Shipwreck (8 page)

TURGENEV
   Goodness me … the sins of the Second Republic won't bear the weight of this revenge drama of cooks and waiters. The Provisional Government promised elections. Elections took place. Nine million Frenchmen voted for the first time. Well, they voted for royalists, rentiers, lawyers … and a rump of socialists for the rest to kick. You have a complaint? A coup d'état by the organised workers, and a salutary period of Terror, would put that right. You could be Minister of Paradox, with special responsibility for Irony. Herzen … Herzen! For all the venality you see around you, France is still the highest reach of civilisation.

Natalie and Natasha enter with George, who is shorn of his beard, moustache and dignity.

HERZEN
   (
puzzled
) Yes …?

TURGENEV
   It's Herwegh, back from Germany.

Benoit follows with glasses of wine.

HERZEN
   
Ach, mein armer Freund
… [Oh, my dear fellow … ]

NATALIE
   There was a price on his head!

Herzen embraces George, who bursts into tears.

HERZEN
   
Trink einen Schluck Wein. Du bist ein Held!
[Take some wine. You're a hero!]

Herzen gives a glass to George. Turgenev, Natasha and Natalie take glasses from the salver.

HERZEN
   (
cont
.) (
toasting
)
Auf die Revolution in Deutschland!
[To the revolution in Germany!]

GEORGE
   
Dankeschoen, danke
… [Thank you, thank you … ] (
toasting
)
Auf die Russische Revolution … und auf die Freundschaft!
[To the Russian revolution … and to friendship!]

NATALIE
   To friendship!

NATASHA
   And love!

TURGENEV
   (
toasting
)
Vive la République!

HERZEN
   (
toasting
)
A bas les bourgeois! Vive le prolétariat!

Benoit, leaving, registers pained reproach, just perceptibly.

HERZEN
   (
cont
.)
Mille pardons
, Benoit.

George weeps afresh. Natalie comforts him. There is a transition to a month later.

J
UNE
1848

A
‘BLUE BLOUSE,'
an old workman in tattered clothes, stands in the room, a desperate motionless figure, invisible to Natalie and Natasha who, innocently embraced, recline on the couch, with George in attendance moping.

GEORGE
   Everybody's being horrible about me. They say I hid in a ditch as soon as the enemy came in sight. You don't believe it, do you?

NATALIE
   Of course we don't.

NATASHA
   Of course not.

NATALIE
   Nor does Emma. Well, she was there.

GEORGE
   She pushed me into it.

NATALIE
   The ditch?

GEORGE
   No, the whole business … chairman of the German democrats in exile, and suddenly I was Napoleon at Austerlitz.

NATASHA
   Waterloo. Oh, sorry … but you looked so defeated.

GEORGE
   Emma still has faith in me. Perhaps she'll invade Poland. She was in love with me before she met me. So were half the women in Germany. My book of poems went through six editions. I met the King. Then I met Emma.

NATALIE
   And she's the one who got you!

GEORGE
   I wish I'd listened to Marx.

NATALIE
   Marx? Why?

GEORGE
   He tried to talk me out of it.

NATALIE
   (
amazed
) Marrying Emma?

GEORGE
   No, the Legion of German Democrats.

NATALIE
   Oh … !

GEORGE
   Now he's crowing over my humiliation … after all I've done for him, taking him to all the best houses, introducing him at Marie d'Agoult's salon …

NATASHA
   The countess?

GEORGE
   Yes, the writer, one of my admirers.

NATALIE
   And you were one of hers, surely … I admire her, too. When she fell in love with Liszt, she followed her heart. Everything had to give way to love—reputation, society, husband, children … just like George Sand and Chopin! … Do you play?

GEORGE
   A little. I compose a bit, too. Emma says if I practised, Chopin and Liszt better watch out.

NATASHA
   
Shto praiskhódit?
[What's this?]

NATALIE
   (
to Natasha
) George looks like Onegin ought to look, don't you think? (
Natalie jumps up and pulls George by the hand.
) Come on, then!

Herzen enters.

NATALIE
   (
cont.
) George is going to play for us!

There is a distant sound of riot, and a transition. Herzen and the Blue Blouse remain.

NATASHA
   (
to Natalie, warningly
) Natalie.

NATALIE
   (
dissembling
) What?

NATASHA
   You haven't got a piano.

NATALIE
   (
brazenly
) Well?

The two women embrace hilariously and take George out.

Herzen sees the Blue Blouse.

HERZEN
   What do you want? Bread? I'm afraid bread got left out of the theory. We are bookish people, with bookish solutions. Prose is our strong point, prose and abstraction. But everything is going beautifully. Last time—in 1789—there was a misunderstanding. We thought we had discovered that social progress was a science like everything else. The First Republic was to have been the embodiment of morality and justice as a rational enterprise. The result was, admittedly, a bitter blow. But now there's a completely new idea. History itself is the main character of the drama, and also its author. We are all in the story, which ends with universal bliss. Perhaps not for you. Perhaps not for your children. But universal bliss, you can put your shirt on it, which, I see, you have. Your personal sacrifice, the sacrifice of countless others on History's slaughter-bench, all the apparent crimes and lunacies of the hour, which to you may seem irrational, are part of a much much bigger story which you probably aren't in the mood for—let's just say that this time, as luck would have it, you're the zig and they're the zag.

