Devastation Road (19 page)

Some miles outside Leipzig a refugee collection point had been established and they had been herded on to a narrow slip road as lines of US military personnel directed them through. Now, along
with hundreds of others, they were jostled into the receiving centre that had been hastily improvised from military barracks. All the hope and relief Owen had felt at seeing the American soldiers
had sunk to the pit of his stomach. When he finally struggled through the hordes to the rows of desks at the end, dragging Irena and Janek with him, they found that the desks had been abandoned and
any system with it. Instead, the uniformed personnel were scattered among the crowd, trying to direct individuals one way or another, or herd groups of people towards transport. One soldier was
firing questions at those around him and then pushing them towards different corners.

‘We are going to be split,’ said Irena.

‘We’re not.’

But against the walls around the hall, various flags had been hung. Owen caught Janek’s eye. For all yesterday’s bravado, the boy now looked petrified.

‘It’s all right,’ he told him. ‘We won’t be split. Do you understand? They’re not going to split us.’ All the antagonism from the day before was paling
into insignificance. ‘Come on. This way,’ he said. ‘We need to get some help.’

He took Irena’s wrist and pulled her back into the crowd.

‘Don’t lose us,’ he told Janek.

The boy nodded. Through the crush of people, Owen could feel his fingers around Owen’s arm.

The noise increased at the back of the hall where there were two sliding doors, and around them the crowd started to surge and swell. There was a hissing outside.

‘
Podívejte se!
’ shouted Janek.

He pointed over Owen’s shoulder. Through a window the funnel of a steam engine could be seen pulling past. Others had seen it too. There was a slowing scream of wheels and inside the hall
a collective intake of breath, and then a combined swell, everyone straining to look and then starting to push, eager to get nearer the doors. They pressed hard against each other, arms and elbows
and shoulders trying to squeeze their way through.

‘Get back!’ a soldier bellowed. ‘Stop pushing.’

‘I can’t breathe,’ Irena gasped.

‘Just stay close.’

The crowd inched forward, taking them with it.

Janek’s fingers slipped and then grabbed on again. Someone’s cigarette breath was against Owen’s neck and a girl’s head was pressed into his shoulder, a suitcase digging
at his side.

The people at the door bottlenecked.

‘Get back! Come on, get back!’

This is how he’d lost Connie. In the crush of a party, the swell of a crowd. All the noise – the laughter and music and shouts of excitement – pressing at his head so that he
had wanted to shout out: Where are you?

‘Let me through.’ He pushed. ‘I said, let me through!’

The soldier was forcing his way through the crowd and Owen grabbed at his sleeve.

‘I’m English,’ he said. ‘Please. You’ve got to help us.’

The man turned his head but barely took Owen in.

‘I said I’m English. Do you know where I go? Please.’

The man looked at him, young and vaguely dazed, just how Owen had imagined an American farm boy, except that now this boy was herding refugees.

There was a flutter of confusion. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. And then: ‘You want Hitchin. Ginger hair. Yeah, over there.’ He pointed.

Owen looked.

‘Got him?’

Owen looked again.

The man who caught his eye was not ginger. He was thickset with a square head, short silvery hair and in an altogether different uniform. A man who, in the moment as he slipped through the
crowd, twenty or thirty feet away, Owen thought he recognized. Then the man was gone.

‘Where?’ Owen said, glancing back. But the farm boy was gone as well.

‘Listen,’ he said for the second time, trying to make himself clearer. ‘I’m a pilot, for God’s sake. British RAF.’

‘With no papers.’

‘No papers, no. Look, I just want to get home.’

The man called Hitchin glanced up from behind his desk. ‘With no disrespect, sir, so do the other God knows how many thousand here. As I said, you’re going to have to
wait.’

‘But I’m English.’

This didn’t seem to interest Hitchin in the slightest. The war must have washed all sorts of people up at this man’s feet, each with a story, when all he wanted was to have as many
of them sorted, processed and moved off his patch as quickly as possible.

‘You must have British contacts here,’ said Owen, ‘or ways one could get in touch with someone?’

‘I’m sorry, son, but I’ve got two thousand people here to deal with right now, not just you.’

‘Yes, I understand that.’

‘But I don’t think you do.’

