The People's Train (25 page)

Artem assured me we were near the Black Sea and all its beauty spots, but it was hard to believe. The grass was green on the hillsides though. On granite knolls on top of green mountains, you’d see a monastery now and then. When big Artem smiled across at me it was because it was all familiar to him. Even the slag heaps had their poetry to him. He was really coming home – he would even see his sister Trofimova who lived in a town on the railway line to Kharkov.

We got off the train at a mining town called Krasnopolovka and climbed down to its flat station. There were flowerbeds some railway guard was tending in spite of the times – when nobody had any time for flowers except peasant wives and a few determined fellows. And a big-boned woman with a pleasant face was waiting there – a telegram from her brother had told her when we were due. What was I to call her? I asked Artem. He told me to call his sister Evgenia Alexandrovna until I got to know her. Then I could call her Zhenya or else Trofimova. There would come some point, he told me, when she would look at me with the light of affectionate friendship in her eye and then it would be time to call her Zhenya, her short name.

Trofimova was a few years older than Artem, but she had the same broad face and strong features. They kissed each other three times. Then I was introduced, and Artem turned to me. When Zhenya first married Trofimov, he said, I missed her so badly I used to catch empty coal trucks all the way down to Kresnopalovka to visit her.

What struck me from the start was her great good humour. She and her brother laughed all the way. And you could see Artem’s style of liveliness in her face.

Trofimova had brought a dray – a borrowed one – to the station and we threw our luggage – my kitbag and his suitcase – in the back and she drove us through dreary streets, past tiny little workers’ terraces as cramped as the corrugated-iron terraces of Broken Hill but here made of blackened stone and brick. On the edge of town the houses were wooden and had gardens. Artem’s sister and her husband lived in one of these.

Artem yelled as we drew up, Are you in there, Trofimov? His sister – with her hands still on the reins – gave him a friendly nudge. She got down, took the horse out of the traces, and with the reins in the grip of her large hands led it to its shed at the back of the house.

Even though it was early summer the night was beginning to get cold. Inside the house there was a smell of linctus and a ceramic stove in the middle of the room was putting out heat. A thin man – barely older than me but hollowed out in the face – struggled up from the stove’s surrounding bench and coughed and greeted Artem. They hugged and kissed. I recognised that cough, I’d heard it in other places. Silicosis. Trofimova signalled us all to sit down quickly at the table. The brother and sister talked like mad. Trofimov would prepare his lips as though he were about to say something and they would pause. But he never managed it. There was never any doubt about Artem’s sister’s power to speak. She talked like the clappers – her eyes and her auburn hair appeared just about ready to burst into flames. I thought, What a family!

Trofimova was telling stories – about her brother, how clever he was. He read genuine books from the time he was eleven; he sang like an angel and he played the clarinet in the institute band.

Suddenly Trofimov got talking. The brother and sister turned to him straight away. All the fun went out of them but not all the interest. I could tell he was talking politics.

He had served for a time in the army in 1915 but had been pulled out of the ranks when his disease became apparent. That he was called up at all showed you how desperate they were, Artem said later. But sleeping in wet or icy bivouacs had hastened his illness along.

As Trofimov spoke he gestured and scowled like an actor. I still find it amazing how much of a person’s politics you can pick up when listening to a language you don’t understand just by observing gestures and faces. What is emphasised. The sudden anger. It makes me think that behind the different languages ideas hang in the air as a kind of common language without words – and that we all understand it. By the time I left the Trofimovs’ I had a pretty good idea of what was going on – Artem had explained the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament in Kiev making a bid for Ukrainian independence from Greater Russia. The Rada was full of soft-headed make-believe socialists, he said. And all this was distressing to Trofimov, who though living in the Ukraine was a Great Russian through and through.

Next morning we were due to catch the train to Kharkov itself, the big smoke. Artem’s sister came to the station to wave us off. She showed no embarrassment or regret at all about what had occurred during the night.

She had given Artem his old room and sent me to sleep in a hut in the garden. At three o’clock or so I was awoken by Evgenia Alexandrovna in a big white nightgown levering herself into my bed, uttering a few soft sentences to me as if we’d been married for a long time and she was attending to some needs I didn’t even know I had. Then she’d patted my face and was gone. It was a revelation to me but I couldn’t help thinking it must have been a dream – though not one I could tell Artem about.

But at the railway station saying goodbye to Trofimova. Her brisk tender way bowled me over – the lack of words let alone of any blame. I wish I could say I felt guilty for Trofimov. But I didn’t. I had always avoided the idea of marriage because in my lifetime and experience it always led to the hollowing out and ruin of the girls who went in for it. I had a fear of making a girl old before her time – that’s what happened to miners’ wives. But I’d never met anyone like Trofimova before – someone who couldn’t be undermined or embarrassed by whatever she’d said and done or by whatever I’d done.

I believed then I’d found a woman. Or the other way round.

