On her first day back at the pharmacy, Marina was greeted by icy silence. Word had spread that she had visited the American embassy in Moscow with her husband. That could mean only one thing, and the girls parted like a wave as she walked in, leaving her face to face with her superior.
“Marina,” Evgenia Ivanovna said coldly, “you’re a foolish child. If I were your mother I’d take down your pants and spank you.”
The next day Marina was called to the office of the head of the hospital. Assisted by the Communist Party organizer of the hospital and two junior doctors, he conducted a virtual inquisition. “You’re so young,” one of them said to her. “You hardly know your husband at all. Yet here you are, trying to go to a strange country with a man you scarcely know.” Urging her to do nothing hasty, her inquisitors suggested that she think it over, and Marina agreed.
A day or so later she had a visit from the party organizer, a woman. Had Marina changed her mind? If not, the woman said, she would regret it the rest of her life. Next, a Komsomol organizer appeared at the pharmacy and told her that she would be summoned to Komsomol headquarters. Her colleagues at the pharmacy continued to treat her with such suspicion that finally, her temper growing short, Marina said: “Girls, don’t worry about a thing. There’s a big corridor in the embassy and nothing but Russian girls on one side. Our government knows every move I made. I didn’t do a thing, I didn’t sign a single piece of paper that isn’t legal. I’m a big girl. Maybe I’m ruining my life, but at least I’m not ruining yours!” The only note of sympathy and understanding came from two elderly cleaning women. “Where your husband goes, you go,” one of them told her. “Fish go where water’s deeper, man goes where life is better,” said the other. “Your husband has seen both. He can compare. He knows which is better.”
At home Marina had never been so close to Alik as she was now. Never before had she needed him so much. After each of her ordeals, he was eager for every detail. When she told him of her session with the head of the hospital, Alik vowed: “If he calls you in one more time, I swear I’ll go talk to him. I’ll make him leave you alone.” Trying to encourage her, he said: “You’re very brave. Remember when you answer them back, I’m with you in spirit every second.”
Marina felt he was proud of her—and he was. Two or three days after their return, he wrote the embassy about the pressures to which she was being subjected. Like a little boy boasting, he concluded: “My wife stood up well, without getting into trouble.”1
To his brother Robert, he wrote:
You don’t know what a trial this is.… The Russians can be crude and very crude at times. They gave a cross-examination to my wife on the first day we came back from Moscow, they knew everything because they spy, and read the mails, but we shall continue to try and get out. We shall not retreat.… I hope someday I’ll see you and Vada [Robert’s wife] but if and when I come, I’ll come with my wife. You can’t imagine how wonderfully she stood up.2
They had their lighter moments, too. There was a raft of forms to fill out for the authorities in Minsk. Marina had to apply for a Soviet foreign passport, good for travel abroad, and an exit visa. Alik needed only an exit visa, but every form had to be filled out at least in triplicate, each with photographs attached. Alik insisted on doing them all, even hers. He told Marina that she would never get around to doing them herself. But he had great difficulty with the forms because, without knowing it, he suffered from a reading disability called strephosymbolia. The condition, also known as dyslexia or “word blindness,” is caused by what doctors term “mixed lateral dominance of the brain.” A person suffering from this condition is not predominantly left- or right-handed, but for genetic reasons displays the characteristics of both. Thus Alik read not only from left to right but also, part of the time, from right to left, and when he wrote he often reversed letters and punctuation marks. Filling out forms was laborious for him, and Marina recalls that he had to bring five or six blanks home for every form he managed to complete successfully. He was in rollicking good spirits nonetheless.
When they were faced with Marina’s biggest ordeal, a full-scale meeting of the Komsomol aktiv of the hospital, Alik wanted to go with her. “You don’t need to,” Marina said. “In fact, you can’t. You’re not a member.”
He tried to support her anyhow. “I won’t let them hurt my little girl.” He took her in his arms. “I want you to show you’re your own person. You’ve a right to go abroad if you want. It’s they who are wrong to meddle. I’ll be thinking about you the whole time. Maybe that’ll help.”
