In Father Jankowski’s parish house there was a huge harlequin Great Dane that slept in a sprawl next to the dining room table. At the smell of meat she woke and rose shamelessly to nudge her floppy jowls onto my lap and rest her head, ears perked and eyes cocking back and forth from my face to the meat tray. She is the first thing I remember as I begin to write about Poland.
Then come the grey skies of Gdansk; the leather faces of shipyard workers; the icy road to Lublin lined with children leaning against the cruel wind in their layers of winter coats, faces hidden in fur; a lady slipping in the snow at the foot of the graveyard, recovering herself and her toppled cart with an embarrassed smile; the young priest, Kazimierz, in his robes, blushing scarlet in the doorway as Father Jankowski sweeps me past him from the icy night to the overheated parlor; Father Jankowski’s nephew, Maciek (pronounced Machie), freezing at the shipyard monument, earnestly translating every word his uncle speaks, his face so white, his eyes so deep, his dreams so modest. And Lech Walesa.
Why Lech Walesa? Very simple: he is the undisputed leader of the banned Solidarity Union, the guiding light of the third mass nonviolent movement in the history of the world. Perhaps it is merely, or mainly, intelligence that keeps his followers from erupting into violence; or maybe an acute sense of their own history. Perhaps it’s just tactical savvy; but I suspect that Lech is like Dr. King and knows, as King knew about police chief Bull Connor, that General Jaruzelski is his brother in the human family. And I suspect that, partly because of Lech, many Poles actually believe in the moral necessity of nonviolence.
It all started in Ginetta’s kitchen on a gusty day in autumn. We were sitting at her small round marble table, sipping tea and speaking French, she with an Italian accent, I with my terrible grammar and limited vocabulary. “Mais, tu sais que je vais en Pologne?” Ginetta said. She was going to visit Auschwitz to seek out and face the demons of her youth. Aside from her own experiences as a prisoner of the Nazis, she had lost both her parents in the Holocaust. “But why don’t you come?” she said suddenly.
“Do I have to visit Auschwitz?”
“No! Of course not! But you could do some other veesiteeng.” Her eyes were twinkling. She knows my dreams.
“O.K.” I said, “as long as I can have dinner with Lech Walesa.”
“Yay, wonderful!” she cried, jumping up and throwing her arms in the air. “So many teengs ave been plan at dees leetle table!” And she bent down to hug me and plant a big kiss on each cheek.
Five weeks later—after a concert tour to Australia; a flight from Sydney to Singapore to Bahrein, to London, to Paris; a two-day visit with friends and a flight to Geneva to meet up with Ginetta—I reached Warsaw, cold, cold Warsaw.
Twelve hours later, still jet-lagged, we walked to the forlorn little car which would drive us the six or seven hours to Gdansk and were introduced to the driver, who spoke pidgin German. At my feet was a yellow plastic bag of chocolate bars, M&M’s, chewing gum, and Joan Baez T-shirts. In my guitar case was a stack of cassettes of Dire Straits, U2, Paul Young, Hall and Oates, and Joan Baez.
An hour out of the city the car’s cassette player ate several tapes, and died, leaving us with a peaceful union of spirits and the rumbling of the rattle trap little car.
Up front, Ginetta was no doubt lost in memories of the underground and her escape to freedom at night in a car with three men disguised as Nazi officials who delivered her into the arms of a waiting nun at the shadowy entrance to a convent.
The Polish countryside was poor, the earth an undernourished grey. Trees lined the roadside, tiny forests streaked with white birches and clotted above with silhouettes of mistletoe. A military compound stretched for miles and miles, fenced in by a thick wall topped with barbed wire. And once we saw, as if a casual reminder, a big ugly Russian tank parked on the roadside. Ginetta and I counted the huge storks’ nests which perched solidly at the tips of pointed roofs. The sun was a pale disc floating on a sea of battleship grey. It was not yet dark when we arrived in Gdansk.
The driver placed a telephone call from a pay phone at the train station, and then he and I waited among the milling commuters, under the big clock. I was inescapably visible in my red cowboy boots and matching scarf; even my coat, a sedate navy blue, was ostentatious in its length and style. Seven minutes later a car pulled up to the curbside and three men hopped out. They had workers’ hands, drab jackets, and good smile lines. I walked toward them and they welcomed me quickly, kissing my hand and speaking briefly to our driver. We followed them through town, zigzagging around traffic, then zooming toward the suburbs. Giant apartment buildings loomed up to the right and to the left. At last we pulled into a parking lot and everyone disembarked in hushed confusion. Unmarked secret police cars were in evidence all around us.
