Oswald's Tale (44 page)

His father said: “You didn’t give me my Party membership and you are not going to take it away.”

That very same day, years ago, Mikhail Fedorovich left that line and took his wife and son and went away to the Urals. Years later, on another day when his father was working in his own office and his mother happened to be standing next to him, some officers came in and said to Yuri’s mother, “Good news for your family. Here are official papers proving that your husband was shot for nothing back then.” They didn’t even know Mikhail Fedorovich was the person next to her. Obviously, this Soviet system was like some compartmental organism in which all kinds of different processes were happening at the same time. There was no core to the system. Not really. Nothing really central. So, it was his father’s fear that if Yuri stayed in Minsk, he would be selected as a victim, while if Yuri went away, they would, bureaucratically speaking, soon be paralyzed. The big machine was so big that you could exploit it.

So, he got to Moscow. Now that he was there, he could say that when you were on the run, you didn’t care whether your roommate for one night was
simpatico
or a
zhlob.
Main thing to consider: that your roommate should not be a danger to you. But Yuri was lucky. He only met good people. If someone asked him why he was there, he just said, “Vacation.” He was a student. He was big, he looked respectable, so no one was interested. Of course, he had to say he was from Minsk because of his passport.

Nor was he afraid of being robbed. At each railway station, they had deposit boxes. For 15 kopecks a day, he would leave most of his money in a locker. While he was in Moscow, he stayed at the Peking, the Leningrad, the Ukraine, the Exhibition—everywhere. If you took a map of Moscow, he would live two days in one hotel, then he would take a taxi crosstown. He had no system—he would just go far away from his last hotel. In those days, you could get into any hotel—it was easy.

Nor were rates bad. At a restaurant, you could drink vodka and eat expensively or just take a side of cabbage. Of course, he didn’t count his money; he had so many rubles he never looked at how much he spent. It was cheap. One meat pie cost 7 kopecks. For good meat and beer, 22 kopecks. Movies, 20 kopecks. Everything was kopecks, not rubles. If you had a buddy, you could go to a hotel dining room or a hotel canteen and eat bread together free of charge, then put mustard on bread, plus pepper, salt, then pour a glass of vodka, have more bread—it was a meal.

He had no close calls in Moscow, and he didn’t worry about it, but he was homesick even if he was having a good time with girls. He had no problem there—he did not have to find his pennies in garbage. He never paid for a woman. He was young, good-looking, he knew how to talk. If he liked a woman, he invited her to a restaurant. Beautiful women were everywhere, plus shop girls. Then, he flew back to Minsk on New Year’s to see his parents. At that time he could drink a whole case of vodka, six bottles. Today he can only drink two bottles of vodka, as he had done today. Two bottles before he came to this interview. Now, more vodka during his interview. In those days he and a buddy could drink their first bottle of vodka in fifteen minutes, the second in twenty, the third in thirty. Just a little more than an hour for three liters. Now, he can still drink a lot of booze, but not like then, no,
c’est dommage.

What was to be made of his story? Toward the end of this interview, Yuri’s mother, Lidia Semenovna, came into the room. She was small and frail and had the title of Honorable Scientist of the Republic of Belarus.

Lidia Semenovna did work on marrow chemistry and radiobiology, and she was proud of having traveled on scientific business trips to international congresses, even to America. When she came back to Minsk in 1961 from America, she had been asked to share her impressions about her visits to different American Universities. “A great many students from the Medical Institute wished me to speak.” She even thinks it was those students who arranged to have her give a lecture at the Trade Union Palace.

She remembers that Oswald, as one member of her audience, came over afterward to say that he was an American, and that Yuri then asked if this American could come home with them. That’s how Oswald happened to visit their apartment on March 17, 1961.

She didn’t have a first impression of him—she was too busy talking to people after her lecture. He was just a young man, a boy really.

At that time her team did research on a nuclear reactor with cobalt sources. She had a large group under her, about thirty people, and her project was under closely held security, like all other subjects concerned with radiation. So, after Oswald appeared at her house, the Organs soon told her it was undesirable, even inadmissible, that he should come again. Such sentiments were also passed on to her husband, Professor Merezhinsky. Their house was not a place where any unknown foreigner should be able to come.

Now, the interviewers asked her about Yuri’s extended trip to Moscow, and she immediately replied that he had gone in the fall of 1963. He had been ill, and he had stayed in a hospital there.

At this point, Yuri interrupted to say: “Mother, I ask you . . . the truthful way of life. Please. Forget that you are a Party member. Don’t lie.”

Mother: “Then I won’t talk. I am saying how it was.”

“Say the truth,” said Yuri.

“I’ll say the truth,” said his mother. “There was an unpleasant story about an episode on a farm, an unpleasant story . . . Komsomol said three boys should be excluded from the Medical Institute.”

It was not enough, Lidia Semenovna said, to justify this attempt to expel Yuri from his Medical Institute. But what has to be understood is that at this farm, Yuri had also been sick, with a constant temperature of 39 degrees centigrade. An inexplicable temperature. Equal to 102.2 Fahrenheit. Since their daughter already had TB, the obvious question was whether Yuri now also had it. No doctor in Minsk Hospital, however, was ready to give a diagnosis. She and her husband were too high in medicine, and so these Minsk doctors did not wish to make a serious mistake. They told her it was better to go to the Tuberculosis Hospital at Second Moscow Institute. So, Yuri spent four months that fall in Moscow—the fall of 1963—and was given a leave from his Institute in Minsk. When he came back, in order to prevent more talk, Yuri’s mother made her son a lab assistant at her own Institute.

After this exposition, mother and son argued in English and in Russian:

YURI:
Mother, be truthful at least once in your life.

MOTHER:
I’m saying only truth.

YURI:
Throw away your Party card.

MOTHER:
It has nothing to do with my Party card.

YURI:
You have Party card in your brains. Why did I leave for Moscow? Because I was ill?

MOTHER:
You
were
ill.

Lidia Semenovna would explain: This man Andreyev had, in fact, participated in a situation against Yuri to injure her husband. Yuri had been used. That was one more reason for Yuri to go to Moscow—so he wouldn’t be expelled from his Medical Institute because of his trouble with that
salo
in the summer of 1963. Once he was in Moscow and medically excused from the Institute, Andreyev and his people couldn’t hurt Yuri, and so they couldn’t hurt her husband. This also coincided with the inflammation of Yuri’s lungs. So, their move had logic. She could say that because Yuri was suffering this inflammation, it did help her to send him to Moscow, but she was also trying to find a doctor in Moscow who could help him.

She could explain further: Being a nuclear researcher, she had her own KGB people to inform her, a Colonel. She was close to her Colonel, because he would go abroad with her when she went to international congresses and so he always alerted her. Whenever trouble started, her KGB Colonel was telling her, “Lidia Semenovna, please keep in mind, don’t let Yuri see this person. It is better if he does not.” They told her about Oswald and how it was better Yuri didn’t meet with him. They talked to her about Yuri’s relations with different women. They didn’t advertise it, but she knew all about Marina and her bad biography in Leningrad. Marina was a beautiful girl, and Lidia Semenovna was worried that Yuri could have interest in her, because she had been warned that this relationship should be stopped.

When, in early fall of 1963, she heard that Yuri was going to be expelled from his Institute, a high retired KGB officer was called in, and a few days later told her, “Lidia Semenovna, don’t do anything with these doctors here. Go to Moscow.” And Yuri’s mother used a slang expression,
motaite.
“‘Skip town,’ they said. ‘It’s not advisable to deal with it here. Get out of town and take Yuri with you.
Smativat—
take off!’”

So, from Minsk she made a reservation at the Akademicheskaya Hotel in Moscow, a room for her son and herself in a hotel where academicians of all republics go. She made her reservation from Minsk and, once in Moscow, took him to a proper hospital, where he stayed for four months. By then, this problem with Andreyev was solved by itself.

YURI:
Do you remember how I was living in Moscow?

MOTHER:
I lived with you in Akademicheskaya Hotel.

YURI:
Don’t do this, Mother. Once in your life be honest. I can’t stand it. I’ll leave.

MOTHER:
I told everything as it was.

YURI:
Yes, of course, long live the Communist Party.

MOTHER:
It has nothing to do with Stalin and the Party.

YURI:
Lidia Semenovna, have you read a simple thing,
Gulag Archipelago
?

MOTHER:
No, I didn’t . . .

YURI:
If you read an article about Gulag, you’ll know better about Soviet reality, [but] you don’t want to read it.

MOTHER:
No, I don’t want . . . Can’t you understand that my position forced them to make me join the Party? They had a special direction for me.

YURI:
Why does all the world hate Russians, Communist revolutionaries . . .

MOTHER:
Okay, you hate me. So what can I do?

YURI:
And you hate me. That’s why I am telling.

MOTHER:
Why would I hate you?

YURI:
No. I know that she hates me.

MOTHER:
You ought to be ashamed to say so! . . .

She was old, and he was ill. At fifty years of age, still handsome, he was bent over and coughing, curled around his glass of vodka like a leaf seared by heat. And she was in her seventies. Together they fought. Bitterly, and with the rage that only a mother and son can feel at the control each has the power to exercise on the other.

The interviewers could wonder if Yuri would ever forgive his mother for revealing that he was a liar on a prodigious scale and so virtually all of what he had told them about Marina and himself was doubtless not true. Ambiguous—since it seemed as if he had seen her to some little degree—but probably not true. Experience bore the same relation to his memory as facts to high romance.

3

The Most Degrading Moment in Her Life

If we are to take the reminiscences of Russians we have known about the state of their feelings in the aftermath of Jack Kennedy’s death, can there be an ending to Volume One more appropriate than to inquire into Marina’s state of mind?

She would say that the most humiliating thing that she ever experienced was on her walk from the police car to the police station after they told her that Lee had been arrested.

The police brought her out of the car, and she had to walk—she didn’t know how far; it looked forever. Maybe it was some short distance; she does not recall. But, such shame—the most degrading, humiliating moment ever in her life. Just by going from car to building. Reporters were shouting, and it was nothing she could understand. She wished some earth would swallow her. She even believed that Lee had committed this crime, because she believed all American authorities. She blindly believed them. They had made an arrest, so what else could there be? She was from Russia—when that black wagon comes (
voron,
they called it in Russia—black crow), you are guilty. Automatically guilty.
Voron
is here! Then she walked through a tunnel filled with reporters. Jammed. She couldn’t believe it. This nightmare had herself in it. Leading role! She was playing a sleepwalker.

All of a sudden, someone shouted to her in Russian: “Mrs. Oswald, did your husband kill America’s President?” That Russian voice kind of woke her up. Fortunately. She was feeling as if she could have drifted out of everything forever. She was abandoned—wife of an assassin who had killed the President.

V
OLUME TWO

OSWALD IN AMERICA