The Road of Bones (7 page)

‘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 Plotov, 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.

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.

They would have trust in me.

It seemed so easy to spread a comforting gloss over what I'd left behind. I felt as if I'd stepped into a whole new life, a world away from the drab city and the grim building site where I'd been working. I
walked through dusk, and into the night. Now, when I looked down two paths, I'd pick the one the moon lit best because it was easier to pick out the writhing tree roots that tried to trip me.

Time passed. Paths narrowed to nothing – little more than the sense that someone had trodden here before. I found myself meandering this way and that. What little of the moon I could still see kept slipping behind cloud. The forest here seemed blacker, and the squawks and rustlings from all the creatures around seemed to get louder and become more threatening.

Whoomph!
Out of nowhere came a blow. It hit me in the stomach, winding me so hard I fell.

I heard a scuffle and a rustling. The moon slid out to light a bent old man, as gnarled and skinny as the stick with which he still threatened me. Hard to believe this ailing greybeard had dealt me such a blow and was clearly so ready to give me another.

The voice came out as a snarl. ‘Who are you? Why are you creeping around here so late at night?'

I rubbed my belly, fighting for breath to answer before the stick came down again. And maybe because this was the only day in my whole life when I'd been free to choose my own paths and go my own way, I found myself – since I had nothing honest to
tell him – falling back on the answer of the schoolroom.

‘I've been sent.'

‘Sent?' He peered as though mystified. ‘Sent? Who by?'

Still on my knees under the threat of his stick, I found that my wits were sharpened. I offered the only answer that might allay his suspicion that I was some runaway.

‘Sent by the commissar.'

His face constricted from fright. He dropped the stick as if it scorched him, leaving me sure that, had I been daft enough to say anything else, he would have used it again and again, till he had beaten me to a pulp and so been rid of me.

But it was as if the very word ‘commissar' had defeated him. He waited warily while I pulled myself to my feet. I stood like a foolish block of wood, and in the end, clearly at a loss himself, he muttered, ‘Then I suppose you'd better follow.'

I reached for the stick he'd tossed aside so fast. In the strange silver half-light I saw a tremor run down the scraggy lines of his face. He watched me heft the stick's weight from one hand to the other, and only after I'd offered it back did I realize that, in his eyes, I was a dangerously fit young man, not some
fraught lad scared to be travelling without permission or papers in the wrong province, and trained in good manners by a grandmother as old as himself.

I fell in behind him on the narrow path. Soon we stepped out of the shadows into a flood of watery moonlight falling on a patch of cleared land. To one side, deep in the shadow of the woods, was a cottage so tumbledown it looked as if it had already sunk half into the earth.

A few feet into the clearing, the old man stopped and turned. His eyes were glittering. Then, as if some festering bitterness had fuelled a burst of courage he didn't even know he had, he pointed with his stick.

‘So there he is! The boy you've no doubt come to chase, lying as idly as your commissar suspected. Feel free to dig him up and drag him back.'

For a moment I was baffled. Then, looking where he pointed, I saw a long thin heap of freshly tossed earth.

Somebody's grave.

Not knowing what to say, I waited. Perhaps I stood so still I looked like one more shadow, for suddenly, hobbling towards us from the broken-backed cottage, came a sparrow of a woman as old as the man at my side.