The People's Train

by Keneally, Thomas

Of course I will, I mumbled. As if a man wouldn’t do that much...

  I’m not saying you wouldn’t do it. Please don’t be offended. This is very awkward.

  I suppose so, I said.

  You will send me a telegram, Artem? Amelia is very precious to all of us.

  You realise, I said. You realise...

  I had been going to remind them that even if she received a telegram one day, it would be at least three days by steamer or a combination of rail and steamer before she was in Brisbane to see Amelia. I had been going to say that I had enough charges in my life without being burdened with the sole care of Amelia. Again, I had become a miserable, whining soul under the weight of their decision to go to Melbourne. Now I repented, and not before time.

  I want you to know, I wish you well. But Buchan, I believe you should read more if you want to be a leader. Despite Plekhanov’s betrayal, you should read The Role of the Individual in History. You should also read Vladimir Ilich’s ‘Our Programme’ and What is to be Done? It’s not as if they’re as long as Kapital. You should also read Martov, even though he’s a Menshevik. As you know, men don’t always follow the wisdom of their original words, but that doesn’t cancel the words. You have to understand what we stand for by understanding exactly what they – the people we disagree with – stand for.

  Sure, Buchan told me equably. Of course. Mind you, I have my own encyclopaedia.

  He put his hand on Hope’s shoulder, and that nearly started the whole madness in me again. But I steered away from it. This crazy fellow who, totally unread, wanted to have people give a series of night lectures he dared to call a labour college. This woman who, while insisting on wearing black, wanted to decamp to Melbourne with a Scot in spats.

  Yes, I said, you are a fortunate man. But all the leaders are thinkers too, and Walter is at least a thinker.

  He took this with good grace.

  Perhaps if we could combine Walter’s intellect and my capacity for action, we’d have a complete being.

  Good luck, I said when I realised there was no profit in talking further. I wanted to ask her, more from curiosity than anything, Do you really love this joke of a Caledonian? But I rose and at last behaved properly, kissed Hope’s scented hand, shook hands with Buchan, and went to the counter to pay for the whole farce.

  T.J. Ryan now sat over Queensland as its chief minister. With his round, fashionably bearded Irish face, he sang his siren song to the people of the state – the control of prices and new laws to improve the lot of labour. There were many who expected the moon, said Ryan, but he declared the best that could be delivered was a few moonbeams. Ah, the old cant, I thought, dressed up in Celtic-style imagery, in Celtic-style palaver.

  He did begin state enterprises in milling and producing food. The growers of sugar cane were promised a fixed price for their product, and so the cane-cutting brethren who had come down, disconsolate, to Russia House in Brisbane were now able to return to their fields and take up their machetes again. State insurance and a state bank were set up. But the old venal banks were not obliterated. An arbitration system for labour was put in place. While not perfect, Ryan’s was indeed the best government I knew of in the world until that stage of history, yet his curtsies towards capital and the war continued and meant that he could not utterly win over a true socialist such as Walter O’Sullivan or make a restless Russian like myself a happy and grateful unthinking citizen of an antipodean Utopia.

  39

  On my visits to Amelia, she would now always ask me, How are you, poor old Tom?

  I had become poor old Tom. I hankered for vanished faces. Her maternal feelings for me were now an enduring and nourishing aspect of my uncertain life. I called on her at least once every two days, since I needed her as much as she needed me. These days she had the company of a nurse – I suspected Hope had installed the woman.

  I’m very well, I always told her. At least I’m not serving on the Galician front. Or any other futile front for that matter.

  Podnaksikov was on some futile front. As I came into Adler’s boarding house one evening from the room at the Stefanovs’, I found Mr Mangraviti waiting in the front room. He rose to greet me. His demeanour was much friendlier than the last time I had seen him.

  Did I speak Italian?

  I told him, Poco.

  Podnaksikov è morto.Nell’ Ellesponto.

  Podnaksikov? I asked stupidly.

  È morto. He imitated a machine-gun. Ratatatatat. Lucia ha ricevuto un telegramma e una lettera assicurata. Lucia ... Tristissima.

  He wanted me, as Podnaksikov’s friend, to visit his daughter and assuage her grief.

