I went to Minsk to find Lee Harvey Oswald. Not the man, of course. His world – his apartment, on 4 Communist Street; the television and radio factory where he was a metal-lathe operator; the Institute of Foreign Languages, where he met girls who spoke English and listened to jazz; the movie theater he sometimes went to; the streets, corners, alleys, the playground and parking lot behind his apartment house through which he’d trundle everyday on the ten-minute walk to work.

Before I arrived in Minsk, I imagined Oswald’s world like an exhibit or crime scene – cordoned off. Oswald lived in Minsk from January 1960 to May 1962, and had he never returned home, no one would have ever known him. But he didn’t stay, which means that Minsk begat Dallas which begat New Orleans which begat Dallas, which means that Minsk is part of a chain of places that culminated in the upending of history, which means that these places are unholy, infused with a dark glow. They comprise a horrifying trajectory that derailed the history that was meant to be with a history that America has been trying, and failing, to transcend ever since.

The people of Minsk (now the capital of independent, Kansas-sized Belarus) who knew Oswald – those who haven’t died or didn’t leave for Russia, the United States, Israel or Argentina – are living the quintessential life of Belarussian pensioners – which is to say they live in apartments with low ceilings that were built by Nikita Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev, and they watch a great deal of television. Their memories of Oswald are vaguely sketched, flimsy, fragmented, water-color depictions of someone they knew before he was known by everyone else.

I have now spent a year immersed in Oswald’s world, seeking him while trying to ascertain what he was seeking. Oswald’s voyage into the Soviet hinterland symbolizes something (spiritual, historical, literary) about the country he was going to and the country he was coming from, and that is a massive dislocation, a melting away of the bonds and compacts that had given rise to the Soviet experiment and, paradoxically, its American counterpart. We think of the early 1960s as a time of great hope and idealism – in the Soviet Union, which had recently emerged from the nightmare of Stalin and was now “building communism,” and in the United States, which had achieved a power and affluence hitherto unknown to any nation ever. But at the very moment that these two powers, and peoples, were mounting their respective apexes, they were also dismantling them: Khrushchev, by loosening up the old strictures, had exposed the fragility of the Soviet state. Oswald, by murdering the emblem of American hope and possibility, had laid bare the thinness of that hope.

Oswald led an unhappy life, shuttling, with his mother, Marguerite, from Louisiana to Texas to New York back to Louisiana. All this movement reflected Marguerite’s unsettled nature, and one senses that it was her attenuated sense of self, her neediness and inability to give unconditionally, coupled with the absence of his father – he’d died two months before Oswald was born – that led the young man to embark on a quixotic search for stability. At 17, he enlisted in the Marines, who sent him to California, then Japan, then the Philippines. Then he returned to the United States. Then, at 19, he set sail for France and then traveled to Britain and then Helsinki, where he received a six-day, tourist visa that enabled him to enter the Soviet Union at the crossing near Leningrad.

He hoped to start over in Moscow, and when the Soviets denied him citizenship he tried to kill himself. The KGB, worried that Oswald might ignite an international scandal, said he could stay, and put him on a train. That was how he wound up in Minsk.

He was probably unaware that the city had not existed fifteen years earlier. All but five or six buildings in the old industrial hub had been razed during the war. Most of the people had been murdered. Out of the rubble, the Soviets had built a perfectly Soviet city – wide boulevards, low buildings, war memorials – and a perfectly Soviet neighborhood for the American, who believed he had finally found a family he could belong to but never, in fact, belonged: His Americanness made him fascinating and untouchable, someone with whom no one wanted to be too closely linked.

He lived inside a Potemkin place. Instead of feeling welcome, Oswald must have felt as if someone else wanted him to feel welcome, and with his porous understanding of things, he must have been very confused.

From his fourth-floor balcony, he could see the park and river and the path where women often pushed baby carriages near the embankment. If he peered to the left, he would have seen Victory Square, with its obelisk commemorating the triumph over the fascists. To the right, was the military headquarters of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, built in the Greco-Roman style, and the opera house and the movie theater. Most mornings, he’d walk from the apartment building to the factory with Sergei Skop, who lived in the same building and was a metal-lathe operator on the second floor of the Experimental Department, at table No. 3, two tables from Oswald, at table No. 1. Work usually began at eight and ended at four, and there was astolovitsa, or canteen, and for sixty kopeks, about 28 cents today, you could get a cup of borscht, a cutlet of pork or beef or pork-beef, potatoes, juice and tea.

I expected that once I arrived in Minsk I would feel something morbid and sinister that corresponded with the historical Oswald, the man on the sixth floor of the book depository at Dealey Plaza, window open, rifle cocked. This would have reaffirmed my sense of who he was. He would have remained a terrible aberration, a historical glitch, and that belief would have reconfirmed a deeper, more important belief that things were supposed to have been much better than they turned out. And not just that – that things can still be made better. If only we muster the will.

But now that I have been immersed in Oswald’s world, I am sure of very little except that it is unremarkable. Not just the place, the physical-geographic configurations of his everyday life, but the consciousness he inhabited. His reaction to his world, his interactions with the people he met, seem utterly ordinary. His behaviors and yearnings, the way he spoke to people, the way they reacted to him, all seem rather familiar. Far from marking a departure from some predetermined American trajectory, Oswald seems very much a function of it. We prefer to think that this little man, so boring and uneducated, barely literate, was but a cog in some mysterious apparatus manned by spies and mobsters or Cuban exiles. This makes him seem accidental, and it permits us to hold on to our theories and hopes that things could be different. But he was not accidental. He was, as his Marxist-Leninist hosts could have told us long ago, a necessary development in a history that could not have been otherwise.

*Photo of Minsk courtesy Alexander Kuznetsov.