After that, Alik did not call for a couple of days. The next time they saw each other was April 18, only a month and a day after they had first met. Alik took her hands, looked gravely into her eyes, and said to her quietly, “Marina, I’d like you to be my wife. I’ve no idea whether you’ll agree. I don’t make much, but I have a little saved up. You’d have to go on working. Are you afraid of marrying a foreigner?”
“You silly,” Marina replied. She was willing to marry him, she said, but she wanted to wait a bit. Alik wanted to get married in May.
“What will other people say?” Marina exclaimed. “We’ve known each other such a short time. Besides, my mama said May is an unhappy month. You should never get married in May.”
Alik said her mother’s superstitions were nonsense. He refused to wait until June. They must marry right away or they must part. Not, he added, that it would be easy for him to part. But he could not bear to go on seeing her and not having her.
Marina went home that night and told Valya that the American had asked her to marry him. She begged Valya to prepare Uncle Ilya for an interview with Alik.
The next day Alik put on his holiday best: a black suit, a white shirt and tie, even a dark blue hat. As he and Marina climbed the three narrow flights to Ilya and Valya’s apartment, he stopped at nearly every step. “Oh, my God, what will I say?” he groaned. “Please help me out.” He was pale, and his knees were shaking as he waited on the landing, summoning courage to ring the bell.
“My heart is pounding,” he said.
“Mine too,” Marina replied.
“He’ll probably chase me away.”
“I don’t know what he’ll do.” They felt like a pair of conspirators.
Ilya met Alik in the living room, and Marina went apprehensively into the kitchen with her aunt. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, she asked: “Aunt Valya, is Uncle Ilya in a good mood today?”
Valya nodded in the affirmative.
“Do you know what he’s going to say?”
Valya had no idea.
Ilya, meanwhile, was asking Alik a battery of the usual questions. He said that Marina was still very flighty. She was fickle and immature, and she wasn’t ready to get married. Then he asked Alik if he had the proper papers. Although he was an official of the MVD, Ilya, as he examined Alik’s documents, overlooked a fact that might have been critical in giving his consent. Alik did not have a regular Soviet passport, but a special document for the so-called stateless person, the foreigner who does not have Soviet citizenship and may or may not have retained citizenship of another country. Ilya later explained that he was not expert in that type of document.2 He thought it was a special residence permit issued to a foreigner during his first three years in Russia, and he believed that Alik was already a citizen of the USSR. Had he had any other impression, he said, he would have withheld his consent to the marriage. As it was, he took the precaution of asking: “And what about America, Alik? Do you intend to go back?”
Alik swore that he did not, and Ilya took him at his word.
After twenty minutes or so, Ilya called Marina in from the kitchen. “So it’s getting married you lovebirds have in mind. Alik, here, asks if he can marry you. I told him what kind of little bird you are, and he has promised to reform you. Do you consent to marry him?”
Marina answered that she did.
“Marriage is a serious thing,” Ilya said. “Personally, I think it’s too soon. But if I say no, Marina will blame me if her life is unhappy later on. If you think you’ll be happy together, then it’s not for me to refuse. Only, live with one another in peace. If you fight or if anything goes wrong, settle it yourselves. Don’t come to me with your troubles.”
Marina broke in like a little girl. “Does that mean you are saying yes, Uncle Ilya?”
“I am. Let’s drink to it.” The four of them went into the kitchen and sat at the table, drinking cognac.
During their lunch hour the next day, April 20, Marina and Alik went to ZAGS, the bureau where Soviet citizens go to register birth and death, marriage and divorce. The two old biddies who presided over the front corridor said, “Which did you come for, to be married or divorced?” Alik announced they had come to be married and produced his residence permit. The unfamiliar document puzzled the old ladies. When Alik told them that he was a foreigner, they instructed him to proceed to another ZAGS office and painstakingly wrote out the address.
