Marina and Lee

by Priscilla Johnson McMillan

  They had their lighter moments, too. There was a raft of forms to fill out for the authorities in Minsk. Marina had to apply for a Soviet foreign passport, good for travel abroad, and an exit visa. Alik needed only an exit visa, but every form had to be filled out at least in triplicate, each with photographs attached. Alik insisted on doing them all, even hers. He told Marina that she would never get around to doing them herself. But he had great difficulty with the forms because, without knowing it, he suffered from a reading disability called strephosymbolia. The condition, also known as dyslexia or “word blindness,” is caused by what doctors term “mixed lateral dominance of the brain.” A person suffering from this condition is not predominantly left- or right-handed, but for genetic reasons displays the characteristics of both. Thus Alik read not only from left to right but also, part of the time, from right to left, and when he wrote he often reversed letters and punctuation marks. Filling out forms was laborious for him, and Marina recalls that he had to bring five or six blanks home for every form he managed to complete successfully. He was in rollicking good spirits nonetheless.

  When they were faced with Marina’s biggest ordeal, a full-scale meeting of the Komsomol aktiv of the hospital, Alik wanted to go with her. “You don’t need to,” Marina said. “In fact, you can’t. You’re not a member.”

  He tried to support her anyhow. “I won’t let them hurt my little girl.” He took her in his arms. “I want you to show you’re your own person. You’ve a right to go abroad if you want. It’s they who are wrong to meddle. I’ll be thinking about you the whole time. Maybe that’ll help.”

  The chairman of the meeting was a leader of the citywide Komsomol organization. Representatives of every department of the hospital appeared as witnesses, as did two girls from the pharmacy. Looking very solemn, they were seated around a long table draped in red, with a red flag furled to one side and an attentive-looking portrait of Lenin peering down from the wall. Only Marina was standing, her pregnancy not yet apparent.

  She was not intimidated by their questions. The Komsomol had not cared about her in the least, she said, until she went to the American embassy. She knew she was being rude, but she was bitterly offended by their questions. She had done nothing to harm others. This was her private life, and she hated having it raked over the coals. When one of the members suggested that her husband might be a spy, she quickly found her reply: “So my husband was right after all. He said you people think there’s a spy under every pillow. Actually what he does every night is tap out messages in Morse code about how the Komsomol is trying to brainwash me.”

  The chairman told her that the Komsomol knew everything about her and her husband, “We knew each time you had a date. We knew when you applied for your marriage license. We knew the date of your wedding,” he said. Marina was chilled but not surprised. She had long been aware that the Komsomol was a tool of the police. Its members were often assigned to report on the activities of their friends.

  Finally, the chairman again warned that her husband might be a spy. “You’re young,” he said. “We wouldn’t expect you to find out right away. One doesn’t wake up to such horrible things overnight.” Marina refused to believe it. “So I don’t know my husband well yet,” she said. “But one thing I can assure you. He’s not an American spy. On that score you can set your minds at rest.”

  When the meeting ended she was told that another meeting would be called with representatives from every hospital in Minsk to decide whether to expel her from the Komsomol.

  “Go ahead and expel me if you like,” Marina said. “But don’t expect me to come to the meeting. I’ve told you everything I know.”

  Out on the street afterward, the chairman drew Marina aside and warned her that she had behaved so egregiously it might now be necessary to make a public example of her. Marina knew a threat when she heard one—a full-scale attack in the press.

  Alik was waiting anxiously at home. Had they “tormented” her long? he wanted to know. The meeting lasted two hours, she told him. “They said you were a spy,” she said with a weary smile.

  “I expected it,” he answered. “That’s what Ella’s family thought.”

  A week or so later, the girls at the pharmacy went off to the meeting on Marina’s case. She waited behind at work. She expected the news they brought: “You were expelled today.” She took it with a touch of bravado. “Fine! Now I’ll have money for the movies.”

  Alik’s response echoed her own. “Fine! Now you won’t have to go to the meetings.” The few times Marina had gone to them, he accused her of using them as a pretext to slip out with old boyfriends.

