The People's Train (6 page)

Amelia coughed as if she understood. Astonishing what a map can conjure up, she said. Old places and old feelings.

Before I gave the atlas back to Amelia, I looked eastward and let my finger stray to Perm and all the railways intersecting there in the foothills of the Urals, and the railway crossing over the mountains and away, now a single isolated black line across reaches of birch forest and taiga to exile on the Aldan and Zeya rivers, where I began my interminable walk out to the railway at Blagoveshchensk near Manchuria, and then on to the Pacific shore. I felt a strange, crusty weariness overcome me again – I had forgotten that during my Brisbane time. Jail can bring about a kind of mental exhaustion. Then escape acts as a stimulant but is hard on the spirit as well. I could name three members of the Russian Workers Union who did not recover from the walk out of Siberia. One was a Socialist Revolutionary who hanged himself from a hardwood beam in Toowong. Another was a hopeless drunk sometimes seen raving on street corners in Brisbane. The third, Menschkin, was arrested in Brisbane for stealing from shops – kleptomania. The police overlooked his crime and now everyone knew he reported to them weekly on the activities of Queensland’s Russians. Kleptomania is, of course, a prison habit, especially for poor prisoners who lack anyone to bring them hampers. Even a
katorzhnik,
a political prisoner, would pick up anything he could. And once you had eaten a cockroach to allay hunger, once you had felt a toxic envy for a man whose cockroach seemed larger than yours, you were spoiled for polite shopping.

I turned the pages looking for Vladivostok, Sakhalin, Eastern China.

My eye lit on Shanghai.

I said, Do you know Suvarov of the Australian Workers Union?

Neither of them did.

Grisha. He was my good friend in Shanghai. In the end, it was easy to get ashore and lose ourselves – yes, even though we weren’t Chinese. Everyone thought you were a sailor on shore leave. It was in fact a little like Queensland was until a few months back. The immigration agent up here was a dear old German named Schwartz who liked socialists and didn’t like the tsar. And he knew that in Queensland cane needed cutting and railways needed building. So he was not a severe gatekeeper of the Commonwealth of Australia.

I am not sure why I made these confessions to the women. When I looked at their faces, I saw they did not know what to ask me next, or whether they’d probed too far. I said, So here I am in Brisbane. Is this not enough?

Suddenly I wanted to get away from the map of Russia. I closed the book.

Amelia remarked, As an educated man, Tom, you must resent being required to labour?

No, I told her. I need to labour. Possibly in a difficult climate. It leaves my mind free.

Curious, said Amelia. My husband used to say that.

Nonetheless, and without rancour against the late Mr Pethick, I wondered if he had ever had his anus violated by a revolver barrel. What could be done with the men who had committed such things, should the revolution come? What school could they be sent to for redemption? Which brought me back to the subject of destroyed souls.

I was just thinking about a man named Menschkin, I told the women. He marches with us, but I’m afraid he then goes to the tsarist consul, McDonald, and to the police.

That’s horrible, said Hope. What can you do to stop him?

It might be best not to stop him, I said. Rather fill his head with information that proves groundless. As an agent provocateur he’s hilarious. Even the police must know he has a comic aspect.

In what sense is he
hilarious?
asked Amelia.

Once he hung around a Russian Emigrants Union meeting telling us how to make mercury bombs in pots of lard. Men who exhort us to make bombs are always working for the tsar. Or for the Police Commissioner of Queensland.

How does one make a bomb? Hope asked. Out of
lard,
you say?

Incendiaries are made of lard and phosphate. Or explosives of mercury and lard. I’m not sure of the details because I’m not of anarchist bent.

I would have thought nothing could match dynamite, murmured Hope.

I turned to my tea and drank it quickly.

You poor man, Amelia said. I’ve upset you with the atlas, haven’t I? I am sorry.

I held a hand up, denying it.

Amelia murmured, No, you have clearly been through a lot, Tom. Yet many of the leaders of your movement live in exile in comparative comfort. Does that ever concern you?

They’ve all been through the mill themselves, I told her. One way or another. Plekhanov, that great old man, and Struve and Martov and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. They’ve all suffered. As a teenager, Vladmir Ilich saw his brother Alexander hanged. His education was interrupted by exile and bannings from universities. Now he’s entitled to some time to write.

I saw Hope shiver in the humid air. I reached a hand out, though it did not touch her. Are you well?

I hear what you’re telling us, she said, but I sense that there’s a great deal more behind it.

