Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  It’s hard to find the right word to describe our relationship, Mrs Z’s and mine. In middle-class Australian society there’s a limit to the number of rôles a middle-aged woman with few ties can have to an unrelated adolescent boy. She can be a teacher (as Mrs Z partly was) or a friend of the family, an ‘aunty’ (which she never quite became—Jean and Tom found her too outlandish and she found they smacked too much of the common herd) or a neighbour, but not much else. Mrs Z, in a society which had no place for such an office, saw herself, I think, as a kind of duenna, chaperoning me as I stepped out into the world, guiding me with a knowing hand away from misalliances into circles she approved of.

  Our first real rift occurred over the Berlin Wall years later, in 1965. When it first went up in 1961 I remember clearly one of Mrs Z’s friends explaining to me with what I can only call a sort of strident patience that it was we in the capitalist West who were behind the barbed wire and those in the East who were free and outside it. The Wall, it turned out, had been built to keep the fascist warmongers in the West out, while the good folk in the East went about their peace-loving, non-exploitative business. If I didn’t like being locked in behind walls, barbed wire and machine-gun turrets, then I should head East just as soon as I could—there were ways. Indeed there were—travel agencies in Pitt Street, for example—and I did, in 1965. I went to Berlin.

  I flew in from Munich. Flying in in those days minimised the impact. Years later Peter and I went from Munich to Berlin by train. Peter fell silent almost as soon as we crossed the border of the GDR at Hof and as we trundled north under a yellowish sky through the devastated landscape of the GDR, through those surreally silent, grimy towns straight out of Victorian England, Peter, a mild-mannered, politically undogmatic man, fell ill with tension and a kind of grief.

  But on that autumnal afternoon in 1965 I approached the Wall with a certain amount of confidence. I’d just spent a few days in Beverly Hills in California, safe in a secluded mansion stuffed full of Meissen figurines while Watts went up in flames on the other side of Los Angeles, and also on Manhattan, squeezed in with student friends in a tiny apartment on West 56th Street. Los Angeles and New York seemed to confirm what I’d been suspecting: that the capitalist world was indeed divided into exploiters and the exploited and the result was rat-infested slums, violence and millions of mutilated lives. I had not been seduced by a stroll down Fifth Avenue.

  I think it was near Potsdamer Platz that I first caught sight of the Wall. You had to walk up to it across scarred vacant land. I climbed up the wooden stairs to the landing and peered across at a watch-tower and some nondescript, brownish apartment blocks on a street just a few yards away. Just out of sight behind those apartments a tram screeched as it turned a corner. Otherwise it was all as lifeless as a stage-set. I’ve never forgotten the screeching tram, lost somewhere in the October fog a street or two away, because as it screeched, precisely at the moment it clanked and screeched, I had another of my luminous moments. It was as plain as the nose on your face that I was not behind the Wall, they were. The prison was over there, after all. That was nearly thirty years ago now, yet to this day every tram that screeches as it turns a corner, even the East Brunswick turning into Bourke Street, Melbourne, seems to be warning me against belief and humbug.

  I didn’t cross the Wall until the next morning on the S-Bahn, curving across the sinister walled canal into Friedrichstrasse station’s glassy hall. Up in the rafters were armed guards and hidden down below at street level manning the checkpoint was a squad of Hollywood Nazis called the Grenzsoldaten. As you stepped from the train in those days onto the platform where Westerners could change trains and head back to the West on another line or take the stairs down to street-level to enter East Berlin, you saw the platform divided lengthwise down the middle by an opaque glass wall. On the other side, not a metre away, you could make out the silhouettes of people living in another world, forbidden to enter yours. It was almost unbearably, ecstatically exciting. For me it was like stepping outside myself into a simulacrum of my own brain, if I can put it that way. My inner world had in a flash become the outer because there in front of me—I could touch it—just a centimetre thick was the division between ordered paradise and the jungle, between system and chaos, between heaven coming to pass and real life. Or so we were told. The ultimate icon. I hurried downstairs, paid my ten Deutschmarks, pushed open a swing door and found myself in a real Pure Land.

  It was, as you’d expect, exactly like all the others I was to visit that October and in later years, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and, of course, Russia. They even smelt the same. They’re well documented. You don’t need me to tell you about them. They weren’t pure. They had no hope of being pure. They were built for angels by people who didn’t even believe in angels.

  I’d smuggled in some journals and magazines that October morning past the chilling Nazi lookalikes about a different kind of paradise and caught a tram into the suburbs way out towards the north-east to pass them on to people whose address I’d been given. Hitler’s laws about minority religions (sects, we like to call them in English, to establish our disdain for them) had been kept intact by the regime in the GDR and the least I could now do was to contravene them. I did this for years in all sorts of places—Russia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia—in fact, at one point I had quite a little network operating out of Moscow through Sergei Prokofiev’s wife Lina Ivanovna. Smuggling for God brought me into contact with all sorts of eccentric, courageous, intelligent people with enormous strength of character, despised, of course, both there and here as daft if not stark raving mad, but just for the record I’d like to say that they struck me almost without exception, and still strike me, as amongst the most clear-sighted people I’ve ever had dealings with.

