Alik was probably planning to use Ilya’s salary, rank, and the size of his apartment in “The Collective,” to illustrate wage differentials and the role of privilege in the USSR. But Marina was apprehensive. She knew that her husband hoped to publish what he was writing, and she was afraid of the repercussions on her family. She asked Alik not to write about her or her relatives, and he complied.
In spite of his difficulties in expressing himself in his own language, due in part to his lack of education and in part to his reading disability, Alik’s spoken Russian was good. Before he came to the Soviet Union, he had studied the language by himself for two years with the help of a Berlitz grammar, and he was still at a loss. But by the time he met Marina, a year and a half later, his Russian was colloquial and idiomatic. He used, more or less correctly and with apparent ease, words she herself avoided because she thought them obscure. From this and from his conservative way of dressing, Marina, who is something of a language snob herself, inferred that he was better educated and from a higher social class than in fact he was.
Marina learned that her husband’s mastery of the language was largely due to the help of his coworkers at the radio plant. From the day he first appeared among them in January 1960, they took him into the courtyard after lunch and started in on his Russian. Seated in the sun in their shirtsleeves, they would pick up an insect and point to it. “Come on now, Alka,” they encouraged him, “what’s this little fellow here?,” and he would commit to memory the word for “ant.”
“They were really great,” he told Marina. “Each day they taught me a new word and went over the ones I’d learned already. They even taught me to swear.” Meanwhile, they laughed and joked with him and asked him questions about America. Since they had no English, he had to answer in Russian. It gave him the push he needed. He came home at night after that, took up his grammar books again, and really began making headway. He had other help, too, from his friend Erich and from a girl at the Foreign Languages Institute who helped him in Russian in return for his help with her English. But it was the men at the plant who got him going.
Marina was impressed by Alik’s Russian. What she liked best was his concision. He could say in three words what she would say in six. Both of them spoke in shorn-off, staccato phrases; Alik spoke English the same way, suggesting ideas rather than completing them. And while his English sounded abrupt and unschooled, perhaps, such speech in Russian was the fashion among the young.
Although she was proud of the way her husband spoke, Marina noticed weaknesses, too. She observed that he never read Russian for pleasure, and when he went to the public library, with the whole of Russian literature before him, he never took out a volume in Russian. Every day he bought a newspaper, Pravda or Izvestia or the Belorussian Communist Party paper. But he said they were boring—“They always say one and the same thing”—and most of the time he merely glanced at them. The only thing he claimed to read were the speeches of Nikita Khrushchev, which were colorful, frequent, and entertaining. They were a great source of knowledge about the country and were given, no doubt to Alik’s delight, to flaying one of his favorite enemies—the Soviet bureaucracy.
Marina thinks he read so little Russian because he was lazy. Neither he nor she knew that he had a reading disability that must have made it tedious and frustrating to wrestle with the strange Cyrillic symbols. Alik was not lazy. He struggled to improve his Russian, and his efforts represent a strenuous attempt to compensate, even overcompensate, for the difficulty with his own language he at most only sensed that he had. When they were at home, for example, Marina used short, simple phrases to be sure he understood. But he asked her to speak normally so that he could keep on learning. When she was angry, on the other hand, Marina expressed herself in abstruse words and long-drawn-out sentences. The words simply flooded from her tongue. “Wait, wait,” Alik would cry out in anguish, not at her anger but at her syntax. “What does it mean? Say it again from the beginning.” Marina found her anger beginning to ebb. “Poor boy,” she would think, “he doesn’t understand.” And her fury would give way to pity.
Unmarried friends of Marina’s often dropped by to seek advice in some matter of the heart. They purposely spoke in synonyms, difficult, unfamiliar words so that he would not understand. But they were reckoning without Alik. He listened raptly and wrote down every word he did not know. He was not prying; he was trying to enlarge his vocabulary. Before long, curiosity got the better of him, and he interrupted the conversation: What did this mean, what did they mean by that? The girls had forgotten. They peered at his sheet of paper trying to decipher what they had said. The words he had written down bore only a coincidental resemblance to the words they had actually spoken. Alik had a good ear, and he had heard accurately enough. But because of his language difficulty, he was unable to reduce to written symbols what his ear had heard.
Alik owed more to the other men at the factory than his proficiency in Russian. So open were they, so easy and frank in his presence, that he felt like one of them. “They tell stories and criticize the foreman and Partog in front of me as if I wasn’t a foreigner,” he boasted to Marina. He soon came to share their attitudes about the party organizer and the deputy director of the factory, and like the other men, he despised the hypocrisy and favoritism on every side. But while he liked his fellow workers, he was not really a part of the things at the plant, and Marina knew it. At lunchtime he nearly always sat by himself, or at a table of men he did not know, rather than with the men he worked with. He did not join the other men on drinking sprees, or go to see them at their homes. He was considered antisocial, and with some of them he was actually unpopular because he had been given an apartment of his own without doing anything to deserve it. They would have forgiven him quickly had he been either a congenial fellow or a good worker. But his work, if anything, was below average. He did only what he had to do and no more. It is ironic that Alik grew to dislike the Soviet system, in part, because of the restrictions it placed upon him, while his colleagues disliked him because of the privileges he received.
