Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  ‘That doesn’t make you a pilot.’

  ‘I’m telling you, sir, I flew Avro Lancasters. Mark three. Great big birds,’ he said, wanting to shout it out. ‘With Max.’

  ‘Max?’

  ‘My brother.’

  ‘And he’s there in your head as well, is he?’

  Owen lost his temper. ‘Look, I’m telling you, I flew. We flew together – Max and I – and I lost him. I bloody lost him.’

  He took a gasp of breath. The man across the desk leant back in his chair, the wooden legs slowly creaking. Owen didn’t even know what he was doing there any more.

  ‘Okay, so backtrack,’ said the colonel. ‘Let’s go back to this camp of yours.’ He jotted something down on a pad beside his elbow. ‘Now let me see, was that before you flew or after?’

  ‘After.’

  ‘Only I’m getting confused.’

  ‘It was after, sir. I flew – we flew – and then I was in the camp. And then I woke up and I was in this field. And I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘Right. And where exactly was this field?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And the camp?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t remember. Look, a place called . . .’ He rubbed his head and tried to think. There had been names but now he couldn’t think of them. Places and people. ‘I’ve been there,’ he said. ‘I went. I went with Janek. We saw it.’

  ‘But it had a name? This camp?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It would have had a name, but no, I don’t know.’ He was getting confused, his head clogged with so much that he couldn’t think straight. ‘Look, perhaps I wrote it down,’ he said, suddenly remembering. ‘I’ve been writing everything down that comes to me, trying to piece it together. And I’ve got it here. See? I’ve been writing it down. I’ll show you.’

  He would lay it out on the desk for the colonel and it would all come back to him: all the names and numbers and circles and arrows, the blueprint for remembering.

  He put his hand in his pocket for it and then the other pocket, but there was only a worn-down pencil, the broken watch and bits of grit and thread. Even the square of material was gone. He checked the jacket pocket and then the trouser pockets again, and the jacket for a second time.

  ‘It’s a square piece of paper,’ he said, still searching. ‘It’s folded, and I have it. It’s here somewhere. Everything’s written on it. I promise. I’ve got it. I’ve got it. It’s just . . .’ He checked the trouser pockets again, digging around in them. He could feel the panic filling him. ‘I had it just here,’ he said, ‘just now. It was here, I’m telling you.’

  He checked the breast of the jacket where something else had once been, then fumbled around within the shirt, thinking he might have slipped it inside for some reason, or perhaps it had fallen out where the button was missing; not the button he had but a smaller one, a different one. He looked on the floor for it. No, it was the letter he needed. No, not the letters. He’d thrown the letters away. It was a piece of paper. A fucking piece of paper with everything he knew on it and now—

  ‘All right, now calm yourself, son.’

  ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘You don’t understand. I was lost. I’ve lost everything. I’ve walked for, I don’t know, ten fucking days, and all I want,’ he said, slamming his hand down on the desk, ‘is some fucking help!’ He stood back, aghast.

  ‘I think you need to sit down, soldier,’ said the colonel calmly.

  Owen sank into the chair, then leant forward for a moment and held his head in his hands, sobbing. He couldn’t stop himself. His fingers fumbled in the jacket, but there was nothing there, not even the square of material.

  The colonel rubbed at the back of his neck. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you home. If that’s what you want.’

  Owen looked up.

  ‘We got planes going back and forth to England all the time these days. Half of our boys are probably still over there. After that you’re on your own, course, but gets you out of this hellhole and back in the fold.’

  The relief flooded through him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  ‘Yeah, well . . . I’ve got enough to worry about here sorting out these cocksuckers without the likes of you.’ The colonel smiled as if perhaps he didn’t mean that, then wiped the back of his finger under his nostrils and took a deep breath. ‘I hope that’s all, mind.’

  Owen hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he said, despite himself. ‘Thank you.’

  Any moment to say anything about Irena had already passed.

