The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Then, with the same suddenness as its onset, at the sink with her one evening, he awoke from his infatuation. A lifetime of accepting the wet dishes from this woman? He couldn’t believe he had ever wanted it.

  Off the beach below was a rock platform, a shoal on which the sea pounded. On a grim winter’s Saturday, beset by his melancholy, Suvarov took to the waves and made for the reef, half hoping he would be pounded to death against it. He would find an end in this same ocean that had ended the tsar’s navy. On the promenade above the beach, a small crowd gathered beneath umbrellas and exclaimed and pointed. He saw them when he turned to look back without regret at the shore that harboured monsters like Mrs Clancy and her daughter. Ahead, the rock platform was bludgeoned by surf and it, too, like the spectators ashore, kept disappearing beneath the swell and revealing itself again. Portuguese men-of-war wrapped purple tentacles around him, and their long strands stung him, but that merely added to his perverse glee. Off the rock platform he chose to tread water for a while, tired now and ready to consider whether he should let himself sink or return to land. He turned in the water. When the swell revealed the beach to him, he could see even more people there, intruding on him with their concern. He was sure he could see a frantic Denise in a navy-blue coat. That was a good reason to drown. But a simple desire for breath made him drag himself towards shore in the end, a failed suicide in his own mind. When he reached the sand, his body was marked with purple strands of stinger. Denise rushed to him and he tried to hobble from her rather than collapse in her arms. But he did not manage to avoid it, and the crowd rushed up to them as to a pair of lovers saved from tragedy, and she towelled him and gave him water and then was gratified to lead him home. The Sydney papers said that during the southerly gale a Russian had swum out to sea to the reef and back with a knife in his teeth, apparently to catch shellfish. In the meantime, against his best instincts and purely from pain and tiredness and despair, he said affectionate things to Denise and suddenly the widow was calling a party.

  She did not ask Suvarov before doing so, and it was not till the event had started and the first drinks were poured, with everyone being very jovial towards him, that she announced that Denise and Suvarov were engaged. The widow’s older brother made a speech in which he applauded Suvarov’s good fortune, and his pluck worthy of a Briton. A man who can escape a barbarous country like Russia and set himself to a trade in a civilised place like Sydney must feel very blessed indeed, the uncle said. He invited the guests to look at the spacious spread the widow had provided – a long chalk, he said, from the sauerkraut, offal and sawdust bread we read about Russians eating. Now perhaps with Denise you can get over your horrid past, he suggested. Directly you are married, we will help you become a proud Australian subject.

  Subject? asked Suvarov mentally. If a subject, then he chose the tsar and all his crimes over the British monarch.

  The end of the would-be engagement party in Sydney found Suvarov dazed. He doesn’t know what to say, said the speechifying uncle, laughing. And indeed Suvarov didn’t.

  A few days later, Suvarov’s misery reached its deepest point. Chinese gardeners delivered some vegetables to the house, and while separating out a hand of bananas, Denise said how much she hated the Chinese as lecherous, diseased, opium-smoking fiends. Perhaps I should be pleased you don’t hate Russians, said Suvarov. But suddenly the last atom of infatuation was gone, and for good. It was a worse destiny than accepting doused plates from her! Suvarov could foresee a lifetime of listening to narrow, uninformed complaints from this complacent woman.

  He did not sleep that night. He left the house early, as if for work. The tsarist prisons were calling to him, he thought. They seemed so much sweeter than the prison of Denise’s arms and the grasp of her unthinking mind.

  He went straight to the city on a tram. A week’s wages waited for him at the marble polishing works, but he knew that the premises would soon enough be watched by the relentless widow. Walking northwards in the city, he saw an unbelievable sight – a young man with a Russian peasant cap carrying a balalaika under his arm. Suvarov immediately began talking to him in Russian. His name was Bondar, he too possessed only small change, and he too was a homesick Russian.

  This Bondar had worked in Newcastle in the coalmines. Before that he had worked in mines around Vladivostok. He had come to Sydney looking for work, had found none, and now was returning with another purpose – to sign on a ship in Newcastle that would get him at least part of the way home.

