Oswald's Tale (27 page)

6

Back to America

After she became pregnant, Lee showed her Dr. Spock’s book one night. She didn’t know whether he had owned it all this time or asked his mother to send it. But every day he translated passages for her until Lee, courtesy of Dr. Spock, was informing Marina how their embryo would develop. He was very proud. He played doctor with her, and she felt him come closer. His Russian even got better. He was making progress.

He had a habit she liked. He could always put everything else aside. Nobody could push him when he was reading. His spelling was horrible, but that could be forgiven. Russian—it’s a hard language. Many Russians do not spell it well. And he did not know grammar. But for speaking, yes. He applied himself. He would stumble only occasionally. His vocabulary was not large, but his pronunciation was good.

However, she was pregnant—“an entirely different language.” Sometimes she felt distant from him. Then, with each week of pregnancy, more and more. Maybe such a condition was normal. “You still love me,” he would say. “It’s just a chemical imbalance.” But she felt a little distaste for him. Now that she had got to know her husband better, Marina decided that he was stingy. They had an apartment that she wanted to fix up, and he kept putting a stop to that. “No,” he would say. “We have everything we need.” Well, sure, but she wanted some feminine touches, and there he was in charge of all their money.

She didn’t like that. She gave him what she earned at work and now she didn’t have money of her own. It wasn’t like they each had their own little drawer. He had it all.

Before they married, she felt there was no need for either one of them to control the other, but then, she didn’t know much. She thought she could be her own person and so had no idea that he was going to tell her what to do. Now, she would bristle when he took a domineering attitude. During courtship, she had been in control; since marriage, the rules were being changed. All the same, there were still lots of times when she would be pleasantly surprised. They would listen to an hour of classical music on their radio, and he would know which composer was playing. Very often they would start a game: She would say it was one composer, he would say another; many times he was right. That was great. He could recognize whether a piece was by Bach or Chopin or Wagner.

Also, Lee taught her to play gin rummy. Her grandmother would not allow cards in their house in Arkhangelsk. Card games were there to please the devil. So Marina had never been interested, but now she played gin rummy with Lee. He beat her, usually. He would enjoy winning: “See, I won again!”—it was important for him. But nothing to her. Somebody had to lose.

Sometimes she would get a glimpse—if only for a little while—of what was in him. Then he would lift his shield again. He was embarrassed to show vulnerability. Only in intimate moments could he be himself, this little boy who wanted attention. Then he would pretend that he didn’t need anything. “He would isolate himself,” said Marina, “and play games with people. Treat them like they were not people.”

Once, on a day when everyone was supposed to vote for some Presidium or something, election workers started knocking on their door at 7:00
A.M.
Lee told them to go away—it was too early. They came back again, and Lee wouldn’t open up. He kept yelling, “This is a free country.” He gave them lectures while they stood outside. She doesn’t remember whether she went to vote, but Lee kept telling her that the Soviet constitution said it was a free country. They were not supposed to drag you out to vote. So she received a speech on politics early that day. Of course, she had never studied that stupid Soviet constitution. That is, she had studied, had even passed her exam, but now she couldn’t recall any of it. So, he had to teach her about her own system, and told her how they were not practicing their constitution properly.

He also liked her to be at home when he arrived. If she came in even ten minutes after him, he’d be upset. “Where were you?” he’d ask. “How come you’re late?” She thinks maybe that’s how his control over her began. Lee’s factory hours were always the same, and hers too, but sometimes she might stop by a store, so how could you know who would come home first?

Pregnant, she was now very sensitive to odor. Their walls seemed to smell; even her balcony seemed rank when she opened its door. She was always sniffing somebody else’s cooking. Nor could she eat. And then there was Lee. If you boiled him in water, he would still have his special body odor. So, by the second month of pregnancy, when he started being not so nice, she began to look for fights. And she had second thoughts—had she made a mistake? Maybe she didn’t love this man.

Soon enough, she learned that Lee not only had a mother but a brother, with a wife and children. All of a sudden, Lee was part of a family—he kept getting more correspondence. Since she didn’t read English, she could not know what these letters were about, but then, one Sunday morning, she found out. Lee woke up and said, “If I have a chance to go to America, would you go with me?”

“You’re joking,” she said.

He said, “No, it’s a possibility. I don’t know for sure, but would you go with me?”

That gave her a feeling that he truly loved her. And she said, “I don’t know. I’m kind of scared.” She took a breath, and added, “Okay. I’ll go.”

It wasn’t that short a conversation—maybe it took an hour, maybe it took three days—but by its end, she said okay. He said, “I told them at the American Embassy that I was giving up my passport. So maybe they won’t allow me to go back. There might be complications. I’ll have to write a lot of letters. And my mother will help. Will you go?” When she finally said yes, he said, “I don’t want you to tell Aunt Valya or any of your relatives. And nobody at work. Not yet. Because maybe it won’t go through.”

