The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  I did not think that occupying the same tent was an accomplishment that would impress Mrs Mockridge. But he talked on about the hearty fellows, the Irish, Canadians, Scots who were the companions of us Russians in the railway camp in Warwick.

  Mrs Mockridge must get home, I told him again.

  No, no, no, he said, waving his head, as if forbidding her to rise from her chair. Did you tell her about the shovelling contest?

  It was true that one Sunday the boss had pitched a Canadian named Lofty Sam against me to see who could fill a wagon with soil faster. Some people ran gambling on it. The railway workers and their families came and watched it; there wasn’t much excitement for them except such a sporting contest. In the end I was fortunate and vain enough to win – and was a mess with sweat afterwards, needing pints of water.

  I told the bare outlines, so that Suvarov would be done with it quickly and let Hope go, but he couldn’t be stopped.

  He went on about our Russian choir – we formed it to sing Russian songs to the Irish on their feast day, St Patrick’s. They were good fellows and appreciated it. As Vladimir Ilich told me in the letter in which he sent me to Perm, You cannot help organising things, Artem. He didn’t say whether it was a disease or a virtue.

  Suvarov said, You know, it’s easy to like the Irish because they are rebellious, but they have no class consciousness at all. Their imagination is so blotted out by some dream of independence they don’t care what kind of independence it is. But they always won the tug-of-war, so Artem went round to all the Russian camps and found a Russian team, full of huge Jews from Odessa and big muzhiks from the Volga. And we ended up winning the tug-of-war too. Artem looks nice, but he can’t stand not winning.

  I confessed it might be true. Hope looked at me.

  The boss liked him so well, said Suvarov, that he put him on the easy job. Explosives.

  Explosives, said Hope with a knowing smile. Did he indeed?

  Yes, I admitted. But I did not blow up the tram.

  She laughed at the idea.

  I too know how to handle explosives, said Hope. My grandfather taught me on our property in the Darling Downs.

  That’s where we worked, said Suvarov excitedly. So your grandfather is a great landowner?

  Yes, said Hope, I suppose you could say that. Sheep and cattle.

  Dear God, said Suvarov. We are mixing with a princess, Artem.

  Yes, I said. Except she is too honest for those pretensions. Anyhow, that’s our life story, and you don’t have to listen to it ever again, Mrs Mockridge. May I escort you to your cab?

  Hope and I left the theatre. She laughed occasionally at this or that aspect of Suvarov’s recital as we descended from the stage and started walking out, but when I looked back, Suvarov was still sitting there on the stage, suddenly looking as dejected as the actor whose part he had played. Sometimes some sorrow from the road he had taken would seize him like this, as if he could not move for its weight.

  I’ll see you at Adler’s, I called.

  He looked up, and his good spirits returned and, Yes, he said. Tovarishch, Artem!

  13

  Walter O’Sullivan and his wife Olive returned to Melbourne on a steamer. I had told him I would follow his directives for local action – he in the Moscow of Australia where the federal parliament sat, me in Brisbane, the Perm or Novgorod of Australia – as long as they did not clash with the program laid out in What is to be Done?, the great tract of my party head, Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Given that Walter had also an enthusiasm for that publication, it was unlikely I would disgree with him. I suggested, however, he write out a document of his own beliefs and send it to an address in Zurich I gave him. It would stand as a wonderful proof that the idea of a revolutionary elite devoted full time to action was believed in and pursued, however modestly, across the globe here, in southernmost places.

  After the night of The Lower Depths I did not see Mrs Mockridge again until May. The executive of the Russian Emigrants Union went down to the wharf to meet eighteen survivors of the Lena goldmine massacre who were touring the world with their story. That very evening we welcomed them onto the stage at Buranda Hall at South Brisbane, where Suvarov had recently had his triumph as the actor. Amelia and Hope arrived together, but I was too busy to greet them as I was introducing the eighteen survivors to our translator for the evening, Setkin the elder, who had been in Brisbane since 1892 and whose English was more than competent.

