Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

The garden of Sokolovo, a gentleman’s estate fifteen miles outside Moscow.

NICHOLAS OGAREV, aged thirty-four, has been reading to NATALIE HERZEN, aged twenty-nine, from a so-called thick journal, the Contemporary. IVAN TURGENEV, aged twenty-eight, is supine, out of earshot, with his hat over his face.

NATALIE   Why have you stopped?

OGAREV   I can’t read any more. He’s gone mad. (He closes the book and lets it fall.)

NATALIE   Well, it was boring anyway.

SASHA HERZEN,aged seven, runs across the garden followed by a NURSE pushing a baby carriage. Sasha has a fishing cane and a jar for tiddlers.

NATALIE   (cont.) Sasha, not too close to the river, darling!—(to the Nurse) Don’t let him play on the bank!

The Nurse follows Sasha out.

OGAREV   But … it was a fishing rod, wasn’t it?

NATALIE   (calling) And where’s Kolya?—(looking aside) Oh, all right, I’ll keep an eye. (resuming) I don’t mind being bored, especially in the country, where it’s part of the attraction, but a boring book I take personally. (looking aside, amused) Far better to spend the time eating marigolds. (glancing at Turgenev) Has he gone to sleep?

OGAREV   He didn’t say anything about it to me.

NATALIE   Alexander and Granovsky will be back from picking mushrooms soon … Well, what should we talk about?

OGAREV   Yes … by all means.

NATALIE   Why does it feel as though one has been here before?

OGAREV   Because you were here last year.

NATALIE   But don’t you ever have the feeling that while real time goes galloping down the road in all directions, there are certain moments … situations … which keep having their turn again? … Like posting stations we change horses at …

OGAREV   Have we started yet? Or is this before we start talking about something?

NATALIE   Oh, don’t be sideways. Anyway, something’s wrong this year … even though it’s all the same people who were so happy together when we took the house last summer. Do you know what’s different?

OGAREV   I wasn’t here last summer.

NATALIE   No, it’s not that. Ketscher’s gone into a sulk … grown men squabbling over how to make coffee …

OGAREV   But Alexander was right. The coffee is not good, and perhaps Ketscher’s method will improve it.

NATALIE   Oh, I’m sure it’s not like Parisian coffee! … Perhaps you’re wishing you’d stayed in Paris.

OGAREV   No. Not at all.

Turgenev stirs.

NATALIE   Ivan …? He’s in Paris anyway, dreaming about the Opera!

OGAREV   Yes, I’ll say one thing, Viardot can sing.

NATALIE   But she’s so ugly.

OGAREV   Anyone can love a beauty. Turgenev’s love for his opera singer is a reproach to us for batting the word about like a shuttlecock. (Pause.) When Maria wrote to introduce herself to you and Alexander after we got married, she described herself as ugly. I’m paying myself a compliment.

NATALIE   She also wrote that she had no vanity and loved virtue for its own sake … She was no judge of her looks either, forgive me, Nick.

OGAREV   (tolerantly) Well, if we’re talking about love … Oh, the letters one wrote … ‘Ah, but to love you is to love God and His Universe, our love negates egoism in the embrace of all mankind.’

NATALIE   We all wrote that—why not?—it was true.

OGAREV   I remember I wrote to Maria that our love would be a tale told down the ages, preserved in memory as a sacred thing, and now she’s in Paris living quite openly with a mediocre painter.

NATALIE   That’s a different thing—one might say a normal coaching accident—but at least you had each other body and soul before the coach went into the ditch. Our friend here simply trails along in Viardot’s dust shouting brava, bravissima for favours forever withheld … not to mention her husband, the postillion.

OGAREV   Are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about highway travel?

NATALIE   Would that be less painful for you?

OGAREV   For me it’s the same thing.

NATALIE   I love Alexander with my whole life, but it used to be better, when one was ready to crucify a man or be crucified for him for a word, a glance, a thought … I could look at a star and think of Alexander far away in exile looking at the same star, and feel we were … you know …

OGAREV   (Pause.) Triangulated.

NATALIE   Foo to you, then.

OGAREV   (surprised) Believe me, I …