The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  The bearded captain to whom we were taken on the bridge did not seem the creature of generous socialist impulse that Sanya had described to us.

  You scum! he roared. You turds floated across from Siberia. Don’t think I don’t know who you are! Criminals! Disturbers of order! Bloody anarchists! I’m going to hand you to the Russian consul in Shanghai. Until then, you’ll be locked up and starved.

  We were pushed into a latrine and the door was locked behind us. The water closet was there so that we could be left indefinitely without fouling the ship. The hopeful sign was that they brought us the same food as the crew ate – rice and steamed fish – and jars of water.

  But since the captain had said he’d starve us, an old prison instinct made us refuse the food. We kept it up for a day and a half. Then the captain appeared, his fury evaporated.

  You are a pain in my arse and I hate having you aboard. But don’t worry – if you don’t put on airs like refusing to eat, you’ll get on all right. Eat up now. You can bunk with the crew.

  He considered us a while, tugging on his moustache.

  No wonder the tsar had trouble with you two.

  We were put to work scraping and painting, and then one dawn the colour of pearl, we entered the port of Shanghai. The density of the traffic in the mouth of the Huang Po, the scows and barges drifting past anchored European warships and freighters, by its nature made one feel hopeful. My two-year escape had brought me to this fascinating place. But the prospect of being returned soured the day.

  The agent of the shipping company came aboard, interviewed the captain, inspected the ship’s log, let stevedores aboard to unload a cargo of Japanese lacquered furniture, and then told us to accompany him to the Russian consulate. At the bottom of the gangway he had posted a tall Indian armed with a rifle, and the guard and agent now escorted us to the Russian legation located in a European-style building on the road called the Bund. We were already depressed, but the tsar’s picture, which looked down on us with a kindly severity in the outer office, left us dismal. At last the door to the consulgeneral’s inner office opened and there stood a young man with a beard trimmed like Nikolka’s. This young man thanked the guard and the shipping agent, permitted them to leave, and then called us into his office. On his wall was a very handy map of the region, the sort of gift of information I felt bound to devour.

  What can I do with you? the young consul-general asked us. Had the shipping agent, with so much on his mind, left without telling him we were stowaways?

  We thought it best not to show the consul our false passports. We told him instead we were sailors but we’d missed our ship in Nagasaki and our papers and belongings were on that ship. The consul told us he was swamped by stranded Russian sailors. He gave us a few dollars of local money – he did so for every stranded sailor. He would send us back to Vladivostok on the very first Russian ship available, but in the meantime we should live in the Russian Sailors’ Home in Fuchau Road.

  We were sent off without any guard or any orders about our behaviour. Standing in the densely peopled street among rickshaw men and coolies and Europeans in the most elegant suits to be seen in the world, we had trouble believing what had just happened.

  He doesn’t want to see us again, said Suvarov in wonder, and it seemed that that was so, that the harried young man would be pleased for us to disappear into the streets that had all the liveliness of the harbour. Huge banners advertising pawn shops were everywhere. Chinese pharmacies stood in every block with their unguessable rows of drawers and big urns full of cures. Men carrying live crabs on a string walked from food shop to food shop, and from the top balcony of a furniture store a Chinese band played. Every three or four doors was a coolie restaurant selling food very cheaply. Men who pulled rickshaws would eat here, replenishing their strength for hauling further humans.

  Lost amid such traffic, we felt our freedom had been achieved at last.

  35

  Suvarov and I would become familiar with the coolie restaurants where the steamed buns or crab tofu was made in a great earthenware stove in the middle of the room.

  With the freedom permitted Europeans here, we wandered in the International Settlement, where we would regularly see teams of coolies, twenty at a time and four abreast, hauling wagons loaded with timber or cobblestones by means of ropes over the shoulder or straps across the breast. They were all thin men, their faces like parchment. They were successors to those slaves who built the pyramids. The rickshaw drivers carried foreigners to the doors of their banks, their concession offices and trading firms, then back to their villas. We learned by observation that the white Shanghai European princelings, once arrived at their broad house-gate, would get down without a word and toss a coin on the pavement for the Chinese driver to pick up.

