Suggested musical accompaniment for the reading: The Double Life of Veronique*

Olivia Newton-John and Mikhail Gorbachev died last month. The latter was a pivotal historic figure who liberated me from my childhood fear of imminent nuclear annihilation. Indeed, his perestroika and glasnost effectively ended the spiraling arms race, precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A Romanian friend of mine wrote the following about his passing on Facebook: “Because of the actions of this man, I lived in a dictatorship only for the first 10 years of my life.”

Of course, how you view the actions of such an important politician depends on which side you find yourself in history. While his passing has been greeted with genuine sorrow and respect outside of Russia, within that nation he was a controversial figure who led to the end of an empire, a way of life and, for some, to a cultural humiliation.

This contrasting perception is much how I found the two World Wars were viewed from certain parts of Europe and the so-called western world. Why the second war was fought has always been rather clear to a Canadian like me: the defeat of Hitler and his Third Reich. But the first one is rather nebulous: something to do with the shooting of a certain Archduke Franz Ferdinand … ?

During the months I taught in the Czech Republic in 1990, I realized that for those who lived within the Iron Curtain, WWI was viewed as a war of liberation from empire – the Prussian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman ones – heralding a period of independence until the end of WWII when that interlude ended. Gorbachev’s demise, especially in this moment when Cold War rhetoric seems dangerously alive, is particularly meaningful as he embodied a non-aggressive solution to those globally challenging times.

Somehow, Newton-John’s passing affected me on a personal level though she is, of course, also a stranger to me. First of all because she died of the same cancer I have been facing – and so far keeping at bay for almost three years – and secondly, for sentimental reasons.

The night after her death, they showed “Grease” on TV. It is iconic for me – as kids, my brother and I created a series of dance routines to songs like “Grease Lightning” and “You’re the One that I Want” that we’d practiced for days and then performed for our parents – and for my daughters who know the words to all the most famous songs by heart and sing them acting out the scenes outrageously.

I was not allowed to go see the film at the cinema when it first came out in 1978 – “Star Wars” was my first official movie outing – but we very nearly wore out the record. Somehow, her passing left me with a mix of emotions that ran from nostalgia to a profound sadness tinged with fear for her 30-year struggle with cancer. And so, this semi-famous singer and actress remained in my thoughts for a couple of days.

I’ve frequently reflected on the idea that we spend our lives alternating between being the suns and satellites of each other; often not even being aware of the central or peripheral role we play in the lives of those we are more or less connected to. And then there are strangers; those with whom we have no apparent connection at all.

During one of the Covid lockdowns, I started playing a game with a dear friend of mine via Zoom called “We’re not Really Strangers”: it consists of a series of cards with questions or statements to discuss. She would draw a card and send a photo of it to me on WhatsApp and we would meet virtually a week later and discuss the particular message.

One week’s card asked: “Has a stranger ever changed your life?” This was an intriguing question for me as my life has been based on a sort of universal trust in humankind. In her last line in the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Du Bois declares: “Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. In a way, that has been a life mantra for me.

I cannot say that a stranger has actually changed my life in an explicit, immediate way, but rather more like my indirect brushes with the lives of Gorbachev and Newton-John. However, opening myself up to the “gentle indifference of the world” and trusting in strangers, particularly in strange places, has critically shaped who I am, how I see the world and how I’ve lived my life.

A series of very different situations come to mind when I consider that card’s question and the numerous times that I have been at the whim of the kindness of people who were either practically or complete strangers to me. The following are some of those experiences.

Toronto, Canada

While I was doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto, I worked at the nearby Jewish Community Centre as a lifeguard and swimming instructor. One crisp winter evening, as I approached the side of the building, I saw a woman I’d noticed many times before. She was truly a woman of the street, regularly transporting her boxes up and down a length of this major downtown thoroughfare, never moving beyond a stretch of two or three kilometres.

This time she had arranged the boxes in a way that made them look like an outdoor store; piled high on her right and left, as if to show off her wares, and lower in the front like a counter. She wore layers of clothing on her rotund body: pants, a skirt, sweaters, a blazer and scarves. Her hair was wrapped in a kerchief. She had high cheekbones and deep blue eyes and her features brought Eastern European origins to mind.

As I passed near her, she motioned to me, scooping the air with her hand. I stood in front of her counter as she quietly said: “No regrets.” She smiled at me: “I just got a soup and a fresh coffee. I want to eat the soup but the coffee will be cold by the time I finish.” She held out a cup of take-out coffee to me: “Would you like it? I don’t want to waste anything.”

