to be spoken to in English in Montreal speak French badly Francophones will immediately switch. But if you want to speak French, insist on speaking English.  At a smoked-meat joint on St-Laurent, on another cold Montreal night, Freed was exhausted, his sense of humor, he said, sorely tested.  One of the horrible things about the referendum,  Freed said,  is this weird calling up of your roots. I consider myself Jewish, bald, of Russian ancestry, a Quebecer, a Canadian, a Montrealer, and I ve never really weighed the degree to which I m one or the other. But in the weeks before the referendum, when it looked like the separatists might win, I found this Canadian root called up. It s very painful to feel these parts of yourself fighting. I didn t want to know I m more Canadian than Quebecer. 
Freed told me of the overwhelming reception he had received at a Chinese banquet after the referendum. Suddenly, we re all ethnic together, he said.  The separatists have turned everyone who isn t Quebecois into a f - - - g family, united in our opposition to them.  He said he knows only one person who is actually leaving because of the referendum.  But I know a thousand who are talking about it,  he
said.  People are going t houses, go liquid in a b guess ten to twenty thou; are going to leave befor referendum which, of < separatists are counting c of the things that pisses in their interest for us to I
Downtown, in the cli< scrapers at the foot of Mont Royal, I met with i Anglophone businessmj had talked to on the pho; nervously told me, off th< death threats associates of ceived from separatist fai large suite at the end o corridor, the businessma ing the latent fear of repr pervasive among non-Frai said he did not want to be  A lot of business is bein and a lot of business is I poned. Companies are d out of Quebec. There wo lie announcements. Pe learned to slip out quiet don't upset their French c
The businessman, wl volved in organizing the I in the last few days of tl dum, showed me a poster shot of the crowd that d; tell you how many hard-i nessmen had tears in the said.  It was the fear of 1c of community, of friends position in society, all at c
 In my twenty-five-y there have been six proloi sions because of politics ; This is not a sport. Tb causes consternation abo bility of doing business lowered his voice.  Bu won t be unprepared r There s serious money be treal separating from Qut set up a corridor to Ont; treal has 65 percent of provincial product and 8 the population, have the rest of  
M he Sunday after the r Rene-Daniel Dubois, Quebecois playwright, was of a full-page interview ir of Paris. A former separat was one of the 40 percei cophones who voted likened the referendum t
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suicide."  The Quebecois imagine that sovereignty will be their act of birth,  he said.  Meanwhile, they do not define themselves as actors, but as victims of the hatred and wickedness of the others.  Describing Quebec as a   soft  totalitarian society,  Dubois said,  The true alternative is this: to be die young man in the white shirt in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, or to be the driver of the tank. Our myths tell us that we are the young man. The truth is that we are seated in the tank. 
1 met with Dubois on a Saturday inNovember, just before the closing night of the revival of his seventeenpart one-man play in French, Don t Blame the Bedouins. A stocky man with hair shaved to prickle length, wire-rimmed glasses, and a tobaccorasp voice, Dubois told me that he was suffering  a kind of boycott. People scream at me, won t talk to me. Culture is always used symbolically in Quebec. Artists are only good if they can be used for nationalism.  What was lost in the symbolism were real social problems, Dubois said.  Half the boys in Montreal don t finish high school, and Quebec has the highest youth suicide rate in the Western world. It s a catastrophe. 
The audiences for his play, he told  e, had been unusually small. The English-language daily, on the other hand, did a big spread on him, and Anglo columnists had quoted approvingly from his Le Monde interview. When I pointed out that he had been shunned by the French and bear-hugged by the English, Dubois shrugged.  What do you
A expect? 
A couple of weeks after the refer-^ndum I arranged to meet again with Marie-Claude and her friend Chan-*a e. Over a vrai Quebecois break-ast bacon and eggs and potatoes ^d beans and toast and, for the sec- nd course, a plate of crepes swimin maple syrup they told me Lat Evancophones who had voted u* were depressed. They thought Nothing had changed, that nothing change. 1 asked them how they e t about Bernard Landry s behavior night of the referendum and ,e cut *n immigration to Quebec and e fears of Anglophones and AlloP ones. They both looked at me with
surprise. The stories hadn t been covered in the French media, they said.
 We are not in contact with Anglos, you know,  Marie-Claude said,  except you. 
I was, I realized, on the other side of a segregated city. The divide of Boulevard St-Laurent, the Frenchspeaking and English-speaking neighborhoods of Montreal, the French and English press, meant that there were two versions of everything. When Bouchard spoke on television just before the referendum, the French version of his address summoned the spirits of the Night of the Long Knives; the terse, disjointed English version he delivered that same night talked of the future partnership between Quebec and the rest of Canada. There were two sets of facts here. If the facts were agreed upon, then there were two completely different interpretations of those facts.
