MITYA: You’re a brave man. A brave man who dares do nothing.
FEDYA: She’s with your father.
MITYA: You think you can make me kill him? Make me run there and strike his brains out? No. It’s her I’d kill. Or myself. Anything to stop this craving…
The torment of believing the woman you want is in another man’s bed. The only thing, brother, we’ve ever had in common.
MITYA exits.
In a rush, FEDYA places his bet—it’s all he has.
The wheel stops.
SCENE TWENTY-SIX
ELENA’s flat.
FEDYA barges in. He is agitated.
FEDYA: Are they lovers?
ELENA: Who?
FEDYA: Anna and Kolya.
ELENA: This is what you’ve rushed here to ask me?
FEDYA: Are they lovers?
ELENA: What difference to you if they are?
We see MITYA throwing rocks against the wall of his father’s house.
FEDYA: Where were you last night?
ELENA: With a man—
FEDYA: You taunt me with your men—?
ELENA: You fret about your secretary—?
FEDYA: About her loyalty—
MITYA: Where is she?
We hear commotion on the streets. See the shadows of people running.
ELENA: I like to be with men who aren’t scared of what Russia might be. That was you once upon a time. Or was it just your way of seducing me?
FEDYA: It was you who seduced me.
ELENA: I was an honest wife when I met you. Not an idea of straying.
FEDYA: Then you shouldn’t have struck me.
ELENA: I struck you because you deserved it.
FEDYA: It was an invitation.
ELENA: A rejection.
A beat.
She slaps him. She slaps him again—fiercely. He takes her.
As they make love, MITYA throws the rocks more emphatically.
MITYA: Where. Is. She?
While MITYA continues throwing rocks, fires spread across the city.
The fires rage.
Sounds of chaos as people panic, the LANDLADY’s broom banging incessantly against her ceiling. Her cries of God Save Us! etc.
Then sudden, stark silence. A beat of darkness.
The sound of a ball going around a roulette wheel at a furious pace.
We see KARAKOZOV. He has a gun—he is aiming it. He shoots.
KARAKOZOV surrenders.
The LANDLADY’s broom.
LANDLADY: [off] They’ve shot the Tsar!
Are you there, Fyodor Mikhailovich?!
They’ve shot the Tsar.
SCENE TWENTY-SEVEN
Pounding. Loud. Slow. Steady.
FEDYA’s flat.
The room is in shadow.
FEDYA sits at his table. He is lost in thought. Almost catatonic.
MITYA and GRUSHENKA together.
MITYA: If they come…?
GRUSHENKA: They won’t…
MITYA: If he’s dead?
GRUSHENKA: It wasn’t you.
MITYA: It’s all been fixed.
No-one else will be suspected.
GRUSHENKA: You didn’t kill him.
MITYA: But the freedom. The freedom I felt when I heard it was done. That he was dead. My father dead. At last. The exhilaration. Like a new life…
I wanted it. Wanted him dead. Wanted it with every cell of my being.
GRUSHENKA: You can’t be hung for a wish.
FEDYA: He killed his father…
GRUSHENKA: [to FEDYA] He was here. With me./ I’ll tell anyone who asks.
FEDYA: He killed his father. He must’ve done. He must have. Or I don’t know what this is.
A commotion outside. Heavy footsteps. Loud voices.
The pounding, loud again. Deafening.
It morphs into the banging of the LANDLADY’s broom.
LANDLADY: [off] Hide everything, Fyodor Mikhailovich! They’re coming for you! They’re coming!
OFFICERS barge into the room. As they open the door, some light comes into the flat. The OFFICERS roughly open the shutters, lighting the room even more.
FEDYA is alone. He can do nothing but watch helplessly as the OFFICERS ransack his flat, searching through every book, every piece of paper.
GRUSHENKA transitions into ELENA; MITYA transitions into KOLYA.
[KOLYA]: Karakozov missed.
The hand of God had intervened.
He recedes.
