The Road of Bones Read online

  ‘Enough!’ he hissed in my ear. ‘Not a word more. Your mother and I haven’t crawled like grubs all these long years to have you risk our skins now. This room of ours does not exist, you understand? It might as well be invisible. We wish it were. Your grandmother’s just some bumbling fool who scours the market for food we can afford. Your mother works like an automaton at the factory. She has no thought except to fill her quota of bullets like a good daughter of the state and get to the end of her week. And me? I have no opinions at all. I am a hollow man. I cut my lengths of wood exactly as I’m ordered. I ask no questions and I have no views.’

  He loosened his grip enough to let me take a breath. But he kept on. ‘And that, Yuri, is how we have survived this nightmare so far. That’s why your mother isn’t in a wagon rolling north, and I’m not lying with a bullet in the back of my head. That’s how we stay alive. And that’s how we intend to carry on.’

  ‘All right!’ I pushed him off. ‘All right!’

  ‘So no more talk of our remaining Leaders, except to say they are the fine protectors of their people.’

  I nodded. He’d at least offered me the dignity of letting me know that I was right. ‘Nightmare’, he’d called it. But it was a clear enough warning. And I am grateful because it did make me wary. I waited longer and I listened more.

  And what I learned was something curious. That how you listen matters. Listen in one way and all you hear is praise and gratitude for whatever comes. Listen in another, and things appear in quite a different light.

  The very next week, at Pioneer training camp, Alyosha threw down his wooden rifle at the end of the practice and rubbed his shoulder.

  ‘I’m so stiff the pains are running up as high as my ears.’

  Sergei, the team leader chosen for his devotion to the troop commissar, promptly rebuked him. ‘Alyosha, when our turn comes to defend the Motherland, the rifles we carry will weigh a whole lot more than these.’

  Behind me, a soft voice said: ‘If we have rifles at all.’

  Sergei spun round at once. All of us knew whoever had spoken was on dangerous ground. The troop commissar didn’t thank us for making jokes about our wooden weapons. That sort of thing was seen, not as high spirits, but as simple mockery – offensive to the state and showing a lack of respect for all those fighting on our borders, whom we would join one day.

  ‘Who said that? On your feet, whoever said it!’

  ‘I said it.’

  The lanky boy who rose left only the shortest pause before carrying on with a broad smile. ‘Haven’t you heard, Sergei, of the glorious way the Thirteenth Volunteers served the Motherland? It seems they were mustered from their towns and villages in a great hurry and found themselves marched, without any boots or weapons, straight to the battle front. They asked their commander, “But where are our guns?” And he pointed over the ridge to the trenches where the enemy lay waiting. “There are your weapons, boys. Now go and fetch them.”’

  I stared. The lanky boy reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who till he reached up with both hands to push his cardboard helmet further back on the mop of his hair. He looked like the monk in one of Grandmother’s pictures – the print my father lifted off the wall and burned for safety the day we heard that the empty churches were to become prison pens. I’d stared at the print so often as a child I could remember, clear as paint, the look of bliss spread over the holy man’s face.

  The boy’s smile widened and his bright eyes danced.

  He’d better take care, I thought. If Sergei realizes this is a tease, he’ll find himself in deep trouble. If I had had more courage of my own, I might have pitched in to join him. After all, I could have asked, ‘And did the soldiers triumph? What happened when these barefooted men walked, unprotected, over no man’s land towards the enemy’s tanks?’ But though this lanky boy had somehow managed to wriggle out of his first defeatist remark by telling this brave tale, I knew I didn’t have his wits.

  So I kept quiet. But later, as we jostled for our bowls of thin soup, I pushed to a place by his side. All evening I waited, hoping he’d say another word to offer a clue to his feelings. He might have fooled Sergei. But I could scarcely doubt that this smart, confident boy’s hunch mirrored mine – that, when it was our turn to join the fight, we’d be no better equipped than we were now with stupid wooden sticks.

