Devastation Road (15 page)

‘I can’t imagine what my father would make of that,’ Owen told her.

‘Your father?’ She looked confused.

It came back to him, just as things sometimes did in the night – a memory wrapped within a dream or dream within a memory. He was walking down the corridors of a
hospital, his feet clipping the tiles as he tried to keep up with his father.

Our bodies are made up of bits and pieces
, his father was saying.
Most of the time everything works just fine. But sometimes something breaks and then it has to be mended. And if it
can’t be mended, well then, we take it out
.

Like a watch or a wireless or the workings of a motorcar.

Then Owen’s father was at an operating table, a throng of nurses around him trying to hold a man down, while Owen’s father shouted:
For God’s sake, he’s not an eel!
All I said was hold him
. And then with a bloody arm in his grip, his father started to saw, and despite the strap of leather in the man’s mouth, the poor wretch screamed and gagged as
the blade crunched through the bone.

Come on, come on then, if you’re going to look
, his father said. His head appeared for a moment from behind the others and he glared at Owen, a thin spattering of blood across his
mask.
I brought you here to watch,
he said,
not stand back there like a bloody plant pot
.

And then, between the legs of the nurses, the arm dropped into the bucket with a thud, but the fingers hooked over the rim as if the mechanism was still working and it would claw its way back
out.

As to what happened next, he was only aware of being lifted from the floor and his father saying:
That’s it. You had your chance. I’m not bringing you again
.

Looking around him at the road and surrounding fields, Owen felt as if he were seated instead in a glass box, nothing quite real, as if he weren’t there at all.

Perhaps I am not, he thought. Perhaps all of this is nothing but the final deluded imaginings of my dying brain. That is why so much is lost already. Every memory I have ever had will fall into
the darkness because, in truth, I am not here at all. I am in a hospital. I am in a field. I am at the side of a bus stop lying on the pavement and quite still, yet within this body I am sliding
under. I am sliding away.

‘What’s he said about his brother?’ he asked, striding to catch up with Irena. ‘Do you really think he’s in Germany? This Petr is a bit of a
mystery, don’t you think?’

‘He will want something,’ she said.

‘Petr?’

‘Janek. People who give help always want something.’

‘I don’t think it’s like that.’

She laughed. ‘Why do you think he is with you? With a war – especially with a war – everything must be paid for. Even help.’

‘I don’t see why we can’t just help each other,’ he said. ‘We’re all looking for someone. You, me, him, us. We’ll do it together, I suppose.’

‘Yes,’ said Irena, appeasing him with a sigh. ‘Yes, perhaps it is that.’

‘He shot a man in the hand,’ said Owen. This was something else that had been plaguing him. ‘Another Czech, I think. In the hand. I mean, why would you do that? If you really
had a grievance with someone, you’d shoot him dead, surely. I’ve seen him fire a gun.’ From the veranda of a house hitting the silver coils of a wind-chime. ‘I don’t
think he missed his mark.’

‘Maybe he wanted this man to remember. Dead men don’t remember so much. But alive . . .’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Every day this man will look at this hand,’ she explained, holding her own hand out in front of her, fingers splayed, ‘and he will see Janek’s face and he will remember
why it is ruined, why this boy shot him. Every day he will do this. Every day. Death is too good for some people. Don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Owen, feeling the softness of his own hand with his thumb, and then that twinge of pain again in his side, the wound that wasn’t there.

It came to him suddenly in a rush, as the memory of his father had not long before. On the road to Leipzig he stopped, the refugees streaming around him. He pressed his hands
over his face, his heart beating hard.

Hello soldier. Want a lift?

Yes. If he closed his eyes now he could see her: sitting beside Max in his brother’s Austin Eton, just as he had first encountered her, the curls of her short sun-bleached hair caught in a
rolled-up headscarf.

That smile. God, that smile.

Hello soldier. Want a lift?

I’m fine, thanks
, he’d said, or something like that.

Oh, don’t be so silly
, she had remarked.
Come on
. She reached out of the car to shake his hand.
Connie, by the way. Your brother’s useless
.

Christ
, Max had complained, lifting his sunglasses.
Give me a chance
. He introduced them properly.

