Waiting For a Visa--Part II

This is the continuation of the previous post, as the name suggests. Although it's kind of self-contained, you may wish to read the build-up here.

Waiting for a Visa: Part II

“So what are the English like once you have a chance to meet them? Are the people on the street as uncouth as these guys at the Consulate?”

How to explain? Hearing his question, it was impossible not to remember one of the later conversations I had had with Tamara. Beautifully enough, as she always was, she mentioned after a week in a secluded English village in Dorset—the sort of place which otherwise exists only in some vague cultural memory and is, therefore, as English as can be—remarking,

“It's not like they say … the English are really quite nice.”

I remember feeling slightly taken aback; as if I had wished to have been there to help her discover the kindness of English strangers; but it was true. So like a mathematician re-treading older ground, I had his question's answer ready. It made me feel awkward to have to tell this man that the place he had been planning to see was worth the while, for the people if definitely not for the food or the weather. How strange it was to tell him that for the most part, the English didn't care much for ID cards and unscrupulous attention to formality. It would do him no good to know that the villagers in Dorset had no appetite for these spiders' webs of paperwork. I told him regardless.

“It's not as if you see the police everywhere you go there … it's not like here”

We both looked around to make sure of exactly where it was we were. Finding the only place in the neighbourhood that was going to serve us a beer meant sitting on the best outdoor garden furniture of the Venice cafe. The name didn't seem particularly promising; the towns of Greater Syria are littered with cafes and bars and restaurants named for Italian cities. Just on the other side of a relatively small sea, Europe, and then for us London, would begin. Just like the grass earlier, it was as if even the local surroundings told you it was better to go abroad. In Jordan, even the beer they served was Dutch, instead of, as Ghassan and I had wishfully hoped for, brought over from Taybeh near RamAllah. Just in case we had a doubt, Amman was there to remind us that the grass was greener—and more abundant to begin with—to the North and West from here. Except that at the moment we couldn't go.

So we clinked bottles of Dutch beer and shared white cheese and cucumbers, and thought of the banality of it all. Ghassan found it difficult to form a complete sentence without expletives uncalled for on the table, and so I tried to help by asking about where he would be in RamAllah; RamAllah always brought smiles to the faces of those who knew her.

By the sounds of things, Ghassan had spent many an-hour sipping Taybeh beer and chewing on nuts under fig tree-shaded coffee shops in that hilly West Bank town. There he would sit and watch as others played backgammon--”I don't play, my brothers and I just never learned, I just kind of watch people do it...”--and observe as the world continued to braid an ever-tighter knot out of the Palestinians. The crooks amongst us found it easier to rob the innocent this way, and the innocent found that they could console themselves. For most of us, it meant just sitting on the sidelines and enjoying backgammon.

Tamara's father had been sitting there whiling away the tedium of his days by playing cards and backgammon at the same coffee shops as Ghassan would go to watch. With all the guilt of my former life of writing horoscopes, I would carry the gospel to anybody who would listen that coincidences meant nothing, that a lucky rabbit's foot or a fortuitous date of birth was going to help you as much as a penguin was going to be helped by a TV remote control; but then I didn't want to believe this now. I wanted to believe that there was a benevolent hand making me just the right strand in just the right strand of the braid; and I needed to know more about Tamara's father.

In better days I'd seen his face in photos and heard his voice echoing through a mobile phone; I'd heard of how Jamal Najih had overcome the loss of his hearing to as a youth to become a character on the West Bank. He would read the stories from people's lips and would tell jokes to follow up on them. As if proving he had a musicality with its own inaudible rhythm he would even, for the very lucky, write lyrical poems that would appear in Palestine's newspapers. It was good to know Jamal was well and that he was famous that Tamara had inherited. All this I wanted to believe over beer and cheese and cigarettes in Amman.

Ghassan had his own problems to worry and believe about. Through the years of NGO workers and diplomats and visiting scholars, and a now-former lover, he'd come to think that he had a home in England, with RamAllah being choked into a pale reflection of its former self. Now he didn't know if that home was ever going to be real to him.

“RamAllah isn't so bad now that I think about it ...”

“I've actually wanted to move there myself” I told him.

It was true once; whether it was true any more is another matter. Would I actually belong there? At one point I had imagined myself sitting on a table and playing Tarneeb with Tamara's father. At an earlier time, I had dreamed of teaching and working at Bir Zeit, making something of being a physicist in a country filled with scientists and poets and broken dreams. Yet here I now was, within driving distance of a gaze over Jerusalem and I was going, not to cross the Bridge—we all know which one it is when we mention it—but to apply for a work visa to go and live in London, and over the years of being a Kuwait-born Palestinian exile living in London, London became home and the Homeland became a memory to be consumed over the dinner-table. I wasn't rushing to help the homeland; I was rushing towards another self-imposed exile.

“I think you'll get your visa by the way ...” Ghassan offered without encouragement.

“You've been waiting for 3 working days now? Yeah, they would have rejected you on the first day. It takes them time just to print out the stuff; something tells me you're going to get yours tomorrow.”

Here was a man I had met only about 2 hours and several beers ago, and now I was prepared to hang on to his words like they were gold dust. He was speaking with all the authority of a scholar who didn't know how to fill out visa forms, and I needed to believe he was right, and I knew I was going to come back the next day and wait again throughout the same fiasco and ask the same questions at the window and maybe get another response that would allow me to continue hoping.






Epilogue … to be continued.