Devastation Road Page 12

  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.

  That night, as the fires blinked out one by one, he lost sight of her again. He travelled back and forth in his mind, trying to find her in the folds of things remembered, this woman whom he had loved who was now gone. He checked his pockets looking for letters, but there was no note of her on the scrap of paper, no mark on the map where she might have stood. With the light too dim, he couldn’t even find the holes in the slip of material, even though his fingers searched and he held it every way he could. He could see no pinpricks of light through it. They had healed in the darkness and were no longer there.

  In his dream the house was still there, the frozen sea spreading out around it, endless and empty. The people were gone, as were the ropes by which they’d been pulling it. There was just him standing outside, the ice fast claiming it: the sound of crackling as he watched it creeping up through the lines of mortar and spreading across the bricks, covering and consuming them one by one beneath its frosty skin. Ice trails fingered around the doorframe and up to the windows, and with it came the glassy crinkling sound like a slowly cast spell.

  He stepped through the doorway where the frozen sea was the floor, the ice still softly travelling up the walls, the steps and the open entrances to each room like a fast-spreading frost. Where he touched the banisters, the ice crunched like lichen. It ran in clumps along the bottom of the skirting boards like snow-white moss. With every patch and piece the ice consumed, it took the constituent of whatever it touched, draining the colour from it, so that all that was left was an ice replica of what had once been – a step, a chair, a table, everything white and frozen. In each room he found the furniture in disarray, unsettled from their normal positions as the house and all its contents had been hauled across the ice, and now bunched up against the furthest wall.

  He stopped. On a mantelpiece, turned to a slab of ice, a frozen candlestick with a frozen candle was now starting to drip, a single ice bead of wax sliding down the stick. Another drip splashed down from beneath the mantelpiece, and when he turned around he saw on one of the ice chairs that there was already a gap in the stretcher where the ice had turned to liquid and melted away. Everything he saw now was dripping, holes appearing in the ceiling, splashing from the light fittings and running down the walls. The house that so quickly turned to ice was just as quickly melting, so that before long he realized there would be nothing left of it, just a frozen sea on which it pooled, endless and empty again.

  His name was Anatol Dubanowski and he was Polský, Janek said, dragging Irena and Owen over to where he sat in the grass. In his endless search to find someone who knew something of his brother, Janek had instead unearthed a man who had been in the camp at Sagan. He spoke little English, Janek said, but if they had someone who could translate, he would speak to them.

  He was an odd fellow, worn thin like they all were, some of the shine lost from his eyes and the skin loose aroun
d his jaw beneath greying stubble. He had a sharp nose and spectacles that he kept pushing up with the back of his hand. He was perhaps in his early forties, Owen thought, although in these strange days it was hard to tell.

  Janek introduced them and the man struggled to his feet and shook their hands, then flung himself down on the grass again and set about rolling some dried leaves into a makeshift smoke. With him was a lad he introduced as Henryk, who had a cabbage ear and a hand that constantly shook, the other holding it down as if it had a mind of its own.

  They exchanged awkward niceties. The man began chattering in Polish to Irena, who had been reluctant to join them at first but politely answered his questions while trying to skirt his roving eye. A blotchy heat rash, Owen noticed, was slowly spreading up her neck. Janek took the baby and sat him on his knee, while Henryk sprawled long-limbed in the grass and held out a finger for the infant to squeeze.

  The man, Anatol, didn’t recognize Owen. He continued to speak in Polish, Irena translating back and forth. There had been hundreds, thousands maybe, at the camp, he said. He couldn’t be expected to remember everyone. Besides, there were many compounds.

  ‘And when were you there?’ asked Owen.

  Irena translated and the man answered.

  ‘Do samego końca . . .’

  ‘To the end,’ she said. ‘January. That is when they move. To other camps.’

  ‘What were you?’ Owen asked. ‘A pilot?’

  ‘Tak,’ said the man, nodding. ‘Kapitan.’

  Owen felt a rush of relief. ‘Were you all pilots?’ he said.

  Irena asked. The man shrugged. The camp was run by the Luftwaffe, he told her. He was a pilot, so yes, there were pilots. But there were other prisoners too. If Owen wanted names and numbers, he should speak to the Germans. Get a list. Although, as far as he knew, everything had been destroyed.

  Owen asked instead if he knew of a man called Max, or another, Petr Sokol. A Czech. But the man shook his head. He’d already told them – there were thousands.

  ‘And ask him where they went, as well,’ said Owen. ‘I need to know the route.’

  But Anatol didn’t know. All he knew was that they’d rested for two days in a brick factory in Muskau because of the snow, and then they’d moved to Graustein and Spremberg. The whole march, he said, had taken them eight days.

  ‘And then what?’ said Owen, but Anatol was still talking.

  ‘Everyone went in different directions,’ Irena told Owen. ‘Some to Nuremberg – the Americans, he thinks. He is not sure. Each compound went to a different camp further west.’

  ‘And where did you end up?’

  Luckenwalde, he told them. Twenty miles or so south-west of Berlin.

  ‘And the British?’

  ‘Nie wiem.’

  ‘He does not know,’ said Irena.

  After that there didn’t seem to be much left to say, and the man was on his feet and brushing himself down. They had to get going.

  ‘But what happened to you?’ said Owen. ‘In the end. When did they let you free?’

  She asked him and Anatol told them: he had been liberated by the Russians. That was over a fortnight ago. He had been walking ever since.

