"Libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)In MoscowHe opened his eyes to the large room. There were high walls, old plush chairs, a heavy rug with a stale odor hanging close. He got out of bed and walked to the window. Hurrying people, long lines for buses. He washed and shaved. He put on a white shirt, gray flannel trousers, the dark narrow tie, the tan cashmere sweater, and stood in his bare feet at the window once more. Muscovites, he thought. After a while he put on his socks and good shoes and the flannel suit coat. He looked in the gilt mirror. Then he sat in one of the old chairs in the lace-curtained room and crossed one leg carefully over the other. He was a man in history now. Later he would print in his Historic Diary a summary of these days and of the weeks and months to follow. The lines, mainly in block letters, wander and slant across the page. The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, crossed-out words, smudged words, words that run together, attempted corrections and additions, lapses into script, a sense of breathlessness, with odd calm fragments. He told his Intourist guide, a young woman named Rimma, that he wanted to apply for Soviet citizenship. On his twentieth birthday, two days after his arrival, Rimma gave him a Dostoevsky novel, in Russian, and she wrote on a blank page: "Great congratulations! Let all your dreams come true!" Things happened fast after that. He had no time to work out meanings, fall back on old attitudes and positions. The secret he'd carried through the Marine Corps for over a year, his plan to defect, was the most powerful knowledge in his life up to this point. Now, in the office of some bald-head official, he tried to explain what it meant to him to live in the Soviet Union, at the center of world struggle. The man looked past Oswald to the closed door of his office. "USSR is only great in literature," he said. "Go home, my friend, and take our good wishes with you." He wasn't kidding either. / They let him know the same day. The visa of Lee H. Oswald would expire at 8:00 p.m. He had two hours to leave the country. The police official who called with this news did not seem to know Oswald had talked to a passport official earlier in the day. Lee tried to explain that the first official had not given a deadline, had held out hope that his visa might be extended. He could not recall the man's name or the department he belonged to in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He began to describe the man's office, his clothing. He felt a rush of desperation. The second official didn't know what he was talking about. It was this blankness that caused his terror. No one could distinguish him from anyone else. There was some trick he hadn't mastered which might easily set things right. Other people knew what it was; he did not. Other people got along; he could not. He'd come so far on his own. Le Havre, Southampton, London, Helsinki-then by train across the Soviet border. He'd made plans, he'd engineered a new life, and now no one would take ten minutes to understand who he was. A zero in the system. He sat near the window looking at the open suitcase on the rack across the room, some of his things still unpacked. I He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he'd done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn't want to know. He opened the door and looked into the hallway. The woman who handed out room keys sat at a small desk near the elevator. She turned to look at him. He went back inside. 7:00 p.m. I He stood at the sink, left shirtsleeve rolled up. He stopped freezing his wrist long enough to prop a clean blade against the razor case. Warm water was running in the tub. Hidell prepares to make his maker, ha ha. Was there something funny about this? He didn't think so. They were always trying to get him to leave places he didn't want to leave. The cold water would numb the pain. That was step one. The warm water would make the blood flow easily. That was two. He would barely have to nick the skin. Gillette sponsors the World Series on TV-they use a talking parrot. He loosened his tie with his free hand. My He imagined Rimma coming at eight o'clock to find him dead. Hurried calls to officials at their homes. He watched the tub fill. Any reason why it had to be filled? He wasn't getting in, was he? Only plunging the cut wrist. Soviet officials call American officials. Always being the outsider, always having to adjust. He turned off the cold water, picked up the razor blade and sat on the floor next to the tub. But why was it funny? Why was he watching himself do it without a moan or cry? The first line of blood came seeping out, droplets running down in sequence from the careful slit. He wasn't here to escape personal pressures. He wasn't a guy with a problem marriage. He had solid convictions, practical experience in the world. He flopped his left arm over the rim of the tub. How do they measure cuts here, in centimeters? Hurried calls to Texas. It's me, Mother, lying in a pool of blood in the Hotel Berlin. He looked at the water going cloudy pink. I taught myself Berlitz. My Russian is still bad but I will work on it harder. I won't answer questions about my family but I will say this for publication. Emigration isn't easy. I don't recommend it to everyone. It means conning to a new country, always being the outsider, always having to adjust. I am