The People's Train (23 page)

As I fought the temptation offered by Lucia Mangraviti, I had a letter from Walter O’Sullivan, telling me that Buchan and Hope were settled in the suburb of St Kilda. He also told me that the war census bill and its gauging of all Australian human resources was the first step in a plan to begin conscripting Australians into an army that until now had been made up purely of yearning volunteers like Podnaksikov.

O’Sullivan urged me, along with Thompson, our leader in Queensland, to write and argue about the iniquity of such a war and of forcing men to fight it.

I would discuss all these issues with Amelia when I went to check on her and see that she was well. On a stick, looking as if she might be toppled by a mere breeze, Amelia still tried to fuss around me with tea and cake – she saw it as her duty. When we discussed the times, the perfidy of the little Welsh prime minister of Australia, Billy Hughes, she would always tell me, I’ve had a letter from Hope.

She must write to you every day.

Every second day or better, replied Amelia. About eight letters a fortnight. I always believed her a wonderful girl, Mockridge and Buchan aside.

In the balmier evenings, we would walk along Roma Street with her nurse, a very glum Englishwoman, and the trams that had brought Amelia and me together as friends went clanging past.

I told her that in Russia, where it was the start of summer, the tsar’s soldiers held their line from the Caucasus to west of St Petersburg. But the scenes of my childhood had been overrun by the kaiser’s men. My brave sister, whom I’d adored in childhood, and her husband Trofimov, who suffered from a black lung, moved for a time to Moscow. I tried to imagine their lives in that hungry city but found I had lost the gift.

The attack on myself and Paddy Dykes was a harbinger of more numerous attacks by soldiers and thick-browed citizens on anyone who doubted the war’s wisdom. The long argument remained the same, whether in France, the Middle East or Mesopotamia. In that time there was no woman in my life except Amelia. I did not often ask her for news of Hope and my sensitivity about it all might have prevented her from telling me too much. In the meantime, Amelia survived through her gentle outrage at the politics of the time. She was appalled and invigorated when Billy Hughes left Australia to visit the Western Front and the Australian troops newly arrived in England and France. He will come back, she predicted, roaring for the conscription of every son of woman.

Sure enough, when the renegade returned from his visit to the Western Front at the end of that failure named the Battle of the Somme, he wanted more lambs to the sacrifice. The physical standards required for the great abattoirs of the Western Front had been reduced now. Anyone would do. But on top of that, Billy Hughes wished to introduce, by referendum, conscription of any and all.

You might ask who opposed all this – apart from Amelia and myself. An extraordinary alliance of people came into being to oppose the conscription vote. Kelly and Trades Hall, of course, and we denizens of the Russian shadows of Brisbane. But also the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, an Irishman who perhaps remembered that earlier in the year – when the Irish Nationalists rose and seized the Dublin Post Office – little mercy had been shown. Australian farmers, too, would prove to be against it. Having already given one son to the furnace they were unwilling to give a second or third who were needed for farm labour and as cherished remnants.

So we all appeared on the town hall steps: Kelly, Amelia on a stick with the nurse holding the wheelchair handy in case, even the premier, Ryan – thanks to political pressure. My normal speech centred on a description of the regime – the regime of the tsar – for which the young Australians had been sacrificed in the Dardanelles. One could feel the air crackling about one’s ears with danger. Young men who had just joined the army stood on the edges of the crowd and hooted at my accented English. But the police – many of them Irish – were themselves not keen on conscription. Some offered tacit protection to meetings that were in theory illegal, though not so in practice now Ryan had been elected to leadership of the state. The worst that happened to me in those days was that I was jostled – a very minor price to pay for a bad accent and a fundamentally revolutionary intent.

I followed avidly what was happening in Russia and discussed it all with Paddy Dykes in our little printery at the Stefanovs’ and with Amelia. The major campaigning season had ended in the Northern Hemisphere. Mr Hughes still despaired that not enough Australians were coming forward to immolate themselves – he said he needed sixteen and a half thousand a month for the mangle.

As for Russia, a general named Brusilov had done good work for the tsar against the Austrians, but incompetence reigned on all other fronts. Even in the Brisbane papers there were imputations that the empress was under the evil influence of the mad monk Rasputin and that the tsar – bravely taking over command of the front – was not up to the job.

I was reporting these matters in
Izvestia
when two black marias pulled up outside the Stefanov house. An army intelligence officer and senior police hammered on the door and demanded to know if there was a printing press on the premises. Mrs Stefanov began to harangue Mr Stefanov. The sky had fallen in exactly as she’d predicted. Stefanov himself called me out from the spare room and the officer presented me with a warrant empowering him to seize all printing equipment on the premises.
Izvestia,
he said, was closed down by order of the War Precautions Act and section 49 of the Defence Act.

