Devastation Road (24 page)

In the quad, medical tents had been erected, people in various military and medical uniforms pottering about, oil drums, a charcoal burner, and a couple of women in striped peignoirs sitting on
a pile of straw mattresses drawing circles in the dirt.

Irena stood holding the baby tight to her, her gaze skittering about.

‘’Sall right,’ Martha told her. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be quite safe here.’

Janek stood, his hand to his nose and his eyes screwed up to the stench of sewage and the warm dust that filled the air.

Martha handed him two boxes from the back of the jeep. ‘Yep. It’s pretty vile but you’ll get used to it,’ she told him. Owen took the third. ‘And this is nothing
compared to the camps.’

‘This isn’t the camp?’ said Owen.

‘Hell, no. We’ve ten thousand in here and this is just the camp hospital.’

The entrance hall of the admin block was full of military personnel, nurses and doctors hurrying through doors, talking in the foyer or passing each other on the curling
staircase.
All hands to the pump
, his father would have said. Through partially open doors Owen could see small offices where uniformed men sat behind desks, talking on the telephone or
scribbling notes. He felt a strange tangling of relief and confusion, as if he had fallen into another world but taken half of what he knew with him and now, thrown together, neither of them made
sense. He had no idea where they were and yet everyone seemed to be English.

‘They’re all sorts, actually,’ Martha said. ‘But, yeah, English on the whole. I’m their token American. I reckon they got me down as a loose cannon.’

‘And are you?’

‘Oh, you have to be here,’ she said as her gaze scoured the hallway. ‘Otherwise, in my experience, nothing gets done. Oh, look! There he is. That’s Hamilton. He’s
with the military government.’

Hamilton was tall and neat, with a slightly hooked nose and a cap pulled over his eyes. He wore grey British battle-dress, and had a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other that he was
clicking furiously. He had the long face of a Dobermann, Owen thought.

‘Ah,’ Hamilton said, seeing Martha as he passed them and swinging around. ‘Jolly good. You’re back.’

‘Yes. And with your penicillin, I might add.’

‘Well done.’

He looked the four of them up and down.

‘This lot with you?’

Janek and Irena fidgeted nervously, Irena holding the baby tight to her as if at any moment someone hurrying past might try to whisk him out of her arms.

‘Yep,’ Martha said. ‘Picked them up on the way over. A present from my uncle.’

She made some quick introductions, but Hamilton seemed more concerned about whether they’d been dusted.

‘Dusted?’ said Irena. She looked terrified.

‘DDT,’ he said. ‘It’s regulation.’

‘Typhus,’ explained Martha. ‘Gotta dust you down. It won’t take a minute.’ She turned to Hamilton. ‘Owen here’s English.’

‘Oh?’ said Hamilton. ‘Right. God, you’re not with Barker’s lot, are you?’

‘No,’ said Owen. ‘I fell out of a plane.’

‘Oh, well, that’s one way of getting here, I suppose,’ he said, barely batting an eyelid. ‘Certainly beats trying to use the ruddy roads.’ He laughed, then leant in
close. ‘I say, you’re not SOE are you?’

Owen had no idea. ‘I don’t think so, sir.’

‘Good. Don’t want any of that lot.’ He took a closer look at the baby. ‘Hello, hello, you don’t look very happy.’

‘He’s sick,’ Martha said. ‘I’m going to whisk him over to one of the blocks as soon as we’re done here. Get Haynes to take a look.’

‘Ah, right. Well, what were you thinking anyway, bringing in a child?’

‘I was hardly going to leave the thing outside the gate now, was I? Anyhow,’ she said, ‘do you want the goddamned penicillin or not? You wouldn’t believe the red tape
I’ve had to duck and dodge to get my hands on this.’

She took the first box from Janek and pushed it firmly into the man’s hands, then piled the other two on top. ‘You owe me a drink. So I’ll see you in the mess later –
right? You can have mine ready.’ She started to usher them out of the hallway, leading Janek by the arm. ‘Double Scotch,’ she called back to Hamilton standing in the busy hallway,
holding the boxes of penicillin, his notebook slipping out from under his arm. ‘I want to know what I’ve missed!’

