"Libra" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

In Minsk

The plant was an eight-minute walk from his flat. He was a regulator first-class, which was another term for metalworker unskilled. The plant covered twenty-five acres, employed five thousand people and turned out radios and TV sets.

On his first day he presented a handwritten autobiography to the plant director. "My parents are dead," he wrote. "I have no brothers or Sisters."

The director welcomed Citizen Oswald.

At eight sharp the duty orderly rang a bell. Grinding metal. Saws cutting through iron ingots. He hadn't realized such high-pitched fury went into the making of a radio.

Meetings all the time. A large picture of Lenin looked down on the workers. Fifteen meetings a month, all after work, plus compulsory daily gym.

He took girls to the opera and went sightseeing. There were a number of imposing structures in this industrial city, some of them a little funny, he thought. The trade-union building had a Greek temple facade but the figures carved into the frieze were a bricklayer, a surveyor, a woman shot-putter and a man in a double-breasted suit, with briefcase.

He ate fried cabbage in stand-up cafes.

Each autonomous republic is represented by eleven deputies in the Soviet of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet. Soviet means council.

/ am learning Russian quickly

In his fourth-floor apartment he had his own kitchen and bath. He slept on a sofa bed. There was a private balcony that overlooked a wide bend in the river that runs through Minsk. The fifth day of every month he got his Red Cross check.

He read on the balcony, wrote in Russian in his steno notebook. Thank you, he wrote. Neuter nouns ending in o take a. He wrote the lyrics of a popular song.

Church spires in the distance.

He had money to spend. He was someone interesting, an American, a stranger with a story. America was a rumor down the street, a gleaming place people didn't quite believe in, and they wanted to hear what he had to say.

Then on May 1, May Day, in the skies over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains, the heart-shaking event took place.

The prisoner stood in a metal cage inside the elevator. Light-proof, soundproof. This was a form of naked awareness he didn't need right now. Irregular heartbeat. Right leg stinging. An exhaustion settling in over the raw headache, the whistling in his ears.

They marched him down a corridor. Four men, two in uniform. He sensed their grim satisfaction, something meritorious in the air, some old grievance righted at last. He was due to land, just about now, along a fjord in Norway.

They led him into a small room. Time to strip again. All afternoon they'd been telling him to take off his pressure suit, flight suit, long Johns, stand still, bend over, give us a look, put on these pants, wear this shirt. Then they'd take him somewhere else and do it all over again.

He knew he was in Lubyanka now, right in downtown Moscow, the local political prison of the KGB. Maybe this was the last of the body searches.

They gave him another set of clothes, including a double-breasted suit three sizes too large, and took him to the interrogation room, where a dozen men sat waiting, three in uniform, two majors and a colonel. No tape recorder in sight. An interpreter sat next to the prisoner. A stenographer, who looked too old to record anything beyond name and nationality, sat at the end of the long table, a rosette in his lapel.

The prisoner nodded faintly at the array of somber faces. Men well established in state security. They seemed to regard him skeptically, although he hadn't said a word yet. Maybe they thought it was too good to be true, getting their hands on an American air pirate after four years of overflights in unmarked planes. The prisoner thought ahead to a lifetime of potatoes and cabbage soup. Maybe a short lifetime. They might shoot him in the courtyard, like a movie, to muffled drums.

Bright flash in the sky, the way the aircraft lurched forward like a car jolted in heavy traffic.

The long night of questions began. Name, nationality, type of aircraft, type of mission, altitude, altitude, altitude. The trouble with lies is trying to remember what you said so you can repeat it when they ask again. Mainly he told the truth. He wanted to tell the truth. He wanted these people to like him. A few shrewd lies in selected areas, if only he could be sure which areas were the ones he needed to protect. There had been no preparation for this. No one had told him what to say. He was only a pilot. This is what he tried to get across. He flew a certain route, flipped the mission switches. He was a civilian employee. He recorded instrument readings, drifted off course, corrected back. A boy from the Virginia hill country. Didn't smoke, drink or chew. Made a plane out of a cigar box for his fifth-grade teacher.

He told them he'd been flying at sixty-eight thousand feet.

Once they examined the wreckage, they would ask him about the destructor unit, which he hadn't activated because he thought it might detonate before he had time to leave the aircraft. Embarrassing. They would also ask him about the poison needle, which they'd confiscated in Sverdlovsk hours earlier. Yes, the prisoner felt a little sheepish. He was supposed to be dead. Some very important men would be mighty surprised when they learned he was still alive. They'd spent millions to make it convenient for him to die.

When the questions ended they gave him another set of clothes, took him to another room, signaled down with the pants, gave him an injection which he assumed would either help him sleep or make him tell the truth.

