Shipwreck (10 page)

HERZEN
   George … George … (
to Natalie
) He's the only real Russian left in Paris. Bakunin's in Saxony under a false
name—he wrote and told me! Turgenev is guess where, and Sazonov has disappeared into an aviary of Polish conspirators who are planning a demonstration. We should go to live in … Italy, perhaps, or Switzerland. The best school for Kolya is in Zurich. When he's a little older, my mother's going to move there to be with him.

NATALIE
   (
to George
) They've got a new system. Put your hands on my face.

GEORGE
   Like that?

George touches her face lightly. Natalie stammers M's and pops P's
.

NATALIE
   Can you feel? That's how you learn if you're doing it right. Mama … Papa … Baby … Ball … George … George …

Herzen jumps up with his letter
.

HERZEN
   Ogarev's engaged to Natasha!

Natalie cries out and opens her letter. They both read
.

GEORGE
   My wife is in an interesting condition, did I tell you?

HERZEN
   Good for Nick!

NATALIE
   It all started before Christmas!

GEORGE
   Well, it's not very interesting. In fact, it's the least interesting condition she's ever in.

NATALIE
   I'm going to write to her this minute!

GEORGE
   (
vaguely
) Oh … all right.

NATALIE
   Let me see what he says.

Natalie, delighted, takes Herzen's letter and gives him hers. She hurries out
.

GEORGE
   There was always something that appealed to me about Ogarev. I don't know what it was … He's such a vague, lazy, hopeless sort of person. (
Pause.
) I thought he had a wife. He had a wife when I knew him in Paris.

HERZEN
   Maria.

GEORGE
   Maria! She kept company with a painter, to speak loosely. Well, he applied paint to canvas and was said to have a large brush. Did she die?

HERZEN
   No, she's alive and kicking.

GEORGE
   What's to be done about marriage? We should have a programme, like Proudhon. ‘Property is theft, except for wives.'

HERZEN
   Proudhon's programme of shackles from altar to coffin is an absurdity. Passions are facts. Making cages for them is the vanity of Utopians, preachers, lawgivers … Still, passions running free, owing nothing to yesterday or tomorrow, isn't what you'd call a programme either. Ogarev is my programme. He's the only man I know who lives true to his beliefs. Fidelity is admirable, but proprietorship disgusting. But Maria was vain, flighty, I worried for Nick. She was not like my Natalie. But with Ogarev, love doesn't turn out to be pride. It's love like on the label, and he suffered it. You think that's weakness? No, it's strength.

Natalie enters wearing a hat and adjusts it, pleased, in an imaginary mirror
.

MARIA OGAREV,
aged thirty-six, poses nude for an unseen painter
.

HERZEN
   (
cont.
) He's a free man because he gives away freely. I'm beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can't be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided up
like a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the cooperation of other people—who are each making the same balance for themselves. What is the largest number of individuals who can pull this trick off? I would say it's smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.

A
PRIL
1849

Natalie looks around. She reacts to an (imaginary) painting. Maria enters, robing herself
.

MARIA
   I've already written to Nick … I told him I had no intention of marrying again, and so had no need of a divorce.

NATALIE
   No … the need is Nick's.

MARIA
   Exactly. Mine is to protect my position as his wife.

NATALIE
   Your position? But Maria, you haven't been his wife for years now, except in name.

MARIA
   That's a large exception, and while it's so, there's three hundred thousand roubles in the six-per-cents, secured against his property. Where would it leave me if I were divorced? Worse still when there's a new wife with her own ideas about her position. You know what a child Nicholas is about money. Anyone can get round him. He had four thousand souls when his father died, and almost the first thing he did was hand over the largest property to
his serfs. He's simply not someone you can depend on. And now he sends you to plead for him and his eager bride. Do you know her?

NATALIE
   (
nods
) The Tuchkovs went home last year. Nick knew her before, but it was only when she returned from abroad … well, you know … and anybody would fall in love with Natasha, I fell in love with her myself!

MARIA
   Really? Really in love?

NATALIE
   Yes!—really, utterly, transported by love, I've never loved anyone as I loved Natasha, she brought me back to life.

MARIA
   You were lovers?

NATALIE
   (
in confusion
) No. What do you mean?

MARIA
   Oh. Utterly, transportedly, but not really. Why won't you look at my picture?

NATALIE
   Your …? Well … it seems rude to …

MARIA
   You've always idealised love, and you think—surely this can't be it? (
She laughs.
) Painted from life, one afternoon when we lived in the Rue de Seine over the hat shop, do you know it? I'll take you there, we'll find something that suits you. Go on, have a good look.

