The Road of Bones (11 page)

Beside him on the bunk, a gaunt-faced man said, almost conversationally, ‘Once, if a man were given such a sentence, the crowds would gather. There'd be solemn robes, drum-rolls and declarations.'

‘Tell us, Professor,' someone said scornfully. ‘How would that make things better?'

The gaunt man bridled. ‘It showed that, back in those much despised days of the Czar, a man's life at least
mattered.
'

There was a thoughtful silence. Finally someone I couldn't see said idly, ‘Twenty-five years . . . Now it's as routine as getting a ticket for the bath-house.'

‘Better than Tygor's sentence,' someone reminded him.

I couldn't help it. I was curious.

‘So what is that?'

Everyone glanced at a man with a badly torn lip as if to offer him the chance to tell his own story. He simply shrugged, so one of the others answered in a
tone of mock solemnity: ‘Tygor's been sentenced to the “Supreme Measure”.'

He'd picked the wrong way of saying it. Tygor's indifference snapped. ‘Leave out their mealy-mouthed fudging! Do me the honour of calling my sentence by its real name.'

Shocked to be staring into the face of a man with no future, I failed to guard my tongue. ‘What?' I said. ‘
Death
?'

‘A smart boy!' someone sneered. ‘And I see from the scabs on his face that he's already learned that the word “persuasion” means being kicked around the cell till blood spurts out of your ears.'

There was another burst of laughter. And suddenly my spirits rose. I looked at these men – sweating and filthy, some of them wearing rags, and half of them old enough to be my own father – and I felt comfort. It was as if a trapdoor had been flung open above my head. Before, I'd only seen a few slim shafts of truth filtering down between boards. Now, suddenly, plain-speaking flooded in like noonday light. What did it matter that I was sitting by a stinking bucket if, every time one of these men opened his mouth, I learned so much about the world around me? Another man would be thrown in. Another, like Tygor, pulled out. And each would have his story – even if those still in
the cell turned out to be the only ones to learn its end.

Tygor never came back. When, three days later, word was tapped through the walls about his fate, one of the men said idly: ‘To think our only epitaph will be the letter.'

I raised my head from chasing lice. ‘What letter?'

He grinned. ‘The one to the family. “This prisoner has lost the right to send or receive correspondence.”'

I felt a jolt of shock. ‘That means you're dead?'

‘What else?'

The solemn man the rest of them had taken to calling the ‘True Believer' spoke up as usual. ‘It is the duty of those in power to put a stop to disaffection. That way, things will go better for the state.'

There'd been the usual wave of scorn. ‘What, is Father Trofim listening behind the wall?'

‘Save your prattle for your next party meeting.'

‘Your own arrest was a mistake, of course! As soon as they realize what a loyal citizen you are, they'll send you back to your family.'

‘Might even offer an apology. Why, Our Great Leader may go so far as to invite you for tea!'

True Believer scowled. The huge man at my side, whose wounds still wept from his last battering, tugged at my sleeve and nodded across the cell. ‘Believe me,
boy. That fool there's not the only monument to the power of Habits of Thought. You tell some men one great fat lie when they're still young, and they'll believe it all their lives. Nothing will shake them.'

He raised his voice at True Believer. ‘Not even the evidence of their own eyes! Not even being dragged through a three-minute hearing instead of a proper trial, then dumped in this cage!'

I thought, with True Believer pretending not to hear, he'd let the matter drop. But, perhaps because of the pain of his wounds, perhaps through the anguish of worry about his family, the big man was working himself up into a fury. Now he was bellowing across the press of bodies: ‘Admit it, cretin! You still believe all that fine tosh poured into your ears about Our Noble Leader. You still believe if the great man knew what was happening, everything would change! You really think that, don't you?'

