The People's Train (11 page)

I now took formal membership of the Russian Social Democratic Party – if Pelageya’s example was to be followed, it was the equivalent of becoming a nun or monk taking vows. It was not to be a party of dilettantes, of yearning amateurs, Vladimir Ilich announced again and again in articles. I spent a year in meetings and in study. My energy, I remember, was limitless. I turned seventeen, and to my mother’s relief found I was to be sent to the Moscow Technical Institute – what had previously been called the Emperor’s Vocational School – on a scholarship.

With one side of my soul I could see the attractions of a student life, of concentrating merely on questions of bridges and railway culverts and being a mere dance-hall-and-café revolutionary. I did study my introductory texts very well, but of course joined the institute’s social democratic club. As for the ever-present possibility of arrest for anyone involved in political action, I denied it could happen to someone as young and unexposed to civil censure as I was. After all, many of my fellows were of far more elevated background than myself and had hosted or visited many workers’ circles. I went to meetings in factories under the privileged but potentially dangerous description of student leader. The workers I met were likeable and passionate, honest men and women, many of them peasants come up to the city and not much different in background from myself or Uncle Efim.

On a clear winter’s day in 1902, the students of the social democratic clubs of the technical institute and the University of Moscow itself proceeded up Volkhonka Street. We were protesting the fact that the education minister had suddenly shipped two hundred teachers to Siberia, and also that the St Petersburg protest march, led by Gorki, had been ambushed by Cossacks.

At the marshalling area at the head of the boulevard, we were joined by workers from the Prokhorov cotton mill and the Stürmer furniture factory, whose progressive owners did not dock their workers for participating in the march. There were railway workers as well, and printers who wanted to be paid for the multiple apostrophes they were required to print but were not rewarded for. As always, the future we marched for meant different things to all the people there. For some – Mensheviks, weak social democrats – a British-style liberal democracy would have done; for many of the compositors a kopek per apostrophe; for others of us only a socialist revolution would serve. And we marched with each other in fraternity since we needed each other’s cooperation.

To make us less scared of arrest, one of the leaders of a contingent from the University of Moscow, an impressive-looking young man in a handmade suit and overcoat and a rich-textured homburg, told us that the fifteen hundred arrested in St Petersburg and sent to the Peter and Paul Fortress in the Neva were being supplied with free cigarettes by the manufacturer father of one of the prisoners. Since I had never seen the inside of a prison, all this sounded very jaunty to me, a little picnic of detention. So I marched lightly out under our red banner towards the Pushkin Memorial, and felt armoured in layers of fraternity.

All this I told Podnaksikov as we scrubbed the gallows floor in Boggo Road, with the ghosts of those who had died in that shed hanging about our shoulders like cobwebs.

Well, I told Podnaksikov, that was my first experience of being rushed by Cossacks. It’s an alarming thing. The trampling horses seemed to pass on to the marchers their own fright and panic. And then five hundred of us were arrested and sent to Poltava.

And how was Poltava? asked Podnaksikov, interested for once.

It was very ... brutal. They sent all the troublemakers from the south there. But, I have to admit, it was part of my education.

He could see, though, that I had tired, something like exhaustion setting in for now.

A beanpole of a guard was at the door. He said, I suppose you bastards consider this clean?

Well, I knew from Poltava and elsewhere that it was suicidal to answer a rhetorical question.

It was after about a fortnight of our detention that I was called to the visitor’s hall and saw sitting there beyond a grille of thick wire Hope Mockridge in an unpretentious tan dress. I was exhilarated but also resented the intervening grille. As I sat down myself, she said, Forgive me, Artem. They did not let me come earlier.

Then she choked on tears for a while. Diffused though she was by wire mesh, I got a sense from her look of health and her outright beauty, that if I concentrated on her I could become part of her and in a way escape with her.

Please, I told her. Don’t be distressed, Hope. We’re not in here forever.

You should not be in here at all, she whispered. Besides, I miss your company.

And I bitterly miss yours.

She sucked in a lower lip as she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. She told me then she had heard that Thompson had begun a hunger strike. Was it true? she asked me.

I hadn’t heard that, I told her.

If you hear he has, tell him Walter O’Sullivan wants him to stop.

She assured me we had not been at all forgotten. Donations to make up for our lost wages and to buy us comforts were coming in. But the chief warden had not let any visitors or money reach us yet. Money had been used to buy us food hampers and it should not be too many more days before we received them. The idea cheered Hope as much as it cheered me.

Walter O’Sullivan has not abandoned you either, she told me, beginning to look brighter through the remains of tears. He has sent one of his lieutenants up from Melbourne. A Scotsman named Buchan. His job is to organise the effort on your behalf.

