Oswald's Tale

by Norman Mailer

  She never thought to herself, “Maybe I’ll go to Prague and it’ll work. Or, if it doesn’t work, I’ll get a divorce.” For Ella, marriage was something you did for life. You loved a person and you trusted him. Because if you didn’t, how could you go to a new world?

  Finally, he became very pushy. He said, “You have to make up your mind if you’re going to marry me,” and when she asked for time to think it over—he said, “No, I have to decide by January 4.” That made her feel more mistrustful. She told him, “I like you, too, but I need time to think.” She was not a person to offend people who were nice to her.

  They had another quarrel, however, concerning New Year’s Eve. He had invited her to a party for that night, and so she turned down an invitation that came to her for another gathering. Then, at the very last moment, he told her that his evening was not going to take place. Now they were without anywhere to go that night for New Year’s Eve.

  There was an expression, razbitoye karito. It meant they were ready to eat, but only had a broken plate. Ella got very angry that they didn’t have a proper situation; she said, “You let me down.” She had never spoken to him like that before, except, perhaps, concerning Inna Tachina. That time he had been cool, but now he, too, became agitated. Finally he said, “You are playing a game with our situation. Oh, you are an actress!” It was equal to saying that her emotions were not sincere. They walked away from one another.

  Since Ella wasn’t going to any party now, she began to help her mother. Some of their family was coming over for a small New Year’s Eve party, so they cleaned house and cooked, and then, as was common in Russia, they napped for a little while around 8:00 P.M. in order to be able to stay up all night. At 11:00 P.M., guests would begin to come, but on this night, at a little after nine, she heard their doorbell ring. She was sleepy when she opened her door. Lee was standing there wearing that Russian hat she had never liked, but he was proud of it, and was standing up straight with his hands behind his back. He said, “You know, Ella, Christmas is one of our dearest holidays in America, and your New Year’s is like our Christmas. That’s why I came to you. This is one day when I feel very lonely and I come to you.” He added, “We have a tradition in America; we usually bring gifts,” and he gave her a big box of chocolates decorated with a little candy statuette. She took his gift and said, “Wait a second. I want to put this away.” She went in to her mother and said, “My boyfriend from America brought me this gift. Can we invite him?” Her mother said, “Yes, of course.”

  So she came back and said, “Listen, would you care to spend an evening with my family?” and he was happy about that.

  When he came back around eleven, he was wearing his gray suit with a tie and was very neatly dressed. Her mother’s brothers soon followed, with their wives. They had served in the Russian Navy and they came with guitars. It was a musical family. Not all had fine voices, but when they were in chorus, it sounded good enough. Everybody sang songs, and they did a step-dance up and down their outside stairs, a Western type of step, which was very popular in the Russian Navy, a Western sort of dance, and her mother’s brothers did it, dancing upstairs, then downstairs, difficult steps, but they were good at it, and so it made for a creative atmosphere. And her mother danced to gypsy songs. Lee and Ella only watched. She was embarrassed to do anything in her own home because these others were so good.

  Before Lee left, hours later, he told her of his impressions. He liked such an atmosphere, liked how everyone sat around eating and drinking and dancing, and then at midnight they had all taken champagne. They didn’t kiss, because that was not a Russian tradition. But after midnight, through the early hours of morning, they would not only sit and eat but go outside, make snowballs, throw them at each other, run around a little, then go back in and eat again. Everyone got tipsy—in fact, she had never seen Lee Oswald as tipsy as he was this night. Friends came, and she introduced him to her friends and relatives, and they sat around the family table and proposed toasts to last year—“Goodbye, last year, you are leaving.” Everybody talked to him, and he was treated as if he were a Russian person who had joined their family party. Her relatives were a little curious about him, but didn’t reveal any special attitude, and her mother was also casual; of course, her attitude was, If Ella dates a man, it doesn’t mean she’s going to marry him.

  January 1

  New Year’s Eve I spend at home of Ella Germann. I think I’m in love with her. She has refused my more dishonorable advances; we drink and eat in the presence of her family in a very hospitable atmosphere. Later I go home drunk and happy. Passing the river homeward, I decide to propose to Ella.

