Alik and Marina started to get ready for their journey. Knowing, or suspecting, that they would soon be leaving, one or another of their friends came by for a visit every night. With the thrill of vicarious adventure, they rejoiced over Marina’s miraculous good fortune. Every one of them longed to see America, to travel freely back and forth across frontiers. Not many, however, would have done what Marina was doing: leave family and country forever, without hope of ever seeing them again.
One day Marina had a memorable encounter. In a shop down the street from the apartment, she ran into Anatoly Shpanko. He had heard the news by the grapevine.
“Take me with you,” he said in jest. Then, more seriously: “Write. Let me know where I can find you. One day I’ll get to America, too. You’ll have money over there. You’ll come back for a visit. Some day we’ll see one another again.”
Marina was uneasy: “I’ve got to go. I have to get home to feed the baby.”
“Baby?” Anatoly was astonished. “Where on earth did you get a baby?”
“I really do have one,” Marina said.
“But I saw you three months ago, and I saw no sign of it then.”
“You didn’t see right,” said Marina, who had in truth, three months before, wrapped her coat carefully around her so that Anatoly would not see that she was pregnant.
Such was Marina’s farewell to the man who had wanted her to be his wife.
As for Alik, he had told almost no one that he was going, only Alexander Ziger and Pavel Golovachev. He also seems to have told another friend at the factory, who exclaimed, “Attaboy! I wish you could take me, too. There’s nothing to stick around for here.”
Alik gave the factory two days’ notice. On May 16 he handed in a statement to the director of the Minsk Radio Plant. His wording was formal and laconic: “I ask to be released from work as of May 18, 1962. I expect to be leaving.”[4]
It was a happy time for Alik. He had conquered two great bureaucracies, and as with so many of his other achievements, he accomplished it alone. While it was the victory over the Soviet bureaucracy that yielded the sweeter satisfaction, he was carried forward on the momentum of his double triumph. His old misgivings receded. He showed no sign of second thoughts and tried to encourage Marina. If she was unhappy over there, he said, she could always come back. Marina was doubtful. She would be ashamed to return after struggling so hard to get out.
“I used to think that, too,” Alik said. “I threw my passport down and told them I didn’t want to be a citizen any more. When, after all that, I didn’t like it, I was so ashamed. I said to myself, I’d rather die than ask to go back to America. But time changes the way you look at things. There’s nothing wrong with making a mistake and thinking better of it later. People do.”
The hardest part was telling Ilya and Valya, an ordeal Marina put off until a week or so before they were to leave Minsk for Moscow. It was painful to be with them after that, painful to speak of parting, yet impossible to speak of anything else.
Ilya had found occasion earlier that spring to say to Marina what he chose not to say to her husband: “Forget America. You never know how it will go. He’ll have a better life here. They’ll give him a bigger apartment. He can study to be an engineer. He’ll never have any worries. So long as Alik stays in this country, he’ll always be met halfway.”
Another time Ilya spoke out again. “He flits from side to side,” he said of Alik, “and is unhappy everywhere. Maybe he’ll go back and not like it there, and then he’ll want to come back here. But he’ll never be allowed to come back. People are tired of nursing him over here.”
Ilya’s last utterance about his nephew-in-law, delivered shortly before the Oswalds’ departure, had the tone of prophecy. “He is,” Ilya said to Marina, “a man who has lost his way.”
Valya did not voice any judgment, only a touching request. She begged Marina to leave baby “Marinka” behind. “You don’t know what will happen,” she implored. “There’s unemployment in America. Alka may have trouble because of having lived over here. You can have other children. I never will. She’ll be happy with us. I’ll take good care of her. I’ll love her more than if she were my own.”
Marina knew that Alik would never allow it, but trying to make amends for leaving, she promised to try.
“Are you crazy?” Alik said. “Have you gone out of your mind? Do you think I’d give up my baby? Never!”
Marina had another painful farewell. Carrying the baby with her, she stopped by the laboratory where Aunt Musya worked. Musya cradled the baby in her arms. Marina saw tears in her aunt’s eyes.
“She’s a good baby,” Musya said. “But the spitting image of Alka.” Then, hopefully, “You haven’t changed your mind?”
“No,” Marina answered. Then, fearful lest she burst into tears, too, she took the baby and quickly left.
They had a great deal to do. Anticipating their departure, they had tried to hand over their apartment to Tolka, the friend who lived with Colonel Axyonov, and his bride-to-be, Lyalya Petrusevich. But much to Alik’s annoyance, they had been rebuffed by the officials of the Minsk Radio Plant, who were in charge of assigning apartments in their building. Nevertheless, they did succeed in registering the apartment in Tolka’s name, and he would move in when the Oswalds left. He managed to stay only one week. The factory threw him out and awarded the apartment to someone else. Tolka did not marry Lyalya.
Alik and Marina sold their furniture, including the baby’s crib. Before leaving their apartment, they had another piece of unfinished business. Throughout their married life they had had the company of an unbidden presence: a tiny meter, or schyotchik ticking away on the wall, even at night when the other electrical devices were switched off. The Oswalds assumed that it was a bugging device and had long promised themselves that before they left the apartment for good, if they ever left for good, they would set aside an hour or so for absolute forthrightness. They would tell the “schyotchik” exactly what they thought of everyone they knew, who was an informer and who was not, to deny the KGB the satisfaction, as Marina puts it, of “thinking it had us fooled.” And so, before they left, they told the faintly ticking, scarcely visible companion of their married life their true opinions about everyone they knew.
On the day before their departure, Alik went to call on Erich Titovyets. He meant to tell Erich—for the first time—that he was leaving. Erich was not at home. He did not learn of his friend’s departure until after the Oswalds had actually left.[5]
One of Alik’s final duties was to visit OVIR, the Office of Visas and Registration, to have the exit visa stamped in his passport. He showed the visa to Marina and remarked, “I wish I could give it to Ziger.”
The Oswalds spent their last night in Minsk at Pavel’s. The next day, May 22 or 23, they boarded the train for Moscow. Russian-fashion, their closest friends, including Pavel and all the Zigers, came to the station to see them off. But even there they noticed that they were being watched by a man who was standing, half-hidden, behind a pillar.
“Listen in if you like,” Eleonora Ziger practically spat in his face. “We have no secrets here.”
Her sister, Anita, added: “I simply loathe people who eavesdrop.”
Marina kept glancing anxiously around the station looking for Ilya and Valya. Finally, she saw them standing way off by themselves in a corner. Their faces were forlorn, and they looked as if they were fearful of being seen by the KGB.