  All the last day I watched him. He dug as hard as I did. He cut as many logs. He argued for his full share of the few lumps of gristle that swam in the gruel, just like the rest of us. He gave out no sign at all that he was different. Once or twice he caught my eye, but only in the way of any boy working close to another.

  Finally the time came for us to climb on the wagons, to go back to our towns and villages.

  ‘Who’s for Radicz?’ shouted one of the drivers.

  I saw the boy lift his bundle to his shoulder. On an impulse I turned towards him and stepped in his path. ‘Tell me your name.’

  The moment the words were out of my mouth I regretted them. I thought he would assume I was one of the boys they set in every troop of Pioneers to eavesdrop and tell tales.

  But, if he did, he showed no sign of it. He smiled the open smile I’d seen all week. ‘Nikolai,’ he told me, and turning away, he swung his bundle up onto the wagon, then used a spoke of the wheel to clamber up beside it.

  ‘Yuri,’ I told him in exchange.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IT WAS THE oddest thing. From that day on, this Nikolai was my very picture of the ones I was looking for – the people I knew must be out there somewhere. People who, like my mother, no longer believed – or, like my grandmother and father, never had been green enough to believe – that this long bloody march of ours would lead to a shining future.

  I kept my eyes open for their tracks. And now I was paying attention, every once in a while I’d spot the faintest signs of opposition. Along a wall I’d see a scrubbed and scraped look that hadn’t been there the day before, and guess the street commissar had had to remove some hastily painted slogan. Once, on a factory chimney, I saw a few frayed threads, and knew that some brave soul had fixed a counter-revolutionary flag so high that whoever was ordered to fetch it down had finished the job in too great a hurry to pull away the last scraps of cloth.

  I couldn’t stop and stare. Just to have slowed my pace would have invited trouble. (‘Why would you notice the torn threads left by a flag if you’d no connection with the saboteurs who hung it there?’) But over the next few days I walked past the brick factory half a dozen times, until at last the harsh spring light fell on the chimney in the right way at the right time.

  Yellow and black. The colours of resistance?

  Yellow and black.

  Next came the summer of the Emergency. We hardly dared go out of the door for the rattle of gunfire. Now everything was rationed: candles, fuel, salt, lightbulbs – even soap and string turned into luxuries. On the worst days I found myself chewing a rag to stave off my hunger. Finally the skirmishes stopped, and we no longer heard the sound of tramping boots below our window.

  A week or so later, school opened again.

  Grandmother took no interest in which of the last two portraits had come down from the wall. ‘Why should I care when one hard wedge knocks out another?’

  But it turned out our saviour was Father Trofim. And very soon, from knowing little about him, all of us could have written a book about his life and his virtues. We knew that he’d been born into poverty. His father was crippled and his mother had died giving birth to a sister. We learned that from the age of six he’d been raised in an orphanage. He had, they told us, always been an excellent pupil. ‘The cleverest boy any of his teachers had seen.’ We knew he’d been pressed into the army at fourteen and covered himself in glory there as well, winning more medals than all the other officers in his company several times over.

  And it was here that he’d come to see the days of the Czar were over. He’d led the struggle. His was the vision and the
strength, not just to start the Revolution in the first place, but to keep it rolling.

  And now he wore his triumphs modestly. His generals were said to worship him. He loved little children as much as they loved him, and we were shown photographs of boys and girls dancing round his throne-like chair and hurling petals. Soon we knew the date of his birth better than we knew our own, and that, if we followed him faithfully with all our hearts and minds, then our beloved nation would very shortly—

  A crock of shit! Simply to let it spill from the tongue was to see it for what it was: nonsense and lies. If Father Trofim was such a hero, such a fine and generous man, why had so many vanished? Why was the struggle so bitter, with rumours of families being uprooted from farms they’d lived on for a hundred years, and villages razed to the ground? We were supposed to praise the Great New Towns of Hope that had sprung up all over. But, in them, everyone was working till they dropped. There were so many arrests that even trusted neighbours had taken to telling tales and even spinning lies to try to curry favour with the guards and save some hotheaded son or daughter of their own found with the recently outlawed yellow and black.

