by Anne Fine
But there is silence and silence. When we were walking, there was at least the rhythmic creak of ice beneath our cloth-wrapped boots. When we drew to a halt, there was a silence so deep, so unnatural, you’d think that all the noise in the world had been swallowed for ever.
We stopped as little as we could. With cold that sent such tremors through the body, there was no comfort in rest. We only settled when we stumbled on places where we might keep a fire alight – in an abandoned guard post, or a natural ice hollow.
Leon would draw out the little wooden box he’d brought from the camp. Crouched with his back to the wind, he’d use the primitive flint lighter someone in camp had traded for a pair of boots. While he set fire to the pine needles and the little store of kindling we’d kept dry under our clothes, I’d scurry round to find more for the next day.
Then I’d delve in the cloth bag I’d dug out hurriedly the day we left, as we passed through the clearing. Already my supplies were so meagre that I was reduced to comforting myself by sucking grease from the cloth.
‘Never mind.’ Oskar winked at Leon as they divided up their own scraps. ‘Soon we’ll be eating like kings.’
‘Hush, fool!’ snapped Leon.
‘Juicy steaks, dripping—’
‘Quiet, I said!’
Had talk of food in plenty made Leon’s stomach groan? ‘We have the guard’s gun,’ I reminded him. ‘Why not go hunting?’
Oskar gave me a grin. ‘Why waste a bullet on some skinny winter bird when we can fell meat your size with a strong fist?’
Fell meat my size?
He meant a young reindeer, surely? Or a bear cub.
But still, unease took its grip. A dreadful thought flashed through my brain. Why had they chosen me to come along with them? They didn’t need a third – and certainly not a boy neither strong nor experienced – not even a friend. I thought of the guard whose stupid innocence had led to his own death and our escape. Was it possible that, far from being one of the beneficiaries of Oskar’s strength and Leon’s cunning, I was about to become one of the victims?
I heard the echo of Grandmother’s voice. ‘Yuri, your head is full of spinning motors!’
For a moment I took it for comfort – as an assurance that what was running through my mind was pure imagination, nothing more than macabre fantasy.
But she had always said it, not as a warning but in simple admiration.
Why?
Because I was usually right.
Already Leon was trying to distract me. ‘At last the fire’s caught! And as the track we’re following widens, we’re bound to move faster.’
But I’d not missed the warning glance he’d shot at Oskar. The world seemed suddenly more dangerous. I felt as if I were above my own body, looking down. I rummaged for some idle thing to say and heard myself, almost like a stranger, asking a question to which I’d known the answer since my first winter in camp.
‘Leon, do you remember that, back in the coldest days, there was a rustling that hung around us. Do you know what it was?’
Before, when I’d asked a question, he’d simply scowled. This time, as if to prove that we were all good friends together around the camp fire, he took the trouble to answer.
‘That? It’s called the whispering of the stars.’
‘The whispering of the stars?’
I made it sound as if I’d never heard the words before. I didn’t turn from the fire, but still I saw the way Oskar was looking at Leon, as if to say: ‘See? Put away your worries. Already the stupid boy’s mind is off on other matters.’
I battened down nausea. But, with my mind still racing down other paths, it was important to keep up my idle questioning. ‘What makes the rustling noise, though?’
‘Your own breath as it falls.’
‘Falls? How?’
Leon shifted with impatience. ‘When it’s so cold, breath freezes straight to grains of ice. That rustle comes as they fall around you.’
I raised my eyes, all innocence. ‘That will be something to tell my family when I get back!’ Then, knowing that in his urge to keep me calm lay my best chance to learn a thing or two about the journey they’d planned, I asked him, ‘When will that be? We can’t walk all the way. How will we travel?’
‘Just as we came,’ he told me. ‘There’s no other way.’
‘By train?’
He turned to Oskar. ‘Tell him.’
Oskar picked a stick out of the hissing fire and drew a cross in front of his huge ancient boots. ‘Here is the camp.’ He drew the stick across. ‘And here’s our path – westwards.’ Lifting the stick a third time, he swept it down in a curve that cut across the path we’d be travelling. ‘And here’s a train line.’
Remembering the map so painstakingly scratched along the side of the truck on which I’d travelled all that time ago, I took a stick to draw a second line. ‘But this is how we got here. The line runs much further south.’
‘Who was it worked on the railways?’ Leon asked sharply. ‘You, or the Bear?’
Oskar cut his stick deeper into the runnel he’d drawn before. ‘This line runs straight from the mines. It has no staging posts or holding camps. And since the trains carry ore and precious metals, the line’s not on the maps.’
I made a face. ‘It can’t go very far west and stay a secret.’
‘No need.’ He pointed with the stick. ‘The lines meet here. A short way north of Treltsky.’
It was important not to raise suspicion. I tossed my charred stick back in the fire. ‘Walking’s enough for me. I’ll leave the planning to you two. If our escape from the camp is anything to go by, I’m in good hands.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Oskar with a tiny smile. ‘You’re in good hands.’
I scrambled to my feet, clutching my belly. ‘You’d think from how little we’ve eaten there’d be no reason for my bowels to slacken.’