The chairman of the meeting was a leader of the citywide Komsomol organization. Representatives of every department of the hospital appeared as witnesses, as did two girls from the pharmacy. Looking very solemn, they were seated around a long table draped in red, with a red flag furled to one side and an attentive-looking portrait of Lenin peering down from the wall. Only Marina was standing, her pregnancy not yet apparent.
She was not intimidated by their questions. The Komsomol had not cared about her in the least, she said, until she went to the American embassy. She knew she was being rude, but she was bitterly offended by their questions. She had done nothing to harm others. This was her private life, and she hated having it raked over the coals. When one of the members suggested that her husband might be a spy, she quickly found her reply: “So my husband was right after all. He said you people think there’s a spy under every pillow. Actually what he does every night is tap out messages in Morse code about how the Komsomol is trying to brainwash me.”
The chairman told her that the Komsomol knew everything about her and her husband, “We knew each time you had a date. We knew when you applied for your marriage license. We knew the date of your wedding,” he said. Marina was chilled but not surprised. She had long been aware that the Komsomol was a tool of the police. Its members were often assigned to report on the activities of their friends.
Finally, the chairman again warned that her husband might be a spy. “You’re young,” he said. “We wouldn’t expect you to find out right away. One doesn’t wake up to such horrible things overnight.” Marina refused to believe it. “So I don’t know my husband well yet,” she said. “But one thing I can assure you. He’s not an American spy. On that score you can set your minds at rest.”
When the meeting ended she was told that another meeting would be called with representatives from every hospital in Minsk to decide whether to expel her from the Komsomol.
“Go ahead and expel me if you like,” Marina said. “But don’t expect me to come to the meeting. I’ve told you everything I know.”
Out on the street afterward, the chairman drew Marina aside and warned her that she had behaved so egregiously it might now be necessary to make a public example of her. Marina knew a threat when she heard one—a full-scale attack in the press.
Alik was waiting anxiously at home. Had they “tormented” her long? he wanted to know. The meeting lasted two hours, she told him. “They said you were a spy,” she said with a weary smile.
“I expected it,” he answered. “That’s what Ella’s family thought.”
A week or so later, the girls at the pharmacy went off to the meeting on Marina’s case. She waited behind at work. She expected the news they brought: “You were expelled today.” She took it with a touch of bravado. “Fine! Now I’ll have money for the movies.”
Alik’s response echoed her own. “Fine! Now you won’t have to go to the meetings.” The few times Marina had gone to them, he accused her of using them as a pretext to slip out with old boyfriends.
Her expulsion was, in reality, a blow to Marina, as if the Komsomol were a mother who had pushed her out in anger. Her world was collapsing beneath her. It was the sort of thing that often happens to a girl before she marries a foreigner, not after. Marina had been spared before her marriage because everyone, even the Komsomol, assumed Alik was a Soviet citizen and could not go back to America even if he wanted to. Few people had seriously supposed that Marina was marrying Alik for a foreign passport. Now the accusation was heard often. “You ought to have married Anatoly,” Marina’s best friend at the pharmacy said. Then she added: “Forget it, Marina. You’ll never be allowed to go.”
The official pressure, as it happened, was over. But Marina had yet to endure other, personal pressures. Her most painful rebuff came from Aunt Valya and Uncle Ilya. On Sunday, a few days after their return from Moscow, Alik went off to visit the Prusakovs. In a matter of minutes he was home again. Valya had answered the bell and said, “I’m sorry, Alik, we don’t want to see you any more.” Valya, the warm, approving Valya, had shut the door in his face.
Alik was crushed, and he begged Marina to find out why he had been turned away. He had repaid the Prusakovs’ kindness by taking a step in secret that was bound to affect them all, perhaps disastrously. But Marina recalls, “Alik just didn’t understand that you don’t do things that way.”
After a week or so, Marina finally telephoned the Prusakovs: “Aunt Valya, I want to see you.”
“Good,” she said. “Come on over, only don’t bring Alka.”
Valya greeted her at the door. “Uncle Ilya is very angry, and he wants to talk to you,” she warned.
“A fine niece you are,” Ilya began. “You’re here all the time. Then you fly off to Moscow without a word and leave me to hear it from others.” He grilled Marina about the visit to the embassy. He wanted to know every detail. “You ought to consult your family before you do a thing alike that,” he said finally, and with that he picked up the newspaper and disappeared into his study.