I smiled back at her and said: “Thanks. But I’m just about to go swimming so I shouldn’t drink anything.” Her wrinkled hand, encased in a worn, brown, fingerless glove, moved the cup closer to me: “Are you sure? I don’t want to waste it,” she repeated. I reached for the coffee and told her maybe a drink would be alright. She then pulled a white bag from under her “counter” and offered me a donut. This time I insisted no, but the gesture, her hospitality, moved me.

I proceeded to the main door of the community centre, entered and walked through the warm, narrow corridor to the change room. Once inside, I placed the coffee on a nearby bench and changed into my bathing suit. Then I sat beside the styrofoam cup, tore back the plastic lid and drank.

Prague, Czech Republic

When I finished my undergraduate degree in spring 1990, I embarked on an adventure teaching English in the Region of Bohemia in the then-Czechoslovakia. The unique historic moment permitted me to live the loosening of Soviet hold on Eastern Europe: Russian troops retreating, along with tanks on flatbed train cars; the traces of hammers and sickles that had been attached to the walls of buildings; statues of Lenin and Stalin covered in sheets and moved to unobtrusive locations; and, of course, the excitement of the first free parliamentary election since the Second World War.

It was a strange and exhilarating time yet mixed with an edge of anxiety. One day, I was in Prague’s Old Town Square under the famous astronomical clock tower listening to street musicians – a novelty that came with the new freedoms – when a bomb exploded. In my naïveté, I imagined ceremonial cannon fire to explain the noise as residue fell from above. Then I turned to see a crowd of people running towards me looking fearfully behind and, as I joined them in their flight, my mind turned to a more sinister conclusion: the Russians had changed their minds and were coming back in fuller force as they’d done in 1968.

No one ever claimed responsibility for the pipe bomb that had been placed in a knapsack at the base of a statue I’d been sitting under the day before. Luckily, it didn’t work as planned and killed no one, though it caused some severe injuries. It was, however, symbolic of those unsettling times.

I travelled into other Eastern Bloc countries during my stay, including Hungary, Poland and East Germany, and here is where the kindness of strangers in a strange place comes in. I’d decided to meet a Canadian friend, who was teaching English in Moravia, in Berlin. At that time, there were no smart phones and so we simply agreed to meet at the information booth at the Berlin train station at a specific time. My trip involved taking a train to Dĕčin, in the north of Bohemia near the German border. I had to wait a couple of hours at night there before I could catch the train to Berlin.

At that time, Dĕčin was principally an industrial city located on the Elbe River, making it an important port as well. That dark night, the streets were empty and desolate. Not a car or person roamed as was typical at that time in most cities: having a car was a luxury and with still-limited restaurant and bar hours, strolls after 10 pm were rare. As I looked for signs of life down the dark roads near the train station, I suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of solitude and a desperate need to speak with a known voice. I wanted to talk to my paternal grandmother but there was not a public phone booth to be found.

I saw a hotel sign on a building across from the station and, entering the gate, I rang the buzzer. A man answered with some delay, holding the door open just a crack. At that point I’d managed to learn a decent amount of Czech and asked him if I could come in to make a collect phone call. He gave me a sharp no and nearly slammed the door in my face. I pushed it inward slightly and pleaded with him. He pushed me out and abruptly shut the door making me feel like a thief.

I must admit that at that point tears fell and I felt terribly dejected as I wandered back toward the station. Near its entrance, however, I saw a light on at the top of an outdoor flight of stairs and climbed them, knocking on my second door of the evening. A railway employee opened it and I asked him if he would let me make a collect call to Canada. I still remember how to say it: “Na účet volaného”. He let me in and allowed me to make that call. And so I was able to chat with my grandmother and hear her familiar voice before I took my unnerving night train to Berlin.

Somewhere in Slovenia

Five years later, after I’d finished a Master degree at McGill University, I worked and saved some money and then decided in January to travel to Europe. I started in Paris and moved my way south and then east into Italy. Among the friends I planned to visit, was one living in a small town near Trieste called Muggia, right at the border with Slovenia. I went there around Carnival time and saw the remnants of colourful paper confetti in Trieste’s main square; resisting on the stone pavement despite the persistent presence of the cold Bora wind.

One afternoon, my friend decided to take me to Slovenia by motorcycle and so we went through customs fairly effortlessly and crossed the border – the European Union had not yet formed, so there was no Schengen Agreement, which allows citizens of EU member-states to circulate freely. (Today, however, terrorism and migration fears, as well as the pandemic, have effectively altered the freedom to circulate within EU borders.)

We headed down the coast stopping to take photographs at various scenic points on the Adriatic Sea. I remember it being a beautiful, unseasonably warm day when our motorcycle suddenly puttered to a stop. We’d run out of gas. My friend left me and the motorbike on the side of the road and headed on foot to the nearest town for fuel. As I waited for him, I realized that somewhere along the way, I’d lost the camera that had travelled with me through Western and Eastern Europe, to Quebec and the Maritime provinces in Canada, as well as Mexico and Cuba.

