Devastation Road Read online

  He was alone, with no idea of how long he had been there. He thought he might be waiting for someone but he couldn’t think who.

  At the lip of shore between two rocks, where the soil was sandy and beach-like, there were the fresh remnants of a campfire and a wooden chair that he was sitting on, painted white but flaking. He wondered who had brought it here, clambering with it up and down the steep slopes of the wood. A couple of empty bottles lay about, the labels scraped off, and above him, in a tree, a rusted paraffin lamp had been squeezed into the fork of two branches.

  He poked idly at the damp ash in the fire and thought about whether he should build a fresh one. Among the remains were charred bits of paper that looked like documents with photographs attached, each with the same outlined face but the features scraped away.

  Every time he heard a sound he turned to see if someone was coming. Somebody would come. He just needed to see who it was.

  He took out the piece of paper and scanned his notes: MAX, a date in someone else’s writing, an inventory of things in his pocket. HAWKERS, he had written. DRAUGHTSMAN. Next to the word SAGAN he had added the symbol he’d found beneath it on the map: III. He’d found other Roman numerals by other places. He didn’t know what they meant.

  He kept expecting to see his brother or his father, or hear Cedar’s bark as he bounded out through the ferns and tore down the slope to him, snuffling up the scents.

  For pity’s sake, there you are.

  He was not a child now though. He was a man older than his years who would retrace his steps and find his way home, picking up the pieces of him as he went. He would put himself back together. All he needed was to remember.

  The lad was tall and lanky, wearing a grubby charcoal jacket with a different coloured patch on each elbow, dusty brown trousers and a bag thrown over his shoulder. He stumbled through the sun-soaked leaves with an upturned cap in his hand, a loaf of bread tucked under his arm, and a tin canister that he swung by its handle, the contents sloshing inside. He made his way down the slope, sliding down on his heels to the pool’s shore, careful not to spill whatever was collected in the cap.

  Was this the same boy? He didn’t know. The boy nodded at the white-painted chair as if Owen had constructed it himself while he had been away.

  ‘Good,’ he said, praising Owen for his handicraft.

  Must be the same boy, Owen thought. He seemed friendly enough.

  The boy thrust the cap into Owen’s hands. It was full of thin-stemmed mushrooms.

  Owen poked at them. ‘Are you sure you can eat these?’

  The boy put the loaf down on the chair and unscrewed the lid from the canister to show Owen the milk.

  ‘Where did you get all of this?’

  The boy grinned, then pressed the canister against Owen for him to hold. He made his way, stepping light-footed from stone to stone, to the waterfall, where he stood, balanced precariously on a rock, and vigorously washed his hands.

  ‘To je krása,’ he shouted, still grinning, as he looked up at the pouring sunlight. ‘Eh?’

  Owen didn’t know but nodded.

  The boy pointed at the overhanging branches and smiled. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

  The broth was watery and tasted stale, but the mushrooms weren’t bad and the bread, although dry, was perfectly palatable if dunked long enough and chewed on for a while. They shared the canister of milk, passing a smile between them at each other’s moustaches.

  ‘Owen,’ Owen said, leaning forward a little and tapping at his chest. ‘English. And you? Your name?’

  The boy smiled again and raised the canister as if it were a glass. He took a generous swig, his cheeks full, then put it down between his feet and swallowed.

  ‘Janek,’ he said. He stood up and opened his arms to display himself. ‘Janek Věnceslav Sokol.’ He took a bow and sat down again. ‘Janek. Janek – Owen,’ he said, motioning to them both and nodding. ‘Good. Dobře.’

  Owen pulled the paper and pencil out of his pocket and finished the equation:

  BOY = CZECH = BREAKFAST = YANECK

  ‘Well . . . hello.’ He smiled awkwardly, and then tipped his bowl upside down. ‘Empty again. Thank you.’ Because he now remembered the boy had fed him once before. ‘That was very good.’

  ‘Petr,’ Janek said. ‘I . . . er . . .’ His eyes roved about, seemingly trying to find the word hanging somewhere from a tree. ‘To mě naučil Petr. Teach me.’

