The Road of Bones (2 page)

My father frowned. Since all the churches had been sacked and locked, even second-hand talk of priests was unwelcome. ‘Any word from him since?'

‘Nothing. He shouted down the empty street, of course. “Keep up the work! Keep up the work!”' She stared at the one smoking ember in the grate and added bitterly, ‘A fine message to leave the neighbours to pass to your sons. Practically a death sentence.'

My father tried to comfort her. ‘No, no. Their mother won't let them take the risk. She was against the business of the journal from the start.'

They shook their heads, and spoke of passing the news to friends the very next morning. And as the tale of Novgorod's arrest spread out from those who knew each other well to those who barely nodded in the street, no doubt fewer and fewer dared venture the general opinion: ‘What sort of
idiot can't tell the difference between the “right to publish” and a steel-capped boot?' But back then everyone who'd been told would at least dare to slow their stride next time they passed the kiosk where
People Before Party
had been heaped in a pile, fruitlessly waiting for customers. I expect that, to some, it barely seemed possible that the earnest, owl-eyed man someone had pointed out to them once in a teashop was even now rattling his way in chains towards some prison camp.

‘Oh, he'll be back,' my grandmother would scoff on such occasions. ‘The fighting kitten's not so easily drowned.'

And in her day, perhaps, most did come back, even if it was years later, and perhaps with a foot gone from frostbite that ran too deep, or one arm swinging uselessly, from being the worst person in the world to trade a journalist's pen for a prison axe. ‘
They
recognize
you
first,' she told me once. ‘Always. There you are, hurrying down the street with your basket, and you sense something in a stranger going past.'

‘What
sort
of something?'

Grandmother had no education (‘Nor any brains,' my mother always said, ‘if she can cling to all that mumbo-jumbo about God and his saints'). So all she could do was turn from her pots and show me: first,
a flicker across the face, then a questioning look; a moment of hesitation.

She picked up her story. ‘You peer at the stranger more closely. “Can that be
Leonie
?” you ask yourself. “There's no longer a picking on her!” Or, “How could a bear like Boris come to look such a
splinter
?” You say their name. And when they see that you're not going to walk straight past, their tears well over, and they clasp you so tight you'd think it was you, not them, who'd been away so long up where the nights are white.'

‘White nights?'

‘In summer. So far north. And black as pitch all winter. Oh, a terrible place to count out seven years with the blows of a pick, then come back to find your family scattered and your life's work gone.'

‘Lucky to come back at all,' my mother muttered. She didn't think I heard. But it made no difference in the end because, slopping food from the pot to the dishes, Grandmother emptied enough of the sludge of her spirits on us all to last the whole meal through:

‘In this benighted country, you can call no man lucky till he's dead.'

I DON'T REMEMBER
noticing when things began to change. I knew one of the Leaders had been accused of doing his utmost to wreck the Glorious Revolution, and had been sent to an ignominious end, hanging from his heels. (How all my schoolmates cheered. How hard we waved our flags. How grateful we were to see the traitor and all his sly henchmen winkled from where they'd been hiding.) I knew our nation's saviours had warned us that there were more enemies of the state still to be rooted out – we must be vigilant,
vigilant
– and that the path of Our Long March now ran through rivers of blood. I knew that we faced enemies on all but one of our borders, and that the army had become as hungry for men as we were for something – anything – more than the meagre ration of herrings and beans and mouldy root vegetables.

So it seemed natural that my parents worked longer and longer hours. The day the china studio was closed (‘Uneconomic frivolity!'), my mother
found herself on the list of common workers sent to one of the new munitions factories springing up around us. My father's shifts at the sawmill were extended by hours. Even my grandmother suffered. Now, far from spending her days warming her fingers by prodding the stubborn vegetables that stuck to the bottom of her pans, she took to trailing round the town in search of wood to burn or queues to join where there were rumours of food.

Dragging me with her, she did her best to stand up to shopkeepers who quickly learned which customers could slip them a few extra coins for better produce, and which couldn't.

‘Your weights are short. And look at these turnips you've given me! They're soft with rot.'

The shopkeeper leaned over the counter to sneer. ‘I can see you were raised on milk and gingerbread. Take it or leave it. That's all there is.'

We had no choice. Already he'd snatched her ration paper and rammed it down on his spike. Even if she could persuade him to give it back, no other shopkeeper would dare take it.

Furious, Grandmother spat an insult back. ‘Easy enough to be Man of Thunder behind your counter along with all the food. Try joining us here in the
queue. You'll soon find out you're nothing but a common cur!'

He thrust his greasy face closer, oozing threat. ‘Are you dissatisfied with what your country has to offer you?'

Grandmother stiffened. Perhaps she sensed what I saw – that people who'd been standing in line behind her in the face-biting wind for two full hours were suddenly melting away as if they'd that very instant decided their family had no need of food that day. Coming to her senses, Grandmother grabbed my arm and moved as quickly as her stiff legs could carry her, not towards home, but up one alley and down another, and in and out of courtyards, till she was sure no one was following.

Then, gasping until she breathed more easily, she raised her wrinkled monkey face to look me up and down as if to check I really were no longer the little boy whose hand had to be held the whole way home.

‘Go on ahead,' she told me.

‘Why?'

‘“Why?
Why
?”' Sheer irritation made her slap out at me. ‘Must you always be wise as a tree full of owls? Stop asking questions! Do as I say! Go home.'

I didn't argue. The way led past Alyosha's house. He'd been my friend as long as I could remember.
We had a thousand ways of passing time together. In summer we chewed stalks on the canal bank. In winter he let me take turns on his sled with him and his sister. Always, at school, we fought to sit side by side. Ordered so firmly home, I didn't think I'd dare knock on his family's door. But maybe he'd be in the street, out on some errand, and we could spend a bit of time down at the river watching the breaking ice float past in giant lumps.

