The Road of Bones

by Anne Fine

  The silence that fell was broken by the usual warning ring of a hammer against a metal post. We gathered for the count. That night I had a whole bunk to myself for the first time, and wasted the hours fighting the fleas that wouldn’t settle till the hammer swung again.

  Another day. As we were shuffling towards the gates, two open trucks stuffed tight with men rattled to a halt outside.

  I heard a voice behind me. ‘They’ve wasted no time in filling dead men’s boots!’

  But we were so far from any transit camp that the new prisoners on the trucks must have been well on their way to us before the pit roof fell. We waited to see if we’d be marched out first, or if the guards would get the dogs to force us back, to march the newcomers in.

  A chill and clinging mist hung over us. I stood and shivered. Which would it be? Us out? Them in? They’d spent the whole night in an open truck and it was obvious that more than a few were only held on their feet by the press of bodies around them.

  But we were off to work.

  And so, of course, we had our orders first. ‘In your lines! Hands clasped behind you. March!’

  We’d learned from the bitter experience of others never to call attention to ourselves by standing out from the crowd. Safer by far always to plod along as close as you could to the centre of any group, with eyes downcast. Still, it was easy enough to steal a glance as we trudged past. One of the men on the first truck was wrinkling his nose at the stink, and staring in astonishment at the vast hummocks of excrement behind the latrines.

  Something about the way he stood, the way he moved, gave me a jolt.

  Could it be? Could it?

  Nikolai! The young daredevil who’d teased Sergei so well at Pioneer camp? Here? In our camp? My heart leaped. At last! A real friend. Someone my own age!

  ‘Heads down! March faster!’

  I bowed my head and splashed through the sea of mud around the stockade. To those stumbling along at my side, I must have looked as dismal as before. Inside I was singing. Already the daydreams had begun. Nikolai would escape the roll call for the mines. Like me, he’d end up on the forest detail. We’d work together day by day. We’d share our stories, and he would tell me how he’d guessed, even all that long time ago, that I was ‘one of them’ at heart. Yellow and black.

  My excitement grew. This time, I knew, things would work out more evenly between us. After all, I’d be the one who knew more. I’d teach him all the tricks. In summer I’d be the one to show him how to protect himself against the burning sun and the vicious mosquitoes. In winter I’d warn him not to panic the first time he woke and found himself unable to lift his head. ‘You won’t be paralysed. It’ll just be your hair frozen fast to the bedding.’

  Perhaps he’d laugh, not quite believing me. I’d show him how to sleep with feet jammed into a jacket sleeve for extra warmth, and how to thicken his overcoat with rags, and wrap his face with more rags against the stinging winds.

  At work too. When we were in the forest I’d show him how to cheat. Why fell a whole new tree when, in some nearby clearing, you’re bound to find one cut down some other winter by someone too weak to drag it back. ‘Cut off its ends to make it look fresh. We call it “making a sandwich”.’

  In short, I’d teach him the only wisdom I’d picked up: ‘Scrape through today in any way you can, and hope for better tomorrow.’

  All day I dreamed as I worked. Slowly the pale sun lifted, then all too soon set again. On came the blinding arc lights, and hours crawled by. At last the work shift ended. Back we all trudged, a herd of coughing, spitting, cursing shadows – all except one of them counting the heartbeats to the end of the day.

  All except me.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THERE HE WAS, in one of the lines of men waiting to take the place of others in the food hut. I watched him shuffling towards the door, clutching his bowl, and wondered what he’d think of our rotten bread and spoiled cod – if we were lucky. I tried to guess if he’d be one of those who bolted down his daily ration the moment it was given him, or if he was a hoarder.

  I’d tried it both ways. If you gobbled, not just your gruel, but the bread too while you were in the food hut, then work next day was even more of a misery. But save your bread till morning and you lay awake all night – and not just from hunger. From under the bundle you used as a pillow it tempted you. Eat me! I might get stolen. Anything might happen. It would be better to eat me now. That tiny lump of bread called to you through dreams of food you hadn’t seen since your arrest: tomatoes, apples, cucumber, butter . . . Don’t wait another moment Eat me now!

