Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  Dedication

  For Yvonne

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Publisher’s Preface

  Chapter One

  Groppi’s

  Chapter Two

  Motherlands

  Chapter Three

  Mother Russia

  Chapter Four

  Mother

  Chapter Five

  Another Disgrace

  Chapter Six

  Full Circle

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other Books by Robert Dessaix

  Copyright

  Angus&Robertson

  Twenty-seven-year-old Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus stepped ashore in Australia in 1882, hoping that the climate would improve his health. While working for a Sydney bookseller, he managed to save the grand sum of £50 – enough to open his very own secondhand bookshop. He hired fellow-Scot George Robertson and in 1886 Angus & Robertson was born.

  They ventured into publishing in 1888 with a collection of poetry by H. Peden Steele, and by 1895 had a bestseller on their hands with A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses. A&R confirmed the existence of Australian talent – and an audience hungry for Australian content. The company went on to add some of the most famous names in Australian literature to its list, including Henry Lawson, Norman Lindsay, C.J. Dennis and May Gibbs. Throughout the twentieth century, authors such as Xavier Herbert, Ruth Park, George Johnston and Peter Goldsworthy continued this tradition.

  The A&R Australian Classics series is a celebration of the many authors who have contributed to this rich catalogue of Australian literature and to the cultural identity of a nation.

  These classics are our indispensable voices. At a time when our culture was still noisy with foreign chatter and clouded by foreign visions, these writers told us our own stories and allowed us to examine and evaluate both our homeplace and our place in the world. – GERALDINE BROOKS

  Publisher’s Preface

  After working on various anthologies and translations, writer and broadcaster Robert Dessaix turned his eye inward, and in 1994 at the age of fifty published his autobiography, A Mother’s Disgrace. During his mid-forties he had undergone a life-changing experience—he had met his biological mother for the first time. He felt this event, along with the years preceding it, would surely constitute a book—and yet inaction initially followed. It wasn’t until fellow author Thea Astley suggested she would write Robert’s story if he didn’t, that he finally put pen to paper.

  The book that emerged is widely regarded as a small masterpiece of Australian writing. Critics praised the author’s literary brilliance as well as his bravery and honesty, calling A Mother’s Disgrace a ‘moving, funny [and] enthralling’ book by a ‘virtuoso in language and master of narrative control’. First released under the Angus & Robertson imprint in 1994, it went on to a second edition in 1995 and a third edition, under the Flamingo imprint, in 1996.

  It was shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and highly commended for the FAW Christina Stead Award, the Age Book of the Year and the National Book Council CUB Banjo Awards. In 1999 the book was translated into French and published by Editions du Reflet in France.

  Sydney, 2002

  ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’

  Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

  1.

  Groppi’s

  One warm April evening in 1984, in a pleasant suburb of Cairo called Zamalek, three exquisite young men tried to kill me. A dance with knives and a pricking at the throat that began with a coffee at Groppi’s and ended, not with a severed wind-pipe, but, oddly enough, with my finding a voice.

  If you’ve ever been to Cairo, you’ll know Groppi’s. Everyone at some time or other drops in to Groppi’s for tea and perhaps a palmier or an almond slice dusted with icing-sugar. Inside Groppi’s, with its cool, high ceilings and its art deco furnishings, Cairo in all its raucous seediness and squalid grandeur suddenly seems pleasantly far away. I felt safe there.

  I’d wandered in alone in the late afternoon, past a knot of chiacking youths, to contemplate the evening. It seemed a shame to waste it, the next day being my last in Egypt, but then again the walk back through the dusk to the hotel might prove adventure enough. So I just sat amongst the dim mirrors and the warm smells of pastry and coffee and let the evening distil.

  Suddenly there was a scraping of chairs and two sleek young Cairenes sat down at my table, lean-faced and grinning. Had I been followed in? There was an awkward question or two (the usual kind: ‘Where are you from? Where is your wife?’) as I drank my tea, and a taut kind of pleasure as well.

