The Parricide

by Diane Stubbings

  Why haven’t you read it?

  ANNA: I—I’ve not had the time.

  FEDYA: Why, what have you been doing?

  ANNA: Studying.

  FEDYA: You’re a student?

  ANNA: I was.

  FEDYA: Of what?

  ANNA: Stenography.

  FEDYA: Yes. A student. Of stenography.

  Where did you study?

  ANNA: Where did I study?

  FEDYA: Where did you study?

  ANNA: Does it matter?

  FEDYA: Some institutions have better reputations than others.

  ANNA: For stenography?

  FEDYA: For unrest.

  ANNA: You’re asking if I’m a revolutionary?

  FEDYA: Are you?

  ANNA: Not all students are revolutionaries.

  FEDYA: Are you?

  ANNA: No.

  FEDYA: There weren’t mumblings of sedition amongst your fellow students?

  ANNA: You think there’s a cabal of stenographers plotting to overthrow the Tsar?

  FEDYA: What do I know of stenographers and their persuasions?

  ANNA: Is there to be any work/ at all this morning—?

  FEDYA: Why didn’t you have the time? To read my book.

  ANNA: I told you. I was studying.

  FEDYA: The rest of Petersburg seems to have had the time.

  Is stenography so arduous a course—?

  ANNA: I was caring for my dying father.

  I was caring for my father.

  A long beat.

  FEDYA: Have you been asked to reveal what I’m writing?

  ANNA: By whom?

  FEDYA: By anyone. By Kolya.

  ANNA: No.

  FEDYA: What notes I make?

  ANNA: No.

  FEDYA: Where I go? Who I see?

  ANNA: Do you need watching?

  FEDYA: There are people who seem to think so. You’d be surprised the sort of people hired to do the watching.

  What’s your relationship with Kolya?

  ANNA: My relationship?

  FEDYA: Why did he send you?

  ANNA: He said I’d be helping a famous novelist—

  FEDYA: That’s what he told you to tell me?

  ANNA: I had hoped it might be Tolstoy.

  FEDYA: Have you read any of my work?

  ANNA: Some.

  FEDYA: And?

  And?

  ANNA: It was a little too sentimental for my taste.

  A beat.

  FEDYA: You can go.

  It won’t work.

  There’s. No. Job.

  SCENE ELEVEN

  KOLYA’s office. ANNA puts money on the table.

  ANNA: He said there’s no job. No novel.

  KOLYA: No novel?

  ANNA: That’s what he said.

  KOLYA: How was he? How did he seem?

  ANNA: How did he seem?

  KOLYA: Anxious? Troubled?

  ANNA: Rude. Hateful.

  Old.

  KOLYA: You need to go back.

  ANNA: He doesn’t seem to like you very much.

  KOLYA: I know.

  ANNA: You said you were friends.

  KOLYA: We’re Russian friends. Bound together by a mutual hatred.

  Give me one day. Then try him again.

  One day.

  [Pushing the money back towards her] For your trouble so far.

  She leaves without taking the money.

  SCENE TWELVE

  The actor playing ANNA transitions into KATYA. As she does—

  [ANNA]: I’d read Crime and Punishment—of course I’d read it. I’d read every book he’d ever written. But if he thought I was going to give him the satisfaction…

  I’d read it each day as I walked to and from the institute. And then, at night, I’d read it again to my father. It was a heavy presence all through Petersburg, that book—and my father wouldn’t be denied it.

  Late at night, as he waited for sleep, my father would tell me the dark story of Dostoyevsky’s arrest. His imprisonment. And the tears would well in my father’s eyes. This, he said—this is how Russia treats her saviours. And it broke my heart to hear it.

  SCENE THIRTEEN

  A candle-lit room. A roulette wheel spinning. FEDYA stands watching the wheel spin and stop, spin and stop. He is barely aware of what is happening with the wheel—he’s absorbed by the figures in his imagination—MITYA and KATYA.

  MITYA: I didn’t think you’d come.

  Are things so desperate?

  A beat.

