Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  Part of Owen hankered back for that time when there had just been the two of them and the days had been simpler – without the confusion of Irena and the baby, the road and all its people infecting them with a collective mind that wasn’t really theirs.

  Owen wrung the shirt out.

  ‘I know you’re angry—’ he began.

  ‘Jste pořád zraněný,’ Janek said, interrupting him and pointing at Owen’s bruised ribs.

  ‘Listen, Janek, I know you’re angry, but this . . . this one-man retaliation unit . . . It has to stop. Do you understand?’

  Of course the boy didn’t, but Owen carried on anyway.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re thinking but if you’re angry – you know, angry,’ he said, trying to make the boy comprehend. ‘If you’re angry because you think they killed your people, that man did not. He’s an ordinary farmer.’

  ‘Já jsem ho nezabil,’ said Janek. ‘Not kill.’

  ‘No. Only because I stopped you.’ The boy was exasperating. ‘Listen, I’m telling you—’

  ‘Ne.’ The boy abruptly stood up, the water dripping from him. He threw his sopping shirt down. ‘No. You listen. Two lives,’ he said. ‘You give me.’

  As Owen stood up as well, the boy gave him a hard shove and Owen stumbled backwards through the water.

  ‘To vy. To je vaše vina,’ the boy shouted, and then more words that Owen didn’t understand. ‘Hledal jsem vás’ and ‘Dva dny. Dva dny!’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Owen. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I save you,’ said Janek. He slammed his fist at his own chest. ‘Já!’ Then he jabbed at the air but whatever he wanted to say, he couldn’t find the words.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Owen. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  The boy was glaring at him again. Saved him from what? Pulled him up into the field? It didn’t make sense.

  Then the boy stepped forward and Owen recoiled, scared that the boy was going to give him another shove that would send him back into the water. But when he spoke, his voice was firm and quiet, an anger still in him that he was trying to contain.

  ‘You help Petr,’ he said. ‘Yes? We find Angličany. English, yes? And you help Petr.’

  ‘But I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you’re saying, Janek. Prove it,’ Owen said. ‘Prove that you saved me.’

  The boy picked his clothes up from around his feet, the water streaming from them, and wrung them out with a few hard twists. He gave Owen a final glare and then slopped out of the river and on to the bank. He grabbed his bag and Owen’s clothes, came back with them and shoved the clothes against Owen’s chest with another furious burst of Czech before he splashed out again, the flag still wrapped around him, and his pale white back disappeared through the trees.

  Owen stood in the river, shaking and clutching his damp clothes to his chest.

  ‘Janek!’ he called, but the boy was gone.

  Above him the outlines of thinly drawn leaves were ablaze with the evening light.

  The boy slept with his head on Irena’s thigh, a soft air issuing out from between his lips. Her fingers stroked lines of comfort into his hair, the tips trailing his face, around his closed eyes, his cheek, his jaw. Little Man lay beside him wrapped in the papoose.

  When Irena closed her eyes too, Owen carefully reached across and very delicately dragged the boy’s bag out from beneath his arm. He softly unfastened the buckles one by one, opening it and feeling around inside the bag that the boy always kept so close to him, never allowing it out of his sight. He didn’t know what he hoped to find; he just knew that he needed to look. Perhaps Janek had taken something that was a clue to who Owen was.

  His fingers found the shapes familiar – a pot, a pan, wooden bowls, sodden socks, the bristles of a brush – all of it tangled among what felt like clothes and a hand towel. Then something hard. The tough cover of a book. He inched it out but there was not enough light to read by. He fumbled in the side pockets and felt the sharp prick of gramophone needles wrapped in a handkerchief, and then tucked beneath them a matchbox, the shuffle of matches inside. He darted his eyes over at Irena and Janek, who were both still and sleeping.

