Alik was crushed, and he begged Marina to find out why he had been turned away. He had repaid the Prusakovs’ kindness by taking a step in secret that was bound to affect them all, perhaps disastrously. But Marina recalls, “Alik just didn’t understand that you don’t do things that way.”
After a week or so, Marina finally telephoned the Prusakovs: “Aunt Valya, I want to see you.”
“Good,” she said. “Come on over, only don’t bring Alka.”
Valya greeted her at the door. “Uncle Ilya is very angry, and he wants to talk to you,” she warned.
“A fine niece you are,” Ilya began. “You’re here all the time. Then you fly off to Moscow without a word and leave me to hear it from others.” He grilled Marina about the visit to the embassy. He wanted to know every detail. “You ought to consult your family before you do a thing alike that,” he said finally, and with that he picked up the newspaper and disappeared into his study.
Ilya had spent a lifetime in a special part of the Soviet bureaucracy. At stake for him in Marina’s application to go abroad, although he never said so, were the pension he had earned by a lifetime of labor, his friends, his apartment, his position of dignity, his way of life. Ilya would soon be retiring. He was looking forward to the peace he had earned.
Marina and her aunt withdrew as usual to the kitchen, and Valya, too, began to scold her. Marina knew that her criticisms were just, but she wanted them all to make up. “Well, what can we do about it now?” Valya said. “It’s too late. All right, bring him over.”
Marina and Alik came together, and this time it was Alik whom Ilya subjected to cross-examination. Once again he went through every step, every nuance of the visit to the embassy. Ilya said that he thought Alik had not only given up his American citizenship but had become a citizen of the USSR. He added that he would never have consented to the marriage if he had known that Alik was not a Soviet citizen. Alik was truthful but vague in his answers to Ilya’s questions. He conceded that he had asked for his American passport back, omitting to mention that he had received it. Marina believes he was ashamed. “Don’t worry, Uncle Ilya,” Alik tried to end the interview on a soothing note. “It’s nothing but a first step. I have no idea whether we’ll even be allowed to go back.”
On the way home he exploded in anger at Marina. “I wasn’t ready for a grilling like that. I had no idea you’d told them everything.”
“They’re my family,” Marina said. “They took me in and gave me a home. I can’t keep things from them.”
“You could have waited awhile,” he said. “We don’t know anything anyway.”
“Alik,” Marina complained. “You force me to lie. I can’t live like that. I can’t open my mouth without giving you away as a liar. You lied about your mother and your age. You lied when you said you couldn’t return to America. Now you’re making me lie. When will there be an end to it?”
There were more questions to come, not only from family and friends but from Marina herself. A few days after their return from Moscow, she observed Alik, for the first time, writing on a yellow pad at home, seemingly lost in thought. Then she noticed that he had photographs and a ground plan of the radio plant. Marina was horror-stricken. So Alik was a spy after all. To make matters worse, he would not let her near the papers and refused even to say what he was doing. Marina was nearly in a panic.
Finally, Alik relented. “I’m writing my impressions of Russia,” he told her.
“What for?” she wanted to know.
“Maybe there are people in America who will want to read them. Maybe I’ll publish them, and maybe I’ll keep them for myself.”
Marina sighed with relief. She thought how foolish she had been. Yet one day when she returned home from work before Alik, she raced upstairs and ransacked the apartment, looking for what he was writing. All she found was a litter of unsuspicious-looking papers covered with her husband’s scrawl.
She did her best to compose herself after that. But then she made another discovery. Alik had a shocking sum of money saved up, the small fortune of five hundred rubles (five hundred dollars), which he said was from the Soviet Red Cross. Again, Marina’s suspicions were aroused. Alik had lied to her in the past. Was he lying again now to conceal the fact that he was a spy?
Marina came to a different conclusion. She had grown up in a country where informing is a way of life. Eyes and ears are everywhere. A trusted friend often turns out to be an agent of the police. It is vital to keep secrets, your own and those of others, merely to have a quiet life. Discretion is, indeed, the better part of valor. But Marina soon realized that her husband’s secretiveness was of another kind entirely. He told lies without purpose or point, lies that were bound to be found out. He liked having secrets for their own sake. He simply enjoyed concealment. For him it was not a matter of life and death but a matter of choice. In a Russian setting that must have seemed like frivolity indeed.
For Marina to perceive, at the youthful age of nineteen, that her husband told lies as a matter of character rather than of necessity was a feat of mature intuition. Still, she trusted him—she had nobody else. All day every day she held back her tears at the pharmacy. But when she came home each night, she broke down. “Alka,” she cried, “don’t leave me. Don’t give me up. You see I have no one but you. No one at work. No Ilya or Valya. I have no family now.”
“My poor little girl,” he said to comfort her, taking her in his arms and kissing the nape of her neck. “Cry as much as you like. It’ll be easier that way.” Then he added, as if to himself, “I never thought it was going to be so hard.”
It was hard, and Marina had moments of vacillation. But she felt from the outset that she had a right to be with her husband, to go where he went, and that she was not doing anything wrong. The opposition she encountered served only to stiffen her resolve. From time to time she wavered, but she did not give up. She was committed to Alik now, and she was sustained by his patience and understanding and by the certain knowledge that he was proud of her.
Somehow, after the initial turmoil, their lives returned to normal. Marina’s pregnancy progressed without incident, but in early August she underwent a special medical examination at the hospital because of “unpleasant sensations in the heart region,”[3] probably the result of the pressures she had been under. There was nothing seriously wrong, however, and she was not hospitalized.
Little change took place in their schedule. Marina went to work at the pharmacy; Alik went to the radio plant. Their evenings and weekends were spent in a variety of ways. Sometimes Alik rented a boat and paddled along the Svisloch River. When he found himself alongside their apartment building, he would shout and wave, “Mama! Marina!” Marina would run out onto the balcony and wave back.
They went on picnics in the woods, sometimes with Alik’s friend Erich Titovyets and sometimes with Marina’s friends Misha Smolsky and his crowd. On one of their picnics, Alik did the hula hoop to amuse the others. And the Oswalds often entertained friends at their apartment. From time to time Erich came by to give Alik a lesson in German. Pavil Golovachev came, Anita Ziger came, and so did Marina’s old friends. There was one item of the Oswalds’ decor that always aroused their comments: Alik’s shotgun. It occupied a place of honor on the wall above the sofa, which was also the Oswalds’ bed. Each week Alik took the gun down and oiled and polished it with the utmost care. He oiled, polished, squinted, then oiled, polished, and squinted some more. The spot on the wall where he hung the gun was stained with oil. From the devotion he lavished on this ritual, it occurred to Marina that her husband was like a mother with a little child. “He’s lonesome for America,” she thought. “He had more amusements there.” He had fewer hobbies, fewer diversions he really enjoyed, than anyone she knew. So seeing him happy with his gun, she did her best to leave him in peace.