The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Move, said the warder.

  My friend would not move.

  Are you coming or not? asked the warder.

  To hell with you! said Petya.

  Since he was already wearing his chains, he would have had to go wherever pushed anyway, but the warder considered that he had committed a small revolution against the tsar’s holy dignity, took out his pistol and shot him in the neck in front of me. The blood sprayed the shoulder of my prison overalls. I heard Petya open his mouth to take a huge breath, then his head went forward and he fell back on me. I held him by the shoulders.

  Let him drop, said the warder.

  We heard later by the prison rumour system that the warder received a reward of five roubles from the prison governor for repressing Petya’s rebellion. I am sure it was the truth.

  I had nearly two years there. But the person who endured all that is not really known to me and seems an utter stranger. I remember it, of course, the secret selfish bonanza of finding shreddy meat in the soup you happened to get, but then the essential brotherly tap-tap-tapping of one’s comrades on the piping – a semaphore you quickly learned. After two months of a purely fluid diet of thin soup imposed by the governor, I began to eat cockroaches, as I would discover o thers did as well. We tried to convince ourselves this was revolutionary ruggedness rather than degradation. But it was both.

  In the late March of 1907 we members of the Kharkov strike committee were amnestied – all because of the birth of a royal child. I was taken out of the Kazan prison gate to be met by my forgiving mother and my sister Trofimova, herself a good radical. My father was off acting in some play, and Uncle Efim was dead.

  After a small time resting in Glebovo, I travelled by rail across the Ukraine and Poland and by steamer to Calais, where I attended a meeting at the Russian School and first met Vladimir Ilich. After the conference, I travelled by train to Zurich, and met him again. He had a place for everyone, and my place, he told me, was to organise the party base in the great railway centre of Perm. I returned home via Germany, but what I did there I kept secret from Hope for the time being.

  Hope arrived one night at the Stefanovs’ door – in what the Brisbaners called winter – to visit the printing room. She received the usual churlish welcome from Mrs Stefanov – quite unlike the hearty welcome in broken English she got from Mr Stefanov, who was what the Australians called ‘a sport’, if he happened to answer her knocking.

  She’s a Cadet, I consoled Hope. The only socialist she has liked is Stefanov himself.

  Hope said, You have all these bizarre names for parties. Remind me, what in God’s name is a Cadet?

  The Cadets are innocents, I told her, so-called liberals. They think they will get a government out of the tsar that is like the government of Great Britain, with which they would be very happy. That is all they dream of. As if the British lived in some Utopia.

  She shook her head and an annoyed, sucking sound came from her lips. She seemed to have some pain, bordering on sourness, in her throat. Something had happened during my imprisonment, I thought suddenly. That was the change in her, and explained tonight’s peevishness

  This Russian house? she said.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and reached for the big purse she carried, which had carpet patterns on it. She was reaching for her chequebook, I knew.

  I put my arm around her shoulders and said, Dear, dear Hope. I think the Russians should do this for themselves. In this case, salvation lies within.

  She looked up. There was a weariness in her eyes I wanted to kiss away, but there was also some determination not to be consoled.

  Do you want a donation or not, Tom?

  Maybe if there’s a shortfall after everyone’s done their bit.

  Is my money somehow unworthy of the Russian cause?

  No, no, I insisted. It’s just that if the Russian community here in Queensland can’t contribute enough for its own home, what are we worth?

  I’ll put the chequebook away in that case.

  Please, do not be offended.

  You and your Russians are a closed shop, aren’t you? she remarked.

  I denied it, of course.

  We don’t choose the circumstances of our birth, she said. You shouldn’t make me culpable for them.

  Again I denied I was doing that, but she seemed determined to be disgruntled.

  I don’t see how I can expiate. Except perhaps with the chequebook. Mrs Stefanov despises me, the men at the Samarkand laugh at me, while to polite society, as it’s called ... well, the less said the better. The whole of Brisbane laughs about my infatuation for you, Tom. It is a small-minded town. They treat my husband with sympathy and contempt. So he pretends, poor fellow, that there is nothing happening.

