Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  ‘Look, I don’t think we should be going into Germany, do you?’ said Owen. ‘That sounds like a ruddy suicide mission.’

  Janek stared at him.

  ‘Deutschland. Nein,’ Owen said. ‘Das ist . . . I don’t know – not good.’

  ‘I look for Petr,’ Janek said. ‘Yes?’

  Owen stood up. He’d had enough but the boy pulled him down again.

  ‘Ani hnout,’ he hissed.

  ‘But I don’t know what we’re doing here,’ Owen said. ‘I don’t even know why you’re still with me. Look, I don’t need your help. I’ll make my own way. What do you want from me anyway?’

  But the boy wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on the sentry crossing.

  Owen pulled at his arm and Janek turned sharply.

  ‘You want home?’ Janek demanded.

  ‘Yes. Of course I do.’

  ‘That way then. England. Yes? You. Me. We go.’

  It was almost dark when they heard the carts. Janek pushed him awake and on to his feet, gathering up his bag. ‘Rychle. Rychle,’ he whispered urgently, then he set off, Owen stumbling blindly after him through the steep woodland as it arced around towards the patrol.

  There seemed to be only a narrow stretch of woodland where it was level enough for them to stand any chance of clambering over the high barbed fence. There, though, a single soldier leant against a post, rifle in one hand, sucking on a cigarette.

  They got as close as they dared and squatted in the shadows around a denser clump of trees. Up the sharp incline to their right they could barely see the road above them or the sentry hut through the pines. The silhouetted soldiers drifted like ghosts in the gloom. He could hear them talking more clearly now, the crack of a laugh.

  The two carts drew near, wheels creaking and rattling, each pulled by a horse and flanked on either side by men, women and children; some sitting, tired and grizzly, in the carts, clutching pots and pans, others held in parents’ arms or walking beside them and gripping a hand. Something about them looked familiar: the rickety piles of furniture, the deer antlers hooked over one side. As the carts pulled up at the crossing, the soldiers gathered around, crowding them. There was a dialogue that soon became heated. The Russian soldiers poked at the adults, nudging them with their guns or giving them a shove against the wagon, laughing, jeering and shouting. One of them called to their comrade down at the fence – Ey! Georgiy! – and signalled him. The soldier stubbed his cigarette out on the post and Owen watched as he struggled up the incline through the trees to join the others. By the time he reached the top, two of his colleagues were already in one of the carts and throwing things out to be caught. They would take whatever they fancied. The refugees were helpless to stop them.

  ‘What do we do?’ Owen whispered, but the boy wasn’t listening, his attention fixed on the road.

  There was a cheer as something smashed. The refugees were pleading, trying to pull the Russians away from their possessions, but the soldiers took no notice. They raised their voices and pushed them about from one to another, while more clambered into the carts. One of them held the antlers on top of his head, mooing like a bull, and they laughed. Another had a woman by the wrist. He wanted something from her and wouldn’t let go. Owen could hear the children crying. The woman pulled hard and then slapped at the man, and a tussle broke out.

  ‘Ted!’ said Janek, and with that he was suddenly up and running, going stooped and swift through the undergrowth, across the steeply tilted hillside.

  ‘Fuck.’ Owen scrambled after him as fast as he could. High on the roadside he could hear one of the Russians yelling, the scared horses clattering their hooves and the creaking of the cart as the animals tried to push back. He could feel his heart thumping, a sharp stitch in his chest, while Janek was fast on his feet ahead of him through the brambles and ferns that snatched at their legs, all the while Owen aware that if they weren’t careful they might step on a mine or he might run through a booby trap, setting off a grenade for real this time.

  When they reached the fence it was higher than Owen had imagined, barbed wire prongs lining the top. Janek held it steady so that Owen could go first. He hauled his way up, the wire straining and rattling under the weight as his feet found foot holes and the wire lines bit deep into his hands. As he reached the top, the fence wavering precariously beneath him, he lifted his leg over, steadied himself and then jumped down, Janek’s bag and canisters quickly landing in the undergrowth next to him. Janek clambered up and over, and then, with a heavy thump, he was down as well, gathering up his things and they were running; and Owen didn’t once look back, but as they slid and scrambled down another slope, disappearing into the dark gully of the forest below, he heard a single sharp shot and a woman started to shriek.