Like some strange marionette, True Believer offered him only a blank face and yet another of those loyal remarks that seemed directed more at some microphone he thought might be hidden in the wall than at any real person. I was reminded how my parents had always said the safe thing in front of strangers. Did True Believer
really
still believe? Or
did he secretly hope that one of the stool-pigeons put into every cell to snitch on others would bother to carry his words back: ‘But there's a loyal man in cell nineteen. And we must let him go!'

By now, the man beside me had sunk back furiously into himself, spluttering and cursing.

An amiable-looking fellow called Boris tried to soothe things. ‘What good would any trial have been to you anyway? Or any lawyer. What did poor Tygor tell us? The man they gave him was so scared for his own family that he scrambled to his feet and said in a nice clear voice: “The good of the Motherland is as dear to a defence lawyer as to anyone else. I confess myself as outraged as any other citizen by the defendant's crimes.”'

All of them were remembering now. ‘ “The defendant's
crimes
”!'

‘His own lawyer!'

‘Lucky to get one, since they've become such a fast-vanishing luxury.'

‘Twelve minutes, Tygor told us. That's all the time they spent, taking away a man's life.'

‘Too many others standing in line outside.'

‘Sittings all day and all night.'

Across the cell, a crooked man with a great burn mark down one side of his face spoke up for the very
first time. ‘Small wonder, given how things turn into crimes before you know it. Look at me! I had one single conversation with a friend about the fact that the streetlights had gone out again. She was arrested and beaten to a pulp. And what do
I
get? Twenty-five years, for “propaganda likely to dishearten the workers”.'

The man beside him shrugged. ‘At least you spoke! My daughter was thrown into prison just for having studied abroad. Was it her fault we came to blows with that particular country right at the time a letter was on its way to her old friends?'

Boris nodded at the one man in the cell who didn't seem to understand a word of any language tried. ‘That poor sap didn't even go abroad. He just stayed where he was. The border changed around him, and he was arrested for not having a passport to the house he'd lived in his whole life.'

Everyone fell silent. Perhaps, like me, they were wondering how much greater a weight of bad luck there must be in the world, now sickness and famine and earthquake had been added to by men with pens, and pages to fill, in their books of new rules.

Certainly the next words spoken might have come from someone thinking along the same forlorn lines. ‘I'm sure it made no difference. Bad luck would have
come his way soon enough, now we're so busy spilling blood along so many of our borders.'

‘One more excuse to tighten the knots a little more . . .'

‘Tell them about the doctor, Boris!'

Boris lifted his head from picking fleas out of his shirt. Enough of us were looking his way for him to offer his story.

‘In my last cell there was a doctor who'd made the mistake of standing beside a foreigner waiting for a tram. He couldn't for the life of him work out what the guards who arrested him were on about –“consorting with enemy aliens” – until they showed him the photograph they said proved his guilt!'

‘Everyone in the whole province will be in here soon.'

‘Except for the ones they lose!'

There was a roar of laughter. And after pitying my blank face, somebody triggered another round of merriment by telling me the story of Vasily Zemskaya, who froze to death in his cell, waiting for someone to find him and fetch him upstairs to the firing squad.

EIGHT DAYS I
was in that cell. When we were finally herded out at dead of night, I truly thought I'd been lucky. Only eight days! (Some had been stewing for months.) I hadn't yet realized that there are stages to despair – steps down through layers of misery until you reach a place where nothing – no, not even your own life – still seems to matter.

They pushed us out into the courtyard, where one of the first light snows of winter was beginning to fall. We sat like dogs at a gate and waited, shivering, until the guards were ready to move us through town.

We marched through back streets. ‘In case the townsfolk realize just how many of us there are,' I heard someone mutter. And I could see how, if you happened to be looking out between your shutters and saw the wide snaking line of us shuffling along the streets in strictest silence, you might begin to wonder. All these men! Can these be the famous ‘vermin' we've been told about so often, chewing at
the roots of the state? But there are so many of them! And they look so much like us!

