Because of his father’s virtually invulnerable position, Pavel had grown up open and unafraid. He was not afraid, for example, to make a friend of the only American in Minsk, Lee Oswald. Nor was he afraid to talk to him frankly both about his country’s virtues and shortcomings. But it soon became clear to Marina that her husband’s liking for Pavel went well beyond the fact that he was one of the few people who could talk to him intelligently about politics. There was a small gadget on the wall of Alik’s and Marina’s apartment that had no apparent use. They supposed it to be a listening device, which led them to speculate about their friends and who might be informing on them. Marina asked about Pavel. Alik looked at her a long, meaningful second and delivered a devastating answer. “I’d trust him,” he said pointedly, “a whole lot sooner than I’d trust you.”
Marina soon came to trust him, too. Pavel had many faults, but he was incapable of calculation and was, as the Oswalds were to learn, an utterly disinterested friend. In fact, Marina believes that Pavel was far and away her husband’s closest friend in Russia, and probably the closest friend he ever had.
As for Pavel’s opinion of Alik, he appears to have had his eyes open. Either on this first visit to Pavel’s apartment or another very shortly thereafter, Marina found herself alone with her husband’s friend, in the bathroom hunting for a towel. “What’s Alik like at the factory?” she asked. “Do the other men like him?”
“They like him,” Pavel replied, “but he’s not quite one of them. You sense that he’s reserved—that he holds himself a little bit aloof. Somehow he’s different from the others.”
“What do you mean?” Marina asked.
“Well,” Pavel’s eyes grew wide and thoughtful, “maybe it’s that he’s not completely open. He isn’t straight from the heart, the way we Russians are.”[3]
Alik had an unhappy experience at the factory only a fortnight after he was married. A special outing was planned, a weekend excursion by chartered bus to Riga and Leningrad. Alik knew his bride’s love of Leningrad and wanted to give her a surprise. He signed up for the trip and said nothing to her about his plan. A day or so later he was given his money back and told that the trip was off. Alik thought no more about it until one Saturday when he went to work and noticed that a couple of his friends were missing. They had gone on the trip to Leningrad. Alik was furious at the deception. “Why couldn’t they tell me to my face?” he fumed, when Marina firmly pried it out of him. “This way it’s so underhanded.”
Still angry, he asked the party organizer at the plant if he had been denied permission to go because he was a foreigner.
“Yes,” the party organizer said. “You have to have permission to go out of town, and that’s usually a matter of days. I couldn’t let you go on my own hook, and I didn’t want to keep everyone else waiting while the militia was making up its mind.”
Alik never forgot. He never forgave the party organizer and refused to have any more to do with him.
Marina also had an unpleasant experience, and it, too, had to do with Alik’s being a foreigner. A week or two after she was married, a rumor swept the hospital and the pharmacy that she had been a prostitute. That, it was said, was why she had had to leave Leningrad. The rumor was traced back to her old beau, Sasha, now an intern in one of the wards. With Sasha known to be a disappointed suitor, the rumor would not have taken hold had Marina not married a foreigner. Her colleagues at the pharmacy were incensed. They had declined to come to the wedding because Alik was a foreigner, but this was another matter. They took Marina to the headquarters of the Komsomol and made her file a complaint that she had been unjustly slandered, which all of them signed as witnesses. Sasha was, in fact, issued a “warning” that he had behaved in a manner unworthy of the Komsomol. When Marina told Alik about the incident, he growled: “If you see Sasha, tell him not to show himself in front of me. I’ll bash his head in.” For good measure he added: “I’ll break both of his legs.”
Despite these ripples on the surface of their tranquility, the early weeks of their marriage were happy ones. But there was one thing that troubled Marina. Alik had never actually said that he loved her. Once when she asked him if he loved her, he replied impatiently, “You ought to know how I feel from the way I act.” He seemed content, it was true, especially when they were together. But sometimes when he was sitting by himself, Marina noticed that an enveloping thoughtfulness settled over him, as if he were unhappy or uncertain in some way. She suspected that he might be thinking about another woman.
Marina’s suspicions were correct. Alik was still thinking about Ella Germann. In the early weeks of his marriage to Marina, he confided to his diary:
May—The transition of changing full love from [Ella] to Marina was very painful esp. as I saw [Ella] almost every day at the factory but as the days and weeks went by I adjusted more and more my wife mentaly…. She is maddly in love with me from the very start.
June—A continuence of May, except that; we draw closer and closer, and I think very little of Ella….[4]
There was another woman in Alik’s life whom Marina did not know about—his mother. Alik had told her that his mother was dead, and she had no reason to doubt him. But a few weeks after they were married, she saw him reading a letter from home with such a thoughtful expression that she asked whether it contained bad news. An hour or so later he glanced up from the book he was reading and said: “Forgive me, Marina. That letter isn’t from my aunt. It’s from my mother.”
Marina was startled, “Why didn’t you tell me your mother was alive?”
“I didn’t know we were going to get married. If people had known I had a mother, I was afraid it might cause her some unpleasantness.”
After that Marina noticed that the arrival of a letter from his mother never seemed to raise her husband’s spirits. “Don’t you love her?” she asked.
“No. It’s a long story,” he explained. “We had a fight when my brother Robert got married. I didn’t like her treatment of his wife.” He told Marina to ask no more about it.
The pain of learning for a second time that her husband had lied to her was blunted by Marina’s discovery that she was pregnant. From the moment they were married, Alik wanted a child. When the first weeks went by with no sign, he suggested that he might have something wrong with him. “Maybe it’s my fault. If there’s no sign in another month, we’ll go to the doctor to be checked.”
Marina was by no means so eager. She mixed herself some chemical contraceptives at the pharmacy. But she found them painful, and a week after they were married, Alik hurled them across the room: “We won’t use those any more.” He offered to take precautions himself if she wanted to avoid a child. (Condoms are known in Russia as “galoshes.”) But Marina was fatalistic, and they took no more precautions. She’d have an abortion (legal in Russia since 1955), she vaguely thought, if it came to that.
3
Pavel seems to have understood Oswald very well, for in a letter he wrote both the Oswalds on September 15, 1962, when they were in the United States, he advised Marina that it was useless to complain about Lee’s lesser faults and that with some people it is a question of “remaking rather than repair.” He added, enigmatically, that there “are not equal standards about important things in this world.” (Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 928, Memorandum dated May 6, 1964, by Richard Helms, Deputy Director of Plans of the CIA, titled “Contacts Between the Oswalds and Soviet Citizens, June 13, 1962, to November 22, 1963.”)