Yet Alik was as well liked in Russia as he had ever been before or was ever to be again. At the plant he was the object of a good deal of teasing, much of it with sexual overtones. Was he sorry he had married a Russian girl? Was she pregnant yet? So many and so personal were the matters discussed at the plant that Marina felt acutely self-conscious. “For heaven’s sake, Alka,” she would exclaim, “don’t tell them about our lovemaking!” For her husband would come home with the most intimate details of the others’ sex lives, together with suggestions that they try some new sexual technique he had heard about. Marina enjoyed his tales about the sex lives of others but had no wish for Alik to reveal their own.
The truth was that the Oswalds were having difficulty in sex, and they were worried about it. They could not reach a climax together; in fact, Marina failed to have an orgasm at all. Whether it was three, five, or ten minutes after they started making love, Alik ejaculated too soon, before Marina was ready. It made her so furious that at times she could have hit him.
“I’ll do anything you want, only please, please don’t be angry,” he would beg.
Sometimes he pretended that he had not had an orgasm yet. “Who are you trying to fool,” Marina said, “me or yourself?” She would slap him on the rear end. “Go and wash yourself off. And don’t show your face in here again.” Half an hour later she was remorseful at being so sharp with him. There were moments, nonetheless, when she thought there was nothing so hateful as the sight of a man who had been satisfied. To her it was the sight of a “dead bird in a bush.”
They tried all sorts of distractions—talking about something else, for example—while they were making love, hoping that he could go on longer, until she was ready for him. Nothing helped. Sometimes in the early months of their marriage she refused sex altogether: “I’d rather you didn’t touch me. You finish too soon. It makes me sick.”
“All men are like that,” Alik sai
d. Or, “With you, what man could wait more than five minutes?” Or, “It would take five men to satisfy you!” Marina began to think it really was her fault. Then one day he suggested something new, a variation he had heard about at the factory. It involved some oral sex, or what they were to call “French love.”6
Marina was greatly embarrassed. But Alik assured her that “between husband and wife everything is good and pure,” and she consented to try it. It became a frequent way of making love, although Marina never felt right about it, and Lee evidently preferred normal intercourse most of the time.
Marina was ashamed of her body. She was acutely self-conscious about it. All through the sexual act she would be thinking how sinful she was, how thin she was, and wondering what Alik must think of her. He took endless pains to reassure her. Again and again he said that she was “the best woman” in the world for him, sexually and in every other way. He made love to her at all times of the month, even when she was menstruating, and this signified to Marina that he accepted her just as she was. Another sign of his acceptance concerned a scar on her lower back, the remnant of a childhood operation. Never in all their married life did Alik mention the scar or ask Marina how she got it. She considered his reticence a mark of the most exquisite tact. As she grew to realize that her husband was not critical of her body in any way, Marina eventually came to feel freer with him.
Alik appears to have been proud of his body. Marina sometimes teased him about his shoulders, which were sloping or, as she put it, “weak” and “womanly.” But she was overcome with joy when, after they were married, she caught the first glimpse of Alik naked below the waist. She considered his legs, his back, and his thighs objects of real beauty and was gratified to think that her children might inherit such marvelous features. He was soon aware of her admiration, and on occasion, when they had quarreled, he would sit with one leg draped over the arm of a chair, displaying his most perfect features. More than once this was an invitation to reconciliation.
Marina was gratified, too, by his cleanliness. She would not have gone near the handsomest man on earth were he not also immaculate. In this respect Alik left nothing to be desired. He was as obsessed as she by the notion of cleanliness. Invariably, no matter how late at night it might be, he bathed, shaved, and brushed his teeth before they made love, singing or whistling and looking forward happily to what was ahead of him. When he was through he would call out, “I’m ready, Mama,” and after sex he washed again. He was, Marina says, “a hundred times cleaner” than she was. It pleased her that while she demanded perfect cleanliness from him, he liked her and accepted her however she happened to be.
Her feelings had changed a good deal since the days when she had been repelled by her husband, repelled by sex, and finally, two months after they were married, spent a brief, unhappy night with someone else in a forlorn effort to discover whether her marriage had been a mistake. She continued to feel an underlying disappointment with the sex act. But as time went on, their sexual relationship grew more harmonious, and eventually Marina came to consider her husband a tender and accomplished lover. “The longer I lived with him, the more I felt attracted to him,” she says, adding that he could be “quite a seducer” when he wanted to be. “He was willing to do anything at all to give me satisfaction.” She was touched by his efforts. They increased the tenderness she felt for him. All through their marriage, sex, despite its discontents, made for much greater closeness between them.
