Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  As he moved the sheet away, his eyes were drawn to a name. Sagan. It sat at the edge of the sheet. He faltered, stared and then turned his gaze back to the other parts of the map. But his eyes kept being pulled to it as if within him two wires had touched, sparking the slightest flicker of something in his head. He scanned around the name with his finger but nothing looked familiar. Only perhaps the shading of a forest. A symbol printed below looked like the Roman numeral: III.

  Sagan. He wondered if he had read about the place recently, or heard it on a broadcast. A place so far at the edge of the map as to be almost hanging off it.

  In the end he pulled out the scrap of paper and stub of pencil and wrote it down anyway, then found it again on the map and twice circled it. His finger followed the faint railway lines that threaded away from it in either direction but nothing else caught his eye.

  As the evening drew in, the fields and woods gave way to forests that rose up over the steepening hillsides, capturing the swelling darkness within the clutch of their boughs. He found a clearing and rummaged around for kindling, but beneath the trees everything was damp. As he poked about he sensed movement nearby – a figure, he thought, changing shapes between the trees and shifting with the shadows.

  He pulled out the pistol. ‘Who’s there?’

  Then, in German: ‘Wer ist da?’

  He held still but all he could hear in the darkness was the nervous fidget of birds.

  He did not sleep but lay for hours, shivering and surrounded by the sounds of the forest. He squeezed his hands into his armpits once more and pulled his knees in tight, the ground growing damp beneath him until it soaked through his clothes.

  He would not be afraid. But twice he sat bolt upright, swinging the pistol furiously about at the shapes of bats that were sweeping between the trees.

  Images, recent and opaque, and untethered to anything else, rose in his mind like air bubbles to the surface and just as quickly burst: sunlight burning through a skin of leaves; water rushing around him. They flashed when he least expected: these leaves so close to his face; or the scuff and scratch of grass being hauled away from under him as if it was the earth, not him, that was sliding. There was no catching them – these sudden openings into what might have been yesterday or the day before or even the year before; it was difficult to tell.

  The trolleybus came. He sat by the window. The street melted away.

  He jerked awake, aware of the stench of smoke and the fizzle of flames. When he turned on his side he found that a shabby-looking boy was squatting in the undergrowth, staring right at him. Owen scrambled to his feet, dropping the jacket that had been draped over him, and pulled out his pistol, but the boy did not flinch.

  In the clearing a fire had been lit and a crude spit constructed with a small animal roasting on it. Moisture from its skinned body dripped and the flames hissed and flared. The smoke was so infused with cooked meat that Owen felt it pulling at his stomach.

  The boy didn’t look much older than fifteen, and was squatting with his outstretched arms resting on his knees and hands lightly clasped. He had an impish quality: unkempt hair with dried bits of leaf caught in it, and a small snub nose. His eyes were narrow and dark, and he scrutinized Owen, then shifted and cleared his throat. He didn’t look in the slightest bit scared, but gauged Owen and the shaking gun with little more than curious suspicion. There was a dried smear of mud across each cheek and another across his forehead. His trousers were dusty at the knees, and he wore a khaki-coloured shirt and black scuffed shoes. The jacket that had been draped over Owen must have been the boy’s too; it had darker patches curling at the elbows. A tatty canvas bag lay beside him, with loose pockets and buckles, and something drawn on it in faded red ink.

  The boy shuffled and tilted his head, chewing on his lips as if he had something sour in his mouth.

  Owen took a step closer. ‘What do you want?’

  Instantly the boy was on his feet and much taller than he had expected. He unleashed a torrent of words and sounds that Owen couldn’t understand. He came closer and Owen backed away. He was still talking, fast.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘Hledal jsem vás,’ the boy shouted. ‘Dva dny. Dva dny!’

  ‘For God’s sake . . .’ Owen stumbled backwards over the jacket.

