Читать книгу Where the heart is - Marita van der Vyver - Страница 7

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, is what we were taught at school. But now school is a long way away, I live in another country and I’ve learnt a new law: paper is power.

Long ago I thought that paper was something delicate that could be crumpled, torn up or set alight. Now I know better. Paper is something mighty that should be copied, certified and signed, watched like gold or wielded like a weapon.

Paper is omnipresent and inescapable. Paper is king, Caesar and president. If you want to live in a different country, you have to learn to respect paper.

Maybe things are different in England or Australia or one of those Anglo-Saxon countries where nowadays computers are widely used to facilitate administrative matters. But in France state officials still seem to harbour grave suspicions about computers. Technology is used simply because it is there, but information isn’t really regarded as information unless it is written on paper. Copied, certified and signed.

Every time I find myself at a mairie or préfecture – the French versions of municipal offices or provincial headquarters – I become depressed at the sight of all those shelves filled with files. Just imagine how many trees had to be felled to manufacture all that paper.

The other emotion that regularly overwhelms me in a préfecture is a little less worthy of me. It’s a kind of blind envy of the Voortrekkers of days gone by who could embark on their Great Trek without papers. Anyone who tried to stop them along the way was summarily mowed down. It’s not a tactic of which I approve, of course. But on more than one occasion in the past few years I’ve had to fight a primitive urge to threaten an unhelpful French bureaucrat with an old-fashioned muzzle-loader.

I don’t want to haul an ox wagon across a mountain. I am genuinely grateful that I was able to load my earthly possessions onto a sturdy ship. But my life would’ve been so much easier if my modern Great Trek was a paperless saga.

It’s not just foreigners who can be driven insane by the French obsession with papers. Every French child receives a carnet de santé at birth, a 96-page book in which every doctor’s visit, inocu­lation, disease and injury of its first few years will be recorded in detail. After that the carnet is supposed to accompany the child throughout its entire school career. When I wanted to enrol my five-year-old son at the local school, the headmaster refused to admit him because he didn’t have such a book. Who knew what horrible diseases he’d brought with him from Africa? I waved his official inoculation certificate about. So it was just a single sheet of cardboard, I protested, but it contained all the ­necessary details. What more could they want?

They wanted more. About 95 pages more. No French official will be satisfied with one page if he can get 96.

No, it’s not just foreigners who struggle to keep head above paper, but it’s worse if you’re from another country. The French are used to it. I suspect that French babies are born with a piece of paper in their hands, a tiny certificate that grants them permission to leave the womb. If you were born elsewhere it can take a lifetime to get all these papers together. If you’re an adult by the time you start this paper trail, you’re like a lame marathon runner who starts the race an hour after all the other runners. You’re never going to catch up. By the time you’ve got your hands on every possible piece of official paper, they’ll have thought up a few new ones.

Sometimes you end up in situations so absurd that it would make Kafka gasp. With me it has happened a few times. Once it was on a sweltering summer’s day in Valence, which was my administrative capital at the time. Soon afterwards it became Avignon, and now it is Valence once again, because I’ve moved house twice, just a few kilometres from my previous address in each case, but each time I ended up in a different administrative department and a different geographical region. Not that I blame the French for that. It was my own ignorance that made me decide to settle exactly on the border between several departments and regions. But I do blame the French for the abyss of red tape into which each of these moves plunged me.

Valence is a good four hours’ drive, there and back, from the village where I first came to live. Every time I had to drive to Valence to hand in yet another obscure piece of paper, an entire day was therefore lost because once you’ve landed inside the préfecture’s enormous fortress you usually have to wait a few hours before it is finally your turn to talk to an official. Assuming that by this time the official hasn’t disappeared to uphold that all-important French tradition known as the extended lunch.

And then you still have to reckon with the unpredictable hours kept by government offices. I kept Daniel out of school one day because he had to be identified as the child on the picture I had to hand in – and we ended up outside a dark, deserted building. I’d chosen the one day of the week on which the préfecture of Valence closed its doors. Which is not necessarily the same day on which the préfecture of Avignon – or the bank in the neighbouring village – closes its doors.

It’s so much easier in a country where you know that from Monday to Friday, between nine and five, you work (or pretend that you’re working), and on weekends you rest. Nothing is ever that simple here in the south of France. Our local supermarket is closed on Sunday afternoons and all day on Monday; the bar is open all day on Sunday but closed all day on Monday; the baker and the hairdresser close on Wednesday; my favourite café in the vicinity closes on Thursday. The post office is open every day (in theory anyway), but for barely two hours in the morning and less than two hours in the afternoon. The library is open only in the morning on some days and in the afternoon on others …

It’s a logistical nightmare. You have to consult a complicated timetable on the fridge every time you want to buy a loaf of bread.

These days I don’t drive to a préfecture without first making sure that I’ll find somebody home. I learnt my lesson the hard way. But in those early days I had quite a few lessons yet to learn. For example, that Catch-22 wasn’t just the title of an entertaining novel.

