by Jason Hewitt
I’ve been here, he realized. My God. But how could it be so familiar? He felt the undeniable sensation that he had stood on that other side of the wire, that he had stared out through it to where he stood now to see – yes, he thought, glancing behind him – this view, this vista, this very same forest. Yet, staring through the fence and along the stretch of compounds, the rows of single-storey barracks and then up at the lookout post, something had changed. He kept expecting to see movement, to hear voices, maybe even shots being fired at them, but wherever he looked there was nothing. Not the sight of a single soul.
They nervously walked the fringes of the camp, eyes alert and ears pricked, but within it the barracks stood like wooden husks. The only movement Owen could see was a loose sheet of paper in the dirt occasionally lifting in the breeze. Two high perimeter fences spanned the length, both with a barbed wire overhang at the top that tipped inwards. Between the fences were tangles of wire, and then, another thirty or so feet in, a taut line of wire fixed a couple of feet above the ground that he wanted to call ‘the ditch’. There were empty guard towers at each corner and every hundred yards in between. Some of the windows were still in place, while around one, smashed glass lay among the bandy legs, pressed into the dirt.
The gates had been forced open and they squeezed through the gap. Owen walked with the pistol held ready in his hand, Janek with his knife, both expecting at any moment to be ambushed. As they cautiously crept through the compound there were dozens of familiar-looking barracks, each raised a little off the ground for the ferrets to poke around beneath. He knew the kitchens, the theatre, the bathrooms where there had been metal tubs for sinks and soap that never lathered. And yet how or why or for how long he had been here he was still unsure.
He stopped at an intersection where the ground was compacted hard by footfall, and felt the hot surge of panic burning out from his collar and sweeping across his head. The buildings so oddly familiar now spread as far as the eye could see, all desolate and empty and yet full in his mind with ghosts.
‘There’s no one here.’
‘Hm, nikdo,’ said Janek, nodding.
The air was filled with the faint smell of kerosene.
In time, he would describe it as a cloud lifting to reveal a landscape that secretly his mind had always known was there. The longer he stood between the barracks with their blinking windows, his reflection captured for him within every glass, the more he saw and knew: the stumps where trees had been felled to clear more space; the two shallow steps up to each barrack; the one step that was broken and had, he saw now, never been fixed; the double-fronted windows; the shutters at each frame hooked open, one or two of the catches snapped so that they groaned on their hinges. Even the old split barrel was there that they had pelted a ball against. And there was the boy watching him. He could so easily have been one of the others, strangely returned, just like Owen.
They walked through it like sole survivors, Janek staring in through one window after another, rubbing the dirt off with his sleeve or knocking in the broken teeth of glass with the butt of his knife. One of the huts had been burnt to the ground and was now nothing but charred timber. In another they found a pile of empty food containers, and in another loose faeces that were fresh and looked human.
When they reached Hut 105, the door was open as if it was already summer. The place, like the others, had been turned over: bits of burnt wood, discarded books and an overturned pot of nails that were hard beneath their feet. Janek picked a magazine out from the debris, the pages one by one curling away from his fingers.
Owen had been in the end room. Teddy Williams, the son of an artist, had bunked above him. He lifted the stained and shallow mattress, and then Teddy’s too, seeing, as he knew he would, that each bunk was missing a plank. They had taken one out of each to craft wickets and cricket bats from.
It was then, staring at the bunks, that he realized that his head was hurting and it had been for some time, as if he were being cracked and prised open. Names came tumbling in and, with them, faces: Joe Hallam, Guy Fletcher, ‘Bugsy’, Moe, Mitch Hamble . . .
He unlatched the window and hurriedly pushed it open, leaning out into the empty compound, trying to breathe, his eyes welling. As he felt Janek’s hand on his shoulder he was hit by a sudden flash of images. He thought he was going to be sick.
They found him scuffling around at the back of one of the barracks on the west side of the camp. All the shutters were closed and, with no more than the finest cuts of light breaking in, he was hardly visible, shuffling about in the gloom like a troglodyte among the desks and upturned filing cabinets. He was bent double, gathering scattered papers from the floor with long bony fingers and murmuring to himself as he held them, pinned to his chest as if they were precious to him.
Without straightening he turned to look at them and, as he took a step into the light, they saw that he was a small-framed man in uniform with round-rimmed glasses. He stared, the untidy pile of papers slipping from his grip until a couple of sheets fell carelessly about his feet.
They held still in the doorway and Owen fumbled for his pistol, thinking for the first time that he might not have shot anyone after all and now, of all times, might find himself incapable.
From behind his thick lenses the little man blinked and darted his eyes about the room. What once must have been a smart uniform was now dirty and sodden. The wire spectacles had been bent and reshaped many times. His hair was short with a once neat parting still greased into place and flecked with debris, and his jowls bristled with stubble. A man gone to the dogs, Owen’s father would have grumbled, who had come across such creatures in his hospital work; tramps and vagabonds and general no-gooders, he had said.
‘What do you know about this place?’ said Owen.
The man seemed surprised by the question.
