The People's Train (7 page)

I was working at the Stefanovs’ one evening under a bare bulb but in the joy of seeing the press stamp the made-up frames and slide forth the wonder of printed paper when there was a curt knocking on the door of my room. Thin Mrs Stefanov was there, frowning and quite handsome. I had a woman visitor, she said tightly. I followed her towards the front door, but as she reached the parlour she stepped into it, leaving me to confront the visitor alone. The energy with which Mrs Stefanov turned away added up to a command that nothing indecent would happen in her house in Merrivale Street. Hence I knew before I saw her it was Hope Mockridge.

So it was – Hope in a dress the colour of duck eggs, her whitegloved hands modestly hidden by a reticule.

I thought I would visit your press, said Hope.

Yes, I said. Ah ... there is no one there but me just now. Suvarov will be along...

So, may I see your printery?

I could not deny her that. On the way along the hall I enquired loudly about her husband’s injuries.

Well, she said, smiling, I now see that despite the magazine story about the Russian girl anarchist, there’s no glory in dynamite.

We got to the back room and sniffed the air saturated with black ink.

So this is the way newspapers are produced in Russia?

And in Australia. The lies are printed in far grander premises across the river, and on far vaster machines.

I am here to work, she told me, taking off her jacket. Then she walked across to the table in the corner, which held a model of a monorail. Rybakov, my asthmatic friend who had been dismissed as a project engineer by Brisbane Tramways, had brought his model and plans for a special tram/train to be stored with me. It made sense – his own room at Adler’s was small. The model was of two white carriages on a small circle of line, but the line was single – a monorail, as Rybakov called it; the People’s Train, the future means of moving people in cities. Having been sacked by Bender, he had to await another chance, and hope for possible public interest in an article about his monorail and its unique gyroscopes he was writing for a magazine called
World Engineering.

It’s got only one line.

Yes. That’s the trick of it. It could change the world.

Wouldn’t it come off the line going round corners?

Not according to Rybakov, I assured her. He’s studied the physics and made gyroscope models.

This ... this is what Bender was raving to us about that afternoon in his office.

Yes. Rybakov calls it the People’s Train.

What a name! she said, and moved away towards our self-inking lever press. On a tray by the wall, I had my Cyrillic script arrayed – a pleasant font,
Berezniki,
familiar to all Russian newspaper readers.

I explained that the work ahead of her was tedious – the task of stacking on a bench the six hundred copies of pages printed on both side, pages one, two, eleven and twelve in one pile, three, four, nine and ten in another, and so on, as they came off my press. That task alone would perhaps occupy some hours.

I have a great deal of time, she said.

She set to, and our conversation became basic, like most cottage- industry conversations. After a time Suvarov arrived to stand at an upright desk and subedit some of the articles we had received so that they were ready when our compositor came.

The next time Hope turned up to my supposedly secret printing press she wore a black hat and a dress of blue and white fabric, and a beautiful opal brooch at her neck. It was a night when the seasons were in transition. The heat was not as torrid as it had been, the nights were balmy but not stifling. The so-called winter, so warm by Russian standards, was nonetheless on its way. Since an orgy had not resulted from Mrs Stefanov’s last admission of Hope to my printing room, this time she had been let in with slightly better grace.

It was earlier in the evening than her last visit. My assistants Suvarov and Rybakov were presently at their dinner at Adler’s boarding house. I had installed a plain, unadorned samovar in the corner. I made Hope a glass of tea with honey, and we sat down on the chairs by the bench where stacked newsprint lay and inhaled again that intoxicating perfume of oily printing ink and newsprint sheets.

Again I asked about her husband and his injuries. She looked at me as if there were more to all that than my simple question could cover.

He’s appearing in court with his arm in a sling, she told me. Very gallant.

And there’s no idea at all who threw the dynamite?

No. Everyone knew who took Amelia’s file. But the dynamiter is a mystery. It was said briskly, as if she were warning me off the subject. She shook her head. It doesn’t interest me. What interested me were your remarks on our hypocrisies. That afternoon at Amelia’s. You know – that story of the man who was ordered to marry for the cause.

She looked away. She sounded calm but was not.

I was playing games that afternoon, I hurried to say. I think I exaggerated how close a friend the bridegroom was to me.

I don’t want you to misunderstand. I am not a stupid girl but of course it’s the sort of discussion that made me even more sharply aware my marriage is a thing of very awkward convenience. I don’t hate him, though ... The truth of marriage is that I
know
him. When his arm was broken, I felt anxiety for him, more than I would for an acquaintance. Does that constitute a kind of love? In any case, if you see me as a hypocrite, being here instead of in his house, then I acknowledge the hypocrisy. I have my excuses. But every hypocrite does.

