Libra (28 page)

“I would say a hardworking, sincere, honest fellow has found himself in a position where he is being crushed by the pressure exerted from opposite directions. That makes him typical, I guess.”

He spoke these words in Russian and saw that Alek was impressed.

He talked to his friends about Cuba, surprised to find they weren’t passionate on the subject. Cuba was a situation he could easily get heated about and it was steady news in the English-language Worker, on local radio and the BBC. Mikoyan signs a trade pact with Che Guevara. Russia sends heavy arms. Ike breaks diplomatic relations.

Chocolate was expensive. These people had a vicious sweet tooth. Always a crowd at the local confectionery. Life was small things. Chocolate, a record player, a meal at the automat.

His friends had trouble with his name. They didn’t feel comfortable saying Lee. It sounded Chinese or just didn’t fit right on the tongue.

He told them to call him Alek.

 

 

Postcard #4. Washington, D.C. It is January 21, 1961, the day after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, and Marguerite Oswald is in Union Station looking for a telephone. She has just traveled three days and two nights on a train from Fort Worth, borrowing on an insurance policy to pay for the ticket, wiping out her bank account to buy a pair of shoes, traveling all this way
sitting up
—
not enough cash for a roomette in the sleeping car. This is an angry, tired and frustrated woman. Letters to her congressman unanswered. Phone calls to the local office of the FBI unreturned. Telegrams to the State Department. Letters and calls to the International Rescue Committee. The State Department talks to the International Rescue Committee but nobody wants to talk to her. Is it really so strange that she uses the word conspiracy? She is only trying to analyze a whole condensed program of things that are not correct.

The White House switchboard tells her the President is in conference.

She throws another coin down the slot.

The State Department switchboard says Secretary Rusk is not available right now but anything they could do for her, etc. etc. The operator is a Negro woman and Marguerite used to live in a mixed neighborhood of Negroes and whites on Philip Street in New Orleans when she was growing up, and played with Negroes, and lived next door to a lovely Negro family, so she finally gets connected, after a lot of back and forth, to a man who seems to be talking from an office instead of a switchboard. There is a silence around him and he says he is an aide and asks her politely what-the trouble is.

“I have come to town about a son of mine who is lost in Russia. ”

She tells the man she is not the sobbing-mother type but the fact is she is getting over a sickness and she doesn’t know whether her son is living or dead. He is somewhere abroad working as an agent of our American government. He has the right to make his own decisions, she says, but there is a good chance he has become stranded by his government and cannot get out.

The man says the Weather has predicted a terrible snowstorm and they have orders to leave early.

Marguerite is wary of conspiracy.

She says into the phone, “I cannot survive in this world unless I know I have my American way of life and can start from the very beginning. I have to work into this, starting from the time he was determined at age sixteen about joining the Marines, which we bickered back and forth, living in the French part of town.”

She says, “He read Robert’s manual day and night. He knew Robert’s manual by heart. And now he is unheard from in over a year, which I am convinced is not completely of his doing, however agents operate overseas. I am here to demand the substance of where he is.”

The man at the State Department says they are all leaving the office due to this predicted storm. It is apparently bearing down. The Weather says it could hit any time.

 

 

Marina loved hearing English spoken. It was exciting, an adventure of a sort. She hadn’t even known there was an American in Minsk. This was something fairly remarkable. The thing that people felt about America never went away.

She danced with Alek on the vast floor of the Palace of Culture. He was polite and neatly dressed, told her how pretty she was in her brocade dress and upswept hair. He spoke English to some of the other boys but only Russian to her, of course. She’d rarely heard English, didn’t know a word except song lyrics, Tarzan, Spam.

Marina herself had arrived in Minsk like snow off the roof, her uncle Ilya said. She was illegitimate, she was an orphan, she was drawn to people who were different. Ilya told the American she had breezes in her brain.

She saw Alek often. They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way. They fell in love the way anyone does. They were from different worlds, totally different cultures, but they were brought together by fate, Marina believed. Her heart began to beat in a different way.

They flattered each other, made each other seem unique and marvelous. It is the lie everyone accepts about being nineteen, which was Marina’s age when she met this unexpected man.

She threw over Anatoly, who looked like an actor in the movies, and she threw over Sasha, who was wonderful in every way and therefore not for her.

Alek had a small lovely flat and listened to Tchaikovsky on the phonograph. He took Marina boating on Youth Lake. They were the same as anyone, completely ordinary, saying what people say. Every fact about their lives was precious. Marina’s weight at birth was a little over two pounds. Alek was in awe of this fact. It was a private charm, something about her to hold dear. He gestured with his hands, trying to find a shape for two pounds of precious life. Her eyes were blue. Her childhood name was Spichka, or Matchstick, for her spare frame and her tendency to flare up, to speak in abrupt excited phrases. These things they told each other were like stories in a book that changes every day, giving their love a quality of never ending.

He told her his mother was dead.

They talked about everything, the sun and the moon, a fly on a pane of glass. He hid in doorways when the cold wind blew. There was a killer wind that blew along the river.

