Chapter 23 Chapter Twenty-Three

Dear Braney: I can't think of a better way to start 1940 than to write to you.I went home and typed in my old bedroom, writing you a letter.The bedroom seemed to be only one-tenth the size I remembered.The whole home looks cramped and messy.God, how many childhood memories does the smell of pesticide bring back! Ah, my dear, what a wonderful place America is!I don't remember, not at all. When I arrived in New York, my father had already been discharged from the hospital. I only found out by calling home.So I took out the two hundred dollars I had earned so hard and bought a 1934 Dodge car, and I drove to Florida!real.I went to Washington first, and I also wanted to find Sloter.I'll come back to this in a moment.But I assure you, he took little comfort from this meeting.I swear to you, Braney, I mainly want to see my country again.Although it is a dead winter, the weather is bad, and the black market towns with shacks are lined on both sides of the road to the south, but the Atlantic states are beautiful, wide, natural, clean, full of silent wilderness everywhere, inspiring people. life and energy.I love every billboard, every gas station.This is truly a "new land".The beauty of the Old World is its beautifully carved form, but the Old World is now decayed and irrational.Thank God I'm out of there.

Take Miami Beach, for example.You know, I used to hate this place.But now I have feelings for Miami, which speaks volumes about my current mood.I left here a rabid anti-Semite.Just now, seeing these carefree smooth Jews in the world, suntanned and outrageously sunbathed - often in expensive furs and pearls and gems and, for God's sake, pink I still feel sick when I walk around in black or orange shirts and shorts.People in Miami Beach don't want to be rich.Every time I saw them I couldn't help but think of Warsaw, feel angry, and of course I forgot about it after a while.People here have the same weak concept of war as Americans elsewhere.

My father had a heart attack that almost killed him, the doctor said he is doing well now, I don't like how weak he looks.He does nothing now but sits in the garden in the sun and listens to the news broadcasts on the radio.He was very worried about Uncle Ellen.He'd never mentioned him much before (actually he'd deliberately kept it out of the question), but now he kept talking about Ellen.Father was terrified by Hitler.He thought Hitler was a monster out to conquer the world.And kill all the Jews. I guess you're waiting to hear my talk with Leslie Sloter - aren't you, dear?

Ok.I tell you.He never dreamed that I would give him such an answer to his marriage proposal!When I told him I was deeply in love with you, he almost fainted, I mean he staggered to a chair and fell on it, pale and ghostly.Poor old Slote!Then we talked for hours, in bars, in restaurants, in my car, and walked around the Lincoln Memorial five or six times, and finally in his room.Jesus, he's whining and whining!Still, I had to let him talk.The main content of our conversation is roughly as follows, repeating these over and over again: Sloter: It's just because you spend a lot of time alone with him.

Me: That's what I told Blaney myself.I say it's a triumph of being together.But that doesn't change the fact that I love him now. Sloter: There's no way you're going to marry him, or that would be the biggest mistake you could ever make.As a friend, I know you better than anyone to say this. Me: That's what I told Blaney too.I said that it would be ridiculous for me to marry him, and gave him all kinds of reasons.Sloter: So, what the hell are you going to do? Me: I'm just telling you about it.I don't have any plans. Slote: You better be sober.You're an intellectual and a grown woman, and Byron Henry is a jovial lad, a carefree loafer, from whom even a school like Columbia manages to escape, and you can't possibly have anything really in common.

Me: I don't want to make you miserable, but, my dear—(I dealt with him very cautiously for a long time on this point, and finally managed to deal with it.) The commonality between me and Byron Henry is very real of.In fact, nothing else seems very real to me right now by comparison. (Slote is in a very depressed mood.) Sloter: (he only asks this once) Did you sleep with him? Me: This has nothing to do with you. (Jastrow tries to hold nothing to Slote. Slote is more depressed.) Sloter: Well, "lc coeur a ses raisons." ①Wait, but I still don't get it.He was a boy, and he was good-looking, or rather attractive, and, besides, he was brave indeed.Perhaps these are the ones that mean the most to you.

