Rodney Barker - Dancing with the Devil - Sex, Espionage and the U.S. Marines - The Clayton Lonetree Story

Genrietta liked the idea that she and her daughter were on a parallel learning track. She had visions of raising a “Renaissance woman,” and that impulse led her to introduce Violetta to a variety of activities. She took her daughter to classical-music concerts, arranged for her to receive piano lessons, and interested her in collecting stamps of painting masterpieces. Winter skiing forays into the forests were complemented with skating ventures at a public rink, where Violetta showed such instinctive coordination that Genrietta enrolled her in classes with a professional. During Genrietta’s summer vacations the two of them would travel to vacation spots around the U.S.S.R., where they would swim and hike and climb mountains. Wherever they went, people were struck by Violetta—she had ash-brown hair and radiant blue eyes that turned green as she grew older before settling on hazel—and that attention would sometimes lead to invitations and opportunities that turned their trips into adventures.

As Violetta began to develop a personality of her own, her mother noticed several distinct features over which she felt she had no influence, however. Violetta had a mind of her own and could be headstrong. Even as a toddler she wanted to make her own choices. Once Genrietta took her to Children’s World to pick out a party dress, and when she selected a dark-cherry one with white polka dots that her daughter didn’t like, Violetta started to scream so loudly the store manager ran over as if to rescue her from abuse.

Violetta was also a very private child, withdrawn almost, and wary of making new friends. Rather than running around in the courtyard and playing with the neighborhood kids, she would sit by herself in their flat and wait for her mother to come home and take her to the theater, or to put flowers on the tomb of the unknown soldier near the Kremlin in memory of her grandfather.

If there was one particular area of concern Genrietta had about her daughter as she grew up, it was her attitude toward men. It wasn’t that Violetta exhibited anything abnormal as an adolescent, other than that it always seemed to work out that the boys who were smitten with her she found annoying. When she was a first-year schoolgirl, the runt of her class became ridiculously infatuated with her and told his mother if he could not sit at the same desk with Violetta, he would refuse to attend school. When the teacher sat them beside each other, Violetta did everything she could to drive him away. She deliberately spilled ink on his notebook. Once she pushed him so hard he fell to the floor. When nothing else worked, she complained to her mother and said she would not go back to school until he stopped pestering her.

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.”