Devastation Road (9 page)

The boy said nothing, his eyes starting to moisten. He carefully tucked the photograph away and then pulled out the last. He sat quite still and stared at it, his hand shaking, and then before
Owen had a chance to see, the boy had screwed it up and flung it into the fire. He slapped the wallet shut and firmly set it down.

‘Who was that?’ Owen asked.

Through the flames, he could just about make out the crumpled face of a girl, older than Janek but younger than Petr. The picture started to curl and wither, the flames slowly taking it.

‘Kate
ř
ina,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Kate
ř
ina is . . .’ He didn’t know.

‘Your sister?’ Owen guessed.

Janek paused, thinking. Then the word came to him.

‘Traitor,’ he said.

They moved westward, leaving the Silesian forests behind, crossing fields, spinneys and wastelands, and skirting the villages and farmsteads wherever they could, the
landscape flattening as they went.

The road they eventually joined was strewn with a ragged trail of people, some heading north as they were, but most passing them in the other direction, hurrying south. The warm air quivered
with a shared urgency, mothers steering children along, their hands lightly on their backs; while the few men they passed looked old and weathered, their beady eyes full of suspicion. Occasionally
there were even German soldiers, making a weary scramble, some of them so tired it seemed that they could barely hold their rifles.

If the English or the Americans were coming, or even the Russians from the east, it was only a matter of time before they happened upon them, he told Janek.

‘And then we will find your brother, and mine too; and they will get us home.’

In the distance a figure sat on the side of the road, the warm sun so bright that in the gentle heat she shimmered as if she were barely there at all. As the road brought them
closer, he watched her offer the passing travellers the bundle she was carrying, presenting it in outstretched arms from the verge, but nobody seemed to want it.

Two men passed, one hauling a trolley piled with sacks and a small dog curled on top like a turd, and after that a lone woman. Once again the figure proffered the bundle. There was a short and
clipped conversation, and the girl, for he now saw how young she was, called out to the woman – ‘
Nein!
’ and then ‘
Bitte!
’ – as the woman walked
on but, like the others, she would not stop.

The offer and the refusal.

The offer and the refusal.

They saw it running on a constant cycle until, as the road drew them nearer, Owen realized that the bundle contained an infant parcelled in a shawl. The young girl looked tired and thin, in a
grubby white dress, a pink cardigan embroidered with fraying flowers, and a headscarf tied tightly over her head.

Without taking his eyes off her, Janek gave Owen’s sleeve a tug.

He leant in. ‘
Nemluvte s ní
,’ he said. ‘No English. Hm?’

Owen saw how desperate she was, holding out the child to everyone that passed, and her voice tremulous.

‘
Bitte, nehmen Sie mein Kind
.’

He tried not to catch her eye, while Janek’s hand at his elbow gently urged him on. Then, to his relief, she suddenly cut in front of them, targeting instead a well-dressed woman walking
several yards ahead.

‘
Bitte, nehmen Sie mein Kind
.’

The woman, who was carrying a leather holdall and had a flowered silk scarf around her neck, tried to ignore her but the girl hurried alongside her.

‘
Nehmen Sie doch bitte mein Kind!
’

The woman turned her head away and quickened her pace. The girl seized at her arm.

‘
Ich will es nicht,
’ the woman said sharply, pulling her arm free, but the girl grabbed at it again.

‘
Bitte! Ich kann mich nicht darum kümmern
.’

‘
Ich kann es nicht,
’ the woman snapped.

The girl tried to force the bundle on her anyway, pressing the crying infant against her and talking fast, imploring her as the woman struggled to push her away, red-faced and flustered now.

Janek shouted, ‘
Lasst sie los!
’ and before Owen could stop him, he was in the middle, giving the girl such a shove that she staggered back against the verge.

‘
Sie kann nicht helfen!
’ he yelled.

She stopped, her eyes filling as the baby wailed in her arms.

Then they turned and marched on – Janek, Owen, the woman with the holdall – leaving the girl behind.

‘
Danke,
’ the woman murmured, but she would no more catch Janek’s eye than she had the girl’s, and after a while they let her pull away, the hard soles of her
patent shoes clicking on the road, the leather holdall still in her hand and the silk scarf fluttering out behind her collar.