Well, hello
. Then she said:
We can move the bags, can’t we, darling?

Of course
, said Max.
Look, for Heaven’s sake, O, will you just get in?

But Owen had been insistent. Better not, he thought.

Can’t you just jump in? Max, darling, tell him
.

But sometimes, as Owen had learnt at Hawkers, you needed to get a slide rule and draw yourself a firm, hard line.

Suit yourself
, said Max.
No dawdling though. I know what you’re like. He’ll be out here bloody hours, and I’m starving. Ma won’t want it getting
cold
.

The tyres skidded. They pulled off with a blast of the horn.

As the Austin Eton picked up speed, his stare fixed firmly on the back of her head.
Turn around
, he thought.
Turn around
.

Then just before the bottle green car vanished around the corner, she had done exactly that.

The Russians were at Schlieben and then Herzberg, it was said, and then Torgau, all the time getting closer, and then they were right in front of them, a dissolute group of them
loitering at the side of the road. Only as they got closer did he see through the crowd that they were taking women at random, one and then another, who screamed and fought as they were pulled from
the crowd and across the ditch through the hedge.

The soldiers looked forlorn and weathered, and wore padded cotton jackets that were stained and threadbare, dented helmets with a red star, and ankle boots and puttees – not at all the
sight of the unstoppable army that he had believed them to be. Some were swigging from flasks of wine, cheering each other on and laughing, teasing the women as they passed, and fiercely pushing
the men from the road if they tried to intervene.

As they drew closer Owen pulled Irena to the other side of him.

‘Help me block her,’ he said to Janek, tugging him into position. ‘And keep hold of the baby,’ he told her, thinking that they might be less inclined to take a woman with
an infant.

She kept her head down as they passed, as did the other refugees on the road, and their collective pace picked up as the tension thickened. His own beating heart wanted him to sprint, and he
could feel Janek beside him stiffening. Don’t let him do anything stupid, Owen thought.

Beside him, another girl – Dutch, he thought – was mumbling prayers under her breath.

Up ahead there was a tussle. Shouts. Another woman taken, a large-framed soldier picking her off her feet as she kicked and screamed, his mates on the side bent double and laughing, one of them
with a stolen Nazi jacket draped over his shoulders, all medals and badges.

Beyond the hedge, Owen caught a glimpse of someone breaking free. The figure made a run for it across the field and a gun went off, the sound like a slap against his ear.

His hand went instinctively to Irena’s elbow.

‘Come on,’ he said under his breath. ‘Hurry, and whatever you do, don’t look.’

They walked as long into the night as they could, putting as much distance as was possible between them and the Russian army, until in a field they eventually gathered,
hundreds peeling away from the road to settle for the night. They weren’t likely to be bombed any more, but in larger numbers they could withstand the attacks of robbers or lone renegades
still determined to take a few down with them to hell.

The night pulled in, the darkness lifting out of the ground and seeping up to fill the sky. Before long the field was a dark sea of burning lights, flames flickering everywhere from freshly lit
fires.

Janek wandered, showing people the photograph of Petr and trying to scavenge food or cigarettes from them. Owen’s eyes followed his silhouette as he drifted from group to group.

They kept the fire burning, poking at it occasionally with a shared stick, and the baby whimpered softly. For a while, though, they did not talk. Around them people were getting raucous: some
drunk, others high on nothing more than their freedom. Bottles were passed around and there was shouting and singing and a man playing a banjo made from a saucepan. The air was thick with ashy
smog.

He lay half propped against Janek’s bag and coat, while Irena jigged the baby who would not settle. On the back of a grubby German medical form that had blown across the field, he found
himself sketching. He filled the paper with the crude mechanics of the bodies around him, sitting at fires or standing about or dancing in front of the flames. For the first time in days –
weeks, maybe – he felt oddly at ease, as if there was comfort in doing something that he had always done, another muscle memory slotting into place with every soft and hard stroke of the
pencil on paper.

Why do you never put any flesh on them?
This was Connie, lying out in another field, on a different day entirely.

