The Road of Bones Read online

  The only words ringing in my ears now as I tramped along the forest paths were those from Father Trofim’s endless speeches: ‘There will be sacrifices. In the interests of the greater good, small mistakes may even be made. But better one or two innocents are temporarily troubled than that the guilty escape.’

  I’d listened. I even recall the scorn that ran through me when I heard the bland words ‘temporarily troubled’. (By then we all knew very well what sort of ‘trouble’ his guards would offer with their steel-capped boots.) I’d even thought back to Nikolai in Pioneer camp, and paid more attention to the Black Marias passing in the street and the scraps of torn posters in the gutters. But I’d still pushed it all from my mind, thinking it had no bearing on my family. In any case, work was so punishing I no longer had the energy to care about anything over and above my own next meal and the next chance to sleep.

  Now, for the very first time, I realized truly what his words could mean. It was the job of the guards to make sure nothing and no one stood in the way of the Revolution. It didn’t matter how old or frail you were, or how unlikely it was that you were hiding something or weren’t telling the truth. If there was any chance at all you might be lying, it had become their ‘duty’ to beat truth out of you. After all, hadn’t Father Trofim said it often enough? ‘A stick of any sort can stop a wheel. All must be broken.’

  I pushed my way on and on. In places the undergrowth was now so thick I had to kick and beat the branches away. In others, the rutted path was wide enough for two. My poor, poor parents! What had I done? How could it be that the stupid outspokenness of one person in a family could lead to the punishment of others? How could they drag my mother away by the hair because her boy had said a few unguarded words? What sort of person could pile such terror onto someone who’d just lost her only son without the chance to hand him his one warm coat, or say goodbye?

  Up came the moon at last. Now I was cold, and hungrier than ever, but I could at least make faster progress and have more confidence I wasn’t wasting time by wandering round in circles. It struck me suddenly how very strange it seemed to be by myself. All of my life I’d either been with my family, or in a class or a squad, a march or a parade, a team or a troop. Always in groups. Always herded, with people watching every move and listening to every word. It seemed so odd to be, for the first time in my life, striking out alone. I was just thinking how, in other circumstances, walking between these whispering trees would be a great adventure, when suddenly the moonlight that had been filtering meanly through the branches above washed over me in a flood.

  The trees had given way to bushes. Within a step or two even the bushes opened up in front of me, and I was tripping over metal track.

  The railway line.

  Here, at least, was a choice. So far as I could tell, this had to be the track between our town and Xhosa, half a day along the line. Should I make for the city?

  Or would I be safer hiding in the forest? I’d heard of others who had managed to stay alive through the summer months, living off any small animals they could snare, and nuts and berries.

  I stood at the side of the track. Part of me longed to turn round and creep home, hoping against hope there were no traps around our flat, no men with silver badges on their caps waiting inside, lounging against the shutters and smoking their cigarettes as they watched the street and waited for the stupid boy they guessed would soon run out of courage and come crawling back to his mother.

  But to leave our province entirely! That was too much of a decision. I wasn’t ready. Perhaps I’d be bold enough to think about it the next day. But not right then.

  And then it struck me. Within an hour or two, they would be after me with dogs. No use to tell myself that I was small fry – some silly boy not worth their time and effort. They already knew how little I’d said, and still they’d bothered to come after me.

  Now I’d defied them, they’d come after me again.

  I was just wondering how fast the news of a runaway boy without papers could pass from one telegraph post to the next when, under my foot, the rail stirred into life.

  It was my only chance.

  I had to take it. So I jumped the train.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JUMPING WAS SCARCELY the word. The goods train that steamed into view a few seconds after I stepped back into the shadow of the bushes was going so slowly that I could all but step onto one of the footplates. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the track ran past some woodsman’s cottage, or over a crossing where, in the moonlight, I might be clearly seen. So I inched my way, spreadeagled, along the train’s side, clinging to every hook and handle, until I reached the wide expanse of a sliding door.

  I listened for a moment. No sound came from inside, so I tugged at the handle. The door glided open easily enough. Apart from a couple of broken crates, there was nothing on the floor. But on a rack along one edge lay heaps of empty grain sacks.

  Perfect covering! Swinging myself onto the rack, I pulled a sack up to my waist and tugged another down over my head. Worming my way into the heap, I stretched out to wait. Twenty minutes was all I needed. Half an hour at most. Any dogs they sent after me would lose the scent at the trackside. The guards might wire their warnings up and down the line, but just so long as I kept clear of stations, I had a chance of staying ahead.

  I lay, half-choked with grain chaff. The gritty feel of it bit into my skin. Stifling sneezes, I counted the minutes in my head. I wanted the train to carry me a good few miles further from the city, but it was important not to risk falling asleep and being found on board at the next halt.

  Was it the rhythm of the counting or the clack of wheels over the joints in the rail that dulled my sense of purpose? In any event I woke to the sound of a bored shout. ‘Xhosa! Xhosa Junction!’

  I’d slept for hours. Daylight was speckling through the sacking. Cautiously I peered through its coarse weave. My heart thumped fit to burst, but apart from the shaft of light streaming in, nothing had changed, and there was nothing to be done except hope no one outside had noticed that one of the truck doors was no longer shut.