①French, it is the first half sentence of an adage by the French philosopher Pascal in the seventeenth century. The meaning of the whole sentence is: "Emotions have reasons that reason does not understand." Me: (avoid the difficulty, who wants to go to trouble?) He has other advantages.He is a gentleman.I've never seen anyone like this except in books.Slote: Am I not a gentleman? Me: I'm not saying you're a brut or a scoundrel.What I mean by an upright gentleman is the ordinary meaning, not the meaning of behaving decently. Sloter: You talk like a saleswoman.Clearly, you want to justify your erotic impulses.You can do this.But the words you use are crude and embarrassing.

Me: It's very possible.But I cannot marry you. (yawns) I have to go to sleep now.Another four hundred miles to drive tomorrow. (Jastrow exits at the end.) On the whole, he is still calm.He said calmly that he would marry me as soon as my madness was over, and that he would go on with his original plans.He's very confident, and in that he's still the same old Slote.His body is now a stranger to me.Although we stayed in his room for an hour, and it was very late, I didn't kiss him once, and he didn't even touch my hand.I guess it might have something to do with my talking about a gentleman?I tell you, he was never like this before (and I dare say I've changed too).

Maybe he's right about me and you.I'd rather not think about the future and think only of the present, or rather, of that moment when we stood by the fire in my bedroom and you put your arms around me.I still love that moment to this day.I still love you and I still miss you.Although we are not together, I have never been so happy in my life, and it would be nice if you could be here at this moment! I said that you look at things too simply, but you are right about one thing.Ellen should leave that wretched house, let it fall and rot, and return to this wonderful country to spend her old age.He had been foolish to have moved there, and even more so to have remained there.If you can persuade him to come back--and I'll write him a letter--I shall be much happier when you come back.But leave him alone, dear.I'm not busy with this matter, and I'll talk about it later when my plan has some shape.

Wish you a Happy New Year.I pray that God will bring down Hitler within 1940, end this terrible nightmare and bring us back together.i love you. Natalie at midnight on new year's eve In the next few weeks, I received three replies one after another.The first two letters consisted of a few sentences in poor scribbles: I'm the worst letter writer in the world.. I miss you so much I can't express it in words.. Without you, everything here is boring right now.. If only I could be with you when I'm in Lisbon ...and that's it for now, I have to go to work now... She read Byron's uncomfortably flat letters over and over again.This reminded her of the first time she saw him in Siena, the image of this light-footed, sluggish young man leaning against the red wall in the hot noon sun, which fits well with his handwriting today: slanted font, the letters are small and flat, making it hard for people to read.The initial b of his signature, swashbuckled, stood out, pitifully, in his ugly calligraphy.Byron lived up to his father's expectations and failed to make a difference, all through this big and flowery b letter.And all his mediocrity is expressed in the smaller and squashed last letters... Poor Byron!

