The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends

[Ian Ruskey]

I was still pretty jet-lagged and the timidity of a new job and the shock of a new culture had yet to wear off when my colleagues in the Consular Section offered me a cup of Cypriot coffee. Hoping it would offset the jet-lag and still wanting to make a good impression, I accepted the ominously small cup and the dark and bottomless liquid within. Andreas pulled out a camera, "to see the shock on your face." The line of visa applicants ground to a halt as everyone filed in to see how the new intern would cope with their coffee, and as I would understand it ten weeks later, their blood. The beverage looked thick enough to chew, and at the bottom of the tiny cup it actually was: sorta like cowboy coffee meets espresso.



The Cyprus Tourism Organization provides the following introduction to Cypriot Coffee in their brochure "Flavours of Cyprus: a food guide for visitors":

"Cypriots drink lots of local coffee. It is made individual in small long handled pots, wide at the base and tapering at the top. These are called mbrikia and come in various sizes. Fresh coffee beans, usually Brazilian, are finely ground or powdered daily and one heaped teaspoon is added to each demitasse of cold water. Sugar goes in at this stage, before heating the coffee on the stove. So you need to know whether you order you [sic.] coffee glykos (sweet), metrios (medium sweet), or sketos (unsweetened).

The mbrikia are heated on the stove and when the sugar has dissolved, the coffee is allowed to come to a boil, forming a creamy froth Kaimaki on top. As the froth turns in from the sides and the coffee begins to rise in the pot, it is removed from the heat and a little is poured into each cup to distribute the froth.

Cyprus coffee is strong and should always be served with a glass of cold water…"

…although in the Consular Section it never was.



Over the next ten weeks I would not only learn to appreciate this drink, but to love it, and to live off it. There would be days when the coffee was all that was kept us going. And more than once I would need a shot of that black fire to keep track of Panayiotis Panayiotou and type the right birthday for Christofides Christofidou or Maria Hadjipetrou. Andreas handed me my second cup that afternoon and said, "Whatever you do, don't put the coffee near the passports, in case it makes a spill."



I arrived on a Tuesday, and though I didn't know it then, Tuesday would become an auspicious day for me in the Consular Section. On Tuesdays we accepted applications from third-country nationals, non-residents of Cyprus: which meant Tuesdays were the days when 80 Iranian PhD students crammed into the waiting room to apply for Student Visas. Around the Embassy people called this madhouse event "Iranian Tuesday."



They set me straight to work scanning SAOs for the Iranians, and it wasn't long before I fell in love with the Iranians. Iran, as you may know, is quite the place these days: with a government that is actively developing enough nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the map twice over, and a President who has referred to America as "the great Satan." Back home I'm pretty sure we're convinced these people are off their rockers. But, being the sadistic rebel that I am, I was immediately fascinated with them and wanted to do everything I could to help them out….seeing that the entire world hates them and all. So I stayed a few minutes late that day to finish the stack I was working on, and the next day I stayed a few minutes more, and two weeks later I was working 12 hour days trying to eliminate the backlog of Iranian applications. Like a good American, I'm always rooting for the underdog, and committed to working hard for him. And as a Study-Abroad student myself, I felt a certain kinship with those guys, and seeing the hell they were going through, I eased my worries about my own visa application by working extra hard on theirs. Irrational I know, but that's how it goes sometimes.

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*

Even before living in Cyprus I began to question the status of a country. It started with Ambrose Bierce defining border as "an imaginary line dividing the imaginary rights of one people from the imaginary rights of another." This notion, combined with the idea that people are people wherever they are, led me to thinking of countries as large clubs.



