The Road of Bones (13 page)

If so, Liv's poor advice had made a mockery of the task. But he was right now. No one would stand a chance in these vast wastes of snow and this great cold.

Still, I was curious. All the next day I kept my eyes that way. With so many bodies sprawled about, it was impossible to tell what men in other pens were doing so long as their backs were turned. But finally we were all herded out, as usual, to stand at the trackside and fumble at trouser flaps and buttons with fingers too frozen to obey. And, on the way back up the ramp into the carriage, I made a pretence of stumbling.

It was an easy enough matter to fall, for just a moment or two, into the wrong pen. Sure enough, there, a few feet beyond the place where Liv stood to scrape his map and tick off days, was a spreading of straw. It was filthy and wet. Why hadn't it been kicked aside? What was it hiding? Could what Liv said be right? Had they been busy all the journey?

Well, what a waste! Because the very next day we were spilled out of that train into another. This one had stoves in each box car. Ah, so they did intend to keep us alive!

And this one took us on – through walls of woolly fog and under frozen stars, past steel-blue ramparts of solid snow – north, north and further north, till we were out of any landscape we might recognize, into a foreign world.

AND SO I
finally came to see for myself those same ‘white nights' of which my grandmother spoke: that strange white flush that blurs the landscape and bleeds it of all life. Even the edges of the hills around seemed to be shivering as though reflected in water. And time seemed suspended, as if the whole world – forests, boulders, dark river creeks and trees – were simply waiting.

But for what? Simply to watch us each morning as we shuffled in our dark drab lines out of the barracks? I'd stumble on, chivvied by guards with dogs, nursing first the raw sore on this foot, then the infected toes on the other. One whole long winter that had been the death of most of my companions on the train had taken its toll on me. I'd watched the others sicken and fall one by one, and by the time the last snows softened into the late spring thaw, I threw their bodies onto the cart without a thought, except for my grandmother's old saying: ‘If you live in a graveyard, there isn't time to weep for everyone.'

Besides, I was haunted by the sense that my life too was over: there was nothing ahead and the only things left to me lay in old memories.

If I stayed alive at all. Because, up where we were, men passed through the camp like shoals of fish – off the trains, into the mines, and under the earth within weeks. ‘The mincing machine', we called it, and watched how well it worked, even in our small camp. I used to wonder how many trainloads of men and women there must be endlessly rolling north, that they could wash in tides through such an outpost – only one of thousands. Word had it that things in other places were even worse, with guards shooting prisoners like birds for sport, and ordering others to take off their boots and coats so they could take bets on how long it would be before each froze to death at his work.

It took men differently. Fear clung around some like mist. From others, it fell as easily as a cloak dropped to the ground. In me, it sparked a streak of devil-may-care to add to the cunning that had been growing inside me since I first stumbled out of that lowered bucket and ran from the building site in fear of my life. That very first day we'd stumbled off the last train and onto the open trucks that carried us to the camp, I'd elbowed my way into the middle of the
crush of bodies, away from the stinging crystals swept by the icy winds. When we arrived in the stockade, my only concern was to study the huts around us, and work my way back along the line of shuffling men till I was sure I'd find myself pushed into the sturdiest and best protected. And when, a day or so later, I was herded towards a lorry headed for the mines, I dared shout at a guard not all that much older than myself, ‘But this is stupid! I'm a woodcutter. I'd be of far more use in the forest.'

He looked me up and down. ‘You?'

‘Yes,' I said bravely. ‘I've been felling trees since I was two years old.'

He burst out laughing and turned to one of the older guards beside him. ‘I hear you like a good bet. I'll wager you this boy can't fell a full-grown pine within an hour.'

The other looked so bored he might have bet his grandmother would float down on a gold cloud if it would have passed the time. ‘Done!'