  Mrs Z was furious when I got back to Sydney and told her what I thought of the Wall. She quivered with displeasure. It was our first serious disagreement and a harbinger of things to come. The Germans, she told me, richly deserved any minor inconvenience such as a wall that might come their way. In fact, what they deserved was suffering on a much grander scale altogether. And if life in the Soviet sector was a little greyer than life in the American sector, that was historically understandable and in the fullness of time would change. America, as always, was obscurely to blame for the Wall, for the difference in living standards and for the temporary limitations on individual freedom in the GDR. I could follow her argument, but I caught the whiff of bad faith and it never quite left my nostrils.

  Not long ago, in another foggy October, I caught a bright yellow double-decker bus (No. 100) from Berlin Zoo just off the Kurfürstendamm straight past the Reichstag, through the middle of the Brandenburg Gate to the corner of Unter den Linden. I could hardly believe what I was seeing through the front window of the bus—we simply swung right at the Reichstag into Ebertstrasse (once cut off from the West by the Wall) and then veered left straight through the middle of the Brandenburg Gate. This wasn’t me, this wasn’t the twentieth century. I jumped out into it. There on the pavement on Pariser Platz in the chilly sunshine is a bazaar. Once you’d have been shot for standing there. Now Russians and Tamils and Rumanians are huddled there selling Soviet sailors’ caps, matryoshka dolls, red and gold Lenin badges and little banners which read: ‘We shall arrive at the victory of Communist labour!’ Just Soviet bric-à-brac now, thrown in with the chocolate bars and belts and scarves and maps of Berlin. It should be exhilarating, but it’s unbearably banal. I can’t look at it for long. I walk off eastwards up Unter den Linden past the Yamaha showrooms.

  In the mid-sixties it was unimaginable that I could live to see this. A divided Europe seemed a natural dialectical arrangement, a legitimate stage in the march of History. All the same, by 1965 I was to an extent my own man (or so I thought). I now had a degree in Russian and French from the ANU in Canberra and a Master’s thesis in Soviet literature underway in the same department. I’d flown alone right around the world, visited
a dozen countries, and not just France and Germany: I’d made my way across Czechoslovakia and Hungary, wandered about the streets of Calcutta, and gone cycling around the Kathmandu valley when there were few Europeans to be seen in Nepal. Guilt about leaving Jean and Tom to live their comfortless lives without me did nag at me, did distress me—I hadn’t, after all, lived at home since moving to Canberra in 1962—but I assuaged the guilt by writing them long letters, full of intimate detail and assurances of my love. There was no reproach in their letters to me—there was no pleasure to compare with finding one of Tom’s fat, loving letters waiting for me somewhere—but deep down I always had to do battle with the fear I’d abandoned them for selfish reasons, a cardinal sin in my book.

  Mrs Z’s watchful, mothering eye still followed me about in those years. It was becoming an irritation. My childhood princess was looking more and more like an ageing xenophobe in a cheong sam with Manchurian ideas about what had been going on in the world for the past fifty years and a disturbing tendency to shout ‘Off with his head’ when crossed. ‘Rasstrelyat’ nado!’ (‘They should be shot!’) was an all too common reaction to any mention of people with dissident views, Pasternak was a talentless nincompoop, Solzhenitsyn a traitor, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva and Gumilev beneath mentioning. It was time I went to Russia and confronted the reality.

  As you can see, the self I packed off to Russia to confront the reality (the only one of my three Pure Lands to have a reality to confront) was not an archetypally Australian male self, if there is such a thing. It knew nothing about any kind of sport (I was forced to play football at school, but never learnt the rules and still don’t know what sort of football it was), had never held a cricket bat in its hand or seen a horse-race, it had never gambled, not even ever bought a lottery ticket, it had never drunk alcohol (in fact, my experience of alcohol is still limited to one glass of Veuve Clicquot, which, if you’re interested, tastes to a virginal palate like a very indifferent apple juice), it had never been in a pub, didn’t know a Holden from a Rover and couldn’t drive. It wasn’t even an Australian intellectual in any real sense: it knew nothing to speak of about Australian politics or history—Archbishop Mannix, say, or Ben Chifley or the Eureka Stockade, these names evoked virtually nothing—and even less about Australian literature or painting (Nolan, Boyd, Williams, Tucker) which it had barely heard mentioned. It didn’t even know it was living in the ’sixties. It’s astonishing that I could have missed the ’sixties so completely, living in a university college, but I contrived to. Smoking dope, dropping acid, rock music festivals, Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan, Vietnam marches, Che Guevara posters—none of it meant anything to me at all. In Moscow a student I was friendly with asked me to translate some Dylan into Russian, but I couldn’t because I didn’t understand the English. No, I had no sense of any revolution sweeping over the world. Marijuana, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, the Rolling Stones—to me they were all just different faces of materialism on the march, different forms of the same old authoritarian message: don’t try to think, you are just a biochemical reaction in our laboratory. So, you see, if anything, this prim little self, almost disconnected from any kind of social reality, with its head in Boston, St Petersburg, Paris, London, anywhere but here, thought it was the rebel, not Dylan or Che Guevara. And Moscow did not disillusion it.