Ilya had spent a lifetime in a special part of the Soviet bureaucracy. At stake for him in Marina’s application to go abroad, although he never said so, were the pension he had earned by a lifetime of labor, his friends, his apartment, his position of dignity, his way of life. Ilya would soon be retiring. He was looking forward to the peace he had earned.
Marina and her aunt withdrew as usual to the kitchen, and Valya, too, began to scold her. Marina knew that her criticisms were just, but she wanted them all to make up. “Well, what can we do about it now?” Valya said. “It’s too late. All right, bring him over.”
Marina and Alik came together, and this time it was Alik whom Ilya subjected to cross-examination. Once again he went through every step, every nuance of the visit to the embassy. Ilya said that he thought Alik had not only given up his American citizenship but had become a citizen of the USSR. He added that he would never have consented to the marriage if he had known that Alik was not a Soviet citizen. Alik was truthful but vague in his answers to Ilya’s questions. He conceded that he had asked for his American passport back, omitting to mention that he had received it. Marina believes he was ashamed. “Don’t worry, Uncle Ilya,” Alik tried to end the interview on a soothing note. “It’s nothing but a first step. I have no idea whether we’ll even be allowed to go back.”
On the way home he exploded in anger at Marina. “I wasn’t ready for a grilling like that. I had no idea you’d told them everything.”
“They’re my family,” Marina said. “They took me in and gave me a home. I can’t keep things from them.”
“You could have waited awhile,” he said. “We don’t know anything anyway.”
“Alik,” Marina complained. “You force me to lie. I can’t live like that. I can’t open my mouth without giving you away as a liar. You lied about your mother and your age. You lied when you said you couldn’t return to America. Now you’re making me lie. When will there be an end to it?”
There were more questions to come, not only from family and friends but from Marina herself. A few days after their return from Moscow, she observed Alik, for the first time, writing on a yellow pad at home, seemingly lost in thought. Then she noticed that he had photographs and a ground plan of the radio plant. Marina was horror-stricken. So Alik was a spy after all. To make matters worse, he would not let her near the papers and refused even to say what he was doing. Marina was nearly in a panic.
Finally, Alik relented. “I’m writing my impressions of Russia,” he told her.
“What for?” she wanted to know.
“Maybe there are people in America who will want to read them. Maybe I’ll publish them, and maybe I’ll keep them for myself.”
Marina sighed with relief. She thought how foolish she had been. Yet one day when she returned home from work before Alik, she raced upstairs and ransacked the apartment, looking for what he was writing. All she found was a litter of unsuspicious-looking papers covered with her husband’s scrawl.
She did her best to compose herself after that. But then she made another discovery. Alik had a shocking sum of money saved up, the small fortune of five hundred rubles (five hundred dollars), which he said was from the Soviet Red Cross. Again, Marina’s suspicions were aroused. Alik had lied to her in the past. Was he lying again now to conceal the fact that he was a spy?
Marina came to a different conclusion. She had grown up in a country where informing is a way of life. Eyes and ears are everywhere. A trusted friend often turns out to be an agent of the police. It is vital to keep secrets, your own and those of others, merely to have a quiet life. Discretion is, indeed, the better part of valor. But Marina soon realized that her husband’s secretiveness was of another kind entirely. He told lies without purpose or point, lies that were bound to be found out. He liked having secrets for their own sake. He simply enjoyed concealment. For him it was not a matter of life and death but a matter of choice. In a Russian setting that must have seemed like frivolity indeed.
For Marina to perceive, at the youthful age of nineteen, that her husband told lies as a matter of character rather than of necessity was a feat of mature intuition. Still, she trusted him—she had nobody else. All day every day she held back her tears at the pharmacy. But when she came home each night, she broke down. “Alka,” she cried, “don’t leave me. Don’t give me up. You see I have no one but you. No one at work. No Ilya or Valya. I have no family now.”
“My poor little girl,” he said to comfort her, taking her in his arms and kissing the nape of her neck. “Cry as much as you like. It’ll be easier that way.” Then he added, as if to himself, “I never thought it was going to be so hard.”
