At this the officer broke into a broad grin, saluted, and wished them a happy journey.
The Oswalds hugged each other as the train carried them over the bridge into Poland.
“I can’t believe we’re on foreign soil,” Alik said.
Marina looked back. “It’s only a bridge,” she thought sadly, “but it cuts you off from your country.” She stole a look at Alik. His face was so happy that she did not tell him what she was thinking.
That day they crossed the Vistula River into Warsaw. There they got out, changed a few dollars into zlotys, and bought beer. At each stop Alik clambered out and took photographs. The Polish countryside was flat, like Belorussia, and the people, too, looked poor, except for a stylish lilt to the way the women wore their cotton dresses. Poland was a good deal like what Marina was used to. But that night, waking briefly in Germany, she noticed that there were two Berlins, the “democratic” one, which was dark, and the other, which was brightly lit. Then the next morning, in Holland, she could not believe her eyes. It seemed to her that she was in a fairy tale tableau. They rattled through village after village, each one prettier than the last and so clean that they looked as if they must be inhabited by dolls. It was Sunday. Entire families were walking to church. And between villages, the meadows were dotted with grazing cows.
When they arrived in Rotterdam, they went straight to the pension the embassy had recommended. The landlady gave them lunch, and then the Oswalds went walking. Never had Marina seen such shops. She floated from window to window, thinking she must be in a dream.
“Alka!” she exclaimed. “When your mother sent us those magazines, I never dreamed you could actually buy those things in stores!”
He was watching her, grinning.
“And look,” she said. “Everything’s so cheap!”
“It’s a whole lot cheaper in America,” Alik said. He bought her a Coca-Cola, her first. It was a touch of home he had been pining for. “See,” he boasted again, “in Holland you drink American Coca-Cola.” It was the only thing he bought her, for it was Sunday and all the shops were closed.
In the pension that night, the sheets were so clean that Marina was afraid to lie down.
They had only that one day in Holland.[7] The next morning, June 4, 1962, they boarded the Maasdam bound from Rotterdam to New York.
The voyage marked the beginning of a change in Alik’s behavior, and in his relationship with his wife. It was not a change for the better.
On the first day out, the two of them went on deck, struck up a conversation with a Rumanian girl, laughed, and had a fine time. But after that, Alik hardly took Marina out on deck at all. He got seasick there, and she did not. It did not occur to her to go alone.
She spent most of the voyage in their cabin with the baby. Taking several sheets of writing paper with him, Alik would vanish upstairs to the library and remain there for hours. Marina supposed he was writing letters. Often, at night, he went alone to the movies, leaving Marina and the baby behind.
He came to fetch her for meals, and it seemed to Marina that the other passengers were staring and laughing at her. She became self-conscious about her appearance and her clothes, unaware that it was the baby, swaddled from her waist to her toes, that was the object of so much attention. They had never seen swaddling before.
They had a charming waiter, a handsome young man whose name was Pieter. Half Russian and half Dutch, he knew a few words of Russian and wanted to know all about Marina. But Alik was suspicious of him. “Don’t tell him anything you don’t have to,” he warned Marina. “It’s no accident that they gave us a Russian-speaking waiter.”
Marina ignored this warning. To the extent their languages would allow, she chatted away openly with Pieter, and she discovered that his last name was “Didenko,” or something close to it. “Where,” Marina asked herself, “have I heard that name before?” Then, with a thud of recognition, she remembered. It was the name of her own, natural father—at least the name her stepfather had shouted at her once in a terrible moment of wrath.
Marina did not know what to make of the change in Alik. Whenever he took her anywhere, it was plain from his expression that he was doing it only out of duty. It was not that he was making other friends. Marina saw no sign of that. She concluded that he was ashamed of her because, as she put it to herself, she looked like “a little Russian fool.” Alone much of the time in the cabin, she sank into low spirits. Everything she knew and loved lay behind her; ahead, everything was unknown. Clearly, Alka neither loved her nor cared for her. Why on earth was she going to America?
Finally, she said to her husband, “Alka, are you ashamed of me?”
He did not reply.
“There’s a beauty shop on the boat. The girls come out looking princesses.”
“Oh, is there?” That was all he said.
Marina grew angry. She had given Alik 180 rubles in Minsk, payment for her maternity leave and money from the sale of their furniture. He had changed all of it into dollars, and she knew that he still had it. Yet he had refused to buy her anything when some boatmen rowed up to the Maasdam off the Irish coast with heavy wool sweaters to sell. There were shops on the ship, but he did not buy her anything there either. Nor did he pick up her hint that she should get her hair done. Marina was too proud to ask him for any money. The one thing she asked for was thread. Sitting by herself in the cabin, she sewed the heels of her wedding shoes.
“Don’t bother,” Alik said, when he saw what she was doing. “I’ll buy you shoes in New York.”
“I’ll sew these until you do,” came his wife’s laconic reply.
Marina’s unhappiness boiled over at a party they attended their last evening at sea. In spite of her attire—the red brocade she had worn the night she met Alik—she felt morose, and looked it.
“Wipe that expression off your face,” Alik said. “People are staring at you.”
“I can’t look any other way,” Marina said.
“Why?”
“Because you’ve changed toward me. Because you don’t love me and I feel hurt.”
“If you don’t care for me the way I am,” Alik said, “go away.”
“Where am I to go?” Marina said. “There’s only one way to go. And that’s the ocean.”
“Okay. Go.”
Marina ran from the table in tears. It was rainy and cold on the deck, and below, the water was gray and forbidding. She did not know what to do. She walked around the deck, and finally, she thought of the baby, who was lying asleep in the cabin. “Junie needs me, even if Alka doesn’t.”
Alik found her in the cabin when he came in an hour later.
“You’re here, are you?” he said.
“Only because of the baby.”
He quickly went out again. But he returned, and they made up. He escorted her to the bar, bought her a liqueur and himself a Coca-Cola. He even allowed her to smoke.
The voyage to America was not a happy one for Marina. She thought that she was somehow responsible for Alik’s strange behavior. She did not know the real reason for his abstraction and indifference to her: as the Maasdam steamed toward New York, he was once again deeply concerned about what might happen to him when he reached America.
Oswald thought that he would be met at the dock by newspaper reporters. He expected to be asked a series of questions designed to incriminate him with the FBI; and trying to prepare himself, he covered page after page of Holland-America Line stationery with a list of questions and answers. Then, dissatisfied, he wrote out a second draft, one which was more politic, less candid, and, apparently to his mind, more successful, since he ended it with the newspapermen exclaiming, with one voice: “Thank you, sir, you are a real patriot!”[8]
7
In Exhibit No. 994, Vol. 18, p. 615, Marina wrote, soon after the assassination, that “we lived in an apartment in Amsterdam for 3 days.” As a result there has been confusion, and even speculation that the Oswalds were debriefed in a CIA “safe house” in Holland before leaving for the United States. Apart from the fact that such a procedure would have been highly unusual, the Oswalds’ documents make clear that they left Moscow on a two-day train trip on June 1, 1962, crossed the border at Brest into Poland on June 2, left East Germany on June 2, entered West Germany and Holland on June 3, and sailed on the