by Chaitali Sen
“People who leave outside of the proper channels relinquish their citizenship. When your parents returned in 1955, their citizenship was conditional. It would have been clearly explained to them upon reentry. They had to apply for restoration of citizenship, but we have no papers showing they completed the process. As far as the government is concerned, you and your parents are here illegally.”
“That’s absurd,” John exclaimed. “Even if her parents aren’t technically citizens, she was born here.”
“But where is your proof?” cried Mr. Hussain. “I have no authority to issue a passport to a non-citizen. Bring us proof and we’ll give her a passport.”
“What kind of proof will you accept besides a birth certificate?” Mariam asked.
That question seemed to confound him. “Maybe an official letter from the hospital where you were delivered. It might work or it might prompt an investigation. Probably they would require an official interview with your parents.”
“My father is invalid. He can’t answer questions.”
“You’re lucky this is the only consequence. We could deport you.”
“Deport me? To where?”
He didn’t answer. Mariam wished they would deport her. Any place had to be better than this.
“All right,” John said, leaning forward. “Forget about her parents for a minute. I am a citizen, unless that’s also under dispute.”
“If you have a passport, you are a citizen,” Hussain said in all seriousness.
“Mariam is my wife. We have a marriage certificate. Why can’t she apply for citizenship as my wife?”
The man looked impressed. “Yes, that’s a solution.”
“How long will that take?” Mariam asked. She wondered if that would also require her parents to make official statements.
“A year or two? I don’t work for Immigration.”
“A year? I can’t get a temporary passport in the meantime?”
The man looked at John. “Please explain to her, we don’t issue passports to people without citizenship. There isn’t any country that does that.” They both turned and watched her wipe tears from her cheeks, but Hussain was unmoved. “Bring proof. Or apply for citizenship as your husband suggested. Those are the simplest solutions.”
John squeezed her hand. “Mariam, wait out in the lobby for a minute.”
She sat in her chair frozen, staring at him. He tilted his chin toward the door. Slowly she stood up and said flatly to the man, “Thank you, you’ve been very helpful.” She stormed out, walking all the way out of the building, and waited for him on the sidewalk. Tears kept falling down her cheeks. People stared at her as they passed. She wiped them away as fast as she could.
John came out a minute later. He hailed a taxi and got in after her. He told the driver where to go and watched him pull out. The driver was on his radio, having a conversation with the dispatcher. John leaned back in his seat.
“I asked if there was anything else that could be done,” he told her.
“You mean like a bribe?” Mariam’s heart was racing. All she needed was another paper in her file saying her husband had offered a bribe. Anyway, if it had worked, he would have looked more pleased with himself.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“We danced around it for a little while. He pretended to be offended at first. Then he asked what I had in mind, I said five thousand . . . ”
“Five thousand? That’s insane.”
“He said ten, and I said, what guarantee do I have that my wife will get her passport, and he said there are no guarantees, and I left.”
“You gave him the money?”
“No, Mariam, I don’t carry that kind of money with me.”
She burst into tears again. This time she couldn’t control the sound of her sobbing. John put his arms around her, trying to hush her. He said he didn’t mean to snap at her. He was a little frustrated, that was all.
“I swear I didn’t know anything about this,” she said.
“Of course you didn’t.”
“My parents have ruined me.”
“It’s possible they just didn’t understand, or they weren’t well-informed.”
She considered the possibility. “Maybe they’re lying, John. What if none of this is true?”
“What do you mean?”
“This restoration of citizenship business. Who has ever heard of such a thing?”
John shook his head. “It sounds strange to me.”
“I’m going to look into it. I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“I know you will,” he said, kissing her forehead.
“I don’t want you to be troubled with this,” she said. “While you’re away, I’ll take care of it. When you get back, you’ll see, everything will be fixed.”
“While I’m away?”
“It won’t be fixed before Copenhagen. I can try but I doubt it.”
His entire demeanor changed, his bravado falling away like a shattered porcelain mask. When they got back into their apartment, he poured a glass of whiskey down his throat before he went off to work.
Mariam called her mother. She told her as calmly as she could what had happened in the passport office. When she was finished with her story, there was silence on the other end of the line. “Mama, do you know anything about this?”
“Of course not, Mariam.” She had never heard her mother sound so shrill. She had to believe that she was telling the truth.
“Are you sure? Did Daddy talk to Immigration alone when you came back into the country?”
“Immigration? There was nothing, Mariam. They stamped our passports and let us go. Do you think I would have left something like that alone?”
“But maybe Daddy knew. Maybe he was afraid to tell you because he knew you would be angry.”
“How am I going to find out from him now? He can barely put two words together.”
She could sense that her mother was getting too upset. Mariam felt she needed to calm her down. “All right, I’m sure there’s a solution. Do you remember the name of the doctor who delivered me?”
“Of course, it was Doctor Shah. We used to run into him many times walking along the canal. He’s long gone, Mariam. He was an old man when he delivered you.”