Alik was extremely jealous of Marina. He allowed no former boyfriend of Marina’s ever to set foot in the apartment unless he was now married. He would not permit her to dance with anyone but him. He was, moreover, very much a Puritan about sex. He hated divorce, and he hated infidelity, especially on the part of a woman. When he heard a case, he would say: “Women are all alike.” He also disapproved of abortion. People, he said, “ought to pay for their mistakes.” He never sought out anybody else, and neither, after that one night in July, did Marina. He never blamed or reproached her for his sexual difficulty—or theirs. He blamed himself for reaching climax too soon, while Marina blamed herself for her inability to reach climax other than through a form of sex of which she felt ashamed. They both enjoyed sex. It made up many a battle between them and was one of the best things in their life together. But because of the form it took, Alik thought that he was less than he should be as a man, and Marina thought she was less than she should be as a woman. Even though their sexual relationship got better as the months went on, each felt that he or she had something still to prove.
— 10 —
The Long Wait
Alik loved to sing. He sang Harry Belafonte in the bathtub, Rimski-Korsakov while mopping the floor, Rachmaninoff while washing dishes. He whistled or sang Russian folk tunes, and when he played opera on the phonograph, he sang and pantomimed as if he were on stage. His favorite singer was the incomparable Russian bass, Chaliapin, and when he sang along with a Chaliapin recording, he would turn red as a beet trying to hit the low notes. When he made it, he would shout: “Look at me. I sing as well as he does!” At the end of an especially taxing passage, he would call out in triumph to Marina: “Mama, I love you!”
One Sunday in early September, when the leaves were turning yellow out of doors, they were sitting together in the apartment, Marina sewing and Alik bending over his diary. He was singing as usual, and Marina noticed that nearly every line ended with the same words—“Oh my darlin’.” They were English words, but she understood them and hoped they might refer to her. After a while she grew tired of hearing the same song over and over. “Put on another record now,” she said. “You’ve been singing that one thing all day.”
“I’m sorry,” Alik apologized absentmindedly but after a brief pause started singing it again.
Marina was to hear the song often, and always, it seemed, when Alik was working on his diary. It was not until years later that she found out it was the title song of the movie High Noon, the story of the sheriff of a small Western town who, against the wishes of his wife and without any help from the townspeople, is brave enough to stand up to a band of outlaws who are out to take over the town. Alik saw the movie in Fort Worth in 1956 on the enthusiastic urging of his brother, Robert, and they loved to sing the song together.1 He may also have seen it again while he was in the Marine Corps, and it is apparent that the theme of the movie and its title song, the conflict between love and duty, made a deep impression on him.
Alik’s favorite opera was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, based on a short story by Pushkin. He saw the movie of the opera countless times and played it on the phonograph again and again. One aria, in particular, he played as many as twenty times a night:
I love you. I love you beyond measure.
I cannot conceive of life without you.
I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake …2
Marina suspected that her husband associated the aria with some former lover, and she grew jealous. She must have shown it, for Alik began to play the record only when she was out and changed it quickly the moment he heard her footstep on the stair. Marina soon found a name to attach to her jealousy. They had received postcards from someone vacationing in the south, and Alik explained that they were from an Intourist interpreter who had helped him a great deal when he first arrived in the Soviet Union. A week or so later the front door opened, and in she walked. It was Rimma Shirokova.
Alik looked pleased but ill at ease as he made the introductions. Rimma, about twenty-seven, was blonde and tastefully dressed, and was plainly a person of education. Marina liked her right away.
Alik and Rimma began to talk in English until Rimma tactfully suggested that they speak Russian so Marina could understand. Marina noticed that the visitor addressed her husband as “Lee,” a name she had rarely heard him called before. Rimma laughed and joked a good deal as the two of them sipped coffee and talked over acquaintances they had in common in Moscow. She asked “Lee” if he was going to con
tinue his education. He told her, untruthfully, that he had applied for Friendship University but had not yet received a reply. “You must study,” Rimma said firmly, and he agreed. She stayed about an hour—she was catching a night train for Moscow—but before she left, Rimma said to Alik: “You have a good wife. Take care of her.”
“What a nice-looking girl!” Marina exclaimed, as soon as she had gone. “How on earth can you love me when you might have had someone like her!”
“I was in love with her,” Alik admitted. “I wanted to marry her. But she is older than I am. She thought I was just a little boy, and she wouldn’t have me.” He assured Marina that she was every bit as good for him as Rimma, and a good deal younger besides. In spite of his reassurance, Marina continued to feel inferior; Rimma was prettier and better educated than she was. “Rimma was too good for him—I wasn’t,” she thought.
Marina remembers more about the visit than her feelings of jealousy. Soon after Rimma arrived, Alik came into the kitchen and said to her in a low voice: “Don’t tell Rimma that we’re trying to go to America!” Rimma had gone out of her way to help him when he was trying desperately to stay in Russia two years before. He must have felt that he would cut a ridiculous figure if she learned that he was now trying, almost equally hard, to get out.
Marina also remembers that Alik was nervous throughout the visit. At the time she supposed that it was because of their former relationship. But years later, when she learned that it was Rimma who had discovered him that day in 1959 when he slashed his wrist in his hotel room in Moscow, she realized that Alik must have been afraid that Rimma would mention his suicide attempt.
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