The People's Train (22 page)

On my visits to Amelia, she would now always ask me, How are you, poor old Tom?

I had become poor old Tom. I hankered for vanished faces. Her maternal feelings for me were now an enduring and nourishing aspect of my uncertain life. I called on her at least once every two days, since I needed her as much as she needed me. These days she had the company of a nurse – I suspected Hope had installed the woman.

I’m very well, I always told her. At least I’m not serving on the Galician front. Or any other futile front for that matter.

Podnaksikov was on some futile front. As I came into Adler’s boarding house one evening from the room at the Stefanovs’, I found Mr Mangraviti waiting in the front room. He rose to greet me. His demeanour was much friendlier than the last time I had seen him.

Did I speak Italian?

I told him,
Poco.

Podnaksikov è morto.Nell’ Ellesponto.

Podnaksikov? I asked stupidly.

È morto.
He imitated a machine-gun. Ratatatatat.
Lucia ha ricevuto un telegramma e una lettera assicurata. Lucia ... Tristissima.

He wanted me, as Podnaksikov’s friend, to visit his daughter and assuage her grief.

Mr Mangraviti led me two streets around to the shop and into a stuffy back parlour that seemed to be humid with Lucia’s tears. Lucia’s big-bosomed mother surrounded her with her arms and soothed her. To my shame, and for the first time, I noticed how remarkable the tear-blurred, dark-headed Lucia looked. Her father pointed out my presence, and she smiled through her grief.

We all sat at the Mangravitis’ parlour table and, with her parents’ approval, I held her hand in mine and spoke to her in English, in which she had more skill than her parents. I am sure you were his last thought, I assured her, only afterwards understanding what a doubleedged comfort that might be.

Later I asked her to go for walks with me in the evenings. If she were as shy as she looked, of course, if she did not secretly exercise some authority over her parents, they would have stopped her coming out with me. I began to see in her the will, the capacity, to command. I would fetch her from the fruit shop and her parents would turn their eyes to heaven, her mother touching a small picture of the Virgin, which hung over the cash register. Russians must indeed have seemed like a mixed blessing to them.

She remembered the island she had lived on as a child, remembered her village, her parents arguing about the lack of food. She remembered, too, how common idiocy and rickets were in that place – children gaping without understanding of the world, or creeping around on legs bent by hunger. The longer I sat with her by the river, the more confidently she began to rail against landowners and money-lenders. Brisbane was better, she said. Her parents stood in their shop among oranges, pineapples, cabbages and melons in astounding bounty.

As I sat beside her on a bench, smelling the plain, unscented soap of the Mangraviti household – her chief perfume – I could feel her thigh against mine and was aroused in obvious ways, but in other ways as well: a wish to find a home in her. I wanted to caress her but I was cautious. If there were a pregnancy, marriage would be necessary. Otherwise she would be sent to one of those convent institutions for fallen girls. I was aware that her remaining affection for Podnaksikov might nonetheless give me an easy run into the enjoyment of such kindnesses as she had extended to him, but though I felt driven to meet and walk with her, I tried to resist her honest scent and the feel of her flesh through fabric. I did not want to end up living in a stilt house – even with as surprisingly robust a girl as Lucia – and raising an indefinite number of Australian children. Many sane men would have thought it my tragedy that I did not want to end up tending a vegetable garden in some lush Queensland valley, standing in my own thicket of pawpaw trees.

In the spring of that year, the troops abandoned Gallipoli and the graves of Mockridge and Podnaksikov. Never mind, said the jingos, they’ll be fighting in France soon.

Increasingly, in those later months of 1915, Paddy spent his evenings with me – sometimes helping me, sometimes writing in the printing room at the Stefanovs’, trading concepts and figures of speech, asking me about Russian factions. His presence created no scandal with Mrs Stefanov, who, now that I wasn’t undermining her husband’s moral fibre any more and had been taught a lesson, was much kinder to me.

