The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  He invited me to tea, and we sat in his living room. He had fruitcake a fellow worker’s wife had made for him, and he brought in the tea like an Englishman, in a teapot. My Australian friends aren’t keen on samovar tea, he explained. In some ways, this is all less fussy.

  He asked me did I want to rent a room from him at very lenient rates. I told him that I thought I might accept his kind offer. Then he poured his cup and mine and sat back and lit one of those cigarettes designed for asthmatics.

  Are they any good for you? I asked. They smelled like bitter menthol.

  They do me no harm, he said, and began at once to cough.

  And the People’s Train? I asked him.

  I’ve built a new model in the Railways office.

  I can keep the other one?

  Yes. We’re running this one as hard as we can, adjusting the miniature gyros with tiny screwdrivers. But now everything is war, war, war. We might have to wait.

  He coughed some more. Then he said, I wanted to let you know– and you won’t like it. Just as I’ve settled in here with my new job ... Well, I’m being sent to Britain.

  Being sent?

  Pretty much. From an article I published a little time back, the British War Office knows about my work. They want me to work on similar schemes.

  Everyone’s being called to the colours, I complained. Everyone!

  They said as a British resident and a loyal subject of the tsar, I would help them. They also implied they’d deport me if I didn’t.

  Do you think they were bluffing? I asked.

  I’m no longer a fire-eater like you. I cannot survive a detention camp here. And of course I don’t want to go back to Russia under guard in the bowels of some steamer. Artem, I won’t fool you ... I don’t push things like you do. I can’t, if I want to live to see the day. And don’t forget, if this war is as bad as 1905, it will bring the fall of our little friend Nikolka. That’s what I want to live to see!

  He studied me for any sign of accusation, and my silence was complicated. I was aware of his earlier sufferings. He’d been imprisoned first when less than twenty, had spent five years in Siberia and then two consumptive years on the run before he got to Harbin in Manchuria. And hadn’t he given up a solid job with Bender to take a low-paid, draughty one out of solidarity with us? And wasn’t I, by loading beef carcases, helping the military too, fuelling the empire and its capitalists?

  I said, So, lucky old Rybakov! You’ll be close to home now.

  He smiled, grateful to me.

  I am sick of Queensland, he said – like the young Russian volunteer earlier. I am literally sick. These seasons here are killing me. It’s all too tropical. You see that beautiful tree outside? For a quarter-hour after I pass it I can’t breathe. But I can’t cut it down because it’s the most beautiful tree in the world. A peculiar thing – my lungs were always much clearer in Harbin.

  On a sunny afternoon in January he departed, first class, on a steamer named Carlisle Castle, whose lower decks were crowded with troops bound, according to rumour, for Egypt.

  Then – of all people – Suvarov. Late that night, when I was drinking tea at Adler’s, Suvarov, stooped and holding a full glass of vodka, approached me. He still had not found his old spark, the whimsy that had once caused him to dress as a Salvation Army officer for that Sunday meeting in town that led to our first arrest.

  I’m sorry, Artem, he told me. I’m away from here! I have not had any rest in Brisbane. I’ve been to jail twice, and the tropical weather doesn’t make up for that. I’m going south to Hobart.

  I urged him to stand his ground. Tasmania might be better but would be close enough in character to Queensland, since the two of them were bound in a federation. But this argument did not sway him.

  He told me that he hated to leave me – we had been together so long that it was like a divorce. But he had to find a place, he said, where he was not blamed for every disturbance on the civic landscape.

  Sadly, I tracked his departure. He spoke to shipping agents. There were always ships that wanted men for the voyage to Hobart – it was the way of things. He vanished one day while I was at work. He left a note saying simply, Goodbye, my old comrade. It was signed S.

  32

  Suvarov and I had become brothers on the difficult road out of far eastern Siberia. But before meeting him I had to go through an initial, time-consuming flight, and though it would have engrossed Hope and Amelia, it was no different in essential detail from that of many others.