  Her expulsion was, in reality, a blow to Marina, as if the Komsomol were a mother who had pushed her out in anger. Her world was collapsing beneath her. It was the sort of thing that often happens to a girl before she marries a foreigner, not after. Marina had been spared before her marriage because everyone, even the Komsomol, assumed Alik was a Soviet citizen and could not go back to America even if he wanted to. Few people had seriously supposed that Marina was marrying Alik for a foreign passport. Now the accusation was heard often. “You ought to have married Anatoly,” Marina’s best friend at the pharmacy said. Then she added: “Forget it, Marina. You’ll never be allowed to go.”

  The official pressure, as it happened, was over. But Marina had yet to endure other, personal pressures. Her most painful rebuff came from Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya. On Sunday, a few days after their return from Moscow, Alik went off to visit the Prusakovs. In a matter of minutes he was home again. Valya had answered the bell and said, “I’m sorry, Alik, we don’t want to see you any more.” Valya, the warm, approving Valya, had shut the door in his face.

  Alik was crushed, and he begged Marina to find out why he had been turned away. He had repaid the Prusakovs’ kindness by taking a step in secret that was bound to affect them all, perhaps disastrously. But Marina recalls, “Alik just didn’t understand that you don’t do things that way.”

  After a week or so, Marina finally telephoned the Prusakovs: “Aunt Valya, I want to see you.”

  “Good,” she said. “Come on over, only don’t bring Alka.”

  Valya greeted her at the door. “Uncle Ilya is very angry, and he wants to talk to you,” she warned.

  “A fine niece you are,” Ilya began. “You’re here all the time. Then you fly off to Moscow without a word and leave me to hear it from others.” He grilled Marina about the visit to the embassy. He wanted to know every detail. “You ought to consult your family before you do a thing alike that,” he said finally, and with that he picked up the newspaper and disappeared into his study.

  Ilya had spent a lifetime in a special part of the Soviet bureaucracy. At stake for him in Marina’s application to go abroad, although he never said so, were the pension he had earned by a lifetime of labor, his friends, his apartment, his position of dignity, his way of life. Ilya would soon be retiring. He was looking forward to the peace he had earned.

  Marina and her aunt withdrew as usual to the kitchen, and Valya, too, began to scold her. Marina knew that her criticisms were just, but she wanted them all to make up. “Well, what can we do about it now?” Valya said. “It’s too late. All right, bring him over.”

  Marina and Alik came together, and this time it was Alik whom Ilya subjected to cross-examination. Once again he went through every step, every nuance of the visit to the embassy. Ilya said that he thought Alik had not only given up his American citizenship but had become a citizen of the USSR. He added that he would never have consented to the marriage if he had known that Alik was not a Soviet citizen. Alik was truthful but vague in his answers to Ilya’s questions. He conceded that he had asked for his American passport back, omitting to mention that he had received it. Marina believes he was ashamed. “Don’t worry, Uncle Ilya,” Alik tried to end the interview on a soothing note. “It’s nothing but a first step. I have no idea whether we’ll even be allowed to go back.”

  On the way home he e
xploded in anger at Marina. “I wasn’t ready for a grilling like that. I had no idea you’d told them everything.”

  “They’re my family,” Marina said. “They took me in and gave me a home. I can’t keep things from them.”

  “You could have waited awhile,” he said. “We don’t know anything anyway.”

  “Alik,” Marina complained. “You force me to lie. I can’t live like that. I can’t open my mouth without giving you away as a liar. You lied about your mother and your age. You lied when you said you couldn’t return to America. Now you’re making me lie. When will there be an end to it?”

  There were more questions to come, not only from family and friends but from Marina herself. A few days after their return from Moscow, she observed Alik, for the first time, writing on a yellow pad at home, seemingly lost in thought. Then she noticed that he had photographs and a ground plan of the radio plant. Marina was horror-stricken. So Alik was a spy after all. To make matters worse, he would not let her near the papers and refused even to say what he was doing. Marina was nearly in a panic.

