Alik shared their disappointment in Russia, but he had believed in Communism for six years now, and it was hard to give up the dream that somewhere a perfect society was coming into being. Was it not sensible to suppose that the clumsy, stolid Russians, who had never done things right anyway, had merely fumbled the chance history had given them, and that in the hands of a livelier, more talented people like the Cubans, and with a heroic leader like Castro, Communism might yet yield its promise? And so, perhaps seeking a cushion against his disenchantment, Alik turned again to Castro, who might truly achieve an egalitarian society and whose Communism, Alik was certain, would be of a gaudier feather altogether than the drab thing Russia had created.
In October, three months after their visit to the American embassy, Marina and Alik still had no word from the Soviet authorities on their application for permission to leave Russia. It had to be assumed that such an application would be considered at a very high level, adding weeks, or even months, to the bureaucratic process. Alik sought to speed things up by putting pressure on the American embassy. He had written to the embassy at least once a month since his trip to Moscow, complaining of the difficulty he was having in obtaining Soviet exit visas and the harassment he and Marina were being subjected to. Now, in Marina’s recent illness, he saw another opportunity to enlist sympathy for his cause, and on October 4 he wrote Ambassador Llewellyn E. Thompson, asking him to make inquiries on his behalf at the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs in Minsk. He said that his wife was still under pressure to withdraw her visa application, and because of that she had been hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. Like many of Alik’s lies, there was a germ of truth in his claim. (Marina had been hospitalized, but not for nervous exhaustion.)[5] He also inquired about the status of his passport renewal, and whether or not Marina’s application to enter the United States had been approved.
The embassy was not encouraging. Oswald’s passport renewal had been approved, but the embassy had been instructed to validate it only when his travel plans to return to the United States had been made, and when he reappeared in person at the embassy. Marina’s status with the American government was still pending, the embassy wrote; finally, Oswald was informed that the embassy had no way of influencing Soviet authorities to act upon applications for exit visas.
Marina was due for a three-week vacation in October. Alik, who had had his vacation, urged her to get away for a change of scene, and after a few days sitting at home, she decided to go to Kharkov, nearly five hundred miles to the southeast, to stay with her mother’s sister, Aunt Polina and her husband, Uncle Georgy (Jorya) Alexandrov. Another sister of her mother’s, Aunt Taisya, also lived in Kharkov, and Marina discovered, to her surprise, that none of her relatives there knew that she had married an American. They were even more shocked when she told them that she had applied for permission to go to America with her husband. Uncle Jorya hardly spoke a word to Marina after that. He stopped laughing and joking and abruptly ceased being the uncle she had known. For Georgy Alexandrov was head of the Kharkov Building Trust, one of the most important jobs in the city, and he, like her Uncle Ilya in Minsk, had every reason to suppose that Marina’s decision to go abroad could affect him disastrously.
Aunt Polina and Aunt Taisya begged Marina to change her mind. They told her horror stories about poverty and unemployment in the United States. “You’ll cry, and no one will hear you,” Aunt Polina said. Because of her, Uncle Jorya and Uncle Ilya might lose their jobs. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you in your condition,” Aunt Polina said, “but I can’t stand silently by while my niece in her inexperience makes such a mistake. Stay here. Let your husband go back by himself. We’ll all help you. You’re young—you can marry again.”
A few days of this, and Marina was sorry she had come. She went back to Minsk a day sooner than planned—and with new doubts about leaving Russia.
The anxious wait for word on their visas and her advancing pregnancy made her nervous and depressed. Night after night, in tears, she would seek reassurance from her husband, and in the mornings she would play Peer Gynt on the phonograph, sob a little, eat breakfast by herself, stare out the windows, and trudge off dully to work. Her mood was a match for the gray skies of autumn. But eventually the crying spells ceased. “Alik stopped paying attention,” Marina recalls, “so I stopped crying.”
Meanwhile, everyday life went on. Alik took Marina to a dance at the factory. His friends were eager to have a look at her, and he could not refuse any longer. But there was another motive. All evening long Alik twirled Marina purposefully on the dance floor, grinned at her as contentedly as a Cheshire cat and generally played the part of the blissfully married man. It was a performance for the benefit of Ella Germann, the girl who had turned him down. “Phi, how ugly and fat she’s gotten,” Alik said. “It’s lucky I married a thin girl.”
The subject of obesity was to come up constantly in their conversations. If Alik said of a woman, “Oh, she’s so thin,” it meant that he liked her. Walking down the street one day, he spotted a girl he knew slightly. She was flat-chested, bony, and tall. “She’d suit me fine” was his comment. “I could feel all her bones.” He once told Marina that he had slept with a girl named Nella. “She was a peasant girl from the country. But there was so much of her in all directions it made me sick. I felt as if I’d overeaten. I had a date with her, but I stood her up.” Marina, always self-conscious about her own thin body, came to realize that it was one of the reasons Alik had married her. Only later, after she had met Marguerite Oswald, did she conclude that Alik’s aversion to plump women had something to do with his feelings for his mother.
Marina and Alik continued to spend a good deal of time at Ilya and Valya’s. Ilya was hospitable, for he had long ago concluded that they would never be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. He spent long, patient hours playing chess with Alik. An experienced player, Ilya nearly always won, and Alik took his losses hard. Ilya would pat him encouragingly on the back and say that his game was getting better. But just as Alik was misleading Ilya by allowing him to suppose that he had abandoned his efforts to return to America, so he was misleading him about chess. He told Ilya that he was just learning to play. In truth, he had been playing since he was about thirteen years old.
Gruffly kind as Ilya was, it was Valya who made Alik a special favorite, and in ways that were telling to one who knew him, he returned her affection. He was obsessed by cleanliness, refusing, for example, to kiss any woman wearing lipstick or to eat food that had been touched by anyone else. For Valya, and Valya alone, Alik made an exception. He allowed her and no one else, not even Marina, to pick up tidbits in her fingers and pop them into his mouth. Once, before Marina’s unbelieving eyes, he went so far as to take a morsel from Valya’s plate and eat it.
Finicky as he was about food, Alik was more finicky still about smoke. He tried to get Marina, a chain-smoker, to stop, claiming that it was bad for the baby. He cut her down to three, then two, then one cigarette a day. But Marina was expert at evading him. She had cigarettes hidden all over the apartment, and she smoked on the sly, even in the bathtub. Alik had a poor sense of smell and rarely noticed.
And he was parsimonious, always saving for something. When they were first married, he was free with their money, buying records and furniture. Then, when he was thinking of returning to America but had not yet said anything to Marina, he put her off. “Later—we’ll see what we need.” Finally, after he had told her of his plans and convinced her to come with him, it was: “Why buy a whole lot now? We’ll only have to sell it when we go.” Marina turned over her salary to him. He doled out money for groceries and saved up the rest for their trip.
5
When the Warren Commission asked Marina whether she had been hospitalized for nervous difficulty during 1961, she denied it (Testimony of Marina Oswald, Vol. 1, p. 97). Only later did she remember that she had been hospitalized because of gas fumes on a bus. Because of her denial, and because medical records handed over by the Soviet government after the assassination contained only Marina’s outpatient record, not her hospital record, the Commission erroneously concluded that Marina had not been in the hospital at all and that Oswald had probably been lying (Warren Commission Report, p. 708).