Marina did not believe it could happen. Later, when she had to fill out her own applications, she still didn’t believe it. Her dream of marrying a foreigner had not included leaving her country. It was just finding a man who had an apartment. She didn’t want to huddle in somebody else’s corner. That was the largest thing about marriage: your own apartment. To meet and marry a foreigner was, in addition, flattering to her, and adventurous. Sometimes she dreamed, Boy, wouldn’t it be great to work in Czechoslovakia for a couple of years? Or East Germany? Buy a sporty coat, look nice. Having married an American, she could tell the girls at work: “See what I got? You just have your Russian nothing.” They answered: “Isn’t your husband a worker?” She told them: “It doesn’t matter. He’s still a foreigner. He’s Oswald, not Vanya.”

But now it was scary. Going to America! It gets scarier if you don’t tell your relatives and keep it to yourself at work. Then in July, Alik said he might have to take an illegal trip to Moscow in order to visit the American Embassy. She wondered if the KGB would come for her then, or would they call her in from work?—she didn’t know how the KGB got in touch with you.

What Marina also did not know was that her husband had been in correspondence through half the winter with American officials in Moscow. More than a month before he even met her, back in early February 1961, he had already sent a letter to the Embassy, requesting the return of that same passport he had left on Richard Snyder’s desk in late October 1959. Snyder had mailed an answer back to Minsk, suggesting that Oswald take a trip to Moscow so they could discuss the matter. They had been in communication since. Oswald was to tell his wife many a lie over their years together, but no single deceit may have been as large as his decision not to inform Marina or Valya or Ilya before the marriage that in his heart he was already on his way back to America.

PART VI

A COMMENCEMENT OF THE LONG VOYAGE HOME

1

Remarks from the Author

Up to this point, nearly all of Oswald’s acquaintances have been Russian, but as his focus of interest moves from Soviet friends, girlfriends, and workers to American government officials, so do the bureaucracies of the U.S. and the USSR consume a larger part of his attention.

So be it. This is, after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view. We are, in effect, studying an
object
(to use the KGB’s word for a person under scrutiny) as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Given the variety of interpretations that surround him, he has continued to exist among us as a barely visible protagonist in a set of opposed scenarios that range from Mark Lane’s—ready to open the case—to Gerald Posner’s—eager to close it. We cannot even begin to list the near-to-numberless practitioners of the art of investigative writing who have been fitting Oswald into one or another species of plot.

Perhaps it would be more felicitous to ask: What kind of man was Oswald? Can we feel compassion for his troubles, or will we end by seeing him as a disgorgement from the errors of the cosmos, a monster?

In this regard, it may as well be stated here that in the effort to find his kernel of human reality, certain liberties have been taken. Even as one stains a slide in order to separate the features of its contents more clearly, so Oswald’s letters and writings have been corrected here for spelling and punctuation. Oswald was dyslexic, and his orthography is so bad at times that the man is not revealed but concealed—in the worst of his letters he seems stupid and illiterate. Considering that he was still in his very early twenties, it is, however, not wholly inaccurate to speak of him as a young intellectual. In this regard, it may be worth taking a look at the Appendix, pp. i–xiv in the back matter. That he had no extraordinary reach of mind as an intellectual is also apparent, even with corrected orthography, but since we are giving him every benefit in this direction in order better to perceive the workings of his mind, let us also recognize how prodigiously crippling is dyslexia to a man who would have a good polemical style. Indeed, it is as intimately crippling as arthritic fingers on a violinist. (The Appendix to this book also contains a short essay on the disabilities attendant on dyslexia written by Dr. Howard Rome of the Mayo Clinic for the Warren Commission.)

It may well take the rest of these pages to decide, all the same, whether such a method of approach—to search for the nature of the man before we decide on the plot—is of use for finding out how Kennedy was shot and why. Until then, we will keep asking who was behind it and which conspiracy was operative. It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd. So the question reduces itself to some degree: If we should decide that Oswald killed Kennedy by himself, let us at least try to comprehend whether he was an assassin with a vision or a killer without one. We must not only look at Oswald from many points of view—first Russian and soon American—but even try to perceive him through bureaucratic lenses. All too often, that is all we will have. Let us recognize, however, that it makes some difference to our commonweal, each and every time, whether an act of murder is visionless and mindless or is a cry of wrath that rises from a skewed heart maddened by its own vision of injustice.

We have come at least to the philosophical crux of our inquiry: It would state that the sudden death of a man as large in his possibilities as John Fitzgerald Kennedy is more tolerable if we can perceive his killer as tragic rather than absurd.

That is because absurdity corrodes our species. The mounting ordure of a post-modern media fling (where everything is equal to everything else) is all the ground we need for such an assertion.