The Road of Bones (9 page)

He spat again, as if the very word had soiled his mouth.

‘Then that great swaggering thief sent men in uniform to “redistribute” our share of the communal grain. But I can see as far into a stone as any man, so when they came back for the last of our chickens—' He broke off. By now we were in the clearing. As if suddenly thinking better of his frankness, he wrapped up the story. ‘So Maria and I threw the last few things we had into the barrow, and pushed it back here.'

We stacked the birch strut with the others and went back for the brushwood. As soon as we were a fair way from the cottage, I started my questions again. ‘How far away is this village?'

‘A day and night of walking.'

‘So how did you know about this place?'

He gave me a wry look. ‘Come, lad. A man is born with legs, not roots. My father built it. He was a woodcutter in this very forest.'

‘How did you get to hear about what happened back where you came from?'

He let out a sour laugh. ‘Everyone knows it's a very foolish goose who comes to the fox's sermon! Those in the furthest fields had the good sense to hide
when they spotted the dust of the trucks coming down the hill from Strevsky.'

‘Was Pavel one of them?'

‘Poor Pavel hadn't wits to hide. Most likely, when the screaming started, his eyes rolled back and he fell into one of his lathers of writhing and drooling. None of the soldiers would have wanted to drag him to the truck. They would have feared he had some fever.'

‘So they just left him there?'

‘Alone. Not fit to feed himself. Barely able to walk.' Old Igor kicked at the brushwood he was dragging as it snagged in a bramble. ‘Of course the news crept back. “Just one young daftie left,” we heard. “Keening and shivering and falling on the ground.” We knew it must be Pavel, so we went off to fetch him.' Igor looked at me with something close to pride. ‘That long walk, mind. And with Maria's bad legs.
And
pushing the barrow, to fetch the boy back home.'

He tugged his brushwood easily over a stump. ‘See?' he said. ‘I've taught you well. You felled that tree cleanly.'

‘Get on with the story,' I told him, little thinking the skills he'd taught me would save my life a short while later.

‘There's little more to tell. We skirted village after village on the way to get Pavel. All empty.'

‘
All
of them?'

‘All of them. Everyone gone. “Cleared from sheer spite,” said Maria. And when we got there, it was just as they'd told us. The boy was squatting in a doorway, mumbling and shaking. We wrapped sacks round him and gathered his last few things. And though we hadn't enough food to keep ourselves, we brought him back with us.'

I wondered what the ‘last few things' of someone like Pavel might be. I knew the old man kept a tattered Bible deep in his mattress. I'd seen him pull it out when he thought I was asleep, and heard his wife's fierce whispers: ‘Igor! Put it away! Better to be arrested for stealing food than reading about angels so blind they can't even see when a country's bleeding to death!'

But surely Pavel couldn't read. And though old folk might cling to hidden Bibles, no one my age had ever been given pictures of saints, or crosses on a chain. What would a boy like him keep? Not coins, for sure. They'd have been taken from him to pay for food. His papers? Certainly. Perhaps a few pretty stones and lumps of glass he'd picked up playing in the village dirt, and fought to keep. Maybe even a
photograph. I knew from Grandmother that some of the peasants had stood for the camera back in the old days, when there was still time for fairs and holidays.

I had the heavier load. Hefting the wayward layers back on top of one another, I stumbled after Igor as he tugged his own fan of brushwood over the roots and stumps, and kept on with his story.

‘On the way home, we heard a whisper that the villagers had been packed onto a train going north.'

I thought of the great frozen bay. ‘Up to Kolskaya?'

‘To work in the mines, we heard. Nobody said the name. All I heard was that, all the long winter, not so much as a rim of sun rises above the horizon. The days are as black as the nights. And, in the summer, the sun never sets.'

‘White nights . . .' I murmured.