  So in the food hut I took my place on the bench with the rest of my work team. At the end of a day in the forest food came before anything, even renewing what I was already thinking of as an old friendship. To peel my attention away for a moment from the division of our group’s ration was to risk losing my share.

  And then I heard the voice I remembered so well, clear as a bell. ‘How can you speak like that? Clearly some things have gone wrong, but only because of the devilish tricks of those who oppose Our Leader. They keep on trying to lead the Revolution off its path.’

  The men around kept eating. You could see it on their faces: what does one fool matter in a country ruled by a madman?

  But Thomas had, as usual, wiped his bowl so clean that he was licking at the shine. And no one left this warm hut till they were pushed out at rifle point. So out of mischief he asked my Nikolai, ‘Why are you here, then? Surely a loyal young man like you should still be out there, working towards the Glorious Future.’

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ said Nikolai. ‘Some accident of paperwork. A misunderstanding. I’ve every faith it will be sorted out. I won’t be here for long.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I’m quite sure it won’t be more than a month or two before word comes to release me.’

  Even the steady eaters were pricking up their ears now. All thought of foolishness was left aside. Here was a gift indeed! A newcomer ready to remind them of old times around a table. After all, many of the men clung to old pastimes. All around, when work ended, there were gamblers, smokers and cardsharps to be seen – even men singing melancholy songs on home-made balalaikas.

  But no one had yet preserved enough of his old self to play the buffoon.

  ‘So tell us, lad,’ cried Dov, happy to take the bait now that all his food was safe inside his belly. ‘What else will be sorted out in a month or two? The fact that the only crops this Great Leader of ours has ever managed to harvest is “enemies of the people”? The problem that not all villages have traitors, but since every village must be terrorized, every village must be found to contain some? The fact that . . .’

  I was distracted from my pride in watching Nikolai’s success in entertaining the men. His colour was rising. How fine an actor could he be? Surely not skilled enough to raise those spots of anger on his cheeks, and set that tiny nerve trembling across his cheekbone?

  Now he was interrupting Dov. ‘These are small matters! Mere misprints in the great unfolding of history!’

  Something in the tone of his voice caused a sickening drop in my spirits. Surely no one – not even those who acted on the stage – could do so good a job of laying claim to false opinions. Could it be possible that Nikolai wasn’t clowning to amuse us all, and what we heard was what he truly thought?

  Could he believe this?

  I thought back to what I’d heard him saying all those years ago about those men who fought without weapons or boots. Now, I knew well enough from talk around me that, far from being willing volunteers, those poor doomed souls had been from punishment battalions. It was at gunpoint that they’d been herded over the bloodsoaked earth towards the enemy tanks that rolled over their bodies. Could I have been mistaken, even back then, in thinking that Nikolai was taking a rise out of our old team leader? When he’d pushed back his helmet and stood with that seraphic smile, reminding me of the holy man in Grandmother’s print, could he have been in as much ecstasy?
Thrilled at the very idea of sacrifice? Ready and willing to be a new sort of martyr – not for a God but for a Cause?

  So had I been mistaken all this time? Could he have been sincere?

  Certainly Dov no longer thought this newcomer was playing games and being comical.

  ‘Mere misprints?’ He spread his hands. ‘That’s what you call the countless hundreds and thousands of men like us? Misprints?’

  ‘The Leader knows what he’s doing. The Leader knows that what he’s aiming for is—’

  Dov’s hand slammed down. ‘The Leader’s a fanatic. A man who, even as he loses sight of where he’s going, works even harder to get there.’

  They were all at it now, scorching Nikolai with their fury. ‘Killing more men!’

  ‘Filling more camps and prisons.’

  ‘The “Great Friend of Families” – conducting a war of blood against his own people!’

  Dov thrust his face across the greasy boards. ‘The man’s an oaf; His thinking is so primitive that he’s indifferent to losses.’