not the total idealist. I have had a chance to watch the American military in action. If you've ever seen the naval base at Subic Bay, you know what I mean. Machines of war across the whole horizon. Foreign peoples exploited for profit. He closed his eyes after a while, rested his head on the rim of the tub. Go limp. Let them do what they want. I would like to give my side of the story. I would like to give people in the United States something to think about. He knew where he was, could picture himself sitting on the tile floor, but felt a sense of distance from the scene. Felt a sleepiness. A false calm. Something falsehearted. Felt like a child in the white tile world of cuts and Band-Aids and bathwater, a little dizzied by aromas and pungencies, fierce iodine biting in, Mr. Ekdahl's bay rum. There is a world inside the world. I've done all I can. Let others make the choices now. Felt time close down. Felt something mocking in the air as he slipped off the edge of the only known surface we can speak of, as ordinary men, bleeding, in warm water. Ministry of Health of the USSR EPICRISIS Oct. 21 The patient was brought by ambulance into the Admission Ward of the Botkin Hospital and further referred to Bldg. No. 26. Incised wound of the first third of the left forearm with the intention to commit suicide. The wound is of linear character with sharp edges. Primary surgical treatment with 4 stitches and aseptic bandages. The patient arrived from the USA on Oct. 16 as a tourist. He graduated from a technical high school in radio technology and radio electronics. He has no parents. He insists that he does not want to return to the USA. They put him in with the nut cases. Terrible food, soft eyes peering. Rimma kept him company and then helped get him transferred to the land of the normally ill. She took an unlabeled jar out of her coat and told him to sip the liquid slowly. Vodka with cucumber bits. To your health, she said. After his discharge she took him to the visa-and-registration department. He talked to four officials about becoming a citizen. They'd never heard of him. They didn't know about his meetings with other officials. They told him it would be a while before they'd have an answer. At his new hotel, the Metropole, he spent three days alone. This was the first of the silences Lee H. Oswald would enter during his two and a half years in the Soviet Union. He walked the corridors past enormous paintings of Heroes of the Soviet. He took his key from the floor clerk, who wore her hair in braids. He smelled the varnish and tobacco. In his room he sat in a fancy chair under a chandelier. He set his watch to the clock on the mantel. His watch, his ring, his money and his suitcase neatly packed had all been sent from the first hotel. Everything intact. Not a kopeck missing. He sketched a rough street plan of Moscow in his notebook, Kremlin at the center. His third day alone he ate only one meal. He stayed by the phone waiting for an official to call. He tried to read his Dostoevsky. He heard tourists go past his door talking about the sights, the beautiful subway stations, amazing bronze and marble sculpture. There was a statue at the end of the corridor. A nude, life-size. The language was hard. He thought he'd do better with his Dostoevsky. The receptionist asked him to sign the tourist register. He told her he was here to dissolve his American citizenship. Oh. She led him into the consul's office. He selected an armchair to the left side of the desk. He crossed his legs, matter-of-fact. "I am a Marxist," he began. The consul adjusted his glasses. "I know what you're going to say to me. Take some time to think it over.' 'Come back, we'll talk some more.' I'd like to say right now I'm ready to sign the legal papers giving up my citizenship." The consul said the papers would take time to prepare. He had a look on his face like, Who are you? "There are certain classified things I learned as a radar operator in the military, which I am saying as a Soviet citizen I would make known to them." He believed he had the man's attention. He saw the whole scene in some future version. Three days alone. This convinced him he had to reach the point where there was no turning back. Stalin's name was Dzhugashvili. Kremlin means citadel. J He stayed in his room, eating sparely, living on soup for a while, racked by dysentery, nearly two weeks alone, nearly broke, sitting in the plush chair, unshaven, in his button-down shirt and tie. They moved him to another room, smaller, very plain, without a bath, and charged him only three dollars a day, as if they knew he could no longer afford the regular Intourist rate. He wrote his name in Russian characters in his steno notebook. The first snows fell. He spent eight hours a day studying Russian, serious time, using two self-teaching books. He took all meals in his room, owed money to the hotel, expected a visit from an assistant manager. No one came. He went to the visa-and-registration department. He told them about his visit to the U.S. embassy, his wish to become a citizen. They didn't seem to know what to do with him. Out on the street a small boy figured him for American, asked for a stick of gum. Subzero cold. Broad-backed women shoveling snow. He was struck for the first time by the immensity of the secret that swirled around him. He was in the midst of a vast secret. Another mind, an endless space of snow and cold. Lenin