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What Is Your Nationality?

Eugene Soukharnikov

    “What is your nationality?”
    “Czech Republic?”
    “I don’t mean that,” a squeaky female voice said in a British accent.
    To Lisa, it sounded as generic British. It could have been Cockney or Received Pronunciation, or a blend of both—Lisa couldn’t have told them apart. It sounded bloody Southern English, the type of accent with which typical Hollywood villains speak.
    The Villainnesss on the other end of the phone line continued,
    “I meant your real nationality. I know your desire to be with us here, in real Europe, is strong, and your parents will pay a premium for that. Some nationalities come at a premium.” She sounded haughty, like a colonial administrator addressing a specimen of one of the lesser breeds, as what she really meant was something like, “So you savage lowlifes want to be with us, hang around us the good white people and our brown pets, right?”
    But of course she didn’t say that; instead, she just questioned and preached.
    “We really need to find the truth behind your nationality. So what is your nationality?”
    “I’ve told you, it’s Czech Republic.”
    “So you are Czech?”
    “No, I am not...not exactly.”
    “So you are trying to defraud us?”
    Lisa, who was over the phone conversing with a Hollywood-sounding Villainnesss at the admission office of a private British university, was confused, angry, and bewildered. Her nationality or her multiple nationalities had been a source of a misunderstanding and assorted troubles before, but she’d never thought that they would lead to a disaster of this magnitude. Her carefully prepared application for study at this UK university was to be rejected because of her nationality.
    “I am not trying to defraud anyone; my parents will pay the tuition.”
    “The question is how much. UK and EU students pay 6,500 pounds per year; in your case, the rate is 14,000. Besides, where did your parents get the money to pay for your tuition?”
    “I don’t know. But I am an EU student, Czech Republic is in the EU.”
    “I don’t understand what you are hinting at, what is your nationality? Are you Czech?”
    “No, I am not...”
    “...and you are?”
    Lisa’s mother was standing next to her, perplexed, befuddled. What was her daughter talking about, what damn nationality?
    “Mom, what is our nationality?”
    “It’s complicated, well...”
    “Hello, I cannot be waiting here forever. Don’t you know what your nationality is?”
    Lisa got the answer from her mother.
    “I am a Buryat. From my maternal side, I am Buryat.”
    Now the Villainness had to take a pause. She was talking to someone else. Then she came back.
    “Buryat is not a nationality. We don’t know what it is. Besides, you said you’re a Czech.”
    “Well...wait a second. I am Jewish. I am a Jew. On my father’s side.”
    “That’s a religion. You want to say that you also hold an Israeli passport?”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Well, you see, your parents should have taught you to speak the truth. On your application form, you stated that you were born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and that you also have a Russian Federation passport. Is that right?”
    “Exactly!”
    “So your nationality is Russian. That means that your tuition is 14,000 pounds, plus you’ll have to furnish us with additional paperwork and prove quite a few more things.”
    “But I am not Russian. Well, I am Russian, because it is not nationality, but citizenship. But I am also Jewish and Buryat.”
    “Oh dear, you are a piece of work. You said already that you are a Czech! What matters is that you are Russian, and it doesn’t matter who you really are if you are Russian.”
    “Yes, I have a Czech passport as well.”
    “But you also said that you are not a Czech. Where did you buy that passport? In the Moscow metro?”
    Lisa didn’t know what to say.
    “No, I got it because I also hold Czech citizenship.”
    “Fine. Let me email you some paperwork along with additional requirements we have here. Today is Friday, so please submit the completed paperwork and all the additional documents by Monday. If you fail to do so, then we will assume that you withdrew your application. Good luck.”
    The Villainnesss hang up and Lisa began to sob.
    A wealthy friend of mine, a member of Russia’s post-Soviet kleptocratic class, has two daughters. He sent his first daughter to the medical school in Leyden. I thought that was cool, because the instant I heard “Leyden,” I remembered that among all people, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe studied medicine here. His second daughter was Lisa. She never got along with sciences, but could draw well. She wanted to become a fashion designer, and the only place she saw herself studying was the UK, namely London. Her obedient parents went along. I have no idea why post-Soviet nouveaux riches and their offspring, along with children of Eastern European thieving classes and wealthy Arabs, are so attracted to that has-been metropolis. Why not Paris? Why not Rome? Why not even Vienna? Why not Tokyo? Or maybe even Hong Kong. Why not somewhere else if you are, as a budding member of Russia’s thieving elite, so determined to stay away from your own country? Why London, this drab, overpriced, over-policed headquarters of the eastern branch of the Transatlantic Reich, full of surveillance cameras, plainclothes cops, devoid of rhyme or soul? To me, London was always an odd place. Yes, on one hand the city is rich in history, but on the other hand history is oversold, perverted, raped. In that way, London is a bit like St. Petersburg, a ghost of its former self, occupied by totally wrong people. But for the post-Soviet nouveau riche and the oligarchs and their children, the story is different. They fly to it like bees to honey or, say, flies to manure.
    Lisa—Elisaveta for long—filled out application forms and submitted all the paperwork to this fairly expensive, irredeemably newfangled “arts” university. On the application form, she’d had to state her place of birth (that was St. Petersburg) and her nationality, which she’d assumed was synonymous with citizenship. Side by side, she had put down Czech Republic and Russian Federation. If I had known about this gaffe in advance, I would have told her to leave just the Czech Republic and avoid mentioning her second “nationality.” But no one asked me for advice, and so she sent her paperwork in.