That first night in Cyprus I stood on my balcony admiring the Pentadactoles Mountains and the nighttime breeze over Nicosia: Nicosia the last divided capital in the world. I looked out at the giant Turkish and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) flag built onto the mountain. I remembered seeing it on Google Earth, but that application fails to capture the way that the flag looms over the city. In the day it takes up a whole face of the mountain, and at night it glows with flashing lights. I spent a lot of time those first few weeks asking myself, asking the other interns: why is that flag there? Why is that country there? The TRNC isn't recognized by anyone but Turkey. The Republic of Cyprus (in the South) claims Turkish-speaking Cypriots as citizens: issues them passports and allows them to pass freely from one side to the other. Wouldn't it be simpler if the TRNC didn't exist: the UN could leave, Turkey could join the EU, all the guard posts on both sides of the island could be dismantled and my friends wouldn't have to waste two years of their lives in a mandatory but unnecessary military service, and most importantly Nicosia's airport could re-open and I wouldn't have to take a $100 taxi ride on my way out of Cyprus. But as I thought about it some more I realized that it couldn't be that simple, and that there must be some reason the people of Cyprus went through all trouble to make that giant flag. In the most basic and naive terms I concluded that they built that flag to proclaim the existence of some important idea. And from placement, facing the capitol of Cyprus, I gathered that the flag is meant to say, "we exist!"…a Turkish identity exists in Cyprus. And it does, it doesn't take more than a few steps across the green line to realize that.



As I spent more time in Cyprus, my thoughts changed. I began to think, why isn't that flag there? Why isn't that country there? After all, no one seemed to be bothered by it. People were able to cross back and forth as it pleased them. It certainly wasn't hurting anyone for it to be there, I mean they have lived with it for 30 years so it can't be that bad. There weren't gun battles or riots, and it seemed that people were well adjusted to the idea of the wall. I spent some time dreaming up things that would require them to take down the wall…but eventually I too got used to it and started worrying about work, and the more trivial daily things.



Now I don't know what to think about the peculiarity of the island which the Greeks refer to simply as ο Κυπριου "the Cyprus." Three days after my internship ends there are going to be some rather significant talks between the respective heads of the Cypriot states. We'll see if they have better luck. If nothing else the Cyprus problem makes things more interesting. Travelers who enter the island in the North often have difficulty when they seek to leave the island from the South, not to mention the innumerable property issues caused by the exodus/occupation/war/and confusion of 1974.



When Iranians came to the Embassy that Tuesday we started telling them to put their documents in a specific order and Andreas would bark at them if they came back with their DS-157 on top instead of their DS-156…be thankful that as an American you never have to apply for a U.S. Visa, or look into the cold stony eyes of a Department of Homeland Security border official as he fiddles for the appropriate stamp to admit you, deport you, admit, deport…

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I began to understand just how bad the Iranians have it when noticed that we could issue visas to Cypriots in just three days, but the Iranians were put in a file drawer to scan and draft their SAOs. I asked Randy, "Why do we do SAOs for the Iranians, and what is an SAO anyways?" "Security Advisory Opinion: required of all nationals of state sponsors of terrorism: Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba…" Basically we send their application off to every law enforcement agency in the United States and all of those have to return the thing with no objection before we can even think about issuing a visa. If this all sounds complex, it's because it is, consequently it can take months, many months for an SAO to come back from Washington. And as long as it takes, the wait is compounded by the time that the applications spend sitting in the file drawers full of SAOs to scan and draft. Some of the applications had been sitting in the drawer for months even before the processing began. I made it my goal to eliminate the backlog and get these applications on their way. At first I spent time getting to know each applicant, before sending them along but with two file drawer filled with SAOs to process I realized this was impractical if I were to get to all the applications buried in that file cabinet. So I started drafting the SAOs in batches, using the same text to carry the same essential information for each applicant. And then I decided to take a break and print some visas for a while.



Most people don't think of Cyprus as an Iranian haven, and it's not really (although many Iranians apply for asylum here). These students were just here to apply for a visa. Since the U.S. and Iran aren't on the best of terms these days, and since it kept getting bombed, the U.S. Embassy in Tehran has been closed. This means that any Iranian hoping to travel to the U.S. must apply for a visa at an Embassy outside Iran. Now the nearest U.S. Embassies are: Baghdad (which is not best of locations), Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ankara (where Iranians are routinely refused visas), Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (but Iranians are prohibited from entering "occupied Palestine"), and Nicosia.

