Alik, meanwhile, had gone to work, since he was not allowed in the maternity section of the hospital. “Congratulations, Papa!” the men shouted when he arrived at the factory. Someone had telephoned from the hospital and left word that his wife had given birth to a baby girl.
Alik had never told the men at the factory that he was expecting a child. But somehow they had found out about it, and the next day at lunch, they held a special ceremony for the new father. They presented him with a big box. Inside were a blanket, a tiny sweater, overalls, little shirts, a yellow bonnet, swaddling cloth—everything a newborn baby would need.
Alik hesitated. He did not know what to do.
“Take it, Papa. What’s the shilly-shallying about?” the men said.
Alik took it. He was very touched, but he was so reticent that he did not know how to thank them.
Because of hospital regulations, Alik did not see the baby until it was eight days old, when he arrived to take mother and daughter home. He was, he confessed later, shocked by the sight of the child; like any new father, he expected her to be partly grown and already quite good-looking.
He made their homecoming memorable. In Marina’s absence he had washed the floors, cleaned the apartment from stem to stern, and washed and ironed all the laundry. Ushering the two of them in, his wife and child, he was filled with happiness. He kissed Marina and said simply: “Thank you.” Then, quietly, “What a pity we have to wait,” meaning for sex. Marina herself felt that if they could have made love on that day, it would have been a kind of completion. It was, anyway, the happiest day of her life. She felt that her husband truly loved her and that, for the first time, he was aware of it.
That evening two of Marina’s friends came by to teach her to swaddle and feed the baby. They left, and Marina was alone. Alik had gone to Ilya and Valya’s to celebrate Valya’s name day. At one o’clock he came home, his cap falling off the back of his head, smiling and tipsy (the fourth and last time Marina was to see him so). “Where’s my baby?” he said. “I want to look at her.”
The baby was asleep, and Marina objected when he said he wanted to pick her up. So he stood over the crib and gazed at her. That night, and every night thereafter, he dragged the crib over to the bed and insisted on sleeping on the side closest to it.
The young couple were more or less on their own when it came to tending the baby. Aunt Musya came to show Marina how to bathe her, but Alik objected to the casual way she handled the baby, as matter-of-factly as if she were a doll. Aunt Valya, too, dropped by whenever she dared, but she quickly learned to come during her nephew’s working hours. His face grew so menacing and pale each time she picked up the baby, and Valya loved holding his “little jewel” so much, that it seemed best to come when the anxious father was out.
Husband and wife differed on how to care for the baby. Alik was faithful to Dr. Spock and loyal to American ways. Marina, of course, preferred Russian ways, and when Alik objected to swaddling the baby, she pointed out that they had no choice, since there were no diapers, no rubber pants, no little shirts or baby pins to be bought in the whole of Minsk. “All right, then, I can swaddle her as well as you,” Alik boasted. But his first attempt ended in hopeless confusion, and Marina had to teach him how to do it. He, on the other hand, using Dr. Spock as a guide, taught her how to burp the baby.
In one sense husband and wife were conspirators. Alik had wanted the baby called June Marina, and as was not unusual for him, he got into a hassle at ZAGS, the registry office, because it was the Russian custom for a child to bear a form of his father’s first name as its middle name, or patronymic. The registry officials (“those burerecrats,” he called them in his diary) won out, and the baby was named June Lee. But as far as the father was concerned, she was June Marina. When they were alone or with friends, all of whom were thrilled at having in their midst a baby with a foreign name, Alik called her Junka (Junie) or Marinka. But Marina, who shuddered each time she heard the baby called by her own name, called her June or Junka.
To the older generation, however, it would have been a scandal for the child to bear any but a Russian name. When they were with Marina’s uncles and aunts, therefore, everyone, even her parents, called the baby Marina. But sometimes Alik forgot and got a warning look or a punch from Marina or one of her friends so that he would not, in the presence of her relatives, give the baby’s true name away.
