The Road of Bones

by Anne Fine

  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.

  Her voice was quavering. ‘Pavel?’

  I took her to be speaking to her husband, but as she came closer it was clear that her eyes were set on me. ‘Pavel?’ It was a note of disbelief. ‘Can it be you?’

  The moment she made out my face, the strange look of hope on her own snapped into one of suspicion. Pulling the old man close, she hissed in his ear, ‘Who’s this? Why is he here?’

  The old man whispered a warning. ‘Take care! The boy comes from the commissar.’

  She turned to face me. Now moonlight picked out her eyes as clearly as I’d just seen his. But where the old man’s had been gleaming with tears, the glitter in hers was born of hatred and scorn.

  ‘Sent by the commissar? Why? To see if you can find yet another way to make a misery of the last of our wretched lives? Isn’t it enough to herd my family onto a train going heaven knows where, and leave their poor boy broken-hearted?’

  The old man clutched her arm. ‘Maria! Curb your tongue.’

  She shook him off and pointed to the grave. ‘There he lies!’ she snarled. ‘Go back and tell that butchering commissar of yours he killed my grandson when he arrested his mother. Go tell that murdering thief that the very last thing left to us is safe from him now. Safe underground!’

  The old man was still trying to hush her. ‘Maria! Enough! Each word you say will be reported back.’

  She turned her fury on him. ‘What’s left to lose? They’ve stolen our land and taken the last of our grain. We’ve no seeds to sow, no fields to sow them in. We’ve nothing now but what’s around us. Igor, you know as well as I do that when the snows come we’ll be dead within a week – frozen or starved.’

  She spat on the ground. ‘So why should I worry what I say in front of whichever little worm the commissar has sent to torment us?’ She turned her scornful look back on me. ‘A boy so stupid he must have lost the path a dozen times to show up at this time of night!’

  But what sharp eyes hunger must give. The woman had no lantern. Only the moonlight shone on me. But still she’d noticed.

  ‘Grain! You have grain?’

  I glanced down. Sure enough, not all the chaff from the sacks had blown off my work jacket.

  Pushing his wife aside, the old man gripped my arm. ‘What? Have you brought back some part of what you took?’

  I couldn’t bear it. I’d thought that we were hungry in the city. I’d heard the soldiers talking on the train, but hadn’t truly realized things could be so much worse.

  I hung my head. ‘I’ve a few hazelnuts in my pocket.’

  Again the old woman spat. But Igor asked, strangely gently, as if, now the damage was done, he was simply curious, ‘So why were you sent?’

  I gazed across the clearing at the pitiful hovel in which these two old scarecrows were scratching through the last of their days. The roof was sadly buckled and full of holes. Weeds straggled at my feet. I thought of the forest cottages my grandmother had told me about in her stories – homes that could stand firm against the worst of winter snows, with crocks filled to bursting: pickled lemons and cabbages, mushrooms and onions and plums; barrels of salted melons, pears in vinegar, soused apples; and loaves of rye bread sitting on every shelf.

  What had the old woman said? ‘Dead within a week – frozen or starved.’

  I was no good at hunting. So:

  ‘I’ve come to help you fix the roof,’ I said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THOSE WERE STRANGE days. I knew the two of them would have found it a good deal easier simply to hate me. But I was young, and worked hard. Each morning the old man came with me into the forest and showed me which trees to fell – not so young they wouldn’t bear the weight of the brushwood we’d soon be spreading over them, but not so thick I couldn’t drag their stripped trunks back through the forest.

  He did his best to help. He tried so hard, I even teased him: ‘Igor, you’d strength enough to bring me down with that old stick of yours. How come you can’t replace your own rotten roof struts?’

  He growled at me, ‘Wait till your own bones crumble. Then you’ll not need to ask such half-witted questions.’

  Most of the time, though, he stayed silent. Silent and sour. I longed to ask him whether all the terrible things I’d heard on the train could really be true
. But, like his wife, he treated me with deep suspicion, fearing that anything he let drop would be reported back.