  3.

  Mother Russia

  Mrs Z was nervously excited when I set off for Moscow for the first time in 1966 as an exchange student. On the one hand I was going to live in the Promised Land she’d never seen, but on the other hand I’d be unchaperoned and might misinterpret what I saw. Which from her point of view I did. Once I got there, it appeared to me that the capitalist press and its running dogs had actually got it all pretty right. Not quite right, perhaps—the reality was more Byzantine, more richly textured and more contradictory than The Sydney Morning Herald could be bothered with—but by and large Western right-wing propaganda seemed to have hit the nail on the head. And so had Tom, in a crude sort of way, shaving in the bathroom.

  Mrs Z was not as naïve in her hopes, however, as a fellow student of mine in Moscow, an undergraduate from provincial Tula (Tolstoy country). He’d been told to attach himself to me for the usual reasons and, casting about for a pretext, he seized upon my ten-volume set of Dostoevsky. Every week for ten weeks he’d come to my room to borrow another volume and have a little chat, touching only very cursorily on Dostoevsky. He was dazzled by Moscow’s monumental grandeur, the boulevards, the symmetrical vistas, the wedding-cake skyscrapers (we lived in one on the Lenin Hills) and he used to ask me, with a touching, almost childlike awe in his voice, how I could live here, at the centre of world Communism, in this palace of learning set amidst parks on the hills above the river, not half an hour from Red Square on the futuristic underground, and still not believe. Surely this was the Third Rome. I didn’t quite know what to say to that, and after he’d returned the tenth volume of Dostoevsky the university’s Foreign Department started sending someone else. I had the same trouble in Lourdes once when my companion on a bus tour, an Irishwoman from Galway, was similarly hurt and amazed that I could be there, in Lourdes, at the grotto and in the church, and still not believe. I’d wanted to say to her, and wanted to say to my friend from Tula, that it was precisely because I was there at the shrine that belief was impossible—and understanding became imperative.

  Things got off to a bad start in Moscow. I arrived there in summer clothes almost straight from Marrakech expecting to find a suitcase of warmer clothes I’d sent ahead waiting for me at the Embassy. To my astonishment the case had been stolen from the First Secretary’s office. The two Moscow policemen put onto the job insisted someone at the Embassy had stolen it. The idea was so ludicrous I couldn’t understand how they could keep a straight face. But then, of course, they weren’t policemen, they didn’t believe the story, either, and would have had contempt for me if they’d thought I believed it. In some sort of sense they’d stolen it themselves, probably, or had been told who had. The important thing was to fill out the forms, mouth the right regrets and hopes, shake hands and go about our business. If we all agree the sky is green, then it must be.

  I never saw the case again, and the first month was a bit of a strain—the weather turned raw early, people were officious and rude, and in the student cafeteria the food was for the most part abominable and all the knives had been stolen. My main memory of mealtimes is of sitting in a cavernous dining hall shovelling mashed potato and gravy into my mouth with a bent fork. Everything seemed to turn into a saga, from registering at the library to having a friend come to my room on a simple visit. But at the end of the month, in early October, I had a watershed experience and felt a lot more relaxed. I’d gone up to the Foreign Department to talk about the course I was taking and to get permission for a friend to visit me in my room in the hostel. (For this you needed to make application in writing well in advance and the friend, in order to get through the two checkpoints, one at the gate and one inside the building, had to be armed with identification and a signed pass.) Things were going badly. I was looked after, if that’s the right term, by Lilia Pavlovna, a completely charmless woman with badly dyed hair who was in charge of what they called the krupnye kapitalisty, an odd expression which means ‘major capitalists’ with overtones of grossness. It was flattering but not reassuring.

  Lilia Pavlovna, adjusting from time to time both her teeth and her spectacles, was trying to convince me that it was in my best interests to study not Soviet literature, the area I was writing my Master’s thesis in and had come to the Soviet Union specifically to work on, but Dostoevsky. I tried to reason with her. She had what Russian friends of mine called ‘Soviet eyes’, not just glassy but osteklenevshie glaza, ‘eyes that have turned to glass’. There was no glimmer of human feeling or warmth in them at all. And the invitation to my room was a problem as well. Why was I inviting an American newspaper correspondent to my room? How did I know her? Where had we met? Then all of sudden I started
to cry. I cried softly at first, a few tears trickling down my cheeks, and then I began to cry quite loudly and to shudder and heave and rock on my chair. I cried noisily and steadily for quite a few minutes. Lilia Pavlovna went rigid with shock. ‘Take yourself in hand!’ she said eventually through her ill-fitting teeth. ‘Why are you crying? Calm yourself!’ I didn’t calm myself at all, but cried on and on in an ecstasy of release. Then I went downstairs to my room and cried on for about three hours. It may not have been the manly thing to do, but it was deeply cathartic. After that I felt ready to live in Moscow.