Olya said, There’s a rumour that a subterranean passage runs from the mansion to the Winter Palace.
Federev laughed. I doubt that’s the truth, he said.
But it didn’t matter. Now Lenin and some of his Bolsheviks were on the run – blamed for the big march by the soldiers and sailors that July which had wanted the Supreme Council of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Soviets in Petrograd to do away with the parliament. Or if the master and his disciples weren’t in hiding in the city, then they were in more far-off quarters.
8
On the way home that night in Federev’s automobile Artem said with a wink, No need to mention my friendship with Hope Mockridge to Tasha. She might be fussy about these things.
With that he started whistling. They were Russian songs I didn’t know. They made me homesick – I couldn’t work out why. I’ve got to learn this bloody language, I told myself. Then I’ll be at home.
Good night, dear Kangaroo, Tasha had said to me in English when we were leaving. Gradually that became my party name – not that I’d signed up to join anything. Since it came from beautiful Tasha even Federev started calling me that. I didn’t like it – Tovarishch Kangaroo – but didn’t have much say in the matter.
There was a letter waiting for us at Federev’s. It was addressed simply to F.S. Samsurov, Kharkov Municipal Soviet, Kharkov. The people at the soviet had obviously forwarded it.
It’s my sister’s hand, said Artem. He tore the letter open and scanned it.
Ah, he announced, and looked at me as if he was weighing me up. Poor Trofimov is dead. Zhenya says it’s a mercy. No more gasping like a landed fish.
I looked away. I had this weird idea that my adventures with Trofimova might have hastened Trofimov’s death.
Well, said Artem. A good man ... a good man.
I’m very sorry, I told him in confusion.
I’ll pass on your condolences, he assured me.
Poor Trofimov – a fellow miner, and I’d betrayed him. Yet I found it hard to think like that – like a man with a conscience. I thought: Here now is Trofimova! And she had already put down a claim on a future with me – or so I hoped.
I thought of how Trofimov’s passing would have been treated had he died of black lung in Broken Hill. The other miners would go to the widow’s house and parade by their brother’s coffin and pat the heads of the dead man’s kids – and mutter something to the bowed widow and slip her a few bob ... That’s where the comparison broke down. I couldn’t imagine Trofimova as the despairing widow.
Artem yawned now and moved on from the memory of Trofimov. His sister had said that when Artem was young he almost saw Trofimov as a rival for possession of his sister. If it were true then that rivalry was at an end.
He yawned again. If I can jot my speeches down in English, he said, I wouldn’t mind if you could edit them and send them back to the Australian Worker. Not that I think I’m the last word when it comes to oratory. And why stop at the Australian Worker? Let’s send the message everywhere – the Weekly World in New York, Daily Worker in London. Few people are in your position, Paddy. To be able to spread our particular news.
I thought, As long as I can understand it.
In the following days we were often at the basement flat in Botanical Street – or else the girls were often at Federev’s apartment. At a meeting in a railway workshop attended by soldiers and workers, Tasha’s name and Artem’s were voted on to attend a regional conference of the Donbass area. Artem came in first in the vote, a little ahead of Tasha. According to the party there was supposed to be no prejudice against women. But there was. And especially against pretty women and maybe especially against pretty young women who were Jewish.
When delegates were elected, an engine driver who was a Menshevik got up from the floor and moved that no one get a free ride down to the congress. That was his way of trying to stop some of us getting there. He accused Bolshevik guards and drivers of giving everyone free rides here and there. That just helped the railways go to hell, he said. They needed the fares and no one should travel free. If you or your party can’t afford the fare, he said (with reasoning that would have gone down well in Queensland), then you can’t afford to be a party and you can’t afford to send delegates.
There was a lot of clapping from the floor. But Artem said, Are we really going to argue over train fares? Does my comrade believe that my fare will rebuild the whole rail system? Is this what the people’s revolution has come to? That it can’t afford to carry us?
