The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  With tongs, Amelia put two sandwiches on my plate and a healthy slice of fruitcake. Oh, she then said, scraping her chair backwards rapidly. I meant also to fetch my atlas. If you don’t mind, Tom – if it involves no personal pain to you, of course – Hope and I would dearly love you to point out where you come from in Russia.

  It won’t cause me any pain, I assured her, laughing and partly lying as well.

  She excused herself and vanished again from the room.

  When she was gone, Hope laughed, a first full-throated laugh.

  She blames me for being curious about Russia. But she’s the one who’s curious. Mind you, she knows Russian history...

  Amelia was back with the large volume, which looked heavy enough to snap her thin wrists. Please, she said, pour yourself some whisky, Tom.

  I nearly did so, to celebrate the headiness of this teatime with Hope, but all my training went against it. The men who drank were the ones most often caught, most often subverted.

  Thank you, Mrs Pethick ... Amelia. But I am not a drinker.

  Admirable, said Amelia. You, Hope?

  Hope was already pouring herself a tumbler, as frankly as a man would.

  Amelia was leafing through the enormous atlas.

  Mr Samsurov ... Tom ... while I was making tea, did my young friend Hope say anything to you about my prosecution file?

  No, I said. But whoever took it did a brave thing.

  Or perhaps the public prosecutor is simply inefficient, Hope suggested.

  I hope you didn’t do it, my dear, Amelia told Hope, because it was too great a risk. And anyhow, I was rather looking forward to pleading guilty to the impaling of Deputy Commissioner Cahill with a hatpin. I am a soldier at heart. She laughed at her own idea.

  Then whoever took the file, said Hope, has really spoiled your fun, haven’t they, Amelia?

  They rather have, Amelia agreed, and winked at me, but did not sit until she’d opened the page to a splendid map of Russia. She placed it in front of me. My finger strayed along the north-eastern Ukrainian– Russian border, and I read the transliterated names of rivers and towns. I found the place.

  I was born here, I told them, near the Ukrainian border. My village was near this place, Yelets. Yes, Glebovo. There. Well, I’m surprised we are important enough for an atlas of the world! My mother was Ukrainian but of Russian stock. My mother’s family were part of the plantation of Russian people in Ukraine.

  A garden of people, I thought. Some of them nettles and weeds, but like many such plants, tall – that couldn’t be denied. It was a long time since I’d spoken the name of Glebovo.

  But I kept on prattling away. I think my temperament is like my mother’s and grandmother’s, I announced. I remembered for a second Maxim Gorki’s love for his grandmother.

  My father was a decent fellow, I told them. But music and drink consoled him for the state of the world.

  I paused. Then on I went. Pulling the clots of information up out of a deep vein.

  It is black soil around there, I told them. Like some of the Darling Downs.

  All at once I was captured by an image of my young parents, riding in a cart to the Yelets monastery, to the Church of the Assumption, to have their wedding blessed. It was a blessing that left them poorer. I was born at the right time, though, a time when the new system of schooling had arrived. Without my letters, I’m sure I could have been the biggest drunk, the worst brute.

  In case they imagined a perfect place, I went on, Sadly, the air is full of the smell of tanneries down by the river. Later, the technical school I went to was here, see. Ekaterinoslav. South of Kharkov. Then the technical university. In Moscow.

  I noticed that Moscow lay like a gem of red and black in the map’s middle. If I was for the moment vainglorious in my reminiscences in front of Hope and Amelia, a stab of the old anguish came back soon enough. Uncertainty, a savage grandfather. Arrest.

  Amelia coughed as if she understood. Astonishing what a map can conjure up, she said. Old places and old feelings.