They marched him past the desk of the section supervisor into a two-tiered cell block. His cell was eight by fifteen with a solid oak door supported by steel bands. There was an iron bed, a small table and chair, a double-pane window reinforced with wire mesh. He was alone and could hear the Kremlin clock. Already word was beginning to spread of the missing U-2. Bod0, Incirlik, Peshawar, Wiesbaden, Langley, Washington, Camp David. This was exciting in a way. As he undressed for the fifth or sixth time this endless, weary and disconnected day, he noticed the peephole in the door.

The spin was upside down, nose of the aircraft pointing skyward, a little like a dream in which you're powerless to move.

The next day, instead of torturing him to get some answers they liked, they sent him on a tour of Moscow.

Aleksei Kirilenko was present for the second round of questions. A package of Laika filters sat on the table in front of him. There were ten men in the room. The questions rolled forth. The prisoner, called Francis Gary Powers, was sincerely telling the truth about half the time, just as sincerely lying the other half. So Alek estimated.

No, he had not flown over Soviet territory before.

No, the CIA had not given him a list of underground agents he could contact here.

No, he had never been stationed at Atsugi in Japan.

What about the plane?

Yes, the plane had once been based in Atsugi.

They'd given the prisoner a peasant haircut. It suited him well, Alek thought. He had a large square head, strong features, the worried look of a rustic crossing streets in the capital.

No, it did not occur to the prisoner that by violating Soviet frontiers he was endangering the upcoming summit conference.

The thinking in the Center was that Khrushchev would not reveal that Francis Gary Powers was alive and in custody until the American cover story was released in all its hopeful and pathetic variations. (An unarmed weather plane is missing somewhere near Lake Van in Turkey after the civilian pilot reported trouble with the oxygen system.) They would add or subtract details as need dictated. But they were counting on a dead man either way.

Then the Premier would mount the rostrum in the Great Hall, wearing a modest cluster of medals on the breast pocket of his business suit, and announce the interesting news, with photographs, with fitting gestures, his voice carrying in bursts over the delegates, Presidium members, diplomatic corps and international press.

Comrades, he would begin, I must let you in on a secret. The broad smile, the choppy gesturing hand. We have the pilot of the innocent weather plane you have all been hearing about. We have the wreckage of the plane. Shot down by our missiles two thousand kilometers inside Soviet territory. The shadow in the sky. Sent to photograph military and industrial sites. We have the camera and rolls of film. Waving the spy photos, making jokes about the air samples the plane had allegedly been sent to gather. Yes, yes, Francis Gary Powers is alive and kicking, safe and sound, despite the plane's destructor unit, despite the poison meant to end his life, and the pistol with silencer, and the long knife. Pausing to drink some water. Seven thousand rubles in Soviet currency. Did they send him all this way to exchange old rubles for new ones?

Laughter, applause.

Alek looked forward to the theater that Khrushchev would make of the U-2 affair. The summit was scheduled for Paris in two weeks. Eisenhower's moral leadership turns to shit.

But as the questions continued for hours, then days, he began to feel uneasy. The men in uniform, the GRU, kept coming back to the question of altitude. Didn't they know how high the plane was flying when they hit it? Had it been an accidental hit with a haywire missile? Had he taken the plane down to reignite the engine after a flameout? Is that how they hit it? There were rumors they hadn't hit it at all. Had the plane been sabotaged by the CIA to wreck the summit?

Francis Gary Powers repeatedly claimed he was at maximum altitude when he felt the impact and saw the flash. Sixty-eight thousand feet. It seemed the GRU thought he was lying. They believed U-2s went much higher and they knew Soviet missiles could not reach these altitudes.

Why would they believe the plane flew higher than the pilot contended?

Because Oswald told them? Surely they would have strong corroboration from other sources. In any case this affair tended to strengthen the boy's claim to authority. He'd evidently been right about the extreme altitude the plane could reach. He was also the one person in the USSR who had inside working knowledge of the U-2, who was American like Powers, who could measure his countryman's responses and telltale inflections, who could evaluate what he said about ground personnel, base security and so on.

Lee H. Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko's mind as some kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous events.

Unknowing, partly knowing, knowing but not saying, the boy had a quality of trailing chaos behind him, causing disasters without seeing them happen, making riddles of his life and possibly fools of us all.

Alek had never been to the United States. Everything he'd learned about the country made him wary of its impulsiveness, its shallow self-assurance. It is a nursery school of a culture, startled, dribbling, forgetful, compared to what we have here, the massive treasure of a history that endures in the souls of the people.

Cigarettes made him patriotic. He was smoking again after six years of nibbling tiny things.

At least Oswald looked American. Francis Gary Powers would eventually stand in the dock in the chandeliered courtroom of the Hall of Columns in his doltish haircut and ridiculous oversized clothes, or undersized clothes, looking like some woodchopper from the Balkans.