  MITYA: I can’t help you if you won’t speak.

  KATYA: My father is dying.

  MITYA: That much I know.

  KATYA: He has debts. If he dies before they are paid…

  MITYA: He dies shamed.

  KATYA: It’s not himself he’s worried for. It’s my mother, his children.

  MITYA: It’s a lot of money.

  KATYA: If you hadn’t said you’d loan it to him…

  MITYA: The loan would not be to your father.

  A beat.

  This is a matter of business.

  A loan at a judicious rate.

  Some gift would need to be given in return…

  VOICE: [off] Place your money.

  FEDYA’s attention is brought back to the roulette wheel. KATYA and MITYA recede into the darkness.

  FEDYA watches the wheel spin. He places his money.

  SCENE FOURTEEN

  MITYA transitions back into KOLYA.

  [KOLYA]: It’s its own myth, that morning in Semyonovsky square. That morning he was slated to die, paraded on the scaffold with the other criminals. A story that cascaded, man to man to man, through the cells where I was still being held, and each of us awaiting a similar fate…

  We’d met first at Petrashevsky’s meetings, his circle of like-minded thinkers—and Fedya like an apparition on its edges—absorbing every word—but biding his time—holding close his opinions…

  And when he did at last speak… I can still hear him. The way his voice blazed out from him…

  All of us there—testing ideas—moving towards a singular vision of the future… All of us condemned for it.

  Just as the rifles were aiming towards the prisoners, the Tsar intervened.

  Fedya was sent to Siberia.

  A different category of death…

  SCENE FIFTEEN

  FEDYA’s flat. KOLYA is happily ensconced when FEDYA enters. FEDYA goes about the room, closing up notebooks, hiding papers.

  FEDYA: I’ve told the landlady not to let you in.

  KOLYA: She’s easily charmed.

  FEDYA: The roubles you throw at her don’t hurt.

  A beat.

  KOLYA: No novel?

  I send you the answer to your prayers and you tell her there’s no novel.

  FEDYA: Tell who?

  KOLYA: Anna.

  Young. Pretty. Brown hair… Ahh. He remembers.

  This novel will be written, Fedya, if I have to write it for you myself.

  Unless Stellovsky is satisfied with whatever you throw his way, I get no new work from you. Not a word. He’ll have everything. For the next eight years. You’ll get not one kopek. And I’ll be publishing one blank page after another. How then am I to help you?

  A long beat.

  FEDYA: Send her if you must.

  KOLYA: I’ll tell her to come tomorrow.

  FEDYA: Just keep away from her. Until the book is finished. Pursue her then.

  A beat.

  How’s your wife?

  KOLYA: Happily languishing on her father’s estate.

  It’s a matter of understanding the boundaries, Fedya. What can and cannot be crossed.

  FEDYA: Did you send my letter to the committee?

  KOLYA: You’d put your own life on the line to support some ragtag students?

  The Tsar liberalised the universities. Called back all those who’d been banished under his father. Made provision so that the poor could attend—

  FEDYA: All res
cinded—

  KOLYA: Because they’ve decided they’d rather turn themselves into powder kegs and blow Russia apart at the first opportunity.

  FEDYA: They need a keener hand to guide them. That’s all. Someone who’ll steer them away from all this talk of destruction—

  KOLYA: You’re thinking you?

  FEDYA: Some sway in the order of things. A voice—

  KOLYA: We’re to let them loose in government now? Keep extending political rights to those who’ve no idea what to do with them—?

  FEDYA: There is in your thinking a defect that I both hate and despise.

  KOLYA: Until you need my money.

  We were on the same side of this once.

  FEDYA: Were we?

  KOLYA: You know we were.

  Determined to break the power of the censors, no matter what. Pushing for the freedom of the serfs—

  FEDYA: This is the history you cling to—?

  KOLYA: Proof that change can come—will come—but in its time—

  FEDYA: Because I don’t remember it, Kolya. You standing beside me on the scaffold while I waited my turn/ to die—

  KOLYA: What chance did I have? Chained up/ in their stinking hole—

  FEDYA: If I knew the students who planted the bombs, I’d not name them.