  His mother had fits. He wondered if that was what had happened, whether it was something hereditary. He remembered her on the kitchen floor, her whole body convulsing as if it was rejecting who she was. Everyone dashing around. Max crying. Cedar had retreated into his basket and was shaking, while in the hallway Agatha, who had only popped in for clematis clippings, was hollering up the stairs for Owen’s father to come and be quick. And all the time Owen had stood there in the kitchen doorway, staring. His father came, pushing past, syringe in hand, for this had happened many times before and, of course, in the end everything was fine. His lasting memory was of his mother apologizing over and over again – as was her way after every episode – for the thing she had no recollection of happening, the trauma she had no memory of putting them all through.

  He woke to voices and flashlights. He was lying on his side among rubble on the floor of a large concrete bunker, his back to the wall where there were six square holes along its length and the lights were shining in. The concrete beneath him felt hard and frozen, and his hand was gripping a round piece of metal – a button or a badge. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. Nothing looked familiar.

  He listened to the voices, three of them: male and hushed and German. He could hear the soft crunch of their feet, and sense the grass and trees around them. The torchlight shone right over him, lying undetected and pressed against the wall, the side of his face on the cold grit floor. Their footsteps came closer until they were right outside, two then three lights shining in, their beams dancing over the back wall and sweeping across the floor and all its moonscape litter.

  He quietly lifted his head. There was a boy standing motionless behind the entrance. Owen could just about make out the shape of a flick knife in his hand. He held one finger to his lip to Owen. A Don’t move, don’t make a sound.

  Outside, there seemed to be some disagreement – perhaps whether to come in or just leave it. Owen held his breath. He could feel a cramp entering his foot and the sharp bits of concrete beneath him burrowing into his side. The lights swept about the room again, over the rubble and animal droppings, and the rotting carcass of a half-eaten fish, its bones lifting out in a fan. One of the beams passed over an abandoned bag on the floor, a red painted symbol on it, but with its dusty colour among the rubble, the torchlight did not stall. The lights swept out again and he heard the men retreating, their mumbled conversations soon lost within the forest, until eventually they were gone and all he could see was the moonlit whites of the boy’s staring eyes.

  JANEK

  The face fused into clarity and then came the recognition, but the boy’s name was lost.

  ‘Půjdem!’

  He kicked the bottom of Owen’s foot and Owen propped himself up.

  It took a while before he could place where he was. He had barely slept and had spent most of the night watching the shallow mass of the boy laid out on the floor, listening to his breathing. Outside the new day was just hatching, a dim bluish grey filling the empty frames along the concrete wall.

  Janek – the name came back to him – swung his bag over his shoulder.

  ‘Půjdem!’ he said again, getting impatient. Then he huffed and walked out into the morning, and Owen
could hear him traipsing away through the forest before he yelled, ‘Proboha, jdeme!’

  Owen struggled up, trying to tread the numbness from his feet, and uncurling his fingers from around the strange button that he had found clasped in his hand when he woke. A large symbol was on the back wall, drawn in charcoal – a flattened ‘V’, like wings in flight, with another, smaller like an arrowhead, directly underneath, and all framed within a square. He stared at it. Had it been there before? He checked his pockets – pistol, paper, button, map – and stepped out into the dawn.

  They walked all day, skirting hamlets and farmsteads, clinging to the woods. Now that they’d crossed the border, the boy was anxious that they weren’t seen.

  ‘Honem! Honem!’ he called, urging Owen on, the map held at arm’s length in front of him, as if even the vague trails he led them down were thinly sketched within its folds.

  The going was hard, the ground uneven. Owen could feel his blisters rubbing, and his calves stung, as did his thighs. The invisible pain beneath his ribs bit with every step. As they walked his mind drifted, looking for Max in the wheat fields, either as a boy, the lingering memory still playing out, or as a man striding through the crop towards him, not a delivery but a collection.

