The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  I understand, I assured him. But I am worried about one of my comrades: Podnaksikov.

  No, if I were them I would try it with your wounded friend, Surov.

  Suvarov, I corrected him.

  Yes. He has a powerless hand. I would press his hand around the butt, if I were them.

  I had noticed that he had no drink at all on his breath, that he was as sober as I was. Had Hope exaggerated his drunkenness to save her – and me – from conscience?

  I have seen this war coming, he told me suddenly, as if it were part of our legal situation. Ever since Japan fought and beat the tsar, the kaiser and the Austrian emperor have been yearning to take on the Russians themselves. His eyes actually twinkled at the idea. Yesterday I was a mere mess dinner-jacket soldier. Now I find myself the adjutant of a battalion.

  I hope you are well used by your generals, I told him.

  Unlikely, he said. I think that, for the beginning, my generals will be as confused as me. In any case I intend to use them well. I should warn you now that, being a certified patriot, I will have the chance to sue my beautiful but silly wife for a divorce. She is a wonderful woman, and she has her reasons to embarrass and exploit me. Just the same, I have employed a private investigator – they are all semi-criminal former constables, but they are skilled at observing adultery. So I am saving you from the courts now so that I can bring you to court later. I also wanted to tell you that though you cuckolded me, Mr Red, you in turn have probably been cuckolded, and so it will go on with our dear Hope.

  Amid my embarrassment I noticed how his conversation darted around erratically. His explicit opinion that I might be replaced by someone else in Hope’s mind made me squirm. Particularly if it were someone like Buchan.

  He held up his hand then, to end that stanza of the conversation.

  Oh, I’ve asked my old friend Fuller KC to keep an eye on you all vis-a-vis what happened with Menschkin. You must prepare to be charged with homicide even pending the coroner’s report. But remain cool. Beware. And keep watchful. That’s all I can tell you. By the way, if you survive this, you might redeem yourself by joining our expeditionary force.

  If I’m innocent I don’t need to redeem myself. That’s what I should have said, but it would have been discourteous. Again I was aware of how irrational his whole argument had been. Maybe he was embarrassed too. He suggested I become a private soldier and then, as far as I could work him out, wanted to name me as the culprit when he sued Hope for divorce! The whole thing was crazy. Yet he was a lawyer and a commander of men. Then I wondered if it was pure uneasiness that made his mind jerk around the map of the world, from wise to savage to philosophic to melancholy.

  Well, as they say at the bookmakers, he continued strangely, all bets are off from here on in.

  I nodded.

  Goodbye, he said, looking downwards and full at me. I hope you don’t end up in that shed at Boggo Road. You know, at the end of a rope.

  He flourished his swagger stick, and his boots creaked in a way they would not after he had been on some front line for a time. At the moment, though, the gallantry of leather, of his belt and diagonal leather strap, could be smelled.

  I wish you much safety, Mr Mockridge, I called as he went.

  Major Mockridge, he said over his shoulder.

  So, later in the night, when they presented me with the revolver to inspect, I was pre-warned against the trick. All due to the mercy of that strange but canny officer, Major Mockridge.

  26

  Back in our communal cell at dawn, Podnaksikov had his face in his hands and I did not know what it meant. It turned out that he had behaved sturdily, but he was a man in fear for his life and might have lost Lucia. That was his grief. The survivor of the Lena massacre was no revolutionary but a man who wanted domestic felicity above all, who wanted his Lucia and a little house in South Brisbane, and some freckled Australian brats, Russian-Italian as they were, running to greet him with voices like crows in the humid afternoons of long summers.

  Morning broke beyond the high-up slit window of the holding cell. By now Menschkin’s body must lie in the police morgue, and soon doctors would come in and look at it and weigh up its fatal wound.

  Mr Fuller KC, a jovial older man with a meaty face, came to visit us in our cell after we’d enjoyed a breakfast of stale bread.