I was aware of a changed atmosphere in other quarters though. By this stage so many had died, people seemed to think more must risk death! People became furious at the idea of anyone calling a pause. I would find that demonstrated to me vividly, bruisingly. I had met Dykes after work one afternoon as summer was coming on, and we caught a tram across to South Brisbane.

As we neared Adler’s boarding house, a large group of men in suits and Australian army uniforms rounded a corner ahead of us. They were talking among themselves – like an oblivious group of youths returning from a cricket match, say. I saw that some had axe handles and – appropriately – metal-tipped cricket stumps in their hands.

When Paddy Dykes and I instinctively looked behind us, we saw another similar crowd of soldiers and civilians, blocking any chance of escape. They knew we had seen them and they approached faster, especially the soldiers, the men in suits waving them on with their hats in a parody of older men waving the young into battle.

You Red bastards! one of the civilians called to us, and a few others cheered and the young soldiers began to sprint, waving their clubs and cricket stumps. A man in an open-collared shirt and suit approached from the front, a wooden club in his hands.

Holy hell, I heard Paddy Dykes say, but with a strange tone that betrayed curiosity about the outcome. Dykes went into a crouch. You wanted to declare me on, you bastard? he roared, I’ll declare
you
on. And he put the fellow on his back before I could appreciate what had happened.

Why now? I wondered as the man with the open collar started in on my shoulders with his club. I had not written or published anything different from that I had written or published at the outbreak of war. Had one of these older men been suddenly alerted to my existence? Had they taken umbrage at Paddy’s writing? Someone got a good blow in against my ribs. I felt an excruciating expulsion of breath and the faint but sharp vibrations of a
crack
too muted to be heard by the yelling men who surrounded Paddy and me. I was aware that Paddy Dykes was fighting much better than I could, more ruthlessly, with greater cunning. Even as I felt a terrifying whack on my ear, I was aware that Paddy was still causing men to hang back and stamping the ribs, heads and genitals of those who didn’t. The one chief cry penetrated the tolling of my head.
Red bastards,
with an occasional chorus of
Kaiser’s poofters.

I was on the ground now, receiving more blows, and then one that made everything distant and still for a second. Then Paddy Dykes was still speaking, defying them, telling them that if they were so keen on fighting, France was only a boat trip away. I thought, What a man – to be able to fight and orate at the same time. I have a dim remembrance of police turning up and counselling all the young men to go home, and leaning over us and saying we shouldn’t have started a fight and we deserved to be charged. My head still rang, my vision was jaundiced.

Constable, said Paddy Dykes, are you seriously telling me that two blokes walking home from the tram took on twenty lunatics? Are you telling me that?

One of the policeman sighed. He had beery breath and an Irish accent. Now look, son, he told the mad-eyed Dykes, who was standing while I was sitting, being unfit for any vertical position. I don’t like that little fucker Hughes either, but we’re not going to have street brawls in South Brisbane. Do you understand? What would your mother think?

My mother died of tuberculosis when I was five, said Paddy, and I could now see his eyes gleaming by the streetlamps.

God rest her, said the Irishman. Now you two go home and no more trouble tonight.

Aren’t you going to arrest those men?

They’ll soon be suffering bad enough to satisfy you, said the policeman.

The other of the two coppers pulled me upright. Can you stand, you Russian bastard? he asked fraternally.

For the next two weeks I stumbled my way to the
Izvestia
printery. Mrs Stefanov had heard that I had been involved in a street riot and been seen yet again in the presence of police. She was cool to me once more in case I brought suspicion down on her house. There had been a time after our supposed trial when she called me by my formal, baptismal names, Fyodor Andreivich, but now she would call down the hall to her husband, Samsurov is here. Just to rile her, honest Stefanov would cry, Need a cup of tea, Artem?

I would have been off work except the superintendent was a native-born Australian resister of the war. He kept me on the wage books. After three days’ rest I was back on hauling. The healing was thus slowed – indeed, I could never recover from a stab of pain every time I lifted my right arm from that day on. Yet whenever I remembered that street attack, my chief impression was of the ferocious warriorhood of Paddy Dykes.

