The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  No sir.

  The coroner growled, No sir. Like a school teacher assuring a child that he was not believed and that punishment was waiting.

  The prosecutor asked next if I knew where Major Mockridge was at the time his wife was cavorting about the bush with us Reds?

  I was angry that Hope was being drawn in by this awful fellow, who would try to flay her even though no charge had been laid against her.

  I do not know where the major was, I said. I know only that Mrs Mockridge does not cavort but has been very kind to us immigrants.

  There was a giggle among the spectators, as if Hope Mockridge and I were a melodrama they were all familiar with, and had seen Act One of, and were now back for the laughter and shock of Act Two.

  I do not know where Major Mockridge was, I managed to tell him. I am sure he was engaged on work he considered worthy of his time.

  Fuller had already objected to the coroner – what could it matter what Major Mockridge was doing at the time?

  I can tell you where he was, said the prosecutor, overriding him. While Reds disported themselves with his wife, he happened to be working with my brother at the headquarters of the Ninth Battalion, organising billets and transport.

  Fuller said, Very worthy, very worthy, and I applaud those patriotic endeavours. But what’s it all meant to signify, Your Worship?

  The prosecutor shouted, It means that given Mrs Mockridge’s choice of company she is not a woman to be necessarily trusted, any more than your clients are to be believed. In other words, there was no reliable or independent British citizen there to verify what befell the deceased, as there would have been had Major Mockridge been there!

  People laughed again, at the idea of Major Mockridge KC picnicking with Buchan and me. It was an argument far away from the issue of supposed murder, but it was somehow powerful and the coroner let it all go on and seemed pleased with it.

  So when did Mr Suvarov wrestle Menschkin’s gun from him? Before or after Suvarov had been shot?

  I said that at no time had Suvarov seized Menschkin’s gun.

  Perhaps you’re right, said the prosecutor. Was the gun even Menschkin’s in the first place? How can we know it wasn’t Suvarov’s gun that he had taken to the picnic? Or, for that matter, yours?

  I had a sense of the solid ground threatening to move out from beneath my feet. I struggled with panic and urged myself not to sound desperate – such was the political prisoners’ code in Russia, but it seemed to have become blurred in Brisbane.

  No, I told the man slowly and with emphasis, none of us travelled with weapons. We had none to travel with.

  The prosecutor said in a dubious voice that my guarantee on that point was very welcome. But he suggested we surmise the gun was ours, the picnickers’ gun, and not Menschkin’s. Suvarov shoots Mensch kin, argued the prosecutor, since his fingerprints are on the gun. Then another of you, with a pistol you had many chances to be rid of, bravely agreed to give Suvarov a flesh wound in support of the story.

  I was aware that the idea made perfect sense to many in the courtroom. I stole a look into the corner where Hope and Amelia sat. They were gone.

  29

  I was not at the time aware of all that was happening in the trial – we did not have the benefit of daily papers. To be one of a number of accused is to see simply one grim corner of the event. The truth was, despite the snide laughter that had attended the mention of Hope Mockridge, beyond my gaze and that of my friends, the Queensland bar and the Queensland judiciary were uneasy about the process to which we were being subjected. I saw the coroner as an individual of great and unquestioned power, sufficient unto himself, a god who could release thunderbolts without creating comment. In reality he was just another old man among other men, and the other men, even as their minds were seized by the international crisis, were also seized by the unsoundness of the procedure we were suffering under.

  This did not mean that they wished us well, but that they harboured certain principles they believed the police had violated. On top of that, it appeared that in every liberal newspaper in the country, in the newspapers of little towns along the rivers of New South Wales, and those south and north of Brisbane, the nature of the prosecution had raised doubts. Though we knew nothing of it, there were editorials that said that on the one hand we were an unsatisfactory element in the society of Australia, but that on the other it did not mean that we had committed a murder.

