by Don DeLillo
I think to myself, “How easy to die”
I would like to give my side of the story. I would like to give people in the United States something to think about. He knew where he was, could picture himself sitting on the tile floor, but felt a sense of distance from the scene.
and “A sweet death, (to violins)
Felt a sleepiness. A false calm. Something falsehearted. Felt like a child in the white tile world of cuts and Band-Aids and bathwater, a little dizzied by aromas and pungencies, fierce iodine biting in, Mr. Ekdahl’s bay rum. There is a world inside the world. I’ve done all I can. Let others make the choices now. Felt time close down. Felt something mocking in the air as he slipped off the edge of the only known surface we can speak of, as ordinary men, bleeding, in warm water.
Ministry of Health of the USSR
EPICRISIS
Oct. 21 The patient was brought by ambulance into the Admission Ward of the Botkin Hospital and further referred to Bldg. No. 26. Incised wound of the first third of the left forearm with the intention to commit suicide. The wound is of linear character with sharp edges. Primary surgical treatment with 4 stitches and aseptic bandages. The patient arrived from the USA on Oct. 16 as a tourist. He graduated from a technical high school in radio technology and radio electronics. He has no parents. He insists that he does not want to return to the USA.
They put him in with the nut cases. Terrible food, soft eyes peering. Rimma kept him company and then helped get him transferred to the land of the normally ill. She took an unlabeled jar out of her coat and told him to sip the liquid slowly. Vodka with cucumber bits. To your health, she said.
After his discharge she took him to the visa-and-registration department. He talked to four officials about becoming a citizen. They’d never heard of him. They didn’t know about his meetings with other officials. They told him it would be a while before they’d have an answer.
At his new hotel, the Metropole, he spent three days alone. This was the first of the silences Lee H. Oswald would enter during his two and a half years in the Soviet Union.
He walked the corridors past enormous paintings of Heroes of the Soviet. He took his key from the floor clerk, who wore her hair in braids. He smelled the varnish and tobacco.
In his room he sat in a fancy chair under a chandelier. He set his watch to the clock on the mantel. His watch, his ring, his money and his suitcase neatly packed had all been sent from the first hotel. Everything intact. Not a kopeck missing.
He sketched a rough street plan of Moscow in his notebook, Kremlin at the center.
His third day alone he ate only one meal. He stayed by the phone waiting for an official to call. He tried to read his Dostoevsky. He heard tourists go past his door talking about the sights, the beautiful subway stations, amazing bronze and marble sculpture. There was a statue at the end of the corridor. A nude, life-size. The language was hard. He thought he’d do better with his Dostoevsky.
Oct. 31. I catch a taxi, “American Embassy” I say.
The receptionist asked him to sign the tourist register. He told her he was here to dissolve his American citizenship. Oh. She led him into the consul’s office. He selected an armchair to the left side of the desk. He crossed his legs, matter-of-fact.
“I am a Marxist,” he began.
The consul adjusted his glasses.
“I know what you’re going to say to me. ‘Take some time to think it over.’ ‘Come back, we’ll talk some more.’ I’d like to say right now I’m ready to sign the legal papers giving up my citizenship.”
The consul said the papers would take time to prepare. He had a look on his face like, Who are you?
“There are certain classified things I learned as a radar operator in the military, which I am saying as a Soviet citizen I would make known to them.”
He believed he had the man’s attention. He saw the whole scene in some future version. Three days alone. This convinced him he had to reach the point where there was no turning back. Stalin’s name was Dzhugashvili. Kremlin means citadel.
I leave Embassy, elated at this showdown. I’m sure Russians will except me after this sign of my faith in them.
He stayed in his room, eating sparely, living on soup for a while, racked by dysentery, nearly two weeks alone, nearly broke, sitting in the plush chair, unshaven, in his button-down shirt and tie.
They moved him to another room, smaller, very plain, without a bath, and charged him only three dollars a day, as if they knew he could no longer afford the regular Intourist rate.
He wrote his name in Russian characters in his steno notebook.
Days of utter loneliness
The first snows fell. He spent eight hours a day studying Russian, serious time, using two self-teaching books. He took all meals in his room, owed money to the hotel, expected a visit from an assistant manager.
No one came.
He went to the visa-and-registration department. He told them about his visit to the U.S. embassy, his wish to become a citizen. They didn’t seem to know what to do with him.
Out on the street a small boy figured him for American, asked for a stick of gum. Subzero cold. Broad-backed women shoveling snow. He was struck for the first time by the immensity of the secret that swirled around him. He was in the midst of a vast secret. Another mind, an endless space of snow and cold.
Lenin and Stalin lay together in an orange glow at the bottom of a stone stairway. It was one of the few sights he’d seen.
He was down to twenty-eight dollars.
He wrote in Russian in his notebook. I have, he has, she has, you have, we have, they have.
