There were other things that attracted her to Alik; little things, such as his accent and his voice on the telephone. And bigger things, too. One evening as they were walking near the opera house, she asked about his family in America. He told Marina he did not have a mother. Was she dead? Marina asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it—it’s too painful.” Later, he said that his mother was dead and that he had been raised by an aunt. And to Marina the fact that they were both orphans, above all the fact they had both lost their mothers, was a significant bond. She told Alik that her parents were dead, too, but said nothing about being illegitimate. After that, they scarcely ever spoke of their pasts.
Alik told Marina that he was twenty-four, almost as old as Anatoly, and Marina found that attractive, too. He also told her that he had renounced his American citizenship and could never go back to the United States. But that revelation in no way diminished his appeal. It was flattery enough that he was an American and that, for the moment at least, his choice seemed to have fallen on her.
One evening toward the middle of April, Alik took Marina to his apartment and began to kiss her until he reached such a point of desire that he said, with “madness in his eyes,” as Marina describes it, that she must go home immediately or he would compel her to stay with him until morning. Terrified and delighted, Marina grabbed her coat and ran home. When she told Valya what had happened, she smiled and said, “I see.”
After that, Alik did not call for a couple of days. The next time they saw each other was April 18, only a month and a day after they had first met. Alik took her hands, looked gravely into her eyes, and said to her quietly, “Marina, I’d like you to be my wife. I’ve no idea whether you’ll agree. I don’t make much, but I have a little saved up. You’d have to go on working. Are you afraid of marrying a foreigner?”
“You silly,” Marina replied. She was willing to marry him, she said, but she wanted to wait a bit. Alik wanted to get married in May.
“What will other people say?” Marina exclaimed. “We’ve known each other such a short time. Besides, my mama said May is an unhappy month. You should never get married in May.”
Alik said her mother’s superstitions were nonsense. He refused to wait until June. They must marry right away or they must part. Not, he added, that it would be easy for him to part. But he could not bear to go on seeing her and not having her.
Marina went home that night and told Valya that the American had asked her to marry him. She begged Valya to prepare Uncle Ilya for an interview with Alik.
The next day Alik put on his holiday best: a black suit, a white shirt and tie, even a dark blue hat. As he and Marina climbed the three narrow flights to Ilya and Valya’s apartment, he stopped at nearly every step. “Oh, my God, what will I say?” he groaned. “Please help me out.” He was pale, and his knees were shaking as he waited on the landing, summoning courage to ring the bell.
“My heart is pounding,” he said.
“Mine too,” Marina replied.
“He’ll probably chase me away.”
“I don’t know what he’ll do.” They felt like a pair of conspirators.
Ilya met Alik in the living room, and Marina went apprehensively into the kitchen with her aunt. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, she asked: “Aunt Valya, is Uncle Ilya in a good mood today?”
Valya nodded in the affirmative.
“Do you know what he’s going to say?”
Valya had no idea.
Ilya, meanwhile, was asking Alik a battery of the usual questions. He said that Marina was still very flighty. She was fickle and immature, and she wasn’t ready to get married. Then he asked Alik if he had the proper papers. Although he was an official of the MVD, Ilya, as he examined Alik’s documents, overlooked a fact that might have been critical in giving his consent. Alik did not have a regular Soviet passport, but a special document for the so-called stateless person, the foreigner who does not have Soviet citizenship and may or may not have retained citizenship of another country. Ilya later explained that he was not expert in that type of document.[2] He thought it was a special residence permit issued to a foreigner during his first three years in Russia, and he believed that Alik was already a citizen of the USSR. Had he had any other impression, he said, he would have withheld his consent to the marriage. As it was, he took the precaution of asking: “And what about America, Alik? Do you intend to go back?”
Alik swore that he did not, and Ilya took him at his word.
After twenty minutes or so, Ilya called Marina in from the kitchen. “So it’s getting married you lovebirds have in mind. Alik, here, asks if he can marry you. I told him what kind of little bird you are, and he has promised to reform you. Do you consent to marry him?”
Marina answered that she did.
“Marriage is a serious thing,” Ilya said. “Personally, I think it’s too soon. But if I say no, Marina will blame me if her life is unhappy later on. If you think you’ll be happy together, then it’s not for me to refuse. Only, live with one another in peace. If you fight or if anything goes wrong, settle it yourselves. Don’t come to me with your troubles.”
Marina broke in like a little girl. “Does that mean you are saying yes, Uncle Ilya?”
“I am. Let’s drink to it.” The four of them went into the kitchen and sat at the table, drinking cognac.
During their lunch hour the next day, April 20, Marina and Alik went to ZAGS, the bureau where Soviet citizens go to register birth and death, marriage and divorce. The two old biddies who presided over the front corridor said, “Which did you come for, to be married or divorced?” Alik announced they had come to be married and produced his residence permit. The unfamiliar document puzzled the old ladies. When Alik told them that he was a foreigner, they instructed him to proceed to another ZAGS office and painstakingly wrote out the address.
A gray-haired gentleman greeted Marina and Alik pleasantly at the second ZAGS and motioned them into a chair. There they made out separate applications, and the old man promised to relay the papers higher up. He suggested that they come back in a week but was unable, in response to their questions, to reassure them or give them any notion whether their application would be approved.
That evening Marina and Alik planted seeds in the window boxes on his balcony. His thoughts to the future, Alik said he hoped they would have a son.
Marina reproached him gaily: “We’re not even married yet, and already you’re dreaming of a son!”
“Do you solemnly promise me a son?” he asked.
She giggled, “I promise.”
They decided to name him David. Marina knew the name from a novel by Theodore Dreiser, and she liked it. Alik went into the kitchen and came back with a sheet of paper. He placed it in front of Marina and instructed her to write: “I promise that we will have a son. We will call him David. Marina Prusakova, April 20, 1961.”
The next evening they went window-shopping for furniture and had supper with Ilya and Valya. As always, Alik got along splendidly with them. Later, as they were sitting in a little park near her apartment house, Alik was rather downcast. He asked Marina to come home with him for the night. “You always tease me so. We’ve applied to be married now. What are you frightened of? Please, Marina.”
2
2. The internal passports carried by Soviet citizens for travel inside the USSR are of three types. One is for Soviet citizens, another is for citizens of foreign countries who have permission to reside in the USSR, and the third is the so-called stateless passport, which Oswald carried, for the foreign resident who has not become a Soviet citizen but who may, or may not, have retained citizenship of another country. Confusion therefore appears to have been possible even for an official like Ilya Prusakov.