  No matter the circumstances.

  I would not name them.

  A long beat.

  KOLYA: Write your book, Fedya. Let that be the hand that guides Russia forward.

  FEDYA busies himself with his papers.

  KOLYA exits.

  A beat.

  FEDYA takes his coat. Exits to the street. Tears a flyer from the doorpost as he passes.

  The sound of a roulette wheel.

  SCENE SIXTEEN

  The sound of the wheel morphs into the steady rhythm of a printing press. KARAKOZOV in a dark room working the presses. There are others there with him, but he is the only one we see.

  STUDENT/S [off] We will be committed.

  We will have no interests of our own.

  No relations.

  No attachments.

  No possessions.

  No name.

  Everything in us immersed in this one singular passion…

  SCENE SEVENTEEN

  FEDYA and ANNA working. As ANNA takes dictation, FEDYA juggles all his scraps of papers, getting them in the right order. He is energised—barely stops for breath. ANNA struggles to keep up.

  FEDYA: [dictating] … and, by some strange perversity, I made a point of putting all my money on it, taking mad risks, a terrible craving to dare possessing me. The sensation that gripped my soul, not killing my desire, no, but feeding it, stirring it, stronger and stronger, until my spirit was entirely spent, until there was nothing left of the man I knew myself to be, of the man—

  ANNA: Slower!

  FEDYA: Slower?

  ANNA: If you have any pity.

  My hand’s beginning to ache. After a whole morning at such a pace.

  FEDYA: How much have we done?

  ANNA: Twenty pages at least.

  FEDYA: This will work.

  This will work.

  I can see light—I think it’s light—at the end of the tunnel.

  ANNA subtly tries to work the ache from her hand.

  Here. Give me your hand.

  ANNA tentatively holds out her hand. He begins to massage it.

  ANNA: [quickly drawing her hand away] That’s not necessary.

  FEDYA: [taking her hand again] On a good day, when the ideas take hold of me, wrestle me into submission—good days that have become rarer and rarer—I need to work my own hand like this.

  A beat.

  It was taught to me by one of the prisoners in the camp.

  He was a blacksmith. In the Engineers. The Army. Before he was jailed. He killed his father. In a jealous rage, but that’s not… His hands would cramp, particularly in the cold weather. And he would sit hour after hour kneading the rigidity from them. I used to marvel at the strength of them. His hands. Until I understood what he’d done with them.

  It’s a good story for a novel, don’t you think? A man who kills his father?

  ANNA: You should write it.

  FEDYA: I will. I am. The ideas are here—in the shadows. They’re just waiting for me to yield to them.

  A long beat.

  ANNA: What was it like there?

  In the prison camps?

  FEDYA: You’re watched. Relentlessly. Not alone for a single minute and you… you come to hate mankind. So many souls packed into such a small space. And what’s yours—what’s left to you—you hold to yourself like a shining prize. Your thoughts—they’re all you have. And when they’re precisely what’s condemned you…

  But I never knew myself so well as when I was there.

  A disturbance from downstairs. The LANDLADY trying to stop someone from coming up the stairs.

  ANNA pulls her hand away and stands on the other side of the room, gathering papers etc, as ELENA enters.

  ELENA is oblivious to ANNA.

  ELENA: Your guard-dog is a very tenacious today, Fedya. [Noticing ANNA] Aah. She obviously felt you weren’t to be disturbed.

  FEDYA: Anna is the stenographer.

  ELENA: Not quite what you described.

  A change, at least, from the sickly virgins who usually moon after you. But isn’t she a poppet? Now I look at her more closely. But aren’t you a darling, with your cheeks all ablaze? And such pretty, pretty eyes. Aren’t they, Fedya? Surely you’ve noticed the lovely brown of her eyes.

  FEDYA: What do I care the colour of her eyes? What do you want?

  ELENA: Send her away.

  FEDYA: We’re working.