  On top of that, every day the court was surrounded by Kelly’s clamorous trade unionists carrying banners, asking that we not be sacrificed to the fervour of the moment. Neither Buchan nor Suvarov nor Podnaksikov nor I knew about any of it. Though we sighted him in court, we knew little of Paddy Dykes’s part in it all – the writing, the discussions with like-minded journalists from the respectable papers.

  Nor did we know that Mr Fuller had subpoenaed the matron from Greenslopes Hospital or that she was a woman of independent soul. Since she was the gatekeeper to an important source of Brisbane’s medical care, she seemed to have no fear of anyone, and she was a woman accustomed to authority over nurses, doctors, patients. We were not in court to see and hear her testimony and so had to rely on reports. She entered the court like a secular nun, a great symmetrically draped and starched veil hanging from her head, an unarguable red cross at the white centre of her breast. When asked questions by Fuller she answered with the innocence of a woman who had no reason to fear anyone. She claimed that the police had visited Suvarov with the gun late in the night of our first questioning. She had led them to him at their insistence, and against her advice, and she had seen them press it into the slack fingers of his right, his good hand, while he was still full of laudanum, faint from blood loss, and had no strength. The matron made it clear how uneasy she had been about it all, and had remained so for some time until at last contacted by Fuller KC.

  What did one make of such perfected ruggedness of the kind the nurse possessed? It was an honesty that evaded the net of politics and theory. It was what it was, like a glory of nature. There is no ideology for sunrises.

  On the street, though we did not know it, people were already accusing the police of making their own evidence – the Queensland police having a reputation for being a blunt instrument.

  But the coroner’s hearing continued and, without books or writing paper, we dwelled interminably in our cells. I wonder how the others endured when my own endurance was so fragile. Then one morning I heard cell doors crash open like thunder, like a biblical tomb door split by lightning. I heard warders shouting. My door opened with sudden fury, and a warder stood there. He said, All right, you Red bastard, you got away with it this time. The coroner caved in. Piss off out of here!

  His presumption was that we had been loitering here of our free will. Soon we were all walking out of Boggo Road’s big gate to be greeted by a cheering crowd. We shook hands with our supporters and smiled and pretended we had not been touched by what had happened. What was remarkable was that, although we emerged into a mass of men and women who considered our fraternity noble and unbroken, each of us went his own way that night. Even Suvarov and I had been separated in the crush of well-wishers outside the prison and may have been glad to be. I’m sure that fact mystified even us. But with people cheering us we felt bound to pretend to them we would lead our lives as before – then secretly didn’t. Though I could see Hope’s big automobile on the edge of the crowd, for reasons I could not understand I returned home to Adler’s in a unionist’s dray. Did we think of each other as bad luck?

  While we were in prison declarations of war had exploded across the globe, involving country after country in subtle alliance and confusing the world’s socialists. I gave myself a few days’ rest and, as I waited to start my job again, I saw a crowd of men outside the town hall, anxious for the coming slaughter. I looked at their long, straight bodies, tufts of hair beneath straw hats and well-blocked felt, all of them wearing suits as if presenting themselves to a bride. It was said in
the papers that only the finest, the antipodean Adonises, should be taken. Men unworthy of the national template need not apply. They joked with each other on the town hall steps and believed that somebody loved them, girls or governments, mothers or monarchs, and the God of the Highest and Most Blessed Things.

  I met by accident that day my former prison warder, the Irishman who gave us chops in Boggo Road, our imprisonment before last. I had not seen him during my recent imprisonment, since he had left the prison service to start his own small dairy along the coast. He saw the war as a mechanism to drive up the price of setting up a homestead, the last vengeance of the British against him and his people. They won’t get me in uniform, he assured me. They can fight their own fucking war.

  All along I thought that there must be at least in St Petersburg and Moscow some sceptical ageing officers and NCOs who remembered the Japanese and sought to dampen the fever of the young. Whereas the British Empire by its very existence exercised a pull on the young. The history they’d learned in steamy classrooms assured the young Queenslanders that they were on the winning team.

