The Road of Bones (5 page)

Shivering with cold, I'd stuff down the only few mouthfuls of food I'd have till noon, and follow my mother down the crumbling concrete stairs to our block entrance.

Here we would part. She'd give me a quick hug of sympathy and hurry off to her factory. Then I'd tramp off down the street.

Most days, at one of the corners I'd meet Alyosha.
Ruefully we'd shrug at one another and fall in step. Sometimes we grumbled about the unfairnesses of the day before. Mostly we picked our way around the potholes in the road in gloomy silence till we reached our place of work – a building site right at the edge of the town where vast new blocks of flats were being built in a hurry to house the families pouring in from the country. (‘They come to join the Next Step Forward,' we were told; but their lost faces and stick-thin arms and legs told quite a different story of why they'd abandoned their villages.)

At five, the foreman swung open the doors to his store hut to herd us inside and stand watching as each of us picked up a hod. In some the wood was rotten. Others rattled from loose joints. But not a single hod could ever be declared beyond use.

‘This one's a goner,' the last boy to push his way into the storeroom would plead with the foreman.

‘It's worked till now.'

‘But the back's soft from rot! It's half off. One more load of bricks will finish it.'

The foreman would scowl with irritation. ‘Stop your slacking, boy, and get those bricks up there. The men are waiting.'

Sometimes you'd be lucky. The man you'd been paired with would be working at ground level, and
you could take your bricks to him carrying the hod at such an angle as to put less strain on its rotten side. More often there would be no choice, and you would have to climb the shaking ladders, dangerously fixed almost above one another so, if you slipped, your bricks would fall so closely past the boy struggling up beneath that he'd be showered in grit. Even if you were the only one on the ladders, you'd hold your breath and move gingerly, rocking the hod as little as possible for fear that any moment you'd hear the creak of splitting wood, and feel that sudden lightening of your load that threw you so off balance that you might tumble after your falling bricks.

Then you would have to work for three whole days without wages to pay for a new hod. ‘Unfair! It wasn't me who broke it. It was rotten to the core. Why should I pay for it?'

The buckets in which the mortar was raised were in no better state. But still it seemed a rule that in the Land of Freedom all equipment was perfect. Breakages or collapses must be due either to carelessness or to deliberate sabotage. So I soon learned to hold my tongue and, at the end of the day, lay any good hod or bucket I'd come across on the side furthest from the stove. Next morning, when we stumbled in, the softest boys would rush for a place
near the stove's open doors, and make great play of sorting through whatever lay on the floor around them while they soaked up warmth. I trained myself to be sterner, and spent the time rooting for whichever hod and bucket I'd taken care to hide the night before under some frozen rags in some dark corner.

In any case, what could a few minutes within sight of two or three short lengths of burning wood do to set up a body that faced whole hours in the biting wind? Some days it was too cold for even the brickies to work. The mortar we raised up to them on the frayed ropes froze in the buckets before they could reach over the sections of wall they were building to haul it in. On days like these we might be sent scouring for wood. We'd wander off down unpaved tracks into the straggling fringe of forest still waiting to be cleared, and think ourselves in heaven because we were gathering sticks like feeble old men.

The spring drew on so slowly. Then summer came at last. At noon they fed us well. Sometimes the soup even had a few stringy threads of meat in it, and I grew taller.

‘See, Yuri? Hard work suits you,' my mother teased, though she was as disappointed as me that, before I was even thirteen years old, my life had
drifted into this long hard street that had no end. Sometimes she'd reach across the table and turn my hands over, weeping on the scars and callouses. ‘And you still a boy!' was all she dared murmur, even to me. But I could see the words behind her eyes. Shame! Waste! Disgrace!

Then came the day of the accident. As usual I had forced my way to the front of the rush to the storeroom, snatched up my halfway reasonable hod, and set off to the stacks of bricks beside the wall. The brickies didn't thank you for bringing them the chipped and broken ones, so even here there was another jostling for the best.