The birth of June brought with it a sudden diminution of Alik’s desire to go home. He wrote only one letter to the American embassy in February and one in March. Perhaps, as with the lull following his marriage the year before, it was the change of focus, the increase of private happiness, that was responsible. But at the same time his anxieties about returning to America were never wholly quiescent. In letters written before and after his daughter’s birth, he was still anxious about what might happen to him when he set foot on American soil. In a letter to the American embassy on January 16, he wrote that he believed his passport might be confiscated on his arrival home.[5]
Then, at the end of the month, a real blow fell. From his mother, Alik heard that his “honorable” discharge from active Marine Corps duty had been changed to “dishonorable.” In fact, it was only changed to “undesirable,” and it had all happened years before when Alik defected to Russia. But this was the first he knew of it.
Alik lost little time in mailing a new batch of letters. On January 30 he wrote the governor of Texas, John Connally. Under the impression that he was still Secretary of the Navy, he asked Connally to look into the matter. “I shall employ all means to right this gross mistake or injustice,” he wrote. He claimed that he was a “boni-fied” American citizen and had “always had the full sanction” of the US embassy and government. He went so far as to compare his sojourn in Russia with that of Ernest Hemingway in Paris during the 1920s.[6] Again Alik had gone to the top. It was the first round of a prolonged and ultimately futile, battle with the Department of the Navy to change the status of his discharge.
On the same day he wrote Connally, Alik also wrote his brother Robert, who, like Connally, was a resident of Fort Worth, asking him to get in touch with Connally about the discharge. He also requested Robert to “ask around again” to see if the government might have charges against him. “Now that the government knows I’m coming,” he added archly, maybe “they’ll have something waiting.”[7]
On February 10 another event sharpened Alik’s anxieties. Francis Gary Powers was released from a Russian prison and returned to the United States. In a letter to his brother written the same day his baby was born, and in another letter soon after, he expressed anxiety about Powers’s return, as if his treatment was a harbinger of how he himself would be treated on his return to the United States. “I hope they aren’t going to try him or anything,” he wrote Robert.[8]
Oswald’s interest in Powers is striking, for the two men appeared to have nothing in common. Shot down on a high-altitude reconnaissance flight over Russia, Powers was captured, branded a “spy,” convicted in a show trial in Moscow in 1960, and spent nearly two years in a Soviet prison. An Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit conference was canceled because of the incident, and Powers became an international celebrity. Oswald was an enlisted man in the Marine Corps whose defection had barely caused a ripple in either the United States or the USSR.
But the career of Oswald and Powers did have one thing in common—the U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance plane. Oswald, as a Marine, had been stationed at three bases—Atsugi, Japan; Cubi Point (Subic Bay) in the Philippines; and El Toro, California—where U-2 aircraft were kept. Everything about the plane was supposed to be secret: its name, its mission, and above all, the incredible altitude to which it could climb. At each base the planes were kept in a classified, tightly guarded area that no one could enter without a very high security clearance. Oswald had only a low security clearance, but it is likely that he saw the U-2 and heard a good deal of gossip about its mission.[9] And if he glimpsed the plane, it is unlikely that he ever forgot the breathtaking sight. With its fragile fuselage and its slender, incredibly elongated wings, the U-2 looked like a giant bird of beauty and menace.
9
In a memorandum to the FBI entitled “Lee Harvey Oswald’s Access to Classified Information About the U-2,” written after Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Helms, the deputy director for plans, conceded indirectly that Oswald may have seen the U-2: “Even if Oswald had seen a U-2 aircraft at Atsugi or elsewhere, this fact would not have been unusual nor have constituted a breach of security. Limited public exposure of the craft was accepted as a necessary risk.” Helms added, however, that Oswald could have heard “rumors and gossip” but that it was most unlikely that he knew the plane’s name or its mission, or that he “had the necessary prerequisites to differentiate between the U-2 and other aircraft which were similarly visible at Atsugi.” This is hard to believe, since the wingspan of the U-2 was so enormous that almost anyone would have seen instantly that its mission was aerial reconnaissance. (Unpublished Warren Commission Document No. 931, dated May 13, 1964, declassified January 4, 1971.)