Devastation Road (18 page)

He spotted a medicine chest on a dressing table, pillboxes thrown about the floor. He scrabbled around on his knees but he couldn’t read the labels, and anyway, he didn’t know what
he was looking for. Something for the baby or was it something for his head?

Downstairs he could hear a cheer and the sounds of a struggle. There were boisterous voices coming from the yard. He grabbed the nearest pill bottle and, pocketing it, scrambled out. The hall
below was already emptying of people just as quickly as it had filled.

When he got into the yard a crowd had gathered in a large circle, yelling and taunting. The group swelled as more joined. Owen strained to see, catching glimpses of the figure moving in the
middle, waving a piece of wood over the heads of the spectators, who still clutched their spoils.

He elbowed through until, with some force, he managed to squeeze his way to the front. The sight that met him he would never forget; not in the weeks and months and years that followed, when
everything else about those times had blurred around the edges. The old man tied to the chair, which had been kicked over so that he was flat on his back, his feet dangling. Janek, pacing
feverishly around the circle, the crowd goading him, cheering him on. The piece of wood that looked like a baluster gripped so tight in his hand. The farmer begged in German while Janek prowled
around him, wringing the baluster in his hands and squeezing it tighter. His face was red, an aggrieved anger that must have been pent up in him like a dark storm starting to unleash itself. The
crowd fed it and stoked it with their hundred voices: ‘
Zrób to!
’ ‘
Doe het!
’ ‘
Faites-le!
’

‘
Nein. Nein!
’ the man pleaded.

Then, horrified and frozen as he stood within the circle, Owen watched as Janek approached the man tipped in the dirt. He held the baluster against the man’s head as the crowd bayed
louder, clenched fists thumping and arms jabbing. Then Janek swung the baluster back, testing the strike, and the excitement of the crowd rose to a melee, before he took aim and swung the wood back
again, and Owen yelled: ‘Janek! No!’

They crouched at a shallow river, washing their clothes and bodies. They had left Irena nursing the child at the roadside. Janek was in nothing but his makeshift flag wrapped
around him like a towel. Owen wore only his shoes, to protect his feet from the sharp stones, and his grubby underpants. In the past he would have been embarrassed, squatting almost naked and
slopping freezing water up into his crotch as he rubbed the shirt that was not his between his knuckles. But not now. His trousers and socks were drip-drying from a stick dug into the soil. Up and
down the river, beneath the trees, others were doing the same: thin white figures glinting in the sun, voices subdued, just an occasional splash and giggle bubbling over the rocks.

The incident at the farmhouse hung between them in the air, invisible but heavy. The boy swilled his clothes carelessly about in the water with a finger. His head had that familiar tilt; his
eyes rested on Owen with a stern stare.

Part of Owen hankered back for that time when there had just been the two of them and the days had been simpler – without the confusion of Irena and the baby, the road and all its people
infecting them with a collective mind that wasn’t really theirs.

Owen wrung the shirt out.

‘I know you’re angry—’ he began.

‘
Jste po
ř
ád zran
ě
ný
,’ Janek said, interrupting him and pointing at Owen’s bruised ribs.

‘Listen, Janek, I know you’re angry, but this . . . this one-man retaliation unit . . . It has to stop. Do you understand?’

Of course the boy didn’t, but Owen carried on anyway.

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re thinking but if you’re angry – you know,
angry
,’ he said, trying to make the boy comprehend. ‘If you’re
angry because you think they killed your people, that man did not. He’s an ordinary farmer.’

‘
Já jsem ho nezabil
,’ said Janek. ‘Not kill.’

‘No. Only because I stopped you.’ The boy was exasperating. ‘Listen, I’m telling you—’

‘
Ne
.’ The boy abruptly stood up, the water dripping from him. He threw his sopping shirt down. ‘No. You listen. Two lives,’ he said. ‘You give
me.’

As Owen stood up as well, the boy gave him a hard shove and Owen stumbled backwards through the water.

