My day at the Sudanese embassy: A sketch in 4 quarters

Pregame:
I arrive at the embassy gate at 9 in the morning, dropped off by the Land Rover. I skitter up to a signboard proclaiming the function of the place, and its hours, texted in Amharic and English. It is not a board, but a series of square metal tubes welded at intervals onto a mast. Except for the topmost one, the informational tubes end bluntnosed and open. But the top tube, the one that identifies the place as the Sudanese embassy, ends in an arrow pointing its beholder toward a derelict cinderblock wall across the street. The outside of the embassy is guarded by a mutilated tin-and-plank-built sentry box where guards sit smoking. Ranged along the wall leading up to the gate are today's supplicants, eagerly clutching their folders and plastic document sleeves. Most, it will turn out, are Somalis. I am the sole mzungu. There is also a young woman who looks Chinese. In the minutes to kickoff, a door built into the gate swings open periodically to emit a guard. The first of these guards looks harmless enough, but after three or four swings of the door, the guards being turned out look positively ferocious. They survey the crowd scornfully before striding on long legs up the street. Is this place a guard factory? If I go in there, how will I end up looking when I come out?

Kickoff:
At just past 9:30, the door is opened by a small man in a jean jacket. He smiles mockingly to reveal teeth stained by tobacco. I take him for an Ethiopian. At a casual flip of this man's head, entire supplicant crowd swarms the gate and clamors through. Jean-jacket man seizes a man in front of me (a Somali?) and pushes him back out onto the sidewalk. "Imshi!" he yells (this is Arabic for go! or get out!). I proceed inside the compound. There is an inside gatehouse, a largish main building with a large corrugated-and-galvanized-tin roofed awning where we are to wait, and a smaller building off in the back left corner.

I walk toward the awning and see Tom, an Englishman I’d met earlier at the Egyptian embassy (you need a preexisting Egyptian visa in order to apply for a Sudan transit visa). We shake hands and he tells me he is there to pick his up. How had he managed that, I wonder. He says he applied the day before, on the Thursday. But they claim to be closed on Thursday, I say. Well, they had let him in. What could he say? I wish then that I had either not seen or blithely disregarded the information in the Lonely Planet about the embassy only being open for business on M-W-F. Which would have allowed me to accompany Ian and Patra on the first leg of their journey up north, to Bahir Dar. They already have their visas, and as they are raring to go, I will have to fly up to meet them once I have the visa in hand. I might add that Tom is flouting the embassy's posted admonition that visas are to be collected at 3 o'clock. No matter. Barely five minutes later the blithe young fellow is walking out with his freshly minted Sudanese transit visa.

First quarter:
I am sitting on a wooden bench and am tightly wedged between an elderly Ethiopian lady with a headscarf and leathery, knotted hands on one side, and a younger one on the other. Outside the lady on my right, there are not too many gray hairs to be found under this awning. The people here are young and youngish hopefuls. I look around and ascertain that, as is the case with Addis in general, the majority of those present are women. Christians among them are neatly turned out in western garb, makeup, and the occasional scarf; the Muslim women dress more modestly, but also well. Some of the Somali women are adorned by tribal tattoos that run in wreaths from forehead to throat. I can hear Somali, Amharic and Arabic spoken. I wait. I read my book about the Puritans' diabolical Indian conquests, occasionally darting my eyes off the page to steal glances at the most luxuriously beautiful of the women. In the interstices of my thinking I confirm that Africa's post-independence violence is inseparable from the rapacity of the continent’s colonizers, with special mention owed to the cowardly and cruel Belgians (may the country break in half an no longer tarnish the annals of history). And I wait. Occasionally there is some hubbub when a rejected application is returned to a defeated supplicant. At one point, a crowd of people rushes out from the shelter and mills around jean jacket man. To what end I have no idea.

At the bottom of the shelter are two windows for bureaucrat-supplicant interface and interrogation. For nearly two hours, neither of them are cracked, and nothing behind them stirs. Occasionally jean jacket man enters the shelter with a cluck to exhort the crowd to silence behind his mysteriously mocking smile. I see what appears to be a southern Sudanese dwarf enter the main gate and exchange salaams with a tall, turbaned Arab. I keep thinking about the business of the other people here. They are not itinerants or adventurers. In their lives they have somehow come to a conjuncture where they have had to set course for Sudan as the way forward—whether to engage in contract labor or to press on for Egypt and what lies beyond the Mediterranean I can only guess.

