The Road of Bones (15 page)

Nikolai raised his voice so even the guards could hear. ‘Why not? He is Our Leader! Wiser by far than us. How can we question him? No doubt, in an ideal world, he'd care for each and every one of us. But how is he to be blamed if, in the Great March towards the Common Good, a few people suffer?'

Dov spat. ‘A charming fellow, no doubt – when he's asleep!'

A man I'd never before seen open his mouth leaned down the table. ‘That's a part of the problem, of course. The bloody man never does sleep. Take it from me, I worked for those who worked for him. And even way back then this “Incomparable Strategist” of ours was sitting up all night signing orders for executions. Friends, colleagues, strangers – he didn't care! It could take hours and hours. Sometimes he sat for so long snuffing out other people's lives, they took to calling him “Stone Arse”.'

I stared at Nikolai. He seemed to be shrinking back in terror at the thought of sharing a few greasy planks of wood with such a pack of traitors. And I kept staring. What I had seen on everyone's faces when he first spoke up was sheer indifference, or, if they'd safely emptied their bowls, a spark of interest – even, in the liveliest, a little amusement.

That had turned to doubt. Then incomprehension. After that came pity. But now they were once again looking at Nikolai with the most simple-hearted amusement. Even an hour later, back in the hut, I heard a chuckle beneath me. Peering over the edge of the bunk, I saw Gregory comforting himself as usual between his coughing fits by running the ends of his fingers around the swirling curlicues of faded pattern on the sleeves of his thick quilted jacket.

‘Something amusing?'

‘Misprints of history!' repeated Gregory, and chuckled himself into another vicious fit of coughing. The rest took up the theme. And for the rest of the evening odd echoes of what Nikolai had said floated around our hut – ‘Mere misprints!' ‘Wiser than us!' ‘These are small matters' – setting off roars of laughter.

The friend I had imagined. Come, and gone, all in one day.

And after that, all I could think of was escape. Don't ask me why. Perhaps it was disappointment that the one person with whom I'd felt some kinship, on whom I'd pinned some hope, had proved to have even less substance than the stinging crystals of fog through which we tramped to work.

Everyone warned me. ‘Forget it, Yuri. Escape's impossible.'

‘If you stop eating to hoard the food you'll need, you'll be dead before you start.'

‘Set off in winter and you'll freeze. In summer, you'll drown in the bogs.'

‘Look around you, boy. Why do you think there are no fences around the places where we work? This is a natural prison.'

And they were right, of course. Impossible to go north. The east was barred by mountain ranges. To the south lay that enormous inland sea few crossed the other way – and only then with special papers. And no one could recall that sense of being carried over endless space and not face the fact that there were hundreds of miles to be retraced even to reach those last few squalid huts we'd seen on the last northward stretch of our great journey.

Still, others had tried it. I heard of a group of prisoners who'd lured a truck of soldiers off the road
into a ravine. They'd all escaped in the ensuing chaos. And though most were rounded up and shot out of hand, some got away. Could one or two have made it out of this frozen waste to more hospitable country where they could hide in the woods and live off what they could find – what the older men called with a chuckle ‘serving in General Cuckoo's army'?

Or had the fierce walls of white defeated them, leaving their bodies to rot in the next spring thaw?

I wasn't the only one to brood on thoughts of escape. The very next day I watched a man with a bad limp trade a whole lump of bread for some small scrap of metal Oleg had picked up at work.

The moment he'd hobbled off, I braved the cutting wind to cross the compound and ask Oleg, ‘What did he want with that?'

Oleg just shrugged. So it was left to me to work my way close enough to the half-lame man in the next headcount to catch him whispering the word ‘north' to his companion.

North? Why should a man say ‘north' when the only words needed were ‘shovel' and ‘bread', ‘work' and ‘cold'? Was it a compass he was hoping to make out of his twist of metal?

