Mother's Disgrace

by Robert Dessaix

  Lilia Pavlovna won, of course, but by then I didn’t mind. One day the cloakroom attendant at the university library said: ‘They’ve written something about you in the paper.’ And indeed ‘they’ had. A small article had appeared in the weekly news magazine Nedelya explaining to its readers that the Australian authorities had sent to Moscow an exchange student with anti-Soviet ideas about Soviet literature and that this could not be tolerated. There was a quote from a Soviet professor who’d met me at the ANU in Canberra and found my views totally outlandish. (No such conversation had ever taken place.) The same week this article appeared, the good professor and I met on a marble staircase in the old university building in the centre of the city. He was sweeping down and I was in the milling crowd at the bottom in the damp. (Russian vestibules are always damp. There’s always a sort of foul steam in the air.) He hailed me from several steps above. ‘The Australian!’ He was jovial today and looking very soigné as usual. Like apparatchiks everywhere, he was basically a large zero, a blank space, and, like Chichikov in Dead Souls, he could fill the space with whatever cardboard cutout of a man circumstances required—the grandfather, the thug, the roué, the romantic—it didn’t matter.

  ‘Well, we’ve talked about your case,’ he said, swivelling in his fine silk suit to nod at this one and that, ‘and decided you’ll study Dostoevsky while you’re here. With your attitudes to Soviet literature it’s inappropriate for you to work here in that field. Dostoevsky.’ He beamed. ‘Agreed?’

  It wasn’t a question. In the event, I was grateful to Professor Kuleshov for plunging me into Dostoevsky for a whole year. In 1966 Dostoevsky had only just been rehabilitated and for the first time since the early years of the Revolution it was possible to discuss Dostoevsky’s Christianity and novels like The Devils freely. I say ‘freely’, but I don’t mean by this that all was permitted. In our weekly tutorials with Mr Tiunkin, a frightened rabbit of a man, terrified the Canadian or Australian in his class might suddenly come out with a heresy he’d then have to deal with, we’d begin with a short lecture on one of Dostoevsky’s novels or short stories, or perhaps on a chapter in Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky. (Bakhtin had also only just been rehabilitated and his, to us then, revolutionary book Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, first published in 1929, had only just been republished in a minuscule print-run.) Then the class would have what was called a debate. Tiunkin would announce a proposition (for example, ‘The figure of Raskolnikov is anti-revolutionary’), appoint one student to defend it and one to oppose it, and then at the end of the tutorial he, Tiunkin, would tell us who was right and who was wrong and why. It was freedom of sorts. The class paper we had to write on Dostoevsky was less ‘free’: it had to be couched in strictly Marxist literary terms and the bibliography had to begin with the letter L for Lenin, then go on to M for Marx, E for Engels and only then to A, B etc. No one minded or thought it odd. We were just giving unto Caesar. Much the same thing happens today in Australian tertiary institutions, after all, where, if not in the bibliography, at least in the text, we find the obligatory mention of Kristeva, Said, Foucault, Lacan, Irigaray … We just have a wider range of orthodoxies struggling for dominance here—and the public’s indifference to all of them is not concealed, just ignored.

  Dostoevsky had a profound effect on my thinking—especially Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment—despite the fact that if we’d ever met we would no doubt have disagreed about virtually everything. He posed all the modern questions in such a way that they came and savaged you in the night, he tortured you until your rationality crumbled and you were willing to give play to your own dualities. Polyphonic, he forced you to listen to your own polyphonies. I would find my various little Catholicisms cowering in the corner. At least for a time. When you read, say, ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov, it’s astonishing how true both voices ring, both Christ’s and the Inquisitor’s, how seductive they both are, how you yearn for both to be right: Christ, who loves humanity and for whom goodness must be freely chosen, even if this means some will chose evil, and the Inquisitor, who distrusts and despises humanity and for whom goodness must be imposed by force, by ‘the sword of Caesar’, through miracle, mystery and authority. Unfortunately, Dostoevsky is a poor prism for political and ethical ideas nowadays. In my final years of teaching Russian literature I found many students barely knew who Jesus Christ was, let alone what the Grand Inquisitor might represent. A few didn’t know the difference between Christmas and Easter.

