“You have to learn American kidding. It’s how we talk to each other.”
“All your life she worked very hard.”
“She told you with the dictionary. You and Mamochka.”
“I know this. It’s very obvious to me.”
“Very obvious is only half the story.”
“What’s the other half?”
He hit her in the face. An open-hand smash that sent her walking backwards to the stove. She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise.
A man spoke to him from the other side of the screen door. Lee looked at his bloated face peering in above the set of credentials he held under his chin. Freitag, Donald. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Dark eyes and five o’clock shadow. They agreed to talk in his car.
There was another man in the car, an Agent Mooney. Agent Freitag sat in the front seat with Mooney. Lee sat in back, leaving the rear door open. He thought of a word, Feebees, for FBI. It was dinnertime and sweltering.
“What this is, we want to know about your period of time in the Soviet Union,” Agent Freitag said. “And being back here, who has contacted you at any time that we should know about.”
“So if I have something sensitive I know about, they would want to hear it.”
“That’s correct.”
“I assemble ventilators. This is not a sensitive industry.”
“You would be surprised how many people link the name Oswald to turncoat and traitor.”
“Let me state I was never approached or volunteered to Soviet officials any information about my experiences while a member of the armed forces.”
“Why did you travel to the Soviet Union?”
“I don’t wish to relive the past. I just went.”
“That’s a long way to just go.”
“I don’t have to explain.”
“Are you a member of the Communist Party of the United States?”
“No.”
Agent Mooney took notes.
“Are you willing to talk to us hooked up to a polygraph?”
“No. Who told you where to find me?”
“It wasn’t hard.”
“But who told you?”
“We talked to your brother.”
“He told you where I live.”
“That’s correct,” Freitag said with some satisfaction. There was a line of beady glisten above his lip.
“Am I being put under surveillance?”
“Would I tell you if you were?”
“Because I was watched in Russia.”
“I thought everyone was watched in Russia.”
Agent Mooney laughed quietly, his head bobbing.,
“My wife is holding dinner,” Lee said.
“How is it you were able to get your wife out? They don’t let people out just by asking.”
“I made no arrangements with them to do anything.”
They covered several subjects. Then Freitag made a faint gesture to his partner, who put away his pen and notebook. There was a pause, a clear change in mood.
“What we are mainly concerned, if there are suspicious circumstances to inform us immediately of any contact.”
“You’re saying let you know.”
“We are asking cooperation if individuals along the lines of Marxist or communist.”
“I want to know if I’m being recruited as an informer.”
“We are asking cooperation.”
“So if someone contacts me.”
“That’s right.”
“I will inform the Bureau.”
“That’s correct.”
Lee said he would think about the matter. He got out of the car and closed the door. He glanced at the license plate as he walked behind the car on his way across the street and into the house. He wrote the license-plate number in his notebook along with Agent Freitag’s name. Then he looked up the Fort Worth FBI office in the phone directory and wrote that number in his book beneath the agent’s name and the license plate, just to have for the record, to build up the record.
Marina called him in to dinner.
He sat in a corner of the large room and watched them talk and eat. Their conversation had a munching sound. They milled and dodged, Russians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Aimenians. It was an evening with the émigré colony, some of the twenty or thirty families in the Dallas—Fort Worth area, English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, constantly comparing backgrounds and education. Baby June was in his lap.
Marina always looked her prettiest on these evenings. People gathered round, prodding her for news. She was recently arrived, of course, and some of them had come here decades ago, thirty years, forty years some of them. Her pure Russian impressed the old guard. She was small and frail. They pictured Soviet women as hammer-throwers, brawny six-footers who work in brick factories. She stood smoking, sipping wine. She wore the clothes they gave her. They gave her dresses and stockings, comfortable shoes. He had his book he could not afford to get typed sitting in a closet in a Carrollton Clasp envelope, notes on scraps of paper, brown bag paper, and they are giving her dental work and stockings. Everything is measured in money. They spend their lives collecting material things and call it politics.
He watched them shake hands and embrace. They complained to Marina that he did not give them a human hello. They thought he was a Soviet spy. Anyone back from Russia who did not share their beliefs was a spy for the Soviet. Their beliefs were Cadillacs and air conditioners.
They gave him shirts which he returned.
A few of them came to his house now and then to take Marina to the dentist or supermarket. Show her how to shop. Here is the baby food. Here is the Swiss cheese. He kept his library books on a small table near the door where they would have to notice as they entered and left. There were books on Lenin and Trotsky plus the Militant and the Worker. Show them who he is. They didn’t want to hear what he had to say about Russia unless it was bad. They closed in on the bad.
George came and sat next to him. The only one he could talk to was George de Mohrenschildt. A tall man, warm-spirited and assured, with a relish for conversation and a voice that surrounds you like a calm day.
“You know, Lee, you have told me practically nothing about Minsk.”
“It’s not an interesting place.”
“It’s interesting to me, you know, because I lived there as a child. My father was a marshal of nobility of Minsk Province in the czarist days. Not that I cling to this nonsense. But I am Baltic nobility, which some of my wives adored.”
“Minsk, we had to get on line sometimes to buy vegetables.”
“You prefer Texas?”
“I don’t prefer Texas. Marina prefers Texas.”
“Do you want me to tell you what Dallas is? It’s the city that proves that God is really dead. Look at these people, wonderful people actually, most of them, but they come by choice to this bleak empty right-wing milieu. It’s the local politics they find so congenial. Anticommunist this, anticommunist that. All right they have suffered, some of them, in one way or another, sometimes horribly. You know how I feel about Marxism. I will tell you frankly the word Marxism is very boring to me. It is very hard for me to find a word or subject more boring than this. But you and I know the Soviet Union is a going concern. We accept this and accept the realities. To the old guard there is no such place. It doesn’t exist. A blank on the map.”
