Devastation Road (33 page)

‘What is the most important thing to him now?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Owen.

‘I think you do,’ he said.

Two shots simultaneously, and in the split second that followed Owen was aware of a third, and of Nemecek twisting and turning with the impact.

On the rattling train Owen found himself looking up at the sky. He could see the bullet-shaped pellet falling from the plane, closer and closer as the train edged across the bridge. The river
roared below. And just as Nemecek’s bullet hit him, bolting through his skin, the bomb struck the end of the bridge. The bullet tore into his body, tearing through the flesh below the ribs as
the bomb blasted through the railway tracks, blowing a hole right through and exploding against the gorge beneath. His insides crumbled. From the train he clambered on to the side of the rails at
the end of the carriage as the brakes shrieked and passengers screamed. And then he jumped. The bridge was collapsing and the front of the train started to tilt. He felt his whole body lurch, and
all of this came to him in a second – the moment of a bullet’s impact.

He fell.

He was falling, the ground rushing towards him. He could hear voices, see Nemecek’s body slip to the ground, Janek still there with his hands to his head as Owen’s legs gave way, and
he fell from the bridge, the river rushing towards him fast and furious. He hit the woodland floor as his body crashed through the water. The sudden roar of the river as it tore him away, the
rumbling of underwater explosions, bits of bridge and rock starting to hit. His head burst to the surface. He was only aware for the briefest moment of the huge wrenching sound from above him as
the engine toppled, peeling the carriages with it one after another. The tremendous eruption of water as the train and half the bridge smashed into the river around him.

Then, in that same moment – as Owen’s bulleted body hit the woodland floor and in his mind the thunderous roar of water crashed down upon him – everything cut to black.

He is at a bus stop in the quivering heat, the hill rising up in the distance. Inside his uniform he has the heart secretly stitched into the pocket. There is a canvas RAF bag
on the pavement beside him. He is going to meet Max. They’ve been called to the station to deliver 14,000lbs of fire-makers. He looks at a familiar wristwatch. The number in the tiny date
window reads 18. Eighteenth of July, he thinks. Nineteen forty-three. The bus is already five minutes late.

The street is deserted. Just him and – in the far distance there on the brink of the hill – her. She is standing on the pavement outside the gate where the steps lead up to the flat.
He can see her quite clearly, still standing where she had said goodbye when she had put her hand to his face, and he had kissed those lips, that cheek, that skin. It is all coming back to him:
when she smiled at him, a breeze lifting her hair. She pats his breast pocket and takes his hand. She kisses the knuckles and then plants a kiss in his palm, closing his fingers around it as if to
keep it safe.

Come back
, she says.
Come back to me
. She puts his hand to her belly.
I need you to come back
.

She straightens his jacket and pulls it tight, and then kisses him one last time; and that, in his mind, is when the first drip falls. It lies on the ground like a petal, and then another and
another. She opens the jacket, and there where the bullet was that Nemecek had fired, that pain that Owen has carried with him all this time like a premonition of the pain to come, he can see that
he is bleeding.

In time he would call it a miracle, for it was Martha who saved him, clawed him back from the dead, and would not give up on either him or the heart that for those few seconds
stopped. Or perhaps it was the cotton heart stitched next to his own that had pulsed first with the love of someone lost and for some time forgotten that eventually reignited it, not the pumping
hands or the cries for help. But for those few seconds he was adrift in a timelessness, with all the time in the world to find himself, to walk through the rooms of a frozen ice house, or run
through the wheat fields with a brother, or spot a button, or catch a bus, the tears streaming down his face. Or kiss someone goodbye.

He wakes in a field. He is not at all hurt or injured. He is in his office suit. He has been sleeping, that is all. And when he wakes and sits up he knows exactly where he is.
He has done this all before. He freewheels through the images. The line in the grass where Janek had dragged him from the river. The zip of a bird. The deep blue sky. The button is exactly where it
should be. No gun yet but he knows where to find it. First he needs to stand up. He needs to look around. He looks for Max but he isn’t there. There is just the field, the gentle tilt of it.
He is quite sure of where he is going. He has walked this walk before.