  Every Wednesday I’d send off a letter to Jean and Tom, telling them everything—who I’d met, what I’d eaten, what plays or concerts I’d been to, what excursions were planned—long, overly bright letters, letters which said: ‘Your son is investing his talents wisely, your sacrifice is worthwhile.’ Once or twice a letter went astray. One day when I went to the university post office to collect my mail, one of the clerks handed me back a letter I’d posted the day before to Jean and Tom, still in its envelope but with the stamps missing. ‘I’m sorry, but the postmaster sometimes steals the stamps,’ the clerk said to me in a matter-of-fact sort of way. ‘You’ll have to buy some more and send it again.’ So I did. Usually the mail got through, despite the postmaster’s eccentricities, and Tom saved every letter and postcard, carefully numbered and dated, and replied every week in his squarish hand in long, rambling letters of his own. Dear Robert, Pleased to have your letter of 20th November describing the parade you attended. It sounds most impressive. I’m glad you were well rugged up. It’s getting quite warm here, the kikuyu is going mad, will have to get the Victa onto it again this weekend. Clarrie Harrison’s leg is playing up on him again, he says it’s the heat … Never the slightest hint of anxiety, never the faintest note of embarrassment that a son of his should be studying in Russia. Young men went away adventuring—that’s what they did. He’d been in Vladivostok himself before the Revolution. Jean rarely wrote. She wept a lot, I gather, because her life was puttering out incomprehensibly. She was completely uncompanioned. Occasionally she’d add a jagged line or two or send a page in different inks, commenting on my letters in a fragmented sort of way. She was teetering now on the edge of her long slide into madness. When Tom finished building his cottage on the hill by the sea at Gerringong—beach, headlands and ocean on one side, deep misty-green valleys and mountains on the other—and they moved there from Sydney, she toppled right over the edge.

  Often apologetically, people still ask me, decades later, what it was like living in Russia in the late ’sixties. In a word, it felt like entropy in action, if that’s not an oxymoron. Organisation becoming disorganisation in front of your very eyes. It often felt as if you’d been caught up in the machinations of some provincial amateur dramatics society, where all the energy goes into arguing about who’s a member and who isn’t, what colour to paint the hall, who will design the programs and who has a right to the society’s car—but no plays are ever put on, or only if the president writes them. It felt like Chekhov.

  It also felt as if there was a war going on, which in a way there was, so it was depressing and dangerous and exciting all at the same time. As in any society at war, the State was glorified, nationalism was rampant, the culture was xenophobic (while posing as internationalist) and the press seethed with hatred of the enemy (Great Britain, the USA, West Germany, China), exaggerating reports of his imminent defeat. All dealings with the outside world—trips, telephone calls, reading the foreign press—were restricted and regarded with suspicion, everything down to the last bus-ticket and theatre program was censored, the architecture was overwhelmingly symmetrical, monumental and intimidating, the people spoke with one voice, individuals were mistrusted, the whole world with the exception of a few right-wing ruling cliques was on our side, the leader was compassionate, wise, ruthless, righteous, omnipotent, invincible, invisible … It could’ve been any country at war. That’s what it was like. It was my first conscious experience of the power that grows out of binary constructio
ns of the world (in this case capitalist/socialist, exploiting/non-exploiting, truth/lies, enemy/friend—those were the main ones). It made me aware of the way binary constructions raise the stakes in any power game and make the thinking on both sides of the divide (the source of all power) more and more totalitarian.

