The Road of Bones (10 page)

I learned how best to scrape muck off the floors and how to recognize sickness in birds, infections in the eye, and combs that paled and drooped beyond the general misery of being stuck in a shed with no fresh air or grasses. Sometimes at night, when they'd all laid aside their endless brawling and screeching, and perched on their crossbars with their pitiful wilted combs, I'd think of them as prisoners trapped in a sunless jail – creatures to pity.

Except that they didn't have to go to Study Circle. Lucky hens!

Study Circle was
misery.
We were a model communal farm, it seemed. Twice a week we all traipsed down to the nearby village hall to listen to a heap of ranting and barking about what we should believe. A joy for those who cared about whether This Disgraced Leader had only gone awry when he said That, or That Disgraced Leader had already become a traitor when he said This. But for a boy who'd spent the day shovelling chicken shit onto a compost heap and carrying buckets of water to the troughs through piles of demented hens, it was a torment.

And a danger too.

I should have known. I should have paid attention. After all, I was eating better than ever before in my life. Nobody knows how many eggs a hutful of hens has laid each day until they're counted; and once you've learned the knack of throwing a raw egg down your throat and crushing the shell in the muck under your boots, you grow strong fast.

I'd even managed to send word home. I cadged a stamp off friendly, amiable Galina, and had the sense to address the letter to Alyosha's family, not mine.
‘Everything's fine here,'
I wrote in letters as plain as
print – nothing like my own.
‘But please go round and tell Uncle Grigor and Aunt Lily that their precious parcel arrived here safely.'

I knew they'd pass the hidden message on. So for the first time since I ran away, I could at least be sure I'd done my best to stop my family – if they were still alive – worrying about me. All that I had to do was keep my wits about me in the endless meetings. But with the shortage of oil, none of the lamps was ever lit. It was so easy to close your eyes against the drone ‘. . . cost of production . . . fluctuations of supply . . . means of subsistence . . . sectarianism . . . instruments of labour . . .'

Usually I'd come to my senses at the Exhortations. Or, at the very least, at the Denunciations. We all pinned back our ears for those. After all, that was the way you learned how things had tightened up since the last meeting, and just how careful you now had to be.

Often, on the walk home, you'd get an even keener sense of how the land lay. ‘Where was Galina tonight? I didn't see her in her usual place. Could she be sick?'

There'd be the most uneasy silence till someone dared say it: ‘The guards came suddenly and took her back with them.'

Again, the silence. We'd all heard Galina muttering to herself over and over about the fact that there were no longer matches to be found. ‘How am I supposed to light the oil heaters without them? What if the hens die of cold? I'll be blamed quickly enough for that.'

But nobody knew who might have told on her. And so the only safe thing to say was, ‘She must have done
something.
'

And maybe some of them truly believed she must have done something more than grumble about one of the shortcomings of the New Rational Agricultural Method. But, either way, it was important for all of us to say the words out loud, with people around to hear us. We'd all heard the tale of innocent little Sofia, who'd worked on a neighbouring farm. She'd been invited to a party. She'd never had a drink before and one of the men had managed to convince her it was ‘a tonic'. While she was puking up her guts out in the yard, one of the boys had said something scathing about Father Trofim.

Sofia wasn't in the hut. She didn't even hear it. But still, one or two days after the first wave of arrests, the guards came back to get her. The other dairy maids had heard her pleading as she was dragged into the Black Maria. ‘How could I “hush up”
something I didn't even
hear
?' Yet with the new Non-denunciation Laws, claiming that you didn't know what had been said was no excuse. The only safe thing was to stay away from people whose tongues were too long.

And away from idiots like me, the night I sent my life careering off the rails a second time.

Oh, I heard the question the lecturer asked me. ‘Who was the first man to recognize that there had been deliberate sabotage in the rail system and take steps to rid the industry of the malign influence of wreckers?' Indeed, I was busy amusing myself with my usual pastime – translating the question into plain language: ‘Who lost his temper and hanged half the country's precious engineers because a lack of investment had led to delays and breakdowns?'