[ELENA]: When word that the Tsar lived made its way through the streets, the people fell down on their knees in thanks. And there they stayed.
The Commission set up to investigate the shooting—the fires—was given unprecedented powers. And all in the name of avenging the Tsar.
She recedes.
The OFFICERS are finished. Just FEDYA alone in his room. It is utter chaos.
The banging of the broom.
LANDLADY: [off] Are you there, Fyodor Mikhailovich?
The broom again.
Fyodor Mikhailovich, are you alive?
FEDYA: I’m here.
A beat.
LANDLADY: [off] I have tea. It’s hot. Come and share it.
A long beat.
FEDYA exits.
SCENE TWENTY-EIGHT
KOLYA’s office.
FEDYA enters, sees that ANNA is there with KOLYA.
FEDYA: She tells you my secrets and you tell the Third Section.
KOLYA: What are you talking about?
FEDYA: [to ANNA] I trusted you—
KOLYA: Stop this—
FEDYA: [to ANNA] How much did you tell him?
ANNA: Nothing—
FEDYA: Then why did the dogs tear my flat apart—?
KOLYA: I warned you—
FEDYA: That you’d go running to the Third Section the first chance you could—?
KOLYA: What would I tell the Third Section—?
FEDYA: [to ANNA] What did you tell him—?
KOLYA: What interest could I possibly have in putting your life in danger?
FEDYA: Oh, don’t believe a woman’s tears…
KOLYA: That mad student is likely sitting in his prison cell reeling off the names of every person he’s ever met. You think your name’s not going to come up?
FEDYA: [to ANNA] What did you tell him?
ANNA: Nothing.
A long beat. FEDYA stares at ANNA.
No longer able to hold his gaze, she looks away.
FEDYA: What other business do you have with him, eh? Apart from my life—?
KOLYA: She wants to help you./ We both do—
FEDYA: You were due at 10. Yet today of all days/ you stay away.
ANNA: I’ve been there at 10 for the last three days. And no answer./ Never an answer.
KOLYA: Because she can never find you,/ that’s why she’s here—
FEDYA: You knew the dogs were coming./ That they’d tear my flat apart—
KOLYA: She came here begging me to find you—
FEDYA: It’s over—
ANNA: Please, Fyodor Mikhailovich—
FEDYA: Let them take all I have. Let them put me in the debtor’s prison. I don’t care. I don’t care. If I never write another word… it’s you who’ll bear the blame.
FEDYA exits.
SCENE TWENTY-NINE
A dark alleyway. FEDYA has no idea where he is. He is uncertain which way to go.
ALYOSHA is with him.
ALYOSHA: What will happen to Mitya?
FEDYA: Let me be. I don’t want this—
ALYOSHA: What will happen to him?
FEDYA: It’s done. Finished.
ALYOSHA: You know where he’ll be sent. You know that/ he won’t survive.
FEDYA: Let. Me. Be.
I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it’s meant to be. What it’s doing to me.
‘If it’s in your head to do it…’
A man can’t be hung for a wish. Not for a wish. For an act, yes. An act. But not fo
r a wish, a word. Not for a word…
It was Mitya who killed him. It had to have been. Otherwise how does it end?
ALYOSHA: He didn’t kill father.
FEDYA: He killed him. He took a rock—
ALYOSHA: No—
FEDYA: He smashed it against his skull—
ALYOSHA: No—
FEDYA: He wanted him dead.
ALYOSHA: But he didn’t kill him. I know.
I know.
FEDYA: Tell me. Tell me once and for all. Does God exist?
ALYOSHA: He must. Or what else are we?
FEDYA: Then is it our obligation to destroy him?
ALYOSHA: And allow all we know to collapse entirely?
FEDYA: So we risk everything on a dream? A delusion?
ALYOSHA: A hope. A promise.
FEDYA: For good? Or ill?
ALYOSHA: Good or ill is in our hands to determine.
FEDYA: And what are we? Tell me.
What do we know of the God we imagine?
ALYOSHA: Do you know what father used to say? That hanging’s too good for him. The man who first invented God.