  Then the oddest thing happened. Up bowled the waiter, sharp as a knife, and said: ‘I can’t serve you if you talk to these two men. You’ll have to leave.’ Nonplussed, embarrassed, I felt my savoir faire desert me instantly. I needed a pithy retort, in simple English. None came. Mohammed and Farouk slid in behind the table on my right. Face had been saved all round, it seemed.

  In time, across the gap between our tables, an edgy conversation started up again. Lots of grinning, lots of subtext, but could I read it? Mohammed, slender to the point of gauntness, nervous and fine-boned, did most of the talking (he was married, one small child, off to Athens on the boat from Alexandria tomorrow), while Farouk, somehow softer, less the chisel, smiled and nodded with just a hint of surliness, the merest pout. A photograph came out (no sign of the waiter) … ‘My wife and child’. I seem to recall they were in Frankfurt—somewhere far away at any rate, somewhere prosperous, waiting. We were all waiting. The ceiling fans filled in the silences.

  Eventually they left, still grinning, ambling gracefully through the doors. They’d thrown the dice and thrown well. I didn’t even know I was playing.

  About ten minutes later I, too, strolled outside into the muggy heat to head back through the traffic and the touts to my hotel across the river. The street was full of yellow light and people lounging, strolling, shouting, murmuring in smoky clusters. It was a street of men. Not far in front of me I caught sight of two men pushing an ancient cream Mercedes up the street, one behind and one half in the driver’s seat. Mohammed and Farouk. The Mercedes bucked and coughed and stopped. They grinned at me. Mohammed called me over. ‘Come for a drive,’ he said, straightening up and rasping something at Farouk. ‘You help us push. We’ll go for a drive.’ Why not? The Mercedes bucked into life and off we lurched. Cairo was now deep mauve.

  What pleasure is there to compare with driving fast but aimlessly on a balmy night across a new city? I once careered around Paris at night on the back of a motorbike, a gold helmet on my head, swooping across squares and bridges, past eerily soft-lit classical façades, along the Seine, up crooked, cobbled laneways, going nowhere, except in my head. Thomas his name was. I’d only known him for half an hour.

  To be frank, you can’t really swoop through central Cairo. Every artery is clogged, especially around Tahrir Square. But after a while we seemed to be at least puttering steadily through a more suburban landscape, with streets of apartment houses, mosques and churches forking off around us at crazy angles. And then we were gliding in and out of these streets quite quickly. I was deliciously lost. At one point we drew up at the gates of some vast, dark pleasure garden, thudding with loud music. Mohammed said it was a disco, but the gatekeeper wouldn’t let us in. We backed out into the stream of traffic again. I didn’t care.

  Now, apart from the occasional adjective, I’m telling you the version of what happened I was later to tell Sergeant Mustafa. Over sixteen hours in his tea-coloured office I told
Sergeant Mustafa what happened so many times, and from so many angles, that I have come to believe this version is the true one. I don’t think he ever quite believed it. But what Sergeant Mustafa was most interested in was what happened next.

  We drew up at the door of a fairly featureless middle-class Cairo apartment block: five or six sand-coloured storeys, with balconies jutting out here and there, a cavernous entrance hall, no one much about. We could have been somewhere in behind the beach at Bondi or St Kilda. Mohammed leapt out and called up to an apartment on the first floor. Lounging next to me on the back seat Farouk seemed to be giggling about something. A head appeared over the edge of the balcony above. There was a brief exchange.

  ‘That’s Hassim. He says to come up and meet his mother.’ Mohammed looked pleased. Husky sounds from Farouk.

  Hassim’s mother? Why not? Lots of smiling, probably, and sticky things to eat and mint tea. More questions about where my wife was. I’d met Arab mothers before in long, cushion-lined rooms off courtyards in Morocco. God alone knows what they’d thought or in what time-honoured story, if any, they’d seen me as a character.

  We clattered up the stairs and met Hassim in the doorway, a little plumper than the other two, a little glossier and a little fairer. Inside, the apartment was large and cluttered with objects—carpets and hookas, brass jugs and paintings—but no mother. That was curious but difficult to know how to construe. I didn’t try.

