Travels to Siberia

What to say about the Russian embassy in Paris, where I spent three mornings in the past two weeks getting our visas for our trip next month to Moscow and St. Petersburg? For starters, it's in Siberia. Few places I've been to in Paris proper are more than a five-minute walk from a Metro, but this is one of them. (Ian Frazier explores this figurative sense of "Siberia" at the start of his fantastic book, Travels in Siberia, which has helped to kindle my own Russo-philia.) Once you get there, you then must wait along the iron fence ringing the embassy, for there is always a line to enter the consular services office, where visas are processed. Security at the front door is handled by a 50ish man in a dark suit who looks like a young Captain Ramius. He somehow manages to smile faintly with his mouth, while glaring at you with steely eyes hidden underneath a prominent brow. It's highly unnerving -- at once welcoming and fear-inspiring. And thereby indicative of the process that unfolded once inside and, based on what I've heard and read, of the country we'll visit.

Churchill once referred to Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." This is very much reflected in the visa-application form for Americans. It's two pages, with spaces of varying sizes (though most of them are small) for entering even more information than I can recall the French government asking of us before we moved to Paris, including the names and addresses of all schools we've attended since high school, all the jobs we've held, all the countries we've visited in the last ten years and whether we're experts in explosive devices. And it must be filled out in black ink, in duplicate, which I learned only after first submitting ours in blue. This error gave me the opportunity to observe the consular office in detail, as I sat at a communal table filling out new forms in black (other people at the table were doing the same, or cutting out passport photos and affixing them to their applications with Embassy-provided scissors and glue), and as I stood in line again that day and the next (I had to come back with the black-ink forms signed by Ashley), and the following Wednesday (to actually get the visas):

- The walls have wood paneling that probably dates to the de Gaulle administration.

- The furniture includes two La-Z-Boy-like leather chairs the same 1960s shade of brown as the walls, one of which broke while someone was sitting in it my second morning there.

- Behind the service windows I saw some bulky phones with curly cords that clearly were also of the same era. The red one looked like it might have once served as Khrushchev's hotline to the White House.

- Every so often I heard a burst of staticky Russian from the windows that appeared to be reserved for Russians, where the consular workers had to use some ancient intercom system to talk to the applicants.

Maybe someday some of that oil, natural-gas and mineral money will trickle down to the Paris embassy. In the meantime, visiting it is a very Kafka-esque experience.

Fortunately, behind the window at which I ended up was a polite, helpful consular officer who spoke English. She showed me my mistakes, told me how to correct them and referred to Ashley as "Mrs." throughout the process ("Here Mrs. must sign the application."). It was thus to her window that I returned on pick-up day, after I discovered a mistake on my visa (Mrs.'s was fine). She remembered me from the week before, told me to come back in fifteen minutes et voilà: the error was corrected, and at last we were good to go to Russia. Which goes to show how important it is to know the right people. Especially in Siberia.

-- MBB