“Don’t panic,” I said to Ginetta of the immense eyes and vivid recall, “we are in the hands of friends.” I put my arm around her and we followed the men toward the building. Still picturing a cozy family dinner and a good interpreter mingling with the seven children, Lech’s wife, Danuta, and a few friends, I began mounting flights of dingy stairs, clutching my plastic bag of American decadence, wondering how old the kids were and if they had any pets. One of the men hustled past me and said something about NBC, and in that second I saw the unsteady glare of a hand-held camera light, plunged my hand too late into my pocket for a tube of lipstick and saw Lech, beaming in the doorway, the TV lights glaring from behind.
Somehow I had not expected him to be so like a schoolboy. Smiling shyly behind his glorious world-renowned moustache, looking not at all fierce, he held out flowers and made a welcoming speech to me and the roomful of people smiling at this wonderful meeting.
“You told Oriana Fallaci that you don’t like to be embraced,” I said as he smiled quizzically, and when it was translated everyone laughed, Lech put out his arms and we hugged, and I learned that in Poland one kisses three times from cheek to cheek.
The whole scene was bright and warm and animated after the steely horizons of storks’ nests and smokeless chimneys. He wore a white shirt and grey jacket with a pin of the Black Madonna on the lapel, and one of Solidarność above the breast pocket. He looked proud, pleased, and preoccupied. Co-workers poked their heads out from doorways and halls, but there was no Danuta and there were no children. Lech apologized for being a bad host, but explained that he was confined to his house at the moment, and therefore could not offer me the visit he would like.
In spite of the bad news we were both grinning like fools in between the formalities. We sat down on the couch while the cameras ground away, and he continued to explain his situation. He was detained in his apartment for “medical purposes.” “Stress, they are calling it this time.” The fact was that he had publicly criticized the recent government elections and had been taken out of circulation. But, he said, “There are so many people awaiting your arrival, at least two hundred this very evening at a small gathering in town, and although you must be exhausted from the journey, could you be imposed upon to meet with them and . . . perhaps . . . sing?” Before I could answer, he was explaining that there would be a mass the next morning, where perhaps I could sing again, and then, if possible, yes, indeed, it was terrible to ask so much, but could I imagine giving a concert for the public in the Brigida church Sunday evening? He sat hunched over, elbows on knees, hands working, his forehead worried in anticipation of the worst. Good God, I thought. Maybe he thinks I’ll say I won’t appear in public until I have a massage, facial, and coiffure, a dinner of filet mignon and crêpes flambées, some decent wine, and a hot brandy for the throat, a beauty rest, and a guided tour of Gdansk to shop for Polish knickknacks.
“Listen, Mr. Walesa,” I told him when I could finally get a word in edgewise. “I came here for purely selfish motives. I wanted to meet you and spend time with you because I admire you very much. The only thing that can give me more pleasure than dining with you and your family is to be of some use to you and your people. I am not the least bit tired. I am exhilarated, and I would be happy to speak and sing tonight, and sing at mass tomorrow morning, and give a concert tomorrow evening. Now may I please have something to drink? And,” I added, “where is Danuta? I want to meet her and get this embarrassing business over with of giving candy and gum to your children.”
A half dozen gorgeous children arrived in a pack at the door and tumbled into the room as though bursting from the frame of a beautiful painting. Their cheeks were red and their eyes clear, and they lined up in a row to stare at me. Danuta appeared in the doorway, pregnant in a brown corduroy smock, pretty, weary, but accepting. She leaned in for a hug, and looking bemused, said yes, I could give the candy to the kids. I rummaged around in my bag and then stood there like a great white hunter, handing out plastic-covered Double Bubble balls to one chubby open fist and chocolates to the next, reminding myself that in this very political context children were still children and loved the crackling of cellophane wrappers and the taste of sugar and the blowing of large, disgusting bubbles.
