The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  I began to wonder had the world ended, and if so was I in Christian hell with the two parallels stretching away to meaningless eternity. But on the third morning I heard a train whistle. I hid in grass and saw the locomotive go by, then emerged to tumble into an empty truck that smelled of livestock, and pulled the door shut. It was the best berth I’d had since leaving Kerensk, and when I woke up I opened the door and saw the domes of something akin to a full-blown city coming up on my right. I jumped out and walked down a road, through columns patriotically adorned, leading to the wooden houses on the outer edge. I stopped a Russian-featured schoolboy. A silly question, I said, winking, but what town is this? This is Irkutsk, he told me with civic pride.

  33

  Mr Deshin had given me an Irkutsk address, which I had memorised. I went there and found a good, substantial timber house like Deshin’s, and was able to rest there with a Russian-Siberian family for a week. Here the first snows began. I did not just then possess a warm enough coat or heavy boots. Yet even if I could have stayed I did not want to. Fitted out by the family, I set off again. My journey was a long, long way from finished – had I known how long my escape would still take I might even have reconsidered.

  I went down to the river and took a job as a stoker on a steamboat bound for a town on the Chinese border. Jumping ship immediately I landed, not waiting till evening when the gendarmes would come through the town looking for missing sailors. I travelled by foot, sometimes by third-class railway, sometimes in kindly farmers’ wagons, into Khabarovsk, where the border turned a corner and ran south towards Vladivostok. Here was the biggest and liveliest town I had been in since Perm. As well as Russians and native peoples, the streets were full of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans labouring on buildings or sitting in teahouses. I felt very safe there, lost among the port’s population of labourers. But ships were carefully watched and searched, so I was nervous about attempting the final leg of my escape. I got talking to a clerk at a timber yard and he let me shelter in the shed at night. Then, in the mornings, I lined up with Koreans and Japanese on the docks of Golden Horn Bay to get jobs loading lumber into scows.

  It was here, while we waited, that I got talking to the tall, ruddy-complexioned Grisha Suvarov. Though his passport name was Fyodor Bannikov, Fedya for short, he would soon tell me his name was Grigorii, and from the beginning he asked me to call him Grisha. I can’t remember what we talked about at first, but I remember it was at once amusing and companionable. The false name confirmed my instinct that he was an escaped political as well. We discussed how to get out of Siberia and catch a ship to Japan.

  I think it’s going to be easier further north, said Grisha. But I can’t travel yet. I need money.

  I too was in that position. I was living off a small daily bowl of fish and rice here. I did not know any former exile to appeal to for help.

  One morning at the wharves, Grisha Suvarov turned up and told me he had got a job with a Russian manufacturer of marble wash basins as a polisher. I could do the job too, he said. When I applied, I was allowed to live with the genial Suvarov in a workshop. Winter came on but I, Konstantin Fomin, could now afford a coat and fur-lined boots. We worked in a long shed with an iron stove in the middle, and the boss fed us. The main food at that season was salted fish.

  There I let him have my real name. If caught by the gendarmes we could use our false ones quickly enough, and I could swear he was Fedya Bannikov as readily as he could swear I was Kostya Fomin. One morning, in fact, police came to the marble works and looked at all our papers. We presented our false passports. We were in the habit of using our false first names in public – Suvarov calling me Kostya, me calling him Fedya. After so long working under the name of K. Fomin, it came naturally to me. The police took our details and departed, but I had a feeling they would be back.

  About midday a moustachioed man in a good suit arrived at the works. Smoking a cigarette in a holder, he began to look over the polished basins. He was building a large house, he said, and would need perhaps a dozen, for one wants one’s servants to be clean too. As he passed Suvarov and me, he growled, Central Library five o’clock. Because of the suit, which was not the kind a police agent would wear, we decided to risk that he was one of our people. We worked the rest of the day then went to the splendid neo-classical library to meet him, finding him at a long desk in the reading room devouring a history of Japan.

  Get yourselves a book each, he told us, and we did so, reference books; The Almanac of the Siberian Provinces – that sort of thing.

  I know who you are. You have to leave the marble works. The police will come back. Find your way up to Nikolayevsk, where the ferries leave for Japan. Go straight to the public library there – someone will have new passports for you.

  He went on reading again as if we were not there.

  What’s delaying you? he asked after a time.

  Suvarov said, Between here and Nikolayevsk?

  Stay hidden. If you have to use the old passports, so be it. Get off any train you’re on as you get near and just walk into town. With any luck you won’t be challenged.

  And so we set off on the fringe of the railway, occasionally catching a freight train for a small distance but avoiding the stations. The spring had arrived again now. There were cherry trees here and they came into bloom, a sense of resurrection filled the huge sky. And the ironic, teasing Suvarov and I were good company for each other. He too liked Maxim Gorki and Gogol as well.

  We walked around intervening towns, at least one of them quite substantial. Trekking through forests into the pleasant Pacific port of Nikolayevsk, we walked down the town’s hills to the public library, sat at a table as the gentleman in Vladivostok had told us to, took from the shelf two copies of The Report on the Resources of Siberia (1898), and waited. A gentleman walked in wearing an overcoat, which he draped across the desk. All the former exiles here in the east seemed affluent. He took new passports from one of his pockets and passed them to us. We had new names.

