Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  March 18–31

  We walk. I talk a little about myself. She talks a lot about herself. Her name is Marina N. Prusakova.

  April 1–30

  We are going steady and I decide I must have her. She puts me off and so on April 15 I propose. She accepts.

  All right, once Lee had gotten out of the hospital, they had started dating, she would tell her interviewers thirty years later. She didn’t see him every night; she certainly kept seeing Anatoly until she finally accepted Lee’s proposal. Then, no more of Anatoly.

  It was not just that Lee was neat and polite. When people were clean, that was very attractive to her. She did like people who bathed and people who could think cleanly. She would admit it: She liked starch. Starch was in Lee’s shirts, and that made her feel free: She could walk out from seeing him anytime she wished. So she had thought. So, she kept seeing Anatoly. Although not to the point of intercourse.

  “Ah, well,” she said to her interviewers, “number one, in Russia, you don’t have that many opportunities to be in somebody’s . . . inside. It was winter when I met Anatoly. So, mostly it was just kissing. And he was a good kisser. Put it that way.” She never felt she was what you call a “sexual person.” More like sensuous. Going to the very end in sex was not her goal. She wasn’t looking for climax. “It’s the part before that interested me.” But with Anatoly, for the very first time, she had wanted to go further. Only, it never happened.

  On the other hand, Lee certainly wanted to sleep with her. Sometimes they would go to his apartment, and things would get to the point of no return. Once, he threw her out, said: “Okay! Stay, or get out!” She got out. But he wasn’t rough. What she liked about Lee, and about Anatoly as well, was the prelude, talking. It wasn’t just physical—grab, kiss, here we go. You talk, and gradually you warm up to it. “I think that was what I liked with Lee prior to marriage. A little bit of conquering.”

  So, he might be gentle, but he was also a bit aggressive when it came to sex. “Why do you think we got married?” she would ask. She shook her head. “Well,” she said to her interlocutors, “dear President Ford told everybody that Lee was impotent and that’s the thing which is not true . . . People like that become President. I am sorry. I have no respect for Mr. Ford.”

  From an FBI report on an interview with Marina Oswald on December 1, 1963:

  MARINA advised [that] her uncle and aunt did not disapprove of OSWALD and, in fact, were glad that she had reduced the number of her boy friends to almost one. They offered no objections to OSWALD and told her it was her decision to make . . . Permission for the marriage was granted [by the registrar] in seven days, and it was thereafter necessary to only wait three more days to fulfill the required ten-day waiting period. They were certified as married by the registrar on April 30, 1961, [and] her aunt and uncle had a reception for them in their apartment. Their mutual friends were invited.

  She advised she was not interviewed by any official and that the only documentation necessary for this marriage was registration of intent and the certification of the marriage ten days later . . . 2

  From Marina’s narrative: . . . It was one of the happiest days in my life. Alik, too, I think, was very happy that we were allowed to get married. He only calmed down on the day of our marriage; before that he went every day to ZAGS [the marriage bureau] to find out if we were to get permission. Only after our wedding did he finally believe that what we wanted had really happened . . . I remember that [on our wedding day] Lee bought me some early narcissi, and we went to the ZAGS with our friends. We came back on foot; the sun was shining; it was a warm Sunday, and everything was beautiful.3

  3

  The Wedding Night

  One day, about a year after Lee moved from the Hotel Minsk to his apartment, Stellina heard that he had gotten married. A floor lady at the hotel said: “Did you know? That American married a Russian girl. One of ours.” But she added: “A woman who is spoiled goods. A Leningrad sidewalk prostitute.” That rumor had spread around Minsk. Stellina remembered that he had told her the girl had said: “Switch off the light and kiss me, please.” A respectable decent young lady wouldn’t talk that way. Respectable young ladies, if they knew any English, would know more than such a phrase. Russian girls were brought up, said Stellina, to take no initiative with men. Sex was friendship and caring, part of the big relationship. Many women were not even told about female orgasm. What for?