They vanished with their mother. Lech was talking again. He narrowed his eyes and tightened his forehead as though concentrating to make every word be the right one and not wasted. And yet, just behind his eyes and all around his cheeks played a devilishness always at the ready for a wild run. He hinted that he would show up at one of tomorrow’s functions, but didn’t say which, and then looked around the room and with a small gesture indicated that it was bugged. I knew from articles I’d read that he outwitted the police and showed up on forbidden days at forbidden places, and I was cheered by the confidence that I would see him again.
“Would you like a brief concert? Now? Impromptu?” I asked. Lech was blushing and the room seemed to twitter with excitement. The camera lights came back on as I tuned the guitar, preoccupied with the fact that Danuta was not with us, and simultaneously a complaint was delivered from the kitchen: Danuta was demanding to hear the concert too.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Lech,” I scolded. “If Women’s Lib hears about this at home, I’ll be shot.” I moved over on the couch and indicated for him to make room for Danuta. He moved toward me and held his hand out unconsciously for his wife and launched into a long explanation about how she was really the master of the household. She came in quietly and sat down.
The kids poured back into the room, chewing gum, and arranged themselves on the other side of me, used as they were to family portraits. I sang “Gracias a la Vida.” One little one, with a lavishly handsome moon face under uneven bangs, stood in the doorway in overalls, and scowled up at me with a look of fierce concentration. I wanted to laugh at his stern and beautiful expression, but I would have embarrassed him, and besides, Lech was holding Danuta’s hand, and a spell hung quietly in the room.
A big, full-featured, clean-shaven man wearing spectacles entered the room and Lech stood up. It was the priest, Father Jankowski. He invited Ginetta and me to stay at the parish house. We accepted, and the priest left.
How I had wanted to talk with Lech! We had only time to begin, to play enough psychic show-and-tell to know we would get along—a fashion plate gypsy and a union organizer—whose common ground was our adherence to the principles of nonviolence. We were both down-to-earth, both equally and infinitely stubborn, neither to be bought. We spoke briefly about violence and whether there was a qualitative difference between spontaneous fist-fight violence and organized state violence. He said that now when he threatens to swat his kids they remind him that he is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Then he said that the world is divided into two kinds of people: the day-to-day people who must work and run their lives and society, and then those up there—he waved his hand in the air and searched for a word, and all the Poles argued noisily until a word was decided upon—glisten, those up there who glisten, he said. I was someone who glistened. But you also glisten, I thought, and I hope I can come back to Poland sometime when you are free to sit under a tree with a tireless interpreter and talk about glistening, and the taste of fear, and the weight of a stork’s nest, and the marvel of laughter.
It was dark when we left the Walesa apartment and drove back into the city, where Father Jankowski greeted us in the courtyard of his parish under the spires of the Brigida church, Lech’s place of worship. That’s where I met Cora, the dog, and workers and friends and journalists and students.
Ginetta and I were shown to our rooms furnished with white lace curtains, couches, lamps too dim for reading, radiators pumping out air too hot for breathing. But the rooms were only a stopover, because it was already time for dinner and special food had been prepared: fresh ham, fresh pork, salads, eggs, sweets, and wine. As usual, I was too excited to eat. Big Father Jankowski ate plenty, and hosted us and the array of young priests and visitors and parish staff who filled up the big oval dining room table. We were served on fine porcelain. Cora learned that I would always pat her, and slip her a bit of ham. Abruptly after dinner, we put on hats and coats and strode out into the courtyard and beyond, ten of us or so, our voices mingling and echoing about the deserted streets in conspiratorial whispers and bursts of laughter. Here I am in Gdansk, I thought, and in a few minutes, I’ll be expected to speak and sing and be generally relevant, and I am delighted. There is no apprehension, no stage fright, only the agreeable feeling of being needed, and the desire to lend my spirit and voice to one more group of people who live in struggle and appreciate me in a special way.
In the faces of two hundred people I saw that the spirit of Solidarity was itself in struggle. These people had a history of unflagging strength and will. I reminded them of that, and I sang to bring them fresh hope and determination.
Two young men were introduced to me and they sang songs in great passions of rage to the strumming of cheap guitars strung with ancient strings. (I will be challenged by the right and by the left for daring to equate their struggles, but no one can challenge the fact that the guitars played by the underground in Chile, El Salvador, and Guatemala are identical to the ones played in Poland and the Soviet Union.) And we ended with “Dona Dona Dona.” Father Jankowski led me through the crowd as people came up with flowers, and I walked back into the night air buried in earmuffs, my huge coat, red scarf, and boots, and immense bouquets piled one on top of the other.