  The colonel picked up the telephone. ‘I’ll speak to Miss Meier. Be here tomorrow morning. And no more favours. Although I guess you’ll be wanting somewhere to sack down?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, and think yourself lucky,’ the colonel said. ‘By my watch you’ve just had double your time.’

  Owen nodded and stood up. The man held the telephone receiver to his ear, waiting for Owen to leave.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Owen as he got to the door, hoping that something else might be salvaged, ‘but the boy I’m with, he’s looking for someone. His brother.’

  The colonel stared.

  ‘If you were to make a suggestion as to where to start looking for someone . . .?’

  ‘What is he?’ said the colonel.

  ‘Czech.’

  The colonel put the phone down, giving up on the call.

  ‘Listen, we’ve spent the last God knows how long trying to sweep these refugees up. Believe me, it ain’t easy. And my problem’s getting this city up and running again: safeguarding a supply of food, clearing out the rubble . . . We’ve an infrastructure that’s blown to hell – water, electricity, tramlines, you name it. Accommodating these people is just one of a hundred problems. Then we got Heinie living here up in arms cos they reckon we’re gonna hand them over to the goddamn Ruskies.’

  ‘And are you?’ said Owen.

  ‘All these displaced persons, we’re trying to clear them out, sending them to camps while we work out a way to get them home.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Listen, pilot – you want my advice? You can’t think about these people no more. They’re not your concern.’

  ‘You’ve not heard of a Czech called Petr Sokol?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘He’s some sort of Czech hero, I think.’

  ‘If you mean a resistance fighter, they’re ten to a dozen these days. I swear to God, you own a house in Prague you probably can’t cross your kitchen to take a damn piss without tripping over a revolutionary propping up your table. Heroes are cheap tender these days. They’re easier to find than bread. And I know what I’d rather have. Now, go on, beat it,’ he said. ‘Or I’m gonna forget to make this call.’

  He picked up the receiver and dialled a single number. Owen could hear the phone ringing out in reception.

  ‘All right, Miss Meier, send her in,’ the colonel said. ‘And while I got you on the line . . .’

  Owen was already opening the door. The woman he had met out in the street was standing in reception with her back to him. She turned as he came through with a raised eyebrow and the slight twist of a smile.

  ‘Oh, it’s you holding things up,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ Owen blustered. ‘Government business.’

  She laughed. ‘I doubt that. Oh, and by the way, your baby’s crying.’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  ‘Well, that’s not what she said.’

  Owen smiled awkwardly. ‘It’s a marriage of convenience,’ he joked, but she was already through the door.

  ‘It seems, Flight Sergeant,’ said the woman at the reception desk, emphasizing each syllable with a degree of petulance, ‘that I’m lumbered not only with organizing a car but also finding you accommodation.’

  ‘Well, if that’s not too much trouble,’ he said.

  The woman sighed. It clearly was. ‘For one, I presume.’

  ‘Three, actually. And an infant.�
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  The woman raised her eyes to the ceiling and sighed again.

  ‘Be here at seven o’clock sharp tomorrow morning then, sir,’ she said. ‘I really don’t want to have to deal with you again.’

  The building was a former hotel in a narrow street not far from the blown-out remains of Katharinenstraße. All the habitable rooms were housing military personnel now, bar the remaining part of the attic where they were to be accommodated. Half of the roof had fallen away, along with the building beside it. Rumour had it, their driver told Owen, that every brick and board of the house had tumbled down but for a mantelpiece on which a fish bowl had been found, still intact, and with a single goldfish still swimming in it.

  As they were led in through the door and up the narrow stairs, a woman and a trail of three children squeezed past, being hurriedly ushered down by a yelling soldier, each of them dragging a suitcase, the sleeve of a knitted mauve jumper trailing out of one.

  A US corporal poked his head over the banisters. ‘Flight Sergeant?’ he called down to Owen. ‘All yours now!’