You take all this too seriously, Hope. As if I were here to judge you.

You may not mean to, but that’s your effect.

I’ve got no power to make you feel uneasy, I said.

Why do you own a printing press, which you operate behind closed curtains, if it’s not to weigh up the world and find it lacking?

It’s just my passion, I said. I might say I need a rest from ideas. But labour on the wharves isn’t enough. I need to talk to others too.

In the condition I was in, every sudden contact was amazing. She reached out and took my hand, stroking the back of it with a thumb. I was won by this touch. She laid her face against my cheek, but when I turned my face to engage her, lip to lip, she averted her head. She said, I am near the end of an illness.

Tuberculosis? I suggested.

But she seemed too healthy for that, and her hair was lustrous. She looked at me directly and I knew at once what she meant. Like so many women, she had been infected by her husband.

Artem ... Tom. I wish to be in your company, for the moment, as a friend. That’s all. There is nothing else.

Her tea was finished, and I thought to get her more.

If you have been ill, I said, and such a woman warrior, then I certainly look forward to meeting you when you are well.

She smiled, moved her head from side to side as if balancing things. It’s the tail end of my sickness, she said. Medical improvements are astounding, and they sweep around the globe with the mail. But we shan’t talk about it any more. Let me fold the papers.

So it began again. The double-printed pages came from the chute at the front of the machine and she folded and stacked them.

And thus we worked together till half past nine, when – as last time – my friend Suvarov arrived.

Rybakov can’t come, Suvarov said. Tonight his asthma is cruel.

As I walked her to the corner of Merrivale Street afterwards, so that she could return north on one of Bender’s trams, I felt consoled in a fraudulent way. Beyond any doubt, it was best that nothing sentimental had happened, that we had talked and worked together like two friends. This was, after all, how genuinely revolutionary men and women, undistracted by the simperings of bourgeois love, were meant to work.

Yet I wanted to have pretexts to see her again. I remembered a coming event all at once.

Perhaps you would like to visit Buranda Hall on Friday night?

Then I remembered that the play would be all in Russian.

Of course not, I answered for her. It’s Maxim Gorki’s
The Lower Depths.
You may not know the play, but Suvarov is playing the part of the actor who hangs himself in despair at the end.

That sounds very entertaining, she said, without a derisive smile.

It’s a grim and wonderful play, I said. Very realistic, set in a low boarding house, full of tragic figures. But all in Russian.

I would dearly love to come, Tom.

The shining tram she was to catch, protected from anarchists by a wall of social outrage, drew up clanging beneath thunderclouds. She climbed aboard as if she had never had a quarrel with the system on which it ran.

We were drinking tea with Suvarov on the dusty stage of Buranda Hall, just south of South Brisbane, where the rags, uprights and timber bunks remained in place, ready for the following night’s performance of
Lower Depths.
It was an excellent production, I thought. Mrs Stefanov had had the surprising courage to play Vasilisa, the greedy and unfaithful dosshouse owner’s wife. Nastia the streetwalker had, for the sake of propriety, been played by young Zetkin, son of Zetkin of the Waterside Workers. In the wrong boy’s hands, this role could have been played entirely for comedy and could have lowered the whole tenor of the play. Although some of his fellow stevedores, Australians, had come to watch the play and had whistled when he first appeared in a dress, he remained resolutely true to Gorki. The Australians knew nothing about this Russian masterpiece but by reading the faces on stage, they – to their credit and my surprise – kept themselves in reasonable bounds from then on. It was a triumph for Rybakov, who had directed the entire performance.

The reason we were still here was that, though I told him Mrs Mockridge had a cab waiting, Suvarov was in one of his talkative moods. He knew a bottle of vodka awaited him back at Adler’s boarding house, where he would be greeted by his fellows as a miraculous and transformed being. Thank you, Mr Gorki! He did not necessarily want to rush the moment, and he was one of those generous men who, though of course enjoying the company of Mrs Mockridge himself, had seen that she was my close friend and so put great effort into enlarging on my reputation and exploits.

Now, said Suvarov, when the old German who is the immigration officer here in Brisbane meets our boat, he stamps whatever papers we have to give him. But one young fellow is in a panic, and Artem says to him, What’ve you got? The young man had a program in his pocket from a theatre in the French concession in Shanghai. Give him that, Artem told him, and the young bloke does and the German stamped it and said, Welcome.