A name-day party was being held for one of the parish caretakers, a woman, and thirty or more people were dining at linen-covered tables set one long in the middle and two short at either end. I drank vodka and stuffed on meats, and noticed that some young people were getting up from their end of the table and leaving the room and returning all flushed, and I realized that there was music and dancing just across the hall. Yes, said the man next to me, he would like to dance, and soon everyone was dancing, a kind of Polish two-step, and when I’d practiced it with four or five people, I went and asked Father Jankowski for a dance. He nodded, took my hand, and led me majestically onto the dance floor where he swept me unselfconsciously into his arms and up against his portly tummy. Everyone else stopped while the Father and I danced in a big circle, me laughing and catching glimpses of hands over mouths and fingers pointing, just beyond the dark mass of Father Jankowski’s well-sculpted stubborn chin. I was roasting and red as a beet when we were through twirling, and left the Father ambling through the crowd in his skirts, acknowledging compliments.
Maciek, Father Jankowski’s nephew, held me gingerly as we highstepped in the overheated room. He asked me questions: Did I know Dire Straits? What was it like at Woodstock? When did I start to sing? Did I like Poland? Maciek’s eyes were sunk deep in his white face, but they shone sparkling blue and were fringed with long and curly lashes. His nose was perfectly straight, his mouth generous and tender, and his white teeth just as straight as his nose. This gaunt but angelic apparition was a fine dancer. I changed partners at the end of “Rose in Spanish Harlem” and danced with everybody, including the cook, who tried to get me drunk on vodka, and in the middle of a polka the room started to spin, and I sat down on a pile of coats and decided it was time for bed.
Kazimierz, the young priest, showed me back to my room and let it be known, in a sentence he’d no doubt been perfecting since I’d arrived, that “if you are needing anything, my room is just next. Right here. Okay?” “Thank you,” I said and kissed his burning cheek. “I had a wonderful evening. And you’re a good dancer. GOOD DANCER.” “Oh, no, yes, well tank you good night,” and he flew down the stairs.
Enveloped in white quilts, Ginetta seemed even tinier than usual next to the huge bouquet of accumulated flowers we’d put on her coffee table. I took a picture of her there, smiling in happy exhaustion under a gruesome portrait of the Virgin Mary, who had tears rolling down the flesh-pink valley between her nose and cheek. A bloody heart hung suspended out in front of the baby Jesus.
At six in the dark morning I rose and dressed. At mass, I sat up in front, in the choir pews sideways to the congregation, so I could see the congregation on my left, Father Jankowski at the altar in front of me, and Lech to my right. NBC and BBC were everywhere. The huge church was very cold, but filled with people of all ages and children bundled up in snowsuits, lining the very front rows at the feet of their parents.
Father Jankowski’s voice rang out, a reflection of the power and clarity of his spirit and actions. The congregation answered in song. Lech sang, too, a little sheepishly, aware of the proximity of my hand-size tape recorder. I was ecstatic, listening to the ritual and wishing that I shared the Catholic faith. This is what church should be, I thought, the strength of a people, their meeting place, their constant spiritual sustenance and their political home. Lech was nudging me, and Father Jankowski was nodding, so I went forward as planned and stood just in back of the altar and sang, “Gracias a la Vida” without the guitar.
A soprano voice rose from the back of the church, accompanied by an organ, and I sang again as the silver plates were passed. Then there was communion, and at the very end of mass the congregation, most of them already standing as the church was overfull, broke into song, raising their hands in the air with their fingers in the victory sign, and Lech raised his hand as well, and so did I.
We all filed into the courtyard. Snow had begun to fall, and thousands of people drifted toward the parish house. From those rough faces and weary bodies rose a chorus almost fearful in its unity. The interpreter muttered that they wanted me to sing. The air would paralyze my vocal cords, I explained, so Father Jankowski and Lech and I went upstairs and stood at a window, me feeling vaguely like the Pope. A microphone materialized for us, and the crowd struck up another song as the snow landed on hats and scarves and eyelashes and stuck there like cotton.
“They’re singing the Popieluszko song, about the priest—” the interpreter was saying.
