She loved all of Deanna Durbin’s films—a beautiful woman, beautiful stories, nice clothes, nice furniture. She was much more attracted by this side of life than politics, but then, at fourteen, she already understood that something in politics was wrong. She remembers walking along a street with a girlfriend and saying, “I think that Stalin doesn’t understand what’s going on in our country because he is receiving false reports.” This was a close friend of hers and they could share such a thought. She couldn’t say it at home, but her closest friend agreed. They saw already how small bosses lied to bigger bosses, always showing the best side of everything in their work, and so people on a higher level must also be doing that with Stalin.
Not many of her girlfriends were political. Dates with boys interested them more. It left Ella a little apart, but that was all right. She started to go out with young men very late—she was nineteen before she had her first date. It caused her no difficulty. Ella considered herself a person who was not envious. Maybe not a hundred percent not-envious, but mostly. And she liked girlfriends who were advanced beyond her, because they came to her and spoke of their experiences. She could learn about life through them, because they needed somebody with whom to share stories. One of her friends once said, “Listen, I like one young man, and I want to meet him, but it’s difficult. Could you do it with me? We’ll walk past where he lives and maybe we’ll see him.” So, Ella immediately put on her coat and went along, because she had begun to understand how important it was for her friend to meet this young man. And never once did the thought occur to Ella, “Maybe he will like me.” No, she just wanted her friend to have her chance.
At that time, her mother was still a temple of perfection to Ella, and interested most in herself. Ella pities her now. Her mother never had a normal life. Now, Ella lives with her daughter and her grandchild and is a teacher and worries whether she has time for them. Teachers are always a little bit crazy, Ella would say. They not only give so much to other people’s children, but when they come home, they have notebooks to check and don’t have time for their own sons and daughters. Still, Ella cooked for her children, washed for them, worked for them as her grandmother had cooked for her.
All the same, there was a time when she thought she might be an actress like her mother, and Ella performed a lot in a public theatre, but finally decided she wanted to go to a University.
She failed her entrance exam, however. She couldn’t get a high enough rating in the Byelorussian language. All her other marks were very good, but she couldn’t sit and wait another year to pass Byelorussian, so in September, along with a good many other girls and boys who didn’t get into Minsk University, she went around to a few factories, and was taken on at Horizon as a trainee. All the while, she still kept trying to enter Minsk University. But, for two years, she couldn’t. Now that Stalin had died, bribery was prevalent. People in the University Entrance Commission even told her that they were given lists of people who should be accepted. If your name wasn’t on such a list and you did well, they might insert false marks to create mistakes for you. All she knows is that after two years of study, her Byelorussian was good, yet she kept receiving 2’s, a very low mark.
Once, when she took part in a poetry reading competition, one of her judges spoke of giving Ella the highest prize, but then, as she learned later, she was rejected because she was not Byelorussian, not “national cadre.” Therefore, she couldn’t represent Minsk in a national competition; being Jewish was looked upon as belonging to a separate nation. It didn’t matter if you were Jewish and a Communist or Jewish Orthodox—you were part of another nation and could not represent Byelorussia. That did not build her confidence.
In her factory, however, it depended more on who was your boss. If you happened to be working under some person who hated Jews, you could have problems, but it didn’t mean everyone was anti-Semitic; and with a good boss, you could have quite a nice life and job. So, she didn’t have factory problems.
When she finally started dating, you couldn’t even say it was true dating. A boy might get tickets to the opera and take her, but often, before she would accept, he would have to talk to her for a whole month about going out with him. She thinks her development was very slow.
By the time she met Lee, she was already twenty-three and had dated many young men. She would go out with someone a couple of times but then realize she didn’t feel anything toward this person, so why continue? On the other hand, it was boring to sit home. Sometimes she would even go out on a date without any feeling that it could be the right man for her.
Meanwhile, she was still determined to get some higher education. What helped was that the Byelorussian Minister of Education had just developed a new law: If you worked in a factory plant for two years, you were put on a list ahead of others who were applying.
So, Ella not only got into Minsk University but had a scholarship, and could quit factory work. Two years later, however, she received a bad mark on an exam and they took away that scholarship. She had to move, therefore, from day study to night school, and resumed her job at Horizon. In fact, they welcomed her back. Ella was already well known because of her participation in amateur concerts. Indeed, the person in charge of personnel told her he was going to put her into a good department that assembled radios.
When she came in on her first morning, she remembers being introduced to Lee. All that week he kept looking at her during lunch break. She knew that if she went up to him and asked for a favor, he would like that even if lots of girls wanted to be his friend. She noticed that when he would walk along the factory aisles, many girls would cry: “Hello, Alik, hi!” as if he were of special importance.
