Indeed, Marina would have been very shocked had she known of the episode. Yet she suspected something. A few weeks after she was married, she noticed a small scar on Alik’s left wrist. She asked if he got it in a fight over a girl and was surprised when he at first refused to answer. She was more surprised still when he snapped: “Don’t ever ask me again.”
“Was it your first love?” Marina persisted.
Visibly upset, he replied, “I was young and foolish then.”
After that Marina noticed, out of a corner of her mind, that Alik kept the scar hidden. He wore a watch on his left wrist and once, when it broke, it was months before he would take it to be fixed. Later, when he broke it again, and again had to take it to be fixed, he covered his wrist with an identification bracelet even though he hated jewelry and knew that Marina, too, hated jewelry of any kind on a man.
Marina never asked him about the scar again. But when she learned that it was the result of a suicide attempt, her thoughts again fastened on Rimma. She believes that her husband attempted suicide not only to put pressure on the Soviet authorities to permit him to stay in Russia, but to impress Rimma. “I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake.”3
About September 20, very soon after Rimma’s visit, Marina was on her way to work on the bus one morning when she was overcome by gas fumes. She stepped off to buy a glass of carbonated water and crumpled to the street in a faint. A passerby rushed her to the Third Clinical Hospital, right above the pharmacy where she worked. When Alik returned to the apartment that evening, he found a message and rushed to the pharmacy. Marina crept down the back stairs of the hospital to see him.
“Did you lose the baby?” he asked, pale and upset. Marina assured him the baby was all right. He told her to do anything, have an abortion even, but be sure no harm came to her.
The doctors found Marina run down and deficient in vitamins and iron. Then they discovered that her blood type was Rh-negative and, fearing complications in the pregnancy, kept her in the hospital about five days. Later, at Alik’s suggestion, they tested his blood. Marina was with him during the test, and she had never in her life seen anyone so afraid of pain and the sight of blood. He nearly fainted twice and was very peevish and cross. “Can’t they dig up a better nurse than that?” he complained. When it was over, it turned out that his blood type was Rh-negative, too.4
Marina was overcome. Fate had, indeed, taken a hand in her life. Throughout her marriage she felt certain that no other husband could have given her a child; no one else would have had the same blood type. It meant that they had been truly destined for one another. Somehow, across an ocean, he had found her.
Marina felt the same way about the scars both of them had on their arms. Skin had been removed from her right arm during an eye operation in childhood. Alik had the scar on his left elbow from the accidental discharge of a pistol while he was in the Marine Corps in Japan, although he told Marina, falsely, that he had been wounded in action in Indonesia. The scars were the same size and looked identical. To Marina the similarity was another sign that she and Alik had been destined for each other by fate.
Marina’s illness was not serious, and she had a good time in the hospital. Nurses came from all over to have a look at the “marvel” who had married an American. She had visits from two or three old beaux, but since husbands were not permitted, she had to steal downstairs to the pharmacy at night to see Alik.
One evening just after she left the hospital, Alik came home in a special hurry. “President Kennedy is going to speak tonight,” he said. He closed the balcony doors to shut out noises from the street, or perhaps to keep the neighbors from hearing. A series of announcements came over the radio, the first in a Baltic tongue, then Russian, then Ukrainian. Next, they heard a voice in English.
“Is it him?” Marina asked.
“Not yet,” Alik answered impatiently.
At the beginning of the year 1961, the year the Oswalds met and married, the new young president of the United States had stood in icy sunshine half a world away and taken the oath of office. “Let every nation know,” he said, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Less than three months later, a band of Cuban exiles armed by the United States landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Khrushchev and Kennedy met somberly in Vienna. A summer of crisis followed. Khrushchev threatened to end Western access to Berlin. Kennedy called out reserves. A wall went up in Berlin. At the end of August, Russia announced that it was resuming atmospheric nuclear testing. Three H-bombs of unprecedented megatonnage were detonated in Central Asia. The cold war entered a dangerous new phase as Khrushchev tested the mettle of the new president.
Alik recognized Kennedy’s voice the second it came over the air. He had apparently heard Kennedy before while he was in Russia, as the result of scores of Kennedy speeches or excerpts broadcast by the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, another station to which he listened. This speech was being broadcast live and in its entirety by the Voice. It was Kennedy’s address of September 25, 1961, given at the United Nations General Assembly, announcing the end of the Berlin crisis.
Alik was rigid with attention as Kennedy spoke for about an hour. The voice was wavy and distorted, and now and then a word was lost by jamming. “Oh, chort” (“damn”), Alik swore each time it happened. Once, when Marina made a slight sound, he waved her in irritation into the kitchen. After that she sat motionless beside him.
The moment the speech ended, Alik bounded into the kitchen to make tea. What was it about? Marina asked. “About war and peace,” he told her and quoted a few of the president’s phrases.
“That’s funny,” said Marina. “Everybody wants peace here. They want peace there, too. So why do they talk about war?”
“Politics,” Alik grinned.
