by Anne Fine
No, better to herd us round behind the glue factories and along the canal, though it must have taken a good hour longer to reach the station yard. It seems the women had been sent ahead, and were already bolted into their box cars. But how many cells had been emptied to furnish so many men? By the time we were pushed through the gate and followed the barked orders to squat in lines on the filthy boot-packed snow, I counted over four hundred.
And we were just the droppings from the prison of one small town! So how could anyone think we could be terrorists, wreckers, conspirators? If that were true, the Leader would have had to drown our revolt in blood, not simply usher us up ramps into the caged compartments of a train.
‘Three more in this one! Quick! You with the arm sling. And you! And you!’
The guard grabbed at an old man stumbling up the ramp and pushed him so hard he fell into the carriage on top of me.
Instantly the old man was howling. ‘My letter! Mind my letter!’
I lifted my sodden boot. The sheets of paper that had slid out of his sleeve onto the board floor were already filthy and torn. The ink spread into pools.
‘My letter!’ His rheumy eyes filled. ‘Now I must start again!’ he wailed. ‘Where will I find the paper?’
One of the prisoners crammed behind the closest mesh partition started to tease. ‘Why bother, Grandpa? No one will ever read it.’
The old man held out the pulpy streaked mess he’d gathered from the floor. ‘But it explains. All they have to do is take a moment to read it. Then they’ll know I’m innocent. Innocent!’
His neighbours’ snorts of contempt set him howling afresh. Beside me, the man with the arm sling broke off from shoving for a place, to offer a pitying look. I was the only one who heard the words he said so softly. ‘Old man, forget it. The ideas of guilt and innocence died a long time ago. Now it’s whatever keeps that wolf in power.’
But still the frail old fellow wept as he tried to sort his ruined sheets of paper. The other watched in growing irritation, then dropped his bundle to lay his one good arm round my shoulder and rebuke our snivelling companion: ‘Be glad you’ve already had a life. If you’re so keen to steep yourself in pity, feel some for the boy.’
The old man lifted his head just long enough to shoot me an angry look. ‘No doubt he earned his place. But I am innocent.’
There was a round of jeering as men turned from fighting for space on the few wooden bunks or by the boarded windows.
‘Does he have cloth for brains?’
‘Oh, just our luck! Another True Believer!’
‘Hey, Greybeard! Still trying to tug the glacier backwards?’
Even the one who’d put his arm round my shoulder couldn’t help muttering, ‘He must be some great professor. No man with ordinary brains could be so stupid.’
I turned away. I’d left a cell packed tight as herrings in a box only to find myself jammed in a place no better than a cage. Why hadn’t I had the sense to take my chances while we were getting here? The moment I tasted the first snowflake and felt the fresh wind in my face, why hadn’t I made a run for it? Stiff as I was, I might have made it. There had been rifles pointed at us, and at my first step out of line, more would have turned my way. But still I might have managed it. I might have dodged the bullets.
And then what? No one would open a door to a stranger, no matter how desperately they rapped, or how much they pleaded. Since helping even those you didn’t know were traitors had become a crime, no one would take that risk, especially at night.
No. Better alive than dead.
Feeling a jolt, I elbowed my way between the crush of men, ignoring their curses. If I stood tall, I could just see between the slats of a boarded window. Over the hills, the dawn was finally breaking. We were off.
Up to the north. New lands. No doubt they would be harsh. But there’d be clear fresh wind and, cold as it might turn out to be, surely there would be sunshine. Better than more time spent in that stinking hole. It was a crush now, certainly. But very soon, surely, surely. . .
I asked the man with the sling, ‘How long will it be?’
‘Till what?’
‘Till we get where we’re going. How long will the journey take?’
I was excited. I truly believe that – in my stupidity – I was keen to get there, keen to find new friends and maybe learn a trade. Even—
I heard his answer. ‘Weeks. Maybe even months.’
‘Months? Crushed in this carriage? In these wire pens?’