  ‘Not true!’ insisted Nikolai. ‘He simply knows that it’s important to crush the enemy within before he moves on.’

  ‘The enemy within!’ Dov turned to his neighbours and scoffed. ‘Here is a boy who’ll no doubt happily freeze to death rather than put on a jacket in the colours yellow and black.’

  Nikolai spat. ‘Yellow and Black! Those traitors! But we will crush them. Crush them without mercy.’

  Dov snarled, ‘You’d follow him even in that? You’d manage to convince yourself, just as he has, that pitilessness is a virtue?’

  Nikolai raised his voice so even the guards could hear. ‘Why not? He is Our Leader! Wiser by far than us. How can we question him? No doubt, in an ideal world, he’d care for each and every one of us. But how is he to be blamed if, in the Great March towards the Common Good, a few people suffer?’

  Dov spat. ‘A charming fellow, no doubt – when he’s asleep!’

  A man I’d never before seen open his mouth leaned down the table. ‘That’s a part of the problem, of course. The bloody man never does sleep. Take it from me, I worked for those who worked for him. And even way back then this “Incomparable Strategist” of ours was sitting up all night signing orders for executions. Friends, colleagues, strangers – he didn’t care! It could take hours and hours. Sometimes he sat for so long snuffing out other people’s lives, they took to calling him “Stone Arse”.’

  I stared at Nikolai. He seemed to be shrinking back in terror at the thought of sharing a few greasy planks of wood with such a pack of traitors. And I kept staring. What I had seen on everyone’s faces when he first spoke up was sheer indifference, or, if they’d safely emptied their bowls, a spark of interest – even, in the liveliest, a little amusement.

  That had turned to doubt. Then incomprehension. After that came pity. But now they were once again looking at Nikolai with the most simple-hearted amusement. Even an hour later, back in the hut, I heard a chuckle beneath me. Peering over the edge of the bunk, I saw Gregory comforting himself as usual between his coughing fits by running the ends of his fingers around the swirling curlicues of faded pattern on the sleeves of his thick quilted jacket.

  ‘Something amusing?’

  ‘Misprints of history!’ repeated Gregory, and chuckled himself into another vicious fit of coughing. The rest took up the theme. And for the rest of the evening odd echoes of what Nikolai had said floated around our hut – ‘Mere misprints!’ ‘Wiser than us!’ ‘These are small matters’ – setting off roars of laughter.

  The friend I had imagined. Come, and gone, all in one day.

  And after that, all I could think of was escape. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was disappointment that the one person with whom I’d felt some kinship, on whom I’d pinned some hope, had proved to have even less substance than the stinging crystals of fog through which we tramped to work.

  Everyone warned me. ‘Forget it, Yuri. Escape’s impossible.’

  ‘If you stop eating to hoard the food you’ll need, you’ll be dead before you start.’

  ‘Set off in winter and you’ll freeze. In summer, you’ll drown in the bogs.’

  ‘Look around you, boy. Why do you think there are no fences around the places where we work? This is a natural prison.’

  And they were right, of course. Impossible to go north. The east was barred by mountain ranges. To the south lay that enormous inland sea few crossed the other way – and only then with special papers. And no one could recall that sense of being carried over endless space and not face the fact that there were hundreds of miles to be retraced even to reach those last few squalid huts we’d seen on the last northward stretch of our great journey.

  Still, others had tried it. I heard of a group of prisoners who’d lured a truck of soldiers off the road into a ravine. They’d all escaped in the ensuing chaos. And though most were rounded up and shot out of hand, some got away. Could one or two have made it out of this frozen waste to more hospitable country where they could hide in the woods and live off what they could find – what the older men called with a chuckle ‘serving in General Cuckoo’s army’?

  Or had the fierce walls of white defeated them, leaving their bodies to rot in the next spring thaw?

  I wasn’t the only one to brood on thoughts of escape. The very next day I watched a man with a bad limp trade a whole lump of bread for some small scrap of metal Oleg had picked up at work.

  The moment he’d hobbled off, I braved the cutting wind to cross the compound and ask Oleg, ‘What did he want with that?’