  It seemed an age before, with a great jolt, the train moved again. I let out the breath I’d been holding, and almost at once heard the sound of boots and voices. Startled, I turned my head to see that what I’d taken in the dark to be a truck cut off from all the rest had narrow sliding doors at either end.

  Every last muscle tensed again as I listened. First came a laugh. Then: ‘Mischa! What a story!’

  ‘Oh, I could tell you a score.’

  ‘Finish this one, if you please.’

  ‘Where was I? Oh, yes. So this brand new little heroine of the Motherland turns out to be no more than eight years old, with the braids in her hair pulled back so tightly that her face is all but scraped back into them.’

  I heard a fiddling with the latch as the man kept on with his story. ‘The winsome little thing comes up to the Leader and curtseys. And he smiles down at her, and even gets out of his chair to take her hand and walk her round the statue of herself. Of course, she’s far too over-awed even to speak, so he tries to put her at her ease. “Don’t it look just like you?” he says to her. “Down to the Medal of Honour!”’

  The voice broke off. I heard a series of grunts. Then, as I watched through the sacking, the door finally juddered along its warped runnel just enough to let a grizzled man in soldier’s uniform wriggle through into the truck.

  The other man followed. ‘He’s good with kids, you have to give him that.’

  His uniform might have been different, but their lined faces were so similar, each might have been the other’s reflection. The two of them glanced around the truck before the taller one called Mischa went on with his story.

  ‘So the little girl simpers and curtseys some more till the old man gets bored and shows it. His guards can’t rush in fast enough to sweep the kid back to her foster mother. And even before our little heroine Yelena is out of the door, he’s turned to Plo
tov, and guess what he says?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You won’t believe this, after all the fuss about her up and down the country. He says: “To think of it! Denouncing her very own parents. What a little turd!”’

  The second man tugged the door safely closed behind the two of them before he said, ‘Takes one to know one!’

  Both of them laughed. I knew they must be talking of Father Trofim as surely as I knew they must be brothers. Only two people who trusted one another with their lives would have dared share a laugh at that last remark – and only then when, as in this truck, they thought there was no chance of being overheard.

  I watched as they strode across to tug at the next door.

  ‘Jammed tight.’

  ‘Here. Let me.’

  But even with the two of them putting their shoulders to it, the next door wouldn’t slide.

  ‘Damn!’ The shorter one turned. ‘No chance of getting through. We may as well work our way back to the others.’

  But the other had lowered himself onto a crate. His voice was serious. ‘Tell me first, Maxim. What’s it been like up here?’

  ‘With the peasants?’ His brother brushed a couple of filthy rags off another of the crates before he settled. ‘A strange sort of farming indeed! The peasants have no grain, and so we harvest them instead, and send them off to prison camps.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Worse.’ Maxim leaned forward to slide the side doors further apart. Forest had given way to open land, and we were travelling faster. ‘Look, Mischa. Didn’t they tell us in school that this part of the province was called the Bread Basket? Do you remember?’ He waved a hand. ‘And look what’s happened. No drought. No crop disease. But still there’s famine everywhere. The smallest children are arrested for stealing ears of corn or pinching apples. A farmer’s machine breaks down and he gets twenty years for wrecking.’ He spread his hands. ‘Why would a man wreck his own machine when already he can’t feed his family, and is so desperate he’s ripped the straw from his own roof to feed the last of his beasts?’

  For a while neither spoke. They simply stared at the countryside as it rolled past. Then Maxim turned back to his brother. ‘See? The fields are choked with weeds. The harvests have gone from “not enough” to “nothing at all”. Last year the commissariat took most of the peasants’ fields “for the public good”. Now this year, to punish them for not producing crops they won’t get to eat in fields they no longer own, each peasant has even had his own last little family plot cut back to nothing.’

  He pulled his crate closer to his brother to say more softly: ‘Mischa, last week I drove through one village where every single family had had their land cut back to their very cottage walls.’

  ‘Are they to starve?’

  ‘Yes. Both as a punishment and as a warning to other villages.’

  ‘His orders, of course?’

  ‘Oh, yes. His orders.’

  Mischa spat. ‘Always his orders! The man has his fingers in every pie. Why, he must never sleep! And he has spies all around.’ He snorted with contempt. ‘Oh, how the rest of them must regret easing him to power! They might have known who he was, but never in a thousand years could they have guessed what he was.’ Mischa’s voice brimmed with scorn. ‘And now it’s far too late for even that pack of jackals to change their minds. He’s polishing them off, one by one. He’s finished bothering with all those “heart attacks” and “accidents”. One word out of place now and you’re in the cells, having the stuffing kicked out of you till you “confess”.’

  Again the two of them fell silent. And it’s hard to explain, but hearing these brothers talk was stirring my heart inside me. How long had it been since I’d heard anybody speak his mind? So long, I’d forgotten. I might have been cowering in dirty sacks, covered in wheat chaff, but hearing these brothers talk to one another so candidly was like stepping out of a cage into fresh air and birdsong. I looked back at the life I’d been forced to abandon and realized it was years since anyone I knew had spoken so freely around me – even my grandmother. My parents’ gathering fears had even put a curb on that brave tongue. Oh, she might still have said a scathing word or two from time to time about the old Czar. But dare to mention Father Trofim? Not in as long as I could remember.

