The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  And more graphic detail still. My hero and Suvarov’s acquaintance Gorki was charged with taking over police headquarters, but when he got there found that the crowd had already arrived and set fire to the place.

  The Queensland papers published a report from The Times that spoke of the good order and good nature of the crowds. The people wore red armbands or red buttonholes as they marched together on the Tauride Palace, where the tsar’s retrograde Duma met. There they cleared some bureaucrats out of their offices and occupied them with a committee (a soviet, that is) of the Councils of Workers’ Deputies – to act as a parallel government.

  They attacked the Peter and Paul Fortress in the middle of the river and let imprisoned soldiers go. They seized the less bizarre jails of the suburbs and – as at the Bastille – let the prisoners go free. The naval cadets at Kronstadt began to shoot their officers. Indeed, it sounded like the day might have arrived.

  Members of my party, the Bolsheviks, were among those elected to the first sitting of the Soviet. In the Soviet, though, there were all sorts of other men and women and opinions – Mensheviks, Trudoviks, the quasi-liberal Cadets. Nonetheless, this Supreme Council of Soviets, of all the workers’ and soldiers’ own works and regimental soviets, put a point on the great javelin of Russian discontent.

  The news is a tonic, Amelia told me from the depths of her chair.

  But waiting on letters from Suvarov and others, we heard conflicting bulletins. There were announcements of the end of rebellion. The forces still loyal to the tsar were marching on St Petersburg. A gentleman named Kerensky tried to bridge the Duma and the Soviet with a further temporary committee aimed at restoring order.

  What was undeniable was that a red flag now flew from the Tauride Palace. That was what excited Amelia and teased my stagnant soul. Then, through clenched teeth, the respectable papers printed the astonishing news – the tsar had abdicated! I found this harder to believe than any mystery of religion. Countless Russians had put all their lives and energies into opposing this man, and he had fallen in the end while caught between the outraged soldiers of the front and the workers of St Petersburg – or, as they were calling it now, Petrograd. The now eternal and glorious Piter! The press was free, the prison doors open, and I was no longer under sentence. So suddenly had this come that I would forget it, waking in my exiled state in the small hours and then the reality rousing in me: No more a prisoner, Artem. No more!

  Even from the distance at which we sat, we could sense the chaos of Russia like the chaos of a Creation. The bulletins reprinted in the Brisbane papers from The Times and other sources depicted soldiers making rough camps in the corridors of the Tauride, attacking the Astoria Hotel and bayoneting so many officers that the revolving doors could not turn for blood. When Sukhomlinov, a former minister of war, appeared, the crowd outside had to be dissuaded from shooting him, but they tore his epaulettes off instead. Most astoundingly of all, the Soviet in the Tauride Palace voted that from now on the military should take its orders not from the government but from the Supreme Council of Soviets itself. The cry was born: All power to the soviets!

  It used to be said that a backward country like Russia could not achieve a revolution until it went thoroughly through the industrial stage like Germany or England or America. But despite all the mutual bloodshed, Germany and England remained loyal monarchies. The revolution was with us. And so suddenly.

  Everyone was congratulating me. Kelly was wringing my hand.

  Marvellous, marvellous, he said. The best news since the war started.

  Russia’s the only country going ahead, said Paddy Dykes. The rest of us are all piss and vinegar. I just can’t believe that bastard Hughes. It’s hard for a man to live with. But it’s all rosy with Russia.

  It was hard to deal with the tumult of what I felt. Since Kerensky and his comrades promised to fight on against the Germans, it became apparent even on the streets of Brisbane that the majority of locals thought it a good thing, an end to backwardness. Meanwhile, in France, their children were hurled against the wire to enfilading fire.

  A telegram came from Hope and Buchan. DELIGHTED PLEASED FOR YOU AT RUSSIAN EVENTS. ARE YOU GOING? H & B.

  I could have sent a bitter telegram back: CANNOT GO IN VIEW AMELIA HEALTH.

  Of course I was pleased I talked myself out of that meanness.

  Yet everyone was asking, When are you going back?

  One night, Paddy Dykes asked me, If you go back, would I be able to come too?

  The idea astonished me.

  I’ve got funds, he argued, and it’s the only place on the move. I could write about events and send back reports. Admittedly, I don’t know the language yet. Would I be in the way?

  I assured him he wouldn’t. The question of how I would raise the necessary funds myself remained open.

  If you went back, Tom, he asked after reflection, what would be the best way?

  Least expensive? I’d take work on a steamer to Japan, and then across to Vladivostok. It’ll be cheaper to travel from there by train to Ukraine and then take another one to Piter.

  Within a few seconds our discussions had become very concrete. I still had my duty to Amelia – to abandon her in her growing weakness seemed unthinkable. But what was thinkable was the matter of how deep and serious a revolution it was after all. After the early turbulence, peace was said to have been made between the Soviet and the Duma, and Prince Lvov – an old liberal with backsliding mystical ideas – had been appointed chief minister. And when many wanted the return of Nikolka, our tsar, would revolution stick?

  It’s not worth going yet, I told Amelia when she raised the question. She lowered her head and looked up at me in doubt. No, I assured her, I could get there if I took a job as a stoker. But then it would take months for me to work my way home. Anything might have happened by then.