He gave me the look you’d give some foolish child. ‘Believe me, you’ll soon have space enough to stretch your legs. Sit by the weak, or sick, or old. There’ll soon be room enough.’
Indeed there was.
There are enough who’ll tell you about the transports: how we were beaten to pulp for making the slightest noise when the train stopped in a siding or a station. How we were fed on salted fish that blistered our lips, and turned us half mad from thirst. How we spent all our time chasing the lice up the seams of our rags and squashing them under our thumbnails only to feel their baby cousins already crawling in our body hair.
I’d prise one out of an armpit or my groin – even from one of my eyebrows. They might be flat and grey, they might be rusty red, swollen with blood. In either case, I got to love the sound they made when I burst them. The old train creaked along. We spent whole days in sidings – sometimes given water and sometimes not. Often, as we gasped with thirst, we’d hear the women further along the train set up a banshee commotion of howling and yelling. ‘Water! Be warned! We’ll all of us scream till you fetch it! So bring us water! Water! Now!’
Admiring their courage, we’d set up a rebellion of our own, hurling ourselves against the wire sides of each compartment. All who were fit enough rushed, first one way, then the other. The sheer weight of our bodies could set our carriage rocking so hard the guards feared it would tip, and cause, not just our own, but all the other carriages along the train to topple off the track, like dominoes falling in turn.
‘Water’s coming!’ they’d shout. ‘Stop all that rocking or we’ll take you out and shoot the lot of you! Water is coming!’
Sometimes the water came. Sometimes it didn’t. And when it did, it always seemed that was the very moment the train jolted back to life and half the precious liquid slopped out of our bowls onto the carriage floor. We’d kneel to suck it up before it soaked away into the dirt and rough boards.
And every day – every single day – they came for the bodies. Sometimes it was only the old or the sick. (The old man with the letter lasted five weeks.) Sometimes it was simply the hopeless. But even as they were fading out of life, we were already eyeing their bundles and bracing ourselves to be the first at their side to strip them of that thicker pair of trousers, that warmer jacket. ‘After the head is off, no one weeps over the hair,’ we muttered to ourselves. ‘The skinned lamb can’t grieve that his wool’s gone.’
But still I chose not to remember their faces. For the further we travelled, the further I was travelling from myself, learning to snatch a bread ration from a dying man, and water from the sick. Oh, it was a fine education – not least in how a man can be forever shivering with damp and cold, his belly empty, and still want to live.
And learn. I learned to sleep through curses and cries and endless futile noisy arguments. I learned not to wake through kicks and punches delivered blindly in the dark. I learned to eat mouldy black-boiled wheat with gusto while all around me swilled the slime from men too weak to wait for the daily walk at rifle point across deserted tracks to empty their bowels and bladders.
Even that daily task could teach me more than I thought.
‘See that?’ said Liv Ullavitch, a man in the next pen along, nodding one morning at the huge letters painted along the side of our truck: WE HAIL OUR GLORIOUS REVOLUTION.
I shrugged. I’d seen the slogan painted on so many walls over the years, I’d barely given the words a glance.
‘Look closer.�
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‘What’s to see?’
He grinned at me. ‘Yuri, are you blind? You climb in and out of this truck every day and haven’t noticed?’
Already the guard was harrying us. But next day, when we stopped, I chose a place to unbutton where I could stare back at the truck. Liv was right. When you looked carefully, you could see something different about the last five letters. The paint looked fresher and, rather as if the signwriter had suddenly handed the task to an apprentice, the little crosslines finishing off the strokes were missing.
WE HAIL OUR GLORIOUS REVOLUTION.
And then I realized what Liv had seen from the start – that someone must once have painted over four letters and altered the last of the rest. Now I was grinning too. How long had this truck rolled over our huge great country bearing its counter-revolutionary message?
WE HAIL OUR GLORIOUS REVOLT.
