The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  I sat on the cot and wondered where I could get books to read in the afternoon and evening silence.

  In the exercise yard, on some days the guards would let us talk to each other, on others we were required to observe official silence but could murmur, and on others still were commanded at the cost of a beating to remain mute. There was always a knot of Australian Aborigines who stood together smoking thin cigarettes they had made themselves and carried in a little tin. One morning early in our stay, Suvarov lit a self-made cigarette with a match. A furrow-faced prisoner who looked eternally old but probably wasn’t more than forty years of age said to him, Mate, never do that, it’s a waste. I can show you how to split a match down so you get four lights.

  This was a trick Suvarov had not learned even in Siberia.

  When it was possible at Boggo Road, we Australian socialists would sit in one of the corners of the yard, and each of us would give in turn a ten-minute speech on theory. Many of them turned out to be anecdotal accounts of the experiences that had made us so-called radicals – we became like Christians recounting the second of their conversion. In the meantime, some warders were kind enough to pass messages and reading matter from one of us to another. A man might end up with a newspaper to read, another with a penny dreadful story about the American west. I must make sure I get some paper from someone, I told myself. I had been thinking of writing an article for a socialist paper, Proletary, whose address in St Petersburg I had. Here there was plenty of time, but no paper, ink or pencils.

  When locked up we were sometimes able to call to one another until the warders told us to cut out that bloody racket. Boggo Road was just like Perm in that way – the regime varied. One month in Perm we were able to meet in a large room decorated with political posters. Physically we went unmolested. Then a more severe warden would be appointed and the banners were ripped down, we were each consigned to our cells indefinitely, and warders we thought we had tamed were in many cases now willing to beat us with batons and threaten us with pistols. At one period of severity there was a warder who would order this or that prisoner into an empty cell, make him stand spread-eagled against the wall with his pants down, and excruciatingly push the barrel of a pistol into his anus. As the prisoner gasped, the warder asked, What if I fire this now? This obscene liturgy had taught me there was one way of dying in particular I was terrified of – to the point of spending the night hours sitting up.

  The routine of Boggo Road began early in the morning when a bell was rung and we rose and dressed. We shivered in the frosty air which came needling in the unglazed rectangle of our cell window. At half past six an enormous voice called, Tubs up and to doors! I lifted my waste tub while carrying my soap and little towel in a pocket of my pants. When our doors were unlocked, we were supposed to advance onto the gallery floor in silence, and since it was a time of day when many warders were on duty, we obeyed.

  One of the guards possessed the same dangerous weariness I had seen in prison warders in Russia – the weariness of men disappointed with their choice of profession and waiting for something to enliven their day. He saw me watching and asked if I was fucking staring at him. Who said you could come from some godforsaken shitheap and look at me? Who told you you could say any fucking thing you wanted to on our bloody streets? Answer that, you Red bastard!

  As a reply I lowered my head. But there was a sense in which I was begging a beating. I could not now remember being as melancholy in Perm as I was then about my little contretemps with the Queensland police. There my imprisonment had been earned or at least expected. But I had come to Australia with other expectations.

  As for the warder who asked me if I was staring at him, it reminded me of my visit to the Russian School in Paris – it was just after my first arrest – when we went to a café with an old Parisian from the days of the Paris Commune who had survived the massacre of the Communards at the cemetery of Père Lachaise. In a bar where the glasses were dulled with grease, he told us young Russians, who were of an age where we’d listen to any advice, that there was a trick to imprisonment. It consisted of this, he said: to concentrate one’s defiance against one warder, not the whole complement of them but one you chose as soon as you got to prison – the sort of man whom the system worried but who might cover that up easily by losing his temper and being brutal. Concentrate all your prison defiance on that guard, said the old man, who may have been for all we knew utterly mad, though we did not suspect him of that. Concentrate all your defiance to the point of inviting a beating. Getting the beating was important. As you lay on all fours spitting blood, you were to make a harmless joke – for example, to ask him, When did you say the dentist was coming?

  From that day, said the old Communard, if you had chosen the right man, you would begin to receive small favours – a gesture, a scrap of food, a book, some paper. Before long, you would be taken aside for conversations. Why? Because the warders are the prisoners as well! You would begin with light discussion, then you would progress to socialist theory. The process – the prison waltz – would enliven you, consume the time, keep the mind sharp.

  I had earlier used the old man’s trick in the Alexandrovski in Perm. What could I lose? I began to exchange direct looks with a guard named Budeskin, a man with an appropriate temperamental streak, a fellow capable of sentimental kindness and outrageous savagery.

  It was this method I tried to use in Boggo Road, making friends with the Irishman. One day, after I smiled broadly at him with a mixture of contempt and oafishness, he led me to an empty cell and beat me severely with a baton and with his left fist, which was his better hand, and then kicked me as I lay on the stone.

  They’re big boots, I complimented him through bloody lips. I wonder if we have the same shoemaker.

  I don’t pretend for a second I said it flamboyantly, but with the fragment of composure I had left.