  Next day, her mother, who had never interfered with her personal life, said to her, “Ella, it’s up to you—you make your own choice. But I want to tell you something: In 1939 you could be taken to prison just because you were born in Poland.” Those were her mother’s words. It gave her pause.

  January 2

  After a pleasant hand-in-hand walk to the local cinema, we come home. Standing on the doorstep, I propose. She hesitates, then refuses. My love is real but she has none for me. Her reason, besides lack of love—I’m an American and someday might be arrested simply because of that example of Polish intervention in the 1920s that led to the arrest of all people of Polish origin in the Soviet Union. “You understand the world situation, there is too much against you and you don’t even know it.” I am stunned. She snickers at my awkwardness in turning to go. (I’m too stunned to think!) I realize she was never serious with me but only exploited my being an American in order to get the envy of other girls, who consider me different from the Russian boys. I am miserable.

  On the night when they had their final conversation about whether he should or should not apply for Soviet citizenship, she finally said, “Alik, you’re probably wasting your time with me. At this point, I can’t agree to marry you. So, don’t get Soviet citizenship. Maybe we should break up altogether because it might be harder afterward.” He answered very nicely: “I understand that I should stop drinking. But the wine is tasty and I want to continue this pleasure for a while.”

  That, however, as she recalls it, was the last time they met. Ella agreed to see him once more, but he didn’t show up. Afterward, he just ignored her in the shop.

  Igor would say that his service looked at this matter from a human point of view. “He didn’t go out and slash anything because he was refused,” said Igor, “and he didn’t seem to bear grudges. Of course, for a certain period of time he was upset, but it didn’t manifest itself in his behavior. He didn’t quit work, for instance, or get sick; he didn’t start carousing—none of that.” If he had undertaken any risky errands at this point—say, asking one person to convey something to someone else—that would have put Counterintelligence on guard. But none of that.

  On the eleventh of January, after they had broken up and everyone knew it, Ella flew to Leningrad for ten days of vacation. There was all sorts of talk about her at Horizon: They had stopped seeing each other, people said, and she had gone to Leningrad to get an abortion. Ella thought, “As if I couldn’t have had one in Minsk!” Fairy tales!

  Still, everybody believed that because she was going out with an American, they had had sex. No American, they would say to her, would date you for so long without it. These men have whorehouses in America, and they always need sex. So when she and Lee stopped seeing each other, Ella had a bad reputation. Yet it was so strange, because he had always been afraid to offend her by being too physical. He was sensitive—yes, he was sensitive.

  January 3

  I am miserable about Ella. I love her, but what can I do? It is the state of fear which is always in the Soviet Union.

  January 4

  One year after I receive the Residence document, I am called into the Passport Office and asked if I want citizenship (Russian). I say no—simply extend my residential passport, [they] agree, and my documents are extended until January 4, 1962.

  EXTRA PAG
E (not included in formal diary)

  Nellya, at first, does not seem to warrant attention since she is rather plain looking and frighteningly large, but I felt at once that she was kind and her passions were proportional to her size, a fact to be found out only after a great deal of research. After a light affair lasting into January and even February, we continued to remain on friendly but conventional terms throughout 1961 up till May when after being married, we no longer met.

  This extra page is our only concrete evidence of his sexual life in Minsk before he meets Marina two and a half months later, on March 17, 1961. For the first fourteen months of his stay in Minsk, Inna Tachina and Nellya seem to be the only women with whom he went to bed.

  Whether he was ever with men during this period is a matter that the KGB was not ready to discuss except by indirection, but then Stepan and Igor’s separate references were often contradictory, as indeed they might be, since one was interviewed in Minsk and the other in Moscow, and more than thirty years had gone by.

  In response to a question about bisexuality, Igor Ivanovich said that Lee was not a clean man, and he did not refuse any situations that offered themselves to him. He had sexual contacts when he could find them, which was not often.