Now, each time I clambered in and out, I had a purpose. Like an obsessed detective I peered and peered, stumbling against a different panel of the truck each day to rub my sleeve against a patch of mud here, a smear of grease there, until at last my labours were rewarded.
There, on the filthy underbelly of the truck, out of sight of the signwriter sent to repair the damage: a tiny splash of paint.
Yellow, again.
Oh, yes. An education.
Mostly I sat beside a man called Stanislas. He was a geologist who claimed he’d earned a twenty-year sentence for deliberately concealing reserves of tin ore underground.
‘How did you hide them?’ I’d asked without thinking, the first time we spoke.
‘Hide them?’ He’d laughed in my face. ‘Young Yuri, have you not yet learned enough about your Motherland to translate a criminal sentence into plain words?’
My senses came back to me. ‘I know! It was your job to dig for mineral ore, but you failed to find a seam.’
‘Bright lad!’
‘What I don’t understand,’ I remember asking him a couple of weeks into our journey, ‘is how it all went so wrong.’
‘All what?’
‘What my mother believed in. You know. What everyone was marching for in all those parades.’
‘You mean the “Glorious Future”?’
‘That’s right.’
Bursting with laughter, he waved an arm around the metal pen in which we sat. ‘You might as well give it its real name now, Yuri. Call it the “Glorious Lie”.’
A memory came back to me of Grandmother, all those years ago, saying the very same thing. But I persisted. ‘When did things change, though? When did it all go wrong?’
Stanislas called to a man slumped against the wire partition dividing our section of the carriage from the next. ‘Hey, Taditz. You were in the thick of it. Over to you!’
It took Taditz a while to respond, as if the history of the business now lay in such a broken past, it wasn’t worth the effort of explaining. But in the end I pestered him enough to make him lift his head.
‘At the start we were just trying to make it work. Better and faster.’
‘The Revolution?’
‘Yes. We didn’t feel we had for ever, so we pushed things along.’ His voice picked up. ‘The people were in a parlous state, you see. There was no justice anywhere. When things are rolling along nicely, you can afford to take your time to primp things till they’re right. But when you’re trying to turn a pigsty into the most perfect and fair society there’s ever been . . .’
He sighed. ‘Well, you can’t run a revolution like a game of croquet – all “After you, please” and good manners. We thought what we were doing was so important, it didn’t really matter which way we went about it. Ends justified means.’ He leaned towards me and grasped the wire. It was as if he was a vibrant young man again. ‘We all believed, you see. Back at the start, you would have had to be a stone not to have worked for change!’
‘My mother was a believer,’ I told him.
He looked at me as if I were a half-wit. ‘Back then, anyone with either a heart or a brain was a believer.’
I asked my question again. ‘So what went wrong?’
He shrugged. ‘At first, not much. A few corners cut too sharp. Then, as the people who were suffering from that squawked out too loud, the arguments began. Some wanted to move faster, some to slow down or do it differently.’
‘Is that when the Leaders began to fall out?’
‘That was the start of it. And when you win a battle, the safest thing to do is call your opponent a traitor and get his portrait down from the wall. It keeps things tidy.’ Across his face spread the ghost of a smile. ‘The problem is, of course, that everyone has to keep up. You mustn’t make the mistake of taking a week’s break in the country. By the time you come back to town, you’ll find you’ve inadvertently laid a wreath on the grave of someone who hasn’t been a hero for five whole days. So you must be a traitor yourself!’
He grinned and waved a hand towards the other end of the pen. Ask Rubachenko.’
Someone leaned over to shake a sleeping body on the other side of the bunk as Taditz called, ‘Wake up, Rubachenko! Tell the boy what you told us in the cell. How, in your library, it wasn’t just the portraits that vanished, it was the books as well.’
‘Tell him yourself,’ growled Rubachenko.