  Before I gave the atlas back to Amelia, I looked eastward and let my finger stray to Perm and all the railways intersecting there in the foothills of the Urals, and the railway crossing over the mountains and away, now a single isolated black line across reaches of birch forest and taiga to exile on the Aldan and Zeya rivers, where I began my interminable walk out to the railway at Blagoveshchensk near Manchuria, and then on to the Pacific shore. I felt a strange, crusty weariness overcome me again – I had forgotten that during my Brisbane time. Jail can bring about a kind of mental exhaustion. Then escape acts as a stimulant but is hard on the spirit as well. I could name three members of the Russian Workers Union who did not recover from the walk out of Siberia. One was a Socialist Revolutionary who hanged himself from a hardwood beam in Toowong. Another was a hopeless drunk sometimes seen raving on street corners in Brisbane. The third, Menschkin, was arrested in Brisbane for stealing from shops – kleptomania. The police overlooked his crime and now everyone knew he reported to them weekly on the activities of Queensland’s Russians. Kleptomania is, of course, a prison habit, especially for poor prisoners who lack anyone to bring them hampers. Even a katorzhnik, a political prisoner, would pick up anything he could. And once you had eaten a cockroach to allay hunger, once you had felt a toxic envy for a man whose cockroach seemed larger than yours, you were spoiled for polite shopping.

  I turned the pages looking for Vladivostok, Sakhalin, Eastern China.

  My eye lit on Shanghai.

  I said, Do you know Suvarov of the Australian Workers Union?

  Neither of them did.

  Grisha. He was my good friend in Shanghai. In the end, it was easy to get ashore and lose ourselves – yes, even though we weren’t Chinese. Everyone thought you were a sailor on shore leave. It was in fact a little like Queensland was until a few months back. The immigration agent up here was a dear old German named Schwartz who liked socialists and didn’t like the tsar. And he knew that in Queensland cane needed cutting and railways needed building. So he was not a severe gatekeeper of the Commonwealth of Australia.

  I am not sure why I made these confessions to the women. When I looked at their faces, I saw they did not know what to ask me next, or whether they’d probed too far. I said, So here I am in Brisbane. Is this not enough?

  Suddenly I wanted to get away from the map of Russia. I closed the book.

  Amelia remarked, As an educated man, Tom, you must resent being required to labour?

  No, I told her. I need to labour. Possibly in a difficult climate. It leaves my mind free.

  Curious, said Amelia. My husband used to say that.

  Nonetheless, and without rancour against the late Mr Pethick, I wondered if he had ever had his anus violated by a revolver barrel. What could be done with the men who had committed such things, should the revolution come? What school could they be sent to for redemption? Which brought me back to the subject of destroyed souls.

  I was just thinking about a man named Menschkin, I told the women. He marches with us, but I’m afraid he then goes to the tsarist consul, McDonald, and to the police.

  That’s horrible, said Hope. What can you do to stop him?

  It might be best not to stop him, I said. Rather fill his head with information that proves groundless. As an agent provocateur he’s hilarious. Even the police must know he has a comic aspect.

  In what sense is he hilarious? asked Amelia.

  Once he hung around a Russian Emigrants Union meeting telling us how to make mercury bombs in pots of lard. Men who exhort us to make bombs are always working for the tsar. Or for the Police Commissioner of Queensland.

  How does one make a bomb? Hope asked. Out of lard, you say?

  Incendiaries are made of lard and phosphate. Or explosives of mercury and lard. I’m not sure of the details because I’m not of anarchist bent.

  I would have thought nothing could match dynamite, murmured Hope.

  I turned to my tea and drank i
t quickly.

  You poor man, Amelia said. I’ve upset you with the atlas, haven’t I? I am sorry.

  I held a hand up, denying it.

  Amelia murmured, No, you have clearly been through a lot, Tom. Yet many of the leaders of your movement live in exile in comparative comfort. Does that ever concern you?

  They’ve all been through the mill themselves, I told her. One way or another. Plekhanov, that great old man, and Struve and Martov and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. They’ve all suffered. As a teenager, Vladmir Ilich saw his brother Alexander hanged. His education was interrupted by exile and bannings from universities. Now he’s entitled to some time to write.

  I saw Hope shiver in the humid air. I reached a hand out, though it did not touch her. Are you well?

  I hear what you’re telling us, she said, but I sense that there’s a great deal more behind it.

  I shrugged.