Then he lifted his voice. As for me, he roared, I will damn well walk there. I have the shoe leather, I have the legs and they are good Bolshevik legs.
Instead of cheers, everyone was falling out of their chairs laughing with him. It seemed to be funnier in Russian than in Federev’s whispered English translation.
There was a time I walked from the banks of the Aldan all the way to the suburbs of Irkutsk, he told them. I did not do it legally either. But I’ll go to Ekaterinoslav legally. Ekaterinoslav does not scare me as a destination. I have come back from Australia to be with my brothers and sisters. And now my good Menshevik here wants to stop me being among them by waffling about fares. If he decides to put this branch meeting at the South Pole, he will find me there. If he puts it in the Arctic – there I’ll be. If he puts it in Rome, he will find me there. If he puts it in London, he will find me there. Voting for my party, for the power of the people.
It was obvious that a lot of the soldiers and workers – if not the railway men – were on our side. Because they could grasp the message. An end to the war, land for the peasants, factories for the workers.
Nevertheless the Mensheviks did win their point and it was our host Federev who paid for our tickets – even mine – and we set off with the girls to Ekaterinoslav in early August. The weather was sweltering in our compartment, but the sisters in their summer dresses looked as if they carried their own shade with them. All Artem’s conversations with Tasha and her sister seemed simply political. In argument his eye moved from one to the other. He did not behave as if he were lovesick for either of them.
The outer suburbs of Ekaterinoslav – a city Artem and the girls had praised – was like outer Kharkov at first with coal dust on everything. But it was beautiful at the centre where all the delegates were put up in a hotel called the Europa. The organisers of the congress had arranged a ride down the river. From a pier set on a lake in parkland we boarded a little steam ferry and Artem sat with Tasha and Olya inside by an open window to catch the breeze from the water. I went walking the deck – this was new country to me and I had the bushie’s habit of dashing around trying to see new things from every possible angle. A few people stood near the open prow where I thought I recognised from behind a particular sturdy-looking woman in a long dress. She wore a peasant shawl a bit like the way some of the soldiers wore their uniforms – to show where they had been and also to show their hope about where they were going. The woman’s dress was white but with a sash over her shoulder that was tied at her hip. She was looking at the shell of a rickety white mansion on top of a cliff on one side of the river. It was Artem’s sister. I skirted her to the front as if she were a dangerous creature.
It is Australia, she said when she saw me.
Zhenya, I said, forgetting I was to call her Trofimova. Are you a delegate? I asked in Russian, amazing myself (though delegate was easy to say – it was delegat). Nevertheless I had to say it twice.
No, she said, shaking her head.
Later I’d find Artem had asked her to come here as an observer and in the belief it would help her with her grief by giving her a sense of a new dawn.
Artem tells me, come! she announced in English.
Trofimov? I said. I’m sorry.
I had to go back to English for this, and I blushed as I said it. I saw the sash she wore over her right shoulder did not carry a political slogan but was pure black – the sign of her widowhood. The rough map of the Ukraine I carried in my head told
me she had not had far to come. Europa Hotel? I asked her.
She nodded. Tasha, she said. Olya.
Then she smiled at me – it was an innocent smile but it seemed to know everything about me. She looked away at the shore but then smiled again at me and nodded. She touched her black sash. Trofimov, she told me. And then more softly, Trofimov, and raised both her hands. But it wasn’t in prayer and it wasn’t asking for any mercy. Once more I was reassured to see a woman no man could make into a victim. This was a full-bodied woman with her brother Artem’s lion heart – that’s how it seemed to me. We stood on the prow together – silent. We watched the way the ferry broke up the reflection of trees and buildings in the water.
