Devastation Road (7 page)

Outside, there seemed to be some disagreement – perhaps whether to come in or just leave it. Owen held his breath. He could feel a cramp entering his foot and the sharp bits of concrete
beneath him burrowing into his side. The lights swept about the room again, over the rubble and animal droppings, and the rotting carcass of a half-eaten fish, its bones lifting out in a fan. One
of the beams passed over an abandoned bag on the floor, a red painted symbol on it, but with its dusty colour among the rubble, the torchlight did not stall. The lights swept out again and he heard
the men retreating, their mumbled conversations soon lost within the forest, until eventually they were gone and all he could see was the moonlit whites of the boy’s staring eyes.

The face fused into clarity and then came the recognition, but the boy’s name was lost.

‘
P
ů
jdem!
’

He kicked the bottom of Owen’s foot and Owen propped himself up.

It took a while before he could place where he was. He had barely slept and had spent most of the night watching the shallow mass of the boy laid out on the floor, listening to his breathing.
Outside the new day was just hatching, a dim bluish grey filling the empty frames along the concrete wall.

Janek – the name came back to him – swung his bag over his shoulder.

‘
P
ů
jdem!
’ he said again, getting impatient. Then he huffed and walked out into the morning, and Owen could hear him traipsing away through the forest before he yelled,
‘
Proboha, jdeme!
’

Owen struggled up, trying to tread the numbness from his feet, and uncurling his fingers from around the strange button that he had found clasped in his hand when he woke. A large symbol was on
the back wall, drawn in charcoal – a flattened ‘V’, like wings in flight, with another, smaller like an arrowhead, directly underneath, and all framed within a square. He stared
at it. Had it been there before? He checked his pockets – pistol, paper, button, map – and stepped out into the dawn.

They walked all day, skirting hamlets and farmsteads, clinging to the woods. Now that they’d crossed the border, the boy was anxious that they weren’t seen.

‘
Honem! Honem!
’ he called, urging Owen on, the map held at arm’s length in front of him, as if even the vague trails he led them down were thinly sketched within its
folds.

The going was hard, the ground uneven. Owen could feel his blisters rubbing, and his calves stung, as did his thighs. The invisible pain beneath his ribs bit with every step. As they walked his
mind drifted, looking for Max in the wheat fields, either as a boy, the lingering memory still playing out, or as a man striding through the crop towards him, not a delivery but a collection.

Oh, bloody hell
, he’d say.
There you are. Mother’s going spare
.

He wondered where Max was. He wished for him to suddenly appear on his motorbike or in his Austin 12/14 with the roof down.
Hop in. We’re going home
.

He pulled out the piece of paper:
SAGAN
. He needed to get to Sagan. He had no idea why, but the more he said the name, rolling it around in his head, the more familiar
and urgent it had become. He
did
know it. He had
always
known it. It could be no coincidence that it was there in his head and circled on the map, drawing his eye to it again and
again as if no other place mattered. When he got to Sagan it would all make sense. Something or someone would be there for him. It was this that was pulling him on.

He looked at the writing. Beneath his sweating fingers the pencil letters were starting to smudge. If he lost the paper or what was written on it there would be nothing for him to cling to but
the vagaries in his head; and if his memories went, maybe he would go with them, all the particles of who he was being lifted from him one by one until, with a single puff of wind, he would be
blown away like dust across the field.

Then another name fell through his thoughts like a stone – something he had been straining for – and he tried to grab it but was too late.

When are you going to get yourself a girl?
Max was always teasing. But there had been someone. Not a Margaret or a Ruth or a Charlotte or a Hetty. They had been Max’s. And not
Suzie Sue – a name that kept coming to him; a girl so beautiful that they had named her twice.

He watched the misshapen silhouette of the boy up ahead against the midday sun, his long gait and the water canister banging against his hip. Across a far barley field to the right he glimpsed a
woman carrying bags and ushering two small children along. The smallest kept stopping to pick things up out of the soil and Owen could hear the mother’s distant voice.