  You mention anarchists so scathingly, Tom. I remember reading a piece – in the London Illustrated News, I believe – about a young woman on New Year’s Eve, sitting by a window in a Russian city and looking out at a snow-covered road. The provincial governor was due to travel down it, and she had a bomb in a tin box inside a fine handbag she had bought just for this event. Buying a handbag for such a thing ... Anyhow, while she sat waiting there was a knock on her door and it was a group of Russian children, children in masks, who threw millet seeds at the house and wanted to be paid for doing it.

  Yes, I said. It brings good luck.

  So she got them to stay, this young woman, and made them tea. And then she saw the governor’s cavalry escort riding past, and told them to leave. She walked out into the street with her bomb, noticed a friend, a man who also carried a bomb. When the governor’s carriage drew near, her friend threw his bomb under the carriage, but it stuck in snow and did not explode. So she threw hers. And it killed the governor, and she went to prison ... An anarchist, you see. And so brave.

  Would you want to bomb people in Brisbane? I asked.

  No. But it’s the level of conviction that interests me.

  Yet, I insisted, surely you don’t envy the naivety of people who believe the world can be changed by one bomb thrown into a particular carriage. Or even by twenty bombs thrown into twenty particular carriages.

  Well no, she conceded, almost with an air of disappointment. But I wondered ... Say I had taken your prosecution file, Amelia– which I deny, anyhow ... What could happen to me in Russia, Tom? Imprisonment?

  If you had done it, or maybe if you hadn’t, you would certainly be jailed or exiled.

  Maybe to our station in the Darling Downs, said Hope to lighten the mood.

  Something like that. Or maybe to the distant north. Cooktown, say.

  Even so, we get off lightly here, don’t we?

  She definitely wanted to believe that.

  So say I was that person, the one who took Amelia’s file. With all the embarrassment surrounding the issue, I might lose my job. But after a while I could begin practising at the bar, you see. I could perhaps find work with the Arbitration Court in Melbourne. Melbourne winters are harsh by Queensland standards, but the point is, there would be no Siberia for me.

  She smiled at me – what I thought of as an Australian smile. It was something alien, unreserved, open. And there might have been some pride there, in the ploy she had pulled off – if indeed it had been her.

  Amelia said, It sounds as if the hypothetical you, Hope, is disappointed not to be more severely punished.

  And so it did.

  Amelia turned to me. But Artem, tell me, you speak as if you’re subject to the orders of your party. That you go wherever they say.

  I entered into the spirit of the occasion. I would show off as I believed Hope was doing.

  I’ll tell you of a case of obedience, I said. A friend of mine ... Slatkin ... has been a loyal member of the party for a decade or more. He’s worked with secret strike committees. He recruited strikers from among disloyal or disgruntled soldiers of the tsar. The party is his life. He has a good intellect, and he’s very amusing.

  He had also occasionally been a bank robber, but I did not tell them that.

  Ah, said Amelia, an ideal fellow.

  The leader of our faction, Vladimir Ilich, who is a great intellectual, has a high opinion of my friend. Vladimir Ilich had another friend named Nikolai Stürmer, the owner – by inheritance from an uncle – of a massive engineering company. Soon young Nikolai, who was a supporter of our party despite being a capitalist, died tragically of tuberculosis and left his money and his plant to the two Stürmer women, his sisters. Vladimir Ilich asked my friend Slatkin and another of our agents to approach the sisters, charm them, marry them, and secure their wealth for the party. So my friend did approach Daria, one of the sisters, with his condolences, and won her over – she had not met too many fellows like him: earthy and humorous, yet well read. They married and the support Nikolai Stürmer had given the party was continued by his sister and Slatkin. The happy couple remitted many thousands if not millions of roubles to the party through its Swiss bank.

  Oh my God, said Amelia, shaking her head. That is obedience!

  And distasteful, said Hope. Are you asking why we don’t feel outrage at the lady bomber, but feel distaste for this?

  Amelia shook her head. Surely you’re teasing us, Tom. Surely this did not happen.