“Yes, I know about him,” I said, remembering the hideous details of his murder. I’d seen the picture of his mother and father in a magazine, and had wept at the misery and shock in their old wrinkled faces and at the ghastliness and irrevocability of their loss. Father Jankowski handed me the microphone. I told the crowd that I had not seen such a spirit since the early days of the revolution led by Martin Luther King and sang, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” and when it was over they started chanting again, but this time Lech darted into the corner of the room, hidden from the window, his face crinkled in laughter and flushing once again.
“What is it?” I demanded. “What?!”
“They ask you to take their greetings to your President.”
I began to laugh and the interpreter lied and said, “They are only joking,” but they weren’t joking, and that only made it funnier.
At that night’s concert, I sang the song I’d written for Lech: “Happy Birthday,” it says to a certain very important Russian official, “what a mighty heart must beat in your breast, to hold fortynine medals on your chest.” The people threw back their heads and laughed until they were wiping tears from the creases that cut from their eyes to their cheeks. The words were all sarcastic until the last verse, which honors Lech and the workers and the Black Madonna. Referring to the government’s silencing of Lech, the very last line says, “We hear you, Lech Walesa, yes, we hear you, Lech Walesa” over and over, and when we came to it the people began to sing along, louder and louder at each repetition. Lech would see it all on video the next day. In fact, he’d see it three times.
After the performance an ex-political prisoner gave me a black and red rosary he’d made in prison out of bread, ashes, toothpaste, and melted plastic. In it were etched tiny, intricately carved symbols of the Shipyard Movement, the wings of the Polish eagle, and the Black Madonna. A tiny old woman in a fuzzy hat with grey wisps of hair poking out from under clutched my arm and handed me something wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon. The kid standing next to me whistled and said, “It’s chocolate.”
Later at dinner Father Jankowski presented me with a beautiful print of the Black Madonna set in a gold frame. Tired and weepy, I suddenly thought I’d burst into tears if I didn’t get some air.
“Maciek,” I whispered, “can we take Cora for a walk?”
And so Maciek, Kazimierz, the Great Dane and I set out at midnight to walk to the old section of Gdansk, the ground slick like iced marble under our feet and the wind slicing through us like slivers of metal.
We headed toward Mariacka Street, the old square that before martial law had been full of lights and people. The three of us linked arms, and a police car glided past. My chest tightened and an uncomfortable feeling passed through me. Three weeks before, the police had picked up a nineteen-year-old student. Finding that he was carrying only a student card, and not the proper identification required since martial law, they had taken him off and beat him senseless. Ten days later he died. Forty thousand people came to mourn him, but we didn’t hear about it in the West. I pulled my two friends in closer to me: it was unbearable to think of any harm coming to them. Just then Cora ran full tilt toward a silhouette across the square, and the form froze in terror while Kazimierz called out vainly for her to stop. But she was too young and gay and the crystal air too exhilarating, and she charged up to the rigid form and danced around him, licking his hand, or trying to, or so it seemed in the dim street light. Then she came bounding back, ears up and eyes shining, and upon hearing Kazimierz’s tone as she drew close, stopped suddenly and slid on the icy pavement that was like marble and sank to the ground at his feet. Kazimierz scolded her softly for a moment and then bent down and patted her reassuringly on the head and neck so that her collar jingled.
Back at the parish house, we three talked in my room about Dire Straits, because I would see them in three days when I left Poland. “You must tell them to come to Poland and there would be,” Kazimierz said, “a million young people to see them in one night.” I gave the young priest a copy of The Best of Joan Baez and he immediately went to his room to put it on the machine. And Maciek—well, Maciek already had a U2 T-shirt, three rock and roll cassettes, and a Joan Baez cassette and a Live Aid T-shirt.
I was a long time awake, lying under my quilt with the radiators turned off and the snow falling silent as paper just two feet from my pillow out in the lonesome courtyard.
Before I returned to Warsaw, Father Jankowski and Maciek took me to visit the shipyard monument. As we passed a big ugly apartment building across from the monument, he looked up.
“One day,” he said, “during a march, a man in the crowd looked up at one of deez windows, and he said, ’You know, I have a funny feeling about dat window,’ and dere was a man up dere who had a gun, and he shooted him.”
I thought for a moment.
“Shot him,” I said. “He shot him.”
