Devastation Road

by Jason Hewitt

  Every time he saw her with Max he burned; and with every snatched kiss, in the shadowy corners of his parents’ house, he felt a tiny bit of him break off and go to hell.

  It had to stop.

  We need to stop this.

  I know, she said.

  But they didn’t.

  Irena – or the girl he had thought of as Irena – stood at the small window of Martha’s office staring out at the empty sky, her gaze somewhere over the barrack rooftops, and her bony hand resting lightly on the sill. She had said that she would not talk to Martha, only Owen, and yet they had been there for fifteen minutes now and she had not said a word.

  He sat looking at her, waiting. Her eyes kept filling but she would not cry.

  When the real Irena Borkowski had given Martha her details, and then the information had been confirmed, Martha had realized the deception.

  Owen felt angry, cheated by this girl yet again. All these lies, he had told her. I don’t know who you are.

  It made no sense. The strangeness he had woken to all those days before never seemed to clear, it just tangled tighter around him. He was so tired of it. Take him to a field now and he would lie there and shut his eyes. He would let the grass grow over him and slowly pull him under the earth.

  Eventually she spoke, not turning to look at him but keeping her eyes locked on the sky outside, wisps of cloud seeming to judder within the pane of glass as below them another truck thundered through the dirt.

  ‘When this is all over,’ she said, ‘for years after this, everyone will say how awful we were. That is what they will remember. That is what they will say. But I am ruined too. I am as ruined as they are. I have no home. I have no family either. I have lost all of that too. But I do not have the – how do you say? – the luxury of being the victim, of being the ones that everyone now will give to, or feel sorry for, or pity, or love. I see this now. I see it here. In this place. In all this. And all I have is the shame of my people. That is all I am left with.’ She turned and looked at him. ‘Do you understand? Right now, it is better to be anything but German.’

  ‘You shaved your head so you could be like them.’

  ‘I did what I had to do. People will feed you then,’ she said. ‘They will give you clothes, water. It’s true.’

  ‘So this Irena Borkowski – the real one – who is she?’

  ‘She was a domestic servant,’ she said. ‘A cook. Krzysztof Krakowski – he was my mother’s gardener. They had both been brought by my father from Poland to work for my family in Hoyerswerda. When the war started we were only allowed to keep them because my father was well respected in the Wehrmacht. They made concessions for him. He fought in Russia, you know. And then when that didn’t work any more and my father had disappeared, my mother would pay the SS off, so that we could keep them and keep them safe.’

  ‘And this Krzysztof chap, he raped you?’

  She nodded. ‘I have not lied about everything. And what he did, it was not revenge for anything, if that is what you think. Before the war we were friendly. He was young, I was young, but feelings like that soon became impossible. My mother was suspicious. The war was getting bigger. The Jewish Poles in Germany were being taken and my mother couldn’t keep paying the SS off. It was only time before something would happen, I suppose: a different SS officer, one that could not be bribed; or we would run out of money; or someone would do something stupid. He wanted me to help him and I would not. I could not help him like he wanted me to. He kept saying that he wanted me to marry him, that I could protect him, but how could I? Everyone knew that sort of thing was not allowed, but he never saw sense. We fought about it. Then one night he got drunk, very drunk and angry with me about it and . . . well . . .’

  ‘That’s when it happened?’

  ‘That’s when it happened.’

  ‘And after?’

  ‘I don’t know whether my mother heard or if it was only by chance, but the next day he was taken. Irena too. I knew – or thought – I would not see them again. I stole her identity papers just before the van came.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I saw them on the table, that was all, and I was angry with them – with them both. I was seventeen. Still a child. I didn’t know what I was thinking.’