  I even wondered if I should confess to him. A dozen times or more I thought of putting down the axe and saying, ‘Listen, there’s no need to keep your beak so tightly buttoned in front of me. I wasn’t sent by the commissar. I lied in fright. I’m just a runaway with no papers, wondering how to get word to my family and trying to work up the courage to move on.’

  But I kept silent. After all, Maria might have snapped, ‘Why should I worry what I say? What’s left to lose?’ But once she learned I’d stumbled on their hovel purely by accident, she might think differently. Simple enough to creep up on a boy while he slept, stave in his head and hide his body in a ditch to keep him from blurting out secrets.

  I knew I couldn’t stay. But surely the more I could learn about what was going on in the countryside around me, the better I’d be able to fool the curious later about where I was going, and why.

  It wasn’t easy, though. The pair of them stubbornly pretended never to hear, or understand, my questions. I think they thought that, even to have stayed, I must have somehow discounted their first strong outburst at the commissar – perhaps put it down to grief. From the moment he handed me my first dipper of water and she pointed out the heap of sacks that was to be my bed, it was as if they were starting afresh with me, as careful and as guarded as anyone else.

  But I was patient. I think I guessed that, like my grandmother, these two had lived for far too long through times when people were free to say exactly what they wanted. They couldn’t play this silent game for ever.

  And I was right. For as I gradually won their goodwill by doing all the things they couldn’t manage, their guard did begin to slip.

  Tiredness helped. All day they’d act like two old prisoners in some dank cell who thought it wiser always to speak blandly or well of the jailor. Darkness would gather round the wretched cottage, and suddenly, even without prompting, I’d find that one or the other was freely spilling out a stream of bile about the miseries of their existence.

  One night in particular, Maria lost patience – first with me, then with discretion. All day she’d been complaining about the pains in her legs. She’d snapped at me when I rose, and when I was going out into the forest, and when I came back again.

  At supper time she handed me the usual bowl. The swirling mess inside gave off a smell so rank I held it further away.

  ‘So what’s in this? Stewed rat?’

  ‘Next time, bring grain with you,’ she told me sourly. ‘Then I’ll bake bread.’

  ‘Eat it,’ said Igor calmly. ‘Some days we think ourselves lucky to be sucking the meat off bats’ wings. So while there’s anything at all in your bowl, have the good sense to work your jaws harder than your eyes.’

  I stirred the ghastly broth. The bones that swirled in it were needle-thin. I lifted up the spoon, and with it came a stinking moth-grey lump. ‘Is it some crow you found lying in the clearing, dead from old age?’

  Maria snapped, ‘If you’d prefer fat roasted wood-pigeon, catch it yourself. Soon we’ll be chewing sweat out of old rags.’ She saw my shudder. ‘Oh, yes!’ she scoffed. ‘What would you know of hunger, little commissar’s boy? My grandfather stayed alive through one bad winter scraping out the hooves of his starved horse, then chewing on the horn.’

  But feeling so ravenous had made me outspoken. I pushed the bowl away. ‘I’ve worked all day. Do you think I can stay alive on slop like this?’ I braved an echo of the two brothers in uniform I’d overheard on the train. ‘There’s been no drought round here. No crop disease, either. Surely there must be wheat somewhere in this province. Or is it that famine is now made by man?’

  Before her husband could frown her out of saying it, the old woman spat her answer. ‘Yes, when whole villages are stripped of all they grow!’

  She’d gone too far. The old man covered his ears with crippled old hands as if he hoped there might still be some chance that I’d go back and tell the commissar, ‘That good man Igor refused to listen to his wife’s treachery.’

  I had to seize the moment – while she was sitting rubbing her swollen legs and couldn’t care. Leaning forward, I whispered, ‘There must be some reason things have gone this way.’

  She gave me a look of contempt. ‘The day those bullies of yours start bothering with reasons, be sure to let us know.’

  I wanted to tell her right there and then that they weren’t my bullies. No, not mine at all. But all I dared say was, ‘All this misery can’t stem from nothing. The villagers must surely have—’

  ‘What?’ Behind their sagging hoods, her old eyes flashed. ‘Showed the commissar their starveling children? Reminded him that you need land and seed to fill a wheat quota? Told him that when a machine is starved of oil, it’ll stop working quite as reliably as if “wreckers” have been at it.’ She spat. ‘In short, been desperate enough to speak up against the new rules!’

