Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  Her first recollection of Lee Harvey Oswald is that on the day he came, men from her shop surrounded him in a circle and started asking questions. “You have cows in America? You have pigs in America?” He couldn’t understand their words, so they showed him with sign language, made animal sounds, and he laughed.

  What she remembers is that Lee Oswald was a very narrow-boned person with a strong neck, a foreigner, so nobody had any type of emotions against him—just a foreigner, he was treated that way.

  Stanislav Shushkevich had seen some Americans before, but this type seemed already shaped in a Soviet way. He was wearing a Russian soldier’s fur hat and it was so tidy, such a typical gray fur, and he was wearing it so comfortably.

  It was sometime in February of 1960 and Shushkevich had recently finished post-graduate work at his University, and high officials at Horizon assumed that he knew English well, although actually he found it easier to deal with written material than to converse. So, two days after Oswald first came to Horizon, Comrade Libezin, the Communist Party Secretary at the plant, a big man, both by virtue of his personal size and the importance of his position, came up to say that Shushkevich was being given a Party errand: Teach this man our Russian language. Up to now, any meetings Shushkevich had had with Americans were at scientific conventions and symposia. This would be the first time he would have a direct relation. So, it was something of an entertainment for him, and he remembers many details. Shushkevich was not a member of the Party, but even so, he had been trained and educated to understand that Americans always represented a small but concrete danger: You could give away certain types of important information without any such intention. On the other hand, he had been assigned officially by a Party directive to teach this man Russian, so he could be in contact with an American without producing any problems for his private life. Stanislav was excited.

  What reduced potential problems even more was that he was instructed to work with another Russian, who also spoke English. The Party obviously didn’t want Shushkevich and Oswald to be alone. After all, Shushkevich was a senior engineer who had developed a certain number of new devices and only happened to be working at Horizon in order to fulfill requirements for his thesis. You had to have practical experience in an industrial enterprise before you could get a doctorate.

  In any event, lessons took place in a second-floor room after work, and Oswald would come to visit him from another building in their factory compound. Shushkevich’s first instructions from Libezin had been, “Don’t discuss anything about his life before he came here.” As a result, they never entered into personal conversation. Shushkevich just worked on verbs, and occasionally tried to teach this American colloquial Russian.

  Oswald seemed not at all tense or unfriendly. He was not suspicious, but reserved, and never expressed gratitude for his lessons. Which hardly mattered. Shushkevich didn’t like him. Having been brought up with old beliefs, he thought no person could be worse than a traitor. A man untrue to one side would always betray the other. It was an official assignment, however, and he took care not to let Oswald read his private opinion.

  In any case, nothing Oswald did was about to change Shushkevich’s view. The American seemed to show no imagination, no emotion, no smile. Their lessons proceeded without great enthusiasm, and Oswald found Russian difficult.

  He did get to a point where he could achieve understanding if Shushkevich spoke slowly, used gestures, wrote words on pieces of paper, and sometimes brought out a dictionary. Actually, he wished to have more of a conversation with him in English, but their relation had to remain one-sided. It never occurred to Shushkevich to worry whether Oswald might learn technical secrets from him. He would apologize, but he did consider himself smart, and he did not believe Oswald could get information from him.

  Never for a moment did any personal feeling develop. Oswald was always very clean and very neat, and while most people would be embarrassed to wear a soldier’s fur hat, Oswald knew how to put it on his head. Maybe he shaped it in some fashion, but it did make him look like a gentleman.

  Finally, Shushkevich was annoyed by the fellow. Oswald was being given a good salary, but he didn’t seem to work as hard as other people who received less money, and Shushkevich remembers turning to one of his assistants and saying, “Listen, we’ve a lot to do today and need to speed up. Why not give this stuff to our American and let him help?” but his assistant replied, “No sense. It will not be well done.”

  That is about all he can recollect, says Stanislav Shushkevich, now Chairman of the Supreme Soviet in the Republic of Belarus, formerly called Byelorussia.