  It seemed natural, in this state of war, that food supplies should be erratic, that greens should disappear in winter, that cafés should run out of coffee and bakeries of bread. Given the times, new buildings were naturally gerry-built just as old buildings were shabby and overcrowded. Even at the university people worked in corridors, behind partitions or twenty to a room with classes for a dozen students held in oddly shaped cubicles the size of a suburban bathroom. Some of my friends lived in mysterious communal flats, with an assortment of other citizens crammed into the maze of rooms around them, their belongings spilling out into the dark passageway, the toilet, the bathroom, even the kitchen, an air of hostility and mistrust seeping into every corner of the flat. Not all my friends lived like that, of course. As in any war, hierarchies were crucially important. There were chains of command, as there had to be, and those issuing commands at the top needed a better view than those carrying them out at the bottom. And they got it: better housing, food, hospitals, medical services, shops, transport and schools. Soviet society seemed to me more rigidly layered than Ancient Egypt.

  The layering was brought home to us very sharply as soon as we registered at the Lenin Library, which is where most of the foreign humanities students were to spend most of their days. As capitalist foreigners we were given passes to Room One, comfortably appointed with private desks and reading lamps and, most importantly, a special catalogue with references to holdings other catalogues in the library did not acknowledge existed. Along with our fellow readers in Room One from the Soviet academic élite, we did not line up in the morning for up to an hour to hand in our coats and scarves in the cloakroom, nor did we jostle for positions at overcrowded tables or wait hours for books to be delivered. It was some weeks before I discovered there was also a Room Two for the slightly less highly placed and politically reliable, a Room Three and even a Room Four for comrades with no status at all and a catalogue to cater to their limited needs. It was the denizens of these halls I strode past in the morning to hand in my coat and scarf at the head of the queue. No one seemed to think it was a peculiar arrangement.

  The main difference from our kind of pyramidal structure was that in Russia the one mafia ran everything. There in some real sense a single mafia sat in parliament, designed the dust-jackets, ran the television stations, issued exit visas, owned all the businesses, published the newspapers, decided on the menu in the restaurants, provided the courts with judges, devised courses in French literature, censored the movies, planned new towns, dammed the rivers and ran the church. Here these functions are spread more entertainingly amongst a whole plethora of mafias—unions, political parties, criminal gangs, committees, cabals of the wealthy, networks of so-called public servants, local councils and so on. Each system has its advantages and disadvantages. The thuggish thrive in both.

  Under our system, it must be said, one mafia can call another mafia to account. Under the Soviet system in my day the mafia that ran everything could not be called to account. To a Westerner this could be terrifying. On several occasions, during encounters with the KGB, the mafia’s hit-squad and intelligence service, this arbitrary, limitless power chilled me to the core.

  On the train at the Finnish border, for instance, everything seemed calculated to terrify. As you approached the border through birch forests, nothing stirred. No foresters, wood-cutters or road maintenance crews, no hikers or strollers, no families out for the day for a spot of fishing or even farmers farming. The carriage was sealed and then, as you rumbled through this unpeopled landscape, each individual compartment was locked. Eventually the train ground to a halt in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere—a few huts, a watch-tower, no platform—and huge mirrors were rolled up and down alongside the train, searching, I suppose, for anyone concealed underneath. Dogs were patrolled up and down the line. Inside the carriage: dead silence. Then methodically, unhurriedly, two KGB border guards unlocked each compartment, entered, relocked it and began to interrogate the passengers and search their luggage. I did this trip several times in both directions in the ’seventies and the pattern never varied. At night it was even more terrifying, with blinding searchlights hanging in the blackness and no sound except for dogs barking.

  It wasn’t the interrogation itself that intimidated me or the way they would spend what seemed like hours reading the labels on records, perusing magazines, unrolling your underwear or taking your electric razor to pieces, muttering disconnected questions all the while about who, where, why, what—why do you come here so often? what is this made of? why are you going to Finland? … No, what brought you out in a cold sweat was the certain sense that these mafiosi could take you outside and beat you up, charge you with drug-trafficking, throw you in jail, even shoot you up against the barbed wire, or, if they felt like it, send you back to Leningrad—they could do anything at all with absolute impunity. They could not be held to account. You were worth precisely nothing, zero. (The answer to the question ‘Why do you come here so often?’, by the way, was ‘Because I like it here so much.’ That seemed to stump them. It was obviously a lie in some basic sense, but it conformed at the same time to an official truth. Ponyatno (‘I see’) was the only reply I ever got to that one.)

