Part 2: The scene moves to Patong Beach, Phuket

Now the scene is at Patong Beach, on Phuket Island, on Thailand’s West coast. Sixteen months after the tidal wave which devastated the area, there are square signs bolted high on posts, with painted blue letters, all along the waterfront boulevard, pointing towards an improbable tsunami escape route.

It is Easter Sunday and the hotel management has put out an information notice for the guests who wish to attend church services, as well as an offer of a bonus for those who will make dinner reservations early: a free dessert to be chosen from the restaurant’s menu, although limited to one person and contingent upon the purchase of an entrée and a main meal per person also, as it is specified in smaller print. As for churches, there is a choice of locations and of languages: Thai, English, Italian, à la carte. The time and the location of the Italian mass are clearly the most convenient.

The church of the Sacred Heart is located on Soi Keb Sup, says the hotel’s leaflet. Asking for the best way to get there, I read the address to the girls at the desk, saying soup for sup. They are so amused that they start laughing out loudly, repeating soup the way I said it, with side comments of their own in Thai. The correct pronunciation is sap, and such is also the spelling on the town’s map they give me out of commiseration. I should take a “tuk tuk”, they say, for fear that I would lose my way.

One of those small utility vehicles, Japanese-made, converted into a minibus, takes me to an alley. The driver gestures: this is the alley I am looking for. There is no church in sight: clothing shops, eating places, massage parlors, but nothing looking like a church.

A policeman, busy with removing a moth trapped inside his cap, tells me that the church is in the next alley. He warns me: I cannot reach it from the back, where we are. I must return to the waterfront boulevard, go left and enter the first alley I encounter. I thank him; the moth finally flies away. I retrace my steps, watched by the shopkeepers, as they are opening their stands, rolling up their iron curtains, sweeping the pavement with wide brooms.

The next alley is difficult to find as its entrance is partially blocked by a store, leaving only a narrow lane on either side. There is no church in it either. Soon it comes to a fork, winding upstream like a river’s tributary. A man and a woman are eating bowls of noodles in a booth – the front of a tourist’s “Information center”, offering all day boat rides to some other islands.

“Do you want a shirt?” retorts the man when I wonder where the church might be. He adds, “Too early: not open.”

He means the shops, of course. Merchants around us are barely starting to stir; some are emptying cartons of colorful sweatshirts onto their stalls. I answer, showing the man my watch. “No, not too early, I am just on time for the service.”

He catches on: a church, not a shirt! He turns to the woman who is still eating her bowl of noodles, unfazed by the questions, and he answers to both of us, “Yes.”

He shows the lesser of the two lanes, the small tributary.

By now, I have become more demanding about directions: “Is it on the right side or the left side of that street?” The man hesitates; then he shows me his left forearm. He nods: left, indeed.

And yes, here it is, on the left side of the narrow street. It is no church by any stretch of the imagination, but rather one of the ground floor stores turned into a chapel and furnished like one: on both sides of a central aisle, eight rows of pews where forty to fifty people are already sitting. There is an altar with a plywood lectern on the right side and further back an electric organ with a curving keyboard. On the walls there are rows of color prints of New Testament scenes, the size of commercial calendars. The tabernacle, at the far end, gilded, overwrought, appears influenced by Buddhist styles. In fact, it looks exactly like the one which the hotel’s help set up near the pool’s bar for the “Songkran” festival, three days ago, on Thursday morning.

“Songkran” is another New Year celebration – not the calendar year, already more than a quarter gone, nor the Chinese Lunar year, which took place a good two months ago, but a Thai version where people throw water at each other: good wishes, good luck, good shower.

Some young girls do it the old fashioned way with pans of water; most have a Star Wars lookalike plastic gun squirting water up to a distance of several steps. They aim them at people on their way to dinner. In the Christian calendar, this week’s Thursday is the day of the Last Supper, painted among others by Leonardo Da Vinci, as Dan Brown, the author of “The Da Vinci Code”, discovered recently to the amazement of many people.

“Don’t you dare!” I say to a thin girl who trains her gun on my freshly pressed shirt, as I step into the street side restaurant. She lowers her weapon towards my ankles: just a drop for good measure.

On the morning of that Thursday, an old man sitting behind a table on the hotel’s patio presented what looked like a large necklace of white flowers to the faithful and to many of the guests as well. They in turn poured water on it. I found that necklace some time later; it is called a “pung ma lei”, I was told by the cocktail waitress on duty at the patio. It had been abandoned near the pool, still wet, its charm exhausted perhaps.

One of the tourists, a German from Munich, told me that the old man was 91 years of age. That German fellow is keen on birthdays as he explained to me that he was 48, and so was his friend and/or colleague perhaps (I did not grasp every word of his heavily accented speech), sitting next to him, smiling and approving: another graying, pot bellied man. This trip, which they took together as usual, was in anticipation of their dreaded 50th birthday, two years down the line. In the meantime, they were to celebrate Bavarian style with a bottle of beer in hand. That day, it was a Thai beer, a Singha, in its matching hand cooler. Heineken was available also, as well as some Chinese makes, their respective merits to be debated, although all clearly inferior to Munich’s best, according to the believers.

Today, at the chapel of the Sacred Heart, the Italian priest who is going to officiate is probably as old as his Buddhist counterpart. He is short and frail; his sparse white hair is carefully combed over the top of his head – not that it makes any difference. He announces mezzo voce the program of the day in familiar asides, and here we go.

He has a local helper, a young man in beach clothes, barefooted. The priest has sandals on, not the traditional leather-strapped European model, severe and monastic looking, but rather the Chinese made, all purpose type with colorful labels on one side. Lighting of the Easter tall candle, blessing of the water, of the people: we follow the liturgy with missals in different languages which we swap among each other. I exchange tips with a middle aged couple sitting next to me: they are from Perth, Australia.

Time to give each other’s peace; the priest shakes hands with each parishioner. In turn, I say: “Bonjour mon père, je suis français.”

With the familiar gesture of the hard of hearing, he bends towards me to grasp the meaning of my words. I repeat: “Sono francese, no italiano.”

He smiles, waves his arms in symmetric fashion: French and Italians are almost the same. He places both of his hands on mine, in a gesture of affection. John Paul II used to do the same when he was working the crowds on Saint Peter’s square, in Rome. Benedict XVI, his Bavarian successor, shows the same ecclesiastic mannerisms as I will notice later on during the Italian television Easter broadcast. It must be something that they pick up early on at the seminary, perhaps even before the end of the first year. The service goes on to its conclusion: La messa e finita.

Next week: We meet again, Mike Russ

Pierre-Edmond Robert is a Professeur of French Literature at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and head of the French as a Foreign Language School. He is the author of critical studies and editions of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, of translations from the English of short stories by the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant and the American Rick Bass. He has published short stories himself and three novels, the last one in 2005 : Pleure pas mon cœur (Bernard Pascuito éd.).