When she laughed, part of the laughter was for scenes from which I was excluded.

This Buchan dresses a little strangely for a socialist, she said, but he’s been very helpful. She laughed again. He does a very funny imitation of Olive O’Sullivan.

In a sudden fit of jealousy I thought that shouldn’t take too much effort, given Olive’s eccentricities.

Does he? I asked stiffly.

My God! Is that bourgeois jealousy I hear in your voice, Tom? Fear not, he’s returning to Melbourne next week. By the way, Paddy Dykes – you know, the Broken Hill man – wants to see me. There are all sorts of rumours around about Freeman Bender.

Then a warder moved in. Her visit was curtailed before I could properly thank her for it.

For a time, all exercise was cancelled. I thought that – according to the strange irrationality of jails – it was because of demonstrations outside the prison. Suvarov and I were, however, taken from our cells each afternoon and required to sweep the main floor of our wing. One of the older warders who supervised us was in a rosy mood – he was about to get his pension, and he let us talk.

Has Thompson gone on hunger strike? I asked Suvarov, since Thompson’s cell was close to his.

Suvarov told me it was true – that was the real reason exercise had been cancelled for us. I thought at once, A hunger strike is too much. With a hunger strike, one should at least undermine a tsar. But to go on a hunger strike against the Queensland attorney-general seemed a waste of grand intent.

And so does he expect us to join him? I asked Suvarov.

Not yet, said Suvarov. One is enough for the moment.

I agree. I received a message from Walter O’Sullivan via Hope. O’Sullivan wants Thompson to stop. Tell him that!

The food Thompson was renouncing was not so sumptuous anyhow. In the morning we were given a sort of gruel with very little salt and no sugar, and black tea. At lunch it was bread and hard cheese, and in the evening the thinnest stew in the Southern Hemisphere. The Irish guard who had beaten me would, as the old Communard of Paris predicted such men would do, occasionally bring Suvarov and me a chop each, wrapped in cheesecloth, from his own table, and would stay in my cell a little while chatting about the situation of Ireland, for whose cause he was a powerless advocate, and comparing it with that of Russia under the tsars. Whether Russia or Ireland, he said, it’s all a matter of land and who owns it! He was right on that.

I told him it was a matter of capital also, and of who owns the means of production and exchange.

Jesus, he told me, just give me two hundred acres up the coast a bit, on one of them lush rivers, and that’ll be enough production and exchange for me. But the day is coming, and the question is, who’ll rise first, Russia or Ireland? You could put a good bet on it one way or another.

Yet this same man, of kindly tendencies and flaws of brutality, was very contemptuous of Hope Mockridge. Perhaps it was because she came from a pastoral family. And she was a woman, and didn’t know a woman’s place.

The promised food hampers arrived with a note in each.
From your friends Hope Mockridge, Paddy Dykes and Walter O’Sullivan.
A committee of salvation! The hampers restored everyone. Thompson had come off his hunger strike at Walter O’Sullivan’s insistence, and Suvarov was permitted into his cell to feed him Scottish broth. And in my hamper came a notepad and a set of pencils. If I handed them through the window to the Irish guard, he would get them sharpened. Don’t go bloody cutting your throat with them, Ivan, he warned me, or my job’s fucked and I’ll have to beat the squealing tripes out of you.

We had served a month and now could have more visitors. Podnaksikov had a visit from the Italian girl, Lucia, and seemed to shed his depression. I was honoured by a visit from Paddy Dykes, who had the look of a man who found it hard to sit still, though he managed it. His brown eyes glowed with excitement.

You might be heartened, he said, to know our mate Bender is in deep shit with his toffy friends – those who got wounded aboard the Palace. I’ve slipped it all to the
Telegraph
but they dare not publish it. The word and the proof are getting around town though. I reckon Bender’s social credit will run out in no time.

The idea of Bender’s shame was very pleasing and, as Paddy said, something to warm a cell with in the short term.

I said, You’re like a mongoose, Paddy. You have gone down a hole and come back with the cobra in your teeth.

Yeah, but it’s more the Queensland taipan, the most poisonous one. And if I wasn’t a – what was it? – a mongoose, if I wasn’t that, I might as well go back to mining bloody ore.

The article finished, I passed it to Hope one visiting day for posting to the editor Previn in Piter, St Petersburg. She told me in return that word of Bender’s involvement in the bombing of the Palace was known throughout the whole of society. What a triumph for Paddy! On the next visit she told me that Bender had resigned his headship of Brisbane Tramways, shut up his great house and put it up for sale, and left on the first steamer for the United States.