I have to write a few lines about Montreal this evening. I just returned from a brief trip to Vancouver. In Vancouver, everyone is friendly. The mountains are snow-capped and majestic; the ocean is deep blue and scintillating; the Vancouverites wear jogging pants, running shoes and Gore-tex. Kitsilano is spotless and the East Side rotting. The older men dressed in smart suits working in real estate talk to you and your brother about their love for hip-hop dancing on the airport bus. The bus driver speaks in a running commentary and lets you ride for free over and over again. You spend twelve minutes talking about hockey.
And in Montreal. I went to get passports photos this morning for a Kenyan Visa. My usual place, a small Hassidic shop up the road, was closed. I go a few blocks down and walk up some stone steps, having stumbled on another store with the same services. I open the door and a deep jangle screams/rings at the back of the shop. There is a long hall-way and it is dark. I emerge into a small sitting room. All four walls are covered in ancient portraits. Young and old, married and children. A younger man comes out and tells me to wait. In the back, I can see the flash of a bulb and the glare of spot lights. A woman is sitting in the shadows with her hands clutching the seat.
Soon after, the woman and an older, short and crotchety man emerge. He sits down at his desk and starts speaking in German to the woman. She has also just had her passports photos taken. Also speaking in German, she tells him that she studies at McGill and has three children. They include me into the conversation. He is German and she used to live in Germany. He tells me that as a photographer he can simply tell these things. He came to Montreal 20 years ago. She is married to a Russian-German man. She met him on the airplane out of Uganda, where she is from. She went to school in Germany for several years and then moved to Montreal with her journalist-husband. He writes for Vanity Fair. She tells me she comes from Southern Uganda, Museveni’s tribe to be exact.
When she leaves, I sit in the dark back room under the shine of the spots. The old man’s assistant has fixed my hair, which pokes out at all sides, and pulls my blouse over the front of my tank-top. Through an ancient Polaroid camera, he takes a series of pictures. The sound of the camera is comforting: an old rattle from the back of the machine to the front. The bulb flashes and my eyes start watering. When we are done, I sit in the living room and watch him cut the photos into regulated passport sizes. He tells me that he knows two sisters who went to Kenya and came back in body bags. They were nurses. He warns me that “black people” go crazy for the white girls. He is living many decades ago, in the 40s and 50s when this type of rhetoric was common-place. I sit and shrug, telling him I have only had wonderful experiences in Eastern Africa and in Nairobi specifically. He concedes, saying he imagines I will come home alive.