Her performance had had the desired effect. Anatoly was angry and insisted on taking her home. Marina refused. She returned to Sasha and her other admirers, and when the dance was over, she brushed past Anatoly, who was waiting for her at the door, with five young men in tow, the stranger Alik among them. All six of them set off down the street. A few paces behind, to Marina’s intense satisfaction, was Anatoly. He called out to her twice. Marina paid no attention. He caught up with her, put his hand on her shoulder, and pleaded: “Marina! I’ve got to talk to you.”
“I can’t talk now. Can’t you see? Go away!”
Alik was a witness to the scene; Alik, the stranger with the funny accent. Long afterward he told Marina that he had made up his mind that night. “I got what I wanted,” he boasted. “I got you away from them.”
The group of young people went to Yury’s apartment, where his mother, who was a professor of microbiology, was waiting up for them. That night, before the dance, she had given a lecture on America, which she had just visited as part of a delegation. Suddenly, Marina realized that Alik was American. Yury had asked him to the lecture, hence the dance, to hear his mother talk about America.
They all sat together in the living room asking Yury’s mother questions. Alik listened carefully but did not say anything. Finally, Yury’s mother went to bed, and the boys turned to Alik. They wanted to know what was right and what was wrong in Yury’s mother’s description of America.
Marina remembers his tone. He was pleasant and self-confident. He dismissed some of her remarks as “propaganda.” The rest, he said, was fair enough. Yury’s mother had been struck by the absence of lines in American stores. She attributed it to those two vices of the capitalist system, unemployment and overproduction, and concluded that Americans were too poor to buy. Alik politely disagreed. The stores seem empty, he said, because there is plenty for everyone at a price each can afford. “Your mother is right, though,” he said to Yury. “Unemployment is a problem.”
Marina liked the way he talked. She especially liked the way he stuck up for his country. She asked him if he loved America. He did, he said, but he did not love everything about it. He disliked unemployment and racial discrimination and added that education and medical care cost far too much. But he noted that housing was better than in Russia and that the ordinary apartment was bigger. Of the two countries, Russia and the United States, he thought America was more democratic because everyone can say what he thinks.
For a while Alik and two of the boys spoke English. Marina, who had seldom heard it spoken before, was enthralled. When it was time for Sasha to take her home, he offered to drop Alik off afterward. The three of them left the apartment together.
When she reached home, Marina rang the doorbell and called out excitedly, “I’m not alone, Aunt Valya. Sasha’s here.” Properly warned, Valya unlatched the door in her nightgown and quickly scuttled back to bed. Marina followed her into her room.
“Aunt Valya,” she whispered, her eyes very large. “Sasha’s in there. Sasha and another boy, an American. He’s really nice. Come in, and I’ll introduce you.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Valya said. “Bringing an American here and the place in such a mess?” She was afraid to meet him. “I look too awful,” she said, then groaned, “Oh, my God, an American was the only thing lacking in your collection.”
Before he left, Alik asked Marina if he might see her again. He begged her to name the time and place, adding that he seldom missed a dance at the Palace of Culture.
“Maybe I’ll go there next week,” she said.
With that the young man said good-night, and as Marina closed the door behind them, she tried to remember Alik’s name. It had a German-Jewish sound to her, something like “Oswald.”
— Interlude —
The path that led Lee Harvey Oswald to the Palace of Culture in Minsk in 1961 had opened up seven or eight years earlier when, as a very young teenager, he was handed a pamphlet on the streets of New York about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the two Americans who were convicted of and executed for betraying atomic secrets to the Russians. Next, when he was fifteen and was looking for what he later called “a key to my environment,” he borrowed books by Marx, Engels, and American Communist writers from the New Orleans Public Library and began to consider himself a Marxist.[1]
Only a few days after reaching the eligible age of seventeen, he joined the US Marine Corps. His half brother, John Pic, had chosen the Coast Guard for a career, and his full brother, Robert Oswald, had recently completed a tour in the Marines; both assumed that Lee enlisted to get out from under the “yoke of oppression” of their mother, Marguerite, who sought to control the lives of all her sons in every way. The older boys had entered the armed services to get away from her, and that was largely Lee’s motive as well. But he had another motive, too. Lee’s father, Marguerite’s second husband, had died before Lee was born, and Marguerite had raised the boy almost single-handedly. Lee desperately wanted to be a man, to learn a man’s skills and be part of the world of men. He idolized his older brother Robert, and he knew no better way than to follow where Robert had led.
Lee’s three-year term of enlistment began on October 26, 1956, in San Diego, California. He underwent the rigorous Marine Corps basic training, including use of the M-1 rifle, both at San Diego and at Camp Pendleton, California. At the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, and then at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, he was trained in aircraft surveillance and the use of radar. Six months after joining the service, he was granted low-level clearance to deal with material up to the “confidential” (as distinguished from the “secret” or “top-secret”) level. He was simultaneously promoted to private first class. Lee had a higher than average IQ, 118 on the Wechsler scale, and during his training he scored well, both in proficiency and in conduct. But he was unpopular with his fellow Marines. He kept to himself, preferred reading to the company of others, and spent his weekends alone.
Lee was next assigned to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro, California, and in the late summer of 1957, he shipped out to Japan, where he joined an air control squadron at Atsugi, outside Tokyo, as a radar operator. The squadron’s job was to direct American aircraft to their targets by radar and to scout for such Chinese or Soviet planes as might stray into the area. It was while he was at Atsugi that Lee may first have become aware of what was perhaps the most highly prized secret in all of US aerial reconnaissance, the U-2 aircraft.
During his early months in Japan, Lee Harvey Oswald began to blossom. He lost the meekness that had caused the men to christen him “Ozzie Rabbit,” and he became more manly and assertive in standing up for his rights. He had his first experience with women and, like many of the men, was said to be keeping a mistress. Feeling free in a way he had not felt at home, he told one friend that he did not care if he ever went back to the United States.
But a curious episode occurred on October 27, 1957, six weeks after Lee’s arrival in Japan and only a few days after his eighteenth birthday. One of his buddies, Paul Edward Murphy, heard a shot in the cubicle next to him. He rushed in to find Lee sitting on his foot-locker, looking in a bewildered way at his left arm. Murphy asked what had happened, and “very unemotionally,” Lee replied,” I believe I shot myself.”[2] The wound, inflicted by a .22 caliber pistol Lee was not authorized to possess, was in his left elbow, and he spent the next two and a half weeks in a naval hospital. It may have been a clumsy accident, but Lee was not a novice when it came to handling guns.