Somebody's Heart Is Burning

by Tanya Shaffer

  About five minutes later, the same man who’d been assisting the Asian applicant appeared at my window, sliding back the wooden cover. He was fortyish and puffy-faced, the whites of his eyes yellow and watery. He gazed at me with a haggard expression.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “I’d like to apply for a reentry visa.”

  He disappeared without a word, sliding the window cover back into place. I waited a few minutes, confused. Had I said something wrong? Then his face appeared at Katie’s window.

  “Can I help you?” he mumbled.

  Katie requested an application for a reentry visa as well, and again he disappeared. Five minutes passed. Ten. Katie and I looked at each other. I raised my hand to knock again, and the window slid back. The man thrust some papers into my hand.

  “You will return these papers to that window,” he said, indicating the cubby marked Officer in Charge.

  “D’you think this guy’s the Wizard or just the gatekeeper?” I mumbled to Katie, when the same face appeared at the Officer in Charge window. We handed him our forms and he told us, in a flat tone, to sit down and wait. Half an hour later he materialized behind the Commonwealth window and summoned us to the counter.

  “The two of you must bring a letter from your association,” he said.

  “What kind of letter?” I asked.

  “A letter in support of your request to leave the country,” he said, a touch of annoyance momentarily animating his face.

  “When should we return?” asked Katie timidly.

  For a moment he stared at her as though this were the single stupidest question he’d ever heard. “When you have the letter,” he said at last.

  “Do we get our passports back?” I asked.

  “When you return.” He closed the window with a thud.

  “Okeydokey,” I said to the piece of wood. “You have a nice day.”

  We returned to the hostel, grumbling. Francis Awitor, the president of the association, had an office right next to the room where we all slept. I knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” he called out.

  “Ko ko,” I said, sticking my head in. “It’s Korkor and Mansah.”

  “Come in, sistahs,” said Mr. Awitor, giving us a polite smile. He was a formal, cautious man who lacked the exuberance of most Ghanaians. Although his office was right next to the place where we all slept and spent long lazy days between projects, we saw surprisingly little of him. On the few occasions when I’d had cause to knock on his office door, he’d always worn the same expression on his face, an expression that said he expected the worst. Katie and I filed soberly into his office and sat down in two metal folding chairs directly facing his paper-cluttered desk.

  “How can I help you?” said Mr. Awitor, adjusting his glasses. “I trust you are enjoying your experience here?”

  “Oh, yes, absolutely!” I said. “I’ve gained so much from volunteering here, I can’t even tell you . . .” I paused awkwardly. “Anyway,” I continued, “we were thinking of exploring some other parts of West Africa—you know, Mali, Burkina Faso—for a couple of months.”

  “Well, your contributions have been most appreciated by the association,” said Mr. Awitor. “Please come back and see us when you return.” He gave us a small smile, and made as if to return to the papers in front of him.

  “Well, thanks,” I said, “but, um, the reason we wanted to see you, actually . . .” I swallowed, feeling inexplicably nervous. Katie, who sat beside me picking at her cuticles, was no help.

  “Yes?” He looked at me coolly over the tops of his wire-rimmed glasses. I explained about the man at the immigration office, the request for a letter from the association.

  Mr. Awitor smiled then, and I relaxed. I shot Katie a glance: What were we worried about?

  “Unfortunately, sistahs, I cannot help you with this,” he said after a moment’s pause. “You see, in the past I have written letters for volunteers, requesting the reentry visa for them. Then the immigration office has phoned me, here,” he tapped the telephone on his desk, “and requested that I come and speak to them. They have asked me, ‘Is it necessary to their work that your volunteers must leave the country?’ and I have told them, ‘No, it is not necessary that they leave the country for their work.’ Then they have said to me, ‘So why is it that you request a visa for them?’ I said, ‘I request the visa only to help them out.’ He then told me I must not request the visas any longer. So you see,” he spread his hands out on the desk, “It is not possible for me to assist you.” He smiled benevolently, and returned to his papers.

  “But they specifically told us we needed a letter from you,” I said.

  He looked at me as though he was surprised I was still there. He shrugged, smiling again. “Perhaps you have not spoken to the right person.”

  The immigration office was hopping when we arrived the next day. A tall, blond Viking stood pounding on the wooden square covering the Western European Section.

  “You’ve given me the wrong form!” he shouted. A small claque of equally Nordic-looking women stood behind him, softly kvetching in a lilting Scandinavian tongue. Behind them a couple of long-haired young German men in heavy metal T-shirts ranted loudly, waving passports and forms in the air for emphasis.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I think the man has gone to lunch without informing us,” said one of the Germans, “He went to collect some forms over an hour ago and has not returned.”

  “Oh, that is simply not on,” said a middle-aged British woman who had entered behind us. “Dreadfully incompetent,” she muttered, sitting down in one of the desk chairs and wiping her brow with a handkerchief. “Dreadful heat.”