When Owen glanced back, the road was quiet again. There was only the girl, holding the child to her chest and trying to soothe it, while she looked helplessly around her. She didn’t seem
to know what to do.

They walked in silence, an uphill slog, but the girl and her baby played uncomfortably on his mind.

It was another ten minutes before he dared turn again, but the road behind them fell away, as long and straight as a grid-line, and now deserted; just the fields swilling on either side, empty
but for the breeze. He stopped, hesitant and suddenly worried.

‘Come,’ Janek said. He gave Owen a glare and pulled at his arm.

But Owen would not. His eyes were fixed on the spot where the girl had been, a feeling of sickness starting to creep through him. He couldn’t see where she could have disappeared to with
the child so quickly. Then a terrible thought struck him, and with a growing sense of panic he started to walk back, slowly at first and then faster, his heart bumping up into his throat and
thumping in his ears. Like a distant echo he could hear Janek behind him, yelling – ‘
Ne!
’ and ‘
Ne! Jdeme!
’ – but Owen would not stop. As the
road took him down the hill, he broke into a run.

The bundle was in the deep grass on the side of the road, just as he had feared, the infant’s small face white within the shawl, its eyes blinking and tiny pink fingers
fumbling at the air. He turned and turned and turned again, scanning the corn in every direction for her, and trying to see her in the pockets of trees.

‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘HEY!’

He waited, and then yelled again, even louder, but the child’s mother was gone.

Janek stalked on ahead, furious and striding hard. He would barely speak to Owen.

‘No!’ he said. ‘No!
To dít
ě
ne!
’

Owen had tried to explain that he couldn’t leave it, but Janek kept shouting, a rattling barrage of Czech. She wouldn’t come back, if that was what Janek was thinking. But Janek
wasn’t listening. He paced down the road throwing his hands up in disbelief.

‘
Ne dít
ě
, je
ž
išmarjá!
’

Already the infant was crying.

In the hours that passed he would tell himself that there had been no choice. The truth, though, was that he couldn’t rationalize why he had gone back and then picked the
child up – it had come from a compulsion within him that he couldn’t put his finger on.

The infant now was inconsolable, its pink face reddening until it was the same colour as the inside of its mouth, and its crying quivered in Owen’s chest. He tried to soothe it as best he
could, holding it this way and that. He was filled with a growing sense of dread. Dear God, what the hell had he done?

On a road lined with poplar trees, the panic finally took him and he tried to give the bawling infant to a family in a wagon. He held it up to the elderly mother at the reins
but she shooed him off, snapping something at him and spurring the horses on. The man and two daughters, who were hurrying alongside the piled cart and hauling their cases, pushed their way around
him.

He stopped the nearest daughter to him, pulling her back. She looked about twenty. Just the right age, he thought. Her face was pale and blotchy, and her greasy hair was sliding out of a clip.
She looked at the child grizzling in his arms, its clenched fist waving.

‘Please,’ he said. If she could just take it . . .

Her eyes were hard.

‘
Englisch?
’ she said.

‘Yes.’

She considered this for a moment. Then, pulling up a force from within her, she spat into his face.

They sat in the entrance of a field, Owen in the long grass, the baby growing heavy in the crook of his arm. He tried jigging it, turning it, resting it over his shoulder and
then holding it again in his arm, but its crying had become incessant and he had no idea how to stop it.

Janek perched on the top bar of the gate, hunched over his knees, and his head tilted with his fingers in his ears.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Owen, ‘but we couldn’t have left it. You understand that.’

The boy turned his head away and gazed instead out across the fields.

Owen had never had someone spit at him before, let alone a girl. He still felt the prickle of her saliva on his skin. It felt like shame.

The baby was a boy. No more than a few weeks old, the thinnest wisps of blond hair lifting from the top of his head. The skin of his face looked loose, as if the flesh still needed padding, and
there were wrinkles gathering around his neck. His eyes were full of gunk and a thin film of snot was drying into a crust under a nose no bigger than a thumb tip. As they sat, the child’s
cries tired into a resentful whimper.

