitering at the side of the road. Only as they got closer did he see through the crowd that they were taking women at random, one and then another, who screamed and fought as they were pulled from the crowd and across the ditch through the hedge.

  The soldiers looked forlorn and weathered, and wore padded cotton jackets that were stained and threadbare, dented helmets with a red star, and ankle boots and puttees – not at all the sight of the unstoppable army that he had believed them to be. Some were swigging from flasks of wine, cheering each other on and laughing, teasing the women as they passed, and fiercely pushing the men from the road if they tried to intervene.

  As they drew closer Owen pulled Irena to the other side of him.

  ‘Help me block her,’ he said to Janek, tugging him into position. ‘And keep hold of the baby,’ he told her, thinking that they might be less inclined to take a woman with an infant.

  She kept her head down as they passed, as did the other refugees on the road, and their collective pace picked up as the tension thickened. His own beating heart wanted him to sprint, and he could feel Janek beside him stiffening. Don’t let him do anything stupid, Owen thought.

  Beside him, another girl – Dutch, he thought – was mumbling prayers under her breath.

  Up ahead there was a tussle. Shouts. Another woman taken, a large-framed soldier picking her off her feet as she kicked and screamed, his mates on the side bent double and laughing, one of them with a stolen Nazi jacket draped over his sh
oulders, all medals and badges.

  Beyond the hedge, Owen caught a glimpse of someone breaking free. The figure made a run for it across the field and a gun went off, the sound like a slap against his ear.

  His hand went instinctively to Irena’s elbow.

  ‘Come on,’ he said under his breath. ‘Hurry, and whatever you do, don’t look.’

  They walked as long into the night as they could, putting as much distance as was possible between them and the Russian army, until in a field they eventually gathered, hundreds peeling away from the road to settle for the night. They weren’t likely to be bombed any more, but in larger numbers they could withstand the attacks of robbers or lone renegades still determined to take a few down with them to hell.

  The night pulled in, the darkness lifting out of the ground and seeping up to fill the sky. Before long the field was a dark sea of burning lights, flames flickering everywhere from freshly lit fires.

  Janek wandered, showing people the photograph of Petr and trying to scavenge food or cigarettes from them. Owen’s eyes followed his silhouette as he drifted from group to group.

  They kept the fire burning, poking at it occasionally with a shared stick, and the baby whimpered softly. For a while, though, they did not talk. Around them people were getting raucous: some drunk, others high on nothing more than their freedom. Bottles were passed around and there was shouting and singing and a man playing a banjo made from a saucepan. The air was thick with ashy smog.

  He lay half propped against Janek’s bag and coat, while Irena jigged the baby who would not settle. On the back of a grubby German medical form that had blown across the field, he found himself sketching. He filled the paper with the crude mechanics of the bodies around him, sitting at fires or standing about or dancing in front of the flames. For the first time in days – weeks, maybe – he felt oddly at ease, as if there was comfort in doing something that he had always done, another muscle memory slotting into place with every soft and hard stroke of the pencil on paper.