  The attic was filled with hotel paraphernalia: broken desk chairs; a pile of mirrors; old wooden coat hangers that had been broken into firewood; a washing line strung up across the room, hung with several dusty tea towels. Two sets of screens divided the attic in three. One had a tin bath in it; the other two each had a shallow single mattress. The colonel’s receptionist, despite her haughtiness, had acquired them a Moses basket and sent it on ahead. There were holes in the roof where falling shrapnel had come through, one piece with such force that it had smashed a hole in the floor as big as a footprint. When they crouched down they could spy an American GI through it, asleep on a bed, the fingertips of one hand tucked into the waistband of his trousers, and a half-drunk bottle of red wine that had tipped and leaked like blood into his boot.

  ‘It will be good if it does not rain,’ said Irena.

  ‘No. One, two,’ said Janek, ostentatiously counting the mattresses. ‘Ne, ne. No good.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen. ‘Someone’s going to have to share, I’m afraid. Share. Yes?’ He held two fingers up, pressed together. ‘We can argue about that later.’

  When he glanced down into the street, the woman and children they had passed on the stairs were still standing out on the pavement surrounded by their cases and bags.

  ‘You did not tell him, did you?’ said Irena.

  She put the sleeping baby into the basket and watched as the infant stirred, and then looked at Owen, waiting for an answer. He felt the shame burning in him.

  ‘I thought you were going to help me. I thought you cared.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see what good it would do.’

  Her eyes filled. ‘Yes, well . . .’ She turned away. ‘Now we will not know.’

  He picked his way through the labyrinths of rubble where paths had been cleared. A group of dishevelled women were trying to right a tram that was burnt out and laid across the street like a barricade. It was grey, as everything else was, and looking old and dusty. When he passed the half-shattered window front of a looted tobacconist, he caught himself in the glass looking old and dusty too.

  It seemed almost impossible that England might be how he had left it. Were these the sights in London as well, he wondered – his neat and tidy draughtsman’s desk now covered in bits of rubble, and the window that he had always propped open with a shoe now broken, shards of glass across his drawing board and shattered beneath his seat? Was the house in Hampshire as ruined as these were, or that small rented flat with the geraniums on the steps outside, each pot cracked and broken, the plants flung and hanging down like boneless limbs between the slatted steps? Or perhaps they had survived. Perhaps, as miraculously as the goldfish bowl, they were still there and stark in their colour, while around them everything else had been blasted to grey.

  He sat for a moment in a square where only a single lamppost was left standing and watched as a couple of women in fur coats poked around among the bricks, picking things out to put into a battered pram.

  He closed his eyes. His thoughts scattered. He kept thinking of the Stowe House Hotel, and then of a child in white ankle socks and smart red sandals, a child he couldn’t place. The New Year’s Eve party came back to him: the crush in the banqueting hall spilling out into the hotel foyer and then further out into the cold, where some of the guests from the bomber squadron and their partners stood around laughing and insulated by a concoction of alcohol and festive cheer.

  The hall, he remembered, had been unbearably hot, the windows all steamed up and the paper chains crushed and damp against them like lines of languid thoughts. There had been a sea of heads and rumbling voices, and through it all the heavy blasting of the band, while reverb from the microphones occasionally cut across the room, slicing conversations in two.

  He had felt perilously drunk and uncomfortable in his service dress, his sweat having soaked right through his shirt. In the spirit of the evening, most of them still had their masks on. The Venetian-themed ball had been the station commander’s idea. So you’d better keep the damn thing on, Max joked, if you want a chance of getting out on a sortie any time soon.