  But you mustn’t think of staying for me, said the Amelia no one but a callous man could leave. I have my nurse, and my letters from Hope and visits from all the girls in the secretarial union.

  No. I should wait and see if the tsar comes back. If he does, he’ll return like thunder.

  Yet I was getting tired of Australian battles, which suddenly seemed minor by comparison with every bulletin from Piter.

  ***

  At the end of the Australian summer there are contrasting days. It might be over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit one morning and blowing a brisk gale from the sea the next, enough to make the stevedores don their tattered jumpers. It used to be the time of year that most afflicted Rybakov. Now, in that uneven weather, Amelia suffered a chill. Within a day or so of renewed heat, the chill had turned to pneumonia. I went to visit her and found her unaware of the world, lying in a bed veiled with mosquito netting. The rasping of her breath was cruel to hear. The nurse, who sat by reading, looked up and said, She feels very little. The doctor has her on laudanum. To make her comfortable, you know.

  I did not like the sound of that.

  But she will get over it, I asserted.

  Perhaps, said the nurse lightly and got up, lifted the netting and, looking at a watch attached to her tunic, took Amelia’s pulse. Then she said, I think you should prepare all Amelia’s friends for the worst.

  I left and sent a telegram to Hope. She arrived three days later by steamer and by that time Amelia was even more profoundly in a coma and even more pitiably searching for breath.

  Sometimes Hope and I drank tea in Amelia’s kitchen. I could look at Hope now without resentment or any mixed feelings. There was a shadow of age over her as she bent her lips to her tea. It made her more lovely but less of the woman I had adored. Passion had, at least, with a sane heart, given way to affection and even – since she lived with Buchan – pity.

  And I had my own distraction – a rueful suspicion.

  I keep thinking, I told Hope, that she’s doing this for me. To free me, so I can go to Russia. I wish I could call her back and have a conversation. I wish I could say, You don’t need to sink
down into the shadows.

  No, said Hope. Don’t fret yourself. Even when she’s unconscious she’s still captain of her own ship. It’s ridiculous to think she’d die for your convenience, Artem. You could have gone anyhow. It’s not as if she’s your mother.

  No. But she is one of my dearest friends.

  I went home after midnight – Hope remained to sit out the vigil. At dawn there was a hammering on the door of Adler’s which, emerging from my room on the ground floor, I answered. A tear-streaked Hope was there.

  Four o’clock this morning, Hope told me. It was sudden, otherwise I’d have come for you.

  We fell into each other’s arms, I felt a click of grief in my throat, and we shuddered with mutual tears.

  The funeral was on a bright, temperate day, the golden mean of the Queensland seasons. The coffin was carried by Kelly and me and two unionists who had known Amelia, and it was accompanied, four each side, by eight of Amelia’s young typists dressed in white and wearing sashes. After the interment there was a wake at the Trades Hall Hotel where toasts were made to her, one of them being a half-tipsy, halfweeping tribute from Hope. Those women you saw, Hope told us, the women either side of the coffin – they were there out of gratitude. She had given them dignity and better wages – sixty per cent over the past five years.

  The statistics ran a little strangely in the saloon bar near the close of a hymn of praise for Amelia. But they arose honestly from Hope’s lips; they were the statistics of her loss.

  When it was time for me to leave, Hope rushed after me.

  Artem, stop, please. Don’t go yet.

  She stood in front of me and fished from her reticule an envelope.

  This was in Amelia’s ‘death file’, as she called it – a list of the things she wanted done after she died. Her nurse pointed it out to me. Inside, there was money for her funeral, of course. So upright to the end! And this one is for you.

  Dubiously I took it. A letter of farewell and encouragement, I thought. But it was thickly padded.

  It’s none of my business, said Hope. But aren’t you going to open it?

  I know she would never have asked this normally but she had drunk too much gin.

  Very well, I told her.

  Inside were fifty-pound notes amounting – I would discover – to three hundred pounds. A fortune.

  And a note.

  Artem, this is for Russia!

  She means that you ought to go direct, Artem. You needn’t work your passage.

  My lids slammed shut with the sadness of that skeletal creature going to this trouble. I thought better of the nurse, who knew all that money was there and had left it untouched.

  The next day I took an early shift and after that Paddy met me and we walked together to the shipping offices of the NYK line. The Yawata Maru was due to sail from Brisbane to Yokohama and Nagasaki in two weeks’ time. We paid our deposit as steerage passengers. We left the office with the sense of having accomplished great things, and walked into the sunshine of the early Queensland winter.

  Russian winters aren’t like this, I told Paddy, but he shrugged.

  There was time to talk to the committee of the soyuz, to leave some cash for the purchase or hire of a new printing press and the upkeep of Russia House – Amelia would have approved of such expenditure. I said goodbye to Lucia, to the Stefanovs, who had found an enduring home in Queensland, and to Kelly. But the palms on the streets, and the shuttling trams over which we had fought our first battle, seemed visible only through a remote lens now, through the wrong end of binoculars. Australia, the passions I had deployed there, the fights fought, the adventures endured, the bright air, seemed precious but all the more so since, even before the Yawata Maru sailed, and under the weight of Russian events, it was sinking beneath the horizon of my concerns.