  Please, you’re getting carried away. You are a noble soul, Hope, and your generosity has always been welcomed. It’s just–

  What is it just?

  Well, it’s not my place to split hairs. But the question that always arises is this: is it your money, which is willing and generous money, or is it ... well, your husband’s?

  She stared at me hard. She was not normally a woman who took offence easily, although perhaps I had said enough to cause it. Now, though, her offence seemed profound. Flouncing could be survived, but she was no flouncer. She quietly picked up her bag with the offered cheque unwritten inside it.

  I think I must go, she said. She looked over at Rybakov’s model of the People’s Train. Here’s us, Artem! Running on the one rail and likely to fall off it. Why does your friend call it the People’s Train anyhow? What makes it more of a People’s Train than one that runs on two rails?

  She was in a mood when any attempt at an answer might annoy her. Nevertheless, I tried to explain.

  It’s like this. When Bender sacked Rybakov, Rybakov said, this is not a train for capital. This is a train for a revolution. A People’s Train.

  He might need to wait a good long time for that, she said.

  What has happened, to make you like this?

  I’m not going to explain, she said. Because I can’t. It’s indefinable.

  She walked out.

  In my male stupidity I thought, Something has definitely happened to make her like this. But sometimes male stupidity is right, which might be the reason it runs on such regular rails.

  21

  A Russian who had done well in the sapphire grounds of Queensland sent us a princely one hundred pounds for the house. I sought a donation from the Trades and Labour Council as well, and Kelly took me for a beer in the hotel in which he was king to discuss the idea. We were drinking, Kelly a beer, me a ginger ale, when three other men entered, one of them my old friend the open-collared, shabby silver miner Paddy Dykes, destroyer of Mr Bender. The second man was one of Kelly’s aides, but the third was something to behold. This, said Kelly, is Harry Buchan.

  Buchan was tall and looked like the sort of fellow who would always be well fed – women would see to it. His moustaches had been trimmed by a barber, and he wore a cravat hemmed in by grey lapels and a blue and white striped collar. His shoes were two-toned and well polished, and he wore spats over them. He had amused green eyes, and his hat, which hung from a polished hand, was of the kind the British wore in South Africa and which were called Baden-Powells.

  He hasn’t read your man Marx at all, said Kelly of Buchan. But he works for O’Sullivan. I should tell you, Buchan, Artem Samsurov doesn’t like syndicalist bastards like the Wobblies you used to hang round with.

  Buchan shook his head. I have Wobbly friends in Melbourne, all right, but that doesn’t make me one. His accent was Scottish and charming. None of your libels there, Kelly, if you don’t mind.

  If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, say I! So, Scottie...

  Please don’t call me Scottie, proud as I am of my Scottish background. I could equally call you Paddy, but I have better manners.

  Point taken, said Kelly. But tell me then, surely Buchan you had recourse in your earlier life t
o the ‘black cat’ and the ‘wooden shoe’?

  ‘Wooden shoe’ was the Wobbly term for sabotage. ‘Black cat’ also implied dynamite and incendiaries.

  You know I never went for the black cat, Buchan asserted. I didn’t see the sense of sitting around at palaver meetings of prodigious length talking of matters industrial and all the time there was someone with mad wee eyes begging us to use the fire-dope stored in the cellar to burn down Melbourne. We’d be more likely to burn ourselves down if someone dropped a cigarette.

  Indeed, instead of lard and mercury, the Wobblies sometimes used something named fire-dope, a mixture of phosphorus and calcium bisulphide. Certain, Buchan admitted, I haven’t read the texts. Plekhanov, Marx. But you don’t have to study books to find out what ordinary men and women want. Speaking of women, what do you think of Mrs Mockridge, that splendid woman who drives her automobile around the town and does kind works for the oppressed?

  There was a second’s discomfort, probably more intense than it needed to be. Then Kelly’s offsider asked unnecessarily, You mean the poor girl whose mongrel of a husband gave her the clap he caught when prosecuting a case in Townsville?