Citizen Oswald came to town wearing his dark tie, cashmere sweater and gray flannel suit. It was nice to be back in Moscow.

They led him into the room some minutes after the interrogation had begun. He sat against the wall, fifteen feet behind the prisoner, with a security man in plainclothes. He had a notepad and pencil.

The news, of course, was everywhere, dominating the press and the air waves. The U-2 was the biggest thing in years. A tremendous clamor of righteous Soviet voices, historic American lies, damaged relations. He listened to Francis Gary Powers trying to handle the questions of Roman Rudenko, who had been one of the chief prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. He thought a prosecutor of Nazis was a slightly dramatic touch for someone like Francis Gary Powers. The prisoner sounded like an ordinary guy. A coal miner's son from some hollow in the boondocks. Paid to fly a plane.

For three solid hours of questions and answers, Oswald stared at the back of the head of Francis Gary Powers.

Then he went to the Chess Pavilion in Gorky Park to see a display of the plane's battered fuselage and tail section. The wings were mounted in the center of the room. The pilot's survival gear, personal effects and signed confession were in glass cases. There were photographs of the pilot under a sign reading powers francis

GARY THE PILOT OF THE SHOT AMERICAN PLANE. The Crowd W3S in a holiday mood. Oswald wondered if Powers played chess. It would be a nice gesture if Alek let him into the cell to play a game of chess with Francis Gary Powers.

His plainclothes escort took him back to Lubyanka. Alek and a uniformed guard led him into the cell block. The floor was carpeted. Powers' cell was on the lower level. The guard slid the cover off the spyhole on the door. Oswald looked into the cell. The prisoner sat at a small table, drawing lines on a piece of paper. Oswald thought he might be making a calendar. Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it's a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.

There was something gentle about Powers. He was the type Oswald could get along with in the barracks. He raised his head a moment and looked directly at the spyhole as if he sensed someone watching. Paid to fly a plane and incidentally to kill himself if the mission failed. Well we don't always follow orders, do we? Some orders require thought, ha ha. He wanted to call to the prisoner through the door, You were right; good for you; disobey. The prisoner wore a checked shirt buttoned to the top. He waved at a fly and returned to his piece of paper. He seemed to toil at those lines he was drawing. What is the Russian for firing squad?

Alek led Oswald to the interrogation room, where they sat alone in the faint stink of ground-out cigarettes.

"Now you've seen him as close as we can get you. Tell me. Does he look familiar?"

"No."

"Do you know him from Atsugi?"

"They wear helmets and faceplates. There are armed guards around them all the time. I never got a good look at a pilot."

"From the bars perhaps. The nightclubs."

"I don't recall him at all."

"Did you know they had flights from Peshawar?"

"Where is that?"

"Pakistan. Where this flight originated."

"No."

"Powers is telling us many lies. What do you think?"

"He's confused. I think he's mainly truthful. He wants to survive."

"He says sixty-eight thousand feet, maximum altitude. You say eighty thousand, ninety thousand."

"I could be wrong."

"I don't think you're wrong."

"I could definitely be mistaken."

"You sounded very sure. You described the pilot's voice. There is reason to believe you were correct."

"Eighty is pretty damn high. Maybe I thought I heard eighty but it was sixty-eight. I think Powers is telling the truth, based on the type fellow he seems to be."

"What type is that?"

"Basically honest and sincere. Cooperating to the best of his ability. What will happen to him?"

"Too early to say."

"Will they put him on trial?"

"This is almost certain."

"Will they execute him?"

"I don't know."

"He'll get the firing squad, won't he?"

"This is not correct to assume."

"That's the way it's done, isn't it? They shoot them here."

Smiling. "Not so much anymore."

"Let me talk to him."

"Not a good idea."

"I could lecture him on the virtues of life in the Soviet Union. Making radios for the masses."

"The masses need radios so they won't be masses anymore."

"I have an idea I've been thinking." He paused to assemble the dramatic words. "I want to go to Patrice Lumumba Friendship University."

"A wonderful place no doubt. But it happens to be in Moscow and I don't think this is the right time for you to live here."

"Alek, how do I get ahead? I want to study. The plant is dull and regimented. Always go to meetings, always read the propaganda. Everything is the same. Everything tastes the same. The newspapers say the same things."

"All right, this much. We will think about further schooling for Lee H. Oswald."

"I will wait to hear from you. I depend on it."

"Tell me, personally, for my own enlightenment, is Francis Gary Powers a typical American?"

It occurred to Oswald that everyone called the prisoner by his full name. The Soviet press, local TV, the BBC, the Voice of America, the interrogators, etc. Once you did something notorious, they tagged you with an extra name, a middle name that was ordinarily never used. You were officially marked, a chapter in the imagination of the state. Francis Gary Powers. In just these few days the name had taken on a resonance, a sense of fateful event. It already sounded historic.