  Katie and I exchanged rueful grins. We took seats, amused by the spectacle of the other visa-seekers’ despair. About forty-five minutes later, the familiar haggard face appeared at the Western European window. The Vikings had given up and departed. The British woman had fallen asleep, her head on the plastic desktop. The German youths, who had been leaning against the wall, charged the window like bulls.

  “What took you so long?” one of them demanded.

  “Here are your forms,” the man said, not dignifying the question with a response. “Return them to this window when you have completed them.” He was just about to close the window when Katie stuck her hopeful face in his line of vision.

  “Hello,” she said, full of false cheer. “I don’t know if you remember my friend Tanya and me. We were in to see you yesterday.”

  “Yes,” he said, with no flicker of recognition.

  “Well, you see,” she went on, “yesterday you told us we must bring you a letter from our voluntary association.”

  “Have you got it?”

  “Well, here’s the rub.” Katie smiled an ingratiating smile I’d never seen her use before. “When we spoke to Mr. Awitor, the president, he told us that your office had expressly forbidden him to write letters on behalf of volunteers! Because, you see, we aren’t traveling with the association. We’ve actually finished our work, and we’re traveling on our own, as tourists, you see. Our work is done, so our comings and goings no longer concern the association.” She flashed the kaka-eating grin again.

  “Your names?” he said.

  We told him.

  “Please wait.” He closed the window. We sighed and returned to our desks. He reappeared a couple of minutes later, holding our passports and letters. “It says here,” he said, holding up our letter, “that you were volunteers. Therefore, we must have a letter from the voluntary organization.”

  “But Katie just explained to you—” I began.

  “Perhaps they are still in need of your services. Perhaps they do not permit you to go.”

  “It’s a voluntary association,” I said, biting off my consonants. “We were there voluntarily. We can leave any time we want!”

  “You must bring a letter—”

  “But you see—” Katie began.

  “You m
ust bring a letter!” His voice remained level, but his eyes blazed with intent.

  I’ve been known, on occasion, to have a bit of a short fuse. I once got into a screaming fight with an elderly woman who worked in a pay toilet in France, when she berated me for not bringing the toilet paper roll back out of the stall. On top of that, I have never done well with bureaucracy. If I could be said to have a pet peeve, it would be people who blindly enforce regulations without ever stopping to question their efficacy or common sense. Friends had warned me, when I left for West Africa, to prepare myself for administrative hassles, but up to now I’d dealt with surprisingly few. Two, to be exact. Once at the post office I’d been put through an hour-long rigmarole of forms and questions in order to collect a package. Just as I completed them, the young woman decided to leave for lunch, and refused to get the package for me until she returned. The second occasion was similar, except it took place in a bank. In both these instances I’d remained calm and ironic, congratulating myself inwardly on my increased maturity. I therefore surprised no one more than myself when I marched out of the visa application room in a burst of fury, slamming the door behind me.

  “Robots! Fucking robot people, rules, rules, rules, they don’t listen!” I shouted in the echoing hallway. A couple of doors cracked and curious faces peeped out, but I was too incensed to care. I strode out of the building and through the courtyard to the side of the road where I sat down in a patch of grass and began to cry. “Robots!” I shouted again.

  I’d been crying for a few minutes when I heard sounds of hilarity coming from across the street. Three men were gathered around a stand which sold chunks of fried yam. They were looking at me and pointing, half-chanting, half-singing, “One . . . Two . . . Three . . . Cry!” They burst into laughter and applause, then began the chant over again. I stared at them for a moment, incredulous. Then I began to laugh. Laughing even harder, they gave me a thumbs-up, cheering.

  Ghanaians, I thought, shaking my head. Gotta love ’em.

  Katie joined me a few minutes later.

  “Did you make any headway?” I asked.

  She shook her head dejectedly. “Though I can’t say it helped, your flouncing out like that.”

  “I know, I know,” I said dejectedly. “I thought I had it under control. I just get so . . .” I paused, at a loss. “Well, it won’t happen again. What do we do now?” I asked.

  I let Katie go first this time. She stuck her head through Mr. Awitor’s door, smiling her special smile.

  “Please come in,” said Mr. Awitor. He raised his eyebrows in a look of tolerant surprise. Though the corners of his mouth turned upward in the semblance of a smile, the tightness of his lips said that the surprise was not a pleasant one. “What can I do for you?” he asked, before we’d had a chance to sit down.

  “Yes, well,” Katie began. We’d agreed to let her do the talking.

  “Yes,” said Mr. Awitor briskly.

  “It’s this matter of the reentry visa,” she said, pausing slightly to clear her throat.

  “I explained to you—”

  “You certainly did explain the difficulty. And we tried to explain it to the gentleman at the immigration office. But you see, unfortunately, he persists in saying that he requires a letter from you. Not a letter stating that you want us to go to Mali, you understand, simply a statement that you have no objection to our going to Mali—”

  But Mr. Awitor was shaking his head sadly.