He wasn't there. I kicked a stone past his door, and back again. But in the end I gave up and hurried home, and it must have been a couple of hours or more before it even struck me that Grandmother must have sent me on ahead for fear the shopkeeper would call for the guards. If they were looking for the pair of malcontents the shopkeeper had described, all they would come across was an idle lad trailing his way home from school and, a street or so over, some ancient biddy trudging back all alone from the market.

Never before had I seen Grandmother so pale from a spat with a shopkeeper. Or scurrying down alleys. But still I didn't realize how much the world around us was changing, or how our lives were shrinking by the day, until the evening I slapped my last ace down on hers and, for the first time ever, got
to crow back at her the boast she always made the moment her cards trumped mine:

‘For some, the crystal stair! For others, just the road of bones!'

My mother smiled. ‘Has Yuri grown up enough to beat you at last? Or are your brains going soft?'

‘Neither,' snapped Grandmother. ‘It's just that, with the boy being cooped up so much, he's turning into a cardsharp.'

I looked up. Sure enough, the shutters were open to catch the last of the evening breeze. It was still light. Why wasn't I outside, racing along the canal bank with Alyosha, or looking for mischief up back streets?

Because no one roamed now. It wasn't just the splatters of gunfire heard from other streets, or even the occasional dull crump of explosions echoing across the city. It was a creeping sense of fear that had turned all our lives into one long, long wait.

And fed suspicion. I sensed my parents no longer trusted my blank face when they were whispering. I noticed their friends stopped coming to the house, and I was no longer welcome knocking on other people's doors, even Alyosha's. But though I must have asked a host of questions over that long, dreary autumn, my parents' answers were evasive and
guarded. And, looking back, I think I must still have taken everything around me for granted, as if the four of us had always spent the gloom of each evening crammed in that tiny room, elbowing for space and trying not to fight for the last shadow of potato.

And some things scarcely changed. The schoolroom was still the schoolroom, for all that the stove was rarely lit now, even on the coldest days. Beatings still fell on us for the same sins: stupidity, fighting, throwing dice in the schoolyard and quarrelling over the lightest banner for the endless parades in honour of the Motherland.

But still, I must have been blind. It was Alyosha who, nudging my elbow one morning, nodded across the room.

‘Look.'

Another of the portraits on the wall had vanished overnight. But even when I burst in with a message at break time to find our teacher still carefully razoring that same leader's face out of our textbook, I thought so little of it I didn't mention it at home – not even though that day it was once again my turn to take the precious volume home.

It was my mother who, flicking through silently, caught her thumb on the cut edge.

‘What's this?'

Her eyes slid down the page to where one sentence now fell into space and another began in the middle.

Her smile was bitter. ‘Ah! So the whispers are right. Now we are down to three . . .'

‘Lily!' my father hissed.

I noticed no more than that it used to be
her
who scolded
him
for speaking too openly. Now he was just as keen on hushing her. But most of the time when I was in the room, they rarely spoke, except to rail about the cold when the vast communal boiler in the basement broke down for the tenth time in a week. Or to complain of their hunger after the meat ration, pitiful as it was, was halved yet again.

‘When will they realize empty sacks can't stand upright?'

‘My belly already thinks my throat's been cut. And now this!'

I sat, unquestioning as a dolt, while the grumbling went on around me, poring over
The Wonderful Story of Our Motherland
in the dim light.

What set me thinking was the song we all knew:

Grandmother sang it under her breath when she was busy with a broom, or scrubbing the table. She claimed she'd learned it at her father's knee. He was as proud of his country as any man, and it was a party trick of his to set her before the other villagers on holidays and festivals, to lisp this old favourite.

‘I sang it faultlessly,' she boasted. ‘Even getting the list of nations in the right order. For years after I grew, people would wink and smile. “Remember how your proud father would stand you on a table to sing it? His two great passions together: country and child.”'

Mother and Father had learned the song nearly thirty years later – she at her school in town and he in his village. They'd met when she'd come with some of her Pioneer friends to help with the harvest. (‘Spy for the Revolution,' my father always teased. ‘See where we hid our grain in case the Leaders decided to steal it later.')

They fell in love. (‘Canoodled in the granary,' Grandmother muttered sourly.) Finally, Grigor summoned the courage to ask his sweetheart to stay.

‘Why?' Lily asked him.

‘So we can be together.'

Scornfully she'd looked him up and down. ‘But you're only fifteen.'

His face grew red. ‘Grown enough for you all summer!'

Lily relented. ‘Come to the town,' she said. ‘Join us. Everything we've been telling you is true. We're changing the world there – getting rid of corruption and injustice and starting everything afresh so it'll be fair for all.'

My father was startled. He'd heard her praising the Five Great Leaders often enough over the threshing. But he'd not realized she cared about the Revolution so much she'd expect him to abandon everything he knew to join her in the city. He'd never left the village in his life. He'd sat beside her at the end of the day as she talked so eagerly of women's rights, equality between the sexes and her commitment to the Great March to Our Glorious Future. But he had taken it much as he took the burbling of a stream. Talking was what women did. He'd been too busy watching the way the firelight shone on the wisps of hair that strayed out from under her red bandanna. He hadn't actually
listened.

‘You were a
fool,
' my grandmother spat at him once through her tears, the day the Three Leaders signed in the ‘Fifty Mile' rule that meant that neither she nor he would ever see the village again. ‘When you were deciding whether or not to follow Lily to
the city, you asked yourself the wrong question. Not, “Do I
want
to do this?” Only, “Do I
dare
?”'