The Stonebreakers [antikvár]

'Beware the month Lenaion, ox-flaying days.' The line had come to him suddenly, at six-thirty that morning. The men had been chipping ice from the windscreens of the lorries, their breath turning to steam in the bitter cold. They had cursed prodigiously as they worked, unleashing grotesque torrents of verbal obscenity. He had paced uneasily about the preparations, angry and impotent, wondering whether he should react, and if so how. He was too old for this sort of thing. Didn't they realise he was seventy-one, for God's sake? He was a scholar, not a porter's foreman; a connoisseur, not a driver's mate. Then he'd thought of the line of poetry, and taken from it an obscure comfort. Where was it from? The Greek Anthology, perhaps. Its repetition as the day unfolded had eased his spirit. Their progress over rutted and crowded roadways had been painfully slow, every delay knocking them further behind schedule; but he had clung on to the words, savouring them as some sort of link with civilisation, setting his suffering in a more sympathetic context. The month Lenaion: that was the Ancient Greek February. This was February too. And these too were ox-flaying days. But the Greek poet had lived two thousand years ago and could not conceivably have understood the agony of an ox-flaying day spent juddering across the plain of Saxony incarcerated in the cab of a draughty furniture van, the irregular pounding of its engine never quite loud enough to extinguish the low thud of distant Bolshevik 1