  Stellina did start to teach him a little Russian, for which he did not pay her a single kopeck. She would instruct him while she took her daughter for walks in her stroller out by Minsk’s big athletic stadium, a couple of kilometers away. He liked children and enjoyed playing with her child, but he was a very complex person, very impressionable. To the point of tears sometimes; other times wholly closed, without emotion. Yet, he would call her Ma, even if she was only seven or eight years older than him.

  When he first started work, he used to come back from the factory too tired to do anything, just destroyed. He wouldn’t even go upstairs to his room, just come into her office, flop into her one armchair, and say, “Ma, I’ve gotten so tired I don’t even have the strength to go and take my key and open my door.”

  She would tell him, “Well, you came to this society to build socialism, so you don’t have to feel tired; you should feel proud.”

  He’d say, “First I need some food and rest and then maybe I can build socialism.” And he showed his shoes, which were poor and worn out. He said, “Listen, it’s cold outside. My shoes, they’re cold too.” Another girl from Intourist happened to be there, and he said, “You want me to give you a gift? These shoes are my gift so you will know what kind of worn-out shoes Americans wear,” but the girl said, “We don’t need gifts like that. We’ve been wearing worn-out clothes all our lives. It’s nothing new for us.”

  5

  Echoes from a Ghetto

  Max Prokhorchik’s parents were buried alive in the Jewish ghetto of Minsk during World War II when Max was four, and so he was raised by an uncle who was a Russian, not a Jew, who became Max’s uncle by marrying Max’s mother’s sister. Max himself never heard much about the ghetto in which he was born; it was not something he wanted to know; it still hurts. When his relatives tried to tell him, he would say, “I don’t want to hear.” Still, everybody in Minsk knew. What is left of that ghetto is one short crooked street that slopes down a hill. It still has old wooden buildings, and at the bottom is a very small park, perhaps twenty by thirty feet in area, with a sizable hollow at the center that was left when all the bodies buried in this place were removed.

  In 1941 a hundred Jews, maybe more, were machine-gunned and then interred there. People could see the earth still moving even as dirt was being shoveled on top, a phenomenon caused by victims struggling beneath. But, slowly, such life diminished. The earth lay there with no movement.

  Max was rescued from the ghetto by this Russian uncle, who had become a partisan, but then he was killed soon after by the Germans. His widow, Max’s mother’s sister, had still another sister also killed by Germans, and subsequently her husband, who was also Russian and not Jewish, stole into Minsk to marry Max’s aunt. In that manner, this family stayed together. By winter of 1942, however, they had to leave Minsk and fled into an outlying forest, where they stayed until 1944, coming back only in the last few days that the Germans were still there. Max’s people had not been informed correctly. They thought that Soviet troops had already returned and Minsk was free. Instead, they came in exactly before the siege was lifted. A dangerous time. Germans were bombing what was left of the city, and so were the Soviets. As Max’s family came in by foot, bombs were falling.

  It was late in June. They found the sister of Max’s real father and she now looked like a bandit chief, a very tough woman w
ho had obtained false Russian documents to protect herself from revealing a Jewish identity, and after they all embraced, Max and his family were so tired this first night that they slept on bare ground, never moving while bombs fell on all the ruins around them.

  After two days of bombing, three Soviet tanks came into Minsk at nine in the morning, and it suddenly became very quiet. A horrible quiet. Everyone expected something terrible. They thought at first it was German tanks. Suddenly, boys began to shout. But the Soviet soldiers remained inside. They were very careful. The gun on their lead tank was still moving slowly from side to side as these vehicles moved on. Then, everybody saw trucks and columns of tanks following. Soldiers in these tanks threw bread to children whenever they encountered a group waving at them.

  There was not a great deal of noise, however, when Minsk was liberated. The real front was already far to the west of Minsk, which had been under siege for weeks before it surrendered.

