The Humorless Ladies of Border Control Read Online Free PDF Page B

We’d expected some procedural difficulty getting an entry visa at the Chinese embassy, located in the shadow of the USS Intrepid on the desolate West Side, but had sailed through the lines, frictionless. We simply dropped off our passports, photos, and a check for two hundred bucks and a week later picked up the passports with our photos laminated onto a visa page.
    The Russians, though, were a different story. Mark Twain, writing over a hundred years earlier, complained that Russians “are usually so suspicious of strangers that they worry them excessively with the delays and aggravations incident to a complicated passport system.” We were required to fill out the PDF application in advance and show up at the consulate building between nine thirty a.m. and twelve thirty p.m. to apply in person.
    The first day, we arrived at ten thirty a.m. and joined the line on the sidewalk, about twenty people deep.
    â€œWell, this shouldn’t take too long,” I thought.
    Two hours later, only five people had entered the building.
    â€œCome back tomorrow,” said the burly security guard in a thick Russian accent and slammed the iron cage around the door shut.
    We looked at our linemates, none of whom seemed shocked. All of them, besides ourselves, were professional line-standers, paid by visa applicants with more money and less free time—or more sense—than we had. They brought books, lined up before the doors opened, and hoped for the best (or, if they were paid by the hour, the worst).
    We returned the next day, at nine a.m. this time, and waited a mere hour and a half outside before being ushered through the glass doors into a waiting room, then to a Plexiglas window like a bank teller’s. A blonde stereotype of a sadistic Slavic bureaucrat didn’t look up from her desk.
    â€œPapers!” she barked, of course. “Passports!”
    She read unhurriedly through the applications, marking them with a red pen, first mine, then Maria’s.
    â€œTwenty-six!” she said, circling that box forcefully. “It is wrong.” She shoved the papers back through the slot beneath the window.
    Item number 11 took one’s passport number, issuing country, and dates of validity. Item 26 asked, “List all countries which have ever issued you a passport.” Since she had already entered her passport information, Maria had left it blank instead of entering “United States.”
    â€œObviously this was just an oversight,” she said to the lady. “Can’t I just write it in?”
    â€œNo! Reprint it and come back tomorrow.” If she’d had a shutter to slam shut, she would have.
    â€œWe’ve been here two days in a row!”
    She muttered to herself, scribbled something in Russian on a Post-it note, slid it to us, and got up from her chair. The interview was over.
    â€œWhat does the note say?” I asked Maria.
    â€œIt says, ‘Can skip line.’”
    â€œWe’re supposed to show armed guards a Post-it note?”
    â€œRussia is the land of useless formalities,” complained Custine, who was himself detained in customs for twenty-four hours while trying to enter Saint Petersburg. “Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never show enough zeal . . . having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another.”
    Yet societies that insist on procedure and red tape can be simultaneously riddled with informal, ad hoc loopholes. We arrived early on the third day, not a little dispirited. We knocked on the cage and showed the guard the note. He waved us in.
    I should properly introduce my other traveling companion on the Russian leg of our journey: a Frenchman, the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, author of the 1839 book Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia . He served the same role for me in Russia that Rebecca West would in the Balkans: a perceptive,