Taditz cheerfully gave him the finger and turned back to me. ‘Well, first his shelves thinned out. And then, it seems, new books began arriving with – fancy! – whole different stories inside them. Fresh heroes. Different beginnings. He claims there were even photographs that looked exactly like the old ones except for strange little spaces where some of the faces had vanished.’
‘Did he speak up?’
‘Did he, hell! He’s not that stupid! No. All Rubachenko did was make the mistake of cracking a little joke.’
‘A joke?’
Taditz was chuckling. ‘Oh, yes. It seems his secretary was a loyal creature who’d marched in so many parades that it had turned her brain. She wanted Rubachenko to join her in sending birthday greetings to Our Great Leader, and Rubachenko said, “Save your stamp money. Our Great Captain’s far too busy rewriting the newspapers back to his birth to read any messages from us.”’
When all the laughter quietened, I asked Taditz, ‘So did she tell?’
‘Shopped him that very same hour. Wouldn’t you? After all, “failure to denounce” is treason. And no doubt like the rest of us, that poor woman has a family.’
‘Still – telling on someone who simply made a joke? Just to stay safe.’
‘Better than telling on him because you’re still a True Believer.’
I couldn’t see it myself. But all the other men who joined in the argument took Taditz’s side. ‘That’s right. Saving your own skin is at least understandable. It’s all those fools who blind themselves to what’s going on who are the worst.’
‘They simply help Our Great Leader heap heavier chains round our necks.’
On the discussion rumbled. I found myself thinking about the last time our train had stopped in a station. In came the guards as usual, with rifles at the ready to remind us that our carriage was labelled goods in transit and goods don’t speak. But by leaning my head against the window, I’d managed to peer between the slats to see the people trailing along the platform.
Luckier than us.
For them to know it, they would have had to see into our stinking box. But, not knowing we were there, no doubt they were wallowing in their own miseries. Their working days of ten or twelve hours or more. The long, long lines to get their pitiful food. Having to share their tiny apartments with two or more other families they hadn’t chosen and didn’t like. All of it showed in their drawn faces and their sour looks, their sheer hostility to one another, their irritation with their children.
And the same ghastly grey despair hung over the refugees we saw along the embankments or waiting to cross the track at the forest halts. The ones with handcarts might still have one or two pots or toys – even
a bundle of clothing to see them through mid winter. Those without carts were stooped under their bundles, and it was easy enough to guess how far they’d come from how little they still carried.
So many people on the move! Some glanced at the train as it rattled past. Most kept their eyes on the path. Sometimes their sheer indifference would lead us to believe we were invisible – shut in some sort of ghostly vehicle – no longer part of the real world. I’d peer through the slats, keeping my fingers spread for fear of splinters ramming into my eye. The wide flat steppes had given way to wastes of white. The snow fell faster. The silence around us thickened. Though none of us spoke of it, we all knew that, by now, without the clothes we’d stripped from our dead companions, we would have been dead from the cold.
Over and over there would be mysterious halts – often at night. We’d hear the door scrape open. Torches would shine into the carriage. In came the guards, complaining about the stink. Then:
‘Hands out for bread!’
‘Can’t find your bowl? Bad luck on you. Your share goes on the floor.’
Hours would pass. Then, just as mysteriously, there would be another jolt and we’d be off again.
Eleven weeks.
I had lost count, but Liv Ullavitch had paid attention to our daily progress, scratching on the side of the carriage a map of where he thought we were, and gouging out a line for each of the days.
One night I woke to the rattle of points, and shouts outside. I heard a scrambling in the next pen along the carriage and Liv’s hoarse whisper. ‘Give me some room. Let me stand. I want to look out.’
The men he’d disturbed were scathing. ‘Why? So you can mislead us again? Confuse two station signs, and keep us waiting for some place that never comes?’
‘Scoff at your own stupidity,’ I heard Liv hissing back. ‘You know as well as I that, even a week ago, without a town to shelter you, you would have burrowed through your hole only to freeze to death.’
Your hole, he said.
Burrow through your hole.