  ‘Oh. To cook? I see,’ said Owen. ‘Yes. Very good.’

  ‘Petr je můj bratr. My . . . er . . .’ He paused again, his hand turning as if flipping through a list of words until he found the right one. ‘Um . . . Bruder. Bruder?’

  ‘Ah, German,’ said Owen.

  The boy nodded. ‘Little.’

  ‘You mean brother.’

  ‘Ano. Brother. Petr is . . . er . . .’

  ‘Your brother.’

  ‘Yes, yes. On je dobrý člověk. He is good man.’

  ‘Good,’ Owen said. ‘Well, he’s taught you well by the looks of it.’

  The boy nodded and faintly smiled, then he rested his elbows on his knees and started to pick at the remnants of bread still held in his hand, breaking it into tiny pieces and then rolling them into balls before he finally ate them.

  ‘There is a war?’ Owen asked. ‘Ein Krieg?’

  ‘War?’ said the boy. ‘Yes.’ He laughed.

  ‘What’s happened? Who’s winning?’

  The boy started talking, something about Nacisti and Rusové, then Američani, his hand sweeping in and out – borders changing, tides turning.

  ‘No,’ Owen said. ‘English, please. In English.’

  But the boy didn’t have the English. He shook his head and batted the conversation away. It was hopeless.

  Owen tried something else, signalling around them as he had done before and getting the map out. He pointed at it. ‘Where are we? I need to know. Do you understand?’

  He handed the boy the sheets and the boy studied them one by one, discarding the unwanted ones on the ground willy-nilly for Owen to pick up.

  ‘Jsme tady,’ he said eventually, laying his fingertip at a point. His bitten fingernail circled an area to the top northern edge of the country. ‘Jizerské hory. Hory.’ It looked like mountains. His finger tapped a spot.

  Owen marked it with the pencil.

  Not far north there was a thick line running west to east that might be a border, and towns and villages that he’d not heard of, each with two names: Reichenberg (Liberec), Gablonz (Jablonec), Friedland (Frýdlant) . . .

  The boy was watching him closely.

  ‘You want home, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen. He felt more desperate than ever. His instinct was to head north-west in the vague direction of England, but from what little he could remember of the geography of Europe, he felt quite certain that Germany bordered the west and at least some of the north of Czechoslovakia, which meant that Austria, probably still under the Nazi regime too, must tuck around the south of it. Together, he thought, they would form a clamped mouth around the country, the Czech lands already swallowed midway down the German gullet.

  The only other option seemed to be to head back into the heart of the country to Prague – but to do what? – or head out to the east in entirely the wrong direction, and as to what lay there anyway, he wasn’t sure. Russia somewhere. Poland somewhere. Countries so alien that even their names – Hungary, Romania, Ukraine – filled him with unease. Poland, he thought. Wasn’t that north, and bordering Czechoslovakia? Then he felt quite sure that the Poles had fallen as well.

  He felt everything within him sink; whichever way he went it seemed that he was trapped and he’d be caught by someone somewhere. They would think he was a spy or an escaped prisoner. He would have to come up with a story of some sort. No one would believe the truth: that he didn’t know what he was doing there.

  His gaze lifted northerly up the map over the line that might have marked a border, until it
reached that familiar name again.

  ‘You don’t know this place, do you?’ he asked Janek. He pointed at Sagan. It looked to be about thirty-odd miles north. Walking distance. Maybe a day and a half.

  Janek shook his head but he ran his fingertip up and down a route anyway, pulling a maybe-yes-maybe-no face, before nodding and handing the map back.

  Perhaps he would walk to Sagan, Owen thought. It was close enough and he was damned whichever way he went. Besides, the name had been niggling at his thoughts all day, the uncomfortable sensation that he knew the name already, and whenever he let his eyes drift across the map, the name, for some reason, always pulled him back.