No, better to herd us round behind the glue factories and along the canal, though it must have taken a good hour longer to reach the station yard. It seems the women had been sent ahead, and were already bolted into their box cars. But how many cells had been emptied to furnish so many men? By the time we were pushed through the gate and followed the barked orders to squat in lines on the filthy boot-packed snow, I counted over four hundred.

And we were just the droppings from the prison of one small town! So how could anyone think we could be terrorists, wreckers, conspirators? If that were true, the Leader would have had to drown our revolt in blood, not simply usher us up ramps into the caged compartments of a train.

‘Three more in this one! Quick! You with the arm sling. And you! And you!'

The guard grabbed at an old man stumbling up the ramp and pushed him so hard he fell into the carriage on top of me.

Instantly the old man was howling. ‘My letter! Mind my letter!'

I lifted my sodden boot. The sheets of paper that
had slid out of his sleeve onto the board floor were already filthy and torn. The ink spread into pools.

‘My letter!' His rheumy eyes filled. ‘Now I must start again!' he wailed. ‘Where will I find the paper?'

One of the prisoners crammed behind the closest mesh partition started to tease. ‘Why bother, Grandpa? No one will ever read it.'

The old man held out the pulpy streaked mess he'd gathered from the floor. ‘But it
explains.
All they have to do is take a moment to read it. Then they'll know I'm innocent. Innocent!'

His neighbours' snorts of contempt set him howling afresh. Beside me, the man with the arm sling broke off from shoving for a place, to offer a pitying look. I was the only one who heard the words he said so softly. ‘Old man, forget it. The ideas of guilt and innocence died a long time ago. Now it's whatever keeps that wolf in power.'

But still the frail old fellow wept as he tried to sort his ruined sheets of paper. The other watched in growing irritation, then dropped his bundle to lay his one good arm round my shoulder and rebuke our snivelling companion: ‘Be glad you've already had a life. If you're so keen to steep yourself in pity, feel some for the boy.'

The old man lifted his head just long enough to shoot me an angry look. ‘No doubt he earned his place. But I am
innocent.
'

There was a round of jeering as men turned from fighting for space on the few wooden bunks or by the boarded windows.

‘Does he have cloth for brains?'

‘Oh, just our luck! Another True Believer!'

‘Hey, Greybeard! Still trying to tug the glacier backwards?'

Even the one who'd put his arm round my shoulder couldn't help muttering, ‘He must be some great professor. No man with ordinary brains could be so stupid.'

I turned away. I'd left a cell packed tight as herrings in a box only to find myself jammed in a place no better than a cage. Why hadn't I had the sense to take my chances while we were getting here? The moment I tasted the first snowflake and felt the fresh wind in my face, why hadn't I made a run for it? Stiff as I was, I might have made it. There had been rifles pointed at us, and at my first step out of line, more would have turned my way. But still I might have managed it. I might have dodged the bullets.

And then what? No one would open a door to a
stranger, no matter how desperately they rapped, or how much they pleaded. Since helping even those you didn't know were traitors had become a crime, no one would take that risk, especially at night.

No. Better alive than dead.

Feeling a jolt, I elbowed my way between the crush of men, ignoring their curses. If I stood tall, I could just see between the slats of a boarded window. Over the hills, the dawn was finally breaking. We were off.

Up to the north. New lands. No doubt they would be harsh. But there'd be clear fresh wind and, cold as it might turn out to be, surely there would be sunshine. Better than more time spent in that stinking hole. It was a crush now, certainly. But very soon, surely, surely. . .

I asked the man with the sling, ‘How long will it be?'

‘Till what?'

‘Till we get where we're going. How long will the journey take?'

I was
excited.
I truly believe that – in my stupidity – I was keen to get there, keen to find new friends and maybe learn a trade. Even—

I heard his answer. ‘Weeks. Maybe even months.'

‘Months?
Crushed in this carriage? In these wire pens?'

He gave me the look you'd give some foolish child. ‘Believe me, you'll soon have space enough to stretch your legs. Sit by the weak, or sick, or old. There'll soon be room enough.'