That was how he liked them though. It wasn’t the flesh or clothes that interested him, or what it was that made them human. It was the muscles inside, the joints, pulleys and pistons; the
shapes of an anatomy, how they fitted together and then came to life like the puzzle of a watch or a dissected frog or a plane. He liked that they never looked finished, the cross guidelines left
through them that helped give them their dimensions. Like the anatomical sketches of da Vinci or Michelangelo’s cartoons that he had seen in the National Gallery in London one summer.

She came back, in that moment. That first family lunch.

The whole afternoon, he remembered, had been unbearable: his father holding court from one end of the table and Max grinning from ear to ear at the other. Owen had purposefully positioned
himself where he wouldn’t have to look at her, but he couldn’t help himself. Every time he’d caught her eye through the silver arms of his mother’s prized candelabra, he
felt the collar of his starched shirt tighten around his throat.

Across the fire, Irena was holding her hand out.

‘I said, you English with your little sketches . . . Can I see?’

He muttered that they weren’t much of anything, but she insisted. ‘I knew you would draw me. If it is me you have to let me see. Come on.’

He reluctantly handed her the piece of paper, and for a while she stared at it.

‘At the top,’ he said, pointing.

Her gaze shifted and he watched her expression finally settle into a frown.

‘They have no faces,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Why you not give them faces? Hm.’ She handed the paper back.

‘I can’t really draw faces,’ he explained. ‘And I’m not interested in them anyway. It’s the body really—’

‘It is just shapes then,’ she said. ‘Without a face, what are we? A box. We can’t see out. You can’t see in. How do you see into someone’s ghost?’

‘You mean soul,’ he said.

‘I know what I mean.’

‘Anyway, they’re just sketches,’ he said, wishing now that he’d never started.

‘Well, you need to put faces on them.’

Irena sat down and poked again at the fire. The infant was getting fractious and she tried to feed him, but the child was upset and wriggling, simultaneously sucking and crying, so tired and
hungry that the poor thing didn’t know what to do with himself.

She swapped arms and tried the other breast, and the baby was silent for a moment but then started up again, his toothless mouth wet and furious and his hands in fists, batting at the air.

‘We need a proper meal,’ he said. ‘None of us can function like this. We need to push on tomorrow. We surely can’t be far from Leipzig now.’

‘I wish it was not here,’ she said.

‘The baby? Come on, you don’t mean that.’

‘I do. When I find its father I’m going to give it to him. I’m going to say, “Here. Here it is. Is this what you wanted?”’

‘You have no idea where he is then?’

She held him in her stare, the light from the flames burning orange across her face.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I told you. They took him to a camp. I don’t know where.’

‘But you are going to find him, for the sake of the child?’

‘It is not for the child,’ she said. ‘It is for me. I did not want it. He forced it on me. It is his child, I tell you. His child, not mine.’

It was an hour before Janek reappeared, swinging two bottles that he’d procured from somewhere and singing. He stumbled about the fire for a while, looking for his feet,
and then offered them the wine, both bottles already opened, half slugged and colouring his cheeks. He swayed for a moment more and then slumped down with an ‘
oeuf
’.

‘Good,’ she said, ‘you are staying.’ Then she laid the child in the grass in front of him and swiped a bottle from his flailing hand. ‘The Englishman and I are
going to find the biggest fire, aren’t we?’ she said to Owen, hauling him up by the arm. ‘And we are going to drink this, all of this, and dance, and I don’t
care.’

‘
Und was ist mit mir?
’ said Janek, slurring. He lolled on to his side.

‘You are in charge of baby,’ she said, and taking Owen by the arm, she led him out into the middle of the field where they did exactly as she had said.

Owen was awkward at first, everything she’d told him hanging heavy in his mind, but she seemed intent on forgetting. Every time he tried to speak she shushed him with a finger and thrust
the bottle into his hand, making him drink before she grabbed it back to take another swig from it herself. She was drunk in no time at all and before long, he too felt strangely careless and
happy. They sang and swung each other around, her arms pulling herself into him so that they staggered, laughing and tripping, with a hundred fires burning behind them. He could smell the cherry
wine on her breath; the smoke and sweat on her skin. And every word she had said was forgotten, lost within a warm fog.