Alek had a small lovely flat and listened to Tchaikovsky on the phonograph. He took Marina boating on Youth Lake. They were the same as anyone, completely ordinary, saying what people say. Every fact about their lives was precious. Marina's weight at birth was a little over two pounds. Alek was in awe of this fact. It was a private charm, something about her to hold dear. He gestured with his hands, trying to find a shape for two pounds of precious life. Her eyes were blue. Her childhood name was Spichka, or Match-stick, for her spare frame and her tendency to flare up, to speak in abrupt excited phrases. These things they told each other were like stories in a book that changes every day, giving their love a quality of never ending.
He told her his mother was dead.
They talked about everything, the sun and the moon, a fly on a pane of glass. He hid in doorways when the cold wind blew. There was a killer wind that blew along the river.
They were marked by fate to be married and they went to the registry office, with spring coming on, only six weeks after they'd met. Alek brought her a cluster of early narcissus and she wore a short white gown with a grass-blade pattern. That night he thanked her sweetly for being a virgin.
She came home from work in the hospital pharmacy to find him doing the laundry or mopping the floor. He would not let her wash his work clothes. He was ashamed of the grime and sweat and did not like thinking of himself as a factory hand, a manual laborer, slotted to do a certain eternal task.
He tuned in the Voice of America every night at ten.
They had matching scars on their arms, his left arm, her right, both scars near the elbow, the same size and shape. A sense of destiny, or mirrored fate. He told her he'd been wounded in action, in Indonesia, in an operation against the communists. He would say nothing to her about the other scar, the one on his wrist.
He was an orphan like her, an outsider, which was all to the good, but beyond that she was not sure who Alek really was. She saw him from a slight distance, it seemed. He was never fully there, He was the other person, the one she lived with, the American who told her he was twenty-four years old but who turned out, on their wedding day, when she saw the marriage stamp in his residence permit, to be only twenty-one.
It was some weeks later that she learned his mother was not dead.
Some of the boys from the plant told Marina that he was a good enough fellow but always kept to himself, always the loner, not really part of things, not at all like a Russian in temperament and feeling-not straight from the heart, in other words.
The day they were married Castro won the Lenin Peace Prize. This was two weeks after the Bay of Pigs.
He wrote in Spanish in his notebook the numbers one to seventeen, leaving out five and six.
"The other girls I knew here, why did they want to go out with me, just like you?"
"I don't know," she said.
"Because I'm American. That's the funny thing. I left my country out of protest against the conditions there and now I'm the all-American boy to everyone. Except I'll tell you this. When I wanted to marry that girl from the factory, Ella, she turned me down flat for the same reason she went out with me in the first place. I'm an American. Sooner or later I'd be arrested as a spy, she said. Her family thinks I'm a spy. She probably thinks I'm a spy. It's the state of fear of ordinary life in Russia. I saw her the other day. Fat as a barrel now."
Interesting, Marina thought, how much writing he seems to do on those large new pads. What are those photographs he keeps on the top shelf of the closet, behind the suitcases? What is this pencil sketch that looks like a ground plan of the radio factory?
He told her he was writing his impressions of Russia.
And what is that thing on the wall, the little fixture near the sofa bed that seems to have no earthly use? Is someone listening to what we say?
Even now, after Stalin, she wasn't sure who to trust. Her own uncle Ilya was a colonel in the MVD. In his uniform he was like a painted hero of the Great Patriotic War. Alek wanted her to find out everything she could about Ilya's rank, his salary, his duties. She knew his position had something to do with the timber industry. A sensitive post but not at all related to spies or counterspies. He was Head of Timber or something similar. That was her impression.
Alek told her to find out more. It was for the sketches he was writing of Russia.
Sometimes Alek rented a boat alone and let it drift along the river past their building. He would shout her name, call repeatedly into the wind until she appeared on the balcony to wave. His return wave was like a child's, a deep and excited delight. He seemed in his little boat to say, "Look at us, a miracle, so true and sure."
Two years earlier, on a vacation trip to Minsk when she lived in Leningrad, Marina had noticed a handsome apartment house with balconies overlooking the river. One terrace was bright with flowers and she'd imagined how lovely it would be to live there. She was certain this was the balcony she stood on now, hers and Alek's, waving, as the boat moved slowly past.
Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses, with God so distant from our lives.
Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.
Postcard #5. A foldout number. "Scenes of Minsk." Oswald is photographed at the Victory Monument, the Palace of Culture, Stalin Square. He is a cheerful enough subject, smiling squarely at the camera, but in fact there is little to be happy about right now.
His application to study at the Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of Nations has been turned down. He takes the news hard. It makes him feel small and worthless. The Chief of Student Welcoming writes that the school was created exclusively for youths of the underprivileged countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Lee wonders how they can think he is privileged. It is part of the general stupidity about life in the U.S.
What else? Well, he has written to the U.S. embassy in Moscow to ask for his passport back. He's a little nervous about this, considering he dumped the passport in their lap, practically forced them to take it, and then said some things he wishes he hadn't about military secrets. Would they want to prosecute him if he returned?
What else? There's this funny little device on the wall of his flat and it's not a socket, a light switch or a thing to hang a picture from. Not only that. He keeps seeing a car marked "Driving School" going up and down his street. Maybe his street is the site of the final exam, he thinks, except there is never a student in the car.
He believes they are watching him because they think he is a false defector sent by the Office of Naval Intelligence. He easily sees the possibility that ONI is waiting to get him out of here so he can tell them what he's learned.
He knows someone is intercepting his mail because right after he wrote to the U.S. embassy, his monthly payments from the so-called Red Cross suddenly disappeared, cutting his income in half. He took the money in the first place because he was hungry and broke and there was snow on the ground in Moscow. He didn't want to think about the true source of the funds. They were paying him for defecting, for answering questions about his military service. Now that he wants to go home, the money stops coming.
No sign of Alek. Not a word. Total silence.
Maybe this is all Alek. It is everything Alek. It is get the goods on him. It is pin him to the wall when all I want to do is study.
/ sfi'// haden't told my wife of my desire to return to US.
His friend Erich introduces him to some Cuban students and he likes talking to them, likes exchanging complaints about the dreariness of Minsk. The Cubans have a talent and a flair. There is an integrity in the Cuban cause, he believes. It is an underdog effort, Here, people use the party to get ahead. The party is an instrument of material gain.