Now, in her night school classes, she was working on some English text and had to translate a number of pages by a certain date, so it was not wholly a pretext to get him to help her. There was some real need. While this would not characterize her in a positive fashion, she would say, she sometimes did use men to do small things for her. For instance, there was an engineer she did not like particularly, but she was not good at drawing certain kinds of wiring schemes, so she asked him to help, even though she had no intention of dating him. For Lee, however, she did not have negative feelings. Since the American seemed to find her attractive, why not ask him to help translate her assignment? In fact when she did ask, he smiled, and they agreed to meet in a smaller workroom that afternoon. She assumed there wouldn’t be anyone else there, although as it turned out, a few workers were still present. She and Lee sat down at a small table where a radio was playing music.
Lee spread out her pages and turned off the sound without asking whether anyone wanted to listen. But Max Prokhorchik was also working there, and he became indignant. He came up and turned the radio back on. Lee turned it off; Max turned it on. Then Lee turned it off, and said, “Russian pig!” Whereupon Max stalked off.
It was unpleasant for Ella. In front of several people, Lee had turned off their radio just because she had to study, but on the other hand, a well-brought-up person would have done exactly what Lee did. At that moment, Ella could say that she was on Lee’s side. All the same, he did not seem too bright at first. His Russian was poor and he took everything as a joke. He laughed a lot. So they laughed a lot, too much maybe. Yet, as she saw more of him, it became interesting to talk about his country.
Before long, he was inviting her to see movies. They went often for walks and to parks and sat on a bench. He would tease her, “You know, I am a rich bridegroom. I have an apartment.”
It was exceptional to be dating an American, and she was curious. Besides, he did not create problems. He was not aggressive. That was understood as their basis for going out together. Some men had been nasty, but he wasn’t. And, of course, he didn’t have financial problems; he even hinted to her that he had high connections. He had met the Chairman of the City Council, Sharapov. “If we need something,” Lee said, “for our future, I can go to the mayor. We can get what we need.” So Lee did seem a
confident person to her, and merry. He had a sense of humor and they still kept laughing a lot. In those days, friends used to call her khakhatushka, a person who enjoys life, and so she and Lee did not have difficult or deep conversations, just talked like young people. She liked to tease him. Not in a bad sense, just to challenge him a little.
During all this time, they dated approximately twice a week, but had lunch together at their cafeteria every day. And they usually sat alone; other people respected their privacy and did not try to join their table.
She never felt: “Oh, I wish we’d go out with other people.” She liked being alone with him. It was her way of dating. She had always had such relations with men. So, she hardly knew anything about his friends or who else he saw.
Once, at the theatre, a man named Erich Titovets came up and started to talk to Lee. This Erich didn’t even put his eyes on her. It was as if she were furniture. He and Lee spoke together while she stood nearby, and she had time to notice that Erich was in his twenties, and blond and well built and handsome. High cheekbones. Erich looked like an American model in magazines, and Lee could have been Russian, as if he were trying to understand what Erich said. Of course, Erich spoke a kind of English you heard at school, a language of culture—precise, almost too fancy. And Lee spoke casually.
Erich was impressive. Erich was the first young man she had met who could speak English without being a student at the Foreign Languages Institute, and when she remarked on that to Lee afterward, he said, “I would like to talk in Russian the way Erich expresses himself in English.”
Nonetheless, she couldn’t say she took to Lee’s friend. It is not easy to like someone for whom you do not exist. And Lee never talked about him. It was obvious that Lee was a person with compartments in his life. So, it was hard to trust him altogether.
She believes Lee knew that she was Jewish, maybe from their very first meeting, but she remembers that he only mentioned it once. That was when he realized she was not exactly jumping into marriage with him. Such a question never got to yes or no for many months, but he did tell her, “I know you are Jewish and people, you know, don’t like Jewish people, but I myself don’t care about that.” It was his way of saying, “It wouldn’t stop me from marrying you.”
Before Lee, a few men had already proposed. There had been one she liked, a Captain, who went off to do his service in Kamchatka, but Ella felt indecisive and didn’t go with him; and there had been another boyfriend she dated for a year, and he, too, had asked her to marry him. So, Lee was hardly first in this kind of relationship, and besides, if Lee was in love with her, she was not in love with him. Rather, she felt it was all right to have nice feelings for someone in a good way, feeling that he was, underneath everything, very lonely here. And so she pitied him enough to feel that if she rejected him, he would be even lonelier. Therefore, she didn’t stop dating him. But she knew she didn’t like him in such a way that one goes on to get married.
Lee told Ella once that she knew more about him than any other person ever had, and so she was surprised when she found out years later that he had a mother still living—he had told her he didn’t. Also, he told her that he never wanted to go back to America.
Once, after they first started going out, he was quite upset. It was when news came to Minsk that an American U-2 had been shot down over Soviet territory, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, had been captured. Lee asked her, “What do you think, Ella? Can it damage me because I’m American?” She told him not to worry personally, because “no one can say you are responsible.” She tried to calm him down and talked to him nicely. She wasn’t really sure, but she did want to support him. It was their most emotional moment yet.
Lee told Ella that when he lived in Moscow he was afraid of Americans more than Russians. In fact, he told her, the Soviet authorities had sent him to Minsk because he would be safe there. He even said: “Here in Minsk I’m invisible. But when I came to Moscow, I was really outstanding.” Americans had been very interested in him, he told her, and had been hunting him and wanted to kill him. She thought maybe he had offered some information to obtain a Soviet citizenship, information Americans didn’t want given out. He said, “If I go back to America, they’ll kill me.”
