Three days later, on Tuesday, when Marina came home from work, Valya informed her that a young man had called, not once but twice, and said he would call again the next day. He had a “nice, polite voice,” Valya remarked, “but I couldn’t understand him very well. It’s probably your American.” On Wednesday he called again. This time, Valya reported, he sounded upset. He was in the hospital and unable to meet Marina the next evening.[1] Would she come to see him in the hospital? Valya had written down the address.
On Friday Marina appeared at the Fourth Clinical Hospital, unannounced, bearing a jar of apricots. Alik was overjoyed. He exclaimed that apricots were his favorite dessert. He was wearing hospital pajamas and flushed with embarrassment when Marina arrived. Both were uneasy as they sat talking in the corridor for about an hour. Alik was to have an operation on his adenoids the next day, and the prospect made him so nervous that he was scarcely able to speak of anything else. As Marina got up to leave, he begged her to visit him again. He looked so pale and seemed so lonely that she agreed. In her pharmacist’s coat, she explained, she could pass for a nurse any time. She could come and go as she pleased.
Marina came again the next day. The operation was over, his adenoids were out, but Alik complained of pain and the absence of anesthetic. Marina felt sorry for him and started coming to see him nearly every day. She noticed that as a foreigner he got a good many favors from the hospital staff. She herself was allowed long after visiting hours. Had she been seeing anyone but a foreigner, she would, she knew, have been shooed summarily away.
One day as they were walking down the hospital stairway. Alik suddenly asked if he might kiss her.
“If you ask,” Marina said, coquettishly, “I’ll have to say no.”
And so he kissed her.
Marina cringed. The whole thing—Alik, his asking for the kiss, the fetid hospital air—repelled her. She felt averse to herself and to him and left abruptly.
Marina resolved not to see him again. She had liked Alik at first, and when her coworkers at the pharmacy learned that she had an American boyfriend, they were intrigued and envious. But now Alik was pale and unattractive. He was not a boyfriend, anyway, just a foreigner she felt sorry for. But she was anxious not to hurt his feelings. So when he called from the hospital a day or so later and asked her to come again, Marina reluctantly consented. As long as he’s sick, I’ll go, she said to herself, but the moment he’s out of the hospital, I’ll refuse to see him again.
He had a hangdog look that first visit after the kiss. Marina sensed that he wanted to say something, and this time, as he walked her down the staircase, he took her two hands, kissed them, and said: “I want you to be my own girl [he used the Russian for “fiancée”]. I don’t want you to go out with anybody else.”
Was it a proposal of marriage, or had Alik merely chosen the wrong word? Marina was surprised, but she replied as she usually did. She promised him that she would think it over—promising herself, meanwhile, that she would go serenely on seeing her other boyfriends, especially Anatoly, whose kisses were still making her head spin. Marrying Alik was the last thing on her mind.
Easter was approaching, and Aunt Valya was overflowing with sympathy for Marina’s new American friend. “It’s bad enough to be in a hospital in your own country,” she said. “But he has nobody here. We can’t let him feel all alone.” So on Easter Sunday Marina turned up at the hospital bearing an Easter egg dyed specially by Valya, as well as candies and kulich, a sweet Russian Easter bread with raisins, donated by Aunt Lyuba.
When Marina returned home, she told Aunt Lyuba that Alik had loved the egg. She also confessed that he had asked her to be his fiancée. In Valya’s eyes that meant he was an honorable young man, and she urged Marina to bring him to supper as soon as he left the hospital. On Tuesday, April 11, the day of his discharge, he came. It was his first meeting with Marina’s aunt and uncle. Marina felt shy about the “fiancée” business and asked Valya not to bring it up.
At dinner Ilya quizzed their guest about how he happened to be in Russia and whether he was happy there. Alik answered that he had come as a tourist and had found it difficult to get permission to stay. But he had been eager to live and work in Russia and learn the truth about it, not just the “truth” that is shown to tourists. He told Ilya that he worked at the Minsk Radio Plant and had his own apartment. He said he had made friends and was happy in Russia.
At the end of the meal, Ilya proposed a toast. He raised a glass of cognac to “the health and happiness of Americans in the USSR.” Then he excused himself to go to work. As he rose from the table, Alik stood up, too, a polite gesture that endeared him to Valya and made an impression on Marina. Ilya put an arm around Alik’s shoulders. “Take care of this girl,” he said. “She has plenty of breezes in her brain.”
When Valya and Marina got up to do the dishes, Alik, in another welcome and unfamiliar gesture, followed them into the kitchen to help. Then he and Marina went for a walk, and she agreed to go out with him two evenings later. When Alik kissed her that night for the second time, it seemed to Marina that the aversion she had felt in the hospital was gone.
The next evening Sasha and Yury came by. Alik had invited them to his apartment, and they asked Marina to come along. She hesitated, then agreed. Alik might as well know that there were other men in her life. Let him feel a pang of jealousy or two. But she insisted on taking Lyalya Petrusevich, a close friend who lived in her apartment building. She and Lyalya had strolled past Alik’s building a year or so before, admiring the balconies that overlooked the river. Now she wanted Lyalya to see the building—and meet her new American acquisition.
Alik was surprised to find not only Yury and Sasha but Marina and Lyalya at the door. He gave them wine and chocolates and they danced. Marina noticed that Alik’s collection of classical records was poorer and reflected a good deal less musical knowledge than the collections of other boys she knew. Alik wanted to walk her home. But she went with her friends instead.
Lyalya was lyrical about Alik. “Good God!” she exclaimed. “That boy is really great! He’s so neat and polite and good-looking, and he keeps his apartment so clean! I’d throw everybody over for a chance at a man like that! You’re too choosy, Marina.”
Marina asked Lyalya whether Alik was better than Anatoly? “Of course,” she said. “If I had a boyfriend as good-looking as that, and an American besides, I’d marry him blindfolded!”
Her Aunt Valya’s approval, and now Lyalya’s, raised Alik in Marina’s esteem. Not everyone could have an American boyfriend; he was the only American in Minsk. He could probably have any girl in town, and it occurred to her that if she wanted to keep him, even as a curiosity in her collection, she had better watch out.
When he came for their date the next evening, Marina’s feelings had undergone a full revolution from what they had been in the hospital. They strolled along the frozen river, and Alik politely cleared the snow off a bench so that Marina could sit down. Soon he confessed that he was cold and led her back to his apartment. He played a record, the theme song from the film Around the World in Eighty Days, and they danced. They did the samba, the cha-cha-cha, and a little rock ’n’ roll. And Alik kissed her again.
From that evening on, Marina’s dates with Anatoly were infrequent. All she wanted was to go to Alik’s apartment and dance, to kiss and drink tea and talk. He was more gentle, tender, and affectionate than anyone she had known. His caresses seemed different somehow, because they were the caresses of a foreigner. Furthermore, it was the first time she had enjoyed the luxury of a man’s kisses without the fear of interruption. With the brief exception of Eddie in Leningrad, she had never before known a man with an apartment of his own.
1
1. According to Soviet hospital records, Oswald was not admitted to the hospital until the next day, Thursday, March 30, and was discharged on April 11.