The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  From the railway barracks – where we were fed soup and rye bread – we were taken that evening out into the streets past grand stone buildings and decrepit wooden houses to the municipal offices, a building like so many Russian buildings that tried to look French. Here the Vladivostok Soviet of Workers and Soldiers met. There was a stove giving off heat in the middle of the hall – even in June – and I was too close to it not to sweat buckets. Some hundreds of people gradually gathered. But with the warmth I drowsed off among the speechifying of the Russian workers, and I missed half of Artem’s speech, in which I believe he said that the thousands of people the tsar had driven out were returning from over the seas to work in the new republic.

  At the end of Artem’s speech, an executive member of the soviet presented Artem with a signed pass that would allow us to travel on the Eastern Railway free of charge. So the next day we got on a real bone-rattler train and travelled in fair comfort on black padded seats. At every railway works and junction they had got word Artem was coming and we were treated to the hospitality of the rail crews. We got to the big town of Khabarovsk, and the same happened there. Artem told me we were only a walk away from the Manchurian b order. But why would a person go there now? A lot had though, in the tsar’s day.

  When I see these towns again, Artem told me, I get the idea I’m still on the run.

  Even in Khabarovsk our journey was just starting. I began to get depressed, thinking we’d be on trains or waiting for them for a year, but I didn’t say anything to put a dent in Artem’s spirits. Our next train was ready to steam due west at last and this time we were put in a red velvet first-class compartment – welcome because we could sleep. The one businessman who also sat in the compartment read his newspaper and tried to ignore us. And so we went on via fir forests and the frozen swamps they call the taiga and across great open plains and with a view of mountains streaked with snow. We stopped at a medium-sized town, and a peasant even more husky than Artem entered the compartment. He was large and strong but greeted us in a quiet voice. The Russian good morning, or whatever he said, sounded endless to me – lots of vowels in there. He smelled of sweat and though he had a good smock, his shoes were made of bast fibre, a sort of straw stuck together with pressure. He quickly latched on to the burzhooi – the middle-class man – hiding behind his paper and deliberately walked across to him, hauled the paper down, and said in a basso voice what was probably, Good morning, comrade. Then he sat down. As the train left he pulled out a knife and began to cut the velvet backing out of a vacant seat. He called something friendly to Artem as he did it. Artem began to laugh.

  He wants it to make shoes, Artem told me. He says red velvet’ll look good in the mud.

  Artem thought a while, with the smile dying on his lips. Then he said, There’s a time for ripping out velvet and a time to stop. This is a time to rip.

  The peasant nodded to us as if he understood Artem, folded the velvet on his lap and began to sleep noisily. The gentleman traveller sighed to whatever gods were still on his side.

  We’d see a lot of scenes like that as we crossed Siberia and southern Russia on our journey to Chelyabinsk. Locomotives were changed over but we stayed with our plush compartment because, said Artem, we were going further than anyone and would need the rest it provided.

  Sometimes soldiers with a bugger-you attitude came into our compartment and sat down and frequently Artem got into conversation with them and they rumbled away about hopeless campaigns and idiot generals and how in the end they had walked home to see to the family farm or visit girlfriends or both. Why they were travelling west again now I didn’t quite understand. Maybe they were going to make trouble in Moscow or Petrograd. As in Vladivostok, some of these men were stocky members of the Asiatic tribes – the children of Kublai Khan, said Artem.

  We made occasional excursions to the harsh wooden third-class carriages where men in caps and smocks and women in shawls were jolted around by every fault of the track. Grain was scarce, they told him. Requisitioners from the army and the government came round to grab the harvest. The cities must be very hungry, one woman said. Some told us how the landlords’ barns had been burned – with the horses blindfolded and led out by young men and returned peasant soldiers. All the women we met in these carriages were like those we passed in towns along the way – those who stopped in their tracks, looking up and frowning at the passing trains from under the shadow of their shawls. And the men in the streets too in their black or red or grey smocks and hats and shoes made out of straw.