‘We’ll have to do something with him,’ Owen said. ‘There must be places. Orphanages or something, I don’t know. Somebody will have it. Don’t you
think?’

The boy kicked his heel at the gate bar and arched his shoulders into a shrug.

‘He’ll need feeding too,’ Owen added. ‘Can’t give him bloody tins of processed meat. We’ll need to find him something. And nappies. God! Milk, clothes . . .
Jesus Christ.’ The list went on.

The boy remained silent. It was so hard to tell whether he was even listening sometimes. He stared out across the field. Something in the trees where the field dipped had caught his eye –
a sudden flash of movement – and he craned to see. For a long time his eyes fixed on a spinney, then he turned to look at Owen.

‘No more road,’ he said.

‘What?’

He swivelled around, jumped off the gate into the field and set off through the furrows.

‘Hey! Where are you going?’

But the boy just whistled a call and beckoned him on with a wave.

In the small cluttered kitchen of a farmhouse they forced a widow at gunpoint to give them food, while the baby screamed in Owen’s arms, and Janek yelled at it and the
woman, waving the pistol about, and Owen shouted and the flustered woman cried, ‘
Nein! Bitte! Nicht schießen!
’

‘
Milch
,’ Janek shouted. ‘
Milch
.’

He swung the gun on the baby and Owen, and then on the woman again, who by now was red-faced and sobbing as she bumped around the table, knocking things over, flour dusting the floor and her
hands all of a flap.

‘And towels,’ Owen added.

‘
Und Brot!
’

‘And soap.’

Janek swung the gun, still yelling.

‘Jesus Christ. Will you put that bloody thing down?’ He’d fire it if he weren’t careful.

The baby screamed and screamed.

After, as they walked, he held the bottle to the child’s mouth and it sucked hungrily on the teat, the bottle old and cracked but good enough until they found something
better. His arms were already aching.

Janek strode on ahead, the milk canister he had stolen yesterday swinging at his side, now full again, and another containing hastily slopped-in soup, and a hand towel looped over his belt.

They had left the woman sobbing on the floor. It was the second time she’d been robbed in a week. The camps had been blown open and the inmates were loose. The Poles and Russians were
marauding the farmlands, taking everything, she had cried.

But that was not their problem and for now they walked, the adrenalin still pulsing through them, Owen happy that Janek was happy and smiling again. He had slapped Owen on the back as they made
their way out to the lane and, for a while, he had walked with his arm draped over Owen’s shoulder.

Owen tried to think of something to sing to the child but all he could find in his head was the hymn, those few lines he couldn’t shift about pilgrims and redeemers.

They were brothers now, Janek said – brothers looking for brothers. Was that why when Owen took the lead, he sometimes thought the boy was Max, that it was Max’s footfall he could
hear behind him? The stone that suddenly scudded past him had been kicked by Max’s foot. Max’s voice. Max’s laugh.
You can’t get rid of me that easily
. Another
stone skittering past.

In his arms, the baby strained to suck at the last dregs of milk. His face reddened with the effort, and he let out a few grizzly, hungry gasps. Owen lifted him on to his shoulder and tried to
comfort him, but in the end the baby started to cry once more.

‘
M
ů
ž
a?
’ said Janek, offering. He took the infant from Owen and held him out in front of him as if the child was a wet and dripping thing. He manoeuvred him around
and then changed his mind, uncertain how to hold him.

‘Not like that. Like this,’ said Owen, showing him.

‘Ah, yes, yes,’ said Janek. ‘Shh,’ he said to the child.

They rested beneath a willow that overhung a rill, Janek leaning against its trunk, with his knees up and the baby cradled within them. The infant clutched a finger with each
hand as Janek softly spoke to him and gently moved his fingers around. The yellow heads of celandine burst up through the thick grass.

Owen lay on his back, studying his notes and trying to make sense of them.
COTTBUS
, he’d written, and
BABY
–
NOT
MINE
. There were other things written and crossed out, connections made with arrows as if they were electrical circuits mapped out at his drawing
board.
We’ll be designing bombers soon
, Harry had said.