Marina also remembers that Alik was nervous throughout the visit. At the time she supposed that it was because of their former relationship. But years later, when she learned that it was Rimma who had discovered him that day in 1959 when he slashed his wrist in his hotel room in Moscow, she realized that Alik must have been afraid that Rimma would mention his suicide attempt.
Indeed, Marina would have been very shocked had she known of the episode. Yet she suspected something. A few weeks after she was married, she noticed a small scar on Alik’s left wrist. She asked if he got it in a fight over a girl and was surprised when he at first refused to answer. She was more surprised still when he snapped: “Don’t ever ask me again.”
“Was it your first love?” Marina persisted.
Visibly upset, he replied, “I was young and foolish then.”
After that Marina noticed, out of a corner of her mind, that Alik kept the scar hidden. He wore a watch on his left wrist and once, when it broke, it was months before he would take it to be fixed. Later, when he broke it again, and again had to take it to be fixed, he covered his wrist with an identification bracelet even though he hated jewelry and knew that Marina, too, hated jewelry of any kind on a man.
Marina never asked him about the scar again. But when she learned that it was the result of a suicide attempt, her thoughts again fastened on Rimma. She believes that her husband attempted suicide not only to put pressure on the Soviet authorities to permit him to stay in Russia, but to impress Rimma. “I would perform a heroic deed of unheard-of prowess for your sake.”[3]
About September 20, very soon after Rimma’s visit, Marina was on her way to work on the bus one morning when she was overcome by gas fumes. She stepped off to buy a glass of carbonated water and crumpled to the street in a faint. A passerby rushed her to the Third Clinical Hospital, right above the pharmacy where she worked. When Alik returned to the apartment that evening, he found a message and rushed to the pharmacy. Marina crept down the back stairs of the hospital to see him.
“Did you lose the baby?” he asked, pale and upset. Marina assured him the baby was all right. He told her to do anything, have an abortion even, but be sure no harm came to her.
The doctors found Marina run down and deficient in vitamins and iron. Then they discovered that her blood type was Rh-negative and, fearing complications in the pregnancy, kept her in the hospital about five days. Later, at Alik’s suggestion, they tested his blood. Marina was with him during the test, and she had never in her life seen anyone so afraid of pain and the sight of blood. He nearly fainted twice and was very peevish and cross. “Can’t they dig up a better nurse than that?” he complained. When it was over, it turned out that his blood type was Rh-negative, too.[4]
Marina was overcome. Fate had, indeed, taken a hand in her life. Throughout her marriage she felt certain that no other husband could have given her a child; no one else would have had the same blood type. It meant that they had been truly destined for one another. Somehow, across an ocean, he had found her.
Marina felt the same way about the scars both of them had on their arms. Skin had been removed from her right arm during an eye operation in childhood. Alik had the scar on his left elbow from the accidental discharge of a pistol while he was in the Marine Corps in Japan, although he told Marina, falsely, that he had been wounded in action in Indonesia. The scars were the same size and looked identical. To Marina the similarity was another sign that she and Alik had been destined for each other by fate.
Marina’s illness was not serious, and she had a good time in the hospital. Nurses came from all over to have a look at the “marvel” who had married an American. She had visits from two or three old beaux, but since husbands were not permitted, she had to steal downstairs to the pharmacy at night to see Alik.
One evening just after she left the hospital, Alik came home in a special hurry. “President Kennedy is going to speak tonight,” he said. He closed the balcony doors to shut out noises from the street, or perhaps to keep the neighbors from hearing. A series of announcements came over the radio, the first in a Baltic tongue, then Russian, then Ukrainian. Next, they heard a voice in English.
“Is it him?” Marina asked.
“Not yet,” Alik answered impatiently.
At the beginning of the year 1961, the year the Oswalds met and married, the new young president of the United States had stood in icy sunshine half a world away and taken the oath of office. “Let every nation know,” he said, “whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” Less than three months later, a band of Cuban exiles armed by the United States landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. Khrushchev and Kennedy met somberly in Vienna. A summer of crisis followed. Khrushchev threatened to end Western access to Berlin. Kennedy called out reserves. A wall went up in Berlin. At the end of August, Russia announced that it was resuming atmospheric nuclear testing. Three H-bombs of unprecedented megatonnage were detonated in Central Asia. The cold war entered a dangerous new phase as Khrushchev tested the mettle of the new president.
Alik recognized Kennedy’s voice the second it came over the air. He had apparently heard Kennedy before while he was in Russia, as the result of scores of Kennedy speeches or excerpts broadcast by the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, another station to which he listened. This speech was being broadcast live and in its entirety by the Voice. It was Kennedy’s address of September 25, 1961, given at the United Nations General Assembly, announcing the end of the Berlin crisis.
Alik was rigid with attention as Kennedy spoke for about an hour. The voice was wavy and distorted, and now and then a word was lost by jamming. “Oh, chort” (“damn”), Alik swore each time it happened. Once, when Marina made a slight sound, he waved her in irritation into the kitchen. After that she sat motionless beside him.
The moment the speech ended, Alik bounded into the kitchen to make tea. What was it about? Marina asked. “About war and peace,” he told her and quoted a few of the president’s phrases.
“That’s funny,” said Marina. “Everybody wants peace here. They want peace there, too. So why do they talk about war?”
“Politics,” Alik grinned.
A day or so later, Alik defended the president’s speech in a discussion with Uncle Ilya. He thought the Soviet government was “sneaky,” since it had attacked the speech without publishing it or printing a fair account. Sipping tea in the kitchen with Aunt Valya, Marina heard her husband speak up stoutly for the United States. Uncle Ilya was equally staunch in his defense of the Soviet Union. But on one thing they both agreed—the Bay of Pigs. Alik roundly deplored American policy toward Cuba and Fidel Castro.
Marina did not know it, but her husband had long been enthusiastic about Castro. That autumn he took her to see a movie about the Cuban leader by the illustrious Soviet film director, Roman Carmen. Alik loved it, and he started calling Castro “a hero” and “a man of talent.” And at about this same time, he began to seek out the Cuban students in Minsk, three hundred or so strong, to learn what he could of Castro’s revolution.
The Cuban students were a lively lot who found Soviet Communism a drab disappointment. They loved singing, dancing, and playing the guitar, but no matter what amusement they thought up, the militia quickly forbade it. They were even discouraged from going out with Soviet girls, and they hated the cold weather. The Cubans were in dread that the Americans would invade their country and overthrow Castro, lest they be doomed to stay in Russia forever. Looking at the dreary, colorless city around them, they asked—was it for this we built a revolution?
3
After the assassination, when Oswald had indeed performed a deed of “unheard-of prowess,” Marina again thought that he had done it to impress Rimma. It was a thought that may have been an unconscious attempt to repress the fear that he had done it to impress her. It is possible, however, that Oswald did, as Marina suspects, associate the opera, and the aria, with Rimma; it is quite likely that when he first saw