  In French Town, where beautiful European-style villas could be found in the quieter streets, there was also an area of bars, cheap restaurants and dosshouses frequented by French seamen. For leisure these men reeled around in rickshaws using the rickshaw puller’s braided queue as a rein and whipping him on with a cane. In this area we rented a whole room to ourselves in a cheap hotel owned by an Armenian. It was always sepulchral, even in the day, and had little room for anything but one large bed for us to share. In a nearby street, though, we came across a Russian bakery. Paying rent a month ahead, we had only a few dollars left, and so went looking for work at the bakery.

  It was a cold season. Fog haunted the streets. We wore grey caps, our Russian belted shirts and thin black overcoats. Suvarov had in his hand a pocket dictionary of Russian and phonetic Mandarin.

  When we arrived at the counter of the place, and stood before the display of bread and delicacies on glass shelves, a Russian cashier and the baker who cooked the bread in the oven at the rear of the shop came forward, each with a grin on his face. Brothers, one of them said. They looked at our clothes and our thin faces, and they knew the story behind them since they had maybe made a journey like ours themselves. The cashier shook our hands, the plump baker wiped flour off his palms with his apron and offered his hand too. They introduced themselves as Radich and Yevgeny. We presented ourselves in turn by our real first names. It felt safe enough to do that. Radich the manager was rueful when we mentioned jobs. He told us the bakery was in fact owned by a Chinese merchant from beyond the margin of the International Settlement, and doubted he himself had the power to employ anyone. But, he said, they’d been authorised to employ Chinese to work on a new bread run in French Town – it was taken for granted that it was always Chinese who delivered bread. Can’t you use us instead? Suvarov pleaded. Russians are half Asiatic.

  Yevgeny wondered about that. White men have never been used for deliveries here. The English were fussy about that, and the French were nearly as bad.

  But we can’t afford to be fussy ourselves, argued Suvarov.

  The two bread men looked at each other. No money at all? asked Yevgeny the baker.

  We have two settlement dollars.

  Holy Mother! said Radich. But now, let’s be clear. You’d have to be here at four o’clock in the morning. You’d have to be here. At four. And never let me down. Even if you’re ill.

  We swore. From then we paid the Armenian’s Chinese servant a few pence to wake us at three each morning, and by four we were at the bakery door and Yevgeny let us in. We counted the loaves for delivery against the French numbers and names and set off hauling the cart by its shafts southwards into an elegant region of French Town. White mansions rose in misty gardens, and a Chinese servant was always waiting at the high gate to accept the European family’s bread.

  Suvarov and I developed a system for the bread delivery. Since I was a broader-shouldered man, I took to harnessing myself to the cart while Suvarov pushed from behind. Suvarov, with his good humour, quickly charmed all the Chinese women servants to whom he handed the loaves. By eleven o’clock we were back at the bakery with an empty cart, and we’d drink tea and discuss socialist theory. I told them stories abou
t Russian immigrants in Paris from when I had been there ten years before, and about Plekhanov, Martov and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. It turned out that neither of our employers was very political. Radich had escaped the police on Sakhalin Island, while Yevgeny had fled an enforced marriage in Khabarovsk.

  I grew a little entrepreneurial. We took some bread down to the harbour, and started to sell it to various Russian freighters. The SS Poltava was a regular visitor to Shanghai and we would always have lunch with the stokers in their mess. The stokers harboured secret feelings of rebellion but had a low quotient of class-consciousness. Women and liquor seemed to be at the forefront of their minds.

  In the end we moved out of our sepulchral dosshouse and into one of the small rooms behind the bakery. From our deliveries of bread to various ships, we got to know deserting sailors and absconded convicts and paid their dosshouse rent. In a small way, Suvarov and I repaid the kindnesses of Siberia.