Sir, I told the army officer, this press does not belong to me – it belongs to the Russian Emigrants Union.

Then you can tell them to forward all enquiries to the Commissioner of Police, he told me. This is an authorised seizure and there will be no compensation to anyone.

He pointed the way to the police and the hallway filled up with them. Mrs Stefanov jabbed her hand towards the room in question, saying in a piteous voice, I know nothing. I tell my husband don’t.

Thus, while I watched, the cellar was emptied out – newsprint, printing frames, print. Disassembled, the printing press itself was carried out of the house while I stood passive, not knowing quite what to do, feeling dismally that the past year had unmanned me.

Best to take it calmly, Artem, Stefanov said in Russian at my elbow.

At least I did not seem to be under arrest.

It was a letter from Grisha Suvarov that gave me comfort. He was back in Piter after only three months’ wandering and was right into the melee. He had got a job as a metal worker in the new Lessner factory in Vyborg. It was a matter of a mere few days before he was attending a party cell. He said he was working with a handsome young man named Shliapnikov who was said to have been the lover of the beautiful but much older grand dame of Russian socialism, Alexandra Kollontai, herself in exile for the moment in the United States.

Almost whimsically he broke into party code we had used when we were young. He and Shliapnikov were seeking active Bolsheviks (
plenty of metal frames
) for the party (
the floor of the factory
). Shliapnikov and he had visited – this created a pang of literary envy in me – the apartment of the great Maxim Gorki himself, supreme Russian writer and generous soul, who lived in Kronversky Prospekt across from the Neva in the fashionable Petrograd district. Gorki let the party use his apartment – for contacts, exchange of information, meetings. It was a wonderful act of open-handedness and foresight by a genius. The great writer, said Suvarov, feared what was happening to his country, both the country of the trenches, where human flesh and blood had become the one amalgam with snow and mud, and in the cities. That winter (sweltering summer in Brisbane), Gorki bemoaned the savage cold, the worst of the war so far, the respectable women begging or acting as prostitutes on the street, the tearing down of fences and even of houses for firewood, the shuffling armies of jaundiced child prostitutes. He told Suvarov about going to one of the little girls and giving her a bundle of money to enable her to escape, but a grubby man came up to him and said, Do you want to get her killed? The others will kill her for that! So gestures of generosity were no good any more.

What was obvious from the letter was that despite all the misery and challenge of the times, Suvarov was happy.

Paddy and I translated this letter, I putting it into immigrant English, he rewriting it in the English of the
Australian Worker,
where it was published.

Paddy Dykes had gone away for a time to write about a failed strike in Broken Hill, but now returned to Brisbane as fast as he could, as if it were the Paris of 1789. It’s like you told me, Tom, he said once, and I did not remember having told him this at all before. It’s the railways that’re the key. Silver’s silver, and wheat’s wheat and beef’s beef, but they only stay put if the railways go out on strike. For a national all-out blue, to put a government in its place, it’s the railways.

Without a newspaper to edit and print I spent more time still at Amelia’s as the summer passed. She was too ill to be out at night in 1916 when the referendum result was announced outside the offices of the
Telegraph
and the movement to bring in conscription was defeated. There was a great meeting at the town hall where girls from the unions handed out red feathers, to counter the white ones that women gave out to men who weren’t in uniform.

Only Paddy Dykes, taking notes, looked melancholy. Do they think the bastard won’t try again? he asked. Australia’s stuffed, rooted, done for.

I had to tell Amelia all about the joyful aspects of this scene as she sat so shrunken in a chair that it seemed the thing was devouring her. In the torrid summer days, when Hughes had announced a second conscription vote, a waxy gloss of sweat would appear on her face as she sat on her verandah, yet she survived to be invigorated by the events of late summer, and news from Russia.

Though I had never been to Piter I could see these things as if on a film in the flickering pictures. Workers walking from Vyborg – stark figures, angry and black against the frozen river, nearing the centre of St Petersburg, shouting, Bread! and Down with the tsar! It was 1905 again. Cossacks not wanting in their hearts to attack them, riding up to them as if to terrify them, then backing away. On the famous Nevsky Prospekt, a young girl with apple cheeks approaching the Cossacks with a bouquet of red roses. The Cossack officer taking them, and peace being thus established. Soldiers leaving their lines to join the people, and when the crowd was fired on, falling to bleed in the snow. Veterans marching in the streets, roaring, They are shooting our mothers and fathers! NCOs of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the Lithuanian Regiment, the Finland Regiment all joining in the uprising and shooting officers who tried to stop them. Workers and soldiers capturing the arsenal, fitting themselves out with rifles and pistols, taking over the ordnance depot where the cannons were, as well as occupying the St Petersburg railway stations.

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.