  “Turn off the light and kiss me” was unheard of. Enough! She didn’t want to meet this young woman.

  First, her aunt and uncle had thought she was going out with too many men. Now that she had it down to two, and wanted to get married, Ilya had to say: “Don’t be in a hurry. What are you getting yourself into? You should know this man better. Such a short period of time.”

  On their marriage day, however, Ilya was nice. He said to Marina, “Maybe you are ready. Love each other. Now that you are married, you should live a peaceful life. Don’t put shame on yourself. Just live so that people see you have a beautiful life.”

  At their pharmacy, Sonya first heard about Oswald when Marina started to say, “I was introduced to this American, Alik—Alka, I call him.” Then Sonya heard a little later that they began to see each other. So when Marina came to them and said that Alka had proposed marriage, the girls thought, well, Marina’s uncle has such a high position and we’re just small people. If he, in his high position, allows them to marry, who are we to decide no? When the girls did remark that he was a foreigner, Marina said, “He’s not going to America.”

  Not one of the pharmacy girls was invited to her wedding, but then, it wasn’t a big party, just her uncle and aunt—not a regular wedding in a restaurant where many people were asked to come. Just close relatives, close friends.

  During the period when Yuri Merezhinsky was friendly with Lee, Konstantin Bondarin noticed that whenever he was returning home from an evening at which Lee was present, a man was always following him. So, he stopped having contact with the American.

  It was precisely for that reason that Kostya didn’t take part in Marina’s wedding. “Yuri and I talked about it. I said to Yuri: ‘We’re being grazed.’” There was a special word, pasut, which was used when you were clearly under surveillance. You were sheep and you had a shepherd watching you.

  As for Marina, Kostya would say that she had a goal in mind and Lee was Victim Number One.

  A victim, after all, is someone who is used as a means. That Marina wanted to get married was obvious to every man who ever had anything to do with her, but Tolya Shpanko would have been the most appropriate for her.

  Inessa didn’t recall when she heard the name Alik for the first time, but there was a period when Marina seemed to disappear for a while and Inessa didn’t see her. So, Inessa was surprised to discover that she was getting married to an American.

  Marina never told Inessa anything in absolute detail, but she did share some of her feelings. It gave Inessa a sense that Marina had dirt upon her, that it was creeping, maybe, toward her soul but hadn’t managed yet to sully it.

  “You can be soiled on the outside, that’s my feeling, but in your soul remain honest and decent. No, those are the wrong words. How can I say it? Well, she’s dear to me, and I saw something in her,” said Inessa.

  “She was confessing; she spoke with a great deal of pain, with a very great deal of pain, believe me. I am afraid of seeming self-assured, but it seems to me that she needed me. She approached the subject gradually. She would talk and talk and then afterward she did get more specific. It was before she got married that she told me all that. She felt entirely alone, as if nobody needed her.”

  Inessa knew that, right before her marriage, Marina was worried that on their wedding night Lee would find out about her past. As she spoke with Inessa, she told her that she did know what to do with herself so that he wouldn’t find out. It was difficult to talk on this subject because it involved physical and medical matters, but afterward, Marina said everyt
hing was okay and Lee had thought she was a virgin. Something she did medically—yes, she did it.

  Inessa said, “Of course, it shocked me, but I didn’t judge her.” Inessa hadn’t known how she had managed something like that, but Marina told her that she was in a pharmacy, after all, and there were one or two substances—when you put them in, you could give yourself strain and tension down there. When the bridegroom consummated the first night, you would have pain. You didn’t have to take acting lessons. Blood was not necessarily present, but the experience was uncomfortable enough to convince any new husband. “This is what I remember Marina telling me.”

  After her wedding, Marina told Inessa that all had gone well and she was happy. This was not because he was such a great hero in bed, but because she had succeeded in convincing him she was a virgin.

  After marriage, Marina became a good and decent wife, Inessa said. It changed her. She had always wanted to have her own home and now she had achieved that. Somehow, Marina settled down.