  Memorise those, he said.

  And he went. As we left the library, we saw a line of police. The long flight has finished, I thought with surprising acceptance. One of them looked at my papers and asked me, What is your name?

  I very nearly said Fomin, whereas my new papers said Bulatov.

  So I told him Bulatov.

  And what are you doing in Nikolayevsk?

  Having a holiday, I told him. I’m a sailor and I think I might get a job on the ferries to Japan. I’ve never seen Japan.

  It was in fact exactly what we intended to do. Like a nihilist I was defying peril, inviting calamity in. There was something inside me that quavered like a sapling in the storm, but also something carelessly confident in my behaviour. I didn’t give a damn. If this was to be death, virtually at Russia’s eastern limit, then let it be.

  They patted us down and we left. The man with the overcoat had given us a little money for a reasonable dosshouse that night, whose owner told us that the police were looking for a jewel thief who had plundered the biggest jewellery shop in the town. At the dosshouse, money had been handed in at the front desk for us by some unknown and blessed person. A message was delivered that we were to meet a nurse at the botanical park and we went there, into gardens where all was blooming, Japanese and Chinese vegetation, and even that of North America, far away to the east. Wearing her cap and cape, a nurse arrived at the park and without a word – she might have been leading us to the gendarmes for all we knew – escorted us to the home of some friends of hers. Again the capacious wooden house of a former exile. In this case of a former convict too, for the father of the family had been a political convict on Sakhalin Island before the war with the Japanese. He had seen the tsarist guards bayonet and shoot many prisoners there, and feigned death to escape the massacre. Our host told us he had passed on to his large family a hatred of the autocracy, and now lived as far from its reach as he could.

  Now he was a prosperous dealer in Siberian and humpback sa
lmon, since the Amur River estuary was rich in these fish that crowded from the ocean into the fresh waters to spawn. Japanese and Russians were paid to catch the salmon with nets and even by hand. Ashore, they gutted them and dried them in the sun on bast matting, then coated them in salt and laid them out in the form of a pyramid. There they awaited sale to the grocers and fish merchants of the city.

  After a pleasant week there, being spoiled with fruit and chocolate by the old prisoner’s children, he offered us work vending fish to stores in the area. Suvarov and I built up our stocks of money from wages and occasional bonuses for signing up orders for salmon. The ports were still closely watched, we were told, and we felt safe with our salmon merchant. But salmon was, above all, a summer business, and in the autumn, with our summer money in our pockets, we wrung the hand of the salmon merchant. We knew we were now in reach of Japan. The idea that in a few hours we might have got to the end of our escape made us both delirious and fretful.

  But the high walls of the fort ramparts, built by an earlier tsar, hung above us – a promise that Russia didn’t let go of her delinquent children too easily. Suvarov alerted me to the fact that, at the wharf gate, some of Russia’s easternmost gendarmes were checking documents and detaining a number of men who looked more or less like us, in serge pants and boots and greasy, creased jackets and caps, in a line of the damned and rejected. The men being pulled out of the line were being taken by guards to line up under the ramparts, as if for a firing squad.

  They’re escaped prisoners or army deserters, an old man told us cheerily.

  We could not risk having that happen to us.

  You slip out first, I told Suvarov, and he did, like a man who’d been farewelling a relative. I kissed a surprised elderly woman and left in my turn. We were not stopped.

  34

  Presenting ourselves at the home of the good salmon merchant again, he advised us to lie low until the new spring. Our patron arranged a safe job for us, felling trees with Koreans in the nearby forests, sharing the Koreans’ huts for accommodation.

  It was a harsh winter toppling trees with crosscut saws held in mittened but chilblained hands, rushing them back into gloves every few minutes to prevent the horrors of frostbite. But the Koreans treated us as their pet Russians and Suvarov entertained them with a sequence of risqué Russian musical numbers, which they loved, being a very earthy bunch.

  When we came back to town in the spring, I had been in the process of escaping for nearly two years. It was still snowing in Nikolayevsk, and the streets were full of troikas. According to what we heard, the gendarmes checked the guests of dosshouses closer to the harbour. We avoided the docks where the trouble had happened late the previous summer, and instead went to one of the harbour inlets used only by small fishing boats, and hired a Gilyak native with creased Asiatic skin and an unceasing smile, in his uniform of velvet trousers and a heavy coat, to row Suvarov and me out to a ship named the Kiyefu Maru.

  We chatted to the man as he pulled hard. A good coat, remarked Suvarov. What animal?

  Dog fur, said the man. It’s the best one. It lasts.

  It was pronouncements like this that made it easy for Russians to sneer at the Gilyaks. Venerable European Russia devoured men and gorged, virtually, on the skins of the miserable, but chose to be fussy when it came to the skinning of a dog.

  Suvarov and I came up the steps of the ship onto the deck, showed our papers, and spent our winter money on a cabin. As the ship pulled away through the broad calm estuary of the Amur, we went walking forward.