  Your comrade Suvarov, he told us, I’m afraid they did manage to get his prints on the gun. Mockridge thought the blighters would. And sure enough, they seem to have taken the chance to force it into the hand of his maimed wing. Not that I was there. Would I were! That at least saved you from a beating, or as they say, a fall downstairs. Just the same, it’s bad, it’s extremely bad for you.

  He seemed entertained by the idea and combed a splendid mane of silver hair with his fingers.

  You will all be charged with being accessories to murder, he said. And first we need to face the coroner’s court.

  Later in the day he spoke to us individually in a dismal interview room. I did feel as cool-headed as Major Mockridge had urged me to be. I knew Fuller was exactly the sort of man to whom other lawyers and judges nodded with respect at Doomben and Eagle Farm racecourses, or at civic balls. As he sat across the table from me, his eyes were nearly closed in a look of Asian amusement. The layers of his big face were brick red either from the climate or from liquor or both.

  Hope Mockridge sends you all her regards, he told each of us. It’s understandable why – for your own good – she can’t visit and why she’s lying low and leaving the business to me.

  Is she paying for your services? I asked him.

  Ah, what a question. Yes. But trade rates. I’m a friend of Major Mockridge. He’s a very complicated fellow, our Mockridge. Now, as we speak, the police are targeting your hides very zealously. Have they had you in that common cell all this time?

  Apart from questioning, yes.

  Oh dear. They don’t mind if you confer. Mockridge did tell me they’re supremely confident. They begin with the proposition that all Reds are liars and degenerates and they go from there. I would like to ask you once more about the events of that day.

  It was a joy in fact to tell him, without dissimulation. Menschkin had drawn near us and we’d caught him at it. Menschkin had said that he’d been driven off his farm and that Russians were an accursed group, and then Menschkin had wounded Suvarov with a wide shot and shot himself all too accurately.

  How long have you known Mr Suvarov? Fuller asked me.

  We travelled in Siberia and then Japan together, and worked in Shanghai.

  It was such a brief statement of our adventures – if you’d call them that – that it sounded untrue to me.

  He is an honest fellow, I assured him.

  Nonetheless, said Fuller, they got his fingerprints on the gun.

  I told him about Suvarov and the tea towel that had been used to staunch the flow, and the tourniquet of similar origin that Amelia tied around his upper arm.

  He bled a great deal, in other words?

  I told him the severe bleeding had stopped before we were back to town.

  But, asked Fuller, he was dazed by blood loss? Not himself? Please say yes.

  Yes, I said.

  He asked me what hospital we brought Suvarov to. I tried to remember. I said, It had something about green in its name.

  Greenslopes, he asserted. Very well. Now, be of good heart. There’s a chance you might get off.

  Only a chance? I wanted to ask him. His bare, unqualified idea of a chance suddenly pitched me back yet again into that evil long shed at Boggo Road.

  Later that day we were separated into individual cells. We were exhausted by then and to an extent Podnaksikov had infected me with his depression. I had not thought imprisonment and execution would be part of my contract when I chose Australia, but as I had said in my article to Previn, it was I who had misread the deed of sale.

  Caveat emptor.

  27

  Now, held at His Majesty’s pleasure
(or, more realistically, that of the Queensland police) on suspicion of murder but not actually charged – a special arrangement of the Queensland judicial system – we were taken to the remand section at Boggo Road. We were to be questioned in the coroner’s court and that was what would lead, if the prosecutor there succeeded, to charges and a murder trial. Our solitary consolation was that the women, Hope and Amelia, were not charged. It had been accepted that they were absent from the events that followed the sighting of Menschkin.

  The warders did not let us exercise together, in case we conspired at our story. Again I feared that if the police now asked Podnaksikov to alter his testimony in exchange for freedom, he might give it.

  Somehow the other prisoners in the remand cells knew we were there and called out, They’re going to hang you fucking Reds! As always, there was something about prisoners that made them even more feverish to see others punished than the authorities themselves.