  The boy gave him a hard shove and then another, and then grabbed at Owen’s gun. Owen pulled it away and made for the trees, but before he knew it the boy had twisted him around with surprising force, tipping him over his foot and bringing him to the ground so that he hit it hard with a gasp and was winded. The boy snatched the gun from his hand, unleashing another string of words that Owen didn’t understand.

  He stood over Owen, pointing the gun.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Owen, submitting. He was on his back and still breathless. ‘Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want but I don’t have anything. I promise.’

  He could see then that the boy was shaking. He pressed the heel of his hand to his eye and then, turning away, he threw the pistol down at Owen’s side. He said something but the venom was gone. He took a few deep breaths as he paced away and then, finding some self-control, came back. He looked down at Owen and then nodded, and Owen hauled himself up on to his elbows. The boy signalled at the fire.

  ‘Máte hlad?’ he said. His anger had almost entirely drained but his frown still puckered. Whatever had happened between them was over. The faintest smile of acceptance flickered across his face.

  They sat cross-legged across the fire from each other, the boy’s eyes interrogating Owen as they both hungrily ate. Owen couldn’t make him out. Using a small flick knife, the boy had cut the meat from the animal with a swift and practised butchery that was equally impressive and disturbing, before serving the slices in wooden bowls with a watery broth and bits of root vegetable that had been simmering in a pan. Owen didn’t know whether to be afraid or thankful. The food was slowly reviving him but doing little to quell his unease.

  Did he know the boy? Had he forgotten? He wondered if more days had fallen away into the abyss. Nothing about the boy looked familiar, yet still he stared with an unflinching curiosity. Only occasionally did he get up to serve more broth or carve more meat from what Owen hoped was a rabbit and not a small cat. He poked encouragement into the fire while Owen discreetly felt in his pockets: pistol, paper, button, map. He pulled out the scrap of paper. There were notes he’d written on it in pencil – the words MAX and SAGAN and HARRY and HAWKERS – but nothing about a boy.

  The boy lifted the bowl and drank the dregs, his dark eyes like polished wood still fixed on Owen.

  Not an imp, he thought, but a bird, in the way he cocked his head or turned it at every sound. He had a nervy alertness, as if he and everything around them was balanced on a wire.

  He untied a canister from his belt and, without saying a word, offered it. Owen sniffed it and then took a sip. The water was warm and stale but he took another mouthful and handed it back. The boy took a swig himself and refastened the cap.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Owen asked.

  The boy said nothing.

  ‘Do you know where I am?’

  The boy’s nose twitched.

  ‘I’m lost. I don’t know where I am. Do you understand? Wo bin ich?’ he said, trying German instead. ‘Yes? Do you speak English? Where am I?’ He signalled around at the trees.

  The boy said something that might have been a name.

  ‘I mean the country,’ said Owen. ‘England, yes? Do you understand?’ He pulled out the scraps of map but the boy was already talking.

  ‘Čechy,’ the boy said. ‘Sudety . . . Protektorát Čechy a Morava.’ He shrugged, as if you could call it what you liked; it didn’t much matter.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re saying. What are you?’ The boy sounded Polish or Russian or something. His words came out buttery but like nothing Owen had heard before.

  ‘Československo.’

  �
�Chesko—?’

  ‘Československo,’ the boy said.

  It sounded like Czechoslovakia, but that was ridiculous.

  Owen stared at the scrap of paper, trying to make sense of the notes he’d written and the pieces of map.

  ‘Here.’ He held out the paper and pencil. ‘Will you write the date?’

  ‘Date?’ said the boy, unsure.

  ‘The date. Yes. Today. I need to know what the date is. What’s the bloody date?’

  ‘Je květen.’

  ‘No,’ Owen said, losing his temper. ‘The numbers.’ He held up his hand splaying his fingers and shook them. ‘The numbers, yes? Do you understand?’

  The boy took the paper and wrote something. He handed it back.

  Owen looked.

  3–5

  What was that? March? May? That couldn’t be right. He felt a heat starting to engulf him.

  ‘The year . . . Now the year. Jahr,’ he said in German. ‘Write the year. Please.’

