Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  But in those days we were royalty. For a start, we had foreign passports so we could, if we felt like it, go to Paris for Christmas or Helsinki for the weekend for some good food and decadent living and bookshops you could browse in. And in the end we’d fly off to our Shangri-las anyway, to countries impossibly far away, forbidden, forever inaccessible, where people lived unimaginably pleasurable lives. ‘Abroad’, ‘over there’, zagranitsa (‘across the border’) was almost fetishised. Bulgaria or the GDR might be technically over the border, but they weren’t zagranitsa. If you claimed to have been abroad and then revealed you’d only spent two weeks at some Rumanian seaside resort, you’d be showing yourself up for the hick you were. Zagranitsa meant the West.

  People had funny ideas about what was ‘over there’, twenty-seven kingdoms away, as they say in Russian. Once, in a train to the east of Moscow, I found myself in a compartment with two young men going home from prison. They were handsome and brutal and ignorant. They were astonished to find themselves talking to someone from ‘over there’. All I remember from our conversation was how outraged they were to learn that I didn’t have a double-storeyed house or a car or a pool or take my vacations in Rio de Janeiro. They suspected I was a government stooge and the conversation turned quite nasty. On the other hand, an Estonian friend of mine, an academic who eventually made a visit to Denmark, was so overwhelmed by what he saw (a vision of Estonia as it might have been without Soviet occupation) that he had to go into therapy when he got back to Tallinn.

  Apart from our passports, we had dollars. Dollars made all the difference. There were special shops in Moscow in those days that sold anything you might want from cameras to caviar, from cars to Akhmatova’s poetry, for dollars. And just to add insult to injury, cheaply. So every week I’d go across town on the underground to the shop on Kutuzov Avenue and stock up on food that was unavailable elsewhere—apples and orange juice, veal cutlets, fine chocolate, jams and compotes, beans and cabbages—and then stagger off to Mrs Prokofiev’s flat upstairs in the same building to off-load some of it and talk about God (she always covered the telephone with a cushion just pro forma to foil the KGB) and then back to my room at the university on the Lenin Hills to cook up a decent meal. And dollars got us into the Bolshoi, dollars got us a table in a top-class restaurant, dollars got us out of almost any queue and straight in the door. Like princes.

  Our attitude to Soviet legalities was princely as well. Since few of us regarded the regime in power as legitimate in any meaningful sense, few of us had much compunction about breaking Soviet law if we thought we could get away with it. There was a forty-kilometre limit on our movements, for example, unless we had a visa to pass beyond it, but most of us ignored the rules if they didn’t suit us. I once took a bus to the Russian Orthodox monastery of Pechori over on the Estonian border, for instance, and clambered round the catacombs and talked with the priests, all without a visa, and in 1971 when I was in Moscow again with my wife, she went skiing with a friend in Armenia without a visa. Not that such expeditions were great threats to the Soviet State. A much more serious infringement of Soviet law was the smuggling of various kinds that most of us indulged in. I used to order all sorts of subversive books from Blackwell’s in Oxford and pick them up at the Australian Embassy on my weekly visits. Freud, Jung, Fromm, English and American fiction (it wouldn’t have occurred to me to bring in Australian fiction), Bibles—and worse. I even managed to bring in Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward in a tiny Russian edition, printed specifically for smuggling, and all these books I gave to Russian friends who’d asked for them.