"I would say a hardworking, sincere, honest fellow has found himself in a position where he is being crushed by the pressure exerted from opposite directions. That makes him typical, I guess."

He spoke these words in Russian and saw that Alek was impressed.

From the Historic Diary.

The coming of Fall, my dread of a new Russian winter, are mellowed in splendid golds and reds of fall in Belorussia plums peaches appricots and cherrys abound for these last fall weeks I am a healthy brown color and stuffed with fresh fruit.

my list birthday see's Rosa, Pavil, Ella at a small party at my place Ella a very attractive Russian Jew I have been going walking with lately, works at the radio factory also.

Finds the approach of winter now. A growing lonliness overtakes me in spite of my conquest of Ennatachina a girl from Riga

New Years I spend at home of Ella Germain. I think I'm in love with her. She has refused my more dishonourable advanis

After a pleasent handin-hand walk to the local cinima we come home, standing on the doorstep I propose's She hesitates than refuses, my love is real but she has none for me. (I am too stunned too think!) 1 am misarable!

He talked to his friends about Cuba, surprised to find they weren't passionate on the subject. Cuba was a situation he could easily get heated about and it was steady news in the English-language Worker, on local radio and the BBC. Mikoyan signs a trade pact with Che Guevara. Russia sends heavy arms. Ike breaks diplomatic relations.

Chocolate was expensive. These people had a vicious sweet tooth. Always a crowd at the local confectionery. Life was small things. Chocolate, a record player, a meal at the automat.

His friends had trouble with his name. They didn't feel comfortable saying Lee. It sounded Chinese or just didn't fit right on the tongue.

He told them to call him Alek.

Postcard #4. Washington, D.C. It is January 21, 1961, the day after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, and Marguerite Oswald is in Union Station looking for a telephone. She has just traveled three days and two nights on a train from Fort Worth, borrowing on an insurance policy to pay for the ticket, wiping out her bank account to buy a pair of shoes, traveling all this way sitting up-not enough cash for a roomette in the sleeping car. This is an angry, tired and frustrated woman. Letters to her congressman unanswered. Phone calls to the local office of the FBI unreturned. Telegrams to the State Department. Letters and calls to the International Rescue Committee. The State Department talks to the International Rescue Committee but nobody wants to talk to her. Is it really so strange that she uses the word conspiracy? She is only trying to analyze a whole condensed program of things that are not correct.

The White House switchboard tells her the President is in conference.

She throws another coin down the slot.

The State Department switchboard says Secretary Rusk is not available right now but anything they could do for her, etc. etc. The operator is a Negro woman and Marguerite used to live in a mixed neighborhood of Negroes and whites on Philip Street in New Orleans when she was growing up, and played with Negroes, and lived next door to a lovely Negro family, so she finally gets connected, after a lot of back and forth, to a man who seems to be talking from an office instead of a switchboard. There is a silence around him and he says he is an aide and asks her politely what the trouble is.

"I have come to town about a son of mine who is lost in Russia."

She tells the man she is not the sobbing-mother type but the fact is she is getting over a sickness and she doesn't know whether her son is living or dead. He is somewhere abroad working as an agent of our American government. He has the right to make his own decisions, she says, but there is a good chance he has become stranded by his government and cannot get out.

The man says the Weather has predicted a terrible snowstorm and they have orders to leave early.

Marguerite is wary of conspiracy.

She says into the phone, "I cannot survive in this world unless I know I have my American way of life and can start from the very beginning. I have to work into this, starting from the time he was determined at age sixteen about joining the Marines, which we bickered back and forth, living in the French part of town."

She says, "He read Robert's manual day and night. He knew Robert's manual by heart. And now he is unheard from in over a year, which I am convinced is not completely of his doing, however agents operate overseas. I am here to demand the substance of where he is."

The man at the State Department says they are all leaving the office due to this predicted storm. It is apparently bearing down. The Weather says it could hit any time.

Marina loved hearing English spoken. It was exciting, an adventure of a sort. She hadn't even known there was an American in Minsk. This was something fairly remarkable. The thing that people felt about America never went away.

She danced with Alek on the vast floor of the Palace of Culture. He was polite and neatly dressed, told her how pretty she was in her brocade dress and upswept hair. He spoke English to some of the other boys but only Russian to her, of course. She'd rarely heard English, didn't know a word except song lyrics, Tarzan, Spam.

Marina herself had arrived in Minsk like snow off the roof, her uncle Ilya said. She was illegitimate, she was an orphan, she was drawn to people who were different. Ilya told the American she had breezes in her brain.

She saw Alek often. They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way. They fell in love the way anyone does. They were from different worlds, totally different cultures, but they were brought together by fate, Marina believed. Her heart began to beat in a different way.

