Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  She waited for Irena to say something. Owen could feel his heart trying to squeeze its way into his throat. He couldn’t believe that she had lied to him, and twice. Why had she made up such stories? What good was it supposed to do? He wondered now if that was why he had hesitated in telling the colonel. If deep within his subconscious he had been questioning her already, even though he had wanted to believe her, to think she’d tell him only the truth?

  ‘Listen, I’m not mad at you,’ said Martha softly. ‘We’re hearing these stories all the time. So, what really happened? Hm? Irena, why don’t you just tell me the truth? We can’t help you otherwise.’

  She leant back in her chair and waited. Owen could hear a heated discussion echoing in the concrete passage below, men’s voices babbling like water, then movement in the stairwell, people hurrying. A truck pulled up. More voices. The sun shone through the cracked window, four squares of light splashing across the table and the back of Martha’s arm.

  Irena moistened her lips. It was as if she were trying to pull out from somewhere within her a voice with which to speak.

  ‘His name is Krzysztof Krakowski,’ she eventually managed.

  ‘Krzysztof Krakowski,’ Martha said. ‘Right.’ She wrote the name down; not on the form, Owen noticed, but on a separate scrap of paper. ‘That sounds Polish.’

  Irena nodded. Her eyes were beginning to fill.

  ‘So you were raped by another Pole. Is that what you’re saying now?’

  Irena nodded again.

  ‘Not an American soldier then, like you said.’

  Irena started to sob.

  It seemed highly unlikely, in Owen’s mind, that of all the Poles swilling around Germany, the one whom Irena was looking for should wash up in this camp. Yet, Martha said, there had been thousands of Poles there. Along with the Russians, they were the biggest contingent in a camp of sixty thousand.

  ‘You don’t think she’s been here herself?’ Owen asked when it was just the two of them.

  ‘No,’ said Martha. ‘But she’s been in a camp somewhere, even if she won’t say.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t cut your hair like that out of choice.’

  ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t just tell me the truth though? What difference would it make?’

  ‘She’s desperate. They all are,’ Martha said. ‘They’ll say anything to get what they need – food, clothes, a ticket home, a new life in America perhaps. They think we’ll just take ’em in. If they can persuade us that we owe them something, that America, Britain, whoever has somehow wronged them, well . . . And anyway, maybe now and again the story is true. We don’t truly know what they’ve been through. We don’t know what’s happened. At the end of the day, the woman’s been raped. In my mind it doesn’t matter who did it. It’s wrong, and I want to help her if we can. I know what she’s going through.’

  ‘You can’t just give the baby up. It’s a life. He’s as much part of you as he is of this man,’ Owen said to Irena as they had stood in the main entrance waiting for someone to lead her to her billet.

  ‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘It is not about love. I cannot love it. I cannot love something that I did not want – not now, not then, not any time, not ever, do you understand? And you cannot make me.’

  ‘But don’t you think you might be able to?’ he said. ‘If you gave the child a name—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I find Krzysztof Krakowski. I give him his child. He raped me. He must have wanted it. “Well then,” I say to him, “here, here it is.”’

  Martha said she could arrange for one of the lads to take him into Camp 1 and give him a tour of what was really happening out there if Owen had the stomach for it, but he hadn’t. He slumped on a pile of crates not knowing what to do with himself. Why in God’s name hadn’t he taken the colonel’s offer? So many times over the last two weeks he had closed his eyes and woken somewhere else. He squeezed his eyes shut again but when he opened them nothing around him had shifted. He looked out across the former parade ground at the tents, the dusty parked military vehicles, and the dishevelled nurses and soldiers milling busily around. Someone had a wireless playing big band swing music that a woman in a headscarf and shawl was spiralling around to and laughing as if she were drunk, her skirt fluttering up as she turned, as if it were trying to propel her off the ground. A line of white figures walked through, dressed from head to foot in overalls, hoods and visors pulled over their heads like strange aliens. As they passed he saw how filthy they were, blood spattered up the legs and the stench of shit wafting from their boots.