  The boy grinned. He wrote, slow and purposeful this time, as if this were a game that he now knew he was winning. He handed it over.

  Owen stared at the numbers.

  1945

  His stomach tightened. His mind went blank.

  ‘Forty-five?’

  ‘Čtyřicet pět.’ He nodded.

  No, Owen thought. That wasn’t right. 1940. 1941, perhaps, but . . . He couldn’t have lost . . . what? That was four years. It couldn’t be true.

  He wasn’t sure that his legs could take him, but without thinking he started to walk. He pushed hurriedly away through the trees. He needed to get out, to get away, but the boy was suddenly coming after him.

  ‘Musíte tady zůstat!’ He grabbed Owen’s arm but Owen pushed him off.

  ‘No, let me go!’

  He stumbled, crashing through the trees, away from the boy and his mouthful of lies. By the time he came out on to the lane he was breathless. He looked about in every direction at the steep slopes and fields and the endless woods. None of it looked real. It was as if he’d fallen through into another world. He didn’t know what to do.

  He didn’t know how far he had gone before he sensed something behind him. When he turned around he could see the figure of the boy down the lane. He carried on, picking up his pace, but he could still feel the boy following him, the bag hauled over his shoulder, the water canister bumping at his thigh.

  ‘What do you want?’ he shouted. ‘Leave me alone!’

  He had no idea where he was going. Sagan, he thought, but he didn’t know why.

  At least we ain’t getting called up, Harry had said, but for some reason here he was.

  He kept taking out the piece of paper and looking at it, uncomprehending.

  3–5–1945

  Nothing about it made sense.

  When he stopped again and turned the boy had stopped as well, and was standing in the road, staring. Owen carried on, trying to ignore him, but he could feel the boy’s stare at the back of his head. He stopped and turned. The boy stopped too. The sunlight was burning around his frame but the distance between them was no different from before. Was he following him on purpose? Did he think this was a bloody game?

  Oh, let him, he thought. I don’t care.

  But he did. He carried on and then glanced back again.

  He’s like a bloody lost dog.

  When eventually he reached a junction he turned right, following the lane through a tunnel of trees. His anger with the boy was starting to dissipate. He was even beginning to feel strangely indebted to him. The boy had fed him, after all. He had watched over Owen while he slept. Again, Owen stopped and turned. The boy was teetering on the cusp of the hillock beneath the dark overhang of trees, the sunlight shining through from behind. This time Owen stood and waited. Oh, let him come if he wanted to, he thought. The boy would slope off to wherever he was going soon enough.

  For over an hour they walked in silence. Owen felt as if he’d been taken hostage, and without a shared language he was completely disarmed. His fingers fumbled in his pockets as he walked for the telltale shape of the button.

  ‘Where are you going anyway?’ he asked, but the boy did not reply.

  As the morning progressed the air became bracing as they kept climbing to higher ground. The boy lingered behind him but with increasing frequency he walked parallel on the opposite side of the lane and threw Owen cursory glances. Whenever Owen stopped to consider the map, trying to match a point on it with something he’d seen – the pinnacles of a remote chateau or the tops of cone-like mountains blurred by distant rain – the boy would stop too, and empty a stone from his battered shoe, or swipe at something with a stick while he waited. And then Owen would pocket the map and carry on, and the boy would fall into line.

  They followed the edge of a field that had recently been set ablaze, patches of the volcanic earth still black and burning. Behind it the trees seemed to melt, and with every change of wind the burning ash blew across their path so that they had to turn their backs to it and cover their eyes, some of the flecks still orange, pricking their cheeks and the backs of their hands.

  They joined a lane that swerved down into a valley, a loosely woven fence separating the road from the farmland. At the bottom of the slope there was an entrance and a grey stone house in a yard with open-fronted wooden outbuildings housing a plough and a wagon. Parked behind the house a couple of small trucks could be seen. Three soldiers in olive drab uniforms were loitering in the yard.

