Sunday, April 30, was sunny and clear. The drip, drip, drip of thawing icicles was forgotten, but the wind was icy and a lingering hint of winter hovered in the air. Marina rose early in the morning to find that her aunt had been up nearly all night putting the finishing touches on her wedding dress, a short white gown with a tiny green pattern, like miniature blades of grass.
At ten o’clock Alik arrived, rather pale. “You look so pretty today!” he exclaimed at the sight of his bride. He urged Aunt Valya to come to the registry office, but she, in high spirits, declined; she had a wedding feast to prepare. And so, accompanied only by their witnesses—Lyalya Petrusevich, who lived across the hall, and her current boyfriend, Valentin—the pair set off in a taxi.
At ZAGS they were received by the same old man who had handled their request to be married. Seated behind a large desk he greeted them gravely, with fatherly familiarity. The only ceremony was the signing of his registry book. Afterward he shook both of them by the hand. “It won’t be easy,” he told them. “Anything can happen in life, but it’s better if you support one another. You’re young, you’re high-spirited, but in marriage you must give in a little and make allowances for each other’s characters.” Then, in a lighter mood, he added: “Next year, if there’s a baby, come back and register it. A baby, by all means. But a divorce, no! I don’t want you back here for that!”
He turned with a solicitous air to Alik. “Do you really love this woman? Do you want to marry her? It’s for the rest of your life, you know.”
Alik emitted a nervous “Yes,” and with a bit of a flourish, the old man placed the marriage stamp in Alik’s passport. Then he admonished the bride: “Be a good wife to him, now. No looking at the other boys!” With that he affixed the stamp to her passport.
They departed in a lighthearted mood, and as they went out the door, Marina peered over Alik’s shoulder to inspect his marriage stamp. She noticed, with vague surprise, that his date of birth was 1939. Out on the street, with no one in earshot, she turned to him. “Why did you lie? You are only twenty-one. Why did you tell me you were twenty-four?”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t take me seriously,” Alik said. “You made fun of Sasha. You said he was only twenty and you’d never marry such a baby.”
It was true she had wanted someone older. But the pang of learning that her bridegroom had lied to her and that he was, after all, only two years older than she, was buried in the excitement of her wedding day. “You are a baby,” she said to him. And she let the subject drop.
There were peals of laughter from the wedding party as they reached the Svisloch River. The bride and groom stood hand in hand on the bridge staring down at the water below. Alik picked a few narcissi from Marina’s bouquet and dropped the petals, one by one, into the sun-streaked river.
By the time they returned to the Prusakovs’, the early guests had arrived. Many brought gifts for the newlyweds. But before the celebration could begin in earnest, there was a job to be done; the bride and her belongings had to be moved to her new home. So Lyalya and Valentin gathered up Marina’s clothing, along with pillows and the homemade feather mattress which was Valya’s wedding gift to the couple, and bundled the whole lot, with the bride and groom, into a taxicab.
Marina blushed as they pulled up in front of Alik’s building. The mattress and pillows, to say nothing of her entire wardrobe, tumbled out of the cab, proclaiming to all the world that this was to be her wedding night. She was embarrassed, too, as Lyalya and Valentin placed flowers all around the bed in Alik’s apartment and, with a final loving pat, laid her nightgown on the pillow. At this, even Alik flushed. Then he joined the others in laughter. “Never mind,” he said. “When you get married, I’ll fix you!”
Back at the Prusakovs’, they quickly found that Valya and her sisters-in-law had outdone themselves. The dining table was piled high with a great variety of Russian zakuski, or hors d’oeuvres: red and black caviar, pâté, crab salad, and salami in a sauce of pepper and wine. There were stuffed Bulgarian peppers and shimmering fish in aspic. There was fruit, of course. And towering over all was the wedding cake. It had many layers, pink and yellow buttercream roses, and an inscription to the bride and groom: “To Alik and Marina—A Happy Life.” It had been made at the bidding of Aunt Lyuba in the kitchen of the Belorussian Council of Ministers where she worked.
As for the celebrants, they included Marina’s three aunts and their families—Valya and Ilya, of course; Lyuba and Vasily Axyonov; Musya and Vanya Berlov and their four children—and several of the Prusakovs’ neighbors. Marina had invited several colleagues from the pharmacy, but they all found an excuse not to come, apparently because the groom was a foreigner. Two friends of Alik’s were on hand: Erich Titovyets, whom Marina had already met, and curly-headed Pavel Golovachev, whom she was meeting for the first time.