They took no interest as I wandered off between the trees as if in search of some sheltered spot to attend to my business. I hoped the cold would dull their wits just enough for them not to count minutes. How far could I get? I might be young and starved and tired, but I had something inside me to give me strength.
Terror. The realization that a boy who’s desperate can be plucked as easily as a peach. I pushed the branches aside and stood, ice crystals spinning and the ground as hard as iron under the rags on my feet. At last I was thinking it. At last the sense of it had wormed its way into my frozen brain. Hadn’t I listened? I’d heard the Bear let out his little teases, and I’d thought nothing of them. ‘Here comes our little beam of hope.’ ‘We don’t want you dead yet.’ ‘Why waste a bullet on some skinny winter bird when we can fell meat your size with a strong fist?’
Could the threat have been any clearer? Had I been deaf as well as stupid?
I was their only way forward.
I was the meat.
Should I wait? Trust this was not the night the Bear would reach out to fell me? And would he even bother to be sure that I was dead before—?
No!
And if I couldn’t let the thought so much as run through my brain, how could I risk it?
Should I hurry away in the darkness? But we had walked for days. I’d barely a scrap of food. Why should I stagger off alone to what would only be a slower death?
Snow crystals whirled around my head. Thoughts whirled inside it. The guard’s coat was on my back now, but Leon would call for his turn to wear it at any moment. Even to have a chance of making it out of the forest I’d need the home-made tinder box to start my fires in the biting winds. I’d need the lighter, tucked back in Leon’s bundle with everything else he’d stripped from the guard. I’d need—
Already I’d been away too long. Wanting more time to think, I started to retrace my steps. But it was only as I staggered out from under the overhanging branches towards the fire that the idea came.
‘Out there,’ I told them, pointing back through freshly spinning snowflakes. ‘Out there is a dead be
ar.’
They both looked up. ‘Dead bear?’
I nodded.
The two of them stared. ‘Not rotted through the summer?’ asked Leon, clearly finding it almost impossible to believe our luck. ‘What, fit to eat?’
I shrugged, as if a youth spent in a prison camp had left me as short of wits as of spare flesh.
Already they were on their feet. After so long, a huge charred bear steak would be a feast indeed.
‘How far?’
Again I shrugged like an idiot. Shaking their heads, they set off between the trees, following my footprints. I made great play of starting to come after, but neither took the trouble to look back. Even before they were out of sight between the trees, I’d snatched up the bundle in which Leon kept everything we had.
I looked around, taking my bearings. There was the way I’d pointed. Here was the track we should be following. And that left half a world of forest in which to hide myself.
But there was only one real choice – to stay on the track and keep ahead of my two desperate companions. They’d work that out soon enough. But to confuse them long enough for me to get round the first bend or two, I crossed the fire and hurled myself between the trees like a clumsy beast, showering off snow and snapping overhanging branches to leave them hanging raw.
A short way in I stopped and, using a spread branch, brushed at the footprints I made in the snow as I retraced my steps back to the camp fire.
The huge white swirling flakes would cover the last of both sets of tracks within moments. And during those moments I set off with Leon’s bundle, silently and hastily along the track, still dragging the branch behind me to do the best job I could of brushing out my footprints.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’VE SEARCHED AND searched, but can’t find words to explain how strange it felt to pull apart that bundle, find the food those two had hidden, and feel no bitterness. How could I blame them? Shared even sparsely between them, the saved scraps wouldn’t have lasted the length of the journey. So soon enough they would have needed their walking, talking larder – their amiable pillar of fresh meat, even content to carry himself along on his own legs till he was needed!
I couldn’t blame them – not even for one shocked and angry moment. I had grown up. I’d lost all innocence. I’d come to learn that, in this world the Leader had created, two things had been so firmly set at one another’s throats that no one could manage both. You could do right by others, or you could act cunningly enough to stay alive. Just look at me! I’d stolen the bundle. I had the gun, the tinder box to light my fires, the money from the guard’s pocket and all that was left of the food. All that I had to do now was stay away from Leon and Oskar until they weakened and froze. Oh, they might forge ahead. They might go back. Or they might sit and despair. Oskar the Bear might even slide his beefy fingers around his old friend’s neck. Cunning Leon might somehow trick his companion into falling so deep into a snowdrift that there would be no escape before he suffocated.
It made no difference. Meat or no meat, without a fire to keep their bodies from freezing, both would die.
And I felt nothing. No guilt. No pity. No triumph. Worst of all, no living interest in their fate, except insofar as it might touch on mine. All that I did was walk. I walked all night, not daring to stop and light a fire for fear of giving Leon and Oskar hope, from the faint smell of burning on the wind, that I wasn’t far ahead. I walked all the next day, starting at every rustle in the forest, each slip of snow from a branch. Forcing my feet to be obedient, I tried to douse my terrors, and think of nothing but the crunch of snow and the moan of the wind in the trees.
I walked for seventeen days – seventeen days! – breaking the journey only to root through the last of the food in the bundle and light the fires that kept my own bones from freezing while I snatched the shortest of rests.
