Soon it was approaching midnight. Valya led Marina into the kitchen and gave her a glass of vodka—“for courage.” Marina then vanished into the bathroom to dress, and when she emerged, she and Alik said their good-byes. “Good luck, my boy!” Ilya said, giving his own brand of gruff encouragement. The guests gathered on the stairway and waved to the bride and groom.
Alik and Marina walked the few blocks to his apartment. Suddenly, as they reached the door of his building, he swept her up in his arms, told her to hang on for dear life, and carried her the four flights upstairs. On his own threshold Alik paused, then gently lifted her across. He never told Marina that it was an American custom.
The two of them stood there bewildered. “Are we really married?” Alik said.
“Take a look at our passports,” Marina replied.
“You’re a sly one,” he said to her. “I didn’t mean to marry—you tricked me into it.”
“Yes, I am clever,” she agreed. “But we’ll divorce tomorrow if you like.”
“You’re tricking me again,” he said. “Tomorrow’s May Day and all the offices are closed.” Then, catching sight of her nightgown neatly folded on the pillow, Alik said: “It’s awfully pretty. I’ve never seen you wear it.”
“Oh—there’s plenty of time,” Marina said. And she insisted on dancing to the phonograph.
When it came to it, she knew nothing about sex after all. She tried to lie still and be quiet. “Careful,” she kept whispering and he, who was very gentle, would stop.
Finally he said to her: “If we stop each time you tell me to, it’ll be a year before we get anywhere. Just close your eyes and try to get through it.”
When it was over and the first light was coming through the window, he kissed her and remarked, very thoughtfully: “Thank you for saving yourself for me. Frankly, I didn’t think you had.”
Later, they were awakened by a knock on the door. Alik opened it, and there, to his utter bewilderment, stood Aunt Valya holding a white plate in her hand. Suddenly, she lifted the plate and hurled it to the floor.
“What’s that about?” Alik asked in astonishment.
“It’s for luck,” Valya said. “The two of you pick up the pieces.”
They dressed and went to Valya’s for breakfast. It was May Day, a gray, drizzling morning, and Ilya was on duty in Stalin Square checking passes for the big parade. In a buoyant mood the newlyweds decided to try to find him. They were going to pay a call across town, and maybe he would let them by without a pass. Ilya was easy to pick out. He was in uniform, eagle-like and very tall. To their great disappointment, he was abrupt with them and refused to allow them into the square. “But I’m your niece,” Marina pleaded with him.
“At home you’re my niece,” he corrected her. “Here, I’m on duty.”
Crestfallen, the bride and groom walked away. “What a bureaucrat he is!” Alik grumbled.
When they reached their destination, they received a warm welcome from Marina’s friends, an older woman and her husband. They plied the newly married pair with vodka, and the husband ran out several times for reinforcements. All day the four of them talked politics, an unlikely pastime for the bride. The hosts asked many questions about America, and Alik was happy to oblige. But what he really wanted to talk about was Russia. The older couple recalled the hardships of the German occupation of Minsk, and the terror and injustice of the Stalin years. But critical as they were of their country’s faults, they were utterly loyal to the Soviet Union.
Marina was pleased by this first day of her married life, grateful for her friends’ welcome and their open-hearted cordiality to her American husband. As for Alik’s steering the conversation toward politics and his rapt attention to everything that was said, she saw nothing surprising in that. She was not interested in politics herself. Politics were in the masculine sphere, and it was to be a long time before she woke up to the fact that her husband’s interest in politics was anything out of the ordinary.
The next evening, the evening of May 2, they paid a call on friends of Alik’s. They were Alexander Ziger, his wife, and two daughters, Eleonora and Anita, who had been like family to Alik from his earliest days in Minsk. Ziger, a black-haired, bushy-browed man of somewhat spherical shape, was deputy chief engineer at the Minsk Radio Plant. He had met Alik nearly a year and half before, during his first visit to the plant on January 12, 1960, and they had seen each other frequently ever since, both at the plant and in Ziger’s home. As the weeks and months went by, Alik had courted both daughters, especially the younger and livelier, Anita. Now, he wanted to introduce them to his bride.
At first, only Eleonora and Anita were at home. They greeted the newlyweds warmly, sat them down, and plied them with coffee. Marina took an immediate liking to Anita, a spirited girl who was constantly erupting into peals of laughter. But she detected something else in the dark and sultry Eleonora. That something was jealousy. When she asked Alik about it later, he conceded that Eleonora had wanted to marry him, but Mrs. Ziger warned him against her elder daughter on the grounds that she might try to use him. His choice then fell on the mettlesome Anita. But she rejected him in favor of a Hungarian.
When the Zigers returned, Mrs. Ziger, a short, plump woman, greeted Marina with great warmth and kissed her tenderly. “My dear child,” she said almost immediately, “consider yourself lucky to have married an American!” Thus, on only the second evening of her marriage, did politics again intrude on Marina’s life.
The Zigers’ story was an extraordinary one. Neither of them was Russian; he was a Pole and a Jew, she was a Belorussian and a Catholic. Both had grown up in eastern Poland, a territory annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, but by that time the Zigers had abandoned their native land and settled in Argentina. There, in Buenos Aires, Mr. Ziger won an engineering degree and went to work in a factory. There, too, his daughters grew up, proved talented, and acquired musical educations. Only Maria Ziger, the mother, was unhappy. She was homesick for her native land, longed to hear the sighing of the birch trees, longed to be laid to rest in the Polish earth. But that soil was not Polish any more. It was Russian, and going home was out of the question.
Then, in the 1950s, everything changed. Stalin died, and Khrushchev, with aggressive acumen, launched a campaign to persuade people like the Zigers to return to Russia. His blandishments fell on credulous ears. The Zigers believed—and came home.
They bitterly regretted their decision. Everyone in Khrushchev’s country was watched, they discovered, and none more closely than those who had chosen to live abroad. Eleonora and Anita suffered most. Both passed the examinations for the renowned Music Conservatory in Moscow. Yet neither was accepted—because they had lived abroad. A ceiling had been set on the Zigers’ lives, and whatever their talents, they could have no hope of going higher. Disillusioned, they applied again and again for visas to leave Russia. Their applications were ignored.
Mr. Ziger refused to give up. He told Marina and Alik: “In a year, or two years, or five, or ten, I believe I’ll get what I’m hoping for. Of course it’s going to take time. But we’ll get our visas some day.”
To Marina his remarks, and indeed the entire evening, were a revelation. Here was a family who had lived in the West and had concluded that life there was incomparably better than anything Russia had to offer. It was an idea contrary to everything Marina had been taught. She was startled, moreover, when Mrs. Ziger led her into the kitchen and said to her pointedly: “My dear child, if Alik ever has the slightest chance of leaving, you must by all means go, too.”