Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  There was something not inappropriate about having these thoughts in Cairo within sight of the pyramids. My natural mother’s name—and my own since Jean and Tom had died—was Dessaix, a name to conjure with, a name that promised stories, not like Jones. Now, in the annals of the Dessaix clan, Egypt has always had an important place. In very different circumstances from mine, Napoleon’s general, Louis-Charles-Antoine Desaix (one ‘s’) de Veygoux landed just outside Alexandria in 1798 on his way to conquer Upper Egypt, of which he was to prove, according to my Nouveau Petit Larousse, an ‘administrateur équitable’. In the accompanying postage-stamp-sized portrait he looks more foppish than fair-minded, I must say, but it’s a small entry between Demosthenes and Descartes and a lot of meaning had obviously to be packed into that one bland word ‘equitable’. It was Louis Desaix de Veygoux my natural mother Yvonne had in mind, I’m sure, when she said to me on the day we first met after forty-five years: ‘Remember you come from Very Good Stock.’ And she rapped on the table we were sitting at three times. Did I really? And in what ways did it matter? And what precisely was stock? De très bonne souche you say in French, especially of dogs, souche giving rise to thoughts of sturdy trunks with deep roots in rich soil.

  Yet when I was brought home by Jean and Tom Jones, Aunty Moat across the road said I looked as if I might be Aboriginal. In 1944 that was a slur you had to pay for. I might be cross-eyed and swarthy, but I had actually been certified a Good Adoption. Every year for seventeen years, at Christmas and on my birthday, Aunty Moat would atone for her offensive observation by giving me a book about Art and a cake of expensive soap. Unwittingly, she did me a great service, because without her books I’d never have known what names like Cézanne, Picasso, Braque and Mondrian meant. Certainly, no one else would ever have mentioned them.

  Aunty Moat lived in a Spanish-style house, with white walls and tiles on the floor, and was artistic. She was a neighbour, not an aunt, but in those days, as you’ll no doubt remember, neighbours formed clans, sang songs around each other’s pianos, gave each other eggs from their chooks, helped each other build garages, quarrelled and cried on each other’s shoulders. Unless, of course, you were Catholic, which was considered extremely poor taste, like farting in a lift. Only old Mrs Edwards was Catholic in our part of the street and she did the decent thing and kept to herself.

  In point of fact, my father Tom himself had been brought up in a large Roman Catholic family as one of thirteen brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and step-sisters). The women in the family, as Jean pointed out, seemed prone to using nail-polish, even on their toes, and to drinking beer and smoking and knowing the names of racehorses. Fortunately, the family seemed to do most of its proliferating in South Australia and, although my father throughout his long life retained that large-family, perhaps even Catholic, geniality, conviviality and tolerance of others’ foibles, he had drifted away from the religion long before I was born, probably when he was a merchant seaman before the First World War. If the local parish priest ever dared show his face on a pastoral call, Tom started up the Victa. Tom was living proof that Catholicism is not like polio. Given a lively imagination, a childhood infection can be permanently cured. If he’d been forced to cast a vote it would probably have gone to something rather more theosophical than traditionally Christian. We used to have arguments about reincarnation over the washing-up.

  It was there at the sink that I first heard my father’s theory about another Egyptian connection. Well before I could write (I suppose I must have been about two or three) I used to concoct long columns of what my father, with Madam Blavatsky’s encouragement, no doubt, was sure were embryonic Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some Pharaonic earlier life or, more prosaically, a rogue Egyptian gene (he knew about the General) might have been casting its shadow. You don’t have to believe it, of course, to find it adds a dimension to living.

  My mother Jean was of quite a different cast: of Scottish stock, rather Calvinist by temperament, although, as a nurse (and she went back to work when I was still a very small child) she had a practical streak when it came to the human body. I caused a furore in our part of the street when I was about four by telling all the children I could the amazing news about where babies came from. The MacFarlanes two doors up didn’t speak to us for three months. And when I was briefly and quite undramatically molested on the way home from school one afternoon, Jean lost no time in explaining to me in some detail what ‘men like that’ did with little boys. I was warned to keep a weather eye out for men wearing socks and sandals, especially if they were sitting on park benches. So in my mind the socks-and-sandals brigade joined women who wore nail-polish on their toes as socially undesirable and the long alliance Tom Keneally has alluded to between virtue and pride was forged. We never got around to men who wore nail-polish on their toes.

