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.