"This is a cruel thing."
"I'm only kidding and don't call me Alek anymore. This is not Alek country. June is not Junka. People will think you don't know your own family by their right names."
"It doesn't sound like kidding when you raise your voice to her."
"You have to learn American kidding. It's how we talk to each other."
"All your life she worked very hard."
"She told you with the dictionary. You and Mamochka."
"I know this. It's very obvious to me."
"Very obvious is only half the story."
"What's the other half?"
He hit her in the face. An open-hand smash that sent her walking backwards to the stove. She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise.
A man spoke to him from the other side of the screen door. Lee looked at his bloated face peering in above the set of credentials he held under his chin. Freitag, Donald. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dark eyes and five o'clock shadow. They agreed to talk in his car.
There was another man in the car, an Agent Mooney. Agent Freitag sat in the front seat with Mooney. Lee sat in back, leaving the rear door open. He thought of a word, Feebees, for FBI. It was dinnertime and sweltering.
"What this is, we want to know about your period of time in the Soviet Union," Agent Freitag said. "And being back here, who has contacted you at any time that we should know about."
"So if I have something sensitive I know about, they would want to hear it."
"That's correct."
"I assemble ventilators. This is not a sensitive industry."
"You would be surprised how many people link the name Oswald to turncoat and traitor."
"Let me state I was never approached or volunteered to Soviet officials any information about my experiences while a member of the armed forces."
"Why did you travel to the Soviet Union?"
"I don't wish to relive the past. I just went."
"That's a long way to just go."
"I don't have to explain."
"Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
"No."
Agent Mooney took notes.
"Are you willing to talk to us hooked up to a polygraph?"
"No. Who told you where to find me?"
"It wasn't hard."
"But who told you?"
"We talked to your brother."
"He told you where I live."
"That's correct," Freitag said with some satisfaction. There was a line of beady glisten above his lip.
"Am I being put under surveillance?"
"Would I tell you if you were?"
"Because I was watched in Russia."
"I thought everyone was watched in Russia."
Agent Mooney laughed quietly, his head bobbing.
"My wife is holding dinner," Lee said.
"How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don't let people out just by asking."
"I made no arrangements with them to do anything."
They covered several subjects. Then Freitag made a faint gesture to his partner, who put away his pen and notebook. There was a pause, a clear change in mood.
"What we are mainly concerned, if there are suspicious circumstances to inform us immediately of any contact."
"You're saying let you know."
"We are asking cooperation if individuals along the lines of Marxist or communist."
"I want to know if I'm being recruited as an informer."
"We are asking cooperation."
"So if someone contacts me."
"That's right."
"I will inform the Bureau."
"That's correct."
Lee said he would think about the matter. He got out of the car and closed the door. He glanced at the license plate as he walked behind the car on his way across the street and into the house. He wrote the license-plate number in his notebook along with Agent Freitag's name. Then he looked up the Fort Worth FBI office in the phone directory and wrote that number in his book beneath the agent's name and the license plate, just to have for the record, to build up the record.
Marina called him in to dinner.
He sat in a corner of the large room and watched them talk and eat. Their conversation had a munching sound. They milled and dodged, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Armenians. It was an evening with the emigre colony, some of the twenty or thirty families in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, constantly comparing backgrounds and education. Baby June was in his lap.
Marina always looked her prettiest on these evenings. People gathered round, prodding her for news. She was recently arrived, of course, and some of them had come here decades ago, thirty years, forty years some of them. Her pure Russian impressed the old guard. She was small and frail. They pictured Soviet women as hammer-throwers, brawny six-footers who work in brick factories. She stood smoking, sipping wine. She wore the clothes they gave her. They gave her dresses and stockings, comfortable shoes. He had his book he could not afford to get typed sitting in a closet in a Carrollton Clasp envelope, notes on scraps of paper, brown bag paper, and they are giving her dental work and stockings. Everything is measured in money. They spend their lives collecting material things and call it politics.
He watched them shake hands and embrace. They complained to Marina that he did not give them a human hello. They thought he was a Soviet spy. Anyone back from Russia who did not share their beliefs was a spy for the Soviet. Their beliefs were Cadillacs and air conditioners.
They gave him shirts which he returned.
A few of them came to his house now and then to take Marina to the dentist or supermarket. Show her how to shop. Here is the baby food. Here is the Swiss cheese. He kept his library books on a small table near the door where they would have to notice as they entered and left. There were books on Lenin and Trotsky plus the Militant and the Worker. Show them who he is. They didn't want to hear what he had to say about Russia unless it was bad. They closed in on the bad.
George came and sat next to him. The only one he could talk to was George de Mohrenschildt. A tall man, warm-spirited and assured, with a relish for conversation and a voice that surrounds you like a calm day.
"You know, Lee, you have told me practically nothing about Minsk."
"It's not an interesting place."
"It's interesting to me, you know, because I lived there as a child. My father was a marshal of nobility of Minsk Province in the czarist days. Not that I cling to this nonsense. But I am Baltic nobility, which some of my wives adored."
"Minsk, we had to get on line sometimes to buy vegetables."
"You prefer Texas?"
"I don't prefer Texas. Marina prefers Texas."
"Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It's the city that proves that God is really dead. Look at these people, wonderful people actually, most of them, but they come by choice to this bleak empty right-wing milieu. It's the local politics they find so congenial. Anticommunist this, anticommunist that. All right they have suffered, some of them, in one way or another, sometimes horribly. You know how I feel about Marxism. I will tell you frankly the word Marxism is very boring to me. It is very hard for me to find a word or subject more boring than this. But you and I know the Soviet Union is a going concern. We accept this and accept the realities. To the old guard there is no such place. It doesn't exist. A blank on the map."
George was in his fifties, still dark-haired, broad across the chest, an oil geologist or engineer, something like that. Lee liked to switch from English to Russian and back again, talking to George. He could take the older man's kidding and teasing and even his advice. George gave advice without making you feel he wanted a week of thank-yous.
"Marina says you have written some notes or something about Minsk. Something, I don't know what she said, impressions of the city."