Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  They travelled west, following the River Helme for some way before finally turning north through the town of Nordhausen where, Martha said, only a month ago the British RAF had destroyed three quarters of the town, killing a thousand prisoners.

  ‘Oh, it’s okay. Our guys are there now,’ she said as they drove through. ‘It’ll go to the Russians soon though, like Leipzig. They used to build rockets there. V-2s. That’s what made it a target.’

  The town was devastated. It was becoming a familiar picture. They passed through in silence, Janek’s arm lolling over the side while Irena held the crying infant tight to her chest. They kept having to wipe the dust from their faces.

  ‘A few weeks ago we found a camp,’ Martha said, ‘just outside of here. It was supplying the workers for the factories. There were five thousand bodies.’

  ‘Five thousand?’ said Owen.

  Martha sniffed. ‘You think that’s shocking. That’s nothing,’ she said.

  After a while she pulled over so that Irena could try feeding the baby, who was still bawling, and Martha could fill the petrol tank from a canister she had in the back. She seemed surprisingly capable.

  Irena sat in the grass trying to feed Little Man but he was writhing and screaming in her arms and wouldn’t take to the breast.

  ‘When we get to the camp I’ll ask Dr Haynes to take a look at him,’ Martha said to Owen. ‘A kid cries for that long and you know something ain’t right.’ She replaced the petrol cap and screwed the top on the canister. ‘What’s the story anyway?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘With the little guy. There’s always a story. I take it the baby’s not his,’ she said, giving a nod at Janek.

  ‘A bit of a sore subject, actually,’ he said. ‘It’s something I should have raised with your uncle.’

  ‘Oh?’ She fastened the hook back under the bonnet.

  ‘She says she was raped.’

  The bonnet dropped with a clang.

  ‘One of ours?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be “raising it with my uncle” if it wasn’t.’

  ‘That’s the point. I didn’t and I should have. She specifically asked me and I didn’t say a bloody word.’

  ‘Why not? Not buying it?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s just . . .’ But now he didn’t know.

  ‘Where’d it happen, anyway?’

  ‘Aachen, she says.’

  Martha leant against the side of the jeep and blew out a puff of air. ‘That’s quite some haul.’

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t know the full story . . .’

  ‘If it was one of our boys, though, I doubt he’s going to make himself known, and if he does, well, with so much else going on, the military here have got pretty good at turning their heads.’

  ‘I was rather hoping we could help her.’

  ‘Is that guilt talking?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I just think she’s had a rough deal.’

  ‘Well, if she’s a Pole come out of a camp, I’d say you’re putting that pretty mildly.’

  ‘Will you talk to her then?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think she wants to be entirely honest with me.’

  Martha called something across to Irena in Polish and the girl nodded. Martha gave the bonnet a slap.

  ‘Looks like you boys are all in the back then.’

  They joined the Berlin–Hanover autobahn heading west. Owen had never seen a road like it. Wide and sleek with four lanes, the trees on either side cut right back to allow the road in all its glory to pass through unhindered. It was flat but curved gently through the countryside, the road elegant but in tatters. The concrete was torn up in places by the weight of vehicles that it could not hold and it was littered with holes caused from bomb blasts that created bottlenecks in the traffic where the trucks and cars and lorries ferrying military personnel in and out of Berlin slowed to weave a precarious route around and through the rubble.

  From the rear seat he watched Martha and Irena up front, snatches of German and Polish whipped back by the wind. As the road grew clearer Martha accelerated, the sound of the road and the engine and a rattling draught combined into a storm that blew hard across his ears. He stared over the side of the jeep. Beside him, Janek had wrapped the baby within the jacket he was wearing, protecting him from the wind.

  Five thousand corpses. It was barely conceivable. We’re just deliverymen, Max had said. Or perhaps that had been him.

  If he let them, the passing fields fused into a blur. He could detach himself from the world that way. The juddering under him felt familiar. The roar of engine noise and pounding of wind. He could hear it shrieking against the windscreen. He could feel how the plane had strained and quaked, the air thundering so hard against it. He could hear voices, people shouting. Owen’s eyes closed.

