Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  After her mother died, she had nobody to come home to. She might be free, but she felt like a slave. She didn’t know what to do with freedom.

  She had a neighbor, a girlfriend who had a bad reputation, and Marina knew it. She liked this girl anyway. Her name was Irina, and she had an illegitimate daughter and worked to support her child. Irina’s man had not wanted to marry her. He had said he wasn’t sure the child was his. Irina was a young girl and she had given him all her heart, so when this man saw that Irina’s baby daughter did look exactly like him, he changed his mind and was ready for marriage, but Irina said, “No thanks. Not after I went through all that embarrassment.” So when everybody told Marina, “Don’t talk to this girl, she’s no good,” she and Irina would meet anyway, not in their neighborhood, but away, and they would talk. She found out about another side of Irina, who said, “Yes, I work from nine to five, but at night I dress up and sleep with men. They are doctors and lawyers, and they pay. I slice myself up for the whole world because that’s how I can get what is best for my daughter, I love her that much.” And Marina thought to herself, “A dedicated mother.” She was almost seventeen then, and Klavdia had died a year ago.

  Now, it was April, two months away from the White Nights, when even at midnight it is still close to twilight, and Marina came back from an outing with other kids on the outskirts of the city. A telegram was there; her grandmother’s funeral was taking place, and Marina didn’t have money to buy a ticket to go to Minsk for her burial. That was a stab to her heart. Everything she loved was gone with Klavdia and now, a year later, it was gone again with her grandmother, and she thought about Irina, who sacrificed her reputation for her daughter’s sake.

  One time when she was out with Irina, it was late. Marina knew that Alexander would lock her out if she was not home by eleven, but Irina said, “I met some guys who just came in from Vitebsk, a soccer team. They brought some fresh fruit. Let’s go there and have a drink.” Marina said she’d have no place to sleep because her door would be locked, but one of the soccer people overheard, and told her, “We have a room, everything will be all right, don’t worry.” So she thought she would just sit up with some of the players and go home by morning. You cannot sleep on a landing all the time.

  But as soon as she undressed and lay down in a bedroom by herself, her door opened and a guy came in, strictly naked, and jumped on her. She fought with him, even if he was a soccer player, and finally she jumped out of bed and stood by an open window. It was moonlight outside and she was standing, trembling by a large fourth-floor window, and she said, “One step closer and I jump.” At that moment she really thought she would jump through the window rather than submit to that man. And maybe she screamed. Because other soccer players walked in and dragged him out. She was shaking badly, but they said, “Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen.”

  On nights when she got back only five or ten minutes late, Alexander would open the door for her, but any more than that—well, she didn’t want to have to listen to all their crap. Maybe she slept on the landing ten times. She had to hope no cleaning lady would see her; it would even be embarrassing for her family that they were treating her so badly. On such nights she would just sit on the stairs; she couldn’t sleep. Or she would go to stay with Irina.

  It was a lazy summer until Irina’s mother talked to her in hard words. This mother ran a pawnshop and sometimes, since she was not working, Marina would spend a day with her, and young boys might come and pawn things and flirt, and maybe she would make a date with them and go out to a restaurant and get a meal, and then come back to Irina’s house and sleep with Irina in her bed. This went on—she doesn’t know, a month? Two weeks? Two months? Whatever. One day, Irina’s mother took Marina into her kitchen and said, “My husband died during the war and I was left with two children. I had to work to support them. I don’t mind giving you shelter for a little while; I know you have hardship at home. But to continue this way, to eat at my home and take advantage of me—no, go find some work. You’re welcome here, but not for freeloading.” Marina turned red; it was true. She apologized—and she never stayed there again.

  It was a dose of strong medicine, but this woman really did her a favor. Because it happened after Marina had been thrown out of pharmacy school. She hadn’t been attending classes. Plus, she felt sick. She supposed it was a vitamin deficiency or something. She had shingles; she still has scars from those big boils all over her head and body. She had to go to a clinic called Place for Curing of Contagious and Venereal Diseases, and she used to wait in line for her medicine and hear everyone whispering, “So young!” and Marina realized they thought she had VD. Actually, she had to take lamp treatments and glucose and vitamin shots. She was terribly undernourished. And she never had VD, of course not, but it was painful that people thought so.