  I no longer remember what we talked about. Perhaps Sergeant Mustafa has a list of subjects written down in some yellowing file. I probably toyed with a mineral water while the boys drank Algerian wine (I’m not much fun in these situations) but I do remember saying no to hashish. (Sergeant Mustafa became very alert at this point in my tale, but not because he admired my virtue.)

  At some point I got up and went to the bathroom, a small, windowless room in the middle of the apartment. A minute later someone banged loudly on the door. Too loudly. Almost trying to break it down. I opened it. Farouk flung it wide and stalked in. The soft side to him had vanished. As I told Sergeant Mustafa:

  [The suspect known as] Farouk fondled me in an ambiguous way, grasped the silver chain around my neck and tore it off. (A bolt of fear.) He then seized my wrist and roughly removed my wrist-watch. (The fear begins to surge.) I protested. He then produced a knife and pressed it into my neck. Then [the suspect known as] Mohammed entered the room and locked the door behind him. He pushed Farouk to one side and began to hit me. He ordered me to take my clothes off. As I did so, Farouk began dancing around me, speaking excitedly in Arabic and jabbing at me with his knife. My bowels opened involuntarily. I was terrified. (All I can think is: ‘What a waste. What a waste. What a waste.’)

  Then [the suspect known as] Hassim began banging on the door and calling out. After some minutes, when I was naked except for my underpants, Mohammed opened the door, argued with Hassim and then pushed me out of the bathroom into the adjoining room. I was thrown onto a divan. All three men gathered in the room (Farouk still dancing madly with his knife) and began arguing in Arabic. (I thought I was going to die. I felt utterly naked, bereft even of self. The room was filling with the stench of my faeces.)

  I don’t know what people usually think when they’re about to die suddenly and stupidly. I know, for instance, that in my case my life did not flash before my eyes. Nor, strangely, did I pray (as I might well have) or feel any rage. My strongest feeling, as I’ve mentioned, was of waste. Here I was, a forty-year-old man, healthy, educated, with every prospect of an interesting, fulfilling life ahead of him, throwing that life away on a whim. And the flimsiest, the most banal of whims. I also remember feeling deeply humiliated. Who’d have thought, who’d ever have thought, that I’d end up naked and shit-smeared with my throat cut on a Cairo rubbish dump? Broadly speaking, a very Protestant response, despite the lack of prayer.

  My other thought was much more down-to-earth but in its own way no less Protestant: P. was waiting for me in Rome, no doubt wandering at that very moment around the streets near the Pantheon looking for somewhere cheap but still Roman to eat. The adventure of our lives, starting the day after tomorrow. With a walk, perhaps, in the morning sun through the gardens of the Villa Borghese up on the hill behind the hotel. I would never arrive. Total abandonment. The big full stop.

  Then the Arabic turned into English. I started to feel real again. Farouk had stopped snaking around with his knife, Mohammed had stood up. Hassim stayed strangely hunched on his chair by the lamp. ‘Get dressed now,’ Mohammed said. ‘Quickly.’ A flutter of hope, the feeling that somehow I might have lurched into a different storyline. My trousers were damp with dribbly shit, even my socks seemed soiled, but I wasn’t about to quibble. Then, as I later told Sergeant Mustafa:

  The three men stood at the door to the apartment, opened it and told me to leave. They pushed me out, abusing me as I went. They then came out onto the landing to watch me walk down the stairs. As I left the building, I turned around to see the number of the building in the street. It was written on a metal plate in Arabic, which I could not read. A middle-aged man in European dress was passing the house. I asked him in English if be would tell me the number of the house. He did. It was number seven. The three men were watching and started running down the stairs towards us. I ran off up the street.

  Foolishly, as it turned out, straight up the middle of the street. Past a restaurant called Le Don Quichotte (its bright yellow neon began blinking in my brain), still no one about except the middle-aged man now a hundred metres behind me, past a Coptic church awash with lights—some kind of celebration, a noisy crowd of people milling around in front—and then the street darkened. I kept running, just away, into blackness. Suddenly I heard a car coming up very fast behind me. I squeezed in between two cars parked on my left. The Mercedes sliced past me, bruising the knuckles on my right hand, then screeched to a halt. I went rigid with terror. Then ran. Across the road, up a side street, around a corner, wild with terror. Le Don Quichotte, Le Don Quichotte, Le Don Quichotte. Headlights behind me. The Mercedes again. It accelerated fast. I leapt out of its path and veered back the way I’d come. Had it stopped? Would they chase me on their young men’s legs?