The noise of insurrection increases.

21 J
UNE
1848

Street.

[From Turgenev's
Literary Reminiscences:
‘At first there was nothing particular that I could see
…
But the farther I went the more
did the appearance of the boulevard change. Carriages became less frequent, the omnibuses disappeared completely; the shops and cafés were being hastily closed … there were many fewer people in the street. On the other hand, all the windows of the houses were open, and a great number of people, mostly women, children, maids and nursemaids, were crowded in the doorways. They were all talking, laughing, not shouting but calling to one another, looking round, waving their hands
—
as though in expectation of some pageant. A light-hearted, festive curiosity seemed to have taken possession of people. Ribbons of many colours, kerchiefs, caps, white, pink, blue dresses shimmered and glittered, rose and rustled in the light summer breeze … The uneven line of the barricade, about eight feet high, came into sight. In the middle of it, surrounded by other tricolour and gold-embroidered banners, a small red flag fluttered with its ominous pointed tongue … I moved a little nearer. The space just in front of the barricade was almost deserted, only a few men walking to and fro in the roadway. The workers exchanged jokes with the spectators in the street who came up to them
…
One of them, with a white soldier's sword-belt round his waist, held out an uncorked bottle and a half-filled glass to them, as if inviting them to come up and have a drink; another, next to him, with a double-barrelled gun over his shoulder, yelled in a drawn-out voice, “Long live the democratic and socialist republic!” Beside him stood a black-haired woman in a striped dress, also with a sword-belt and a revolver thrust in it; she alone did not laugh … Meanwhile the sound of drums drew nearer and grew louder …']

Natalie, carrying Kolya, the Nurse pushing a stroller containing a three-year-old
(TATA),
as it were, and Mother holding Sasha's hand, hurry across the street. Sasha carries a tricolour on a pole, which encumbers him.

NATALIE
   Oh God—oh God—quickly … There were omnibuses full of corpses.

MOTHER
   You must be calm for the children …

Herzen meets them and takes Kolya.

HERZEN
   (
to Sasha
) Go with Mama. What are you doing with that?

SASHA
   Benoit says to wave it for the Garde Mobile!

HERZEN
   Go inside.

NATALIE
   Did you see?

HERZEN
   Yes.

NATALIE
   The omnibuses?

HERZEN
   Yes.

Rachel's voice is heard again
…
but ‘The Marseillaise' is drowned out in volleys of rifle fire.

27 J
UNE
1848

There is a transition to the interior, with cheerful music heard from the street.

Kolya remains with Herzen and sits on the floor with his top. Turgenev is with Herzen. Benoit delivers some letters to Herzen on a salver and leaves.

TURGENEV
   Have you been out? It's amazing how life settles back. The theatres are open. There's carriages in the streets again, and ladies and gentlemen inspecting the ruins as if they were in Rome. To think it was only on Friday morning the laundress who brought my washing said, ‘It's started!' And then four days shut away in this awful heat, listening to the guns, knowing what must be happening and helpless to do anything … oh, that was torture.

HERZEN
   But with clean laundry.

TURGENEV
   I trust if we're going to have this conversation—

HERZEN
   I didn't invite conversation. If I were you, I'd take avoiding action. These four days could make one hate for a decade.

TURGENEV
   I'll go, then. (
Pause.
) But allow me to express the opinion that somebody must do your laundry, too.

HERZEN
   Letter from Granovsky! Just wait till he hears! (
He opens the letter.
) All you liberals are splashed with blood no matter how you tried to keep your distance. Yes, I have a laundress, possibly several, how would I know? The whole point of the serving class is that the rest of us, the fortunate minority, can concentrate on our higher destinies. Intellectuals must be allowed to think, poets to dream, landowners to own land, dandies to perfect their cravats. It's a kind of cannibalism. The uninvited are necessary to the feast. I'm not a sentimental moralist. Nature, too, is merciless. So long as a man thinks it's the natural order of things for him to be eaten and for another to eat, then who should regret the death of the old order if not we who write our stories or go to the opera while others do our laundry? But once people realise the arrangement is completely artificial, the game is up. I take comfort in this catastrophe. The dead have exposed the republican lie. It's government by slogan for the sake of power, and if anyone objects, there's always the police. The police are the realists in a pseudo-democracy. From one regime to the next, power passes down the system until it puts its thumbprint on every policeman's forehead like the dab of holy oil at an emperor's coronation. The conservatives can't keep the smiles off their faces, now they know the whole thing was a
confidence trick. The liberals wanted a republic for their own cultivated circle. Outside it they're conservatives. They cheered on Cavaignac's butchers while wringing their hands with their fingers crossed. Well, now we know what the reactionaries have always known: liberty, equality and fraternity are like three rotten apples in their barrel of privilege, even a pip could prove fatal—from now on it's all or nothing, no quarter, no mercy.

TURGENEV
   (
mildly
) You sound like Belinsky, adjusting some poet's reputation … Do you think there's something Russian about taking everything to extremes?