The People's Train (32 page)

Artem began speaking like a conspirator. There are in fact three Cossack armies over in Novocherkassk. Someone woke me up earlier to tell me. What their intentions are I have no idea. But they could swallow us whole if they tried.

It was a good distraction from the question of Tasha and him.

I asked, Is Trofimova in a safe area?

I had heard all sorts of things about Don Cossacks being terrible raiders.

I told her to wait for us in Ekaterinoslav. But you can’t depend on her to be obedient. Or on the Cossacks to stay where they are.

The thought of Cossacks and Trofimova kept me awake two hours. Surely Artem wouldn’t have been so calm if he thought his sister in danger. I looked over at the corner where I could see clearly the rifle I’d been issued. It was impossible to imagine using it in anger. But to save Artem? To save the sisters? And Trofimova!

Federev might be a different matter ...

After a week, the Cossacks had not moved. The brave railway men over in the east at Novocherkassk – Mensheviks though many of them might have been – had made things difficult for them by holding up the arrival of fodder and grain in that town. It was decided to be safe for us to attend a coming congress in Ekaterinoslav. When we arrived there by train we went by truck straight to the technical university where I searched the crowd for Trofimova’s face. Artem’s speech had been so well advertised that if she was in the city she could not
not
have heard about it.

It was when Artem came down from the platform to almost universal applause that Trofimova presented herself, smiling and wearing a green autumn-weight dress with an embroidered neck and not a shawl or a sash but a citified felt hat. I felt a stab of warmth for her. She kissed her brother on both cheeks and then me – smiling but giving no signals. Maybe she wanted me then or later to make some new gesture towards her, but I didn’t have enough experience to know what I was meant to do.

She kept her mysteries to herself as she travelled a few days by train around the Donbass with us – to Krivoi Rog and Zaporozhye, where she stayed overnight in the women workers’ room in any hotel or party headquarters available to her. We stayed in the men’s barracks.

She was a very jolly travelling companion and would wink at me at times. But they were not amorous winks. I’d seen other men in the state of confusion I was in and had always thought what idiots they were. Now I was the idiot.

In Krivoi Rog they put us in a mansion. Artem started work with the local military committee to put outposts on their approach roads. Would that hold the Cossacks? I was wondering as I waited in the lobby. I saw Trofimova appear from the back of the house. She said in Russian and without a smile, Come!
Syuda!
My Russian education had proceeded to the point that I understood her. She led me off to the back of the house like a sister comrade bent on serious business. We went down a corridor and suddenly she stopped and flung open a door. Here – in what must once have been a servant’s room – there was a bed and a mattress that had seen better days. She gestured me in as if she wanted me to paint the place. The door closed and she clamped her mouth on mine. Then she fell on the bed and the embroidered skirt was lifted as an invitation. Which of course I accepted with so much gratitude I would have had trouble uttering it.

In each of the towns the breadlines along the pavements were very long. People told us they stood in line for six hours for a few grams. This was what Kerensky’s revolution had brought them.

A supply problem, Artem told his sister and me. And a hoarding one.

I looked at Trofimova’s frown. Like her smile it took up her whole face and was as beautiful. But I found it easy to imagine her as a pursuer of hoarders.

Whenever we were served a meal in those days, it was chiefly sawdust bread and thin soup with a piece of gristle in it.

Don’t enquire into where the meat in the soup comes from, Artem advised one evening in a canteen in Zaporozhye. Just be grateful there isn’t more of it! And he’d laugh.

Hunger pangs would wake me a number of times a night in the rooms Artem and I shared. My rib bones had never hung over my stomach like they did now. Trofimova too was gaunter than she had been but it didn’t seem to reduce the size of her soul.

Of course I thought her very beautiful in her second dress – the green she brought out of her bag and put on. Green seemed to me a sign of forgotten widowhood. In any case I loved travelling from town to town with those two great spirits.

From the windows of the trains we caught around the coal towns I would see lean-looking peasant-women staring as we went past. It was like they were ready to derail trains if they thought they were carrying any food.

