Bitterly hurt, Marina picked up the baby, grabbed some swaddling cloth, and ran out the door. Alik did nothing to stop her. He sat on the bed and watched her go.
She went to Ilya and Valya’s in tears, announced that she had had a fight with Alka and had left him. She did not say what the fight had been about. Valya was sympathetic. Ilya was not; he told Marina she could spend the night, but she was not to come to him any more when she and her husband had a fight. He was not going to help.
That night Marina lay awake thinking for a long time. She had had three blows that day: Polina’s letter, the fight with Alka, and now it seemed that Ilya did not love her either. She decided that she would not go to America. “Alka doesn’t love me,” she thought, “and what if something happened to Ilya and Valya on our account after we go?” But in the morning she changed her mind, for she felt that underneath her other emotions, she did love Alka after all. Encouraged by Valya, she set off toward home. She met Alik coming down the street in the other direction.
They returned to Valya’s to decide what to do, and there they found Marina’s Aunt Musya. She had been angry with Alik for months. Now she had a chance to vent her wrath. She scolded him for being cruel to Marina and trying to take her to America. Alik grew very pale. Finally, he asked Marina to come home with him. When she refused, he said, “Okay, stay if you want. But at least let me take the baby.”
Marina grabbed the baby. “You’ve no right to take a child from its mother,” she cried.
Alik went into the next room and stood there, crying quietly by the window. Valya ran back and forth trying to make peace. Alik’s tears softened her heart, and she urged Marina to go back to him. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. “He’s pale as a ghost by the window. The tears are streaming down his face. I even heard him say, ‘What have I to live for? What am I to do now?’”
At last Marina agreed. She had wanted Alik to suffer, and she wanted proof that he loved her. His tears seemed to be the proof she needed. And she had no more right to take the baby away from him than to hurt her relatives.
The tears were still streaming down his cheeks as Valya led him into the room. “You don’t love me,” Marina said. “I won’t go with you.”
“I do love you,” he said, and oblivious of Musya, Valya, and his own tears, he kissed Marina and the baby.
That was that. It was the end of Marina’s wavering over America. They returned home together, and when they reached the apartment, Alik unswaddled the baby. “Bad Mama,” he said, kissing her hands and feet. “She wanted Papa never to see his good girl again.”
— 12 —
Departure for America
It was as well that Marina’s doubts were at an end, for events were picking up momentum. On April 12 Oswald wrote his brother that he expected to be able to leave Russia within a month or two. But then he added a sentence that betrayed both ambivalence and apprehension about his return: “Now that winter has gone, I really don’t want to leave until the beginning of fall, since the spring and summer here are so nice.”[1]
Oswald hated the cold weather in Minsk. It was one of the reasons, he said, for his decision to leave Russia. But that spring he still complained in his letters home that the American embassy was as slow with its formalities as the Russians had been with theirs. He made several telephone calls to the embassy, and a secretary in the consular office who spoke with him when the consular officers were out grew to dislike him indelibly. Oswald was very impatient about the delays and complained, in particular, about travel arrangements. He had been authorized a loan only large enough to cover the cost of the least expensive means of transportation back to the United States—train and ship—but he behaved as if it was his birthright to be wafted home by jet aircraft or, as a veteran, albeit an “undesirably discharged” one, to be flown home on a government transport.
Throughout the long bureaucratic process of his return, Oswald corresponded regularly with both his mother and his brother, and his letters to the two members of his family who were closest to him are revealing in their contrast. To Robert, Oswald was friendly, open, frank. He shared a few of his problems, his small adventures in Minsk, even his political ideas. There was no sharing in his letters to Marguerite.
The striking thing about Oswald’s letters to his mother is that, although they are empty of concern or affection, they are filled with requests. Of the seventeen letters he wrote to Marguerite between the resumption of their correspondence in June 1961 and his departure from the Soviet Union nearly a year later, fourteen contained a request or a reminder of some earlier request. At first the favors he asked were simple enough: Time magazine and books for himself, fashion magazines for Marina, pennies for friends who collected American souvenirs. But it was not long before the errands he asked of his mother, an older woman with a job, were substantial.
It fell to Marguerite to do some of the paperwork for her son’s return, including obtaining an affidavit of support for Marina from her own employer. Marguerite even suggested that she raise money for his return through a public appeal. Oswald vetoed the idea; at that moment the very last thing he wanted was publicity. But he instructed her to try to get money from the Red Cross or the International Rescue Committee. Any gifts—not loans—would be welcome. But above all, she was not to send her own money. And concerned about both his military status and the reception he was likely to receive in America, Oswald also asked his mother for his Marine Corps discharge and old newspaper clippings about his defection to Russia.
Oswald asked Robert for favors, too, but they were direct requests, as his criticisms of some of Robert’s actions were also direct. With Marguerite he was indirect. He praised, he cajoled, he condescended to let her help him, and he made it plain that it was not for her to offer him advice. Oswald respected his brother, but he seemed to fear his mother and the prospect of any closeness between them. He manipulated Marguerite, always with the twin purposes of exploiting her, yet at the same time keeping her at a distance.
Marguerite’s reward was meager. In one letter Oswald told her that there was no need for her to meet him in New York on his return to America. In a later letter, however, he hinted that he and Marina might come to her: “I cannot say exactly where we shall go at first probably directly to Vernon.”[2] Marguerite was living in Vernon, a small Texas town thirty miles northwest of Fort Worth. But having dangled that prize in front of his mother, Oswald quickly snatched it away. In a letter written the very next day, he said that he would visit both her and Robert, but “in any event I’ll want to be living on my own and probably will finally live in Fort Worth or New Orleans.”[3]
Oswald was playing emotional hide-and-seek with his mother: Now you’ve got me, now you don’t. He used her, he depended on her, and then he pushed her away. Not surprisingly, his correspondence with the American embassy reflected this same attitude. He had walked out on his country, just as he had walked out on his mother. Now he expected the embassy, like an indulgent mother, to forgive, forget, and go to extraordinary lengths to bring him back, without any thought of a return.
On May 10 an official of the embassy wrote Alik to inform him that it was ready to issue Marina’s visa in Moscow. The final impediment had been removed, and the Oswalds could come to the embassy as soon as they got their affairs in Minsk in order. It was the word Alik had been waiting for, but by this time it was as if he no longer cared. He had, after all, proved his point. He had a right to leave Russia if he chose, and to take a Soviet citizen with him. It was now the bureaucratic momentum on both sides that carried him forward, rather than any very positive desire to go home.