Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  Owen stared, bewildered. ‘Oh Christ.’

  Before he knew it he was running.

  The jeep had followed a narrow track until the trees had grown too dense around it and it could go no further. Owen followed Nemecek’s voice. He was irate and shouting at Janek; he sounded half crazed. Crouching low, Owen pulled the pistol from his pocket; it was too late now to get help. He picked his way through the ferns that were lush and still wet from rain, the sodden leaves quietly squelching under his feet and his shirt fast becoming damp on his back.

  In the smallest of clearings, Nemecek was standing over the boy, who was kneeling at his feet, the mouth of Nemecek’s gun pressed at the back of Janek’s head.

  Owen stepped forward.

  ‘I wouldn’t come any closer,’ the major said, not taking his eyes from Janek. ‘And put that thing away. We both know that I can put a bullet through his head before you’ve even managed to cock it. There is only one person who has ever taken a shot at me and lived, and now I have him on his knees.’ He laughed. ‘We have an old score to settle. Máme nějaké staré účty k vyřízení,’ he said to Janek. ‘Mm?’

  ‘Is that what all this is about?’ said Owen.

  ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘The war is over.’

  ‘Your war, perhaps. Not ours. When the Germans leave the Czech republic, who will control it then? Hm? The Soviets? The Poles? The Hungarians? You can’t leave it to the Czechs. They let you sell them to the Germans. No, not even sell them.’ He laughed. ‘Give them away. A gift to Hitler from your Mr Chamberlain. And what do they do? Nothing. They give themselves to the Führer. They welcome him in. They let him terrorize them. They sleep with the devil.’

  Janek shouted: ‘To není pravda!’

  Nemecek struck him hard with the butt of his pistol. ‘Co ty o tom víš?’ he said. He gave Owen a sideways glance. ‘His loyalty is touching – don’t you think? But completely misinformed.’

  Janek clutched the side of his head. Owen could see the blood beginning to seep between his fingers. The boy muttered something.

  ‘Petr?’ the major said, smiling. ‘Always Petr. Petr uletěl, jako pták.’ He made a whistling sound. ‘Flew away, hm? Like the coward he is. The great Petr Sokol,’ he scoffed. ‘He was a big fish in a small bowl. All talk. The new Czech republic, he said. Czech for the Czechs. And what happened when the Germans came? Hm?’

  The boy said something and Nemecek laughed.

  ‘They did not take him prisoner,’ he told Owen. ‘I don’t know where this boy gets his crazy ideas from. He wasn’t a threat to the Germans. He wasn’t anything. Nothing. He ran away. Like I keep telling you. He abandoned you. All of you. You,’ he said, poking Janek in the back of the head with his gun, ‘just don’t listen.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Owen. ‘Just let him go.’

  ‘Let him go?’ He laughed. ‘I’ll do no such thing.’ He turned his attention to Owen, the gun still held against Janek’s head. ‘Let me tell you something: I used to work with this boy’s father. I was loyal. I was hardworking. I was the voice between him and us Sudeten employees, his go-between, his lapdog. His factory would have been nothing without us. We made his father rich. And when the economic crash happened, what did he do? He let us all go. He kept only the Czechs. Only them.

  ‘I lost my job. We all lost our jobs. He told us we all had to get another job. There were no other jobs. But he turfed us out anyway to save his own neck, feed his own family, but without a care for us or our families. He made me hate him. I didn’t want to.

  ‘And then his son, this Petr.’ He spat the name into the back of Janek’s head. ‘The great Petr Sokol,’ he mocked. ‘He made us believe he was on our side. He organized a demonstration outside the factory gates. He was going to demand his father give us our jobs back; stand with the workers, he said. But his father would never listen to him. It was just Petr trying to placate us, disowning his father for his own ambitions. The demonstration got violent. He wanted them to riot. His father called the police. There was fighting, and a boy got shot. My boy. A boy his father had employed and then, like us all, he had thrown him out on the street.’

