I should have been married for about four days now. This is, alas, not the case.
A couple of months ago, Stace and I agreed that patience was the order of the day, and that we should not panic about not having heard about my visa interview, which every applicant for a K-1 visa (that is, a Fiancé Visa) has to undergo at a United States consulate- in my case, the impressively scary-looking Embassy in Grosvenor Square, in London. I was expecting, as had happened to a friend’s sister a few years ago, to suddenly receive an appointment, have a medical, be interviewed and leave the same day all visa’d up.
“If it gets to Christmas and we still haven’t heard, I’ll call them.” I said. Now, I hear you say, this demonstrates a distressing level of complacency, not to say indifference, vis-a-vis the visa process. This, I hear you protest, is your future. Regard this Davis, you say, and say she isn’t the woman you want to marry! You must proceed without delay, surely!
Now, I quite understand your strength of feeling; indeed, I share it. I agree entirely. But what you must understand is that the ONLY way to contact the Visa Section of the embassy is to phone them, at a special rate of £1.20 per minute, and needless to say, nobody at the other end of the phone is in any rush. It once cost me £10 for them to tell me they had received my documents. The feeling of agony, as time runs through the pinch in the hourglass at an alarming rate, and Skype forecasts dire consequences should one’s credit expire, is akin to that felt whilst trying to pass a chilli-coated porcupine through one’s lower intestine. So, I counselled caution. Stacey argued against, and we settled on me phoning them on the 20th of December. I did so.
“Yeah, actually the procedures have changed. You now have to book your medical before we’ll give you an interview. Yeah, that changed about six weeks ago. No, we didn’t tell you, no. That’d be meeting you halfway, and more typical of a system which treated you like a human being. That procedure was changed too, yeah. Yeah, a while back now, yeah. You too, sir. Bye.” click……
I was furious. We were waiting day after day for news. I could have beaten Usain Bolt over the distance from the car to the letters on the doormat after work. And all this time we could have been getting something sorted out, arranging the medical, booking train tickets, arranging time off work, getting ahead of the curve, but we hadn’t been, because they had changed the rules halfway through the game? I was not happy.
I arranged a medical appointment and booked train tickets. Three days later I got an email from the embassy, advising me it was time for me to book my medical so they could move things along a bit. I find that one disadvantage of electronic media is that in situations like this, an email doesn’t scrumple well. It takes the edge off the dramatic gesture if you have to print the offending document out first.
The clinic I had to arrange my appointment with is the only one in the UK the American embassy uses to carry out its medical checks. Nice little earner, I thought to myself. I arrived in London; I sat and ate the finest burger I have ever beheld at a nearby burger joint apparently staffed entirely by pleasantly flamboyant Americans. I went and filled in a medical history, and heard all sorts of horror stories from other people waiting. Now, this whole process has been a monumental pain in the neck. It has been accompanied by a wailing and an aching of balls. But it hasn’t been horrific. It has been boring and frustrating, occasionally demeaning, patronising and intrusive. And it has kept me away from Stace for far too long. But it has never been truly terrifying, and yet there were people here telling me stories about having been married in the US for four years and then denied re-entry into the States and being separated from her husband for another year until they sorted something out. Or someone who was continually hassled flying in and out of the US despite his documentation being in order; detained at Immigration for hours on end.
What the tellers of these stories had in common was their blasé familiarity with USCIS (US Customs and
Immigration Service) procedures, and an incongruous tendency to have done something fairly dumb as regards their US immigration status. For instance, Married-In-The-US-And-Then-Denied-Re-entry Girl was trying to stay in the US based on the fact she was married to a US citizen. However, she had originally entered America on a student visa, not with the intention of staying there. The horror stories were all being told by people who had blatantly not read the manual. My advice, should you want it, is when dealing with USCIS be absolutely open and honest, volunteer information if it will help and remember that doing something the long way round is probably the quickest way of getting it done. Thoroughness is a supreme virtue. I was poked, prodded, bled, had chest x-rays taken, was inoculated against Tetanus, Measles, Mumps and Rubella, charged £260 for my sins, and pushed off into the loving custody of my dear friends Helen and Corin™ who were putting me up for the weekend. Relieved to have it over with, and in excellent company, I spent one of the best weekends I can remember peeling veg and making chutney, eating fantastic cheese, drinking cider and rum and looking through a telescope at the moons of Jupiter. It was a truly restorative experience, and I came back north with my soul intact, and generally feeling the love.