It was hard, and Marina had moments of vacillation. But she felt from the outset that she had a right to be with her husband, to go where he went, and that she was not doing anything wrong. The opposition she encountered served only to stiffen her resolve. From time to time she wavered, but she did not give up. She was committed to Alik now, and she was sustained by his patience and understanding and by the certain knowledge that he was proud of her.
Somehow, after the initial turmoil, their lives returned to normal. Marina’s pregnancy progressed without incident, but in early August she underwent a special medical examination at the hospital because of “unpleasant sensations in the heart region,”3 probably the result of the pressures she had been under. There was nothing seriously wrong, however, and she was not hospitalized.
Little change took place in their schedule. Marina went to work at the pharmacy; Alik went to the radio plant. Their evenings and weekends were spent in a variety of ways. Sometimes Alik rented a boat and paddled along the Svisloch River. When he found himself alongside their apartment building, he would shout and wave, “Mama! Marina!” Marina would run out onto the balcony and wave back.
They went on picnics in the woods, sometimes with Alik’s friend Erich Titovyets and sometimes with Marina’s friends Misha Smolsky and his crowd. On one of their picnics, Alik did the hula hoop to amuse the others. And the Oswalds often entertained friends at their apartment. From time to time Erich came by to give Alik a lesson in German. Pavil Golovachev came, Anita Ziger came, and so did Marina’s old friends. There was one item of the Oswalds’ decor that always aroused their comments: Alik’s shotgun. It occupied a place of honor on the wall above the sofa, which was also the Oswalds’ bed. Each week Alik took the gun down and oiled and polished it with the utmost care. He oiled, polished, squinted, then oiled, polished, and squinted some more. The spot on the wall where he hung the gun was stained with oil. From the devotion he lavished on this ritual, it occurred to Marina that her husband was like a mother with a little child. “He’s lonesome for America,” she thought. “He had more amusements there.” He had fewer hobbies, fewer diversions he really enjoyed, than anyone she knew. So seeing him happy with his gun, she did her best to leave him in peace.
Her friends had no such compunctions. They urged him to bring it with him the next time they all went to the country, and he did. The day was dull and overcast, and although it was not yet the end of August, there was a hint of autumn in the air. The birches and aspen were turning yellow; the pine trees whispered overhead. The girls picked mushrooms and hazelnuts and built a fire under a canopy of pines. The boys went off in search of doves. There was a crack of rifles, and when they returned they were empty-handed, but joking and in obvious good spirits. Halfway through the shoot they had given up doves and looked for squirrels and rabbits. They claimed to have hit a few, but no one had been able to locate his prey. None of the boys mentioned whether Alik was a good or a poor shot.4
He did, in fact, belong to a gun club, a necessity to possess a gun in the USSR. And before he met Marina he had gone on a few outings. But he complained that the club held more meetings than outings, and after their marriage their expedition to the country was the only time he used his gun. Marina thought little about her husband’s having a gun; she supposed merely that it was one of those things men do.
When Alik and Marina were alone in the apartment, he spent a good deal of time on his writing. Marina calls everything he wrote his “diary,” but actually, in addition to the diary proper, he wrote letters home, a memo on his love affairs in Russia, and two essays, which he called “The Collective” and “The New Era.” When Marina first noticed that he was writing, in mid-July soon after their return from the American embassy, Alik was furtive and uncomfortable about it. The moment she came in the door, he snapped his folder shut and put the writing away. As time went on he grew accustomed to writing with Marina in the room but continued to show the old uneasiness if any of their friends came by. He would close his folder and quickly hide it, and Marina sensed that he was shifting uneasily in his chair, waiting for the visitor to go.
He wrote on a large pad and the pages were carefully numbered. The pad was in a yellow folder, which he kept on the topmost shelf of the kitchen, at the very back, behind a stack of suitcases and well out of Marina’s reach. Once she suggested that he keep it in a place that was easier to get at. Marina promised not to touch it. He refused: “You’ll give it to someone else to translate.”
Marina was, indeed, a little curious. She did not know English, but she was familiar with Latin script and had spotted her name and the names of other girls in the Diary. “I hope you’re writing nice things about your old girlfriends,” she teased. “It’s none of your business,” he snapped. Another time she asked him to translate a little of the diary aloud.
