Marina thinks he read so little Russian because he was lazy. Neither he nor she knew that he had a reading disability that must have made it tedious and frustrating to wrestle with the strange Cyrillic symbols. Alik was not lazy. He struggled to improve his Russian, and his efforts represent a strenuous attempt to compensate, even overcompensate, for the difficulty with his own language he at most only sensed that he had. When they were at home, for example, Marina used short, simple phrases to be sure he understood. But he asked her to speak normally so that he could keep on learning. When she was angry, on the other hand, Marina expressed herself in abstruse words and long-drawn-out sentences. The words simply flooded from her tongue. “Wait, wait,” Alik would cry out in anguish, not at her anger but at her syntax. “What does it mean? Say it again from the beginning.” Marina found her anger beginning to ebb. “Poor boy,” she would think, “he doesn’t understand.” And her fury would give way to pity.
Unmarried friends of Marina’s often dropped by to seek advice in some matter of the heart. They purposely spoke in synonyms, difficult, unfamiliar words so that he would not understand. But they were reckoning without Alik. He listened raptly and wrote down every word he did not know. He was not prying; he was trying to enlarge his vocabulary. Before long, curiosity got the better of him, and he interrupted the conversation: What did this mean, what did they mean by that? The girls had forgotten. They peered at his sheet of paper trying to decipher what they had said. The words he had written down bore only a coincidental resemblance to the words they had actually spoken. Alik had a good ear, and he had heard accurately enough. But because of his language difficulty, he was unable to reduce to written symbols what his ear had heard.
Alik owed more to the other men at the factory than his proficiency in Russian. So open were they, so easy and frank in his presence, that he felt like one of them. “They tell stories and criticize the foreman and Partog in front of me as if I wasn’t a foreigner,” he boasted to Marina. He soon came to share their attitudes about the party organizer and the deputy director of the factory, and like the other men, he despised the hypocrisy and favoritism on every side. But while he liked his fellow workers, he was not really a part of the things at the plant, and Marina knew it. At lunchtime he nearly always sat by himself, or at a table of men he did not know, rather than with the men he worked with. He did not join the other men on drinking sprees, or go to see them at their homes. He was considered antisocial, and with some of them he was actually unpopular because he had been given an apartment of his own without doing anything to deserve it. They would have forgiven him quickly had he been either a congenial fellow or a good worker. But his work, if anything, was below average. He did only what he had to do and no more. It is ironic that Alik grew to dislike the Soviet system, in part, because of the restrictions it placed upon him, while his colleagues disliked him because of the privileges he received.
Yet Alik was as well liked in Russia as he had ever been before or was ever to be again. At the plant he was the object of a good deal of teasing, much of it with sexual overtones. Was he sorry he had married a Russian girl? Was she pregnant yet? So many and so personal were the matters discussed at the plant that Marina felt acutely self-conscious. “For heaven’s sake, Alka,” she would exclaim, “don’t tell them about our lovemaking!” For her husband would come home with the most intimate details of the others’ sex lives, together with suggestions that they try some new sexual technique he had heard about. Marina enjoyed his tales about the sex lives of others but had no wish for Alik to reveal their own.
The truth was that the Oswalds were having difficulty in sex, and they were worried about it. They could not reach a climax together; in fact, Marina failed to have an orgasm at all. Whether it was three, five, or ten minutes after they started making love, Alik ejaculated too soon, before Marina was ready. It made her so furious that at times she could have hit him.
“I’ll do anything you want, only please, please don’t be angry,” he would beg.
Sometimes he pretended that he had not had an orgasm yet. “Who are you trying to fool,” Marina said, “me or yourself?” She would slap him on the rear end. “Go and wash yourself off. And don’t show your face in here again.” Half an hour later she was remorseful at being so sharp with him. There were moments, nonetheless, when she thought there was nothing so hateful as the sight of a man who had been satisfied. To her it was the sight of a “dead bird in a bush.”
They tried all sorts of distractions—talking about something else, for example—while they were making love, hoping that he could go on longer, until she was ready for him. Nothing helped. Sometimes in the early months of their marriage she refused sex altogether: “I’d rather you didn’t touch me. You finish too soon. It makes me sick.”
“All men are like that,” Alik said. Or, “With you, what man could wait more than five minutes?” Or, “It would take five men to satisfy you!” Marina began to think it really was her fault. Then one day he suggested something new, a variation he had heard about at the factory. It involved some oral sex, or what they were to call “French love.”[6]
Marina was greatly embarrassed. But Alik assured her that “between husband and wife everything is good and pure,” and she consented to try it. It became a frequent way of making love, although Marina never felt right about it, and Lee evidently preferred normal intercourse most of the time.
Marina was ashamed of her body. She was acutely self-conscious about it. All through the sexual act she would be thinking how sinful she was, how thin she was, and wondering what Alik must think of her. He took endless pains to reassure her. Again and again he said that she was “the best woman” in the world for him, sexually and in every other way. He made love to her at all times of the month, even when she was menstruating, and this signified to Marina that he accepted her just as she was. Another sign of his acceptance concerned a scar on her lower back, the remnant of a childhood operation. Never in all their married life did Alik mention the scar or ask Marina how she got it. She considered his reticence a mark of the most exquisite tact. As she grew to realize that her husband was not critical of her body in any way, Marina eventually came to feel freer with him.
Alik appears to have been proud of his body. Marina sometimes teased him about his shoulders, which were sloping or, as she put it, “weak” and “womanly.” But she was overcome with joy when, after they were married, she caught the first glimpse of Alik naked below the waist. She considered his legs, his back, and his thighs objects of real beauty and was gratified to think that her children might inherit such marvelous features. He was soon aware of her admiration, and on occasion, when they had quarreled, he would sit with one leg draped over the arm of a chair, displaying his most perfect features. More than once this was an invitation to reconciliation.
6
Later he admitted that he had actually been initiated into oral sex much earlier, by an older woman (probably a prostitute) in Japan.