  Along with the oranges and chocolates I used to take religious books and journals to Lina Ivanovna Prokofiev every week and she would arrange for them to be distributed to ‘friends’ in Leningrad, Vilnius and one or two other Russian cities. Lina Ivanovna was a rather crotchety, aristocratic, Latin personality (she was Spanish-born and eventually became a Spanish citizen), obsessed with the question of which of the two Madame Prokofievs was the real Madame Prokofiev—she or the woman she referred to as Mendelson-Prokofieva. Prokofiev’s wife, you see, received invitations to foreign embassy receptions in Moscow, could prop up on the window-sill gold-embossed invitations to openings in London and Madrid, had entrée into certain privileged circles amongst Moscow’s cultural élite—but which of the two women was she? Legally Lina Ivanovna was—Prokofiev never divorced her after taking up with Mira Mendelson-Prokofieva—but the Soviet government gave its preference to Mira, who had strong Party connections. I was disappointingly uninterested in the whole question, I think. It was too much like a Gogolian farce, and I much preferred to get on with our smuggling or to listen to her talk about her extraordinary life in Paris and America and about how, one afternoon on her way back from a Western embassy, she was arrested by the KGB and sent to a labour camp for eight years, about how her interrogators had taunted her, since she believed God was Spirit and was All, to turn herself into a bird and fly out the barred window, about how her children came home from school that afternoon to find the flat empty, the floor-boards ripped up, the wall-paper hanging in strips from the walls and their mother ‘disappeared’.

  One of the problems on the smuggling front was that none of our ‘friends’, especially in Leningrad or Vilnius, was quite in Lina Ivanovna’s social class. She loved them in a touching sort of way because of the ideas they’d held onto in silence together through prison and concentration camp over decades, but they also irritated her with their ordinariness. They were nobodies, and in Russian culture this question of the nobody versus the somebody (of what makes an identity, what validates it) is one that’s always been acutely felt. ‘Who do you think you are?’ the Madman’s head of department asks in Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. ‘What are you? Just nothing, an absolute nobody.’ The Madman counters that the director is ‘really a cork, not a director, and an ordinary cork at that—a common or garden cork, and nothing else …’ Without God, Gogol would have said, identity has no meaning. We’re all just corks—or heads of departments or Kings of Spain, it makes no difference—without God. There’s no up or down without an absolute indication of direction. I fear I may have said something similar to Lina Ivanovna about her own identity—I was not averse to bringing the conversation pompously back to basics. And although I’m sure she nodded in agreement and smiled and patted my hand, I don’t imagine any metaphysical argument could have withstood the pressure of an invitation to the United States Embassy, or her highly coloured sense of herself as Lina Llubera, Spanish concert singer, wife of Russia’s most gifted composer.

  You couldn’t help loving our ‘friends’ in Leningrad. Sometimes one of them would come to Moscow to pick up the books and journals, sometimes I would go to them in Leningrad on some pretext. Any arrangement involved risky calls from public telephone booths to communal flats and, for Olga Aleksandrovna in particular, since she was blind, difficult journeys alone across town in buses and trams. We used to meet in Marya Timofeyevna’s room in a flat on the top floor of an old palace right on the Neva, on the Kutuzov Embankment near Peter the Great’s summer palace. We’d sit there, the three of us, looking out across the river to the Peter and Paul Fortress and the cruiser Aurora and warm each other with cups of tea and talk about people we knew and metaphysics.

  Marya Timofeyevna was a large, wheezing, moon-faced woman, jolly, contented, badly dressed—the kind of Russian woman you can see on any bus or tram, clutching her bulky bags and pushing her way with loud determination towards the door. She wanted warmth and reassurance from our meetings, she wanted to hear the Books read again, in Russian, after all those years—nearly forty now since the authorities had rounded them all up, sent some off to prison and death and let some live on in silence. Olga Aleksandrovna was altogether different. A heavy woman, always in black, with her silver hair drawn back in a bun, Olga Aleksandrovna was one of those sent to a prison camp in Bashkiria in the Urals for belonging to an outlawed religious society. She stayed there, in prison and then
in exile, for twenty-nine years, until the Khrushchev era of de-Stalinisation, and through malnutrition had lost her sight. She now lived in a communal flat in the suburbs of Leningrad, a pensioner, like her friend Marya Timofeyevna, without a single trace of bitterness or the slightest sense of loss or deprivation. It still astonishes me. She was the metaphysician of the two, drinking in our readings, debating their meaning with a Talmudic intensity, laughing with joy at each discovery of meaning, seeing in her blindness more than any of us.