A day or so later, Alik defended the president’s speech in a discussion with Uncle Ilya. He thought the Soviet government was “sneaky,” since it had attacked the speech without publishing it or printing a fair account. Sipping tea in the kitchen with Aunt Valya, Marina heard her husband speak up stoutly for the United States. Uncle Ilya was equally staunch in his defense of the Soviet Union. But on one thing they both agreed—the Bay of Pigs. Alik roundly deplored American policy toward Cuba and Fidel Castro.
Marina did not know it, but her husband had long been enthusiastic about Castro. That autumn he took her to see a movie about the Cuban leader by the illustrious Soviet film director, Roman Carmen. Alik loved it, and he started calling Castro “a hero” and “a man of talent.” And at about this same time, he began to seek out the Cuban students in Minsk, three hundred or so strong, to learn what he could of Castro’s revolution.
The Cuban students were a lively lot who found Soviet Communism a drab disappointment. They loved singing, dancing, and playing the guitar, but no matter what amusement they thought up, the militia quickly forbade it. They were even discouraged from going out with Soviet girls, and they hated the cold weather. The Cubans were in dread that the Americans would invade their country and overthrow Castro, lest they be doomed to stay in Russia forever. Looking at the dreary, colorless city around them, they asked—was it for this we built a revolution?
Alik shared their disappointment in Russia, but he had believed in Communism for six years now, and it was hard to give up the dream that somewhere a perfect society was coming into being. Was it not sensible to suppose that the clumsy, stolid Russians, who had never done things right anyway, had merely fumbled the chance history had given them, and that in the hands of a livelier, more talented people like the Cubans, and with a heroic leader like Castro, Communism might yet yield its promise? And so, perhaps seeking a cushion against his disenchantment, Alik turned again to Castro, who might truly achieve an egalitarian society and whose Communism, Alik was certain, would be of a gaudier feather altogether than the drab thing Russia had cre
ated.
In October, three months after their visit to the American embassy, Marina and Alik still had no word from the Soviet authorities on their application for permission to leave Russia. It had to be assumed that such an application would be considered at a very high level, adding weeks, or even months, to the bureaucratic process. Alik sought to speed things up by putting pressure on the American embassy. He had written to the embassy at least once a month since his trip to Moscow, complaining of the difficulty he was having in obtaining Soviet exit visas and the harassment he and Marina were being subjected to. Now, in Marina’s recent illness, he saw another opportunity to enlist sympathy for his cause, and on October 4 he wrote Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson, asking him to make inquiries on his behalf at the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs in Minsk. He said that his wife was still under pressure to withdraw her visa application, and because of that she had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. Like many of Alik’s lies, there was a germ of truth in his claim. (Marina had been hospitalized, but not for nervous exhaustion.)5 He also inquired about the status of his passport renewal, and whether or not Marina’s application to enter the United States had been approved.
The embassy was not encouraging. Oswald’s passport renewal had been approved, but the embassy had been instructed to validate it only when his travel plans to return to the United States had been made, and when he reappeared in person at the embassy. Marina’s status with the American government was still pending, the embassy wrote; finally, Oswald was informed that the embassy had no way of influencing Soviet authorities to act upon applications for exit visas.
Marina was due for a three-week vacation in October. Alik, who had had his vacation, urged her to get away for a change of scene, and after a few days sitting at home, she decided to go to Kharkov, nearly five hundred miles to the southeast, to stay with her mother’s sister, Aunt Polina and her husband, Uncle Georgy (Jorya) Alexandrov. Another sister of her mother’s, Aunt Taisya, also lived in Kharkov, and Marina discovered, to her surprise, that none of her relatives there knew that she had married an American. They were even more shocked when she told them that she had applied for permission to go to America with her husband. Uncle Jorya hardly spoke a word to Marina after that. He stopped laughing and joking and abruptly ceased being the uncle she had known. For Georgy Alexandrov was head of the Kharkov Building Trust, one of the most important jobs in the city, and he, like her Uncle Ilya in Minsk, had every reason to suppose that Marina’s decision to go abroad could affect him disastrously.
Aunt Polina and Aunt Taisya begged Marina to change her mind. They told her horror stories about poverty and unemployment in the United States. “You’ll cry, and no one will hear you,” Aunt Polina said. Because of her, Uncle Jorya and Uncle Ilya might lose their jobs. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you in your condition,” Aunt Polina said, “but I can’t stand silently by while my niece in her inexperience makes such a mistake. Stay here. Let your husband go back by himself. We’ll all help you. You’re young—you can marry again.”
A few days of this, and Marina was sorry she had come. She went back to Minsk a day sooner than planned—and with new doubts about leaving Russia.
The anxious wait for word on their visas and her advancing pregnancy made her nervous and depressed. Night after night, in tears, she would seek reassurance from her husband, and in the mornings she would play Peer Gynt on the phonograph, sob a little, eat breakfast by herself, stare out the windows, and trudge off dully to work. Her mood was a match for the gray skies of autumn. But eventually the crying spells ceased. “Alik stopped paying attention,” Marina recalls, “so I stopped crying.”