  We would get out at watering places to wash ourselves at the pump. Bare-chested men crowded around, waiting to throw water over their stale bodies.

  It took only twelve days even with some waiting in sidings to get to Chelyabinsk, two-thirds of the way, where our train with the velvet seats terminated. Now everyone Artem met told him what a quick trip we’d had. They said sometimes soldiers formed gangs, lived in camps in the forests and raided and delayed trains. But it hadn’t happened to us.

  Like Omsk – a town we’d already been through – Chelyabinsk was a real city. Rolling in towards the main station I could see great homes of white and reddish stone and then at the station itself soldiers begging, a lot of them on crutches or missing a limb. The Red Guards paraded around in their bits of uniform, and as we left the train I saw men who looked like bandits, in round hats and tight-waisted coats decorated with storage holes for bullets and a dagger at the waist. These coats were called dokhas, and were favoured by men from Georgia. In the station lobby you could buy postcards of Kerensky and other leaders inspecting troops in grand opera uniforms.

  Artem reacted to the postcards with rare bile. Look at the pompous bugger, he said. His father was an honest headmaster and taught Vladimir Ilich. Kerensky must get all this rubbish of his – wanting to fight on in the war and so on – from his mother.

  There was to be a day’s delay before we could catch the train north-west. We went to an unpainted cranky-looking teahouse. As we walked, Artem relished the smell of coal and metal in the air. He was used to this sort of city.

  That night we were guests of a Bolshevik journalist and his young wife – their address had been given to us by a Bolshevik engine driver in Omsk. The journalist had been shot through a lung serving under General Brusilov in 1915 and a sort of shade of future widowhood hung over the young wife and gave her face a bruised look.

  And again I was like the unwitting child in this group. The couple sat at this dinner table with Artem and me over a plain meal of cabbage soup with a bit of onion and horsemeat and talked by the hour. I had had my first encounter with horsemeat when I ate it one night from a café near a railway station in one of the towns along our way. It tasted strange enough but I was eating it in such good company it didn’t matter.

  Artem was – as always – a great talker – though he wasn’t alone. The whole country seemed to me to be yapping and arguing. And because I didn’t really know what they were saying, everything I heard sounded just as important as the last thing.

  The journalist with the bad lung made his wife cry by saying he wouldn’t end up seeing what became of it all – of this wild and woolly time. But I got a sense that to them everything – absolutely everything – seemed to be just around the corner. These were people with a light inside them.

  Before we went to sleep in the room that we shared Artem and I talked. Artem’s conversation was all about the mess the railway system was in. He had an old railway man’s eye for that sort of thing. Should the trains serve the army? Or should they take food to Petrograd and Moscow? And if they did that, how did you stop speculators getting hold of it?

  The next morning the young journalist – with a lot of ceremony – presented a telegram to Artem. Apparently it was from the party leadership. Even though we had been headed for Moscow and Petrograd, this telegram instructed him to go to Kharkov and the coalmines of the Don. That’s where he was to get
going – in country he knew.

  That day I wrote a report of what I’d seen for the Australian Worker and left it with the journalist’s wife for posting. Soon we were rolling along on wooden seats among a big crowd of peasants and mine workers across the Don basin. There were lots of coal towns and they looked grim. Smoke blocked the sky and the slag heaps were higher than mountains and spread their black grit over everything. But it was possible now to believe that the coal was the people’s coal. No one dared to say anything different these days.

  Artem assured me we were near the Black Sea and all its beauty spots, but it was hard to believe. The grass was green on the hillsides though. On granite knolls on top of green mountains, you’d see a monastery now and then. When big Artem smiled across at me it was because it was all familiar to him. Even the slag heaps had their poetry to him. He was really coming home – he would even see his sister Trofimova who lived in a town on the railway line to Kharkov.