  Owen remembered the clippings. The rioting crowd. Petr’s fist in the air. The headlines that he had not been able to make out but the odd word as he’d scanned the page – sabotáž – and two names: Petr Sokol and Antonín Nemecek. A boy aged fifteen – perhaps the same age as Janek.

  ‘This boy’s family,’ Nemecek went on, ‘has taken my job, my livelihood, my son, and now this,’ he said, holding his handless arm up. ‘They have caused me nothing but pain. But I am Sudeten. I fight for me. I play one side against the other but this is my war, not theirs or yours or anyone else’s, and I say it is not over!’

  ‘This boy,’ Owen said, ‘has lost his family too, you know. His parents.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that? You can’t trust anyone these days, not even family.’ He nudged Janek with the tip of his gun once more. ‘Hm? His sister let slip where they were,’ he told Owen. ‘She was dating a Sudeten German. She had walked out on them for him, this man. She told me where they were.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Owen.

  ‘I mean the war was in pieces. The Protektorát, the so-called government. Martial law. I went to find them. Someone else would have done it if it was not me.’

  Owen relived the sensation of a figure hauling him up into the field. And then, like a distant echo in the far recesses of his head, two shots and then a third before the figure crouching over him in the dark had turned and run.

  A house. Two graves. The boy standing over them. He had seen them from a bedroom window. Then, in his mind, he was stepping once again through the debris of a room, the chair with a penny-sized hole puffed into it, the sunlight coming through another hole in the wall. He remembered the crackle of smashed china beneath his feet and the snap of broken photo frames, the photographs already taken.

  There, in the woods, his legs gave a little. He stepped out from under the trees, straightening his arm, feeling the tightening of anger within him. He pointed the gun at Nemecek, ready to fire it.

  ‘Let him go,’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Haven’t you done enough? I said let him go.’

  There was the sharp click of a safety catch. The major’s driver stepped out from the trees, his gun fixed on Owen, while Owen pointed his at Nemecek who still had Janek kneeling before him, his own pistol pressed into the back of the boy’s head.

  ‘Do you think I drove all this way, orchestrated all of this, just to pat him on the back and wave him off? No. He has made me a joke. This,’ he said, holding up his handless arm, ‘is a joke. You’re right. I want to ruin him, not kill him. I want him never to forget. So, do I take his hand? Hm?’ He glanced at Owen. ‘When he took mine? What is the most important thing to him right now, do you think? Not his parents.’ He laughed. ‘Not his traitorous sister or his cowardly brother. Not his two little siblings, gone. What’s the most important thing to him now?’ He signalled for his comrade to keep his gun trained on Janek, and then he took a step closer to Owen, pointing the gun at Owen instead.

  ‘What is the most important thing to him now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Owen.

  ‘I think you do,’ he said.

  Two shots simultaneously, and in the split second that followed Owen was aware of a third, and of Nemecek twisting and turning with the impact.

  On the rattling train Owen found himself looking up at the sky. He could see the bullet-shaped pellet falling from the plane, closer and closer as the train edged across the bridge. The river roared below. And just as Nemecek’s bullet hit him, bolting through his skin, the bomb struck the end of the bridge. The bullet tore into his body, tearing through the flesh below the ribs as the bomb blasted through the railway tracks, blowing a hole right through and exploding against the gorge beneath. His insides crumbled. From the train he clambered on to the side of the rails at the en
d of the carriage as the brakes shrieked and passengers screamed. And then he jumped. The bridge was collapsing and the front of the train started to tilt. He felt his whole body lurch, and all of this came to him in a second – the moment of a bullet’s impact.

  He fell.

  He was falling, the ground rushing towards him. He could hear voices, see Nemecek’s body slip to the ground, Janek still there with his hands to his head as Owen’s legs gave way, and he fell from the bridge, the river rushing towards him fast and furious. He hit the woodland floor as his body crashed through the water. The sudden roar of the river as it tore him away, the rumbling of underwater explosions, bits of bridge and rock starting to hit. His head burst to the surface. He was only aware for the briefest moment of the huge wrenching sound from above him as the engine toppled, peeling the carriages with it one after another. The tremendous eruption of water as the train and half the bridge smashed into the river around him.

