The Road of Bones (18 page)

Above it, snow lay in the cracks of rock like streaks of silver bullion. I raised my head. On the stiff breeze it flooded over me – the tang of the blessed spring melt! What lay ahead of me now in all that shining distance was nothing more than snow so lightly frozen it would crackle when I walked on it, a pale clear sun, and rivers bubbling through their winter crust.

I'd made it.

The air was filled with a crystalline freshness. Now there'd be fish to catch and game to ensnare. Soon I'd be walking over last year's pine needles instead of snow. And, sooner or later, walking across the gently stirring land that lay in front of me, I would find shelter.

It was a woodsman's hut. From the look of it it had been empty all winter, but under a pile of rags there
lay a sliver of soap. Soap! I'd not seen soap in as long as I could remember.

Against the wall rested a shard of mirror so grimed with age I didn't realize that was what it was until I lifted it. I rubbed it clean and stood back to look.

The shock of it! I don't believe I would have recognized myself had I not grown to look so much like my own father. How I had aged and changed. Even my shorn hair was growing back nearer to grey than brown.

And that's where I stayed, coaxing the squirrels out of trees into the traps I found, roasting woodcock and fish. To rid my body of lice, I scrubbed myself raw each morning, and stood beside the river to let the cold breeze dry my body while I watched the chunks of breaking ice go rushing past.

And I took stock. I had a gun. A hoard of bullets. The uniform of a guard. And hair grown long enough to pass. So there began a week of industry. I trimmed my hair more evenly with the sharp edge of a stone. I threw away the worst of my rotten footcloths, and washed the others, then tore them into such thin strips that I could weave them into something that might pass for proper boot linings. I cleaned the gun by rubbing grit from the river up and down its sides
till it was gleaming. I flattened out the guard's cap and brushed the overcoat till it looked halfway to smart.

But then my courage failed me. There would be times when I'd be passing men in uniform – real guards, not easy to fool. Surely it would be wiser to travel in the quilted jacket I'd tossed in the corner. Lice eggs lay hidden in every seam and it would take more than one underwater beating to drive out so much dirt. But still I carried it down to the river's edge, studying the stitching doubtfully. Would it be strong enough to hold? This jacket of Gregory's had seen me through the fiendishly bitter weeks of middle winter and, if I were caught, the guard's coat would be ripped off my back in an instant. Should I be sent to any of a thousand camps, I'd need its warmth simply to stay alive.

I spread the jacket and ran my fingers over its dirt-caked pattern just the way I'd seen Gregory doing so often, sitting on his bunk.

A stiffness caught my attention. Was that an inner lining? But when I moved my hand across to the next quilted square, the sense of one more layer underneath was suddenly gone.

So. Not a lining.

I lifted the other sleeve and ran my fingers over that instead. And there was nothing to match.

Here was a mystery. We all had hiding places and our little secrets. What was it Gregory had wanted to keep so badly he'd sewn it into his jacket? And all those times I'd watched him run his fingers over his sleeve as if idly tracing the pattern, had he been checking something? Making sure it was still there?

Lowering my head, I pinched the jacket and bit through a stitch. I pulled out just enough thread to work a finger inside.

There were two folded sheets of paper.

I tugged at more stitches till I could pull them out. I flattened them on my knee.

Identification papers! Gregory's name and place of birth. His former occupation. Cabinet maker. How had he managed to keep them? Our papers were taken from us at the moment of arrest to make escape more difficult. Keeping them hidden in the way he had done must have earned Gregory more than one savage beating.

Why had he
bothered
? I brought to mind the gentle, hopeless man who'd coughed himself to death below my bunk, and thought I knew the reason. With Gregory, the sheer
stupidity
of his arrest was never out of his mind. The thought that his life had been destroyed for ever because of one stroke of the pen had seemed to him so monstrous, so far beyond
belief, he'd felt obliged to keep the proof of it. Hadn't I heard him saying it a thousand times? ‘How could I lose my wife and child, my job and home, and end up in this stinking hut? How could my life have boiled down to
this
?' Knowing the reason was hidden in that little square of quilt must be what had kept him sane: ‘I'm not imagining this horror. Here under my fingers lies the cause. One scribbled number.'