“He’s dead?” Marian asked, and somehow that made her laugh deliriously. She laughed so hard it alarmed her mother. “Stop, darling, you’re frightening me.”
Mariam put her hand up to her mouth, trying to stop herself, and at the same time, her fingers caught a flood of tears.
They consulted a lawyer. He told them Mr. Hussain had been correct, that there was such a statute that required returning refugees to restore their citizenship if their loyalty to the sovereignty of the country could not be established. He gave examples of scenarios in which the law was likely to be applied, for instance if a male bypassed his military service either before he left or upon his return, or if there were ties within the family to the secessionist movement. Mariam had to admit that both of those could have been true. Certainly her grandfather would have been considered a part of the secessionist movement, and if her father had ever done his military service, she never heard about it.
He advised them to take the least drastic route first, to try to get a statement from the hospital where she was born and resubmit her passport application. If the application was submitted through the lawyer, there was a chance they would take it more seriously and let the paperwork slide through. Mariam got a statement from the hospital, and they resubmitted the application through the lawyer. Even if that worked, she would be lucky to get a passport before the summer.
John was evasive about his trip to Copenhagen. Whenever she asked him questions about it, and tried to get him to show some urgency in getting ready for the trip, he told her he had it all under control. Mariam decided n
ot to talk to him about it anymore. She wondered if he was angry with her, or her parents, for creating this situation. If he blamed her in any way, he didn’t show it. He was working hard on his dissertation and the presentation for Copenhagen. He seemed tired, and he didn’t want to talk about Copenhagen. Other than that, his behavior toward her had not changed at all.
In early March, when the trip was imminent, he came home and found her folding laundry on the bed. He came into the room talking. He told her he had canceled their plane tickets because he was not going to Copenhagen. He had already told Nehemia. It was already done. He was sorry that he had kept it a secret from her, but he had no desire to face another separation, even if it was for a short time. He rambled on, talking about lost years and regret.
As Mariam listened to him, all she could think was that they had made a mistake. She kept repeating it in her head, we’ve made a terrible mistake, a terrible mistake, until she blurted it out and John stared at her intently. “What do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean. It’s a mistake.” She was crying again. Her nerves were so fragile.
He narrowed his eyes. “You mean us? We’re the mistake?” She nodded and he grabbed her by the shoulders. When he saw that he had taken her too roughly, he laid his hands more gently on her cheeks. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that, Mariam. Are you unhappy here with me?”
“No,” she said. Of course she wasn’t unhappy with him. It was only his sacrifice that was intolerable.
“Then don’t say that, Mariam.”
She lowered her head, feeling ashamed and guilty. Her tears soaked his shirt. In a year, maybe even in a few months, she hoped she would look back on all this and realize how oblivious she had been to the temporary nature of their hardship. She imagined talking about it at a dinner party, describing her passport difficulties and saying, “It was such a nightmare,” in the same way she had often heard people exaggerating situations that were stressful and even maddening, but nothing close to a nightmare.
NINE
When he came back from Copenhagen, Nehemia called John into his office. John expected a summary of the conference but Nehemia didn’t want to talk about Copenhagen. He wanted to know when John would be turning in his dissertation. John said, “Any day now.” Then Nehemia got to the point. He told John he would be announcing his resignation at the end of the week. John needed to defend his dissertation before the new director came in. “How soon is that?” John asked.
Nehemia said, “Any day now.”
It wasn’t that John didn’t know something was going on. Nehemia had been under pressure for a while to run a more practical program. Every time he had a bad meeting with the college chancellor, he lectured his doctoral students about the importance of pure research, saying scientists were not in the business of nation building and the only way to judge the value of a research topic was by the scientist’s engagement in the questions guiding that topic. John had heard his arguments countless times, and while he agreed with him in principle, he could see Nehemia becoming somewhat dogmatic about it. He called Malick’s program kindergarten geology and Mount Belet a mining academy.
“Why do you think I wanted to take you to Copenhagen?” Nehemia asked. “I’m concerned about your future. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering what happened to John Merchant.”
“I don’t plan to stay,” John assured him.
Nehemia didn’t seem to hear him. “I remember the distraction of having a pretty new wife, John. But I had time. You don’t. Everything here is about to change.”
“There are some delays with Mariam’s passport, that’s all. As soon as she can travel, I’ll put in my applications. If you know someone who can expedite things . . . ”
“It’s because you married a girl from Sulat,” Nehemia interrupted. “Nothing against Mariam, but you’ve made things difficult for yourself.”
John regretted telling him the truth. He’d made the same mistake with his own father, and got a similar response. His father had performed heart surgery on cabinet ministers, by all accounts adding years to their lives, yet he was afraid to ask them to do a small kindness for Mariam. It surprised John because he could see how quickly his parents had fallen in love with her, despite their resistance to his marriage. They embraced her with all kinds of loving gestures, especially his father, but they were equally eager to distance her from the family name as soon as a reason presented itself. He didn’t understand how they could regard her with so much affection and shame all at once.