We both slowed our pace. The dusk was gathering. I don't know what Igor was thinking. But I was remembering Grandmother. Suddenly I saw her in my mind's eye, as clear as paint, cursing the feeble fire beneath her blackened pots and talking of those condemned to count out year after year with the blows of their axes. My mother too. ‘Lucky to come back at all,' she'd always muttered. The comfort I'd created for myself slithered away. Now, for the first time, I faced it honestly – the thought of being
severed for ever from my own family; the fear of what might have happened – still be happening – to them; and, even if the worst had failed to happen, the horror of knowing they might be crawling through their days and lying wide awake at night, sickened with fear about what might be happening to me.

Now I understood why Igor said it might have been better if Pavel had gone with the others. It would be easier for his mother, surely, to know at least whether her son was living or dead.

‘What happened?' I asked Igor to distract myself. ‘Why did Pavel die?'

‘I say his poor heart broke. With his mother not there to soothe him, he fell sick in a different way. He lay on those same sacks as you, and lost the feeling for life. And as he got weaker, it was as if those terrible fits of his lost interest in tormenting him.'

I waited while Igor sniffed back tears. After a moment he told me briskly, ‘But his end was peaceful enough. The last few days he simply lay staring up at the sky through the holes in the roof. There was none of his usual mumbling and keening. And a boy who had always pushed everyone else aside to get to his food could no longer be tempted by even the freshest of hens' egg—'

He broke off and shot me a furtive glance.

‘Couldn't even be tempted by
what
?' I said. ‘That brushwood of yours is making such a noise I can't hear what you're saying.'

‘Nothing,' he said.

And, knowing we'd each of us lied as clumsily as the other, we worked in silence till the darkness fell.

That night every muscle ached, but I couldn't sleep for thinking of the boy who'd lain on the filthy damp rags under me only a short time before, staring up at the sky through the decrepit roof.

Tomorrow the holes would be gone. I'd build a makeshift ladder with sturdy lengths of wood and a heap of knotted twine Igor had dragged from some corner. We'd pull off the rotten struts. I'd haul the new ones up and lay them close enough to one another that, once the brushwood had been spread across, the holes could be stopped with handfuls of straw packed down with clumps of moss.

With luck and a better roof to shelter them, the old man and his wife might last a little longer. But Pavel was gone. Life had drained out of him on these very sacks. The night I came, I had dropped onto them without a thought except that they made a softer bed than the earth-packed floor. But now I
realized that, since that sad soul had been lifted out of them, they'd probably not even been shaken.

I was lying on another boy's deathbed.

It was enough to keep sleep well away. I thought of slipping out under the stars until I'd shaken off my grisly imaginings. But the old man had worked all day at my side. I didn't want to disturb him.

That's how I came to be awake still when I heard the rustle – not just the usual restless stirring from the old couple, but more as if someone were feeling around for something on the floor.

I made great play of rolling over in sleep, then watched from behind a flung arm as the old woman pulled herself up and, painfully slowly, tugged on her boots. Again I thought of my grandmother. With three flights of stairs to stumble down and a courtyard to cross, she'd had to reach for the night pot. All Maria had to do was shuffle over to that little patch of bushes they'd pointed out to me on my first day.

I watched through the gap she left in the doorway. But in the soft dawn light I saw her go another way entirely – along the only path Igor had never led me along in search of good trees to fell.

Curious, I waited. It seemed an age before I saw her hobbling into view again, holding her hands in front of her, palms upward.

And resting on them?

Hens' eggs.

She'd kept them well enough hidden while I was spooning up her radish stews and those strange patties I could swear were filled with nothing more than roots and grubs.

Is cunning like fever? Can you catch it from the people around you? Next morning, as the two of them were pulling on their boots, I sat bolt upright and said, ‘Do you hear a hen?'

I tipped my head to make a show of listening. ‘Yes! A hen. And getting closer.' I pointed one way. ‘Down that path.' Then I pointed another. ‘No! Down there.'

Of course they heard nothing. There was nothing to hear. But knowing that my ears were young and theirs were old, they took my word for it. Nothing was said, but in an instant the two of them were out of the cottage, one heading down one path, one down the other in search of the hens they feared must have escaped from their pen. Hens they were determined to keep secret – so secret they'd let me starve rather than share a single egg.

