Oswald's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

Western, adventurous. Like Italian cinema. Marina loved Fellini films so much.
    Those movies certainly gave her ideas. Once, Marina even told Valya that in her opinion, Ilya was not for her; officers were always marrying educated women. Valya still remembers; it hurt so deeply.
    Valya had been faithful to her husband, but Marina didn’t understand why. She wanted Valya to have an affair. She even urged her. Since Valya couldn’t have a baby with Ilya, why didn’t Valya make a baby with someone else? “Why should you suffer because of him?” And Marina said that if Valya had a man over, she, Marina, could even sit at the entrance and watch to see if Ilya was coming. “You could have your affair, and then you could have a baby.” To which Valya said, “No, I couldn’t. If Ilya found out, he would kill me.” Of course, Ilya was sometimes very strict with Marina. And Marina didn’t like that. No one could offend her without being paid back. Once Valya and Marina were marinating cucumbers and needed leaves from a berry bush to flavor them, so they went to a theatre where there were many flowers outside, and a berry bush, and they started to pick leaves. There was a woman in charge of this park who began to scold them and said, “How do you dare? Don’t you know why we put bushes and flowers around? Don’t you know that we want to look beautiful so all of our city can enjoy it? And you come here and destroy such beauty?” But Marina said, “You know what we’re going to do? Pickle cucumbers. Come visit us and you will have some cucumbers too. What are
you
doing, after all? We’re not doing anything wrong.” If it were not for Marina, maybe Valya would have been fined, but Marina could always stand by her decisions and feel that whatever she did was right.
    One night in March of 1961, Ilya was away on a business trip and Marina went to a dance at the Trade Union Palace and then came back later that night and woke up Valya and whispered to her that she’d been dancing, and then she said, “Valya, get up. Show how cultured you are, because I have brought home an American. I brought you an American. Make a good cup of coffee.” Marina was happy and said, “I would like for you to act educated.”
    Of course, Valya got scared. She almost shivered in bed. If Marina had come through the door with an American ten years earlier, back in Stalin’s day, they’d all be in prison. Now, in 1961, there was a big difference in feeling—they had gone from Stalin to Khrushchev—and so Valya remembers that she was not very worried and she got up and made coffee for the American, who was nice, very nice, and dressed very neatly. His name was Alik because, as she learned later, nobody could say Lee—it sounded like Li, that is, Chinese—and so it was a while before she learned his full American name was Lee Harvey Oswald.

2
    Zyatouk
    Sasha Piskalev, seventeen years old in the summer of 1958, could not pass his exams at Minsk Medical Institute the first time he tried. It was a serious blow. From childhood, Sasha had dreamed of becoming a doctor. He had been an ailing child, so he always loved and respected people in white gowns, and liked how they came and cured him and cured other people. Any person who could bring sick people over into a healthy state had to be very important. So, after he failed his exams, he obtained a job at Professor Bondarin’s laboratory and served there as an assistant. Bondarin treated him well. Although Sasha was very young, this esteemed professor always called him by both his first name and by his father’s first name, Nikolai, addressing him as Sanich, a nice way of speaking to somebody who’s young, using the patronymic, Sasha Nikolaivich, by way of the short form, Sanich. And, by 1960, Sasha succeeded in becoming a medical student at the evening faculty while still working days with Professor Bondarin.
    He also became friends with Professor Bondarin’s nephew, Konstantin Bondarin. Kostya