  INTERVIEWER: One person responded to a question by saying: You’re right, she wasn’t a virgin on her wedding night. She was worried that Lee would find out, and she went to the pharmacy and got something. She was protecting her marriage.

  MARINA: Okay.

  INT: That’s exactly what was said.

  M: Okay. It’s true. So? So you are a sex pervert to spend five days to get somebody to talk about subject like this . . . I mean, isn’t it enough?

  INT: I’m telling you what happened in the course of the interviews. Pavel told us about an incident that happened at the radio factory, when guys came up to Lee and kidded him, and said: “Well, was your wife a virgin or not? How much blood was on the sheet?” We could never find out what Lee’s answer was.

  M: I don’t know.

  INT: Nobody seems to remember how he answered that question. So we don’t know whether that was something which bothered him. It’s of value to know whether every time he had a disagreement with you, every time he had an argument with you . . .

  M: Your guess is as good as mine.

  INT: We’re not interested in the sex by itself but in what knowledge he had of your past. How did it affect him? Your girlfriend said you were concerned about your marriage. She said it with a lot of emotion and feeling. That you were doing it to protect your marriage.

  M: At least I was serious about that.

  INT: Exactly right. That helped us understand that you were serious about the marriage.

  M: I wanted to have a family. I was damn serious about that.

  INT: Let me get it out, so we don’t have to feel anybody is hiding anything. Inessa told us in this same interview, in kindness, with great love and affection for you, that you, Marina, carried a great burden from Leningrad. And about how difficult your life was in Leningrad and with your stepfather, and that you had to live a life which you were not proud of.

  M: It wasn’t by choice.

  INT: Inessa explained how you felt very bad and were very much worried that you had had this life in Leningrad, and that you had to resort to things to survive, to eat, to find a place to sleep . . .

  M: I never once in my life was paid money.

  INT: I’m sure you weren’t.

  M: I was looking for love in some wrong places and sometimes I had to pay for that. I actually was raped by a foreigner.

  INT: What?

  M: I mean, I was trapped in a room. He locked the door. And you know how they have those dezhurnayas that sit over there in the hallways of hotels holding keys for people who are out? I couldn’t scream. I thought, what would this woman think of me? So I fought this man. He finally threw me against him. He said, “Well if I knew you were a virgin, I would not have touched you.” . . . Lee didn’t ask me, but on my wedding night, I pretended. I was terrified, I said to myself, When night comes, what am I going to do? I mean, what? It’s a clean-cut life from now on. I want to be serious, and I was terrified. But Lee did not ask me.

  INT: He never asked whether you were a virgin?

  M: He did thank me for it. So I thought, “Oh my God. I flew over that . . . now I’m holy again.”

  INT: Right.

  M: All my life that’s all I wanted to be . . . And then Lee came from the factory and told me about how guys there talk, and he laughed and he said how barbaric and awful. And I said, “Don’t you talk about us. I don’t want to be discussed.” And once, now I recall, we had an argument and he kind of mumbled: “Yeah, little virgin.” And I said, “Yes, I am.” I said, “Prove it that I’m not.” And he dropped the subject.

  April 3

  After a seven-day delay at the Marriage Bureau because of my unusual passport, they allow us to register as man and wife. Two of Marina’s girlfriends act as bridesmaids. We are married at her aunt’s home. We have a dinner reception for about twenty friends and neighbors, who wish us happiness (in spite of my origin), which was in general rather disquieting to any Russian since foreigners are very rare in the Soviet Union, even tourists. After an evening of eating and drinking in which Uncle Wooser started a fight and a fuse blew on an overloaded circuit, we take our leave and walk fifteen minutes to our home. We lived near each other. At midnight we went home.

  4

  Honeymooners

  Marina would say now that her main reason for getting married was to find someone to belong to, and to have a family. Marriage was holy. One entered it for life. So, of course, she wanted to come to her marriage with purity. Of course. In Russia it was a tradition that a man married a virgin, but with Americans she didn’t know how to read their feelings. Americans were a novelty. Maybe they wouldn’t care as much.

