The People's Train (30 page)

Koba was just stirring himself as we left the apartment the next morning. He appeared from his room in his collarless shirt and pants and embraced Artem and then me. Bon voyage, Comrade Wah-wah! he yelled.

I thought that today there was a bit less malice in it.

We went downstairs and this time there were no Red Guards and no car. Just a wiry little man even shorter than me and with a tugged-down cap. He was smoking and when he saw us he stubbed out the cigarette and put it in his pocket. He said nothing but led us outside to a tram line.

Artem whispered, See the gendarme on the corner.

In case we were followed we kept changing trams, rushing from one to another. Then we’d get off and hurry up a string of laneways until we reached another avenue and a different line. The little man seemed happy with the third tram we caught. We crossed the famous Nevsky Prospekt and I won’t bang on about all the great buildings there – just that it was magnificent with the great white buildings stretching away, as well as a string of palaces and church domes with hammered gold all washed with rain and glinting in the dawn.

Lots of people were already on the streets selling things and holding signs. The poorer prostitutes were still working. There were so many of them standing about. It looked like the city couldn’t satisfy its hunger any more and turned to this army of street women.

Artem pointed out a four-domed church, and then a fortress on an island. That’s where Trotsky is. The Peter and Paul Fortress.

A few minutes later we pulled into the forecourt of a railway station – smaller than the one we’d arrived at the day before. I didn’t ask its name of course. Much later I would find out it was the Sestroretsk Station and its line ran along the coast of the Gulf of Finland.

Our little ferret of an escort hopped off the tram outside the station and told us to hurry after him. He rushed us through the grimy columns and raced along a platform and onto a train. The three of us settled ourselves down on the ancient tattered upholstery of a carriage just as the doors were closed.

Not too comfortable, Paddy, Artem told me with a wink.

We rolled out past factories and factory barracks where the workers slept on the premises. Suddenly we were on the shore of the Baltic – though in what direction we were headed I took a lot of trouble not to calculate. Factories gave way to villages and dairy farms.

I saw off the coast what I suspected was the naval island of Kronstadt – where the sailors were in control and had their own soviet that Kerensky’s government and the Duma hadn’t been able to get under control. It was its own republic. But I turned my head away from the view and didn’t ask Artem about it.

We journeyed for two hours among low-set forests and villages that looked less dismal than the ones further south, then we got off the train at a country station. Children in dresses and sailor suits looked down at us with real pity while we stood looking lost at our little siding. Why would we be getting off at a dump like this? they were asking themselves. We turned and began to trudge through the village attached to the siding. The sun was very high. The clouds were milky and the air hazy. Just like in an Australian town, dogs curled up in the dust of the main road. But everything else was different. There was a stone police barracks like a fortress near some local bigwig’s two-storey stone house. Everything else was the usual weathered black timber. At the other end of the street we could see and hear a timber mill buzzing away. When we strolled along the road no one took much notice except a sleepy copper on a chair in the gateway of the barracks. He was in his summer uniform – a white soldier’s shirt with a wide belt and black pants and boots. He looked at us but didn’t think we were any threat to good order. Our escort said he probably thought we were farmers going to the mill to buy timber.

Our guide led us now down a side street to a path that ran around a shallow lake with reeds. The humidity was worse than in Brisbane and the whole area seemed to be alive – sizzling and frying with insects and frogs. The sun bit into our backs but then we came to the shade of birches and the strong-smelling kind of tree they called Russian olive.

Our escort now took us off the track onto a narrow pathway. Ahead of us – set above a field of hay – was a tiny wooded hill and on its slope a little hut with a thatched roof. As we approached we could see the door of the place lay open. Our escort knocked and then took a nervous look into the deep shadow inside.

An older man in shirtsleeves and trousers came to us out of the dimness. He was holding a copy of a Petrograd newspaper and his blue-grey hair was dishevelled. He shook hands with our escort. Then he pumped the hand of Artem and smiled. After a while Artem turned to me and said, Let me introduce Mr Yemelyanov. We’re on his property.

