This morning the call to prayer went out from the minarets in Istanbul, and woke me briefly. As I rolled over, before sinking back into a rum-soaked sleep, my only thought was, "We have done it. We have finally arrived in Istanbul."
Yesterday morning it was the din of the Krakow bus station which woke me, and the first thing I saw, hanging across the room, was a foto of the great wall of China, sinously wending its way over umpteen sepia hills into the sepia distance, and a saying attributed to Lao Tzu - "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
My father once had a sermon entitled "How do you eat an elephant?" Lest I keep you in suspense too long, the answer was "Bite by bite." I didn't find it very funny at the time, but I suppose son's rarely find their father's sermons very scintillating. I am of course, grateful that he has become more interesting as I have aged.
The message which underlies both of these sayings is that large things are composed of so many small things in combination. Do the small things, and in time you will have done much.
Moving to Istanbul was in every way an elephant, and in order to eat the bitterest parts first, we began at the tail, since every one knows that the finest steaks on an elephant are found in the trunk. (I suppose it has to do with all the work that the trunk has to do - that and the fact that it is round and can be cut into plate-sized steaks which have two holes in them is just too cool - my favorite thing to do is to put it on my face so I can see through the two holes and then use my best whispery-anguished Haley Joel Osment voice to say "I see elephant boogers.") But I digress.
I mentally divided our "move to Istanbul" project into 3 phases.
1. Find jobs.
2a. Get paperwork (work visa for Turkey, etc.) and
2b. pack/ship our belongings, and
2c. leave the European Union.
3. Live cheaply in Istanbul for 3 weeks till our university-provided apartment opens up.
There were a lot of factors that influencing each step which had to be juggled and balanced. For example, we had to move out of our apt. in Poland before August 1st, so our boxes had to be sent prior to that. The boxes will take 1-2 weeks to arrive. We cannot move into our apt. until Aug. 20th, and we cannot send boxes to the university until we are there to pick them up - sooooo, we had to find a apt. to stay at for 3 weeks, where we could receive a ton of boxes.
Another example is our work visas. Before we could apply for our work visas, we had to recieve a letter from the Turkish ministry of education. This in itself was a surprise, as we were not informed of this step till me had already made plans to leave the country, and close our accounts. Thus we were to be left without employment, and without internet, while we waited in our apartment, (which we were lucky to be able to keep,) for this letter to arrive. We would then take this precious gem of bureacratic excreta to the embassy of the country in which we are legal residents. We were told that this letter would take a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks after a couple of weeks, we noticed that our window of legal residency in Poland was quickly drawing to a close, which would, legally, make the letter in question pointless once we had recieved it, as we would no longer be allowed to apply to this embassy. These, among other similar situations, produced a low-level of constant apprehension, tension, which caused us to chew the insides of our cheeks at night, and snap at each other over nothing. How to resolve a million small problems at once, and in time.
At every step, at every stage, we found ourselves surrounded with more questions, to which only the petty gods of beauracracy could answer for us. Unfortunately the small gods of beauracracy will frequently let their phones ring for 10 minutes straight before telling you to call their "call center," and 15 calls later you will find out that really, no one knows anything. Yes, definitely, someone should know something, but really, that someone wouldn't be us.
The main problem with this scenario, of course, is that when you arrive at the embassy, the prim authoritarian fortuitiously located behind thick plate glass will indeed believe she knows something, and it might in no way resemble what you would wish her to know. Nor will she come out from behind the glass so you might instruct her in the ways of righteousness, and shooting her is right out, since the glass is probably bullet-proof, and furthermore you had to pass through a metal detector and open all your bags in a tiny room, observed by a man through another thick plate-glass window, (and he wasn't coming out, either,) before you were even allowed into this room. The one weapon you are left with is your smile. Well, and your whiney-voice, if you think it will help. Oh, and oodles of cash. Except we don't have oodles, we have piddles. And we really need to keep our piddles.
In the end, however, the smiles and bowing and a small offering of $78 left upon the alter propitiated the small gods, and after 7 hours of waiting, they blessed us with 2 small sheets of green paper, glued into our little blue books. A week later I was lying in a bed in a hostel in Krakow, across the street from the bus station, listening to the chimes before the announcements which no longer meant anything to me. I would never ride those busses again.
The week inbetween had been yet another slow-motion panic. A near daily mailing of boxes, cleaning, calling, making appointments, and finding papers. Our boxes were weighed and our suitcases were weighed and re-weighed, and judged ok, then later simply estimated to be too heavy, then on the day of judgement found to be lighter than necessary. Our bank accounts were closed, our Zloty converted to Euros, our Euros converted to Lira, our dollars held like limp green fish in our hands while we pondered how long we could hold this worthless currency, on hopes it might regain some value. Papers were signed, our landlord endured for one last time as he told us he didn't have time to inspect the cleaned (and subtly re-painted in places) apartment, despite our meeting him at the time he requested. Last suppers were had with friends, and on the day of our departure, the last meeting with our employer.
Where we were informed that the past month she had been avoiding us because she was hurt, angry even, so we may have noticed that this month she was a bit "distant." I declined to point out that since in the normal course of events she did not speak to us for months at a time, her increased distance during this frenetic time in our lives had, somehow, boggle-the-mind-though-it-may, passed unnoticed by us.
The cause was a poster, posted on a restaurant door. A friend of ours, hearing that we were to be without income over the month of July, had put up a poster advertising our services. The idea had not been ours, nor the placing of the poster, nor the wording. We had been informed of it, and had not objected, had even thanked her, as it was a great kindness on her part, and furthermore, I have long been of the opinion that if someone has the energy to take the initiative in something, the world should shut up and get out of the way.
In the event, as August is a vacation month, we receieved but a few calls from it, none of which resulted in a single class. The offense, however, was in the wording. And the offense, it seems, was not lessened by the fact that we had not initiated nor contributed to said poster. It was a question of loyalty, and we had been found wanting.
As I sat there, listening to my employers sighs of crushing disappointment, I thought back over the trips to the post office, the calls handled in a language I don't speak, trying to get a taxi big enough for the boxes, the amount of time spent packing, the rolls and rolls of tape and brown paper (postal regulations!) we had bought, the hours spent on the bus and train, the night in Warsaw, the standing, supplicating, of the gods of the embassy, the endless calls to the embassy in Warsaw, and in D.C., the visits to the doctor's office, the giving away of the things that were still useful, the throwing away of so much that was not, the selling of a few items, the endless running and running and tension and lists of it all, and then I thought of the bus ride still ahead of me, the plane trip, the showing of the doctor's report to the border guard, and the consequent explanation, all of which would happen today and tomorrow before I could relax again.
I didn't interrupt her. I sat there, thinking my thoughts, pretending to listen. I kept my eyes focused on her, my head nodding slowly, dutifully, as I softly shifted my weight on the sofa, and silently farted.