  One of the chief Lena River strikers, Lebedev, was rather impressed by Brisbane – all the sunshine, and the fact this meeting could be held openly. I have to admit that is the excitement I felt when I first came here. On the platform, Lebedev began by drawing a picture for us of life in dismal Bodaybo, between the mountain ranges on the Vitim River, tributary of the Lena, among mountains and in a valley the sun liked to flee. Here the miners had been working fifteen to sixteen hours each Siberian day without a union to protect them. The number of accidents from broken drills and rashness with explosives and gas explosions meant that from every thousand men who worked digging the gold, seven hundred could expect an injury. Tyrannous foremen had the power to fine workers for failing to meet levels of production, damage to equipment and other technicalities, so a part of the pitiable wages went to pay fines. The rest, said Lebedev, was issued in coupons that could be used only to buy deplorable goods at company stores that charged an excessive price.

  When workers at the Andreevsky goldfield went on strike, led by Lebedev and others, it was like the Potemkin battleship rebellion in 1905, claimed Lebedev. It all started with rotten meat. That was all the store had to sell. If you bought meat from the locals along the foothills of the mountains, you were arrested and beaten. The strikers demanded an eight-hour day, a large pay rise, an end to all fines and an improvement in the supply of food. The Lena goldmining joint stock company ignored the demands. The strike spread to other goldfields along the Lena, and troops in fur hats came riding up from Kerensk. These soldiers arrested Lebedev and other members of the strike committee and put them in prison. The following day, thousands of people marched to visit the state prosecutor on the Nadezhdinsky goldfield, where miners were being held in the lock-up, to protest the arbitrary arrest. But before they could reach the prosecutor’s office, they were ambushed from both sides and the front by soldiers, who opened fire, killing hundreds of people and wounding hundreds more.

  Though the strike was still in progress, sympathisers had got Lebedev out of prison and then out of the country by way of the east. As he left, he urged the workers and their families to abandon the goldfields, though many did not want to give up the graves of their dead to Lenzoloto, the company. But if the ten thousand miners of the Lena and all their families abandoned the gold company then its directors would learn the lesson that labour was not powerless, and investors such as Count Sergei Witte, minister of the tsar, and Empress Maria Fyodorovna, birdlike mother of the tsar himself, might be similarly damaged.

  When Lebedev finished his story, there was great applause from the floor. Amelia was smiling and Hope, for some reason, was glowing, as if first-class ideas had been rubbed together to make warmth. Questions were now asked from the floor. The anarchists wanted to know why, with their access to dynamite, the miners had not blown up the pit heads and the crushing machinery. Lebedev pointed to the presence of the army and the concern the strikers had for their wives and families. A dynamite attack would be a roar from the people, but the state could roar back louder. It was the withdrawal of labour that was most important.

  I was leaving Buranda Hall after locking it when I saw in the gloom, glistening moist with an early winter dew, the massive navyblue Mockridge vehicle. Hope was not in it but appeared out of the dark blue shadow of the building in a yellow dress and white jacket.

  A fascinating evening, Tom, she told me. She handed me an envelope. Could I make a contribution to the upkeep of those men?

  You are always generous, I said. I’ll send you a receipt.

&
nbsp; There’s no need, she replied, the last word transforming itself into a laugh.

  Where is Amelia?

  Amelia has too much socialist pride most of the time to ride in my big machine. She yielded to the tram. Will you crank the engine for me again?

  There would have been plenty of departing husky fellows who could have done that but she had waited for me. She sat at the wheel, and I jerked the crank and the machine started raging away.

  I stepped back and waved. I’ll walk home, I cried out.

  She did not seem to hear and descended from the driver’s seat to the ground.

  I wanted to tell you, she said. I am whole. The doctors have declared me recovered.

  Her face looked luminous with a wafer-thin gaiety. There was something in it that I was uncomfortable with.