Upon my friend’s return, we decided to go in search of my historic camera. We backtracked to our last photo spot where we met a man who said he’d seen a couple of people – a grandfather and granddaughter – walking along the shore. He told us where they lived and we headed deeper into Slovenia turning off onto a dirt road. At the end of it, we found a group of people gathered by some wooden cabins near a small hotel complex and asked them if they knew the grandfather and granddaughter or had seen a camera lying around. Surprisingly, they knew who we were referring to and said the camera had likely been left at the nearby hotel.

Having spent that time teaching in Eastern Europe, I’ve often wondered how much of all that cooperation to locate my camera had been simple kindness and how much a sort of reflex or residue of communist times when everyone was watching everyone and the fear of being caught doing anything illicit, or that could be perceived as being anti-regime, was ever-present. Whatever the motivation, the hotel is exactly where we found my camera.

La Ceiba, Honduras

In autumn 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Central America, and particularly Honduras, destroying 70 percent of that country’s already very fragile infrastructure. I’d been dating a Honduran man at the time and he was desperate to find a way to help his compatriots. This led to co-founding an organization called Friends of Honduras. Through that NGO, we collected and sent six and a half containers of food, clothing and equipment to various locations in the country, as well as dozens of boxes of medicine on a Canadian air force flight, making it the largest Mitch relief effort for Honduras in Canada.

The efficient job we did permitted five Friends of Honduras members to travel to Central America and witness the effects of our efforts through World Relief funding. That trip resulted in the development of the New Horizons Project; an initiative to build 20 houses for 20 families in Tocoa, Honduras, which is in the Department of Colón, just west of the Mosquito Coast. It meant that over the course of two years, I travelled back and forth from Canada, and spent about six months of my life in that country, as the volunteer project coordinator.

On one of those trips, my colleague and I arrived in La Ceiba airport, via the capital Tegucigalpa, the evening after a very fierce tropical storm. Though our flight was relatively uneventful – my colleague had spent most of the short ride chatting with the passenger beside him – upon landing, the weather conditions were quite dire, with heavy rain and the roads thick with mud. We walked to the bus stop for Tocoa and waited in the dark: no matter what time of year, light and dark always come more or less at the same time in Honduras; between 5:30 and 6:30 am and pm respectively.

Transportation for regular Hondurans – the type I tended to use – is generally very approximate: both in the type of vehicle – a mini-van with the seats ripped out, a taxi with half the floor missing, a yellow and black school bus that has exhausted its service in North America and ended up there; and in the scheduling – patience is the most important virtue in Honduran travel as the arrival and departure of a bus often seems based on nothing in particular. There is no railway system in the country except the competing railway tracks of United Fruit and Standard Fruit, which were built along the north coast in the late 19^th century and used into the 20^th century to transport pineapples, bananas and other fruits to main ports such as Puerto Cortes.

After about 20 minutes, a car slowed down and stopped in front of us. It was the woman who’d been sitting beside my colleague on the plane. She informed us that the road to Tocoa was closed because of the storm and that no bus would be passing to take us there that night. She then proceeded to invite us to sleep at her home where we spent a lovely evening with her children, had a good night’s sleep and then were able to head off on a bus to Tocoa the next day after a hearty breakfast.

Somewhere on Highway 400, Canada

My family is fortunate enough to own one of Georgian Bay’s spectacular 30,000 islands at the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. They are made of Precambrian pink and orange granite bedrock mixed with black igneous rock and rose quartz. White pine trees, that bend eastward, are the dominant coastal feature. During the summer, my parents live in a more-than-a-century-old two-storey wood and stone cottage, which is a quick boat ride to the mainland and about a 35 kilometre drive north of Parry Sound. Until we purchased it in 1994, the island was in the same family and originally bought from King Edward VII by a woman named Elizabeth Pierce in 1904. Folklore has it that the sturdy floor in the main part of the house is made of wood planks salvaged from a sinking lumber ship.

As a freelancer in the early 2000s, I used my parents’ old, navy blue Chevy Impala to travel back and forth from the island to Toronto so I could spend some time with them between projects. One stifling hot weekday in July, I hurried down Highway 69 – then a twisty two-lane road that passed through small towns consisting mainly of a gas station, a diner and a general store, as well as glorious tree-lined lakes and rivers – and then proceeded along the larger Highway 400, to make it to a meeting at 6 pm.

Traffic was still light as I drove south of Barrie, at the time still a small city on the shores of Lake Simcoe. Then at a certain point north of Toronto, I accelerated and had no response. I moved to the right lane and then glided to a stop on the shoulder, at which point I remembered something my mother had said about the gas gauge not working very well.