  I mentioned earlier a guard in the Alexandrovski prison in Perm and then in the Nikolayevski work camp nearby. His name was Budeskin and he became my personal governor, confidant and disciple. He told me sad stories about his wife’s family, about his sister-in-law who was the bastard child of the landlord. His daughter had gained a scholarship to the regional polytechnic and was the family’s hope. As well as telling me such intimate things he began to bring me books, and food from his own kitchen. And just as I thought I had found a friend for the duration of my sentence, I was deprived of his company.

  One early evening in the spring of 1909 we were ordered from our cells and told to bring our caps and blankets with us. We were lined up in the prison forecourt where armed guards – whose faces were unknown to us – were drawn up with carbines. Budeskin had not warned me of this movement and it might have been a surprise to him as well. But it was always on the cards that we would be marched out to Siberia, and the marches were never measured in mere hundreds of miles – the tsar always rewarded his prisoners with marches of three to four thousand or so versts, two and a half thousand miles, to work camps or to exile in small towns.

  Now, wrapped in our blankets, we started out through inner and outer gates, waiting while one was closed and the next opened, until we emerged into the streets of the town. Perm is not a pretty town but it looked delightful by the light of the torches the guards carried. When we entered the zone of streetlights and evening street hawkers, we could smell the day’s bread from bakeries – at that time of day about to close. Smoke fumed from the chimneys of the armaments factory where the night shift was at work. On my right I saw the ornate windows and turrets of the railway administration building and then the Magdalen Church that, except for its dome, looked more like a bank.

  Only the better roads had escaped the thaw, and long before we got to the double-eagle columns that marked the city’s outer gate, our boots were not only sinking into the mud of the season but filling with it as well.

  Outside the city we were rested for a few hours in a tobacco warehouse, then marched off in the mild day. That night, wrapped in our thin blankets, it was an old schoolhouse we sheltered in. At unexpected moments on the march they would tell us to stop and strip off our clothes so that they could see whether we had somehow stolen anything on our passage through the villages, but all we’d stolen were the shit-stains and vermin we’d picked up in prison.

  Now my memory of the journey blurs a little. We were walked for weeks or then months on end, sleeping in fields as the nighttimes became warmer. Those who grew ill were towed along in farm wagons commandeered by the guards, or travelled along rivers in barges while the rest of us trudged along the tow path. It was endless. We forgot Perm, we barely believed in a destination, and the road became our home.

  When in the first few weeks the awesome peaks of the Urals presented themselves like God’s wrath, they put us on a train with barred windows for the journey through the mountain passes. So we crept up the great gorges and then came down in switchback turns to the fields and, ultimately, to the swamps and forests of Siberia, where again we sometimes had the luxury of travel by farm cart or by barge. We reached a transit prison surrounded by birch forests, and were left there for some weeks in barracks. Here random beatings were routine, and though I avoided them, I was not there long enough to benefit from the sort of relationship I had built with Budeskin. The meat the local traders sold the camp governor was already putrefying, but succulent smells came f
rom the officers’ cookhouse.

  On calm nights in camp on some tributary of the Lena, I could almost believe that I was on an excursion with friends. We sang choruses of folk songs and music hall favourites – ‘Juniper, Juniper’ and ‘Steppe All Around’. ‘Steppe All Around’ is like an Australian song I have heard – the one about the drover who asks to be buried under a coolibah tree.

  Steppe, endless steppe,

  The way lies far before us,

  And in that endless steppe,

  A coachman lay dying...

  A barge took us to a village named Zhigalovo, and our officer, a decent fellow, let us meet some of the citizens of the town in the communal hall. These men were Russian exiles, men permitted to live in Siberian towns who had married Siberian women and had stayed on in the region of their punishment. A small number of those we met in the hall had served time in prison camps, not merely in the torpor and misery of Siberian villages. They seemed not quite as prosperous as the exiles, and quite possibly worked for them as clerks and shop assistants. But the kind officer wanted us to meet them so that we could see a future for ourselves if we behaved well and – knowing what camp life was like – so that exiles of Zhigalovo might send us food packages and write reassuring letters to our families.

