Astonished, Marina assured Mrs. Ziger that Alik had no thought of leaving her country. But later, it occurred to her that, at the time of her marriage, Mrs. Ziger already knew what she herself did not: that Alik Oswald intended to go home.
Oswald’s diary confirmed not only that the Zigers were aware of his intention, but that Mr. Ziger had had a hand in shaping it. From the very beginning of their acquaintance, he had warned Oswald against taking Soviet citizenship, an act that would forever close the door on his leaving the USSR.
May 1, 1960: At night I visit with the Zegers daughters… Zeeger advises me to go back to U.S.A. It’s the first voice of oppossition I have heard. I respect Zeeger, he has seen the world. He says many things, and relates many things I do not know about the U.S.S.R. I begin to feel uneasy inside, its true!
Jan. 4–31, 1961: I am stating to reconsider my desire about staying. The work is drab the money I get nowhere to be spent….
Feb. 1: I make my first request to American Embassy, Moscow… I stated “I would like to go back to U.S.”
March 1–16: I now live in a state of expectation about going back to the U.S. I confided with Zeeger he supports my jugement but warnes me not to tell any Russians….[2]
The May Day holiday over, on Wednesday, May 3, Marina and Alik went back to work, and their everyday married life began. Each day, six days a week, the alarm clock went off and Alik rose at seven. He dressed quietly and fixed his breakfast, which was invariably the same: coffee, a hard-boiled egg, and four tiny sweet rolls. Then he sat on the bed beside the sleeping Marina. He kissed his bride and told her, “I hate so much to go off and leave you here.” After a few minutes he would tear himself away. “Look out, now. Don’t oversleep,” he would call as he went out the door. At 9:30 the alarm went off again. Marina struggled out of bed, sipped the coffee he had left her, pulled on her clothes, and dragged herself off to work.
Alik met her every evening outside the pharmacy at 5:30. They would stroll for a bit, nod to friends on the street, window-shop, then repair to the cafeteria opposite their apartment house for dinner. It was a dingy, bare place called the “Café-Avtomat,” which was staffed not by vending machines but by tiny, officious waitresses swathed in white who were forever shouting “Next!” and “Hurry up!” to those who were standing in line. The food was not very good, but Alik preferred it to Marina’s cooking.
By the time they reached home, sunset would be flooding the apartment with a reddish glow. Alik would vanish onto the balcony to weed and water the flowers. Then he loved nothing better than to sit outside with his feet propped against the window boxes, leaning back in his chair and gazing out at the night sky and the river. Sometimes he used binoculars to scan the horizon and in particular, the main street of Minsk to his left, to see what was playing at the movies. The evening was over when, in the concluding phase of his ritual, Alik tuned in to the Voice of America at ten to listen to the English-language news.
Money burned a hole in Marina’s pocket, so she was only too happy to turn over to Alik what she earned and allow him to take charge. He paid for everything, from the groceries they shopped for together to the ice cream and halvah they carried home every night as a concession to his sweet tooth. The first few weeks they spent a good deal on records—classical for him, popular for her—and furniture: a low Georgian bed, or takhta, a tiny child’s bureau, and four chairs.
Marina was proud of their apartment, of the spare, modern, uncluttered look they had given it, and of her own sprightly touches of color—a spray of birch leaves here, a bouquet of flowers there. But she quickly discovered that her husband had a domestic streak, too. Only a few nights after they were married, she came home to a surprise: a new kitchen table and tablecloth and a new set of silverware. Not only had he bought the table and set it, he had decorated it with a bunch of spring flowers he had stolen in a public park. But it was not, as some brides might suppose, a hint that he would like to start taking his evening meal at home. “Better the cafeteria,” he said to her, “than what you fix.”
He bought her another surprise—white lace curtains. When he got them home, they were the wrong length; his solution was manly and straightforward. He took a pair of scissors and sheared them off around the bottom. At woodworking he was more accomplished. He made little legs for their bed and fashioned a rod to hang their clothes on in the closet.