The guests soon were seated before the table. Vanya Berlov struggled to his feet. “Valya,” he admonished his sister-in-law. “Have you forgotten how to cook? Things are usually tasty at your house but suddenly, today, they’re bitter.” The other guests took up the chorus, “Gorko, gorko” (“Bitter, bitter”), in keeping with the Russian custom that the wedding wine is bitter until sweetened by the kisses of bride and groom.
Marina reddened with embarrassment. At length, after much shrinking on her part and much shouting by the others, she relented. She and Alik stood in full view of the company, and he kissed her firmly on the lips. Only then did the guests resume their feasting. But every few minutes the raillery was renewed. Someone would shout: “Gorko!” The chorus would grow louder, the bride and groom kissed, and the guests once again fell to feasting.
Before long, drinking gave way to dancing. Uncle Ilya, as always on such occasions, danced with all the ladies and gaily kissed every one. The bride, by contrast, was an enigma even to herself. She succumbed to some nameless confusion while dancing with Ilya and left him standing on the dance floor. “My God!” he groaned. “My own niece, and she won’t even dance with me!”
Marina played a trick on Alik. Because she wanted to flirt with the men at her wedding, she told him it was the Russian custom for the bride to dance with everyone. It was her last chance, after all. One by one the men politely asked Alik for permission. He very affably smiled and nodded his assent. Marina danced with all of them, while Alik spent most of his wedding party standing by himself in a corner.
Feeling pity for her new nephew, the kind-hearted Valya took him in hand and taught him how to waltz. The wedding guests then raised a chorus for Alik to dance with his bride. With his cheeks pink and his eyes glowing, he did a few turns with Marina as if he had been waltzing all his life.
When the guests asked him to sing an American song, Alik obliged with a Russian song instead, the popular “Moscow Evenings,” of which he had memorized every verse. Then he and his friends Erich and Pavel sang a trio, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” Finally he sang his favorite, an Armenian drinking song with Russian words:
Where can I find the sweet words?
How can I say that I love you?
You have brought me so much happiness life
I sing to you and share with you my life.1
Soon it was approaching midnight. Valya led Marina into the kitchen and gave her a glass of vodka—“for courage.” Marina then vanished into the bathroom to dress, and when she emerged, she and Alik said their good-byes. “Good luck, my boy!” Ilya said, giving his own brand of gruff encouragement. The guests gathered on the stairway and waved to the bride and groom.
Alik and Marina walked the few blocks to his apartment. Suddenly, as they reached the door of his building, he swept her up in his arms, told her to hang on for dear life, and carried her the four flights upstairs. On his own threshold Alik paused, then gently lifted her across. He never told Marina that it was an American custom.
The two of them stood there bewildered. “Are we really married?” Alik said.
“Take a look at our passports,” Marina replied.
“You’re a sly one,” he said to her. “I didn’t mean to marry—you tricked me into it.”
“Yes, I am clever,” she agreed. “But we’ll divorce tomorrow if you like.”
“You’re tricking me again,” he said. “Tomorrow’s May Day and all the offices are closed.” Then, catching sight of her nightgown neatly folded on the pillow, Alik said: “It’s awfully pretty. I’ve never seen you wear it.”
“Oh—there’s plenty of time,” Marina said. And she insisted on dancing to the phonograph.
When it came to it, she knew nothing about sex after all. She tried to lie still and be quiet. “Careful,” she kept whispering and he, who was very gentle, would stop.
Finally he said to her: “If we stop each time you tell me to, it’ll be a year before we get anywhere. Just close your eyes and try to get through it.”
When it was over and the first light was coming through the window, he kissed her and remarked, very thoughtfully: “Thank you for saving yourself for me. Frankly, I didn’t think you had.”
Later, they were awakened by a knock on the door. Alik opened it, and there, to his utter bewilderment, stood Aunt Valya holding a white plate in her hand. Suddenly, she lifted the plate and hurled it to the floor.
“What’s that about?” Alik asked in astonishment.
“It’s for luck,” Valya said. “The two of you pick up the pieces.”