As I approached Adler’s boarding house one evening, I was delighted to see Suvarov leaning like a bent scarecrow on the front fence as if he had never gone away. He looked thinner but sun-bronzed, and wore a seaman’s leather cap.

Grisha, I called out. Tell me it’s you!

Smiling, he straightened up, came to the gate and embraced me.

Where have you been? I asked. Tasmania? Or even further afield?

All the cities, he said, in this part of the world. To Hobart as a stoker, then Melbourne. Then, I regret to say, Sydney.

You
regret?

He shook his head. I got to know a girl there, he explained. I think I’m being chased by a private detective. So I’m afraid I’m just here for a moment, Artem, I’m signed on a Chilean ship bound for Valparaiso – a sailing ship, so it’s just as well I’ve got experience with sails from working on the schooners on Lake Baikal.

He had done that long before I met him.

But you can’t be serious, I told him. I can’t afford to lose you again. And Valparaiso’s no closer to home than Brisbane.

I took him at once to the Samarkand. Of course I wanted to know all that had happened to him down south. Under the Samarkand’s dim electric lighting, he began to speak about his experiences in Hobart, and I saw that his Australian travels had been as complicated as his Siberian escape. Are we designed, Suvarov and me, for complications and only for complications? I wondered.

In Hobart, he told me, he lived for a while in a Greek boarding house that catered to fishermen. But, out of cash, he had taken his tent to a beach on the west bank of the Derwent, and camped and fished for whiting. It was all so much a repetition of our existence in Nagasaki. He took a job on a schooner making for Melbourne and, on landing there, rented a room in Port Melbourne from a widow who lived in a ramshackle house along the bay. Then, in between working on Greek fishing vessels, he went for a tour aboard a visiting Japanese warship and found that the guns were marked with the name of the Putilov works in St Petersburg, where he himself had once been a metal turner. This ship had been captured from the Russians in the Battle of Tsushima ten years before.

He survived on heaped plates of shark meat discarded as useless by the Greeks and cooked by his landlady. She could tell Suvarov was on the move and, being lonely and maternal, she begged him not to leave. But he knew he would go on to Sydney, as if to find or even to flee the Russian echoes he had discovered in Melbourne.

One day he left a letter for the old lady and took the train that carried him to the north-east limits of the city. He had kept his tent and now lugged it with him on the road to Sydney. At night he shared the ground at the edge of pastures with ox-cart drivers, gold prospectors and sheep shearers, to whom he was generous with his limited tent space. Arrived in Sydney at last, he worked with poor fishermen at Watsons Bay, sharing their wooden shacks. The Pacific Ocean came booming in the Sydney Heads, the same ocean in which the Russian fleet, venturing beyond its proper place, had been defeated. He admired the sandstone of the great heads and cliffs of Sydney.

Now he fell back on one of the skills he’d learned on Russia’s Pacific coast – he got a job at a marble basin factory as a polisher. The factory was in the beach suburbs of Sydney, reached by tram from the city. In a house at Bronte Beach lived an old widow who had made her fortune selling soft drinks and lollies to summer bathers at the string of beaches around there. Suvarov could afford to take one of her rooms up at the top of the house, where the chief sound came from waves bullying the sandstone headlands, and from seabirds. The widow, Mrs Clancy, held parties to which she invited her own friends and her children’s, and it became apparent to Suvarov that these parties were designed to suck in young men who might marry Denise, her pretty, pleasant but not overly clever eighteen-year-old daughter. Suvarov saw that the widow dominated her daughter to the extent that Denise would obediently marry any man Mama nominated. Suvarov did not consider himself a potential suitor, but one young man in particular, a clerk, a very well-brushed but innocent young fellow named Michael, seemed to be the frontrunner for the hand of the daughter. Because he was a lively conversationalist, which the older woman liked, Suvarov was invited to take his meals at the main table downstairs whenever the other young man was present.

