Red-Tape (One)
The story begins two years ago. I had been in Israel for almost three months. I was earnest back then, ticking off my bureaucratic to do list as if I had faith in the red tape. I turned up at government offices without so much as a book to read, assuming that everyone would want to help me, that assisting an oleh in his bureaucratic absorption was the country’s pre-eminent spiritual mission, a fundamental joy.
The sagging bellies and the sour eyes didn’t put me off. Contempt was the stock response from the pen-pushers to my honest cries for help, yet it still didn’t sink in. I kept coming back for more, picking up my number 318 coupon (while the electronic notice-board told me we were up to 250) as if it was a lottery ticket and I really had a chance of winning.
Here, though, my memory fails me. I remember going to the transport ministry in Talpiot to sort out the pre-requisites for my driving test, a simple matter of driving round the block a few times to prove that my UK license wasn’t a mere fiction. For some reason, I never went back afterwards to pick up the actual license. This was the mistake.
I had little need to drive; the robust green Egged chariot soon became my vehicle of choice. A few months ago, though, I realised I didn’t have a physical driving license. Having found a job and a bachelor-pad, albeit of the cramped variety, my drive towards maturation told me I needed the card, the plastic, my photo digitally transcribed on its shiny surface like a royal seal.
There are no vehicle licensing authority offices in Tel Aviv; I had to choose between Holon and Jerusalem to check my status. I work next to Abu Ghosh, so Jerusalem was the more convenient option. There, in the all-consuming vastness of Binyan Clal, an angular and puffy ulcer that seems to have been designed with the sole aim of disorienting people, I was received immediately. “Why didn’t you pick up your driving license?” the clerk asked, without waiting for an answer. “Now you’ll have to do the theory test. And do it quickly, or you’ll have to do the practical again.”
Outside the snow was melting; I sludged through the slime pondering this new surprise, the theory test. I had done of those back in the old country, Wood Green to be exact, and it had been a cinch, a formality, impossible to fail unless – perhaps – you were high on cocaine. This, though, would be a very different exercise. In a country without speed cameras, where more people have died on the roads than in all the wars combined, the theory test has a difficult reputation. “Oh it’s quite hard,” someone told me. “I took it ten years ago, but you’re not allowed many mistakes, and the questions are far from simple.”
My displeasure at having to actually revise for the test was tempered by the discovery that I could do it at Tel Aviv’s central bus station. It’s intended use, I’m told, is as a bomb-shelter in case of the apocalypse, so it somewhat overshadowed Binyan Clal, but I’m there twice a day coming to and from work, so I know its corridors and clefts reasonably well.
One bright afternoon, then, I did a spot of reconnaissance. The – how shall I put it? – Theory Offices sit on the 5th floor, left at the escalators leading up to Egged. It’s a silent part of the building, a murky hum that’s at odds with the boom-boom trance that dominates elsewhere, and I admit I felt calm as I approached, the only one on the road, keen to find out more. I opened the door to the office speculatively, the latch making a great bang, eager to learn how to proceed.