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*

John "Randy" Carlino was an information officer in the Army before he became Consul and First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Cyprus. He served in Vietnam like my dad and has the same sort of wit and quirky expressions. One day, as I was working late on SAOs, he shouted from his office, "Get out of here Ian, it's time to go home." "I'll be done in just a minute." I shouted back. "Spoken like a good worker…yes sir…It's so hard admittin' when it's quittin' time. That's an old Patty Loveless song. Have you heard that one?" Or when taking up an application for further review, he would say "Let's take a look at old Joe. Joe Shmoe from Timbucktoe" and that was meant as a sort of recitation of some song rattling around the deranged carvers of Randy's mind. All of the FSNs had adopted this practice as well. And after lunch the whole room sat there cooing to various applications and forms in words handed down by country singers and folk artists. After a few weeks I found myself dong the same, "Ms. Zarah Khodafar, with an account balance of 2,000,000 Iranian whatevers…walking with diamonds on the soles of her shoes…" and on and on until I was just as crazy as the rest of them. The Consular Section seems to have that effect on people, and maybe that's what Randy meant when he said, "I sure hope you're not doing this when you're my age." It is important to understand that there is part of the Consular Section that is just as glorious and awesome as we might expect (interviewing the Minister of Finance for a visa, and inspecting foreign passports for signs of alteration), but there is also part of the Consular Section that is just as boring as a thousand other offices from Reno to Hoboken.



Occasionally I would pass the time by taking the opportunity to chit chat with some of the visa applicants as they waited for this or that, but one of them turned out to be a cute girl and Andreas teased me for making "Kaiemaki with the Iranians" not to be confused with Kaimaki (which the Cyprus Tourism Organization told you about a few pages ago). When Randy heard about it he said, "No flirting at the window there Ian. Service with a smile, but let's keep it at that." This was quite characteristic of American Customer Service. Anonymous in a way and generally friendly, but nothing more than the generic smile and idle small talk, nothing that might give the impression you were talking to an actual person instead of an agent of the United States government. It is a deliberate strategy of the State Department to rotate all the people with any sort of power at the embassy every two or three years, to prevent 'clientitis.' By contrast, when I applied for my visa at the Greek Embassy the officer asked me what I was studying and then we struck up a conversation about Homer and Ancient Greek and she took down my phone number to give to her husband, who is a classics scholar and writing his dissertation on Plato. That sort of Kaimaki would never fly at the American Embassy.

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*

Andreas is also the Counter-fraud Expert at the Consular Section, so one day he showed me what to look for to see if a passport is genuine or if it has been altered in any way. He showed me the watermark, micro-printed, raised ink, ultraviolet, and holographic features to look for. It didn't take long before I became a full-fledged passport enthusiast, and what better place than a consular office to examine all sorts of passport and visas. The Cypriot passport is ok, it has a nice hologram on the data page that makes the dove fly out of the state seal and turn into a silhouette of the island as you angle the passport from left to right. The ultraviolet features, however, are rather plain, and the Cypriot visa is just the same old EU visa that everyone uses these days. The Iranian Passport is interesting as it opens the other ways (since Arabic reads right to left) and it has a little note in the back cover, "the bearer of this passport is not allowed to travel to occupied Palestine." The Turkish, Egyptian, Indian, Israeli, Syrian, and French passports that I saw were rather old fashioned, the photo is just glued in and verified with a seal. The new Greek passport is about equivalent to the new US passport in terms of security features and design, but of course it is cooler because it has a picture of the Antikythera Mechanism on page 5 instead of a picture of rural Wyoming, and a hologram of the Parthenon instead of the Capitol building. But the prize for the best passport has to go to Germany. Apparently the guy who designs the German passport is just insane. He sleeps in the lab and works like a maniac, but his passports is beautiful. All the security features work together, making it impossible to alter just one part of it. I only saw the old version, which still had a glued in photo, but the photo had the person's name cut into it and there was a laminate over the data page with hologram of the person's face over their information.