  Oleg just shrugged. So it was left to me to work my way close enough to the half-lame man in the next headcount to catch him whispering the word ‘north’ to his companion.

  North? Why should a man say ‘north’ when the only words needed were ‘shovel’ and ‘bread’, ‘work’ and ‘cold’? Was it a compass he was hoping to make out of his twist of metal?

  And why not? Even the walking skeleton they called Old Georg had spent whole hours gleaned from stolen minutes polishing two lengths of wood. Now they were hidden in some hollow tree along with his fantasy: ‘They’ll make good skis. They’ll see me through the valley.’ Surely not all the dreams we clung to were as hopeless as his. Tales filtered in from other camps. The prisoners in one work party had scattered in a blizzard. The men in another had jumped their guards and shot them with their own guns.

  ‘It can be done, then!’

  The men around me laughed. ‘Oh, yes! Once you’re away from the camp, the rest is easy!’

  ‘Angels swoop down to lift you on their wings and carry you over a thousand miles of snow and ice.’

  ‘And drop you safely in the city.’

  ‘Along with a picnic basket to keep you going till you find a job where no one asks to see your papers.’

  Again they all hooted with merriment. ‘Yuri, face it! You’ll still be here with us as long as you have a hole in your arse!’

  But hope is not some dried leaf you can let fall and watch blow away in the wind. I spent my days imagining each step of my escape. The strange hut barnacled with ice I’d happen across by sheer good luck as I stumbled through the forest. The kindly old man who’d share his last loaf with me just as my strength failed. The cart that would rumble by, with an axle just deep enough to hide on.

  And last – most blessed of all – the snaking steam train that would slow for the rise just as the guard was looking the other way. . .

  I’d look up, only to realize that what had startled me was my own voice. I had been singing. Singing! So near did freedom seem!

  But it was only a daydream: a thin safe braid of imaginings through which I could weave my own path, choose my own ending. The dreams I had at night followed a different pattern. Then, I would find myself beside a door I’d never seen before, set in the stockade. It had no lock and I knew on the other side there would be sunshine, apples! My mother would be there, her arms outstretched. Weeping with happiness, I’d tumbl
e through – only to hear mocking laughter and find myself falling into black, black night.

  No. Better to stick to daytime fancies as we worked, and marched, and stood in endless lines.

  ‘Stay back there! Second count!’

  ‘What is the point?’ Tarquin grumbled. ‘They barely care who we are. Why should they care how many of us they let in or out?’

  And why indeed? From time to time the guards would take against a prisoner. (It seemed to me they took an especial pleasure in ordering poor Nikolai onto the next truck to the mines.) But on the whole they went through their miserable routines as sourly as those they herded to and fro.

  We stamped our feet, and bound our face-cloths tighter against the bitter sleet. At last the doors in the stockade opened like jaws to draw us all back in. We stumbled to the shelter of the hut, with Tarquin still complaining.

  Sensing some entertainment, one of the men began to tease. ‘Would you prefer them to make more sense of the counts by giving us back our papers to be inspected time and again?’

  Tarquin snorted. ‘A fine show that would be! Half the dolts can’t read. They’d just stare at the page, then either take against your face and kick you senseless, or let you go.’

  From Gregory’s bunk beneath came one of those great storms of coughing we knew would soon be the death of him. I heard the weak rasp of his voice: ‘What difference would that make? Our papers are a sham. I begged the stubborn oaf who gave me mine, “Do I look eight years old? Somebody’s going to arrest me for travelling on false papers because you’ve written one number so carelessly it looks like another.” But would he lift his pen to change it? No. And now I’m going to cough the last of my guts up in this filthy hut.’

  A commonplace enough story. It had no power to shock. So I can only think that it was pity for a man so close to death that made me lean over the side of the bunk to say, ‘That’s why you’re here? A simple mistake in your papers?’

  Gregory tried to hide whatever ghastly stuff it was he was spitting into his food bowl. And when he spoke again, it was as if he were offering comfort to me, not the other way round.