A gray-haired gentleman greeted Marina and Alik pleasantly at the second ZAGS and motioned them into a chair. There they made out separate applications, and the old man promised to relay the papers higher up. He suggested that they come back in a week but was unable, in response to their questions, to reassure them or give them any notion whether their application would be approved.
That evening Marina and Alik planted seeds in the window boxes on his balcony. His thoughts to the future, Alik said he hoped they would have a son.
Marina reproached him gaily: “We’re not even married yet, and already you’re dreaming of a son!”
“Do you solemnly promise me a son?” he asked.
She giggled, “I promise.”
They decided to name him David. Marina knew the name from a novel by Theodore Dreiser, and she liked it. Alik went into the kitchen and came back with a sheet of paper. He placed it in front of Marina and instructed her to write: “I promise that we will have a son. We will call him David. Marina Prusakova, April 20, 1961.”
The next evening they went window-shopping for furniture and had supper with Ilya and Valya. As always, Alik got along splendidly with them. Later, as they were sitting in a little park near her apartment house, Alik was rather downcast. He asked Marina to come home with him for the night. “You always tease me so. We’ve applied to be married now. What are you frightened of? Please, Marina.”
Marina rose and walked away, tears streaming down her face. “They’re all alike,” she thought. “They all want the same thing. What do they take me for—a fool? They think I’m not even worth marrying.”
Alik caught up with her. “Forgive me, Marina. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. But really it is a strain. I didn’t know you cared so much about a ceremony.”
“It’s not the ceremony,” Marina replied. “I’m hurt because you’re just like all the others. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
She went home in a fearful cacophony of feelings. She had meant it when she said that she never wanted to see him again. Applying at ZAGS had been nothing but a trick. He did not want to marry her at all. “What does this American take me for—a fool?” she asked herself again and again.
She was angry at Alik. If he wanted her that badly, he would have to ask to be forgiven and marry her. Before, she had wanted to marry him because she cared for him. Now she would make him marry her on principle. But in the morning when she woke up, she felt that she did, in fact, love him.
At lunchtime the next day, Alik appeared at the pharmacy to apologize. He refused to go back to work unless Marina forgave him, and she did. She even agreed to phone ZAGS for news of their application. But the following week was a long one for both of them. Sometimes she phoned ZAGS and there was no news. Other times the telephone rang and rang, and no one answered. Each evening when he arrived at the Prusakovs’ for dinner, Alik scanned Marina’s face anxiously. “Do you think they’ll let us get married?” he said again and again. Marina asked what he would do if they were refused? Go to Moscow, Alik insisted, and appeal to the Foreign Ministry. What, Marina wanted to know, did the Foreign Ministry have to do with marriages? He said only that he would go to the “very highest” level.
Finally, Marina was asked to appear at ZAGS in person on April 27. When she got there, she was told that permission had been granted. “Why are you marrying him?” the gray-haired man asked. “Really and truly, couldn’t you have found yourself a Russian?”
“I’ve plenty of Russians to choose from,” Marina answered. “It’s just that I like him and want t
o marry him.”
“Well, it’s none of my business,” the old man said. He told Marina to come back with Alik on Sunday, April 30, at eleven o’clock in the morning for the wedding ceremony.3
News spread like a brush fire that Marina had been given permission to marry “her American,” and by no means was everyone pleased. The girls at the pharmacy were in high excitement, but Tamara, a slightly older woman in whom Marina confided, had doubts. She was convinced that of the two men Marina had been seeing, it was Anatoly whom she loved.
“But what would other people say?” Marina objected. “He’s so gangling and tall, and he isn’t the least bit handsome.”
“And who would you be getting married for?” Tamara asked. “Other people—or yourself?”
Anatoly, too, reacted quickly. He asked Marina to meet him in a café, and there he wished her the best of luck. But he remarked that “no one falls in love in two weeks.” It was his opinion that Marina had chosen Alik “because foreigners have such privileges here.” Marina was stung, partly because it was Anatoly who was accusing her and partly because there was truth in what he said.