On the cliffs, watching the strong Pacific currents and the occasional sounding whale bound for northern breeding grounds, Suvarov realised again that he was fatally homesick for Russia. On the nights Mrs Clancy held her parties, his chief relief from the suffocation of the house was to sit on the headland in the teeth of prevailing southerlies, buffeted by winds and yearning for the unpretty northern suburbs of the Vyborg district in Piter. There – in his entire lifetime – he had been happiest. One evening, as he sat there on the cliff, he saw the daughter climbing towards him in her long green skirt. The last light was bouncing off clouds and favouring her with its glow. He stood for her. Of course he could not avoid asking her to share the seat with him.

She suggested teasingly that he had been avoiding her. He denied it. All at once she had her arms around him, and her shyness turned to tears.

My dear Russian, she said, you are the only one who can make me happy. Mother steers me towards Michael, because he makes lots of money, but you’re the only one I can love. You with your jokes and your sadness...

Suvarov was carried away by this. He noticed all at once that she possessed sad green eyes, and decided she had undiscovered maturity. Staring into her eyes he promised not to avoid her any more. At the next party Michael the clerk could tell from the glances Suvarov and Denise exchanged that he himself no longer had the chief claim. Michael started to come to the house less. Suvarov and Denise would wash up after dinner and he caught the widow and her brothers and sisters, Denise’s aunts and uncles, exchanging winks. He came to the conclusion that he had passed some test, that doing the washing-up with a girl in Australia meant an intention to marry.

Then, with the same suddenness as its onset, at the sink with her one evening, he awoke from his infatuation. A lifetime of accepting the wet dishes from this woman? He couldn’t believe he had ever wanted it.

Off the beach below was a rock platform, a shoal on which the sea pounded. On a grim winter’s Saturday, beset by his melancholy, Suvarov took to the waves and made for the reef, half hoping he would be pounded to death against it. He would find an end in this same ocean that had ended the tsar’s navy. On the promenade above the beach, a small crowd gathered beneath umbrellas and exclaimed and pointed. He saw them when he turned to look back without regret at the shore that harboured monsters like Mrs Clancy and her daughter. Ahead, the rock platform was bludgeoned by surf and it, too, like the spectators ashore, kept disappearing beneath the swell and revealing itself again. Portuguese men-of-war wrapped purple tentacles around him, and their long strands stung him, but that merely added to his perverse glee. Off the rock platform he chose to tread water for a while, tired now and ready to consider whether he should let himself sink or return to land. He turned in the water. When the swell revealed the beach to him, he could see even more people there, intruding on him with their concern. He was sure he could see a frantic Denise in a navy-blue coat. That was a good reason to drown. But a simple desire for breath made him drag himself towards shore in the end, a failed suicide in his own mind. When he reached the sand, his body was marked with purple strands of stinger. Denise rushed to him and he tried to hobble from her rather than collapse in her arms. But he did not manage to avoid it, and the crowd rushed up to them as to a pair of lovers saved from tragedy, and she towelled him and gave him water and then was gratified to lead him home. The Sydney papers said that during the southerly gale a Russian had swum out to sea to the reef and back with a knife in his teeth, apparently to catch shellfish. In the meantime, against his best instincts and purely from pain and tiredness and despair, he said affectionate things to Denise and suddenly the widow was calling a party.

She did not ask Suvarov before doing so, and it was not till the event had started and the first drinks were poured, with everyone being very jovial towards him, that she announced that Denise and Suvarov were engaged. The widow’s older brother made a speech in which he applauded Suvarov’s good fortune, and his pluck worthy of a Briton. A man who can escape a barbarous country like Russia and set himself to a trade in a civilised place like Sydney must feel very blessed indeed, the uncle said. He invited the guests to look at the spacious spread the widow had provided – a long chalk, he said, from the sauerkraut, offal and sawdust bread we read about Russians eating. Now perhaps with Denise you can get over your horrid past, he suggested. Directly you are married, we will help you become a proud Australian subject.

Subject? asked Suvarov mentally. If a subject, then he chose the tsar and all his crimes over the British monarch.