On this scorching hot day in Valence the woman at the préfecture refused to give me a temporary residence permit unless I had a social security number. So I walked over to the Sécurité Sociale, yet another enormous fortress a few blocks away, to get the required security number. But here a grumpy monsieur refused to give me a security number unless I had – wait for it – a temporary residence permit.

Catch-22.

Back to the préfecture to explain. Back to the Sécurité Sociale to plead. Back to the préfecture to explain, to plead and to threaten …

I was seven months pregnant, heavy and sweaty with swollen feet, and on each slow journey between the two buildings the sun burnt a hole right through my scalp. After a few hours of this absurd form of torture I subsided onto the steps outside one of the two buildings and started to cry inconsolably. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. For the first time I really understood what Elizabeth Smart meant when she chose this sad title for her novel. While outside a government building in Valence I sat down and wept.

Another day, another low. This time in Avignon, which had in the meantime become the seat of all my administrative resentment. One of those days in late winter when the mournful mistral sucks every last bit of the life-urge from your body.

Let me first explain about the mistral.

I promise I’ll never complain about the Cape southeaster again. The Cape southeaster is a pleasant breeze compared to the Provençal mistral. Yes, it’s true that the southeaster flings you against lampposts and in front of cars, but it lasts only a couple of days and, once you’ve survived the onslaught, the peninsula always looks more beautiful than before. The clean air above Table Mountain is enough to make you instantly forget the annoying wind. The Provençal mistral is stronger than the southeaster, colder than the southeaster and, above all, more persistent than the southeaster. The mistral blows for up to thirty days at a time. During my first spring here, there were exactly three windless days in the whole of April.

According to our local meteorologist Jean-Pierre, the fertile Rhône Valley acts as a kind of bellows for a wind that is born in the Alps – although its icy breath sometimes makes you suspect that it comes straight from Siberia – and then blasts open its way to the warm Mediterranean Sea. A simple explanation, therefore, but not the sort of thing you’re likely to read in tourist brochures. If all those sun-starved crowds heard that their hard-earned Provençal holiday could be blown away before their eyes, day after day after day, they certainly wouldn’t come here in such droves.

Be that as it may. It was on one such wind-ravaged day that we stood in Avignon in front of the desk of a clerk who had to issue a temporary travel permit to Daniel so that he’d be readmitted to the country at the end of a family visit to South Africa. No happy holiday lay ahead of us. My mother had died in South Africa in the same week my daughter was born in France. Now, about two months later, the baby was strong enough for us to embark on the long journey to go and bury my mother’s ashes. Well, in actual fact the baby had been strong enough a month earl­ier, but it had taken two months to obtain all the papers required for the journey – including a new passport for the new family member, a renewed French passport and an international driver’s licence for Alain. Only Daniel’s bit of paper still had to be arranged. Just a final formality. Or so we thought. After all we were armed with every possible official paper the child had ever received in his life, from his birth certificate to his school reports, you name it.

And then the woman behind the counter asked – with a face that said ‘Here comes trouble’ – if I could prove that I was the child’s mother.

‘But of course,’ I said indignantly. ‘Look, there is my name on his birth certificate!’

‘Non, non,’ she said. This certificate was in English. She needed one that had been translated into French.

‘But it’s only a question of a few names!’ I objected. ‘Our names are still our names, whether they’re written in English or in French!’

‘Non, non,’ she said. Rules were rules. She couldn’t issue the permit unless I supplied a translated birth certificate.

Well then, I’d quickly go and translate it on my computer, I said in an attempt to make peace (because we had to leave for Cape Town in a week), and hand it in the next day.

‘Non, non.’ Her face sagged like a soufflé that’s been taken from the oven too soon. It had to be an official translation. By an official translator. Certified with an official stamp. And that ­wasn’t all. (Here comes the really bad news, I knew right away.) This birth certificate wouldn’t do, translated or not, because it wasn’t the correct one.

What did she mean it wasn’t the correct one? The child had been born only once! He’d been given only one certificate to mark the occasion!

No, she explained. This was an abridged version. She needed the full certificate, freshly issued by the relevant state department in the child’s country of birth, less than three months before. At these words the prospect of our South African family visit disappeared like a ship on the horizon. No, not as calmly as that, more like a ship falling over the edge of a waterfall. I knew by now that any application for official documents from South Africa, via the South African embassy in Paris, meant a wait of two to three months. There wasn’t any way that I could get my hands on a full certificate – let alone an official translation – in the week before we were supposed to fly to Cape Town.

And at that moment of unbearable tension the clerk decided to close her counter and go and enjoy her lunch.

Our forlorn little group – Alain, Daniel, Mia in her pushchair and me – didn’t have lunch that day. We wandered through the wind-torn streets of Avignon trying to figure out how we would get to South Africa. Or rather, how we could ensure that Daniel would be able to return with us to France. Surely provision had to be made for special circumstances, I murmured half-hopefully. If I explained that it was about my mother’s death? But Alain, who knows the French better because he is one of them, shook his head sadly. Non, non. Rules were rules.