They flattered each other, made each other seem unique and marvelous. It is the lie everyone accepts about being nineteen, which was Marina's age when she met this unexpected man.

She threw over Anatoly, who looked like an actor in the movies, and she threw over Sasha, who was wonderful in every way and therefore not for her.

Alek had a small lovely flat and listened to Tchaikovsky on the phonograph. He took Marina boating on Youth Lake. They were the same as anyone, completely ordinary, saying what people say. Every fact about their lives was precious. Marina's weight at birth was a little over two pounds. Alek was in awe of this fact. It was a private charm, something about her to hold dear. He gestured with his hands, trying to find a shape for two pounds of precious life. Her eyes were blue. Her childhood name was Spichka, or Match-stick, for her spare frame and her tendency to flare up, to speak in abrupt excited phrases. These things they told each other were like stories in a book that changes every day, giving their love a quality of never ending.

He told her his mother was dead.

They talked about everything, the sun and the moon, a fly on a pane of glass. He hid in doorways when the cold wind blew. There was a killer wind that blew along the river.

They were marked by fate to be married and they went to the registry office, with spring coming on, only six weeks after they'd met. Alek brought her a cluster of early narcissus and she wore a short white gown with a grass-blade pattern. That night he thanked her sweetly for being a virgin.

She came home from work in the hospital pharmacy to find him doing the laundry or mopping the floor. He would not let her wash his work clothes. He was ashamed of the grime and sweat and did not like thinking of himself as a factory hand, a manual laborer, slotted to do a certain eternal task.

He tuned in the Voice of America every night at ten.

They had matching scars on their arms, his left arm, her right, both scars near the elbow, the same size and shape. A sense of destiny, or mirrored fate. He told her he'd been wounded in action, in Indonesia, in an operation against the communists. He would say nothing to her about the other scar, the one on his wrist.

He was an orphan like her, an outsider, which was all to the good, but beyond that she was not sure who Alek really was. She saw him from a slight distance, it seemed. He was never fully there, He was the other person, the one she lived with, the American who told her he was twenty-four years old but who turned out, on their wedding day, when she saw the marriage stamp in his residence permit, to be only twenty-one.

It was some weeks later that she learned his mother was not dead.

Some of the boys from the plant told Marina that he was a good enough fellow but always kept to himself, always the loner, not really part of things, not at all like a Russian in temperament and feeling-not straight from the heart, in other words.

The day they were married Castro won the Lenin Peace Prize. This was two weeks after the Bay of Pigs.

He wrote in Spanish in his notebook the numbers one to seventeen, leaving out five and six.

"The other girls I knew here, why did they want to go out with me, just like you?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Because I'm American. That's the funny thing. I left my country out of protest against the conditions there and now I'm the all-American boy to everyone. Except I'll tell you this. When I wanted to marry that girl from the factory, Ella, she turned me down flat for the same reason she went out with me in the first place. I'm an American. Sooner or later I'd be arrested as a spy, she said. Her family thinks I'm a spy. She probably thinks I'm a spy. It's the state of fear of ordinary life in Russia. I saw her the other day. Fat as a barrel now."

Interesting, Marina thought, how much writing he seems to do on those large new pads. What are those photographs he keeps on the top shelf of the closet, behind the suitcases? What is this pencil sketch that looks like a ground plan of the radio factory?

He told her he was writing his impressions of Russia.

And what is that thing on the wall, the little fixture near the sofa bed that seems to have no earthly use? Is someone listening to what we say?

Even now, after Stalin, she wasn't sure who to trust. Her own uncle Ilya was a colonel in the MVD. In his uniform he was like a painted hero of the Great Patriotic War. Alek wanted her to find out everything she could about Ilya's rank, his salary, his duties. She knew his position had something to do with the timber industry. A sensitive post but not at all related to spies or counterspies. He was Head of Timber or something similar. That was her impression.

Alek told her to find out more. It was for the sketches he was writing of Russia.

Sometimes Alek rented a boat alone and let it drift along the river past their building. He would shout her name, call repeatedly into the wind until she appeared on the balcony to wave. His return wave was like a child's, a deep and excited delight. He seemed in his little boat to say, "Look at us, a miracle, so true and sure."

Two years earlier, on a vacation trip to Minsk when she lived in Leningrad, Marina had noticed a handsome apartment house with balconies overlooking the river. One terrace was bright with flowers and she'd imagined how lovely it would be to live there. She was certain this was the balcony she stood on now, hers and Alek's, waving, as the boat moved slowly past.

Destiny is larger than facts or events. It is something to believe in outside the ordinary borders of the senses, with God so distant from our lives.

Some people don't believe in God but they color eggs at Easter just to change the pattern of their days.

Postcard #5. A foldout number. "Scenes of Minsk." Oswald is photographed at the Victory Monument, the Palace of Culture, Stalin Square. He is a cheerful enough subject, smiling squarely at the camera, but in fact there is little to be happy about right now.