  He was on a train, the fur of hedges whistling past. He kept checking the documents in his hand: names and addresses and a photograph. There had been others that he’d thrown away, or burnt near a woodland pool sitting on a chair, scratching his face from all of them except these still in his hand, sitting on the train with a canvas bag by his side, a number scrawled on it: 4993.

  When they empty the camp, we’ll need to be ready, someone had said. Government says we need to stay in line, but if you make a run for it, don’t get caught.

  Now he was on a train; how long later, he didn’t know, only that through the windows the snow had gone and for some unknown reason he was heading east. The carriage was busy and around him the other passengers seemed agitated. A girl in stark white ankle socks sat opposite him, a suitcase beside her, a bear with one eye sitting in her lap. The train’s wheels ground on the tracks and clattered in his chest. The sun blinked and flared through the window, flickering too fast across her face.

  The little girl leant to one side and peered along the gangway. They had not spoken all journey but they had been playing a game of shadows. When she leant one way, he leant out the same; when she lifted a finger, he did too. It was like a conversation. Now, when she leant, he did as well, only this time she shook her head and he glanced behind him. Two SS officers were making their way through the crowded aisle and checking papers. He held the documents a little tighter. Where his palm was perspiring it was lifting the ink from the paper and smudging it. His heart quickened. The train jolted. Those standing grabbed at something to steady themselves, then the train tilted again as the track curved.

  He carefully peeled his hand away. The ink stains were now there on his fingers. The documents were so clearly a forgery. The little girl had noticed too. Then she looked up at the officers approaching. The train rattled and lurched.

  They left the autobahn, heading north. Janek sat in the front now, holding his hand out to feel the rush of air blowing between his fingers.

  They passed through a town called Celle where they crossed a river. Along the streets there were hundreds of old timber-framed houses with the now familiar white sheets still hanging from the windows. The town, Martha said, had saved itself by surrendering. Then they were out in the fields again. The road led them across a heath and through dense and fragrant woods where whole patches had been burnt down – to flush out snipers, Martha revealed. Then they passed through a field, enclosed by trees, where lines of labourers were digging, turning over the soil, and there were boards with skull and crossbones.

  They drove alongside some fencing, criss-crossing like the bars of a cage behind the branches of the hedge. Through the blinks of light, mesh of wire and leaves, he kept thinking he could see thin figures and pale lumpy mounds. They had to cover their noses to the stench of burning and the billowing clouds of smoke that blew out across the road. In the distance he could hear the sluggish chug-chug of a tractor.

  ‘You said you wanted bringing to a camp,’ Martha said, calling back over her shoulder at Owen and Irena. ‘Well, folks, here it is.’

  They rounded a bend. A single pole crossed the road and there w
ere wooden huts on both sides. A couple of men in familiar-looking battledress raised the barrier and waved them through.

  ‘Here she is, Ron,’ one of them said. ‘Where the dickens you been?’

  ‘Round and about,’ Martha said. ‘You boys miss me?’

  ‘Not half,’ said the other with a cheeky grin.

  ‘My God,’ said Owen, with a sense of relief, ‘they’re English!’

  Martha looked back at Owen and smiled.

  They arrived at some barracks, an area of quadrangles, each consisting of clusters of four-storey buildings that spanned out in every direction as far as he could see.

  It had been an old Panzer training school, Martha explained as they pulled up outside a main building.

  They clambered out of the jeep, all slightly dazed. Janek wandered, stumbling backwards over his own feet as his head tipped back to see the buildings all around them: solid, concrete, functionary blocks, with rows of regimental windows. One or two faces hung behind the glass like ghouls; a couple of figures leant out through open windows, their thin arms hanging like broken sticks.

  In the quad, medical tents had been erected, people in various military and medical uniforms pottering about, oil drums, a charcoal burner, and a couple of women in striped peignoirs sitting on a pile of straw mattresses drawing circles in the dirt.

  Irena stood holding the baby tight to her, her gaze skittering about.

