The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

Another furious noise and a cannonade arched over the sky. The column didn’t hesitate but kept steadily on.

  Artem – in his army overcoat and boots – came out of the building seconds after them. It took Suvarov and me a few seconds to notice him there. Tired out he was still smiling. I’d never seen such a man for smiling – maybe the only one in the whole damn Smolny.

  Ah, he said, it’s a great thing to be everyone’s friend.

  It’s a gift you’ve got, said Suvarov. Can you imagine Trotsky being liked all the time? And drinking tea with grubby old Antonov-O?

  Trotsky’s military council are too busy here, he told us. They asked me to go down and see why the place isn’t ours yet.

  The place? Suvarov asked.

  The place! said Artem.

  Now? I asked.

  Yes, said Artem. Coming?

  But you don’t have a rifle, said Suvarov.

  Paddy will protect me.

  Yeah, I said. Dead-eye Dykes.

  I was close to trembling with exhilaration about this excursion with Artem. Back to the palace. The biggest excursion in the world. I didn’t give a brass farthing for whether life went beyond that or just closed down around me. As long as I went to the Winter Palace with Artem.

  Okay Paddy, said Suvarov, let’s show Artem the ropes. Where will we find a truck or something like it?

  It was easy to ask but there wasn’t one waiting in front of the gates. The armoured cars were all gone too – on errands and taking the city over and maybe assaulting the palace. The result was we had to set out on foot behind the procession of worthy souls. We heard rifle fire – way off and like the noise of meat on a spit. But there was no sound of big guns.

  We hadn’t gone far when we met a truck coming from a side street and loaded with leaflets printed in the Smolny cellar. Artem and Suvarov and I were permitted to climb aboard.

  Our truck honked as we drove past the column. Dignified-looking men in frock coats were determined to be brave. The women seemed to show their courage by buttoning up their capes and hugging them around them. From our truck the soldiers threw out leaflets to the marchers. We clutched at a few ourselves – for history’s sake. The leaflets were a bit premature: Citizens, the provisional government is deposed. State power has passed into the hands of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.

  Some of the marchers balled the leaflets up in their fists without reading them and threw them back at the truck.

  There were a lot of people along the Prospekt – they had come out of their houses and cellars and were peering in the direction of the rifle fire and wondering. As we passed they picked up the thrown leaflets too and read them.

  We got as far as the place where the canal flowed under the Nevsky Prospekt and where the roadblock with even more parked and abandoned vehicles was still in place. So we jumped down from the back of the truck. But as it turned out the self-sacrifice squad were turned back by the laughter and mockery of ordinary soldiers and sailors and sailors’ girls. One of the gentlemen exhorted his fellow marchers to retreat.

  We were let through and arrived trotting beside a Red battery near the old staff building. The guns weren’t firing at all. When Artem asked them why, they said it was because our troops had gone in and – the gunners hoped – were doing well enough as it was. We could hear and smell plenty of small-arms fire echoing within the palace. One gunner told Suvarov that the infantry were taking it room by room – an idea that seemed very dramatic. Were the Junkers really fighting to the death after all?

  The three of us followed a squad of Red Guards who were suddenly running across the square with their boots clattering. I could see as we got closer that some captured and fearful Junkers and sobbing Death Battalion women were being brought out of the building with their hands up. We went on inside to the entry hall that had taken my breath away that afternoon, and where the noise of rifle fire from the corridors of the building was setting off deafening echoes. We made for the stairs and all at once met soldiers coming down them carrying rolled up tapestries – one soldier to each end. Another man was carrying a big ornamental German vase. While fighting continued somewhere behind them! Artem held up his hand and stopped the looters. Didn’t they understand, he asked them, that all this belonged to the people now and they were disgracing the people and themselves?

  The soldiers looked both shamefaced and cranky. But they obediently put everything they had down on the stairs. At the top of the stairs and in the corridor beyond Artem had to talk to other men hoisting Meissen vases, ormolu clocks, some pieces of tapestry ripped out by bayonet, a Persian mat, and an ornamental pair of binoculars.