And why not? Even the walking skeleton they called Old Georg had spent whole hours gleaned
from stolen minutes polishing two lengths of wood. Now they were hidden in some hollow tree along with his fantasy: ‘They'll make good skis. They'll see me through the valley.' Surely not all the dreams we clung to were as hopeless as his. Tales filtered in from other camps. The prisoners in one work party had scattered in a blizzard. The men in another had jumped their guards and shot them with their own guns.

‘It can be done, then!'

The men around me laughed. ‘Oh, yes! Once you're away from the camp, the rest is easy!'

‘Angels swoop down to lift you on their wings and carry you over a thousand miles of snow and ice.'

‘And drop you safely in the city.'

‘Along with a picnic basket to keep you going till you find a job where no one asks to see your papers.'

Again they all hooted with merriment. ‘Yuri, face it! You'll still be here with us as long as you have a hole in your arse!'

But hope is not some dried leaf you can let fall and watch blow away in the wind. I spent my days imagining each step of my escape. The strange hut barnacled with ice I'd happen across by sheer good luck as I stumbled through the forest. The
kindly old man who'd share his last loaf with me just as my strength failed. The cart that would rumble by, with an axle just deep enough to hide on.

And last – most blessed of all – the snaking steam train that would slow for the rise just as the guard was looking the other way. . .

I'd look up, only to realize that what had startled me was my own voice. I had been singing. Singing! So near did freedom seem!

But it was only a daydream: a thin safe braid of imaginings through which I could weave my own path, choose my own ending. The dreams I had at night followed a different pattern. Then, I would find myself beside a door I'd never seen before, set in the stockade. It had no lock and I knew on the other side there would be sunshine, apples! My mother would be there, her arms outstretched. Weeping with happiness, I'd tumble through – only to hear mocking laughter and find myself falling into black, black night.

No. Better to stick to daytime fancies as we worked, and marched, and stood in endless lines.

‘Stay back there! Second count!'

‘What is the
point
?' Tarquin grumbled. ‘They barely care who we are. Why should they care how many of us they let in or out?'

And why indeed? From time to time the guards would take against a prisoner. (It seemed to me they took an especial pleasure in ordering poor Nikolai onto the next truck to the mines.) But on the whole they went through their miserable routines as sourly as those they herded to and fro.

We stamped our feet, and bound our face-cloths tighter against the bitter sleet. At last the doors in the stockade opened like jaws to draw us all back in. We stumbled to the shelter of the hut, with Tarquin still complaining.

Sensing some entertainment, one of the men began to tease. ‘Would you prefer them to make more sense of the counts by giving us back our papers to be inspected time and again?'

Tarquin snorted. ‘A fine show that would be! Half the dolts can't read. They'd just stare at the page, then either take against your face and kick you senseless, or let you go.'

From Gregory's bunk beneath came one of those great storms of coughing we knew would soon be the death of him. I heard the weak rasp of his voice: ‘What difference would that make? Our papers are a sham. I begged the stubborn oaf who gave me mine, “Do I
look
eight years old? Somebody's going to arrest me for travelling on false papers because
you've written one number so carelessly it looks like another.” But would he lift his pen to change it? No. And now I'm going to cough the last of my guts up in this filthy hut.'

A commonplace enough story. It had no power to shock. So I can only think that it was pity for a man so close to death that made me lean over the side of the bunk to say, ‘That's why you're here? A simple mistake in your papers?'

Gregory tried to hide whatever ghastly stuff it was he was spitting into his food bowl. And when he spoke again, it was as if he were offering comfort to me, not the other way round.

‘Yuri, you know as well as I do that the very next morning I would have made the mistake of looking too long at some important bridge. Or said “Good morning” to someone a neighbour had just been kicked into denouncing.'

Another fit of coughing choked him before he could finish up weakly, ‘What does it matter?'

But still, it ate at me. Such a sweet man, and so close to his grave. At least I'd brought disaster on myself with my own tongue. Through autumn winds so strong that you could lean on them, through all the blinding whorls of winter storms, I burned with frustration. These were my best years that were
trickling away. The seasons when I should have lived, and loved, and felt my strongest, were one long suffering grind.

