Chapter 10 ★1942

The loading place was at the Austerlitz railway station, and there were many refusals, camouflage nets, barbed wire strung with caltrops, sandbags, and the cold March air.Alexander did not come.He stayed at home, sitting in the only easy chair he had, depressed and quiet.Since his bankruptcy, he has given up all the little things that have allowed him to live for decades, like going to the bistros of second- and third-rate artists in Montparnasse for a bachelor's lunch, going to the Rue Vaugirard and the imitation Risis drink coffee and hang out in the Champs Elysees (to see the Germans take over, thanks, and to see these bastards googling, Justine criticized a few words).He no longer subscribes to "Gringle Weekly", because he has no money, and on the other hand, because of Maxson's [Note 1] article on "Some Little Things Caused by a Massacre" [Note 2], he no longer subscribes to "I am everywhere "[Note 3], because Marcel.Ru Angdo [Note 4] criticizes He Nei with bad words.Schwab's little sentence: I do not accept that the Virgin Mary is the little Jewish woman of the Rue des Rosiers.He no longer listens to the news on the radio.He continued to smoke, smoking all the cigarette tickets Justine got.He coughed as usual.Perhaps nothing was on his mind.

[Annotation 1] Maxsons (1906︱1956): French journalist and writer, who wrote literary reviews for "Gringle Weekly" for a long time. 【Annotation 2】"Some Little Things Caused by a Massacre": A collection of short essays published in 1936 by the French writer Chérin (1894︱1961).Schelling's works often have heroic and comical tones and epic styles in nihilistic thoughts. She is one of the greatest French writers of the twentieth century. work. [Annotation 3] "I am everywhere": French international news weekly, published from 1930 to 1944. Since 1932, it has fully supported the fascist regime in Europe, and later became the most influential of the Vichy regime. powerful newspapers.

【Annotation 4】Marcel.Jouendeau (1888︱1979): French writer who published an anti-Semitic anthology "The Scourge of the Semites" in 1938. [Annotation 5] Rose Street: Located in the Marais district of Paris, a neighborhood populated by Jews. Adie looked at his profile, hooked nose, high forehead, carefully trimmed mustache, long black hair combed back, it was abnormally thick for a man of his age, she imagined him twenty-five At the age of 10, he left Mauritius for the first time, bold and fearless, exhausted, charming, and wanted to start a new life in France.Everything that separates him from this splendor, this youth, everything that slips away and escapes, year after year, until this empty living room is left, from which he will be kicked out in a short time.

Justine held something in her hand.At the station, she was busy with things, constantly exhorting and rewarding the porters.Come here, the mirror, to the innermost place, placed between two chests of drawers, those cardboard boxes for tableware, the dismantled wardrobe, those wooden boxes, those wicker boxes, which contained clothes and stacks of old clothes And the yellowed linen sheets, and this big wooden box, in which she piled all of Adie's toys, dolls with ceramic faces, housekeeping toys, yellow dwarf card games, Lotto puzzles , dominoes, diabolo, gyroscope, high jump ball, toy projector, ludo, frog fishing, mini croquet, and even the pitching board that Atie was terrified of when she was a child, which was a piece of pulp with monsters on it He opened his mouth wide and swallowed the cylinders made of cloth one after another, scaring Adie to hide in the cellar.When we get to Nice, what are we going to do with these things?When this pile of miscellaneous things was loaded into the car, Ai Dieer asked casually.So my grandson, what are they going to play?Justine's answer made Adie very dissatisfied.grandson?You mean my child?

This is a good time to talk about it, on this platform full of panicked people, everyone is busy salvaging their furniture and clothing, as if everyone in the world is thinking about these things, the enemy wants maybe Bloodthirsty Russians They will break through all obstacles and invade Europe, this is the story of General Le Mercier's wife, a woman who is almost insane, and she was still in the Rue Cotentin at that time. De︱Dion︱Bouton [Note] Driven out of the garage, it has been sleeping in the garage for a long time because it has no money to buy oil these years. It looks like an animal from ancient times, towering on its thin paws, yellow and The black body is mottled with rust.Justine made a set of rubber curtains for the trip, and the outer layer was sewn with flannelette (the red curtain was also stuffed with cloth, and the lead fell), so that everyone's legs would not be exposed to the wind and rain.Completing the work was a blacksmith who welded some arches to the split canopy, on which a wooden platform was fastened, like the roof of a funicular.Everything that wasn't loaded into the wagon at the station found its place on this platform, mattresses, rolled up rugs, door curtains, and last but not least, stacked one on top of the other, several gardens. Justine managed to stuff some tablecloths, sheets, napkins, soap, and even a few bags of potatoes in a pile of old clothes, as if someone was going to come and collect the city tax.It's pathetic, ridiculous, and vaguely shameful at the same time, Atie thought.Her brand-new driver's license (Alexander had failed every time he tried, even though he'd been driving since he owned a car) made her the driver of the bench car.