“I write in English so you won’t be able to read it.”
“Is it secret?” she asked.
“No. I just don’t like people reading my things.”
Marina decided to study English at the Institute of Foreign Languages. But Alik was not enthusiastic about the idea and refused to help her learn. “Study by yourself,” he told her. “Or study if we go to America.” Once she asked why he had not found a wife who knew English. He replied that he much preferred a wife who did not.
Alik’s diary sprawled over twelve large, handwritten pages, but he lavished much of his attention on “The Collective,” an ambitious fifty-page essay.5 On the surface the essay is a description of the Minsk Radio Plant, loaded with facts and figures. At a deeper level, however, the radio plant is a metaphor for the whole of the Soviet Union, and the major theme is political control and how the Communist Party runs the country. The essay does not come off. It is not well organized, and the analogy between country and factory on which it depends breaks down. It is also biased by a rather special insight, the kind that is born of hostility. But although the handwriting is almost illegible and the spelling and punctuation erratic, it is thorough and thoughtful, and it reflects a good deal of work—by no means the work of someone stupid. The message that emerges is clear: Alik felt suffocated by the rigid controls that the Communist Party exercised over Soviet life.
While he was working on “The Collective,” Alik pelted Marina with questions: the retail prices of countless items, as well as details of Komsomol meetings she had been to. He also wanted to know the salary and rank of her Uncle Ilya, both of which, since Ilya held a sensitive post, were something of a secret to her. However, by discreet questioning of her Aunt Valya and the neighbors across the hall from the Prusakovs, she learned that Ilya was a full colonel of the MVD, to which rank he had only recently been elevated, and that his salary was nearly three hundred rubles (three hundred dollars) per month, though Valya claimed it was only two hundred.
Alik was probably planning to use Ilya’s salary, rank, and the size of his apartment in “The Collective,” to illustrate wage differentials and the role of privilege in the USSR. But Marina was apprehensive. She knew that her husband hoped to publish what he was writing, and she was afraid of the repercussions on her family. She asked Alik not to write about her or her relatives, and he complied.
In spite of his difficulties in expressing himself in his own language, due in part to his lack of education and in part to his reading disability, Alik’s spoken Russian was good. Before he came to the Soviet Union, he had studied the language by himself for two years with the help of a Berlitz grammar, and he was still at a loss. But by the time he met Marina, a year and a half later, his Russian was colloquial and idiomatic. He used, more or less correctly and with apparent ease, words she herself avoided because she thought them obscure. From this and from his conservative way of dressing, Marina, who is something of a language snob herself, inferred that he was better educated and from a higher social class than in fact he was.
Marina learned that her husband’s mastery of the language was largely due to the help of his coworkers at the radio plant. From the day he first appeared among them in January 1960, they took him into the courtyard after lunch and started in on his Russian. Seated in the sun in their shirtsleeves, they would pick up an insect and point to it. “Come on now, Alka,” they encouraged him, “what’s this little fellow here?,” and he would commit to memory the word for “ant.”
“They were really great,” he told Marina. “Each day they taught me a new word and went over the ones I’d learned already. They even taught me to swear.” Meanwhile, they laughed and joked with him and asked him questions about America. Since they had no English, he had to answer in Russian. It gave him the push he needed. He came home at night after that, took up his grammar books again, and really began making headway. He had other help, too, from his friend Erich and from a girl at the Foreign Languages Institute who helped him in Russian in return for his help with her English. But it was the men at the plant who got him going.
Marina was impressed by Alik’s Russian. What she liked best was his concision. He could say in three words what she would say in six. Both of them spoke in shorn-off, staccato phrases; Alik spoke English the same way, suggesting ideas rather than completing them. And while his English sounded abrupt and unschooled, perhaps, such speech in Russian was the fashion among the young.
Although she was proud of the way her husband spoke, Marina noticed weaknesses, too. She observed that he never read Russian for pleasure, and when he went to the public library, with the whole of Russian literature before him, he never took out a volume in Russian. Every day he bought a newspaper, Pravda or Izvestia or the Belorussian Communist Party paper. But he said they were boring—“They always say one and the same thing”—and most of the time he merely glanced at them. The only thing he claimed to read were the speeches of Nikita Khrushchev, which were colorful, frequent, and entertaining. They were a great source of knowledge about the country and were given, no doubt to Alik’s delight, to flaying one of his favorite enemies—the Soviet bureaucracy.