  Over a year before that, before most of the trouble with her stepfather, there had been one boy she actually fell in love with. She was sixteen and visiting Minsk just for the summer, two years before she went there to live; she met a boy named Vladimir Kruglov. Since every window was open in Valya’s apartment because of the heat, Marina could hear Kruglov playing a guitar upstairs. Marina heard from Valya that Vladimir, who was a student at Leningrad University, was lonesome in Minsk. He was older than her, but since he was always playing his guitar, Marina thought he was serenading her. She fell in love.

  One night she and Vladimir got tickets for a movie, and when they came out, it was pouring rain, and Vladimir said, “I have a friend who lives near here,” so they went to that apartment and dried themselves with towels and sat together and that became the first time she was kissed. First time in her life. She started crying. She was only sixteen, and Vladimir Kruglov said, “What is this trouble?” and she said, “Volodya, I’ve never been kissed before.” He said, “If I had known that, I never would have done it. Who could know that you would have such a reaction?” But she was in love, so she stayed there for a little while, although she was scared to death; and early next morning, like five o’clock, she went for a walk and a little later she told herself she would never wash her face again because it was her first kiss and she had to keep it forever.

  After that summer, when she went back to Leningrad, things were not so fine. At that time, she was still studying at pharmacy school, but little by little, her stepfather began to isolate her. At table, they began to give her scraps. She had a little money from her grandmother, a small pension divided among her younger brother, her younger sister, and herself, but now, if she was hungry and bought dinner for herself two or three days in a row, her money was gone. She was having to find ways to make out. After such a bad winter in Leningrad, a lot started to happen. A fine spring followed, and a wild summer. She still remembers one night when her boyfriend, Eddie—a man twice her age—got off a boat with her and it was early morning. People were still cleaning the streets; the sun was shining; everything sparkled. She and Eddie were both in a good mood because the White Nights had been beautiful and their boat had gone out to the Gulf of Finland. Music had been playing all night, and you could dance and maybe smooch a little.

  As they passed the market, Eddie said, “I want to buy you flowers,” and he picked up a bunch, and they went skipping through wet puddles. Their city was so cheerful. But all of a sudden, she saw her stepfather walking toward her, and she had to run into the nearest entry of an apartment house.

  She told Eddie that if her papa had seen her, what would he think? He would not know it was the next thing to innocent. With Eddie it was play and caressing, petting, never any more than that. But she was ashamed of what her stepfather would think. He would probably believe she was a streetwalker. All those flowers, and out with a man so early that morning.

  So she tried to go home and sleep, but Alexander came in and said, “Still in bed? Get up!” Then he said, “Get out of here!” And called her a whore. Then she was sure he had seen her. He said, “I do not want you in this apartment. Get out of m
y life.” And she said, “No, you cannot throw me out.” And he said, “You have relatives in Minsk. Just go.” Marina said, “I don’t want to leave. I’m going to complain to the city militia that you are cruel and rude and sending me away against my will.” He said, “Okay, see your militia, and I’ll tell you who your real father was.”

  At that moment, he stopped himself and went out the door. That was it. She never did learn any more about her real father.

  All this while, she kept seeing Eddie, who worked for a film studio in Leningrad, Eddie, from Soviet Georgia, who was dark and had a mustache. She liked him. She did not see him every day, and she had other boyfriends. But there was nothing big going on. She was very choosy.

  Of course, she also had rough dates who would take her out for dinner, but at the end, she would manage to avoid them—so far. She just felt lucky to have a meal. Even excited. It was like you were balancing the meal against future trouble. You eat first, then you hold the man off afterward—a hard way to earn a meal. But she was so hungry, and yet was still a virgin. And she was still thinking of a white prince, a red carpet and flowers. It didn’t happen. It was always a roughneck.