But then, Suvarov continued, the fight begins. We arrive at the immigration dormitory, which is run by an Englishman. And he says to us all, If you join a trade union in Australia you will be deported by the government. The unions are a source of discontent and disorder and if you join such groups we will send you back to Russia to the tsar’s army. And Artem speaks up and says, Sir, Mr Englishman, there is no such deportation law as the one you speak of. You see, the Englishman didn’t know the law and neither did Artem. But Artem could sniff out imaginary laws just as fast as the Englishman could make them up.

I intend to join the unions of my fellow Australians, Artem told him, and every Russian immigrant knows that he should do the same.

The Englishman assigned Artem to clean the lavatories, so Artem just said, Thank you, Mr Petty Tyrant. I have lived in lavatories in Shanghai and cleaning them is too good a job for me. You understand,
they
see Artem in one light and he turns the light back on them.

Come on, Suvarov. Why don’t we go home?

But Suvarov wouldn’t be silenced.

So Artem left and found Rybakov, and stayed with him at Adler’s. As for myself, I had no money, and I lacked Artem’s courage, so I pretended to be a good tsarist and spent a week free of charge in the dormitory.

And so, I said, we all became happy Queenslanders.

But Suvarov wasn’t nearly finished.

And then I was sent out to work on the fettling gang, out in Tallwood, and a week later I hear from a Russian travelling through that he saw Artem at Warwick, working on the new line there. I set out to travel to Warwick, because I knew Artem would talk the man in charge there into giving me a job. I had a good swag and slept in paddocks under the stars. The last bit I travelled with some railway fellows on a small rail machine – you know the sort of thing. And I got to this big construction camp with white tents, and found Artem. He gave me tea and took me to see the boss, who already knew Artem even though he’d been there only a few days. Why? Artem can work like a machine, that’s why. So we were building a rail bed and carrying rails, and we shared the same tent.

I did not think that occupying the same tent was an accomplishment that would impress Mrs Mockridge. But he talked on about the hearty fellows, the Irish, Canadians, Scots who were the companions of us Russians in the railway camp in Warwick.

Mrs Mockridge must get home, I told him again.

No, no, no, he said, waving his head, as if forbidding her to rise from her chair. Did you tell her about the shovelling contest?

It was true that one Sunday the boss had pitched a Canadian named Lofty Sam against me to see who could fill a wagon with soil faster. Some people ran gambling on it. The railway workers and their families came and watched it; there wasn’t much excitement for them except such a sporting contest. In the end I was fortunate and vain enough to win – and was a mess with sweat afterwards, needing pints of water.

I told the bare outlines, so that Suvarov would be done with it quickly and let Hope go, but he couldn’t be stopped.

He went on about our Russian choir – we formed it to sing Russian songs to the Irish on their feast day, St Patrick’s. They were good fellows and appreciated it. As Vladimir Ilich told me in the letter in which he sent me to Perm, You cannot help organising things, Artem. He didn’t say whether it was a disease or a virtue.

Suvarov said, You know, it’s easy to like the Irish because they are rebellious, but they have no class consciousness at all. Their imagination is so blotted out by some dream of independence they don’t care what kind of independence it is. But they always won the tug-of-war, so Artem went round to all the Russian camps and found a Russian team, full of huge Jews from Odessa and big
muzhiks
from the Volga. And we ended up winning the tug-of-war too. Artem looks nice, but he can’t stand not winning.

I confessed it might be true. Hope looked at me.

The boss liked him so well, said Suvarov, that he put him on the easy job. Explosives.

Explosives, said Hope with a knowing smile. Did he indeed?

Yes, I admitted. But I did not blow up the tram.

She laughed at the idea.

I too know how to handle explosives, said Hope. My grandfather taught me on our property in the Darling Downs.

That’s where we worked, said Suvarov excitedly. So your grandfather is a great landowner?

Yes, said Hope, I suppose you could say that. Sheep and cattle.

Dear God, said Suvarov. We are mixing with a princess, Artem.

Yes, I said. Except she is too honest for those pretensions. Anyhow, that’s our life story, and you don’t have to listen to it ever again, Mrs Mockridge. May I escort you to your cab?

Hope and I left the theatre. She laughed occasionally at this or that aspect of Suvarov’s recital as we descended from the stage and started walking out, but when I looked back, Suvarov was still sitting there on the stage, suddenly looking as dejected as the actor whose part he had played. Sometimes some sorrow from the road he had taken would seize him like this, as if he could not move for its weight.

I’ll see you at Adler’s, I called.

He looked up, and his good spirits returned and, Yes, he said.
Tovarishch,
Artem!