  The two Russians camped in a clearing by a creek on their first night out of Sydney, and after a smoke Bondar reached for his balalaika and played ‘In the Mountains of Manchuria’. Then he began to sing songs he’d picked up in the mining towns of Siberia. ‘The tsar does not know how I slave and ache here in the hungry dark.’ He’d also acquired some Australian, British and American songs, and had a wonderful voice.

  Within a few days on the road, their food was gone, and Suvarov suggested Bondar might earn a bit of money playing to farmers. Bondar wandered up to a dairy farmhouse on a hill, presented himself to the farmer and sang on the verandah – ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down’. But the farmer’s muscular wife emerged onto the verandah and shouted, Get out of here with your bloody music, you bloody foreigner. You’re waking the kids.

  That night they crawled into some wagons at a railway siding – bags of cement were covered with a tarpaulin. Between the cold sky and the cold cement they had no hope of sleeping. They could hear people laughing from a hotel that stood on the dirt road by the railway track. Bondar grabbed his balalaika at once, said he was going to try it again. In his absence, Suvarov heard the noise from the pub grow louder. An hour later Bondar was back, telling Suvarov to rouse himself. He had enough money to buy them a night’s stay at the hotel and to buy railway tickets to Newcastle.

  In the beautiful harbour at Newcastle there were Danish, Italian, English, Peruvian, Norwegian and other ships. As Suvarov surveyed them with his new friend, he saw the harbour police launch returning to vessels with sailors who had deserted. The deserters had chains on their wrists. On the docks stood a shipping agent watching with satisfaction as the men were taken by force back to their ships.

  Bondar and Suvarov made their approach to the agent and were taken aboard a Chilean sailing ship. By the time they paid for their uniform and blanket, and the captain had given a quarter of their advance pay to the shipping agent, they had little left. But at least they felt they were on their way. Then a collision with a whale left them with some damage to their bows and so they had put into Brisbane. If not for that whale I would not have seen Suvarov before he went. He would be going as soon as the ship was repaired.

  He could not be dissuaded, and the next morning, while loading the refrigerated sides of beef on the north side of the river, I saw an elegant sailing ship, gleaming white and black-trimmed, under way down the mangrove reaches of Moreton Bay. I decided, If he’s going to Russia, I must go soon as well. I felt the strangeness in what had become familiar. Brisbane. I suddenly realised that Brisbane was a ridiculous choice of exile for me. The aspects of it I had liked were now repugnant, and as vacant as the sky-splitting raven-like cries of my fellow workers.

  As I fought the temptation offered by Lucia Mangraviti, I had a letter from Walter O’Sullivan, telling me that Buchan and Hope were settled in the suburb of St Kilda. He also told me that the war census bill and its gauging of all Australian human resources was the first step in a plan to begin conscripting Australians into an army that until now had been made up purely of yearning volunteers like Podnaksikov.

  O’Sullivan urged me, along with Thompson, our leader in Queensland, to write and argue about the iniquity of such a war and of forcing men to fight it.

  I would discuss all these issues with Amelia when I went to check on her and see that she was well. On a stick, looking as if she might be toppled by a mere breeze, Amelia still tried to fuss around me with tea and cake – she saw it as her duty. When
we discussed the times, the perfidy of the little Welsh prime minister of Australia, Billy Hughes, she would always tell me, I’ve had a letter from Hope.

  She must write to you every day.

  Every second day or better, replied Amelia. About eight letters a fortnight. I always believed her a wonderful girl, Mockridge and Buchan aside.

  In the balmier evenings, we would walk along Roma Street with her nurse, a very glum Englishwoman, and the trams that had brought Amelia and me together as friends went clanging past.

  I told her that in Russia, where it was the start of summer, the tsar’s soldiers held their line from the Caucasus to west of St Petersburg. But the scenes of my childhood had been overrun by the kaiser’s men. My brave sister, whom I’d adored in childhood, and her husband Trofimov, who suffered from a black lung, moved for a time to Moscow. I tried to imagine their lives in that hungry city but found I had lost the gift.