They dressed and went to Valya’s for breakfast. It was May Day, a gray, drizzling morning, and Ilya was on duty in Stalin Square checking passes for the big parade. In a buoyant mood the newlyweds decided to try to find him. They were going to pay a call across town, and maybe he would let them by without a pass. Ilya was easy to pick out. He was in uniform, eagle-like and very tall. To their great disappointment, he was abrupt with them and refused to allow them into the square. “But I’m your niece,” Marina pleaded with him.
“At home you’re my niece,” he corrected her. “Here, I’m on duty.”
Crestfallen, the bride and groom walked away. “What a bureaucrat he is!” Alik grumbled.
When they reached their destination, they received a warm welcome from Marina’s friends, an older woman and her husband. They plied the newly married pair with vodka, and the husband ran out several times for reinforcements. All day the four of them talked politics, an unlikely pastime for the bride. The hosts asked many questions about America, and Alik was happy to oblige. But what he really wanted to talk about was Russia. The older couple recalled the hardships of the German occupation of Minsk, and the terror and injustice of the Stalin years. But critical as they were of their country’s faults, they were utterly loyal to the Soviet Union.
Marina was pleased by this first day of her married life, grateful for her friends’ welcome and their open-hearted cordiality to her American husband. As for Alik’s steering the conversation toward politics and his rapt attention to everything that was said, she saw nothing surprising in that. She was not interested in politics herself. Politics were in the masculine sphere, and it was to be a long time before she woke up to the fact that her husband’s interest in politics was anything out of the ordinary.
The next evening, the evening of May 2, they paid a call on friends of Alik’s. They were Alexander Ziger, his wife, and two daughters, Eleonora and Anita, who had been like family to Alik from his earliest days in Minsk. Ziger, a black-haired, bushy-browed man of somewhat spherical shape, was deputy chief engineer at the Minsk Radio Plant. He had met Alik nearly a year and half before, during his first visit to the plant on January 12, 1960, and they had seen each other frequently ever since, both at the plant and in Ziger’s home. As the weeks and months went by, Alik had courted both daughters, especially the younger and livelier, Anita. Now, he wanted to introduce them to his bride.
At first, only Eleonora and Anita were at home. They greeted the newlyweds warmly, sat them down, and plied them with coffee. Marina took an immediate liking to Anita, a spirited girl who was constantly erupting into peals of laughter. But she detected something else in the dark and sultry Eleonora. That something was jealousy. When she asked Alik about it later, he conceded that Eleonora had wanted to marry him, but Mrs. Ziger warned him against her elder daughter on the grounds that she might try to use him. His choice then fell on the mettlesome Anita. But she rejected him in favor of a Hungarian.
When the Zigers returned, Mrs. Ziger, a short, plump woman, greeted Marina with great warmth and kissed her tenderly. “My dear child,” she said almost immediately, “consider yourself lucky to have married an American!” Thus, on only the second evening of her marriage, did politics again intrude on Marina’s life.
The Zigers’ story was an extraordinary one. Neither of them was Russian; he was a Pole and a Jew, she was a Belorussian and a Catholic. Both had grown up in eastern Poland, a territory annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, but by that time the Zigers had abandoned their native land and settled in Argentina. There, in Buenos Aires, Mr. Ziger won an engineering degree and went to work in a factory. There, too, his daughters grew up, proved talented, and acquired musical educations. Only Maria Ziger, the mother, was unhappy. She was homesick for her native land, longed to hear the sighing of the birch trees, longed to be laid to rest in the Polish earth. But that soil was not Polish any more. It was Russian, and going home was out of the question.
Then, in the 1950s, everything changed. Stalin died, and Khrushchev, with aggressive acumen, launched a campaign to persuade people like the Zigers to return to Russia. His blandishments fell on credulous ears. The Zigers believed—and came home.
They bitterly regretted their decision. Everyone in Khrushchev’s country was watched, they discovered, and none more closely than those who had chosen to live abroad. Eleonora and Anita suffered most. Both passed the examinations for the renowned Music Conservatory in Moscow. Yet neither was accepted—because they had lived abroad. A ceiling had been set on the Zigers’ lives, and whatever their talents, they could have no hope of going higher. Disillusioned, they applied again and again for visas to leave Russia. Their applications were ignored.
Mr. Ziger refused to give up. He told Marina and Alik: “In a year, or two years, or five, or ten, I believe I’ll get what I’m hoping for. Of course it’s going to take time. But we’ll get our visas some day.”