‘Do you speak English?’
He nodded.
‘Who are you?’
‘No one,’ the man said.
Janek stiffened. The man’s English was articulate but his accent was German.
‘What are you doing here then?’ said Owen.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked back.
Owen hesitated. ‘Looking for someone.’
‘Who?’
He paused then motioned with his head to Janek. ‘His brother.’
The man’s eyes flicked across and back again.
There was a click as Owen lifted the safety catch on his pistol. ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘What everyone is,’ he said. ‘Hiding.’
‘What do you mean?’
The man poked the glasses further up his nose with his finger, the other hand still clutching the papers to his chest.
‘A reckoning is coming,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
The man didn’t answer. Instead he hesitantly bent his knees, lowering himself, his eyes never straying from them, until his outstretched fingers could blindly reach around his ankles for the renegade sheets and gather them up into his pile.
‘What are they, anyway?’ said Owen.
‘They are nothing.’
Janek moved forward and the man hastily retreated further into the shadows, stumbling over the broken bits of furniture in the dark. Then, as Janek went to snatch one of the papers from him, the man abruptly darted, dodging Janek’s hand and slamming Owen hard against the wall as he ran past them and out.
‘Bloody hell!’
‘Prase nacistický!’ Janek started after him, but the man was already gone, papers fluttering in his wake.
‘Don’t,’ said Owen, calling him back. ‘Leave him.’
He pushed himself away from the wall and caught his breath, then picked up the dropped pistol and one of the discarded papers. He pushed open one of the shutters so that the light fell in. It looked like a registration form: boxes completed in neatly printed German and attached on the top left-hand corner was a photograph of a man. He was holding up a card that bore the n
umbers 5792. Owen scanned the form. There were recognizable English words scattered among the German: place names and family names, an address in Dorset. He stared at the face in the photograph – a man with oiled hair and a cleft in his chin. He was wearing an RAF jacket.
He leant against a porch rail and looked out at a vegetable patch kicked to smithereens, at the swallows looping over the field beyond, and the distant firs bristling in the breeze. On the post beside him was that same symbol that had appeared in the concrete store – the two ‘V’s forming wings and a head enclosed in a square. He wondered how it had got there and when he ran his fingertip lightly over the scratches, it felt like it had been freshly cut, the wood still hard and dry.
He turned his attention back to the garden. For a while he watched wind chimes made from cut tins gently spinning on an apple branch, God’s last glints of light running down them like melted silver. He tried to cling to the memories that had come to him in the camp. If he could keep playing them in his head, turning them over and over, maybe they would crystallize and then they would be safe.
He wrote down everything he remembered: Joe Hallam, Guy Fletcher, ‘Bugsy’, Moe, and Teddy Williams – faces that had come back to him and that he could see now in his mind.
HUT 105
RUSSIANS – GERMAN BORDER
BRITISH RAF
He paused and circled it, then added a question mark. He had been quite convinced that Max would be there, that they had been together, but now he couldn’t place him there.
He closed his eyes and tried to think, but whatever else he’d remembered of the day had already slipped from his mind.
In the cellar Janek had discovered a well-stocked food store – the previous incumbents of the house had clearly left in a hurry – and as they ate from the tins, Owen laid the scraps of map out in front of the fire, trying to piece together a route. Granted the boy had navigated them here but the fields and woods were a hard slog. They should find a road and hold their nerve. Keep their head down and make for a town. He was a British citizen, after all. He would hand himself in to the first official and be done with it. The boy – well, he was free to do as he liked.
He scanned the map, hunting out roads, then circled Cottbus several miles to the west. It was a start. He wrote it on the paper. There were railway lines too, leading from Sagan, some heading west, others south. His finger followed them down into Czechoslovakia, pausing at every point where they crossed a river. He had been at one of these spots, he thought – a collapsed bridge. He wondered which of these rivers he had walked along, which railway line out of all these threads was now broken and out of use.
He remembered a man, Uncle Archie, coming one afternoon in a smart black Bugatti. He had given Owen his driving goggles to wear as they lounged about in the drawing room. The whole summer had been a washout and so, to brighten up an otherwise damp and disappointing day, he had entertained them with tales of his daredevil deeds and near scrapes as a fighter pilot, making the sound effects of the FE2 as it dived, and pumping his arms as if they were guns. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
Don’t believe a word of it, their mother had said. Your uncle’s a perennial liar. If you’re not careful, he’ll be telling you next the pope was his co-pilot.
Wingman, actually, sis, Uncle Archie had said. Douglas Fairbanks was my co-pilot – as you damn well know.
Strange how memories were breaking through as if he’d slipped under ice and now there were patches of it starting to melt so he could see snippets of the life he’d once had on the surface. Just when he thought his memory was improving, just when he thought he could retain the events of a day, something always disappeared in turn. Such as where the pistol had come from, or the button or the map or the worn-out shoes he was wearing. It was this circular churn of losing and finding and losing that he found hardest to comprehend. It was as if everything was stored in his head; he just didn’t have the light with which to see it all at once.