I shrugged.

You mention anarchists so scathingly, Tom. I remember reading a piece – in the
London Illustrated News,
I believe – about a young woman on New Year’s Eve, sitting by a window in a Russian city and looking out at a snow-covered road. The provincial governor was due to travel down it, and she had a bomb in a tin box inside a fine handbag she had bought just for this event. Buying a handbag for such a thing ... Anyhow, while she sat waiting there was a knock on her door and it was a group of Russian children, children in masks, who threw millet seeds at the house and wanted to be paid for doing it.

Yes, I said. It brings good luck.

So she got them to stay, this young woman, and made them tea. And then she saw the governor’s cavalry escort riding past, and told them to leave. She walked out into the street with her bomb, noticed a friend, a man who also carried a bomb. When the governor’s carriage drew near, her friend threw his bomb under the carriage, but it stuck in snow and did not explode. So she threw hers. And it killed the governor, and she went to prison ... An anarchist, you see. And so brave.

Would you want to bomb people in Brisbane? I asked.

No. But it’s the level of conviction that interests me.

Yet, I insisted, surely you don’t envy the naivety of people who believe the world can be changed by one bomb thrown into a particular carriage. Or even by twenty bombs thrown into twenty particular carriages.

Well no, she conceded, almost with an air of disappointment. But I wondered ... Say I had taken your prosecution file, Amelia– which I deny, anyhow ... What could happen to me in Russia, Tom? Imprisonment?

If you had done it, or maybe if you hadn’t, you would certainly be jailed or exiled.

Maybe to our station in the Darling Downs, said Hope to lighten the mood.

Something like that. Or maybe to the distant north. Cooktown, say.

Even so, we get off lightly here, don’t we?

She definitely wanted to believe that.

So say I was that person, the one who took Amelia’s file. With all the embarrassment surrounding the issue, I might lose my job. But after a while I could begin practising at the bar, you see. I could perhaps find work with the Arbitration Court in Melbourne. Melbourne winters are harsh by Queensland standards, but the point is, there would be no Siberia for me.

She smiled at me – what I thought of as an Australian smile. It was something alien, unreserved, open. And there might have been some pride there, in the ploy she had pulled off – if indeed it had been her.

Amelia said, It sounds as if the hypothetical
you,
Hope, is disappointed not to be more severely punished.

And so it did.

Amelia turned to me. But Artem, tell me, you speak as if you’re subject to the orders of your party. That you go wherever they say.

I entered into the spirit of the occasion. I would show off as I believed Hope was doing.

I’ll tell you of a case of obedience, I said. A friend of mine ... Slatkin ... has been a loyal member of the party for a decade or more. He’s worked with secret strike committees. He recruited strikers from among disloyal or disgruntled soldiers of the tsar. The party is his life. He has a good intellect, and he’s very amusing.

He had also occasionally been a bank robber, but I did not tell them that.

Ah, said Amelia, an ideal fellow.

The leader of our faction, Vladimir Ilich, who is a great intellectual, has a high opinion of my friend. Vladimir Ilich had another friend named Nikolai Stürmer, the owner – by inheritance from an uncle – of a massive engineering company. Soon young Nikolai, who was a supporter of our party despite being a capitalist, died tragically of tuberculosis and left his money and his plant to the two Stürmer women, his sisters. Vladimir Ilich asked my friend Slatkin and another of our agents to approach the sisters, charm them, marry them, and secure their wealth for the party. So my friend did approach Daria, one of the sisters, with his condolences, and won her over – she had not met too many fellows like him: earthy and humorous, yet well read. They married and the support Nikolai Stürmer had given the party was continued by his sister and Slatkin. The happy couple remitted many thousands if not millions of roubles to the party through its Swiss bank.

Oh my God, said Amelia, shaking her head. That
is
obedience!

And distasteful, said Hope. Are you asking why we don’t feel outrage at the lady bomber, but feel distaste for this?

Amelia shook her head. Surely you’re teasing us, Tom. Surely this did not happen.

No, Mrs Pethick, I assure you it did. And everyone is happy. The party has funds and is able to stand by its principles and finance its efforts. And my friend was very happy, the last time I heard. And so was his wife. No one was damaged, yet everyone who knows the story says, How shocking!

The two women looked at each other. Then Amelia said, No one can really approve of that story, Tom. Can they? But it is correct of you to shake up our comfortable assumptions.