‘
Matouši! Pojd’!
’ She grabbed at the child’s wrist and hurriedly began to drag him as the boy started to cry.

Walking, he sometimes thought it was the back of another that he was seeing in front of him, not Janek. He had stared at the same back for hours on that walk – from where
and to where he was still unsure – but the jacket was quite clear now. It had been heavy grey wool that attracted the snow much like the others did – seeping in through the outer
material, the clothing and then the skin. He remembered the thickness of the arms, the scuffed right elbow, the man’s narrow body lost somewhere within the folds, the way the back of the
collar was fraying, the glimpse of threads hanging from beneath the man’s tightly wrapped scarf.

The name was gone but he had known it once. There were others in his head – Barnes, Budgie, Peri, Smithy – but none of them seemed to fit. The memory of the back of the man’s
coat remained quite clear though, even the points in it where the creases came and went, as if it had formed a union with the man within it, so that if clothes had muscle memory you could have
taken this man out of them and they would still have walked through the snow without him, those trousers and those shoes, but most of all that jacket. Its arms would swing this way and that; the
same creases would come and go.

They rested in a copse of chopped trees, dozens and dozens each taken down to a stump so that it looked like a crop of seats. A few stumps away Janek puffed on a cigarette, the
smell of the smoke bringing back memories of Max. Owen had no idea where the cigarette had come from.

After a few minutes Janek wandered across to the edge of the field and draped himself over the fence, still sucking on the cigarette, while Owen poked around with the watch, the air where Janek
had sat infused with the tang of tobacco. He wondered if he could mend it. He had managed to prise the back off. Inside, the springs and wheels stood stationary. He gave each a gentle nudge with
the blunt tip of the pencil but nothing wanted to move. He took the watch to pieces and emptied all its cogs and coils and tiny screws into his hand. Now though, scattered out across his palm, none
of the parts seemed to bear any correlation to the others. He poked at one or two of them with his fingernail, uncertain even what they were. If he could navigate his way around anything as complex
as an instrument panel, he could navigate his way around something as simple as a watch.

Even as a child he had taken things to pieces – clocks, wirelesses, gearboxes and carburettors – and then tried to rebuild them, only better. He liked to see how things worked, the
design and construction – even of a living creature. He had dissected a frog once, all on his own. He had pinned it to a slab of wood while it was still alive and then had been disappointed
when, the moment he had nervously cut it open, it had promptly died. He had so wanted to watch its tiny pumping heart.

Janek wandered back, pinging his cigarette stub into the grass and then stepping up on to one of the stumps, and then from that on to another and to another, having to jump sometimes, barely
crossing the gap. He suddenly appeared on the same stump as Owen, behind him, his toe kicking at Owen’s backside. He peered over Owen’s shoulder at what he was doing before leaping off
on to the next.

Owen turned back to the task in hand. These were the sorts of things he had liked to draw: cogs and wheels, the workings of a watch, every mechanical piece like a biological organ, pumping life
into the machine. At his board in the Experimental Drawing Office on Canbury Park Road he had drawn the workings of aeroplanes, knowledgeable of their thermodynamics, and detailing everything to
the peak of precision.
We’ll be designing bombers before long
, Harry had said, although Owen had no recollection of that.

On warm days like this on the second floor of the old furniture depository he would often open the sash pane beside him, using a spare shoe as a wedge to keep the window open. The smell of the
rail tracks on the other side would waft in or the fumes from the Experimental workshop, or sometimes, when the wind was right, the smell of Mr Birch’s Fish and Chips.

He had enjoyed the neat orderliness of his craft – the careful angles and finely drawn lines, the precision of his calculations – and also the grace and beauty of his work, as if it
were not just a plane he was creating on the clean crispness of the paper, but a bird of human design. He was the creator: its wings envisaged and crafted by him, the almost feminine nose, the taut
tail at the back, the mechanics of its aviation, so that sometimes if you glanced up at the sky it was hard to distinguish the organic from the mechanical. That, at least, was his aspiration as he
hunched over the drawing board, the window propped open and the high jinks of the factory shop boys drifting in from below.