So, thanks to Igor's fine training, I became a woodcutter. Next day I learned that the man who'd taken the bet and saved me from the mines was called Sly Joe, and much disliked. But from the moment I earned him that fistful of money, he went easy on
me. The work was brutally hard, though. My palms soon hardened to two wide callouses. My soul began to shrivel. And always, always in the back of my mind was the thought that, when my ten years were over, my grandmother would be dead and, if they were still alive, my parents most likely lost without trace.

The months crawled by. Sometimes we worked in gangs, sometimes alone or in pairs. A frequent workmate was a man called Arkady. Behind his back we called him the Holy Fool, and often, back in the hut at night, the others tried to torment him.

‘A hard day, Arkady? What thoughts ran through your mind as the sleet sloshed in your boots and that sore spread on your hands? Did you think back on your stupidity, trading a wife, a home and a son for a belief held by only a few old biddies with so many worms in their brains they'll never think clearly again!'

He'd shrug. ‘Amuse yourselves as you choose. I'll not deny the living God – for them or you.'

‘But, Arkady! A lifetime of snow and ice and black flies so you can say the two words “I believe”? Even your precious God can't think that that's a bargain!'

‘You live your own life. I'll live mine.'

‘Trusting in a better to come! At least we've wits enough to know this is the only one we'll ever get!'

Arkady lowered his head. I guessed he'd fallen into quiet prayer in search of strength. The pack pursued him through his murmurings. ‘Hush all your pointless babbling!'

‘Time to grow up and stop believing in fairy tales.'

‘Join us here, in the real world!'

There was a shout from one of the upper bunks. ‘Leave the man be.'

Instantly someone else snarled, ‘He's lucky it's only insults that fall on his head. I look his way each night, and I could cheerfully kick him into the next blizzard. How dare he sit there wrapped in his magic cloak of mumbo-jumbo? A man who could have chosen another life! Wasting away here! He is an insult to the rest of us who had no choice!'

The wave of fury took its time to settle. Arkady kept his head down, still mouthing his prayers. I asked myself how anyone could truly think there might be a caring God. Was Grandmother herself still mumbling prayers on my behalf? Even as the months crawled by and one more vicious winter came and went, was she still begging all the saints to keep me safe? No doubt some prisoners managed to bribe a guard to smuggle out their letters, but I had no means with which to haggle. In spite of that, did everyone at home still hope that I'd come back some day?

One morning in summer we were called from our woodcutting because of an accident at the mine. It took an hour or so to load the body carts. On the way back I took a chance on the man beside me – a newcomer off the last train – and steered the cart off the track towards a deep split in the earth that I had noticed after the spring melt.

‘What's this?' the newcomer asked. ‘Your own private burial ground?'

‘As good a grave as any,' I muttered as he watched me drag the first broken body through the fringe of willow herb that hid the crevasse. I tipped the dead man over. ‘Lose a few here on every trip and we've a better chance of staying out of it ourselves.'

He helped me at my black work, and as we spread the remaining bodies more evenly over the cart, he told me bitterly, ‘I was a vegetable grower on my old communal farm. And if I'd dared lose as many turnips in one year as they've lost men this one day, they would have thrown me into jail.'

‘Wait until winter,' I told him. ‘Down at the real burial ground the frozen bodies end up stacked like logs.'

The newcomer made a wry face. ‘I suppose you can't dump them here when the hole's packed to the brim with ice?'

‘That's right.'

He sighed. And so their heap just grows higher.'

I couldn't help but grin. ‘Not that much higher. We lay the ones on the top out carefully. Then, each time there's a fresh snow fall, we prise a few bodies off and hide them in the soft drifts.'

He beat at the cloud of mosquitoes eating away at his face. ‘Why bother? The moment the thaw comes they'll be seen again.'

I burst out laughing. ‘What sort of fool are
you
? As soon as the river's crust has thawed enough, we boot them in and send them tumbling out of sight to save ourselves the work of digging the burial pits even deeper.'

We hauled in silence till we reached the others. And, hours later, when we'd been ordered back to the clearing to make up the real day's work through the white night, he was still shaking his head.

‘Five carts of dead men. All in one morning! Why, Death himself would doff his cap to them.'