Two men came to his room before seven the next morning. He stood barefoot in his flannel trousers and pajama tops, studying their moves. He didn’t think it was Grandfather Frost and his head elf. The room was theirs now. He wasn’t sure how they’d taken it over so fast but he knew he felt like an intruder, some kind of bungling tourist. It was his fault they had to get up so early.
They weren’t dressed like the officials he’d met. They weren’t Intourist people or collectors of overdue bills. One of them wore a black car-coat and dark glasses like a gangster on the Late Show. The other guy was older, in snow boots, going quietly bald.
It was this second man who gestured for Oswald to sit on the bed. He said his name was Kirilenko.
Oswald said, “Lee H. Oswald.”
The man nodded, smiling faintly. Then he sat in the chair, in his coat, facing Oswald, his right hand dangling between his knees.
Lee volunteered the following.
“My passport is with the U.S. embassy. I surrendered it to them as a sample of no longer wanting to be a citizen. As I told them flatly.”
The man nodded one more time, eyelids falling shut.
“Do you know what organization I represent?”
Oswald gave a half-smile.
“Committee for State Security. We believe you’ve been trying to contact us in your own way. Not fully knowing how perhaps. You understand we’re wary of all attempts to contact us. A nervous habit. With luck we’ll get over it someday.”
Kirilenko had light blue eyes, silvery stubble, the beginning of a sag to his lower jaw. He was stocky and wheezed a little. There was a slyness about him that Oswald took to be an aspect of friendliness. He seemed to be talking to himself half the time the way a middle-aged man might drift lightly through a dialogue with a child, to amuse himself as much as the boy or girl.
“Tell me. How do you feel?”
“Some diarrhea for a while.”
Nodding. “Are you happy to be here? Or it was all a mistake. You want to go home.”
“I feel fine now. Very happy. It’s all cleared up.”
“And you want to stay if this is what I understand.”
“To be a citizen of your country.”
“You have friends here.”
“No one.”
“There is your family in America.”
“Just a mother.”
“Do you love her?”
“I don’t wish to ever contact her again.”
“Sisters and brothers.”
“They don’t understand the reasons for my actions. Two brothers. ”
“A wife. You are married.”
“No marriages, no children.”
The man leaned still closer.
“Girlfriends. A young woman, you lie in bed and think of her.”
“I left nothing behind. I had no quarrels with anyone.”
“Tell me. Why did you cut your wrist?”
“Because of disappointment. They wouldn’t let me stay.”
Nodding. “Did you feel, in all seriousness, you were dying? I’m rather curious to know, personally.”
“I wanted to let someone else decide. It was out of my hands.”
Nodding, eyelids falling shut. “You have funds, or they will send funds from home?”
“I am down to almost nothing.”
“Good warm clothes. You have boots?”
“It’s a question of being allowed to stay. I’m ready to work. I have special training.”
Kirilenko seemed to let that pass.
“Where would you work? Who would give you work?”
“I was hoping the state. I am willing to do whatever necessary. Work and study. I would like to study.”
“Do you believe, I wonder, in God?”
“No. ”
Smiling. “Not even a little? For my personal information.”
“I consider it total superstition. People build their lives around this falsehood.”
“On your passport, why do I have the impression you crossed out the name of your hometown?”
“It’s completely behind me was the reason for doing that. Plus I didn’t want them contacting relatives. Which the press did anyway. But I didn’t take their phone calls or answer their telegrams.”
“Why did you tell your embassy you would reveal military secrets?”
“I wanted to make it so they had to accept my renouncing my citizenship.”
“Did they accept?”
“They said it’s a Saturday and they close early.”
“Your unlucky day.”
“They said, ‘Come back and we’ll do what we can.’ ”
“I think I’m enjoying this talk.”
“I didn’t give them the satisfaction of reappearing. I wrote them my position instead.”
“And these secrets, which you’ve carried all this way.”
“I was in Atsugi.”
Nodding.
“Which is a closed base in Japan.”
“We’ll talk further. I wonder, though, if these secrets become completely useless once you announce your intention to reveal them.”
This last remark was delivered directly to the other KGB man, who leaned against the window frame smoking. Kirilenko made it sound like a scholarly aside. He leaned close to Oswald once more.
“Tell me. The scar is healing well?”
“Yes.”
“You can stand the cold? The cold isn’t too ridiculous?”
“I’m getting used to it.”
“The food. You eat the food they serve here? Not so bad, is it?”
“It’s only the hospital food that wasn’t good. Like any hospital.”
He looked down to see if his pajamas were sticking out of his trousers. He was wearing his pajama bottoms under his suit pants because he’d hurried to answer the knock at the door.
“What about the Russian people? I’m personally curious to hear what you think of us.”
Lee cleared his throat to answer the question. The question made him happy. He’d anticipated being asked, sooner or later, and had an answer more or less prepared. Kirilenko waited patiently, appearing to enjoy himself, as if he knew exactly what Oswald was thinking.