  Now, when I sang the anthem, I was terrified, knowing the commissars had taken to proving their loyalty to Father Trofim by finding traitors behind every bush. One little slip would single me out. Then, when more names were needed for the next list of ‘troublemakers’, it would be me and my family who sprang to mind. There was a whisper running round of one small girl whose hair turned white overnight when they chose her to dance for Father Trofim. And even in our school Oleg ran off, simply for being picked to carry a wreath to one of the memorials. (His family paid heavily for that. The last that was heard of them was a scuffle on the stair, a few stifled cries and the slam of a car door.)

  But no one ever saw a thing. Whenever the soldiers came, you’d think the people they took away with them were the last living creatures in town. Wiser that way. By then, we were all so frightened, the simplest truth couldn’t be said aloud.

  Except by Grandmother.

  ‘Here is a man who has learned, if you beat a dog hard enough, all you will have to do after that is show him the whip end.’

  One week, in school, the top two classes were asked to rise. A Diktat was read out. Once, I had barely listened when we were gathered to listen to these bloated pronouncements. Now they all interested me. Some were new rules (the Diktats). Nobody was to walk on the river paths. Rail journeys for mere pleasure were now forbidden. Everyone must take their papers to the street commissar to be checked yet again.

  Some were called ‘Explications’. From these you might learn, for example, that if you had thought that having a ration book in your own name entitled you to food of your own, you were mistaken. Everyone under sixteen was supposed to be fed out of the share for their parents.

  Then there were the Exhortations. These, it appeared, were written by Father Trofim himself. One week we’d hear the story of how some child had written a forty-page poem called ‘Our Great Captain’ in his praise. A week or so after, it might be some tale of inspirational sacrifice: a group of miners who had offered to work one week in every three without pay for the sake of the Next Great Step Forward; a woman who’d found money in the gutter and, rather than use it to feed or clothe her own family, had sent it to Father Trofim. Even, once, the tale of a little girl of only eight who, hearing her parents speak critically of Father Trofim, had slipped from the house and along to the police in order to denounce them. (I had expected quite a different ending to this story. While not exactly believing that little Yelena would have been packed off home with a flea in her ear and a lecture on family loyalty, still I was shocked to hear that Father Trofim had personally pinned on her Pioneer uniform an honour of state. There was no word of what became of her parents. And that, we all thought, boded ill for them.)

  On this particular day, it was a Diktat. I listened, as usual, with my ears on stalks, tracking the sense of it through the ponderous phrases: ‘. . . the high achievements of our educators . . .such have been the great steps. . .no further need for study. . .greater use elsewhere . . .report to the work commissar at five tomorrow morning’.

  The teacher sank to his seat as if winded. His face was a picture of unease. With no top classes to teach, how would he keep his job? How would he feed his family?

  Alyosha turned to me. ‘Work commissar? Five in the morning tomorrow? What does it all mean?’

  There were schoolmates all around, and no one knew now who could be trusted. So it seemed sensible to say no more than what the Diktat had, but in plainer words.

  ‘We’re dismissed from school,’ I explained. ‘It seems our teachers have done such a great job with us that there’s no point in holding us back any longer from helping fulfil the Great Economic Plan.’

  He stared. ‘Leave school? At twelve?’ He seemed delighted. ‘Who’d believe our luck? Escaping from this place two whole years early.’

  ‘Almost three for me,’ crowed Misha behind him. He turned to the boy at his side. ‘What will you choose to do, Vasily? Will you drive a train? Or go to be a sailor?’

  Dreamers! The very next morning my mother shook me awake at four. ‘Yuri. Get up!’ There was no fire. To warm me, all she could offer was some cold radish stew she’d kept back from my meagre supper. I forced it down and staggered out into the icy dark street.