  2

  We got off the train at a mining town called Krasnopolovka and climbed down to its flat station. There were flowerbeds some railway guard was tending in spite of the times – when nobody had any time for flowers except peasant wives and a few determined fellows. And a big-boned woman with a pleasant face was waiting there – a telegram from her brother had told her when we were due. What was I to call her? I asked Artem. He told me to call his sister Evgenia Alexandrovna until I got to know her. Then I could call her Zhenya or else Trofimova. There would come some point, he told me, when she would look at me with the light of affectionate friendship in her eye and then it would be time to call her Zhenya, her short name.

  Trofimova was a few years older than Artem, but she had the same broad face and strong features. They kissed each other three times. Then I was introduced, and Artem turned to me. When Zhenya first married Trofimov, he said, I missed her so badly I used to catch empty coal trucks all the way down to Kresnopalovka to visit her.

  What struck me from the start was her great good humour. She and her brother laughed all the way. And you could see Artem’s style of liveliness in her face.

  Trofimova had brought a dray – a borrowed one – to the station and we threw our luggage – my kitbag and his suitcase – in the back and she drove us through dreary streets, past tiny little workers’ terraces as cramped as the corrugated-iron terraces of Broken Hill but here made of blackened stone and brick. On the edge of town the houses were wooden and had gardens. Artem’s sister and her husband lived in one of these.

  Artem yelled as we drew up, Are you in there, Trofimov? His sister – with her hands still on the reins – gave him a friendly nudge. She got down, took the horse out of the traces, and with the reins in the grip of her large hands led it to its shed at the back of the house.

  Even though it was early summer the night was beginning to get cold. Inside the house there was a smell of linctus and a ceramic stove in the middle of the room was putting out heat. A thin man – barely older than me but hollowed out in the face – struggled up from the stove’s surrounding bench and coughed and greeted Artem. They hugged and kissed. I recognised that cough, I’d heard it in other places. Silicosis. Trofimova signalled us all to sit down quickly at the table. The brother and sister talked like mad. Trofimov would prepare his lips as though he were about to say something and they would pause. But he never managed it. There was never any doubt about Artem’s sister’s power to speak. She talked like the clappers – her eyes and her auburn hair appeared just about ready to burst into flames. I thought, What a family!

  Trofimova was telling stories – about her brother, how clever he was. He read genuine books from the time he was eleven; he sang like an angel and he played the clarinet in the institute band.

  Suddenly Trofimov got talking. The brother and sister turned to him straight away. All the fun went out of them but not all the interest. I could tell he was talking politics.

  He had served for a time in the army in 1915 but had been pulled out of the ranks when his disease became apparent. That he was called up at all showed you how desperate they were, Artem said later. But sleeping in wet or icy bivouacs had hastened his illness along.

  As Trofimov spoke he gestured and scowled like an actor. I still find it amazing how much of a person’s politics you can pick up when listening to a language you don’t understand just by observing gestures and faces. What is emphasised. The sudden anger. It makes me think that behind the different languages ideas hang in the air as a kind of common language without words – and that we all understand it. By the time I left the Trofimovs’ I had a pretty good idea of what was going on – Artem had explained the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament in Kiev making a bid for Ukrainian independence from Greater Russia. The Rada was full of soft-headed make-believe socialists, he said. And all this was distressing to Trofimov, who though living in the Ukraine was a Great Russian through and through.

  Next morning we were due to catch the train to Kharkov itself, the big smoke. Artem’s sister came to the station to wave us off. She showed no embarrassment or regret at all about what had occurred during the night.

  She had given Artem his old room and sent me to sleep in a hut in the garden. At three o’clock or so I was awoken by Evgenia Alexandrovna in a big white nightgown levering herself into my bed, uttering a few soft sentences to me as if we’d been married for a long time and she was attending to some needs I didn’t even know I had. Then she’d patted my face and was gone. It was a revelation to me but I couldn’t help thinking it must have been a dream – though not one I could tell Artem about.