  ‘So you took them. And then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘for a while. Then my mother was taken as well. She had been listening to your British broadcasts. She thought our news people were not telling the truth about what was happening on the eastern front. She was worried about my father so she would listen to your BBC, hoping to get something of the truth. Then a neighbour told the SS. She’d had the volume up too loud or perhaps someone had told them about the bribes. I don’t know. Anyway, they came and they took her, just like they took all the rest. And that was that.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I was pregnant. They left me alone in the house to fend for myself. Then when it was clear that the war would be over soon and Germany was ruined, there was talk of Russians advancing, that everyone was going to be raped and murdered, so I left too. Germans were being taken from the road and beaten to death. It was like hell.’

  ‘And is that when you took Irena’s name?’

  She nodded. ‘I told you. My mother was a language teacher. We spent some years in Poland. Before the war my father was a site manager at a German shoe factory near Posen. My mother taught German to the Poles in the offices, and Polish to the Germans living there, like us. It was useful. She was useful. It was her that got my father the job in the first place. She knew Herr Blumenthal. Anyway, I realized I could pass for a Jew if I had to. I still had Irena’s papers. She was older than me but she has a young face. With my head shaved no one would know any different.’

  ‘You didn’t think someone might question it?’

  ‘You have seen it,’ she said. ‘The chaos. You understand. I thought I would never see her again. I was certain she was dead.’

  ‘And what’s your name?’ said Owen. ‘Your real name.’

  ‘Anneliese,’ she said. ‘It is Anneliese Dreher.’

  ‘Does Janek know?’

  She shook her head.

  He stood up and came out from behind the desk. There wasn’t anything left to say. The girl turned back from the window. She was starting to sob now.

  ‘Please. You have to help me.’ Her hand was on his face. She was trying to stroke him, trying to kiss him. ‘I’ll do anything. You have to help me.’

  He pushed her off. ‘No. Come on, stop that.’

  She backed away against the wall, shaking her head vehemently. ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what they will do.’

  On a Sunday in early June 1943 – the last date he can fix in his mind with any certainty – she had driven him out to Wonersh in Max’s Austin. It had been an audacious act that perhaps he would never forgive himself for but with only a few hours’ leave left before he was transferred to Warboys – now his training was completed – they had done it anyway. The country lanes had been quiet and they had folded the roof down, Connie in her sunglasses and that familiar scarf rolled and knotted around her head.

  They strolled out through the fields of rape, their arms held up as if together they were wading into the sea, and in the field beyond they sat in the grass smoking a couple of Woodbines as a heron flew by on lolloping wings, low and languid over the stream. For a while they watched a bumblebee busying itself among the cotton grass. She was playing with a grey scrap of material she’d found snagged like wool on a fence, turning it around and around in her hand and holding it to her cheek with her fingertips as if she were positioning a patch that she was going to pin to her face.

  I’ve never understood how they manage to get off the ground, she said. For such a bulbous body they have such frightfully fragile wings.

  That was why bees and birds were so much stronger than us, he told her, and that was how da Vinci had come up with the idea for his ornit
hopter, and that if mankind were ever to find a way off the ground, it would need to employ the use of mechanics. And thank God for that. Otherwise, without the war, he wouldn’t have had a job. Da Vinci’s ornithopter was, he said, the closest thing to strapping yourself within the ribcage of a bird.

  Here was a girl who appreciated this, who had an inquisitiveness that was rare, he thought, in these days where planes were just expected to fly and no one questioned what it took to get 70,000 lbs of metal off the ground and moving. It wasn’t just power, he told her. It was a three-way love affair between aerodynamics, mechanics and art.

  Sydney Camm had said it himself: Aircraft design is an art and not a science.

  These are the things he remembered from that one afternoon in June, or perhaps many afternoons gathered before: the weight of her arm looped through his; the touch of her lips as she’d stretched to kiss him; how when he’d laid out on the grass, the side of his face pressed to it, she had danced and swung herself around, and all he could see was her feet and the swishing hemline of her skirt wafting by his face. Was that when he had sketched her, that very first time? Was that when she had said to him: Aren’t you going to give me a face?

  Long after they’d finished in fields and cafes and rented hotel bedrooms, their conversations would linger in his mind and bring with them secret smiles.