  “I’m very sorry, ladies, but as I told you—”

  “You told us,” I interrupted, “that you couldn’t ask for our visas. And we don’t want you to! If you could just say that we’re no longer working for you and you don’t care if we go to Mali or not . . .”

  He laughed and made the same gesture, palms up on the table. “I cannot so much as mention Mali in a letter,” he said.

  “Fine!” I said, my voice rising. “Fine! Don’t mention Mali. Not a word about Mali. How ’bout I just type up something that says you don’t care where we go one way or the other, and you sign it? How about that?”

  “Tanya . . .” Katie placed a warning hand on my arm.

  “Sistah Korkor, there is no need to shout,” Mr. Awitor said. The polite smile now made me want to wring his neck. “As I have already made clear to you—”

  But I was off the chair and out of his office, back into the hostel, raging and banging doors. Every ounce of my hard-won self-control was gone. It was as though, all at once, the accumulated months of heat and nausea and frustration with the work had rolled down a hill like a giant magnetic ball, picking up scraps of rubbish as it went.

  “Goddamn it!” I shouted. “God fucking damn it! Idiocy! Total, brainless, robotic . . .”

  “Sistah, what is it?” said Ayatollah, who’d been out in the yard behind the hostel, washing some laundry.

  “Don’t concern yourself,” said a new French volunteer, before I had a chance to answer. “She has a high temper.”

  That stopped me. “How would you know?” I asked. The girl had arrived yesterday. We hadn’t exchanged ten words.

  She shrugged, flapped a hand at my behavior, smiling. “I know Americans.”

  There were no applicants in the visa room when we arrived. The American Section window was open, and the familiar jowly face was behind it, staring glumly at some papers on the counter in front of him.

  “You must speak to this lady,” he said as soon as he saw us, jerking his head toward the Officer in Charge window.

  To our great surprise, we saw that the window there was also open and a cheerful young woman’s face peered out. She beamed as we approached.

  “Friends,” she said warmly. “How can I help you?”

  “Well,” I said, a spark of hope igniting painfully in my chest. “We put in applications for reentry visas several days ago . . .”

  “Your names, please?” Her smile was radiant, beatific. It illuminated her entire face.

  We snuck a look at each other as she disappeared into the recesses of the office. Could she be as golden as she seemed?

  When she returned, she actually opened a door next to the windowed panels and joined us in the room.

  “Please, ladies, have a seat,” she said. She held our passports, applications, and the fateful letter in which we’d exposed the fact that we’d once been volunteers. “I understand that you were working here, and now you would like to leave the country and travel. I understand as well, that you would like a visa so that after your travels you may return to Ghana. We are happy that you find Ghana so sweet that you want to return.” She paused, glancing down at the papers. “Yet surely you understand that we require a letter from your association to back up your request.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled directly into my eyes.

  The flicker of hope in my chest died instantly, leaving a cold lump. “Miss . . .” I began wearily.

  “Mrs. Oppong,” she said.

  “Mrs. Oppong, perhaps your compatriot has explained to you—” and then abruptly, I stopped. Why was I putting myself through this? To save fifty bucks? I could leave the country and apply for a new visa from the Ghanaian embassy in Mali. If that didn’t work I’d try the one in Burkina Faso. Sooner or later somebody would let me back in. I looked at Mrs. Oppong, who was gazing at me with an expression of consternation, a slight furrow in her brow.

  “Is there a problem, sistah?”

  “No problem at all,” I said, making myself breathe normally. I even managed a smile. “I’ve just decided not to pursue a reentry visa at this time. I’d like my passport back.”

  “Oh, sistah! Surely you would like to reconsider. If it’s not possible for you to provide the proper documentation, we could take a few more days to determine—”

  “Thank you, sister,” I said firmly. “You’re very kind. But I’d like my passport back, please. How ’bout you, Katie?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, in a small voice. Katie was on a tighter budget than I was, so the extra fifty or so dollars for
a new visa were more significant to her. She also had a more cautious personality than I did—she would worry terribly about whether or not we’d be able to get back in once we’d left.

  “If you could just bring us a letter,” Mrs. Oppong said gently. Her eyes were bright, luminous. I was certain that she was a siren. She would lure us here again and again, each day, to discuss the state of our reentry visas. The process would be drawn out for weeks, months, until the time we’d allotted for our trip had completely evaporated. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. I’d heard stories. Cautionary volunteer legends.

  “But I’m afraid we can’t,” said Katie. “We can’t get you a letter.” She was on the verge of tears.

  “Well, then, I’ll just hold onto this a few more days and reconsider.” Mrs. Oppong held Katie’s passport aloft.

  “Not mine,” I said emphatically.

  “Not yours, Miss Shaffer,” said Mrs. Oppong, and a slightly unpleasant note came into her voice. Frowning, she placed my passport in my outstretched hand.

  “Come on, Katie,” I said. “If you change your mind you can always bring it back.”

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Oppong, alarmed. “But then you would have to start the process all over, from the beginning.”