  Fresh Red Guards and soldiers came up the stairs behind us and down the corridor. They were rushing past us to get into the fight still going on in the back of the palace. We quickened our step. Part way along the corridor we saw another line of Death Battalion girls being brought down the marble stairs from the second floor under guard. Their escorts were mocking them and threatening of course to root them. But Artem called the soldiers to order. The women soldiers were pathetic to look at – just girls really. Some of them wept like the women we’d seen being led away outside. When they had joined their legion they’d pledged to die for the tsar. But they had properly chosen not to die for that little show-pony Kerensky.

  Be of good heart, sisters! Artem told them. Suvarov called, Now you can fight for the people!

  Well, said Artem when they were gone down the corridor towards the front steps. Things seem to be moving along.

  We heard further footsteps descending the marble stairs. A bunch of Red Guards in bits and pieces of civilian and military clothes were bringing more prisoners down the stairs. The leading guard yelled, Pozhaluista, tovarishchi! Get out of the way, comrades! Behind him came a number of gentlemen who looked tired and pale but well dressed. I recognised at once the frock-coated Doctor Kishkin – a Cadet. I’d seen his picture in magazines. After him came Tereshchenko. Tereshchenko was a youngish fellow – about five or six years younger than me – and he let his cold eye fall over the three of us. He seemed less scared than the doctor but was the most hated by soldiers because he had tried to bring back execution for disobedience to officers. He had also been one of those they called the Freemasons – they plotted the February revolution inside the lodges the way the French had with theirs. Now he was on his way into oblivion. This was the cabinet of the provisional government – powerless now – being marched downstairs by three working men with rifles. The provisional government really was falling – like the archangels God threw out of heaven.

  Tereshchenko saw Artem. Monsieur Samsurov, he said coolly.

  Artem nodded. Comrade Tereshchenko, he said.

  He asked Tereshchenko where Kerensky was.

  Tereshchenko cried, At the gates of Petrograd – with a new army!

  When these prisoners had passed Artem decided we’d climb to the next floor. From the marble corridor up there we could see an opened door. We walked in and I was surprised to see Reed and an American woman-friend of his – as young as he was and pretty and full of energy. They were wandering around the cabinet table looking at the ministers’ notepads.

  Reed called to us. Hello, gentlemen. Hello, Australia. Look, they didn’t know what to do next. They were doodling.

  He held up a page on which one of the ministers – instead of writing an edict – had drawn a lamppost.

  Why not? asked Artem. Kerensky’s abandoned them.

  A large group of Red Guards flooded into the room and tried to grab Reed and his woman-friend – presuming they were well enough dressed to have something to do with the Provisional Government. Artem ordered the guards to leave them alone. Foreign comrades, he said. He pointed to me. Like Mr Dykes, he told them and grinned at me. A huge joke! After all – soon he’d be back at the Smolny with the best of news.

  It was all over on that floor. But there was still firing elsewhere. As we came down the stairs again we had no way of kno
wing then that that was about the time the Red Guards started looting the wine cellars and drinking up vintages beyond their maddest dreams. We could hear soldiers still exchanging shots at the back of the building. Someone must have been resisting! Surely the shots weren’t executions.

  Suvarov suggested we head through the room he and I had been in that afternoon. As we reached the corridor we found a number of unarmed Junkers – pale-faced and hatless – under the guard of two sailors. Some looked sullen. A few of them trembled and were tearstreaked. The Red Guards were yelling threats of execution.

  It was Suvarov who stepped up this time – taking Artem’s cue – and told the Junkers he realised they’d been forced into defending the place. Now they could fight on the side that was naturally theirs. After this same speech Artem had given the women prisoners the Red Guards began escorting the Junkers downstairs. No executions, called Artem.

  I thought innocently what a model revolution this was – passion and no slaughter.

  We strode into the big room with the paintings of Russian victory set high up on the walls. In the windows the machine-guns we’d seen that afternoon stood still unmanned and still pointing out into the square. We went up to look at them for a second and felt them and found them cool to the touch. These weren’t fired much, said Suvarov.

