Then, when she was twelve years old and in the sixth form, another young boy had such a crush on her he would climb the tree outside her window just to watch her.
What worried Genrietta was that Violetta was growing up without a male presence. She had no regular father and no brother, and she was living in a household occupied by three generations of women.
And then along came Vladimir.
Genrietta and Violetta were at the skating rink one day when this handsome young man approached them and struck up a conversation. His name was Vladimir, and he said he recognized them from the neighborhood, where he had seen the two of them taking walks. They asked him to skate with them, and that was the beginning.
Though he was hardly the ideal match—he was thirty-one, whereas Genrietta had just turned forty, and he was employed as an electrician, which was socially beneath her position as head instructor of descriptive geometry at one of Moscow’s top technical institutes—it was exciting for Genrietta to be pursued by a virile younger man. Almost as important, he was an absolute dream around Violetta. His knowledge of physics and math enabled him to be of great help to her with her homework, he was a genius with electricity, rigging games for her so they lit up when she played with them, and the two of them loved to skate and ski together. Indeed, as an intimacy ripened between them, Violetta would rush home from school just to be with him. And if he was late, she would look petulantly at her watch and say, “Mom, why isn’t Vlad here yet? He was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago.”
The complications that Vladimir would introduce into the household would not be fully appreciated, or understood, until years afterward. Unbeknownst to Genrietta, Violetta, who was fifteen years old at the time, developed a romantic attachment of her own to Vladimir. She even fancied the notion the two of them might end up together. And when Vladimir and Genrietta announced their intention to marry, she was shattered with jealousy.
At this point in the telling of her story Genrietta paused, as if to catch her breath. And in that brief interlude I tried to imagine the family dynamics, the lines of tension this marriage must have drawn between mother and daughter. What it must have been like for Violetta—at an age when girls idealize romantic love, when she was beginning to feel the first stirrings of passion—to lie awake at night in their small two-room apartment and listen to the sounds of her mother making love with the man she wished were lying beside her.
As it turned out, Genrietta was not just taking a breather; she was debating how much to tell me. When she decided, she added a macabre postscript. Several years before Vlad entered her life, while she was teaching at the technical institute, a young student had developed a neurotic obsession with her. He had been a sensitive young man, uniquely talented at painting and music, but high-strung and intense. She hadn’t realized he was also emotionally unbalanced until the day she received a love letter from him, imploring her to marry him. She was astonished, but she didn’t want to hurt him, so she answered him with gentle playfulness. “When I was young, I all the time felt a great love toward my teachers as well,” she recalled telling him. “It will pass.”
But this one was not to be discouraged. He thought that perhaps she was rejecting him because she felt it would be unethical for a teacher to have an affair with one of her students, and he offered to transfer elsewhere if that would make their relationship more proper. Once again she treated his overtures lightly. “I am not the right person for you,” she insisted. “Someday you will find a woman your age, someone more like you, who will make you very happy. Who knows, maybe you will even marry my daughter Violetta, and I will be your mother-in-law.”
It was simply unthinkable that anything could come of his attraction for her, and when at last she convinced him of this, he became distraught, delirious. After a final appeal he went on a cognac-drinking binge, and after passing out he never regained consciousness. In the note he left behind, he let it be known that without Genrietta he could no longer bear living on this earth.
The story didn’t end there. His spirit continued to haunt Genrietta. Sitting by herself in her flat, she was unable to shake the feeling he was standing in the hall outside and at any minute the door would swing open and he would stride into the room. At night she was afraid to go into the bathroom because she thought his spirit was in there waiting to pounce on her. Once, walking alone down an empty street, she thought she heard his footsteps following her, so she quickened her pace, and just when she knew his hands were about to reach out and grab her by the throat, she wheeled around to defend herself, but there was no one there.
The point Genrietta wanted to make was that she had missed what was going on with her daughter and Vladimir because of something internal that was preoccupying her. “Vladimir, you see, was the same age as the love-struck student. Physically they even resembled each other. The coincidence was too much to ignore. When he proposed I simply could not take a chance on creating another human tragedy.”
Silence filled Genrietta Khokha’s dimly lit loft-studio. In a whispered voice she said very few people were aware of what I had just heard. Even Violetta was unaware of this history.
She went on to say it was an awful feeling to know that you were responsible for inflicting an unforgivable injury on someone to whom you intended no harm, and how when that happened you damaged your own life. She was speaking for herself, but I somehow sensed she was letting me know that this was a feeling her daughter had come to know as well.
The opening line of Anna Karenina—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—kept coming to mind as the tale of Violetta’s teenage years unfolded. Her mother’s marriage to Vladimir was an emotional trauma that became a turning point with the birth of a baby girl, Svetlana. Not only did Violetta resent the attention bestowed on her new half sister, her grandmother, Zoya, emerged as a destructive force in family relations. The old woman was getting senile, and fearing that her own position in the household was being usurped, she did everything in her power to turn her granddaughter against Genrietta.
“Your mother has traded both of us for this man,” she whispered to Violetta. “Watch out now or she’ll turn you into a babysitter.”
Zoya even went so far as to confide to Violetta, “I am the person you have to thank for being on earth, because I’m the one who stopped your mother from having an abortion. She never wanted you.”
After that, the domestic atmosphere became very strained. Violetta felt betrayed—by her mother, and by the man she’d fallen in love with. Now that a younger sister had come along, she felt replaced and no longer part of the family. At home there were constant scenes and quarrels. She was rude with her stepfather and hostile toward her sister, and she treated her mother with cold-hearted contempt. Genrietta saw what was happening, knew she was losing her daughter, and did not know what to do about it.
As with all Soviet children, growing up Violetta had joined Communist youth organizations. She had attended the Octoberites club as a little girl, where she was taught to play games through which ran themes of Communist ideology. When she was nine she received the red kerchief of the Young Pioneers, which she wore proudly around her neck as a badge of honor. And at the age of fourteen she had become a member of Komsomol, a political organization that prepared Soviet youth to become party members, though by this time a lot of the idealism had been lost and joining was almost an automatic act.