  ‘’Sall right,’ Martha told her. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be quite safe here.’

  Janek stood, his hand to his nose and his eyes screwed up to the stench of sewage and the warm dust that filled the air.

  Martha handed him two boxes from the back of the jeep. ‘Yep. It’s pretty vile but you’ll get used to it,’ she told him. Owen took the third. ‘And this is nothing compared to the camps.’

  ‘This isn’t the camp?’ said Owen.

  ‘Hell, no. We’ve ten thousand in here and this is just the camp hospital.’

  The entrance hall of the admin block was full of military personnel, nurses and doctors hurrying through doors, talking in the foyer or passing each other on the curling staircase. All hands to the pump, his father would have said. Through partially open doors Owen could see small offices where uniformed men sat behind desks, talking on the telephone or scribbling notes. He felt a strange tangling of relief and confusion, as if he had fallen into another world but taken half of what he knew with him and now, thrown together, neither of them made sense. He had no idea where they were and yet everyone seemed to be English.

  ‘They’re all sorts, actually,’ Martha said. ‘But, yeah, English on the whole. I’m their token American. I reckon they got me down as a loose cannon.’

  ‘And are you?’

  ‘Oh, you have to be here,’ she said as her gaze scoured the hallway. ‘Otherwise, in my experience, nothing gets done. Oh, look! There he is. That’s Hamilton. He’s with the military government.’

  Hamilton was tall and neat, with a slightly hooked nose and a cap pulled over his eyes. He wore grey British battle-dress, and had a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other that he was clicking furiously. He had the long face of a Dobermann, Owen thought.

  ‘Ah,’ Hamilton said, seeing Martha as he passed them and swinging around. ‘Jolly good. You’re back.’

  ‘Yes. And with your penicillin, I might add.’

  ‘Well done.’

  He looked the four of them up and down.

  ‘This lot with you?’

  Janek and Irena fidgeted nervously, Irena holding the baby tight to her as if at any moment someone hurrying past might try to whisk him out of her arms.

  ‘Yep,’ Martha said. ‘Picked them up on the way over. A present from my uncle.’

  She made some quick introductions, but Hamilton seemed more concerned about whether they’d been dusted.

  ‘Dusted?’ said Irena. She looked terrified.

  ‘DDT,’ he said. ‘It’s regulation.’

  ‘Typhus,’ explained Martha. ‘Gotta dust you down. It won’t take a minute.’ She turned to Hamilton. ‘Owen here’s English.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Hamilton. ‘Right. God, you’re not with Barker’s lot, are you?’

  ‘No,’ said Owen. ‘I fell out of a plane.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s one way of getting here, I suppose,’ he said, barely batting an eyelid. ‘Certainly beats trying to use the ruddy roads.’ He laughed, then leant in close. ‘I say, you’re not SOE are you?’

  Owen had no idea. ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

  ‘Good. Don’t want any of that lot.’ He took a closer look at the baby. ‘Hello, hello, you don’t look very happy.’

  ‘He’s sick,’ Martha said. ‘I’m going to whisk him over to one of the blocks as soon as we’re done here. Get Haynes to take a look.’

  ‘Ah, right. Well, what were you thinking anyway, bringing in a child?’

  ‘I was hardly going to leave the thing outside the gate now, was I? Anyhow,’ she said, ‘do you want the goddamned penicillin or not? You wouldn’t believe the red tape I’ve had to duck and dodge to get my hands on this.’

  She took the first box from Janek and pushed it firmly into the man’s hands, then piled the other two on top. ‘You owe me a drink. So I’ll see you in the mess later – right? You can have mine ready.’ She started to usher them out of the hallway, leading Janek by the arm. ‘Double Scotch,’ she called back to Hamilton standing in the busy hallway, holding the boxes of penicillin, his notebook slipping out from under his arm. ‘I want to know what I’ve missed!’

  For someone who had been resident in the camp no more than a fortnight, Martha had got herself rather well established. Everybody knew her. The benefit, she claimed, of being practically the only American on site. She had even managed to requisition a small office from a Red Cross liaison officer who had been persuaded to share a desk with a Jewish army chaplain who, Martha claimed, was hardly ever there anyway.