and Stalin lay together in an orange glow at the bottom of a stone stairway. It was one of the few sights he'd seen. He was down to twenty-eight dollars. He wrote in Russian in his notebook. I Two men came to his room before seven the next morning. He stood barefoot in his flannel trousers and pajama tops, studying their moves. He didn't think it was Grandfather Frost and his head elf. The room was theirs now. He wasn't sure how they'd taken it over so fast but he knew he felt like an intruder, some kind of bungling tourist. It was his fault they had to get up so early. They weren't dressed like the officials he'd met. They weren't Intourist people or collectors of overdue bills. One of them wore a black car-coat and dark glasses like a gangster on the It was this second man who gestured for Oswald to sit on the bed. He said his name was Kirilenko. Oswald said, "Lee H. Oswald." The man nodded, smiling faintly. Then he sat in the chair, in his coat, facing Oswald, his right hand dangling between his knees. Lee volunteered the following. "My passport is with the U.S. embassy. I surrendered it to them as a sample of no longer wanting to be a citizen. As I told them flatly." The man nodded one more time, eyelids falling shut. "Do you know what organization I represent?" Oswald gave a half-smile. "Committee for State Security. We believe you've been trying to contact us in your own way. Not fully knowing how perhaps. You understand we're wary of all attempts to contact us. A nervous habit. With luck we'll get over it someday." Kirilenko had light blue eyes, silvery stubble, the beginning of a sag to his lower jaw. He was stocky and wheezed a little. There was a slyness about him that Oswald took to be an aspect of friendliness. He seemed to be talking to himself half the time the way a middle-aged man might drift lightly through a dialogue with a child, to amuse himself as much as the boy or girl. "Tell me. How do you feel?" "Some diarrhea for a while." Nodding. "Are you happy to be here? Or it was all a mistake. You want to go home." "I feel fine now. Very happy. It's all cleared up." "And you want to stay if this is what I understand." "To be a citizen of your country." "You have friends here." "No one." "There is your family in America." "Just a mother." "Do you love her?" "I don't wish to ever contact her again." "Sisters and brothers." "They don't understand the reasons for my actions. Two brothers." "A wife. You are married." "No marriages, no children." The man leaned still closer. "Girlfriends. A young woman, you lie in bed and think of her." "I left nothing behind. I had no quarrels with anyone." "Tell me. Why did you cut your wrist?" "Because of disappointment. They wouldn't let me stay." Nodding. "Did you feel, in all seriousness, you were dying? I'm rather curious to know, personally." "I wanted to let someone else decide. It was out of my hands." Nodding, eyelids falling shut. "You have funds, or they will send funds from home?" "I am down to almost nothing." "Good warm clothes. You have boots?" "It's a question of being allowed to stay. I'm ready to work. I have special training." Kirilenko seemed to let that pass. "Where would you work? Who would give you work?" "I was hoping the state. I am willing to do whatever necessary. Work and study. I would like to study." "Do you believe, I wonder, in God?" "No." Smiling. "Not even a little? For my personal information." "I consider it total superstition. People build their lives around this falsehood." "On your passport, why do I have the impression you crossed out the name of your hometown?" "It's completely behind me was the reason for doing that. Plus I didn't want them contacting relatives. Which the press did anyway. But I didn't take their phone calls or answer their telegrams." "Why did you tell your embassy you would reveal military secrets?" "I wanted to make it so they had to accept my renouncing my citizenship." "Did they accept?" "They said it's a Saturday and they close early." "Your unlucky day." "They said, 'Come back and we'll do what we can.' ' "I think I'm enjoying this talk." "I didn't give them the satisfaction of reappearing. I wrote them my position instead." "And these secrets, which you've carried all this way." "I was in Atsugi." Nodding. "Which is a closed base in Japan." "We'll talk further. I wonder, though, if these secrets become completely useless once you announce your intention to reveal them." This last remark was delivered directly to the other KGB man, who leaned against the window frame smoking. Kirilenko made it sound like a scholarly aside. He leaned close to Oswald once more. "Tell me: The scar is healing well?" "Yes." "You can stand the cold? The cold isn't too ridiculous?" "I'm getting used to it." "The food. You eat the food they serve here? Not so bad, is it?" "It's only the hospital food that wasn't good. Like any hospital." He looked down to see if his pajamas were sticking out of his trousers. He was wearing his pajama bottoms under his suit pants because he'd hurried to answer the knock at the door. "What about the Russian people? I'm personally curious to hear what you think of us." Lee cleared his throat to answer the question. The question made him happy. He'd anticipated being asked, sooner or later, and had an answer more or less prepared. Kirilenko waited patiently, appearing to enjoy himself, as if he knew exactly what Oswald was thinking. Oswald