His application to study at the Patrice Lumumba University of the Friendship of Nations has been turned down. He takes the news hard. It makes him feel small and worthless. The Chief of Student Welcoming writes that the school was created exclusively for youths of the underprivileged countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Lee wonders how they can think he is privileged. It is part of the general stupidity about life in the U.S.

What else? Well, he has written to the U.S. embassy in Moscow to ask for his passport back. He's a little nervous about this, considering he dumped the passport in their lap, practically forced them to take it, and then said some things he wishes he hadn't about military secrets. Would they want to prosecute him if he returned?

What else? There's this funny little device on the wall of his flat and it's not a socket, a light switch or a thing to hang a picture from. Not only that. He keeps seeing a car marked "Driving School" going up and down his street. Maybe his street is the site of the final exam, he thinks, except there is never a student in the car.

He believes they are watching him because they think he is a false defector sent by the Office of Naval Intelligence. He easily sees the possibility that ONI is waiting to get him out of here so he can tell them what he's learned.

He knows someone is intercepting his mail because right after he wrote to the U.S. embassy, his monthly payments from the so-called Red Cross suddenly disappeared, cutting his income in half. He took the money in the first place because he was hungry and broke and there was snow on the ground in Moscow. He didn't want to think about the true source of the funds. They were paying him for defecting, for answering questions about his military service. Now that he wants to go home, the money stops coming.

No sign of Alek. Not a word. Total silence.

Maybe this is all Alek. It is everything Alek. It is get the goods on him. It is pin him to the wall when all I want to do is study.

/ sfi'// haden't told my wife of my desire to return to US.

His friend Erich introduces him to some Cuban students and he likes talking to them, likes exchanging complaints about the dreariness of Minsk. The Cubans have a talent and a flair. There is an integrity in the Cuban cause, he believes. It is an underdog effort, Here, people use the party to get ahead. The party is an instrument of material gain.

He is photographed one more time, wearing dark glasses.

Near his building was a five-hundred-foot radio tower enclosed in barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards with the usual snarling dogs. Not far away were two smaller structures, just as well guarded. These were jamming towers, designed to interfere with high-frequency broadcasts _vfrom Munich and other Western cities.

He saw himself writing this story for Life or Look, the tale of an ex-Marine who has penetrated the heart of the Soviet Union, observing everyday life, seeing how fear rules the country. Chocolate is four times more expensive than in the U.S. No choice, however small, is left to the discretion of the individual.

He has taken photographs of the airport, the polytechnic institute and an army office building, just to have, to save for later.

"A strange sight indeed," he would write, "is the picture of the local party man delivering a political sermon to a group of robust simple working men who through some strange process have been turned to stone. Turned to stone all except the hard faced communists with roving eyes looking for any bonus-making catch of inattentiveness on the part of any worker."

He saw himself in the reception room at Life or Look, his manuscript in a leather folder in his lap. What is it called, morocco?

He got his friend Erich to give him lessons in German.

When Marina told him she was pregnant he thought his life made sense at last. A father took part. He had a place, an obligation. This woman was bringing him the kind of luck he never figured on. Marina Prusakova, herself born two months premature, weighing two pounds, from Archangel on the White Sea, halfway round the world from New Orleans. He took her face in his hands. Fair-haired wispy girl. Full mouth, high neck, blue-eyed flower girl, his slender pale narcissus. Let the child look like her, even that little sulky curl of the mouth, her eyes showing fire when she is angry.

He danced her around the room, promised to take better care of her than anyone ever had. She would be the baby until the real baby came.

He told her the stores in America were incredibly well stocked, full of amazing choices. Whatever a baby needed, all you had to do was find the nearest department store. Whole departments for babies. Whole stores, babies only. You've never seen such toys.

He was home first, washing the breakfast dishes. He heard her climb the last flight, getting slower every day. She had ice cream and halvah in a bag.

"They're getting ready to make Stalin disappear," she said. "I walked past the square and it's roped off."

"They'll have to use dynamite."

"They'll drag him down with chains."

She put the food away and sat at the kitchen table, behind him, lighting up a cigarette.

"It's way too big," he told her. "They'll have to blow it up."

"Too many Stalinists still around. I think they'll knock him down with chains and drag him off under cover of dark. So no one knows until it's too late."

"They already know. The square's roped off. Put out that cigarette please."

"I am doing much, much less these days."

"No good for baby. No, no, no," he said.

"I don't do so much, Alek."

"You hide them all around. I find cigarettes in every corner. Very bad for baby."

"I do less and less now. Two cigarettes today. What about the visas?"

"I went all over. The ministries, the departments, a total run-around. They are hopeless people, Marina. They read my mail, so I complain to my brother in my letters about their hopeless bureaucracy."

