The Road of Bones by Anne Fine

back at once, pretending not to hear.
    And by the time I rose to leave that hall, believe me, everyone had done the same to me.
    Everyone had vanished.

C HAPTER T WELVE
    THE ROOM WAS enormous. Above the stove hung the usual vast portrait of Father Trofim. Along two sides, bookshelves were stacked floor to ceiling with box files. The rest of the walls were plastered with posters showing men with steel mittens crushing others in their grasp, or vipers with men’s faces being poked from their filthy nests.
    All around me were the shrill and twisted slogans we’d been taught to shout in the mass rallies and torchlight parades. ‘Root out the treacherous crowbait!’ ‘Blood for blood.’ ‘No mercy!’ ‘We must break the enemy’s wings.’
    The bottom halves of the windows were thickly smeared with paint. Above my head a naked lightbulb hung, and round the room dangled flypapers thick with the bodies of flies and bluebottles – some dusty and desiccated, some still oily bright or busily struggling.
    Beside me stood two guards. They had the dread badge on their caps – that vicious silver serpent,coiled to strike. They’d booted me around so much I’d no brains left to listen. I stared up at Father Trofim’s hard painted eyes as the inspector read out the final charges.
    â€˜Provocateur . . . Propaganda . . . Agitation . . . Panic-monger . . .’
    Did the man sitting so calmly at his desk realize how absurd it was, what he was saying of me?
    â€˜
Panic
-monger?’
    One of the guards stepped closer, as though to kick me some more. Lazily the inspector waved him back. My head dropped in my hands. I had explained a hundred times. There was no point in persisting.
    Nonetheless, I was stunned by just how quickly and easily the sentence was pronounced.
    â€˜Ten years’ hard labour.’
    â€˜Ten
years
?’
    But even as the words came out of my mouth, I realized I’d feared worse. We’d all known eating an apple could count as ‘Theft of State Property’. We knew the weak and old and simple-minded were being dragged in under the blanket accusation of ‘Limiting National Progress’. But the recent decree on Revealing State Secrets had caught out a dozen people from our communal farm before we’d grasped the fact that anything they chose could count as asecret now. All talk of epidemics. Mention of a local airport. Discussion of the harvest. Why, simply saying the word ‘famine’ could earn you twenty-five years.
    Ten years was almost nothing. It was a sentence for a juvenile. Over the last few years we’d watched Father Trofim take against Mongols and Jews, Yakuts and Kazaks. Some of the new countries inside our ever-widening borders had all but been emptied as every man or woman who dared raise a voice against the banning of their folk songs – or even of the growing of their national flower – was packed onto a punishment train. You’d think the mineral mines up north would now be bursting at the seams, but for the rumours that grim conditions chewed up the lives of prisoners so fast, even the daily spill-outs from the trains could scarcely keep pace.
    It would have happened soon enough, I thought: arrest for something – it barely mattered what. My luck had lasted longer than expected. Even in this dull, faraway province, the squalid roll call was turning into a billowing flood.
    I was one fleck of spume on one small wave of it.
    I scarcely cared. ‘Thank you,’ I even heard myself saying as I was dragged to my feet and bundled out of the room to make space for the next. I suppose I thought that I’d be thrown back into that slimy darkhole where I’d spent the last few days. (Three? Four? The beatings and interrogations had followed on one another’s heels so fast I’d lost all track of time.)
    But no. Instead of kicking me down the stone steps as usual, the guard pushed me