The congress of the various wings of the Social Democratic Party was held in a theatre that still had the scenery of a living room painted on canvas at the back of the stage. There were more peasant delegates than I’d seen at the Kharkov meetings – they wore boots and smocks cinched at the waist with big belts and were probably yelling that the land belonged to them. A chairman was elected – he was a Menshevik. He read out an agenda. He was booed a few times and it was clear that our side – though maybe outnumbered as delegates – had a lot of support. I made notes in a little notebook I’d acquired. Social Democratic Party very divided, I wrote. Mensheviks would fit into Holman’s Labor government in New South Wales or Ryan’s in Queensland.
After a while everyone settled down and the speeches seemed fairly polished. It was the fumbling Duma in Petrograd – and Kerensky – who wanted to be another Napoleon and dressed as if he was – who got most of the abuse.
***
At the hotel that evening Trofimova kept very close to the sisters, Tasha and Olya. I passed her once in the corridor on the way to dinner. She smiled and opened up her arms – just as a gesture though. It said no instead of yes. I found myself doing something I’d never done before – I tapped my left chest twice with the first two fingers of my right hand. Where had that come from?
Meanwhile I made myself busy writing about the congress for the Worker.
Comrade Artem Samsurov formerly of Brisbane was welcomed on the stage. After a brief charming speech was elected by acclamation a member of the Regional Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party.
Later in the day there was a side meeting of the Bolshevik delegates in a little concert hall. This was a very ornate room and made a mockery of our ordinary clothing. Here Artem was elected secretary of the Donbass Central Committee of the Bolsheviks – one of the tasks for which he’d been sent to Kharkov by the people in Piter.
Among the others elected was Tasha.
At the railway station that night, Trofimova – who was going east while we were all going north – pecked me first on one cheek then on the other and looked me in the eye with what seemed to an uninformed man like something close to affection. I wanted to say her name, Zhenya, as she left for another platform.
I was what I never expected to be – a disappointed admirer – as I watched her make her way over a connecting bridge.
Our train steamed in and I boarded, then pretended to write in my notebook through all the happy conversation of the others. I fell asleep with the jolting of the train and had some sad dreams about my mother. I woke in the first light of morning and found Artem still flirting with the Abrasova sisters as if he hadn’t let up all night. I was pleased when we pulled into the grim vaulted old station in Kharkov. The Abrasova girls looked tired and so we took a hackney coach to their place.
From there Artem and I walked to Federev’s – we didn’t have unlimited funds for hackneys. I want to dictate something to you right now, he said. For English readers. You’re not tired are you, Paddy?
Federev was not at home, so we sat in the living room while Artem gave me his English notes for his Russian lecture of the following evening at the technical university. As well as Australia, the Second International occupied his speech. The Germans and the Belgians had got together in 1889 and started it. Its last meeting had taken place in Brussels just before the war started – around the time Menschkin killed himself during Hope Mockridge’s picnic. Then war was declared and Kautsky of the German Social Democratic Party caved in to the hysteria the way T.J. Ryan and Fisher and Hughes had done. Therefore the Second International had failed from pole to pole. What had failed in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane had also failed on the shores of the Baltic Sea. Universal brotherhood was killed off in the trenches and the swamps on the Galician border or the forests of the north-east as surely as it was killed off at Gallipoli.
Artem left me to make what I could out of his notes and then we slept a while. Then – writing on my own. Nothing kept me awake better. I finished the piece and posted it to the Australian Worker that afternoon at the Central Kharkov post office. It was strange to think the lower end of government still worked – the mail and the lamp lighting and the trams.
9
When Federev saw us at breakfast the next morning he announced that our Bolshevik group would take over a fine house that had belonged to the family of the late General Gubin. The family were gone and the house stood unoccupied. Gubin himself – Federev told us – had died a mysterious death. Last spring his corps had got out of control on the Polish front. These probably included the men we’d seen in the park the day the thief had been thrown into the river. Federev said it was not certain how General Gubin had died. He might have killed himself in despair when his soldiers set up bars and theatres and brothels in their dug-outs and invited German scouts across the lines to enjoy themselves there in a brotherly spirit. Or he might have been shot by his own men. In any case, the rest of the Gubin family had fled and were living in Italy.