  She was there. From behind the anonymity of the mask he had found it almost impossible not to look at her, although now, sitting in the rubble and in an altogether different life, he couldn’t picture her at all other than the black velvet of her dress and how it had drawn his attention to the paleness of her skin. Barnes and Budgie were close by, shouting over the din about the rum punch that nobody was touching because some fool, Barnes announced, had spilt milk in it. Owen couldn’t help but look at the nape of Connie’s neck, thinking then, as he thought now, of kissing it, or the thin ridge of her collarbone that led his eyes down into her dress. Perhaps he would have every bit of her that Max hadn’t touched: a spot on her neck, a handful of freckles, an earlobe that he might gently press between his lips.

  With one hand at his thigh beside her, Owen hadn’t been able to stop a finger lifting to touch, all too briefly, the back of her wrist, before hooking it around her own finger. And she had not pulled it away. The smile had been no more than a hint but he had caught it nevertheless.

  He would leave them and this time tomorrow he would be in a car or on a plane or maybe even back in England, being questioned by the War Office in a smart room in Westminster. In London, at least, there would be people who knew him: there would be records and addresses and names and photographs. His life might even be presented back to him, a string of hard and solid facts that he could thread back together like beads on a necklace.

  He had searched through his belongings again but the paper and all that was on it was gone, lost on the road somewhere or fallen from his pocket in the chaos of the receiving centre and trodden underfoot.

  He had found the square of material though, sewn into the inside breast of the jacket once more, and the heart rethreaded with neat red stitches. When he put the jacket on again, he could feel it beating against his as if it were alive.

  A wave of anger and shame washed through him as he crossed another rubble-strewn street. Why hadn’t he told the colonel about Irena? He felt as if he’d betrayed her with his silence, his weak-willed hesitation. You should not trust anyone, she had said to him, and he had proven her damn right.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, he decided, or pity her, or care. It was just that . . . Well, she was so silent sometimes, clamming up over questions she didn’t like, and when she did speak it was with such brusqueness that it often took him by surprise. He didn’t know how to deal with her or with the way she looked at him, as if she wanted something from him that she could not, dare not, say.

  Of course he felt sorry for her, protective over her now in a way that he had not felt earlier. He wanted to ask her what exactly had happened with this American, but he knew that he wouldn’t. He thought instead of his mother caring for babies abandoned after the last war. They hadn’t all been fathered b
y dead men, she had told them. Many more had been conceived in a similar manner to this one, he now realized; although, of course, his mother had always been too refined to say exactly what that was.

  He needed to somehow ensure that Little Man would be all right. Yet tomorrow Owen would be gone and it would be out of his hands. When he got back to the hotel he would apologize. And tomorrow morning at the military government quarters he would damn well say what he should have said, what Irena had told him to say: that the US army owed her.

  He found himself on a street called Klostergasse, and then, passing the entrance to a blown-out shopping arcade, the coloured tiles on the ceiling cracked and dusty, he caught a glimpse of a child running past at the other end, not dissimilar to a child that he had seen before in his mind. White socks. Smart sandals. A child that kept coming back to him, sitting on a bench opposite him in a room that was small and crammed with people. She held a bear with a missing eye and the sunlight, in his mind’s eye, was flickering far too fast across her face.

  A lorry’s engine popped and she was gone from his thoughts. He was at a junction but although he stopped, unsure, he had no choice but to turn left on to Nicholaistraße, the other roads being blocked. Every bombed street looked the same so that it was hard to tell one from another, and it wasn’t long before he realized he was lost. He sat on a fallen slab of concrete while he tried to get his bearings. On the street in front of him a satchel was crushed into the dust. On the other side, two sparrows were drinking rainwater from the remnants of a broken plate. All the days that were stacked behind him, and all the things that had been said and had happened, were starting to feel like strange dreams. None more so than the day before. All the things Janek had said still circled in his mind.

  He stood up and dusted the dirt from his trousers. From several buildings down, where a blast had taken half a house away, a flurry of wind lifted sheets of newspaper from the arm of a chair that teetered on the cliff of a living room and carried them over the edge. He watched as they blew across the road, and for a while, until they dropped, it was as if they had come to life and were flying like wide-winged birds.