It was getting cold and Owen poked at the fire. Janek was sitting on the window seat cleaning the dirt from his fingernails with the tip of his knife. Owen still didn’t understand why the boy was with him but he was too nervous now to ask. Janek said that they were bratři, which Owen took as ‘brothers’.
‘You and me?’
‘Ano. And Petr.’
Ah, yes, Petr.
Then, slipping the blade away and slithering from the seat, Janek brought his bag over and sat on the floor beside Owen in front of the fire. He unbuckled a pocket and pulled out a wallet. It was battered and empty but for a handful of photographs, each folded twice.
He handed Owen a grainy black and white photograph and pointed. The man staring back appeared to be quite a few years older than Janek, and stood proud and handsome in a soldier’s uniform. He looked dignified and bear-like, not gangly like his brother, with dark hair, his chest puffed and thumb hooked and heavy in his pocket. He had the same sharp jawline as Janek, the same slender nose and intense deep-set eyes that seemed to stare the cameraman down through the lens.
‘Good man,’ said Janek. He thumped his chest and Owen wondered whether he had meant ‘strong’ or ‘loyal’, or maybe even ‘brave’.
‘He’s a fine-looking chap.’
‘Yes.’
‘And he is in Germany? Deutschland?’
Janek nodded.
‘How do you know?’
‘They take him.’
‘The Deutschen?’
He nodded.
‘Where?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Deutschland.’ He gave Owen a look as if to say, where else? ‘I look for Petr. We look. Yes?’
‘Well . . .’
‘You and me. Two lives. Yes?’
He had no idea what the boy was getting at. ‘Yes, of course, but do you understand, I need to get home?’
He passed the photograph back, but Janek seemed to have misunderstood.
‘Good. Brothers,’ he said.
‘No, I didn’t mean that,’ said Owen, but the boy had already pulled out another photograph and handed it to Owen.
This one was a man and woman sitting together with straight backs, both of them grey-haired and plump in their Sunday finest.
‘Moje matka. A můj otec,’ he said, pointing. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes,’ said Owen. ‘I see.’
In the photograph they were holding each other’s hands, the man’s focus fixed on the camera, professional and businesslike, unlike his wife who looked awkward and distracted, glancing from the corner of her eye at something that was happening out of shot. Again the same nose, there in the father. His mother had a larger-boned build. Owen nodded and tried to hand the photograph over but Janek shoved it back.
‘No. Look. You look.’
‘Yes. I’ve seen. They must be proud.’
‘Podívejte se!’ he said.
Then he snatched the photograph away and pushed it back into the wallet. For some reason Owen had irritated him, and with a slight scowl on his face, Janek fingered through the photographs and then handed Owen another.
A boy and a girl, both five or six years old and dressed in smart summer clothes. The girl was sitting on a doorstep, pulling her dress over her knees, while the boy, grinning toothily, stood in the doorway behind her, savagely brandishing a stick.
‘Is that you?’ Owen asked with a faint smile.
‘Lukáš,’ said Janek. He pointed at the girl. ‘And Nicol.’
‘And where are they now? With your parents?’
The boy said nothing, his eyes starting to moisten. He carefully tucked the photograph away and then pulled out the last. He sat quite still and stared at it, his hand shaking, and then before Owen had a chance to see, the boy had screwed it up and flung it into the fire. He slapped the wallet shut and firmly set it down.
‘Who was that?’ Owen asked.
Through the flames, he could just about make out the crumpled face of a girl, older than Janek but younger than Petr. The picture started to curl and wither,
the flames slowly taking it.
‘Kateřina,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘Kateřina is . . .’ He didn’t know.
‘Your sister?’ Owen guessed.
Janek paused, thinking. Then the word came to him.
‘Traitor,’ he said.
They moved westward, leaving the Silesian forests behind, crossing fields, spinneys and wastelands, and skirting the villages and farmsteads wherever they could, the landscape flattening as they went.
The road they eventually joined was strewn with a ragged trail of people, some heading north as they were, but most passing them in the other direction, hurrying south. The warm air quivered with a shared urgency, mothers steering children along, their hands lightly on their backs; while the few men they passed looked old and weathered, their beady eyes full of suspicion. Occasionally there were even German soldiers, making a weary scramble, some of them so tired it seemed that they could barely hold their rifles.
If the English or the Americans were coming, or even the Russians from the east, it was only a matter of time before they happened upon them, he told Janek.
‘And then we will find your brother, and mine too; and they will get us home.’
In the distance a figure sat on the side of the road, the warm sun so bright that in the gentle heat she shimmered as if she were barely there at all. As the road brought them closer, he watched her offer the passing travellers the bundle she was carrying, presenting it in outstretched arms from the verge, but nobody seemed to want it.
Two men passed, one hauling a trolley piled with sacks and a small dog curled on top like a turd, and after that a lone woman. Once again the figure proffered the bundle. There was a short and clipped conversation, and the girl, for he now saw how young she was, called out to the woman – ‘Nein!’ and then ‘Bitte!’ – as the woman walked on but, like the others, she would not stop.