The man beside us told him sourly, ‘Don't you believe it. In one of my transit camps there was dysentery. And, after that, typhus so bad whole compounds emptied of men faster than they could
bring in more to bury the dead, then catch it and die in their turn.'

I made the usual joke. ‘Fine, Dov. You take the prize! You've seen the worst.'

‘We gambled poorly,' he admitted. ‘To get the extra rations, we kept the bodies back until they stank.'

Suddenly he stopped. No more than a pace from the path, a man was hanging from a rope coiled round a branch. His neck was awry. I realized with a shock it was the fellow we'd all seen only that morning, bent over a broken handsaw, moaning quietly, with tears running down his beard.

Dov stepped up closer. ‘Poor sod!'

I thought he was about to cut the dead man down. But no. Those huge hands, stained for life from working with leather, began at once to peel the footcloths off the hanging body.

The newcomer spat. ‘Death here, there, everywhere! What are the three of us now, except bags of live bones waiting to line the roads to' – he turned his burning eyes my way – ‘the Glorious Future!'

And, after that, indifference took him. Each time guards threatened, he'd simply murmur, ‘Hurry up and shoot. What do I care?' Like many round me, it only took him a few days to come to believe that we
were all corpses in the making. What was the point in worrying any more when it would happen?

And I'm not stupid. I knew it was sheer luck, and luck alone, that Sly Joe's passion for gambling had saved me from an early death in one of the mines. I knew that every one of the days spent felling trees for pit props and dragging them back to the clearing was one more lucky one.

And luck runs out. I should have felt the same despair. Indeed, I tried. I'd shivered in the same bunks, tended the same raw sores, felt the same hunger. And yet . . .

Sometimes the sunlight had sparkled so brightly across the boundless sheets of snow. Or, in the stinging wind under the china-blue sky, I'd smelled the blessed spring melt. Once I'd stood under a tree and my heart sang to see the way its tall brave trunk soared up towards the clouds. I'd watched the eagles sailing overhead. I couldn't help it. Even something as simple as seeing the grayling twisting in the river could stir something hopeful in me.

And there were always,
always,
things to learn. About the guards – which ones had tempers, which had been seen to laugh, which ones paid no attention when they caught you cramming the bursting berries into your mouth in the short summers. I don't
believe I ever came to hate them – after all, their lives were just as limited as ours, their days as long and empty, even if their only job was to watch us while we did the work.

We dragged a tree trunk past Sly Joe one morning as he sprawled on a grassy hummock, counting the winnings from his last bet. ‘That's right,' Gregory muttered in between his desperate fits of coughing. ‘We'll lift the rock. You do the groaning.'

‘Why's he called Sly?' I asked when we'd been safely swallowed up again between the bushes.

‘That one? Because his brain's the devil's workshop! He takes against a prisoner and, lo and behold, they're on the next truck to the mines. He owes a fellow guard a gambling debt and – would you believe it? – just as the money should be changing hands, the other's body is found at the bottom of the ravine. An accident?' He shrugged. ‘Perhaps. The
first
time . . .'

‘Why should his fellow guards risk playing cards with such a poor loser?'

‘They don't – once they've been warned. And the replacements are mostly so young and green he wins their money off them fair and square. But even the
squirrels in the trees know that the man's a villain, so the name sticks.'

I looked back between the trees to where Sly Joe had turned his boot caps up to the filtering sun. ‘Is he asleep?'

‘Yuri,' Gregory warned me. ‘Never trust a guard's closed eyes. With lives so dull, they're looking for excuses to play with their guns.'

A timely reminder. I turned back to my work, and my luck held. Two years and more crawled past. Over a thousand days of hearing the thud of my axe and little else all through the day and through my dreams at night. The death of others was never far away. The rotten food claimed so many through the short burst of summer that I'd have been glad to see clouds gathering if I'd not known from hard experience that, within a week or two, the breezes would stiffen. Soon I would find my voice lifted away by chilly gusts, and realize I'd wished the horrors of that burning, biting season away too soon.