When I was eighteen, my parents decided I needed to visit my grandmother in Lviv. I’d been there at six and remembered nothing, of course. Grandmother had come to us since then, but now the family council concluded that their grown son ought to reconnect with his roots.
We waited for the university winter break, and I flew out. There was no direct flight from our city to Lviv, so I stopped first in Moscow to stay with my uncle. Those three days were great. For one thing, he smoked, which meant I could smoke right there in the room instead of running out to the street or the balcony. For another, after his many marriages and divorces, he had three daughters and not a single son — clearly a source of some frustration, because my uncle had plenty of hard-won life wisdom to pass on and no one to receive it. Then along came a nephew who loved to listen, paired with an uncle who loved to talk. Three days vanished in an instant, and I was on a plane to Lviv.
I fell in love with Lviv immediately. A completely enchanting city — every building, every cobblestone casting its spell. In the evenings, when my relatives came home from work or school, we’d sit and talk. In the mornings, I went out to wander.
It didn’t take long to discover, on Arsenalna Street — I may be misremembering, it’s been nearly forty years — a basement pub done up in the style of an old European tavern. I think the famous Reberna restaurant is there now. Beer barrels, oak tables, bare red brick. These days I’ve seen enough of that kind of thing to spot instantly what’s authentic and what’s dressed up to look old. But back then I was encountering a real medieval European city for the first time in my life, and inside it, a real medieval tavern. What’s more: for one ruble you could get two delicious open-faced sandwiches and four full mugs of magnificent Lviv beer, beside which everything I’d drunk before paled completely. So I arranged my daily routes through the city to arrive, reliably, somewhere around noon, at the entrance to that pub on Arsenalna. I’d walk in with a ruble and walk out slightly drunk and in a dreamy mood.
One evening, heading home to my grandmother’s from the pub, I came upon two women arguing loudly a couple of courtyards away. One — Russian — was calling the other a Banderivka; the other — Ukrainian — was firing back with Moskalka and Katsapka. And I felt a sudden pang of sadness: such a beautiful city! Such a lovely evening! I had beer and sandwiches in me and felt good about the world, and here were these women spending this perfect evening on nonsense. So I tried to make peace between them. Strangely enough, it worked — just not quite as I’d intended. Both respectable ladies looked me over, ran some quick anthropometric calculations, and promptly united. Together they informed me that “all kinds of little Jewish brats wander around here sticking their long noses into other people’s business.” Somehow they didn’t ruin my mood — thank you, beer; thank you, Lviv. But after that I stopped wading into neighborhood ethnic disputes. Not worth the trouble.