Marina thinks he read so little Russian because he was lazy. Neither he nor she knew that he had a reading disability that must have made it tedious and frustrating to wrestle with the strange Cyrillic symbols. Alik was not lazy. He struggled to improve his Russian, and his efforts represent a strenuous attempt to compensate, even overcompensate, for the difficulty with his own language he at most only sensed that he had. When they were at home, for example, Marina used short, simple phrases to be sure he understood. But he asked her to speak normally so that he could keep on learning. When she was angry, on the other hand, Marina expressed herself in abstruse words and long-drawn-out sentences. The words simply flooded from her tongue. “Wait, wait,” Alik would cry out in anguish, not at her anger but at her syntax. “What does it mean? Say it again from the beginning.” Marina found her anger beginning to ebb. “Poor boy,” she would think, “he doesn’t understand.” And her fury would give way to pity.
Unmarried friends of Marina’s often dropped by to seek advice in some matter of the heart. They purposely spoke in synonyms, difficult, unfamiliar words so that he would not understand. But they were reckoning without Alik. He listened raptly and wrote down every word he did not know. He was not prying; he was trying to enlarge his vocabulary. Before long, curiosity got the better of him, and he interrupted the conversation: What did this mean, what did they mean by that? The girls had forgotten. They peered at his sheet of paper trying to decipher what they had said. The words he had written down bore only a coincidental resemblance to the words they had actually spoken. Alik had a good ear, and he had heard accurately enough. But because of his language difficulty, he was unable to reduce to written symbols what his ear had heard.
Alik owed more to the other men at the factory than his proficiency in Russian. So open were they, so easy and frank in his presence, that he felt like one of them. “They tell stories and criticize the foreman and Partog in front of me as if I wasn’t a foreigner,” he boasted to Marina. He soon came to share their attitudes about the party organizer and the deputy director of the factory, and like the other men, he despised the hypocrisy and favoritism on every side. But while he liked his fellow workers, he was not really a part of the things at the plant, and Marina knew it. At lunchtime he nearly always sat by himself, or at a table of men he did not know, rather than with the men he worked with. He did not join the other men on drinking sprees, or go to see them at their homes. He was considered antisocial, and with some of them he was actually unpopular because he had been given an apartment of his own without doing anything to deserve it. They would have forgiven him quickly had he been either a congenial fellow or a good worker. But his work, if anything, was below average. He did only what he had to do and no more. It is ironic that Alik grew to dislike the Soviet system, in part, because of the restrictions it placed upon him, while his colleagues disliked him because of the privileges he received.
Yet Alik was as well liked in Russia as he had ever been before or was ever to be again. At the plant he was the object of a good deal of teasing, much of it with sexual overtones. Was he sorry he had married a Russian girl? Was she pregnant yet? So many and so personal were the matters discussed at the plant that Marina felt acutely self-conscious. “For heaven’s sake, Alka,” she would exclaim, “don’t tell them about our lovemaking!” For her husband would come home with the most intimate details of the others’ sex lives, together with suggestions that they try some new sexual technique he had heard about. Marina enjoyed his tales about the sex lives of others but had no wish for Alik to reveal their own.
The truth was that the Oswalds were having difficulty in sex, and they were worried about it. They could not reach a climax together; in fact, Marina failed to have an orgasm at all. Whether it was three, five, or ten minutes after they started making love, Alik ejaculated too soon, before Marina was ready. It made her so furious that at times she could have hit him.
“I’ll do anything you want, only please, please don’t be angry,” he would beg.
Sometimes he pretended that he had not had an orgasm yet. “Who are you trying to fool,” Marina said, “me or yourself?” She would slap him on the rear end. “Go and wash yourself off. And don’t show your face in here again.” Half an hour later she was remorseful at being so sharp with him. There were moments, nonetheless, when she thought there was nothing so hateful as the sight of a man who had been satisfied. To her it was the sight of a “dead bird in a bush.”