  But back to Cairo. On this last day in Cairo I had actually meant to visit the pyramids, scene of Louis-Charles-Antoine’s heroic victory over the Mamelukes, barely glimpsed to the west in a shimmer of heat and sand from my hotel balcony. That glimpse was all I was ever to get because from the moment I appeared at the Tourist Police at nine o’clock that morning, script learnt, in pursuit of justice (scion, you see, as I liked to think, of the equitable Louis), Sergeant Mustafa, mustachio’d and alarmingly swarthy, took me over. We sat in his shabby, yellowish office from nine until one. He drank tea copiously, served by a grey-clad peon of some kind, who slithered in and out with his wet tray of glasses, but none was offered to me. I went over my script from start to finish and finish to start many times. We started in the middle and went backwards, we started near the end and inched forwards. We hopped about in it, zigzagged, turned circles, dived, but I was word-perfect.

  Something deeply interested Sergeant Mustafa about the case. It wasn’t, needless to say, my stolen watch or silver chain. What was it? He flirted with the possibility of a sexual subtext to my story, but there was nothing of that in my script. He seemed bemused. There is, we both were thinking, more to this than meets the eye. But isn’t there always? Eventually, we went outside into the smoky glare, got into his car and chugged two miles to Zamalek. It took forever in that nightmarish, car-choked, boiling city and Sergeant Mustafa seemed disinclined to chat. We were heading, as it turned out, for Le Don Quichotte. We found it, parked and ambled up the empty street to number seven. There were the heavy glass doors, the cavernous entrance hall, the stairs. Sergeant Mustafa went up to the first floor landing (I was watching from the street) and knocked on the door. No answer. He then knocked on the neighbour’s door and this time had more luck. A quick exchange and Sergeant Mustafa came down the stairs, two at a time now, reinvigorated, on the scent, and off we drove towards the bazaar.

  The man who owned the flat (Hassim’s father) was known to Sergeant Mustafa, he told me, and we just might be onto something. Now, this wasn’t in my script. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be onto anything, not sure any hashish-dealing on the part of Hassim’s father, for instance, was necessary to my tale. By this time on this Cairo afternoon I was hungry and thirsty and starting to fray around the edges. On the other hand, the hero of my tale was standing up quite well, I thought, and Sergeant Mustafa must not know the difference. Somewhere in the bazaar near the walls of the university we found the shop where Hassim’s father, in air-conditioned comfort, sat in a glass box and traded in expensive bric-à-brac—brass jugs and reticules and necklaces—and, perhaps, we thought now, in one or two other things as well. But what a charming man he proved to be: tall, grey-haired, with cultivated manners, quite the gentleman. I watched them from outside through the glass. And he watched me.

  Then back we chugged to the office in the late afternoon and settled down to wait for something. What? As it turned out, several numbing hours later, for Hassim. By now Sergeant Mustafa had an assistant, somewhat thinner, sharper, intent on nibbling away at my well-established tale. At me, in fact. Hour after dry hour the three of us tossed back and forth the details of the night before. He sai
d, I said, they said, they drove, I went … And then at about nine o’clock in the evening Hassim was brought into our stuffy room, now brown and shadowy with just one bare electric light-bulb burning.

  Hassim was in a state of abject terror, he was wild-eyed with it, quaking, weeping. I nodded and he was led away again. I felt numb. What would they do to him? Would they put his head in a bag full of chilli-powder and roll and kick him on the floor? Or would daddy be encouraged to suggest another approach?