To Marina his remarks, and indeed the entire evening, were a revelation. Here was a family who had lived in the West and had concluded that life there was incomparably better than anything Russia had to offer. It was an idea contrary to everything Marina had been taught. She was startled, moreover, when Mrs. Ziger led her into the kitchen and said to her pointedly: “My dear child, if Alik ever has the slightest chance of leaving, you must by all means go, too.”
Astonished, Marina assured Mrs. Ziger that Alik had no thought of leaving her country. But later, it occurred to her that, at the time of her marriage, Mrs. Ziger already knew what she herself did not: that Alik Oswald intended to go home.
Oswald’s diary confirmed not only that the Zigers were aware of his intention, but that Mr. Ziger had had a hand in shaping it. From the very beginning of their acquaintance, he had warned Oswald against taking Soviet citizenship, an act that would forever close the door on his leaving the USSR.
May 1, 1960: At night I visit with the Zegers daughters … Zeeger advises me to go back to U.S.A. It’s the first voice of oppossition I have heard. I respect Zeeger, he has seen the world. He says many things, and relates many things I do not know about the U.S.S.R. I begin to feel uneasy inside, its true!
Jan. 4–31, 1961: I am stating to reconsider my desire about staying. The work is drab the money I get nowhere to be spent.…
Feb. 1: I make my first request to American Embassy, Moscow … I stated “I would like to go back to U.S.”
March 1–16: I now live in a state of expectation about going back to the U.S. I confided with Zeeger he supports my jugement but warnes me not to tell any Russians.…2
The May Day holiday over, on Wednesday, May 3, Marina and Alik went back to work, and their everyday married life began. Each day, six days a week, the alarm clock went off and Alik rose at seven. He dressed quietly and fixed his breakfast, which was invariably the same: coffee, a hard-boiled egg, and four tiny sweet rolls. Then he sat on the bed beside the sleeping Marina. He kissed his bride and told her, “I hate so much to go off and leave you here.” After a few minutes he would tear himself away. “Look out, now. Don’t oversleep,” he would call as he went out the door. At 9:30 the alarm went off again. Marina struggled out of bed, sipped the coffee he had left her, pulled on her clothes, and dragged herself off to work.
Alik met her every evening outside the pharmacy at 5:30. They would stroll for a bit, nod to friends on the street, window-shop, then repair to the cafeteria opposite their apartment house for dinner. It was a dingy, bare place called the “Café-Avtomat,” which was staffed not by vending machines but by tiny, officious waitresses swathed in white who were forever shouting “Next!” and “Hurry up!” to those who were standing in line. The food was not very good, but Alik preferred it to Marina’s cooking.
By the time they reached home, sunset would be flooding the apartment with a reddish glow. Alik would vanish onto the balcony to weed and water the flowers. Then he loved nothing better than to sit outside with his feet propped against the window boxes, leaning back in his chair and gazing out at the night sky and the river. Sometimes he used binoculars to scan the horizon and in particular, the main street of Minsk to his left, to see what was playing at the movies. The evening was over when, in the concluding phase of his ritual, Alik tuned in to the Voice of America at ten to listen to the English-language news.
Money burned a hole in Marina’s pocket, so she was only too happy to turn over to Alik what she earned and allow him to take charge. He paid for everything, from the groceries they shopped for together to the ice cream and halvah they carried home every night as a concession to his sweet tooth. The first few weeks they spent a good deal on records—classical for him, popular for her—and furniture: a low Georgian bed, or takhta, a tiny child’s bureau, and four chairs.
Marina was proud of their apartment, of the spare, modern, uncluttered look they had given it, and of her own sprightly touches of color—a spray of birch leaves here, a bouquet of flowers there. But she quickly discovered that her husband had a domestic streak, too. Only a few nights after they were married, she came home to a surprise: a new kitchen table and tablecloth and a new set of silverware. Not only had he bought the table and set it, he had decorated it with a bunch of spring flowers he had stolen in a public park. But it was not, as some brides might suppose, a hint that he would like to start taking his evening meal at home. “Better the cafeteria,” he said to her, “than what you fix.”
He bought her another surprise—white lace curtains. When he got them home, they were the wrong length; his solution was manly and straightforward. He took a pair of scissors and sheared them off around the bottom. At woodworking he was more accomplished. He made little legs for their bed and fashioned a rod to hang their clothes on in the closet.
