Devastation Road (13 page)

‘There are no sides now,’ she said. ‘All you can do is look after yourself.’

The more Owen considered this war that he had somehow fallen into, the less he realized he knew.

It was the British, Janek had said, who had started it anyway. ‘You give Czech land away.’

‘What do you mean – gave your land away? When?’

But Janek had dismissed this with the flick of his hand, and Owen wondered whether this was just something that his brother had told him.

‘He should come back,’ Irena said. ‘We must go.’

But the boy did not appear.

Owen took the baby from her and nestled him in his arm. The tiny infant was sedated on milk, his eyes blinking with wonder at the sun, dried crusts of snot clogging his tiny nostrils. Owen
wandered up and down the fence with him, scanning the fields for Janek and the road with its slow crawl of trucks and tanks. He rocked the baby a little, soaking up the comfort in his weight and
warmth. They couldn’t call him nothing. They would have to think of a name.

‘What do you do?’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ She was picking daisies and had them bunched in her clasped hand.

‘I mean, do you have a job? And what are you doing in Germany anyway?’

‘I was domestic servant,’ she told him.

‘Oh?’

‘A family in Hoyerswerda.’

‘A German family?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

‘I thought perhaps . . .’ He didn’t know. ‘Your English is very good, that’s all. A relief, actually,’ he added. ‘I can’t tell you how exhausting
it’s been with Janek.’

‘Janek?’

‘The boy,’ he said.

She nodded.

‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘All grunts and hand gestures. A lot of gesticulation.’ He laughed. She gave him a thin, polite smile.

‘I’m impressed anyway,’ he said.

How long must it have been since he’d had a decent conversation? The girl, he had decided, might at least be a mediator between them. He had never been one for chatter – that had
always been Max – but, God, he needed it now.

She gave him a coy glance then bent to pick a dandelion. ‘I wanted to teach languages,’ she told him. ‘In university.’

‘But you didn’t?’

No,’ she said. ‘The war.’

Oh yes, he thought. That. ‘Perhaps you could do it after.’

She didn’t seem convinced. She twiddled the flower carelessly in her hand and then, looking at her stained fingertips, discarded it in the grass.

‘And you speak German?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘Excellent. And Czech too?
Č
eský?
’ He smiled.

‘No.’

‘Oh. That’s a pity,’ he said.

Awkwardly, he reached across and pinched one of the daisies from her bouquet. He tickled the baby’s nose with it and held it under his chin, forgetting that it wasn’t a
buttercup.

‘I’ve been wondering where the father is.’

‘He is not here,’ she told him.

‘I can see that. Is he fighting somewhere?’

She laughed at him. ‘No.’

‘What about your family then?’ he said. ‘Your parents?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was quiet a moment, then, on an impulse, she threw the daisies out into the field, a sudden shower of white and yellow, and draped herself over the fence. ‘I don’t care
anyway.’ She kicked at the lowest slat, and then turned to him with a challenging gaze. ‘You have children?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t know?’ She looked surprised. ‘Oh. You are good with baby,’ she said. ‘You have a wife?’

‘Yes. Well, I don’t know. I think so.’

‘You are not so very sure of much.’

‘No.’

‘Ah,’ she said, standing up straight. ‘Now I understand. She is leaving you, or she is coming back now, or you don’t know. You don’t trust her.’

‘No, it’s not like that.’

‘She is one of those women.’

‘No, it’s not that at all. I don’t know. I don’t remember.’

‘You don’t remember.’ The way she laughed at him sounded like an accusation.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s gone. Lots of it’s gone. That’s all. I fell or hit my head, a bomb blast or something, I don’t know. Anyway, it doesn’t
matter.’ He tried to explain, struggling to find the words to express how it was like an empty sea and only now were occasional islands starting to surface, the smallest fragments of land
that he might cling to.

‘Like this war,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s happening, what
has
happened, who even is fighting any more. It had barely started, you see, but now this .
. . I mean . . .’ He shrugged. ‘It might not even be the same one as far as I’m concerned. All of this,’ he said, hoisting the baby up on his shoulder and waving his hand
across the field at the clogged line of military traffic worming along the road. ‘I can hardly believe in it. I don’t even know how I got here.’