When we got off the train in Kharkov – which I now thought of as home – it wasn’t like the old days. There were no bands to meet us. Things were too grim for that sort of thing. We caught a tram back to the Gubin mansion and my hopes rose when I saw it – all the more so since Trofimova was with us. When we arrived we saw the soldiers huddled around smoky fires in the front garden.

As we went up the stairs Tasha and Olya came out from their office– bedroom onto the landing. Trofimova gave both of them the same formal sisterly kiss and then they all disappeared into their room and left Artem and me standing there in our male lack of consequence.

Artem insisted I should now learn how to fire a rifle. I still did not even know how to get the clips of bullets I’d left under my bed into the thing. I might have if I’d grown up on a farm as Australians were supposed to. But it was not only that I was unfamiliar with firearms. I had a strange reluctance besides that. I trusted my body but not this added and unwieldy piece of wood and metal. Yet something was afoot and Artem insisted.

One morning a sergeant named Oleg and I – carrying our rifles – jumped aboard a truck crowded with soldiers, which dropped us off in a clearing on the edge of the city. The sergeant started rumbling at me now and raised his own scarred weapon while I imitated everything he did. He shot first and frightened crows out of the woods with a noise that seemed to crack the sky open. My rifle was heavy when I raised it. It buffeted my shoulder so strongly when I fired that I stumbled backwards and Oleg laughed. My shot had plunged the bullet into the earth less than fifty yards from me. But after firing more shots I got to be more at ease with it. I had refused to take up arms in the name of the British Empire and now – in the name of international fraternity – I was learning to shoot people. I know the cause was different. Even so ... The smell of my gunpowder hung in the air and the uneasy question of the young men in leather jackets and Artem’s knowledge arose again.

By noon I was a certified rifleman of the revolution.

Meanwhile the widow Trofimova worked quietly in Tasha’s office and was back to wearing a grey scarf around her head like a peasant woman. But I suppose that’s what she was. She sometimes came into Artem’s office to look at one of our wall maps and she would smile at me briefly. She had a businesslike air about everything she did. Let’s attend to this problem. That was the way she went about love. If she did love me, that is. The word had not been uttered even though I now was far enough along to understand it if it had been.

She would stride downstairs with that same air to go into Federev’s office without invitation – even though the place had become a sort of Holy of Holies – and view the more detailed maps there. I could tell she didn’t like Federev no matter what her brother said. She obviously thought him haughty. But she liked his maps.

One day when making my way with a bucket to the hand pump in the garden, I met her on the landing of the back stairs. These were the stairs the servants used in the grand old days of the Gubin mansion – away from the gaze of their masters. It was an appropriate place for an accidental meeting.

She was looking out the back window at the soldiers in the yard below. Without a conscious thought I took her shoulders and pressed against her and kissed the back of her neck. I called her Zhenya – the taboo first name. She was entitled to brush my hands away and tell me to go to hell. Instead she turned and pushed me into a seated position on the windowsill and found life where I’d never expected there to be any. Then she lifted her skirts despite the risk of being seen or other people using the stairs. (Hardly anyone did anyhow because the revolution had given them the right to use the front ones.) She placed her body over me and mewled in a way that was divine music. To my surprise she didn’t simply adjust her dress once all was done but spent quite a time kissing me. Then she stepped back and smiled and straightened her dress and slowly climbed the stairs. She turned once to smile and speak in a lowered voice – Russian endearments.

From then on I felt an ache that was unfamiliar. Now she would smile at me a great deal and one day over barley soup in the canteen downstairs took my hand in hers and then fiercely stared at some Red Guards at a nearby table who dared to smile. The back stairs remained our favourite meeting place.

One night when it was raining hard – it had rained for four days, and Artem and I now had grey army greatcoats to add to our blankets – Artem murmured, I intend to ask Tasha to marry me. She is a wonderful woman. An intellectual but without pretension.