was thinking, This is a man I can trust completely. Factory smoke hung fixed in the distance, tall streamers absolutely still in the iced blue sky. He rode with Kirilenko in the rear seat of a black Volga. The city was stunned, dream-white. He tried to figure out the direction they were taking by keeping an eye out for landmarks but after he sported the main tower of Moscow University nothing looked familiar or recallable. He saw himself telling the story of this ride to someone who resembled Robert Sproul, his high-school friend in New Orleans. It was Eisenhower and Nixon who killed the Rosenbergs. The room was twelve by fifteen with an iron bed, an unpainted table and a chest of drawers in a curtained alcove. Down a dark hall was a washbasin and beyond that a toilet and small kitchen. Kirilenko said something to the other man, who left for a moment, returning with a squat chair, which he set by the table. They gave Oswald a questionnaire to fill out on his personal history, then another on his reasons for defecting, then another on his military service. He wrote all day, eagerly, going well beyond the scope of specific questions, scribbling in the margins and on the reverse side of every form. The chair was too low for the table and he wrote for extended periods standing up. In the evening he had a short talk with Kirilenko. They talked about Hemingway. The older man was the one who sat on the bed this time, still in his bulky coat, remembering lines from Hemingway stories. "Someday when I'm settled here and studying," Oswald said, "I want to write short stories on contemporary American life. I saw a lot. I kept silent and observed. What I saw in the U.S. plus my Marxist reading is what brought me here. I always thought of this country as my own." "One day I would genuinely like to see Michigan. Purely because of Hemingway." "The Michigan woods." "When I read Hemingway I get hungry," Kirilenko said. "He doesn't have to write about food to make me hungry. It's the style that does it. I have a huge appetite when I read this man." Oswald smiled at the idea. "If he's a genius of anything, he's a genius of this. He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry. You've never been to Michigan?" "I went where I was told," Oswald said. Kirilenko looked tired in the dim light. His boots were salt-stained. He stood up, pulling his muskrat cap out of his coat pocket and smacking it in the palm of the opposite hand. "We have large subjects to cover," he said. "So: I would like you to call me Alek." In the morning they talked about Atsugi. Oswald described a four-hour watch in the radar bubble. Alek wanted details, names of officers and enlisted men, the configuration of the room. He wanted procedures, terminology. Oswald explained how things worked. He talked about security measures, types of height-finder equipment. Alek took notes, looked out the window when his subject had trouble recalling something or seemed unsure of his facts. Two men joined them to talk about the U-2. The weather plane, one of them called it, deadpan. They brought a stenographer with them. They wanted names of U-2 pilots, a description of the takeoff and landing. Not friendly types. The stenographer was an old man with a rosette in his lapel. When Oswald didn't know the right answer he made one up or tried to vanish in excited syntax. Alek seemed to understand. They communicated outside the range of the other men, silently, without gestures or glances. The name of a single pilot. The name of a mechanic or guard. Deadpan fellows leaning toward him. He described times when the radar crew received requests for winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, ninety thousand feet. He described the voice from Alek said they would resume in the morning. Lee wanted a sign from him. How is it going? Will they let me stay, give me solid duties, allow me to study economics and political theory? "I have a click in my knee when I bend," Kirilenko said. "What do you think, old age?" There is time for everything, he seemed to mean. Time to recall the smallest moment, time to revise your story, time to change your mind. We are here to help you clarify the themes of your life. They spent many days on Oswald's early experience in the military, many more days on the U-2 and Atsugi, dividing every compact topic into fractional details, then dividing these. They moved on finally to MACS-9, his radar unit in California. Castro was exploding on the scene. Oswald had wanted to go to Cuba and train young recruits. He was a skilled technician and fighting man, sympathetic to Fidel. He subscribed to a Russian-language newspaper and a socialist journal. He answered the guys in his quonset hut with He told Alek about the rumors he'd heard of a false defector program run by the Office of Naval Intelligence. They inserted agents into the Eastern Bloc, a select number of men posing as victims of the American system, lonely and impressionable, eager to adopt another kind of life. This was precisely at the time he was taking steps to defect. The whole scheme was written with him in mind. He half expected to be approached by Naval Intelligence. It was easy to believe they knew about his pro-Soviet remarks and Russian-language newspaper. He would tell them he was trying to make contact in his own way. They'd train him intensively. He'd be a real defector posing as a false defector posing as a real defector. Ha