Meanwhile, everyday life went on. Alik took Marina to a dance at the factory. His friends were eager to have a look at her, and he could not refuse any longer. But there was another motive. All evening long Alik twirled Marina purposefully on the dance floor, grinned at her as contentedly as a Cheshire cat and generally played the part of the blissfully married man. It was a performance for the benefit of Ella Germann, the girl who had turned him down. “Phi, how ugly and fat she’s gotten,” Alik said. “It’s lucky I married a thin girl.”
The subject of obesity was to come up constantly in their conversations. If Alik said of a woman, “Oh, she’s so thin,” it meant that he liked her. Walking down the street one day, he spotted a girl he knew slightly. She was flat-chested, bony, and tall. “She’d suit me fine” was his comment. “I could feel all her bones.” He once told Marina that he had slept with a girl named Nella. “She was a peasant girl from the country. But there was so much of her in all directions it made me sick. I felt as if I’d overeaten. I had a date with her, but I stood her up.” Marina, always self-conscious about her own thin body, came to realize that it was one of the reasons Alik had married her. Only later, after she had met Marguerite Oswald, did she conclude that Alik’s aversion to plump women had something to do with his feelings for his mother.
Marina and Alik continued to spend a good deal of time at Ilya and Valya’s. Ilya was hospitable, for he had long ago concluded that they would never be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. He spent long, patient hours playing chess with Alik. An experienced player, Ilya nearly always won, and Alik took his losses hard. Ilya would pat him encouragingly on the back and say that his game was getting better. But just as Alik was misleading Ilya by allowing him to suppose that he had abandoned his efforts to return to America, so he was misleading him about chess. He told Ilya that he was just learning to play. In truth, he had been playing since he was about thirteen years old.
Gruffly kind as Ilya was, it was Valya who made Alik a special favorite, and in ways that were telling to one who knew him, he returned her affection. He was obsessed by cleanliness, refusing, for example, to kiss any woman wearing lipstick or to eat food that had been touched by anyone else. For Valya, and Valya alone, Alik made an exception. He allowed her and no one else, not even Marina, to pick up tidbits in her fingers and pop them into his mouth. Once, before Marina’s unbelieving eyes, he went so far as to take a morsel from Valya’s plate and eat it.
Finicky as he was about food, Alik was more finicky still about smoke. He tried to get Marina, a chain-smoker, to stop, claiming that it was bad for the baby. He cut her down to three, then two, then one cigarette a day. But Marina was expert at evading him. She had cigarettes hidden all over the apartment, and she smoked on the sly, even in the bathtub. Alik had a poor sense of smell and rarely noticed.
And he was parsimonious, always saving for something. When they were first married, he was free with their money, buying records and furniture. Then, when he was thinking of returning to America but had not yet said anything to Marina, he put her off. “Later—we’ll see what we need.” Finally, after he had told her of his plans and convinced her to come with him, it was: “Why buy a whole lot now? We’ll only have to sell it when we go.” Marina turned over her salary to him. He doled out money for groceries and saved up the rest for their trip.
All through the fall, America was very much on Alik’s mind. He pored through copies of Time magazine that began to arrive in bundles from his mother in Texas, issues that were full of stories and pictures of the Kennedys, and of another public figure who was to become important in Alik’s life, Major General Edwin A. Walker. Still there was no word from the Soviet authorities, and Alik made visits to three Soviet government offices in Minsk to inquire about the progress of their visas: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Office of Visas and Registration (OVIR) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They could tell him nothing. He began to complain in letters to his brother Robert about the slothfulness of Russian bureaucrats, suggesting that his rights under international law were being violated, protesting the American embassy’s lack of interest in his case and stating his determination not to stay in the USSR a single moment beyond the first of the year (his Soviet residence permit was due to expire on January 4). His complaints were designed not so much
to impress Robert as the Soviet officials whom he presumed to be reading his mail. But there were signs of uncertainty and hints in his letters that Alik was aware that life would not be so easy when he got back home. On one occasion he wrote Robert: “Its not going to be to convient to come back to the States and try to start life over again.”6
Meanwhile, an event of great public magnitude had occurred, an event that Alik soon saw was to have a bearing on his life. While Marina was on vacation in Kharkov, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party opened in the Kremlin in Moscow, and a new wave of “de-Stalinization” got under way. Stalin’s body was removed from its marble mausoleum on Red Square, and Khrushchev began to move away from the alliance with China and toward better relations with the United States. As his friends Pavel and Ziger probably suggested to Alik, it was a hopeful omen as far as his and Marina’s visas were concerned.
A week or so after her return from Kharkov, Marina was trudging home from work one night through Stalin Square, a vast, cobblestoned area in the center of Minsk, when she noticed with mild surprise that a space the size of a city block had been roped off around the gigantic statue of the dead dictator that towered over the square. Later that night, houses trembled and shook to the heavy tread of tanks and trucks as they rolled through the city streets and took up position around the statue. By morning a high fence had gone up to conceal the tanks.
Of course there was talk at the pharmacy. “They’ll never get it down with chains and tanks,” one of Marina’s coworkers said. “It’s too big. They’ll have to use dynamite.”
The next night Marina was wakened out of a sound sleep by a series of loud explosions. She sat bolt upright in bed. “Do you hear?” she nudged Alik. “Is it war?”
Marina and Lee Page 21