The first quarter ends when the Chinese girl approaches me to ask if I have any idea what is going on, in an Australian accent. I tell her what I know by way of Ian and Patra's experience: That we can expect to pick up the application forms from the left teller sometime soon; that after submitting the completed application with two photographs and copies of both our passports and onward Egyptian visas, the reviewed forms will be returned to us by the left teller with the word "neg" written down the margin in a calligraphic scrawl, something that should occasion no concern; that the application will then need to be submitted to the ultimate authority behind the right counter for further review, and that we should not be overly concerned if it takes an hour or more to get the attention of this ultimate authority; and that, barring any complications, it will then be time to pay. I tell her that my friends were here for a total of four hours. And that jean jacket man wields more power than you might expect, and should be approached in a pinch. What I do not tell her, for lack of knowledge, is that in the quarters or acts remaining, some bona fide dramas will be played out before us.

Second quarter:
I have moved to sit by the Australian girl when the window behind the left counter swings open to reveal an inoffensive-looking Sudanese bureaucrat. This is the man who hands out applications. Because most of those present are already somewhere in the middle of the process—back for their second or third go—there is only a minor tussle to get at the window. I recall that during the tussle, a strong wind scoured the canopies of whatever alien trees stood outside the gate, sending streams of seared fragmentary foliage trickling through the sunlight, a hissing reel of mortal decay. For a moment I forget the window, listening into the wind: Empty-handed messenger.

As we jostle for the applications being handed through the window I converse with a Somali (Moxammed I think) who like me is seeking a Sudanese transit visa. I ask him is he transiting to Egypt, to which he says in his harsh Somali voice, no, to South Africa. Which doesn’t exactly check out—but what tactics might you not employ if you were a Somali seeking a better life? The Aussie girl and I, having formed a natural faranji league, eventually manage to shove our passports through the window (they need to see the Egyptian visa before they will relinquish the precious form) and get our applications. We fill them out and fall to talking. She has been on the Africa circuit for six months, from South Africa on up. Much like Ian and Patra, with the difference that she is 21, and traveling on her own. Which speaks not only to her determination and courage (and affluence!), but also to the generosity and kindness of Africa's many peoples. Especially given the kinds of stories I hear about the reception Africans sometimes give people who they assume to be Chinese.

I tell her that I have shared her experience of such and such a place, but I am loath to qualify my errand in Africa, having found it to be usually more expedient to leave off disclaimers of project or purpose when palavering with fellow travelers. I don’t think I enjoy attention for my plans, preferring when it attaches to occupation of the moment, to charisma (is that condition any different to the full occupation and enjoyment of the present?). The second quarter ends when we hand in the completed applications to the man behind window number 1, and get them back in hand almost as quickly.

Third quarter:
By now it is perhaps 11:30. We are gripping our applications and conversing to pass the time. Window number 2 suddenly swings open to reveal a most severe Sudanese interrogator. From the south, from central Africa, his skin tone is at the far end of the human spectrum whose other extreme is occupied by the English and some of the pale peoples dotting the Baltic. His is a black alloyed with purple and cobalt. A name is called out by an officious Ethiopian in a pinstriped dinner jacket who sits on a desk between window number 2 and the crowd. The interrogator's lower lip is extended in a pout of displeasure and disapproval even before he begins questioning these people for whom there is actually something hanging in the balance of the visa application process. He conducts his interviews in a mixture of Arabic and English, and in Amharic through the agency of the man in the dinner jacket, whose position ensures that interrogator and supplicant are separated by six feet and one intermediate official.

To judge by their smiles and looks of relief, the interrogations seem to pass off successfully for the applicants concerned. Until a certain Ethiopian lady’s name is called. As she approaches, the man asks her to confirm her prospective address in Khartoum. She stumbles. Strike one. The next question concerns her kinship to a man indicated on her application. Was he her father? Husband? Brother? This is the crux of the interrogation. Again she faltered. She could not specify the relation. After trying to get her to specify who the man was another two or three times with something like patience, he handed her her application and passport in disgust, waving her away with a flip of the hand. For her part, because language and reason had failed her—who knows what sordid complexities lay behind the uncovered subterfuge—she was left with her face as the only effective means of suasion. As he was hacking away at her defenses, the expression grew ever more plaintive and desperate, until at last, like a master actress or caricaturist, she had her mien perched on the very edge of tears. When she was turned away she did not cry. Instead she went out to compose herself, and then returned to the shelter, standing in the “gallery” where she was on prominent display to the interrogator. There she managed masterfully to hold the verge-of-tears look for the better part of an hour. During which hour other women would emerge from their interview unscathed and elated, adding still more gravity to her affect.

After perhaps an hour and a half of these interrogations, I begin to think that I might try to make something happen on my account. I tap the dinner-jacketed interpreter to see when it might be my turn to submit to the visa section's ultimate authority, but he shrugs my hand off and fixes me with an acid stare. "Wait!" When, some minutes later, I approach jean jacket man to see if he can intercede to turn the crank of ultimate authority, he marches me right up to window 2 and is about to plead my case when the ultimate authority angrily tells him to leave, and me to sit down. So much for his pull.