  So the exiles took down our names and promised to write to our relatives and tell them we were well when last seen. But one of them, a gruff man with a huge black beard, passed me a paper. Learn it, he muttered. It consisted of the names of three river towns. The names of three men. Later in the night, I learned these items off by heart, knowing I’d been given an escape route. I remember still the first name – Zerbikov, K.F., of a little town named Martynovka which served a number of work camps. The mystery of why the man had chosen me remained unexplained. Had others been similarly helped?

  As they dropped prisoners from our column off at this and that timber camp, we were left with a party of sixteen and were taken by our remaining guards up the Aldan River in boats made of canvas, and afterwards were issued horses and rode without saddles across the taiga to the village of Martynovka, where Zerbikov, K.F., lived. Beyond that lay mountains snow-capped even in summer.

  That’s where we ended, ten miles from the village in a camp on the edge of a dreary swamp. Our generous officer was gone – he had reported to a larger camp some miles west. Midges and mosquitoes infested our new camp, but in the hut in which I was placed the veteran prisoners took a strange joy in telling us that when winter came we would yearn for the warm mosquito days.

  I was warned by several men that there were informers in every hut, but what surprised me was the decent, noble sturdiness of purpose of some, those who had come to terms with their situation, even if those terms were death by attrition. Or else by accident.

  We went out cutting trees each day and manhandling them to a mill. The easier milling jobs were allotted to trusties who got extra food. An occasional timber-gang prisoner was known at an opportune moment to put his neck in the path of the steam-driven buzz saw. Men called it the Siberian guillotine.

  As the short autumn came, morning parades continued despite rain or sleet, wind or mud or snow. I stood numbly at attention with the others to watch men flogged for trying to steal off-cuts of timber from the mill to fuel the tepid hut fires. I was hungry all the time, but without a mirror could not see what that was doing to my appearance. We talked a lot about the unknown merchant in Martynovka who was doing well supplying meat so far along the stages of rottenness that it was not fit for sale in the towns and villages. Only the niggardly amount we were fed saved us from food poisoning and dysentery. Just the same, a young man died of the meat and we carried him to the camp cemetery, a swamp two miles along a track leading from the camp town. Into the bog the young intellectual was thrown – with all his ideas locked up forever in his dead brain – without a word of ceremony.

  I decided I must try to visit Zerbikov, K. F., of Martynovka, even if the attempt killed me. There was just enough of autumn left to try it in.

  The day I edged away from a timber gang, everyone was distracted by a young man who’d been injured. A larger fir tree, in falling, had snapped off a sapling which – as it flew whirring among us – flattened one of the prisoners. Guards came striding up to inspect the bloody injuries. And I sidled out of the clearing. I left without any ambition and doubted I would get ten miles, and I had two thousand or so to cover as the bird flies to reach the Pacific coast, but was no bird and must deal with north-flowing rivers and ferries and railway lines that sometimes moved south and only sometimes honestly and accommodatingly east. To tell the truth, I don’t think I was quite sane at the time. As I rushed away through the shafts of trees I had what a religious person would call an angelic visitation. A golden conviction of being in the hands of some providence filled me – a crazed idea that the whole thing was designed to turn out happily. First, however, I had somehow to cross the Aldan River. I did not know how. I more or less expected to be translocated by magic.

  And, according to my delusions, I was sent a messenger. As I came down to a ferry landing through a fringe of trees, I saw a young Yakut, a Siberian native, who was caulking the seams of his beached skin-covered boat with thick clay dug out of the riverbank. His weathered face was like an assertion of hope. I was meant, according to the lunacy I was afflicted with at that moment, to take the chance of speaking to him. I offered him my prison jacket in return for passage in his boat to Martynovka. He took it but told me, Not Martynovka, too full of gendarmes. Kerensk, though.

  Kerensk seemed so far south and thus upriver as to be beyond my present imaginings. But I went along with him. His suggestions seemed statements of infallibility. When he was finished caulking, he lifted the boat and set it in the river, took me on board and began rowing. The river was not so strong and he was able to skim past the grey houses of Martynovka and my unwitting comrade K. F. Zerbikov. It turned dark. As I slept in the bottom of the hide boat, we entered the great Lena and edged towards Kerensk. In Kerensk my contact was to be one Deshin, F.V.