A beat.
ALYOSHA: Brother…
FEDYA: Let me be.
SCENE THIRTY
ELENA’s flat. ELENA and ANNA.
ANNA: He’s sent me away. He won’t open his door. He refuses to work.
You understand the contract’s terms?
ELENA: Perfectly.
ANNA: What he’ll forfeit?
ELENA: You read them, don’t you? Fedya’s stories. I’d know that wide-eyed mawkishness anywhere.
You’ve probably devoured them since you were a child. Fallen in love with his irresolute heroes. Imagined Fedya something stepped from the pages of one of his own books.
Reality must have come as quite the shock.
ANNA: I have exhausted every other avenue…
One week’s work. Less. Then he’ll be free to follow whatever course he chooses.
A beat.
ELENA: I’d always envisaged Fedya and I working together. Writing together. Our ideas echoing one off the other, and the noise we would make… Deafening.
A heart as charged as my own, that’s what I saw. A man I might bring to a better version of himself. Sound familiar?
You think he’s listening to you… This way he has of making you believe that everything you say is entirely original. That it’s never been said before, and if it has, never with such brilliance. But then, once he knows he has you, it all falls away.
ANNA: You say you love him—
ELENA: Don’t you dare—
ANNA: But you’d break him as savagely/ as any creditor—
ELENA: Don’t you dare to lecture me about love. What have you had—a few clumsy lovers?—and you think you know about a man like Fedya? You’re a puff of air. He’d consume you, like a flame expends oxygen.
I know you’re in love with him—
ANNA: No—
ELENA: I know you think he’s in love with you—
ANNA: I took up stenography to pay my own way, not to attract the notice of men.
ELENA: And I’m to—what? Applaud you for putting your independence to such good use?
ANNA: Will you help him?
ELENA: Will I make him sit down with you and write this novel?
No.
ANNA: Then I don’t know what else to do.
ELENA: You want to know what to do?
Walk away, Anna.
Walk away.
If you want a future that’s in any way your own.
SCENE THIRTY-ONE
FEDYA’s flat. In full daylight the disarray of the flat is obvious. FEDYA sits staring at the mess. ELENA watches him.
ELENA: When she told me you were refusing to work, I thought perhaps you’d seen what needed to be done. Yet here you are. Still as a statue.
FEDYA: Did you think you could push and push? That the Tsar wouldn’t/ dig in his heels?
ELENA: It wasn’t me who turned your flat upside down. And it wasn’t the students. And it wasn’t because someone took a shot at the Tsar that it was done, though they’ll use it as their excuse. You thought the freedoms you’d won were secure? Not when it takes just the whim of one man and his futile government to tighten again the leash and wrench us all back into line.
A beat.
ELENA: The day the first of the shots were fired. That’s the day you finally called me back to you.
You wanted to be part of this. You wanted that we should be part of this together.
You cannot lose your nerve.
FEDYA: Where, Elena? Where in all this destruction does a spirit breathe?
ELENA: You think there’s room for the spirit in what we have? When all is put to right—there’ll be room enough for the spirit then.
FEDYA: For the few who survive the guns.
ELENA: Which is the greater sin, Fedya? To wither away—surrender the essence of yourself—for want of action? Or to dare to build something new—and bear the sacrifices that must be made?
Karakozov put himself forward. He put his life forward. For the good of us all.
FEDYA: What is it you want me to do? What?
ELENA: It’s not Russia you fear for Fedya. All this disquiet about blood and destruction. No. It’s your own life that obsesses you. Of dying without ever becoming this man you seem to believe yourself to be.
FEDYA: It’s not death that scares me.
ELENA: What then?
FEDYA: Losing my soul.
ELENA: You have no soul to lose. It’s an idea that’s past its time. Just another of your maudlin—
FEDYA: You know nothing of me—
ELENA: Another of your maudlin—
FEDYA: You know nothing of me—
ELENA: You really think we can have been lovers this long—
FEDYA: You know nothing of who I am!
