I had decided not to write a letter or make a phone call and to just show up. A word of advice I’d received was that Russian people respected resourcefulness. If you went to the trouble to locate and confront them in person, I’d been told, they would be so impressed it would be hard for them to turn you down.
Accompanied by a fearless young Russian woman as my interpreter and toting a bag full of knickknacks—cosmetics and Kleenex, two items I’d been told were in short supply—we boarded the metro to Tekstilshiki, exited at an underground station, and surfaced along a busy boulevard lined with the metal kiosks that have become the symbol of the new commercialism in the new Moscow. They were stocked with liquor, beer, chocolate bars, and a brand of cigarettes I had to smile at. Between the expected Camels and Marlboros was a pack of Hollywoods, and the small print assured the smoker it was an “All-American blend.”
With little trouble we found the small, prefabricated, rather characterless apartment complex, and having agreed it would be best for her to go ahead and smooth the path for me, my interpreter disappeared in a dark entryway while I took a seat on a bench in the tree-filled courtyard.
Several kids rode by on bikes; a woman strolled by pushing a baby carriage. I looked up once and saw someone peering at me from behind drapes. The ten minutes she was gone seemed like twenty, and when she came walking out, I tried but was unable to read her expression. “I’m talking with the mother,” she said, “but she’s afraid to talk with you. I will give her what you’ve brought.”
I held out my bag of gifts, and watched her until she disappeared. I had no idea what was going on, and was even more confused when she came back out and gestured rather abruptly, “Let’s go.”
We were halfway back to the metro stop before she explained. My theory was correct: Violetta still lived there, along with her mother and her sister. But only the mother was home, and she was absolutely paranoid. Told that an American writer who wanted to talk to her was waiting outside, she had gotten extremely upset, and only some fast talking had kept her from slamming the door.
“So how was it left?” I asked.
“I gave her your presents, and I wrote your phone number down and mine and said we hoped to hear from her.”
The call never came. A week went by, then a second week, and finally I could wait no longer; I had to make something happen. Another tip I’d been given about dealing with Russians was that they respected perseverance. I should expect to hear no, but that wasn’t necessarily the last word. So at ten o’clock one evening I decided to make a personal appeal.
It was getting dark by the time I arrived at the apartment building, and the lights were out in the second-story apartment where Violetta and her family lived. Once again I took a seat on a bench outside and waited. It was shortly after midnight when I heard footsteps and watched a woman enter the building. Unable to speak Russian, and without a description to go by, I had no way of knowing whether it was Violetta, her mother or sister—or even a neighbor, until a light went on in the flat. Within seconds I was ringing the buzzer to apartment number six.
There was silence, and then a woman’s voice spoke from behind the door. No doubt she was inquiring who was there, so in fumbling Russian I recited three phrases I’d memorized from a Berlitz tape: “Good evening. How are you? Do you speak English?”
A safety chain rattled, and the door opened a crack, enough for me to see that I was addressing a plump woman in her late fifties with two gold front teeth and oversized eyeglasses. She said something, but I had reached the limits of my Russian vocabulary, I assumed that I was being asked to identify myself, so I did, in English. To which she spoke again in Russian, and once more I answered in English. And we went back and forth like this several times before we both gave up. She looked bewildered, and I did not know what to say next.
Suddenly I had a thought. In an elaborate pantomime, I pretended to make a phone call, and when an imaginary Natasha answered, I handed over the imaginary receiver. It worked. After a moment’s hesitation she opened the door to me.
Sitting in a 1950s vintage kitchen, I called my interpreter, who mediated a conversation with Violetta’s mother over the phone. The gist was that yes, my package had been received. She was sorry for not responding, but if I would meet her tomorrow afternoon at her place of work, she would explain.
The following day Natasha and I met at a central location and walked together to an ornately columned, eighteenth-century building that housed the Artists Union. Violetta’s mother, whose name was Genrietta Khokha, and her second daughter, Svetlana, an eye-catchingly pretty seventeen-year-old with short-cropped hair, were waiting inside. Noticeably absent was Violetta, but her presence hovered over the conversation, as we all knew that without her we would not be sitting here talking.
After a round of introductions and small talk during which I learned that Genrietta was a retired teacher of geometry at an oil-and-gas institute who now designed leather goods, she invited us to join her in her studio. Leaving a high-ceilinged, pillared ballroom, we walked up a flight of stairs, down a series of corridors, through what looked like the dressing room of a theater troupe, and into an attic area, where we followed a walkway of boards across the old rafters before arriving at a safe and private room where chairs were arranged around a table on which a cake and a bottle of Coke were waiting. And there, with very little preamble or prompting, Genrietta announced her willingness to answer what questions I might have.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Perhaps the timing was right, I thought. It almost seemed providential.
But relatively soon Genrietta disclosed the real reason she was confiding in me. “It will be hard for Violetta to talk with you because she has been unable to break off her connections with the KGB. She is still under their control,” she said. “But I will talk to you on her behalf because I am no longer afraid of them. And because”—there was a catch in her throat, and tears welled in her eyes before she finished—“because the KGB stole my daughter from me.”
18
For her own protection Genrietta had been told very little about her family history, because after the Revolution and the Civil War, when the Communists idealized the peasantry and the working class, families of aristocratic or Jewish origin, families with “foreign connections” or intelligentsia status, were labeled “class enemies” and a threat to socialism in the U.S.S.R. and would hide their heritage out of fear of oppression and purges. She did know that both her parents were Ukrainian. She also knew that as a young man her father had served in a Russian cavalry unit as a “recorder of events,” and that the atrocities he witnessed during Stalin’s forced famine in the thirties so disturbed him, he found a way to be transferred to Moscow, where he was employed as an accountant in a military plant. And she knew that he had brought his young wife, Zoya, with him, and they had named their firstborn Genrietta after the heroine in an English novel her mother was reading at the time she was born.