Irena and Janek lingered nervously nearby.

‘I tell you what,’ said Owen, ‘who’s your commander? Where do I go for information, for help? I just need to make contact with the British government.’

‘You said.’

‘Yes, but you’re not listening. That’s all I’m asking for. Isn’t there someone I can speak to? There must be someone in charge.’

The man raised an eyebrow.

‘What about in Leipzig?’ Owen said. ‘Someone must have a line of communication with the British forces.’

‘Look,’ said the man, finally losing his temper. ‘The last thing MG HQ’s got time for right now is sorting out the woes of some goddamn rookie pilot like you. I said
we’d get to you in good time, sir, but I’ve got two thousand people here already to deal with and more coming every minute.’

‘I just need pointing in the right direction, that’s all,’ said Owen firmly.

‘No, what you need is to fill in the goddamned form, like I said,’ he told him, pushing it back across the desk one more time and prodding it with his finger.

‘But I can’t. I’ve already explained this.’ He waved his hand at the various boxes. ‘Half of this information you need, I don’t have. I don’t
know.’ He tried another tack. ‘Look, can’t you at least get someone to look at the child?’

‘They’re with you?’ Hitchin said, at last surprised by something.

‘We’ve been on the road for God knows how many days. We’re hungry, do you understand? Starving. The child needs some attention.’

‘We don’t have any medical facilities here,’ said the man. He turned his attention to Irena. ‘What are you anyway? Polish?’

Irena nodded.

‘Okay, well, we need you to get yourself over there,’ he said, pointing at a disparate group gathering in one of the corners. ‘We’ll get you packed off somewhere
soon.’

‘No,’ said Owen. ‘She’s coming with me.’

‘No, hero,’ said Hitchin. ‘She’s not going with you. She’s going to stand over there with all the others and she’s going to do exactly what she’s told,
without a fuss or a song and a dance, and she’s gonna take the kid with her. Is that understood? I don’t know who the hell you think you are, soldier, throwing your weight around, but
you’re not the goddamn cavalry. Okay?’

At that point a man appeared at Hitchin’s shoulder. He was thin and nervous-looking, with red splotches of eczema dabbed like thumbprints down his neck.

‘Sir?’

‘For Christ’s sake, what now?’

‘Sorry to interrupt, sir.’ The man bent down to speak into his ear. ‘It’s about the train,’ he said. ‘Bit of a mix-up, I’m afraid. They’ve sent
the wrong boxcars. We can’t use them, sir.’

Hitchin took a deep breath and then sharply stood up, bucking the table and shoving it out hard.

‘Parsons!’ he yelled with a voice one only had in the army. ‘Get yourself over here. Jesus Christ. We’re gonna have a goddamn riot.’

He started pacing over towards the man and Owen made a last desperate grab for his arm.

‘Sir!’

‘Oh, for the love of God. Do what the hell you like! Turner!’ he yelled. A man with a bandage around his head sprang from his seat. ‘Will you just get them out of my goddamn
hair?’

‘I missed it,’ the man called Turner said, as he ushered Owen and Irena out, Janek hurrying after them. ‘Where’d he say you guys need to get?’

‘MG HQ,’ said Owen, whatever that was.

‘Ah hell,’ muttered Turner. ‘Hitchin’s orders, right?’

‘Right,’ said Owen.

The open-topped jeep took them through the suburbs, Turner at the wheel, and his partner, Anderson, struggling to control a map, which flapped in the wind as he tried to
navigate them through the blown-out streets and rubble. In the back, Owen, Janek and Irena were scrunched in so tight that every time they hit a hole, Owen felt the boy’s hipbone crunch
against his own. Irena tried to protect Little Man from the dust and dirt as it blew up into their faces.

The east of Leipzig looked relatively intact but for the occasional building blown out and the bullet holes pelted like peepholes into the walls. Here and there people were sweeping rubble from
the paths. They drove through clouds of scent that wafted from blossoming gardens. Along the electrical wires, birds chattered in long lines.