  Eddie’s last name was Dzhuganian, and he was very nice. She went over to his apartment one day to leave him a note, but when she asked for him, someone said, “Is that a man with a little boy?” So she found out that he was married and living in Leningrad with his wife. And she didn’t know what he did to excuse himself—maybe he told his wife that he was shooting a movie all night long. Maybe he was free this summer because he had sent his wife and boy out to a dacha and so he owned summer for himself. He was playing with her, and she wrote him an angry letter, and wouldn’t see him.

  After that, she certainly felt too lazy to work. That was when she was staying with Irina, who took her out one night on a double date with a client, an Afghani, who tricked Marina into coming up to his hotel room. He said he was going right out again; would she come with him just for a minute and a bite to eat while he changed clothes. Then, he raped her. He took her by force, and that was how she lost her virginity. Afterward, he said, “I didn’t know you were a virgin. I want my money back.” That was how she found out he had paid Irina in advance. After this Afghani had put her out of his room, Irina said, “Well, what do you expect? Do you think you can go around with me forever, and eat, and do nothing for it?” And then Irina’s mother spoke to her as well.

  She felt she was a fallen woman. Yet, that summer she also met some boys who invited her on picnics, and they spent time tramping through forests outside Leningrad, a big group with musicians and a fire. They would sing through the White Nights. Some of these musicians would hire prostitutes, but she stayed with the nice naive kids. One night, there was even a wild orgy at one end of this picnic, but she just sat and talked with the nice kids, and when morning came, everyone went for a swim—just a little kissing, that’s all. She spent an entire weekend like that, Saturday and Sunday, and when she came home she found herself thinking about her grandmother and how she was dead, and she had not even been writing to Tatiana before she died because she had felt so guilty about how she was living, but she had been receiving money from her pension and hadn’t written to thank her. Even in a letter, she couldn’t face Tatiana. She had failed her. It was horrible. She felt like a prostitute because she had been taking meals from men on dates. Now, out of stupidity, she had lost her virginity to that Afghani, and she didn’t have a job; she didn’t want to have a job—she wanted a good time. It was not what she wanted her grandmother to see. She wasn’t worthy of her love. Now Grandmother was gone, and she couldn’t even go to her funeral. She looked at herself in a mirror and asked, “What has become of me?”

  So, when Irina’s mother shamed her for not bringing anything in, she decided that she must put herself together again. She found a job in a school cafeteria. She would clean tables and sweep floors after recess. One day, three or four boys came running in who hadn’t yet eaten, but she was still sweeping. They looked at her—they were younger than her, just kids, but wearing good uniforms, spoiled kids from elite parents—and they said, “What a pretty girl. And, look, she has a broom in her hand.” That howled through her mind. Here were these boys making fun of her. She wasn’t born to sweep floors. So, she switched to work in another school, and the principal there, a Mr. Nieman, liked her and took an interest in her and got her a job in a pharmacy, and she was enrolled again in a night school for pharmacists. She couldn’t believe how much had happened to her all in one spring and summer, but now was the time to live quietly, and for her last winter in Leningrad, now that she was working and back in school, she saw a good deal of a family named Tarussin and their boy, Oleg, who was an exceptionally gentle young person. She thinks she would have made a good wife to Oleg Tarussin, except that she liked his parents more than she liked him. Of course, she did like him, and very much, although not in a way where you could feel crazy about the fellow. But his parents loved her. She was the daughter they had never had. For the first time since her mother’s death, she felt loved again and time went by half peacefully compared to the summer before. Yet, when she graduated from pharmacy school, she wondered whether to go to Minsk. It would be too easy to marry Oleg Tarussin, and she did not think she could stay in Leningrad, not when memories were sharp knives. Besides, she was still seeing Eddie and he told her to go. She fell in love too easily, he said, and he feared she would get herself into real trouble if she remained. Soon after, another soccer player tried to rape her, and she didn’t get home until nine in the morning. She borrowed the ten additional rubles she needed for train fare, packed a bag, and left to go live with Valya and Ilya. It was true, she had decided. Leningrad was not the right place for her.