Marina is the first to say that “I married Alik because he was American.” It was almost as if, being the only American in Minsk, he had the right to pick anyone he pleased. It would have been an act of lèse-majesté to refuse. But Marina adds, “I married him because I liked him. He was neat and clean and better looking than Anatoly. I was more in love with him than with anybody else at the time.”
She also concedes that his apartment played a role in her decision and that she might not have married him without it. For Marina had always felt unwanted and “in the way.” All her life she had dreamed of having a room of her own. She had seen many a marriage turned into a nightmare of animosity for lack of a decent place to live, and for her, as for many girls she knew, the great lottery of Soviet life was to find a man you loved—who had an apartment.
The apartment also played a role in guaranteeing the consent of her Uncle Ilya. For Ilya wanted his own apartment to himself. He may, moreover, have wanted Marina married so that he could once again enjoy the full-time attention of his wife. How else explain the fact that Ilya, a Russian chauvinist and a xenophobe, quickly gave his consent to his niece’s marriage to Alik, a foreigner and a factory hand, and discouraged her interest in Anatoly, a Russian with a much better future? Ilya himself called Marina “flighty,” and he knew that he could influence her choice. Yet he never bothered to meet Anatoly and see with his own eyes who was the better man and who would give Marina a better life. For Ilya there was no comparison. The difference lay not in the qualities the two men possessed, but in the apartment one of them possessed.
But there were other currents stirring, emotional currents, and they, too, powerfully affected Marina’s choice. Because of her illegitimate birth, she had felt like an outsider all her life. From her earliest years she showed the way she felt in her choice of friends, in her reluctance to join the Pioneers and the Komsomol, and in her long string of alien and exotic beaux. Marrying Alik, for her, was the culmination of a lifelong flirtation with the outsider.
For all these reasons, and possibly because of what she considered “incestuous” attractions to her first cousin Valentin and, perhaps less consciously, to her harsh stepfather Alexander Medvedev, Marina felt impelled to marry “out,” just as far out as she could go. And who could be farther out than an American, a native of her country’s feared and admired enemy, the United States?
There was something else about Alik that attracted her, a kinship they shared. He, too, obviously felt “outside” and alone in Minsk, but it went further back. Marina believed that he was an orphan, and that made her feel enormously sympathetic toward him, as if they were brother and sister. Both obviously felt the same way about their early lives. Both rejected their past so completely that they did not tell each other anything about it—ever. Because he was older than she was, Marina could look up to Alik. They would support and take care of each other. Alik was exotic—yet somehow familiar.
There is one other way in which Marina was nearly fated to marry Alik. He brought her the attention she craved. They had only to walk down the street hand in hand for heads to swivel and eyes to pop. It was unimaginably gratifying to her. For at a deeper level, Alik’s choice of her and the attention it brought, confirmed the feeling she had always had that she was different and special. The mere fact of being married to him would mean that for the rest of her life she was going to be singled out as someone special. Such outer recognition was in profound correspondence with the inner feeling she had had all along.
Marina had no thought of leaving Russia. In spite of his other attractions as a foreigner, she did not marry Alik for his passport. She believed him when he said that he did not want to go back to America; that, in fact, he could not go back. It was only one of several lies he told her. She did not know that, even before they met, he had written to the American embassy in Moscow to request his passport and help in returning to the United States. Nor did she know that he had lied about his age. He was twenty-one, not twenty-four. And he was not an orphan—his mother was alive.
And so Marina made the choice she was bound to make. “Maybe I was not in love with Alik as I ought to have been. But I thought I loved him.” And perhaps she did, for she made her decision with few regrets and surprisingly few backward glances. She had an instinct that she was doing what was right for her, the thing ordained by her destiny to be special. The step she was taking was in harmony with so many of her needs, both inner and outer, as to have been almost inevitable. What, after all, was “love” compared to the forces that were carrying her toward Alik? And were those forces not also love?
