The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

These minor injuries of Brisbane worthies were mourned in the daily papers with a reverence appropriate to the wounds of Christ. Of course, they brought Hope and her husband back into the public eye, and, most importantly, they served as proof even to the strikers that the strike had gone too far and that now nothing further could be hoped for. Here – went the argument – was the fundamental havoc that lay behind a supposedly peaceful plea for better wages! Australians liked order, and dynamite was disorder and outside the scope of their desires.

  I wondered had the troublemaker Menschkin done it to discredit the strikers, but decided that, if so, it would have been designed to do far less damage to the fathers of the city than it had.

  Within a day or two of the dynamite outrage, Hope Mockridge resigned from the attorney-general’s department. For days we did not see her at Trades Hall. Perhaps she was nursing her husband, who had been sent home from hospital. Whether worse things happened in Russia or not, I wanted to hear from her. Had the government forced her out of our company with threats?

  I had, in the meantime, asked Walter O’Sullivan to speak to the soyuz one evening. In company with Suvarov and Paddy Dykes, whom we’d met by accident along the way and who intended to report on O’Sullivan’s speech, I neared Buranda Hall very early.

  Mr Dykes, said Suvarov, tell me: are you a miner who writes for newspapers or a newspaperman who used to be a miner?

  Paddy thought about it.

  A newspaperman who used to be a miner is the answer, I think– but not the best man at either, I’m sad to say. You see, I went to this meeting in Sydney once and saw Billy Hughes speak. Now, there’s a man no more educated than me. And throw into that, if you like, a face like a green prawn. And he has a Welsh voice and adenoids. But when he spoke ... Here was a bloke who used to repair umbrellas for a living. I thought, well, anything’s possible. He’s attorney-general of the Commonwealth of Australia. A bloke no more educated than me! And he makes a law for a bank for ordinary people. And I decided, Paddy, you can get off your backside and do more. I began writing for the Worker. I was still a miner. But now...

  Now you’re a journalist, I told him.

  I bloody hope so, he said.

  Artem, Suvarov said as we walked up to the hall, a wooden structure set in its own patch of high grass, look out the back!

  There was a dray at the rear of the hall, and a man in shirtsleeves was hauling cases between it and the back door. The three of us advanced up the side of the hall, listening to the clatter as the draydriver shifted his crates through an open door into the small room at the back of the hall. Then Menschkin emerged, looking happier than I’d seen him lately.

  Ah, he said, going pale. Mr Samsurov and Mr Suvarov.

  He did not bother to refer to Paddy Dykes.

  Suvarov’s carroty hair seemed to blaze in the evening air. He stepped up to Menschkin and asked what he was doing.

  I am delivering ... Someone ordered...

  Then he simply ran. He was faster than anyone would think. Suvarov chased him for a while but then obviously wondered what good catching him would do, given Menschkin’s protection from the Queensland police.

  We went into the back room, where crates of beer bottles with no labels on them were stacked high. Sly grog, said Paddy at once. The bastard!

  Illegal liquor. Menschkin’s demented plan was to leave it here, out of sight, and then the police could raid, find it and close the hall and the soyuz down. Paddy and I looked at each other, and began laughing at Menschkin’s childlike plans. He was going to a crazy amount of effort to please his masters. Suvarov, Paddy and I loaded the dray again with the unlabelled beer, and led its horse by the halter two hundred yards or so down the street, where we unhitched the horse and left the animal grazing in the lush pavement grass, and the beer standing in the dray, waiting for any adventurous passer-by to sample it.

  O’Sullivan and his wife arrived early to look over the platform and to practise elocution – something that Olive supervised. Eeh, aah, ooh, said O’Sullivan, stretching his jaw muscles. I began to wonder had I made a mistake. But when the crowd arrived and he started to speak there was no doubting his seriousness, nor even his philosophic affinity with Vladimir Ilich. What does Australia need? he asked. And what the world? Does it need a gang of part-time social democrats whose chief task is to prove to their betters that they are responsible people, good managers of the public purse? Where will that ever get us? The Australian Socialist Party is based on the proposition of overthrowing – to defeat capitalism, not to finesse it; to undermine it rather than dance with it. In this task, said O’Sullivan, we do not welcome dilettantes. We plan to be the party to whom people turn when they have become aware that the earth belongs to those who labour on it, and the factory belongs to those who labour in it. At this stage we do not seek votes. We seek activists.