George was in his fifties, still dark-haired, broad across the chest, an oil geologist or engineer, something like that. Lee liked to switch from English to Russian and back again, talking to George. He could take the older man’s kidding and teasing and even his advice. George gave advice without making you feel he wanted a week of thank-yous.
“Marina says you have written some notes or something about Minsk. Something, I don’t know what she said, impressions of the city.”
“Everything I learned at the radio plant plus the whole structure of how they work and live.”
A woman picked up June and made the same noises that Marina’s relatives used to make, shaking the baby and gabbling at her.
George said, “You know, I am sitting and looking at this wonderful child and I am saying to myself, I can’t help it but she looks just like Khrushchev. She is a baby Khrushchev with a big round head, a bald head, little narrow eyes.”
“Kennedy would be better, for looks.”
“I admire Kennedy. I think this man is very good for the country.”
“Jacqueline, for looks.”
“And his wife. And Jacqueline too. I knew her on Long Island when she was a girl. Very lovely child. Although he is quite a libertine with the women, this particular President, I understand. Not that I consider this a flaw. I am the last to say. But I’ll tell you about some women. They will love you for your weaknesses. They will love you precisely for your flaws. This means trouble, my friend.”
Lee found the child back in his arms. He said, “What Kennedy is doing for civil rights is the most important thing. He started off badly with the Bay of Pigs disaster. But I think he learned.”
“He changed.”
“I saw American Negro athletes get the greatest glory for their country and then they went back home.”
“It’s a humiliation to me,” George said, “that I am sitting in a room with not a single Negro here.”
“To face blind hatred and discrimination.”
“Kennedy is trying to make the shift. Painfully slow but he’s doing it. It’s humiliating tome that I can’t befriend a Negro without consequences among my friends or in my profession. I live in University Park. We are incorporated, a township. If a Negro family tries to move in, the township buys the house at two or three times its value. The family disappears, goodbye, like magic.”
“Look at the anti-Kennedy feeling here.”
“Poisonous. Young Dallas matrons tell the most vicious jokes. Their eyes light up in the strangest way. It’s clear to me they want him dead.”
George went across the room to embrace an elderly man and woman. Lee found himself smiling at the scene. He watched people steer through the room, holding plates of food before them. A man offered Marina a cigarette from a black-and-white case. Lee had his collection. He’d written to an obscure press in New York for a twenty-five-cent booklet called The Teachings of Leon Trotsky. Back comes a letter saying it’s out of print. At least they sent a letter. He saved their letters. The point is they are out there and willing to reply. He was starting a collection of documents.
She would never refuse a cigarette.
He planned to write to the Socialist Workers Party for information about their aims and policies. Trotsky is the pure form. It was satisfying to send away and get this obscure stuff in the mail. It was a channel to sympathetic souls, a secret and a power. It gave him a breadth and reach beyond the life of the bungalow and the welding company.
She is the type that doesn’t refuse. It is thrilling to her to be given things. She will take your cigarettes, money, paper clips, postage stamps, whatever you want to give her. There is a certain woman that glows at the smallest gift.
Trotsky’s name was Bronstein.
Half a bungalow on an unpaved street. He slept next to his Junie, fanning her with a magazine in the middle of the night.
When George came back he did a curious thing. He moved his chair around and sat facing Lee, with his back to the room. He had a hanky folded to a point in his breast pocket. His tie was brown.
“Now, what I am talking about is having you show me these notes of yours, whatever condition they are in, because it is Minsk and I am interested.”
“It is also the system. The whole sense of historic ideas being corrupted by the system.”
“Good, wonderful, you must let me see.”
“It isn’t all typed yet,” Lee said.
“Typed. I will have it typed. Please, this is the least of your worries. ”
“It’s called ‘The Kollective.’ I did serious research. I read journals and analyzed the whole economy.”
“Is there anything else? Because I would like to see anything at all from that period. Observations of the most innocent type. What people wear. Show me everything.”
“Why?”
“Okay I will tell you why. It is really very simple. In recent years I have been approached a number of times about my travels abroad. It is strictly routine. In other words you went to such-and-such, Mr. de Mohrenschildt, and we’d like to know what did you see, who did you meet, what is the layout of the factory you toured and so on. It is routine intelligence that thousands of travelers every year say okay this is what I saw. It is called the Domestic Contacts Division and there is a man who asked me to talk to you strictly low-key, friendly, of the CIA, and this is what I am doing. He is a good fellow, reasonable fellow, so on. I am always traveling, I am always coming back, and when I come back there is Mr. Collings on my doorstep and we have a chat, low-key, with drinks. I have written things on my trips which I give him willingly and I have given things to the State Department because this is my philosophy, Lee, that I must take on the coloration, let us say, of the place where I am living and earning my income at the particular time. A country is like a business to me. I move from one to another as opportunity dictates. I will learn Croatian in Yugoslavia. I will learn the French patois as the Haitians speak it. This is how I survive as someone who has come through a revolution and a world war and so on. I am always willing to cooperate. I take on the coloration. It is my message to them that I am not the enemy. A necessary gesture. I am not in the market to be persecuted. In other words here is my itinerary, here are my notes, here are my impressions. Let’s have a drink and be friends.”
“It isn’t all typed.”
“Please, I have my consulting firm, you know, with paper, pencils and a girl who types. I will give you a copy, of course, plus the original notes.”
“You will also give a copy to Mr. Collings.”