ELENA: Because you refuse to share yourself with me.
FEDYA: And all you’ll get you have.
A long beat.
ELENA readies to leave.
ELENA: Sit here and do nothing if you must. But there’s a boy in the fortress who is being tortured—
FEDYA: Who brought him here? Who trailed him around Petersburg like a dog?
How many of us must dance and dance and fall at your feet before you see what you do?
ELENA: You’re a louse. A louse. A scrap of life that barely deserves our attention. You’re nothing like a man.
ELENA is almost out the door.
FEDYA: You know why I gamble?
ELENA: Enlighten me.
FEDYA: Because gamble all you have and you understand. That there’s something absurd in us. Irrational. And no matter how much you will it otherwise, it won’t be suppressed.
ELENA: Because you can’t quell the irrational in yourself?
FEDYA: It won’t work. Your way. It can’t work.
There’s nothing—nothing—that will make men love their fellow-men. There’s no law of nature that demands it. That man should love mankind.
ELENA: Watch the next turn of the wheel, Fedya. You’ll see how wrong you are.
SCENE THIRTY-TWO
The actor playing ELENA, getting out of costume.
[ELENA]: We’ll never be their equal. We’ll always wants more of them than they’ll ever want of us.
People will know that Fedya and I once loved. He will give his account of it, and I’ll give mine. Let the scholars debate as long as they will whose version is the truth and whose the work of genius.
SCENE THIRTY-THREE
KOLYA’s office. A dishevelled FEDYA has just arrived. He has a crumpled page in his hands.
FEDYA: [referring to the page] Spare not the guilty?
KOLYA: If I’m to survive,/ what choice do I have—?
FEDYA: Spare not the guilty?
KOLYA: If the alternative is to leave the rest of us defenceless? Then yes, ‘spare not the guilty’.
Since when does progressive politics me
an standing back while decent people are terrorised and hounded to death?
A long beat.
FEDYA: I need money.
KOLYA: That’s all you have to say?
FEDYA: Karakozov is to be executed.
KOLYA: While those who provoked him flee.
I pity him.
FEDYA holds out his hand.
FEDYA: I’ll never be free while I’m forever burdened by debts.
Finish what you’ve started, Kolya. Put me out of my misery once and for all. But tell them everything this time.
KOLYA: You want to keep the Third Section off your back? Work. Write your novels. Meet your contract—
FEDYA: You haven’t seen what they’ve done!
This isn’t opening my mail. Watching where I go. Knocking on my door at all hours of the night. They’ve turned my apartment upside down. I don’t know what they’ve taken, I don’t know what they’ve left behind…
KOLYA: What was there?
FEDYA: You know/ there’s nothing.
KOLYA: How do I know what you have/ hidden away there?
FEDYA: Nothing. I have nothing.
KOLYA: Then what does it matter what they’ve taken—
FEDYA: Because it’s my work! My work! It’s all I have!
A long beat.
FEDYA: I could pinpoint every sheet of paper. Every chapter, annotation. Every thought, but… I don’t know now. The confusion of it all. I don’t know whether to toss every last sheet of it on to the fire or to believe there really might be something amongst it all that’s worth saving.
A long beat.
KOLYA: I didn’t betray you, Fedya. I have never betrayed you.
FEDYA: Give me money.
KOLYA puts money on the desk.
FEDYA: You gave me up.
KOLYA: It wasn’t me.
FEDYA: You gave us all up.
KOLYA: If you need to believe that—
FEDYA: Released with not a mark/ against your name—
KOLYA: In order to bleed me dry/ with your endless empty promises of novels and articles—
FEDYA: Released with compensation—
KOLYA: Then fine. Go on. I’ll bear it. Because I believe in the man you might one day be. And I would sacrifice anything—anything…
I didn’t betray you.
FEDYA: Friend—God—Tsar, Kolya. If we don’t interrogate their every word. Their every silence. Then what use are we?
FEDYA takes the money. Exits.
The Parricide Page 5