Another man in shirtsleeves appeared. He was somewhat younger but he was totally bald and looked a bit Asian. This fellow was a little too thin to be called stocky. He wasn’t a peasant and he didn’t look like an athlete. But he was an impressive-looking man with the air of someone used to being in control of the room.

Yemelyanov stood back and let Artem say hello to this new man. As he did that our escort took a fresh Petrograd newspaper from his breast pocket and handed it to Yemelyanov. The bald fellow embraced Artem and shook his hand warmly and kissed him on both cheeks. They spoke to each other and then Artem told the other man who I was but did not give me the fellow’s name. The man frowned a little and looked at Artem. It was clear I was unwelcome.

Artem spoke up as if explaining me. He didn’t seem embarrassed at all and in the end the man extended his hand a bit crookedly and shook mine. His eyes looked Asiatic – Tartar maybe – and though they were half-closed they were beaming. Slowly – from memories of photographs – I realised who it was. This was Vladimir Ilich. He was here – in a humpy that would have been considered rough quarters even in the Barrier Range. I felt the amazement Tasha had felt in Geneva about the ordinariness of Vladimir Ilich’s household. This was a very plain old hutch in which to find the leader of the party, the man most feared by Kerensky.

My shock at that was nothing compared to the fact that my first moments with the famous man were marked by his disapproval.

Vladimir Ilich gestured that Artem should join him in the room beyond. I could see a bit of it through the doorway: a desk and heaps of papers and books. Did he bring them with him into exile or had they been supplied by Yemelyanov?

He led Artem through into his little room and shut the door.

In the outer room, Yemelyanov fetched the escort and me some tea in glasses. Then our escort went to sleep as Yemelyanov was more and more absorbed in the newspapers on the table and I just waited – not even taking notes in case they were later found on me by gendarmes – while the day got hotter. It was about noon that the door to the inner room opened again. Vladimir Ilich came out leading Artem.

Voda,
Vladimir Ilich said to me – a word I understood. Water. He looked me in the face and said slowly,
plavanye
– swimming. Two words in a row I understood!

We followed him out the door and down behind the hut to a little gravelly beach by a pond. There we took our shoes and socks off and then our clothes and we all went running into the water. I was expecting it to be cold since it must have been frozen solid all winter. But in fact it was really pleasant. I saw Vladimir Ilich’s bald head as he leaned back in the water and closed his eyes and sort of smirked at the sun.

I went out along the silky bottom till the water was up to my armpits. I couldn’t swim – I’d grown up too far from the coast for that, seven hundred miles from Sydney and nearly three hundred from Adelaide. In a desert where there were no pools like this one. Yet I felt comfortable here. I watched Artem swimming – where had he learned? – and Vladimir Ilich’s skull breaking the surface and coming up shining with water.

After the swim we tried to get the mud off our feet – a job that didn’t seem to worry Vladimir Ilich as much as it worried me – and then sloped back up that ordinary hill to the shanty. Artem asked Vladimir Ilich if I could see his room. The great man agreed and I was taken into it. It astounded me how many books he’d managed to get in there. He was still working flat out on a book or article. He had a number of French-language books on the Paris Commune. I would read in time that what Vladimir Ilich learned from the Commune was that the doomed workers of Paris – the Communards – tried to take hold of the state machinery. But taking hold hadn’t been enough. One way or another they should have smashed it – that was the concept Vladimir Ilich was busy with.

Vladimir Ilich and Artem went back to work. The escort had vanished. Yemelyanov lay down on a low cot against one of the walls. I sat at the table framing in my mind the further details of the ultimate piece I would write on this extraordinary visit.

A mop-haired man in a good suit without a collar arrived late in the afternoon of that first day. He carried a small-bore rifle in one hand and two hares in the other. Hearing his voice Vladimir Ilich and Artem came out to greet him. He told them he’d wandered off Y emelyanov’s land and onto a neighbouring estate where the gamekeeper had caught him and wanted to have him arrested. But he pretended to be a visiting Swede unable to understand the gamekeeper.

Now the man handed the two hares to Y emelyanov and sat down very happy with his day’s work. But he didn’t look like a hunter at all – probably one of the reasons the gamekeeper let him go.