  He gathered up the bowls, spoons and pan and took them to the waterfall to wash them out, then refilled the boy’s water canister and slopped water over his face. When he came back the boy had taken a watch from his wrist that Owen hadn’t noticed before and was scrutinizing it. He held it to the light, the watch glass winking, and turned it in his hand, studying the back as if searching for an inscription. He held it to his ear, tapped the glass and shook it, then tried to prise the back from it.

  ‘Jsou rozbité,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders and tossing it into the ashes.

  ‘Perhaps I can mend it,’ Owen offered.

  The boy dismissed this with a wave of a hand as if it was hardly worth the bother.

  When Owen came back from relieving himself in the ferns, the boy was scratching something into one of the boulders with a knife.

  ‘Aha, good,’ he said. ‘We go.’

  As they started to make their way up between the rock formations, the boy caught hold of Owen’s arm and stopped him, and then pulled the mushroom cap over Owen’s head.

  Owen took it off again and handed it back.

  ‘Thank you, but no.’ He didn’t know where the cap had come from or whose cap it was.

  ‘Vy jste Angličan, yes?’ said Janek.

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen. He’d already told him that.

  ‘Ano.’ He pulled the cap firmly over Owen’s head again and slapped him on the back. ‘Now Čech. Yes?’ He laughed.

  The ground in the wood was rarely flat and either dropped suddenly away beneath them or rose at such a steep angle that it was almost impossible to clamber. The undergrowth was treacherous, thick with dead leaves that hid the thin trailing branches of bushes that pulled tight like tripwires around your ankles or, disturbed by your passing, whipped up from the leaves and bit like vipers at the backs of your calves. Owen found himself grasping at trunks and branches as what seemed like a delicate slope slipped perilously away beneath the leaves, and he grabbed at anything to stop himself sliding, the boy coming down fast as well, swearing all the way. Owen hauled himself up until he stood on the bridge of a sharp incline. He could hear Janek huffing behind him, and then from another slope he dropkicked a pine cone.

  ‘Gól!’ he shouted, his arms in the air as if he had suddenly scored.

  Before long the ground seemed to steady, the tumbling contours of the land finding a gentler rhythm. Owen watched the boy as he wiped spiderwebs from his face and then peeled their sticky trails from the tips of his fingers. He seemed quite at ease out here among the trees.

  They reached a wire fence ringing a perimeter. On the other side a fresh green rye field rolled on wide and deep before it reached another line of trees, the apex of a barn poking out from behind them. The field was empty but for the wavering sea of crop and a gnarled, spindly tree that stood stark against the horizon. On every branch, scraps of white material had been tied like ribbons, the sun catching on them as they curled in the breeze.

  ‘Look!’ Owen cried. He picked up his pace. He fancied sitting beneath it, resting his eyes, and looking up at the white tokens of material tied as if every one of them was something lost and found; memories now safely tethered, or promises, or vows.

  He followed the fence, trying to find a way through, one eye on the glimmering tree, the other aware of the boy stumbling behind him and jabbering on about something that Owen didn’t understand. Then he saw a gap where the wire fence had been pulled away.

  ‘This way,’ he called. ‘Through here.’

  He was aware of the boy starting to run behind him as Owen reached the gap and turned to step through, and then he was yanked back as the boy yelled and the pull took Owen off his feet. Suddenly the boy was on top and winding him, one arm pressing Owen’s head down, the other held over his own, his sour breath blasting against Owen’s neck, and all his elbows and knees digging into him.

  ‘Get off,’ Owen shouted.

  But Janek wouldn’t. Then he slowly lifted his head and looked up, and scrambled to his feet and away.

  Owen hauled himself up. He could barely catch his breath.

  ‘Musíte si dávat pozor!’ the boy exclaimed. He was pointing angrily at a thin grey line pulled taut across the gap, and then something grey and egg-like wedged into the tree. ‘Boom!’ he shouted. He threw his arms up. ‘BOOM!’

  Jesus Christ. Owen’s hand instinctively went to his throat where the wire stretched between the gap would have caught him, the pull ring from the grenade tugging free. His heart was beating fast. The boy jabbed his finger at him, still furious.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Owen said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Musíte být moc opatrný!’