  A good thing, said Artem.

  Abandoned rifles and rubbish and strewn blankets littered the floor of the big chamber. A door stood open at the far end of the room and we could hear a shot or two coming from somewhere close by. There were some voices and the sound of boots. Then silence. The place was being converted. From a place of power to a museum. We crossed the floor littered with dropped rifles and rubbish and were ready to go through into that further corridor but we heard before we were even at the door the sudden screams of a woman. Then the screaming gave way to a howl of pain. We emerged into the corridor to find the bloodied bodies of two Junkers and, a few yards further along, someone in a frock coat with his black and grey striped trousers pulled down, grinding into a wailing girl of the Death Battalion. She wailed and had her hand on his jaw pushing it up. One of her fingers fell into the man’s mouth and he bit it and she screamed piercingly.

  The man was Slatkin.

  25

  My first thoughts – if you could call them thoughts – are shameful to admit. They are a confession of what war and conflict can call forth in men who’ve always fancied they’re decent fellows. I hadn’t felt any rage about the Death Battalion women on the stairs. But on seeing Slatkin – instead of being shocked – I thought yes, this is a girl who’d chosen to serve the tsar until death. Why shouldn’t the bitch be split open and torn apart and punished?

  The shock of that idea stained everything. It was one of those things that if you thought them once they could poison a lifetime. But then – the next second – the object of my anger became Slatkin. He went on struggling with the girl. It seemed he hadn’t noticed us. A tapestry and a Meissen vase were damn all compared to this. Why would he shame the revolution after all he’d done: the raids on arms depots and the planning with the sailors. The wealth Vladimir Ilich had let him enjoy? And on the rim of a new world. Why would he betray us and the woman by hauling her army pants down around her boots and exposing her to his anger and his punishment like that?

  I could see Artem was for once flabbergasted. Suvarov yelled, S latkin, stop it for Christ’s sake!

  My reaction was more primitive. I went to Slatkin and kicked him full-force in the ribs. He fell off the girl. One of his arms was folded into his torso like a broken wing and he began cursing me in his mother tongue. Artem and I moved in and hauled him upright with his pants around his knees still.

  Slatkin, Slatkin, said Artem as a reproach. Slatkin’s prick was still upright but he didn’t blush about that and he was telling us he’d kill us. Artem reached down to the girl – her hair was dark and her face an oval of fright and she trembled and thought we were part of her punishment too. Artem reached down and – as she yelped in terror again – began pulling up the army pants she should never have been let wear. If he hadn’t been so quick about it I would have said he’d done it tenderly. His face was scarlet as if he was the criminal. Letting go of the girl, he yelled something angry at Slatkin. Slatkin didn’t bother fixing his own dress up. I heard Suvarov whistle and turned and saw Slatkin had pulled a Mauser from a holster strapped near his armpit. He swung its elegant black barrel between all three of us.

  Artem said, Stop it, Konya.

  I’d never known that was Slatkin’s pet name. Konya Slatkin was certainly selecting who to shoot and I felt the old anger rising in me at being a target in the first place and knew I’d charge at him soon – regardless. The girl saw the gun and was screaming anew– certain she would be the chief target. But it didn’t seem so. It was between me and Suvarov that Slatkin swung the gun. He had decided not to kill his old friend Artem but he hadn’t given up the idea of shooting one of us. Suvarov wisely reached out and held the thin girl with the oval face by the wrist – an instinct told us both that if she fled he would then have certainly turned the gun on her.

  I was saved from making a mad run at him by feeling on my shoulder the weight of my now-familiar rifle. For the first time I unshouldered it to point it at another human – Slatkin. I moved the safety lever and worked the bolt while I yelled at him. I called him obscene names – a fucker, a rootjockey, a sodding disgrace. Suvarov– while hanging on to the girl with one hand – had his other one out while he pleaded in Russian. Artem said, Slatkin, men and women were killed taking this palace. Will you disgrace them?