  As the old Communard had predicted, here too in Queensland the fellow became a friend, warning me about raids on the communal cell where we were allowed to meet and which was sometimes hung with slogans the warder would have considered blasphemous.

  In silence we would march to the sanitary yard, a cold place smelling of human degradation where we emptied our cans and washed ourselves, and then we marched into one of the exercise yards and – on the right days – conversation would burst out. In the exercise yard, old lags taught boys card-sharping and pickpocketing skills quite openly, and frequently the guards did not seem to mind.

  Young Podnaksikov, the Lena massacre survivor, was in love with an Italian woman in New Farm and very depressed at having been separated from her. He told Suvarov, There is no place for me in Russia and no place for me here.

  Sometimes I was on work details with him and we could converse a little. We would generally be scrubbing floors or tables, or the stones of the sanitary yard if we were unlucky. He had never spent time in prison, and I told him that in the first month everything is strange since there was a build-up of horrifying or absurd things the prisoner had to catch up on. But once you started to do everything by rote, well ... time evaporated.

  To cheer him up, I told him I had been in prison in Perm the better part of two years, then in a labour squad nearby, then marched off as part of the labour battalions to Siberia. Like Hope and Amelia before him, he took an interest in my prison stories. Did I think prison was worse here than in Russia? he asked.

  In some ways better, I told him. There are warders who hate you – I was nearly beaten the other morning, I think, when I dared lay eyes on a warder. And then I managed to get some blows out of the Irishman. In Australia, the attitude of the warders is, You’ve broken our laws, you are guilty according to the court, and we will punish you. In Russia, you’d get beaten up a lot more even while the warders said to you, You know, you are on the side of right, even we can see that, but nevertheless we’ll haul into you and smash your pretty looks just because we hate the tsar too. So, my dear Podnaksikov, choose between those two options if you want
to!

  One thing, I then continued: most of these Boggo Road warders are like mere functionaries – so far they’ve stuck to the letter of the law. They don’t randomly flog a man – they wait for a signal of permission from more senior men. And this place is cleaner. That’s because we scrub it every day.

  I am very hungry, Podnaksikov admitted. Even after such a little time, I’m hungry.

  Oh yes, I said. The meat ... it’s not like the meat I lug for a living. It’s the sort of thing they sell from the back door. Knock the maggots off it and wipe it down with salt – that was the process.

  I had indeed noticed that there were few fat prisoners in Boggo Road.

  One day Podnaksikov and I were led into the long stone shed beneath the prison’s back walls where executions took place. I don’t like these places – they have a dismal air nothing can disperse, a sort of spiritual stench. In this execution shed, the scaffold had a sort of gantry on which the condemned could be swung out from the platform and over space. Only two months before a child-killer named Swanston had been hanged here, and the squalor and sourness of his crime and punishment still hung in the air.

  While we scrubbed, for my own sake as well as his I started asking about Podnaksikov’s childhood. For though the prison was in theory run on the silent system, if you were working in small parties most guards didn’t mind if you talked or not.

  In answer to my question, Podnaksikov told me his grandfather had been exiled to Siberia in the 1880s and had married an Eastern Khanty woman, a native of Siberia, as had his own father in turn. Yet despite being five-eighths indigenous by descent himself, he looked very Russian, barely a trace of Asia in his eyes. His father had been a miner and was a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries and then ran a small store in one of the towns on the upper Lena, where there was a lot of passing boat traffic.

  He was very popular, said Podnaksikov. I assure you, not price-gouging like most shopkeepers. He said publicly he didn’t lend money like other shopkeepers because he knew it was the way men were turned into devourers of their own kind. Privately he might make a loan, but not at outrageous interest.

  The man was thus a saint, according to Podnaksikov.

  After the great Lena massacre of which Podnaksikov was a survivor, certain rich progressives had brought a group of the survivors to Moscow to speak to others of their persuasion. Then he and other survivors were sent to Germany, France, England, the United States – an education in itself. Australia was the last stop and was considered a benign one. Now his friends from the Lena River massacre had departed, and here he was with me, scrubbing the Boggo Road execution chamber and yearning for a girl from New Farm.

  But your childhood? he asked me in return.

  I laughed. Everyone is like Maxim Gorki these days, talking about childhood, I told him. My Australian friends can’t help asking that question and I’ve given them a detail here and there.

  He ground his brush into the evil floor.

  Even so, he said. Let’s have the lot.

  17

  Whenever anyone asked about my boyhood my imagination was captured by the patches of colour everyone noticed in villages, the little window boxes of geraniums or pink fuchsias in the midst of dismal timbers. These tiny gestures of brio, of defiance against drabness, were the work of brave women, trying to give a little prettiness to aged structures and hard lives. They were the brightness in the dust. Many women put into them the love they could no longer spare for brutish husbands. They stood for the affection and anxiety of grandmothers and mothers and aunts.

  And the other thing – mud. Around Glebovo it had a metal smell as if it was left over from mining, but also an aroma like raw red wine. Chemistry certainly went on in it, and it was the home of the dead as it squeaked and sucked beneath my feet.