[Annotation] De︱Dieng︱Bouton: The largest car manufacturer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Justine accompanied her to the district government office in the 15th arrondissement to apply for that sesame seed, so that the gates of the city would be opened and they could escape the trap of Paris.The German officer was elegant, meticulous, and well-mannered, and the interpreter, a sly-faced young man in black leather with the air of a punk, kept darting his eyes over Atel during the entire interview. Glance, as if trying to see her figure and the legs under her maroon coat.

Return Home Road Pass [Note]: Heimschaffungs︱Bestatigung der Fluchtlinge durch Strassenverkehr [Annotation] After Germany and France signed the Armistice Agreement in June 1940, the northern half of France was occupied by Germany, the southern half of the free zone was under the jurisdiction of Marshal Pétain's Vichy regime, and the French-Italian junction in the south was occupied by Italy district.From Paris (German Occupied Area) to Nice (Mediterranean Sea, Italian Occupied Area), you must apply for permission from the German Occupation Army, and you must pass through the free zone before you can arrive.The French here refers to the return home road pass, but the German refers to the refugee return home pass, with the word refugee added.

It was stamped and released at Lusac︱Castle Town Office【Note】. [Annotation] Lussac︱Castle Town: A small town in central France, located on the border between the occupied zone and the free zone. An unsealed envelope containing gasoline allocation coupons, each fifty liters, the control and inspection place is at the Lussac︱Castle Town Hall, and four days later, at the Castell︱Le︱Lie Town Hall【Note】 . [Annotation] Castell︱Le︱Lie: A small town in southern France, located on the Mediterranean coast, about 330 kilometers west of Nice. Of course, you have to tell a little bit of a lie.When the young interpreter examined Alexander's ID card with an illiterate concentration, he spelled out the words on the card: Born in Mauritius Island, Mocha District, he criticized bluntly that these foreigners took the road Jamming Adie interrupted him: Sir, he is an old man who has been sick for many years, and the southern climate is his only chance of survival.Justine didn't even turn her head.An old man who has been ill for a long time, her husband has become like this.

Going to the south was supposed to be a vacation.Go to the Mediterranean for Easter, to the groves of acacia and lemons, to the coves near Toulon, to the Gulf of Aron, or to Yejo, to the beaches of Le Lafondu.She and Luo Hong often talked about these places, a journey full of fragrance, love, and more than anything else, it was like a honeymoon trip that was too sweet. Now the road is straight and empty, through lovely country, fields of wheat before earing, pastures, and fern-covered slopes.The light sky is scattered with a few gentle little clouds, and the horizon is light blue.Ai Dier sings while driving, she can sing all kinds of songs. La Traviata, Lucia of Lammermoor, The Mercy of King Dido.The bearded king marches, drunken marches. [Note] Later, when she ran out of songs, she sang "Midnight Christian", "Christmas Bells" in English, and even "Christmas Tree" in German, since everyone has to live in German In the cultural atmosphere, since you have to train yourself to speak German, let's sing!It was her way of distracting herself from the noise of the engine, which made her feel out of breath at any moment, and from the sound of Alexander snoring unconsciously in the backseat.Justine regained her confidence.She joins Eddie's singing.Perhaps a new life has begun for that sentence that has since become Alexander's famous saying!has been imprinted in her heart.

[Annotation] Lyrics of Offenbach's opera "Beautiful Helen". Did she see the traces of the war?On the broken walls and ruins along the way, you can see a name, a slogan, black holes in the fields, charred car wrecks, a cart with missing wheels, and the skeleton of a horse half standing and half standing. Leaning against the hedge, the color of red soot, his teeth sneered at sparrows and jackdaws.Compared with the ruins of Dunkirk, Verdun, and Chalon, and the collapsed bridges of Orleans and Poitiers, they are actually nothing.But here, on both sides of this endless highway, what you see are not photos, nor those frightening images that you can see on the films of EMI Film Company.No voice is lying, hoarse the truth.Strange, even disturbing, is the excess of calm, the fields so beautiful, the sky so blue, a lifeless stillness, or, more realistically, a dizzying emptiness from defeat.