"You are writing to him and to them. Two letters for the price of one."

"We're saving a fortune," he said.

"Where is Texas actually?"

He washed the coffeepot in tepid water.

"It's where General Walker lives. The head of all the ultra-right hate groups in America. The Worker had a headline today. general walker bids for fuhrer role. He resigned his army command so he won't have any military restraints when he tries to lead a far-right takeover."

"Should I learn English now?"

"Later, when we get there."

These days and nights were a revelation to him. He was a domestic soul, happy in the home, a householder who did the dishes, chatted with his wife about the wallpaper. It was wonderful to discover this. He had a chance to avoid the sure ruin. It seemed so safe in these small rooms with Marina near him to talk to and touch, to make this Russia seem less vast and secret. So many angers waned as he sat under a lamp reading, reading politics and economics, his wife always near, in a loose dress, pregnant, with streetlights shining on the river.

That night they heard the rumble in their sleep. Two, three, four hollow booms, like some power in the sky, deep-rolling across the night. He lay still, eyes open now, waiting for her to speak, knowing what she would say, word for word.

"What is it, Alek, thunder?"

He heard the last slow rumble.

"They're blowing up the statue of your leader."

Tishkevich, the personnel chief, told Citizen Oswald that his performance as a regulator was unsatisfactory. He was not displaying initiative. He was reacting in an oversensitive manner to helpful remarks from the foreman. He was careless in his work.

He said he was writing a report. He would state all these things and would add that Citizen Oswald takes no part in the social life of the shop.

No trace of Alek. No word. Not a single sign he even knew Oswald was alive.

His mother found him. She wrote a letter telling him that the Marine Corps had given him a dishonorable discharge.

He wrote to his brother to ask whether the government might be planning to take action against him.

He wrote to the U.S. embassy to ask for a government loan so he and his family could travel to America.

He wrote to his mother to ask her to file an affidavit of support on Marina's behalf.

He wrote to Senator John Tower of Texas and to the International Rescue Committee.

The whole process of paperwork channels, endless twisting systems, documents in triplicate-an anxious labor for him to decipher these forms and fill them out.

He was writing to John B. Connally Jr. because he thought that Connally was Secretary of the Navy. He was actually the Governor of Texas.

Marina walked in, carrying the paperback Dr. Spock a friend of hers had sent from England. She sat next to him and he translated passages into Russian. She told him that giving birth is a woman's secret, like something that happens on the ocean floor, in dim light and silent water, the one mystery no one can solve even when we know the biology involved.

Dr. Spock wrote, "Don't be afraid of your baby. Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being."

Marina looked at him when he translated these lines. She seemed to be asking for the first time, What kind of place is America?

He went back to his letter. Could he tell the Secretary that he was a false defector? He wanted to repair the damage done to him and his family. He knew his rights. He wanted his honorable discharge reinstated. But could he tell the Secretary, the way his mail was constantly intercepted, that he'd been sent by Naval Intelligence to live in the USSR as an ordinary worker, observing the system, photographing areas of strategic value and making note of the details of everyday life?

He saw himself sitting next to a tasseled flag in the Secretary's office, talking to the Secretary, a square-jawed man with honest eyes, a friendly type Texan.

Dawn. Marina wakes me. Its her time.

The experience had a form, a sense of tradition and generation, like his own father standing in a dimly lit hallway waiting for word of a son. Word of Robert Oswald. The second son would not be born until the father was two months dead.

He wrote at once to Robert.

Well, I have a daughter, June Marina Oswald, 6 Ibs. 2 oz., born Feb. 15, 1962 at 10. am. How about that?!

But then you have a head start on me, although I'll try to catch up. Ha-Ha.

How are things at your end? I heard over the voice of america that they released Powers the U2 spy plane fellow. Thats big news where you are I suppose. He seemed to be a nice, bright american-type fellow, when I saw him in Moscow.

He put another coat of paint on the secondhand crib while Marina was in the hospital. He dusted and scrubbed the whole flat, did the laundry, ironed her blouses and skirts. In the end the bureaucrats insisted that the baby's middle name must be the same as the father's first. He moved the crib to his side of the bed and slept every night only inches from June Lee.

Stateless, word-blind, still a little desperate, he got up in the middle of a spring night and wrote the Historic Diary.

He wrote it in two sittings, breaking for coffee at 4:00 A. M. He wanted to explain himself to posterity. People would read these words someday and understand the fears and aspirations of a man who only wanted to see for myself what socialism was like.

It was his goodbye to Russia. It signified the official end of a major era in his life. It validated the experience, as the writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events.

Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mess of composition. Let them see the struggle and humiliation, the effort he had to exert to write a simple sentence. The pages were crowded, smudged, urgent, a true picture of his state of mind, of his rage and frustration, knowing a thing but not able to record it properly.