  Oh, bloody hell, he’d say. There you are. Mother’s going spare.

  He wondered where Max was. He wished for him to suddenly appear on his motorbike or in his Austin 12/14 with the roof down. Hop in. We’re going home.

  He pulled out the piece of paper: SAGAN. He needed to get to Sagan. He had no idea why, but the more he said the name, rolling it around in his head, the more familiar and urgent it had become. He did know it. He had always known it. It could be no coincidence that it was there in his head and circled on the map, drawing his eye to it again and again as if no other place mattered. When he got to Sagan it would all make sense. Something or someone would be there for him. It was this that was pulling him on.

  He looked at the writing. Beneath his sweating fingers the pencil letters were starting to smudge. If he lost the paper or what was written on it there would be nothing for him to cling to but the vagaries in his head; and if his memories went, maybe he would go with them, all the particles of who he was being lifted from him one by one until, with a single puff of wind, he would be blown away like dust across the field.

  Then another name fell through his thoughts like a stone – something he had been straining for – and he tried to grab it but was too late.

  When are you going to get yourself a girl? Max was always teasing. But there had been someone. Not a Margaret or a Ruth or a Charlotte or a Hetty. They had been Max’s. And not Suzie Sue – a name that kept coming to him; a girl so beautiful that they had named her twice.

  He watched the misshapen silhouette of the boy up ahead against the midday sun, his long gait and the water canister banging against his hip. Across a far barley field to the right he glimpsed a woman carrying bags and ushering two small children along. The smallest kept stopping to pick things up out of the soil and Owen could hear the mother’s distant voice.

  ‘Matouši! Pojd’!’ She grabbed at the child’s wrist and hurriedly began to drag him as the boy started to cry.

  Walking, he sometimes thought it was the back of another that he was seeing in front of him, not Janek. He had stared at the same back for hours on that walk – from where and to where he was still unsure – but the jacket was quite clear now. It had been heavy grey wool that attracted the snow much like the others did – seeping in through the outer material, the clothing and then the skin. He remembered the thickness of the arms, the scuffed right elbow, the man’s narrow body lost somewhere within the folds, the way the back of the collar was fraying, the glimpse of threads hanging from beneath the man’s tightly wrapped scarf.

  The name was gone but he had known it once. There were others in his head – Barnes, Budgie, Peri, Smithy – but none of them seemed to fit. The memory of the back of the man’s coat remained quite clear though, even the points in it where the creases came and went, as if it had formed a union with the man within it, so that if clothes had muscle memory you could have taken this man out of them and they would still have walked through the snow without him, those trousers and those shoes, but most of all that jacket. Its arms would swing this way and that; the same creases would come and go.

  They rested in a copse of chopped trees, dozens and dozens each taken down to a stump so that it looked like a crop of seats. A few stumps away Janek puffed on a cigarette, the smell of the smoke bringing back memories of Max. Owen had no idea where the cigarette had come from.

  After a few minutes Janek wandered across to the edge of the field and draped himself over the fence, still sucking on the cigarette, while Owen poked around with the watch, the air where Janek had sat infused with the tang of tobacco. He wondered if he could mend it. He had managed to prise the back off. Inside, the springs and wheels stood stationary. He gave each a gentle nudge with the blunt tip of the pencil but nothing wanted to move. He took the watch to pieces and emptied all its cogs and coils and tiny screws into his hand. Now though, scattered out across his palm, none of the parts seemed to bear any correlation to the others. He poked at one or two of them with his fingernail, uncertain even what they were. If he could navigate his way around anything as complex as an instrument panel, he could navigate his way around something as simple as a watch.

  Even as a child he had taken things to pieces – clocks, wirelesses, gearboxes and carburettors – and then tried to rebuild them, only better. He liked to see how things worked, the design and construction – even of a living creature. He had dissected a frog once, all on his own. He had pinned it to a slab of wood while it was still alive and then had been disappointed when, the moment he had nervously cut it open, it had promptly died. He had so wanted to watch its tiny pumping heart.