  The breeze blew out the first struck match. The second was lit just long enough to see the book was written in Czech. With the third he flicked hastily through it, finding at the back several loose pages. He lit another match. Not pages but newspaper clippings. The first was old – 1918 – and had a photograph of thirty-odd men standing in a well-ordered group as if they were part of a political assembly. The next included a map, most of it faded, but he could see that border areas had been shaded and labelled Sudety. On the corner of the page a date was visible: 30. záři 1938. As the match burnt out he laid more articles flat on his knee in the dark, and then struck another match to sift through them. Time and again he came across similar-looking photographs in the creased clippings. There were rallies, demonstrations, brawls, a crowd of men clashing with a group of soldiers outside the main doors of an office building and then, in another, what looked like factory gates. Caught within the crush was a darkhaired man waving a baton, his mouth open mid-shout. It was Petr. And there again, in the next photograph and the next, sometimes with his name – Petr Sokol. He lit another match and scanned the text. There were other names: Josef Myska . . . Filip Jankovic . . . A whole article about a boy, Antonín Nemecek, who seemed to be only fifteen. Other words caught his eye, some similar to English so that he could guess their meaning: ‘sabotáz’ and ‘demonstrace’ and ‘politický’. In the scrum of a demonstration, Petr’s face in the thick of it, there was a smaller man fighting alongside him, his fist raised and clenched. He had an armband around his jacket, and as Owen held the clipping closer, keeping the match alight, he noticed that the band had Janek’s symbol on it – a flying bird within a box. He riffled through the other clippings, lighting match after match and finding the same man, the same armband, Janek’s symbol again and again. Only with the last match did he sense something, and in that brief and final quiver of light, he looked across and saw that Irena’s eyes were on him.

  Behind closed eyes that night, fragments of the day came back to him, and an afternoon too. An August weekend back at The Ridings.

  Oh, you sketch. Max, you never said.

  They were sitting on deckchairs on their parents’ lawn, Max and Owen with their sleeves rolled up, sweating in their linen trousers, while Connie languished in a lilac summer dress.

  Come on then, she said. Do me.

  Max had heaved himself up in the chair, saying, You won’t like it.

  I might.

  Well, only if you don’t mind looking like the inner workings of a Tornado.

  Oh, Maxwell, she had said. Don’t be such a child.

  Actually, I’m really not very good, Owen said. He had only brought his sketchbook out so as to distract himself from her, but he’d barely put pencil to paper. Cedar wouldn’t sit still.

  Why don’t I draw you, then? She held her hand out for the pad. Come on, hand it over.

  Oh, hello. Brace yourselves . . .

  For goodness’ sake, Max. She turned on him. You’ve not even seen it yet.

  She rested the pad on her knees and, repositioning herself, she thoughtfully stared at Owen with the end of the pencil pressed against her lip and one eye squinting at him as if, in the sunlight, he kept slipping out of focus. Then, holding the pad secretively to her, she made a few flourishing pencil marks in no more than a matter of seconds and proudly handed the pad back.

  Max swiped it from Owen’s hand and together they looked at it. Max snorted. As stick men went, she’d given Owen an obscenely large head.

  And why’s one arm half the length of the other? remarked Max. Good God, has Father been at it?

  They had all laughed at that.

  Now don’t tell me, she said, leaning into Owen with a playful smile, that you’re not very good. Compared to that I’m sure you’re
a bloody Rembrandt or, I don’t know, what’s his name. The one with the Venus de Milo.

  She had been thinking of The Birth of Venus so he told her, Venus de Milo’s a statue.

  Well, you know what I mean.

  Besides, he added, I’m really not very good at faces.

  That’s true, grumbled Max.

  Well, maybe you’ve not had the right subject.

  And in that moment, on that hot afternoon, he wondered if she had purposefully caught his eye then, or perhaps nothing had happened at all but the rush of heat to his face and the need to turn away.

  He lived in constant fear of himself; that at any moment something regrettable might burst from his mouth when he saw her or he might not be able to stop himself from reaching across to touch her hand. At the Falkirks’ dinner party that October, he’d had to take himself out of the room entirely and stand in the hallway for a moment, trying to wipe incorrigible thoughts from his head. She had seen what had been going on behind his eyes. Only later did he know that she was starting to feel it too.