  When we arrived within sight of the town and saw its golden cupola, my wise Yakut put ashore, hid the boat among the branches, then suggested I should skirt around the town, go to the first teahouse at the southern edge of the town – it belonged to a former prisoner – and ask after my contact, Deshin. But I knew I had to be careful. I was dressed in a ragged jacket and pants, and if it hadn’t been for the discolouration of dirt and mud and sap I would have been an advertisement for the work camp. But given their condition I might just about pass as a pauper.

  The last I saw of the Yakut, forever my Yakut, he was darting across the river on the slight, contrary current. I didn’t even know where he was headed.

  I did as he suggested, finding the south-east road into the town and walking into the teahouse. Fortunately the only two customers were engaged in playing durak, as engrossing a card game as you could hope for. Reckless with need, I asked the owner straight out for Deshin. I felt I had a right to aid but later, when less demented, I was awed by the man’s open-handedness. He took me out to his residence, gave me tea and cake and fitted me out with a smock, trousers and boots that had belonged to his dead son. And then I went, in his child’s clothes, and never saw him again.

  Armed with an address, I approached Deshin’s house, a big place of logs with a broad wooden balcony. Deshin was my second angel– for once I didn’t hesitate to use the word in my head. He came to the door – a small but vigorous man who had made his fortune as a timber merchant – and rescued me from a suspicious servant. He seemed amused, and his eyes twinkled; when he took me down to his cellar, he introduced me to two other escaped felons there, one from a camp to the south, the other an exile who couldn’t stand his village any more. We three rested and ate single-mindedly. Fresh bread, butter, meat. I was sometimes shamefully sick afterwards.

  Deshin would come and chat with us in the evenings. He was a Siberian patriot. If a man wanted to live freely and occasionall
y express his opinions, this was the place! You could almost forget the tsar here. Deshin praised the taiga and its mysteries, and the swift-flowing rivers that were fed by its mountains and drained into the faraway Arctic seas. He had made himself happy with a Siberian wife who had since died, and with his business and his imaginings of rivers flowing to unimaginable estuaries beyond the Arctic Circle. His life seemed enviable to us escapees. But it wasn’t available to us.

  Deshin’s group of former exiles had gathered passports from men who had died, and they knew how to remove the original details with acid and then insert other details. They did this for the three of us escapees, and my passport made me Konstantin Fomin. These documents we escapees called ‘boots’, because they let us take to the road with a sense of security, even though we still had to be careful. At four o’clock one morning we were taken down to the Lena banks and boarded a large wooden lighter with a boat-steerer standing in the stern. It had been recommended we should go north again, with the current, to reach this or that river village from which we could more easily embark on escape than we could through the open country around Kerensk. We floated off, each with our own plans. The other two intended to land at a ferry stage downriver where a steamboat would take them up a tributary running east. But I chose to get off earlier at a landing south of that, at a village – so the boat-steerer said – big enough for a fellow to lose himself in if he needed to. From there I could walk three hundred kilometres to the railway that I could then follow all the way into Vladivostok.

  On arrival, for fear of being spotted or reported despite my new identity as Konstantin Fomin, I did not enter the village and instead found a south-east, hard-baked road. The first slurry of winter mud had earlier formed on it and then been rendered solid by a few unseasonably warm days. I was hurrying on this surface to get to the rail before the snow started. I avoided towns and – by choice – traversed forests and slept in barns in clearings or abandoned woodmen’s huts, and despite some stinging rains made the distance to a ferry on the Angara River in sixteen days. I offered a hair comb I had been given the day I had met the exiles and former prisoners as a fare to the hairy ferryman so that he’d take me across. Then, two days later, emerging from a birch forest, I saw the rails glinting away to a west I had been denied, and an east where I was a stranger. No traffic seemed to run here. I walked past many noxious-looking swamps for two days on the hard rail bed, my feet suffering as they had not in all their previous abuse.