They were marked by fate to be married and they went to the registry office, with spring coming on, only six weeks after they’d met. Alek brought her a cluster of early narcissus and she wore a short white gown with a grass-blade pattern. That night he thanked her sweetly for being a virgin.

She came home from work in the hospital pharmacy to find him doing the laundry or mopping the floor. He would not let her wash his work clothes. He was ashamed of the grime and sweat and did not like thinking of himself as a factory hand, a manual laborer, slotted to do a certain eternal task.

He tuned in the Voice of America every night at ten.

They had matching scars on their arms, his left arm, her right, both scars near the elbow, the same size and shape. A sense of destiny, or mirrored fate. He told her he’d been wounded in action, in Indonesia, in an operation against the communists. He would say nothing to her about the other scar, the one on his wrist.

He was an orphan like her, an outsider, which was all to the good, but beyond that she was not sure who Alek really was. She saw him from a slight distance, it seemed. He was never fully there. He was the other person, the one she lived with, the American who told her he was twenty-four years old but who turned out, on their wedding day, when she saw the marriage stamp in his residence permit, to be only twenty-one.

It was some weeks later that she learned his mother was not dead.

Some of the boys from the plant told Marina that he was a good enough fellow but always kept to himself, always the loner, not really part of things, not at all like a Russian in temperament and feeling—not straight from the heart, in other words.

The day they were married Castro won the Lenin Peace Prize. This was two weeks after the Bay of Pigs.

He wrote in Spanish in his notebook the numbers one to seventeen, leaving out five and six.

“The other girls I knew here, why did they want to go out with me, just like you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Because I’m American. That’s the funny thing. I left my country out of protest against the conditions there and now I’m the all-American boy to everyone. Except I’ll tell you this. When I wanted to marry that girl from the factory, Ella, she turned me down flat for the same reason she went out with me in the
first
place. I’m an American. Sooner or later I’d be arrested as a spy, she said. Her family thinks I’m a spy. She probably thinks I’m a spy. It’s the state of fear of ordinary life in Russia. I saw her the other day. Fat as a barrel now.”

Interesting, Marina thought, how much writing he seems to do on those large new pads. What are those photographs he keeps on the top shelf of the closet, behind the suitcases? What is this pencil sketch that looks like a ground plan of the radio factory?

He told her he was writing his impressions of Russia.

And what is that thing on the wall, the little fixture near the
sofa bed that seems to have no earthly use? Is someone listening to what we
say?

Even now, after Stalin, she wasn’t sure who to trust. Her own uncle Ilya was a colonel in the MVD. In his uniform he was like a painted hero of the Great Patriotic War. Alek wanted her to find out everything she could about Ilya’s rank, his salary, his duties. She knew his position had something to do with the timber industry. A sensitive post but not at all related to spies or counterspies. He was Head of Timber or something similar. That was her impression.

Alek told her to find out more. It was for the sketches he was writing of Russia.

Sometimes Alek rented a boat alone and let it drift along the river past their building. He would shout her name, call repeatedly into the wind until she appeared on the balcony to wave. His return wave was like a child’s, a deep and excited delight. He seemed in his little boat to say, “Look at us, a miracle, so true and sure.”

Two years earlier, on a vacation trip to Minsk when she lived in Leningrad, Marina had noticed a handsome apartment house with balconies overlooking the river. One terrace was bright with flowers and she’d imagined how lovely it would be to live there. She was certain this was the balcony she stood on now, hers and Alek’s, waving, as the boat moved slowly past.

Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses, with God so distant from our lives.

Some people don’t believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.

 

 

Postcard #5. A foldout number. “Scenes of Minsk.” Oswald is photographed at the Victory Monument, the Palace of Culture, Stalin Square. He is a cheerful enough subject, smiling squarely at the camera, but in fact there is little to be happy about right now.

His application to study at the Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of Nations has been turned down. He takes the news hard. It makes him feel small and worthless. The Chief of Student Welcoming writes that the school was created exclusively for youths of the underprivileged countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Lee wonders how they can think he is privileged. It is part of the general stupidity about life in the U.S.

What else? Well, he has written to the U.S. embassy in Moscow to ask for his passport back. He’s a little nervous about this, considering he dumped the passport in their lap, practically forced them to take it, and then said some things he wishes he hadn’t about military secrets. Would they want to prosecute him if he returned?

What else? There’s this funny little device on the wall of his flat and it’s not a socket, a light switch or a thing to hang a picture from. Not only that. He keeps seeing a car marked “Driving School” going up and down his street. Maybe his street is the site of the final exam, he thinks, except there is never a student in the car.

He believes they are watching him because they think he is a false defector sent by the Office of Naval Intelligence. He easily sees the possibility that ONI is waiting to get him out of here so he can tell them what he’s learned.

He
knows
someone is intercepting his mail because right after he wrote to the U.S. embassy, his monthly payments from the so-called Red Cross suddenly disappeared, cutting his income in half. He took the money in the first place because he was hungry and broke and there was snow on the ground in Moscow. He didn’t want to think about the true source of the funds. They were paying him for defecting, for answering questions about his military service. Now that he wants to go home, the money stops coming.