Chapter 32 Biegottingen

It's time for me to go. It's time for me to leave Germany. It's time for me to leave Göttingen. I have lived in this small town for ten years. There is a saying in ancient China: There is no banquet that lasts forever under a pergola for thousands of miles.This is how a person's life is.At that time, the Buddha stipulated that the Buddha should not spend three nights under the sang.I am afraid that if a monk stays under a mulberry tree for three consecutive nights, he will feel nostalgic.This is not good for monks' practice.I lived in Göttingen not for three nights, but twelve hundred times more than three nights.How can I get rid of the feeling of nostalgia? Fortunately, I am a layman. I have never wanted to be a monk. I don’t want to practice immortality and Taoism.Nostalgia let it nostalgia! But nostalgia is a limited period after all.I am a person with a country, a family, parents and a wife, and it is time for me to leave.

Recalling when I first came here ten years ago, if someone told me: You must live here for five years, I would definitely jump up: Five years is worth it! Five years is more than 1,800 days! But now , Not only has five years passed, but it is twice as many as five years.I didn't feel anything special at all.As I said at the beginning of this book, like a misty spring dream, ten years flew away.Now, if someone told me: You have to live here for another ten years.Not only will I not jump up, but I will happily accept it. Yet I must go. It's time for me to go. At that time, there was actually only one way to return to China from Germany, and that was through Switzerland, where there was the legation of the Kuomintang government.Zhang Wei and I therefore inquired everywhere about ways to go to Switzerland.After many inquiries, I heard that there is a Swiss family in Göttingen.We hurriedly made a special trip to visit. She was a middle-aged woman who looked like a housewife, and she was very kind.But, she told us, she couldn't handle the entry visa; she had to go to Hannover.Zhang Wei and I then took a bus and drove more than a hundred kilometers to Hannover, the capital of this region.

Hannover is the largest and oldest historic city nearby.I have long admired the name, but I have never been here.When I came here today, I was really surprised: Is this still a city? Although from a distance, there are still many tall buildings; but when I get closer, I can only see ruins.The remaining ruined walls look like the Colosseum left over from ancient Rome.There are still roads, but they are also covered with large and small bomb craters.Some cars have resumed driving, but the number is not too many.What caught our attention was the situation on the sidewalks on both sides of the road.The pattern of high-rise buildings in Germany is almost exactly the same in all major cities: no matter how high the building is, there is always a basement at the bottom, which is truly built underground.No one can live here.The people who lived upstairs were allocated one or two rooms for each family, and stored potatoes, apples, bottled strawberry jam, briquettes, and firewood in them.It never occurred to me that there would be other uses.As soon as the war broke out, the German people believed the fascist leaders' bragging at first, thinking that British and American planes were all paper, and they must not fly one step beyond the German border.There are no real air-raid shelters built in big cities at all.Later, beyond people's expectations, the enemy's paper planes turned into steel, and the bragging of the fascist leaders turned into soap bubbles.The British and American bombs exploded on their heads, and they fled into the basement to avoid air raids as a last resort.This of course doesn't help.British and American bombshells sometimes penetrated floors and exploded upwards in basements.The result can be imagined.Sometimes a lighter bomb penetrates a building of two or more floors and explodes on the spot.The basement was spared, but the results were far more dire.The bombed building above collapsed, covering the basement tightly.People who live inside, cry out every day and make the earth not work. I have no personal experience of what it feels like, so I don't want to talk nonsense.However, who would think of this and would not shudder? In the beginning, there would probably be relatives of their own who spent countless days of hard work digging out the corpses of the relatives of the victims in the basement and taking them to the cemetery. to bury.But as time went by and the bombings became frequent, the relatives who were outside might also be buried in the basement somewhere, waiting for others to dig up the bodies.How could they come to dig up other people's corpses? However, when it came time to go to the grave, the few who survived were unwilling to sweep the graves of their relatives, and the cemetery of their relatives was the basement.As a result, wreaths that should have been placed on the cemetery were filled next to the garbage dumps outside the basement under the broken walls of the high-rise buildings on both sides of the road.It was these wreaths that we saw when we came to Hannover, and this kind of sight cannot be seen in Göttingen.I was baffled at first.When I understood the reason, I was again amazed, terrified, and sad.It is said that the mice in the cellar were over-nourished due to eating human flesh, and grew to a length of more than one foot.Such an excellent and great nation as Germany has come to this end.My heart was sour, sweet, bitter, hot, with mixed feelings, and I really wanted to cry somewhere.

This is what happened in Hannover.This is of course the result of "carpeting" when bombarding indiscriminately.However, even a rug can't help but have some voids.A few buildings have survived in such gaps, and there are still rooms that are barely usable for office work.Therefore, people who have no house to live in the city return to their temporary residences in the towns outside the city at night, and come to the city to work during the day.The Swiss agency in Hannover is also housed in such a building.We walked through countless ruins to find the office.Because I did not receive a formal invitation and approval from Switzerland, the office said it could not issue an entry permit to me.I'm kind of taking a run for nothing.However, not only did I not regret it, but I was also a little happy; I accidentally got an opportunity to see with my own eyes what the real situation of the so-called bombing was.Otherwise, I would have lived in Germany for ten years and claimed to have been bombed for nothing.The little bombing of Göttingen is nothing compared to Hannover.If you can't see the real bombing, you will hold a grudge for life.