  By the end of the meeting, I had been impressed sufficiently to take an entry form and join his ASP.

  Olive approached me, notepad in hand. I know we have met before, she said, but would you mind writing your name out here? In roman script?

  I did so. I saw Suvarov joining too. We were now members of an antipodean echo of Vladimir Ilich’s organisation.

  Across the city men began to return to work at the meatworks and the waterfront and railways. But Mr Freeman Bender would not take the tramway strikers back. So much for the mercy of Justice Higgins! The Trades Hall declared the strike had ended with a moral victory, and so I returned to work as well, since there is no sense in being a strike force of one.

  The good news was that the first edition of Australian Ekho, eight pages in length, had been printed, distributed and posted. A typical letter from readers came from some lonely place in the hills behind Rockhampton. How could I begin to express my joy at seeing in print the language that is my mother, and the sentiments expressed which we have been forced by oppression to embrace. The Ekho was a consolation to the most far-flung of the Russians.

  11

  I was working at the Stefanovs’ one evening under a bare bulb but in the joy of seeing the press stamp the made-up frames and slide forth the wonder of printed paper when there was a curt knocking on the door of my room. Thin Mrs Stefanov was there, frowning and quite handsome. I had a woman visitor, she said tightly. I followed her towards the front door, but as she reached the parlour she stepped into it, leaving me to confront the visitor alone. The energy with which Mrs Stefanov turned away added up to a command that nothing indecent would happen in her house in Merrivale Street. Hence I knew before I saw her it was Hope Mockridge.

  So it was – Hope in a dress the colour of duck eggs, her whitegloved hands modestly hidden by a reticule.

  I thought I would visit your press, said Hope.

  Yes, I said. Ah ... there is no one there but me just now. Suvarov will be along...

  So, may I see your printery?

  I could not deny her that. On the way along the hall I enquired loudly about her husband’s injuries.

  Well, she said, smiling, I now see that despite the magazine story about the Russian girl anarchist, there’s no glory in dynamite.

  We got to the back room and sniffed the air saturated with black ink.

  So this is the way newspapers are produced in Russia?

  And in Australia. The lies are printed in far grander premises across the river, and on far vaster machines.

  I am here to work, she told me, taking off her jacket. Then she walked across to the table in the corner, which held a model of a monorail. Rybakov, my asthmatic friend who had been dismissed as a project engineer by Brisbane Tramways, had brought his model and plans for a special tram/train to be stored with me. It made sense – his own room at Adler’s was small. The model was of two white carriages on a small circle of line, but the line was single – a monorail, as Rybakov called it; the People’s Train, the future means of moving people in cities. Having been sacked by Bender, he had to await another chance, and hope for possible public interest in an article abo
ut his monorail and its unique gyroscopes he was writing for a magazine called World Engineering.

  It’s got only one line.

  Yes. That’s the trick of it. It could change the world.

  Wouldn’t it come off the line going round corners?

  Not according to Rybakov, I assured her. He’s studied the physics and made gyroscope models.

  This ... this is what Bender was raving to us about that afternoon in his office.

  Yes. Rybakov calls it the People’s Train.

  What a name! she said, and moved away towards our self-inking lever press. On a tray by the wall, I had my Cyrillic script arrayed – a pleasant font, Berezniki, familiar to all Russian newspaper readers.

  I explained that the work ahead of her was tedious – the task of stacking on a bench the six hundred copies of pages printed on both side, pages one, two, eleven and twelve in one pile, three, four, nine and ten in another, and so on, as they came off my press. That task alone would perhaps occupy some hours.

  I have a great deal of time, she said.

  She set to, and our conversation became basic, like most cottage- industry conversations. After a time Suvarov arrived to stand at an upright desk and subedit some of the articles we had received so that they were ready when our compositor came.