  Now she sat at a table made steady with wedges of paper and nothing on it but some forms and a telephone. Owen and Irena sat opposite. Janek had been driven off with a member of the 32nd Casualty Clearing Station to his Czech dormitory in what Martha called Camp 3, where internees considered healthy again were housed ready for deportation. Owen had said he’d track him down later but Janek still played on his mind. He felt strangely responsible for him and, now that he was out of sight, also a growing anxiety that something wasn’t right. Janek would find comfort in being with the other Czechs, he assured himself; the same relief that he was finding among fellow Brits. It was as if he had finally found his voice, and with that his freedom. Another piece of him claimed back. He was almost complete.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be fine. You’ll be fine,’ Martha had said to the boy, but Janek hadn’t looked at all sure. They had already started deporting those fit enough to travel, Martha had told them. Five thousand Poles had been despatched to Celle only a few days ago from where they had then caught trains back home.

  ‘I’ll try to make sure you’re in the next batch of Czechs,’ she told Janek, although she couldn’t make any promises.

  Janek’s only concern though was his brother, and he’d stood in the middle of the parade ground shouting out his brother’s name to no avail, quite convinced, it seemed, that Petr was there.

  Owen, being a British officer of rank, would be bedded in a shared room with an ambulance driver called Wilkins, whom Martha hadn’t yet come across but Hamilton vouched was a good sort. As for Irena, she would be placed in a shared room with other Polish women.

  ‘Perhaps a couple of minutes in the office first, though?’ Martha had asked. All DPs needed to be registered, and she took down their details while Little Man was taken to a hospital block to be inoculated and given the once-over.

  He half listened while Martha asked Irena questions: name, date and place of birth, last known address . . . She checked Irena’s identification papers and handed them back. The girl seemed hesitant in answering anything about hersel
f.

  His eyes drifted around the room, which was barely bigger than a cupboard. There was a single shelf on one wall with nothing on it but a box file on its side and a French/German dictionary swollen with damp. A window looked down upon the quad and across to the hospital blocks; the pane was cracked and juddered in its frame every time a truck rumbled past.

  ‘Some of them don’t remember,’ Martha had told him. ‘They know practically nothing about themselves.’ You had to find one thing with which to unlock them. A childhood nickname. A memory of some sort. Maybe even an object. ‘And then, it’s glorious. The door opens,’ she said. ‘They sit there and they start talking.’

  Not Irena though. He saw the slop of bath water and Irena’s wet hand on his stomach, her fingers moving down like liquid. Then the thought was gone. He tuned back in. He had missed something and now the half-completed form had been pushed aside.

  ‘What about this incident then,’ Martha was saying, ‘with this man? You know.’

  Irena looked at the floor, pretending not to understand, then lifted her head again with some purpose, determined now to stare Martha out.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about what happened,’ Martha said. ‘I want you to know that. But, well . . .’ She took a breath. ‘It wasn’t one of our boys now, was it? It wasn’t an American soldier who raped you.’

  Irena held her stare, then blinked several times. Owen could feel his own chest tightening. He tried to catch Martha’s eye. What the hell was she playing at?

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she went on. ‘I don’t blame you for lying. We get these kinds of stories all the time.’

  He wondered what she meant by that, and how many other Poles like Irena she had questioned before.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘you said yourself that the child is a couple of months old now, yes? Well, you see, the way I look at it, that would mean that even if he was a month premature, whoever did this when you were in Aachen, if you were in Aachen like you said you were – that is right, isn’t it?’

  She waited for a nod that didn’t come.

  ‘Look,’ she said, drawing breath, ‘what I’m saying to you is that our troops hadn’t got as far as Aachen by then. They didn’t get there ’til September and the town fell in October. So, like I say, it’s a bit unlikely – don’t you think? – that it was a US soldier out on patrol like you said it was, given that the baby’s a good couple of months old and it’s now – what? – only just May.’