  Sergeant Mustafa and his assistant now left the room, leaving me alone in its brownish fug for the first time in over twelve hours. The door was open. Was I being invited to leave? Not just yet. Hassim’s father came in now, smoothly grey and speaking faultless English. How very unfortunate the whole thing had been. Surely I would agree that his son had played only the most minor of roles. Would I like some tea? I would? With sugar? No? The thing was that poor Hassim, although of course he’d been foolish to let those brigands in, would now find his whole career at Cairo University blocked, his life, so to speak, in ruins. Would it not be better for all concerned to let the matter drop? He realised I was out of pocket over the whole thing and happily would let me have … let’s see, he happened to have right here with him now some English pounds, quite a few, as a matter of fact … not to put too fine a point on it, some hundreds. Might not they make good my loss and …

  No. I got quite stony. Whatever game he or they or we were playing (and I’d long since lost track of the rules), he’d mis-played his hand: my virtue (my pride) was now doubly offended. And anyway, if I was not mistaken, it was the father, not the son, who was on Mustafa’s hook. He’d be better off slipping the good sergeant three hundred portraits of the Queen, not me. Games with three players are always treacherous. He left in silence—not, I fervently hoped, to wait for me outside with some more violent offer.

  Sergeant Mustafa and his assistant drifted back in. It was now close to midnight. I was nearly speechless with fatigue. I said I wanted to go. (Why hadn’t I opted out earlier, I began to wonder? I wasn’t guilty of anything, I was a free man. Why didn’t I just get up, thank them for their trouble, if not for their hospitality, and go?) Ah, well, you see, they hoped at any moment to bring Mohammed and Farouk to the station. They were on their track. It was important, in order to snare the father, to get the three boys talking. And to get them talking they needed me. But I had a plane to catch to Rome, I said, in just a few hours’ time—I could hardly remember at what time—four-thirty, five. I really had to go.

  Wouldn’t I stay another day and help them catch their fish? Suddenly the room began to smell evil. I wanted to get out. All right, they said, you can go. But first you must sign a statement. Wait while it’s prepared. We waited shiftily. The assistant decided on one last nibble. Lean-faced like Mohammed, quite young, quite wiry beside his heftier boss, he fixed me with his cat-and-mouse-game gaze and said: ‘Are you quite sure there was no … sexual proposition to you at any point?’ ‘None,’ I said, faithful to the end to what I’d thought was the agreed script. After a while the statement arrived. It was in Arabic. God knows what it said or who had written it. Yet another version of the night’s events, presumably. I signed it and left. It was one o’clock in the morning. I’d been there sixteen hours. A few hours later I took off for Rome and that walk with P. in the Villa Borghese. I told him the story, of course, although in yet another version from the one I’d told Sergeant Mustafa, from the signed Arabic statement, and from Hassim’s and from the version Mohammed and Farouk were perhaps at that very moment having beaten out of them. But they were now on their own, locked into a storyline I could not rewrite for them. Turning round to look back over the roofs of Rome on that warm April morning in the gardens on the hill, I was already in another life.

  As it happens, just for the record, in March 1800 Louis Desaix also left Egypt for Italy, but with unhappier consequences. Mid-afternoon on 14 June at Marengo in Piedmont he finally came galloping up to Napoleon, who had been faring badly all day against the Austrians. Cannons were thundering and the air was filled with smoke and the stench of death. ‘Alors, mon chef,’ he’s supposed to have said, glancing at his pocket-watch, ‘il n’est que trois heures, il reste encore le temps de l’emporter.’ (‘It’s only three o’clock, we still have time to win.’) Nearby, at Vigna Santa, at the head of the 9th light infantry brigade, he was shot through the heart with a single bullet and fell dead from his golden-tassled horse. An elegant enough death, if a trifle sudden. In fact the French did go on to win the day, but Napoleon was anxious to take credit for the victory, despite his supposed affection for the young general, so Desaix’s contribution has been covered in silence for the last two hundred years—a statue here, a nondescript street named after him there. A recent historian has even claimed Napoleon had his general assassinated. Whatever the truth of that accusation, he died the same day as the treacherous Kléber was killed back in Cairo, the same Kléber he had fought with in Egypt, yet Kléber has an avenue and a metro station named after him in Paris. Not that these official silences and twistings of the facts are of much real consequence to me now. Eventually a grosser fabrication came to light.