For someone who had been resident in the camp no more than a fortnight, Martha had got herself rather well established. Everybody knew her. The benefit, she claimed, of being
practically the only American on site. She had even managed to requisition a small office from a Red Cross liaison officer who had been persuaded to share a desk with a Jewish army chaplain who,
Martha claimed, was hardly ever there anyway.

Now she sat at a table made steady with wedges of paper and nothing on it but some forms and a telephone. Owen and Irena sat opposite. Janek had been driven off with a member of the 32nd
Casualty Clearing Station to his Czech dormitory in what Martha called Camp 3, where internees considered healthy again were housed ready for deportation. Owen had said he’d track him down
later but Janek still played on his mind. He felt strangely responsible for him and, now that he was out of sight, also a growing anxiety that something wasn’t right. Janek would find comfort
in being with the other Czechs, he assured himself; the same relief that he was finding among fellow Brits. It was as if he had finally found his voice, and with that his freedom. Another piece of
him claimed back. He was almost complete.

‘Oh, he’ll be fine. You’ll be fine,’ Martha had said to the boy, but Janek hadn’t looked at all sure. They had already started deporting those fit enough to travel,
Martha had told them. Five thousand Poles had been despatched to Celle only a few days ago from where they had then caught trains back home.

‘I’ll try to make sure you’re in the next batch of Czechs,’ she told Janek, although she couldn’t make any promises.

Janek’s only concern though was his brother, and he’d stood in the middle of the parade ground shouting out his brother’s name to no avail, quite convinced, it seemed, that
Petr was there.

Owen, being a British officer of rank, would be bedded in a shared room with an ambulance driver called Wilkins, whom Martha hadn’t yet come across but Hamilton vouched was a good sort. As
for Irena, she would be placed in a shared room with other Polish women.

‘Perhaps a couple of minutes in the office first, though?’ Martha had asked. All DPs needed to be registered, and she took down their details while Little Man was taken to a hospital
block to be inoculated and given the once-over.

He half listened while Martha asked Irena questions: name, date and place of birth, last known address . . . She checked Irena’s identification papers and handed them back. The girl seemed
hesitant in answering anything about herself.

His eyes drifted around the room, which was barely bigger than a cupboard. There was a single shelf on one wall with nothing on it but a box file on its side and a French/German dictionary
swollen with damp. A window looked down upon the quad and across to the hospital blocks; the pane was cracked and juddered in its frame every time a truck rumbled past.

‘Some of them don’t remember,’ Martha had told him. ‘They know practically nothing about themselves.’ You had to find one thing with which to unlock them. A
childhood nickname. A memory of some sort. Maybe even an object. ‘And then, it’s glorious. The door opens,’ she said. ‘They sit there and they start talking.’

Not Irena though. He saw the slop of bath water and Irena’s wet hand on his stomach, her fingers moving down like liquid. Then the thought was gone. He tuned back in. He had missed
something and now the half-completed form had been pushed aside.

‘What about this incident then,’ Martha was saying, ‘with this man? You know.’

Irena looked at the floor, pretending not to understand, then lifted her head again with some purpose, determined now to stare Martha out.

‘Look, I’m sorry about what happened,’ Martha said. ‘I want you to know that. But, well . . .’ She took a breath. ‘It wasn’t one of our boys now, was
it? It wasn’t an American soldier who raped you.’

Irena held her stare, then blinked several times. Owen could feel his own chest tightening. He tried to catch Martha’s eye. What the hell was she playing at?

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she went on. ‘I don’t blame you for lying. We get these kinds of stories all the time.’

He wondered what she meant by that, and how many other Poles like Irena she had questioned before.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘you said yourself that the child is a couple of months old now, yes? Well, you see, the way I look at it, that would mean that even if he was a month
premature, whoever did this when you were in Aachen, if you were in Aachen like you said you were – that is right, isn’t it?’

She waited for a nod that didn’t come.

‘Look,’ she said, drawing breath, ‘what I’m saying to you is that our troops hadn’t got as far as Aachen by then. They didn’t get there ’til September
and the town fell in October. So, like I say, it’s a bit unlikely – don’t you think? – that it was a US soldier out on patrol like you said it was, given that the
baby’s a good couple of months old and it’s now – what? – only just May.’