  It struck me then, during the late ’sixties and early ’seventies when I was moving back and forth between Moscow and Canberra, how little scope there is in polite company in Australia for talking without embarrassment about anything too metaphysical—fears and feelings and private philosophies. In Russia I used to feel, perhaps wrongly, that you could turn to the person next to you on a bus and say: ‘What do you think about death, then?’ and get into a very interesting discussion, probably with the whole bus. You couldn’t do that in Australia. I rarely had conversations like that with my friends at home. I never seem to have them now. It’s partly my fault—I get so impatient with whatever I think is humbug. In Russia impatience was a style, a way of confronting the world. There you could shout ‘Drivel!’ and ‘Lies!’ and no one sulked or broke off the discussion. I think my friends at home, and Jean and Tom, must have thought me awfully stiff-necked and self-righteous—and no doubt I was, but it was partly style.

  Even today, sometimes—rarely, because the subject is nowadays in such poor taste—I hear the urbane and the knowing in our society, the high-school-debating-society rationalists of our popular culture, pour scorn on any philosophy that questions the absolute reality of matter. They’re joined by physicists and chemists on a gleeful winning streak, suburban Anglicans, medical gurus—indeed, the entire chatting establishment. To them above all it’s lunatic idealism, an offensive denial of the reality of human suffering, a middle-class refusal to confront the world’s Auschwitzes, Biafras and Mogadishus, not to mention lesser evils—stomach cancer, cyclones, pig farms, acid rain or the truly disgusting life cycle of the mole-rat.

  I know what they mean, I acknowledge that they’ve ‘won’ (they ‘own the discourse’) and that there’s no answer to their objections that they would find remotely acceptable. But I do remember Olga Aleksandrovna. In practice, I must say, not knowing quite how to say it, it doesn’t at all work out the way one might think. In practice, the educated Buddhist or Christian Scientist or Sufi mystic can be as involved in the world and the rational solving of its problems as a quantum physicist, for much the same reasons—and be enriched by the infinite view in both directions. Understanding Einstein or the uncertainty principle or experimenting with some unified theory of everything, whatever it’s called, in one sense changes everything, but in another nothing at all. You can be obsessed by quarks and still love P. D. James, understand that time and space are aspects of the same thing and still worry about missing the train, understand God to be All and still join the Labor Party or work in a rape crisis centre. The cut-off point for involvement in the world changes from person to person. It’s annoying that this should be so, but it is.

  Quantum physicists have a cultural advantage, all the same, over out-and-out idealists, even if their critique of common-sense materialism is as disruptive and profound as any idealist’s. They are scientists, thus safe from the attacks of rationalist societies who can get on with pouring scorn on spoon-benders, mind-readers and levitators, even if what they actually say is more confronting to common sense than the wildest idealism. In the late twentieth century respectable people ask questions of science, not spiritual philosophies; and philosophers, historians, linguists and even literary critics scamper to get inside the scientific fold. It’s the only way to be taken seriously by people you take seriously. If you want to know what is true and what isn’t, if you want to revolutionise your thinking about the universe, you read not Teilhard de Chardin or Paul Tillich (let alone, God help us, some New England nut-case like Mary Baker Eddy—I can almost hear you snorting), but Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins or James Gleick. You might just get away with a spiritual nut-case if it’s Third World or ancient enough—some Himalayan guru or St Teresa of Avila. The Orange People recruited some very unlikely inner-suburban graduates to their cause on this principle. But it’s inconceivable to anyone with an education and a mortgage that materialism could be mistaken in its fundamentals, even if it shades acceptably into belief and speculation on its outer fringes, at the level of superstrings and parallel universes, for example. Western materialism is in its heyday. It’s been my experience that fundamental doubts about the absolute reality of matter are best kept to yourself.