  He kept thinking of the fencing he’d seen along the road, them driving past so fast that the barren wastelands beyond it, and the shape of barracks and twig figures, had come to him through the quickly shifting sunlight and leaves like strange blurring images he used to see through his grandfather’s zoopraxiscope.

  His memories had been like that, turning and turning and yet still not real. They were all trying to forget something and now he wondered whether in his own mind things were better off left as they were. You haven’t lost your memories, you’ve hidden them, Irena had said. And perhaps she was right.

  Now, though, Connie kept slipping into his mind. He couldn’t keep her out. That treacherous kiss, the churn of desire, the realization of what he was doing – it all dropped through him like a bomb.

  No, he had said, or maybe: We can’t, or We shouldn’t, or Jesus, what the hell are we doing? He remembered a girl sniggering from further down the landing of the hotel and, with that, Connie had suddenly slipped from within his arms and run. He hadn’t known what to do with himself as he saw her go, slamming his fist against the wall, and then thinking he might be sick. He recalled nothing else of that night except being at the top of the staircase and wanting to call out to her. He had pulled the mask from his head but she was already lost to him. In that wave of drunken panic as he tried to hunt her out in the crowd, the countless heads below him had been a shoal of debris swilling in a sea.

  He rubbed at his eyes now, trying to wipe the memory away. In the yard, two trucks had pulled up and bodies were being laid out, joining those already in long rows along the edge of one of the buildings. Three women were searching through them, peeling back the blankets that covered each of them in turn. He watched them for a while, two with Stars of David still stitched to their coats. When the third turned he realized that it was Irena. She was looking for a dead man: Krzysztof Krakowski.

  The ambulance driver, Wilkins, whom Owen was supposed to be sharing a room with, never did show. The war, it seemed, was full of such little mysteries. He sat on Wilkins’ bed and walked his fingertips across the window. Come back, Connie had said, or I need you, or maybe nothing at all. And then, as if in the haze of a hot summer’s day, she too had melted away.

  He would fix the boy’s watch, he told himself, and then he would find him and give it to him as a token of thanks. Sitting in that attic the previous night with the boy so inconsolable, and Owen’s hand on his knee, he had felt them knotting tighter together. Two brothers looking for brothers, Janek had said. And now, without him, Owen felt lost.

  He took the watch from his pocket and opened the casing, emptying all its tiny parts out on to the bed sheet. He had fixed things – taps, radios, carburettors. He would fix this. If he thought about it logically, every piece had its place, its function and connection, so that bit by bit the wheels and cogs turned, time would move again and events unfold, each one tipping into another – a downed plane, a POW camp, a long walk through the snow. And then what? He couldn’t think. Only that at some stage the boy had pulled him into a field and then for some reason had left him for dead.

  Slowly and methodically he pieced the watch back together, dropping each tiny element back into place with a bent bit of wire fashioned into tweezers, everything there for a reason and everything in its place. He found some comfort in returning to his old logical ways. He replaced the
cover, fastening it with a click and then held the mended timepiece to his ear, and, with a satisfied smile, he heard the metallic ticking of its tiny beating heart.

  It took Owen some time to find the Czech block and when he did there didn’t seem to be anyone about apart from an elderly man on the concrete doorstep clasping a tin of food tightly in his hand.

  ‘What boy?’ he said in strained English when Owen asked if he’d seen Janek.

  ‘He’s tall and thin,’ explained Owen.

  The man humphed at that – they were all tall and thin.

  ‘We arrived today. He’s new here. Fifteen, maybe sixteen, I don’t know.’

  The man shrugged. ‘People come and go. They are digging up a turnip field. Maybe he is one of them. Or in the forest. They do that now. Go to the forest.’

  Owen wanted to know what for.

  The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know. See what they can find.’

  He asked Owen if he had any cigarettes and Owen said no. Then the man took one out of his own pocket anyway and took a while to light it.

