Marina hurried over to them. “Why didn’t you join us?”
“We didn’t want to be in the way,” Valya said. She turned to Alik: “Take care of Marina. She has nobody now but you.” She was on the edge of tears.
“Be sure to write,” Ilya broke in, his stoical front intact. Then to Alik: “You heard what Valya said?”
“I promise,” Alik replied.
“It’s time to go,” said Valya, no longer trying to hold back her tears. She kissed the three of them goodbye, lingering longest over the baby. Ilya, too, kissed Alik. Then, for the last time, he kissed Marina.
Mrs. Ziger, for her part, was uninhibited. “We’ve seen so many off,” she lamented. “When will it be our turn?” She spoke to Marina: “No matter how hard it is there, never, ever, come back here. But remember the birch trees, the people, our Russian countryside. Think well of your homeland always.”
Marina and Alik boarded the train. They stood at the window as, very slowly, the train started up. Marina’s friends Olga and Inessa threw flowers. They were narcissi, the flowers Marina had carried at her wedding.
“Come back if you are not happy there,” Pavel called after them. The Zigers shouted at them to write.
Marina heard someone cry, “We’ll see one another some day.” Then she saw Ilya and Valya. They were huddled together, desolate, looking as if their world had fallen apart.
The last sight Marina saw was their friends Olga, Inessa, and Pavel running along the platform, reaching out to touch the train. They ran a very long way.
For a few minutes, in the compartment, both Alik and Marina were silent. She started to cry. He stroked her as if she were a kitten. “I hope these really are better times,” he said. “I hope Uncle Ilya won’t lose his job or his pension.”
When they reached Moscow, they felt like a pair of carefree children. For three days they stayed at the Hotel Ostankino, on the outskirts of town; then they moved to the Hotel Berlin in the center of Moscow. They went to the American embassy several times, and Alik showed no fear of being arrested. They felt so relieved that just for the fun of it they smuggled a girlfriend of Marina’s, now living in Moscow, into the embassy, past a pair of bewildered militiamen. She sat delightedly inside, in the very citadel of capitalism, poring over the shiny magazines while the Oswalds went about their tasks.
Alik had his passport renewed, and the baby had her photograph taken and attached to her father’s passport. Marina was given her American visa, and the embassy made reservations for them on the Maasdam, a Dutch passenger ship sailing from Rotterdam for New York on June 4. The embassy loaned Oswald the entire cost of the tickets, $418, and arranged for him to pick them up in Rotterdam. Officials of the embassy also suggested a cheap hotel, or “pension,” where they could spend a clean and comfortable night in Rotterdam, and either Oswald or the embassy made the reservation. The embassy helped Oswald pay the railway fare from Moscow to Rotterdam. He contributed 90 rubles ($90), and it contributed $17.71.
Oswald had paid for the train trip from Minsk to Moscow, and he was paying for their hotel room, about 8 rubles a day, and meals in Moscow. He would also buy food during the railway journey to Holland and pay $7 or $8 for the pension in Rotterdam. So his out-of-pocket expenses for the journey home would come to between $200 and $300. Oswald left the Soviet Union owing the United States government $435.71.[6]
Marina was given a medical examination by the embassy doctor, Alexis Davison, a slender, pink-faced young naval officer who spoke impeccable Russian. The son of a Russian woman and a distinguished physician from Atlanta, Georgia—his parents met when his father was on an aid mission in Russia during the 1920s—Davison had a style that was humorous and irreverent, as breezy and American as his strawberry blond crewcut. Marina liked him immediately. He treated her with exactly the right combination of seriousness and levity, reassuring her that life in America was far better than in Russia. He urged Marina to look up his mother in America—Natasha Davison, now a widow, a grande dame in the Russian manner and one of the reigning spirits of Atlanta.
Alik liked Davison, too. He enjoyed the navy doctor’s jokes and was grateful to him for cheering up Marina at a moment when his own hands were full and his wife’s anxieties substantial. Later the Oswalds came across Davison’s name again. In the summer of 1963, the Soviet government accused him of being the go-between for Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a highly placed Soviet official who was tried and shot as a spy for the United States. For his alleged espionage, Davison was expelled from the USSR.
The Oswalds had other errands to run. They went to OVIR and to Gosbank, the State Bank, where Alik changed most of the rubles he had saved into dollars. Since they were to cross Europe by train, they had also to pay visits to the embassies of Poland, East Germany, West Germany, and the Netherlands to obtain transit visas. The errands required much sitting and waiting in anterooms, and Marina sometimes stayed behind at the hotel. Alik was happy as a lark. Late one afternoon he burst into their hotel room exhausted but elated. “My, I’m tired!” he exclaimed. “But I wouldn’t mind doing this for a year. It’s better than working in a factory!”
Their last evening in Moscow was a memorable one. They spent it at the apartment of Yury and Galka Belyankina; Galka had been a friend of Marina’s in Minsk, and the party ended with many farewell toasts. When the Oswalds pulled out of Moscow’s green-tiled Belorussian Station late the following afternoon, June 1, it was Galka Belyankina who saw them off. She was the last friend they were to see in Russia.
Their route lay through Minsk, where they were due to arrive early the next morning. Marina had wired Valya, begging her to come to the station, and she was in high excitement as the train pulled in, hoping for another glimpse of her aunt. She and Alik bounded onto the familiar platform, raced up and down, and searched everywhere. But Valya was nowhere in sight. Feeling crushed and trying not to show it, Marina said, “We’re breathing Minsk air for the last time.” She was in tears when they returned to their compartment. “Don’t worry. Don’t cry.” Alik held her tightly around the shoulders. “Everything will be all right.”
Next morning they were due at the border town of Brest. Alik had been puzzling over a problem: what to do with his Diary and the other things he had written in Russia. He had no intention of giving up his precious papers to a customs officer. An hour or so out of Brest, he hit upon a solution. He strapped the sheets of paper around his waist under his clothing. He did not seem specially nervous as he did it, but he told Marina to watch out for one of the conductors, a woman, whom he (and Marina, too) suspected of working for the KGB. The woman was too well educated to be a conductor, he said.
The pair presented a homely tableau as their train drew puffing into Brest. They were sitting in their myaqky (“soft” or first-class) compartment, the husband—composed but bulging a little around the waist—filling out customs declarations, the wife and baby surrounded by swaddling cloths that she had rinsed out and hung up to dry. Both were sipping tea in the Russian style from glasses.
Marina, who had expected to be questioned and perhaps searched, was astonished at how simple it turned out to be. A pair of nice-looking officers came into the compartment. One of them opened a suitcase and snapped it shut again without even looking inside.
“Have you any gold or other valuables or foreign currency?” he asked politely.
“Yes,” Marina answered, pointing to the baby.