  On the foredeck, in very thin clothing, sat a number of Chinese and Japanese coolies, travelling as deck cargo and returning to their families. A Japanese officer stood in front of two of them, beating them with an iron marlin spike. Hey, we called in Russian. Stop that!

  Fortunately the officer ceased. He told us in a rage that these deck passengers always crept aboard without paying their two and a half roubles. Suvarov clattered down the companionway, faced the officer, counted from his pocket five roubles that I was sure we would ultimately need, and gave them to the man.

  But for Christ’s sake, he said, stop beating them!

  The two Japanese coolies, their faces distorted by the spike, tried to kowtow to Suvarov but he told them, whether they understood or not, that they were men of equal value as the fellow who had beaten them.

  We had enjoyed such patronage from the Russian exiles of Siberia that we came to expect the Russian émigré community in Japan would do us the same favours. I think it is fair to say that even my good friend Suvarov had become accustomed to this help, though not to an extent that it disabled his native wit. Yet how else to explain that we lashed out to buy cabin tickets, all to share a main cabin in which Japanese fish and timber merchants strutted. When we saw these merchant princes of Japan smoking and talking emphatically, we began to wonder why we had not saved our money and travelled with the Chinese and Japanese on the foredeck.

  ***

  We landed one misty morning four days later in Niigata, and travelled southwards on the railway, trying to talk to the Japanese families on board the train. We did not tell them that three of their countrymen had expired for the sanctity of class on the foredeck of the Kiyefu Maru.

  We changed trains in Kyoto, and galloped up a hill to look at a temple, where we met a Russian who told us there were exiles living in Nagasaki over the straits in Kyushu. Then we rushed back to the train. In Nagasaki we wandered the streets looking for a Russian face but spotting none. We entered the premises of a few Russian merchants who made it clear they didn’t particularly want to know us.

  In Nagasaki Suvarov and I sank so low that we bought a net and caught shrimps, and picked up sea cabbage and shellfish. One day, while I was studying a Japanese grammar in our dosshouse, Suvarov came home to announce that he had met a wealthy merchant who wanted to learn Russian from him. We were both invited to join him as his guests at the kabuki opera. We all sat there in the semi-darkness, watching a tragic play in which the main character performs ritual suicide. Before that a comical character appeared, who was either American or European, and this was signalled by the fact that he was dressed in a checked suit, rather fresher than the one I’d later see on Paddy Dykes. The Japanese laughed heartily at him, which showed that they welcomed making Europeans a target of scorn, and explained why we were sometimes treated with hostility on the streets.

  As we sat listening to music to which we lacked the key, I began to suspect by the man’s gestures and eye movements that he wanted Suvarov for a lover. Suvarov had already visited some teahouses in Nagasaki where one could find the company of women, and I did not want him to sell himself to the merchant out of pure financial need.

  In fact, Suvarov rebuffed the merchant and we were forced to leave our accommodation, and slept in a cave in the side of one of Nagasaki’s coastal hills. We shared it with Koreans, who were also waiting for a change of fortune. We visited the docks every day to see if Russian ships had put in and to try to start a conversation with the sailors. It was hard without our being able to afford to buy them rice wine.

  Two sympathetic sailors we met in the street and visited a teahouse with became friendly with us. This time Suvarov was not scrupulous. He and one of the sailors disappeared for a time. After they returned, the sailors agreed to sneak us onto their ship, the Khabarov, which was leaving for Shanghai – where there were, they said, hordes of Russians. Knowing we might starve if we did not take this chance, we got a boatman to row us to the ship by dark and climbed a ladder to its deck, where the sailors met us and hid us in lifeboats. We lay there all through the night and until dusk the following day. But on the verge of sailing the captain and his officers, making a final inspection before leaving, found us. There is nothing more ridiculous and few things less dignified than emerging from a lifeboat, stumbling upright, and being asked by an officer whether we had shitted in there.

  He had us rowed ashore again, yelling after us, It’s a good thing you’r
e Russians.

  We were back in our smoky cave, with Koreans who somehow knew about our adventures and found them hilarious. These Koreans knew how to cook good rice with a mere smattering of sardine, and they gave us some in repayment for the pure comedy of our situation.

  The next ship in, also bound for Shanghai, was the Primorsk, and Suvarov and I expended our last coins on taking a Primorsk sailor, Sanya, to a waterside teahouse. This time Suvarov did not have to pay any price of the flesh to get aboard. Sanya took us down to the wharf and showed us where the shore-leave boat picked up men every hour after dark. If we got into the boat muffled up and appeared a little drunk, we could get away with boarding the Primorsk because the coxswain wouldn’t count us. To prepare for the journey we filled our pockets with bread and Korean dumplings, farewelled our fellow cavedwellers, and went and met the shore-leave cutter. Then we motored out to the Primorsk and clattered aboard with the others. There had been no officer at the gangway and Sanya had assured us that even if we were caught the captain was liberal-minded. Just don’t mention me, said Sanya. That was all.

  We hid in an equipment locker on the main deck. The next dawn an officer discovered Suvarov urinating through the taffrail, and I heard him taken past the locker where I still hid. Obviously there would now be a search, so when it began I threw open the locker door and gave myself up.