The Road of Bones Read online

  He wasn’t there. I kicked a stone past his door, and back again. But in the end I gave up and hurried home, and it must have been a couple of hours or more before it even struck me that Grandmother must have sent me on ahead for fear the shopkeeper would call for the guards. If they were looking for the pair of malcontents the shopkeeper had described, all they would come across was an idle lad trailing his way home from school and, a street or so over, some ancient biddy trudging back all alone from the market.

  Never before had I seen Grandmother so pale from a spat with a shopkeeper. Or scurrying down alleys. But still I didn’t realize how much the world around us was changing, or how our lives were shrinking by the day, until the evening I slapped my last ace down on hers and, for the first time ever, got to crow back at her the boast she always made the moment her cards trumped mine:

  ‘For some, the crystal stair! For others, just the road of bones!’

  My mother smiled. ‘Has Yuri grown up enough to beat you at last? Or are your brains going soft?’

  ‘Neither,’ snapped Grandmother. ‘It’s just that, with the boy being cooped up so much, he’s turning into a cardsharp.’

  I looked up. Sure enough, the shutters were open to catch the last of the evening breeze. It was still light. Why wasn’t I outside, racing along the canal bank with Alyosha, or looking for mischief up back streets?

  Because no one roamed now. It wasn’t just the splatters of gunfire heard from other streets, or even the occasional dull crump of explosions echoing across the city. It was a creeping sense of fear that had turned all our lives into one long, long wait.

  And fed suspicion. I sensed my parents no longer trusted my blank face when they were whispering. I noticed their friends stopped coming to the house, and I was no longer welcome knocking on other people’s doors, even Alyosha’s. But though I must have asked a host of questions over that long, dreary autumn, my parents’ answers were evasive and guarded. And, looking back, I think I must still have taken everything around me for granted, as if the four of us had always spent the gloom of each evening crammed in that tiny room, elbowing for space and trying not to fight for the last shadow of potato.

  And some things scarcely changed. The schoolroom was still the schoolroom, for all that the stove was rarely lit now, even on the coldest days. Beatings still fell on us for the same sins: stupidity, fighting, throwing dice in the schoolyard and quarrelling over the lightest banner for the endless parades in honour of the Motherland.

  But still, I must have been blind. It was Alyosha who, nudging my elbow one morning, nodded across the room.

  ‘Look.’

  Another of the portraits on the wall had vanished overnight. But even when I burst in with a message at break time to find our teacher still carefully razoring that same leader’s face out of our textbook, I thought so little of it I didn’t mention it at home – not even though that day it was once again my turn to take the precious volume home.

  It was my mother who, flicking through silently, caught her thumb on the cut edge.

  ‘What’s this?’

  Her eyes slid down the page to where one sentence now fell into space and another began in the middle.

  Her smile was bitter. ‘Ah! So the whispers are right. Now we are down to three . . .’

  ‘Lily!’ my father hissed.

  I noticed no more than that it used to be her who scolded him for speaking too openly. Now he was just as keen on hushing her. But most of the time when I was in the room, they rarely spoke, except to rail about the cold when the vast communal boiler in the basement broke down for the tenth time in a week. Or to complain of their hunger after the meat ration, pitiful as it was, was halved yet again.

  ‘When will they realize empty sacks can’t stand upright?’

  ‘My belly already thinks my throat’s been cut. And now this!’

  I sat, unquestioning as a dolt, while the grumbling went on around me, poring over The Wonderful Story of Our Motherland in the dim light.

  What set me thinking was the song we all knew:

  Fairest of Lands, your power shines

  Over your mountains and across your seas . . .

  Grandmother sang it under her breath when she was busy with a broom, or scrubbing the table. She claimed she’d learned it at her father’s knee. He was as proud of his country as any man, and it was a party trick of his to set her before the other villagers on holidays and festivals, to lisp this old favourite.