‘
To vy. To je vaše vina
,’ the boy shouted, and then more words that Owen didn’t understand. ‘
Hledal jsem vás
’ and ‘
Dva
dny. Dva dny!
’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Owen. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I save you,’ said Janek. He slammed his fist at his own chest. ‘
Já!
’ Then he jabbed at the air but whatever he wanted to say, he couldn’t find the
words.

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Owen. ‘I don’t know what you’re saying.’

The boy was glaring at him again. Saved him from what? Pulled him up into the field? It didn’t make sense.

Then the boy stepped forward and Owen recoiled, scared that the boy was going to give him another shove that would send him back into the water. But when he spoke, his voice was firm and quiet,
an anger still in him that he was trying to contain.

‘You help Petr,’ he said. ‘Yes? We find
Angli
č
any
. English, yes? And you help Petr.’

‘But I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you’re saying, Janek. Prove it,’ Owen said. ‘Prove that you saved me.’

The boy picked his clothes up from around his feet, the water streaming from them, and wrung them out with a few hard twists. He gave Owen a final glare and then slopped out of the river and on
to the bank. He grabbed his bag and Owen’s clothes, came back with them and shoved the clothes against Owen’s chest with another furious burst of Czech before he splashed out again, the
flag still wrapped around him, and his pale white back disappeared through the trees.

Owen stood in the river, shaking and clutching his damp clothes to his chest.

‘Janek!’ he called, but the boy was gone.

Above him the outlines of thinly drawn leaves were ablaze with the evening light.

The boy slept with his head on Irena’s thigh, a soft air issuing out from between his lips. Her fingers stroked lines of comfort into his hair, the tips trailing his
face, around his closed eyes, his cheek, his jaw. Little Man lay beside him wrapped in the papoose.

When Irena closed her eyes too, Owen carefully reached across and very delicately dragged the boy’s bag out from beneath his arm. He softly unfastened the buckles one by one, opening it
and feeling around inside the bag that the boy always kept so close to him, never allowing it out of his sight. He didn’t know what he hoped to find; he just knew that he needed to look.
Perhaps Janek had taken something that was a clue to who Owen was.

His fingers found the shapes familiar – a pot, a pan, wooden bowls, sodden socks, the bristles of a brush – all of it tangled among what felt like clothes and a hand towel. Then
something hard. The tough cover of a book. He inched it out but there was not enough light to read by. He fumbled in the side pockets and felt the sharp prick of gramophone needles wrapped in a
handkerchief, and then tucked beneath them a matchbox, the shuffle of matches inside. He darted his eyes over at Irena and Janek, who were both still and sleeping.

The breeze blew out the first struck match. The second was lit just long enough to see the book was written in Czech. With the third he flicked hastily through it, finding at the back several
loose pages. He lit another match. Not pages but newspaper clippings. The first was old – 1918 – and had a photograph of thirty-odd men standing in a well-ordered group as if they were
part of a political assembly. The next included a map, most of it faded, but he could see that border areas had been shaded and labelled
Sudety
. On the corner of the page a date was
visible:
30. zá
ř
i 1938
. As the match burnt out he laid more articles flat on his knee in the dark, and then struck another match to sift through them. Time and again he came
across similar-looking photographs in the creased clippings. There were rallies, demonstrations, brawls, a crowd of men clashing with a group of soldiers outside the main doors of an office
building and then, in another, what looked like factory gates. Caught within the crush was a darkhaired man waving a baton, his mouth open mid-shout. It was Petr. And there again, in the next
photograph and the next, sometimes with his name – Petr Sokol. He lit another match and scanned the text. There were other names: Josef Myska . . . Filip Jankovic . . . A whole article about
a boy, Antonín Nemecek, who seemed to be only fifteen. Other words caught his eye, some similar to English so that he could guess their meaning: ‘
sabotáz
’ and
‘
demonstrace
’ and ‘
politický
’. In the scrum of a demonstration, Petr’s face in the thick of it, there was a smaller man fighting alongside
him, his fist raised and clenched. He had an armband around his jacket, and as Owen held the clipping closer, keeping the match alight, he noticed that the band had Janek’s symbol on it
– a flying bird within a box. He riffled through the other clippings, lighting match after match and finding the same man, the same armband, Janek’s symbol again and again. Only with
the last match did he sense something, and in that brief and final quiver of light, he looked across and saw that Irena’s eyes were on him.