  I then came to a night-club, I think by the river, with a taxi-stand in front of it. I took a taxi to my hotel (ashamed of my stink). The clerk at the desk paid for the taxi. I then went to my room, Sergeant Mustafa, locked my door securely and stayed there until this morning.

  I was in the grip of a new fear now: that my snarling dandies, my elegant thugs, would come to my room in the night and throw me from my twenty-second-floor balcony with its expensive view of the pyramids. I stood at the door half the night, my eye glued to the peep-hole, expecting to see them loom bulbously into view in the misshapen corridor outside.

  Drawing the beige curtains across the view of the pyramids, I sat down at the desk by the beige lamp and started to rewrite the story so far. (For you, Sergeant Mustafa, a version for your files.) Leaping up from time to time to hold my breath and stare through the fish-eye in the door, I retold myself the evening through the dead hours until dawn over and over again, until I got it right. On Sheraton bond. I didn’t feel crushed by what had happened, you see. In fact, if anything, suspended there writing at some nameless hour in the silence high above Cairo, anonymous, disconnected, some part of me was now spiralling upwards. On words, then phrases, sentences and whole stories. Who I was—had been, would be—suddenly seemed so fluid, the self so evanescent, protean. A word, a name, and by some magic a precarious self would crystallise briefly in the void and float there, many-faceted and glinting. And then dissolve. It was a dangerous moment and I soared on it.

  Yet surely, I said to myself, I had a real history. Or, to put it another way, I had lived a real life—an almost inexcusably unremarkable one, some might say. For a start, I’d had a not unhappy childhood as childhoods go. I’m not at all convinced now that happy childhoods are a good thing, I think they can lead to a kind of moral
paralysis, a sort of smug Swissness of the spirit, but once you’ve had one there’s nothing much you can do about it. Adopted as a baby towards the end of the Second World War, I grew up in lower middle-class comfort, if that’s the right word, on Sydney’s lower North Shore. We only had an ice-chest when everyone else had a refrigerator, we had no car, no telephone and no television set when all our neighbours had them, but we were not impoverished. It was an unremarkable house we lived in, wedged between the primness of a lawn-edged street out the front and the wildness of a bush-filled gully behind. (In secret ways those two boundaries—the primly mown buffalo verge on the street and the bush at the back, dense with night sounds and animal possibilities—still function as boundaries to my sense of who I am.) My unremarkable parents were middle-aged and irritated with one another and loved me (I now know) like a beautiful thing that might break, but it was they who in fact broke and died, one mad. Abandoned (as I saw it) first by my natural mother and now by Jean and Tom Jones I tried to make a life by being married—it was by now the early 1970s—and by excelling at my chosen craft of teaching others in minute detail the largely superfluous things from Russian culture I’d mastered myself. My wife and I lived for a time in all sorts of far-off places—Moscow, Helsinki, Paris—crisscrossing the world from Kashmir to Peru and from Java to Lapland on study trips of one kind or another.

  Abandoned yet again (as I saw it), this time rather abruptly by my wife, I moved to Sydney, thought I’d seize life by both hands and put an ad in the personal columns. In 1982 I met P., took up with him or he with me, and two years later off we flew to Europe for a grand tour, he straight to Italy and I via Egypt. And so I came to Cairo, to Groppi’s and to my spiralling moment on the twenty-second floor of the Sheraton Hotel. And although it grew out of a sense of nothingness, of being stripped bare of any self, of being brutally silenced, untongued, reduced to animality, it was also a luminous moment in its way. Perhaps in George Steiner’s terms it was even quite a Modernist moment, the point at which the covenant between my lived life and the stories I’d told myself about it broke.