"Do you believe, I wonder, in God?"
"No."
Smiling. "Not even a little? For my personal information."
"I consider it total superstition. People build their lives around this falsehood."
"On your passport, why do I have the impression you crossed out the name of your hometown?"
"It's completely behind me was the reason for doing that. Plus I didn't want them contacting relatives. Which the press did anyway. But I didn't take their phone calls or answer their telegrams."
"Why did you tell your embassy you would reveal military secrets?"
"I wanted to make it so they had to accept my renouncing my citizenship."
"Did they accept?"
"They said it's a Saturday and they close early."
"Your unlucky day."
"They said, 'Come back and we'll do what we can.' '
"I think I'm enjoying this talk."
"I didn't give them the satisfaction of reappearing. I wrote them my position instead."
"And these secrets, which you've carried all this way."
"I was in Atsugi."
Nodding.
"Which is a closed base in Japan."
"We'll talk further. I wonder, though, if these secrets become completely useless once you announce your intention to reveal them."
This last remark was delivered directly to the other KGB man, who leaned against the window frame smoking. Kirilenko made it sound like a scholarly aside. He leaned close to Oswald once more.
"Tell me: The scar is healing well?"
"Yes."
"You can stand the cold? The cold isn't too ridiculous?"
"I'm getting used to it."
"The food. You eat the food they serve here? Not so bad, is it?"
"It's only the hospital food that wasn't good. Like any hospital."
He looked down to see if his pajamas were sticking out of his trousers. He was wearing his pajama bottoms under his suit pants because he'd hurried to answer the knock at the door.
"What about the Russian people? I'm personally curious to hear what you think of us."
Lee cleared his throat to answer the question. The question made him happy. He'd anticipated being asked, sooner or later, and had an answer more or less prepared. Kirilenko waited patiently, appearing to enjoy himself, as if he knew exactly what Oswald was thinking.
Oswald was thinking, This is a man I can trust completely.
Factory smoke hung fixed in the distance, tall streamers absolutely still in the iced blue sky. He rode with Kirilenko in the rear seat of a black Volga. The city was stunned, dream-white. He tried to figure out the direction they were taking by keeping an eye out for landmarks but after he sported the main tower of Moscow University nothing looked familiar or recallable. He saw himself telling the story of this ride to someone who resembled Robert Sproul, his high-school friend in New Orleans.
It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs.
The room was twelve by fifteen with an iron bed, an unpainted table and a chest of drawers in a curtained alcove. Down a dark hall was a washbasin and beyond that a toilet and small kitchen. Kirilenko said something to the other man, who left for a moment, returning with a squat chair, which he set by the table. They gave Oswald a questionnaire to fill out on his personal history, then another on his reasons for defecting, then another on his military service. He wrote all day, eagerly, going well beyond the scope of specific questions, scribbling in the margins and on the reverse side of every form. The chair was too low for the table and he wrote for extended periods standing up.
In the evening he had a short talk with Kirilenko. They talked about Hemingway. The older man was the one who sat on the bed this time, still in his bulky coat, remembering lines from Hemingway stories.
"Someday when I'm settled here and studying," Oswald said, "I want to write short stories on contemporary American life. I saw a lot. I kept silent and observed. What I saw in the U.S. plus my Marxist reading is what brought me here. I always thought of this country as my own."
"One day I would genuinely like to see Michigan. Purely because of Hemingway."
"The Michigan woods."
"When I read Hemingway I get hungry," Kirilenko said. "He doesn't have to write about food to make me hungry. It's the style that does it. I have a huge appetite when I read this man."
Oswald smiled at the idea.
"If he's a genius of anything, he's a genius of this. He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry. You've never been to Michigan?"
"I went where I was told," Oswald said.
Kirilenko looked tired in the dim light. His boots were salt-stained. He stood up, pulling his muskrat cap out of his coat pocket and smacking it in the palm of the opposite hand.
"We have large subjects to cover," he said. "So: I would like you to call me Alek."
In the morning they talked about Atsugi. Oswald described a four-hour watch in the radar bubble. Alek wanted details, names of officers and enlisted men, the configuration of the room. He wanted procedures, terminology. Oswald explained how things worked. He talked about security measures, types of height-finder equipment. Alek took notes, looked out the window when his subject had trouble recalling something or seemed unsure of his facts.
Two men joined them to talk about the U-2. The weather plane, one of them called it, deadpan. They brought a stenographer with them. They wanted names of U-2 pilots, a description of the takeoff and landing. Not friendly types. The stenographer was an old man with a rosette in his lapel.
When Oswald didn't know the right answer he made one up or tried to vanish in excited syntax. Alek seemed to understand. They communicated outside the range of the other men, silently, without gestures or glances.
The name of a single pilot. The name of a mechanic or guard.
Deadpan fellows leaning toward him. He described times when the radar crew received requests for winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, ninety thousand feet. He described the voice from out there, dense, splintered, blown out, coming down to them like a sound separated into basic units, a lesson in physics or ghosts. They pressed him for facts, for names. Many more questions. Air speed, range, radar-jamming equipment. He hated to say he didn't know.
Alek said they would resume in the morning. Lee wanted a sign from him. How is it going? Will they let me stay, give me solid duties, allow me to study economics and political theory?
"I have a click in my knee when I bend," Kirilenko said. "What do you think, old age?"
There is time for everything, he seemed to mean. Time to recall the smallest moment, time to revise your story, time to change your mind. We are here to help you clarify the themes of your life.
They spent many days on Oswald's early experience in the military, many more days on the U-2 and Atsugi, dividing every compact topic into fractional details, then dividing these. They moved on finally to MACS-9, his radar unit in California.
Castro was exploding on the scene. Oswald had wanted to go to Cuba and train young recruits. He was a skilled technician and fighting man, sympathetic to Fidel.
He subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper and a socialist journal. He answered the guys in his quonset hut with da and nyet. It used to get them all worked up. They called him Oswaldovich.
He told Alek about the rumors he'd heard of a false defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. They inserted agents into the Eastern Bloc, a select number of men posing as victims of the American system, lonely and impressionable, eager to adopt another kind of life.
This was precisely at the time he was taking steps to defect. The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. He would tell them he was trying to make contact in his own way. They'd train him intensively. He'd be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha.