“What’s happened?” Marina asked.
“I shot Walker.” He was out of breath and could barely get out the words.
“Did you kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“My God. The police will be here any minute. What did you do with the rifle?”
“Buried it.”
Marina’s teeth started to chatter. She was certain that police dogs would track down the rifle and be at the house any second.
“Don’t ask any questions.” Lee switched on the radio. There was no news. “And for God’s sake don’t bother me.” He peeled off his clothing and hurled himself on the bed. There he lay, spread-eagled, on his stomach. He fell asleep right away and slept soundly the whole night through.
Marina could not go to sleep. She lay awake for hours listening for the barking of police dogs and the footsteps of policemen on the staircase. She glanced over at Lee, who was lying like a dead man beside her, and she felt sorry for him. She felt a pity almost physical in its closeness and fear of what the police would do to him. “There will be time,” she thought, “to scold him and punish him later. But not now. Not while he is in danger.”
An idea flickered across her mind. She would go to the police and tell them, in sign language or some other way, what her husband had done. She put the thought aside. The truth is that she had no one to lean on but Lee and was deathly afraid of losing him. “I’ll be alone without a husband,” she said to herself, “and what good will that do anyone?” Nor, with her lack of English, did she know how to tell her story, much less make anyone believe her. The police would only send her home, and Lee would give her a beating.
So great was Marina’s dependence upon Lee that she did not consider other alternatives. She was forever picking up loose change from Lee’s bureau and buying the cigarettes he forbade her. She could have picked up a dime, called the de Mohrenschildts from a public phone, and asked them to drive her to the police station and interpret for her. Failing the de Mohrenschildts, she could, in sign language or in some other way, have asked her former neighbors, the Tobiases, to help, and they lived just around the corner. Nor did it occur to her that the police might be able to find a Russian interpreter.
Even if Marina had considered any of these alternatives, there was another factor that would have held her back: her Russianness.
She had grown up in a world where police spies are everywhere and it is your duty by law to inform on anyone, even the person closest to you, if you know he has committed a crime. Failure to do so makes you criminally as liable as he. In such an environment the only honor, the only way of keeping faith, is never, ever, to inform. The law says you must; Marina’s private morality says that you must not. And so it would be one thing to scold Lee harshly, to his face, and try to change him, or even to appeal to friends to try to change him, but quite another to go to the police or involve the state in any way. To do that would breach a relationship beyond repair.
Marina would have been incapable of going to court even in self-defense when her stepfather tried to frame her as a prostitute. As she saw it, her going to court against him, even though it was he who brought the charges, would have destroyed their relationship. Now it was the same with Lee. A wife would have to hate her husband to inform on him. How on earth could they live with one another, much less trust one another, after that? She did not know that in this matter Soviet and American law are directly opposite. Here, in most states, it was not her duty to go to the police; and she would not in any state have been allowed to testify against Lee in court. But since she assumed that her legal duty in the United States was exactly what it would have been in Russia, her failure to act made her in her eyes—and perhaps in Lee’s—his accomplice.[23]
So Marina did not go to the police, or consider it for more than a moment or two. Although she told herself that it was her legal duty to inform on Lee, her personal morality stressed loyalty to her husband above everything. And this loyalty was to expose her to a crushing sense of guilt when many people told her that if only she had gone to the police “after Walker,” a later, lethal event would not have happened. But even after that event, Marina’s feelings of guilt continued to cluster incongruously around the dim, but intact, figure of General Walker. Her guilt over her failure to inform on Lee “after Walker” was to save her, until she could better bear it, from facing the huge, intangible and infinitely more complex question of what responsibility, if any, she bore in a much greater tragedy.
— 25 —
Legacies
Marina woke up the next morning exhausted and with a headache. Lee was in the living room, leaning over the radio. He turned to her, crestfallen. “I missed. They don’t say much. Just that somebody unidentified took a shot at General Walker.”
Marina was hugely relieved, but she was still too nervous to touch her morning cup of coffee. Lee went out to buy a paper. When he came home he was angry. “Oh, hell!” he said. “Walker moved his head at the last minute. That’s the only thing that saved him. My aim was perfect. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina now asked the question she had been wondering about all along. Who was Walker? She had heard the name before but she had no idea what he had done that might make Lee want to kill him.
Lee did not go into details. He merely said that Walker was a “Fascist” and a former general, a madman and the leader of a Fascist organization.
Marina objected that no matter who he was, Lee had no right to kill him. Maybe he had a wife and children.
“He lives alone,” Lee answered sharply. “If someone had killed Hitler in time, many lives would have been saved.”
That stopped Marina. All her life she had heard about Hitler’s atrocities, and she could not think how to respond. She asked Lee how he had escaped and where he had left his rifle.
General Walker, he told her, had been sitting at the back of his house near a window, working at his desk. Lee aimed and fired only one shot. He did not wait to see whether he had hit his mark. The church meeting next door was breaking up. Plenty of people, plenty of noise. Lee ran. By the time he heard the wail of police sirens, he was far, far away.
It is not clear from Marina’s account whether Lee rode one bus home that night or two. It is logical that he would have run straight through the woods to his hiding place, buried the rifle, then hurried to a bus stop and ridden home. But it is not certain he did it that way. Marina, for some reason, was haunted by the idea of police dogs. They would pick up Lee’s scent and trace the rifle to its hiding place. “Don’t worry about the dogs,” Lee reassured her. “Lots of people go by that house. So they trace it as far as the bus. That’s where they lose the scent. I buried it a long way off.” From that remark it could be inferred that Lee boarded a bus near Walker’s house actually carrying his rifle, hopped off close to his site in the woods, buried the rifle, then took another bus home. He did tell Marina that the bus he took was not the one he generally rode when he went to General Walker’s.[1]
The Dallas papers of Thursday, April 11, ran front-page stories about the attempt on Walker’s life. Lee left the apartment to buy both morning and afternoon editions and lay on the sofa listening to news bulletins on the radio. It was reported that the police had identified the bullet as a 30.06. It was also reported that an aide to the general had noticed two men in a “late-model, unlicensed car” in the alley behind Walker’s house on the night of his return. After the shooting, a fourteen-year-old boy, Kirk Newman, who was a neighbor of Walker’s, claimed that he had seen two cars, one with one man in it, the other with several, speed away from the scene.
23
All through the time that Marina was growing up in Russia, there was a law on the statute books—an infamous law of 1934—that provided that a close relative of anyone suspected of a serious crime against the state is as liable for the crime as the suspect, whether or not the relative knew of the crime either before or after it was committed. The atmosphere created by this and other laws appears to have affected Marina from the moment she learned of her husband’s attempt on General Walker. Although she had neither known of his attempt in advance nor approved of it later, Marina appears to have felt that she was as guilty as he was. Her special feeling of guilt in the Walker affair lingered for months, even years, and it probably cannot be understood without knowledge of the Soviet laws of complicity that existed throughout almost the whole of her life in the USSR.