  No, Mrs Pethick, I assure you it did. And everyone is happy. The party has funds and is able to stand by its principles and finance its efforts. And my friend was very happy, the last time I heard. And so was his wife. No one was damaged, yet everyone who knows the story says, How shocking!

  The two women looked at each other. Then Amelia said, No one can really approve of that story, Tom. Can they? But it is correct of you to shake up our comfortable assumptions.

  I’m sorry, Mrs Pethick ... I’m just making the point. I didn’t want to offend you.

  No, said Amelia. Not in the least.

  No, Hope agreed.

  I was willing now to play the contrite male who has gone too far, told the wrong story in the presence of ladies. At least it might stop them quizzing me about Russia all the time.

  But your friend’s motives, said Hope. They were so cold, so planned.

  And so effectual, Hope, Amelia reminded her.

  We drank the dregs of tea.

  I can drive you home, Tom, Hope offered.

  No, there is no need.

  We thanked Amelia, and I walked with Hope to open the car door and then crank the engine. As she was about to get into the car, she stopped. She had come to a sudden decision – I didn’t know what it was, and the idea that something new was to be said excited me. We were both standing, either side of Hope’s car door, in the infinite possibility of the moment.

  She said, I wanted to tell you, perhaps out of vanity ... I stole Amelia’s prosecution file and put it in the stove in our kitchen when the Irish maid was out. I saved Olive Sullivan’s notebook and left it on a table at Trades Hall.

  I smiled. I always knew you did it, Hope, I assured her. So ... what will happen to you?

  I’ll resign from the public service with a show of great chagrin over their implication that I might have done it.

  I laughed with her.

  And then I will take a holiday for a few months, and then I’ll apply to the Queensland bar for admission. The vote may be split but I shall be admitted. I told you inside that there’s no great danger for me.

  Well, great danger isn’t necessary. It doesn’t ennoble the soul.

  Because what she had given me was a precious thing – I couldn’t imagine her telling that to her husband straight out – I responded in kind.

  I will entrust something to you too, I said. As a gift. I am not going back to my boarding house now. I am going to another house belonging to the Stefanovs, in Merrivale Street. I have rented a room there.

  You have left your old boarding house?

  No. The truth is that I have rent
ed a room to house a printing press. I have a compositor to do the setting. He begins on Monday. The first edition of the Australian Echo will be printed there behind drawn curtains.

  She said, almost at once, I may have time on my hands soon. Could I come and help you in any way?

  It would be a waste of your talent, dear Mrs Mockridge.

  But it was of course the offer I was fishing for.

  You said that prison made you want simple, physical work. I could benefit from some simple work too. Folding and stacking a Russian newspaper sounds very attractive for the moment.

  She and I were complicit from then. We knew that we would be something like plotters in the shadow of the rickety old printing press. It was beyond believing, though, that we would in the end add the weight of desire to the Stefanovs’ floorboards or the narrow single bed, little more than a cot, with which the room was furnished. It served only a mundane purpose: I would sometimes lie down and spend the night there after finishing my work in the small hours.

  10

  One morning, as Freeman Bender’s ornate tram – the Palace – moved up Milton Road towards the city, a man wearing a mask of black, the anarchist colour, and presumed to be of the Chicago faction, the dominant Wobbly faction in Australia, emerged from behind a lamppost on the corner of Cribb Street and threw a bomb made out of a large jam tin at one of the tram’s windows. As the bomb exploded, the driver brought the tram to a halt and it did not leave the tracks. Because of the strengthened and wire-meshed windows of the tram, some of the blast was deflected back across the street, where, said witnesses, it knocked the anarchist on his arse, after which the masked man was seen running down Cribb Street before darting into a lane and vanishing.

  The explosion had come as an utter surprise to those inside the tram, and had done them some damage. Commissioner Urquhart received cuts to his forehead from flying glass, the Supreme Court’s Justice Cooper suffered facial wounds from glass and was bruised by a flying occasional table. Mr Mockridge KC, seated with his back to the window, suffered deep neck and scalp wounds from the glass and a broken arm.