  ‘I sang it faultlessly,’ she boasted. ‘Even getting the list of nations in the right order. For years after I grew, people would wink and smile. “Remember how your proud father would stand you on a table to sing it? His two great passions together: country and child.”’

  Mother and Father had learned the song nearly thirty years later – she at her school in town and he in his village. They’d met when she’d come with some of her Pioneer friends to help with the harvest. (‘Spy for the Revolution,’ my father always teased. ‘See where we hid our grain in case the Leaders decided to steal it later.’)

  They fell in love. (‘Canoodled in the granary,’ Grandmother muttered sourly.) Finally, Grigor summoned the courage to ask his sweetheart to stay.

  ‘Why?’ Lily asked him.

  ‘So we can be together.’

  Scornfully she’d looked him up and down. ‘But you’re only fifteen.’

  His face grew red. ‘Grown enough for you all summer!’

  Lily relented. ‘Come to the town,’ she said. ‘Join us. Everything we’ve been telling you is true. We’re changing the world there – getting rid of corruption and injustice and starting everything afresh so it’ll be fair for all.’

  My father was startled. He’d heard her praising the Five Great Leaders often enough over the threshing. But he’d not realized she cared about the Revolution so much she’d expect him to abandon everything he knew to join her in the city. He’d never left the village in his life. He’d sat beside her at the end of the day as she talked so eagerly of women’s rights, equality between the sexes and her commitment to the Great March to Our Glorious Future. But he had taken it much as he took the burbling of a stream. Talking was what women did. He’d been too busy watching the way the firelight shone on the wisps of hair that strayed out from under her red bandanna. He hadn’t actually listened.

  ‘You were a fool,’ my grandmother spat at him once through her tears, the day the Three Leaders signed in the ‘Fifty Mile’ rule that meant that neither she nor he would ever see the village again. ‘When you were deciding whether or not to follow Lily to the city, you asked yourself the wrong question. Not, “Do I want to do this?” Only, “Do I dare?”’

  And yes, of course, with such a challenge set himself, he’d jumped a train within a week. He tracked down Lily from her careless scribblings on the scrap of paper she’d left him. (‘Even the street name was wrong.’) And when he finally found her, she was already in bed with someone else. ‘I slammed the door and sat against it so neither he nor she could go out without stepping over me.’

  Lily let Grigor in. ‘Just till you find a place of your own. I’m with Constantin now.’ But within a week Constantin had given up coming. Each time Lily came back from a meeting, Grigor was still there. One night she let him into her bed again and, next morning, told him what a disgrace it was for a healthy young man to waste a single day when he could be out there helping to build the brave new world.

  ‘I went off singing that morning,’ he told me drily. As if to prove it, he began to belt out the old song that had become our nation’s anthem since the real one had been declared ‘backward and counter-revolutionary’ for mentioning the Czar. (‘They’ve had the man’s head off,’ Grandmother muttered scornfully. ‘Why fret about his hair?’)

  The first few lines are easy enough and my father made no mistakes singing them:

  ‘Fairest of Lands, your power shines

  Over your mountains and across your seas.

  Cradle of Peace, what nat
ions do you bind

  In brother love? Dear Mother of my heart,

  I count them for thee.’

  Everyone gets that far. But then my father spun confidently into the part that’s difficult: the list of all of the countries bound in brother love that make us such a great land – verses full of strange names, where you can be all too easily tricked by the tune into skipping a republic or two.

  My father never faltered, but came to a resounding finish at the end of the third verse.

  I knew the song as well. We’d sung it twice a week in Pioneers since I was eight years old. First we’d be sent to gather wood for the fire (before the order filtered down that that was treason against the state, and we just shivered). Then we’d form lines, and march up and down behind the ramparts of heaped snow, singing the anthem and slapping ourselves to its beat to try to keep from freezing. I had a good memory and sang it as unthinkingly as a bird. The names of the republics sailed out of my mouth in perfect order. (When commissars came, I’d always been the one chosen to sing the anthem in the long ceremonies of respect, and no one was jealous because they all knew that a single small slip would have earned them a beating.)