A child would have known to offer the answer, ‘Good Father Trofim.' (Even if that were wrong, and just for once somebody else was in the line for praise, I could be sure the lecturer wouldn't correct me for fear of falling foul of yet another new offence on the statute book: ‘Robbing the State's Principal Strategist of His Due'.)

But, from the bench behind, I heard a firm whisper. ‘Palchinsky! Palchinsky!'

Later, I learned that someone was putting out his
hand for a rag to stop a draught. He said ‘Palchinsky' only to wake his neighbour to the need to pass it across.

But, like a fool, I spoke out, brave and bold: ‘Palchinsky!'

How was I to know the dozing man's namesake was a famous wrecker? (And he himself was lucky. Now that people were being arrested simply for living under the same roof as the accused, there would be scores in cells from the mere accident of sharing a blackened name.)

‘Palchinsky?'

The shock round the room was palpable. My brain, half stewed all day in fumes of chicken shit, instantly cleared as I realized what I'd done. How can your life be capsized by a whisper? Already the women sitting on either side of me were inching away. There was a scuffle at the door as if, for their own safety, some of those standing there were already elbowing one another out of the way, to be the first to denounce me.

I sat there thinking of what someone had said as we watched poor Galina's children rounded up to be swept off to the state orphanage.

‘This morning they were a family. Now there is nothing. Everything is gone for ever.'

Not daring to mix with such a dangerous babbler, I'd fallen back at once, pretending not to hear.

And by the time I rose to leave that hall, believe me, everyone had done the same to me.

Everyone had vanished.

THE ROOM WAS
enormous. Above the stove hung the usual vast portrait of Father Trofim. Along two sides, bookshelves were stacked floor to ceiling with box files. The rest of the walls were plastered with posters showing men with steel mittens crushing others in their grasp, or vipers with men's faces being poked from their filthy nests.

All around me were the shrill and twisted slogans we'd been taught to shout in the mass rallies and torchlight parades. ‘Root out the treacherous crowbait!' ‘Blood for blood.' ‘No mercy!' ‘We must break the enemy's wings.'

The bottom halves of the windows were thickly smeared with paint. Above my head a naked lightbulb hung, and round the room dangled flypapers thick with the bodies of flies and bluebottles – some dusty and desiccated, some still oily bright or busily struggling.

Beside me stood two guards. They had the dread badge on their caps – that vicious silver serpent,
coiled to strike. They'd booted me around so much I'd no brains left to listen. I stared up at Father Trofim's hard painted eyes as the inspector read out the final charges.

‘Provocateur . . . Propaganda . . . Agitation . . . Panic-monger . . .'

Did the man sitting so calmly at his desk realize how absurd it was, what he was saying of me?

‘
Panic
-monger?'

One of the guards stepped closer, as though to kick me some more. Lazily the inspector waved him back. My head dropped in my hands. I had explained a hundred times. There was no point in persisting.

Nonetheless, I was stunned by just how quickly and easily the sentence was pronounced.

‘Ten years' hard labour.'

‘Ten
years
?'

But even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized I'd feared worse. We'd all known eating an apple could count as ‘Theft of State Property'. We knew the weak and old and simple-minded were being dragged in under the blanket accusation of ‘Limiting National Progress'. But the recent decree on Revealing State Secrets had caught out a dozen people from our communal farm before we'd grasped the fact that anything they chose could count as a
secret now. All talk of epidemics. Mention of a local airport. Discussion of the harvest. Why, simply saying the word ‘famine' could earn you twenty-five years.

Ten years was almost nothing. It was a sentence for a juvenile. Over the last few years we'd watched Father Trofim take against Mongols and Jews, Yakuts and Kazaks. Some of the new countries inside our ever-widening borders had all but been emptied as every man or woman who dared raise a voice against the banning of their folk songs – or even of the growing of their national flower – was packed onto a punishment train. You'd think the mineral mines up north would now be bursting at the seams, but for the rumours that grim conditions chewed up the lives of prisoners so fast, even the daily spill-outs from the trains could scarcely keep pace.

