Libra - Don Delillo [98]
“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 hardfisted 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