When we occupied the house, said Federev, we would have a great number of soldiers and Red Guards to call on to protect the place. Because the Bolshevik faction was the only party promising an absolute end to the war.
So the Gubin house was to be our fortress – even Federev would have a bed there in case he was too busy to come home. We packed our kits and were driven the short distance to the Gubin mansion. And there we walked through a double door with columns on either side and from the large entrance hall went up a broad staircase to the upper floor, to the room where it had been decided – I don’t know by who – we would be working and living from now on. I could see the places on the walls where the Gubins’ paintings had been and wondered where they’d disappeared to.
The day before we moved in there were mainly meetings. Then suddenly there were jobs. All at once Federev and Artem and Tasha had roles they seemed to know how to play. In a big room on the ground floor, Federev was to be the chief of security – he would guard the premises and the party’s principles. He was supposed to gather intelligence about our enemies and about the armaments other groups had. Almost straight away his clothing changed. He wore a military cap and a well-tailored military jacket. A number of soldiers put maps up on the wall for him to study. He began his work. Immediately his office was full of housewives and good-looking boys bringing information from the suburbs and the bars and teahouses and Turkish baths of the city.
Tasha and Olya were given an office at the head of the stairs. They headed some sort of secretarial and propaganda departments. They kept in touch with the members of the party. They wrote speeches and articles for our newspaper – it was named Izvestia just like Artem’s Brisbane newspaper. It was published from a cellar across the city. Olya typed letters for the rest of us. Equality between man and woman hadn’t reached the typewriter yet. Anyhow – as dear old Amelia would have said – it doesn’t matter as long as the shorthand typist is valued.
Artem was to be military liaison, chief of supplies and propaganda – he shared that task with Tasha – and I was taken on as his informal aide. I felt shy about this. The most I could do was work up a bit of an English-language story out of the English speech notes Artem gave me and to write in longhand and with my direct rough style for the Australian Worker and anyone else wh
o’d give me the time of day. But my Russian was still like that of a child. Did I belong? Of course I didn’t. But I didn’t want to go home either. I couldn’t believe everything that had happened. The people who’d met us at Kharkov station a few weeks ago had just moved into a house without taking any lease. They’d said at the little meetings they had the army and the Red Guards on their side and now – going by the numbers of armed men around the house and in the guardroom downstairs – it turned out to be true.
And if you’re here in the first place, I told myself, no sense creeping around as if you aren’t a welcome guest. Artem must have known I’d go home if he told me to. So until he said it ... here we were.
In our office across from that of the sisters, army cots were put in place for us to sleep on. Though everyone seemed to be making up their work as they went along, there wasn’t a doubt that we were on what the English call a war footing.
The mansion was well guarded, as I said – the guardhouse was in the big reception room across from Federev’s office. It seemed the city knew we were here and protected by soldiers. Now and then there’d be catcalls between our guards and the young men and women from the finer academies who marched past in white cadet uniforms or summer skirts shouting insults at Vladimir Ilich and everyone inside the building. Sometimes more mature men and women marched past holding banners that said the soviets should be abandoned and the Rada obeyed in the Ukraine and the Duma in Russia. We’d look up from our work and hear the yelling in the street. We’d hear our sentries calling their own insults back.
One of Artem’s first problems was feeding everyone in the Gubin mansion. Our kitchen and communal dining room were downstairs at the back of the house and what the army cooks prepared there came from the municipal warehouses. To reach them Artem and I would travel by truck with the documents he signed as a member of the Donbass Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. Whatever party the men in the warehouse came from, they didn’t want to refuse us or our truckload of soldiers and Red Guards. Artem had flour distributed to the barracks around the city where soldiers dossed. Other officials of the city soviet were doing that – some people resented that they were not willing to cooperate in the noble business of being slaughtered by the Germans and Austrians. But if they weren’t given bread they would just seize it from civilians. Artem didn’t want that. At heart he was a law and order man.