And so, one day in January, I received a letter which I’m sure was subtly designed to screw with my head. It came in an envelope with a window through which could be read my name and address, as per usual. The back of the envelope was stamped United States Official Business. The subtle mind screw starts with them getting your name right on the address, but not in the letter. Deliberately, too:
“Dear POTTS; RICHARD JAMES” it opens, despite having been perfectly correct in the address, when they called me Richard Potts. It was printed in Courier New, as well, which I feel is an overly dramatic touch. Never mind. From that point on, it gets worse.It referred to me throughout the rest of the letter as “this case”. Rather than by name, I mean. Never mind. I had an appointment.
At 8.30 on the appointed day I queued up in front of two ladies in Grosvenor Square. The square is beautiful. Even the incongruously modern Embassy has a certain charm. It is overbearing and a bit too much, but in a comforting, American way. There are statues of FDR, looking extremely patrician and dignified, and of Eisenhower, looking frankly rather rumpled. But he had been up all night liberating Europe, so we’ll let him off. The ladies checked my letter, and asked me to stand in the next queue, in front of a masked security guard. He was accompanied by two policemen. They were the ones with the machine guns. After waiting in his queue, he sent me to queue inside the big glass kiosk. There was a police van parked outside- painted pillar box red- with tinted windows. The kiosk was like airport security. Bag on the conveyor belt, belt and keys and wallet in the box.
You aren’t allowed any electronic devices in the embassy. None. no phone, no iPod, no laptop. Not even car keys with a radio central locking device. You have to leave them elsewhere; they suggest a local pharmacy with whom they have an agreement. I knew in advance, so had come prepared. There is a sign on the door to the kiosk which I have recreated below. It’s easy to mock up because I’ve never seen one like it, and it sticks in the mind:
So, apparently, you can’t take your bomb in with you either. You must have to leave it at the local pharmacy too. I was made to leave the security kiosk because they found a prohibited item in my rucksack. Hardly the most dignified moment in my career, emptying a rucksack on the pavement in Grosvenor Square, to find a dud AA battery, and throw it in the bin next to the massively conspicuous police surveillance van. I rejoined the queue by the masked security guard, passed through the kiosk, went into the embassy and was given a number, and was asked to join the queue in the visa hall.
This queue wasn’t a line; it was like an airport departure lounge surrounded by 25 service windows. A number is called once every 20 seconds or so which requires the person with that number to go to a window. You can’t, therefore, settle down to read because you have to pay attention to the numbers. After an hour and a half of sitting in Kafka’s local branch of Argos, your brain has turned to slurry.
At this point, a woman whom I thought acted rather aggressively for someone in the role of a minor clerk with the same decision-making powers as a mosquito in a typhoon, asked me to pay for the visa, and to let her see various documents. My birth certificate. My police certificate. Where was my German police certificate? I didn’t have one? Why not? Did you brush your teeth this morning? Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
I explained my reasons for not having a German police certificate. Although I had lived in Germany, I’d never spent more than 11 months there. We had debated whether or not I needed to apply, and I thought that on this basis, I’d save the time, money and hassle and not apply to the Germans for a police check. This is an example of the long way round being quicker. She was not impressed. She voiced her lack of impressedness. She went tut, and made me feel ashamed and angry and patronised. I did not feel lucky.
I felt bloody awful. It had taken us MONTHS to get this appointment. Months of work; hundreds of dollars, hundreds more pounds. Time off work. Medical records. Injections, X-Rays, petitions, phone calls, photographs. Filling in forms and printing out correspondence. And then the bloody water torture of checking the post every single day. And here I was, sitting, looking at I didn’t know how much shit, because I thought it would have been easier. What was actually at stake here? Who knew? The interview? Another month of waiting? Were our wedding plans in danger? Was my future marriage at stake? I had no idea, and no way of finding out. I couldn’t phone anyone, as my phone was elsewhere in London. I couldn’t do a damn thing except wait and listen to the numbers being called. For another hour and a half of dread, fused with painful boredom. I was very grateful for not having drunk any caffeine that morning. By the end of those 90 minutes I was half a cup of weak coffee away from standing up and hurling my chair across the room. Which would have been bad.
And then, into our lives, came a man who I believe was called Gary. He was a friendly, dapper, middle-aged man, who looked the way I imagine Stace’s grandpa probably looked about 25 years ago. He was a scholar and a gentleman. He was the first actual American I’d met all day, and he was understanding and helpful. After a short- very short- interview, he told me that today was not my day for getting a visa. He needed the German police check, and told me how I could get my hands on one. I have since applied for it; it’s very simple. He told me that when I’ve got it, they’ll send a courier to pick it up, along with my passport, and they’d continue the processing from there. He didn’t want to see any of my files, emails or photographs. He wished me a nice day, and I left more or less empty handed, but not without hope.
And so here we are; all we need are a German police certificate (or, as they call it, a Testimony of Good Conduct- I do love the Germans’ way with words), and a K-1 Visa. We’re two little pieces of paper away.