But Natalie read these empty, sloppy, clumsy letters like Bernard Shaw's letters over and over again, and put the letters under the pillow.These letters were in sharp contrast to what she was about to write.To pass the time, she took out her master's thesis, which she had written three-quarters in French, and planned to translate it into English as a dissertation when she entered Columbia University or New York University in the fall to obtain a degree.The title of the dissertation is: "Two Different Views on the War from the Sociological Point of View: Durkheim's 1915-1916 Works on Germany and Tolstoy's 1869 A comparison of the two concluding remarks." This thesis is very well written, and even Sloter, after reading a few chapters, showed a smile like that of an authoritative scholar at Oxford University, expressing his approval.Not only did she want to finish it, she was going to revise it.She begins with the pro-German and anti-French tendencies shown by most American university public opinion in the interwar period.Due to her experience in Poland, she leaned more towards Durkheim's view of Germany.These things were as ignorant to the writer of the letters under her pillow as the principle of relativity.Just reading the title of her dissertation would give Blaney a headache.But she doesn't care about these.She loves him. There were pop songs that sweetly touched Natalie's heart, songs about a woman's crush on a worthless man, and a sad shepherd boy lamenting, missing his lover, as if she had suddenly become interested in this cheap Something very yearning.She used it to satisfy her fantasies, and was ashamed of herself, but still never tired of hearing it.She bought some records and listened to them over and over again.Byron Henry writes badly, which is certainly not good.But when she recalled his eyes, his lips, and his arms, she lost all judgment.She read and reread some of his badly written sentences, and was glad that he had written them all. Another letter came, an answer to her first long letter from Miami Beach, much better written.On the few pages of letter paper, Byron typed clearly with the typewriter. He rattled off a letter for a while without typing a single word wrong, just like a stenographer. Dear Natalie: Ah, this is exactly what I want, a very good letter.God, I've been waiting a long time. I'll skip the section about America and Miami, look for the narrative about Sloter first, and then read it from the beginning.You don't have to tell me how good America is compared to Europe, I'm so homesick right now, I'm dying.It's two completely different things from my miss of you.I miss you so badly, as if you were still in that room downstairs.I am only now beginning to understand why the filings always go to the magnet.Sometimes, when I sit in the room thinking of you, the suction from you is so strong that I have a feeling that if I let go of the arm of my chair, I will float out of the window, across France, Fly across the Atlantic all the way to your home at 1316 Normandy Road. Natalie was fascinated by these imaginative and wonderful metaphors and read them several times. Slote thought with all his heart that he was going to marry you soon.He has missed his chance. By the way, I have already read more than a third of the tome on the German problem listed by Slote.Some cannot be found in English, but I am tirelessly reading the ones I can find.I have nothing else to do here.There is also an advantage to being alone in this desolate city.Jastrow held a special tutorial for me personally. His point of view is similar to that of Slote. It is a new nation in Europe.But they are strange and inscrutable people.All of the authors listed by Slote end up promoting some pedantic and harmful views, and are horribly convinced that they are right.They believed that the Germans had been duped for centuries so the world should be reorganized on their terms.So far, my opinion can be summed up as follows: After all, Hitler is the soul of Germany today-you only need to go to Germany to understand this; the Germans cannot be allowed to rule Europe, because most of them have a psychopath, although they are very Talented, but unable to rule themselves; if they try to conquer Europe, someone has to beat them.Otherwise, barbarism will triumph.Ellen Jastrow added some of his own views, saying that there is a "good Germany" of progressive liberals and a "bad Germany" of what Sloter calls romantics and nationalists , are closely related to geographical location and Catholicism.I don't quite understand what he said. (I wonder if some of these views can pass the postal inspection? I think they must pass. Italians are afraid of Germans and hate them very much. There is a saying about Mussolini. He is a monkey released from a tiger. Wonderful.) Getting Ellen Jastrow out of here seems like a good plan.But there was a small technical error about his naturalization, which was so long ago that I don't know the details, but he never bothered to correct it.The new Consul General in Rome was a narrow-minded bureaucrat, and he made things difficult in many ways.All of this will of course be figured out - and the people in Rome say the same - but it will take time. So I'm not leaving Ellen alone now.But by mid-April, even if your plan is still in the air, I have to go back to my country.At that time, whether Ellen came back or not, I had to go.In addition to attending my brother's wedding, my father is also eager to send me back to the submarine school. The next officer training class will start on May 27. I will study for six months, and then I will practice on a submarine for a year. The location of the submarine In the Connecticut area.It's unlikely I'll be in the military, and I won't be until the war is in full swing, but even if I do, we'll be together for a long time. Siena is such a boring place.The mountains are brown.The vines were cut down to black stumps.People walked lazily on the street with gloomy faces.The 1940 races have been cancelled.It's cold and it rains a lot.But in the lemon room, the lemon trees are still in bloom, and Ellen and I still go there for coffee.When I smell the fragrance of flowers, I think of you.I often go there, just to smell the fragrance of