Behind closed eyes that night, fragments of the day came back to him, and an afternoon too. An August weekend back at The Ridings.

Oh, you sketch. Max, you never said
.

They were sitting on deckchairs on their parents’ lawn, Max and Owen with their sleeves rolled up, sweating in their linen trousers, while Connie languished in a lilac summer dress.

Come on then
, she said.
Do me
.

Max had heaved himself up in the chair, saying,
You won’t like it
.

I might
.

Well, only if you don’t mind looking like the inner workings of a Tornado
.

Oh, Maxwell
, she had said.
Don’t be such a child
.

Actually, I’m really not very good
, Owen said. He had only brought his sketchbook out so as to distract himself from her, but he’d barely put pencil to paper. Cedar
wouldn’t sit still.

Why don’t I draw you, then?
She held her hand out for the pad.
Come on, hand it over
.

Oh, hello. Brace yourselves
. . .

For goodness’ sake, Max
. She turned on him.
You’ve not even seen it yet
.

She rested the pad on her knees and, repositioning herself, she thoughtfully stared at Owen with the end of the pencil pressed against her lip and one eye squinting at him as if, in the
sunlight, he kept slipping out of focus. Then, holding the pad secretively to her, she made a few flourishing pencil marks in no more than a matter of seconds and proudly handed the pad back.

Max swiped it from Owen’s hand and together they looked at it. Max snorted. As stick men went, she’d given Owen an obscenely large head.

And why’s one arm half the length of the other?
remarked Max.
Good God, has Father been at it?

They had all laughed at that.

Now don’t tell me,
she said, leaning into Owen with a playful smile,
that you’re not very good. Compared to that I’m sure you’re a bloody Rembrandt or, I
don’t know, what’s his name. The one with the
Venus de Milo.

She had been thinking of
The Birth of Venus
so he told her, Venus de Milo
’s a statue
.

Well, you know what I mean
.

Besides,
he added,
I’m really not very good at faces
.

That’s true
, grumbled Max.

Well, maybe you’ve not had the right subject
.

And in that moment, on that hot afternoon, he wondered if she had purposefully caught his eye then, or perhaps nothing had happened at all but the rush of heat to his face and the need to turn
away.

He lived in constant fear of himself; that at any moment something regrettable might burst from his mouth when he saw her or he might not be able to stop himself from reaching across to touch
her hand. At the Falkirks’ dinner party that October, he’d had to take himself out of the room entirely and stand in the hallway for a moment, trying to wipe incorrigible thoughts from
his head. She had seen what had been going on behind his eyes. Only later did he know that she was starting to feel it too.

Max, of course, was so blind to her that he saw nothing else.

I wish you’d talk to her more. For Heaven’s sake, O, she’ll think you’re bloody mute
.

But Owen didn’t trust himself, and Max remained oblivious of the herculean efforts he was making not to let anything show.

Surely then he had tried to stay away, and surely she had too. Yet every time he thought of her, it was of a stolen glance between the arms of a candelabra or the slight curl of a smile seen in
the wing mirror of Max’s Austin. Then, one evening on the way home from a dance, with a chap called Barnaby sitting up front with his brother and the beams from the car cutting through the
night, he had let his leg relax against hers. Even though they had both stared out of opposite windows, deaf to Max and Barnaby’s chatter, he could feel her thoughts reaching for him, and the
return of pressure against his leg.

The hall was packed, the heat unbearable, the air filled with clamouring voices and the stench of grubby bodies and stale sweat. Around them was a sea of heads in caps and
head-scarves. Everywhere Owen looked there were scared eyes and children crying. No one seemed to know what was happening or what it was they were supposed to be doing or why they were even
there.