  One day the British paper in the International Settlement – the Courier – carried an editorial item condemning certain Russians in the French quarter who had undermined European prestige and violated the concept of face by taking the work that properly belonged to Chinese coolies. I had not had the mental room nor the ease in which to write a letter reporting my movements to the leader, Vladimir Ilich. Now – spurred by the grand imperial attitude of the Courier – I did so, reporting on all I had seen in Eastern Siberia and beyond. I raised with Vladimir Ilich the question of moving, a matter that occupied a great deal of Suvarov’s and my time. America was the obvious place. We also had a number of ships from the Australia run come in to the port of Shanghai and that seemed a possibility. The attraction of Australia as a supposed working man’s paradise where labour representatives were elected to parliament was powerful. In the end, I was drawn by that idea and so was Suvarov.

  More than two years had now passed since my first escape, and Suvarov and I had built up our accounts to the point where we could afford a steerage passage to Australia. Radich and Yevgeny decided to come with us, as did a Russian deserter, but they intended to leave the ship in Melbourne whereas Suvarov and I had read plenty about the warm weather of Queensland. We travelled for three weeks in a cabin for eight people. Some nights we simply had to sleep on deck, since the air below was barely breathable.

  South of Borneo the captain kindly filled a large tarpaulin frame with water to make a swimming pool for us and we would strip to undervests and sit in it by the hour.

  And that was how, as brothers, Suvarov and I reached the great southern continent and lived and worked together until the Menschkin case drove him away to Tasmania.

  36

  It was in the early southern summer that we came into Moreton Bay. From the deck of our ship, we could see the Brisbane wharves and sun-leathered waterside workers pushing hand carts loaded with bales of wool and other goods. If one were to believe the British paper in Shanghai, they were letting down the prestige of Europeans as well. The streets seemed more full of lorries and cars seemed more numerous in the streets beyond the wharves than they were in Russian cities, and it was then I noticed the tram cars, their cleanliness, their good order and – as I would find out – their putupon drivers and conductors. The working men of Brisbane wore singlets, which was the Australian equivalent of the Russian smock, and overalls and sturdy boots and broad-brimmed hats. I would find that this – perhaps with a woollen jumper in the winter – was the standard uniform.

  It had been interesting that before leaving Shanghai we had acquired false passports but in our real names! This, despite the remote risk that people in Australia might have a list of escaped tsarist prisoners. It was a liberation to travel under one’s genuine name and to present oneself on those terms. Landed from our ship by launch we were processed for entry into Queensland in a little portable tent set up by a German-born official, and it was obvious he was very sympathetic to our situation. In a season when labour was needed in Queensland, the German-Australian official and his two auxiliaries placed very little obstacle to our landing.

  This generous attitude was not reflected when we went walking in the city, however. We sat on a bench in the botanic gardens and were moved on by a policeman for fear that we were vagrants. Strolling in the streets of the city, we decided to buy something to wear less disconcerting to passers-by than Russian smocks. We went into a store like the one I worked at in French Town and a curt male shop assistant sold us shirts and singlets and pants. Before we could return to the immigrant dormitory, where we were allowed to sleep for seven days, we met a friend of Suvarov on the street. Even I thought it was a strange sight, two Russians embracing each other on a street corner in Brisbane.

  The man’s name was Cherlin. He took Grisha by the shoulders. Do you know those bastard gendarmes hanged Kolya?

  I did not know Kolya, but suddenly Russia seemed closer and I knew that complete escape could never be achieved.

  The dormitory supervisor tried to recruit us as scab labour to go to a place named Bundaberg where members of the Australian Workers Union were on strike. He said that we would be sent back to Russia if we did not and that there was a law to that effect. Many of the Russian new arrivals joined in a walkout, including Suvarov.

  But now, Suvarov was reduced to nervousness and was on his way to Tasmania or there already, and it would not surprise me if by his own efforts he became an itinerant again, a negligible figure to the authorities.