ha. Alek sat across the table shaking salted nuts in his fist. He said something about getting a TV set brought in. Oswald was surprised to hear that broadcasting started at six in the evening. It was one of the strangest things he'd heard since crossing the ocean. The guard showed up. He showed up every evening before Alek left. Alek never introduced him, didn't seem to notice he was in the flat. The guard usually sat by the washbasin in the hall, his hat balanced on his knee. There were things Oswald didn't tell Alek, like details of the MPS-16 radar system, just integrated into the network. He wanted to see how their friendship progressed. It occurred to him that the U.S. military might have to spend jillions to change the system anyhow, now that he'd crossed to the other side. How strangely easy to have a say over men and events. The other thing he didn't tell Alek concerned the false defector program. When nobody contacted him, Ozzie decided to sign up for a foreign-language qualification test. Russian. Just to see if he'd get noticed. His rating was P for poor throughout. A doctor and nurse came to give him a physical. They listened to his heart, shined a light in his ears. They weighed and measured him and went away with samples of his urine and blood. Then three men arrived and took him to a concrete building about half an hour away. He walked into a modern apartment. They had him remove objects from his pockets. They sat him down in a chair that was attached to a console equipped with graph paper, pen recorders, dials, switches, etc. They told him to put his feet flat on the floor. Then they attached tubes and devices to the arms, chest and hands of Oswaldovich. One of the men sat facing him. Is your name such-and-such? Did you ever use another name or identity? Is your favorite color blue? Are you an agent of U.S. intelligence? Are you in secret contact with anyone in this country? Is your hair brown? Have you been sent here to assassinate some person or persons? Are you married? Are you homosexual? Do you smoke or drink? Deadpan. No sign of Alek. Oswald stood while they unplugged him from the console. He was lonely for his friend and had a sneaking suspicion he'd messed up the test something awful. He told them Alek had promised TV. Someone arrived with his belongings. He stayed in the new apartment for three days. They gave him intelligence tests, aptitude tests, personality profiles, tests in English and basic math, tests in the recognition of patterns and shapes. He dreamed of walking into the house on Ewing Street, in Fort Worth, his hair sopping wet from a swim at the Y. Lenin and Stalin in an orange glow. Caspian Sea, largest inland sea in the world, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. Kremlin means citadel. He is telling the story of his stay in a guarded apartment somewhere in Moscow to a man in a suit and tie. Maybe it is Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick on TV. / Kirilenko stood on the parquet floor of his partitioned office in the First Section, Seventh Department, Second Chief Directorate at KGB headquarters, the Center, 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, a mass of elaborate stonework comprising an old main building, a postwar extension, a prison, Lubyanka, famous for exterminations, other, lesser buildings, and a courtyard visible through barred windows or screens of heavy-gauge mesh. He liked to think standing up. The nice thing about the Center was the inexpensive caviar and salmon available in Building 12 across the square, and the J amp;B and Johnnie Walker at a dollar a bottle. The not-so-nice thing was the heavy sense of Stalinist terror. He also hated the chair they'd given him, a modern contour piece that looked ridiculous behind his old wooden desk. All the more reason to stand. He kept his arms behind him, left hand clutching right forearm. He was thinking about the American boy, Lee H. Oswald. The lesson of Lee H. Oswald was that easy cases are never easy. It made him think of the classical axioms of his early training in geometry and arithmetic. Sad to learn that those self-evident truths, Alek liked the boy. Such naked aspiration in his eyes. He was trying to get a grip on the world. Facts, words, historic ideas. He struggled against his fate, yes, exactly, like someone in the social universe of Marx. He believed genuinely in high principles and aims even if he was not yet assured of a sense of perspective. At twenty years old, all you know is that you're twenty. Everything else is a mist that swirls around this fact. He slit his wrist to stay in Russia. But idealists of course are unpredictable. They tend to be the ones who turn bitter overnight, deceived by lies they've told themselves. Men who defect for practical reasons are easier to manage and maintain. Money, sex, frustration, resentment, vanity. We understand and sympathize. We get close to the edge ourselves sometimes. They'd been watching him since Helsinki, where he registered at the Torni Hotel, moved to the cheaper Klaus Kurki, applied for a visa at the Soviet consulate, told a clerk in passing that he was an ex-Marine highly qualified in radar and electronics. A walk-in. But not so sure of himself. Not certain how to go about it. They made it easy for him to get in, providing a visa in forty-eight hours. In Moscow his Intourist guide, Rimma Shirokova, reported his choicest remarks to the Fourth