Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

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.

APRIL 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.