  I’m not sure what I expected. Could I have been enough of a fool to think the work commissar would be standing there at Depot 157 with a list of our strengths? ‘Dmitri, your teachers tell me that you sing like a thrush. Off with you to train at the opera house! Georgio, you’re strong, so you can be a woodsman. As for you, clever Yuri, it would be criminal not to take advantage of your skills with the pen. So you can choose: will you write films to cheer and encourage the workers? Or would you prefer to sit in an office and write something more serious – reports on the logging achievements along the eastern boundaries, perhaps? Or an account of power station construction?’

  We gathered in the yard, some of us half asleep still, some jumping with excitement. The work commissar glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand, then all he said was: ‘Names starting with A to L to the cement yard. As for the rest of you, you’re to be hod carriers.’

  Alyosha turned to me. He looked mystified. ‘My name begins with M. So does yours. Medev. Molovotz.’

  Too sick to speak, I nodded.

  He was staring. ‘Hod carriers? You and me? The cleverest boys in the class?’ The blood drained from his face and he said it again. ‘Hod carriers!’

  We’d seen them often enough, on building sites and bare terrain cleared for some new purpose. They stumbled over the rough ground, their faces swathed against the wind and sleet with filthy rags. Their backs seemed permanently bent and, even in their thick mittens, their hands looked like claws.

  I heard a voice behind us. ‘What about me?’ It was poor crippled Vladimir. ‘Am I supposed to swing a hod along with me between my crutches?’

  The idea was such nonsense, we showed no sympathy. Vladimir, at least, would have to be found some other job. But his complaint just seemed to highlight the fact that Alyosha and I both had firm legs and strong backs. And if a country’s goal is Equality for All, who can complain when letters of the alphabet are taken to double as dice to determine people’s futures?

  A cement yard’s no picnic place. Could hod carrying be any worse?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NOW CAME WHAT, in my stupidity, I took to be the worst time of my life. Each morning I was shaken awake before dawn, to hear myself whine like a baby.

  ‘I can’t! Too cold! Too tired!’

  Sometimes my mother was gentle. Sometimes her irritation showed itself. ‘On your feet, Yuri! Do you want us all to suffer when they come looking for you?’ Either way, I’d try to push down bitterness. No point in asking how it had come about that she had the good fortune to work in the warmth of a press of bodies and machines, while I was forced to work
outside in even the worst of weathers.

  Shivering with cold, I’d stuff down the only few mouthfuls of food I’d have till noon, and follow my mother down the crumbling concrete stairs to our block entrance.

  Here we would part. She’d give me a quick hug of sympathy and hurry off to her factory. Then I’d tramp off down the street.

  Most days, at one of the corners I’d meet Alyosha. Ruefully we’d shrug at one another and fall in step. Sometimes we grumbled about the unfairnesses of the day before. Mostly we picked our way around the potholes in the road in gloomy silence till we reached our place of work – a building site right at the edge of the town where vast new blocks of flats were being built in a hurry to house the families pouring in from the country. (‘They come to join the Next Step Forward,’ we were told; but their lost faces and stick-thin arms and legs told quite a different story of why they’d abandoned their villages.)

  At five, the foreman swung open the doors to his store hut to herd us inside and stand watching as each of us picked up a hod. In some the wood was rotten. Others rattled from loose joints. But not a single hod could ever be declared beyond use.

  ‘This one’s a goner,’ the last boy to push his way into the storeroom would plead with the foreman.

  ‘It’s worked till now.’

  ‘But the back’s soft from rot! It’s half off. One more load of bricks will finish it.’

  The foreman would scowl with irritation. ‘Stop your slacking, boy, and get those bricks up there. The men are waiting.’

  Sometimes you’d be lucky. The man you’d been paired with would be working at ground level, and you could take your bricks to him carrying the hod at such an angle as to put less strain on its rotten side. More often there would be no choice, and you would have to climb the shaking ladders, dangerously fixed almost above one another so, if you slipped, your bricks would fall so closely past the boy struggling up beneath that he’d be showered in grit. Even if you were the only one on the ladders, you’d hold your breath and move gingerly, rocking the hod as little as possible for fear that any moment you’d hear the creak of splitting wood, and feel that sudden lightening of your load that threw you so off balance that you might tumble after your falling bricks.