“Oh, God! I said shooted? It is an unregular verb?”
“Yes, Maciek. It’s unregular.”
I thought for another moment.
“Did the man die?”
“Oh, yes, of course, he died.”
I sent over a bottle of Nina Ricci eau de cologne for Danuta, and a note which said, “I understand that in order to live with a saint you have to be a martyr”; and for Lech, a crucifix that belonged to my grandfather, a turquoise Joan Baez T-shirt, and a note which said, “Next time maybe we can go fishing. ...”
The car was puffing white clouds in the courtyard, but Father Jankowski appeared waving his arms and calling that someone from the Catholic University at Lublin was on the phone and wanted me to come and sing a concert for the students the very next day. I sighed and thought about sleeping late on my last day, curled up under the covers in my cold hotel room in Warsaw, in total peace with my broken phone and no schedule, but there was Father Jankowski tilting backward, spreading his arms like a great black eagle, saying that Lublin was the only school of its kind between Japan (waving one hand) and Australia (waving the other). I said yes, I’d come and sing, but they didn’t believe me. Father Jankowski took the phone to answer their astonished questions. She charges nothing for you, there is no one with her and she carries no equipment, and you’d better organize things perfectly or I’ll shoot you.
I kissed everybody, from the cooks to the Father. Kazimierz was trying to push his blush down below the white collar, but it was no use. Cora came down the stairs with my earmuffs in her mouth, and I took them, sticky and black, and kissed her, and she kissed me back, a huge wet swipe from my nose to my forehead.
On the roads of Poland a Mercedes is a racing car, and it took only five hours, with music all the way, from Gdansk to Warsaw. I gave the driver a tape, and a chocolate bar for his wife. Alone in my hotel room, I sat down on the bed and burst into tears. Ginetta finally wafted in from the snow two hours later, and she chatted with me up and down the hallways, pausing every now and then to hold me away and tell me how tired I looked.
At dinner I asked to take the leftover cauliflower to my room, and they prepared an entire new one, which slid around on the plate like a giant steaming dumpling. Did I want it taken to my room? Oh no, thank you so much, let me, I said, and ten waiters, with nothing to do because of full employment in this socialist society, watched me gather coat and scarf and purse and then, balancing the cauliflower on the porcelain plate, stagger out of the dining room. I woke up in my bed four hours later with the lights on, my clothes in a heap on the floor, and a cold cauliflower on the windowsill. I was still wearing the earphones I must have put on to listen to ah, yes, it was Pink Floyd who had bombed and strafed me to sleep in their war requiem, The Final Cut. I shut my eyes and slept six more hours.
Lublin was three hours away and colder as we headed east, the snow slashing across the highway and women walking backward against the wind. The audience had broken the doors down getting in for seats, filled up the little stage, and lined the hallways outside as far as you could see. Teachers abandoned their lectures and whole classes came. I sang newer songs for the kids, and they sang me two songs, and then gave me rosaries and letters for Dire Straits. When I left they said they still couldn’t really believe I’d come.
Back in Warsaw, a man was waiting for me in the lobby. He wanted me to meet two political prisoners who were currently out of jail, though I gathered they spent as much time in as out. They were from the intellectual community, a man and wife, aristocratic-looking with beautiful children. The husband listened to me sing and walked around the room quietly while the other guests sat. He had brilliant eyes. He told me of a ninety-eight-year-old man who lives in Warsaw, who when asked about his age, says it’s a big nuisance because now, when he does his exercises, he has to stand on his head near a wall so he can lean his feet against it.
Oh, I will miss all of you, your humor and cleverness. I will miss being where the things we say and do make a difference. “What does freedom mean?” a man from the unofficial press asked me. I thought hard and my response was grim. Perhaps there are two kinds of freedom, I said. The kind that is born into and taken for granted, like mine in the States; and the kind measured by the little victories of its acquisition, each one savored and celebrated. At home we have freedom of speech, but fewer and fewer words with any meaning are ever spoken. We have freedom of thought, but nothing pushes us toward creative thinking. We have freedom of choice, and a diminishing quality of moral and spiritual values characterizing our choices. And here, where you have to fight for it, a spirit is created like the one in the courtyard of the parish. The people sing, cherish their children, love their church, and care for their neighbors. This is not a commentary on the East and West, I said, it is a commentary on struggle.