The Road of Bones by Anne Fine Page A

past the arch into the glare of a long corridor studded with doors. Unlocking one at the end, he shoved me in, over a heap of legs stretched out on the floor.
    A wave of grumbling met me. ‘Take more care!’
    â€˜Keep your damn boots to yourself!’
    â€˜Hush up, there. Settle down.’
    Somebody pointed to the corner in which a bucket leaked in stinking pools onto the floor.
    â€˜I can’t sit there.’
    â€˜Then stand.’
    Within a minute the mass of bodies had settled back to how they were when I came stumbling in. I leaned against the wall, realizing with a fearful drop in spirits that, just as my entrance into the cell meant nothing to anyone in it, so my disappearance from the life outside meant nothing to anyone either. As easily as those on the communal farm had accepted that I’d been ‘sent’, so they’d accept that I would not come back. Already I could hear the whisper with which they would distance themselves from any more thought on the matter. ‘Pavel? A shame. Heseemed a nice enough boy. But he must have done
something.
’
    Such was the power of Father Trofim. After all, everyone knew Galina was good and loyal. They had no reason to think worse of me. But still I knew that almost all of them would find it easier to think that she and I (and all the hundreds of thousands of others) had betrayed Father Trofim, rather than risk for a moment daring to think that things were the other way round: that
he
had betrayed
us.
    And I admit I didn’t feel that my life was over. (Maybe I was too young.) Deep down, I still believed that somebody – soon – would take the trouble to review my case and listen to my story. I couldn’t for a moment really believe that I had been shunted, like some old railway truck, into the dead-end siding of quite the wrong life. Indeed, after the storm of beatings, there was a strange sort of tranquillity about the cell, as if the very stones of its walls were telling me, ‘For now, the worst has happened. Leave anguish to others. It’s safe to shut your eyes.’
    So, in fits and starts, I slept.
    By morning the seat of my trousers was stuck to the floor. The stench from the bucket was making me, and those around me, retch. Each time one of the other prisoners came over to add to the overflowingpail in one way or the other I struggled manfully to get further away, but found myself firmly held in place by the press of bodies around me.
    Forty-two men in a cell with bed boards for six.
    No. Forty-five. Three darkened heaps I’d taken to be bundles of possessions suddenly stirred into life.
    â€˜How many new in the night?’
    â€˜Just the boy.’
    They all knew where to look. The one who’d asked the question spoke directly to me. ‘Yes, yes. It’s not a dream. Everything around you is real.’
    Someone else asked, ‘Sentenced?’
    â€˜Ten years,’ I told them in tones of deep self-pity, and was astonished to find my words greeted with incredulity and laughter.
    â€˜Ten years!’
    â€˜Ten!’
    A young man with scrubbing-brush hair and freckles over his broad face was staring at me with envy. ‘Only
ten
?’
    â€˜It’s a boy’s sentence,’ someone beside him explained.
    He gave me a scowl so deep that you’d have thought I chose my own sentence. ‘Lucky to be so wet behind the ears,’ he growled. ‘Ten years indeed!’ He caught my stare. ‘Yes! Look me in the eye! I’mgiven twenty-five for “having an underground weapons arsenal”. Know what that means?’
    I shook my head.
    â€˜It means that when they turned the ridges of our cabbage patch, they found some rusty old knife.’ He groaned. ‘Twenty-five years! All of us! Mother, sisters – everyone!’
    Beside him on the bunk, a gaunt-faced man said, almost conversationally, ‘Once, if a man were given such a sentence, the crowds would