She waited for Irena to say something. Owen could feel his heart trying to squeeze its way into his throat. He couldn’t believe that she had lied to him, and twice. Why had she made up
such stories? What good was it supposed to do? He wondered now if that was why he had hesitated in telling the colonel. If deep within his subconscious he had been questioning her already, even
though he had wanted to believe her, to think she’d tell him only the truth?

‘Listen, I’m not mad at you,’ said Martha softly. ‘We’re hearing these stories all the time. So, what really happened? Hm? Irena, why don’t you just tell me
the truth? We can’t help you otherwise.’

She leant back in her chair and waited. Owen could hear a heated discussion echoing in the concrete passage below, men’s voices babbling like water, then movement in the stairwell, people
hurrying. A truck pulled up. More voices. The sun shone through the cracked window, four squares of light splashing across the table and the back of Martha’s arm.

Irena moistened her lips. It was as if she were trying to pull out from somewhere within her a voice with which to speak.

‘His name is Krzysztof Krakowski,’ she eventually managed.

‘Krzysztof Krakowski,’ Martha said. ‘Right.’ She wrote the name down; not on the form, Owen noticed, but on a separate scrap of paper. ‘That sounds
Polish.’

Irena nodded. Her eyes were beginning to fill.

‘So you were raped by another Pole. Is that what you’re saying now?’

Irena nodded again.

‘Not an American soldier then, like you said.’

Irena started to sob.

It seemed highly unlikely, in Owen’s mind, that of all the Poles swilling around Germany, the one whom Irena was looking for should wash up in this camp. Yet, Martha
said, there had been thousands of Poles there. Along with the Russians, they were the biggest contingent in a camp of sixty thousand.

‘You don’t think she’s been here herself?’ Owen asked when it was just the two of them.

‘No,’ said Martha. ‘But she’s been in a camp somewhere, even if she won’t say.’

‘How do you know?’ he said.

‘You don’t cut your hair like that out of choice.’

‘I don’t understand why she didn’t just tell me the truth though? What difference would it make?’

‘She’s desperate. They all are,’ Martha said. ‘They’ll say anything to get what they need – food, clothes, a ticket home, a new life in America perhaps. They
think we’ll just take ’em in. If they can persuade us that we owe them something, that America, Britain, whoever has somehow wronged them, well . . . And anyway, maybe now and again the
story is true. We don’t truly know what they’ve been through. We don’t know what’s happened. At the end of the day, the woman’s been raped. In my mind it doesn’t
matter who did it. It’s wrong, and I want to help her if we can. I know what she’s going through.’

‘You can’t just give the baby up. It’s a life. He’s as much part of you as he is of this man,’ Owen said to Irena as they had stood in the main
entrance waiting for someone to lead her to her billet.

‘You do not understand,’ she said. ‘It is not about love. I cannot love it. I cannot love something that I did not want – not now, not then, not any time, not ever, do
you understand? And you cannot make me.’

‘But don’t you think you might be able to?’ he said. ‘If you gave the child a name—’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I find Krzysztof Krakowski. I give him his child. He raped me. He must have wanted it. “Well then,” I say to him, “here, here it
is.”’

Martha said she could arrange for one of the lads to take him into Camp 1 and give him a tour of what was really happening out there if Owen had the stomach for it, but he
hadn’t. He slumped on a pile of crates not knowing what to do with himself. Why in God’s name hadn’t he taken the colonel’s offer? So many times over the last two weeks he
had closed his eyes and woken somewhere else. He squeezed his eyes shut again but when he opened them nothing around him had shifted. He looked out across the former parade ground at the tents, the
dusty parked military vehicles, and the dishevelled nurses and soldiers milling busily around. Someone had a wireless playing big band swing music that a woman in a headscarf and shawl was
spiralling around to and laughing as if she were drunk, her skirt fluttering up as she turned, as if it were trying to propel her off the ground. A line of white figures walked through, dressed
from head to foot in overalls, hoods and visors pulled over their heads like strange aliens. As they passed he saw how filthy they were, blood spattered up the legs and the stench of shit wafting
from their boots.

He kept thinking of the fencing he’d seen along the road, them driving past so fast that the barren wastelands beyond it, and the shape of barracks and twig figures, had come to him
through the quickly shifting sunlight and leaves like strange blurring images he used to see through his grandfather’s zoopraxiscope.