  Maxim was leaning closer to his brother now and taking care to speak even more softly.

  ‘I’ll tell you this, Mischa. I think this Glorious Leader of ours has come to think you’re the better man for showing no mercy. Either he truly believes these starveling peasants still have stockings filled with gold coins, or . . .’

  ‘Or—?’

  ‘Or he’s waging war on his own countrymen. Think of it! He divides their land time and again to give more and more of it to the commissariat. If they object, he sweeps them off to prison camps up north – whole families, Mischa! Down to the youngest child! He gives their farms to strangers. He’s taken their crops, their cattle – even the last of their few chickens. He’s broken the countryside – turned it into a desert – and now that there’s barely a grain of wheat growing there, he’s happy to arrest the whole lot of them out of revenge and spite.’

  The voice fell to a whisper. ‘Think back to what we learned in school. You know as well as I do that if the Czar had treated even a dozen of his serfs this way—’

  ‘Oh, yes! The country would have boiled over! And yet this madman’s sunk his teeth so deep in us that thousands go missing and it’s as if he tips their bodies into water. Within a moment, silence closes over them. Nothing is said.’

  ‘Even by those around him?’

  Mischa spat again. ‘Brutes.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Every last one. Yesterday I heard a story. Father Trofim loses his favourite fountain pen. A few days later, one of his henchmen asks him, “Have you found it yet?” and Father Trofim answers cheerfully, “Yes. It was under the sofa.” Instantly the head of security leaps to his feet. “I’m sorry, Leader, that’s impossible! Down in my cells I already have a dozen who’ve confessed to taking it.”’ Mischa shifted uneasily. ‘Last week I heard—’

  But he broke off. There was a thud of footfalls getting closer. Before the brothers even had time to pull their crates further apart, there was a rattling and the door they’d come through slid back on its runnel.

  The soldier who pushed his head through asked, amiably enough, ‘Is some conspiracy afoot? Look at the pair of you, sitting like two old ladies at the parish pump.’

  Maxim waved an idle arm towards the open truck side. ‘Just admiring the view.’

  The newcomer glanced out. ‘What’s to see? Nothing but forest again now.’

  Unruffled, Maxim added, And I was telling Mischa here of all the women he’ll miss now he’s insisting on leaving that soft city berth of his to go back to a fighting batallion.’

  The interloper grinned. ‘Isn’t this a week’s leave? Your brother must make the most of his chances.’ He jerked a thumb towards the passing countryside. ‘From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t take much to make a peasant woman lift her skirts round here. I’m told a quarter of a loaf will do it these days.’

  Mischa rose. ‘We’ll come with you. Time for a turn or two at cards before we reach Strevsky?’

  Strevsky! My heart nearly stopped again. In the next province!

  The crates were kicked aside. The brothers brushed the grain dust off the back of one another’s trousers. And then all three of them were gone.

  Less than a minute afterwards, I was gone too. The moment their footsteps faded, I was bolt upright, pulling off the sacks. They’d left the side door gaping wide. I leaned out only long enough to peer ahead and check the steepness of the slope beside the track.

  Then, even before the train began to slow for the long rise to Strevsky, I’d hurled myself out, head first like a circus tumbler, somersaulting over and over, down the long slope and into the trackside bushes underneath the trees.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

&n
bsp; SO WAS IT good fortune or bad that sent me rolling down the slope into that patch of wild strawberries? Because sometimes when I look back I think that, without their cheerful little red faces spread over the ground to offer a glimmer of comfort, I might have given up on the forest right there and then, and set off along the track to almost certain arrest as I neared the next station.

  Instead, with my mouth and hands stuffed with berries, I took off between the trees. A little further along I came to a clearing with hazelnuts for the picking to replace the few berries left in my hands. Cracking them between my teeth, I ate enough to satisfy the last of my hunger, and still kept on, stuffing my pockets till hazelnuts spilled out of them.

  Then I pushed deeper into the forest.

  The ground was soft with moss. Lichens climbed the tall silver birches, and everything around me breathed out scent. I couldn’t help but think that, if I’d not come here in this way, leaving behind all I had, I would have been so happy picking my way between the trees, choosing this path over that, upstream over downstream, this cloudberry over that bilberry. If I’d not been a boy in a province not his own, without his papers, I would have sung from sheer good spirits as I walked.

  Each time the path divided, I peered down both ways. When it was dry, I chose the path on which sunlight speckled most strongly. After each shower, I’d take the one along which the raindrops clinging to the branches shone brightest silver.

  I walked all day, drinking from streams and napping on beds of emerald moss in dappled clearings. Even my worries about my family gradually settled. After all, everyone knew I’d run from the building site, and not from home. A few sharp questions here, a man watching the door for a week or so, then, just as the guards would have to face the fact that I’d slipped out of their grasp, so surely my parents would be able to comfort themselves I’d got away safely.