Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Civil marriages, we were told, were performed at the Mairie, Geneva's city hall. One afternoon the second week in October, we stowed our bikes in the rack outside that pinnacled structure and found our way to the marriage license bureau on the second floor.

It was our first encounter with Swiss bureaucracy. We progressed through a labyrinth of offices till we found ourselves standing at a counter filling out a five-page form. This document turned out to be merely a request for permission to fill out the real form, which we could pick up in another office by presenting a stamped authorization issued at still a third location.

So it went, visit after return visit. Forms in duplicate, forms in triplicate, forms requiring witnesses, forms requiring fees. And at each outpost of this mysterious paper kingdom, a long line of patient Swiss who'd no doubt been standing in. such lines since they could write their own names (all caps, black ink).

Again and again we pedaled to the Mairie. We brought financial statements. Medical reports. An affidavit to our identities from the American Consulate. On an afternoon off from paperwork, we went to a jeweler and chose two slender gold bands. But now a technicality appeared for which there seemed no solution. Under Swiss law, when a woman under twenty-one wished to marry. it was her parents who had to apply for the license. "And as Mademoiselle is only nineteen..."

In the largest, highest -ceilinged, darkest -paneled room of the Mairie that John and I had yet entered, sat a very small, very senior official. Gravely he thumbed through the by-now sizable sheaf of papers on the matter of M. Sherrill and Mlle. Schindler. The very senior man was very sorry. Since my parents had not come forward to make the necessary application...

License Denied.