  But at the railway station saying goodbye to Trofimova. Her brisk tender way bowled me over – the lack of words let alone of any blame. I wish I could say I felt guilty for Trofimov. But I didn’t. I had always avoided the idea of marriage because in my lifetime and experience it always led to the hollowing out and ruin of the girls who went in for it. I had a fear of making a girl old before her time – that’s what happened to miners’ wives. But I’d never met anyone like Trofimova before – someone who couldn’t be undermined or embarrassed by whatever she’d said and done or by whatever I’d done.

  I believed then I’d found a woman. Or the other way round.

  3

  The railway station at Kharkov was another cathedral of steam, slung between two stone towers. We could see it ahead of us as we were coming over the Don railway bridge. When we pulled in we got down with our belongings in a suitcase and an army kitbag and were bowled over – I was anyway – to see the Railway Workers’ Union brass band playing in Artem’s honour at the ticket gate. Our suits were greasy and we carried our belongings in knocked-about luggage, but we – or at least Artem – were like arriving princes. There were a number of people standing there with the band – members of the town soviet, some of them in the grey uniforms in which they had fought the war, some educated workers, young women of good families in summer dresses and light coats of blue and yellow, and men with trimmed beards, burzhooi, men who looked as if they owned an engineering plant or were doctors or lawyers – and they all applauded Artem.

  After he’d shaken each of their hands, I was presented to them. They clapped and grinned as if I deserved it for being an Australian – something exotic, a living sample of the working class from the other end of the world! Roll up, roll up and don’t trip over the tent peg! In my poor suit I was the proof of international fraternity.

  One man in the welcoming party – boasting a tailor-made suit and a pomaded moustache – led us past the band to a large car into which we and a number of the welcoming committee all squeezed, including a grizzled soldier and two of the young women. This impressive-looking man introduced himself as Izaak Abramovich Federev. He was a lawyer, he said. A uniformed chauffeur held the door for us, and a pale, very good-looking blonde girl in a white dress and sky-blue jacket sat on one side of Tom, and the burzhooi in his frock coat sat on the other. The handsome girl’s sister sat across from them and so did I, on a sort of dickie s
eat with my back to the driver. We drove through the town, down long avenues of apartment buildings that like the posher buildings in towns further east looked to me exactly like pictures I’d seen of Paris. Occasionally the big sweaty soldier added a few words to the conversation and his voice was as deep as a cave. Yes, there was stale sweat – some of it my own – in that big automobile. But it was like an argument in itself. The well-bred girls did not wrinkle their noses.

  In Australia I’d never got anywhere near a car like this one. It was far bigger than Hope Mockridge’s. I was excited both by its engineering and by the closeness of us all. All brothers and sisters – everyone from the man who owned the car to the soldier to the two girls with their knees together so as not to take up the room of the arriving heroes. The sun shone on the finest city I had ever seen. But there were also street meetings being held on corners – soldiers and deputies or others standing under red banners and haranguing the crowds. It was a season in which nearly everyone was claiming to be the true Reds. And on a closer look some of the buildings were gutted and rags of blackened curtain blew in the warm breeze from the east. Soldiers kept guard outside a handsome villa whose door stood wide open. The furniture inside had probably been taken away by people and the liquor from the cellar gone to satisfy the thirst of soldiers. We rolled past a great green sunny space and the man in the frock coat– Federev – leaned over and said in accented English: The city soviet have named this Freedom Square. It is the biggest square in Greater Russia. Bigger than the Kremlin itself.

  We arrived at a grand building and Federev invited us to his apartment on the fourth floor.

  We took a lift to his flat – a glorious place with a main room big as a ballroom. An old woman served tea and small cakes and after that the others left in small groups. When they were all gone, Federev advised us to rest and refresh ourselves in the bedrooms he assigned us and promised to take us for a walk in Freedom Square later in the afternoon. Before going into our separate rooms Artem and I had a little chat in the corridor.