‘You could live through the war like I have and still not believe it,’ she said.

‘Yes, well, I just want to go home,’ he told her.

‘And,’ she added, ‘I do not believe you have lost your memory. You cannot lose memories.’

That’s not true, he thought.

‘So you are liar, or they are not lost, they are hidden, and you don’t want them.’

‘Not true,’ he said, but she wasn’t listening. She was waving at Janek, who was coming up through the field with what looked like a loaf under his arm and, good God, was that a
flask of wine?

She smiled. ‘I don’t think he likes me,’ she said. ‘Look. He does not wave.’

‘He doesn’t know you yet,’ Owen said. ‘He was the same with me for days.’ Or maybe it hadn’t been that long. Owen could not be sure.

‘You trust him?’ she asked, not taking her eyes from the boy as he cut his way up to them through the crop. ‘I don’t think you should trust him.’

‘Why not?’

‘You should not trust anyone.’

‘Well, that’s going to make this rather difficult then, don’t you think?’

She turned and gave him a smile. ‘Come. We must go.’

It was Janek, of course, who found the motorcycle and who – commandeering Owen’s help – hauled it out of the ditch. He stood with it on the road, holding it
upright while he studied it. It was an old BMW R12. Max had been a motorcycle fanatic and had obsessed about such things. This one, though, was battered and covered in dents and prangs, but after
Janek had kicked the throttle and it had stalled several times, it eventually belched into life.

He revved the engine and soon he was tearing down the lane, kicking up dust and stones, and then swinging the bike around and pelting back. They stood on the verge and watched, Irena rocking the
child.

The boy showed no fear, squeezing the throttle, pushing the bike to go faster as he rode back and forth, head down, back low, the wind shaking his collar and rippling through his trousers. Just
like Max, Owen thought, roaring through the country lanes, with him clinging on behind, yelling,
Max, slow down. You’re going to have us in the ditch!

‘Waah!’ Janek shouted.

He swerved to a halt in front of them. He wanted Irena to get on the back.

‘
Nein. Nein,
’ she said, laughing, but finally he persuaded her and she pressed the baby into Owen’s arms and lifted her dress to hitch her leg over the seat. She
wrapped her arms around Janek’s waist, looking petrified. He revved the engine and they were off, Irena shrieking all the way, pushing the side of her head into his back and clenching her
eyes shut.

It took several runs before she would open them and several more after that before she was laughing and they were both shouting at the thrill of it, the heads of meadow grass bowing as the
motorcycle whistled past, and dandelion seeds dancing in the road, whipped up in the backdraught.

Owen followed them along the verge with all the paraphernalia of the baby, the bags and canisters. Just as he was starting to get annoyed, the motorcycle ran out of fuel. He watched as in the
distance they freewheeled to a stop, laughing and sticking their legs out like stars. They got off and Janek pushed the bike over to the side of the road and let it clatter down. They waved at Owen
and he waved back, setting off to catch them up, but they were already walking on ahead.

He watched her. He
had
watched her – this other girl who had entered his thoughts and was gone again. There, within that blink of his eye, in the passenger seat
of an Austin Eton, or on the back of a disappearing motorcycle, or hurrying down the stairs at a party, and in another blink lost as he stared down from a balcony at the hazy swill of people.

He just wanted to hold her in his mind long enough to see her face.

He watched this girl in the same way: the back of her milky pale calves greasy in the sun, the faint silhouette of her legs through the white fabric of her dress, the curve of her hip, the hump
of the infant held in front of her – whom she carried with care but had not cared to name; whom she had given away but could not let go of. She seemed too young to be a mother and yet too
bruised now and altered to remain a girl.

Sometimes, as Janek and Irena walked ahead and their outlines blurred in the soft haze and flicker of sunlight and shadow, he could imagine the two of them standing in for him and this woman he
so dimly remembered. He wondered if that was the gait of her, the shape of her, her laugh; if what he saw was, in fact, her standing on a distant pavement, gazing at him one last time. But he knew
if he ran to her and turned her around she would be gone, just as he was to her, slipping even from himself, bleeding memories and slowly ebbing away.

The scrap of material lay loose in his hand, a short fringe of frays around each edge and the whole thing no more than two inches square. He turned it over and back again.