I scoured it for the carelessly written date of birth that had derailed a good man's life and led to his early death. What had he told me he'd said to the official he'd begged to change it? ‘Do I
look
eight years old?'

How long ago was that? How many years had Gregory rotted in the camps?

I peered at the year of birth as it seemed written, and tried to work it out. But to a boy whose only practice in numbers since he left school had been ‘one load, and then one more, and then one more', the counting wasn't easy. It took a while to reach the answer.

And yet, how worth the effort!

Eighteen years old!

This was a gift indeed to a boy who might pass for anything from fourteen to twenty! Papers that suited!
Papers that might be handed over almost with confidence for inspection.

I put them safely under a stone and washed the jacket in the icy rolling water, remembering all the while how often Gregory had lain on his bunk and muttered bitterly, ‘One careless little mistake! Enough to ruin a life!'

An error like this could prove to be a club with two ends.

Enough to ruin his life. But, if I stayed lucky, perhaps enough to salvage mine.

NOW THERE WAS
nothing to be done but show more courage. I set off walking again, guessing that, since I'd not seen a living soul since leaving the forest, I must be days from a settlement. From time to time I'd see what looked like wisps of smoke in the distance, or some black smudge on a hill that might have been a man or a woman busy with sheep. But mostly there was nothing except hills thawing to a green almost unbearably bright to eyes so unused to colours, the bouncing spring breeze and, now the last of the powdery snow in the cart tracks had vanished, mud squelching underfoot.

Turning a corner, I saw a far-off figure and felt a wave of terror. Who was this stranger coming my way? A guard? A soldier? Perhaps even some other escaped prisoner ready to rob me of my bundle?

I didn't dare leave the path. To change direction or step aside would look suspicious. I didn't dare slow my pace. I simply let the figure draw so close that I could see the streaks of silver through his
beard. My heart was thumping so loudly I was sure he could hear it.

Just as he passed, he raised a thumb to the sun and said in a voice so frail it might have been a sheet of paper rustling: ‘Not so uncertain today.'

I nodded as eagerly as a doll with a broken head-spring. ‘No, indeed!' I heard myself saying as I strode past him.

Safely past him!

Into my mind sprang one of my teacher's scoldings: ‘Only a simpleton offers his fellow man no more than talk of the weather.' What did my teacher know? I felt as proud as if I'd passed the hardest examination! Indeed, I was still preening myself on my wits and repeating the clever exchange over and over – ‘Not so uncertain today.' ‘No, indeed!' – long after the two of us had become no more to one another than specks in the distance.

Puffed with the triumph of having passed so easily as just another stranger on the road, my boldness grew. Where better to practise the hardest deception than in this desolate place?

I pulled the uniform we'd stripped from the guard out of my bundle. ‘I'll walk past just one person,' I told myself. ‘Whoever it is, they'll not dare speak, and I won't even nod. I'll just stride past as if
they're no more to me than the mud on my boots.'

With hands that shook, I put on the trousers and jacket. Even before I threw the overcoat across my shoulders, the sweat was pouring down. But as I pulled on the cap with that dread silver badge, my courage flooded back. So they were right, those old men in the camp! How many times had I heard them grumbling it as they struggled with warped saws and poorly mended hatchets? ‘Just give a man the tool and he can do the job.'

Put on that cap, and confidence and vigour surge through your body like an electric charge. Behind that little silver serpent coiled to strike lies all the power of a hundred thousand vicious beatings. I swear I rose in stature. My stride was steadier on the road. After the years of trying to be invisible, I was astonished to find myself marching along almost with pride.

Then turning a bend to meet my very first challenge. It was a haggard woman carrying some bundle of her own. She kept her eyes down as she scurried past. I stopped to watch her hurry on, and even if she realized the steady sound of my footfalls had come to a sudden halt, she didn't dare turn.