  Mr Mangraviti led me two streets around to the shop and into a stuffy back parlour that seemed to be humid with Lucia’s tears. Lucia’s big-bosomed mother surrounded her with her arms and soothed her. To my shame, and for the first time, I noticed how remarkable the tear-blurred, dark-headed Lucia looked. Her father pointed out my presence, and she smiled through her grief.

  We all sat at the Mangravitis’ parlour table and, with her parents’ approval, I held her hand in mine and spoke to her in English, in which she had more skill than her parents. I am sure you were his last thought, I assured her, only afterwards understanding what a doubleedged comfort that might be.

  Later I asked her to go for walks with me in the evenings. If she were as shy as she looked, of course, if she did not secretly exercise some authority over her parents, they would have stopped her coming out with me. I began to see in her the will, the capacity, to command. I would fetch her from the fruit shop and her parents would turn their eyes to heaven, her mother touching a small picture of the Virgin, which hung over the cash register. Russians must indeed have seemed like a mixed blessing to them.

  She remembered the island she had lived on as a child, remembered her village, her parents arguing about the lack of food. She remembered, too, how common idiocy and rickets were in that place – children gaping without understanding of the world, or creeping around on legs bent by hunger. The longer I sat with her by the river, the more confidently she began to rail against landowners and money-lenders. Brisbane was better, she said. Her parents stood in their shop among oranges, pineapples, cabbages and melons in astounding bounty.

  As I sat beside her on a bench, smelling the plain, unscented soap of the Mangraviti household – her chief perfume – I could feel her thigh against mine and was aroused in obvious ways, but in other ways as well: a wish to find a home in her. I wanted to caress her but I was cautious. If there were a pregnancy, marriage would be necessary. Otherwise she would be sent to one of those convent institutions for fallen girls. I was aware that her remaining affection for Podnaksikov might nonetheless give me an easy run into the enjoyment of such kindnesses as she had extended to him, but though I felt driven to meet and walk with her, I tried to resist her honest scent and the feel of her flesh through fabric. I did not want to end up living in a stilt house – even with as surprisingly robust a girl as Lucia – and raising an indefinite number of Australian children. Many sane men would have thought it my tragedy that I did not want to end up tending a vegetable garden in some lush Queensland valley, standing in my own thicket of pawpaw trees.

  In the spring of that year, the troops abandoned Gallipoli and the graves of Mockridge and Podnaksikov. Never mind, said the jingos, they’ll be fighting in France soon.

  Increasingly, in those later months of 1915, Paddy spent his evenings with me – sometimes helping me, sometimes writing in the printing room at the Stefanovs’, trading concepts and figures of speech, asking me about Russian factions. His presence created no scandal with Mrs Stefanov, who, now that I wasn’t undermining her husband’s moral fibre any more and had been taught a lesson, was much kinder to me.

  I was aware of a changed atmosphere in other quarters though. By this stage so many had died, people seemed to think more must risk death! People became furious at the idea of anyone calling a pause. I would find that demonstrated to me vividly,
bruisingly. I had met Dykes after work one afternoon as summer was coming on, and we caught a tram across to South Brisbane.

  As we neared Adler’s boarding house, a large group of men in suits and Australian army uniforms rounded a corner ahead of us. They were talking among themselves – like an oblivious group of youths returning from a cricket match, say. I saw that some had axe handles and – appropriately – metal-tipped cricket stumps in their hands.

  When Paddy Dykes and I instinctively looked behind us, we saw another similar crowd of soldiers and civilians, blocking any chance of escape. They knew we had seen them and they approached faster, especially the soldiers, the men in suits waving them on with their hats in a parody of older men waving the young into battle.

  You Red bastards! one of the civilians called to us, and a few others cheered and the young soldiers began to sprint, waving their clubs and cricket stumps. A man in an open-collared shirt and suit approached from the front, a wooden club in his hands.

  Holy hell, I heard Paddy Dykes say, but with a strange tone that betrayed curiosity about the outcome. Dykes went into a crouch. You wanted to declare me on, you bastard? he roared, I’ll declare you on. And he put the fellow on his back before I could appreciate what had happened.