  How do you feel, she quizzed him once as they sat in bed, about me having a slight schoolgirl fancy on the late Amelia Earhart?

  I don’t much mind, he joked, as long as she’s still dead.

  And this, he announced on another day, holding his sketch to the hotel window so the sun bleached through, is the mechanics of a bee. Reconfigured – as you can see – in the style of the late da Vinci.

  They had laughed those days – in those few and fragile piecemeal hours when they could cocoon themselves away from the world, when there was him and her and no one else, and they could pretend that everything about them existed only in that room.

  Then, on that June day at Wonersh, as he’d helped her across the stream, she’d slipped and, grabbing his jacket, had pulled a button clean away. It dropped with a splash and had tumbled through the current some way before they had scooped it out with his cap.

  Oh no, she said, it’s your RAF jacket. If we don’t sew that back on, my God you’ll be in trouble.

  While he’d dozed in the grass, his cap drying on his knee, she sat with his jacket heaped in her lap and sewed the button back on. Only you and I will ever know, she said, and then she leant over him and he felt the warmth of her kiss.

  They didn’t know what to do with her. It had gone up through the ranks almost as far as the lieutenant colonel. She’d have to go, Hamilton speculated. They couldn’t house a German as if she was a Polish Jew. It was a displacement camp for victims of the Nazi regime, not a bloody hotel.

  ‘She is a victim,’ said Martha.

  ‘And you believe that?’

  ‘She was raped!’

  ‘That’s not under debate,’ argued Hamilton. ‘It’s whether we let a German stay or not, regardless of what’s happened to her.’

  ‘We had Germans imprisoned in the camp,’ Haynes pointed out. ‘Victims of persecution.’

  ‘Yes, people who had already been incarcerated here. And now we open the gates to everyone?’

  ‘We can’t shut people in or out,’ said Martha.

  ‘We’ll have half the nearby villagers turning up,’ said Hamilton, ‘wanting to be fed. And all because, in their eyes, we’ve pillaged their gardens, emptied their cupboards and stolen half of their clothes to care for Germany’s so-called victims, to compensate for the crimes carried out here that they’re now all claiming they know nothing about!’

  ‘They don’t come in though,’ said Haynes, ‘and there’s a very good reason for that. If they do they know what will happen. You only have to see what happened to the German nurses they sent. Their uniforms practically torn from their backs. They turned on them like bloody animals. I’ve never seen anything like it.

  ‘When we first liberated the camp,’ he told Owen, leaning in, ‘there were Russian and Polish prisoners hurling SS guards out of top-floor windows. One man was strung up and skinned. I mean, skinned. They want revenge, and I tell you, sometimes I want to do it myself, just for the sheer bloody awfulness of the things I’ve had to deal with here.’

  They had already needed to move her. Guppy the sapper had told Owen that they’d put her in a private room.

  Can’t have her lot with the Poles, he’d said. They’ll have her for sausages.

  ‘I mean, what does she want anyway?’ said Haynes. ‘She’s one in sixty thousand here so even the fact that we’re wasting time talking about her is winding me up. I don’t give a flying fig whether she comes or goes.’

  ‘Well, you should do,’ said Hamilton. ‘We’ll be setting up a precedent.’

  ‘I don’t think she knows what she wants,’ said Owen. It was the first time he’d dared to speak. They’d been debating it for half an hour and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. ‘I don’t think she’s capable of thinking straight at the moment.’

  ‘Well, she’s not alone there,’ grumbled Haynes. ‘I can’t think straight here either. It’s bloody impossible.’

  ‘And we need to consider the kid,’ said Martha.

  ‘Well, that’s easy,’ said Hamilton. ‘They’ll just take it off her.’

  ‘Why the hell would they do that?’

  ‘We must have lists of orphanages,’ Hamilton said. ‘She’s not fit, is she? She’s not a fit mother.’

  And so the conversation went. Owen felt that he had nothing to offer. He didn’t know the systems or the procedures, or the paperwork that needed to be dealt with. The only thing that seemed to be evident was that no one particularly wanted the issue to take up much time. As Haynes had pointed out, she was only one in sixty thousand.