‘There you are!’

It was Martha. He at least knew that.

‘I thought we were going to lose you, but you’ve pulled through,’ she said.

His jaw felt loose. He wanted to ask where Janek was, where Irena was, and the baby. He knew that some of this was wrong, but he couldn’t think what. His fingers curled around the bed
sheets, the soft feel of cotton.

‘He’s gone,’ she said. ‘Before you ask. Janek, I mean. Went yesterday. Haynes drove him down to Celle. There was a train we managed to get him on.’

Owen tried to speak. She leant in close and he tried again.

‘You’ve been here three days,’ she said. ‘He sat with you for two of them. I’m sorry. I know I’m not much of a substitute.’ She pulled something from
her pocket and pushed it into his hand. ‘He wrote you this, by the way,’ she said. ‘Haynes helped him with the English, so you’ll have to blame him for the
spelling.’

The folded sheet of paper had been tied with string around a watch. He held it tight in his hand.

‘Oh, and that goddamned major of yours is dead,’ she said. ‘Haynes took him down. I think you shot as well, but God knows where that went. Lucky, I suppose. You might have been
court martialled.’

She went on talking but he was already falling. The darkness pooled over him so that when he came to, he was no longer in the hospital block, in one of a thousand beds.

He is clambering instead over the wrecked remains of a train. The iron is hot in the sun, the heat blasting off the metal. A cloudless blue sky reflected in the broken windows. He picks his way
across the overturned carriages, the smashed wood and timbers caught among the broken rails. Standing on the side of a carriage that now has become its roof, he wrenches open a door and peers down
through it. The carriage is full of dirty water, bodies floating about. One of them is a small girl, wearing white socks and bright red sandals. She is floating face down. Beside her there’s
a scattering of his forged identity papers floating like waterlilies, the ink draining from them, and there, nudging against the wall of the carriage, a stuffed toy bear. When he lies on his
stomach and reaches down to pull it out, he sees that one of its eyes is missing and the other is a single rusted tin button.

He drops the door shut and sits for a while, then climbs on to the fender and slides down to the boiler. He wades into the water and pulls out a canvas RAF bag that has got caught by a branch.
He knows what is in it. It has his camp identification number – 4993 – scratched into the canvas. He unhooks the buckles, opens it and finds the rye bread. He takes the letters out and
reads each of them one last time, committing every word that she has written to memory, the letters he had carried with him all that time, before, just like then, he lets them slip into the water,
and the river washes the ink from them and, like scattered waterlilies, sweeps them away.

The field ambulance took him from the camp, with Haynes at the wheel. Martha and Hamilton waved from the gate, along with a French girl with cropped hair whom they all called
Nurse Joubert. The remaining Czechs had gone; the Dutch and Serbs too. Before long the camp would be empty, all signs of what had happened there vanished entirely.

As for Owen, he was on the road to recovery and Haynes would drive him to Hamburg, where he would spend the night before his flight home.

He didn’t see the girl standing at the edge of the field as the ambulance bore him through the camp gates and out along the road. He didn’t see her waiting, hoping to see him one
last time if even for a second through a grubby passing window. She stood with her arms as if in the crook of them she still carried a baby, and as the truck passed, she turned and watched it go,
knowing perhaps that it was Owen and she would not see him again.

From the line of tables outside the café along the Alsterarkaden you could see both bridges across the Alsterfleet and the view across to City Hall, which had hardly
any war damage at all, he noted. The sun etched its way around it, drafting its outline against the blue, sparking on the clock face that topped the central tower. While below, in the main square,
British tanks were lined up, the taking of the city and victory over Germany now complete.

He nursed a barely warm coffee. The sun shone over the water through the arches, the shadows of the railings tangling around his feet. He closed his eyes for a moment, the pain beneath his ribs
real now and throbbing beneath the bandaging. The clock chimed the quarter hour. She was late; he knew she would be.

Along the neat row of tables people sat, basking in the sun and making small talk. Mostly they were German but occasionally a British voice would rouse him. Two women were quibbling over whether
they should leave a tip. Through the arcade, a deliveryman hauled a cart of bottles over the cobbles. It rattled through Owen’s chest and out through the hole where a bullet had once been.
Life, it seemed, went on.