  I was shocked at this, that despite all Hope’s work for the trade unions, a union aide would mention so openly and lightly what must only have been to him a rumour. Paddy Dykes looked away, affronted for my sake and Hope’s.

  My face colouring, I said for the instruction of Buchan and Kelly’s aide, Mrs Mockridge has done a great deal for us. She represented the members of your party, Mr Buchan, in court and is very generous to the Russians in town here, too. No one here should slight her.

  Dear brother, Kelly’s offsider told me, I spoke that way to condemn her husband. Not the lady herself.

  Buchan struck a slightly poetic pose. She is a wonderful combination of pulchritude and right-mindedness, he declared.

  Kelly groaned. You’ll be reciting Robert Burns next.

  Oh, said Buchan, there was a man who could praise the lassies. And he intoned:

  Of a’ the airs the wind can blaw

  I dearly like the west,

  For there the bonny lassie lives,

  The lassie I lo’e best.

  There wild woods grow,

  And rivers flow,

  And mony a hill between,

  But day and night my fancy’s flight

  Is ever wi’ my Jean.

  Kelly said, I’ll have Samsurov lash you with Russian if you don’t shut up.

  Buchan turned to me. I was up here during your wee imprisonment. Walter O’Sullivan sent me to address the question of your welfare and I hope I achieved something worthwhile in that.

  I could tell from his air of self-possession that he was sure he had vastly lightened our pain.

  I conferred with Mrs Mockridge, he went on, and she emphatically praised your intellect, Mr Samsurov. Now we in Melbourne have plans for a labour college, in which of course we would lecture on your brave efforts up here. Should you ever be in Melbourne, we would love to hear a lecture from you on the Russian Marxists.

  I said that I would be happy to oblige. If ever I was in his city.

  Perhaps it’ll give Mr Buchan some understanding, said Kelly, winking.

  Indeed, said Buchan, I’m no way averse to a little enlightenment. At the least, I have thought up a way to hold a rally without being arrested for it.

  We were, of course, all interested to hear.

  Well, he said, you could stage a Family Picnic for Peace. They can’t stop a picnic. We could hold it at that Roma Street Park. It’ll hold hundreds.

  Your idea or O’Sullivan’s? asked Kelly.

  I have in truth to admit it’s entirely my own, said Buchan.

  Kelly raised his amber glass. Let’s drink to Mr Buchan then, because he has something there! And while we’re at it, let’s drink to this wonderful little bastard from Broken Hill, who ran the mongrel Bender out of town.

  So we drank to the ambiguous Scot and to Paddy Dykes. All my mental best wishes as I swallowed my ginger ale were devoted to Paddy.

  22

  I was often very tired these days, though more fruitfully and pleasantly so than when I first arrived. My compositor had given up on the paper, and on Monday nights I had to do the job myself, which could take me to three in the morning. On Tuesdays there was the meeting of the Russian soyuz, which was followed then by my sitting on a stool for three hours among a circle of men translating the Telegraph into Russian for the benefit of those with poor English. I was often booed for what I read, and treated as if I were responsible for the crazy editorials of that rag and others. On Wednesday, there was the affiliated unions meeting at Trades Hall, after which I ran the press and perhaps saw Hope for a few hours, and on Thursday night the Australian Socialist Party met in a parlour at Delaney’s Hotel, across from the Russia House for which the soyuz had now made an offer. On Fridays I did the night shift at the meatworks.

  On the weekends I worked on assembling the library. I had organised young Stefanov and my jail friend Podnaksikov around town collecting Russian, Ukrainian, German, Estonian and English books for our library. Once we acquired the house we were able to put the books on shelves and send off a list of titles to Russian workers in Townsville, Cairns, Ipswich and elsewhere, and post books to them. Among our newspapers were the German-and Russian-language editions of Sotsial-Democrat, the organ of the Bolshevik party, and of Prosveshchenie and Novy Mir from the United States.

