The Parricide
Page 6
SCENE THIRTY-FOUR
The actor playing KOLYA getting out of costume.
[KOLYA]: I was young. And to be among such people? To be counted a friend by Dostoyevsky? Who wouldn’t have boasted…? Who wouldn’t have ventured—perhaps once, perhaps twice—to repeat what they’d heard—feel the shiver of such words on their own tongue? Who wouldn’t have risked another man’s name to advance their own?
SCENE THIRITY-FIVE
The beating sound of heavy rain.
FEDYA at the roulette tables. He is agitated. He is losing.
In his imagination, he can see a figure cowering in the corner of a cell. It may be KARAKOZOV. It may be ALYOSHA. He can hardly tell them apart.
SCENE THIRTY-SIX
ANNA’s flat. ANNA stands with a wet, bedraggled FEDYA.
FEDYA: You judge me.
ANNA: No.
FEDYA: You have no comprehension what it’s like. After ten years in Siberia—after proving yourself to be a man of character—strength—and yet to still find within yourself a need of such force—to stand before fate and throw all you have on whatever way out it might offer you—a need so intense…
It’s as though the world is offering you the chance to breathe again. If only for a moment.
ANNA: What do you want, Fyodor Mikhailovich?
FEDYA: I need to meet this contract.
ANNA: What does that have to do with me any more?
FEDYA: I need your help.
ANNA: I’ve taken another job.
You should go home. Get dry—
FEDYA: I can’t go home—
ANNA: Why?
FEDYA: I can’t—
ANNA: Why not?
FEDYA: Are you lovers?
ANNA: How could you/ even ask—?
FEDYA: Did he pay you—?
ANNA: Stop—
FEDYA: To tell him what I’d done—?
ANNA: Stop—
FEDYA: To tell him I’m more guilty than even he could have imagined—?
ANNA: Stop!
FEDYA: You don’t know him, Anna.
ANNA: I don’t know you.
I used to think the world of you—once upon a time.
Go home.
FEDYA: He’s there. He’s there all the time. He follows me.
ANNA: Who’s there?
FEDYA: I think it was him. Who killed his father? Not directly, not by his own hand, but…
ANNA: Who? Who killed his father?
FEDYA: In my story. Of the parricide.
There’s a third brother. I see it now. He’s a revolutionary. A true revolutionary. An atheist for whom it’s more than just a political stance. Who sees nothing but emptiness. And I’ve heard his voice in my head. Day and night. ‘In God is nothing. In God is nothing.’ But it’s not so much God that he rejects as the world God’s created. Can see no alternative than that it must all come crashing down. And the accident of man’s existence, that he has no other purpose but to watch its disintegration.
There’s a painting—in Basel I think it is—and I’ve made him, this brother, I’ve made him stand in front of it. For hours. Just contemplating it. It’s of Christ. The dead Christ. His corpse. He was shaken to his very soul. To see Christ there—a man like any other. All bone and shrunken flesh. And his face horror-struck by the wrench of his last moment. As though not a breath of divinity or resurrection would ever move through him. It terrified him—this brother—to see everything he’d ever argued so forcefully proven that it could never again be doubted…
ANNA: If this is the man you must write, then… then you must write him.
FEDYA: It has driven him mad.
ANNA: Then you must find him his salvation.
FEDYA: I can’t.
I need to meet this contract.
Help me.
SCENE THIRTY-SEVEN
ANNA putting on coat, hat, gloves etc, readying herself for work.
ANNA: It wasn’t, I told myself, that I couldn’t live without him, but that I couldn’t live without playing such a part… Without touching, in the frailest way, all that he might one day write—all that he might one day be…
SCENE THIRTY-EIGHT
FEDYA’s flat. There are still papers everywhere. ANNA is very business-like, gathering her own notes together.
ANNA: I’ll have them transcribed and returned to you first thing tomorrow.
FEDYA: It’s done then?
ANNA: One hundred and fifty pages.
FEDYA: Is it any good, Anna?
ANNA: I’m not here to judge the worth of what you write, Fyodor Mikhailovich.
A beat.
FEDYA: Would you like tea?
ANNA: No.
FEDYA: We hardly stopped—
ANNA: I’d like to get home—
FEDYA: Your hand—
ANNA: Is fine.