The sound of a plane over them, its metal skin glinting in the sun, brought him back. He couldn’t be here because he was a draughtsman. He felt the boy’s eyes on him. There must have
been something else.

By late afternoon the deciduous trees had given way to pine, the forest growing airy and the trunks rising over them, naked and tall. Beneath them the ground was carpeted in
spongy moss as if the forest floor had been bubbling, and was covered in needles and a scattering of ferns and gangly saplings. Birds bickered above them and there was a pattering of distant
gunfire and then a boom so deep that it throbbed within the ground.

He watched the boy hurriedly tramping on ahead. He had shown Owen on the map how close he thought they were. Up ahead he bent to pick something from the curling branches of a fern and held it
up, saying something. It was a grey woollen mitten. And twenty minutes later, by chance, he found its pair.

They cut across two railway tracks and continued through the trees, the boy now walking with his hands in the mittens and snapping at midges as if he had lobster claws. As the dying sun burst
through the lofty heads, it threw corridors of light through the forest and turned the trunks metallic: silver, copper and brass. Janek then found a woollen hat in some nettles and hooked it out
with a stick. It made Owen think of a man he’d once seen lying face down in the snow.

It was this increasing light that was the first sign. The edge of the forest, he had thought, or a clearing, or another railway line. Then, through the pines, he spied a
watchtower high on its bandy-legged perch. He dropped down and held still.

‘Janek, get down,’ he hissed.

The watchtower seemed to be empty but it wasn’t that that was making his heart quicken. He edged forward through the trees, his eyes searching for any movement and scanning for guards as
they both crept closer. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. This was where three days’ journey had taken him; this was the Sagan that had been written and twice circled on a scrap
of paper, the pull that he’d felt in the pit of his stomach, the only spot on the map that had caught his eye and kept luring it back. He remembered the
III
. He saw what it meant
now. He scrambled closer and lay down.

‘
Pane bo
ž
e
. . .’ Janek said under his breath behind him, who had probably seen nothing like it, but Owen had. Like a key clicking open a lock, the memory suddenly
opened, his mind foretelling everything that he saw the split second before he saw it – the shapes of the buildings, the long huts with shallow roofs and high, wired fencing and double set of
gates, the second and third sentry posts; sight and memory compounding in a fused moment of connection.

I’ve been here, he realized. My God. But how could it be so familiar? He felt the undeniable sensation that he had stood on that other side of the wire, that he had stared out through it
to where he stood now to see – yes, he thought, glancing behind him – this view, this vista, this very same forest. Yet, staring through the fence and along the stretch of compounds,
the rows of single-storey barracks and then up at the lookout post, something
had
changed. He kept expecting to see movement, to hear voices, maybe even shots being fired at them, but
wherever he looked there was nothing. Not the sight of a single soul.

They nervously walked the fringes of the camp, eyes alert and ears pricked, but within it the barracks stood like wooden husks. The only movement Owen could see was a loose sheet of paper in the
dirt occasionally lifting in the breeze. Two high perimeter fences spanned the length, both with a barbed wire overhang at the top that tipped inwards. Between the fences were tangles of wire, and
then, another thirty or so feet in, a taut line of wire fixed a couple of feet above the ground that he wanted to call ‘the ditch’. There were empty guard towers at each corner and
every hundred yards in between. Some of the windows were still in place, while around one, smashed glass lay among the bandy legs, pressed into the dirt.

The gates had been forced open and they squeezed through the gap. Owen walked with the pistol held ready in his hand, Janek with his knife, both expecting at any moment to be ambushed. As they
cautiously crept through the compound there were dozens of familiar-looking barracks, each raised a little off the ground for the ferrets to poke around beneath. He knew the kitchens, the theatre,
the bathrooms where there had been metal tubs for sinks and soap that never lathered. And yet how or why or for how long he had been here he was still unsure.