In an instant I'd rolled off my rags. I pulled the sacks off the mattress on which the old man lay. Sure enough, there was the hole. I spread my fingers wide, but in there was only the greasy old Bible.

Throwing the sacks back, I scrambled to my feet. Where would a sharp old woman hide eggs from the boy who'd worked his fingers raw bringing spars for her roof? She'd not trust them to foxes outside.

There were no cupboards. All the shelves were bare. The floor was hard-packed earth.

And then I saw the shoes under a broken stool. The strips of ancient leather were stretched across a netting of braided birch bark, with a stuffing of hay.

A stuffing of hay. And inside each of them, a fresh hen's egg. Other things too. In one, my fingers touched a fat round coin. I pulled it out. Gold!

And in the other, a piece of folded paper.

I unwrapped it carefully. It was the papers of Pavel Tretsov. Of Strevsky Province. Age fourteen.

I was no thief. I pushed the gold coin safely back in the hay of the shoe and pushed the eggs in after as carefully as if I'd laid them myself.

But I put Pavel's papers in my pocket.

That night I nagged and nagged until Maria agreed to lend me the stump of her pencil and a scrap of wrapping ‘to write a letter to my mother'.

‘Three lines at most, mind! It won't last for ever.'

I wrote the lines. Next day I worked without a break, fixing the roof spars, spreading the brushwood
over, then clotting every last hole with moss and earth.

That night, as soon as both of them were snoring, I dropped the pencilled note where they would see it when they rose.

And even before Maria had risen to look for her eggs, I was gone.

THE SIZE OF
our country! Five days I travelled – mostly to be quite sure that no one would look at my papers, then at my face, and know they weren't a match. And still I found myself beneath the Chelya hills, barely a step through that great province.

Seen from a train window, the countryside I walked through, mostly by night, no doubt looked normal enough. But to a boy scavenging along the way, it was as if a host of locusts had passed through. Where had the rabbits gone? Had even the ptarmigans starved? Around me was nothing – nothing! One night I had the good luck to stumble over someone's dying fire while I was carrying a stinking crow I'd not been able to bring myself to eat, or toss aside.

It was a risk. Maybe whoever built the fire was still close by. Nevertheless, I sneaked out of the darkness and flipped a couple of embers onto a scoop of bark torn from a rotting stump. I crept off. Further along the path, I stopped to listen. Everything seemed
silent enough. So I pushed my way deeper between the trees and scraped around for dried leaves and twigs for kindling.

That crow! Who'd have believed it seemed to me a feast – the sort of meal a prince might call for in a fairy tale. Next day I found some moulding pignuts and a few more roots, and, hours later, stumbled on a clearing with berry bushes. All stripped bare.

By the fifth night, the dizzy spells were getting stronger. With my knees trembling so much that I could barely walk, I came upon the outskirts of a village. It seemed the only choice left to me now was between courage and starvation.

I plumped for courage and crept closer.

Someone was sitting, idly whittling wood in the moonlight, on the step of a huge wooden hut. Even from where I stood I smelled the stench. For just a moment my starved brain thought the foul reek must come from the man I took to be some sort of night guard, as if his body were rotting from the inside out.

But then I realized. It was poultry droppings!

If this was a chicken hut, then this must be one of the communal farms. I drew back into the shadows of the straggling woods and waited till dawn, hatching my plans and practising my story – even the
words in which I'd tell it. Just as the night was thinning into grey, I thrashed as noisily as I could through the last bushes, whistling cheerily, and, walking up to the step, confronted the dozy guard with a confident greeting.

‘What ho, comrade! Pavel Tretsov. Sent to help clean out the chicken house. Have I come to the right place?'

Would it sound mad to say that was the happiest time of my whole life? My arms were pecked till they bled. I had to learn how to force my way through masses of frenzied chickens happy to kill one another and me for a beakful more grain. I learned how to chop off their heads, and how to hoist a sack of feed onto my back, and how to carry the vast trays of eggs without breaking a single one.