  The boy grabbed Owen’s arm and pulled them both into a crouch. He then pelted, head stooped, across the grass and ducked behind the fence. He glanced over the top and slumped back down.

  ‘Honem!’ he hissed, signalling to Owen, who ran over and then squatted down beside the boy, both of them breathless with their knees up and backs to the fence.

  ‘What is it?’ Owen said. He turned to take a look.

  Through the latticework of branches he could see the house and the uniformed men, bulky rifles in their hands, each held by a strap over a shoulder. One of them sat on an upturned pail, digging around in the dirt with the toe of his boot. The other two stood by the trucks, lounging against the bonnets, and talking the same Slavic language as the boy.

  The boy squinted through the thin gap in the fence, glanced over the top and then through the gap again, trying to get a clearer look. Owen held the pistol against his chest. He could hear the boy’s agitation in the heaviness of his breath.

  Then, from inside the house, there came a commotion. A stout uniformed man with severely cropped silver hair and a square reddened face appeared in the doorway. He was dragging out a woman who was struggling and shouting in his arms.

  The boy clenched Owen’s arm, his fingertips digging in. The woman clung on to the doorframe and yelled desperately to someone inside – Aleši! Ondřeji! – before the soldier shouted something and wrenched her away.

  The boy stood but Owen yanked him back down.

  ‘Don’t!’

  The men at the trucks were opening the doors, one of them flicking a catch on his gun. Another soldier appeared from within the house hauling out two young boys. He gripped each by the upper arm and dragged them as they struggled and fought across the yard. He forced them viciously into one of the trucks, while the woman was digging her heels into the dirt, trying to lower herself to the ground, but the silver-haired man heaved her up as she screamed and shouted, and, with his comrades, pushed her into the second vehicle.

  The door slammed as, beside Owen, the boy tried to stand again, shouting, ‘Nacistický sráči!’ but Owen hauled him down harder.

  ‘You’ll get yourself shot.’

  Then from behind the fence came a ferocious roar of air. Through the gaps between the woven strips of bark they saw flaring jets of flames as two of the men torched the outbuildings, great projections of dragon-fire issuing from flamethrowers, while another stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, a silhouette against the glowing fireball as the hallway was engulfed.
The trucks started. Voices shouted. Through a truck window the woman was shrieking as the flames broke through the roof of one of the outbuildings, already crackling at the sky. The downstairs windows of the house splintered as smoke began to issue.

  Owen wrapped his arms around the struggling boy.

  ‘Nacistický sráči,’ he yelled, before they were forced to bury their heads, the heat so intense against the latticed strips of wood that they could hear the dried crackle of bark on the other side of the fence slowly peeling away.

  It was not that he was lost that concerned him most. Nor was it that he had found himself in a war that he remembered so little about, which now seemed to be consuming everything and everyone within it. Nor was it that he had ended up in an obscure country that in the past had been nothing more than a strange name in the news broadcasts, or, even, that somehow he seemed to have wiped several years from his mind. No, what concerned him most was that things he now knew for sure – and knew that he knew – could suddenly be lost again, and then found, and lost once more, as if they had never been there in the first place. Not things from years past, securely embedded, but things learnt yesterday, or an hour ago, or five minutes. He had to work hard just to keep them in his head. Like the train wreck. Or the ransacked house. Or the button. Or even the boy.

  Owen was still not sure if he should know him. Or how long they had been together. Or even what his name was – if, indeed, he had asked. All he knew was that he was Czech, and had quite likely fed him.

  BOY = CZECH = BREAKFAST

  He had found it on the scrap of paper – a formula for remembering.

  He was sitting beside a pool sunk within a sunlit dell, surrounded by boulders and overhanging trees. A small waterfall surged down through a line of rocks littered with broken branches and coursed some eight or nine feet into the pool. Thin-framed dragonflies motored about like silent biplanes, coming in low to scuff the water and swerving the bomb blasts of droplets that splashed from the waterfall. Leaves tumbled around him, spiralling whirligigs drifting down.