At home armed with a school English-Russian dictionary, I translated the application form. With the help of the said dictionary, I filled out the form.
On the back of the form, there was a table for applicants to score themselves from 1 to 5 in 3 categories: age, occupation, and knowledge of English. If the total score was less than 13, applicants were politely asked not to waste anyone’s time. In the age category, the highest score of 5 was given to the people between 25 and 34 years old inclusively. The next group from 35 to 44 got 4 points and so on. I just turned 35. ‘Bummer!’ thought I and put 4 points in the corresponding box. There was nothing I could do about my age. Application developers got 5 points, just as my friend said. My fluency in English was probably a 1. ‘Never mind,’ decided I and wrote another 5 on the form to get 14 points and therefore to make myself eligible for submission. The application process was expected to take over one year. Surely there was plenty of time for me to learn the language. I would enroll in an English class right after lodging the application, study hard and pass the language test when it was time to sit it. That’s how naïve I was.
Having finished with the form itself I made a list of the required supporting documents. They were usual vital records certificates, proof of education, confirmation of employment and the like, except for one document that puzzled me a lot. It was a police certificate that stated that I did not have criminal records – quite normal these days, but something unheard of in 1991 in the Soviet Union. It was too late to ask my friend how he got it, but if he had done it I could do it too. First I went to the local police station. A policeman on duty stared at me as if I were nuts when I explained what was needed. Thanks God, he did not laugh or yell at me. Seeing how serious I was about that certificate he told me to try our neighborhood police officer.
That officer was hard to catch. Several times I came to the door of his office located in a tiny vacant apartment on the first floor of a residential building. The door was locked. One day I got lucky and the officer was in there. The only room of the apartment was bare save for a dusty writing desk and some odd chairs. The officer, a middle-aged skinny man in the uniform, nervously greeted me. He did not expect visitors. My request for a police certificate made him even more nervous. He could not give me the certificate because he did not know me and if I had committed any crime. The officer had a point there. It was before computerized systems came into existence and he had no way to check if I was a good citizen or not. My point was that had I been a criminal he would have heard about me since I lived in the area he was responsible for. The officer was not sure if he would, but decided to investigate the case further and asked about the purpose of the certificate. My guts told me that it was not a good idea to explain about migrating to Australia and I started flat out lying. Shamelessly I made up a story about getting a job at a foreign company in Moscow that required a background check. The officer asked for the phone number of the company. I could only continue improvising.
‘No problem, I have their number, but they only speak English at this company. Do you still want to call?’
‘Do you speak English?’ asked the officer.
“Yeah, that’s why I am considered for the job’.
‘Are you going to move to Moscow then?’
‘I have to if I want to work for them’.
The officer sighed and gave up. He pulled out a drawer and took out of it a school notebook with lined pages. On a blank page, he wrote a statement that to his knowledge I had no criminal records. I asked for a stamp. The officer sighed again and stamped the statement. It was so short that it occupied only the top half of the page. The officer looked critically at his work. Somehow he decided that I was not worth the entire page. He tore its top half out of the notebook and gave it to me. The end result was a scrap of paper with ragged edges. I sincerely thanked the officer. Lying does not come to me easily. I was at the point of a mental breakdown when I was leaving the building with the priceless statement.
After all documents, including the police certificate on a page from a school notebook, were translated into English and their translations were notarized I neatly stapled each document with its translation and organized them in a logical order. It was time to lodge my application. The Soviet postal service could not be trusted. Important letters, especially sent to foreign entities, mysteriously disappeared. The only option was to deliver the package in person. My plan of action was to go to Moscow, submit the application, return home and wait for a response, oh, and to study English while waiting. Well, things do not always go according to plan.