  41

  The attack on myself and Paddy Dykes was a harbinger of more numerous attacks by soldiers and thick-browed citizens on anyone who doubted the war’s wisdom. The long argument remained the same, whether in France, the Middle East or Mesopotamia. In that time there was no woman in my life except Amelia. I did not often ask her for news of Hope and my sensitivity about it all might have prevented her from telling me too much. In the meantime, Amelia survived through her gentle outrage at the politics of the time. She was appalled and invigorated when Billy Hughes left Australia to visit the Western Front and the Australian troops newly arrived in England and France. He will come back, she predicted, roaring for the conscription of every son of woman.

  Sure enough, when the renegade returned from his visit to the Western Front at the end of that failure named the Battle of the Somme, he wanted more lambs to the sacrifice. The physical standards required for the great abattoirs of the Western Front had been reduced now. Anyone would do. But on top of that, Billy Hughes wished to introduce, by referendum, conscription of any and all.

  You might ask who opposed all this – apart from Amelia and myself. An extraordinary alliance of people came into being to oppose the conscription vote. Kelly and Trades Hall, of course, and we denizens of the Russian shadows of Brisbane. But also the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, an Irishman who perhaps remembered that earlier in the year – when the Irish Nationalists rose and seized the Dublin Post Office – little mercy had been shown. Australian farmers, too, would prove to be against it. Having already given one son to the furnace they were unwilling to give a second or third who were needed for farm labour and as cherished remnants.

  So we all appeared on the town hall steps: Kelly, Amelia on a stick with the nurse holding the wheelchair handy in case, even the premier, Ryan – thanks to political pressure. My normal speech centred on a description of the regime – the regime of the tsar – for which the young Australians had been sacrificed in the Dardanelles. One could feel the air crackling about one’s ears with danger. Young men who had just joined the army stood on the edges of the crowd and hooted at my accented English. But the police – many of them Irish – were themselves not keen on conscription. Some offered tacit protection to meetings that were in theory illegal, though not so in practice now Ryan had been elected to leadership of the state. The worst that happened to me in those days was that I was jostled – a very minor price to pay for a bad accent and a fundamentally revolutionary intent.

  I followed avidly what was happening in Russia and discussed it all with Paddy Dykes in our little printery at the Stefanovs’ and with Amelia. The major campaigning season had ended in the Northern Hemisphere. Mr Hughes still despaired that not enough Australians were coming forward to immolate themselves – he said he needed sixteen and a half thousand a month for the mangle.

  As for Russia, a general named Brusilov had done good work for the tsar against the Austrians, but incompetence reigned on all other fronts. Even in the Brisbane papers there were imputations that the empress was under the evil influence of the mad monk Rasputin and that the tsar – bravely taking over command of the front – was not up to the job.

  I was reporting these matters in Izvestia when two black marias pulled up outside the Stefanov house. An army intelligence officer and senior police hammered on the door and demanded to know if there was a printing press on the premises. Mrs Stefanov began to harangue Mr Stefanov. The sky had fallen in exactly as she’d predicted. Stefanov himself called me out from the spare room and the officer presented me with a warrant empowering him to seize all printing equipment on the premises. Izvestia, he said, was closed down by order of the War Precautions Act and section 49 of the Defence Act.

  Sir, I told the army officer, this press does not belong to me – it belongs to the Russian Emigrants Union.

  Then you can tell them to forward all enquiries to the Commissioner of Police, he told me. This is an authorised seizure and there will be no compensation to anyone.

  He pointed the way to the police and the hallway filled up with them. Mrs Stefanov jabbed her hand towards the room in question, saying in a piteous voice, I know nothing. I tell my husband don’t.

  Thus, while I watched, the cellar was emptied out – newsprint, printing frames, print. Disassembled, the printing press itself was carried out of the house while I stood passive, not knowing quite what to do, feeling dismally that the past year had unmanned me.

  Best to take it calmly, Artem, Stefanov said in Russian at my elbow.