Section of the Seventh Department, where they were passed on to Kirilenko. Alek waited, let the low officials mix things up, let the boy pace his room; had him moved to a cheaper room; waited, waited. There were one hundred and thirty listening devices in the U.S. embassy. In his combination safe Alek had a transcript of Oswald's remarks about revealing military secrets. Through the efforts of a clerk in the consulate section he had a photograph of Oswald's passport as well as a copy of a confidential telegram sent from AmEmb Moscow to the Department of State concerning the young man's statement. MAIN REASON "I AM MARXIST." ATTITUDE ARROGANT AGGRESSIVE. An easy case that left Alek wondering about Oswald's procom-munist career in the military. Didn't U.S. intelligence pick this up? Wouldn't they want to use his political sympathies to find out what they could about the people he contacted, about KGB recruitment methods, agent training? They would turn him when it suited their purpose. That's when he would tell them everything he'd learned, just as he was telling us. Does Mother Russia want this boy? He was useful as a radar specialist at a U.S. base. What do we do with him here? Is it conceivable we might send him to the building on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where he would be trained, genuinely educated, in Marx and Lenin, microphotography and secret writing, Russian and English, rebuilt so to speak, given a new identity, sent back to the West as an illegal? That's what they all want, isn't it, these people who live in corners inside themselves, in blinds and hidey-holes? A second and safer identity. Teach us how to live, they say, as someone else. The test results were in and only his urine got a passing grade. He tended toward emotional instability. Tended toward erratic behavior. Had some form of dyslexia or word-blindness. Scored fairly well in physical sciences, low in most other categories. The polygraph was more or less chaotic but then it almost always is. An easy case-send him home-except that Alek had a quota. There was pressure to handle a certain number of recruitments, turn up beautiful information (or make it up yourself). The vital take was the U-2 data, which Alek did not wholly trust. Eighty thousand feet? Ninety thousand feet? Nothing flies that high. Fly to ninety thousand feet, you see the souls of the dead in rings of white light. The men who'd debriefed Oswald on the weather plane were officers of the GRU, military intelligence, and they hadn't officially pronounced on the data they'd been given. What could they say? If the boy was word-blind, couldn't he be number-blind as well? Alek sat in the swooping chair. A number of dangers cling to the slim figure of this Lee H. Oswald, an innocent who wanders into the outer rings of the Center, leaving thoughtful men to speculate. Are the Americans monitoring his progress? Would they let him fall into our arms if they thought he knew important things? Atsugi is a key base. There are reports from Hanna Braunfels, dredged from the files of the Seventh Department (Japan, India, etc.) of the First Chief Directorate. In a sense we have already gone too far with the boy, exposed too many of our methods. Despite all the tests and interviews, we may know less about him than he knows about us. In some office in the Pentagon, they are waiting to pick his brains. Alek was paid to drive himself crazy. One thing the tests confirmed. This was not agent material. You want self-command and mettle, a steadiness of will. This boy played Ping-Pong in his head. But Alek liked him and would arrange something decent. Has to be far from Moscow. A place where there are no foreign journalists, no chance to use him for propaganda. Give him a nice apartment, a well-paying job, a sweet subsidy in the name of the Red Cross-incentives to remain in this country. Alek had every reason to believe that Lee H. Oswald would eventually be given Soviet citizenship, become a genuine Marxist and contented worker, go to lectures and mass gymnastics, fit in, find his place in history, or geography, or whatever he was looking for. A true-blue Oswaldovich. Still, he would recommend that surveillance be maintained, indefinitely, wherever the boy was sent. Lee was not sure if this official was one of the men he'd seen before. There'd been so many, in the same dark suit. The official told him he was not yet being considered for Soviet citizenship. Instead he was given Identity Document for Stateless Persons Number 311479. It was, anyway, a nice-looking piece of paper. The official told him he was being sent to the city of Minsk. LIBRA • The official pronounced the name with a devastating clarity, as if moved by a painful ringing in his teeth. Oswald cracked a little joke. "Is that in Siberia?" The official laughed, shook the American's hand, then clapped him hard between the shoulder blades and sent him out into the snow. The next day the Red Cross gave him five thousand rubles, which just about knocked him flat. One day later Lee H. Oswald, with a just-shaved look, set out by train for this place Minsk. Seven hours out of Moscow he caught twenty minutes' sleep on a wooden bunk with a rented mattress and pillow. Then he ate meat pie and drank tea and could not recall a meal that tasted better. The land was forested here, silent and white in the Russian dusk. |
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