The railway station at Kharkov was another cathedral of steam, slung between two stone towers. We could see it ahead of us as we were coming over the Don railway bridge. When we pulled in we got down with our belongings in a suitcase and an army kitbag and were bowled over – I was anyway – to see the Railway Workers’ Union brass band playing in Artem’s honour at the ticket gate. Our suits were greasy and we carried our belongings in knocked-about luggage, but we – or at least Artem – were like arriving princes. There were a number of people standing there with the band – members of the town soviet, some of them in the grey uniforms in which they had fought the war, some educated workers, young women of good families in summer dresses and light coats of blue and yellow, and men with trimmed beards,
burzhooi,
men who looked as if they owned an engineering plant or were doctors or lawyers – and they all applauded Artem.

After he’d shaken each of their hands, I was presented to them. They clapped and grinned as if I deserved it for being an Australian – something exotic, a living sample of the working class from the other end of the world! Roll up, roll up and don’t trip over the tent peg! In my poor suit I was the proof of international fraternity.

One man in the welcoming party – boasting a tailor-made suit and a pomaded moustache – led us past the band to a large car into which we and a number of the welcoming committee all squeezed, including a grizzled soldier and two of the young women. This impressive-looking man introduced himself as Izaak Abramovich Federev. He was a lawyer, he said. A uniformed chauffeur held the door for us, and a pale, very good-looking blonde girl in a white dress and sky-blue jacket sat on one side of Tom, and the
burzhooi
in his frock coat sat on the other. The handsome girl’s sister sat across from them and so did I, on a sort of dickie seat with my back to the driver. We drove through the town, down long avenues of apartment buildings that like the posher buildings in towns further east looked to me exactly like pictures I’d seen of Paris. Occasionally the big sweaty soldier added a few words to the conversation and his voice was as deep as a cave. Yes, there was stale sweat – some of it my own – in that big automobile. But it was like an argument in itself. The well-bred girls did not wrinkle their noses.

In Australia I’d never got anywhere near a car like this one. It was far bigger than Hope Mockridge’s. I was excited both by its engineering and by the closeness of us all. All brothers and sisters – everyone from the man who owned the car to the soldier to the two girls with their knees together so as not to take up the room of the arriving heroes. The sun shone on the finest city I had ever seen. But there were also street meetings being held on corners – soldiers and deputies or others standing under red banners and haranguing the crowds. It was a season in which nearly everyone was claiming to be the
true
Reds. And on a closer look some of the buildings were gutted and rags of blackened curtain blew in the warm breeze from the east. Soldiers kept guard outside a handsome villa whose door stood wide open. The furniture inside had probably been taken away by people and the liquor from the cellar gone to satisfy the thirst of soldiers. We rolled past a great green sunny space and the man in the frock coat– Federev – leaned over and said in accented English: The city soviet have named this Freedom Square. It is the biggest square in Greater Russia. Bigger than the Kremlin itself.

We arrived at a grand building and Federev invited us to his apartment on the fourth floor.

We took a lift to his flat – a glorious place with a main room big as a ballroom. An old woman served tea and small cakes and after that the others left in small groups. When they were all gone, Federev advised us to rest and refresh ourselves in the bedrooms he assigned us and promised to take us for a walk in Freedom Square later in the afternoon. Before going into our separate rooms Artem and I had a little chat in the corridor.

His English is good, I told Artem.

A lot of the
burzhooi
speak English. Most of them speak French too. You see they had tutors when they were kids, and then they travelled a lot when they were young. French is the one they really like but they can take their English for a spin as well.

In my room I lay on my soft bed and felt too lucky to sleep and too tired to write anything for the
Australian Worker.
For the moment I felt I was a breathing part of a great attempt to reach out for the light. Houses might get burned down and velvet ripped. There might be fury. That had to be expected. In the meantime I felt this stretching of the skin.

I was turning into a different human being.

That night the apartment was more crowded than it had been earlier in the day. The young women were back, the railway men, workers in suits no better than mine – worse in terms of stitching because in the new republic thread was scarce too. Two well-dressed aesthetes were there as well, their complexions nearly as soft as those of the girls. No passwords seemed to be exchanged but I noticed that a worker had been put on watch by the front door. Federev spoke in Russian then English and introduced Artem as a leading figure of the committee who had organised the strikers in 1905 and who had been punished and driven to the limits of the earth by the tsar’s malice. Then the lawyer pointed to me as a brother from the end of the world.

Artem rose. He was very fluent and spoke with a half-smile on his face as the room filled with the smell of the soldiers’ cheap tobacco. It stung the eyes but neither Federev nor the two young women we’d travelled with that morning complained about it. I noticed one of the two soldiers in the room had been reduced to using newsprint for cigarette papers.

I heard Artem utter the names Fisher and Cook. Hughes and T.J. Ryan were referred to occasionally, and I could guess what he was saying – that the Labor Party in Australia had failed in its great chance, that it’d been tamed and become party to the war just the way the German social democrats had. Just as surely, the Cadet liberals and Mensheviks in the Russian Duma were insisting on carrying on the war against the Germans and Austrians, even though there was a ceasefire for the moment.