  PART II

  OSWALD IN MOSCOW

  1

  King’s English

  From Oswald’s diary1:

  October 16, 1959

  Arrive from Helsinki by train; am met by Intourist Representative and taken in car to Hotel Berlin. Register as student on a five-day Deluxe tourist ticket. Meet my Intourist guide Rimma Shirakova. (I explain to her I wish to apply for Russian citizenship.)

  Rimma loved to speak English. Rusty now, she could say, but she would conduct, if you will, every word of this interview in English, and she could tell the gentlemen who were speaking to her now that back then, for the Soviet people, 1957 had been an exciting year. After much preparation, Moscow had opened at that time a festival to establish human relations between foreigners and Russians in Moscow. It was the greatest event for changing life in the Soviet, she explained. Rimma was twenty in 1957, a student at Moscow Foreign Languages Institute, and she met a number of new people and spoke to foreigners and taught English to children.

  Freedom was very great in that year, you see. There were so many young foreigners and young Russians all together. Foreigners heard about it and wanted to come for visits. So, in 1959, Intourist was started to arrange all the work for tours and visas, and Intourist took on many guides, which is how Rimma would say she got into it.

  First of all, new employees took courses on how to become good at their work. That was connected to studying relevant material that guides should use. For example, Rimma took examinations on how to show their Kremlin Treasury. That was in June of 1959, and those who passed were offered a job in July; most of them were her fellow students at their Foreign Languages Institute.

  In September, most of these people, to use King’s English, were sacked. Only those like herself, who showed excellent retention of facts, were accepted for permanent work.

  Come autumn and winter of 1959, there were few tourists, but in general, through 1959, there had been a good number of Americans, and a big business exhibition came and went in August. Rimma had worked with seventeen “boys.” That was how they introduced themselves: “boys.” They were governors from seventeen Southern states of America, seventeen big boys, all of them with cameras. And Russian people in those days had a picture
of Americans never being without their cameras.

  Rimma was slender then and had blond hair and was good-looking. Besides English, Rimma spoke Arabic, and one time she worked with a high delegation from the United Arab Republic. They were pleased with her, high ministers, very high level, all of them, and they kept telling her how she was very good.

  At the end of this United Arab Republic tour, she took them one evening to see the Bolshoi, and their evening ended at eleven, time for Rimma to go home. Time for those Arabs, too! But suddenly they began asking where they could go next. She was shocked. “What do you mean?” she said. “Evening is over. You go to bed.” But they began saying maybe there were some restaurants (some late restaurants with women). She began to reprimand them: “How bad of you. You have shown me pictures of your wives, your children, you have such wonderful wives, and now you want to go somewhere with women—shame on you!” They might be high ministers from Arab countries—still, she scolded them and said, “We have nothing like this. What do you think of my country and of me?”

  Next day, next morning, none of them spoke to her. Didn’t even say good morning to her. Her boss scolded her. “How could you dare? Do you know what kind of people you deal with?” What could she say? Was it in her character to say yes to such matters? She was young and she was blond and she could have been very good-looking but for a small growth like an eraser tip of a pencil on one side of her nose, what you call in English a wen!

  Now, as part of her regular work, each morning she would report to Central Administration in the National. There, at that hotel, guides would be given a list of tourists coming to Moscow. One day in October of 1959, October 16, Rimma was given the name of a man she was now assigned to take around in Moscow for five days. When she met him, however, she was surprised. He had not only arrived by Deluxe class—but he was taking his whole tour Deluxe. Only rich people travel in such a class. The most wealthy! How many can come alone Deluxe to Moscow for five days? So, she was expecting quite another kind of fellow, some gentleman who would be like an equal maybe to her governors of seventeen Southern states, and they had not even been Deluxe. Only first class. Deluxe was two rooms to yourself, a suite. Naturally, she was expecting a middle-aged man who would be impressive. A dandy!