The Road of Bones (19 page)

It took a while before I could force my fingers closed around the pen. The sweat of fear seeped out of every pore. Press on, I ordered myself. For all you know, he'll think you're some overgrown peasant who learned his letters badly. He'll think it's foolishness, not fear, that's oozing out of you like fat from a roasting pig.

‘Take your time!' he said sourly, laying one card on the next. But clearly my presence was distracting him because, with an oath, he whipped the top one off again and glared at me.

‘Must you hang around all day?'

Stay calm, I told myself. He can't see into your head. He doesn't know your brain has shrivelled to nothing in a camp. He thinks you're stupid, so just struggle through.

Down they went, one by one, in letters so clumsy you'd think they'd been drawn by a child in his nursery.

Gregory Leonid Timorsch.

‘Your papers?' he barked, shaking his head in wonder that he'd even had to demand them. ‘And your Permission of Leave or Transfer.'

Papers, I had. But as for any Permissions, I was stumped. To give myself time to think, I started to root in my bundle. Should I turn and run? Or pull out the gun?

But he'd turned one more card, and his impatience got the better of him. ‘Never mind!' he snapped, and pressed his official stamp down twice – once on my destination, and once on my pitiful handiwork.

He pushed the voucher towards me. Before my
clumsy fingers had even managed to scrape it off the desk, he was back to his game.

So there I stood. With papers. A uniform. A little money in my pocket. And a travel permit to Treltsky!

Now, for the very first time, I truly felt I might be headed for freedom. I hurried away, feeling my heart swell with a happiness so sharp it hurt. The flood of exhilaration could have lifted me from my feet, it was so strong. It was like growing wings.

The road turned. Stifling the impulse to move as usual into the shadow of trees, I forced myself to walk as boldly as any other man down one long open stretch of road and then round a bend.

There, in a valley, lay a huge workyard. Its slanted watchtowers were slung together with fences of barbed wire. Lorries rolled past the sentry post one by one. The place was a morass of carts and cranes and pallets, with scores of workers scurrying like ants.

And there, behind the fence, with jets of steam occasionally hissing, lay the great steam train that would carry me on the first step of my long journey home.

Can I describe it – that extraordinary feeling of watching the mountains behind me turn into hills,
the forests become fields, the towering pines change back to aspen and birch? The train rolled over great rivers, some still carrying huge chunks of snow and ice down from the north towards the warming plains. That whole great sleeping land began to wake and breathe. It felt like a return to life.

I kept myself to myself, pretending to sleep when others came near. I left my place only to buy food from one of the starveling old biddies who seemed to appear out of nowhere whenever the train juddered to a halt. Strange feelings ran through me constantly. How odd it was not to feel perpetual hunger. How difficult to choose between this lump of bread and that (and how hard not to slide my arms round my choice to protect it when anyone came near).

I watched the land roll past – huge, endless – and thought back to the anthem I'd forced my parents and grandmother to sing all that long time ago,
Fairest of Lands,
about our nation's boundaries. I understood it now. Always before, my patriotism had been stiffened by terror. (Just one word out of place and I'd have earned a beating.) But this was something new – an admiration for a land so vast, so strong, that it could suffer almost anything. A land I now understood had been made even more noble by
its evil sufferings. A land whose glories shone all the brighter for the bloody sacrifices from which they sprang.

This was a
different
sort of love of country, born in my own mind, forged by my own experience.

Heartfelt.

One evening, shortly after darkness fell, I heard the warning call. ‘Treltsky! Treltsky Junction! All change!'

The train juddered to a halt. I gathered up my bundle and pushed the truck doors apart to gaze at this, the first real settlement on the way.

What had I been expecting? A golden city? Rivers of milk and honey running through? Chickens that fluttered to lay their eggs in my path? Sour cream in buckets?

It was a drab little town with only the sparsest lights dotted here and there on its plain grid. One pair of headlights juddered down a blacked-out street. A few dogs whined. Had this small place always been starved of kerosene, or had things worsened since I'd been away? No doubt Our Glorious Leader would still be knocking back his foreign wines, and stuffing his belly with rich imported foods. But clearly his blight lay just as heavily as ever on all the rest. I jumped down from
the train, shaking my head in wonder. What sort of double book-keeping was this that made one man a king, and rated the lives of others so lightly that all their miseries could count for nothing?

I plodded up one street and down the next. All around loomed huge grey buildings, nine or ten storeys high, and yet the roads were no better than country cart tracks, scarred with the deepest potholes and running with mud.

Around the corner swept a brace of headlights – the first I'd seen since I stepped off the train.

Of course! A Black Maria. I flattened myself back in the shadow of a doorway, and out they poured, those men dressed just like myself.

I heard their grating voices. ‘Up on the seventh floor. This side.'

‘Is Popov round the back?'

‘Oh, yes. He'll crush her into crowbait if she tries getting out that way.'

‘Right, then!' I heard a laugh. ‘On with the ferret chase!'

The clatter of their steel-tipped boots rang through the door and up the staircase. I shrank back further. But for the guard they'd left by the Black Maria, I would have run, prepared to trade the risk of being seen against the horror of watching some
poor soul dragged out to suffer as I had. What had this woman and I done to find ourselves swept with such ease into the rubbish bin of history? Was it no more than bad luck that we'd been born in the hollow of such a poisonous wave? Was everyone living now supposed to comfort themselves that those born after might have better fortune, and live out their own days on some happy new crest?

The shouts grew louder. I heard the sound of wood splintering.

Way, way above, a casement window opened. A woman scrambled onto the narrow sill and stood, spreadeagled against the torchlights swirling behind her, shouting to rouse the dead.

‘Wake up, all you good people! Take courage and support us! Join the fight! Freedom and justice!'

The guard on the street bellowed upwards. ‘Grab her! Don't let her jump!'