It would have happened soon enough, I thought: arrest for something – it barely mattered what. My luck had lasted longer than expected. Even in this dull, faraway province, the squalid roll call was turning into a billowing flood.

I was one fleck of spume on one small wave of it.

I scarcely cared. ‘Thank you,' I even heard myself saying as I was dragged to my feet and bundled out of the room to make space for the next. I suppose I thought that I'd be thrown back into that slimy dark
hole where I'd spent the last few days. (Three? Four? The beatings and interrogations had followed on one another's heels so fast I'd lost all track of time.)

But no. Instead of kicking me down the stone steps as usual, the guard pushed me past the arch into the glare of a long corridor studded with doors. Unlocking one at the end, he shoved me in, over a heap of legs stretched out on the floor.

A wave of grumbling met me. ‘Take more care!'

‘Keep your damn boots to yourself!'

‘Hush up, there. Settle down.'

Somebody pointed to the corner in which a bucket leaked in stinking pools onto the floor.

‘I can't sit there.'

‘Then stand.'

Within a minute the mass of bodies had settled back to how they were when I came stumbling in. I leaned against the wall, realizing with a fearful drop in spirits that, just as my entrance into the cell meant nothing to anyone in it, so my disappearance from the life outside meant nothing to anyone either. As easily as those on the communal farm had accepted that I'd been ‘sent', so they'd accept that I would not come back. Already I could hear the whisper with which they would distance themselves from any more thought on the matter. ‘Pavel? A shame. He
seemed a nice enough boy. But he must have done
something.
'

Such was the power of Father Trofim. After all, everyone knew Galina was good and loyal. They had no reason to think worse of me. But still I knew that almost all of them would find it easier to think that she and I (and all the hundreds of thousands of others) had betrayed Father Trofim, rather than risk for a moment daring to think that things were the other way round: that
he
had betrayed
us.

And I admit I didn't feel that my life was over. (Maybe I was too young.) Deep down, I still believed that somebody – soon – would take the trouble to review my case and listen to my story. I couldn't for a moment really believe that I had been shunted, like some old railway truck, into the dead-end siding of quite the wrong life. Indeed, after the storm of beatings, there was a strange sort of tranquillity about the cell, as if the very stones of its walls were telling me, ‘For now, the worst has happened. Leave anguish to others. It's safe to shut your eyes.'

So, in fits and starts, I slept.

By morning the seat of my trousers was stuck to the floor. The stench from the bucket was making me, and those around me, retch. Each time one of the other prisoners came over to add to the overflowing
pail in one way or the other I struggled manfully to get further away, but found myself firmly held in place by the press of bodies around me.

Forty-two men in a cell with bed boards for six.

No. Forty-five. Three darkened heaps I'd taken to be bundles of possessions suddenly stirred into life.

‘How many new in the night?'

‘Just the boy.'

They all knew where to look. The one who'd asked the question spoke directly to me. ‘Yes, yes. It's not a dream. Everything around you is real.'

Someone else asked, ‘Sentenced?'

‘Ten years,' I told them in tones of deep self-pity, and was astonished to find my words greeted with incredulity and laughter.

‘Ten years!'

‘Ten!'

A young man with scrubbing-brush hair and freckles over his broad face was staring at me with envy. ‘Only
ten
?'

‘It's a boy's sentence,' someone beside him explained.

He gave me a scowl so deep that you'd have thought I chose my own sentence. ‘Lucky to be so wet behind the ears,' he growled. ‘Ten years indeed!' He caught my stare. ‘Yes! Look me in the eye! I'm
given twenty-five for “having an underground weapons arsenal”. Know what that means?'

I shook my head.

‘It means that when they turned the ridges of our cabbage patch, they found some rusty old knife.' He groaned. ‘Twenty-five years! All of us! Mother, sisters – everyone!'