  Max felt nothing on seeing German prisoners. Of all that period when they were rebuilding Minsk with these Germans, he remembers little. What he does recall is that he was hungry. In those days, there was never enough. It was not until later, early in the Fifties, that there was finally enough food for all. He was seventeen, and he went to work in a factory producing purses and suits, and there he stayed until he was taken into the Red Army.

  Recruited in 1956, he served for three and a half years as a foot soldier in Mongolia. When he got out, he started to work at Horizon. He had had some vocational experience in the service, so his job in the experimental shop was not unfamiliar.

  Two days after he went to work, he encountered Lee Oswald. Max recalls this date as late in January, when he knew nobody. He had been given a workplace and instruments and he knew what to do, so he calibrated everything on his punch-press, and chose proper diameters. At lunchtime he felt free to go out and have a smoke. It was accepted practice among workers that if somebody left his bench, you had to wait until he came back and gave approval before you could start working with his machine. But when Max returned, all his settings had been changed and the special piece he had been working on was dismounted. It was Max’s first job, and he wanted to show his foreman that he was skilled. A man who worked near this machine pointed Oswald out: “He’s the one.” And Oswald was standing with his back to Max. So Max touched his shoulder and said, “What are you doing?” This fellow started to speak some un-Russian language, and Max was shocked and surprised. He couldn’t understand what was going on. Then this fellow turned and tried to move Max away—not a push, just to move him, but his expression was angry. Maybe it was a bad day for him, also. He made this gesture as if to say, “Move aside,” and that made Max even angrier. He took this guy by his lapels, which is, as they say, “taking him by his breasts,” and pushed him into a column. Then everybody surrounded them and pulled them apart and Horizon’s Party Secretary, Libezin, came over screaming and took Max upstairs to see his shop manager. Libezin explained that this fellow he took by the breasts had come from America.

  Then they brought Oswald up, introduced him, and said that Max should apologize. They were polite about it, but they said, “He’s a new person here; he doesn’t know our rules, so apologize. You started it.” Max didn’t want to.

  Meanwhile, this fellow just sat there as if he didn’t care, didn’t understand. Max said, “I will apologize, but I won’t shake hands. It will take time to do that.” Max was very angry. They told him, “You are equal. He’s American, you’re Russian, you’re both workers.” But Max said, “He did something wrong to me and he should pay for it.” Perhaps if Oswald had spoken Russian, they could have talked about it. But here they were steering Max into a strange situation. So he compromised by standing up, putting his hand on his chest, and bowing his head, not his body—he bowed his head. Because Oswald didn’t understand this language, he thought Max had apologized, and he remained silent, and then he left with Libezin. That was all Max had to do with Oswald for quite a while.

  Stellina knew she was not supposed to have that much private contact with foreigners. So she asked another interpreter, Tanya, to go out with him. Tanya did speak English, and Stellina suggested that Alyosha invite Tanya to a film.

  However, it proved complicated. While Tanya was happy-go-lucky and nice, though not particularly well educated—certainly not a girl from the intelligentsia, who might look down her nose at Oswald; in fact she lived with her mother, who was a janitor—still, you could not say that their first meetings ran smooth. Alyosha invited Tanya to see a movie, but there were two theatres in the same large courtyard, and he had gone to one and she was waiting near another. Next day, he came to Stellina and said, “Ma, what kind of girls are you introducing to me? She deceived me; she didn’t come.” In her turn, Tanya said, “He didn’t show up.” Next day, they agreed to meet at the Summer Theatre, but this time it turned out that Minsk had two such cinemas, identically named, but at opposite ends of town. So it happened again. He was boiling. “Ma, is she mocking me?”

  That was all finally worked out, and they started going around together. A couple of weeks later, he came to Stellina and said, “What kind of woman did you give me? I tried to kiss her, and she said, ‘No kissing. First, we’ll get married, then kiss.’”