This is the case for Hannover. Other cities larger than Hannover, such as Berlin, have been bombed.I heard later that after the upper floors of a building in Berlin were bombed, they collapsed and completely buried the basement.Someone in the basement smashed bricks and stones with bare hands in the dark. Fortunately, he broke through the wall, climbed into the neighbor's basement that had not been bombed, got out, and saw the light of day again.However, the upper half of the ten fingers have been worn off, and the flesh and blood are blurred.If you are not so lucky, you will get nothing but call.The people outside clearly heard the cry, but the pile of bricks, tiles and rubble could not be cleared for a while.I could only bear to listen to it. At first, the cry was still loud, but then it gradually became weaker. After a few days, there was silence, and the result was known.What is it like in the hearts of relatives, what kind of torture they have suffered, can people think about it? There has been such an experience, if you don’t go to the madhouse, you will go to the hospital.Such a tragic tragedy is caused by human beings who are known as the "spirits of all things".Isn't that so?

After hearing these things, I naturally thought of the original Berlin, the Berlin I visited ten years ago and three years ago.Needless to say ten years ago, just three years ago, what was Berlin like? Although the war had already broken out and Berlin had been attacked by air, it had not yet been "carpeted", and the market was still bustling with people. There is quite a bit of energy in the communication.However, in an instant, it was almost turned into ruins.This change is really big.Now let me describe this change in the comparison between the present and the past. I am not a Jianglang, and I can't talk about it, but now I am even more embarrassed.While thinking hard, I came up with a clever way.I would like to borrow from the articles written by everyone in ancient Chinese Fu, and select two passages from them, one showing prosperity and the other showing decline, to make a comparison between the present and the past.After nearly two thousand years, the distance between land and earth exceeds tens of thousands of miles. Of course, the situation is completely different.The atmosphere, however, is all the same, and it is precisely this atmosphere that I now desperately need to describe.With the wonderful pen of the ancients, I express my feelings about the ups and downs of today.I am very proud of being able to come up with such an ingenious method of embedding flowers and trees. I don’t know which god enlightened me in the dark, so that I obtained the "epiphany".Is there any suspicion of plagiarism? No, absolutely not.I did the labor, I bottled the old wine, and I stole it.

Let's first copy a section of Zuo Taichong's "Shu Du Fu": Yayeshao City is connected to its west.The meeting place of the market is the abyss of thousands of merchants.There are hundreds of tunnels and thousands of Luosi.There are mountains of bribes, and beautiful stars are numerous.Women from the city wear beautiful makeup.There are many mistakes in Jia Mao's life.The emergence of foreign objects is strange, strange in all directions. A few oddities are listed above.From these short quotations, we can also see the prosperity of the capital of Shu.This bustling atmosphere is completely consistent with the impression Berlin left on me.

Let me quote another passage from Bao Mingyuan's "Fu of Wucheng": Observe the solid protection of the foundation, and sacrifice ten thousand to one king.In and out of three generations, for more than five hundred years, the melons were cut and the beans were divided.Zekui depends on the well, and the road is barren.The altar is in the domain of Luo Yu, and the order is fighting and flying. ... Tongchi has already collapsed, and the steep corner has collapsed.Looking directly thousands of miles away, only Huang Ai can be seen.Contemplating and listening quietly, the heartache has been destroyed.

What is written here is a Wucheng, but in fact Bao Zhao has something to pin on.On the surface, Berlin, which has been bombed to pieces, is not quite the same.However, the feelings that people get from it are so similar! Why don't the fascist leaders think that "all sacrifices are one king".But what was the result? The so-called "Third Reich" was "divided into pieces".Now what people see in Berlin are dilapidated walls, "looking straight ahead thousands of miles away, only see yellow eyes".According to my German friends, not to mention rebuilding, it will take 50 years to remove the current garbage.Isn't it natural for the Germans to "contemplate and listen, but their hearts are already broken"? I have lived in Germany for so many years, and I can imagine how I feel when I see this situation.

But it's time for me to go. It's time for me to leave Germany. It's time for me to leave Göttingen. My real hometown beckoned to me, a wanderer. At the thought of leaving, my feelings of parting immediately came to my mind.I often tell people that Göttingen seems to be my second hometown.I have lived here for ten years, which is second only to Jinan and Beijing.Every building, every street, and even every plant and tree here have shared joys and sorrows with me for nearly four thousand days and nights in the past ten years.I liked them at first, but now when I want to say goodbye, I think they are even more lovely.Göttingen is a small city, and every corner of the city seems to have left my footprints. I seem to have stepped on every stone. I don’t know how many shops I have been in and out of.Seeing everyone on the street seemed familiar.The tall oak trees on the ancient city wall, the lush green grass in the Schiller Lawn, the towering spire of the Bismarck Tower, the frightened deer in the big forest, the snow bell poking out of the snow in early spring, and the colorful red leaves on the top of the mountains in late autumn , and so on, all these complicated things all affect my emotions.As for the old university and my respected teachers, I feel even more inseparable.Last but not least, there is also my landlady, who is now also only parted.Ten years of getting along, how many winds and moons, how many unforgettable past events, "it was only common at that time", but now it is unimaginable and unattainable, very, very unusual.

Yet I must go. My true homeland beckoned to me. I suddenly thought of the poem "Lvci Shuofang" by Liu Zao, a poet of the Tang Dynasty: Dozens of Frost in Bingzhou Homecoming Day and Night Recalling Xianyang Crossing the dry water for no reason But Wang Bingzhou is his hometown Farewell, my second hometown, Göttingen! Farewell, Germany! When can I see you again?