I looked down the highway and saw an exit not too far off, so I grabbed my purse, locked the door and started to walk. To this day, I distinctly remember that I was somehow not worried about my predicament or about the fact that I would likely not make the meeting that I had convened and that was to be held at my home.

Probably, I walked no more than a few minutes before a man in a pickup truck pulled up beside me and asked if I needed some help. This kind stranger gave me a lift to the nearest gas station, filled a container he had with fuel, drove to the nearest entrance to the southbound lanes of the highway and brought me back to my car. He then proceeded to pour the gas into my tank and, once he was sure the car would start, gave me a quick goodbye and headed off on his way. I made it to my meeting that day, just in time.

Ramallah, West Bank – Palestine

Since 2005, I have been an activist in the No TAV (treno di alta velocità) movement which is against the construction of a high-speed freight rail project that involves a 57-kilometre tunnel through the Alps. My involvement brought me to a number of conferences, one of which took place in Luxembourg in spring 2012. Joined by activists, artists, journalists and human rights defenders from across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, I was privileged to meet Greeks who’d demonstrated in Syntagma Square, members of Spain’s Indignados, young Libyans who’d left their country for the first time and Egyptians who’d led the protests in Tahir Square. I also met an activist from the West Bank who invited me to Palestine in November of that year.

My husband and I spent six days behind what Israeli’s call the West Bank Wall and Palestinians refer to as the Apartheid Wall. Upon completion, it will run more than 700 kilometres and over the years its construction has eaten away at land legally belonging to Palestinians. They were intense and difficult days during which we visited refugee camps, towns with entire populations that were facing eviction to make room for Israeli settlers and areas where industry polluted Palestinian agricultural land. We also participated in an impromptu demonstration near Hebron’s Shuhada Street – a former economic hub for Palestinian merchants that has been closed to them since 1994 after an Israeli settler killed 29 Palestinians in a Mosque.

While visiting Jerusalem, we saw the Weeping Wall and arrived by chance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Within the walls of the old city, we wandered down the narrow, crowded lanes amongst vibrantly coloured fabrics and ceramics and stands selling bright red pomegranate juice. We heard layers of music mixed with Arabic and Hebrew and smelled wafts of sweet incense. One evening, we watched the sun set from the top of the mount above Nablus as the melancholy call for prayer rose up into the sky.

Our friend had consistently been flying the No TAV flag I’d given him at the weekly demonstrations in his hometown of Bil’in, so we decided to carry it to the protest ourselves the Friday before our departure. After having learned what we should do if we were arrested and other details, we spent at least three hours that day participating in the dramatic run towards the wall, only to be pushed back by teargas and rubber bullets. Moving back and forth in waves with international, Palestinian and Israeli activists was a gruelling and frustrating experience and we were more than ready to head to Jerusalem for the night and then to Tel Aviv airport for our return flight the next day.

Half way through our stay, however, tensions between Israel and the Gaza Strip had risen and missiles had begun to fly. Friday is a holiday in the Muslim world and in the West Bank it is the day of protest. That evening, as we approached Qalandia, the main check point to Jerusalem, we saw the black smoke of burning tires and then clouds of teargas entered our cab. The checkpoint was blocked with protesters and soldiers. We could not get through.

Exhausted, we asked our taxi driver to take us back to our hotel in Ramallah as I mapped out alternate routes to get to Tel Aviv in my head. Upon our arrival, we faced a massive cab fare we didn’t have the cash to pay for. Then a hotel employee came out onto the street and, recognizing us, told the driver we were friends and so we paid what we could. That night we were offered a free room and, the next day, we made it to Tel Aviv and back to Rome on the last flight before they closed the Israeli airport.

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What have I learned from these experiences? Certainly, that I have been mostly lucky with strangers. But that may also be because I do not link a person who is unknown to me to ideas that are encapsulated in words like foreign, strange or external.

Most of the terms used to describe someone from outside our community, indicate an “alienness”, an otherness that I somehow have not integrated into my vision of people, whether they are strangers from strange worlds or not. In French, the words stranger and foreigner are the same étranger(ère) and are rooted in the term strange – étrange. The word straniero in Italian comes from the Latin extraneus. It is generally used to describe a foreigner and is linked to the word strano, which means strange.

My understanding is perhaps more like the Latin word for foreigner which is peregrine and refers to the pilgrims who travelled to Rome for religious reasons. With this word, the notion of hospitality is implicit, something that the Ancient Greeks encapsulated in their term philoxenia, which literally translates to “friend to the stranger”, much like the woman who offered me that cup of coffee.

*The Double Life of Veronique is a 1991 film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. The film’s characters, Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher, do not know each other but share a bond that transcends language and geography.