It made him more interesting, but she didn’t believe it was real. She just thought they were passing remarks; he was not that brave. She recalls an episode when they were coming down a street that led to her house, and a young girl ran up and said, “I’ve just been attacked, they took my bag, help me!” Well, most Soviet men would have run off to try to catch the thief, but Lee just consoled the girl, and Ella said, “Well, we probably won’t get her bag—such thieves don’t wait around.” Lee even asked if they could take another street.
They did continue on a different route and everything was fine, except the girl took it very hard. She had, after all, lost her pocketbook. Later, thinking about it, Ella decided maybe he was a bit of a coward. Or maybe, if it was as he had said, that Americans in Moscow wanted to kill him, maybe he thought that here, too, somebody was looking to provoke him. So, he was staying out of trouble. He certainly didn’t talk about political matters. Once she even went so far as to ask why many people in America wanted war, and he answered, “Americans don’t really understand what war is because there was no combat on their territory.” She told him, “I know what it is, and I don’t like it.” He just said, “Yes, yes, you are right. I know how much you suffered.”
Otherwise, they did chat about many matters. But there were also moments on summer evenings when they just sat on a bench and enjoyed a silence as if he were a Russian man. She felt he reacted to everything with understanding, but was very reserved. Even though they dated for many months, maybe eight months, it was still too short a period for her to comprehend his nature. He never showed much. He was always even, kindhearted, smiling, nice, without ups or downs. Only twice, in fact, did they have a quarrel. Of course, she was also easygoing. People even said to her, “You laugh so quickly. If I show you my finger, you start to laugh. So easy you are.”
It is possible she did laugh too easily. When she read his diary all these thirty and more years later, she could not believe how distorted was his sense of time. He had had them meeting after the summer of 1960 when, in fact, they had known each other back in May of 1960, when the American U-2 was shot down, and they talked about Gary Powers. How little she had known of Lee, and how little, obviously, he had known of her.
FROM KGB OBSERVATION
PERFORMED FROM 12:00 TILL 24:00 SATURDAY, JULY 2, 1960
At 14:30 Lee Harvey left his work and went for lunch to caféautomat, situated on Pobedy Square. Had his meal, was home at 15:00.
At 16:00 he left apartment house, got on trolley bus N1 at Ploshchad Pobedy and went till Central Square without paying his fare. He got off bus through back door and went to newspaper store N1 at Marksa Street.
There he bought some newspaper and went to grocery store N13 at Prospekt Stalina. He did not buy anything, left store, went to GUM. Took a look at goods at plastics department and without buying anything left store and went to florist shop, then to bakery and then to café
At 20:20 Lee Harvey left his house and walked fast to Opera Theatre. There he started walking up and down near main entrance. After 10 minutes he headed for square, there at central alley he met with unknown woman by nickname
They looked at photo display window after which walked along Prospekt Stalina for about 35 minutes talking to each other about something.
At 21:45 Lee Harvey and
t to Circus Theatre. Lee Harvey showed tickets and they took their seats in row 10 and began watching American feature film
Dora proved to be Ella.
June–July
summer months of green beauty, pine forests, very deep. I enjoy many Sundays in the environs of Minsk with the Zigers, who have a car, “Moskvich” . . .
Later that summer, Pavel went boating once with Oswald. Lee liked the water, but as far as working the oars, this was one American who didn’t mind, Pavel decided, if somebody else did it. Pavel, for example.
FROM KGB OBSERVATION
PERFORMED FROM 8:00 TILL 23:00 SUNDAY, JULY 3, 1960
At 10:35 Lee Harvey left his house, got on trolley bus N6 at Ploshchad Pobedy stop, bought ticket and got off at Komsomolskaya stop through back door. He went straight to bakery shop, bought himself a piece of cake and glass of coffee, ate it all up and left. Outside he looked around, went to movie theatre Centralny, bought newspaper Banner of Youth at paper stand, browsed it through and turned back. At corner of Prospekt Stalina and Komsomolskaya Street he stopped, looked through newspaper again, crushed it and threw it away in trash bin. After that he went to GUM, looked at goods in household department, left store, bought some paper at newspaper store N1 and returned home.
At 13:30 Lee Harvey left his house for second time and walked slowly to stationery store at Gorky Street where he bought portable radio and returned home. In 30 minutes Lee Harvey left his house again, got on trolley bus N1 at Ploshchad Pobedy stop, got off at Komsomolskaya stop through back door and came to GUM to records department. There he took 20 minutes looking through lists of records, didn’t buy anything, left store and went to electrical goods store N71. There Lee Harvey bought a couple of records, after which got on tram N7 at Ploshchad Svobody stop and without talking to anybody got to Opera and Ballet Theatre stop, got off tram, visited stationery and consumer goods stores. 15:45 walked home.
Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery Page 13