  Why now? I wondered as the man with the open collar started in on my shoulders with his club. I had not written or published anything different from that I had written or published at the outbreak of war. Had one of these older men been suddenly alerted to my existence? Had they taken umbrage at Paddy’s writing? Someone got a good blow in against my ribs. I felt an excruciating expulsion of breath and the faint but sharp vibrations of a crack too muted to be heard by the yelling men who surrounded Paddy and me. I was aware that Paddy Dykes was fighting much better than I could, more ruthlessly, with greater cunning. Even as I felt a terrifying whack on my ear, I was aware that Paddy was still causing men to hang back and stamping the ribs, heads and genitals of those who didn’t. The one chief cry penetrated the tolling of my head. Red bastards, with an occasional chorus of Kaiser’s poofters.

  I was on the ground now, receiving more blows, and then one that made everything distant and still for a second. Then Paddy Dykes was still speaking, defying them, telling them that if they were so keen on fighting, France was only a boat trip away. I thought, What a man – to be able to fight and orate at the same time. I have a dim remembrance of police turning up and counselling all the young men to go home, and leaning over us and saying we shouldn’t have started a fight and we deserved to be charged. My head still rang, my vision was jaundiced.

  Constable, said Paddy Dykes, are you seriously telling me that two blokes walking home from the tram took on twenty lunatics? Are you telling me that?

  One of the policeman sighed. He had beery breath and an Irish accent. Now look, son, he told the mad-eyed Dykes, who was standing while I was sitting, being unfit for any vertical position. I don’t like that little fucker Hughes either, but we’re not going to have street brawls in South Brisbane. Do you understand? What would your mother think?

  My mother died of tuberculosis when I was five, said Paddy, and I could now see his eyes gleaming by the streetlamps.

  God rest her, said the Irishman. Now you two go home and no more trouble tonight.

  Aren’t you going to arrest those men?

  They’ll soon be suffering bad enough to satisfy you, said the policeman.

  The other of the two coppers pulled me upright. Can you stand, you Russian bastard? he asked fraternally.

  40

  For the next two weeks I stumbled my way to the Izvestia printery. Mrs Stefanov had heard that I had been involved in a street riot and been seen yet again in the presence of police. She was cool to me once more in case I brought suspicion down on her house. There had been a time after our supposed trial when she called me by my formal, baptismal names, Fyodor Andreivich, but now she would call down the hall to her husband, Samsurov is here. Just to rile her, honest Stefanov would cry, Need a cup of tea, Artem?

  I would have been off work except the superintendent was a native-born Australian resister of the war. He kept me on the wage books. After three days’ rest I was back on hauling. The healing was thus slowed – indeed, I could never recover from a stab of pain every time I lifted my right arm from that day on. Yet whenever I remembered that street attack, my chief impression was of the ferocious warriorhood of Paddy Dykes.

  As I approached Adler’s boarding house one evening, I was delighted to see Suvarov leaning like a bent scarecrow on the front fence as if he had never gone away. He looked thinner but sun-bronzed, and wore a seaman’s leather cap.

  Grisha, I called out. Tell me it’s you!

  Smiling, he straightened up, came to the gate and embraced me.

  Where have you been? I asked. Tasmania? Or even further afield?

  All the cities, he said, in this part of the world. To Hobart as a stoker, then Melbourne. Then, I regret to say, Sydney.

  You regret?

  He shook his head. I got to know a girl there, he explained. I think I’m being chased by a private detective. So I’m afraid I’m just here for a moment, Artem, I’m signed on a Chilean ship bound for Valparaiso – a sailing ship, so it’s just as well I’ve got experience with sails from working on the schooners on Lake Baikal.

  He had done that long before I met him.

  But you can’t be serious, I told him. I can’t afford to lose you again. And Valparaiso’s no closer to home than Brisbane.

  I took him at once to the Samarkand. Of course I wanted to know all that had happened to him down south. Under the Samarkand’s dim electric lighting, he began to speak about his experiences in Hobart, and I saw that his Australian travels had been as complicated as his Siberian escape. Are we designed, Suvarov and me, for complications and only for complications? I wondered.