  Suddenly sturdy, tall boys, in new baggy army uniforms instead of suits, leaned from the trams in Roma Street, calling to girls. The impact of all this jollity was that the price of bread and tea and sugar and beef, all Australian staples, had – as my former warder had told me – suddenly leapt. Workers were laid off by manufacturers. People with German names had their windows broken. All the usual silliness, the human race returning to its vomit as predictably in Brisbane as ever in the cities of Russia.

  Over the next two months nearly sixty thousand men, or so I would read, joined the ranks, although the Australians needed only twenty thousand of them for now. Surely the Russians these days, conscious of the Japanese victories of 1905, weren’t clamouring like the innocent Australian boys to get into the battle?

  But there was a sense in which I understood the Australian enthusiasm. The blank eye of the Australian sky seemed oblivious to many Australian masculine virtues. Considerable virtues indeed I had found them to be in the railway camps. A straight sort of people! Now history was reaching towards them, including them, inviting them – to use the words of the newspaper editorials – to the great global corroboree, the dance of gallantry. The Telegraph attributed it all to love of empire, and I had seen the same complicated if jovial earnestness in the young men who would be slaughtered by the Japanese at Port Arthur in Korea.

  30

  I was by the first evening after my release back in the print room at the Stefanovs’, admitted by Mr Stefanov who pumped my hand up and down in congratulation. I was delighted to be reacquainted with my printing frames and machines, and amazed at their loyalty in waiting there faithfully for me – though dear old Rybakov, through frequent visits, had been able to issue an Izvestia news-sheet now and then, a one-page bulletin telling the Russians of Queensland that I had been wrongfully placed in prison and informing them of the progress of our ordeal. Soon I would move all the newsprint and apparatus to Russia House but I did not want the trouble of that yet.

  I wondered now how our conversation would get started if Hope arrived. The strange interview I’d had with Major Mockridge made me more than uncertain. But sure enough, she came that same night, knocking on the Stefanovs’ door after looking for me at Adler’s. I was putting into type an article warning Russian workers against being swept up in the war hysteria, or getting the idea that it was a way to prove they had a right to be in Queensland. The earth was theirs. They had a right to be where they were without having to put on a uniform or take up arms.

  As she came in, we kissed like brother and sister, she as uncertain of me as I was of her.

  As a safe move, I asked first about Amelia.

  Isn’t she a sad sight now? Hope replied.

  I told her how I’d glimpsed them from the dock.

  She raised her head and shook it for a second. That’s why I may not be along for a week or two. I’m busy with helping Amelia out. And with a committee of wives.

  A committee of wives? I asked. It sounded crazy.

  I’m raising money for soldiers’ comforts. On behalf of my husband. I know you won’t approve, Tom.

  All infatuation had been burned out of me by the Menschkin affair. I knew that I owed her and her husband my freedom. But even that seemed part of the disorder of their minds and their marriage. You are both mad, I thought but did not say. You have caught madness from each other. Why play at being dutiful to each other when the world knows that you aren’t? I wondered how the other wives treated her – but, I began to suspect, she was not oblivious to all contempt. She actually liked it, playing the game that way!

  I know there’s folly on both our parts, she said. But he thinks all this will make up for some of the errors of his life.

  Such as giving you syphilis? I asked in a murmur.

  She wasn’t appalled by my bluntness. Yes, she said. That too. I hate the war, as you know. But in this I must be loyal to him.

  But you haven’t been loyal.

  I know. But I must be now. I don’t know if I can help with Izvestia much longer.

  I felt relief to be escaping what I now saw as the whole Mockridge mess. I stared at this beautiful, demented woman.

  We kissed then. Despite everything some animal feelings were raised, but she excused herself and left. Just as well. It had all become impossible. If Buchan wanted her, well ... She could brew up a further madness with him.