  The next time Hope turned up to my supposedly secret printing press she wore a black hat and a dress of blue and white fabric, and a beautiful opal brooch at her neck. It was a night when the seasons were in transition. The heat was not as torrid as it had been, the nights were balmy but not stifling. The so-called winter, so warm by Russian standards, was nonetheless on its way. Since an orgy had not resulted from Mrs Stefanov’s last admission of Hope to my printing room, this time she had been let in with slightly better grace.

  It was earlier in the evening than her last visit. My assistants Suvarov and Rybakov were presently at their dinner at Adler’s boarding house. I had installed a plain, unadorned samovar in the corner. I made Hope a glass of tea with honey, and we sat down on the chairs by the bench where stacked newsprint lay and inhaled again that intoxicating perfume of oily printing ink and newsprint sheets.

  Again I asked about her husband and his injuries. She looked at me as if there were more to all that than my simple question could cover.

  He’s appearing in court with his arm in a sling, she told me. Very gallant.

  And there’s no idea at all who threw the dynamite?

  No. Everyone knew who took Amelia’s file. But the dynamiter is a mystery. It was said briskly, as if she were warning me off the subject. She shook her head. It doesn’t interest me. What interested me were your remarks on our hypocrisies. That afternoon at Amelia’s. You know – that story of the man who was ordered to marry for the cause.

  She looked away. She sounded calm but was not.

  I was playing games that afternoon, I hurried to say. I think I exaggerated how close a friend the bridegroom was to me.

  I don’t want you to misunderstand. I am not a stupid girl but of course it’s the sort of discussion that made me even more sharply aware my marriage is a thing of very awkward convenience. I don’t hate him, though ... The truth of marriage is that I know him. When his arm was broken, I felt anxiety for him, more than I would for an acquaintance. Does that constitute a kind of love? In any case, if you see me as a hypocrite, being here instead of in his house, then I acknowledge the hypocrisy. I have my excuses. But every hypocrite does.

  You take all this too seriously, Hope. As if I were here to judge you.

  You may not mean to, but that’s your effect.

  I’ve got no power to make you feel uneasy, I said.

  Why do you own a printing press, which you operate behind closed curtains, if it’s not to weigh up the world and find it lacking?

  It’s just my passion, I said. I might say I need a rest from ideas. But labour on the wharves isn’t enough. I need to talk to others too.

  In the condition I was in, every sudden contact was amazing. She reached out and took my hand, stroking the back of it with a thumb. I was won by this touch. She laid her face against my cheek, but when I turned my face to engage her, lip to lip, she averted her head. She said, I am near the end of an illness.

  Tuberculosis? I suggested.

  But she seemed too healthy for that, and her hair was lustrous. She looked at me directly and I knew at once what she meant. Like so many women, she had been infected by her husband.

  Artem ... Tom. I wish to be in your company, for the moment, as a friend. That’s all. There is nothing else.

  Her tea was finished, and I thought to get her more.

  If you have been ill, I said, and such a woman warrior, then I certainly look forward to meeting you when you are well.

  She smiled, moved her head from side to side as if balancing things. It’s the tail end of my sickness, she said. Medical improvements are astounding, and they sweep around the globe with the mail. But we shan’t talk about it any more. Let me fold the papers.

  So it began again. The double-printed pages came from the chute at the front of the machine and she folded and stacked them.

  And thus we worked together till half past nine, when – as last time – my friend Suvarov arrived.

  Rybakov can’t come, Suvarov said. Tonight his asthma is cruel.

  As I walked her to the corner of Merrivale Street afterwards, so that she could return north on one of Bender’s trams, I felt consoled in a fraudulent way. Beyond any doubt, it was best that nothing sentimental had happened, that we had talked and worked together like two friends. This was, after all, how genuinely revolutionary men and women, undistracted by the simperings of bourgeois love, were meant to work.

  Yet I wanted to have pretexts to see her again. I remembered a coming event all at once.

  Perhaps you would like to visit Buranda Hall on Friday night?

  Then I remembered that the play would be all in Russian.

  Of course not, I answered for her. It’s Maxim Gorki’s The Lower Depths. You may not know the play, but Suvarov is playing the part of the actor who hangs himself in despair at the end.

