Free The People's Train by Thomas Keneally Page B

have been the biggest drunk, the worst brute.
    In case they imagined a perfect place, I went on, Sadly, the air is full of the smell of tanneries down by the river. Later, the technical school I went to was here, see. Ekaterinoslav. South of Kharkov. Then the technical university. In Moscow.
    I noticed that Moscow lay like a gem of red and black in the map’s middle. If I was for the moment vainglorious in my reminiscences in front of Hope and Amelia, a stab of the old anguish came back soon enough. Uncertainty, a savage grandfather. Arrest.
    Amelia coughed as if she understood. Astonishing what a map can conjure up, she said. Old places and old feelings.
    Before I gave the atlas back to Amelia, I looked eastward and let my finger stray to Perm and all the railways intersecting there in the foothills of the Urals, and the railway crossing over the mountains and away, now a single isolated black line across reaches of birch forest and taiga to exile on the Aldan and Zeya rivers, where I began my interminable walk out to the railway at Blagoveshchensk near Manchuria, and then on to the Pacific shore. I felt a strange, crusty weariness overcome me again – I had forgotten that during my Brisbane time. Jail can bring about a kind of mental exhaustion. Then escape acts as a stimulant but is hard on the spirit as well. I could name three members of the Russian Workers Union who did not recover from the walk out of Siberia. One was a Socialist Revolutionary who hanged himself from a hardwood beam in Toowong. Another was a hopeless drunk sometimes seen raving on street corners in Brisbane. The third, Menschkin, was arrested in Brisbane for stealing from shops – kleptomania. The police overlooked his crime and now everyone knew he reported to them weekly on the activities of Queensland’s Russians. Kleptomania is, of course, a prison habit, especially for poor prisoners who lack anyone to bring them hampers. Even a katorzhnik, a political prisoner, would pick up anything he could. And once you had eaten a cockroach to allay hunger, once you had felt a toxic envy for a man whose cockroach seemed larger than yours, you were spoiled for polite shopping.
    I turned the pages looking for Vladivostok, Sakhalin, Eastern China.
    My eye lit on Shanghai.
    I said, Do you know Suvarov of the Australian Workers Union?
    Neither of them did.
    Grisha. He was my good friend in Shanghai. In the end, it was easy to get ashore and lose ourselves – yes, even though we weren’t Chinese. Everyone thought you were a sailor on shore leave. It was in fact a little like Queensland was until a few months back. The immigration agent up here was a dear old German named Schwartz who liked socialists and didn’t like the tsar. And he knew that in Queensland cane needed cutting and railways needed building. So he was not a severe gatekeeper of the Commonwealth of Australia.
    I am not sure why I made these confessions to the women. When I looked at their faces, I saw they did not know what to ask me next, or whether they’d probed too far. I said, So here I am in Brisbane. Is this not enough?
    Suddenly I wanted to get away from the map of Russia. I closed the book.
    Amelia remarked, As an educated man, Tom, you must resent being required to labour?
    No, I told her. I need to labour. Possibly in a difficult climate. It leaves my mind free.
    Curious, said Amelia. My husband used to say that.
    Nonetheless, and without rancour against the late Mr Pethick, I wondered if he had ever had his anus violated by a revolver barrel. What could be done with the men who had committed such things, should the revolution come? What school could they be sent to for redemption? Which brought me back to the subject of destroyed souls.
    I was just thinking about a man named Menschkin, I told the women. He marches with us, but I’m afraid he then goes to the tsarist consul, McDonald, and to the police.
    That’s horrible, said Hope. What can you do to stop him?
    It might be best