  ELENA: I was working last night—it didn’t stop you storming in—

  FEDYA: I’d have turned right around—

  ELENA: Once you’d done with me—

  FEDYA: It was you who started it—

  ELENA: Refusing to leave till you’d gone through every page, looking out for your name—

  FEDYA: Then find someone other than me to write about.

  ELENA: You think I haven’t anything better to write about than you? I wouldn’t set my ambitions so low.

  FEDYA: What do you want?

  ELENA: I need a reason to be here now?

  FEDYA: We’re working.

  ELENA: Whatever you want to call it.

  FEDYA: Why are you here plaguing my life?

  ELENA: You think I want this misery again?

  FEDYA: Then go—

  ELENA: On your knees you said you were—

  FEDYA: You think I’d shed a tear/ if you walked out—?

  ELENA: Swore you’d die without me—

  FEDYA: Better dead than this—

  ELENA: You destroy/ my life—

  FEDYA: You crush/ my will—

  ELENA: If I asked you to kill a man…

  If I asked you to kill a man, would you do it?

  FEDYA: Which man?

  ELENA: Any man I choose.

  FEDYA: Yes. Right now, yes.

  A beat.

  ELENA: [to ANNA] You can go.

  ANNA: But the work—

  FEDYA: Go. There’ll be no more work today.

  ANNA realises there is no point arguing further. She exits.

  A beat.

  ELENA sits.

  A beat.

  FEDYA falls at her feet, kisses her stockings etc.

  SCENE EIGHTEEN

  The actor playing ELENA transtions into GRUSHENKA. As she does so—

  [ELENA]: He was a difficult man to say No to, when the fire was in his eyes. The fierceness…

  I knew it the first time we loved. In the grass it was. On the edge of the park at Lublino…

  Within a week he’d worked me loose of my marriage and there was no going back. Not to my life as it had been…

  Until his wife called him back to her—plucked at his guilt with her whining and ailing.

  I thought I would die… thought I
was dead… but…

  There was a young man in our village. Went off to study the law. Came back certain of nothing but that it must be dragged down. And the Tsar and his nobles with it… He filled entirely the void Fedya had created in me—gave me my voice—teased out from me what I had for so long yearned to say…

  It was when tuberculosis took him that I could think of nothing else but finding Fedya again.

  She is now fully GRUSHENKA.

  SCENE NINETEEN

  We see FEDYA. He is writing in his notebook. GRUSHENKA is present in his imagination.

  We see MITYA and KATYA, just as they were in scene thirteen.

  MITYA: The loan would not be to your father.

  A beat.

  This is a matter of business.

  A loan at a judicious rate.

  Some gift would need to be given in return.

  KATYA: I understand.

  As GRUSHENKA speaks, MITYA approaches KATYA, begins caressing her face. Lets his hands run lightly over her body. He is clearly planning to take her.

  GRUSHENKA: [to FEDYA] I know you think you love her.

  I see the way you watch her.

  FEDYA: Why play him off against his father? If you love him so much?

  GRUSHENKA: To discover how much I love him. Is that answer enough for you? To discover how much he loves me.

  Or maybe because it’s what women do.

  A beat.

  You’ve no need to pine over them. He won’t have her. He hasn’t the nerve. Not for this. Not for murder.

  You know what must be done. Know in your heart he’s not the man to do it.

  FEDYA: He said he’d kill him—

  GRUSHENKA: He’s all bluster and air—

  FEDYA: He wants his father dead—

  GRUSHENKA: Not as fiercely as you do.

  Oh, you have your reconciliation. You drink your father’s wine and tell him stories and pretend you don’t hate him—pretend you’ve forgotten the past…

  He will bungle the deed and then weep when it’s done.

  No, what you need is a brave man. A man who dares…

  MITYA: [stepping back fom KATYA] You can go.

  KATYA: But the money?

  MITYA: It’s yours.

  KATYA: But I have no way to…

  MITYA: Go.

  GRUSHENKA: There. You see?

  All bluster and air.

  SCENE TWENTY