Libra

  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.

  No sign of Alek. Not a word. Total silence.

  Maybe this is all Alek. It is everything Alek. It is get the goods on him. It is pin him to the wall when all I want to do is study.

  I still haden’t told my wife of my desire to return to US.

  His friend Erich introduces him to some Cuban students and he likes talking to them, likes exchanging complaints about the dreariness of Minsk. The Cubans have a talent and a flair. There is an integrity in the Cuban cause, he believes. It is an underdog effort. Here, people use the party to get ahead. The party is an instrument of material gain.

  He is photographed one more time, wearing dark glasses.

  Near his building was a five-hundred-foot radio tower enclosed in barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards with the usual snarling dogs. Not far away were two smaller structures, just as well guarded. These were jamming towers, designed to interfere with high-frequency broadcasts,from Munich and other Western cities.

  He saw himself writing this story for Life or Look, the tale of an ex-Marine who has penetrated the heart of the Soviet Union, observing everyday life, seeing how fear rules the country. Chocolate is four times more expensive than in the U.S. No choice, however small, is left to the discretion of the individual.

  He has taken photographs of the airport, the polytechnic institute and an army office building, just to have, to save for later.

  “A strange sight indeed,” he would write, “is the picture of the local party man delivering a political sermon to a group of robust simple working men who through some strange process have been turned to stone. Turned to stone all except the hard faced communists with roving eyes looking for any bonus-making catch of inattentiveness on the part of any worker.”

  He saw himself in the reception room at Life or Look, his manuscript in a leather folder in his lap. What is it called, morocco?

  He got his friend Erich to give him lessons in German.

  When Marina told him she was pregnant he thought his life made sense at last. A father took part. He had a place, an obligation. This woman was bringing him the kind of luck he never figured on. Marina Prusakova, herself born two months premature, weighing two pounds, from Archangel on the White Sea, halfway round the world from New Orleans. He took her face in his hands. Fair-haired wispy girl. Full mouth, high neck, blue-eyed flower girl, his slender pale narcissus. Let the child look like her, even that little sulky curl of the mouth, her eyes showing fire when she is angry. He danced her around the room, promised to take better care of her than anyone ev
er had. She would be the baby until the real baby came.

  He told her the stores in America were incredibly well stocked, full of amazing choices. Whatever a baby needed, all you had to do was find the nearest department store. Whole departments for babies. Whole stores, babies only. You’ve never seen such toys.

  He was home first, washing the breakfast dishes. He heard her climb the last flight, getting slower every day. She had ice cream and halvah in a bag.

  “They’re getting ready to make Stalin disappear,” she said. “I walked past the square and it’s roped off.”

  “They’ll have to use dynamite.”

  “They’ll drag him down with chains.”

  She put the food away and sat at the kitchen table, behind him, lighting up a cigarette.

  “It’s way too big,” he told her. “They’ll have to blow it up.”

  “Too many Stalinists still around. I think they’ll knock him down with chains and drag him off under cover of dark. So no one knows until it’s too late.”

  “They already know. The square’s roped off. Put out that cigarette please.”

  “I am doing much, much less these days.”

  “No good for baby. No, no, no,” he said.

  “I don’t do so much, Alek.”

  “You hide them all around. find cigarettes in every comer. Very bad for baby.”

  “I do less and less now. Two cigarettes today. What about the visas?”

  “I went all over. The ministries, the departments, a total run-around. They are hopeless people, Marina. They read my mail, so I complain to my brother in my letters about their hopeless bureaucracy.”

  “You are writing to him and to them. Two letters for the price of one.”

  “We’re saving a fortune,” he said.

  “Where is Texas actually?”

  He washed the coffeepot in tepid water.

  “It’s where General Walker lives. The head of all the ultra-right hate groups in America. The Worker had a headline today. GENERAL WALKER BIDS FOR FUHRER ROLE. He resigned his army command so he won’t have any military restraints when he tries to lead a far-right takeover.”

  “Should I learn English now?”

  “Later, when we get there.”

  These days and nights were a revelation to him. He was a domestic soul, happy in the home, a householder who did the dishes, chatted with his wife about the wallpaper. It was wonderful to discover this. He had a chance to avoid the sure ruin. It seemed so safe in these small rooms with Marina near him to talk to and touch, to make this Russia seem less vast and secret. So many angers waned, as he sat under a lamp reading, reading politics and economics, his wife always near, in a loose dress, pregnant, with street-lights shining on the river.