  According to Stepan, however, Oswald didn’t exhibit any deviations. That was Stepan’s forthright statement. Before his marriage to Marina, they had observed that Oswald would “meet with a girl sometimes and take her home, and God knows what they did there. Sometimes he took her only to the nearest tram stop.” In that respect he led a normal, ordinary life, at least as they understood it by Soviet ways. If he was attracted to a lot of girls, that just meant he had what it takes—he was a guy. Otherwise, girls would have rejected him. “Besides, a homosexual reveals himself in his behavior,” said Stepan, “and in his interests, in his voice. Usually a homosexual has a thin voice, something feminine to it, and then, such a fellow is only interested in women in a formal way, but his eyes start blazing when he sees a man, especially—excuse me for saying it—when his butt is big. He is constantly showing up at public toilets, and often they perform their acts there. So a homosexual has certain constant, distinctive traits which can be used to flush him out, and we didn’t observe such traits in Oswald. I spent all this time thinking about traits because, before this, I had a case involving a homosexual and I knew a thing or two about such matters.”

  PART IV

  MARINA’S FRIENDS, MARINA’S LOVES

  1

  Yanina and Sonya

  At work, there were people who were not without love for Marina. Yanina Sabela had been in the pharmacy at Third Clinical Hospital on Lenin Street for ten years when Marina moved from Leningrad to Minsk, and Yanina saw her as a very attractive girl, with a rich internal world, and well brought up. Strong-willed, yet quite open. Yanina had entered the pharmacy in Third Clinical Hospital when she was very young and so the difference in age between them was just a few years—Yanina was twenty-four and Marina eighteen—but all the same, Marina was very professional, and Yanina saw her as sophisticated despite her age. As for herself, Yanina felt she lacked a lot of social knowledge, like how to introduce yourself to people—there were gaps in her development. She’d been brought up in a provincial place in the Mogilev region of Byelorussia, but Marina, being from Leningrad, had had a different development. Even schoolchildren from Leningrad seemed to know more than people from anywhere else. There were so many museums in that city. All the same, Yanina was close friends with Marina and they shared a lot.

  Later, after Marina had been working in their pharmacy for about six months, she and Yanina spent a weekend together out of Minsk with friends; perfectly all right—girls slept together in the same bed, so nothing wrong there—and they got close; they talked a lot. Yanina remembers hearing about how Marina’s stepfather used to scream at her. If he called her a prostitute, she was not; she was a normal nice person. Yanina could understand such situations because her father had also been very strict and sometimes screamed dirty words at his children, but Yanina just ignored such tirades. You know, among Russian men in small provincial places, you hear nasty rude words; so such accusations didn’t impress Yanina. She knew Marina better.

  Sonya was born in Zabolat, a village 150 kilometers from Minsk, and her father was in charge of a farm; her mother had been a milk-girl on that farm. Of eight children, Sonya was born first, and her family, being Byelorussian, had her baptized, but then, in these villages people were always being baptized in an Orthodox church, and sometimes even with a ceremony. What it really meant was that guests were invited to your house afterward and you laid out a special table of food and then neighbors and relatives were invited to celebrate. A Party member wouldn’t show up unless he or she was also your relative. Actually, they didn’t pay too much attention to whether there had been an actual baptism or not. Main idea: If a baby is born, let everybody come and celebrate.

  In her late adolescence, after her secondary technical education, Sonya got an assignment to the pharmacy at Third Clinical Hospital, in Minsk. It was there that she met Marina, and Sonya recalls that Marina always dressed a little better than others. She was receiving a salary no larger than anyone else’s, but Marina’s aunt provided her with food, and Marina certainly spent her money on clothes. All the same, she was kind, not greedy. She had a ruble, okay, someone wants to borrow money, she would give it—she was not greedy. If you asked her, she wouldn’t think, “Oh, maybe I’ll need it later.” She would just offer it. She was straight: She would tell you the truth to your face rather than whispering it behind your back. She was even not afraid to talk directly to people above her. She would just say, “I need this for my job.”

  Pharmacy work was from nine until four, and there were about fifteen girls on duty, assigned to different specialities. Sonya, for example, would do everything that needed high sterilization; Marina dealt mostly with eye prescriptions; but each could do another’s job if there was a need for that in a given day. Marina was a good worker, very good on such matters.