  But where we all stopped singing made me curious. It sent me back to my books. And to my teachers. That week, I must have asked a hundred questions. (Easy enough, once you’ve an interest.) This country is so huge that, if you sent word to the furthest parts, for months you’d have no idea whether you’d lost the message or the messenger. Line us all up, and you’d not believe we are one nation. You would see men in beards, and men for whom even the sight of hair on the face of a man is an abomination. At one end we have women dark as nuts, and at the other, women white as lard. We have whole lands of different peoples: merry and taciturn, careless and ardent. In this great country there will be people going to bed while others are rising. There will be people freezing from the cold while others are parched from the heat, and villages that starve while other villages are packing away the grain for seven years.

  And few will know the slightest thing about each other. So it was easy to intersperse the things I wanted to know (‘How many?’ ‘When?’) with the things that I didn’t (‘And do they wear the same sorts of clothes as us?’ And is their gruel made out of oats, like ours?’) and, over the days and weeks, gather a list of numbers – numbers so huge they’d make your hair stand on end.

  When I was ready, I lifted my head from my books at last. ‘Go on,’ I ordered my family. ‘Sing the anthem. All together. The anthem.’

  ‘Go bother someone else,’ my mother said. ‘I have no time for singing.’

  ‘Hush, Lily!’ said my father, glancing at the wall we now shared with the Litnikovs. Clearly he feared that, if she were overheard, she might be thought ‘unpatriotic’, and rumours were coming in that more people than you might have guessed were being arrested under the new Acts of Loyalty signed in that summer.

  I made the most of my father’s uneasiness.

  ‘The anthem’s different!’ I said loudly, almost nodding towards the thin wall. ‘Let’s sing it as we think of Our Leaders.’

  They stared. But now they had no choice. Only that week the papers had praised a man to the skies for boring a tiny hole to eavesdrop on the neighbours he suspected of plotting to wreck the Next Great Step Forward.

  So we all sang the song we’d learned so thoroughly – Grandmother over sixty years ago, my parents thirty years back, and me only a few years before.

  And it was exactly as I had thought. Grandmother sang along cheerfully and stopped where she always had, at the end of the second verse. Mother and Father kept on for one single verse more before they came to a halt.

  And only I could keep the song up through the last eight lines.

  I lowered my head to my books again. Maybe they thought that, having wreaked my mischief, I’d returned to my lessons. But not a bit of it. I was copying out figures. How many lived in this republic here? How many Kurds were there? How many Tartars? How many Yuseks had we liberated on the western front? How many Germanics had the annexation of Sirelia brought us?

  And the numbers! The numbers!

  This ‘Cradle of Peace’ in which I lived had, it seemed, since my grandmother’s childhood, added at least two hundred million souls.

  Two hundred million souls!

  CHAPTER THREE

  SO AM I sly? Because I said nothing to my parents or grandmother. I just started to think about this ‘Fairest of Lands’ of ours, and open my eyes a little wider. I saw the rags on our beds. The mouldy turnips in our pot. The glances between my parents whenever a slogan exhorting us all to even greater efforts went up on one of the factory chimneys we could see from our window, or news came in of yet more wreckers unmasked. (‘What’s to wreck?’ Grandmother asked sourly, using a filthy old footcloth to coax our last handleless pan away from the fire.)

  I looked out of the same old window, but now I saw things very differently. Where I’d seen busy people scurrying to work with their heads down against the wind or sleet, now everyone looked furtive. I watched the endless parades and, instead of admiring the banners, I noticed the dutiful faces beneath them, the glances at clocks and the impatient stamping. I’d nudge Alyosha off the same old steps and wonder, as he pulled me after him, if he was still as carefree as he seemed. Or if, like me, he had no words for what was going on around us, and, like me, had been learning through his skin that he and his family would be safer if there were never any words at all.