  Then, in that same moment – as Owen’s bulleted body hit the woodland floor and in his mind the thunderous roar of water crashed down upon him – everything cut to black.

  He is at a bus stop in the quivering heat, the hill rising up in the distance. Inside his uniform he has the heart secretly stitched into the pocket. There is a canvas RAF bag on the pavement beside him. He is going to meet Max. They’ve been called to the station to deliver 14,000lbs of fire-makers. He looks at a familiar wristwatch. The number in the tiny date window reads 18. Eighteenth of July, he thinks. Nineteen forty-three. The bus is already five minutes late.

  The street is deserted. Just him and – in the far distance there on the brink of the hill – her. She is standing on the pavement outside the gate where the steps lead up to the flat. He can see her quite clearly, still standing where she had said goodbye when she had put her hand to his face, and he had kissed those lips, that cheek, that skin. It is all coming back to him: when she smiled at him, a breeze lifting her hair. She pats his breast pocket and takes his hand. She kisses the knuckles and then plants a kiss in his palm, closing his fingers around it as if to keep it safe.

  Come back, she says. Come back to me. She puts his hand to her belly. I need you to come back.

  She straightens his jacket and pulls it tight, and then kisses him one last time; and that, in his mind, is when the first drip falls. It lies on the ground like a petal, and then another and another. She opens the jacket, and there where the bullet was that Nemecek had fired, that pain that Owen has carried with him all this time like a premonition of the pain to come, he can see that he is bleeding.

  In time he would call it a miracle, for it was Martha who saved him, clawed him back from the dead, and would not give up on either him or the heart that for those few seconds stopped. Or perhaps it was the cotton heart stitched next to his own that had pulsed first with the love of someone lost and for some time forgotten that eventually reignited it, not the pumping hands or the cries for help. But for those few seconds he was adrift in a timelessness, with all the time in the world to find himself, to walk through the rooms of a frozen ice house, or run through the wheat fields with a brother, or spot a button, or catch a bus, the tears streaming down his face. Or kiss someone goodbye.

  He wakes in a field. He is not at all hurt or injured. He is in his office suit. He has been sleeping, that is all. And when he wakes and sits up he knows exactly where he is. He has done this all before. He freewheels through the images. The line in the grass where Janek had dragged him from the river. The zip of a bird. The deep blue sky. The button is exactly where it should be. No gun yet but he knows where to find it. First he needs to stand up. He needs to look around. He looks for Max but he isn’t there. There is just the field, the gentle tilt of it. He is quite sure of where he is going. He has walked this walk before.

  ‘There you are!’

  It was Martha. He at least knew that.

  ‘I thought we were going to lose you, but you’ve pulled through,’ she said.

  His jaw felt loose. He wanted to ask where Janek was, where Irena was, and the baby. He knew that some of this was wrong, but he couldn’t think what. His fingers curled around the bed sheets, the soft feel of cotton.

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘Before you ask. Janek, I mean. Went yesterday. Haynes drove him down to Celle. There was a train we managed to get him on.’

  Owen tried to speak. She leant in close and he tried again.

  ‘You’ve been here three days,’ she said. ‘He sat with you for two of them. I’m sorry. I know I’m not much of a substitute.’ She pulled something from her pocket and pushed it into his hand. ‘He wrote you this, by the way,’ she said. ‘Haynes helped him with the English, so you’ll have to blame him for the spelling.’

  The folded sheet of paper had been tied with string around a watch. He held it tight in his hand.

  ‘Oh, and that goddamned major of yours is dead,’ she said. ‘Haynes took him down. I think you shot as well, but God knows where that went. Lucky, I suppose. You might have been court martialled.’

  She went on talking but he was already falling. The darkness pooled over him so that when he came to, he was no longer in the hospital block, in one of a thousand beds.