I found out later this man was one Grigorii Zinoviev – fellow exile of Vladimir Ilich and a man who sometimes irked him. This supposed hunter still had traces of rabbit blood on his fingers as he began a lively conversation with Artem about things going on in the capital and then about moving pictures. Vladimir Ilich laughed when the matter of the flickers came up and went back into his office but this time left the door open. Zinoviev asked Artem had we been to see Vera Kholodnaya in
The Song of Triumphant Love,
based on a book of Turgenev’s I eventually read and found overblown. The picture was just out and apparently packing them in in Piter. But Artem explained to the hunter that though the cinemas were still crowded in Petrograd we hadn’t had a chance to go yet. The hunter said he believed Kholodnaya would be a great actress of the revolution and that Sarah Bernhardt was drab beside her. It would be essential – come the day – that we would make lots of big films to get the message out to people. It would be the best way.

At the end – exhausted by his adventures – the hunter lay down on his cot in the hut’s third room separated by a curtain. The rest of us went out with Yemelyanov in the long twilight to help him cut his hay. I took up a sickle instead of a scythe – since it looked easier for a beginner. Artem – who’d done this sort of thing when he was young – cut like a machine, in big semicircular swathes. Vladimir Ilich was a better reaper than you would have guessed too – as if he’d once taken a few lessons from peasants.

We went back to the hut where an outdoor kitchen had been set up – probably by some unseen servants of Yemelyanov’s. There was a samovar sitting on a steel plate to one side. On a spit above a fire the pink bodies of the skinned rabbits were being roasted. Yemelyanov turned the spit now and then. I watched him and wondered how he had become a Bolshevik. He didn’t seem like a city bourgeois or the owner of an estate.

The rabbits were served up in bowls once they’d been cooked through and were so succulent I forgot all about politics. The fire kept the insects away from us and our repast.

When it was time to sleep Zinoviev and I chose to bed down outside. I went to the privy down the hill a little and – as I later comically boasted – sat on the same seat as Vladimir Ilich had. Once I settled on a blanket in the twilight I found that the air was thick with mosquitoes again. But I slept.

The dawn came up very early and rain began to fall. Zinoviev and I went inside.

Vladimir Ilich had already begun talking to Artem again in the office. Later, Artem told me what he and Vladimir Ilich had talked about on the first morning and the second of our visit. On the first morning he told Artem he wanted him on the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks and that voting him in could be managed. (What would Federev think of Artem’s promotion if that happened?) He could then go back to Kharkov and begin to ready the party for an armed uprising against the provisional government and the Ukrainian Rada and all the rest. We must act soon, Vladimir Ilich told him, or the autocrats will use the All-Russia Congress – due to meet in October – to wipe us out. The slogan
All Power to the Soviets
was all very well, but Kerensky’s provisional government wasn’t going to allow all power to go to any Council of Soviets. The council was full of temporising Mensheviks anyhow – they’d never rebel! Kerensky – flitting between the old tsarist parliament the Duma on one side of the Tauride Palace and the Council of Soviets in the other wing of the palace – wanted to put the two together like a donkey and a horse to make an impotent creature. It was a useless mule of a thing.

This is at least the way I put down Artem’s version of the whole interesting conversation.

The rain went on. In the outer room the rest of us moved around to escape the leaks that were even more plentiful than in your average bark-covered hut in Australia. When Artem emerged from Vladimir Ilich’s office it was well towards noon.

Artem told me he had asked Vladimir Ilich whether he knew Suvarov – our old friend from Brisbane. Vladimir Ilich said Suvarov was active in Vyborg at the crucial Putilov works – important since its workers numbered in the tens of thousands.

That afternoon – a miserable, humid, drizzling affair – Vladimir Ilich started packing his books into suitcases. It was normal for him to move around to avoid arrest and it would turn out that he intended to go north into Finland. For that he and Zinoviev needed passport pictures taken. A photographer they called Dimitri turned up with a bag full of wigs and moustaches and a camera. Vladimir Ilich and Zinoviev tried the wigs on and then the photographer told them to lie on the ground and he took passport pictures of them from above. He printed them – using emulsions and chemicals and whatever photographers use – in the curtained section of the hut. It took a while. But he came out smiling.