Diane Stubbings - The Parricide

LANDLADY: [ off ] For you? None.

FEDYA: [ to ANNA] Go downstairs and get some tea from her.

LANDLADY: [ off ] I’m still waiting on last month’s rent.

FEDYA: [ gesturing to the money on the table ] And take her a handful of that to shut her up.

ANNA: I’m not here to make your tea. Nor to pay your rent.

FEDYA: Where are the pages from yesterday?

ANNA retrieves them and hands them over.

You can go.

ANNA doesn’t move.

You can go!

ANNA: You have a contract—

FEDYA: It bleeds me dry—

ANNA: Stellovsky will own you—

FEDYA: Do you think I care?

I have this. [ Gesturing to his notebook ] This is all I need. All I am.

ANNA: One week and it’s done. You’re free. We both are.

FEDYA: Do you understand the ocean of debt I’m drowning in—?

ANNA: Then meet your contract—

FEDYA: That only last week my crazed sister-in-law was back here demanding I buy her son out of the military/ because it no longer suits him?

ANNA: And there it is. Today’s great woe—

FEDYA: You think I don’t want to clear my debts? Be a free man again—?

ANNA: Any excuse. Any distraction. And you chase it like a dog after its tail. This novel won’t be written while you’re forever searching for the next thing to suffer over.

I don’t understand it. This misery you cling to.

FEDYA: It’s my lucky charm. It keeps me alive.

ANNA: It’s a vanity.

FEDYA: Do you know where I’ve been?

ANNA: Gambling.

FEDYA: Gambling, yes. With my life. With the future…

I see it now, Anna. Where to place my money. Where I’d been so fearful of placing it. They are right. The students. To a point, they are right. What must be done…What it is our right, our duty…

A slow tapping sound, building. A slow pounding.

FEDYA stares into the middle-distance, the almost trance-like state that precedes a fit.

ANNA realises something is wrong.

ANNA: Fyodor Mikhailovich—

The lights dim.

Fyodor Mikhailovich—

The room is in shadows.

Reality gives way to FEDYA ’s imagination.

FEDYA and ALYOSHA are lit by an incredibly white light.

ALYOSHA is on his knees.

FEDYA: Off your knees.

You’ve no need to mourn.

ALYOSHA: He’s dead.

FEDYA: I know.

ALYOSHA: My teacher.

FEDYA: Another will come.

ALYOSHA: I want no other.

FEDYA: This is not your path.

ALYOSHA: His body’s fallen to dust.

FEDYA: As any man’s.

ALYOSHA: I believed him more than a man.

FEDYA: You must abandon him.

ALYOSHA: It has hardened me—

FEDYA: Yes.

ALYOSHA: Hardened my faith.

FEDYA: No, no, the miracle didn’t come.

ALYOSHA: That I am on my knees. That I have seen my way. Is that not miracle enough?

FEDYA: There’s no truth to be found here. Not in abject service to prayer and ritual. To venal laws. That’s what you will come to understand.

ALYOSHA: I understand all I need to understand. Have seen here—on my knees—all I need to see.

That there is only one doorway to perfection and that is death.

That demand all you want your heaven here on earth, you can never have it.

That you, brother—you’re just as scared as the rest of us.

A shift in the light. ALYOSHA recedes into the shadows as FEDYA suffers a fit.

ANNA can do nothing but watch.

FEDYA ’s flat. ELENA sits reading through the pages of a manuscript. KOLYA enters.

KOLYA: How is he?

ELENA: He’s sleeping.

KOLYA: Anna said it was bad.

ELENA: No worse, I expect, than usual.

KOLYA: Were you here?

ELENA: Anna hasn’t already told you?

KOLYA: Would I be asking if she had?

ELENA: The landlady’s girl fetched me.

KOLYA: You know what’s brought it on.

ELENA: Do I?

KOLYA: Letters defending the students?

He’ll not be your propagandist.

ELENA: You think the money you keep feeding him will one day make him yours?

KOLYA: He has friends who’ll ensure he travels no further down that road than he already has.

ELENA: He’s not forgotten, Nikolai Ivanovich—he’s been betrayed before, when he believed himself among friends.

FEDYA emerges. He is weak.

FEDYA: Here we all are. Together again.

He sits at his work table, stares at it as though he wants to do something, but lacks the wherewithal to begin.

FEDYA: But you were talking. Don’t let me stop you.

An argument. About my future. My intentions.

KOLYA: It’s all moved too fast, Fedya. The risks now far outweigh any good you can do—

ELENA: Better to do nothing then—to stand up bravely for the status quo—

During the following ANNA enters. Her arrival is barely acknowledged.

KOLYA: Support the students and you give your name to every madness they enact. You might as well hold the gun yourself.

ELENA: It’s a risk worth taking—

KOLYA: Easy to say when it’s not your liberty at stake—

ELENA: It’s precisely my liberty at stake—

ANNA: Do you hear yourselves?

Can you not understand what you’re doing to him?

ELENA: Get out. Both of you.

FEDYA: You say you want a book from me, Kolya?

KOLYA: Your first contract after Stellovsky’s is done.

FEDYA: How about this? A man at a crossroads. Three possible ways before him. Pilgrim. Revolutionary. Or husband. Which does he choose? Which would you have him choose? What’ll get me the most money?

KOLYA: You cater your writing to the buyer now?

FEDYA: It’s what I’m known as, isn’t it? A hack?

KOLYA: I thought Crime and Punishment changed all that.

FEDYA: Yet here I am, still expected to churn out novels under the threat of a stick.

KOLYA: They all come with their own risk. It’d depend on what he intends to wager, this hero of yours.

FEDYA: Not on how much he might win?

KOLYA: Is he likely to win?

FEDYA: What do you say, Anna? Which road is my hero’s way to happiness?

A beat.

FEDYA: Which road?

ANNA: Husband.

FEDYA: No doubt?

ANNA: None. If those are his choices…

FEDYA: Should he seek then an intelligent companion, or merely a kind one?

ANNA: [ deferring to ELENA] An intelligent one.

FEDYA: I think he should choose a kind one. So she’ll take pity on him and love him.

ELENA: Have you done with your love play, Fedya? Shame on you, to turn a young girl’s head so cruelly. You know which road you must take. You know where/ you should be—

FEDYA: They’ve offered me a fine choice, Anna. The terror of revolution or the terror of the state—our lives balanced on whether we set our bet on the red or the black.

What is it? Tell me. That one thing that will push a man full over the edge. Not teetering at its brink, but…

ELENA: You should rest now, Fedya.

FEDYA: We have work to do. Anna and I.

ELENA: Leave it for another day.

KOLYA: She’s right,/ Fedya.

FEDYA: You want me to work. Let me work.

A beat.

KOLYA leaves.

ELENA waits.

FEDYA makes it clear he expects her to go also.

A beat.

ELENA exits.

ANNA readies herself for work. FEDYA struggles for something to say.

FEDYA: It’s still dark…

There’s a place I go, Anna—before the fit overtakes me—a place of such transparency… I’d give my whole life to stay there for one moment longer…