  ‘And where are you heading now?’ said Owen. ‘Surely you should be going east?’

  But the man had no intention of returning to Poland. His gaze turned vague as he spoke, glancing behind them over the fields and pushing his spectacles up his nose.

  ‘He says there is nothing left for him there,’ Irena translated when he eventually spoke. ‘He says he had some family in Switzerland. He is hoping they are there and alive.’

  ‘And your friend?’ Owen motioned at Henryk.

  The man shrugged. The boy had no one else, he told them. Perhaps he was going with Anatol.

  He finally made excuses to leave that Irena didn’t bother translating, even though the man’s eyes were fixed hard on her. The rash creeping up the side of her neck had almost reached her ear.

  Owen shook their hands and thanked them.

  ‘Powodzenia,’ the man said.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Good luck,’ said Irena.

  ‘And you.’

  Then Anatol went to kiss Irena goodbye, but as he took her arm he pulled her close enough to whisper something, a question perhaps, into her ear. She tugged her hand free and glared at him.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ said Owen.

  ‘Ah. Tak, tak,’ said the man, nodding and flashing a subservient smile at them all with a mouthful of wonky teeth. Then, beckoning Henryk to follow and raising his hand in a wave, he stepped off the verge and they had soon disappeared into the crowd of bobbing heads.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ asked Owen, as Irena took the baby from Janek and gathered him up in her arms.

  ‘Irena?’

  She turned.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She hoisted the infant on to her shoulder with so little care that he started to cry. ‘I don’t have to like all Poles,’ she said, ‘just because I am a Pole.’

  ‘No—’

  But she was already out in the road and walking, taking the baby with her.

  How little he knew about her; how little he knew about them both. In time, he supposed, the three of them would disperse just as accidentally as they had come together; Irena disappearing into the haze on the road just as she had appeared, Janek gone when Owen awoke, leaving nothing behind of him but the warm dust of a fire.

  She had no brothers or sisters, she told him. Her parents had wanted more. They had wanted a son, she said, but that was not to be.

  ‘And where are they now? You said they were gone.’

  ‘They took my father first,’ she said. ‘And then my mother. And then the house. They left me in the street. I don’t know where my father is. In a prison somewhere. A camp. I should not allow myself to think that he is dead, but I do.’

  They were leaning against a fence, while in the far distance he could see more fields, only these were battle-scarred, the charred remains of spindly trees sticking out like broken wires.

  He looked at Irena. ‘And your mother?’

  She shrugged. ‘If one is alive it will be my mother,’ she said. ‘She speak many languages. She is useful. She is, er . . .’ She struggled for a moment to find the English. ‘At a girl school,’ she said finally.

  ‘Headmistress?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She didn’t much care. ‘Our house was like her school.’ She clenched her fist tight and shook it.

  Owen nodded. ‘An iron grip. You sound like you don’t much like her.’

  ‘What can I say? My mother is a bully. My father is a liar. Thank God for the war,’ she said. ‘Or I would not know.’

  ‘But you still love them?’ he asked.

  ‘You do not have to respect someone to love them,’ she told him. ‘And you do not have to understand them.’ She paused, then asked, ‘What is worse, do you think? A road full with people like this, or an empty one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Do you hate the Germans?’ It was, perhaps, a foolish question, and for a long time she did not answer.

  ‘Some people, they mistook the devil for God,’ she said eventually. ‘In my opinion it is an easy mistake to make. But, then, I am not like other Poles.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Owen asked.

  But she only shrugged and rested her head on her folded arms, leaning into the fence and looking the other way.

  ‘Does your family know about the baby?’

  She lifted her head and glanced back at the child. Janek was showing him something he had spotted in the hedge and holding him under his arm as if he was going to toss the baby in after it.

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘Not the truth,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? You were raped, weren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t like that word.’ She stood up straight.

  ‘So, what will you tell her
about the child, if you find him, this father, and he takes it, which I very much doubt he will?’

  ‘I will tell her that the baby is dead,’ she said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Will you go home, then, when this man is found?’

  ‘No. I told you, they took it. I have no home.’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘What will any of us do?’ she said. ‘Start a new life somewhere. Pretend none of this happened and that I am happy. What do people do?’

  ‘Find their families, perhaps, like Janek is trying to do, like I am.’

  ‘Janek.’ She smirked as if the boy was a joke. ‘His brother is dead,’ she said. ‘You know that. They always are.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He is Czech. He is – how you say? – troublemaker. Dangerous. If what he says is true.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They will have no choice. It is like the Jews and the Germans. They will always be as they are.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She laughed. ‘You can stop a war but you cannot change people’s opinions. They will always hate what they hate. Like mushrooms,’ she said. ‘Or, I don’t know, moths. Surround me with them or get rid of every last one, it makes no difference. I will still hate them. That is the Germans and Jews. So, the war is over. What difference does it make? It does not change anything.’

  ‘You can’t really believe that.’

  ‘Why would it?’ she said.

  She was not like any of the other girls Max had dated. That perhaps had been the problem. A sleeves-rolled-up type of girl, Max had said. A man’s got to change with the times. We need girls like her now. There’s a war on. I need someone practical. Someone who gets things done and doesn’t sit around all day filing her nails.

  And that’s what the others did? Owen had asked.

  No, I’m just saying. Margaret and Ruth and that lot, well, they’re all good crack, but take them out of the dance hall and pop them in some overalls and they wouldn’t know a spanner from a bloody Spitfire.

  Connie was on the patio admiring their mother’s geraniums.