But Alik’s main concern was washing and cleaning. If he did not meet Marina at the pharmacy, the first thing he did when he arrived home was wash the breakfast dishes and mop the floor. Then, on the days when they had hot water, he did the laundry. When Marina came in the downstairs door, she could hear her husband, four flights up, singing the Volga Boatmen’s Song or some other Slavic melody. Entering the apartment, she would be greeted by a cloud of steam.
“My girl is home, is she?” Alik said, bent over the bathtub.
“She is.”
“I’m doing the laundry.”
“So I see.”
Alik was ashamed of the fact that he did manual labor. He did not want Marina to see his grimy work clothes. When she offered to do them herself, he snatched them away from her and said, “I don’t want you washing my dirty clothes.”
If Marina for any reason came home late, she would find Alik waiting at the top of the stairs with an angry, mistrustful look that she was soon to know very well. “Where have you been?” he would ask. “I called the pharmacy, and they said you had already left.”
“I was shopping with Sonya,” Marina might answer truthfully.
“Sonya—or who?” he would ask.
“In a half hour I couldn’t do much,” Marina said, “no matter who I was with.”
Alik was extraordinarily jealous. Even if she was only a few minutes late, he demanded a full explanation of where she had been, with whom, and what she had been doing.
The first few weeks of their marriage, Marina and Alik spent most of their free time by themselves. On weekends they often went to one of the two large lakes outside Minsk for a picnic. Both lakes were in marshy areas surrounded by birch groves, clumps of aspen, and clearings with tiny daisies in bloom. Alik would take a boat and row Marina out to an island in the middle of the lake. There they picnicked, and he lay in the sunshine by the hour trying to get a tan, usually ending up with a sunburn instead. Marina liked to lie on her stomach in the grass, watching the minnows and the baby frogs darting in the shallow water. Once, using his T-shirt as a net, they spent a long time splashing in the water in a futile effort to snare some fish.
A week or so after their wedding, they spent an evening with Marina’s uncle Vasya and aunt Lyuba Axyonov. In an attempt to keep up with Uncle Vasya, Alik downed four shots of vodka. He was not used to it and was soon drunk. They brewed some coffee to sober him up, and he fell asleep on the sofa. But on the way home he was still tipsy and burst out with “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” “Hush,” Marina told him. “The police will arrest you for being noisy.” “Hell,” he shouted, “it’s a free country. No one will arrest a man for singing.”
Another night they went to a movie, a Polish thriller about a stealthy Nazi spy who got off scot-free, unlike Soviet movies in which the enemy spy always got caught.
“I’d love a life like that,” Alik commented as they came out of the theater.
Marina felt a stab of anxiety. Was it possible, she wondered for a fleeting second, that her American husband might be a spy, like the German villain of the movie? “Are you mad?” she inquired.
“I’d love the danger,” came the spare rejoinder.
One evening Alik took Marina to see his friend Pavel Golovachev, with whom he worked at the factory. With his fair hair, snub nose, and open, peasant features, Pavel was easy to write off as a hick from the country, and Marina had done precisely that when she met him at her wedding. But when she saw his apartment, she realized that she could not have been more mistaken. Pavel occupied three rooms with the most sophisticated decor she had ever seen. He had fashioned a tape recorder and a television set of his own, and he had a vast collection of foreign tapes. Pavel, it appeared, was the son of a general, one of the great Russian air aces of World War II and a man who had twice received the highest combat award: Hero of the Soviet Union. The general was allowed to keep apartments in various parts of the country, and Pavel occupied one of them. By virtue of his father’s position, he qualified as a member of the Soviet aristocracy. Marina soon came to believe that he was an aristocrat in the Greek sense as well, one of the very “best.” Open, friendly, frank Pavel, or “Pavlik,” was a “golden human being.”
Because of his father’s virtually invulnerable position, Pavel had grown up open and unafraid. He was not afraid, for example, to make a friend of the only American in Minsk, Lee Oswald. Nor was he afraid to talk to him frankly both about his country’s virtues and shortcomings. But it soon became clear to Marina that her husband’s liking for Pavel went well beyond the fact that he was one of the few people who could talk to him intelligently about politics. There was a small gadget on the wall of Alik’s and Marina’s apartment that had no apparent use. They supposed it to be a listening device, which led them to speculate about their friends and who might be informing on them. Marina asked about Pavel. Alik looked at her a long, meaningful second and delivered a devastating answer. “I’d trust him,” he said pointedly, “a whole lot sooner than I’d trust you.”
