The Road of Bones Read Online Free Page A

beneath them, the glances at clocks and the impatient stamping. I’d nudge Alyosha off the same oldsteps and wonder, as he pulled me after him, if he was still as carefree as he seemed. Or if, like me, he had no words for what was going on around us, and, like me, had been learning through his skin that he and his family would be safer if there were never any words at all.
    One night I was woken by the sound of shouts in the street. My mother’s face was turned to the wall. Was she asleep, or pretending? My father’s eyes too were closed and Grandmother snored deeply in the chair.
    I slid out from under my rugs, and moved to the shutters.
    Instantly my father’s eyes snapped open. ‘Yuri! Step back!’
    But I’d already seen a woman pushed roughly into the back of a car, her shoe left in the gutter, and knew the news would trickle back of yet another saboteur found on our street. I wondered how I could have been so stupid for so long. Why had I never before looked at my mother and asked myself how someone who’d once sat in firelight and talked of the Revolution with shining eyes could turn into someone who, when the third Leader in a row was denounced as a traitor, did no more than murmur, ‘Fine ravens, pecking out each other’s eyes!’
    My father too I saw with clearer eyes. This man who’d joked so cheerfully of the revolutionaries creeping back the moment it suited them to steal his family’s grain had turned into a man too timid to speak his thoughts aloud.
    But then, who did? No one I knew. Even my grandmother no longer dared so much as nod a greeting to the old biddies she used to stand beside in church, mumbling the prayers my mother said simply distracted fools from changing the real world they lived in to something halfway as fine as the imaginary world they hoped to reach. Only behind our shutters was Grandmother brave enough to make her old proud claim – ‘They’ll not waste fifty grams of lead putting a bullet in this old brain’ – and carry on telling the stories I had been hearing all my life.
    But I had changed too. Now, as each story tumbled out of her, I took the time to listen.
    â€˜. . . And as the Czar’s men caught hold of him, he lifted the handles of his barrow and sent his cabbages rolling down the hill, shouting, “Come, good neighbours! A free cabbage for everyone! And two for the louse who snitched on me!” And, before you could turn, the street was filled with men and women chasing down the hill after the cabbages. But even those who got there first and carried baskets withthem took no more than one, for fear they would be thought the traitor who betrayed him!’
    Like everyone else my age, I had been taught that the Czar was a monster, a tyrant born to suck his people’s blood. But truth trickles out through a crack.
    Grandmother noticed me staring. ‘Yuri?’
    My mother too glanced at me. ‘Yuri? Why so pale?’
    I shook my head. ‘Nothing.’ But I was thinking, Now, when the soldiers come, everyone vanishes. No one would stay to chase a cabbage down a hill.
    And how quickly the threads had tightened. It seemed no time at all since Alyosha and I were jumping over Novgorod’s pamphlets heaped by the kiosk on our way to school. Who, now, would even dare lean out of the window to hear the message the owl-eyed printer had shouted out for his sons, or to see how he broke his glasses, or what he looked like as he was carried away?
    No one.
    The kiosk was long gone. These days, I thought, as soon as anyone hears the tramp of soldiers, they latch the shutters tight and hide in their beds. No one sees anything. No one dares hear a thing.
    Next morning I asked Alyosha in an idle voice, ‘Remember Novgorod?’
    Instantly he peeled away from my side and down the nearest alley. I hurried after. He began to run. I trapped him in a doorway. His face was pale.
    â€˜Agreed!’ I