Not on Record
You come to the consulate by appointment, but there is a queue all the same, and you stand in it a long while. Today a woman stood in it with four sons. The eldest is fourteen or fifteen. The three younger ones came one after another, aged three to five.
The eldest keeps the little ones occupied: he sits them down on the bench, lifts one back up, says something under his breath. To his brothers he speaks Turkish; to his mother, Russian. The little ones are in trainers, he is in rubber flip-flops. When their turn comes he picks up the smallest and goes in first.
The mother is in gloves and a niqab, only her eyes and forehead uncovered. Tall, very straight, holding her head the way women hold it when they know they are being looked at.
Inside we end up at neighbouring windows, and their whole conversation is audible from beginning to end.
She speaks Russian with the slight accent people acquire after years among another language, with little occasion to use their own. She has been in Türkiye nine years.
The consul asks outright:
“Illegally?”
A pause.
“Yes,” she says, barely above a whisper.
The boys are standing beside her. The eldest does not turn round.
The rest comes out after that. Neither she nor the children hold any other citizenship. Her passport has expired. The eldest son’s passport has expired. The three youngest have never had passports at all; their citizenship is recorded nowhere.
The consul asks her to uncover her face, to confirm her identity. She refuses, and asks for a woman consul. There is no woman consul.
She uncovers her face. She does it loudly, demanding and aggrieved at once, and her voice carries across the hall.
What happened in those nine years does not emerge from the conversation. Without legal status there is no registered work, no school, no medical care; let us suppose all of that can somehow be substituted. They live, one imagines, in a gecekondu—one of the self-built quarters whose name means “set down overnight”, after the houses that went up between dusk and dawn to be standing, roofed, by morning. You can stay inside one for years. What is not clear is the other thing: how do they get past the document checks? Here they are routine. Yet somehow they got themselves to the consulate today.
Five people have lived nine years in a country without existing for it. The three youngest do not officially exist anywhere at all.
I finished my own business earlier. On my way out I looked back: she was standing at the window, the eldest holding the smallest in his arms. Half an hour later I was showing my papers to the gendarmes.
