You consider us Jews.
On the corner of Meshchanskaya Street and some lane, named after God only knows whom, across from a fashionable hair salon located on the ground floor of a concrete-paneled building, there stands an old stately mansion. The mansion is in the last year of its life, even though its fine architecture and location—in the center of Moscow just north of the Garden Ring—should have guaranteed it years of uninterrupted happiness. A long time before the 1917 revolutions, this single-family dwelling with balustrades and adjoining stables used to be taller than its neighbors. The stucco designs, which adorn the cornices and spaces between the roof and upper story windows, spoke to the good taste and prosperity of the mansion’s original owners, and also served as a testament to the architect’s craft and vision. In the decades following the revolution, the mansion was subdivided into apartments. And now, as Moscow was being readied for the 1980 Olympics, a decision was made to empty the mansion of its inhabitants and renovate it completely. The decision was final, and there was talk that the old residents would be resettled in the city’s new sleeping districts.
In this old mansion lived the family of Professor Levitin: Herbert Anatolyevich Levitin himself, his wife Tatyana Vasilyevna and their son Anatoly, and, more recently, Grandfather Vasily Matveyevich, Tatyana’s father. For the past twenty years, Professor Herbert Anatolyevich Levitin had been working at the medical school’s primary care clinic: first as a young resident having recently returned from two years of medical service in a remote Russian village, then as a young assistant professor, later an associate professor, and, for the last six years, as a full professor of medicine.
The events of the past two years had turned the lives of the Levitins upside down, transmuting them from a successful professorial family with a steady (if not exactly pampered) daily life into a grief-stricken family, and the air itself scraped the soul with something akin to the barbed wire of concentration camps: hopelessness.
But this did not happen all at once. When we first saw this old mansion, when we met the Levitins and began to follow their fate, the plot was just starting to thicken.
Moscow Jews had already been awakened by the wave of Jewish emigration rolling in from the provinces, yet this ever-growing wave had somehow bypassed Doctor Levitin and his family. They had a good enough life, and Doctor Levitin rejected the herd mentality both in social and scientific affairs.