  One night I was woken by the sound of shouts in the street. My mother’s face was turned to the wall. Was she asleep, or pretending? My father’s eyes too were closed and Grandmother snored deeply in the chair.

  I slid out from under my rugs, and moved to the shutters.

  Instantly my father’s eyes snapped open. ‘Yuri! Step back!’

  But I’d already seen a woman pushed roughly into the back of a car, her shoe left in the gutter, and knew the news would trickle back of yet another saboteur found on our street. I wondered how I could have been so stupid for so long. Why had I never before looked at my mother and asked myself how someone who’d once sat in firelight and talked of the Revolution with shining eyes could turn into someone who, when the third Leader in a row was denounced as a traitor, did no more than murmur, ‘Fine ravens, pecking out each other’s eyes!’

  My father too I saw with clearer eyes. This man who’d joked so cheerfully of the revolutionaries creeping back the moment it suited them to steal his family’s grain had turned into a man too timid to speak his thoughts aloud.

  But then, who did? No one I knew. Even my grandmother no longer dared so much as nod a greeting to the old biddies she used to stand beside in church, mumbling the prayers my mother said simply distracted fools from changing the real world they lived in to something halfway as fine as the imaginary world they hoped to reach. Only behind our shutters was Grandmother brave enough to make her old proud claim – ‘They’ll not waste fifty grams of lead putting a bullet in this old brain’ – and carry on telling the stories I had been hearing all my life.

  But I had changed too. Now, as each story tumbled out of her, I took the time to listen.

  ‘. . . And as the Czar’s men caught hold of him, he lifted the handles of his barrow and sent his cabbages rolling down the hill, shouting, “Come, good neighbours! A free cabbage for everyone! And two for the louse who snitched on me!” And, before you could turn, the street was filled with men and women chasing down the hill after the cabbages. But even those who got there first and carried baskets with them took no more than one, for fear they would be thought the traitor who betrayed him!’

  Like everyone else my age, I had been taught that the Czar was a monster, a tyrant born to suck his people’s blood. But truth trickles out through a crack.

  Grandmother noticed me staring. ‘Yuri?’

  My mother too glanced at me. ‘Yuri? Why so pale?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’ But I was thinking, Now, when the sol
diers come, everyone vanishes. No one would stay to chase a cabbage down a hill.

  And how quickly the threads had tightened. It seemed no time at all since Alyosha and I were jumping over Novgorod’s pamphlets heaped by the kiosk on our way to school. Who, now, would even dare lean out of the window to hear the message the owl-eyed printer had shouted out for his sons, or to see how he broke his glasses, or what he looked like as he was carried away?

  No one.

  The kiosk was long gone. These days, I thought, as soon as anyone hears the tramp of soldiers, they latch the shutters tight and hide in their beds. No one sees anything. No one dares hear a thing.

  Next morning I asked Alyosha in an idle voice, ‘Remember Novgorod?’

  Instantly he peeled away from my side and down the nearest alley. I hurried after. He began to run. I trapped him in a doorway. His face was pale.

  ‘Agreed!’ I said. ‘Agreed!’

  His breathing slowed. His colour rose again, and after a moment of thinking, he bit his lip and nodded. There was no need to say what had been settled between us. I didn’t ask Alyosha what horrors in his street – or family – had set his nerves so on edge he’d end a friendship rather than hear a word about a man who’d once gone a step too far. And he didn’t volunteer to tell me.

  But curiosity is a weed that spreads. One night I said to my father in what I again pretended was idle innocence, ‘What if the last two Leaders should fall out?’

  ‘Yuri,’ my father warned. Already his eyes were shifting to the door as if on the other side there might be someone with his ear to the wood. ‘Show more sense, son. Keep your eyes down and your ears closed, and we will all be safer.’

  ‘But,’ I persisted, ‘no one imagined of the other three that they would prove to be traitors. So what’s to say—?’

  I got no further. The breath was knocked out my body. I found myself against the wall. One of my father’s fists was close to my face, the other hand clenched round my throat.