  FROM KGB OBSERVATION

  PERFORMED FROM 07:00 TO 23:00 ON JANUARY 30, 1960

  At 7:30 Lee Harvey left hotel, went to Volodarskogo stop, got on trolley bus, route N1, and without talking to anybody went to Pobedy Square, got off and went down Zakharova and Krasnaya Street to his work. He was at work by 7:45.

  At 14:05 Lee Harvey left Horizon factory and walked fast to Pobedy Square, got on coming trolley bus N2, bought ticket and without talking to anybody went to Volodarskogo, got off trolley bus and was at Hotel Minsk by 14:20 . . .

  At 17:55 Lee Harvey went down to lobby, went to hairdresser, had his hair cut, and went back to his room.

  He did not leave his room until 23:00. Observation stopped at this point until next morning.

  Stellina remembers that before too many weeks had gone by, Aloysha seemed to have found an English-speaking friend, a medical student named Titovets, who certainly spoke English very well, and this fellow would come over to the hotel often, and they would go out together. So Alyosha began to be a little more at ease. It wasn’t like the first few days, when he was, as they say, “not on his own plate.” Then, a week or two later, Stellina saw Alyosha once with another friend, a nice-looking blond-haired fellow named Pavel Golovachev. In Minsk, a number of people, including Stellina, had heard about Pavel Golovachev because his father was a famous Air Force General. Now, he and Alyosha were friends.

  Of course, there was great interest in Alyosha as an American, a real American, and unmarried. Young women even came to the hotel and said, How do we get to meet this guy?

  6

  Twice a Hero

  The work of Stepan Vasilyevich on Oswald was always studied critically by Igor. A developer could fail to see something in time, so Igor could not be satisfied only with what Stepan reported, but looked to give specific directions.

  Igor did want to point out that he had a large number of other matters to oversee, and so it is important to understand that while he kept watch on each project, each developer had to live in his case, accumulate every fact, make evaluations, and then come up with proposals for action that would develop his viewpoint. Stepan, therefore, was leading the case.

  “Now, of course, mistakes were made,” Igor said. “Sometimes our actions were not commenced in time, and some of Oswald’s actions were not prevented; nothing, obviously, can be perfect.”

  One early instance—and it still stands out in Igor’s memory—is that Stepan did not take steps to screen Oswald away from one eighteen-year-old at the radio factory who happened to be the only son of an Air Force General who was also a twice-decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, a very high award. But his son, Pavel, was considered to be of “dissident nature” and was dealing
in petty activities on the black market. So they were afraid of what a qualified agent could do with young Golovachev—maybe even recruit him over to Western thinking.

  Libezin, the big man in charge of proper ideological environment, came walking down Pavel’s aisle and said, “Anyone here speak a little English?” Pavel happened to be the one who did. He was not asking for it, he could have said that he did not know English, but he nodded. Libezin took him to meet Oswald at his worktable, and there they were, shaking hands.

  Pavel had studied English from fifth to tenth grade and, of course, it wasn’t much. His first reaction to Oswald was that he looked like an extraterrestrial who had all of a sudden ended up in their factory. “Well,” said Pavel to himself, “if it is not Lucifer, it is a man. That will be proved by time, but there is nothing repellent about him.”

  Besides, in that period, Khrushchev had started a campaign for peace and friendship. Society was opening up. You had to keep in mind the specifics of that time. So, there was Pavel, on the second day after this introduction, standing with a pocket dictionary and Lee Oswald next to him with another dictionary. Of course, not knowing that their association would be important someday, Pavel did not keep notes. But then, for many years after, he wanted to forget all of it, the whole goddamn thing, you understand? He really did not keep it in his memory. Now, he doesn’t remember too much, and he doesn’t want to make up stories. He could spin a tale about how he and Lee Oswald went to pick up girls, but that was not the case.

  It was more like he took Oswald around the shop and helped him communicate with other workers when a job had to be explained. At first, however, this American’s vocabulary was minimal. Pavel had to explain a word like “falling” by taking a box of matches and dropping it from his hand. That way, he taught Lee a song, “Falling Leaves.”