In Lussac︱Castletown, reality suddenly emerges.A long queue of vehicles, cars, trucks, buses, bench cars, two-wheeled carts, waiting to pass through the narrow passage surrounded by barbed wire strung with barbed wire.A corporal squad leader and two gendarmes were there to give orders. People who watched the excitement, widows with tears on their faces, and children with colds waited all day long. The car formation moved forward meter by meter. Waste of precious fuel, they push De︱Dion︱Bouton forward.The post station at the entrance of the village, the cafe, an ordinary square, a crossroad, and a church with a bell tower make people feel as if they are in Brazil.The spirit of Alexander came again: I don’t know who told me before that someone was collecting the sarcophagus of the Merovingian dynasty, collecting the skeletons of women, and these women seemed to be giants!Adie teased him: Then can we visit?There was no cure for him.There is a kind of person who still kisses hands in a garbage dump and tells a joke when a disaster happens.She thought of Mauritius, the lords of the manors, so elegant, so noble, so impatient to teach the shins of rebel slaves to be cut off, or to sow their seeds in the bellies of colored girls. . But today, none of that matters.People go south and maybe never look back.Adie felt a bit bitter.On this steep, straight, and empty road, in the middle of the field, every milestone is being pulled out, planed, demolished, and hardened.Ai Dier knew that she was twenty years old, and she understood that she had never been young.Xenia had told her this long ago, and one day she said: You look like an eternal old maid!After she finished speaking, she beat her hard with her small fist as usual: "Okay, don't cry!"This is my birthday present to you! Straight down the road, the belle époque carriage flaunts its past splendor like a voluptuous woman displaying her outdated jewelry and ripped furs.Justine was serious and erect, wearing a hat and long gloves to make herself look respectable to the Germans.Alexander, with a tawny face, was recognizable as an old guy who came back from the colony at a glance. A few strands of white hair were intermingled with the disheveled black hair, which had a certain Indian flavor.Strange luggage was kept in De︱Dion︱Bouton, especially those crutch-knives from Mauritius in Alexander's collection, which he refused to sell, and a few more sailors with a net made of string. The usual knot, to tie these knives to the roof of the car and dangle them from side to side.And he asked the carpenter to make a model of a large screw propeller based on the design drawings he drew. It is said that it will completely change the propulsion method of aircraft if Justine hadn't sold this machine at the last minute (now what? Everyone is suspected of being a spy, and if we get stopped, we're doomed!), has he managed to trick his wife into taking the model with him? After Béziers [note], it broke down again and again.The gasoline was adulterated, and Eddie would have to remove the carburetor, blow hard into the jets, and give the crank a turn before it bounced back and broke her arm, or parked in an abandoned Next to the livestock drinking trough, I used a rag to remove the drain plug of the radiator. Along the way, I carefully listened to every creak, wheezing, and whistling of the cylinder liner, and paid attention to every impact of the hammer of the drive shaft. , that was the death knell tolling for De︱Dion︱Bouton, and perhaps also for its passengers, in this no-man's-land, in this flowery desert, in the dead, deadly countryside, where these In the small pine trees on the border of the wilderness, many bandits and murderers hide among them. [Annotation] Beziers: A small town in southern France, located on the Mediterranean coast, about 400 kilometers west of Nice. In the inns and inns where these business travelers live, where Justine used to laugh, that's where people on paid leave live and the same rumor goes around every night: don't go this way, don't Take that road, avoid the La Verne bridge, it looks like there are mines on the bridge, don't talk to the nuns on the road, a priest and his maid have been arrested, these people are the fifth column.Miss, don't ask for directions, you'll take a shortcut, and then, whoop!The murderer is out, and worse, you'll be thrown into a well, the Germans are retaliating for what the Moroccans did in Germany, and even a family with young children can be a trap! [Annotation] France has implemented a paid vacation system since 1936. Before that, vacations were activities that only the bourgeoisie could enjoy. Their pass is this piece of paper folded in four, with blue pen, written in German: Bescheinigung Die Frau Brun (Bu Hang), Ethel (Ai Dieer) AusParis ist berechtigt, mit irhem Kraftfahrzeug n° 1451DU2 Nach Nizza zu fahren. Es fahren mit ihr Familiaren Paris, XII, 1942 Der Standortkommandant Oberleutnant Ernst Broll Then put on the official seal, an eagle with outstretched wings, its head turned to the left, a crown in its talons, and a cross with a hook on the official seal. An elegant, unassuming man in a black uniform without a cap, he seemed to her a resemblance to the philosophy teacher at the high school in Maghorn Street.The same short-sightedness, the eyes are a little hazy, and when the dimples are sunken, the same slender smile will appear.He carefully filled out the Ausweis【Note】, and then added something in the lower left corner with a beautiful slanted font, perhaps to ease the violence of this pattern. This bird of prey is waving the most hated crosshook in the world. , like four scythes on a shaft, he added a word, and an exclamation point: Fluchtlinge! 【Annotation】Ausweis: German, meaning identity documents. Atelier imagined innocently, he wished them luck.After a long time, she checked the dictionary and realized that this honest man, this hard-working official, only summed up the situation of these people in one word. In the car: refugee!