But then you have a head start on me, although I'll try to catch up. Ha-Ha.
How are things at your end? I heard over the voice of america that they released Powers the U2 spy plane fellow. Thats big news where you are I suppose. He seemed to be a nice, bright american-type fellow, when I saw him in Moscow.
He put another coat of paint on the secondhand crib while Marina was in the hospital. He dusted and scrubbed the whole flat, did the laundry, ironed her blouses and skirts. In the end the bureaucrats insisted that the baby's middle name must be the same as the father's first. He moved the crib to his side of the bed and slept every night only inches from June Lee.
Stateless, word-blind, still a little desperate, he got up in the middle of a spring night and wrote the Historic Diary.
He wrote it in two sittings, breaking for coffee at 4:00 A. M. He wanted to explain himself to posterity. People would read these words someday and understand the fears and aspirations of a man who only wanted to see for myself what socialism was like.
It was his goodbye to Russia. It signified the official end of a major era in his life. It validated the experience, as the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events.
Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mess of composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not able to record it properly.
He went back to the first day, fall of 1959, jumping right in, writing in a child's high fever in which half-waking dreams, dreams with runny colors, can seem a state of purer knowledge. He felt little charges of excitement when he set to work on his suicide attempt in the voice of Hidell, theatrical, self-mocking. It was the true voice of that episode. He'd heard it then, watching his own fishy blood mix into the bath water (somewhere, a violin plays) and he was quick to use it now, sweating in his pajamas at the kitchen table.
Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.
He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.
Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn't that he didn't know.
He stood on the balcony with his coffee. The breeze made his wet pajamas stick to his body. An N on its side becomes a Z.
Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.
He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.
Let them see the struggle.
He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.
"It will be terrible, Alek, breathing the air of Russia for the last time."
"Your friends already envy you."
"I'll be unbearably sad at the train station. Our good friends standing on the platform. No one will believe I'm actually going. My uncle and aunt will be so unhappy. 'Marinochka, it's like a trip into space.' I can't bear to think about it."
"They'll weep with envy, I bet."
"I want them to throw flowers when our train pulls out. White narcissus petals floating down. The air must be full of flowers."
She imagined ahead. The train station, the border, the ship. But that was as far as she could go. There was nothing collecting in her mind that looked like a picture of a home.
Her husband sat at the kitchen table, writing.
He wrote "The Kollective," a painstaking essay of more than forty handwritten pages on life in Russia, life in Minsk, the hard-fisted discipline of the radio plant. He compiled statistics and asked Marina a hundred questions about food prices, customs, etc. He wanted to examine the subject of control, the Communist Party's domination of every aspect of Soviet life.
He wrote "The New Era," a brief account of the destruction of the Stalin monument in Minsk.
He made notes for an essay on "the murder of history"-the terrible march of Soviet communism. Deportations, mass exterminations, the prostitution of art and culture, "the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia."
Marina cried, leaving Minsk. A man at the train station stood watching, half hidden in the crowd. She saw him briefly through the window. Was it her former boyfriend Anatoly, with the unruly blond hair, who'd once proposed to her, whose kisses made her reel, or was it the KGB?
When their train approached the Polish border, Lee took his diary pages, his essay pages, all his notes, and began stuffing them in his pants and shirt. He had pages nestled ridiculously in his crotch. Two Soviet customs men came aboard and Marina drew their attention to the baby. The agents gave their luggage a quick look and wished them good fortune.
Aboard the SS Maasdam he kept on writing. Rotterdam to New York. He wrote speeches he might one day deliver as a man who'd lived for extended periods under the capitalist and communist systems.
He wrote a forward to "The Kollective."
He wrote a sketch titled "About the Author." The author is the son of an insurance man whose early death "left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck."
The women on the ship were American and European, up-to-date, carefully tailored. Marina seemed a girl in their company, small, shabby-looking, lugging a baby swaddled Russian-style in bands of linen. She sat in their third-class stateroom. Except for mealtimes she was almost always there.
"Should I learn English now?" she said.
Early morning, June 13-June, his daughter's name-he stood on deck and watched the south rim of Manhattan appear at the edge of the sea, an arc of broad buildings crowded in the mist. He was seeing what Leon Trotsky saw near the end of his second foreign exile, 1917, the skyline of the New World. All the time he was in Russia he'd barely thought of Trotsky. But now he could feel the man's spirit. Trotsky was the seeker of asylum. Thrown out of Europe. Hounded by secret police. Crossing the ocean to Wall Street on a rusty Spanish steamer.
Lee was worried that the police would be waiting for him on the Hoboken docks. Here comes the defector with his beggar wife and beggar child. He had answers ready for them, two sets of answers he'd drafted and memorized in the ship's library. If he sensed he could get by as an innocent traveler, those were the answers he'd give, friendly and nonpolitical. But if the authorities were hostile, if they tried to put him on the defensive, if they had information about his activities in Moscow, he was prepared to be defiant and scornful. He would make an issue of his right to certain beliefs. Stand up to them, mock them, look right in their squeezed policemen's eyes and tell them who you are.
A tugboat moved through the harbor dawn, and bridges emerged, piers, highway lights along the Hudson.
If they could only make it to Texas, things would be all right.