LITMIR.BIZ

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exactly on the border between several departments and regions. But I do blame the French for the abyss of red tape into which each of these moves plunged me.

      Valence is a good four hours’ drive, there and back, from the village where I first came to live. Every time I had to drive to Valence to hand in yet another obscure piece of paper, an entire day was therefore lost because once you’ve landed inside the préfecture’s enormous fortress you usually have to wait a few hours before it is finally your turn to talk to an official. Assuming that by this time the official hasn’t disappeared to uphold that all-important French tradition known as the extended lunch.

      And then you still have to reckon with the unpredictable hours kept by government offices. I kept Daniel out of school one day because he had to be identified as the child on the picture I had to hand in – and we ended up outside a dark, deserted building. I’d chosen the one day of the week on which the préfecture of Valence closed its doors. Which is not necessarily the same day on which the préfecture of Avignon – or the bank in the neighbouring village – closes its doors.

      It’s so much easier in a country where you know that from Monday to Friday, between nine and five, you work (or pretend that you’re working), and on weekends you rest. Nothing is ever that simple here in the south of France. Our local supermarket is closed on Sunday afternoons and all day on Monday; the bar is open all day on Sunday but closed all day on Monday; the baker and the hairdresser close on Wednesday; my favourite café in the vicinity closes on Thursday. The post office is open every day (in theory anyway), but for barely two hours in the morning and less than two hours in the afternoon. The library is open only in the morning on some days and in the afternoon on others …

      It’s a logistical nightmare. You have to consult a complicated timetable on the fridge every time you want to buy a loaf of bread.

      These days I don’t drive to a préfecture without first making sure that I’ll find somebody home. I learnt my lesson the hard way. But in those early days I had quite a few lessons yet to learn. For example, that Catch-22 wasn’t just the title of an entertaining novel.

      On this scorching hot day in Valence the woman at the préfecture refused to give me a temporary residence permit unless I had a social security number. So I walked over to the Sécurité Sociale, yet another enormous fortress a few blocks away, to get the required security number. But here a grumpy monsieur refused to give me a security number unless I had – wait for it – a temporary residence permit.

      Catch-22.

      Back to the préfecture to explain. Back to the Sécurité Sociale to plead. Back to the préfecture to explain, to plead and to threaten …

      I was seven months pregnant, heavy and sweaty with swollen feet, and on each slow journey between the two buildings the sun burnt a hole right through my scalp. After a few hours of this absurd form of torture I subsided onto the steps outside one of the two buildings and started to cry inconsolably. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. For the first time I really understood what Elizabeth Smart meant when she chose this sad title for her novel. While outside a government building in Valence I sat down and wept.

      Another day, another low. This time in Avignon, which had in the meantime become the seat of all my administrative resentment. One of those days in late winter when the mournful mistral sucks every last bit of the life-urge from your body.

      Let me first explain about the mistral.

      I promise I’ll never complain about the Cape southeaster again. The Cape southeaster is a pleasant breeze compared to the Provençal mistral. Yes, it’s true that the southeaster flings you against lampposts and in front of cars, but it lasts only a couple of days and, once you’ve survived the onslaught, the peninsula always looks more beautiful than before. The clean air above Table Mountain is enough to make you instantly forget the annoying wind. The Provençal mistral is stronger than the southeaster, colder than the southeaster and, above all, more persistent than the southeaster. The mistral blows for up to thirty days at a time. During my first spring here, there were exactly three windless days in the whole of April.

      According to our local meteorologist Jean-Pierre, the fertile Rhône Valley acts as a kind of bellows for a wind that is born in the Alps – although its icy breath sometimes makes you suspect that it comes straight from Siberia – and then blasts open its way to the warm Mediterranean Sea. A simple explanation, therefore, but not the sort of thing you’re likely to read in tourist brochures. If all those sun-starved crowds heard that their hard-earned Provençal holiday could be blown away before their eyes, day after day after day, they certainly wouldn’t come here in such droves.

      Be that as it may. It was on one such wind-ravaged day that we stood in Avignon in front of the desk of a clerk who had to issue a temporary travel permit to Daniel so that he’d be readmitted to the country at the end of a family visit to South Africa. No happy holiday lay ahead of us. My mother had died in South Africa in the same week my daughter was born in France. Now, about two months later, the baby was strong enough for us to embark on the long journey to go and bury my mother’s ashes. Well, in actual fact the baby had been strong enough a month earl­ier, but it had taken two months to obtain all the papers required for the journey – including a new passport for the new family member, a renewed French passport and an international driver’s licence for Alain. Only Daniel’s bit of paper still had to be arranged. Just a final formality. Or so we thought. After all we were armed with every possible official paper the child had ever received in his life, from his birth certificate to his school reports, you name it.

      And then the woman behind the counter asked – with a face that said ‘Here comes trouble’ – if I could prove that I was the child’s mother.

      ‘But of course,’ I said indignantly. ‘Look, there is my name on his birth certificate!’

      ‘Non, non,’ she said. This certificate was in English. She needed one that had been translated into French.

      ‘But it’s only a question of a few names!’ I objected. ‘Our names are still our names, whether they’re written in English or in French!’

      ‘Non, non,’ she said. Rules were rules. She couldn’t issue the permit unless I supplied a translated birth certificate.

      Well then, I’d quickly go and translate it on my computer, I said in an attempt to make peace (because we had to leave for Cape Town in a week), and hand it in the next day.

      ‘Non, non.’ Her face sagged like a soufflé that’s been taken from the oven too soon. It had to be an official translation. By an official translator. Certified with an official stamp. And that ­wasn’t all. (Here comes the really bad news, I knew right away.) This birth certificate wouldn’t do, translated or not, because it wasn’t the correct one.

      What did she mean it wasn’t the correct one? The child had been born only once! He’d been given only one certificate to mark the occasion!

      No, she explained. This was an abridged version. She needed the full certificate, freshly issued by the relevant state department in the child’s country of birth, less than three months before. At these words the prospect of our South African family visit disappeared like a ship on the horizon. No, not as calmly as that, more like a ship falling over the edge of a waterfall. I knew by now that any application for official documents from South Africa, via the South African embassy in Paris, meant a wait of two to three months. There wasn’t any way that I could get my hands on a full certificate – let alone an official translation – in the week before we were supposed to fly to Cape Town.

      And at that moment of unbearable tension the clerk decided to close her counter and go and enjoy her lunch.

      Our forlorn little group – Alain, Daniel, Mia in her pushchair and me – didn’t have lunch that day. We wandered through the wind-torn streets of Avignon trying to figure out how we would get to South Africa. Or rather, how we could ensure that Daniel would be able to return with us to France. Surely provision had to be made for special circumstances, I murmured half-hopefully. If I explained that it was about my mother’s death? But Alain, who knows the French better because he is one of them, shook his head sadly.

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