Marina rose and walked away, tears streaming down her face. “They’re all alike,” she thought. “They all want the same thing. What do they take me for—a fool? They think I’m not even worth marrying.”
Alik caught up with her. “Forgive me, Marina. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. But really it is a strain. I didn’t know you cared so much about a ceremony.”
“It’s not the ceremony,” Marina replied. “I’m hurt because you’re just like all the others. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
She went home in a fearful cacophony of feelings. She had meant it when she said that she never wanted to see him again. Applying at ZAGS had been nothing but a trick. He did not want to marry her at all. “What does this American take me for—a fool?” she asked herself again and again.
She was angry at Alik. If he wanted her that badly, he would have to ask to be forgiven and marry her. Before, she had wanted to marry him because she cared for him. Now she would make him marry her on principle. But in the morning when she woke up, she felt that she did, in fact, love him.
At lunchtime the next day, Alik appeared at the pharmacy to apologize. He refused to go back to work unless Marina forgave him, and she did. She even agreed to phone ZAGS for news of their application. But the following week was a long one for both of them. Sometimes she phoned ZAGS and there was no news. Other times the telephone rang and rang, and no one answered. Each evening when he arrived at the Prusakovs’ for dinner, Alik scanned Marina’s face anxiously. “Do you think they’ll let us get married?” he said again and again. Marina asked what he would do if they were refused? Go to Moscow, Alik insisted, and appeal to the Foreign Ministry. What, Marina wanted to know, did the Foreign Ministry have to do with marriages? He said only that he would go to the “very highest” level.
Finally, Marina was asked to appear at ZAGS in person on April 27. When she got there, she was told that permission had been granted. “Why are you marrying him?” the gray-haired man asked. “Really and truly, couldn’t you have found yourself a Russian?”
“I’ve plenty of Russians to choose from,” Marina answered. “It’s just that I like him and want to marry him.”
“Well, it’s none of my business,” the old man said. He told Marina to come back with Alik on Sunday, April 30, at eleven o’clock in the morning for the wedding ceremony.[3]
News spread like a brush fire that Marina had been given permission to marry “her American,” and by no means was everyone pleased. The girls at the pharmacy were in high excitement, but Tamara, a slightly older woman in whom Marina confided, had doubts. She was convinced that of the two men Marina had been seeing, it was Anatoly whom she loved.
“But what would other people say?” Marina objected. “He’s so gangling and tall, and he isn’t the least bit handsome.”
“And who would you be getting married for?” Tamara asked. “Other people—or yourself?”
Anatoly, too, reacted quickly. He asked Marina to meet him in a café, and there he wished her the best of luck. But he remarked that “no one falls in love in two weeks.” It was his opinion that Marina had chosen Alik “because foreigners have such privileges here.” Marina was stung, partly because it was Anatoly who was accusing her and partly because there was truth in what he said.
Marina is the first to say that “I married Alik because he was American.” It was almost as if, being the only American in Minsk, he had the right to pick anyone he pleased. It would have been an act of lèse-majesté to refuse. But Marina adds, “I married him because I liked him. He was neat and clean and better looking than Anatoly. I was more in love with him than with anybody else at the time.”
She also concedes that his apartment played a role in her decision and that she might not have married him without it. For Marina had always felt unwanted and “in the way.” All her life she had dreamed of having a room of her own. She had seen many a marriage turned into a nightmare of animosity for lack of a decent place to live, and for her, as for many girls she knew, the great lottery of Soviet life was to find a man you loved—who had an apartment.
The apartment also played a role in guaranteeing the consent of her Uncle Ilya. For Ilya wanted his own apartment to himself. He may, moreover, have wanted Marina married so that he could once again enjoy the full-time attention of his wife. How else explain the fact that Ilya, a Russian chauvinist and a xenophobe, quickly gave his consent to his niece’s marriage to Alik, a foreigner and a factory hand, and discouraged her interest in Anatoly, a Russian with a much better future? Ilya himself called Marina “flighty,” and he knew that he could influence her choice. Yet he never bothered to meet Anatoly and see with his own eyes who was the better man and who would give Marina a better life. For Ilya there was no comparison. The difference lay not in the qualities the two men possessed, but in the apartment one of them possessed.