  I’m very pleased, I told her. For your sake.

  In her exuberance she pulled me to her and she quickly kissed my cheek and then wiped it with a handkerchief.

  I need time, she said, to breathe out the last exhalations. Then I will come and stack newspapers with you. And – to speak frankly, Tom, we will be lovers then. We’re equals, so why shouldn’t I say it? Why shouldn’t I be the seducer?

  But I saw signs even then that she was a woman engaged on a project, not on a passion. She was straining too hard to be a free woman. What she said was not in her nature.

  She drove off then. In the night light the dust she raised looked a shade of mauve.

  G’day, Tom, I heard behind me. It was little Paddy Dykes. I had not seen him in the hall but was pleased he was still in Brisbane.

  That was a top-class evening, he remarked. A good idea to have a translator, eh. It helped a lot. By the way, he said, dropping his voice to a level that wasn’t by the way at all, I’ve come across some interesting news about the dynamite chucker, and Mr Bender’s tram. One of the unionists told me he met a man in a pub in Woolloongabba, and this bloke made a very interesting claim about the tram. Just got to check out a few things yet.

  Tell me, was it that idiot Menschkin?

  Doesn’t seem so, he said. Doesn’t seem so at all. But that’s another story. For all his good work, or to get rid of him, the police have arranged for him to be given a farm allotment up north. Just a little dairy place near Rockhampton. As for the dynamiter, I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

  Mr Dykes, you seem to be indeed an inquiring man.

  I don’t want to go back to the big slag heap in Broken Hill, so I have to come up with the good stuff. Talk to you soon, Tom.

  He waved and started to move away, but remembered something. Oh, he told me, that company store thing, selling bad food at any price they like, siphoning the wages back? That happened here too. Bastardry! My granddad was stuck at a station in the Barrier Ranges five years because he couldn’t pay off the bill he owed the station owner. It’s a good trick to play on a man, isn’t it? And the owners in Siberia and the owners in Australia thought it up on their own, without sharing ideas at all. Doesn’t that beat everything?

  Well, I said, human nature unregulated! It explains all the world’s sorrows.

  The next morning it was reported that Mrs Hope Mockridge had visited her husband in hospital. That news item cast a strange light on her conversation with me. I would need to get used to Hope’s mixed messages.

  Even so, I dreamed of heroic service to Hope Mockridge, of ridiculous proofs of love, even unto death, and so forth. These dreamings were certainly more excessive than anything I had allowed myself before. The question that arose was: were these fantasies really as pathetic as our scholars would have it? They seemed all at once to be so profoundly planted in me that one wondered whether even the greatest revolution in society could quickly uproot them – the male impulse towards idolising and debasing, the woman’s impulse to selfimmolation, which I had seen even in Krupskaya. Hope Mockridge had put under siege my agnosticism about a connection between man and woman that excluded all others.

  As I had in the past, I calmed myself by thinking of my grand father. He would reach out and cuff my grandmother without warning and she, wonderful woman though she was, would just shake her head and get on with everything useful to do with livestock and the house – the things he was too lazy or embittered to attend to. My grandfather had a sour heart he never passed on to my father, I am happy to say. But in this situation I imagined my grandfather, so savage later in his disappointment at things, being subject at the start to the same luscious impulses as me, an intoxicating and exclusive devotion to my grandmother’s face and body and noble heart, to the extent he could not imagine ever sending blows and curses in her direction.

  There was a time when men, including the greatest revolutionaries and writers, played love songs on banjos, simply ‘followed their hearts’. Like the young homeward-bound Russian in Turgenev’s The Torrents of Spring who falls in love with the daughter of the owner of a chocolate shop in Frankfurt, and is compelled to remain in the city, obliged by his infatuation and his outside chance of winning the girl. Why did I love that novel when I was sixteen? Was it for the twists of plot and the barriers and trials of blood put in the way of poor Sanin’s love for Gemma Roselli?

