The Road of Bones Read Free Page A

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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 . . .’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜When will they realize empty sacks can’t stand upright?’
    â€˜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:
    Fairest of Lands, your power shines
    Over your mountains and across your seas . . .
    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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Why?’ Lily asked him.
    â€˜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