  ‘The boys, they come back,’ he said, eventually taking a drag and coughing. ‘Do not worry.’

  Then Owen remembered and drew Janek’s symbol in the dirt with his finger. ‘What about this?’ he said. ‘Have you seen this?’

  ‘Oh,’ said the man. ‘That boy. You English brother.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen, wondering what Janek had been saying.

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ the man said, pointing, ‘planning revolution. I am too old for fight. And what is left for Resistance to resist?’ The man shrugged again, befuddled by it all. He pulled another drag. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  Owen climbed four flights looking in every dorm for Janek: six beds in each, three on either side. Some rooms were partitioned into cubicles with narrow wardrobes and stacked luggage making precarious dividing walls or army blankets strung across on ropes. In one room a couple of men were playing draughts on a board scored into the floor with chalk and different coloured pebbles. In another women sat around a dusty wireless listening to a crackling news broadcast, sewing or threading laces through old, battered shoes. There was no sign of Janek. When Owen reached the last room, certain that Janek would be there, there was just his threadbare jacket on a mattress and the bird in the box scratched into the wall.

  Martha wiped the last hunk of bread around her plate, soaking up the gravy juice before popping it into her mouth. With the mental and physical grind of what they were doing there, Martha said that the least the British government could do was ensure they were well fed. That said, the food was all provided by the Germans.

  ‘You demand what you want,’ she told him. ‘Food, clothes, their homes – and they give. What choice do they have? It’s like they’re finally waking up after some crazy dream.’

  She had made some inquiries and had asked a few of the Red Cross nurses and a couple of British doctors she knew, as well as some of the medical students who had been brought over from London. But none had come across a Pole called Krzysztof Krakowski.

  ‘Is there no way the child can be taken into care?’ Owen asked.

  ‘Who are you kidding?’ She pushed her plate aside. ‘We can’t really do anything until we got some procedures going.’

  Nor was there any sign of Petr.

  ‘There are new lists coming out of the camp every day, and other camps too,’ Martha said. ‘We put them up on the notice-boards. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.’

  On a brighter note, she’d not only got Janek’s name on a list of Czech deportees who would be able to leave the day after next, but she’d also got the lieutenant on the case about getting Owen on to a flight.

  He thanked her.

  ‘Well, glad to finally be doing something right,’ she said.

  ‘And if Janek doesn’t want to go?’ he asked. ‘He’s quite determined to find his brother, and he’s downright stubborn when he wants to be.’

  ‘Well, there are countless other camps he could try. That’s what many of them are starting to do. But you’d be better off persuading him to stay here, mind, so we can send him home. That way,’ she said, ‘if we find his brother at least we know where to send him.’

  After dinner there was a daily medical progress review that didn’t finish until eleven and then they were joined in the mess by Hamilton and two other Brits – Haynes, a doctor who had spent several years as a surgeon at the Royal Marsden before joining the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Guppy, a sapper from Brighton whose real name was Fisher. A large consumption of alcohol was the only way to survive the horrors of the job, it seemed.

  ‘It stops you going mad,’ said Haynes. ‘You do what you can to block it out. I don’t want to spend my nights thinking about the things I’ve been seeing all day.’

  ‘So we drink ourselves into oblivion,’ Guppy said.

  Before long Owen was indeed perilously drunk. Haynes seemed intent on providing an endless supply of Scotch and then vermouth and then flaming brandy that made everyone cheer. All Owen could think was that he was in a fucking circus. And he wished he could get out.

  ‘And now look,’ Haynes was slurring at Hamilton, ‘we’re treating them no better.’

  ‘Codswallop,’ said Hamilton.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Haynes. ‘Camp 1 – how long before we started to get them out? Before we got them any medical attention? Hm? Two fucking weeks. I had to wade through their shit. Pits,’ he said, turning to Owen. ‘Pits knee-high in bodies. And what help do we get? What did we get today?’ He stood up now, unsteadily, and swung his empty glass around.