Next Tuesday began after another harrowing journey clutching the handlebars of my "Squeaky Red Dragon" – a name which perhaps gave that bicycle more credit than was due. I tell you, nothing gets the blood going and adrenaline flowing like dodging trucks and speeding morning commuters on a bicycle that might very well fall apart as you're riding. I arrived in the office 5 minutes late to find a cup of that Cypriot heaven waiting on my desk next to a stack of Iranian SAOs. That Tuesday the other Consular Officer was on leave so Randy did all the interviews by himself. He finished at 1:30 what was usually finished at 11:00. When he finally came off the window he said, "I am tired. But what do we have this afternoon? Yep. The road goes on forever and the party never ends. That's an old Robert Earl Keen riff, but Joe Ely sang it best." Joe Ely seemed to have captured the spirit of the office those days. One Consular Officer left post, another was on vacation, leaving just Randy. Both the Visa Clerks left post, and two of the Foreign Service Nationals (local staff) were on leave. Our 10 person office had boiled down to just 4, and some days just 3. The workload, however, was not dropping off as quickly



I was reaching the breaking point too, so I started planning a vacation, something to "boost moral" as Randy would say, and something that would resurrect my spirits.



Just over two years ago, at the end of a nine day fast in the Gila Wilderness, I resolved to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And long before that I had dreamt of visiting my good friend Yarden, who moved to Israel five years ago. Since I was in the neighborhood (or at least the same time zone), I started looking at plane tickets. Yarden offered to show me around, and off I went.



On the way to the bus station her father explained that the day I'd chosen for my pilgrimage to Jerusalem was significant: it was a high holy day in Judaism marking the destruction of the Second Temple. "Confusion" he said, "Confusion characterizes the Israeli people these days. And today especially" as they try to reconcile their religion with the more common and attractive secular life-style. This was on a Sunday mind you, after the traditional Jewish Sabbath, where observers of the faith are forbidden to work (they even prepare all their food before hand on Friday night). A high holy day after the Sabbath meant two days of fasting and mourning: requiring more discipline than is practical for most people—hence the confusion.


In the Holy City I experienced confusion as well, although perhaps a simpler variety, as I wandered the streets, and always seemed to end up going down the same shop-ridden alley, heckled by the same shop owners. "Where are you from?" "Come into my shop." –the national language of Israel is Hebrew, so everything about these statements was designed for American tourists. Yarden and her friends warned me that I would get ripped off shamelessly in the Old City. But I had to try it our, and I was ripped off shamelessly. As I wandered around I ran into a man with a kind face, who struck up a conversation with me, he explained that he was born in the Old City and lived there all his life. He showed me a little chapel as we walked along, and as we turned a corner he said, "You can go down that way to the Western Wall." Then in a much gruffer tone, "Give me money."

Interlocutor: "I'm sorry, what?"

"Give me money."

Interlocutor: "Why?"

Not wanting to be impolite, I gave him 10 shekels.

"What is this? This is nothing." He pocketed the ten shekel coin and he was in back in my face before I could catch my breath. "Give me money: One hundred twenty shekels. Give me money. Paper money, this is nothing. I can't buy a coffee with this. I have seven children."

I gave him a twenty shekel note, explaining that I couldn't give him any more. I backed away slightly, and then turned my back to leave. As he walked away I heard him grumble that he was getting ripped off. And as I walked away I heard myself grumble that I was getting ripped off. I did the math, he asked me for $40 bucks for our five minute tour and conversation, and I gave him $10. He had seemed like such a kind and polite man. Throughout the day I met several old men with kind faces who were born in the Old City and lived there all their lives…but I quickly parted company with all of them.