  And there I stood with Paddy Dykes, the most unexpected companion of all – a substitute, perhaps, for Amelia’s immortal spirit.

  Part Two

  Paddy Dykes’ Russian Journal

  1

  I’m an accidental Russian, led here from a far-off place and by a famous man. This is the tale of my travels with Artem Samsurov, well known enough to have a stamp dedicated to him in the 1930s when others were being shot and removed from the record. This is also the story of myself – in the year 1917. Many still think of it as the year of years! Many write about it. Here I’m adding my voice to the many. Anyone who was there in the summer and autumn of 1917 and could read and write but still doesn’t take up his pen and put something to paper about those times – he’d be rightly judged a failure.

  On the ship I spent every morning studying Russian grammar with Artem. I think by the time the first part of the journey ended in Japan I could speak the language like an eighteen-month-old and read it like a three-year-old. I’ll give little time to Japan. For a little while, though, Artem and I found ourselves among these lovely fish-and rice-eating people who had thrashed the Russians in 1905. The skin of Japanese women, I saw, was silken after all. Artem thought me a dry old fish myself – good only for stoushes and reporting. Indeed I’m a desert man, coming from Broken Hill. Hunger and the sun hollowed me out. But if I’d been on my own instead of with Artem, I might have been delayed a bit longer among those people in Japan, and grabbed any job, as an inland sea fisherman, say, or even mining.

  Enough of that. I’ve got my path in life, and I’m writing about my Russian education, which began, as I say, when I was still a child even though I was thirty-five years old. Innocent as one of those kids presented in a long embroidered gown at the baptismal font. Like most children, I was a witness instead of an actor on life’s stage. But others were active, and when it came to activity, you couldn’t beat Artem Samsurov.

  To get to Siberia we caught the ferry across from Fukura on Honshu, and we watched the great mountains disappear behind us. I loved the look of snow as a novelty. But Artem told me I’d get enough of it next winter and come to curse it.

  We came up Golden Horn Bay towards the great terraced streets of Vladivostok. They shone in a bright mid-summer sun that would stay up for most of the day. The ferry landing was right next door to the big white palace of a railway station, and I’d find as I travelled that the Russians put a lot of work into their railway stations. Standing in front of that one, I thought I’d finally arrived in Russia. The fact is I’ve been arriving every day since.

  The last time I was here, Tom told me, we were running away up the coast to Nikolayevsk. Suvarov and me.

  There were soldiers in their grey uniforms everywhere in the streets and around the railway. Many of them had Asian faces from the tribes of Siberia. They’d been stationed here, Artem told me, because the tsar had feared the Japanese might attack Russia while its main army was in the west. A lot of the soldiers I saw had tuberculosis and stopped in the street to spit into bloody rags. They looked ragged, restless and dangerous – men who were fed up and might have shot their officers. At intersections we also saw the rifle-bearing civilians, factory workers in bits of uniform but mainly their poor old clothes– their red armbands were what really identified them. These were a new militia and called themselves Red Guards. They took themselves more seriously than the soldiers, and didn’t look any more war-weary than me.

  I’d got a geography lesson from Artem – along the lines that to get to Petrograd from Vladivostok is three times Sydney to Perth. I’d always thought there was nothing bigger than Australia. But there in Vladivostok we were facing three Australias. I thought Europe was all small, I told him. It was what Australians consoled themselves with. Europe is small and every ten miles there is someone that hates someone else, and Australia is large and we love each other – or so the story goes.

  At the railway station, Artem didn’t go anywhere near the ticket counter. It was as if he knew the geography of the place. We went down some steps, crossed some rails and Artem knocked on the door of the railway workers’ barracks. A young man with greas
e-stained overalls opened the door and listened to Artem. Then he opened the door further and we went into the dimness of a sort of laundry room. On this clear humid day the smell of wet Russian socks from the barracks was just like the smell of wet miners’ socks at Broken Hill. Beyond was a common room and the young railway man pointed us towards it. There was a crowd of drivers, firemen, guards and fettlers sitting and talking and smoking rough tobacco in pipes. A cheap samovar of tea steamed away. Almost straight off Artem was recognised by an engine driver.

  Now a lot of what was said to us in Russia early on I didn’t understand. At first I asked Artem to explain and later – after maybe three months – began to understand it a bit. So I’ll do my best to say – or sometimes take a stab at – what talk took place. This engine driver said something like, Comrade Samsurov, I was with you in the Perm railway yards. Have you been all this time in prison?

  Artem was straight away treated with respect. I don’t pretend they all knew him, but a number had heard enough about him, his arrest, work in Perm, his escape, to want to wring his hand. They invited us to sit. Artem sat down and began to talk with them, now and then turning to tell me what they were saying to him, and what he was saying to them. I’m letting them know Australia is a wonderful place, he informed me as if he’d become a Brisbane patriot. But the workers have no proper class consciousness – except for you.

  Indeed all eyes were on me as if I was a strange and special creature. I would get used to this.