Wash up in the concrete bank at Barbes-Rauchachourt where the recent immigrants crowd the traffic islands selling cigarettes and amphetamines, speaking French with the thick accents of Africa and Eastern Europe, this other tongue which connects them mouth to mouth across continents and reasons for coming here. The wind whips cold curls around the corner to the entrance to the Metro tracks and in those quick blasts the deals seem desperate - cocaineMarlboroRedmethsex - but soon the buyers depart with the trains and the men game one another instead, matching dollars to drugs and girls against marlboros, searching for a value: translated, never actually traded.