Another hour passes. The girl and I talk lazily, perfunctorily. I doze briefly. She goes out to see if there is any food to be had. The 3rd quarter will not end. While she is gone I overhear two middle-aged Arabs (Syrians?) talking strategy. "Don't talk to that guy in Arabic. Talk to him in English, whatever you do. And don't tell him you work in my company. You're there on a visit." I'm not sure what that language caveat signifies—perhaps the assumption is that Syrian Arabic would make the Sudanese official feel somehow inferior and provoke a rejection out of spite.

It is also worth mentioning that the tutoring Arab, as well as a number of supplicant Somali men, periodically encourage me to make another move on window 2, thinking to sail in on my privileged coattails; and that whenever I heed their sage advice I am rebuffed by the pinstriped interpreter. When Pei returns (as the Aussie girl is named), we eat a couple of revivifying rolls. She says that she is considering withdrawing her application, taking the delay for a sign. I encourage her to wait it out, having come this far. At length the interrogations are concluded, at which point jean jacket man comes running in to silence everyone, then to pull them bodily away from window number 2, lest they should pollute the ultimate authority’s field of vision and so distract him from his delicate task. With the crowd reorganized and pacified, he collects our applications, as well as those of the strategerizing Arabs and some of the Somali men who had begun their long journey that day with me at window number 1. It is the endgame of the 3rd quarter, with the home team looking like it might pull off the shutout.

Fourth quarter:
It is 2:30 in the afternoon. It does not seem that jean jacket man has been able to hand the documents over to the ultimate authority, who appears to have either left the office or retreated into some murky corner of his official’s lair—so I feel my heart sink when jean jacket man draws near to hand them back. But it's not as I fear. Come back at 3:00, he says. Visa OK. Pay cashier then. Now we take lunch. So Pei and I go up the road for a quick njera sampler. Given the emotional drainage of the wait, I do not presently recall what we discussed. Emotional exhaustion! What vanity, I now feel, to cite the experience of the embassy as grounds for emotional exhaustion. What right to I the vagabond-itinerant possess in the face of all these people for whom love and livelihood are at stake—what right, I repeat, have I to be affected on my own behalf in the face of all this? Seeing how most of the world lives makes me want, in spite of myself, to occupy no space, to command no empathy, to merit no respect. None at all. What a contradictory sentiment to be seen in one who wants everything from the world! Well. I may want to squeeze the last gritty droplet of experience out of this thing, but I wish to go about it quietly, unobtrusively—by disappearing.

But—chaff!—this is a game summary, and I need to get on with the fourth quarter. Done breaking the fermented flapjacks that pass for bread here, we shuffle back to the embassy. It is five of three, the supplicants are ranged with patience and good grace against the wall, and the shadows of posts and palings are playing longer on their faces than before. The woman with the plaintive expression is not among the waiting. After 10 minutes or so, the gate opens and we are permitted to storm inside. Because I am utterly ineffective at African-style clamoring (being too much of a gentleman, you see), I end up near the rear of the line snaking from the cashier’s counter. Suddenly inspired to chivalrous pageantry, the Arab who had been advising his friend admonishes the women to form their own queue. "Lady first!" he says. Yet because the cashier alternates between the two lines in his processing of payments, the segregation is really no more than that. It is not to the women's advantage. But the important thing is that it was an arrangement that the consigliore could be content with. After some minutes Pei makes her payment and flees. See you Monday when the visas are ready. See you Monday.

It takes about half an hour to get to the head of the line, by which time I have the beginnings of a sunburn. Just as it is my turn to hand my materials to jean jacket man, who will in turn pass them to the cashier, he is approached by the Somali who featured in the second quarter—the one who was obtaining a Sudanese transit visa so that he could head for South Africa. "Please my friend. Please help me. I have been here 8 times and nobody has helped me. Please.” Jean jacket man takes his materials and makes no show of considering them before handing them back. The mocking grin turned malevolent, he orders the man to leave: "Imshi!" The defeated Somali trudges back to the tin-roofed waiting area, no doubt to enter a futile plea at window number 2. The dwarf is looking on from the shadows. He is grinning.

It is now my turn to pay. Never have I had to go through more for the honor of forking over $61. Of course, this process has been much easier than getting into the DRC, but at least that was free. The process is complete. The clock has expired. Payment filed, jean jacket man places my certified application and passport at his feet with the rest of them. I open my mouth to thank him, but have lost my voice and can manage little more than a croak.