How you saw what was happening in Quebec depended on your point of view. To Anglophones and Allophones, the Quebecois are a dominant, even oppressive majority. But through Francophone eyes, the province is a tiny, embattled island in an invincible sea of English. The idea that the Quebecois could ever oppress anyone seems, to them, ludicrous. 1 told Chantale and Mane-Claude how pervasive anxiety and uncertainty were among the non-Francophones I had encountered, and that people were talking openly and constant y about as many as a million peop e leaving Quebec, but to Chantaleit sounded like just another attack. We treat the Anglophones well, she said.  They don t do so badly.
On the night of the referendum, when Parizeau announced that etn-L, were to blame fa the crowd cheered I had seen rhe color drain from Marie-Claude * cheeks. Caught between the mono culture of her childhood and cos mopolitan Montreal, she had always teen worried about  rhe shadow ^ racism  in the separatist movemen .  I would like everyone to be inclu   ed in the project of a new country, she said now.  But I can undead their feeling of rejection. I know that it exists, but only because you tell me it does. I m not so much in contact with these people. I don t
have close friends that aren t Francophones. The thing that makes me sad is that I m more conscious of the walls in my city. I don t know how to reach out. The walls were there before, but now they ve been named. 
A rode Montreal s absurdly quiet, rubber-wheeled Metro east the guy beside me was reading a pamphlet on Esperanto grammar to meet Pierre Vallieres, the intellectual leader of the Front de Liberation du Quebec during the 1960s and the author of the best-selling White Niggers of America, a revolutionary tome in which Vallieres likened the Quebecois to slaves:  the workers of Quebec are aware of their conditions as niggers, exploited men, second class citizens.... Were they not imported, like the American blacks, to serve as cheap labor in the New World? The only difference between them is the color of their skin and the continent they came from.  In the 1960s in Montreal, FLQ bombs were routinely exploding on the wealthy English west side of the city. Vallieres was convicted of contributing to one bombing through  his writings, his words, his attitudes, etc. 
In a Vietnamese restaurant in the Gay Village, Vallieres, a frail Jesuitical man, said he had recanted the use of the term  nigger :  You have to understand the context. In the Sixties, it meant somebody who was downtrodden, somebody who was abused. That was the situation here. Now this is not the case. There is more poverty than there ever was before, but there are many, many Allophones who are poor as well.
I had heard Vallieres on the radio talking about his frequent visits to Sarajevo over the last few years. When I asked him why he had gone, he said,  I felt it was my duty to see an experiment in self-management and self-determination and socialism fal into fratricidal wars and internecine killing.  Vallieres, who now says he was never a Quebecois nationalist, doesn t see what happened in Sarajevo happening in Montreal. Sarajevo is a small city, a unilingual city, and it s a city that is steeped in tradition. Montreal is younger, larger, and North American. In Sarajevo the war began outside the city, but if there is a
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conflict here, it would arise from inside, like the blacks in South-Central Los Angeles. 1 don t think it would be a real war with arms and bullets, but there might be some sparks. 
Andre McLaughlin, Vallieres s companion, who also spends a lot of time in Sarajevo, said,  I m much more pessimistic about Montreal. After the referendum, a young man came to the house, very disappointed with the result, and he said he agreed with Parizeau s statement that the ethnics were to blame. He believes that Quebec is taking 40 percent of Canada s immigrants. That s not true, but try to convince that young man that what he thinks is based on emotion. When I tell my friends in Sarajevo about the referendum here, they say,  Remember, that s how we started.  We have a lot of volunteers in Sarajevo who are willing to come here and I	teach us the art of survival. 
n the parallel universes of French and English newspapers and television, politicians continued their poisonous post-referendum fighting  now, once again, pre-referendum fighting always with a different interpretation. Jacques Parizeau resigned without apologizing for his remarks, and was given a statesman s send-off. Lucien Bouchard, the man of fate, gave up his position as leader of Her Majesty s Loyal Opposition in the federal parliament to take Parizeau s place as premier of the province and prepare for the next vote on independence. Bernard Landry remained the deputy premier. Prime Minister Chretien, fulfilling promises he had made during the referendum campaign, introduced bills recognizing Quebec as a distinct society, giving the province a veto over constitutional change, and decentralizing power. Nothing Chretien did seemed to matter. The popularity of sovereignty rose in the polls. The rest of Canada, as separatists hoped, was exhausted. Patience with the Quebec Problem was spent; the country had been desensitized to what seemed to be the certainty of its fragmentation.
CHALLENGES
One of the enormous diaspora of exMontrealers now living in Toronto told me his eighty-year-old parents had left Montreal for Ontario. He laughed and said he now calls Quebec  the Old Country. 
The only thing that no one I met, separatist or federalist, talked about was what would have happened if the vote had gone the other way. Nobody wanted to talk about the fact that a few days before the referendum a member of parliament of the Bloc Quebecois, Bouchard s separatist party in the federal assembly, had sent a statement to army barracks in Quebec saying that  soldiers of Quebec origin  would be expected to transfer their loyalty to the new nation. No one mentioned the October Crisis of 1970, when Prime Minister Trudeau declared a state of emergency and sent tanks into the streets of Montreal and arrested hundreds to put down the picayune threat of the Front de Liberation du Quebec. No one wanted to think