The end of the would-be engagement party in Sydney found Suvarov dazed. He doesn’t know what to say, said the speechifying uncle, laughing. And indeed Suvarov didn’t.

A few days later, Suvarov’s misery reached its deepest point. Chinese gardeners delivered some vegetables to the house, and while separating out a hand of bananas, Denise said how much she hated the Chinese as lecherous, diseased, opium-smoking fiends. Perhaps I should be pleased you don’t hate Russians, said Suvarov. But suddenly the last atom of infatuation was gone, and for good. It was a worse destiny than accepting doused plates from her! Suvarov could foresee a lifetime of listening to narrow, uninformed complaints from this complacent woman.

He did not sleep that night. He left the house early, as if for work. The tsarist prisons were calling to him, he thought. They seemed so much sweeter than the prison of Denise’s arms and the grasp of her unthinking mind.

He went straight to the city on a tram. A week’s wages waited for him at the marble polishing works, but he knew that the premises would soon enough be watched by the relentless widow. Walking northwards in the city, he saw an unbelievable sight – a young man with a Russian peasant cap carrying a balalaika under his arm. Suvarov immediately began talking to him in Russian. His name was Bondar, he too possessed only small change, and he too was a homesick Russian.

This Bondar had worked in Newcastle in the coalmines. Before that he had worked in mines around Vladivostok. He had come to Sydney looking for work, had found none, and now was returning with another purpose – to sign on a ship in Newcastle that would get him at least part of the way home.

The two Russians camped in a clearing by a creek on their first night out of Sydney, and after a smoke Bondar reached for his balalaika and played ‘In the Mountains of Manchuria’. Then he began to sing songs he’d picked up in the mining towns of Siberia. ‘The tsar does not know how I slave and ache here in the hungry dark.’ He’d also acquired some Australian, British and American songs, and had a wonderful voice.

Within a few days on the road, their food was gone, and Suvarov suggested Bondar might earn a bit of money playing to farmers. Bondar wandered up to a dairy farmhouse on a hill, presented himself to the farmer and sang on the verandah – ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down’. But the farmer’s muscular wife emerged onto the verandah and shouted, Get out of here with your bloody music, you bloody foreigner. You’re waking the kids.

That night they crawled into some wagons at a railway siding – bags of cement were covered with a tarpaulin. Between the cold sky and the cold cement they had no hope of sleeping. They could hear people laughing from a hotel that stood on the dirt road by the railway track. Bondar grabbed his balalaika at once, said he was going to try it again. In his absence, Suvarov heard the noise from the pub grow louder. An hour later Bondar was back, telling Suvarov to rouse himself. He had enough money to buy them a night’s stay at the hotel and to buy railway tickets to Newcastle.

In the beautiful harbour at Newcastle there were Danish, Italian, English, Peruvian, Norwegian and other ships. As Suvarov surveyed them with his new friend, he saw the harbour police launch returning to vessels with sailors who had deserted. The deserters had chains on their wrists. On the docks stood a shipping agent watching with satisfaction as the men were taken by force back to their ships.

Bondar and Suvarov made their approach to the agent and were taken aboard a Chilean sailing ship. By the time they paid for their uniform and blanket, and the captain had given a quarter of their advance pay to the shipping agent, they had little left. But at least they felt they were on their way. Then a collision with a whale left them with some damage to their bows and so they had put into Brisbane. If not for that whale I would not have seen Suvarov before he went. He would be going as soon as the ship was repaired.

He could not be dissuaded, and the next morning, while loading the refrigerated sides of beef on the north side of the river, I saw an elegant sailing ship, gleaming white and black-trimmed, under way down the mangrove reaches of Moreton Bay. I decided, If he’s going to Russia, I must go soon as well. I felt the strangeness in what had become familiar. Brisbane. I suddenly realised that Brisbane was a ridiculous choice of exile for me. The aspects of it I had liked were now repugnant, and as vacant as the sky-splitting raven-like cries of my fellow workers.