What of Alik? Why did he marry Marina? He acted for a variety of reasons, of which he himself appears to have been aware of only one. He confided to his diary that he was still in love with Ella Germann, the dark-haired Jewish girl at the factory who had rejected his proposal of marriage three months before. He was, he wrote, marrying Marina “to hurt Ella.”4
Of course, Marina herself played a part in his decision. She set her cap for Alik, and she won. From the outset, she showed just the right blend of eagerness and hesitation. She made him feel jealous with her many boyfriends; she made him feel wanted with her sympathetic visits to the hospital. Then, too, she came as part of a package, a family who made Alik feel welcome, and especially an aunt who may have reminded him of his own aunt in New Orleans, a female relative whom he genuinely cared about. Finally, Marina teased him sexually, exactly as an American girl of her age might have done. She led him on, made him desire her, then refused herself unless they were married. Alik could have searched the length and breadth of Russia and not found a girl as American in her sexual behavior as Marina. He, too, may have felt that she was exotic—yet somehow familiar.
But there were other, deeper reasons that enabled Alik, for the first time in his life, to think about marriage at all. Emotionally, he was freer than he had ever been before; free, that is, of his mother and the inner conflicts she incited in him. Thousands of miles from home, he had not written her in more than a year. Apparently, it was only at such enormous distance from Marguerite, emotionally as well as geographically, that he was able to summon up the strength to marry; that is, to replace her in his life.
While Alik’s distance from his mother may have been the principal key to his emotional wholeness at this time, it was not the only one. He was, in Russia, receiving tremendous support from his environment; a job from which he could not be fired, an apartment, his “Red Cross” subsidy. And in addition to the government’s munificence, he was on the receiving end of a great deal of generosity from the men and women he met. Left to themselves and unafraid, Russians are extraordinarily hospitable. They go out of their way to help the foreigner. Thus, in Russia Alik was liberated a little from the American myth of independence, the idea that it is a sin to be weak and in need. Russians do not feel that way. Their history
has been far too studded with catastrophe, each family has suffered far too many random disasters, for people to cherish such illusions. Dependence is a reality of life—the weak simply accept succor from the strong. There is a huge amount of cheerful give and take.
Alik was deeply dependent—and he was ashamed of it. It was something he tried to deny, but in Russia he hardly had to bother. There, this quality of his received protective coloration—from his special needs as a foreigner, from the naturalness of giving and taking, and from the generosity of nearly everyone around him. And being camouflaged on the outside, his need was very nearly masked from Alik himself. Cradled and buttressed by Mother Russia, he was on more gracious terms with himself than he had ever been before.
Marina says that Alik was happy in her country, happier than he had ever been before and was ever to be again. He was receiving an enormous emotional subsidy from everything and everyone around him. But for all that Mother Russia was giving him, it was not enough, for his dependence was bottomless. He disliked his job as a manual laborer, he disliked the dull provincial city of Minsk. He wanted to continue his education, but thus far Soviet authorities had taken no action on his request to attend the Patrice Lumumba University of Friendship of Peoples in Moscow to study as a full-time student—not technical subjects, but economics, philosophy, and his real forte, so he believed, politics. He was no longer interested in Soviet citizenship and had already made the opening moves in his campaign to return to the United States. It is paradoxical that just as he was courting Marina, preparing to accept her as his future wife and acting positively to meet his needs, he was also planning to reject her homeland, the country that had given him the energy and inner coherence to marry in the first place.
For more than a year, no one at the American embassy in Moscow had known the whereabouts, or the fate, of Lee Harvey Oswald. Then in February of 1961, the embassy received a letter from him postmarked Minsk.5 Oswald accused the embassy first of ignoring an earlier letter, which he had in fact not written; then he stated his desire to return to the United States, “that is if we could come to some agreement concerning the dropping of any legal proceeding’s [sic] against me”; and reminded the embassy of its obligations toward him as an American citizen, although it was by no means certain that he was one. Despite his attempt to renounce his citizenship, and his fear that he might have committed some crime for which he could be prosecuted, he acted as if he expected the very best from the embassy and the American government.
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