Devastation Road (5 page)

The boy stood but Owen yanked him back down.

‘Don’t!’

The men at the trucks were opening the doors, one of them flicking a catch on his gun. Another soldier appeared from within the house hauling out two young boys. He gripped each by the upper arm
and dragged them as they struggled and fought across the yard. He forced them viciously into one of the trucks, while the woman was digging her heels into the dirt, trying to lower herself to the
ground, but the silver-haired man heaved her up as she screamed and shouted, and, with his comrades, pushed her into the second vehicle.

The door slammed as, beside Owen, the boy tried to stand again, shouting, ‘
Nacistický srá
č
i!
’ but Owen hauled him down harder.

‘You’ll get yourself shot.’

Then from behind the fence came a ferocious roar of air. Through the gaps between the woven strips of bark they saw flaring jets of flames as two of the men torched the outbuildings, great
projections of dragon-fire issuing from flamethrowers, while another stood in the doorway of the farmhouse, a silhouette against the glowing fireball as the hallway was engulfed. The trucks
started. Voices shouted. Through a truck window the woman was shrieking as the flames broke through the roof of one of the outbuildings, already crackling at the sky. The downstairs windows of the
house splintered as smoke began to issue.

Owen wrapped his arms around the struggling boy.

‘
Nacistický srá
č
i,
’ he yelled, before they were forced to bury their heads, the heat so intense against the latticed strips of wood that they could hear
the dried crackle of bark on the other side of the fence slowly peeling away.

It was not that he was lost that concerned him most. Nor was it that he had found himself in a war that he remembered so little about, which now seemed to be consuming
everything and everyone within it. Nor was it that he had ended up in an obscure country that in the past had been nothing more than a strange name in the news broadcasts, or, even, that somehow he
seemed to have wiped several years from his mind. No, what concerned him most was that things he now knew for sure – and knew that he knew – could suddenly be lost again, and then
found, and lost once more, as if they had never been there in the first place. Not things from years past, securely embedded, but things learnt yesterday, or an hour ago, or five minutes. He had to
work hard just to keep them in his head. Like the train wreck. Or the ransacked house. Or the button. Or even the boy.

Owen was still not sure if he should know him. Or how long they had been together. Or even what his name was – if, indeed, he had asked. All he knew was that he was Czech, and had quite
likely fed him.

BOY
=
CZECH
=
BREAKFAST

He had found it on the scrap of paper – a formula for remembering.

He was sitting beside a pool sunk within a sunlit dell, surrounded by boulders and overhanging trees. A small waterfall surged down through a line of rocks littered with broken
branches and coursed some eight or nine feet into the pool. Thin-framed dragonflies motored about like silent biplanes, coming in low to scuff the water and swerving the bomb blasts of droplets
that splashed from the waterfall. Leaves tumbled around him, spiralling whirligigs drifting down.

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 V
ě
nceslav Sokol.’ He took a bow and sat down again. ‘Janek. Janek –
Owen,’ he said, motioning to them both and nodding. ‘Good.
Dob
ř
e
.’

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 m
ě
nau
č
il Petr
.
Teach me.’

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

‘
Petr je m
ů
j 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
č
lov
ě
k
. 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
Ameri
č
ani
, 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 Angli
č
an
, 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
Č
ech
. 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.