  That sounds very entertaining, she said, without a derisive smile.

  It’s a grim and wonderful play, I said. Very realistic, set in a low boarding house, full of tragic figures. But all in Russian.

  I would dearly love to come, Tom.

  The shining tram she was to catch, protected from anarchists by a wall of social outrage, drew up clanging beneath thunderclouds. She climbed aboard as if she had never had a quarrel with the system on which it ran.

  12

  We were drinking tea with Suvarov on the dusty stage of Buranda Hall, just south of South Brisbane, where the rags, uprights and timber bunks remained in place, ready for the following night’s performance of Lower Depths. It was an excellent production, I thought. Mrs Stefanov had had the surprising courage to play Vasilisa, the greedy and unfaithful dosshouse owner’s wife. Nastia the streetwalker had, for the sake of propriety, been played by young Zetkin, son of Zetkin of the Waterside Workers. In the wrong boy’s hands, this role could have been played entirely for comedy and could have lowered the whole tenor of the play. Although some of his fellow stevedores, Australians, had come to watch the play and had whistled when he first appeared in a dress, he remained resolutely true to Gorki. The Australians knew nothing about this Russian masterpiece but by reading the faces on stage, they – to their credit and my surprise – kept themselves in reasonable bounds from then on. It was a triumph for Rybakov, who had directed the entire performance.

  The reason we were still here was that, though I told him Mrs Mockridge had a cab waiting, Suvarov was in one of his talkative moods. He knew a bottle of vodka awaited him back at Adler’s boarding house, where he would be greeted by his fellows as a miraculous and transformed being. Thank you, Mr Gorki! He did not necessarily want to rush the moment, and he was one of those generous men who, though of course enjoying the company of Mrs Mockridge
himself, had seen that she was my close friend and so put great effort into enlarging on my reputation and exploits.

  Now, said Suvarov, when the old German who is the immigration officer here in Brisbane meets our boat, he stamps whatever papers we have to give him. But one young fellow is in a panic, and Artem says to him, What’ve you got? The young man had a program in his pocket from a theatre in the French concession in Shanghai. Give him that, Artem told him, and the young bloke does and the German stamped it and said, Welcome.

  But then, Suvarov continued, the fight begins. We arrive at the immigration dormitory, which is run by an Englishman. And he says to us all, If you join a trade union in Australia you will be deported by the government. The unions are a source of discontent and disorder and if you join such groups we will send you back to Russia to the tsar’s army. And Artem speaks up and says, Sir, Mr Englishman, there is no such deportation law as the one you speak of. You see, the Englishman didn’t know the law and neither did Artem. But Artem could sniff out imaginary laws just as fast as the Englishman could make them up.

  I intend to join the unions of my fellow Australians, Artem told him, and every Russian immigrant knows that he should do the same.

  The Englishman assigned Artem to clean the lavatories, so Artem just said, Thank you, Mr Petty Tyrant. I have lived in lavatories in Shanghai and cleaning them is too good a job for me. You understand, they see Artem in one light and he turns the light back on them.

  Come on, Suvarov. Why don’t we go home?

  But Suvarov wouldn’t be silenced.

  So Artem left and found Rybakov, and stayed with him at Adler’s. As for myself, I had no money, and I lacked Artem’s courage, so I pretended to be a good tsarist and spent a week free of charge in the dormitory.

  And so, I said, we all became happy Queenslanders.

  But Suvarov wasn’t nearly finished.

  And then I was sent out to work on the fettling gang, out in Tallwood, and a week later I hear from a Russian travelling through that he saw Artem at Warwick, working on the new line there. I set out to travel to Warwick, because I knew Artem would talk the man in charge there into giving me a job. I had a good swag and slept in paddocks under the stars. The last bit I travelled with some railway fellows on a small rail machine – you know the sort of thing. And I got to this big construction camp with white tents, and found Artem. He gave me tea and took me to see the boss, who already knew Artem even though he’d been there only a few days. Why? Artem can work like a machine, that’s why. So we were building a rail bed and carrying rails, and we shared the same tent.