  He is clambering instead over the wrecked remains of a train. The iron is hot in the sun, the heat blasting off the metal. A cloudless blue sky reflected in the broken windows. He picks his way across the overturned carriages, the smashed wood and timbers caught among the broken rails. Standing on the side of a carriage that now has become its roof, he wrenches open a door and peers down through it. The carriage is full of dirty water, bodies floating about. One of them is a small girl, wearing white socks and bright red sandals. She is floating face down. Beside her there’s a scattering of his forged identity papers floating like waterlilies, the ink draining from them, and there, nudging against the wall of the carriage, a stuffed toy bear. When he lies on his stomach and reaches down to pull it out, he sees that one of its eyes is missing and the other is a single rusted tin button.

  He drops the door shut and sits for a while, then climbs on to the fender and slides down to the boiler. He wades into the water and pulls out a canvas RAF bag that has got caught by a branch. He knows what is in it. It has his camp identification number – 4993 – scratched into the canvas. He unhooks the buckles, opens it and finds the rye bread. He takes the letters out and reads each of them one last time, committing every word that she has written to memory, the letters he had carried with him all that time, before, just like then, he lets them slip into the water, and the river washes the ink from them and, like scattered waterlilies, sweeps them away.

  The field ambulance took him from the camp, with Haynes at the wheel. Martha and Hamilton waved from the gate, along with a French girl with cropped hair whom they all called Nurse Joubert. The remaining Czechs had gone; the Dutch and Serbs too. Before long the camp would be empty, all signs of what had happened there vanished entirely.

  As for Owen, he was on the road to recovery and Haynes would drive him to Hamburg, where he would spend the night before his flight home.

  He didn’t see the girl standing at the edge of the field as the ambulance bore him through the camp gates and out along the road. He didn’t see her waiting, hoping to see him one last time if even for a second through a grubby passing window. She stood with her arms as if in the crook of them she still carried a baby, and as the truck passed, she turned and watched it go, knowing perhaps that it was Owen and she would not see him again.

  OWEN

  From the line of tables outside the café along the Alsterarkaden you could see both bridges across the Alsterfleet and the view across to City Hall, which had hardly any war damage at all, he noted. The sun etched its way around it, drafting its outline against the blue, sparking on the clock face that topped the central tower. While below, in the main square, British tanks were lined up, the taking of the city and victory over Germany now complete.

  He nursed a barely warm coffee. The sun shone over
the water through the arches, the shadows of the railings tangling around his feet. He closed his eyes for a moment, the pain beneath his ribs real now and throbbing beneath the bandaging. The clock chimed the quarter hour. She was late; he knew she would be.

  Along the neat row of tables people sat, basking in the sun and making small talk. Mostly they were German but occasionally a British voice would rouse him. Two women were quibbling over whether they should leave a tip. Through the arcade, a deliveryman hauled a cart of bottles over the cobbles. It rattled through Owen’s chest and out through the hole where a bullet had once been. Life, it seemed, went on.

  He saw it all around him. He had walked though the city’s flattened streets, picking his way around the rubble of the train station and gazing around him at the forlorn carcasses of buildings, the endless flurries of dust blowing out and swilling around his feet, and all he could think was: we did this. Max and I. Deliverymen delivering bombs. They couldn’t be held responsible, but he felt responsibility all the same. He was filled with an almost unbearable shame just seeing the faces of the children sitting about on kerbs, or the single mother struggling to push a pram through the debris.

  Here though, on the arcade, the rubble had been swept up, the pavements washed down, wooden boards laid over holes and streetlamps righted. Across the way, a woman was banging the soot from a rug over a balcony, while two floors up another was helping a girl to water a window box. People walked with shopping bags. He’d seen them queuing for bread. He had even stopped to watch two boys playing with a broken tennis racquet – one tossing ball-sized chunks of rubble that the other would strike, blasting it against a halftumbled wall and leaving pellet-shaped marks among those already there.