Straight away I thought what I hadn’t had time to think before – that he shouldn’t marry Tasha. I did not see her as a wife. Despite her gifts as an orator and despite her beauty – which she spent no time on – there was still something flimsy, something contrary to Artem’s character, about her. Federev had once mentioned that prison – even though it gave her a kind of prestige – had been hard on her. The problem was that to me Tasha didn’t seem to exist beyond her reputation. She was most alive and was a real presence when she spoke at factories around Kharkov. In the Gubin house she was a bit like a ghost.

She’s very young, I said – as diplomatically as I could.

So does that mean you don’t approve, Paddy?

I just wondered ... would it do any harm to let a bit of time pass?

No, no harm in normal circumstances, he said without seeming to resent the question. But it seems Tasha is to have a child.

Oh well, I said. I was amazed. They must have met some other time than the night on which he’d protested his innocence. But pregnancy trumped everything.

You’ll be my best man, Paddy, of course.

Of course, I said.

What a shame we can’t make it a double celebration. Myself and Tasha, you and Trofimova. She wouldn’t be a good peasant if she didn’t want to remarry. But you’re probably not ready.

I had a sense he was winkling me out. He certainly knew something about Trofimova and me. For once I didn’t mind that.

On a rainy Saturday Artem and Tasha were wed at the Kharkov munici pal building. Tasha had come all in white and wore a colourful lace shawl. Artem was in his grey jacket with red armband and pants and military boots. Not for the first time a marriage was made because of the seed already in the mother’s womb. Trofimova beamed through the ceremony. She didn’t have the doubts I had.

Afterwards we all went to Federev’s apartment for an excellent dinner of borscht, potatoes, pig knuckle and veal he’d bought from a black-market butcher.

The marriage of Artem and Tasha was a revolutionary marriage. Our living arrangements were not changed to allow the bride and groom to share a room. It wouldn’t have worked anyhow – in the Gubin mansion there was no more privacy anywhere for a married couple. The strange thing was that matters were in fact easier for Trofimova and me.

In a town named Gorlovka down in the south-east Donbass a meeting of the miners’ soviet was broken up by a Cossack regiment that rode into the mining camp shooting and slashing. No one had decided yet on a figure for the miners killed there. The Cossack officers had not taken too well either the strike by thirty thousand Donbass Menshevik and Bolshevik railway men. At the rail junction of Kaluga twelve railway workers were shot. But still very few of the men went back to work. Then a town soviet building was shelled by artillery and as a meeting of Bolsheviks fled the building there was another slaughter with the Cossacks yelling, This is what we’ll do to all the other Bolshevik Jewish bastards!

This was the intelligence that made its way to Kharkov. Sometimes it was carried by grey-faced survivors.

The problem is, said Artem, to work out if these are isolated instances – a wild regiment here, another there – or if they are all going to behave that way.

This was a thought that frightened everyone.

But in the end the Cossacks are farmers, he reasoned. The only way to their hearts is to promise them land.

We drove out with Sergeant-Major Brevda to visit our outposts in the fields either side of the road to Chuguyev. In a crowded tent Artem met the veteran officers – men risen from the ranks in most cases, and some of them hard-faced veterans and others surprisingly fresh-faced and poetic looking. All men who’d proved themselves to their soldiers. Artem suggested to them we send emissaries to meet up with the Cossacks. It wouldn’t be without peril of course. (Of course indeed! I thought.) Artem told them he was willing to lead the delegation the following night.

Be a good fellow, Paddy, and don’t mention anything to Tasha, he said on the way home.

For once I was left behind when Artem was driven out the following night to collect his team at the outpost and roll on in an armoured car towards Chuguyev and Malonovka to parley with the Cossacks. By now our intelligence was that a majority of the Cossacks had at least formed their own regimental committees which their officers could no longer discipline out of existence. Their overall representatives were the people to speak to. With something of a journalist’s selfishness – if I was still a journalist after all – I thought I’d miss out on a good tale of a nighttime encounter but as well as that I was worried. Lately Tasha had shed a lot of tears. Sometimes it was Olya who was the comforter. Other times you heard Artem’s r umble from within the office. Artem had mentioned she was frightened for their unborn child. And now – in a meeting of the kind being planned by Artem – some small shift of events could lead to it being born fatherless.