The further in they drove, though, the worse it became. Owen’s stomach sank as he gazed up in bewilderment at the remains of the buildings leering over the jeep. Some had been flattened to
no more than mounds of brick and stone. The bombings had happened quite some time before, but even so, every now and then Turner had to swerve to avoid a scattering of bricks. Some of the buildings
were burnt-out shells, blackened and charred around the empty windows; others had parts blown away entirely, leaving nothing but random walls and lonely chimney breasts, the bones of a house with a
mountainous avalanche of rubble flooding through, taking walls down with it and flinging them like shingle out across the street. From up above, ash and dust drifted down. It covered the road in
thick silt, and the tyres kicked it up around them so that it fell on their hands and Owen’s trousers and got caught in Janek’s hair.

Bulldozers were shovelling up broken brick and debris into huge heaps.

‘We’re trying to clear the main through-roads first,’ Turner yelled back to them. ‘I tell you, though, no sooner have you cleared one bit than a block falls down some
place else and the goddamn road gets blocked again. I swear, this thing’s gonna take weeks.’

Their route did appear rather circuitous. Turner seemed an erratic driver and was constantly swerving to miss a blasted hole in the road, or a canister that had blown across it, or a splay of
bricks where a wall had come down. Twice they found their route blocked, and Anderson scanned the map for a way around while Turner threw the jeep into reverse and backed speedily up the road or
made a sharp three-point turn, reversing over rubble, wood and broken glass.

The high buildings that were still upright cast cold shadows across the street. Owen looked up at the blown-out windows, the iron balconies, and the white sheets or pillowcases hanging from them
in submission. Janek tipped his head back too, his eyes wide with disbelief. Irena kept her own gaze locked on the road, coughing as the smoke billowed into their faces. Occasionally dusty children
could be seen scuttling like beetles over the brick slags, covered in the same dirt that blew in scurvy waves across the road. Old men sat in doorways; with their motionless grey pallor they looked
like ancient gargoyles guarding the entrance to a troglodyte world.

The new US Military Government headquarters was on Leibnizstraße, off what once must have been a busy intersection. Most of the line of houses was still intact: tall,
narrow windows lined up along each floor in a style that was almost Georgian, and smaller basement windows that peeped warily like half-closed eyes over the top of the pavement.

Turner pulled up outside. A couple of soldiers with steel helmets were forming a loose guard outside the double doors. From open windows at the top of the adjacent building, the crackly sound of
a big band could be heard, and further down the street voices from a wireless.

‘Here you go,’ said Anderson. He opened his door and got out, nodding at one of the soldiers standing outside, then helped Irena out with the baby, Owen and Janek following.

As Turner and Anderson drove off Owen stood on the pavement and looked up at the countless windows.

The two US privates on the entrance wouldn’t let them in. Owen had to admit, they must have looked like an unlikely troop of vagabonds. He went through the speech he’d rehearsed in
his head. No, he didn’t have any papers, but he was a pilot, British government business, and he had not come all this way to be left on the doorstep.

The two soldiers standing between him and the entrance looked at his clothes.

‘Do you honestly believe I would have got halfway across Germany in a British uniform?’ he said.

They saw his point but still weren’t going to allow Irena and Janek in.

‘No refugees, sir,’ one of them said. ‘Strictly military personnel.’

‘At least let the girl through.’

‘We’re not supposed to let any refugees in,’ the man said.

‘Especially her lot,’ added the other.

‘And whose lot is that exactly?’ said Owen.

Before the man had a chance to answer there was a voice across the street.

‘These two not playing ball?’

The woman was in uniform: light brown pocketed jacket with a red felt title badge stitched to one shoulder, a black glove folded over the top of one pocket, a cream blouse, and army green skirt
and cap. She had a document case full of papers under her arm. She pulled at the other glove still on her hand as she walked briskly towards them, her heels crunching on the gravel in the road.

‘English?’ she said, the accent cheery American.

‘Yes,’ said Owen.

The only American woman he’d taken much notice of before was Loretta Young. He’d been to see her three times in
The Unguarded Hour
when it had played at the Regal Cinema on
Richmond Road. This woman had the same dark curls held in place with a clip.

‘Well, that’s great. C’mon, Teddy,’ she said to one of the men. ‘Don’t be such a spoiler and let the good man in.’

‘It’s these two that are the problem, miss,’ he said. ‘Rules, ’n’ all.’