Marina soon came to trust him, too. Pavel had many faults, but he was incapable of calculation and was, as the Oswalds were to learn, an utterly disinterested friend. In fact, Marina believes that Pavel was far and away her husband’s closest friend in Russia, and probably the closest friend he ever had.
As for Pavel’s opinion of Alik, he appears to have had his eyes open. Either on this first visit to Pavel’s apartment or another very shortly thereafter, Marina found herself alone with her husband’s friend, in the bathroom hunting for a towel. “What’s Alik like at the factory?” she asked. “Do the other men like him?”
“They like him,” Pavel replied, “but he’s not quite one of them. You sense that he’s reserved—that he holds himself a little bit aloof. Somehow he’s different from the others.”
“What do you mean?” Marina asked.
“Well,” Pavel’s eyes grew wide and thoughtful, “maybe it’s that he’s not completely open. He isn’t straight from the heart, the way we Russians are.”3
Alik had an unhappy experience at the factory only a fortnight after he was married. A special outing was planned, a weekend excursion by chartered bus to Riga and Leningrad. Alik knew his bride’s love of Leningrad and wanted to give her a surprise. He signed up for the trip and said nothing to her about his plan. A day or so later he was given his money back and told that the trip was off. Alik thought no more about it until one Saturday when he went to work and noticed that a couple of his friends were missing. They had gone on the trip to Leningrad. Alik was furious at the deception. “Why couldn’t they tell me to my face?” he fumed, when Marina firmly pried it out of him. “This way it’s so underhanded.”
Still angry, he asked the party organizer at the plant if he had been denied permission to go because he was a foreigner.
“Yes,” the party organizer said. “You have to have permission to go out of town, and that’s usually a matter of days. I couldn’t let you go on my own hook, and I didn’t want to keep everyone else waiting while the militia was making up its mind.”
Alik never forgot. He never forgave the party organizer and refused to have any more to do with him.
Marina also had an unpleasant experience, and it, too, had to do with Alik’s being a foreigner. A week or two after she was married, a rumor swept the hospital and the pharmacy that she had been a prostitute. That, it was said, was why she had had to leave Leningrad. The rumor was traced back to her old beau, Sasha, now an intern in one of the wards. With Sasha known to be a disappointed suitor, the rumor would not have taken hold had Marina not married a foreigner. Her colleagues at the pharmacy were incensed. They had declined to come to the wedding because Alik was a foreigner, but this was another matter. They took Marina to the headquarters of the Komsomol and made her file a complaint that she had been unjustly slandered, which all of them signed as witnesses. Sasha was, in fact, issued a “warning” that he had behaved in a manner unworthy of the Komsomol. When Marina told Alik about the incident, he growled: “If you see Sasha, tell him not to show himself in front of me. I’ll bash his head in.” For good measure he added: “I’ll break both of his legs.”
Despite these ripples on the surface of their tranquility, the early weeks of their marriage were happy ones. But there was one thing that troubled Marina. Alik had never actually said that he loved her. Once when she asked him if he loved her, he replied impatiently, “You ought to know how I feel from the way I act.” He seemed content, it was true, especially when they were together. But sometimes when he was sitting by himself, Marina noticed that an enveloping thoughtfulness settled over him, as if he were unhappy or uncertain in some way. She suspected that he might be thinking about another woman.
Marina’s suspicions were correct. Alik was still thinking about Ella Germann. In the early weeks of his marriage to Marina, he confided to his diary:
May—The transition of changing full love from [Ella] to Marina was very painful esp. as I saw [Ella] almost every day at the factory but as the days and weeks went by I adjusted more and more my wife mentaly.… She is maddly in love with me from the very start.
June—A continuence of May, except that; we draw closer and closer, and I think very little of Ella.…4
There was another woman in Alik’s life whom Marina did not know about—his mother. Alik had told her that his mother was dead, and she had no reason to doubt him. But a few weeks after they were married, she saw him reading a letter from home with such a thoughtful expression that she asked whether it contained bad news. An hour or so later he glanced up from the book he was reading and said: “Forgive me, Marina. That letter isn’t from my aunt. It’s from my mother.”
Marina was startled, “Why didn’t you tell me your mother was alive?”
“I didn’t know we were going to get married. If people had known I had a mother, I was afraid it might cause her some unpleasantness.”