  Nothing changed. Slatkin’s pants still had him hobbled and he still looked like a crime against heaven. I had raised my rifle and had him in my sights even while he had the little black bore of the Mauser pointed at me. Then he simply swung the Mauser to the girl and shot her in the head. The bullet and the sound both flew off the walls of the corridor.

  Artem rushed to Slatkin and restrained him. And Suvarov came to restrain me from shooting Slatkin. Then the three of us – me still holding my rifle – knelt beside the girl whose eyes were still half-open. Her lips made a hissing sound – lower than a hiss though – a whisper without words. I started crying like a kid because I could see a light – already dim in her eyes – going dimmer still and dwindling away to the very limits of dimness. Piss stained her pants, poor thing.

  I got up again and Artem – who’d once insisted I select one – now reached out to take my rifle from me. But I clung on. Slatkin had dressed again and had a look on his face that showed you he’d already begun to make excuses for what he’d done. I came raging in at him and smashed him in his uninjured side with the butt of the thing. The Mauser flew from his hand and fired when it hit the marble floor. Where the shot went none of us knew. It harmed none of us and it was the last poisonous shot of the capture of the palace.

  I retreated from Slatkin and picked the Mauser up and made a gift of it to Suvarov who was still kneeling beside the girl as if he thought she could be revived.

  Suvarov pocketed it and stood and went either to hit or help Slatkin. But in his pain Slatkin refused all friendly hands. He glowered over his shoulder at me.

  Bugger you! I yelled.

  I had probably made an enemy for life. I hoped so. He’d besmirched everything. He had soiled me with all the rest. The bastard! At the highest point of fraternity – when the world had changed – I had found out too much about the beast inside me, the one I had rushed to wall up but had never known was there until now. And the beast in this old campaigner Slatkin.

  Artem went to Slatkin who was crouched from my assaults. He spoke almost gently to him.

  Get a blanket from in there. He pointed towards the door of the great hall we’d been in. And then cover her, he said.

  Slatkin stood crookedly and went on buttoning his jacket. Get one of your lackeys to cover her, he said.

  No, Artem roared. No. You! He pointed again to the big ballroom. If not
, he said, I’ll make you carry her across the square.

  Slatkin slunk off in a way I wouldn’t have said was possible for the man who raided the Kharkov arms depot – though it was credible in a man whose ribs had been assaulted. Soon he was back with a blanket and threw it slapdash over the girl so Suvarov had to finish the job. I noticed how bony the girl’s wrist was and how small her hand – the only bits Suvarov didn’t cover. A few tears stung my eyes. I thought that something as vague as what had brought me to Russia had driven her into the Shock Battalions of Death.

  When I looked up again Slatkin stood upright in spite of his pain and pointed a finger at me. It was meant to be a threat. Then he began arguing with Artem in Russian. But I could guess what he was saying. We’re all men together. These things come over a fellow. The silly bitch provoked me. Artem shook his head but not in the way I would have wanted – not like someone casting Slatkin off forever.

  We’ll go, Artem said.

  It was one o’clock before we came down the steps to the massive entrance hall of the captured Winter Palace. Red Guards sat on the marble drinking the tsar’s wine. Other men and women were reeling round and raising the bottles they’d captured so easily. One of them yelled, Rasputin’s altar wine! and then poured the stuff half down his jacket and half into his mouth. They knew by now we had the palace and the main blood they were spilling was the blood of the vine.

  Out in the square there were lumps of plaster in the square fallen from high above where a shell had dislodged it. Apart from that the building looked the same as it had that afternoon. But now, as Suvarov said, it was under new ownership.

  We got a lift back to the Smolny in a truck. This time we were not exhilarated. Slatkin also sat with us. Sometimes he talked in Russian to Suvarov and Artem and sometimes turned hard eyes and hardened mouth at me as if I were the bloody miscreant.

  We’ll see who comes out of this standing, I wanted to tell him. But it would have been useless. I decided the bastard would have enjoyed robbing banks whether asked to by the party or not.