  Finally, Alik relented. “I’m writing my impressions of Russia,” he told her.

  “What for?” she wanted to know.

  “Maybe there are people in America who will want to read them. Maybe I’ll publish them, and maybe I’ll keep them for myself.”

  Marina sighed with relief. She thought how foolish she had been. Yet one day when she returned home from work before Alik, she raced upstairs and ransacked the apartment, looking for what he was writing. All she found was a litter of unsuspicious-looking papers covered with her husband’s scrawl.

  She did her best to compose herself after that. But then she made another discovery. Alik had a shocking sum of money saved up, the small fortune of five hundred rubles (five hundred dollars), which he said was from the Soviet Red Cross. Again, Marina’s suspicions were aroused. Alik had lied to her in the past. Was he lying again now to conceal the fact that he was a spy?

  Marina came to a different conclusion. She had grown up in a country where informing is a way of life. Eyes and ears are everywhere. A trusted friend often turns out to be an agent of the police. It is vital to keep secrets, your own and those of others, merely to have a quiet life. Discretion is, indeed, the better part of valor. But Marina soon realized that her husband’s secretiveness was of another kind entirely. He told lies without purpose or point, lies that were bound to be found out. He liked having secrets for their own sake. He simply enjoyed concealment. For him it was not a matter of life and death but a matter of choice. In a Russian setting that must have seemed like frivolity indeed.

  For Marina to perceive, at the youthful age of nineteen, that her husband told lies as a matter of character rather than of necessity was a feat of mature intuition. Still, she trusted him—she had nobody else. All day every day she held back her tears at the pharmacy. But when she came home each night, she broke down. “Alka,” she cried, “don’t leave me. Don’t give me up. You see I have no one but you. No one at work. No Ilya or Valya. I have no family now.”

  “My poor little girl,” he said to comfort her, taking her in his arms and kissing the nape of her neck. “Cry as much as you like. It’ll be easier that way.” Then he added, as if to himself, “I never thought it was going to be so hard.”

  It was hard, and Marina had moments of vacillation. But she felt from the outset that she had a right to be with her husband, to go where he went, and that she was not doing anything wrong. The opposition she encountered served only to stiffen her resolve. From time to time she wavered, but she did not give up. She was committed to Alik now, and she was sustained by his patience and understanding and by the certain knowledge that he was proud of her.

  Somehow, after the initial turmoil, their lives returned to normal. Marina’s pregnancy progressed without incident, but in early August she underwent a special medical examination at the hospital because of “unpleasant sensations in the heart region,”3 probably the result of the pressures she had been under. There was nothing seriously wrong, however, and she was not hospitalized.

  Little change took place in their schedule. Marina went to work at the pharmacy; Alik went to the radio plant. Their evenings and weekends were spent in a variety of ways. Sometimes Alik rented a boat and paddled along the Svisloch River. When he found himself alongside their apartment building, he would shout and wave, “Mama! Marina!” Marina would run out onto the balcony and wave back.

  They went on picnics in the woods, sometimes with Alik’s friend Erich Titovyets and sometimes with Marina’s friends Misha Smolsky and his crowd. On one of their picnics, Alik did the hula hoop to amuse the others. And the Oswalds often entertained friends at their apartment. From time to time Erich came by to give Alik a lesson in German. Pavil Golovachev came, Anita Ziger came, and so did Marina’s old friends. There was one item of the Oswalds’ decor that always aroused their comments: Alik’s shotgun. It occupied a place of honor on the wall above the sofa, which was also the Oswalds’ bed. Each week Alik took the gun down and oiled and polished it with the utmost care. He oiled, polished, squinted, then oiled, polished, and squinted some more. The spot on the wall where he hung the gun was stained with oil. From the devotion he lavished on this ritual, it occurred to Marina that her husband was like a mother with a little child. “He’s lonesome for America,” she thought. “He had more amusements there.” He had fewer hobbies, fewer diversions he really enjoyed, than anyone she knew. So seeing him happy with his gun, she did her best to leave him in peace.

