Tuesday marked the beginning of significant change for our little family. After months of filling out forms, standing in endless lines, and subterranean emotional preparation, my husband and I found ourselves finally at the American Consulate in Frankfurt to take the final steps toward his U.S. residence visa.
What that means for us is, after having lived these past seven years in Germany, my husband’s homeland, we may very well be returning to the Chicago area once and for all before summer’s end. I’m very excited about this, and I think my husband is, too. And our son will be delighted.
The day at the Consulate passed very smoothly. The mission was to attend an interview conducted by one of the Consulate officials and then proceed to his physical, as outlined in the appointment letter. Just like in the movies, there was a line of people waiting to get into the Consulate itself. As we waited, I noticed a sign on the wall that indicated no electronics are allowed in the building. Opening the bag I held, I looked inside and found we had forgotten to leave my husband’s cell phone in the car. He took the phone and ran down the block to put it away.
In the meantime, a young woman, 23 years old, turned around and started talking to me. She revealed that she had lived near my hometown, and even had attended church meetings in the little schoolhouse-turned-community center in our farming community. (Actually, it’s no longer a farming community, but a burgeoning village—a recent victim of urban sprawl.) I was really amazed to run into someone else from my tiny little corner of the Midwest. Last year on the subway, I ran into a young woman, a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary no less, who is from the next town over from ours. It really is a small world.
As we laughed together, the woman behind us joined our conversation .
“I admit it,” she’d said, “I was eavesdropping.”
The first young woman and I both made the same dismissive hand gesture and at the same time said, “That’s okay!”
“This far from home,” I said, “we’re all family.”
Just as my husband returned, and while the three of us were deep in conversation, one of the line attendants inquired after each person’s business. Now here’s the interesting part. To the girl in front of me, and the girl in back of me, he spoke English. To me, he spoke German. I don’t know what it was that made him assume I might be German, except maybe my reddish dark-blond hair and blue eyes. But other than that, I’m about as American as they come. My clothes certainly have held to my American roots—t-shirt, oversized PolarTec pullover, hiking boots. And my hair basically has kept its style over the last seven years: long with bangs. I’m horribly unfashionable in this part of the world, and embarrassingly out of date in my own country. So why would he presume to speak German to me—especially after interrupting our little Kaffee Klatsch? Didn’t he hear us all chatting away in English?
He ushered the three of us (my husband trotting behind to catch up) to the front of the line where we simply checked in and were given a number ahead of several others who no doubt wondered what gave us privilege over them. Then, we had to stand in another line to enter an antechamber, where we had to pass through a metal detector and x-ray our bag and coats, just like at the airport or a courthouse. Only four people at a time could enter the antechamber, and that’s where I was separated from my new friends. I didn’t see them again, even after entering the Consulate, but that was not surprising. My husband and I were directed to the immigrant visa section of the large waiting hall, separate from the American portion of the area where passports, birth-abroad certificates, and the like are handled.
It was about 8:20 a.m. when we entered the Consulate, and were immediately directed to Window 22, where we paid our application fee. (Someone had told us last year, before we even started the application process, to expect to pay around $500 in fees before it was all over. He was not kidding!) We were given our receipt and told to sit in the waiting area until our number was called again. W511. We looked around, and decided the wait wouldn’t be as long as we thought it would be (the papers sent to us indicated a 3- to 6-hour process). There simply weren’t many people around, and our number was pretty low. It certainly didn’t take long before our number was called to Window 23, where we turned in my husband’s application—as if he already hadn’t filled out a zillion other forms last summer, putting this whole thing in motion. We finished up there nice and quick, with no fuss, and were told to sit and wait until our number was called again.
This wait took a little longer. After fidgeting in our chairs for a while, I said to my husband, “I’m going to read a little bit. Once I really get into it, they’ll call our number.” And sure enough, maybe ten minutes later, we were called up to Window 11. There, we turned in all of our documents: police report, military records, birth certificate, marriage license, affidavits of support—a whole pile of papers. In a bored monotone and without pause for breath, the woman gave us instructions of what to do when we first arrive in the States. After spending a few minutes getting those instructions straight, we were told to sit down—again—and wait for our number to be called—again—for the formal interview.
This wait took still longer, and not even my old reading trick helped speed things up. I think it was because we were both a little nervous and I couldn’t concentrate. We waited long enough that we both began to wonder if maybe they might call our number on the American side. It sounds silly, but we’d waited just long enough for our numbed minds to start hypothesizing and playing tricks on us.
Eventually, we were called to Window 17, our final destination at the Consulate. The interview seemed more like a chat over coffee than an actual interview, except for the obvious questions the interviewer asked us: Where will we be living, has my husband been there before, how long have we been married (all of this information was already on the umpteen thousand forms we’d filled out), why do we want to relocate? At one point, I took my husband’s hand, and the man smiled at me and said, “Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
It was 11:10 when we finished up with the formal interview, and, taking the advice of our interviewer, we took one of the taxis lurking outside the consulate to the doctor’s office to make it there before it closed at 11:30.
As we rushed through the door of the doctor’s office, the Turkish receptionist, adorned in her very attractive head scarf and ankle-length black skirt, directed us to a waiting room upstairs. When we entered, we recognized several other people from the Consulate waiting hall. We all smiled at each other in greeting, everyone clearly excited by the prospect of gaining their U.S. immigrant visas. At another desk, a woman crossed my husband’s name off a list. Beside his name was the scheduled time of our interview, 8:30. The list was long, and there were people with later interview times at the Consulate who had yet to arrive, their names still to be crossed off. Like everyone else, we had to pay the doctor €125 in cash—German insurance would not cover this exam, imagine that—and after seeing that list of Consular patients for the day, I said to my husband, “This doctor must make a whole lotta money.”
Back in the waiting room, my husband and I talked about the man who’d interviewed us. “I think he liked us,” I said to him. “He was really nice, very friendly.”
“Too friendly,” my husband said. “Did you notice how quick he was with his questions?”
I thought about it and realized my husband was right. The man had been very friendly. Very chatty. But in the midst of the chattiness, he shot out pointed questions, so that those taken off-guard by his friendliness might stumble over one if they had secretive or dishonest reasons for wanting to gain permanent admittance to the U.S.
I said, “You’re right,” and felt a little let down. I like to think I’m not naïve, but sometimes I really can be. I like to believe the best in people. We had been a nice, humble couple during the interview. I’d smiled genuinely at the interviewer, thrilled that we had finally attained this final step, the future opening up before us, both of us happy and optimistic. And the man had seemed like a really nice guy. I understood his position, of course, being one of the final people to decide yay or nay to hopeful (and sometimes devious) immigrants from Germany. But I really wanted to believe he was a nice person, that he’d liked us, that the sparkle in his eyes had been as genuine as my smile. So, in a conscious decision to not play devil’s advocate for once, I let myself believe what I wanted to believe.
The physical went smoothly, too, though there was one hitch in my husband’s immunization records. Once we get that straightened up early next week, the physical results get sent to the Consulate. Within two weeks after that, we’ll know whether my husband has received his visa.
We have still another long wait ahead of us, but I’m fairly confident the outcome will be favorable.