He went back to the first day, fall of 1959, jumping right in, writing in a child's high fever in which half-waking dreams, dreams with runny colors, can seem a state of purer knowledge. He felt little charges of excitement when he set to work on his suicide attempt in the voice of Hidell, theatrical, self-mocking. It was the true voice of that episode. He'd heard it then, watching his own fishy blood mix into the bath water (somewhere, a violin plays) and he was quick to use it now, sweating in his pajamas at the kitchen table.

Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest.

He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.

Limits everywhere. In every direction he came up against his own incompleteness. Cramped, fumbling, deficient. He knew things. It wasn't that he didn't know.

He stood on the balcony with his coffee. The breeze made his wet pajamas stick to his body. An N on its side becomes a Z.

Even in the rush of filling these pages, he was careful to leave out certain things that could be used in legal argument against his return to the U.S. Yes, the diary was self-serving to a degree but still the basic truth, he believed. The panic was real, the voice of disappointment and loss.

He knew there were discrepancies, messed-up dates. No one could expect him to get the dates right after all this time, no one cared about the dates, no one is reading this for names and dates and spellings.

Let them see the struggle.

He believed religiously that his life would turn in such a way that people would one day study the Historic Diary for clues to the heart and mind of the man who wrote it.

"It will be terrible, Alek, breathing the air of Russia for the last time."

"Your friends already envy you."

"I'll be unbearably sad at the train station. Our good friends standing on the platform. No one will believe I'm actually going. My uncle and aunt will be so unhappy. 'Marinochka, it's like a trip into space.' I can't bear to think about it."

"They'll weep with envy, I bet."

"I want them to throw flowers when our train pulls out. White narcissus petals floating down. The air must be full of flowers."

She imagined ahead. The train station, the border, the ship. But that was as far as she could go. There was nothing collecting in her mind that looked like a picture of a home.

Her husband sat at the kitchen table, writing.

He wrote "The Kollective," a painstaking essay of more than forty handwritten pages on life in Russia, life in Minsk, the hard-fisted discipline of the radio plant. He compiled statistics and asked Marina a hundred questions about food prices, customs, etc. He wanted to examine the subject of control, the Communist Party's domination of every aspect of Soviet life.

He wrote "The New Era," a brief account of the destruction of the Stalin monument in Minsk.

He made notes for an essay on "the murder of history"-the terrible march of Soviet communism. Deportations, mass exterminations, the prostitution of art and culture, "the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia."

Marina cried, leaving Minsk. A man at the train station stood watching, half hidden in the crowd. She saw him briefly through the window. Was it her former boyfriend Anatoly, with the unruly blond hair, who'd once proposed to her, whose kisses made her reel, or was it the KGB?

When their train approached the Polish border, Lee took his diary pages, his essay pages, all his notes, and began stuffing them in his pants and shirt. He had pages nestled ridiculously in his crotch. Two Soviet customs men came aboard and Marina drew their attention to the baby. The agents gave their luggage a quick look and wished them good fortune.

Aboard the SS Maasdam he kept on writing. Rotterdam to New York. He wrote speeches he might one day deliver as a man who'd lived for extended periods under the capitalist and communist systems.

He wrote a forward to "The Kollective."

He wrote a sketch titled "About the Author." The author is the son of an insurance man whose early death "left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck."

The women on the ship were American and European, up-to-date, carefully tailored. Marina seemed a girl in their company, small, shabby-looking, lugging a baby swaddled Russian-style in bands of linen. She sat in their third-class stateroom. Except for mealtimes she was almost always there.

"Should I learn English now?" she said.

Early morning, June 13-June, his daughter's name-he stood on deck and watched the south rim of Manhattan appear at the edge of the sea, an arc of broad buildings crowded in the mist. He was seeing what Leon Trotsky saw near the end of his second foreign exile, 1917, the skyline of the New World. All the time he was in Russia he'd barely thought of Trotsky. But now he could feel the man's spirit. Trotsky was the seeker of asylum. Thrown out of Europe. Hounded by secret police. Crossing the ocean to Wall Street on a rusty Spanish steamer.

Lee was worried that the police would be waiting for him on the Hoboken docks. Here comes the defector with his beggar wife and beggar child. He had answers ready for them, two sets of answers he'd drafted and memorized in the ship's library. If he sensed he could get by as an innocent traveler, those were the answers he'd give, friendly and nonpolitical. But if the authorities were hostile, if they tried to put him on the defensive, if they had information about his activities in Moscow, he was prepared to be defiant and scornful. He would make an issue of his right to certain beliefs. Stand up to them, mock them, look right in their squeezed policemen's eyes and tell them who you are.

A tugboat moved through the harbor dawn, and bridges emerged, piers, highway lights along the Hudson.

If they could only make it to Texas, things would be all right.