    Within half an hour after that conversation with “the Villainess,” Lisa got an email from the admissions office. It came with a bunch of attachments.
    The email, which was a formal letter, said that after giving a careful consideration to her application to determine if the school would benefit from her as a student and to ascertain the exact amount of tuition to be charged, they would like her to provide some additional information—just to clarify a few details. As she’d mentioned that her mother lives in the Czech Republic and was married to a Czech national, they would like to see her mother’s marriage certificate as well as tax returns for the past six years. They would also like to see rental agreement for their flat in Prague, and if it was purchased, then they would like to know sources of funds with which the unit was bought. Since Lisa’s father was a Russian Federation resident, they would like her to provide them with six years of his tax returns, translated and apostilled. They’d like to see his detailed curriculum vitae and the list of his employers, with references and contact information, for the past ten years. They needed to know how he earned money, and she’d have to prove that the money with which he intended to pay her tuition did not come from illicit sources. The list was endless.
    What am I to do? thought Lisa. She realized that there was no way she or her very well-connected father would be able to make, collect, or forge a fraction of those documents. Not over the weekend. The list of absurd requirements meant that she was already rejected. She was hysterical when she called her father. About five minutes after hanging up, he called me and asked for advice—not about Lisa’s getting admitted to that university, as it seemed to be hopeless, but how he should calm his daughter.
    I told him what I thought. “Why do you post-Soviet thieves want to emulate people who hate you and what do you try to push yourself into places where no one wants you? Why London? Why not Milan?”
    “Because she wants to be there.”
    “No, because you are frigging foolish, uncultured thieves. Your entire thieving class are just nationality-deprived vermin. The damn nomenklatura.”
    At this moment, he was prepared to listen to my rants. He even agreed with what I was saying, but asked me to give Lisa a call anyway.
    “Come on, you’ve got ideas. Please calm her down.”
    I called Lisa. I told her that her problem was that she really became a Czech, and in the process became disused to the discrimination Russians are subjected to. “You were mistaken for someone with wrong nationality. It is perfectly fine to discriminate against Russians but not against some other people, least of all EU vassals. Your grave mistake was mentioning Russia on that application form. Those idiots would never have figured out who you are; what they care about is your association with Russia, the country and the people against which their regime wages an undeclared war. Caught unawares, you ended up on the battle line and, worse, you allowed them to abuse you. That letter and those requirements basically say that they don’t want you.”
    “So what am I to do?” she asked again. “Is everything lost?”
    I had an idea. I had read about it in the memoirs of some Soviet dissident. In jail, he’d found a way to spoil jailors’ lives, and his misery generation method had then spread all around. “Get a wad of paper and a bunch of envelope. Then you write a complaint—the more preposterous, the better—and then you send that complaint out to everybody. Literally to everybody. They will come down like a snowball, like an avalanche; the superiors would have to do something about the situation you are complaining about just to spare themselves from the unending harassment. If it worked in the old SU, the method must work in a similar though much more evil entity like the EU. That’s just pure logic.”
    She wrote an intelligent complaint. She accused the UK university of discrimination again and of substituting one’s origin and ethnicity with nationality. She threatened to file a human rights complaint and go to the media. She said that she was a Czech Republic citizen and deserved the protection of the EU. I was searching for email addresses and she was sending out her complaint by email: to the Villainnesss at the Admissions, to the university president, to their public relations department, to all newspapers, to Downing Street, to EU commissioners, to the Czech embassy, to British Airlines, to the Royal Albert Hall, all with a request to forward the complaint to the proper recipient. Lisa labored until six in the morning. She was engaged in intelligent, destructive, carpet bombing-style spamming. And she was quite afraid of the consequences.
    The next day, the Villainess called Lisa at around noon. Lisa was surprised, because she didn’t quite believe that my email carpet bombing plan would work—she had sent those complaints out of desperation. Her heart almost stopped when she heard the Villainess’s voice. At that moment, she was certain that not only would she be rejected, but she would be blacklisted with other the UK schools.
    The Villainess...apologized. She asked Lisa most humbly if she had a spare moment. She told her that they had resolved the issue and that they mistook her for someone else. “We are terribly sorry.” Of course her nationality, as far as the “university” was concerned, was Czech, and she wouldn’t have to present years of her parents’ tax records, leases, or marriage certificates. She was admitted. Yes, of course she would pay the standard EU citizen tuition—6,500 pounds, that is “Sorry about all the confusion.”
    It sounded like a miracle. As if recognition of a secondary vassal state citizenship transformed a lowly Untermensch into almost a human.
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it. Once again, sorry about that, and congratulations!”
    Lisa was on top of the world, in seventh heaven, right on cloud nine; the sweet Villainnesss’s words fell down like heavenly manna.
    “Thank you. I am so happy it worked out.”
    “Me too. By the way...” The Villainnesss paused.
     “You don’t have to answer...sorry...but may I ask you one private question?”
    “Sure, go ahead.” Lisa was too happy to object.
    “Well, tell me...how should I put it? I just became curious. Tell me if you can...what is your nationality?”

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