  Max, of course, was so blind to her that he saw nothing else.

  I wish you’d talk to her more. For Heaven’s sake, O, she’ll think you’re bloody mute.

  But Owen didn’t trust himself, and Max remained oblivious of the herculean efforts he was making not to let anything show.

  Surely then he had tried to stay away, and surely she had too. Yet every time he thought of her, it was of a stolen glance between the arms of a candelabra or the slight curl of a smile seen in the wing mirror of Max’s Austin. Then, one evening on the way home from a dance, with a chap called Barnaby sitting up front with his brother and the beams from the car cutting through the night, he had let his leg relax against hers. Even though they had both stared out of opposite windows, deaf to Max and Barnaby’s chatter, he could feel her thoughts reaching for him, and the return of pressure against his leg.

  The hall was packed, the heat unbearable, the air filled with clamouring voices and the stench of grubby bodies and stale sweat. Around them was a sea of heads in caps and head-scarves. Everywhere Owen looked there were scared eyes and children crying. No one seemed to know what was happening or what it was they were supposed to be doing or why they were even there.

  Some miles outside Leipzig a refugee collection point had been established and they had been herded on to a narrow slip road as lines of US military personnel directed them through. Now, along with hundreds of others, they were jostled into the receiving centre that had been hastily improvised from military barracks. All the hope and relief Owen had felt at seeing the American soldiers had sunk to the pit of his stomach. When he finally struggled through the hordes to the rows of desks at the end, dragging Irena and Janek with him, they found that the desks had been abandoned and any system with it. Instead, the uniformed personnel were scattered among the crowd, trying to direct individuals one way or another, or herd groups of people towards transport. One soldier was firing questions at those around him and then pushing them towards different corners.

  ‘We are going to be split,’ said Irena.

  ‘We’re not.’

  But against the walls around the hall, various flags had been hung. Owen caught Janek’s eye. For all yesterday’s bravado, the boy now looked petrified.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he told him. ‘We won’t be split. Do you understand? They’re not going to split us.’ All the antagonism from the day before was paling into insignificance. ‘Come on. This way,’ he said. ‘We need to get some help.’

  He took Irena’s wrist and pulled her back into the crowd.

  ‘Don’t lose us,’ he told Janek.

  The boy nodded. Through the crush of people, Owen could feel his fingers around Owen’s arm.

  The noise increased at the back of the hall where there were two sliding doors, and around them the crowd started to surge and swell. There was a hissing outside.

  ‘Podívejte se!’ shouted Janek.

  He pointed over Owen’s shoulder. Through a window the funnel of a steam engine could be seen pulling past. Others had seen it too. There was a slowing scream of wheels and inside the hall a collective intake of breath, and then a combined swell, everyone straining to look and then starting to push, eager to get nearer the doors. They pressed hard against each other, arms and elbows and shoulders trying to squeeze their way through.

  ‘Get back!’ a soldier bellowed. ‘Stop pushing.’

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ Irena gasped.

  ‘Just stay close.’

  The crowd inched forward, taking them with it.

  Janek’s fingers slipped and then grabbed on again. Someone’s cigarette breath was against Owen’s neck and a girl’s head was pressed into his shoulder, a suitcase digging at his side.

  The people at the door bottlenecked.

  ‘Get back! Come on, get back!’

  This is how he’d lost Connie. In the crush of a party, the swell of a crowd. All the noise – the laughter and music and shouts of excitement – pressing at his head so that he had wanted to shout out: Where are you?

  ‘Let me through.’ He pushed. ‘I said, let me through!’

  The soldier was forcing his way through the crowd and Owen grabbed at his sleeve.

  ‘I’m English,’ he said. ‘Please. You’ve got to help us.’

  The man turned his head but barely took Owen in.

  ‘I said I’m English. Do you know where I go? Please.’

  The man looked at him, young and vaguely dazed, just how Owen had imagined an American farm boy, except that now this boy was herding refugees.