After that Marina noticed that the arrival of a letter from his mother never seemed to raise her husband’s spirits. “Don’t you love her?” she asked.
“No. It’s a long story,” he explained. “We had a fight when my brother Robert got married. I didn’t like her treatment of his wife.” He told Marina to ask no more about it.
The pain of learning for a second time that her husband had lied to her was blunted by Marina’s discovery that she was pregnant. From the moment they were married, Alik wanted a child. When the first weeks went by with no sign, he suggested that he might have something wrong with him. “Maybe it’s my fault. If there’s no sign in another month, we’ll go to the doctor to be checked.”
Marina was by no means so eager. She mixed herself some chemical contraceptives at the pharmacy. But she found them painful, and a week after they were married, Alik hurled them across the room: “We won’t use those any more.” He offered to take precautions himself if she wanted to avoid a child. (Condoms are known in Russia as “galoshes.”) But Marina was fatalistic, and they took no more precautions. She’d have an abortion (legal in Russia since 1955), she vaguely thought, if it came to that.
Then one day on a picnic they made love. It was a luminous day in June, cloudless and hot, with daisies and wildflowers in bloom. Alik was certain there would be a child after that. And a week later, standing at one of the marble-topped tables in the Café-Avtomat, Marina crumpled to the floor in a faint. It was the signal he had been waiting for. When they got back to their apartment building, he carried her tenderly upstairs and lowered her gently onto the bed. Sitting beside her, the tears streaming from his eyes, he told her for the first time that he loved her.
The next day he made her go to a doctor for confirmation. But the doctor threw up his hands and said it was too early. Shortly afterward, however, when he learned that Marina’s menstrual period was overdue, Alik took her in his arms and danced gleefully around the room. “My girl is pregnant. I told you so. I promised. I’ll be a father now.”
Marina did not know it, but her husband had been twice treated in the Marine Corps for gonorrhea.5 Perhaps that is why he suggested it might be his fault when she showed no sign of pregnancy in the early weeks of their marriage. Perhaps, too, the fear that he might be unable to have a child played a part in his elation.
Once she knew that she was pregnant, a change came over Marina. She had enjoyed making love before, but now she was repelled by it. When Alik approached her for a kiss, she had to summon up strength not to push him away. She thought she had made a mistake getting married. By this time she had learned about the existence of Ella, and all her confused emotions burst out in the first serious quarrel.
It was an evening later in June, and Marina and Alik were strolling through the park. A band was playing. They were standing beneath a tree, and Alik asked for a kiss. She refused. He wanted to know why.
“I don’t know, Alka,” she said. “Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe I don’t love you after all.”
“Do you want a divorce?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she replied noncommittally.
“I ought to have married Ella after all,” Alik said. “She at least loved me. Do you remember the morning after we were married—May Day? I went out on our balcony, and there was Ella on the street outside. She was crying. She left as soon as she saw me.”
“A fine proof of love she gave you,” Marina taunted. “Between you and her parents, she chose them. Poor Jewish girl. She was only crying out of jealousy, because someone took her little American away. She thought no one would have you.”
Marina sat on a bench, shaking with sobs, while Alik went off by himself and paced among the trees. When he returned, he said: “Look, it’s too late now. Suppose we did want a divorce; we’ve still got the baby to think of. Come on now. Let’s go to a movie. That’s enough of making each other miserable.”
But the movie was sold out and they ambled home through the park. People were dancing in a pavilion. “Let’s dance,” he suggested. Marina refused.
“You don’t know what you want,” Alik said, trying to reason with her. “People get that way when they’re pregnant. You’re not used to it yet. Things look bad to you right now. But you’ll get over it.”
Marina was unmollified. “You’re not even pregnant, and you think you made a mistake, too. You’re sorry you didn’t marry Ella.”
“I don’t care about Ella,” he said.
“Then why did you say you saw her from the balcony that day?”
“You hurt me, and I wanted to hurt you back.”
He spent the rest of the evening placating her. “I told you before that I used to go out with her. I even asked her to marry me. But she was scared. She hurt my pride. But I’m not in love with her. She’s gotten so fat it’s awful. She’d have gotten fat as a barrel if I’d married her.”
Marina was ready to make up. All she wanted was reassurance. “How did you know I wouldn’t get fat?” she inquired as she tumbled into bed. He reassured her, and the two of them made up.