  I recite my weekly schedule not to arouse pity – I had chosen that timetable – but to indicate that I did not see as much of Hope as I might have wished. She had forgiven me for our earlier scene. I did not then face the reality that, though she and I could make the feast of a day or a year, it would not be nutriment for a lifetime. On the other hand, why should she devote a span of years to a peasant? I was fortunate to have a day, or the remains of a busy evening. With part of my soul, that’s all I desired.

  Buchan the Melbourne prophet held his peace picnic, with a Russians versus the Rest tug-of-war, but not all union families came. There was a working-class fear that to speak of peace at a time when a great contest seemed to be brewing in Europe could be seen as unpatriotic.

  By 1 August, Queenslanders read that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Russia, but that on the grounds of monarchical solidarity Kaiser Wilhelm had appealed to our friend the tsar not to think ill of the German empire. But Russia had already ordered its first mobilisation of its western army.

  Despite the calamitous and stupid war against Japan nearly ten years past, I well knew the attractions of soldiering to Russian peasant boys. Some felt duties to ageing parents and were reluctant, but others saw any horizon beyond that which encircled their village to be welcome. When Britain declared war – involving, of course, Australia – all at once the public grounds of Brisbane were full of barking sergeant-majors ordering around the lean volunteers in their mixture of suits and wide-awake hats, button-up jackets and slouch hats. Both Digby Denham the premier and that man of Labor, Thomas Joseph Ryan, who wanted Denham’s place, announced that if the empire were attacked, Queensland would be there, and pointed towards the kaiser’s men who controlled German New Guinea and must be evicted. The enemy is not as far from us as the people of Queensland might think, intoned Digby, as if Queensland had something to fear from the small launches of the German administration in New Guinea. The great Queenslander Andrew Fisher, who led the Labor Party in the parliament in Melbourne, desiring to be prime minister yet again, wanted to assure everyone that he was ready to fight too – ‘to the last man and the last shilling’. I wondered how many other supposed social democrats throughout the world would make similar statements on behalf of this or that warlord.

  But I get ahead of events. On 2 August, the evening of the war, Hope– wearing an elegant green dress suggestive of peace – had come to visit me in the printing room at the Stefanovs’. We drank tea and she told me she was there with an invitation. She and Amelia were organising a pi
cnic for the next day in the hills south of the city – a social event to honour Mr Buchan – and she wondered if Suvarov and Podnaksikov and all the others would come and tell him about our stint in Boggo Road. It would be a good way of pooling ideas on what action to take in the event of a war, she said. I confessed I had already met Buchan. I kept secret my own feeling that Mr Buchan barely deserved being honoured.

  She smiled. He doesn’t pretend to be an intellectual, does he? He is a man of action. Whereas you, Tom, you are both a mental and physical giant.

  I still felt the tinge of bourgeois jealousy. How would we all fit in her automobile? I asked.

  Those who couldn’t fit inside, she said, would fit on the broad running boards.

  Paddy Dykes? I suggested.

  I’ve already asked. He says he has to work. But I think that for some reason he doesn’t like Mr Buchan.

  I did not look forward to this event.

  The next morning she drew up in what I now thought of satirically as her ocean liner of a car to collect us from Adler’s. Podnaksikov had earlier gone to fetch his shy Italian girlfriend, Lucia Mangraviti, who in her blue dress and a straw hat possessed a raw, unconscious peasant beauty. Lucia was admitted to the interior of the car to occupy the back seat with Suvarov. Podnaksikov stood on the running board beside her, as if to protect her from wayside assassins. For the moment I sat in the front with Hope.

  While the others conversed, she told me, My husband is very excited at the idea of war. Did you know he’s a major of militia? Legal officer to the Brisbane regiment. He spots a chance to redeem himself in battle.

  Then, I said, I would pity his soldiers.

  He will never go into battle, she said. But I can see the dream in his eye. He sent his old uniform out for cleaning, and he’s been to the tailor’s to order a new one.

  She gave this news about the uniforms with a restrained but total contempt that made me uneasy.