The Holy City is many things to many people. So I was surprised that to me it was a city of crooks, charlatans, and con-men. But upon reflection these are exactly the sort of people I needed to meet in the Holy City. I have long operated under the delusion that such people don't actually exist, despite the reports. I never expected to meet such ruthless and shameless people, much less in a place as sacred as the Holy City. I was reminded of myself during the Killer game: like Richard Nixon "I made a lot of money." When Yarden was teaching me bits of Hebrew slang we came quite naturally to the term combiné, which applies to an instance of a combinator making a friar of a man by enticing him into a situation contrary to his interests. 'You get something, I get something too, and what I get is better.' This is a common mode of interaction in the Holy Land, and in every land, and it was time I came to terms with that.



Back in the Consular Section, Randy told me about a series of online schemes whereby people tried to get money out of unsuspecting Americans, by telling them stories about troubles and asking for just a few hundred dollars via wire transfer. The unconcerned probably just ignore the emails; the unenlightened might just send the money; but the concerned and enlightened call the Embassy to have us find and help the person. There are even people who seduce Americans via online dating services and then request money for a visa so they can come and visit…but it's always five or ten times the amount that we actually charge for visas. And these Mediterranean beauties never apply for visas...they probably aren't even in the Mediterranean, but some group of Brazilian low-life looking to generate enough capital to start a coffee farm.



After spending all Monday night talking with my good friend Yarden, I caught a 4 AM taxi to airport and got on the first flight to Cyprus, departing out of gate B3. I arrived in the Consular Section only an hour late for the long line of Iranian applicants, "Andreas I need a coffee." That was the first day I left on time since my second week.

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*

Perhaps it betrays the poetry of this report to tell you that my last day in the Consular Section was not a Tuesday. My last day was a Friday: the standard quitting day for offices from Reno to Bangkok.



­­­On my last day I finally found out why everyone seemed to hate the Iranians. I guess a few years back their travel agent was more aggressive than he is today. His insistence and "assistance" of Iranian visa applications often bordered on fraud. But there is still only one travel agent arranging trips for Iranian PhD students to Cyprus, and he still tells them every way to exploit our system, and he still exacts a pretty penny from each of them. So it was more than a coincidence when all the Iranians that week were staying at the Lucky Hotel in Larnaca (45 km away from the Embassy).



*

You can't save the world. Maybe I'm wrong about that….I hope I'm wrong about that. But even if I am, it may be better to think it's impossible sometimes. I tried to do everything I could to help our Iranian student visa applicants on their way to the United States. When I arrived in the Consular Section they put me straight to work on two file drawers filled with SAOs for the Iranians. I made it my goal to eliminate the backlog of applicants and two 50 hour work weeks later I still failed. I told myself, that I had a sort of moral obligation to process those applications. Each folder held someone's life plans and dreams, and so if I could spend some extra time typing it up, sure…why not. I even went in on Saturday, explaining to one of my fellow interns: "Some person's life plan is on hold in an office that I have a key to; I'd have to be some kind of asshole not to lift a finger."



But a Cypriot friend of mine in explained it best as we looked out over the Castle of Othello in Famagusta when he said, "You can do that, but there will always be people who need your help….and you'll loose your life, trying to save theirs." Maybe he was right, and maybe I should have spent more than two hours in Famagusta that day, instead of swinging by the Embassy to work on SAOs again…I mean, how often do I get to spend time in Famagusta?



That perhaps is the true consular experience: to reach that point where everyone's crisis is just your job, and allowing yourself to go home and have your own crises for a change.



Now that it's over, I've enjoyed reclaiming my life as a private citizen. I've felt free to do some more daring things: Monday night I went to a peace rally in the buffer zone, and yesterday I had lunch at the "Syrian Arab Friendship Club," I even made a prank phone call to the U.S. Embassy, "Mr. Andreas, this is the White House…" And this weekend I am going to disappear behind a cup of tea at the beach.