Marina told Lee that he had no right to spank somebody else’s child.
“Thanks,” said Lee. “And if anything happened to him, it would be my fault.”
After the football game he got down on all fours, allowed Chris to ride on his back, and played “Horsey” on the living room floor. The two of them enjoyed it greatly, and Marina could see that her husband still was dreaming of having a son.
That night was a special one for them. It started on a playful note, with Marina, in bed, begging Lee to give up any thoughts of going back to Russia.
Half teasing, half thinking out loud, he said: “We’ll go to Russia. I’ll get a decent job at last. I’ll work, you’ll work, the children will go to kindergarten. We’ll see Erich and Pavel.”
“I don’t want to go to Minsk. Let’s go to Leningrad.”
“I don’t want Leningrad. Let’s go to Moscow,” he said.
“Alik, if you want Moscow, I won’t go. Come on, Alka, let’s not go to Russia at all.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Hooray,” Marina nearly shouted, pouncing around the bed like a kitten. “Do you swear?”
“I swear.”
“Word of honor?”
“How you need my word of honor?”
“Because sometimes you promise one thing and do another.”
“I won’t betray you this time.”
At that moment he looked just the way Marina liked him best—“no clouds in his head.”
Suddenly Lee turned tender and was more frank with her than he had ever been before. Neither of them had said much to the other about the lives they had led before they met, for what each had been seeking in marrying the other was a new life. In fact, it had only been a month or so before, in New Orleans, that Marina finally told Lee that as a teenager in Leningrad she used to go around cold, hungry, and threadbare, delivering telegrams during the New Year’s season. She had hardly ever mentioned Petya and Tanya, her brother and sister, or her stepfather, Alexander Medvedev.
Lee had told Marina even less, but tonight he wanted to talk about every woman he had ever cared about before he met her. The first had been in Japan while he was stationed there in the Marine Corps. She had been thirty-four years old, nearly twice his age, but she looked much younger than she was. He threw her over, he said, after she had taught him something about sex and he realized that she wanted to marry him. The next one had been thin, but she had had a great many lovers, and he was afraid of catching venereal disease. The third had cooked for him, and he saw more of her than of anybody else. “But she was fat, I soon got tired of her, and she bored me,” Lee said. “I went to see her more for her cooking than for love.” He had had five other women in Japan.
In Russia he had at first gone without a woman for a year. Then there had been a whole parade. “But it’s all in the past,” he said. “I was only tricking them. Then a girl came along in a red dress—and she tricked me.”
The girl in the red dress was Marina, of course, but he did tell her a little about the others, especially Ella Germann, the girl he had asked to marry him. “Her grandmother scared her away,” Lee said. “Being American, she thought that I must be a spy.” He added that he was grateful to Marina because she had never thought he was a spy. And he told her that of all the women he had known, she was the only one he ever loved.
“Oh, Alka, you don’t love me. Look at the way we fight.”
“Everyone does that.”
“If you loved me, maybe we wouldn’t fight.”
“You silly, don’t you see that I love you?” He stroked her hair. “Did you grow your hair long especially for me?”
“Who else but you?”
“Mama will have long hair now. See how pretty her hair is. I love Mama’s eyes, her little bones, her nose, her ears, her mouth.” And he began to kiss her. “Who taught you to kiss?” he asked her, looking into the mirror above her head.
“It’s all in the past,” she said.
The next morning, Sunday, Ruth was up ahead of everybody else. She went to the living room, and there, on her desk, lay the handwritten note Lee had been typing from the day before. The note was folded, and Ruth started to read below the fold. The words she saw were these: “The FBI is not now interested in my activities…” Ruth was thunderstruck. She had no idea to whom these words were addressed, but she of all people knew they were not true. She was not accustomed to reading other people’s letters without permission. But Lee was using her typewriter for his lies, and she felt, in a way, that she had the right. So she read the whole thing:
Dear Sirs:
This is to inform you of events since my interview with Comrade Kostine in the Embassy of the Soviet Union, Mexico City, Mexico.
I was unable to remain in Mexico City indefinitely because of my Mexican visa restrictions which was for 15 days only. I could not take a chance on applying for an extension unless I used my real name so I returned to the US
I and Marina Nicholeyeva are now living in Dallas, Texas.
The FBI is not now interested in my activities in the progressive organization FPCC of which I was secretary in New Orleans Louisiana since I no longer live in that State.
The FBI has visited us here in Texas. On Nov. 1st agent of the FBI James P. Hasty warned me that if I attempt to engage in FPCC activities in Texas the FBI will again take an “interest” in me. This agent also “suggested” that my wife could “remain in the US under FBI protection,” that is, she could defect from the Soviet Union.
Of course I and my wife strongly protested these tactics by the notorious FBI.
I had not planned to contact the Mexican City Embassy at all so of course they were unprepared for me. Had I been able to reach Havana as planned the Soviet Embassy there would have had time to assist me. but of course the stuip Cuban Consule was at fault here I am glad he has since been replaced by another.[12]
Ruth was suddenly alarmed.[13] She wondered what sort of man she was giving shelter to, and she saw immediately that he was a good deal “queerer” than she had supposed. The letter sounded to her less like that of a spy than of someone who was trying to make an impression on someone else who was a spy. It contained, in any event, statements she knew to be lies, weird language like “the notorious FBI,” references to Mexico, and a false name. Ruth wondered whether a single word was true.
The shower was running; Ruth hoped that Lee might be in it, and she hurriedly made a copy of the letter, stuffed it in an envelope, and shoved it deep into a corner of her desk. If anybody from the FBI came that week, she would hand it over right away, for she wanted to be rid of the thing. Ruth was convinced that the FBI must know a lot about Lee, more than Hosty had let on. She therefore expected that the FBI would know what to make of her discovery. Meanwhile, she put the original of the letter back where she had found it, right in full view on the desk, and there it lay all day Sunday as it had lain all day Saturday. Its being there for everyone to see did not seem to bother Lee a bit.
As usual he looked at football that afternoon. Michael was at home and had occasion to step over Lee while he was lying stretched out on the floor. Michael felt a pang of self-reproach. He thought he was being rude, stepping over Lee that way without even trying to make small talk. But he had given up trying to build a bridge to Lee or understand him because Lee seemed to block it somehow. Michael thought it a shame that they should be there, two men in the same house, and be unable to talk to one another. He wished they could communicate better.
12
Exhibit No. 103, Vol. 16, pp. 443–444. It is interesting that Oswald exonerated the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and blamed everything on the Cuban consul. According to the defector Yury Nosenko, it was the Russians who were to blame for his troubles, the KGB in Moscow having decided to refuse him a visa. Nosenko has added that, but for the assassination, Marina and her children would probably have been granted reentry visas, although Oswald would not have been permitted to return to the USSR. Oswald’s blaming the Cuban consul, however, is a clue to his frame of mind after his return from Mexico, when he turned against Cuba and resumed his old faith in the USSR. Questions have been raised about how Oswald knew that the Cuban consul in Mexico City, Señor Asque, had been replaced. On Oswald’s last visit to the consulate, September 27, Asque was closeted with the man who was to replace him when Mrs. Duran called Asque out and asked him to speak to Oswald.