  ‘All right, Haynes,’ said Hamilton. ‘We all know.’

  ‘Yeah, c’mon, Roy,’ said Martha. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘What do we get?’ he shouted. ‘Jam yesterday. And today? Today? Crates of fucking lipstick.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Owen said, or something like it. As Martha had escorted him to his digs he had hardly been able to keep hold of the wall.

  ‘’Sall right,’ she said. ‘We’re on the Scotch every night. We got ourselves immune.’

  ‘Haynes isn’t.’

  ‘Well, no, not Haynes,’ she conceded. ‘But then he’s a doctor.’

  He shuffled forward on the edge of the bed and sat with his head between his knees, feeling that he might at any moment tip right over or be sick. He felt her hand hot on the back of his shoulder. The other was holding a glass of water for him.

  ‘I couldn’t find him,’ he said, meaning Janek. They had been here for half a day and already everything had changed. ‘Will she be all right?’ he said. ‘Will they be all right?’

  ‘Who?’ she said. ‘Irena and the baby?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Everyone.’ He felt completely desolate. ‘I shouldn’t have got drunk,’ he said. ‘I forgot about them.’

  ‘They’re not your problem any more,’ she told him. ‘We’ll look after them. We’ll send them home. They’ll want to be with people from their own country anyway.’

  ‘But they’re all strangers,’ he said. ‘I know them.’

  Martha sighed. ‘Let’s have another drink,’ she said. She had a bottle of bourbon back in her room that she’d been waiting to open for weeks.

  ‘In my experience,’ she said, swilling the whiskey around in the glass and then watching it spin, ‘there are three types of women here. The young ones who are here because they want an adventure of some sort, wanna travel and don’t see why the hell you men should be gallivanting around having all the fun. Then there are the goody-two-shoes type who are here under moral obligation and see it as their ticket to heaven, you know, the sort who love being in the middle of a crisis and proving their worth. And then – well – then there are those, the third type, who are just here to escape from something, because it sure as hell beats the crap out of being at home.’

  ‘And which one are you?’ he said.

  ‘My God, what do you think?’ she said. ‘I’m not a damn crusader.’

  UNRRA had
been recruiting men and women from all across Europe, she told him, not just America. She’d taken a boat to England and then a plane to Paris, and then a long bumpy ride to Granville in Normandy, where UNRRA had its training centre.

  ‘And there we sat,’ she said. ‘We were supposed to be sent out into the field in teams to help with the refugee problem. But it was a goddamn fiasco. When they do finally send you out, you’re completely under-resourced. My team, we had two old reconditioned army trucks with blankets, camp beds, water bottles, that sort of stuff. And that was it. We lost one of the trucks two days after we left. Tipped right over. Then Francine – she was the welfare officer from Montpellier – she got ill. And Stefan and Riordan were at each other’s throats all the time anyway. So the team got disbanded.’

  ‘And you ended up here?’

  ‘You all get washed up somewhere. I couldn’t abide all the damn paperwork that was part of UNRRA anyway. I tagged along with the American Field Service volunteers. There are still a few of them knocking around. I just wanted to get on with it. You know, get stuck in.’

  He agreed that she didn’t seem to be the type that much cared for rules.

  ‘Listen, when you have five hundred, eight hundred, I don’t know, a thousand people dying here every single day, you don’t have time to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i’s. The war might as well still be raging for all the good the peace is doing us.’

  Sitting on her bed, he leant back against the bedroom wall. He could feel himself succumbing. Beside him Martha shuffled, her neat legs crossed at the ankles, her skirt just over the hillocks of her knees. As she pressed her hand into the mattress, the springs groaned and the mattress dipped, their shoulders pressed together. He thought about Irena and Janek having sex, and then about having sex with Martha on the narrow strip of floor, or against the wall or on this bed, and how she might lie beneath him, gripping the sheets.