It was also at about this time, toward the end of January, that Lee began to hint to Marina that he was thinking of sending her and the baby back to Russia. He complained that it was hard supporting a family in America. Alone, he would not have to worry so much about holding onto his job. He could live in a rooming house, learn how to drive, and buy a car. Then if he lost one job, he could pick up and move to another town.
His hints made Marina feel even more miserable, guilty, and “in the way.” “Alka doesn’t love me,” she thought. She felt that she was the sole cause of his increasing irritability and that marrying her had ruined some far-reaching scheme he had for his life. “You needn’t have brought me to America,” she said. “You could have left me behind.”
Although his hints were more than enough to poison her frame of mind, she did not really believe them. “He has started speaking Russian so badly, he no longer knows what he is saying,” she said to herself. “Besides, he gets pleasure out of tormenting me.” But the fact is, Lee knew very well what he was saying, and he did indeed have a far-reaching scheme. It is a scheme he may already have had in mind when he took the Elsbeth Street apartment in early November. Alexandra Taylor noticed that on the day he moved in, he inspected all the doors and windows with care, perhaps to check whether the neighbors could witness his comings and goings.
— 22 —
The Sanction
For Marina, the month of February 1963 was far and away the worst in all her married life. Lee had been hitting her ever since they arrived in America; in February there was a dramatic change in the style and ferocity with which he did it. No longer did he strike her once across the face with the flat of his hand. Now he hit her five or six times—and with his fists. The second he got angry, he turned pale and pressed his lips tightly together. His eyes were filled with hate. His voice dropped to a murmur, and she could not understand what he was saying. When he started to strike her, his face became red and his voice grew angry and loud. He wore a look of concentration, as if Marina were the author of every slight he had ever suffered and he was bent on wiping her out, obliterating her completely. To Marina it seemed that it was not even a human being he saw in front of him. Most horrifying of all was the gleam of pleasure in his eyes.
Their fights occurred over nothing, with Lee’s anger ballooning up quickly, out of all proportion to the occasion. He became even stingier than usual, and if by accident Marina left some item off the grocery list she gave him, or if she went to a store by herself and bought some item, no matter how cheap, that they did not absolutely require, it might be the cause of another beating.
Marina could defend herself only with words. “Your beating me shows your upbringing,” she said on one occasion.
“Leave my mother out of this!” Lee cried and struck her harder than before.
He stored up every grievance, and at the tiniest pinprick from her, they all came pouring out. “I’m not hitting you just for this,” he would say, naming the pretext of the fight, “but because I’ll never forgive you for running off to your Russians. Oh, what humiliation you made me suffer. Always you go against me! You never, ever do what I want!” Or if they were fighting over one thing, he would ask, “Do you think I’ve forgotten that?” and bring up something entirely different. “I’ll never, ever forget.”
Marina yearned for some sign of affection. But whenever she tried to wheedle it out of him, he would say, “I know what you want,” meaning sex, and Marina’s feelings were so hurt that she would run from the room. His sexual demands were violent. Late on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon he might bark at her. “Stop washing the dishes. Lee’s hot!” and try to force himself on her. He insisted on having sex any time he felt like it, whether Marina wanted it or not. He would pin her down by the arms and legs and take her by force while the tears came pouring down her cheeks.
Marina thought that it was only the violence, the struggle, that made him want her at all. Once she told him he was “crazy.”
“What’s that you said?”
“You’re crazy.”
He grabbed her by the throat and threatened to kill her if ever she said that again.
But the complaint that came up like a refrain was her disloyalty in “running off” to “her Russians.” When she asked why he had begged her to come back, he said it was only because of the baby.
“It wasn’t me you needed at all?”
“No—not at all.”
“There’s nothing for me here, then,” Marina said, crushed.
On another occasion he told her he had asked her back to prove that he had power over her, more power than Bouhe and the other Russians, and that “I could get you back if I felt like it.”
“What on earth do you want from me, Alka? What is it you need?”
“You’re my property,” he said, “and I’ll do with you as I please. So long as I want you, you’ll stay. If not—then off with you. Don’t you forget as long as you live that you belong to me any time I want.”
In Minsk Lee had urged Marina more than once, in matters outside their home, to stand up for herself, “be her own person,” and express her individuality. But now he behaved like a slave owner, smiling triumphantly when he had forced her to beg his forgiveness. Wistfully, Marina recalled a halcyon time, the Stone Age, she thought it was, when she read that there had been matriarchy before patriarchy reared its ugly head. She wished she were in a matriarchy now. Looking back on it with wry humor, Marina describes their life together as “a period of slave ownership with a number of slave revolts in between.” She adds with regret, however, that the “slave revolts” were quickly put down by force. At work Lee’s behavior was also growing more erratic. One day in the darkroom, Lee and another man, each hurrying as usual to meet a deadline, were trying to develop film in the same pan. The man asked Lee to move over a little, and Lee refused, saying he had gotten there first. In the midst of narrow aisles and delicate equipment, they were on the edge of fisticuffs when John Graef spotted trouble on the far side of the darkroom and moved in to break it up. It was this incident that awakened Graef to the fact that of the eighteen or twenty men in the photographic department, not one liked Lee. Graef was slowly reaching the conclusion that “everybody couldn’t be wrong.”[1]
Lee was also growing more and more secretive. When he started typing school, he began to sign out of work half to three-quarters of an hour later than he had before. On Wednesdays, when he did not have a class, he regularly, and from the outset, signed out even later. It is possible that during this time, when most of the other employees had gone home, Lee rifled the files of Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall and reproduced its tax returns, an item he later appended to a curriculum vitae as an example of his photographic proficiency.[2] And it is possible that it was at this time that he produced the forged documents later found in his possession: a Selective Service notice of classification and a Marine Corps certificate of service, both in the name of Alik James Hidell—the name he had used to order the revolver. It is also likely that on his way from work to typing class, he regularly stopped by the post office to see if the gun had arrived, which would account for the fact that he often “slipped into” class late and out of breath.[3]
1
Testimony of John G. Graef, Vol. 10, pp. 187–189, 193; Testimony of Dennis Hyman Ofstein,