  2

  Neighbors

  Ilya had a fellow officer in MVD, Mikhail Kuzmich, a doctor, who lived across the hall from Ilya and Valya, and when it came to singing arias at parties, there were not many who had a better voice. Misha Kuzmich was full of energy as a young man. He received splendid marks in medical school. When not yet twenty years old he was already a military doctor and was sent to the Western front in the Great Patriotic War.

  Afterward, he was both a professor and an academician—a little of everything, he said. Since he was speaking loudly to his interviewers, Misha’s wife, a full-faced, good-looking blond lady named Ludmila, also a doctor, began to tease him gently. “He is being so lively,” she said, “because Misha thinks that when he raises his voice, you will be able to understand Russian.”

  Ludmila is the older sister of Larissa, who was Marina’s dear friend when Marina and Larissa were young adolescents and Marina would come to Minsk for visits. These sisters, Ludmila and Larissa, had a father who had been repressed in 1937. He was arrested on Ludmila’s birthday, the second of February. Once, years later, she received a postcard on that date from Yalta, sent by her brother to congratulate her. He added, however: “I remember everything connected with this date.” So did Ludmila. It had left her open to other people’s feelings.

  Sometimes when she visits her brother, she asks to read her old letters. He has kept a large album of such correspondence, with snapshots, and when she goes through the book that concerns 1937, she begins to cry. At that time she had three older brothers. She was a fourth child, born after the three boys, who would all love her dearly, and while Ludmila’s parents usually celebrated everyone’s birthday, hers was considered special. On the second of February, guests came—children, then grown-up people—and they were all waiting for her father to come back from work on this day in 1937, but he did not arrive. At night, there was a knock on the door, her mother opened it, and here was her father under arre
st, accompanied by men from the militia. Her father apologized in front of everybody for having to make such an entrance.

  At that time he was in charge of a huge meat factory in the far east, a very high position. Nonetheless, these militia-men began their search while everyone was still present—moved furniture at will, opened drawers. Their guests disappeared.

  In prison, her father was not tortured, but neither was it easy. He may have been mistreated less than others since he was a well-known person, yet they would still put him on his knees in a corner and he would have to remain there through a night, or they would throw tobacco dust in his eyes. Nonetheless, it was not equal to that severe attitude with which they dealt with other people in this same prison. Mostly petty humiliation.

  It developed that some people still respected him. So, a message was delivered to her mother at one o’clock one night, to tell her to visit the prison. Her husband had a message to give. His note said: “In a few days they are going to take me to my meat factory, where they want to prove I’ve committed certain acts, and I need the following documents to defend myself . . .” He had been accused of sending out a boxcar load of spoiled meat.

  Fifteen months after his arrest, they not only allowed him to go home, but put him back on his job and he worked hard for many years, and then Marina’s friend Larissa was born in 1941, fourteen years after Ludmila, and the war with Germany began.

  Despite his high position, her father was not a Party member, although he knew what was going on. Ludmila remembers that whenever he heard a piece of propaganda on their radio which he found impossible to listen to, he would say to her, “Hi, darling—get me our potato masher.” It was his way of saying, “If we could only smash such nonsense to bits!” He hated the war, but then, Ludmila’s father was so much in love with his three boys that on the day war commenced, he began to cry, and said to her, “I’m going to lose my sons.” He had become established again as an influential man, and so was able to keep his youngest boy, who had just graduated from high school, out of induction, but that son went voluntarily, and in four months was killed in combat. When the notice arrived, Ludmila’s mother was so upset that she didn’t tell her husband. Whenever she could contain her grief no longer, she would go over to her neighbors in order to weep so that at home she could behave as if nothing had happened. But Ludmila’s father grew worried: Why for four months had there been not one letter? Yuzik was this son’s name, and Ludmila’s father went to his Party Secretary at work and started to complain: “Why are there no letters?” And that Party Secretary replied, “What do you mean, no letters? Don’t you know about Yuzik?”