Somewhere out there on the dark road at the edge of some dimly lit village Artem was greeting a number of Cossack deputies at an inn.

Cossacks aren’t fools – that was one of Artem’s constant sayings. Those he met told him their officers had them properly steamed up with the idea that the Bolsheviks meant to put every Don Cossack to the sword and take their crops and womenfolk. It can be imagined what Artem and our other people said: It’s your hetman – your beloved leader – who has his eye on your land, boys. And what’s happening to it anyway while you’re out here fighting your Russian brothers?

The other thing the Cossack delegates told Artem’s group was better news: that the artillery units were on the edge of revolt.

That delighted Artem – the father of an unborn child. Babies and artillery are a terrible mix. Kharkov won’t be shelled? he asked.

How can we say for sure? asked one ageless Cossack.

Artem was secretive at first when he arrived back by truck about breakfast time and sat with me downstairs drinking bitter coffee. Tasha was pale as she came in to join us and grabbed Artem’s offered hand. Yes, still a tigress in the handbills and articles she wrote but there was a gloss of tiredness on her face.

I could tell it worried Artem. He who sat scanning her fine but harried features.

Meanwhile I’d noticed the way Trofimova chatted a lot with the Red Guards in the garden and the corridor. Somehow I could tell she had a gift for remarks you’d call pungent and I heard the men laughing with her. One evening I saw her in Federev’s front office speaking in a pleasant and lively way with the lawyer’s young aides. Carrying a sheet of paper in her hands she seemed to be jotting down names as these polished young gents uttered them. After half an hour she emerged into the lobby where I was lounging. She lifted the page she had. It was a series of names. I read one. V. A. Bondarchuk. She no doubt intended to take her own action. Surely not as extreme as Federev’s men had been. I wondered would Federev himself be all serene with her intended activities.

But the growl and detonations we began to hear two mornings later seemed to show how unreliable the Cossack delegation Artem met had been. There was a period of brief questioning – men and women looking at each other. Is that thunder or what I know it is?

With a group of Red Guards – some of them looking a little paler than they had when parading the streets – Federev, Artem, Sergeant-Major Brevda, Ismaylov and I drove. We were all armed – or nearly so. I’d given my rifle to a soldier in the back of the truck to mind. Those 352 men in the back were clutching their rifles with intent. Listening to the guns of the anti-revolution, carrying a rifle still seemed more fantastical to me than carrying a cane.

From a headquarters tent near the village on the road to Chuguyev we could hear some of our own light guns returning the fire from hilltops around. The southern forces of General Kornilov were moving on us. Artem and Federev studied a map in an impromptu staff tent. It was marked with the names and numbers of our infantry and mounted regiments spread out north and south of the road behind breastworks of various heights and quality.

The noise from both sides’ cannons continued. The officers were discontented because as yet – until we captured bigger ones – our guns were of lighter bore than theirs. Everyone seemed to think this was a considerable problem. But both sets of artillery seemed to rock the earth we stood on and make the canvas of the tent shudder. I had never been so close to the firing of such huge machines before. As the shells left the mouths of our nearby inferior cannon they took my breath streaming out behind them.

After a while one of our intelligence officers came into the tent and shouted to Artem that their artillery was strangely disorganised – no concerted barrages, he said. No damage to human beings on our side. Some damage surely? asked Artem. Some scratches and wounds surely. The expert shrugged.

Within an hour and a half all firing had ceased. From the tent flaps we could see that our soldiers still stood by their barricades of timber.

Artem looked at me and jerked his head towards the tent opening. We went outside and got into the front seat of a lorry and Artem told the driver to drive down the road. We drove for forty minutes and then found ourselves in a crowd of wagons carrying soldiers eastwards. Since the Cossack army wore uniforms of the same colour as us, it took me a while to understand we were among a Cossack rearguard and that they were going back the way they’d come. Their generals had brought them to water but they had refused to drink. We stopped and let them all pass us by. Then we turned and rolled back towards our lines and Kharkov.

It was a most astounding journey and it taught me that all military operations have more in common with the ridiculous than newspapers ever say.