  The Czechs were being prepared for the trucks arriving the following day. They would be driven to Celle where trains would be waiting for them to return them home. Each deportee had to be registered, carefully printed SHAEF cards filled in, one copy of each sent to the destination reception centre, the others held in Germany. Janek was processed along with the rest. This time tomorrow he would be on his way home, but still nothing had been unearthed of Petr.

  Outside Janek’s block there were now Czech flags hanging from several of the windows, one or two daubed with the familiar marks. Owen passed the old man on the step outside, politely greeting him, and then ran up the four flights of stairs. He didn’t expect Janek to be there but he had the watch anyway. Perhaps he could slip it into the boy’s bag for him to find later. It would make Janek smile.

  As he ran up, voices echoed – boys of Janek’s age and younger dispersing down the stairs, alive with their strange chatter. Their sense of excitement was hardly surprising, he thought, as he let them clatter past. They would soon be going home.

  Janek was sitting cross-legged on his bed, struggling to fix a brooch, trying to bend the clasp back into position with his fingernails and then his teeth. Two other boys whom Owen recognized as the ones who had been kicking a can about amid their parade out of the camp that morning sat around on the floor among a litter of items: kitchen utensils, boxes of chocolates, empty rucksacks, photograph frames, various Nazi memorabilia, and what looked like a musical box. One had a pile of clothes on his lap. He lifted one up and shook it out – a ripped Nazi jacket. He poked his finger through a bullet hole and wiggled it like a worm, and the three of them laughed. It was only then that they saw Owen.

  ‘May I come in?’ he said.

  The one with a pile of trinkets around his feet hurriedly gathered them up, shoving them into a bag. Janek and the other boy stared.

  He walked nervously into the room, three sets of eyes following him.

  In among the clutter, something that resembled a campaign headquarters had been set up. On the wall above Janek’s bed he had stuck all the newspaper articles tha
t Owen had found in his bag – pictures of Petr caught in the crush of a demonstration or a riot or a protest, sometimes with his fist in the air, but always he was there in the thick of it. Beside the clippings, the scraps of map that had once been Owen’s had also been stuck up and pieced together. The name Sagan circled and clinging to the edge, and other names circled now too – dotted across the whole of Germany and elsewhere – that he couldn’t quite make out.

  ‘Looks like someone’s been busy,’ he said. He wondered what they were playing at.

  As his eyes took in the rest of the room with a growing sense of unease, he noticed maps scattered across a desk, piles of sticks thick as wrists, more flags – some draped over the back of a chair, others hung from a line pinned across the room, drying where Janek’s bird had been newly painted. There were empty bottles and scraps of cloth too and, to his horror, even a rifle kicked under a bed, gun cartridges scattered carelessly across the floor.

  He motioned at the bed – ‘May I?’ – and then sat down at the foot of it anyway. Janek carried on what he was doing, his elbow sticking out at an awkward angle as he struggled to fix the clasp.

  ‘Do you want me to have a look?’ Owen said, offering his hand.

  ‘No!’ Janek held the piece of jewellery closer to him. He didn’t want Owen touching it.

  The two boys sitting on the floor watched him with suspicion. They were about the same age, Owen thought, but thinner even than Janek, and yet somehow they had survived and now they too were fit enough for sending home.

  He took the watch from his pocket and dropped it on the bed.

  ‘I mended it for you,’ he said. ‘I thought you might like it.’ They had brought it all the way back from a pool in Czechoslovakia, after all. Everything would be mended, they had said, starting with a watch.

  Janek held his arm up so that the sleeve fell back to reveal another newer and cleaner watch already on his wrist. He carried on working.

  ‘Look, will you just take it?’ Owen said. He’d damn well mended it for him. He tried to force it into Janek’s hand. ‘I want you to have it.’ Grudgingly Janek took it and held it to his ear and then pushed it into his pocket, tossing the brooch on the floor.