The Road of Bones Read Free Page B

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.
    â€˜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 tothe city, you asked yourself the wrong question. Not, “Do I
want
to do this?” Only, “Do I
dare
?”’
    And yes, of course, with such a challenge set himself, he’d jumped a train within a week. He tracked down Lily from her careless scribblings on the scrap of paper she’d left him. (‘Even the street name was wrong.’) And when he finally found her, she was already in bed with someone else. ‘I slammed the door and sat against it so neither he nor she could go out without stepping over me.’
    Lily let Grigor in. ‘Just till you find a place of your own. I’m with Constantin now.’ But within a week Constantin had given up coming. Each time Lily came back from a meeting, Grigor was still there. One night she let him into her bed again and, next morning, told him what a disgrace it was for a healthy young man to waste a single day when he could be out there helping to build the brave new world.
    â€˜I went off singing that morning,’ he told me drily. As if to prove it, he began to belt out the old song that had become our nation’s anthem since the real one had been declared ‘backward and counter-revolutionary’ for mentioning the Czar. (‘They’ve had the man’s head off,’ Grandmother muttered scornfully. ‘Why fret about his hair?’)
    The first few lines are easy enough and my father made no mistakes singing them:
    â€˜Fairest of Lands, your power shines
    Over your mountains and across your seas.
    Cradle of Peace, what nations do you bind
    In brother love? Dear Mother of my heart,
    I count them for thee.’
    Everyone gets that far. But then my father spun confidently into the part that’s difficult: the list of all of the countries bound in brother love that make us such a great land – verses full of strange names, where you can be all too easily tricked by the tune into skipping a republic or two.
    My father never faltered, but came to a resounding finish at the end of the third verse.
    I knew the song as well. We’d sung it twice a week in Pioneers since I was eight years old. First we’d be sent to gather wood for the fire (before the order filtered down that that was treason against the state, and we just shivered). Then we’d form lines, and march up and down behind the ramparts of heaped snow, singing the anthem and slapping ourselves to its beat to try to keep from freezing. I had a good memory and sang it as unthinkingly as a bird. Thenames of the republics sailed out of my mouth in perfect order. (When commissars came, I’d always been the one chosen to sing the anthem in the long ceremonies of respect, and no one was jealous because they all knew that a single small slip would have earned them a beating.)
    But where we all stopped singing made me curious. It sent me back to my books. And to my teachers. That week, I must have asked a hundred questions. (Easy enough, once you’ve an interest.) This country is so huge that, if you sent word to the furthest parts, for months you’d