  In Hobart, he told me, he lived for a while in a Greek boarding house that catered to fishermen. But, out of cash, he had taken his tent to a beach on the west bank of the Derwent, and camped and fished for whiting. It was all so much a repetition of our existence in Nagasaki. He took a job on a schooner making for Melbourne and, on landing there, rented a room in Port Melbourne from a widow who lived in a ramshackle house along the bay. Then, in between working on Greek fishing vessels, he went for a tour aboard a visiting Japanese warship and found that the guns were marked with the name of the Putilov works in St Petersburg, where he himself had once been a metal turner. This ship had been captured from the Russians in the Battle of Tsushima ten years before.

  He survived on heaped plates of shark meat discarded as useless by the Greeks and cooked by his landlady. She could tell Suvarov was on the move and, being lonely and maternal, she begged him not to leave. But he knew he would go on to Sydney, as if to find or even to flee the Russian echoes he had discovered in Melbourne.

  One day he left a letter for the old lady and took the train that carried him to the north-east limits of the city. He had kept his tent and now lugged it with him on the road to Sydney. At night he shared the ground at the edge of pastures with ox-cart drivers, gold prospectors and sheep shearers, to whom he was generous with his limited tent space. Arrived in Sydney at last, he worked with poor fishermen at Watsons Bay, sharing their wooden shacks. The Pacific Ocean came booming in the Sydney Heads, the same ocean in which the Russian fleet, venturing beyond its proper place, had been defeated. He admired the sandstone of the great heads and cliffs of Sydney.

  Now he fell back on one of the skills he’d learned on Russia’s Pacific coast – he got a job at a marble basin factory as a polisher. The factory was in the beach suburbs of Sydney, reached by tram from the city. In a house at Bronte Beach lived an old widow who had made her fortune selling soft drinks and lollies to summer bathers at the string of beaches around there. Suvarov could afford to take one of her rooms up at the top of the house, where the chief sound came from waves bullying the sandstone headlands, and from seabirds. The widow, Mrs Clancy, he
ld parties to which she invited her own friends and her children’s, and it became apparent to Suvarov that these parties were designed to suck in young men who might marry Denise, her pretty, pleasant but not overly clever eighteen-year-old daughter. Suvarov saw that the widow dominated her daughter to the extent that Denise would obediently marry any man Mama nominated. Suvarov did not consider himself a potential suitor, but one young man in particular, a clerk, a very well-brushed but innocent young fellow named Michael, seemed to be the frontrunner for the hand of the daughter. Because he was a lively conversationalist, which the older woman liked, Suvarov was invited to take his meals at the main table downstairs whenever the other young man was present.

  On the cliffs, watching the strong Pacific currents and the occasional sounding whale bound for northern breeding grounds, Suvarov realised again that he was fatally homesick for Russia. On the nights Mrs Clancy held her parties, his chief relief from the suffocation of the house was to sit on the headland in the teeth of prevailing southerlies, buffeted by winds and yearning for the unpretty northern suburbs of the Vyborg district in Piter. There – in his entire lifetime – he had been happiest. One evening, as he sat there on the cliff, he saw the daughter climbing towards him in her long green skirt. The last light was bouncing off clouds and favouring her with its glow. He stood for her. Of course he could not avoid asking her to share the seat with him.

  She suggested teasingly that he had been avoiding her. He denied it. All at once she had her arms around him, and her shyness turned to tears.

  My dear Russian, she said, you are the only one who can make me happy. Mother steers me towards Michael, because he makes lots of money, but you’re the only one I can love. You with your jokes and your sadness...

  Suvarov was carried away by this. He noticed all at once that she possessed sad green eyes, and decided she had undiscovered maturity. Staring into her eyes he promised not to avoid her any more. At the next party Michael the clerk could tell from the glances Suvarov and Denise exchanged that he himself no longer had the chief claim. Michael started to come to the house less. Suvarov and Denise would wash up after dinner and he caught the widow and her brothers and sisters, Denise’s aunts and uncles, exchanging winks. He came to the conclusion that he had passed some test, that doing the washing-up with a girl in Australia meant an intention to marry.