  Eventually, of course, you’d lurch into no man’s land, stop for what seemed like hours again (had a command gone out to haul you all back and arrest the lot of you?) and then set off again for the station at Vainikkala on the Finnish side of the border. It was always bathed in light, with people walking up and down the platform, talking, smiling, even laughing. The buffet would be open selling yoghurt, cakes, apples, bananas, ham sandwiches, orange juice, chocolate milk … Everyone would crowd in smiling and talking loudly, the assistant would say ‘Can I help you?’ and ‘Thank you’ and you felt, perhaps simplistically, but you did, that this is how life should be in a civilised country. Go two hundred metres and the war is over.

  Oddly enough, twenty years later, when my closest Russian friend came to visit me in Sydney for the first time, after applying intermittently for about ten years for an exit visa, she said much the same thing. ‘It’s so normal here,’ she said. This is how people should live.’ Zealot friends of Mrs Z’s took her on a tour of Redfern and a psychiatric hospital at Rozelle and tried to explain to her about late capitalism. ‘No, no, you don’t understand—this is all normal,’ she kept saying, ‘this is how human beings should live.’ It isn’t, of course, and any cultural materialist worth his salt should have been able to make it clear to her that ‘normal’ has no universal meaning, but I knew exactly what she meant after those border crossings into Finland.

  The most sinister border crossing I ever made was in the other direction. We were rattling along in the train between the border and the first city on the Soviet side, Vyborg, once a Finnish city called Viipuri. This is where the border guards left the train in those days and I suppose took the bus home to be exemplary fathers and sons and husbands. I was sharing a compartment with a Belgian businessman who had made no secret of his Soviet sympathies. He was the son of Russian émigrés in Brussels, sleekly suited, suave in a Gallic sort of way. We pulled into the platform at Vyborg, empty except for men in uniform. We both stared out the window at the magnificent ornate woodwork on the doors opposite. Suddenly two KGB guards dragged a screaming woman off the train, across the deserted platform past our window and through the massive oak doors we were staring at. ‘No, no, no!’ she was screaming—what else was there to scream? ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ There was silence for a moment in our cosy compartment. Then, still gazing steadily out the window at the station, my companion said placidly: ‘What beautiful doors!’

  That remark was echoed a thousand times during my years in
Russia. What a beautiful park! What a beautiful church! What a beautiful view! What a beautiful city! What delicious ice-cream! What a wonderful concert! All true. Yet, as with the doors at Vyborg, there was something vaguely obscene about saying so without mentioning the screaming woman. Not that you could, really, even with friends, any more than visiting Russians can decently bring up Aborigines dying blind and diseased at forty-five in humpies and shacks all over the country while they’re on a shopping spree in David Jones. In normal intercourse the two realities must be allowed to coexist. Some Russian friends didn’t want to talk about anything else except the screaming woman—about censorship, corruption, labour camps, genocide—and, although it sounds shameful to say so (because all those things were going on) that became tedious, too. Again, it was like the war—you couldn’t think and talk about suffering all the time.

  You must remember that we foreigners lived like princes. It’s a wicked and wonderful feeling. Nowadays, I expect, you can only really get that feeling by going to an underdeveloped country in Africa or Asia and staying at the Hilton for a week or two, venturing out into the teeming, smelly streets occasionally in clean, ironed clothes to pick through souvenirs. Mrs Z was certainly the princess when she first went to the Soviet Union, long after I’d returned. Attired in fashionable silks and wools and furs, she flew in with her matching bags crammed full of expensive presents for her family and dispensed largesse. A princess for three months. I think for Mrs Z and other émigrés—even for me, if I’m honest—there’s an element of regret in our joy that our Soviet friends can now travel abroad and holiday in Heidelberg and buy Swatch watches and videos … and, well, live like princes and princesses for a week or two as well. We’ve lost our cachet.