I’m sorry, Mrs Pethick ... I’m just making the point. I didn’t want to offend you.

No, said Amelia. Not in the least.

No, Hope agreed.

I was willing now to play the contrite male who has gone too far, told the wrong story in the presence of ladies. At least it might stop them quizzing me about Russia all the time.

But your friend’s motives, said Hope. They were so cold, so planned.

And so effectual, Hope, Amelia reminded her.

We drank the dregs of tea.

I can drive you home, Tom, Hope offered.

No, there is no need.

We thanked Amelia, and I walked with Hope to open the car door and then crank the engine. As she was about to get into the car, she stopped. She had come to a sudden decision – I didn’t know what it was, and the idea that something new was to be said excited me. We were both standing, either side of Hope’s car door, in the infinite possibility of the moment.

She said, I wanted to tell you, perhaps out of vanity ... I stole Amelia’s prosecution file and put it in the stove in our kitchen when the Irish maid was out. I saved Olive Sullivan’s notebook and left it on a table at Trades Hall.

I smiled. I always knew you did it, Hope, I assured her. So ... what
will
happen to you?

I’ll resign from the public service with a show of great chagrin over their implication that I might have done it.

I laughed with her.

And then I will take a holiday for a few months, and then I’ll apply to the Queensland bar for admission. The vote may be split but I shall be admitted. I told you inside that there’s no great danger for me.

Well, great danger isn’t necessary. It doesn’t ennoble the soul.

Because what she had given me was a precious thing – I couldn’t imagine her telling that to her husband straight out – I responded in kind.

I will entrust something to you too, I said. As a gift. I am not going back to my boarding house now. I am going to another house belonging to the Stefanovs, in Merrivale Street. I have rented a room there.

You have left your old boarding house?

No. The truth is that I have rented a room to house a printing press. I have a compositor to do the setting. He begins on Monday. The first edition of the
Australian Echo
will be printed there behind drawn curtains.

She said, almost at once, I may have time on my hands soon. Could I come and help you in any way?

It would be a waste of your talent, dear Mrs Mockridge.

But it was of course the offer I was fishing for.

You said that prison made you want simple, physical work. I could benefit from some simple work too. Folding and stacking a Russian newspaper sounds very attractive for the moment.

She and I were complicit from then. We knew that we would be something like plotters in the shadow of the rickety old printing press. It was beyond believing, though, that we would in the end add the weight of desire to the Stefanovs’ floorboards or the narrow single bed, little more than a cot, with which the room was furnished. It served only a mundane purpose: I would sometimes lie down and spend the night there after finishing my work in the small hours.

One morning, as Freeman Bender’s ornate tram – the Palace – moved up Milton Road towards the city, a man wearing a mask of black, the anarchist colour, and presumed to be of the Chicago faction, the dominant Wobbly faction in Australia, emerged from behind a lamppost on the corner of Cribb Street and threw a bomb made out of a large jam tin at one of the tram’s windows. As the bomb exploded, the driver brought the tram to a halt and it did not leave the tracks. Because of the strengthened and wire-meshed windows of the tram, some of the blast was deflected back across the street, where, said witnesses, it knocked the anarchist on his arse, after which the masked man was seen running down Cribb Street before darting into a lane and vanishing.

The explosion had come as an utter surprise to those inside the tram, and had done them some damage. Commissioner Urquhart received cuts to his forehead from flying glass, the Supreme Court’s Justice Cooper suffered facial wounds from glass and was bruised by a flying occasional table. Mr Mockridge KC, seated with his back to the window, suffered deep neck and scalp wounds from the glass and a broken arm.

These minor injuries of Brisbane worthies were mourned in the daily papers with a reverence appropriate to the wounds of Christ. Of course, they brought Hope and her husband back into the public eye, and, most importantly, they served as proof even to the strikers that the strike had gone too far and that now nothing further could be hoped for. Here – went the argument – was the fundamental havoc that lay behind a supposedly peaceful plea for better wages! Australians liked order, and dynamite was disorder and outside the scope of their desires.

I wondered had the troublemaker Menschkin done it to discredit the strikers, but decided that, if so, it would have been designed to do far less damage to the fathers of the city than it had.

Within a day or two of the dynamite outrage, Hope Mockridge resigned from the attorney-general’s department. For days we did not see her at Trades Hall. Perhaps she was nursing her husband, who had been sent home from hospital. Whether worse things happened in Russia or not, I wanted to hear from her. Had the government forced her out of our company with threats?