‘What is that?’ Irena asked, her eyes on him as she changed the baby’s nappy.

‘I don’t know,’ he told her. ‘Nothing.’

Just a plain bit of material and not even cut with any care. It had the same colour as a raincloud, snipped from the sky.

Clouds he knew. Cumulus. Cirrus. Stratus. Altostratus. He had looked down on them and through them, the aircraft barely making more than an indentation as if the clouds were no more than ghosts,
so that not even a bullet-shaped plane cutting through the belly of them would distract them from their drift. His first flight as a new recruit in the Air Training Cadet Corps came to him. It was
in a small yellow Tiger Moth called Quincy and the updraught had taken her up like an elevator. Seated nervously next to the pilot, he had fallen in love with the sky that day – finding God
somewhere in it, and the wonder of the heavens. They had flown low over the Hampshire countryside and then out as far as Bristol and the Severn Estuary. It was early morning and everywhere the
fields and countryside were lightly veiled in mist, and at one point steam from a railway locomotive had risen right up through it. He had got his first sense of it that day – the glory of
being a pilot.

The river was fast-flowing as it bumped and splashed over the rocks, scurrying around in whirlpools and leaping the fallen branches. His finger searched up and down the map but
he couldn’t fathom out where they were.

They struggled along the bank between the trees until first one and then the other direction became unnavigable, the bank so steep and the willows leaning so far over that there was no way
around and they had to turn back.

‘What now?’ said Irena.

Whichever way they looked there was no sign of a shallower calmer stretch and, unable to orient themselves, they didn’t know how far they would need to walk until they found a bridge.

‘Here is not so deep,’ said Janek hopefully. ‘I will take baby,’ he announced, but Irena wouldn’t let him.

‘Let me then,’ offered Owen.

‘I don’t need your help,’ she said.

They sat on the bank and took off their shoes and socks, Janek and Owen tying the laces and hanging them around their necks. They secured the baby into the papoose to keep him safe, then Owen
fastened the milk and water canisters to his belt; their coats and blanket he hooked around his neck as well to keep his hands free.

They edged their way in, Janek first, Irena and the baby in the middle, and Owen bringing up the rear. He could hear the sound of their breath, taut with concentration.

The water was freezing, and the current a lot stronger than it had looked from the bank. It pulled at his calves as they edged in deeper, using their fingertips to steady themselves against the
slippery rocks and their bare feet fumbling in the torrent for each footing. Beneath him he could feel broken branches, the sharp edge of stones, and the sludgy sponge of algae.

‘Fish!’ Janek exclaimed.

‘Where?’ Owen felt the unexpected whip of something hard like a snake against his leg. ‘An eel!’ he said.

It darted away. He saw it tunnelling through the water but then he lost sight of it. He carried on, feeling his way slowly forward, until there was a yelp from Janek and Irena shrieked, and they
both splashed in. Their arms flailed as they tried to find their feet again, the water surging around them. Owen scrambled down, slipping in to reach them as they struggled to help each other
against the fierce flow.

Irena cried, ‘
Das Baby!
’

The fall had already taken her several feet downstream and as she tried to stand Owen could see the empty papoose swilling in the water around her neck. He and Janek dived in, struggling against
the flow. Irena was feeling around in the water with her hands, dipping her head under to look and then up again as she tried to keep her footing among the rocks. The water crashed and roared
around Owen as he surged downriver, desperately searching for a glimpse of the child.

Behind him Janek came up choking.

‘I can’t see him,’ Owen yelled.

‘There!’ Irena quickly shouted.

Owen turned and saw the infant caught in the relentless tumble of the river, under and up again, turning and turning. Janek flung himself forward to reach him and Owen dived too. He pulled hard
strokes, his legs kicking against the rocks and weeds, the canisters banging against his back. In front of him the baby disappeared again, sucked under. Then the child was there and Owen lunged for
an arm. He pulled the infant in and held him close as the current washed them against a fallen tree trunk. Then Janek grabbed Owen’s shirt to steady him and threw an arm around Owen to keep
the three of them upright. They both spluttered and coughed. He was aware of Irena upstream, her hands clutched to her head. He felt Janek’s laboured breath against him as the two of them
held each other and the child between them. The water splashed hard against their faces. The baby started to howl.