‘Too easy,' I told myself. ‘One more – just to be sure,' and kept on walking down one long slope and up another, to the brow of the next hill.

Almost at once I heard the rumble of engines. A short way on, the track ran into a wide stony road. Keeping in the shadow of trees, I followed the road at my side as, trundling past, came lorry after lorry, closed and barred.

Still staying out of sight, I walked down yet another slope, and then another, till without warning I found myself stepping out under the struts of a watchtower.

Above me, a sentinel with a rifle was peering down.

I froze. Thinking myself back in my prisoner's rags, I waited for the rifle's sharp report and the last sting of flesh.

He took the briefest look, then, seeing me standing there in hopeless indecision, swung his rifle to the side.

It was an idle flick. What? Was he using it, not as a weapon but as a pointer? I glanced the way he'd shown and, sure enough, there was a sentry hut.

I could have run, but I'd have risked a bullet in my back. So, trapped, I walked towards the open doorway. From inside came the reek of fatty stew. A horribly scarred man with a mouth like a dark hole glanced up from his game of solitaire.

‘Where to?' he asked me, reaching for the pad that lay beside his spread cards.

Where
to
? This was a harder test than talk of weather! And what a fool I'd been. Why wasn't I better prepared? Even as a guard, I needed a story to account for myself. I'd carried the uniform in my bundle for days – cursed its weight, taken the trouble to brush it clean and shine the buttons with a gritty rag. And then I'd wasted all that time admiring the flight of eagles and even flowers – flowers! – but not put a single moment aside to work out my story.

Or even consider the truth. Because, if I am honest, this was the moment I first realized that the thought of home was no longer in my mind. Too much had happened. I had been away too long. I'd seen too many horrors. Hope, longing, yearning – all of the thoughts and feelings that keep a man's heart alive were lost to me now. They'd brought me too much pain. I'd pushed them down so far it was impossible even to think of walking through the door into my mother's arms. Indeed, it no longer seemed possible that the old building in which I'd spent my childhood was even standing. My parents were surely long lost in all the country's bitter upheavals. And no doubt my grandmother lay, a heap of old bones, in an unmarked grave.

The only road was back. But as to where I might be headed, that was a mystery.

Still the guard was waiting. Laying down another card, he reached for the pen and looked up to ask with gathering impatience, Are you
deaf
? I asked, where to?'

And yet the future was a blank. The past was still too raw. All I could think of was the place I'd left. I stood and pawed the dirt like an anguished beast, unable to think of one single name except that of my own camp.

But then it came to me – a memory of Oskar drawing his map in the snow to show me where the train from the mines would meet the main line.

‘To Treltsky.'

‘A nice surprise!' he said scornfully, lifting the pad's mottled cover to reveal a hundred of those bright green slips I'd seen and envied so many times.

Rail travel permits.

He flicked to a few on which he'd already filled in some of the details. Even from where I stood, I could read the word ‘Treltsky' on the one he tore from the pad. As he flattened it in front of him, the truth finally sank into my brain. I'd walked so far I'd met the railway line. The lorries rattling past must come from nearby mines. Some way beyond this hut must
lie the track. And since the rail trucks only rolled this far to drop off prisoners or to pick up ore, the only ones to travel back on them were guards on leave, or off to some new posting.

Already his eyes were back on his cards. I'd watched enough solitaire to know his game had almost come out perfectly. Was that what saved me from any further questions – that and the fact that I'd chosen a destination so commonplace that this railway permit officer had already filled in the forms?

I reached for the voucher.

‘Not so fast!' he snarled. ‘I know your unit's little tricks – take it from me and sell it on to someone else! You sign it here – in my presence.'

He pushed the pen towards me. I stared at my right hand as if it were some small beast I couldn't trust.
Could
I still write? How many years had it been since I'd grasped anything other than the handles of woodsaws and axes.