But there were other currents stirring, emotional currents, and they, too, powerfully affected Marina’s choice. Because of her illegitimate birth, she had felt like an outsider all her life. From her earliest years she showed the way she felt in her choice of friends, in her reluctance to join the Pioneers and the Komsomol, and in her long string of alien and exotic beaux. Marrying Alik, for her, was the culmination of a lifelong flirtation with the outsider.
For all these reasons, and possibly because of what she considered “incestuous” attractions to her first cousin Valentin and, perhaps less consciously, to her harsh stepfather Alexander Medvedev, Marina felt impelled to marry “out,” just as far out as she could go. And who could be farther out than an American, a native of her country’s feared and admired enemy, the United States?
There was something else about Alik that attracted her, a kinship they shared. He, too, obviously felt “outside” and alone in Minsk, but it went further back. Marina believed that he was an orphan, and that made her feel enormously sympathetic toward him, as if they were brother and sister. Both obviously felt the same way about their early lives. Both rejected their past so completely that they did not tell each other anything about it—ever. Because he was older than she was, Marina could look up to Alik. They would support and take care of each other. Alik was exotic—yet somehow familiar.
There is one other way in which Marina was nearly fated to marry Alik. He brought her the attention she craved. They had only to walk down the street hand in hand for heads to swivel and eyes to pop. It was unimaginably gratifying to her. For at a deeper level, Alik’s choice of her and the attention it brought, confirmed the feeling she had always had that she was different and special. The mere fact of being married to him would mean that for the rest of her life she was going to be singled out as someone special. Such outer recognition was in profound correspondence with the inner feeling she had had all along.
Marina had no thought of leaving Russia. In spite of his other attractions as a foreigner, she did not marry Alik for his passport. She believed him when he said that he did not want to go back to America; that, in fact, he could not go back. It was only one of several lies he told her. She did not know that, even before they met, he had written to the American embassy in Moscow to request his passport and help in returning to the United States. Nor did she know that he had lied about his age. He was twenty-one, not twenty-four. And he was not an orphan—his mother was alive.
And so Marina made the choice she was bound to make. “Maybe I was not in love with Alik as I ought to have been. But I thought I loved him.” And perhaps she did, for she made her decision with few regrets and surprisingly few backward glances. She had an instinct that she was doing what was right for her, the thing ordained by her destiny to be special. The step she was taking was in harmony with so many of her needs, both inner and outer, as to have been almost inevitable. What, after all, was “love” compared to the forces that were carrying her toward Alik? And were those forces not also love?
3
A small but interesting example of disarticulation of the Soviet bureaucracy may be seen here. In January, officials at OVIR, the Office of Visas and Registration, inquired whether Oswald was still interested in acquiring Soviet citizenship, and he answered no. He asked merely to have his residence permit extended for one year. Thus, OVIR in Minsk had at least a hint that he was thinking of leaving Russia. The following month, February of 1961, he wrote the US Embassy in Moscow asking to have his passport back and stating his desire to go home. His Soviet “Red Cross” subsidy was immediately cut off, an indication that his letter had been intercepted and the appropriate agency in Moscow, probably the KGB, knew his intentions. Yet two months later, in April, when he applied at ZAGS, still another official agency, to marry Marina, no effort was made to dissuade either of them. Usually, when a Soviet girl applies to marry a foreigner who is not a Soviet citizen and who may leave the country some day, strong pressure is brought on the girl not to go through with the marriage, and permission is very often denied. That the Oswalds were permitted to marry is a sign that it was generally supposed in Minsk that Oswald was already a citizen or was on his way to becoming one. The disarticulation was therefore a double one: what Moscow knew, Minsk did not; and OVIR in Minsk, which could have suspected Oswald’s intentions, did not communicate any suspicions to ZAGS, the bureau that registers marriages—another sign that controls in the USSR, as elsewhere, are not perfect.