At last I set off with my load: sixteen bricks firmly settled on my shoulder, packed in the hod four by four. The workman I was fetching for that day was called Big Karl. He came from the east, and hardly ever spoke. If you were ahead with the stacking, he might nod as if to say, ‘Well done.' If you fell behind, you'd find him waiting, fists on hips, scowling. The look on his face alone would be enough to make you tip your bricks out in a rush and scurry down the ladders for more without taking even a moment to catch your breath.

That morning I was on the highest ladder when I heard – a floor or so beneath – that soft cracking
sound that meant a hod was collapsing, followed at once by the sound of bricks sliding and the usual yell.

‘Watch out below! Watch out!'

Did the unlucky boy make the mistake of trying to hold his bricks back by twisting the hod round? In any case, it was too late. All that he managed to do was point his falling load even more truly at the boy climbing the ladder below him.

Beneath me, I heard a desperate scuffling noise. The ladder groaned. There was a scream cut off by a pitiful thud.

Did Karl see the blood drain from my face? Instantly he dropped his trowel to lean over and lift the hod from my shoulder as easily as if I'd been carrying feathers.

Free of the weight, I dared look down.

‘Alyosha!'

I was back down the ladders in no time at all. But he was dead. Spread on his broken back, staring up wide-eyed, a look of shock still on his face.

‘Alyosha!' I buried my face in the grit on his jacket. ‘Alyosha! Alyosha!'

The foreman pulled me off, but not roughly. Now I was crying my eyes out. ‘Alyosha! Alyosha!'

Somebody led me away, back to the storeroom,
and left me to weep for a while. Then, at a word, I had to dry my tears and pick up my hod. Alyosha's body had vanished. Though people were making detours round the place where he'd been lying, everyone was working again. I filled my hod and lugged it up the ladders. When I reached the top, Big Karl stopped trowelling for a moment to turn and speak.

‘A friend?'

‘We started school together.'

He nodded. ‘Bad luck. Bad luck indeed.'

Then he went back to his work.

Again that word. Luck. As if there were nothing that couldn't have been predicted about ladders set too close together and hods so rotten they were bound to spill bricks. Hours later, as we sat round, dispirited and silent, eating our soup, I heard myself saying it.

‘There should be rules about such things. The state of the hods and the buckets. The jammed pulleys and the fraying ropes. The safety of the ladders. There shouldn't be such careless accidents. Someone should see to it, and straight away.'

‘A brilliant idea!' scoffed Vasily. ‘We could make fine rules for ourselves. No more than four bricks in a hod, I say.'

‘No more than eight hours' work a day!' said someone else, raising another laugh among those to whom Alyosha was no more than a face that had vanished.

‘Why stop there?' Anton said. ‘Why not a rule that we can't work at all when it's too cold?'

‘You'd only need inspectors to go round checking.'

‘Inspectors! Yes!'

They fell about laughing. I knew I was doing what Grandmother always called ‘talking my head off my body'. But I couldn't leave it. Somewhere, a few streets away, the boy who'd made a thousand ice slides with me, laughed at my jokes and whispered answers when I was stuck in class was lying dead on some slab.

‘What's so crazy about the idea?' I persisted. ‘Don't they make rules for us already? Rules about everything. A rule that we can't take our tools home at night, not even to repair them or keep them safe. A rule that you have to wait for the whistle outside in the freezing cold, not in the warm storeroom. A rule that we have to stay after hours whenever the foreman demands it.' I spread my hands. ‘So what would be so odd about a rule to keep the ladders further apart, to stop an accident even an idiot could have foreseen?'

I'd gone too far. Nobody spoke. They stared
uneasily down into their bowls of soup. Finally Caspar said boldly, ‘Father Trofim said each of us was to think of ourselves as a small spoke in one of the wheels carrying the Great Revolution as far and as fast as it can go. He warned us the path will run through rough ground and some of the wheels may get damaged. He says the only important thing is that the Revolution keeps rolling on.'

I had a vision of lanky blond Nikolai back at Pioneer camp. He hadn't said one word that could be proved to smack of rebellion; but with one beatific smile he had managed to make it clear exactly what he thought of sending volunteers to battle without boots or guns.

With poor dead Alyosha in mind, I wanted to speak up as well. But I am not so clever. The smile I tried to summon must have appeared no more than a cold sneer. The only words I managed to spit out were, Ah, yes! Of course! The Revolution! Rolling on towards our Glorious Future!' And any fool listening would have been able to hear the disbelief in my voice.