flowers, and then close my eyes, for a moment, you seem to be right in front of me!Natalie, there must be a God, or I wouldn't have met you.That God must be both yours and mine, because there is only one God.I love you. Braney "Great, great," Natalie said aloud.Tears welled up from her eyes and dripped onto the thin airmail. "You poor sorrel-haired little fellow," she kissed, staining orange lips.Then she looked at the date again: February 10th, and today is April 9th, almost two months after an airmail letter!It's so slow, it's too late to reply.He might be on his way home, but she still grabbed a piece of stationery and started writing.She simply couldn't help herself. Natalie's father is listening to the radio in the garden.They had just finished lunch when her mother was out for a committee meeting.Just as Natalie was pouring love on the stationery, a news broadcast drifted in through the open window through the warm air.The announcer's loud, clear and emotive voice made her stop writing. The "sit-in war" is over.A fierce naval and air battle is raging in Norway.The National Broadcasting Corporation now reports the special communiqués on the state of the war from the belligerent capitals as follows: London Nazi Germany unprovoked a blitzkrieg without warning.Immerse neutral Norway by sea and air while German ground forces advance into Denmark.According to the announcement issued by the Norwegian government, there was fierce resistance in Oslo, Narvik, Trondheim and other important coastal strongholds, but German reinforcements flooded in.The Royal Navy moved quickly to cut off the invasion.Admiralty Winston Churchill announced this morning that any German ship entering the Skagerrak would be sunk. Natalie put down the letter paper and pen, and walked to the window.Her father sat with his back to her, his bald, tanned white hair hanging on one side, in the harsh sun, listening intently to this shocking development. The French government in Paris announced in an official communique that the allies would join forces to support the cause of democratic Norway's war of resistance and were ready to meet the German invasion with "hand-to-hand combat".Pessimistic commentators pointed out that the fall of Norway and Denmark would add more than a thousand miles to German control of the European coastline and would mean the failure of the British blockade. The Berlin Propaganda Department issued the following communiqué: In order to thwart British plans to seize Scandinavia and prevent Germany from obtaining iron ore and other raw materials from Sweden, the German armed forces have peacefully placed Denmark under its protection, And entered Norway by sea and air, where they were warmly welcomed by the masses.Oslo is already in German hands, and life in the capital is returning to normal.Scattered resistance by small groups of British-bought troops had been crushed.The Führer has sent the following congratulatory message to... Natalie went out into the garden to find her father fainting the shocking news and was surprised to find that your father had fallen asleep listening to the radio with his head on his chest.The radio was still blaring loudly, and he usually listened to the news broadcasts. His face was obscured by the shadow cast by the linen white cap, but she could see a strange expression in the corner of his mouth.The upper row of teeth protruded ridiculously above the lips.Natalie walked to him and touched his shoulder with her hand: "Dad?" He didn't answer.She froze suddenly, and now she could see that his upper dentures had fallen out. "Dad!" She pushed him, and his head drooped, and his hat fell to the floor.She put her hand inside his loose printed sweatshirt and got wet.There is still heat, but the heart is not beating.Before she could scream and run into the house to call the doctor, for a split second, she saw that her father's face was very much like Ellen Jastrow's, which she had never noticed while he was alive. Pass. During the next few weeks she sank into a deep sorrow.Natalie hadn't thought much of her father since she was about twelve years old, he was just a businessman, a sweater maker and the head of the Jewish synagogue, while she was already a haughty, educated , People who follow the trend.Since then, she has become increasingly aware of how her father's life has been spent with feelings of inferiority towards Ellen Jastrow and her own daughter.Now that he was dead, she was in such a state of grief that she couldn't eat or sleep, and sleeping pills didn't help.Her mother was an old-fashioned woman, too busy going to Hadassah meetings and raising funds for charity, who had done so much for her daughter over the years and didn't know what to do with her, and now she was suffering her own grief Come to comfort Natalie, but it's no use.Natalie was lying on the bed in the bedroom.Crying, almost all day at first, then several times a day for several weeks.She suffered from the guilt of having neglected and despised her father in the past. He loved and spoiled her.When she offered to go to the University of Paris for two years, she had to do as she said.She did not even ask whether he had so much money for her, and he was severely tormented by her strange and unfortunate experience.While he was alive, she felt no guilt.Now that he's gone, she's the only one left.It was too late to express love and remorse to him. ① Hadassah is an American Zionist women's organization founded in 1912.The main activities in the United States are educational work and charity work.Part of the activity after World War II was to send American Jewish women and children to Israel. According to the news broadcast on the radio, there is a lot of disaster in Norway.The German onslaught was successful.The landing of the Allied forces failed.The remnants of the Norwegian army retreated into the mountains, with the Germans in hot pursuit.All these news sounded to her like vague rumors that had little to do with her.The reality was her crying-soaked pillow and the stream of tanned middle-aged Jews and the endless chatter about the economy. Two things happened in succession before she came to her senses.These two events were: Byron's return from Europe and Germany's attack on France.