The Immigration Office

On Tuesday, we went to the Immigration Office in Kaposvar for our residence permits. When we applied for visas through the Hungarian Consulate in Los Angeles, one of the required documents was a form proving we’d be staying in a home truly owned by the owner; in July, a man showed up at the Dévais’ house and executed a walk-through to make certain that the house itself was acceptable as well. This form then ended up in Kaposvar, which is why we headed there rather than to the larger office in Pécs, where we might have had a better chance of speaking to someone who knew English.

The visa application itself was nerve racking, though every assurance made by the man in Los Angeles turned out to be true (if I spoke only to the woman in this office, she provided instead impatience and logistically disturbing questions, and I needed a run and a day more to calm the fears she would unsettle). Even the titles of our visas were made of bureaucratic ambiguity: I needed a visa called “For a Visit of More than 90 days for Other Reasons,” but nowhere does it list the other reasons; everyone else needed a visa called “For a Visit of More than 90 Days for the Purposes of Family Reunification,” a title which seems to promise fragmentation and loss. We’d sent birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, extra passport photos, proof of medical insurance and financial security and income, as well copies of the Fulbright grant and the signed housing agreement, and all of these sensitive documents went back and forth through the mail twice. See the website for a hint of what we experienced.

Because we actually had our visas when we applied for the residence permits, our last official steps towards entry were to be small ones. But the feeling of helpless terror in the face of unknown bureaucracy, cultivated over a month through the mail and experienced so sharply in Frankfurt, returned in an office with no windows and no English. When we arrived, there were three desks and three clerks and five groups ahead of us. We all stood to the left of a pillar in the middle of the room. After twenty minutes and no movement in lines and the distressing disappearance of clerks for increasing lengths of time, three others showed up and moved to the right of the pillar, creating an alarming Y shape in the line. Ten minutes later, someone else showed up and blithely took a number from one of the desks, causing the rest of us to gasp in bile and surprise and reshuffle our queue once again. By this time, only one clerk was disappearing and returning. The clerk called out number four in Hungarian: we were number seven. I left the office for a bathroom and the men in the office upstairs gesticulated to the floor below and laughed as soon as I was out of the room. Once outside the bathroom, I tried to get the key from the toothless man who emerged from it but he didn’t want to give it up. Stephanie was reading to the kids back in the Immigration Office, and number four was still at the table. When they left, finally a new number was to be served; but suddenly newcomers swooped in without a number and were comfortably served, destroying my sense of order. Further disturbing this were the groups who, after twenty minutes at the desk and leaving to fill out forms, cut back in for another twenty minutes. Still, none of the other clerks returned. Finally, number six took his place at the table. There was tension between number six and me: he was one of the Y overflows arriving after us; we had played dominance games with our eyes and then he got to the queue numbers before me. Number six spent less than a minute exchanging angry words in Hungarian before grabbing his passport and storming out, which finally cleared our path to the table: number seven.

What was distressing about all this was partly concern about being served at all, but the biggest portion was anticipation for what might happen once we had the papers in front of us. Annamaria, our Fulbright liaison in the Budapest Office, had told me they’d be waiting for us in Kaposvar and knew our case and had our papers. But how could she be so sure that any of these random clerks would know who we were and what we needed? In fact, when the lone clerk in the room finally shrugged to indicate “Whoever’s next” and I rushed over, he spoke no English and seemed at an absolute loss. All my fears were confirmed. But suddenly, there was another man in front of us, a man we had not yet seen, a man with solidity and weight. And like magic, he said, in a kind of English, “You are Grosskopf?” And we sat down.

Finally! We were now the people at the table at which everyone stared. And forty minutes later, we were told to come back two hours later when our permits would be ready.

We were nervous about the time, because Katalin’s brother and parents were waiting for us at their house on Lake Balaton, and we were approaching the conservative hour I’d set to meet them. We’d brought two phones, but Stephanie and I don’t use cell phones in Seattle and we couldn’t get them to work. And we also didn’t know at that point that we wouldn’t just be picking up the permits once they were ready. We would be signing multiple other forms, each of which was painstakingly prepared and then maddeningly, walked back to the photocopier and copied individually, such that, with three papers for each of us to sign, our officer took fifteen additional trips to the photocopier. Five of these provided identical warnings, photocopied five times, and then signed five times, and then photocopied five more times—a page and a half written in Hungarian about our status as foreign nationals, which we were told to read when we returned home. At least this was a promise that, at some point, we could leave the room.

Sophie in Kaposvar

Annamaria told us the office was open from one to three in the afternoon. We arrived at one. It was now 4:40. The cotton candy Lacko senior bought the girls an hour and a half later on the shores of Lake Balaton was welcome color and delight.