The whistle blew to get us back to work. I scrambled to my feet and was the first to pack my hod with bricks and get to the ladders. All afternoon I worked like a fury, hauling the bricks up to the top
floor at such a rate that I was soon piling them higher than the strip of wall Big Karl was working on.

At the end of the day he clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘You've lost a friend, Yuri. Still, there's no need to work for two.'

It was the first time he'd touched me – or even called me by name. I felt the tears rise. Shyly I glanced up to catch him looking at me in the way my mother looked at my hands – as if to say, How can this be happening to someone before they've even had the time to grow into a man?

‘ALYOSHA?' MY MOTHER
gripped the cloth wrapped across her chest. ‘Little Alyosha?' She sank onto the stool. ‘Oh, the black grief of it! His poor, poor mother!'

Grandmother merely shrugged. I turned away. When I looked back, I caught her eyeing my torn boots and guessed she was already wondering if she dared go round and, under the pretence of offering our family's condolences, beg for the use of Alyosha's for herself or me.

But no one dared answer their door now – not even at the saddest times. And Alyosha's sister would need the boots soon enough. So, clearly shaking off the thought, she muttered only, ‘One poor soul lifted from the road of bones,' and settled back to scraping the last of the crust out of the bread pan.

My father was last home. I watched him shiver when he heard. An evil day!' Each time he passed behind, I felt his hand on my shoulder, as if he needed to assure himself that this boy hunched over
the table, still trying to stem his tears, was at least warm to the touch, not lying cold and still like his poor friend.

It was a comfort. Next day I felt calmer. The sun shone silver through the breaks in the cloud and I fell into the rhythm of work almost with pleasure. At noon we sat eating our soup as usual and, though no one mentioned Alyosha, I felt that I was being looked at with sympathy by my companions. When I dropped my crust of black bread into the gap between us, Georgio even passed it back instead of snatching it up and stuffing it into his own mouth.

So I had nothing in mind when, just as dusk was beginning to fall, I heard shouts and a rattling. I reached the top of the highest and shakiest ladder before I dared turn. But once I was safely over the parapet of bricks Karl had been laying, and onto the firm concrete base, I took the chance to peer down.

The noise was coming from the gates. Two men were shaking the chain, and shouting at the foreman to let them in.

He'd seen their uniforms. He hurried over faster than he'd run to Alyosha on the ground. He tried to undo the padlock in such haste he twice dropped the key and had to scrabble for it in the little heaps of spilled cement around his boots. The minute the
chain ends fell apart, the men stepped into the workyard.

Just for a moment the three of them stood talking, the sunlight glinting on the silver badges on the guards' caps. Then, as the foreman turned with a finger stretched to point, I felt Karl's hand on me for the second time within twenty-four hours. He was pushing me down behind his freshly laidbricks.

‘It's you they're after.'

‘Me?'

‘Aren't you the one who opened his mouth too wide over his soup?'

‘All I said was—'

He cut me off. ‘Whatever you said, it was more than enough.' Still holding my head down, he was pulling me over the rough cement floor to the other side of the building, alongside the trees.

‘Quick!' he said. ‘Get your foot in the bucket.'

‘In the bucket?' I peered over the edge. What was he thinking? To lower me over like a load of mortar being sent back down?

I thought he was mad and my face must have shown it.

‘Use your wits, Yuri. Either you risk a fall now, or you wait for those men to make even more of a mess of you later, here or in their cells.'

‘Cells?'

‘Yuri, wake up! You've seen the colour of their uniforms. You know who's coming for you.'

And if I was pale before, now I was grey with fright. I knew the men must already be striding across the yard towards our block, kicking aside anything that lay in their path, as they'd soon be kicking me. Suddenly I felt I could smell, even from so far up, the leather of their holsters and the oil in their guns. I would be dragged away without a chance. I'd heard enough about the Leader's guards to know that either I'd never be seen again or, if I did come back, people would take one look at what was left of me and think the men in grey would have been kinder to finish the job properly while they still had me.