NATALIE
   (
looking
) He's got the porcelain quite well … What do you do with it when just anybody comes, your … companion's friends, the landlord, strangers …? Do you cover it up?

MARIA
   No … it's art.

NATALIE
   And you don't mind?

Maria shakes her head
.

MARIA
   (
confidentially
) I'm in the paint!

NATALIE
   What do you … (
mean
)?

MARIA
   Mixed in.

NATALIE
   (
Pause.
) I've only been sketched in pencil.

MARIA
   Naked?

NATALIE
   (
laughs shyly
) Alexander doesn't draw.

MARIA
   If an artist asks you, don't hesitate. You feel like a woman.

NATALIE
   But I do feel like a woman, Maria. I think our sex is ennobled by idealising love. You say it as if it meant denying love in some way, but it's you who's denying it its … greatness … which comes from being a universal
idea
, like a thought in nature, without which there'd be no lovers, or artists either, because they're the same thing only happening differently, and neither is any good if they deny the joined-upness of everything … oh dear, we should speak German for this …

MARIA
   No … I could follow it, being in much the same state when I met Nicholas Ogarev at the Governor's Ball in Penza. A poet in exile, what could be more romantic? We sat out and talked twaddle at each other, and knew that this was love. We had no idea we were in fashion, that people who didn't know any better were falling in love quite adequately without dragging in the mind of the Universe as dreamt up by some German professor who left out the irritating details. There was also talk of the angels in heaven singing hosannas. So the next time I fell in love, it stank of turpentine, tobacco smoke, laundry baskets … the musk of
love! To arouse and satisfy desire is nature making its point about the sexes, everything else is convention.

NATALIE
   (
timidly
) But our animal nature is not our whole nature … and when the babies start coming …

MARIA
   I had a child, too … born dead. Yes, you know, of course you know—what wouldn't Nicholas tell your husband? … Being taken to meet Alexander for the first time was like being auditioned for my own marriage.

NATALIE
   It was the same for me, meeting Nick, and I was expecting Sasha.

MARIA
   Poor Nick. Even my having another man's child, it was nothing to the agony he went through when he found himself caught in the middle between his wife and his best friend.

NATALIE
   But we all loved each other at the beginning. Don't you remember how we joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other?

MARIA
   Well, I didn't want to be the only one standing up.

NATALIE
   That's not so, is it?

MARIA
   Yes—it is so. I found it embarrassing … childish—

NATALIE
   Even at the beginning! How sad for you, Maria … I'm sorry …

Maria, to Natalie's complete surprise, suddenly gives in to her rage
.

MARIA
   Don't you look down on me with your stuck-up charity, you're still the simpering little fool you always were—giving away your birthright,
idealising
it away in your prattle of exalted feelings … You can tell Ogarev he'll get nothing out of me, and that goes for all his friends!

The interview is evidently over. Natalie remains composed
.

NATALIE
   I'll go, then. I don't know what I said to make you angry. (
She gathers herself to leave.
) Your portrait, by the way, is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation … If he dips his brush here and prods it there, he'll get this time what he got last time, and so on till you're done. But that's neither art nor love. You and your portrait resemble each other only in crudeness and banality. But that's a trivial failure. Imitation isn't art, everyone knows that. Technique by itself can't create. So, where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry, and who are you to call it prattle? German philosophy is the first time anyone's explained everything that can't be explained by the rules. Why can't your expert lover satisfy a desire to paint like Raphael or Michelangelo? That would shut me up, wouldn't it? What's stopping him? Why can't he look harder and see what the rules are? Because there aren't any. Genius isn't a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it's nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn't a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it's all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can't all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what's our consolation, we fall short at love. (
She pauses for a last look at the portrait.
) I know what it is. He's got your tits too high and your arse too small. (
Natalie leaves.
)

M
AY
1849

Saxony. In a prison room, a lawyer
(FRANZ OTTO)
is seated at a table. Bakunin is in chains, sitting opposite
.

OTTO
   What were you doing in Dresden?

BAKUNIN
   When I arrived or when I left?

OTTO
   Just generally.

BAKUNIN
   When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire. But after a week or two, a local revolution broke out against the King of Saxony, so I joined it.

OTTO
   (
Pause.
) You understand who I am?

BAKUNIN
   Yes.

OTTO
   I am your lawyer, nominated by the Saxon authorities to present your defence.

BAKUNIN
   Yes.

OTTO
   You are charged with treason, for which the penalty is death. (
Pause.
) What brought you to Dresden? I suspect it was to visit the art gallery with its famous
Sistine Madonna
by Raphael. In all probability you had no knowledge of any popular insurrection brewing against the King. On May the third, when the barricades appeared, it was a complete surprise to you.