  After a few days, Suvarov was brought into the section, his wound dressed and closed up. Though we could barely talk as he passed down the corridor, he turned his tormented face to me. I am such a fool, Suvarov called out suddenly in Russian. They put the revolver in my hand while I was still dosed with laudanum. They say they have my fingerprints!

  Occasionally he would break out in talk addressed to no one, to the ether, and his voice from the cell was quavery and depressed. I had never heard him like this, not even the time when a ship’s captain locked us up in a latrine for days under threat of return to the tsar’s justice.

  At a morning parade I was able to slip a note into Podnaksikov’s hand. It said, If you give way to them you will be their creature for life like Menschkin. I was consoled to see that in the best tradition of prisoners he read it and swallowed it, with quite an easy jerk of his prominent Adam’s apple. But then he stared at me so bleakly.

  I became stupidly anguished about whether Hope had been to visit Buchan, or whether she had written to him and not me. Buchan looked steadfast and ruddy-faced when he was escorted past my cell for exercise.

  At last a guard, possibly sweetened by our friends, brought me a letter that came from Hope.

  Dear Tom,

  I wish to tell you that our committee – yes, we have formed a committee on your behalf – is working very actively for your case, and our friend Paddy Dykes has written much and spoken to other journalists about it as an example of police malice. We held a public meeting at the Buranda Hall. The hat was passed round and people gave very generously to your defence and your comfort.

  I wanted to give you the sad news though that Amelia, who has been working very hard as the secretary of the fund, has suffered a stroke. One side of her face is paralysed, and one can imagine her as a genuine old lady for the first time. It’s very sad. But be assured, I am spending a great deal of time on her care.

  Yours with affection,

  Hope Mockridge.

  I was disturbed by the chasteness of that Yours with affection, even though I knew she did not say anything more than that for fear the letter might be intercepted. But as I had begun to suspect in my last stay in Boggo Road, I did not feel as sturdy as I did in my earlier detentions.

  Old Fuller visited us once more before the coroner’s court was due to sit on the death of Menschkin, and I asked him for an opinion on how the other prisoners were holding up, chiefly because I felt my own isolation from them hard.

  He said he thought they were very well.

  They haven’t become like that police creature Menschkin, if that’s what you mean.

  The Brisbane Coroner’s Court on the corner of George and Turbot streets was a fine, yellow-stoned, only slightly sooty building in the British style, with the symbol VR on its cornice. I had passed it often enough in my journeys around the city. We did not enter beneath the cornice, however. We were taken there in handcuffs by enclosed black wagon, each this time accompanied by a constable who had instructions not to permit us to talk. On our arrival in the small courtyard we were taken down to a communal cell where a sergeant of police and two constables continued custody of us in relays. Suvarov began suddenly to speak and was told to Shut up, you murdering Red bastard!

  Our eyes were eloquent though.

  They took Podnaksikov up first. Since we were a mongrel mixture of accused and witnesses, we were not to be in court for the duration of the trial but only for the period of our testimony. Yet testimony was long. Podnaksikov was gone nearly two hours and waiting for him was hard. Buchan seemed particularly good at it, leaning his head back and dozing. He still wore, scuffed, the two-tone shoes, but he’d given up his spats. Above all he did not share the pallor of Suvarov or Podnaksikov.

  At last Podnaksikov came back, wan, but able to look us in the eye and put his head on the side and perform a shrug in a way that seemed to promise us he had made no foolish concessions, or at least thought he hadn’t.

  While the court was in recess they brought us some stale bread and a thin soup and the cell was full of the clatter of our spoons like the clatter of shuttles in a factory.

  Buchan was then taken up and his interrogation took up the entire and endless afternoon. Across the room Suvarov shook his head at me as if he might rather be beaten than wait this long. Like me, he might not have been the prisoner he once was. Our separate escapes from our exile to the Pacific coast of Siberia had left us unsuited for jail life and I could see that if he were sentenced to a long term, he would not live, and that strangling for a finite period at a rope’s end might be easier.