  And speaking of false leads, red herrings and outright lies, four years later in Sydney I had another pivotal experience which grew out of that moment in Cairo. It grew out of it because in my spiralling upwards that night I realised that in all the stories I’d told myself about my life up to then I’d always circled around the question of my mother. (And father, too, in a vaguer way, but there were no real stories about him, he always seemed to me to play a bit part.) It was partly out of pride (I felt so self-made), partly out of fear of what or who I might find and partly because I didn’t know how to start. After Cairo I wanted to fill in this shaft of silence running up through the centre of my life, at least with words. I didn’t think much beyond a story. But in April 1988 something simply happened.

  2.

  Motherlands

  Peg was in William Street in Sydney’s seedy inner east looking for my office. William Street, if you don’t know it, is a grand avenue gone hideously wrong, a hideous cock-up of a boulevard, very Sydney, sweeping down from the birthday-cake Town Hall into the jumble of Woolloomooloo and then up again to the gigantic neon Coca Cola sign on the hill at Kings Cross. Scattered amongst the hamburger joints, futon shops and car sales rooms down in the trough at that time were the offices of the ABC. Peg was late and confused about which building my office was in. Westpac? Westfield? That red brick tower further up the hill?

  In the cool of Westfield Towers she scanned the list of tenants. Dalwood, Driscoll, no Dessaix. She stopped a middle-aged woman on her way out to lunch. Did she know a Robert Dessaix in this building? Well, you ask that kind of question when you’re running late and it’s warm and muggy and you have to do something quickly. No, said the woman (Peg barely focussing on her now), she didn’t, but it was odd that Peg should ask because she had been a Dessaix (or so Peg reported)—Yvonne, as a matter of fact, her name was. Anyway, Yvonne knew where the studios were, if that was any help, because she worked for the ABC too, and a few minutes later Peg came bustling into the studio where I was waiting, a bit on edge now, and as she settled herself in behind the microphone to tape her review for my program she told me half over her shoulder what had happened just a few yards down the road. About this Yvonne Dessaix.

  I was thunderstruck. While one part of me taped Peg’s review of a Mexican novel, another part of me slid backwards into silence to crouch there, speechless and bewildered, pondering what to do. Just a few yards from where I was sitting, in Westfield Towers, a middle-aged woman called Yvonne Dessaix was returning from lunch. That was my mother’s name. She was my mother’s age. How many middle-aged Yvonne Dessaixs could there be in Sydney? It was 1.35. By 1.40 I could have met my mother. Everything could change, for her and for me, everything could be transformed five minutes from now. If I chose. But as the other part of me chatted with Peg and the operator, suggest
ing a retake here and a longer pause there, scribbling notes on the script and answering the phone, the quieter, crouching part was sliding further back into silence. She might not have ever told anyone, she might want to forget, she might not approve of me, she might be happy with four children and have loud, crowded Christmases every year with so many presents under the tree she lost count, she might cling to me crazily and go mad at the end like Jean. I was fine, I’d made a life, I was me, without her, let her go, just pass quietly by, let it rest … The taping was finished now, we moved out into the stairwell and my two selves edged together again. ‘Bye, Peg, thanks a lot, see you later.’ As she clattered off down the stairs, I turned back towards the studio, restored to myself and feeling strong.

  But before I even got back to the studio door, I wheeled around, flew down the stairs, across the street and down the hill, through the Westfield foyer, and into the lift. Four, three, two, one floor above me was my mother. Here ten yards, ten seconds from where I stood, was my mother. We would collide. I’d willed it. Excuse me, where’s Yvonne’s office? Around the corner? Second door? The door was open. There she sat. It was not my mother.

  How do you know such things? Are there pheromones or something? Before me at her desk sat a smallish woman, not quite petite, perhaps, but open-faced, immediately friendly, lively eyes looking up at me … but not my mother. A delicate moment, wouldn’t you say? And a profoundly sobering one.

  I can’t now quite remember what we said to each other. Something about how odd it was we’d never bumped into each other before—of course, her name was not Dessaix, but still my program had been going to air for several years, the name is so unusual, you might have thought … And how did I fit in? Yvonne was not uninterested in family history. Exactly what I’d feared. ‘Oh, I come from Canberra,’ I said (only a half untruth). I’d always found that stumped them. And my father? ‘Dead,’ I said, ‘no trace. Interesting to have a longer chat some day.’