FEDYA: [gathering together his scraps of paper] Is it really all over…?
ANNA busies herself packing her bag.
A quiet pounding.
FEDYA shifts towards the state that precedes a fit.
The pounding gets louder.
Tightening spotlight on FEDYA. Building spotlight on a SOLDIER, standing in the snow. He is cold. He has a rifle. His feet, the rifle, pound on the ground as he tries to stay warm.
We see the whole room again.
ANNA: Fyodor Mikhailovich—
The pounding sound again.
Spotlight on FEDYA. Spotlight on the same SOLDIER, standing in the snow. Still pounding his rifle, pounding his feet, trying to stay warm.
We see the whole room again.
What can I do?
A crack like a gunshot.
In that moment, almost like a flash—
Tight spotlight on FEDYA. Another tight light on KARAKOZOV. Another on the SOLDIER. All the lights are incredibly bright.
Another crack. KARAKOZOV is shot. He falls.
We see the whole room again. We hear the LANDLADY’s broom banging.
LANDLADY: [off] They’ve executed him, Fyodor Mikhailovich. That bastard student is dead.
Another crack.
In that moment, like a flash—
Tight spotlight on FEDYA. Incredibly bright. Tight spotlight on the SOLDIER, his gun aimed at FEDYA. FEDYA waits for it to fire. The SOLDIER fires into the air.
We see the whole room again.
ANNA: Fyodor Mikhailovich—
What can I do?
The room is overwhelmed by shadows.
Reality gives way to FEDYA’s imagination.
The moment where the two worlds of the play merge: he is unsure whether it is ANNA or KATYA who is standing in front of him; he is the third brother in his novel of the parricide, speaking to the woman he refuses to admit he loves.
FEDYA: Why do I cling to it? This misery?
Because it’s the substance of my life—forever suspended between belief and disbelief… God and…
If you could sow within me one grain of faith… one grain—if we could live for this world alone… But with all we know—the more we know—there can be no truth. No truth. It changes from one day to the next and…
A man sees such things, such a complex reality, such events, a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, full of such astonishing details, beginning with the most exalted manifestations of the human spirit to the last button on a dress front…
He is close to ANNA/KATYA now. An intensely intimate moment.
The blood’s still here. The blood’s still on my hands. How is it I’m left to live? When I too wanted him dead? When I’m as guilty as him?
The light holds for a moment. Seeps to a deep blood red.
We see the whole room again.
FEDYA falls to his knees.
The first moments of a fit.
Darkness.
Then silence.
SCENE THIRTY-NINE
A light in the darkness. A small fire burning.
FEDYA’s flat.
FEDYA is asleep on the sofa.
FEDYA stirs.
FEDYA: I thought you were leaving.
ANNA: Today. I’m leaving today.
FEDYA: The novel?
ANNA: Taken to the notary.
FEDYA: Not to Stellovsky?
ANNA: He couldn’t be found.
The notary has it. He knows your side of the bargain was kept.
A beat.
I found your notebook. The one you were asking for.
Here.
She hands him his notebook. He riffles through the pages.
FEDYA: How do I write, Anna?
How do I turn what’s in my head into words? Words that warrant an ounce of anyone’s attention?
ANNA: You sit at your desk, Fyodor Mikhailovich. You put your pen to the paper.
FEDYA tears pages from the notebook, throws them on to the fire.
ANNA: Fyodor Mikhailovich—?
FEDYA: It’s not what I thought it was.
ANNA: So you destroy it?
FEDYA: If there’s anything in it—anything of merit—a fire’s not going to destroy it.
A long beat.
ANNA: [gathering her things to leave] I’ll ask the landlady to bring you soup. Whatever you need.
FEDYA: I had a dream, Anna Grigorevna. A good dream it seemed. A dream that seemed to promise good things. I was organising my papers. Trying to. Amongst all the mess I found the strangest thing. Buried underneath piles and piles of papers. A tiny diamond. Tiny. But with such a fierce light. I knew I’d treasure it to the end of my days.
What do you think it might mean?
ANNA: A dream is a dream.
FEDYA: I’m wrong to think it might herald some happiness to come?
ANNA: Elena Petrovna is a very beautiful woman. I’m sure she’ll bring you great happiness.