In the end we phoned the South African embassy in Paris – who fortunately have shorter lunch hours than the French in Avignon – to ask if they could help. I know a few people who work there. Well, I haven’t actually met them personally, but I’ve phoned them for help so many times that they feel like distant relations. And to be sure, the capable Ms Anker (one of my almost-relations) promised to have an affidavit drawn up, in French, to say that I was Daniel’s mother. And to fax it directly to the office in Avignon. I just had to give her the fax number and the name of the head of the office.

With renewed courage we now waited for the clerk’s return. We hoped that she’d enjoyed a pleasant lunch so that she would be in a more accommodating mood when she resumed her place behind the counter. And indeed she was looking less grim – there was even the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth – when we stood in front of her once more. Incredible how the mood of a French citizen can be influenced by a plate of food.

But the smile disappeared the moment we asked to see the head of the office. Non! Impossible! Just for five minutes, we pleaded, just to explain about the sworn statement the South African embassy was going to send. Impossible! All right then, we sighed, rules were rules after all, but could she please give us the person’s name and fax number? Impossible, the clerk said.

And suddenly I snapped. After nearly two years of silent suffering at the hands of the French bureaucracy, I’d reached breaking point. I stamped my foot on the floor like a naughty child and my face turned an unattractive red and I raised my voice. I refused to leave until I’d spoken to the office head. I would spend the night here if I had to! I would cling to the furniture if the police tried to drag me away!

Fortunately at this stage my French was still so bad that the terrified clerk didn’t understand half my desperate threats. What she did understand was that she was dealing with a woman on the brink of insanity. She grabbed the telephone and muttered a few anxious words into the mouthpiece. See, I cried to Alain (who was rubbing my back as if I was a growling dog that needed to be pacified), sometimes you have to be rude to get your way! There you are, she’s phoning the office head! He wasn’t so sure, Alain mumbled, he thought she might be calling the security guard to come and remove me.

But she was indeed calling the office head. Who still refused to see us, but did give the clerk permission to reveal the highly secret telephone number to us. Alain immediately walked outside with his cell phone and, huddling against a window for protection from the vicious wind, dialled the number. He heard the phone ring right behind him, he heard a woman’s voice answer the phone on the other side of the window, he heard the same voice in his ear. Could he see her for a few moments? he asked. No, she said, she was busy. Yes, he said, he could hear that she was busy – busy talking to him – so he wanted to know if they could do the talking in her office. When she tried to refuse again, he threatened to climb through the window.

In the end we managed to talk to her face to face for a few seconds.

Unfortunately it didn’t help us get our hands on Daniel’s travel permit. The next day when the South African embassy tried to fax the affidavit, the fax machine in Avignon was out of order. A day later the fax machine was working but it had run out of paper. And the day after that the préfecture in Avignon was closed. At the end of the week we boarded the plane to Cape Town in blind faith that the entire family would be readmitted to France.

The sequel to the story is that the French consulate in Cape Town solved the nerve-racking problem in a day. Perhaps the great distance between the diplomatic staff in Africa and the fatherland allows them to be a little more lenient about official papers. Perhaps it’s just that things work differently in Africa.

And then at last it happened. Two years after I’d first applied for a temporary residence permit I received an excited call from the secretary at the local mairie. Come right away, Nathalie said, your permit has arrived. As if it were an ice cream that would melt if I didn’t hurry. By this time the coveted bit of paper seemed far less real than a melting ice cream, more like the Holy Grail. I stuffed the baby into her pushchair and charged down the cobblestone lane so fast that the pushchair almost lost a wheel. Out of breath I burst into the mairie and grabbed the laminated card out of Nathalie’s hand – and felt a wave of disappointment hit me. Somewhere someone had made a mistake. It was my face in the photo. It was my name on the card. But it couldn’t be my permit.

I’d applied for a two-year permit that would have to be renewed at regular intervals. (Before my arrival the French had made it quite clear that this was the most I could hope for.) But there was a very important condition attached to this bit of paper. I wouldn’t be allowed to work in France. Or rather, I’d be able to work as a writer – not really regarded as work, I suppose – but trying to earn a French income was out of the question. And now I held in my shaking hands a ten-year residence permit, which gave me permission to work on top of it.

‘They’ve made a mistake,’ I muttered to Nathalie.

‘Don’t ask questions,’ Nathalie said with a typically Gallic shrug. ‘Take the permit and get out of here.’

Which is what I did.

But the next day I started asking questions all the same. Carefully, of French acquaintances, certainly not of French bureaucratic officials who might want to take the permit back. And that’s how I discovered that the French government’s unexpected generosity wasn’t a miracle, just a practical arrangement for the sake of the baby in the pushchair with the broken wheel. I was no longer the undesirable étrangère from Africa; I was the mother of a French child. I’d earned a certain status. The French had opened their arms to me. And I wanted to tear off these arms with rage.

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?!’ I raged at the baby’s French father. ‘Surely they could see that I was pregnant every time I had to hand in another stupid piece of paper at the préfecture! And now I find out that all those papers were unnecessary!’

But Alain just shrugged, like Nathalie at the mairie, with a look that said, Don’t ask questions.