  ‘But I didn’t see it.’

  The boy signalled around them and then with a pair of fingers he pointed to his eyes – they needed to be alert.

  ‘Two!’ he said, jabbing his finger at Owen. ‘Yes? Two now. Hmm?’

  ‘Two what?’ said Owen.

  But the boy did not reply.

  It was the sight of the Red Cross food parcels that did it – scattered along the side of the road, the boy stumbling along the ditch and looking at each in turn before someone else could come along and steal the contents.

  He was a deliveryman, not a soldier, and he was not here because once, in another lifetime, he had been a draughtsman or a son or a brother or even somebody’s lover.

  Delivering packages, that’s all, Max had said. So I don’t know why you’re making such a bloody fuss about it.

  But what those packages were, Owen could not remember. This was how the day was going, falling into moments of clarity and then confusion, as if in his mind they kept walking through patches of fog. Not Red Cross parcels – that he would have remembered.

  Further along the road, the boy hurled one over the hedge, furious that they were all empty.

  ‘Do prdele!’ he shouted.

  His father had been a doctor dealing with amputees. It was the boy splicing the tops off nettles with a stick that brought a recollection of his father – curling white moustache, large flopping sun hat and white summer jacket, strolling around the garden, a pair of secateurs clasped discreetly behind his back. He would deadhead the roses and, with nimble surgical precision, nip off any broken stems, just as he did the ruined limbs of soldiers. There, he would mumble to himself as he stepped back to admire his handiwork. Oh yes, that’s better.

  There was something comforting, familiar even, in logging everything that came back to him.

  DELIVERYMAN

  BOY = YANECK

  FATHER – DOCTOR – AMPUTEES

  There was no knowing what might be needed; what might trigger something, that might trigger something else; that finally, and in a roundabout kind of way, might tell him what he was doing here and what he might be walking back to. A home somewhere. A wife somewhere. The cold and empty side of a bed.

  They followed a narrow road up a ridge through thick forest, until it curved around a deep gully high on the hillside and they saw a sentry hut and a number of soldiers, tall wire fencing and a pull-up gate.

  They slowed and Janek ushered him quietly down a slope through a cover of trees. When they had crept some distance and had found a vantage point from which they could spy on the crossing, Janek settled himself in the undergrowth, stretching his legs out and leaning back on his elbow
among the leaves.

  ‘Now what?’ Owen said.

  The boy motioned him to sit as well.

  ‘We wait?’ said Owen. ‘What is this, anyway? Is this the German border?’

  The boy didn’t answer.

  The wind stirred the leaves and after a while there came the patter of rain, which rapidly grew heavier and turned the early evening light from silver to lead grey. Still they waited. They watched the soldiers up at the crossing. In time the rain abated but not before it had dampened them through to the skin.

  Owen watched the boy beside him sprawled out on his side, scratching shapes into the earth. The slightest disturbance and his sharp eyes darted.

  He couldn’t see why Janek had latched on to him. He was beginning to feel like a fugitive; or as if he had two lives running in parallel – the one he remembered and the one here and now – and yet they had no point of connection as far as he could tell.

  Perhaps he should give himself up. These men at the border crossing would have food and water, a line of command. He’d tell them that he was a British citizen, that he needed to speak to someone, goddamn it, he needed to get home.

  Through the dimming twilight he could barely see them now. Just the murmur of their voices and the reassurance of a laugh. What was to say the boy wasn’t leading Owen on a wild goose chase anyway? That Owen could trust the boy when he couldn’t even trust himself?

  ‘These men,’ he whispered, ‘are they German? Deutsch?’

  The boy shook his head. ‘Rusové.’

  ‘Russian? But I thought . . . Look, what’s going on here? Where are we? Isn’t this a German border? Deutschland?’

  ‘Ano,’ said the boy, nodding.

  ‘So, where are they? Wo sind sie? Die Deutschen?’

  The boy threw his stick away and mumbled something.