  I spread my hands. ‘How does it happen? How do they let it happen? How can whole villages full of people allow themselves be tormented by so few?’

  She stared at me as if I must have stepped off the moon to know so little. ‘You’re young,’ she said at last. ‘You’re green and stupid.’

  She dropped her head until I could no longer see the scorn in her eyes. She rubbed her legs again. It was a while before my sharp ears caught the last few words she muttered:

  ‘And you have yet to learn that, when he goes stalking, it never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be.’

  That night I dreamed of Nikolai. I saw him standing on the barricades, his cap perched jauntily on the side of his head, holding his flag high and taunting the men in uniform standing in ranks fifty paces in front of him, waiting for the order to charge.

  ‘Join us!’ he bellowed. ‘You know you’re on the wrong side. Weren’t you all workers and peasants before you were forced to be soldiers? The future lies with us! With justice and fair shares and liberty for all. Break ranks and join us!’

  I woke, my heart bursting with pride. This was my friend! I could still feel the bite of the spring wind on my cheeks and taste the smoke of the street fires.

  And then it struck me. The street in my dream came from the history book in school. That was the Gortov bridge. There were the tramlines. The cap Nikolai wore was the sort we had worn all our lives in school parades and off at Pioneer camp. The banner he waved was our old banner.

  In my head, Nikolai stood for those with courage enough to try to shake off this brute who’d seized the seat of power and set about throttling our country. Yellow and black. But in my dream he had been waving the flag of those we’d learned to praise: those first few brave young leaders who’d had the strength and vision to overthrow Grandmother’s old Czar and start the Glorious Revolution my mother once truly believed would rid the world of corruption and start things afresh.

  With justice and fair shares and liberty for all!

  So there it was. The years roll by. Governments come and go. Everything changes. And everything stays the same.

  So Grandmother had been right each time she said it, after all. ‘Only a fool cheers when the new prince rises.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘TELL ME ABOUT Pavel,’ I begged next day, when Igor and I were dragging the last of the birch trees back to the clearing.

  Perhaps he thought his wife had spoken her mind. Why hide things now? Maybe the fact that within a day or two he’d have a better roof over his head went some way to softening him. Maybe he simply wanted to talk about a grandson he’d loved.

  Whatever the reason, instead of apeing deafness the old man answered. ‘Never a strong boy. From birth, he’d fall in fits and thrash on the ground.’ His face went dark. ‘But after your men had—’

  ‘Not my men,’ I interrupted firmly. ‘I keep on telling you. I was sent.’

  He let the matter go. ‘Well, to be fair Pavel was soft in the head all his life.’ He peered bet
ween the trees, as if to check his wife wasn’t there to listen. ‘Maria won’t have it, of course, but I believe things might have been easier if he’d been dragged to the train along with all the rest of them.’

  ‘All the rest?’

  He gave me a wary look, then shrugged. Again I had the feeling he thought the damage was already done. He might as well tell me the story.

  ‘They took the whole village – all that were left, of course. The men and grown boys had been taken for soldiers more than a year before.’ Dropping his end of the birch spar, he stared off between the trees as if he were watching things as they happened. ‘First they herded the women out of the fields and pushed them into trucks. Then the guards seized all the old folk who had come hurrying up to curse and wail at them as they carried off their daughters. They swept up the children still clinging to their grandmothers’ skirts.’ He spat on the ground. ‘And after that fine work, they went back for those still sitting in the dirt, too young to walk.’

  I busied myself pulling the birch trunk along by myself as he trailed after me, passing his sleeve over wet eyes. It was a while before I dared bring him back to his story. ‘But you and Maria . . .?’

  ‘We’d left already.’ He sighed. ‘We’re old enough to know one straw’s enough to show which way the wind blows. First your fine commissar stole our last cow with that long fancy word of his.’ The venom Igor felt had clearly oiled his memory. ‘“Requisitioned”. Yes, Butterpat was “requisitioned”.’

  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?’