Oswald was thinking, This is a man I can trust completely.
Factory smoke hung fixed in the distance, tall streamers absolutely still in the iced blue sky. He rode with Kirilenko in the rear seat of a black Volga. The city was stunned, dream-white. He tried to figure out the direction they were taking by keeping an eye out for landmarks but after he spotted the main tower of Moscow University nothing looked familiar or recallable. He saw himself telling the story of this ride to someone who resembled Robert Sproul, his high-school friend in New Orleans.
It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs.
The room was twelve by fifteen with an iron bed, an unpainted table and a chest of drawers in a curtained alcove. Down a dark hall was a washbasin and beyond that a toilet and small kitchen. Kirilenko said something to the other man, who left for a moment, returning with a squat chair, which he set by the table. They gave Oswald a questionnaire to fill out on his personal history, then another on his reasons for defecting, then another on his military service. He wrote all day, eagerly, going well beyond the scope of specific questions, scribbling in the margins and on the reverse side of every form. The chair was too low for the table and he wrote for extended periods standing up.
In the evening he had a short talk with Kirilenko. They talked about Hemingway. The older man was the one who sat on the bed this time, still in his bulky coat, remembering lines from Hemingway stories.
“Someday when I’m settled here and studying,” Oswald said, “I want to write short stories on contemporary American life. I saw a lot. I kept silent and observed. What I saw in the U.S. plus my Marxist reading is what brought me here. I always thought of this country as my own.”
“One day I would genuinely like to see Michigan. Purely because of Hemingway.”
“The Michigan woods.”
“When I read Hemingway I get hungry,” Kirilenko said. “He doesn’t have to write about food to make me hungry. It’s the style that does it. I have a huge appetite when I read this man.”
Oswald smiled at the idea.
“If he’s a genius of anything, he’s a genius of this. He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry. You’ve never been to Michigan?”
“I went where I was told,” Oswald said.
Kirilenko looked tired in the dim light. His boots were salt-stained. He stood up, pulling his muskrat cap out of his coat pocket and smacking it in the palm of the opposite hand.
“We have large subjects to cover,” he said. “So: I would like you to call me Alek. ”
In the morning they talked about Atsugi. Oswald described a four-hour watch in the radar bubble. Alek wanted details, names of officers and enlisted men, the configuration of the room. He wanted procedures, terminology. Oswald explained how things worked. He talked about security measures, types of height-finder equipment. Alek took notes, looked out the window when his subject had trouble recalling something or seemed unsure of his facts.
Two men joined them to talk about the U-2. The weather plane, one of them called it, deadpan. They brought a stenographer with them. They wanted names of U-2 pilots, a description of the takeoff and landing. Not friendly types. The stenographer was an old man with a rosette in his lapel.
When Oswald didn’t know the right answer he made one up or tried to vanish in excited syntax. Alek seemed to understand. They communicated outside the range of the other men, silently, without gestures or glances.
The name of a single pilot. The name of a mechanic or guard.
Deadpan fellows leaning toward him. He described times when the radar crew received requests for winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, ninety thousand feet. He described the voice from out there, dense, splintered, blown out, coming down to them like a sound separated into basic units, a lesson in physics or ghosts. They pressed him for facts, for names. Many more questions. Air speed, range, radar-jamming equipment. He hated to say he didn’t know.
Alek said they would resume in the morning. Lee wanted a sign from him. How is it going? Will they let me stay, give me solid duties, allow me to study economics and political theory?
“I have a click in my knee when I bend,” Kirilenko sai
d. “What do you think, old age?”
There is time for everything, he seemed to mean. Time to recall the smallest moment, time to revise your story, time to change your mind. We are here to help you clarify the themes of your life.
They spent many days on Oswald’s early experience in the military, many more days on the U-2 and Atsugi, dividing every compact topic into fractional details, then dividing these. They moved on finally to MACS-9, his radar unit in California.
Castro was exploding on the scene. Oswald had wanted to go to Cuba and train young recruits. He was a skilled technician and fighting man, sympathetic to Fidel.
He subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper and a socialist journal. He answered the guys in his quonset hut with da and nyet. It used to get them all worked up. They called him Oswaldovich.
He told Alek about the rumors he’d heard of a false defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. They inserted agents into the Eastern Bloc, a select number of men posing as victims of the American system, lonely and impressionable, eager to adopt another kind of life.
This was precisely at the time he was taking steps to defect. The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. He would tell them he was trying to make contact in his own way. They’d train him intensively. He’d be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha.
Alek sat across the table shaking salted nuts in his fist. He said something about getting a TV set brought in. Oswald was surprised to hear that broadcasting started at six in the evening. It was one of the strangest things he’d heard since crossing the ocean.
The guard showed up. He showed up every evening before Alek left. Alek never introduced him, didn’t seem to notice he was in the flat. The guard usually sat by the washbasin in the hall, his hat balanced on his knee.