He saw it all around him. He had walked though the city’s flattened streets, picking his way around the rubble of the train station and gazing around him at the forlorn carcasses of
buildings, the endless flurries of dust blowing out and swilling around his feet, and all he could think was: we did this. Max and I. Deliverymen delivering bombs. They couldn’t be held
responsible, but he felt responsibility all the same. He was filled with an almost unbearable shame just seeing the faces of the children sitting about on kerbs, or the single mother struggling to
push a pram through the debris.

Here though, on the arcade, the rubble had been swept up, the pavements washed down, wooden boards laid over holes and streetlamps righted. Across the way, a woman was banging the soot from a
rug over a balcony, while two floors up another was helping a girl to water a window box. People walked with shopping bags. He’d seen them queuing for bread. He had even stopped to watch two
boys playing with a broken tennis racquet – one tossing ball-sized chunks of rubble that the other would strike, blasting it against a halftumbled wall and leaving pellet-shaped marks among
those already there.

He saw her crossing the bridge and knew instantly that it was her. She was dressed efficiently in a grey skirt suit, a collection of files held in her arm. He watched her turn off the bridge and
swing a right and then come flurrying through the arcade, threading through the passers-by.

‘Flight Sergeant Thomas?’ she said, a little breathless. Her words were clipped and well spoken. How refreshingly English, he thought. ‘Cathy Bridport. RAF Liaison Officer. So
sorry. Have you been waiting long?’ She pulled up a chair and sat down, dumping the pile of folders she had been carrying next to the ashtray. ‘I’ve only been here a week myself.
I’m still getting lost.’ She lit a cigarette and offered him one, which Owen politely declined. ‘Not helped, I suppose, by the fact that you never know which roads are going to be
blocked. You think a building’s safe and then down it comes.
Bosh
. It’s a wonder anyone sleeps at night. I know I don’t.’ She took a puff and blew it out.
‘God, that’s better. I’ll just grab a coffee. Then we can get down to business.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Oh look! I’m sorry, you’ve been here an
age.’

She signalled for the waitress and a thin girl with floury fingerprints on her apron stepped out from the café. Cathy ordered a coffee. ‘And one of those nice pastries, please.
Eine kleine Konditorei
.’

The waitress nodded.

‘And you?’

‘Coffee and cake,’ said Owen. ‘Yes. That would be lovely. Thank you.’

‘Well, least I can do for keeping you waiting,’ she said.

In the July 1943 bombings, forty-five thousand of Hamburg’s inhabitants had been killed, she told him. Half the city destroyed.

‘We’ve taken over the Gestapo headquarters,’ she said. ‘The British Army Field Security, I mean. The boys are in their element there. Can you believe it – the place
was still fitted out with all their old telephone-tapping devices? They’ve been having high old jinks.’

‘Forty-five thousand?’ His head seemed stuck on the number.

‘Well, it wasn’t just us,’ she said. ‘The Americans too. It simply had to be done, didn’t it?’

‘Why?’

She gave him an odd look over the rim of her coffee, then leant across and stubbed her cigarette out in the cracked ashtray.

‘Perhaps we would be better off looking at your files,’ she said. ‘Fill in a few gaps.’ She opened the folder and leafed through. ‘Last dated sortie: twenty-seventh
of July 1943. Declared missing: twenty-eighth of July. Last radio contact: somewhere over Hamburg. You’ve rather come full circle,’ she said, scanning down the page. ‘Captured on
landing.’

‘Yes. If my memory serves me . . .’

‘Well, we’ll come back to that, shall we?’ She turned the page and read on. ‘From what we’ve gathered, you would have been taken to Dulag Luft, west Germany, then a
camp over in the east. One of their Luftwaffe places, right?’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Then it gets murky.’

She rifled through more papers. ‘From our intelligence, there’s a record you were all moved to Nuremberg.’

‘Nuremberg?’

‘Yes. In the west. You arrived in early February.’