  That night they heard the rumble in their sleep. Two, three, four hollow booms, like some power in the sky, deep-rolling across the night. He lay still, eyes open now, waiting for her to speak, knowing what she would say, word for word.

  “What is it, Alek, thunder?”

  He heard the last slow rumble.

  “They’re blowing up the statue of your leader.”

  Tishkevich, the personnel chief, told Citizen Oswald that his performance as a regulator was unsatisfactory. He was not displaying initiative. He was reacting in an oversensitive manner to helpful remarks from the foreman. He was careless in his work.

  He said he was writing a report. He would state all these things and would add that Citizen Oswald takes no part in the social life of the shop.

  No trace of Alek. No word. Not a single sign he even knew Oswald was alive.

  His mother found him. She wrote a letter telling him that the Marine Corps had given him a dishonorable discharge.

  He wrote to his brother to ask whether the government might be planning to take action against him.

  He wrote to the U.S. embassy to ask for a government loan so he and his family could travel to America.

  He wrote to his mother to ask her to file an affidavit of support on Marina’s behalf.

  He wrote to Senator John Tower of Texas and to the International Rescue Committee.

  The whole process of paperwork channels, endless twisting systems, documents in triplicate—an anxious labor for him to decipher these forms and fill them out.

  He was writing to John B. Connally Jr. because he thought that Connally was Secretary of the Navy. He was actually the Governor of Texas.

  Marina walked in, carrying the paperback Dr. Spock a friend of hers had sent from England. She sat next to him and he translated passages into Russian. She told him that giving birth is a woman’s secret, like something that happens on the ocean floor, in dim light and silent water, the one mystery no one can solve even when we know the biology involved.

  Dr. Spock wrote, “Don’t be afraid of your baby. Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being.”

  Marina looked at him when he translated these lines. She seemed to be asking for the first time, What kind of place is America?

  He went back to his letter. Could he tell the Secretary that he was a false defector? He wanted to repair the damage done to him and his family. He knew his rights. He wanted his honorable discharge reinstated. But could he tell the Secretary, the way his mail was constantly intercepted, that he’d been sent by Naval Intelligence to live in the USSR as an ordinary worker, observing the system, photographing areas of strategic value and making note of the details of everyday life?

  He saw himself sitting next to a tasseled flag in the Secretary’s office, talking to the Secretary, a square-jawed man with honest eyes, a friendly type Texan.

  Dawn. Marina wakes me. Its her time.

  The experience had a form, a sense of tradition and generation, like his own father standing in a dimly lit hallway waiting for word of a son. Word of Robert Oswald. The second son would not be born until the father was two months dead.

  He wrote at once to Robert.

  Well, I have a daughter, June Marina Oswald, 6 lbs. 2 oz., born Feb. 15, 1962 at 10. am. How about that?!

  But then you have a head start on me, although I’ll try to catch up. Ha-Ha.

  How are things at your end? I heard over the voice of america that they released Powers the U2 spy plane fellow. Thats big news where you are I suppose. He seemed to be a nice, bright american-type fellow, when I saw him in Moscow.

  He put another coat of paint on the secondhand crib while Marina was in the hospital. He dusted and scrubbed the whole flat, did the laundry, ironed her blouses and skirts. In the end the bureaucrats insisted that the baby’s middle name must be the same as the father’s first. He moved the crib to his side of the bed and slept every night only inches from June Lee.

  Stateless, word-blind, still a little desperate, he got up in the middle of a spring night and wrote the Historic Diary.

  He wrote it in two sittings, breaking for coffee at 4:00 A.M. He wanted to explain himself to posterity. People would read these words someday and understand the fears and aspirations of a man who only wanted to see for myself what socialism was like.

  It was his goodbye to Russia. It signified the official end of a major era in his life. It validated the experience, as the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events.

  Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mess of composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not able to record it properly.

  He went back to the first day, fall of 1959, jumping right in, writing in a child’s high fever in which half-waking dreams, dreams with runny colors, can seem a state of purer knowledge. He felt little charges of excitement when he set to work on his suicide attempt in the voice of Hidell, theatrical, self-mocking. It was the true voice of that episode. He’d heard it then,
watching his own fishy blood mix into the bath water (somewhere, a violin plays) and he was quick to use it now, sweating in his pajamas at the kitchen table.

  Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.

  He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.

  Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn’t that he didn’t know.

  He stood on the balcony with his coffee. The breeze made his wet pajamas stick to his body. An N on its side becomes a Z.

  Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.

  He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.

  Let them see the struggle.

  He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.

  “It will be terrible, Alek, breathing the air of Russia for the last time.”