The rule is that you have to register your Russian visa within seventy-two hours of arrival into the country. If you are prepared to pay a bloodcurdling nightly rate to stay at some swish hotel for foreigners who do not mind being screwed or whose companies are paying, they’ll register the visa for you pretty much in-house. If however, like us, you are staying with your friends or have some other private arrangement, then there are two options: you can either find and pay an increasingly rare specialised travel agent to stamp your visas (specialised means one that has set up a streamlined, self-regulating chain of bribed officials in all the right places) or you can go through the official channels, where, in principle, the whole procedure should cost close to nothing.
I call OVIR (the Office of Visas and Registration) from Petya and Natasha’s home, hoping to inquire for their opening hours. The phone rings out. I try again. This is hopeless. I get Billie to put on her already disintegrating boots, and we start walking. Once we find it, the building does not say ‘OVIR’, but I got the address from this year’s phone book, and several people passing by have all pointed out to us the same semi-concealed structure tucked away from the street. Billie instinctively pushes her body closer to mine. I hold her hand and stroke her hair just a little bit. I did not have to bring her with me today. I chose to because I wanted her to know the difference between this bureaucracy and the kind she will spend her lifetime getting exasperated with. It is like a vaccination, only I am giving her a really big dose of the poison so she can shake off the other stuff without giving it a second thought.
Inside the building, there are no navigation aids to help people like me orient themselves – no reception area, no nameplates, no helpful signs indicating behind which door men and women with the right stamps may be hiding. The idea of wearing one’s identity on one’s sleeve continues to be repugnant to most official organisations in contemporary Russia. I suppose these lethargic mazes – hermetically sealed, impenetrable official spaces that infantilise visitors – are a hallmark of any engorged bureaucracy. Since there are no visual clues as to how things are done around here I search my memory, which obligingly throws up images of thousand-strong queues of aspiring migrants, my family included, at the end of the 1980s. It sprinkles fragments of conversations on top of these images: For months we went to OVIR as to work. And then the Mayor said, ‘I hope all of you kikes will leave, every single one of you.’ There is no better cure for nostalgia than a trip to OVIR.
The walls in the corridor are plastered with the latest amendments and changes to various rules and decrees, but no amount of working backwards can help me reconstruct the original regulations. I give up after five minutes and turn my attention to other people in the corridor, who are leaning against the walls with not a single chair, trying to take up as little space as possible. Once in a while, one of the doors along the corridor will open and a man or a woman with an unmistakable look of contemptuous superiority will walk out and disappear behind another door, while the people sweating out of their brains in the overheated corridor will unconsciously suck their stomachs in. I have it in me too – the stomach-sucking gene. I can feel it. I can feel my whole body shrinking and my voice acquiring cheerful timidity.
‘Hesitation is akin to death,’ Lenin, paraphrasing Peter the Great, famously exclaimed the day before the 1917 Revolution began. So I poke my head into the only room along the corridor that has its door ajar. The gap is not so much an invitation as a literal opening, an opportunity not to be squandered.
‘Good morning! I need to register my visa, please.’
‘This is a wrongly formulated request!’
‘What would ‘the properly formulated request’ sound like?’
Silence. I am clearly being ignored. Come on, I was born in the Soviet Union, I should have acquired the inborn immunity to all this bureaucratic S&M with my mother’s milk. Regroup, breathe in and try again.
‘I am sorry, but I am not quite clear what you mean.’
‘This is not OVIR.’
‘Oh, right, could you please tell me how to get to OVIR.’
‘OVIR no longer exists.’
‘What am I supposed to do with my visa?’
Silence. The cockroach behind the desk shrugs his shoulders.
I am back in the corridor, shaking. Billie looks at me. I look at her. So much for developing her street smarts and a sense of proportion.
‘You should go in, sit down, have a chat, endear yourself to him,’ a woman who is using the wall plastered with notices to fill in an application form tells me. I thank her, take a deep breath and go back into the room. This time I sit down, take my time and look intently at the man on the other side of the table, imploring him to forget whatever differences we had in the past.
‘A few years ago this is how you registered your visa. Has the shop been closed?’
‘What shop?’
Wrong again. I am perpetually off-key today. Picked the wrong intonation. Too much familiarity. His irritation is palpable. I wanted to sound self-possessed so he would not be tempted to draw blood, but I totally misjudged it. Soon I am back in the corridor, seething and powerless.
Only later do I learn that a few years ago all the local OVIR offices were dismantled and their responsibilities handed to local police precincts. The Passport and Visa Department of the local police precinct is now responsible for visa registration. The guy I was talking to must have been the head of one such department, not that he would reveal his secret to me. Back in the corridor, questions jump out of Billie. She did her best to hold them back for most of the interlude. ‘Why is this man talking to you like this? Isn’t he supposed to help you? What happened, Mum?’
Billie, the truth is that I have forgotten how it feels to be on the receiving end of the petty functionaries’ and bureaucrats’ almost biological need to diminish and humiliate. If I could have only opened my mouth then, if I could have shaken off the powerless rage that gripped my mind and my body, perhaps, this is what I would have said to you: My dear Billie, imagine spending a lifetime surrounded by guys like this, meeting them everywhere you went – at university and at work, at a corner shop, in a hospital and, of course, at a police station. This guy, Billie, would be your boss, your neighbour, the principal of your school, the man who decides which taps and toilets the plumber will fix today and tomorrow, the one who issues residential permits and passports, who presides over the attestation commission of every university and college in this country. Imagine realising that this guy is as good as it gets. Because you are dealing with a mere bureaucrat, even if one of a vicious and obsessive strain, it means you have not been deported, sentenced, exiled or put into a psychiatric institution. As long as you know how to play the game, chances are that with time you can find a way to this guy’s heart. Money, cognac, French perfume for the missus, favours you can pull, favours your friends can pull, someone you know knows this guy’s superior or, perhaps, your kids – oh, miracle of miracles – go to the same soccer club.