  Yet now she was going, it came to me that all her generosity could not be explained by madness, by a manoeuvre within her marriage. I was overcome by sorrow that I’d been curt to her.

  It doesn’t mean, I said as she paused by the door, we don’t all owe you so much.

  She nodded and went through.

  I would see less of her now than at any time since we had first met– including the prison periods. Before Christmas, Major Mockridge was one of the officers who led the Ninth Battalion of Queenslanders through the streets, behind a brass band, to notable enthusiasm from families on the pavement. Their exhilaration seemed to rise and add lustre to the sun. As the major and Hope had both implied, battle could obliterate the memory of what could barely be spoken of. At the level of such parades as this, military fervour could approach a religious ecstasy.

  The grinning martial ardour of the younger men was heartbreaking to behold. They thought a brisk dash against the enemy would settle things. The glad unknowingness of their womenfolk could sting tears from the eye.

  Russians were fighting the Germans in the forests of Tannenberg, and, lured forward by success, were surrounded. The cables printed in the Brisbane Courier indicated that the Russians were in a triumphantly encircled condition. I suspected that they were the victims of a slaughter. It seemed no time afterwards that the French and English were fighting in front of Paris to save it from the Germans. But even before that, I was horrified to see two young Russian waterside workers turn up to a meeting at our soyuz house wearing the Australian uniform. One seemed slightly embarrassed, as if he did not quite know why he had volunteered – indeed, he said he’d done it while drunk. The other was unapologetic and said, tsar or not, Russia is in danger. I feel I must help. And heaven knows, he said, the tsar might become kinder after this war.

  Then, at the Russia House we had by now acquired, Podnaksikov presented himself without apology in the cap, tunic and leggings of an Australian soldier. The war changed everything, he said.

  Like the boy earlier, he used the argument that Russia must be helped, and that the tsar would become more democratically minded through the process of the war and his alliance with the British and French. In the light of his height and broad shoulders, and despite the dismissed charges against him, the recruiters had taken him and he was grateful. Lucia still saw him, he told me, and the parents were almost reconciled to him. He said, My future is an Australian one. And I can’t tell them that better than by putting on the uniform of the Australian Imperial Force.
/>   We shook hands. As if I were his uncle, I asked him to be cautious.

  Despite all you say, he told me with a smile, this isn’t as bad as Russia.

  The Australian unionists who now came to Trades Hall wearing uniforms had similar arguments. If the workers stood by the empire now, said Billy Foster of the Tramways Union at one meeting, there’d be no denying their claims afterwards. I read in the Telegraph that various Irish national leaders had made the same statement. Stick by the old empire, and it will behave well to its subjects after it has been saved! As if empires had been built without savagery and with every promise honoured! The idea seemed as stupid to me as the belief that the taipan snakes who slithered before the Russian cane-cutters would, if sung to correctly, decide to be non-venomous.

  The next week there were two more Russian youths in uniform.

  I had a visit from an officer, one of them told me. He was accompanied by a fellow in a starched tie. They told me all Russians who did not join the Australian army were being deported.

  I was seized by familiar outrage. They told you that? They can’t do it. That’s ridiculous. Why didn’t you check with me?

  But they didn’t seem too upset by the idea of the horror awaiting them. If the Russian – Japanese war had been so deadly, why did they think this war would be easy on flesh, bone and spirit? And in all wars the early recruits are fed into the mincer first.

  I was getting sick of Queensland anyhow, one of them whispered to me, as if he’d chosen a sea cruise.

  31

  In those first weeks of the war, Rybakov had suddenly been recruited as an engineer by Queensland Government Railways and – being a man who liked his own place – moved out of Adler’s once more to occupy a nice little house in Merrivale Street. In its front garden was the plant they called the jacaranda, blooming deep-blue in the front and strewing the ground – as summer came on – with a fall of vivid petals.