  Out of the blue, there was sudden, graphic news. The Queenslanders, the Australians, the New Zealanders had been used in the Hellespont – on the peninsula named Gallipoli – to make a landing and try to capture Istanbul, and so give the tsar at last his warm water port by which his armies could be supplied. It was as if the land I’d fled to had been drawn into some great plot to pursue the benefit of the tsar. The Queensland newspapers claimed that the Queensland battalion, the Ninth of the Third Brigade of the First Australian Division, had been first ashore. I wondered what Major Mockridge made of that fierce landing under fire.

  Two weeks later, battalion adjutant Major Mockridge was killed at the head of some dusty and meaningless ravine while leading a party of Australians in a probe. He fell at the head of his men in an assault on the upper escarpment on top of which the Turks were well dug in. I don’t know why I felt such grief for the man and the boys he had led into the ambush. In the eyes of the Telegraph, this former militia officer had laid his body upon the high altar of the Empire, and the ravine was thereafter christened in his honour – Mockridge Gully.

  Russia was never mentioned as the mainspring of this operation, though all of us in our boarding houses discussed it endlessly. In Gallipoli, slaughter outran the capacity of newspapers to record. For a country of small population, Australia was indeed laying many on its empire’s altar. There were mothers’ sons in Mockridge’s probe whose future had been dependent on the judgement of a flawed officer whose wife had rebuffed him, with whom he shared a shameful disease, and who thus had a taste for immolation.

  I wrote to Hope. I remembered, I said, that Hope and he worked together to save our very necks. I feel that if things had been only a little different he would have been more closely your ally.

  I met Paddy Dykes sitting on a bench at Trades Hall drinking tea. He looked up at me from a newspaper, then he stood.

  You heard about Major Mockridge? he asked me.

  I told him I had.

  Shouldn’t have been there in the first place. The blind leading the blind.

  Something similar to that, I agreed.

  He held up his newspaper. I’m reading about these bloody ministers of religion. Coming home from leave in England. And all of them say the English have cleaned themselves up for the war effort, reformed themselves completely. Living angelic bloody lives it seems. Hardly a pub open and as for prostitution ... But the Australians are still too interested in cricket and football, and the races at Eagle Farm and Doomben. And beer, of course. What total balls!

  And he sat do
wn to write something in his notebook. I was sure he was writing along the lines of, If labour gives up cricket, what will capital give up?

  After the landings in the Dardanelles, parsons and priests became busy in another sense. I saw them on the streets of South Brisbane walking the pavements, telegrams in hand, on their way to deliver them and to comfort newly desolated women.

  At Trades Hall Kelly was angry. Capital will drive the essentials of life upwards! This idea captured him and made him a radical; the Labor government he so fervently believed in, despite all, wanted a wage freeze! Workers could tighten their belts while capital got rich on selling them the food for their tables. We also became aware of our people losing their jobs. They came into Russia House from the metal factories and joinery works, where machinery was being packed up to send to Britain. Men were also sacked from the coalmines, since governments were wary of the dangers of exporting Australian coal all the way to England, across oceans filled with raiders and U-boats. At Russia House we looked after our own as we had promised to. In saying ‘our own’ I display the ethnic bias that has been the bane of socialism. But that had been the promise of my earlier appeals for funds.

  I was suddenly living on my savings too. The owners of the meatworks had closed them down in the face of Premier Ryan’s newly opened state butchers’ shops and from the unfounded fear that their meat could not safely be shipped to hungry Britain. It would be a fear they would get over quickly.

  I’ll tell you a strange story, Paddy said to me at Trades Hall one evening. The miners at Broken Hill know Germany bought most of Broken Hill’s ore before the war started, and now it’s being aimed back at Australians in the trenches.

  In the absence of Suvarov and Rybakov, and in the remoteness of Hope’s behaviour (and mine, to be fair) I felt bereft of my normal sounding boards, and Paddy Dykes fulfilled the role. We worked on an account of the Menschkin case so that the Australian Worker could publish it in a small pamphlet ultimately named The Persecution of Workers and Their Friends:The Story of the So-Called Queensland Murder Case.