  Her friends had no such compunctions. They urged him to bring it with him the next time they all went to the country, and he did. The day was dull and overcast, and although it was not yet the end of August, there was a hint of autumn in the air. The birches and aspen were turning yellow; the pine trees whispered overhead. The girls picked mushrooms and hazelnuts and built a fire under a canopy of pines. The boys went off in search of doves. There was a crack of rifles, and when they returned they were empty-handed, but joking and in obvious good spirits. Halfway through the shoot they had given up doves and looked for squirrels and rabbits. They claimed to have hit a few, but no one had been able to locate his prey. None of the boys mentioned whether Alik was a good or a poor shot.4

  He did, in fact, belong to a gun club, a necessity to possess a gun in the USSR. And before he met Marina he had gone on a few outings. But he complained that the club held more meetings than outings, and after their marriage their expedition to the country was the only time he used his gun. Marina thought little about her husband’s having a gun; she supposed merely that it was one of those things men do.

  When Alik and Marina were alone in the apartment, he spent a good deal of time on his writing. Marina calls everything he wrote his “diary,” but actually, in addition to the diary proper, he wrote letters home, a memo on his love affairs in Russia, and two essays, which he called “The Collective” and “The New Era.” When Marina first noticed that he was writing, in mid-July soon after their return from the American embassy, Alik was furtive and uncomfortable about it. The moment she came in the door, he snapped his folder shut and put the writing away. As time went on he grew accustomed to writing with Marina in the room but continued to show the old uneasiness if any of their friends came by. He would close his folder and quickly hide it, and Marina sensed that he was shifting uneasily in his chair, waiting for the visitor to go.

  He wrote on a large pad and the pages were carefully numbered. The pad was in a yellow folder, which he kept on the topmost shelf of the kitchen, at the very back, behind a stack of suitcases and well out of Marina’s reach. Once she suggested that he keep it in a place that was easier to get at. Marina promised not to touch it. He refused: “You’ll give it to someone else to translate.”

  Marina was, indeed, a little curious. She did not know English, but she was familiar with Latin script and had spotted her name and the names of other girls in the Diary. “I hope you’re writing nice things about yo
ur old girlfriends,” she teased. “It’s none of your business,” he snapped. Another time she asked him to translate a little of the diary aloud.

  “I write in English so you won’t be able to read it.”

  “Is it secret?” she asked.

  “No. I just don’t like people reading my things.”

  Marina decided to study English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But Alik was not enthusiastic about the idea and refused to help her learn. “Study by yourself,” he told her. “Or study if we go to America.” Once she asked why he had not found a wife who knew English. He replied that he much preferred a wife who did not.

  Alik’s diary sprawled over twelve large, handwritten pages, but he lavished much of his attention on “The Collective,” an ambitious fifty-page essay.5 On the surface the essay is a description of the Minsk Radio Plant, loaded with facts and figures. At a deeper level, however, the radio plant is a metaphor for the whole of the Soviet Union, and the major theme is political control and how the Communist Party runs the country. The essay does not come off. It is not well organized, and the analogy between country and factory on which it depends breaks down. It is also biased by a rather special insight, the kind that is born of hostility. But although the handwriting is almost illegible and the spelling and punctuation erratic, it is thorough and thoughtful, and it reflects a good deal of work—by no means the work of someone stupid. The message that emerges is clear: Alik felt suffocated by the rigid controls that the Communist Party exercised over Soviet life.

  While he was working on “The Collective,” Alik pelted Marina with questions: the retail prices of countless items, as well as details of Komsomol meetings she had been to. He also wanted to know the salary and rank of her Uncle Ilya, both of which, since Ilya held a sensitive post, were something of a secret to her. However, by discreet questioning of her Aunt Valya and the neighbors across the hall from the Prusakovs, she learned that Ilya was a full colonel of the MVD, to which rank he had only recently been elevated, and that his salary was nearly three hundred rubles (three hundred dollars) per month, though Valya claimed it was only two hundred.