Ratty Rant

On the walk back, he berates me for the star’s alignment.

We open the door to an office that is untouched by time, straight into a time capsule of Soviet-era sameness with large shelves brimming with knickknacks, dusty manuals, frayed hardcover books of unknown content, potted plants on the sill, instant coffee accoutrement's accompanied by a dozen old-fashioned cups and saucers, the type you find in every home in the region. The woman, tall and elbowing old-age, flexes in tight pants, and after answering the mandatory "Dobry den" peers from her spectacles, stands up, turns her back to us, and proceeds to put on lipstick. Red. I see it when she turns back around. The place is a revelation to me and I marvel at the relic, imagining it just as it must have been before, a perspiring museum. Soothing to her, I gather, what with all the new world orders, her office is just as it always was when she first gained her post, back in the early seventies. We’re here to have her inspect our papers.

She gestures us to take a seat, and after I do, some confusion ensues and she points my boyfriend to another chair. Maybe she just meant for him to sit. Whatever, I think, and gaze at her now familiar features, having seen them innumerable times in these parts of Slovakia. He hands her the papers. I sit back, keeping mum, as she doesn’t speak English and I, no Slovak. My mood is hopeful, optimistic even.

Surely, once she sees the documents, she will nod and send us on our way back to the other office for final approval, the one we just left prior to being instructed to come to this one. She leafs through the stacks of papers - bounded, stamped, signed, country-colored ribbon-adorned, translated, notarized - and after some brisk banter back-and-forth, he leaves, and I, taking my cue, follow suit.

The pile remains with her. Once we are outside the door, he motions for us to sit down on a browned-green couch that surely has been unceasingly plopped on without so much as a wipe for the last thirty or forty years. I am somehow delighted by that prospect, as if I have been given a privileged seat into what was denied me by the Iron Curtain before.

Walls of skuzzy pea green with undulating ridges like dilated veins faces us. Us in the narrow stairway in which we are made to wait and wait in the moldy green sofa. I keep note of my surroundings, wishing I could take pictures. I venture to ask him, my betrothed, as much and am somewhat wounded by his refusal. What’s the big deal? I think to myself. I could post it on my blog later, with entertaining and informative commentary. The corner walls has a curtain whose motif can best be described as spleen-blue, though I am at a loss as to the why of that curtain, being the place is insured against light, having never entered it.

At some point, the Gypsy man we saw at the earlier office emerges and I, seeing him as our compatriot in the ordeal, offer a convivial “Dovidenia,” rousing another chastising from my boyfriend. Why did you do that for? he sneers.

Because we saw him earlier and I felt like it, I say. I have been here long enough to observe "they" are not exactly on equal footing with the rest of the population. It is my intention to do my part to treat them well and encourage them to form a revolution of their own. I gather it will take some ingenious effort there, something that will harness a considerable amount of energy. I have time though, and as I’m thinking this, a rather big, vertically and horizontally, specimen of a young woman, skulks out of another office, one of many of the same sort.

She stalks the hall but I lose track of her movements soon enough, only to see her re-emerge a few minutes later, skulk back into her office and slam the door behind her. Was it an accident? I wonder. Or did she do it on purpose, an exclamation for our benefit. The range of passive-aggressive expressively here is wondrously diverse. “Pan Novak,” I hear. That’s him, my boyfriend’s name. Never mind that the papers in question are mine, not his, so it would seem fitting she’d call out my name, or at least both of our names, but then again, this is no time for feminist protestations.

So we go in and after taking our spots on the respective institutional chairs, of which at least three people, two men and one woman, pop by and brush against me at various points, without so much as a "Pardon," she points to the papers, voluminously pontificating as she leafs through them, all the while exchanging incomprehensible words that are made less so by a characteristically sadistic grin on her part and fraying brows over bulging eyes on his.

Something’s wrong. Of course there is.

There had to be something. She wants the contact information of the original office that issued the document, with all the dates of their handling it. Never mind that an Uberoffice has already verified that document with all its ninny
contents.

What’s this, a sworn affidavit? Anyone can swear under oath. Why is this signature in blue ink – the rest is in black. How do I know it’s not falsified? It could just as well be.

They’ve already been checked, and have an Apostille (the stamp that is supposed to assuage every qualm), you nitwit, which should instruct you to shut your trap and take it. How do I know you are not genetically modified? I think.

A breath – I envision more translations, more money spent on inanity.