But just before that sickening thud so very close in front of me, I heard the hunted woman's last brave cry.

‘Yellow and Black!'

I'LL TELL YOU
this. Sow seeds of anger and bitterness deeply enough and what will bloom is utter fearlessness. I strode back to the station, stopping each person who passed.

‘A pen? Have you a pen?'

One glance at my cap, and they'd have sold their souls for one to offer me. I had no time to make a play of kicking them for being empty-handed. I let them pass, still grovelling, and before they'd even scuttled down the next side street, astonished at their luck, I would be tackling another of those whose work shifts started long before dawn.

At last I had a pen in hand. Backing into a doorway, I took out the travel permit and stared.

Treltsky.

Preltsky?

Simple enough. A careful flick of the pen. And with a hundred thousand places in this vast country, who would be confident enough to pick an argument?

Within a shorter time than I could have imagined, I was back on a train, still travelling west. I had a red plush seat in a compartment for six, with lamps like glass dewdrops and a heater that would have doubled as a furnace in my old camp. The ticket inspector knew better than to ask to see my travel permit more than once, and all my fellow travellers stared anywhere except at the silver serpent on my cap, or into my eyes. I felt the authority of the uniform I wore in every furtive glance that shot my way. The insidious strength of it renewed my force of mind – though I was not so much of a fool as to forget it was a borrowed power, and one small trick of fate could once again turn my world upside down. I hadn't failed to notice that, linked on behind like poor rough cousins happily ignored, were trucks just like the ones I had been herded onto before, to travel east, now rolling back for more fodder for the camps, more men to work their fingers to the bone and bodies into the grave.

I could be one of those again.

But not the same man. I'd changed too much inside.

I spent my hours staring out through the window. Now there was more to look at: villages and towns – real towns, with schools and prisons, bands and
parades, and busy factories. The things I saw as we rolled past! Once, on a sun-drenched platform, I watched a boy teasing a kitten with a ragged end of string and was astonished that the young still passed their time with empty-headed amusements. I saw a woman and her friend exchange a confidence, throw up their aprons and rock. That must be grief, I told myself. It can't be merriment. How could it be that, as one brave woman hurls herself from a window with a dying rallying cry, others can still be laughing at things so easily told? No, it's not possible. No, not with all these nightmares being lived along the track.

I watched it all – old men in tears, and women doubled under the loads they carried, dragging their wailing children. Try as I might, I felt no pity. I wanted to shake them from their ignorant dreams. ‘You think your life's a misery?' I wanted to bellow through the compartment window. ‘Think again! When you want water, you drink. You empty your bowels at will, not when you're ordered to do so. If you have lice, you've no one to blame but your own lazy self!'

By now, of course, they would be out of sight. But I'd still be staring back at where they'd vanished, thinking my murderous thoughts. ‘Stupid, self-pitying peasants! When your feet bleed, at least you
can sit by the wayside without fear of a bullet in your brain. And if you're lucky enough to have a lump of bread in the evening, at least you can hope there'll be more where that came from. You don't have to slave through the whole of the next day in icy blizzards, up to your knees in freezing slime, knowing for certain it will be hours and hours before you've half a chance of seeing even another crumb.'

And then I'd see a sight to soften me. The first mimosas. A glorious patch of willow herb. I'd gaze out into the blinding splendour of some bright morning and wonder what could ever have gone so wrong, that a country so rich in gifts could end up so dirt poor. As for the next Great State Plan! The next Stride Forward, the next Committed March! What sort of confidence could any leader have in any better future if he could send so many to rot for so long? I thought of the years marked down on our sentence sheets. Fifteen years! Twenty-five! Life! Anyone who truly believed that better times were on their way would be ashamed to write such numbers.

Get off the train, I tried to order myself. Cross the track. Go back the other way, to where you saw that clump of meadowsweet. Marry some pretty girl and tell yourself it's not your job to live out anything more than your own life.

But even a fool would snap himself out of such fairytale dreamings. There was nowhere to hide. And when had any of us been allowed to choose for ourselves where to live, or even what to do? The Glorious Leader had managed to turn this whole great country of ours into one giant
trap.

And even as the word rang through my brain, the train began to judder. The wheels screeched to a halt.

I watched my five companions glance uneasily towards the window. The track was swarming with men in uniforms just like my own.

‘Security check! Inspection! Out with your papers!'

Already those around me were rooting in their bags and pockets. The shouts grew closer. Yawning and stretching as if I'd had to face the fact that it was time to join my fellow guards and help with the inspection, I rose to my feet.

I slid the compartment door open and looked out. More guards with rifles stood along the track on the other side.

Brazen it out, I tried to tell myself.

But every instinct warned me. Not here. Not now. Instead, abandoning my bundle, I slid the door closed behind me and tried to walk along the narrow corridor past the other compartments with so much easy confidence that anyone who saw me would
think I was one of the guards doing the check.

I worked my way to the back of the train and slid the bolt of the door that barred the way to the old viewing platform. Climbing the rail, I dropped down onto the large iron link that joined the prisoners' trucks to the passenger compartments.

I peered out on both sides. There was no chance of getting away unseen. So, choosing one side, I stepped out as casually as if I'd just ducked under the link from the other.

Cocking a thumb behind me, I said to the nearest guard, ‘We've more men than we need on that side.'

He scowled. ‘We'll never have more men than we need with this lot. They get stronger every day. Three trains derailed already this year. And then that bridge.' He shook his head. ‘Yellow and Black! They have the cunning of weasels. They ought to change their colours. They should be grey and brown! That's what they ought to call themselves. Weasels!'

‘True,' I said easily, moving off along the train and peering under each truck in turn to make a show of being part of the inspection. He showed no interest. Neither did the guard standing beside the next truck.