And still John was happy. Despite the attitudes of his parents and his trusted advisor, despite the crushing disappointment they’d already encountered in their young marriage, it was impossible for him to be unhappy. As long as he could protect her, as long as he could hold off his terror of her retreating, he knew happiness was his natural condition now.
For her part, Mariam was trying to control her nerves. He had underestimated her reaction to his decision not to go to Copenhagen. Though it was the right decision and he didn’t regret it, he spent days undoing the damage it did to her confidence. She made him promise not to give up any more opportunities for her. If he had to go away, she would wait for him; she would still be here when he got back. “You should know that about me by now,” she said. It was meant to reassure him but she missed the landing. All of their conversations regarding Copenhagen were plagued with these tiny failures of intent and interpretation. In the end they agreed to move on from the subject. It helped to hand the problem over to a lawyer who seemed to understand the situation. All they had to do was follow his directions and wait. That was something they could endure together.
John told Nehemia he would take his advice to heart. Nehemia meant well, but there was nothing John could do right now to satisfy him, and no point in talking about it anymore. He left the office and went to look for Vic, who should have been dismissing his undergraduate seminar. John stood outside the classroom door, watching Vic through the glass panel. The class had gone over by at least five minutes, and Vic was still giving an animated lecture, talking fast and waving his huge hands around for emphasis. At one point Vic said something funny and his students burst into laughter. Vic waited for their laughter to subside before finishing his lecture. John shook his head, smiling at the spectacle. Vic had a gift for this. He was a fine scholar but this was his calling and his passion, and John felt a flood of pride and relief that he was doing so well. All of Vic’s troubles seemed to be behind him.
He couldn’t wait around for Vic anymore. It was four o’clock and Mariam’s shift at the library was over. She was waiting for him on the steps of the science building and when she saw him, she smiled. It was a beautiful day.
Nehemia made sure John’s dissertation defense went smoothly and secured him an appointment letter for the following year. He and his wife were giving their apartment to Mrs. Nehemia’s niece and leaving in June for McGill University in Canada. At the end of May, John and Mariam went to their apartment for dinner. The women chatted like old friends while Nehemia tried to prepare him for the changes in the department. His replacement hadn’t been chosen yet, but all of the candidates had backgrounds in ore mining or petroleum. Everyone loyal to Nehemia had been shut out of the selection process. “It will get ugly, John. Keep your head low and get out as soon as you can.”
John found it difficult to say goodbye to Nehemia, who had influenced him more than his own father. The department gave him an emotional farewell party and even Malick came to town for it. As much as those two liked to insult each other, there was always an obvious affection between them.
John asked Malick if he was leaving the country too, and Malick laughed, hitting him hard on the back. He wanted Malick to stay in Alexandria for a few days and invited him to stay with him and Mariam. They had a narrow room that John used as an office, but Mariam had managed to fit a small bed across from John’s desk.
“You shouldn’t have gone through the trouble,” Malick said when he saw the furniture so tightly fit into the room. “I could have slept on the floor.”
“It’s true Malick can sleep anywhere,” John told her. “I’ve watched him fall asleep on a boulder.”
Malick was happy to spend a few days in Alexandria. He was fond of the city. He asked if the parakeets and chipmunks still feasted together by the big cypress tree at the botanical gardens. When he looked around and realized neither John nor Mariam had any idea what he was talking about, he got excited and started packing a picnic with the lunch Mariam had made, insisting they go immediately to the gardens to witness an enchanting display of interspecies friendship. They took a taxi and in a while they were at the entrance of the gardens. They followed the main path until they came to the cypress grove and there they were, the striped chipmunks and green parakeets grazing on seeds children tossed on the ground. “Isn’t it sweet?” Malick asked Mariam. Mariam agreed that it was sweet, and she passed the question onto John. John had to admit that he didn’t understand all the excitement. “They’re chipmunks and parakeets. They’re the same size. They eat the same things. If they were lions and gazelles I’d be impressed.” John could have gone on. These creatures weren’t even interacting with each other.
“He’s no fun,” Mariam said. “Let’s go and eat on the lawn.” She led the way to a picnic spot and spread out a blanket. The lawn was full of children. A fleet of kites invaded the sky and they watched them fly as they ate their lunch. When she was finished, Mariam took out her book and said she wanted to read. She lay down on her stomach and opened her book. John was ready to lie down next to her and take a nap, but Malick jumped to his feet and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
He didn’t mind joining Malick. It would be a good opportunity to talk. They strolled past a children’s exercise class that had begun on the lawn. A thin man with a high-pitched voice was shouting a rapid sequence of exercises into a bullhorn, eliminating children who could not keep up. Those children had to make a train behind him, each child wrapping his or her arms around the child in front. Sometimes the man turned to them with exaggerated gruffness, lowering his voice about half an octave, and scolded them in a way that made them quiver with laughter.