  Janek wandered back, pinging his cigarette stub into the grass and then stepping up on to one of the stumps, and then from that on to another and to another, having to jump sometimes, barely crossing the gap. He suddenly appeared on the same stump as Owen, behind him, his toe kicking at Owen’s backside. He peered over Owen’s shoulder at what he was doing before leaping off on to the next.

  Owen turned back to the task in hand. These were the sorts of things he had liked to draw: cogs and wheels, the workings of a watch, every mechanical piece like a biological organ, pumping life into the machine. At his board in the Experimental Drawing Office on Canbury Park Road he had drawn the workings of aeroplanes, knowledgeable of their thermodynamics, and detailing everything to the peak of precision. We’ll be designing bombers before long, Harry had said, although Owen had no recollection of that.

  On warm days like this on the second floor of the old furniture depository he would often open the sash pane beside him, using a spare shoe as a wedge to keep the window open. The smell of the rail tracks on the other side would waft in or the fumes from the Experimental workshop, or sometimes, when the wind was right, the smell of Mr Birch’s Fish and Chips.

  He had enjoyed the neat orderliness of his craft – the careful angles and finely drawn lines, the precision of his calculations – and also the grace and beauty of his work, as if it were not just a plane he was creating on the clean crispness of the paper, but a bird of human design. He was the creator: its wings envisaged and crafted by him, the almost feminine nose, the taut tail at the back, the mechanics of its aviation, so that sometimes if you glanced up at the sky it was hard to distinguish the organic from the mechanical. That, at least, was his aspiration as he hunched over the drawing board, the window propped open and the high jinks of the factory shop boys drifting in from below.

  The sound of a plane over them, its metal skin glinting in the sun, brought him back. He couldn’t be here because he was a draughtsman. He felt the boy’s eyes on him. There must have been something else.

  By late afternoon the deciduous trees had given way to pine, the forest growing airy and the trunks rising ove
r them, naked and tall. Beneath them the ground was carpeted in spongy moss as if the forest floor had been bubbling, and was covered in needles and a scattering of ferns and gangly saplings. Birds bickered above them and there was a pattering of distant gunfire and then a boom so deep that it throbbed within the ground.

  He watched the boy hurriedly tramping on ahead. He had shown Owen on the map how close he thought they were. Up ahead he bent to pick something from the curling branches of a fern and held it up, saying something. It was a grey woollen mitten. And twenty minutes later, by chance, he found its pair.

  They cut across two railway tracks and continued through the trees, the boy now walking with his hands in the mittens and snapping at midges as if he had lobster claws. As the dying sun burst through the lofty heads, it threw corridors of light through the forest and turned the trunks metallic: silver, copper and brass. Janek then found a woollen hat in some nettles and hooked it out with a stick. It made Owen think of a man he’d once seen lying face down in the snow.

  It was this increasing light that was the first sign. The edge of the forest, he had thought, or a clearing, or another railway line. Then, through the pines, he spied a watchtower high on its bandy-legged perch. He dropped down and held still.

  ‘Janek, get down,’ he hissed.

  The watchtower seemed to be empty but it wasn’t that that was making his heart quicken. He edged forward through the trees, his eyes searching for any movement and scanning for guards as they both crept closer. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was where three days’ journey had taken him; this was the Sagan that had been written and twice circled on a scrap of paper, the pull that he’d felt in the pit of his stomach, the only spot on the map that had caught his eye and kept luring it back. He remembered the III. He saw what it meant now. He scrambled closer and lay down.

  ‘Pane bože . . .’ Janek said under his breath behind him, who had probably seen nothing like it, but Owen had. Like a key clicking open a lock, the memory suddenly opened, his mind foretelling everything that he saw the split second before he saw it – the shapes of the buildings, the long huts with shallow roofs and high, wired fencing and double set of gates, the second and third sentry posts; sight and memory compounding in a fused moment of connection.