Marina was gratified, too, by his cleanliness. She would not have gone near the handsomest man on earth were he not also immaculate. In this respect Alik left nothing to be desired. He was as obsessed as she by the notion of cleanliness. Invariably, no matter how late at night it might be, he bathed, shaved, and brushed his teeth before they made love, singing or whistling and looking forward happily to what was ahead of him. When he was through he would call out, “I’m ready, Mama,” and after sex he washed again. He was, Marina says, “a hundred times cleaner” than she was. It pleased her that while she demanded perfect cleanliness from him, he liked her and accepted her however she happened to be.
Her feelings had changed a good deal since the days when she had been repelled by her husband, repelled by sex, and finally, two months after they were married, spent a brief, unhappy night with someone else in a forlorn effort to discover whether her marriage had been a mistake. She continued to feel an underlying disappointment with the sex act. But as time went on, their sexual relationship grew more harmonious, and eventually Marina came to consider her husband a tender and accomplished lover. “The longer I lived with him, the more I felt attracted to him,” she says, adding that he could be “quite a seducer” when he wanted to be. “He was willing to do anything at all to give me satisfaction.” She was touched by his efforts. They increased the tenderness she felt for him. All through their marriage, sex, despite its discontents, made for much greater closeness between them.
Alik was extremely jealous of Marina. He allowed no former boyfriend of Marina’s ever to set foot in the apartment unless he was now married. He would not permit her to dance with anyone but him. He was, moreover, very much a Puritan about sex. He hated divorce, and he hated infidelity, especially on the part of a woman. When he heard a case, he would say: “Women are all alike.” He also disapproved of abortion. People, he said, “ought to pay for their mistakes.” He never sought out anybody else, and neither, after that one night in July, did Marina. He never blamed or reproached her for his sexual difficulty—or theirs. He blamed himself for reaching climax too soon, while Marina blamed herself for her inability to reach climax other than through a form of sex of which she felt ashamed. They both enjoyed sex. It made up many a battle between them and was one of the best things in their life together. But because of the form it took, Alik thought that he was less than he should be as a man, and Marina thought she was less than she should be as a woman. Even though their sexual relationship got better as the months went on, each felt that he or she had something still to prove.
— 10 —
The Long Wait
Alik loved to sing. He sang Harry Belafonte in the bathtub, Rimski-Korsakov while mopping the floor, Rachmaninoff while washing dishes. He whistled or sang Russian folk tunes, and when he played opera on the phonograph, he sang and pantomimed as if he were on stage. His favorite singer was the incomparable Russian bass, Chaliapin, and when he sang along with a Chaliapin recording, he would turn red as a beet trying to hit the low notes. When he made it, he would shout: “Look at me. I sing as well as he does!” At the end of an especially taxing passage, he would call out in triumph to Marina: “Mama, I love you!”
One Sunday in early September, when the leaves were turning yellow out of doors, they were sitting together in the apartment, Marina sewing and Alik bending over his diary. He was singing as usual, and Marina noticed that nearly every line ended with the same words—“Oh my darlin’.” They were English words, but she understood them and hoped they might refer to her. After a while she grew tired of hearing the same song over and over. “Put on another record now,” she said. “You’ve been singing that one thing all day.”
“I’m sorry,” Alik apologized absentmindedly but after a brief pause started singing it again.
Marina was to hear the song often, and always, it seemed, when Alik was working on his diary. It was not until years later that she found out it was the title song of the movie High Noon, the story of the sheriff of a small Western town who, against the wishes of his wife and without any help from the townspeople, is brave enough to stand up to a band of outlaws who are out to take over the town. Alik saw the movie in Fort Worth in 1956 on the enthusiastic urging of his brother, Robert, and they loved to sing the song together.[1] He may also have seen it again while he was in the Marine Corps, and it is apparent that the theme of the movie and its title song, the conflict between love and duty, made a deep impression on him.
Alik’s favorite opera was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, based on a short story by Pushkin. He saw the movie of the opera countless times and played it on the phonograph again and again. One aria, in particular, he played as many as twenty times a night:
Marina suspected that her husband associated the aria with some former lover, and she grew jealous. She must have shown it, for Alik began to play the record only when she was out and changed it quickly the moment he heard her footstep on the stair. Marina soon found a name to attach to her jealousy. They had received postcards from someone vacationing in the south, and Alik explained that they were from an Intourist interpreter who had helped him a great deal when he first arrived in the Soviet Union. A week or so later the front door opened, and in she walked. It was Rimma Shirokova.
Alik looked pleased but ill at ease as he made the introductions. Rimma, about twenty-seven, was blonde and tastefully dressed, and was plainly a person of education. Marina liked her right away.
Alik and Rimma began to talk in English until Rimma tactfully suggested that they speak Russian so Marina could understand. Marina noticed that the visitor addressed her husband as “Lee,” a name she had rarely heard him called before. Rimma laughed and joked a good deal as the two of them sipped coffee and talked over acquaintances they had in common in Moscow. She asked “Lee” if he was going to continue his education. He told her, untruthfully, that he had applied for Friendship University but had not yet received a reply. “You must study,” Rimma said firmly, and he agreed. She stayed about an hour—she was catching a night train for Moscow—but before she left, Rimma said to Alik: “You have a good wife. Take care of her.”
“What a nice-looking girl!” Marina exclaimed, as soon as she had gone. “How on earth can you love me when you might have had someone like her!”
“I was in love with her,” Alik admitted. “I wanted to marry her. But she is older than I am. She thought I was just a little boy, and she wouldn’t have me.” He assured Marina that she was every bit as good for him as Rimma, and a good deal younger besides. In spite of his reassurance, Marina continued to feel inferior; Rimma was prettier and better educated than she was. “Rimma was too good for him—I wasn’t,” she thought.
Marina remembers more about the visit than her feelings of jealousy. Soon after Rimma arrived, Alik came into the kitchen and said to her in a low voice: “Don’t tell Rimma that we’re trying to go to America!” Rimma had gone out of her way to help him when he was trying desperately to stay in Russia two years before. He must have felt that he would cut a ridiculous figure if she learned that he was now trying, almost equally hard, to get out.
2
After the assassination a fragment of the aria was found among Oswald’s belongings. It is in Oswald’s handwriting, in Russian, and it contains omissions, mistakes, and indecipherable phrases. It is probably an attempt to reproduce the words by listening to the recording (Exhibit No. 53, Vol. 16, p. 191). Author’s translation.