They tried all sorts of distractions—talking about something else, for example—while they were making love, hoping that he could go on longer, until she was ready for him. Nothing helped. Sometimes in the early months of their marriage she refused sex altogether: “I’d rather you didn’t touch me. You finish too soon. It makes me sick.”
“All men are like that,” Alik said. Or, “With you, what man could wait more than five minutes?” Or, “It would take five men to satisfy you!” Marina began to think it really was her fault. Then one day he suggested something new, a variation he had heard about at the factory. It involved some oral sex, or what they were to call “French love.”6
Marina was greatly embarrassed. But Alik assured her that “between husband and wife everything is good and pure,” and she consented to try it. It became a frequent way of making love, although Marina never felt right about it, and Lee evidently preferred normal intercourse most of the time.
Marina was ashamed of her body. She was acutely self-conscious about it. All through the sexual act she would be thinking how sinful she was, how thin she was, and wondering what Alik must think of her. He took endless pains to reassure her. Again and again he said that she was “the best woman” in the world for him, sexually and in every other way. He made love to her at all times of the month, even when she was menstruating, and this signified to Marina that he accepted her just as she was. Another sign of his acceptance concerned a scar on her lower back, the remnant of a childhood operation. Never in all their married life did Alik mention the scar or ask Marina how she got it. She considered his reticence a mark of the most exquisite tact. As she grew to realize that her husband was not critical of her body in any way, Marina eventually came to feel freer with him.
Alik appears to have been proud of his body. Marina sometimes teased him about his shoulders, which were sloping or, as she put it, “weak” and “womanly.” But she was overcome with joy when, after they were married, she caught the first glimpse of Alik naked below the waist. She considered his legs, his back, and his thighs objects of real beauty and was gratified to think that her children might inherit such marvelous features. He was soon aware of her admiration, and on occasion, when they had quarreled, he would sit with one leg draped over the arm of a chair, displaying his most perfect features. More than once this was an invitation to reconciliation.
Marina was gratified, too, by his cleanliness. She would not have gone near the handsomest man on earth were he not also immaculate. In this respect Alik left nothing to be desired. He was as obsessed as she by the notion of cleanliness. Invariably, no matter how late at night it might be, he bathed, shaved, and brushed his teeth before they made love, singing or whistling and looking forward happily to what was ahead of him. When he was through he would call out, “I’m ready, Mama,” and after sex he washed again. He was, Marina says, “a hundred times cleaner” than she was. It pleased her that while she demanded perfect cleanliness from him, he liked her and accepted her however she happened to be.
Her feelings had changed a good deal since the days when she had been repelled by her husband, repelled by sex, and finally, two months after they were married, spent a brief, unhappy night with someone else in a forlorn effort to discover whether her marriage had been a mistake. She continued to feel an underlying disappointment with the sex act. But as time went on, their sexual relationship grew more harmonious, and eventually Marina came to consider her husband a tender and accomplished lover. “The longer I lived with him, the more I felt attracted to him,” she says, adding that he could be “quite a seducer” when he wanted to be. “He was willing to do anything at all to give me satisfaction.” She was touched by his efforts. They increased the tenderness she felt for him. All through their marriage, sex, despite its discontents, made for much greater closeness between them.
Alik was extremely jealous of Marina. He allowed no former boyfriend of Marina’s ever to set foot in the apartment unless he was now married. He would not permit her to dance with anyone but him. He was, moreover, very much a Puritan about sex. He hated divorce, and he hated infidelity, especially on the part of a woman. When he heard a case, he would say: “Women are all alike.” He also disapproved of abortion. People, he said, “ought to pay for their mistakes.” He never sought out anybody else, and neither, after that one night in July, did Marina. He never blamed or reproached her for his sexual difficulty—or theirs. He blamed himself for reaching climax too soon, while Marina blamed herself for her inability to reach climax other than through a form of sex of which she felt ashamed. They both enjoyed sex. It made up many a battle between them and was one of the best things in their life together. But because of the form it took, Alik thought that he was less than he should be as a man, and Marina thought she was less than she should be as a woman. Even though their sexual relationship got better as the months went on, each felt that he or she had something still to prove.