Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  He wouldn’t say his group had the highest morals. But he and Marina were great friends and they didn’t gossip about each other; they were higher than gossiping about each other. Real friends, very funny, nice company. Yet, because of that difficult relationship with her stepfather in Leningrad, he thought she was a most unhappy person.

  5

  Leonid

  Leonid Gelfant was only sixteen when he finished high school and began to work on architectural jobs in Minsk. In fact, he has by now been thirty-three years in his profession, and his work is everywhere—but always as a part of his Minsk group.

  At sixteen, he was not open at all, but closed, very shy. Still, he was goal-oriented and knew what his profession would be. Never interested in sports or tourism, he was brought up in a conservative family of doctors, and did like literature and opera. While his family was not religious and followed no Jewish traditions except for those holidays represented by certain kinds of food, his father had graduated from Hebrew school and could speak a bit of Hebrew and Yiddish. Yet, at this period of time, educated people were not brought up to acquire religion. His family did congratulate him for his thirteenth birthday, but no bar mitzvah took place.

  He was friends with Misha Smolsky, who was always sparkling with energy. And during a New Year’s party in 1960, he met Marina at Misha Smolsky’s family’s dacha. He was twenty-three years old and not thinking of marriage. He didn’t even date a lot of girls; he was still shy. Of this party, he only remembers a few details.

  He sees a room with a stove. It’s cold outdoors, but inside is cozy because there’s a fire in that stove. Next, he remembers seeing this same stove, but now a girl has arrived. It is Marina, a slender girl with large, luminous eyes, standing near that stove. It is all he remembers. Perhaps there were fifteen people at this party.

  Marina had a way of looking at you. It was simple, yet it attracted. Something in her was unprotected. It gave a special charm. She had trembling lips and, for that matter, her nose was a little blue because she was always cold—she was one person who always felt cold—and a specific odor came off her, which she found embarrassing. When a person does pharmacy work, one’s clothes and hair keep some whiff of medicine clinging to them, and she hated that. But Gelfant, personally, did not mind. Somehow, that seemed something good about her. It attracted him. Perhaps he was also drawn to her because she didn’t have her own home, or a father or mother.

  Gelfant, in comparison, had a close family. His father had been completely devoted to his home life and children, an attractive man, very charming, full of tact. In turn, Gelfant considers himself also a devoted man, who would like to live, perhaps, like his father. So, Marina and he were in different environmental and emotional situations, and had different goals. When they met, it was an agreeable surprise, but it was never something he saw as his future. Call it a New Year’s adventure. On New Year’s Eve, you always expect a miracle. Since she produced on him an impression of a person who needs protection, she inspired his desire to help her, to be tender with her.

  Their relationship—which he never calls an affair—went on about six months, but it was not continuous. There were times when they wouldn’t see each other for a couple of months. Perhaps on five occasions they had an intimacy—not more than that. And, indeed, he would not have wanted anything to develop with greater speed. It was a modest relationship, then.

  6

  Inessa

  At the beginning of 1959, Inessa was already working. She had finished Construction Technical Secondary School, and lived with her parents and her brother and sister. Her father was an engineer at the Ministry of Construction, Byelorussia, and her mother stayed mostly at home, a housewife, but Inessa would say that her family had a cultural circle of friends and certainly did live at a high intellectual level.

  She doesn’t recall how she first met Marina, but it may have been in a cafeteria, probably in 1960. She remembers, however, her first impression: very bright lips with no makeup—just naturally bright lips; so Inessa found her attractive. A person can’t become a friend in so short a period as two years, since it usually takes much longer to share all your difficulties, but nonetheless, Inessa felt close. Marina was like a sister to her. They visited at each other’s homes; they went shopping together; and sometimes Marina would be invited to dinner, or to her parents’ gatherings, which had become one of the traditions of Inessa’s family in those days, for on such evenings art was always being discussed, and politics as well, and Marina would do her best to try to fit in. The very fact that Marina felt out of place only made Inessa feel closer to her, and out of such closeness, Marina began to tell Inessa some of what could be called “the dark secrets in her life.” Marina did tell certain things that Inessa wasn’t going to talk about now. However, she could say that it was “like a cry of the soul. A very bad negative experience.”

  Because of such a sharing of intimate secrets, Inessa could say that Marina remained special to her.

  7

  Kostya

  A neat, spare man with a boxer’s broken nose, he is in excellent shape and looks as much like a coach as a doctor, but there he is in his office at a clinic, cautiously ready, Dr. Konstantin Bondarin, and our interviewers are present because a New Year’s Eve party welcoming 1961 (on the same evening that Lee Oswald was at Ella’s home) took place at the apartment where Bondarin lived, at the age of seventeen, with his grandmother. Sasha Piskalev was also present at this party, and with him came Marina. At the time, Kostya’s grandmother was in a hospital and so an opportunity had presented itself to celebrate New Year’s with an intimate group. There were eight of them present—Sasha, Marina, Anatoly Shpanko, a girl for Shpanko, a girl for Konstantin himself, and one other couple whose names he no longer remembers, but they were friends of Anatoly Shpanko, a fellow medical student. For music, they played tapes, mostly Elvis Presley, and earlier in the evening, a lot of dancing and drinking went on, until about 2:00 A.M., when Kostya and Marina disappeared into a bedroom. Before they could get very far with any project, Sasha started knocking on the door. Konstantin even had to step out and calm him down. He was tough enough for that—he liked to box—but then, there was no question of getting into a fight. Sasha was not such a type. Still, given that interruption, Marina was no longer in any kind of mood. They made a date, therefore, to have another meeting tomorrow, New Year’s Day, at a bridge near the railroad station.