  There was a flutter of confusion. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. And then: ‘You want Hitchin. Ginger hair. Yeah, over there.’ He pointed.

  Owen looked.

  ‘Got him?’

  Owen looked again.

  The man who caught his eye was not ginger. He was thickset with a square head, short silvery hair and in an altogether different uniform. A man who, in the moment as he slipped through the crowd, twenty or thirty feet away, Owen thought he recognized. Then the man was gone.

  ‘Where?’ Owen said, glancing back. But the farm boy was gone as well.

  ‘Listen,’ he said for the second time, trying to make himself clearer. ‘I’m a pilot, for God’s sake. British RAF.’

  ‘With no papers.’

  ‘No papers, no. Look, I just want to get home.’

  The man called Hitchin glanced up from behind his desk. ‘With no disrespect, sir, so do the other God knows how many thousand here. As I said, you’re going to have to wait.’

  ‘But I’m English.’

  This didn’t seem to interest Hitchin in the slightest. The war must have washed all sorts of people up at this man’s feet, each with a story, when all he wanted was to have as many of them sorted, processed and moved off his patch as quickly as possible.

  ‘You must have British contacts here,’ said Owen, ‘or ways one could get in touch with someone?’

  ‘I’m sorry, son, but I’ve got two thousand people here to deal with right now, not just you.’

  ‘Yes, I understand that.’

  ‘But I don’t think you do.’

  Irena and Janek lingered nervously nearby.

  ‘I tell you what,’ said Owen, ‘who’s your commander? Where do I go for information, for help? I just need to make contact with the British government.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not listening. That’s all I’m asking for. Isn’t there someone I can speak to? There must be someone in charge.’

  The man raised an eyebrow.

  ‘What about in Leipzig?’ Owen said. ‘Someone must have a line of communication with the British forces.’

  ‘Look,’ said the man, finally losing his temper. ‘The last thing MG HQ’s got time for right now is sorting out the woes of some goddamn rookie pilot like you. I said we’d get to you in good time, sir, but I’ve got two thousand people here already to deal with and more coming ever
y minute.’

  ‘I just need pointing in the right direction, that’s all,’ said Owen firmly.

  ‘No, what you need is to fill in the goddamned form, like I said,’ he told him, pushing it back across the desk one more time and prodding it with his finger.

  ‘But I can’t. I’ve already explained this.’ He waved his hand at the various boxes. ‘Half of this information you need, I don’t have. I don’t know.’ He tried another tack. ‘Look, can’t you at least get someone to look at the child?’

  ‘They’re with you?’ Hitchin said, at last surprised by something.

  ‘We’ve been on the road for God knows how many days. We’re hungry, do you understand? Starving. The child needs some attention.’

  ‘We don’t have any medical facilities here,’ said the man. He turned his attention to Irena. ‘What are you anyway? Polish?’

  Irena nodded.

  ‘Okay, well, we need you to get yourself over there,’ he said, pointing at a disparate group gathering in one of the corners. ‘We’ll get you packed off somewhere soon.’

  ‘No,’ said Owen. ‘She’s coming with me.’

  ‘No, hero,’ said Hitchin. ‘She’s not going with you. She’s going to stand over there with all the others and she’s going to do exactly what she’s told, without a fuss or a song and a dance, and she’s gonna take the kid with her. Is that understood? I don’t know who the hell you think you are, soldier, throwing your weight around, but you’re not the goddamn cavalry. Okay?’

  At that point a man appeared at Hitchin’s shoulder. He was thin and nervous-looking, with red splotches of eczema dabbed like thumbprints down his neck.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, what now?’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, sir.’ The man bent down to speak into his ear. ‘It’s about the train,’ he said. ‘Bit of a mix-up, I’m afraid. They’ve sent the wrong boxcars. We can’t use them, sir.’

  Hitchin took a deep breath and then sharply stood up, bucking the table and shoving it out hard.

  ‘Parsons!’ he yelled with a voice one only had in the army. ‘Get yourself over here. Jesus Christ. We’re gonna have a goddamn riot.’