Lee’s reactions were often inexplicable. Around this time Marina lost a purse containing $10 he had given her for groceries, and she expected to be scolded or even beaten. When he hardly responded at all, Marina broke into tears. Lee tried to cheer her up by talking baby talk, then talking like a Japanese. He played games on the way to the grocery store, where he brought her red caviar, smoked herring, and other treats.
On New Year’s Eve, the biggest holiday of the Russian year, Lee, oblivious, or uncaring, went to bed about ten. When midnight struck, Marina was alone in the bathtub thinking of her friends in Russia and wondering how they were celebrating. She pretended that the bathtub was filled with champagne. In her imagination she could see corks flying into the air and her friends back in Minsk singing and drinking New Year’s toasts. By the time she emerged, tears of homesickness were pouring down her face. She was furious at Lee for going to sleep. She felt that he did not love her, that her marriage and her life with him in America were a fraud.
In that mood she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Anatoly Shpanko, the medical student whose offers of marriage she had refused both before and after meeting Lee. Now that she was safely at a distance, thousands of miles away, her feelings for her rejected suitor came pouring out. She realized that she had cared for him deeply, more than she knew at the time, and she believed that, had it not been for Lee, she would have married Anatoly. With him she would have been happier.
This was Marina’s letter, as she remembers it.
Anatoly dear,
Very late, I am writing the letter you asked me for.
Late, I want to wish you a Happy New Year.
It is not for this I am writing, however, but because I feel very much alone. My husband does not love me and our relationship here in America is not what it was in Russia. I am sad that there is an ocean between us and that I have no way back….
Alik does not treat me as I should like, and I fear that I shall never be happy with him. It is all my fault, I think, and there is no way of setting it right. How I wish that you and I could be together again.
I regret that I did not appreciate the happy times we had together and your goodness to me. Why did you hold yourself back that time? You did it for me, I know, and now I regret that, too. Everything might have turned out differently. But maybe, after the way I hurt you, you would not have me back.
I am writing because you asked me to write you the truth about my life here and because I hope we are still friends.
I kiss you as we kissed before.
P.S. I remember the snow, the frost, the opera building—and your kisses. Isn’t it funny how we never even felt the cold?
Marina was weeping as she finished.
She kept the letter three or four days, just as she always did. Then she took 25 cents’ worth of stamps from the drawer, stuck them on the envelope, and mailed it. A day or so later, on Monday, January 7, Lee came home from work waving an envelope.
“A letter for you,” he said. “Who were you expecting to hear from?”
“Aunt Valya?”
No, he said, and she suggested two or three others.
“Who did you write this to?” He shoved the letter to Anatoly in front of her, then quickly snatched it away.
She wanted to tear it out of his hands, but he hid the letter behind his back. “You’ve no right to read my letter,” she cried.
“You’ll read it aloud,” he said.
She jumped up and tried to run out of the room, but he caught her and forced her to sit down. He sat facing her and began to read the letter. Halfway through, he stumbled over her handwriting and asked her what the rest contained. She would not tell him, and he slapped her twice across the face.
“It’s enough, what I read already.” He disappeared into the kitchen.
Marina snatched the letter and hid it in the drawer where their bed linens were kept.
“Is it true what you wrote?” Lee asked when he returned to the living room.
“Yes,” she said.
He slumped onto the sofa and sat there, his head in his hands, for a long time. Finally he straightened up. “Not a word of it is true,” he said. “You did it on purpose. You knew they changed the postage and that the letter would come back to me. You were trying to make me jealous. I know your woman’s tricks. I won’t give you any more stamps. And I’m going to read all your letters. I’ll send them myself from now on. I’ll never, ever trust you again.” He made her get the letter and tear it up under his eyes.
Marina says that there were times when she tried to make Lee jealous, but this was not one of them. The postal rates had not changed; Marina’s mistake seems to have been that the letter was overweight.
Again, Lee’s response was a good deal milder than she might have expected. After all, he frequently beat her for nothing. But this time he merely slapped her, and he did not have the mean, murderous look he generally had when he hit her. Marina even had the impression that he slapped her only because he felt he had to: “It was like a heroic gesture in the movies.” She considered it a “just reproach.” But she was baffled by the inappropriateness of his reaction. He practically ignored it when she did something dreadful, yet for a mouthful of sharp words or a bit of mulish behavior, he would beat her up.
She did not write to Anatoly again. She repented her foolishness and was relieved that he had not received her letter. But from now on, nearly everything she wrote went through Lee. She handed each of her letters to him in an unsealed envelope. Then no matter to whom it was written, but especially if it was to a girlfriend who knew Anatoly, he would scan it for a hidden or separate message inside. Marina accepted his censorship like a child. Once in a while she did slip a letter past Lee to one of her girlfriends in Minsk requesting news of Anatoly, exactly as Lee feared. But aside from these breaches of discipline, she lapsed into helplessness. Stamps were expensive, and she depended on Lee for them, except for such change as she could scrounge from his bureau.
There were ten apartments in the building at Nos. 602 and 604 Elsbeth Street, and Lee avoided his neighbors whenever he could. He hated to run into any of them, hated being seen coming or going, refused to exchange pleasantries in the hallway, and invariably used the back door of the building, although there was a perfectly good entrance in front.
Marina was more gregarious. One day she stopped by to visit Mrs. Mahlon Tobias, the wife of the elderly, white-haired manager of the building. She did not speak English, of course, but when Mrs. Tobias remarked that “your husband says that you’re Czech,” Marina understood enough to shake her head vigorously—“No, no, I’m Russian.”[4] Again, she had caught Lee in a lie and she demanded an explanation. He told her that he was afraid he would be fired or that the landlord would throw them out if Marina was known to be Russian. In fact, the owner of the building at Nos. 602 and 604 Elsbeth Street, William Martin Jurek, was of Czech origin, and Lee, who could be clever about such things, probably knew it. If so, he may have thought that Mr. Jurek would prefer a Czech to a Russian tenant.
When Lee was at home on the weekends, the Tobiases noticed that he seldom let Marina out of his sight. He even came with her to fetch the vacuum cleaner, use of which was shared by all the tenants.[5] What they and the other neighbors did not know was that it was Lee who vacuumed the apartment, carried out the garbage, did most of the dishes, and turned down the bed every night. He rarely refused a household chore. He was not only dutiful but an affectionate husband, and there were periods when he would follow Marina around all day. At such times, she says, he literally “wore me out with his kisses.” He allowed her, besides, two indulgences. One was deciding whether and when they would have children. The other was letting her sleep in the morning. He got up by himself very early, made his breakfast, and left the coffee on the stove for Marina. On weekends he very often served her breakfast in bed. On Sundays, and Saturdays if he did not go to work, it was Lee who made up their beds.