  Since Sasha stayed over and awakened with a hangover, he and Konstantin talked next morning about Marina. She was a beautiful woman, Sasha said, and he was devoted to her, but Kostya could see that Sasha had an uneasy feeling about last night and was hurt that Kostya had been alone with her. Sasha even tried to ask what had happened, but Kostya said, “Nothing. You drank too much, and imagined a lot of things.”

  That evening, carrying a bottle of champagne, he met Marina at the bridge, and took her to a friend’s apartment. He could not use his own place because Anatoly Shpanko, who shared a room with him, was still there with his guests, so Konstantin used his friend’s abode. All this friend had to know was that he needed three hours.

  In general, it was clear that Marina had prepared for their meeting. It even started off with light kisses and tenderness when he met her at seven that night by the station. At his friend’s apartment, they played music and drank champagne. He had known while dancing with her last night that there was nothing in his way. And he was ready, although, of course, there was no question of going directly from door to bed. In Russia, women didn’t do that. They needed psychological preparation. So, there was the sort of conversation where you talk about a lot of things at once—easy talk. Now, it’s difficult for him to remember anything concrete, but it was flirty on his part. He would praise her, and compare her with agreeable examples. As far as he remembers, he didn’t try to talk about her private life. They did touch on Sasha, and she said that she didn’t feel much for him; but all the same, she really wouldn’t want him to know about these r
elations. He could see that she was still interested in Sasha to a certain extent. As a candidate for marriage, anyway. That manifested itself afterward, when she started going out with Anatoly Shpanko, then maybe with Yuri Merezhinsky. At that point, it seems to Kostya, she was striving to get married.

  It never occurred to Kostya that there was for himself a possibility of falling in love with Marina. Not by tomorrow, certainly. Falling in love could only occur as the result of a long-term relationship. And then there was another fact: She was Sasha’s girlfriend. So, he didn’t really know how long he was going to see her.

  He did, however, spend a long time seducing her on this evening. Maybe so long as an hour and twenty minutes, or even more. They knew how it was supposed to turn out, so they didn’t hurry; he paid no attention to time. He was certain it would end positively.

  Kostya was only seventeen, and somewhat scared. He could sense that she was a woman with experience, so he didn’t know whether she would like him, and therefore, to a certain extent, he felt a little afraid. Now, thirty years later, he could laugh. “When you have a very young man who is overexcited and a bit uneasy, he’s like a rabbit. That could certainly cause a woman to react negatively.” She did try to calm him down, to make it clear that everything would be okay so that he wouldn’t be so nervous, and maybe that is why their prelude lasted so long. He had wanted to sleep with her right away, but his own lack of self-confidence held him back. Champagne helped, however, to dull his fear, and in general, he was still certain everything would turn out fine. Finally, they dimmed all lights. She waited for him to take her clothes off, and that happened rather fast. Right away, they were scattered all over. And his clothes came off quickly, too.

  Why did a man have sex with a lot of different women if it wasn’t to bring new experience into his life? So, in this sense, since Konstantin had very little experience, Marina gave him a lot to recall. It was from the extravagance of her behavior and her expression in bed. They had sex a second time, and he needed no help for that. She didn’t do oral sex, but she really liked to be kissed, and when you kiss a young woman whose skin is soft, really very soft, you get excited. And by kissing her body, by just kissing her everywhere, you could bring her to a state of ecstasy. That’s how sexually exuberant she was—or so he thought. He had been to bed with a few women before, but this was his first exciting time, his first real one, the first time with a young woman. Usually, it had been with women much older than himself. He was amazed because of her apparent excitement when he started to kiss her all over.

  Still, she seemed to understand that when it came to these matters, he was still a youth. She wasn’t entirely happy with him. Despite all her exuberance while they were doing it, it seemed to him (and it certainly turned out that way) that he didn’t satisfy her all that much. She was further away from him when they parted than when they began.

  At that time, he didn’t have even an idea that women could have orgasms. She wasn’t shy, and she dressed herself in front of him, and now he would certainly have been happy to continue their relationship, but when he went up to her and tried to caress her, she said, “No, no, no—don’t take it too fast.” And he understood that something didn’t sit well with her, that it would not go any further. This haste with which she got ready to go home put him on his guard, and she only allowed him to see her as far as the bridge where they had met on this early New Year’s night.

  8

  Yuri Merezhinsky

  “My story will be very boring,” Yuri says, “not interesting.”

  He is a handsome man of about fifty and may once have been as good-looking as a movie star. But now, he is ravaged by illness and his shoulders are hunched. To meet his interviewers, he has come from a hospital several hundred kilometers away, and has been drinking all day; at night, he is still drinking with the harsh pride of a Russian who measures his prowess by the slugs of vodka he can continue to mix with powerful emotions.

