At least that was the way she viewed the situation, which was why she decided to let things play out on their own, and to allow fate to decide how it would end.
By the time Clayton left for Vienna, Violetta, in her mother’s words, had been “conquered” by Clayton’s love. They met to say goodbye to each other, and then Clayton left for the airport and Violetta rushed home because he promised he would call and say goodbye one more time. Watching her sit by the telephone waiting for it to ring, Genrietta thought she had never seen a girl so desperately in love.
His final words before leaving Russia were “Whatever happens, I will come back for you.”
Violetta waited a “whole week” before she sat down at the table in her room, set out her favorite picture of Clayton wearing blue jeans and a faded workshirt and standing in Red Square with the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral as a backdrop, and wrote him a letter. In it she told him she knew it was silly but each day when she returned home from her job at the Irish Embassy, a small part of her would be disappointed not to find him waiting for her. No matter where she was or what she was doing, she wrote, he was never far from her thoughts. “I can’t get rid of the memories and I don’t want to.”
Before leaving, he had talked about going to Vienna as an adventure, and in her letter she said she envied him and wished she could be there with him, sharing “new impressions, new places, new people,” instead of sitting in her room, alone, “staring at your picture and thinking how much I love you.”
Several days later he surprised her with a phone call. He was having trouble adjusting to Vienna, he said, and missed Moscow, missed her. They were words she wanted to hear, but as she wrote him afterward, it worried her to think of him feeling depressed. “I want so much to be in Vienna, next to you and share all your troubles so that you don’t feel alone there.”
After that she wrote him every few weeks, telling him about the ballets she attended at the Bolshoi Theater; a vacation she took with a girlfriend to the Caucasus, where they stretched out on the beach, swam in the sea, climbed mountains; and how much she anticipated the day when he would return. “I think that all the things that parted us—distance and circumstance—are temporary and we will be together again…. Now I am absolutely sure that I can’t feel happy, completely happy, without you by my side.”
The letters that he wrote her were filled with daily details of his life, made less boring by sharing them with her—a detachment inspection by the company commander, a required attendance at a diplomatic function. But they would almost always end with his reassuring her that his love for her continued to grow stronger by the day, and that he was looking forward to coming back to Moscow and visiting her, he hoped by the end of the year.
Throughout this period Violetta was never able to forget completely the “official” side to their relationship, because she had been instructed to encourage Clayton’s ongoing cooperation in her letters. Which she did, reminding him that Uncle Sasha’s blessings were important to their future plans. But even as she played her part, there was a difference now, because at the same time she was doing her duty she was staying true to her inner feelings. She wanted them to be together and knew this was the only way it could happen.
Their clandestine relationship had been going on for over a year, and as time had passed and nothing bad had happened, Violetta had begun to believe that maybe fate watched over young lovers. The year 1986 was drawing to a close, and she was waiting to hear precisely his plans for returning when she learned that he had been arrested.
She was frantic. There were no letters from him to explain what had happened, Uncle Sasha claimed ignorance, one or two small articles appeared in the Soviet press but they added little to her understanding, and the next thing she knew, her name had surfaced in the Western press as the woman at the center of the sex-for-secrets spy scandal and Western reporters had tracked her to the Irish Embassy and were requesting interviews.
Violetta left work one day, did not return the next, and put her life on hold, awaiting the outcome of Clayton’s trial. She rarely left home and tuned in daily to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe on the radio, listening for news about Clayton’s case. What she heard made her despair. She had not given a great deal of thought to the specific worth of the information Clayton had passed to Uncle Sasha, and in particular she hadn’t thought about his actions in terms of punishable criminal offenses. But she thought there was something clearly exaggerated and not quite real about the charge that he had seriously damaged the national security of the United States.
The evening she received a phone call telling her that a military court had found Clayton guilty of espionage and sentenced him to thirty years in prison, she was devastated. Until then she had held out the hope that some miracle would happen that would scale down the dimensions of this tragedy.
For the first time she became really scared. If what they had done together had brought such a terrible fate to him, that started her thinking that perhaps something equally awful was meant for her. Would the KGB blame her for the failure of the operation? she wondered.
She was crying softly when she called her mother into her room and broke the news that Clayton had been sentenced to prison. And then, in a voice so low Genrietta could barely hear her, Violetta said, “Mama, if something bad happens to me, I want you to promise that you will do something for me.”
Genrietta protested, “Veta, don’t talk like that.”
“Please, Mama. Promise me.”
Tears welling, Genrietta asked her daughter what it was she wanted her to do.
“I want you to bury me in the dress that Clayton gave me.”
Genrietta knew what dress she was talking about. Clayton had given it and a bottle of perfume to Violetta as a gift. It was a black-and-white-checked dress, made of wool with a white collar, and it hung in Violetta’s wardrobe beside the two white dress shirts he had also given her. Although she had yet to wear it out, she would put it on for special family occasions because, she said, it made her feel closer to Clayton.
“If that is your wish,” Genrietta replied.
In the days that followed, Violetta entered a depression that seemed bottomless. She was unable to sleep, so she stayed up all night smoking cigarettes and drinking wine and listening to foreign broadcasts on the radio on the chance they would have something new to report about Clayton. Finally, as the dawn lightened her window, she would fall asleep, only to rise late in the day, fix herself something to eat, and return to her room. She was silent, sullen, and unresponsive, and on the rare occasions she shared her feelings, she would frequently speak about death.
“I’m not afraid to die,” she said on one occasion. “To me it’s one and the same as life.”
When she talked like this, Genrietta was at a loss. She wanted desperately to help her daughter through this difficult period, but Violetta could not be comforted. Genrietta now believed that if harm came to Violetta, it would not be instigated by the KGB but by Violetta herself. On those occasions when her depression seemed dangerous, Genrietta would call her friends and they would take turns coming over and keeping a suicide watch through a particularly hard night.
It pained Genrietta to see her daughter let herself go like this, ignore her appearance, and indulge in unhealthy habits, and around the house she tried to maintain an upbeat attitude, hoping it would brighten Violetta’s mood. But nothing seemed to work. A doctor said she was suffering from a nervous breakdown, but when the days turned into weeks, the weeks added up to months, and still Violetta remained in her room, reading, watching TV, listening to the radio, smoking, and drinking herself into a stupor, it was apparent that this was more than an illness: Violetta seemed almost to have given up on life itself.