But Alik’s main concern was washing and cleaning. If he did not meet Marina at the pharmacy, the first thing he did when he arrived home was wash the breakfast dishes and mop the floor. Then, on the days when they had hot water, he did the laundry. When Marina came in the downstairs door, she could hear her husband, four flights up, singing the Volga Boatmen’s Song or some other Slavic melody. Entering the apartment, she would be greeted by a cloud of steam.
“My girl is home, is she?” Alik said, bent over the bathtub.
“She is.”
“I’m doing the laundry.”
“So I see.”
Alik was ashamed of the fact that he did manual labor. He did not want Marina to see his grimy work clothes. When she offered to do them herself, he snatched them away from her and said, “I don’t want you washing my dirty clothes.”
If Marina for any reason came home late, she would find Alik waiting at the top of the stairs with an angry, mistrustful look that she was soon to know very well. “Where have you been?” he would ask. “I called the pharmacy, and they said you had already left.”
“I was shopping with Sonya,” Marina might answer truthfully.
“Sonya—or who?” he would ask.
“In a half hour I couldn’t do much,” Marina said, “no matter who I was with.”
Alik was extraordinarily jealous. Even if she was only a few minutes late, he demanded a full explanation of where she had been, with whom, and what she had been doing.
The first few weeks of their marriage, Marina and Alik spent most of their free time by themselves. On weekends they often went to one of the two large lakes outside Minsk for a picnic. Both lakes were in marshy areas surrounded by birch groves, clumps of aspen, and clearings with tiny daisies in bloom. Alik would take a boat and row Marina out to an island in the middle of the lake. There they picnicked, and he lay in the sunshine by the hour trying to get a tan, usually ending up with a sunburn instead. Marina liked to lie on her stomach in the grass, watching the minnows and the baby frogs darting in the shallow water. Once, using his T-shirt as a net, they spent a long time splashing in the water in a futile effort to snare some fish.
A week or so after their wedding, they spent an evening with Marina’s uncle Vasya and aunt Lyuba Axyonov. In an attempt to keep up with Uncle Vasya, Alik downed four shots of vodka. He was not used to it and was soon drunk. They brewed some coffee to sober him up, and he fell asleep on the sofa. But on the way home he was still tipsy and burst out with “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” “Hush,” Marina told him. “The police will arrest you for being noisy.” “Hell,” he shouted, “it’s a free country. No one will arrest a man for singing.”
Another night they went to a movie, a Polish thriller about a stealthy Nazi spy who got off scot-free, unlike Soviet movies in which the enemy spy always got caught.
“I’d love a life like that,” Alik commented as they came out of the theater.
Marina felt a stab of anxiety. Was it possible, she wondered for a fleeting second, that her American husband might be a spy, like the German villain of the movie? “Are you mad?” she inquired.
“I’d love the danger,” came the spare rejoinder.
One evening Alik took Marina to see his friend Pavel Golovachev, with whom he worked at the factory. With his fair hair, snub nose, and open, peasant features, Pavel was easy to write off as a hick from the country, and Marina had done precisely that when she met him at her wedding. But when she saw his apartment, she realized that she could not have been more mistaken. Pavel occupied three rooms with the most sophisticated decor she had ever seen. He had fashioned a tape recorder and a television set of his own, and he had a vast collection of foreign tapes. Pavel, it appeared, was the son of a general, one of the great Russian air aces of World War II and a man who had twice received the highest combat award: Hero of the Soviet Union. The general was allowed to keep apartments in various parts of the country, and Pavel occupied one of them. By virtue of his father’s position, he qualified as a member of the Soviet aristocracy. Marina soon came to believe that he was an aristocrat in the Greek sense as well, one of the very “best.” Open, friendly, frank Pavel, or “Pavlik,” was a “golden human being.”
2
Exhibit No. 24, Vol. 16, pp. 94–105. In quoting correspondence and other writing by Oswald, spelling and punctuation have in some instances been corrected for the sake of clarity, and in others, such as this one, they have been left as Oswald wrote them.