A few hours later, he met me and Jonathan Revusky on the Place d'Huiles by the Marseilles Old Port. The 21-year-old was sitting outside a closed Le Ginseng, where his cousin's a waitress.
Staring at a menu on the wall behind him, I made small talk, asked how long he had been in France. Just a year and a half, he said. We moved to nearby Le Cigalon, had a cutthroat beer, chatted.
Enjoying our conversation so much, he accompanied Jonathan Revusky and me to Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde, just half a mile away, though steeply uphill. In that 87 degree weather, I was huffing and had to park my lardy ass a couple of times. My new young friend didn't break a sweat.
Inside the church, he knelt down and prayed, then bought a crucifix and a Virgin Mary statue for 13 Euros from the gift shop. His cousin had apparently lent him some money. It's good to belong to a network. He has relatives in England and Poland also. He dreams of going to England, "I hear that life there is really great."
His name is Tha' » §y, which means water. "You're meant to flow everywhere," I said.
"Yes, that's me," he laughed.
Devout, he goes to mass every week, at a Vietnamese church in the 17th arrondissement, two metro lines away. He's planning a Vatican trip. "Many people dream of seeing it at least once in their lifetime. I will actually see it."
The best view of Marseille is from the northern end of Le Pharo, a park. From that vantage point, you'll have at your feet the 17th century Fort St Jean, the 19th century cathedral, with its domes, twin spires and banded marble design, and the Old Port with all of its fishing boats and yachts.
"What more do you want?" I marveled. "I can sit here for hours and just look at this."
Tha' » §y, "And it's even better when you have a good conversation!"
Deeming the Old Port a terrorist nest, the Germans and their French collaborators raided it in January of 1943, arrested roughly 6,000 individuals, then deported 1,642, 782 of whom were Jews. All the remaining residents of the Old Port, around 30,000 people, were cleared out so it could be dynamited, then rebuilt. In May of 1944, English and American planes bombed the Old Port and killed 1,752 people.
Tha' » §y has no fear of being deported, "I know a guy who's been here ten years, illegally. As long as I don't rob or kill anyone, the police won't bother me, and if I get sent back, I get sent back."
After we had parted ways with Tha' » §y, Jon observed, "That kid is like the protagonist of a picaresque novel. He's a contemporary Huckleberry Finn! I can certainly understand the restrictionist point of view on immigration, that people like this should be sent back, but when you meet a kid like this, you really have to be inhuman, to turn off a certain human side of one's being, in order not to feel some empathy with him."
"He's a survivor, man. He's not thinking about the larger implications of what he's doing. People have always been drawn to better opportunities, and you can even make a case that he's a political refugee."
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