Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

GEORGE   Because being a stoic didn’t mean a sort of uncomplaining putting up with misfortune, that’s only how it looks on the outside—inside, it’s all about achieving apathy …

HERZEN   (laughs) No, I love you.

GEORGE   (hardening) … which meant: a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn’t passive, it’s the freedom that comes from recognising new borders, a new country called Necessity … it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can’t for the moment be altered … which people find quite difficult. We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do. God, we were busy!—bustling about under the sky, shouting directions to the winds, remonstrating with the clouds in German, Russian, French … and hailing every sunbeam as proof of the power of words, some of which rhymed and scanned. Well … would you like to share my umbrella? It’s not too bad under here. Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that can’t-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it’s bucketing down on your picnic.

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.