  Speaking Russian combined with English, he proceeds to his narration, proud, aggressive, contemptuous of any specific reality he has to relate.

  “My story will be very boring, not interesting. My parents and I lived in a building called House of Scientists near Minsk railway station, and I can tell you this should be called ‘Story of Children Who Come from Cream of Society.’ My father was a great scientist; he became part of our Soviet scientific history. My mother, the same—Honorable Scientist of Byelorussian Republic. Immediately after Gagarin was launched into space on Sputnik, my mother was interviewed, my father was interviewed, I was interviewed.

  “I will tell you long story about myself. When I was small, I played football in an apartment. It was apartment of First Secretary of Communist Party of Byelorussia, and football was possible because their rooms were so big. My mother was part of governmental delegation to United Nations, together with Khrushchev.

  “As for me, I liked Elvis Presley. Not important,” said Yuri, “whether rock or jazz. Important was that something came to us from Western countries.” Personally, he liked Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong—but Elvis Presley even more. Most of what they heard was tape-recorded, although he and his friends listened to radio, too—BBC, Voice of America. He was very much interested in clothes then, was always well dressed.

  “During that time, I was a student at our Medical Institute and there was a custom for prominent people to give a lecture after a visit to another country. So, my mother prepared one for our Trade Union Palace, and everything was demonstrated with slides. It was a large hall, maybe five hundred people, and someone came up to me then—Lee Oswald. Just introduced himself as Alik Oswald. Said he had come from America, and he started to speak English. At that time my English was good.”

  After Yuri’s mother’s lecture, they went upstairs to a ballroom, where a dance had started, and Alik got interested in Marina. “She was a very attractive, impressive person, effective. She—how you say?—attracted people. She looked right; she was not gray. She looked—the word we use is effektnaya—a powerful effect upon people. This evening she had to look like very best, like she never looked before. I knew her before. I knew her after. But she never looked so attractive as this evening. It was like from God—it was high, very high.”

  INTERVIEWER: Was she wearing lipstick?

  YURI MEREZHINSKY: She painted her lips all of the time.

  INT: All the time?

  YM: Yes.

  INT: That’s interesting, because the word we get is that she never used lipstick.

  YM: She was very attractive. Effective.

  INT: How long had you known her then?

  YM: It doesn’t matter—one day, two days, a year—I knew her long enough to know who was who. She was a woman, not a girl. Not a young woman. She was older. We were tired of her in sex.

  INT: Tired of her in sex? We? Let’s be precise here.

  YM: I don’t know about other people. I can talk only about myself. I never went with her to bed. But I could sleep with her even on a staircase.

  INT: You say you had her any way you wanted?

  YM: Yes, sure.

  INT: Your friends had her?

  YM: Sure.

  INT: For certain?

  YM: Sure.

  INT: I ask because, in her biography, she told the writer, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, that she was a virgin when she was married.

  YM: I already told you Marina was not very precise in her biography.

  INT: I wanted to be sure.

  YM: She was sent out from Leningrad in twenty-four hours for prostitution with a foreigner, and she came to Minsk.

  INT: For prostitution? Literally?

  YM: With a foreigner. Then she came to Minsk. Because she had an uncle here. She was lucky.

  INT: She was in such a jam?

  YM: We call it 101 Kilometers—which means being sent very far away. From Leningrad.

  INT: This is a matter we would like to clear up.

  YM: System now is different.

  I
NT: Who told you she was a prostitute in Leningrad?

  YM: You ask a question which I consider very intimate.

  INT: Let me ask it in a different way.

  YM: No, it was right question to ask. She came here with four other people who were sent out of Leningrad together. She was in group. Two young men, two women. And her uncle worked for Ministry of Internal Affairs, MVD, that’s why she was privileged to come to Minsk and not 101 Kilometers. What it means, 101 Kilometers, you have to cut trees in forest.

  INT: A labor camp?

  YM: Job for prostitutes and people who don’t work. You were sent out of big cities to work, hard labor. At that time, anybody could be accused of any type of prostitution. She was seen regularly in Hotel Leningrad, and they told her to leave immediately because of foreigners. She was seen with foreigners and was asked to leave.

  One of her friends was in Minsk too. A man taller than me, bigger than me. He had a nickname, Gon-don-chick, from the condom, wide condom. He bought condoms cheap—four kopecks for one—and he bought brushes with which you clean your clothes. Then he made four holes in each condom and he took hair from his brushes and put this hair into holes in each condom, and then he put another condom over this one with hair. And he sold it to prostitutes, and many people bought it. For big money. That’s why they called him Condom-chick, because he made women happy, yes. At that time, you even had condoms with mustaches. So, that was his nickname. Condom-chick, Gon-don-chick. A large profit, of course. He was very popular with women.

  Now, said Yuri, there was a problem—he and his group, he would say, were fed up with Marina. They didn’t know how to get rid of her. She was good at sex, but when a woman is always with her legs spread, sometimes you resent it. She never worried about anything like reputation.