Page 335 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1. Born in the USSR

At that time I was still registered in Kharkov because I had failed to change my

apartment there for the one in Moscow for the three years of my residence in the capital.
And Svetlana was registered in Lithuania which had broken away from the USSR, but
did not issue its own passports yet, and was unwilling to give out the soviet ones. We
were not married because of the same rea-sons. Therefore, in the shortest time possible
we needed to settle these questions too. Our good friends helped us with this.

When high officials from the Department of visas and registrations (Russian
abbreviation is OVIR) knew the details of our situation, they immediately refused to
help us; however, a worker from the district branch of the OVIR who was found through
our friends, did. He showed humanity and, as they say, “put himself in our shoes” and
issued a foreign passport for Svetlana. In order to anticipate any misunderstanding, I
would like to say that he did not do it for the sake of money, but helped as one human to
another, which was very rare then and even more so now. He refused to accept my offer
of payment and even said that there were things more important than money. I was
pleasantly surprised by this.

When we received our passports, we could finally continue with all formalities
concerning the American visas. I relied on Constantine Orbelian and gave our passports

to Vladimir Mironov, who worked then in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR.
We could not have imagined what ad-ventures awaited us as a result of such trustfulness.

The only way to register our relationship officially and quickly was to get married
by a village soviet (council). Again our friends came to help us! One of them had good
connections in the Spasko-Lutovinovskiy village soviet in the Orlov region, which was
housed on the former farm-stead of the well-known Russian writer Turgenev. One fine
day we went with Vladimir Sergeev and Nina, who organized all this, as wedding
witnesses. We pretty quickly reached the place and, wading a little through the mud of
dirt roads, came to the village soviet.

Well, when you don’t visit the country for a long time, especially in the fall-winter
period, you tend to forget what it is like. Therefore, when we abandoned our warm car,
it appeared that we had to walk on dirt. On the positive side, the dirt was slightly frozen
and we left to overcome the last “obstacle”! In order to do this Svetlana had to pick up
the flaps of her fur coat and thus to cross a small “sea” of the semi-frozen dirt. This made
us laugh and joke that surely no one had this kind of wedding ceremony!

We waited some time for all the officials to arrive, and the ceremony began. The
head of the village soviet pronounced the words required in this situation, we and our
witnesses signed the papers and in ten minutes we got our marriage certificate and
stamps in our passports! That evening a small group of friends organized a wedding
party in one of the Moscow restaurants. Svetlana and I are very grateful to all of them
for the human warmth they wrapped around us…

40. Departure to the USA

At the beginning of December our “friends” made one last attempt to organize a
car accident in the USSR. One day I, Svetlana and our friend went to a town near
Moscow to visit his uncle whose wife had breast cancer in the final stages. We drove
through the center of Moscow, and I turned from Sadovoe Koltso to the Avenue of
Peace. The road was iced and I drove very slowly. When we got to the Krestovskiy

Back to contents
335