  She could say this much again: Lee did like to laugh about how barbaric it was in peasant villages. Showing bloody sheets!

  She remembers that in Leningrad, when she was fourteen years old, she would dream of getting married. Some white prince would come. No dirt, nothing. So, when she became—what would you call it?—a witness to life’s reality, she was not prepared. Probably, she said, it’s that way for every little girl.

  After they were legally married at the license bureau, ZAGS, and a stamp was put on her passport, she happened to notice Alik’s date of birth. It was 1939. She realized then that he had been lying when he told her he was twenty-four. He was only twenty-one. She said, “If I knew, I wouldn’t have married you.” It was only a joke, but he said to her that he had worried whether she would take him seriously. After all, she had said that Sasha was only twenty and she was not about to marry babies.

  For their wedding, Valya had prepared a feast: crab salad, salami, black caviar, red caviar, pâté. And then she had stuffed a fish with its own cooked meat, kept the skin whole and put all the fish meat back inside, but now, no bones. Not one. It looked like a real fish again. And yet you could slice it. Such a special effort.

  Marina had already begged her aunt not to go through any Russian tradition of saying, “Gor’ko, gor’ko.” But as they sat around their table eating, somebody pretended to be choking on too much pepper, and so everybody started crying out: “Gor’ko”—which means bitter—and Marina turned red. In obedience to such custom, they now made her kiss Lee over and over every time somebody said, “Gor’ko.” Later, she danced with everyone, and then Erich Titovets and Pavel and Alik sang “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Next morning, Valya walked right into their apartment and dropped a plate on the floor with enough noise to wake up ghosts. Then she said to Alik, “Russian custom.”

  At her wedding, Marina had been embarrassed by Aunt Musya’s husband, Vanya, who got drunk. (Lee called him Wooser!) As usual, he couldn’t handle liquor. A Vanya! He crowed like a rooster, screaming away at the wedding party. Marina was embarrassed. “I thought, my new husband will ask himself: ‘What kind of family did you just marry into?’ It was very uncomfortable.”

  That night, when they went back to his apartment, they discovered that Valya and Larissa had placed flowers all around their bed. Her nightgown was on a pillow.

>   They didn’t have a honeymoon. They just spent two days in bed getting accustomed to each other—what would you want her to tell? They were new. They couldn’t analyze everything. Talk a little, observe a little—bit by bit you go on; you don’t make any big issue. Little by little. When you read romantic books, it’s not enough; you want more. But sex was not romance. More like soiled clothes.

  One thing: Lee was not bashful. He could walk around their apartment naked. As if it were nothing. That was surprising to her—that a man could be so comfortable before he got dressed. But she never said anything about it. For Minsk, however, he was some exhibitionist. She had just never experienced this American way. Lee was not even embarrassed to get up and go to the bathroom while leaving the door open. That was unusual. Marina was trying to find out what was expected of her. She did not know what her man wanted, so she had to learn.

  Guys at Lee’s factory, she soon found out, were always talking about sex. Quite a big topic over there. That was why Marina never wanted to date factory boys—their mentality. When Alik would laugh at what they said, she would say, “Don’t tell them about our lovemaking. Don’t you dare.”

  Alik’s first experience with sex had not only been with a Japanese girl, but he also said that he’d never had an American girl. Just Japanese and Russian girls. Marina wondered whether he felt that he was missing something. Maybe he should have had a girl from his own country first? No, Marina didn’t know what to expect during these first few days of marriage. She could say that she kind of lived in euphoria. Finally married, you know! And she had married an American. She had that stupid apartment she’d always dreamed about. God was smiling on her. Finally! A year or two before, she had been with Larissa and they’d been walking past this same apartment house. It was such a beautiful place from outside, with its high balconies between high white columns. Marina had pointed up to one and said, “I’d like to have that,” said it before she ever met Lee, even said to Larissa, “Do you know anybody who lives here?” Larissa said no.