  Late in the ’seventies I went looking for Olga Aleksandrovna again. The only way to trace someone in those days was by going to an Information kiosk on a street corner, poking your identity card through the window and then asking for the address or telephone number you needed. There were no (publicly available) telephone or street directories, and this way, of course, ‘they’ knew who was interested in whom. I startled the woman in a Moscow kiosk once by asking for the telephone number of the Peruvian Embassy, which was, of course, classified information. If you didn’t know the number of the Peruvian Embassy you must ipso facto be the kind of person who had no right to know it, so what was I doing by asking? Was I a lunatic, a spy, an insolent prankster? Anyway, on this occasion, I hadn’t seen Olga Aleksandrovna for several years, I was in Leningrad for just a day or two and very much wanted to see her again. I stood on the hard-packed snow peering up into the little window in the kiosk waiting for the address. ‘That citizen is dead,’ said the woman briskly. There was nothing to do but wander away and remember.

  Another answer I remember giving about what it was like to live in the Soviet Union was that it made you cynical. I must have been asked in Russian because I remember saying just one word: tsinizm (cynicism). It’s an unpleasant word, especially in Russian. It cancels out hope. It says, I don’t believe your stories, I mistrust your motives, your truths are self-serving lies, good will not triumph, greed has already won. In Russia cynicism is lightened with humour, a delight in the paradoxical and in clownishly mocking hypocrisy and official pieties. It’s leavened in Russia, too, with a rather sentimental belief in the grain of goodness to be found gleaming somewhere in the filth, the image of Christ to be espied in the most piggish of countenances. The Russians also had the advantage Noam Chomsky has referred to of living inside a totalitarian society and therefore not needing political illusions. The regime simply coerced people into repeating its lies and pieties about peace and freedom and justice and all the other abstractions leftist and rightist ideologies smother us in. Belief was beside the point. In our sort of society, by way of contrast, in radical student clubs and the RSL, for instance, illusion is of the essence and its manufacture by those at the top who believe in nothing an important industry.

  The sort of experience I had in Russia during the Brezhnev years colours your attitude towards Australian leftism. It sours you. It would be strange if it didn’t. So, while I do understand the faith our leftist intelligentsia and working-class activists once put in the Soviet Union, particularly in the 1930s, and their eagerness to weigh in on the socialist side in what they saw as the battle between ‘socialism’ and ‘fascism’ for historical supremacy, I find it almost overwhelmingly difficult, knowing what I know, simply to nod sympathetically and pass over in silence the support many Australians gave until quite recently to regimes which systematically murdered and oppressed their populations in pursuit of a dream of social justice. The true believers will impatiently explain, of course, that there was nothing ‘socialist’ about the Russia I lived in and nothing Marxist about its philosophical underpinnings, but I have to say that it did feel as if public ownership of the means of production and distribution along Marxist lines was being experimented with and it felt like a disaster. It felt as if you were on a train that had
careered off the rails, grinding countless human lives under its wheels, while the driver sat up in the engine assuring the numb or panic-stricken passengers that everything was under control, everything was going according to plan and here for your edification as the train lurched onto its side were a few more quotations from Karl Marx. This colours your attitude to Karl Marx. It also colours, I hope understandably, your attitude towards the leftist intelligentsia at home who, whatever they may say now, for over half a century declared that you’d either been hallucinating all along (the train had never left the rails) or had never understood why it was necessary for revolutionary trains to leave the rails for a brief period. In either case, regardless of the truth, you were supporting the wrong side in their binary construction of the world. You must be ‘right-wing’, you must be ‘conservative’, ‘reactionary’. Leftism came to mean to me the right to oppress, deceive, lie, kill, wage war, imprison and enslave in the name of an entity called ‘the people’. Rightism seemed to be the same thing in the name of an entity called ‘the nation’. How these two mystical entities were defined seemed to depend on where your interests lay. But one thing is still clear: past support for the butchers in the Kremlin is not shameful—indeed, it’s often construed as a personal tragedy, deserving of sympathy—whereas support for non-socialist butchers is shameful. How can you help being cynical?

  I’ve also come to agree with Vaclav Havel’s view that social and political problems are in the first instance ethical problems, not the other way around. Perhaps you have to spend a few years in a society with a radically different social structure and ideas about justice, equality, goodness or punishment for the strength of Havel’s argument to become apparent. It’s an argument that gets short shrift in Australian intellectual circles and you learn to be selective about where you voice it. Sympathy for it certainly distances you from the Marxist interpretation of history.