  Down again, Buchan smiled and said aloud, with that prison pallor we’d seen on Podnaksikov, They’re not getting it all their own way. That wee Fuller is giving them gypsum!

  He too was shouted at to be silent by the policemen watching us from a nearby room.

  We’ll come in and beat the suffering fucking liver out of you bastards! one of them roared.

  We had been permitted to urinate in a waste bucket in the corner. Buchan, for having spoken, was given the job of emptying it in the sewer down the corridor, and then we were cuffed again to be returned to Boggo Road. As we made our way to the back of the prison truck Buchan whispered, Hope was in the court! Beautiful!

  This sparked in me enough asinine speculation to keep me awake in the dark, until I fell into an hour of nightmares deep in the vacancy of the prison night. The fact that I knew where he was – in a cell down the corridor – and that no jealous lover was ever as certain about his rival’s movements as I was, did not help at all.

  28

  The next morning it was only Suvarov and myself who were taken out and handcuffed to make the journey in the big black wagon. I was still irrationally angry at what Buchan had said and in a petulant lather about Hope being in court when I appeared. First up the stairs to the court that day, as I rose up to the dock I scanned the public gallery and could not see her. Paddy Dykes was obvious in the press box with his withered, sad-eyed face. But then I spotted her in the far corner of the court, sitting by a sadly shrunken Amelia, half-reclined in a wicker wheelchair. At once I thought, The death of Menschkin did this to Amelia, tilted some delicate balance. Reconciled and chastened, I gave a nod in the women’s direction, though not with enough emphasis to cause them trouble.

  On the bench, the coroner was quite aged and white-haired, wearing not a black gown but a brown suit. It was not his age that worried me as much as that dangerous look some old men have that something essential in their lives vanished at some point, and they intend to exact punishment for its absence. He was as stern a presence as any judge.

  The clean-shaven crown prosecutor, robed and wigged, questioned me at great length. The travel to the picnic, Mrs Mockridge driving – a fact that he managed to convey did not impress him at all – the exact route to the picnic place, who sat where?

  Oh, said the prosecutor, the witness Podnaksikov told us that Mrs Pethick occupied the front seat of the vehicle.

  I explained that she did for a time, and that all of us men took turn
s riding on the running boards.

  All of us? asked the prosecutor like a hawk, and had me argue that useless point to the extent that even I thought my own account became blurred and uncertain. From a supposed small lie about who sat where, he intended to build a vaster picture of our guilt.

  Fuller, rising, appealed to the coroner that all this had been covered already and was not germane to the case. The coroner disagreed, but with some sign of respect for Fuller, whom he called the esteemed Mr Fuller. Then the prosecutor continued, probing for all lapses of memory, dressing them up as malice and lies, interrogating me on our progress up the hill, among the trees, asking where we sat at the picnic, when the women went away, where they were when Menschkin was sighted.

  Let us go into the many quarrels you had had with Mr Menschkin, the prosecutor said. You quarrelled with him when he found what is called sly grog at a meeting of the Russian Emigrants Union, commonly known as the soyuz?

  I told him Menschkin had not found anything there – he had put it there himself.

  The prosecutor behaved as if he hadn’t heard this version of the sly-grog fiasco and shook his head.

  Then there were some reports of fire junk and incendiaries being kept in that same building, Buranda Hall.

  No, it was not kept there, I said.

  I suppose Menschkin brought that too?

  Yes.

  Ah, said the prosecutor. If he was guilty of so many insults to the majesty of your union, you must have found him even more acutely annoying? And therefore, I suppose, you would all the more have dearly liked to see him dead?

  I informed the coroner, Sir, I did not touch him.

  But the coroner groaned, Your fellow Red Russians drove him off his farm in Rockhampton. Was that authorised by you?