  On a crasser level, did he carry a packet of condoms in his pocket, just in case?

  I could not imagine my friend and mentor Vladimir Ilich strumming too many banjos or fighting too many duels for his wife, Krupskaya, nor her wanting him to. In his youth the Okhrana would have shot him for free, without his needing to invite another jealous male to do it.

  Suvarov, who was bolder and more experienced than me in these matters, thought it a great joke to buy some condoms at the Polish chemist’s shop in Turbot Street one day. He joked that he virtually needed to tell the chemist he was a syphilitic before the man would sell them. I didn’t tell him how this banter irked me. But even my anger was suspect. Why shouldn’t love be practical? Particularly if it were not love but a sickness.

  Yet, meeting by arrangement in the Stefanovs’ curtained room, in the shadow of the modest printing press standing like the patron saint of our adventure, Hope Mockridge and I took to the single bed the place offered and partly sated and partly enlarged our hunger for each other. The bed was enlarged too, so that it seemed a valid arena for us. She proved all that could be imagined: a superb, white, richly curved creation, generous enough to let me see that much. Still, there was a discretion and modesty in the way she went about it – is it crass to say that in large part her outer garments remained undisturbed?

  I was amazed with the height and scale of our appetite, and it mattered not at all that Mrs Stefanov might come to her own conclusions, for I had that demented feeling that the world must surely be a co-conspirator in our delight. In any case, judgement had been sent flying. Between our raging bouts, we edited the paper together. She suggested metaphors and emphatic phrases for a letter I sent throughout Queensland, asking the Russians to contribute their florins to a permanent Russian address in Brisbane, where men could stay when they came south from the cane fields, and where newcomers like the Lena survivors could be welcomed after their few irksome days at Immigration House.

  Suvorov and Rybakov must have both known, and chosen not to know, what was happening. They would time their visits to the room when Hope Mockridge was not there. I don’t know how they managed that, and I have to confess that for the first week or two of my frenzy, I took it as part of the way the cosmos – yes, the cosmos! – was applauding and accommodating what I thought of as love.

  And in those weeks, rising in my throat like a bubble, was an intention to show her Russia. But what Russia? The Russia of miserable Glebovo? The rail yards at barren Perm? The Russia I felt such a boyish urge to show her was not there to visit. It was mapped along my veins and the veins of many like me. Its future architecture was laid out deep in our brains. It was a Russia as yet unbuilt. It could not yet be revealed to anyone.

  One evening Hope and I sat over tea, her hair loose, honey swirling in our cups as
it dissolved. She leaned a head on her hand, lost in thought, then said, You are different from Englishmen, Tom.

  For some reason I could smell peril and suddenly wanted to stop her. I would be very embarrassed if she began comparisons with her husband. Surely she wouldn’t. And despite everything, I found that I did not want her to talk of us now as destined lovers, sentenced to each other’s embrace. I wanted that idea to remain in my brain.

  Am I also different from Celts? I asked her.

  Oh God, yes. She shook her head, and then said deliberately, Your consideration, for example.

  I had an urge to bury my head but I said, Of course I should be considerate. We are collaborators in pleasure. Of course I should be!

  Not all men think women are meant to have pleasure.

  Well, love is democratic. Otherwise it’s just a monster and his bait. A violation. A landlord raping a peasant.

  I had never had a conversation like this before.

  She was smiling broadly at my solemnity. She said, I have done my best to be forward like a modern woman. But it’s difficult...

  I rubbed her arm with the back of my hand. She said, One young man I knew kissed me as if I might break in his hands. I intended to marry him for a time, but I knew his carefulness would drive me mad.

  That’s why boys like that go to prostitutes, I said. They pay, and in return they are allowed to maul.

  As for the landlord and the peasant, I wouldn’t say that about my husband. I’d say he was more like a gentleman out riding who accidentally tramples someone’s field.