And those around me must have seen my restlessness and desperation. For one day, in the column for the count, someone called Vasim touched his arm to mine and whispered, ‘See who is watching you.'

I glanced the way Vasim twisted his rag-covered hand. Sure enough, in the next column, that towering man we were all in the habit of calling the Bear had turned his head into the bitter wind to look my way.

The call rang out. ‘Heads down! Your hands behind you! March!'

And we were off again. But that night was the same. As we stood stamping on the filthy snow, impatiently waiting our turn to get back through the gates and into the shelter of the huts, the Bear's eyes were on me.

No one around me knew any more about him than I could see with my eyes. ‘The Bear? I'll tell you this much. He has bigger thumbs than brains!'

‘Born with steel mittens, that one.'

‘The Sublime Strategist certainly missed a trick not offering a man like that a job in his prison cellars. He could tear the wings off an eagle.'

Still he looked my way. Gradually I came to notice he wasn't the only one taking an interest. Time and again through the long second count, a man with a wild frizzy beard also kept turning to look me up and down.

‘He's called Leon,' Dov whispered, adding admiringly, ‘A smart one, that. He certainly knows how many beans in a bag make five.'

I heard my grandmother's voice, ‘Curly hair, curly thoughts!' and took to wondering for the millionth time if any of my family were still alive, and if so, how they managed. The man called Leon failed to look my way again – not that day, or the next – and so I gave him little thought until a few mornings later, when he was ordered from his place at the front of his column to clear a drift of snow that had banked up against the stockade, hemming us in.

When the great gates were finally hauled open, he failed to move away. Making great play of ramming the shaft of his shovel deeper down into the blade, he managed to linger long enough to bark out a word like a cough as I went past.

‘La
-trine
!'

I heard it clearly.
Latrine.

I knew the message was for me. I had no doubt. And I was sure he meant that very night. All day I
put the meeting out of my mind. Who was to say this wouldn't be the morning some guard lost patience and shot him? Or perhaps he'd be standing in view when someone realized they were a few men short for the next convoy to the mines. ‘Here! You! You! And
you
!'

Three more lives over. And no one for me to meet over those heaps of shit once more too frozen to be moved till spring.

But he was there. When our hut was herded out, he was the only one of his group still to be squatting, feigning a running sickness.

I took a place beside him on the planks.

At once he spoke. ‘I hear your mind is on escape.'

‘Not mine,' I told him promptly. ‘You must be mistaken.'

He'd have dismissed me for a fool if I'd said anything else. Brushing my caution aside, he told me, ‘You stand no chance alone. So come with us.'

‘Us?'

‘Me and the Bear.'

We'd had no more than a moment and he was still pretending to be busy with his business. But already a guard on the watchtower was turning his rifle our way. Quickly Leon rose from his squat and, fumbling with his clumsy home-made buttons, set off for his own hut.

I watched him go – a strong-looking man with a firm stride. That night, between my thin shivering dreams, the thought came back over and over.

Who
better
to travel with than him and the Bear?

And, by the morning, who
else
?

FROM THAT DAY
on, I started to keep back scraps from each day's ration: a lump of bread, a thread of gristle as strung out as my own nerves. I smuggled them out of the stockade hidden in the cloths round my face. That way, if there was a search, I could at least get their benefit. I'd plod along in utter misery, resisting the temptation to see each guard's threatening glance as the excuse to swallow the precious mouthfuls to stave off my burning hunger. Once we reached the clearing, I'd wait for a quiet moment to ram the morsels, one by one, day by day, into the rag bag of other frozen pieces I'd hidden deep in the snow under a bush.

Now that our paths had crossed, I seemed to see the man who'd approached me time and again – now standing in line for a headcount, now with his arms protectively round his bowl in the food hall. But, from a host of casual questions to those around me, I learned no more about Leon than that no one knew any harm of him, and some admired his wits. Clearly
he had the skill of fending off attention – always a good thing in the camp. And, like me, he must have had good luck, or he'd already have been down the mines.