  At least I did not seem to be under arrest.

  It was a letter from Grisha Suvarov that gave me comfort. He was back in Piter after only three months’ wandering and was right into the melee. He had got a job as a metal worker in the new Lessner factory in Vyborg. It was a matter of a mere few days before he was attending a party cell. He said he was working with a handsome young man named Shliapnikov who was said to have been the lover of the beautiful but much older grand dame of Russian socialism, Alexandra Kollontai, herself in exile for the moment in the United States.

  Almost whimsically he broke into party code we had used when we were young. He and Shliapnikov were seeking active Bolsheviks ( plenty of metal frames) for the party ( the floor of the factory). Shliapnikov and he had visited – this created a pang of literary envy in me – the apartment of the great Maxim Gorki himself, supreme Russian writer and generous soul, who lived in Kronversky Prospekt across from the Neva in the fashionable Petrograd district. Gorki let the party use his apartment – for contacts, exchange of information, meetings. It was a wonderful act of open-handedness and foresight by a genius. The great writer, said Suvarov, feared what was happening to his country, both the country of the trenches, where human flesh and blood had become the one amalgam with snow and mud, and in the cities. That winter (sweltering summer in Brisbane), Gorki bemoaned the savage cold, the worst of the war so far, the respectable women begging or acting as prostitutes on the street, the tearing down of fences and even of houses for firewood, the shuffling armies of jaundiced child prostitutes. He told Suvarov about going to one of the little girls and giving her a bundle of money to enable her to escape, but a grubby man came up to him and said, Do you want to get her killed? The others will kill her for that! So gestures of generosity were no good any more.

  What was obvious from the letter was that despite all the misery and challenge of the times, Suvarov was happy.

  Paddy and I translated this letter, I putting it into immigrant English, he rewriting it in the English of the Australian Worker, where it was published.

  Paddy Dykes had gone away for a time to write about a failed strike in Broken Hill, but now returned to Brisbane as fast as he could, as if it were the Paris of 1789. It’s like you told me, Tom, he said once, and I did not remember having told him this at all before. It’s the railways that’re the key. Silver’s silver, and wheat’s wheat and beef’s beef, but they only stay put if the railways go out on strike. For a national all-out blue, to put a government in its place, it’s the railways.

  Without a newspa
per to edit and print I spent more time still at Amelia’s as the summer passed. She was too ill to be out at night in 1916 when the referendum result was announced outside the offices of the Telegraph and the movement to bring in conscription was defeated. There was a great meeting at the town hall where girls from the unions handed out red feathers, to counter the white ones that women gave out to men who weren’t in uniform.

  Only Paddy Dykes, taking notes, looked melancholy. Do they think the bastard won’t try again? he asked. Australia’s stuffed, rooted, done for.

  I had to tell Amelia all about the joyful aspects of this scene as she sat so shrunken in a chair that it seemed the thing was devouring her. In the torrid summer days, when Hughes had announced a second conscription vote, a waxy gloss of sweat would appear on her face as she sat on her verandah, yet she survived to be invigorated by the events of late summer, and news from Russia.

  42

  Though I had never been to Piter I could see these things as if on a film in the flickering pictures. Workers walking from Vyborg – stark figures, angry and black against the frozen river, nearing the centre of St Petersburg, shouting, Bread! and Down with the tsar! It was 1905 again. Cossacks not wanting in their hearts to attack them, riding up to them as if to terrify them, then backing away. On the famous Nevsky Prospekt, a young girl with apple cheeks approaching the Cossacks with a bouquet of red roses. The Cossack officer taking them, and peace being thus established. Soldiers leaving their lines to join the people, and when the crowd was fired on, falling to bleed in the snow. Veterans marching in the streets, roaring, They are shooting our mothers and fathers! NCOs of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the Lithuanian Regiment, the Finland Regiment all joining in the uprising and shooting officers who tried to stop them. Workers and soldiers capturing the arsenal, fitting themselves out with rifles and pistols, taking over the ordnance depot where the cannons were, as well as occupying the St Petersburg railway stations.