FEDYA: Elena has gone to Paris. I don’t expect ever to see her again.
A beat.
FEDYA: I thought I might work it into a novel. A pitiable man who dreams of such a treasure. Who spends all his life searching for it. Who ends by discovering it’s been in the one place—the one place closest to his heart—where he has always failed to look.
Would you believe that possible, Anna? If you read such a novel?
ANNA: In the pages of a novel… yes, I’d believe it.
But I feel you’re teasing me, sir—
FEDYA: Sir?
ANNA: Playing with me—
FEDYA: Why would I do that?
ANNA: To judge how a young woman—an inexperienced woman, if you will—might react to such words.
FEDYA: How would she react?
ANNA: I don’t know how to unriddle you—
FEDYA: How would she react?
ANNA: I could work for you every day for the rest of my life and I’d never understand you.
FEDYA: Tell me, Anna. How?
ANNA: I don’t know. What do I know? What does she know? But that this man was four weeks ago—four days ago—on fire with such a passion… That he would watch this other woman walk into the room and the desire that would… What do I know? But that I have been abused and tried and tested… So much good… So much good, Fyodor Mikhailovich has been crushed out of me. Crushed out of all of us. Between these bombs and executions and hatreds that speak nothing of my life. It seems impossible to know anymore—what is right. What is good. It seems that it’s only in the pages of a novel that anything good can survive. That hope can survive.
You tested me—
FEDYA: No—
ANNA: You tested my loyalty to you—
FEDYA: No—
ANNA: What did you want? Did you want me to betray you? And now, is it that I’m supposed to deny you—?
FEDYA: Deny me?
ANNA: To give you yet another thing to mourn for—?
FEDYA: It wasn’t to test you—
ANNA: Another excuse to do nothing, to run from all you might achieve—?
FEDYA: To test my fate. My fate. To see if the past would be allowed to rest. Or if it would rise up and bury me.
ANNA: What do you want me to do? Just say. Do you want to live, Fyodor Mikhailovich? Or do you want to die?
FEDYA: Before I fell ill—in the clear moments that come before the darkness—I was again in front of the firing squad, Anna… waiting for the order to fire. And an abyss opened out at my feet. A chance to save myself. I knew I must jump—could see no other answer but to jump. But I couldn’t move. Not from the fear of it—the fear of not making it to the other side—but because of all I wasn’t yet prepared to abandon. It was trading one manner of freedom for another. One manner of imprisonment. I was frozen to the spot…
It became clear to me then. Clear as it had never been before. What I must write. How I must live. It was a revelation. That I can live again. That even among the darkest and ugliest aspects of life, I can live. As long as my soul is free—as long as my mind is not captive…
Agreeing to life, Anna—agreeing to God—they’re acts of will. Like forgiveness. Like love.
ANNA: Forgiveness can’t be deliberated, Fyodor Mikhailovich. Nor love. We can only answer what’s in our hearts.
A long beat.
FEDYA: Could she love him, Anechka?
Could she?
A beat.
ANNA leads him back to the table. Sits him down. Hands him a new notebook, a pen.
A beat.
He returns to the fire, salvages a page or two of the notebook, takes them back with him to the desk.
As ANNA continues to work to bring order to the flat,
FEDYA bends his head, begins to write.
THE END
Copyright Page
CURRENCY THEATER SERIES
First published in 2014
by Currency Press Pty Ltd,
PO Box 2287, Strawberry Hills, NSW, 2012, Australia
enquiries@currency.com.au
www.currency.com.au
in association with La Mama Theatre
First digital edition published in 2014 by Currency Press Pty Ltd
The Paracide copyright © Diane Stubbings, 2014
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Performance Rights
Any performance or public reading of The Parricide is forbidden unless a licence has been received from the author or the author’s agent. The purchase of this book in no way gives the purchaser the right to perform the play in public, whether by means of a staged production or a reading. All applications for public performance should be addressed to the author c/– Currency Press.
Printed ISBN: 9781925005097
ePub ISBN: 9781925004762
mobi ISBN: 9781925004779
Cover image: Vasily Perov, Portrait of F.M. Dostoyevsky. Source: Google Art Project
Cover design by Peter Mumford.
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