When he had finished speaking he answered questions, and when it was over he came straight to me with his usual half-smile on his broad face and said, Paddy, I have a favour to ask. Will you find out from our host who is the girl in the blue coat?

Then he whispered, How she smouldered, Paddy! She’s out for vengeance – Nikolka had better watch out.

People drank tea and shook hands earnestly with Artem and sometimes with me and then left by ones and twos. The two artistic-looking young men shook our hands vigorously before speaking quietly to Federev then departing. The blonde girl in the blue coat smiled and called him Tovarishch Artem – a name the Russians pronounced
Artyom.
Artem spoke to her briefly – his eyes were ablaze and his face full of good humour. Then she and her sister were gone too and we sat down in the state room with Federev, who drank some brandy and inspected his moulded ceiling for a bit. After a while he leaned forward to continue discussions. He was proud of his English and determined to speak it.

An excellent group, he said. Stout souls. You noticed the young men? One is a lecturer in philosophy at the university, the other a great connoisseur of the arts, a friend of Stravinsky and Cocteau. And then the men from the Starilov works and the veteran soldiers. Not to forget the women. What an alliance!

Who are the sisters? I asked, remembering Artem’s request. The girl in blue? The one in yellow?

The blue coat is Tasha, Federev said. Tasha is her party name. She spent time with Lenin’s family in Geneva – this was after she had been in exile in Voronezh. She was in prison too.

Jesus! said Artem. He stroked his brow.

Now their name is Abrasova, said our host. The one you ask about is Natasha Varvara Abrasova – Tasha. The sister is Olya. He grinned knowingly at me. Men always ask about Tasha first. Poor Olya is an afterthought yet she is a sturdy little creature. Their father is a surgeon. They’re Jewish – as am I.

Jewish? asked Artem. With that hair?

Perhaps some Cossack violated her great-grandmother, our host said matter-of-factly. These things happen. Anyhow, she is not as shy as she looks. You’re lucky she did not jump up and take the speaker’s rostrum from you, Comrade Artem.

The conversation then drifted away from the good-looking Abrasova sisters. Artem told Federev about the peasant who cut the velvet from the train seats. Federev laughed, shaking his head – as if cutting the velvet was a sign of progress. Which maybe it was.

Everything has to be brought down and rebuilt! he said. I know. I know. Even this apartment. Even if I am given a room and a half to live in, brotherhood is more important than splendid isolation.

You take a very enlightened view, said Artem. My literary idol, Gorki, is more shocked by the mess he sees in Petersburg.

It is peculiar, said our host, that a great writer such as he cannot see that all this is necessary. What did we have before, when the streets were clean enough to satisfy Gorki? We had people crushed under the wheels of authority. My father for one!

He rose and reached for a decanter of French brandy on a sideboard – he offered us some and when we declined asked if we minded him having some. Sitting again, he continued, You see, my father was a captain in the engineers. An educated farmer’s son. The cavalry was closed to him on both counts: that he was self-educated and a Jew. But he was appointed to an engineering unit. Twelve years ago there was a great Japanese slaughter of Russians at Mukden in Manchuria. Have you seen that painting of the Russian officer standing among his dead, screaming, with his hair turned white?

We hadn’t seen the painting.

Well, there is such a painting. Now my father was a wit and he had a sharp tongue – certainly he did. He was famous for parodies of his colonel. My late mother and I got the bitter details of what happened from a junior officer who survived. Before the battle, the Japanese had advanced as far as a place named Fuhsien when my father and his men were ordered by his colonel to stay by the river, building a pontoon bridge under the barrels of the Japanese artillery. My father made the point that his company of engineers would be overrun – the Japanese would use the pontoon bridge itself to get to them. That shouldn’t be a problem, said his colonel. After all, you can make the Japanese fall over laughing. You make the other officers laugh soon enough at me.

Our host shook his head.

My father wrote a letter in the half-hour left before he returned to the site with his sappers. He wrote to my mother, You said, my darling, many times, that you would kill me. Our colonel is saving you the trouble.

Federev let the awful story hang in the air.

You see, according to some it is barbarous to shoot a thief or let the garbage build up in your courtyard. But what about the barbarism that out of pure vanity throws an entire company of engineers away? And for nothing. The colonel himself was killed two days later in the Japanese onslaught. Let us hope there is a hell for his sake!

Our host was trembling and reached for his brandy again.

Anyhow ... if you keep people in a barbarous condition, he said, you can’t expect them not to break a few windows when you let them loose. Their barbarism is not their fault. It’s the fault of their former masters. Who would have them back under subjection in a second, given the chance.

Tom murmured, All power to the soviets, would you say?

Precisely, said our host. Not to the Duma, not to the Rada or any other body. But to the soviets. A regimental soviet would not have killed my father.