I had, in the meantime, asked Walter O’Sullivan to speak to the
soyuz
one evening. In company with Suvarov and Paddy Dykes, whom we’d met by accident along the way and who intended to report on O’Sullivan’s speech, I neared Buranda Hall very early.

Mr Dykes, said Suvarov, tell me: are you a miner who writes for newspapers or a newspaperman who used to be a miner?

Paddy thought about it.

A newspaperman who used to be a miner is the answer, I think– but not the best man at either, I’m sad to say. You see, I went to this meeting in Sydney once and saw Billy Hughes speak. Now, there’s a man no more educated than me. And throw into that, if you like, a face like a green prawn. And he has a Welsh voice and adenoids. But when he spoke ... Here was a bloke who used to repair umbrellas for a living. I thought, well, anything’s possible. He’s attorney-general of the Commonwealth of Australia. A bloke no more educated than me! And he makes a law for a bank for ordinary people. And I decided, Paddy, you can get off your backside and do more. I began writing for the
Worker.
I was still a miner. But now...

Now you’re a journalist, I told him.

I bloody hope so, he said.

Artem, Suvarov said as we walked up to the hall, a wooden structure set in its own patch of high grass, look out the back!

There was a dray at the rear of the hall, and a man in shirtsleeves was hauling cases between it and the back door. The three of us advanced up the side of the hall, listening to the clatter as the draydriver shifted his crates through an open door into the small room at the back of the hall. Then Menschkin emerged, looking happier than I’d seen him lately.

Ah, he said, going pale. Mr Samsurov and Mr Suvarov.

He did not bother to refer to Paddy Dykes.

Suvarov’s carroty hair seemed to blaze in the evening air. He stepped up to Menschkin and asked what he was doing.

I am delivering ... Someone ordered...

Then he simply ran. He was faster than anyone would think. Suvarov chased him for a while but then obviously wondered what good catching him would do, given Menschkin’s protection from the Queensland police.

We went into the back room, where crates of beer bottles with no labels on them were stacked high. Sly grog, said Paddy at once. The bastard!

Illegal liquor. Menschkin’s demented plan was to leave it here, out of sight, and then the police could raid, find it and close the hall and the
soyuz
down. Paddy and I looked at each other, and began laughing at Menschkin’s childlike plans. He was going to a crazy amount of effort to please his masters. Suvarov, Paddy and I loaded the dray again with the unlabelled beer, and led its horse by the halter two hundred yards or so down the street, where we unhitched the horse and left the animal grazing in the lush pavement grass, and the beer standing in the dray, waiting for any adventurous passer-by to sample it.

O’Sullivan and his wife arrived early to look over the platform and to practise elocution – something that Olive supervised. Eeh, aah, ooh, said O’Sullivan, stretching his jaw muscles. I began to wonder had I made a mistake. But when the crowd arrived and he started to speak there was no doubting his seriousness, nor even his philosophic affinity with Vladimir Ilich. What does Australia need? he asked. And what the world? Does it need a gang of part-time social democrats whose chief task is to prove to their betters that they are responsible people, good managers of the public purse? Where will that ever get us? The Australian Socialist Party is based on the proposition of overthrowing – to defeat capitalism, not to finesse it; to undermine it rather than dance with it. In this task, said O’Sullivan, we do not welcome dilettantes. We plan to be the party to whom people turn when they have become aware that the earth belongs to those who labour
on
it, and the factory belongs to those who labour
in
it. At this stage we do not seek votes. We seek activists.

By the end of the meeting, I had been impressed sufficiently to take an entry form and join his ASP.

Olive approached me, notepad in hand. I know we have met before, she said, but would you mind writing your name out here? In roman script?

I did so. I saw Suvarov joining too. We were now members of an antipodean echo of Vladimir Ilich’s organisation.

Across the city men began to return to work at the meatworks and the waterfront and railways. But Mr Freeman Bender would not take the tramway strikers back. So much for the mercy of Justice Higgins! The Trades Hall declared the strike had ended with a moral victory, and so I returned to work as well, since there is no sense in being a strike force of one.

The good news was that the first edition of
Australian Ekho,
eight pages in length, had been printed, distributed and posted. A typical letter from readers came from some lonely place in the hills behind Rockhampton.
How could I begin to express my joy at seeing in print the language that is my mother, and the sentiments expressed which we have been forced by oppression to embrace.
The
Ekho
was a consolation to the most far-flung of the Russians.