  As I told Amelia and Hope, when the breeze blew from the south we were near blinded by the emanations of tanneries. We boys swam all the time during the summer in a little stream that ran into the Vorskla River, far enough above the regional mines and tanneries to be safe for children to cavort in. We would sit down as naked as Adam on the mudflats cooking fish we caught, living like little savages in our pre-political, pre-economic existence.

  My father was an excellent performer of dramatic parts he had learned by heart. The house was full of his rehearsings. Bits of the heroic saga about the mythic bogatyri heroes. Verses about country people, and a finish consisting either of Pushkin or Shakespeare. The orchestras in the province sometimes asked him to do recitations between their musical items. He would perform even for the dinners of the Landlords’ Association, and our own landlord, old Scriabin, summoned him up to the big house to enliven his parties. He should have been a full-time actor, but his world did not permit that.

  During winter, from the time I was about seven, he would go off on tour for a month or two with a travelling theatre group. My mother, with her handsome open face, forerunner of the face she would bequeath to my sister Trofimova, minded the farm and the accounts and did a better job than my father ever did. She never complained to me about his absence. She thought him a good man and a suppressed artist. Sometimes she would travel to theatres where he was performing and come back reciting snatches from plays. She showed us how Lady Macbeth was haunted by her own bloody hand.

  Mother told me about Scriabin’s house where she had been a servant. Mrs Scriabin would see a maid yawn after twenty or more hours without sleep and beat the girl savagely, in an absolute frenzy of rage. When my father and mother were young, one of the Scriabins’ tenants stood up to them on the rent. Scriabin’s sister, worse than her brother, demanded the man be beaten. He died at the hands of the agent and the overseer had him buried in the garden in front of his own farm. Then the sister Miss Scriabin’s power over the region was so absolute that she simply let the farm again, and invited a new, submissive tenant family in to live with the murdered man’s ghost.

  I started school at seven, facing a ferocious but gifted young teacher – a lost soul as I see him now, too brilliant for us and for our poor village of Glebovo, and ready to punish us for it. He told us about his journeys to Kiev and Kharkov and Moscow, the very journeys that had left him discontented with his lot. I think he would have liked to have thrown bombs into palaces, but for lack of the opportunity to do so, he persecuted us. Our rural faces and our coarse smocks showed him every morning the limits set to all his ambition.

  My memories of the 1900 strike had to do in part with my mother’s brother, Uncle Efim, who worked as a carpenter in the railway sheds in Kharkov, our nearest big city over the border of the Ukraine. To that city, our Russian and Ukrainian forebears had frequently travelled looking for succour or work or to sell a saddle or a pot they had made. I overheard my mother telling my father that Aunt Marta was not happy about Uncle Efim’s distant work and addiction to strike meetings. In the towns there were a number of pretty young bourgeois women, operatives of the party, involved in organising meetings, printing leaflets and helping the works committees. These were dangerously alluring young women, who starved themselves to save money for the movement and thus looked angelic with their almost transparent complexions. Uncle Efim, said my mother, wasn’t immune to a pretty face, or a bit of starved ankle.

  My uncle would visit us with various socialist friends from Kharkov for a Sunday in the country. I loved those days. Uncle Efim was a big fellow, in the image of my mother. He was proud of having escaped the village and of having a job in the city, chiefly because being a worker had given him a new view of the world, a view not passed down by warty old elders and village priests. He belonged to the Union of Railway Employees and Workers, and was a member of the Social Democratic Party. He had ambitions to close down one day the entire railway system in the name of workers’ justice. And he sang industrial and political ballads to my father’s fiddle.

  A black tree grows on our farm.

  It sucks all the good from the soil.

  It withers every seed, it wipes every
smile away.

  Whose is this tree?

  Nikolka’s tree.

  The tree, that is, of the tsar.

  My uncle and the other men from Kharkov seemed so glamorous to us because they had city things – one of them wore a boater! No one bossed them around at the railway works, or so they said. They told contemptuous stories of workers at the Concordia engineering plant being flogged beside their lathes. They’d like to meet the boss that would flog them! They listened to my father recite, and pleaded with my mother to perform things she had seen in the theatre.

  My grandmother sat by the tiled stove, smiling on all now that her brutal husband was bedridden.

  In the meantime, my aunt grew suspicious of a particular pretty Jewish university student and party organiser who had moved down to Kharkov from Moscow, but who had been in distant places like Warsaw and Vienna. She was the liaison between the workers and those middle-class doctors, lawyers and engineers who were willing to provide either strike funds or apartments for a secret meeting or for storing printing presses and literature. The young Jewish university student who starved herself for the revolution had complained to the membership that the Kharkov strike committee contained too few workers and too many doctors, lawyers, engineers. This burzhooi girl told the largely burzhooi committee that they were effete and amateurish. (My aunt feared she might find Uncle Efim too authentic and too passionate.) The girl complained that the committee lacked all the normal subcommittees for organisation, propaganda and agitation. Nobody was even appointed to look after the literary functions any strike committee should hold to raise money.