But mostly I simply put one foot in front of the other and told myself that there was nothing to be done except endure. This road was colder, fouller, even more dangerous than those before. But my whole life had gone down the wrong track. Nothing about it had ever been any choice of mine.
And that was nothing special. We were all slaves, walking a road of bones. Like everyone else in our benighted country, I was a cog in the machine. So why not simply plod and plod and plod between the trees, out between billowing mounds of fallen snow, then back between trees? If none of my short life had ever truly been my own, why not just plod, plod, plod?
And so I walked. Through everything: through frosty murk, winds strong enough to lean on, nights so black I might have feared my eyes had fallen out. I walked across crunching river beds, past dazzling snowdrifts and under skies ablaze with stars. I walked through air so translucent it seemed as if the world must have been born that very morning, and, within hours, through squalls of ice that beat so viciously they soaked through Gregory’s long quilted jacket as easily as if it were made of tissue.
I’d light a fire, thinking of Leon and the Bear. In death, had they huddled close, their bodies crusted with ice? I’d warm my arms enough to bring back a little feeling, then peel off the jacket and stretch it over a frame of branches above the fire. I’d wear the guard’s thick overcoat till that in turn was soaked through. On and on.
Days passed. The moon turned. And I kept walking. I kept the gun at hand, so desperate with hunger that I’d have risked wasting every last bullet if I’d seen one thing moving in all that ocean of white.
And then, one morning, I stumbled over a dead ptarmigan. Had the poor creature fallen, frozen, from the sky? So starved I couldn’t wait, I feasted, half on charred skin, half on icy meat. Still, the food raised my spirits enough for it to seem that, after that day, the ice crystals swept less cruelly into my face. At times they turned to little more than snowy dust as the track twisted downwards – down, down, down – through pines, along the river creaking in protest beneath its thinning crust, down to a bridge.
From there, it widened. At last the fear was gone that I might mistake the way, and end up following some cart track into a dead-end forest clearing. Still the road wound down and down. I walked all night. By morning, when the blue-black of an almost starless night gave way to thin grey light, mists curled around me. On and on I went, until ahead of me I saw a thickening band of weak and yellow light.
It was the sun. Less than an hour later, the snow-fields on either side shone brightest silver.
Was that a bird? Was it singing?
I stopped. That’s when I saw it in a cleft in the bank beside the road. A flower! A yellow flower!
Above it, snow lay in the cracks of rock like streaks of silver bullion. I raised my head. On the stiff breeze it flooded over me – the tang of the blessed spring melt! What lay ahead of me now in all that shining distance was nothing more than snow so lightly frozen it would crackle when I walked on it, a pale clear sun, and rivers bubbling through their winter crust.
I’d made it.
The air was filled with a crystalline freshness. Now there’d be fish to catch and game to ensnare. Soon I’d be walking over last year’s pine needles instead of snow. And, sooner or later, walking across the gently stirring land that lay in front of me, I would find shelter.
It was a woodsman’s hut. From the look of it it had been empty all winter, but under a pile of rags there lay a sliver of soap. Soap! I’d not seen soap in as long as I could remember.
Against the wall rested a shard of mirror so grimed with age I didn’t realize that was what it was until I lifted it. I rubbed it clean and stood back to look.
The shock of it! I don’t believe I would have recognized myself had I not grown to look so much like my own father. How I had aged and changed. Even my shorn hair was growing back nearer to grey than brown.
And that’s where I stayed, coaxing the squirrels out of trees into the traps I found, roasting woodcock and fish. To rid my body of lice, I scrubbed myself raw each morning, and stood beside the river to let the cold breeze dry my body whil
e I watched the chunks of breaking ice go rushing past.
And I took stock. I had a gun. A hoard of bullets. The uniform of a guard. And hair grown long enough to pass. So there began a week of industry. I trimmed my hair more evenly with the sharp edge of a stone. I threw away the worst of my rotten footcloths, and washed the others, then tore them into such thin strips that I could weave them into something that might pass for proper boot linings. I cleaned the gun by rubbing grit from the river up and down its sides till it was gleaming. I flattened out the guard’s cap and brushed the overcoat till it looked halfway to smart.
But then my courage failed me. There would be times when I’d be passing men in uniform – real guards, not easy to fool. Surely it would be wiser to travel in the quilted jacket I’d tossed in the corner. Lice eggs lay hidden in every seam and it would take more than one underwater beating to drive out so much dirt. But still I carried it down to the river’s edge, studying the stitching doubtfully. Would it be strong enough to hold? This jacket of Gregory’s had seen me through the fiendishly bitter weeks of middle winter and, if I were caught, the guard’s coat would be ripped off my back in an instant. Should I be sent to any of a thousand camps, I’d need its warmth simply to stay alive.
I spread the jacket and ran my fingers over its dirt-caked pattern just the way I’d seen Gregory doing so often, sitting on his bunk.
A stiffness caught my attention. Was that an inner lining? But when I moved my hand across to the next quilted square, the sense of one more layer underneath was suddenly gone.
So. Not a lining.
I lifted the other sleeve and ran my fingers over that instead. And there was nothing to match.
