North by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Page B

you've just got to amalgamate with all those people, feet, heads! . . . and not suffocate when the car jolts . . . bim! . . . bam! when the wheels joggle! breathe on the bim , not on the bam! . . . our cat Bébert is pretty well compressed in his bag by the five hundred people in the car . . . every bump! especially at the stations, the knots of people getting in and out. . . ah, Tiergarten! I wonder . . . is Tiergarten the end of the line? . . . I should have asked . . . everybody gets out . . . slowly . . . I ask another broad with a raspberry dip . . . our train for Grünwald is on the other platform . . . let's get it straight this time . . . the right direction . . . we should have changed twice . . . I ask her to repeat . . . I monopolize her, the only employee on the platform . . . naturally there's a lot of griping . . . angry, mean . . . say, that's a good one! "fallschirm!" "parachute!" . . . meant for us . . . I'd heard it before . . . the duffel coats we were wearing . . . some kids had glommed us . . . pretty soon there were ten of them . . . twenty . . . all pointing their fingers, calling us parachutes . . . the girl in the raspberry cap ignored them . . . all those kids are Hitlerjugend , they're wearing swastika armbands, "Hitler Youth". . . Attila Youth, Pétain Youth, Thiers, de Gaulle, tomorrow Kroukrou, Ramses, Beelzebub Youth, just give them a badge! they'll die of joy! deliver whole carloads of scalps!
    The Hitler Youth spent half their time tracking down parachutists . . . at the time all Teutonia was haunted by fear of "fallschirmfäger," parachutist saboteurs . . . the newspapers ran full-page stories, teen-age heroes decorated by Hitler, in person! Iron Crosses with diamonds! . . . the Chancellor kissing little boys and girls! . . . just what they were looking for. . . we and our duffel coats! tomorrow you'll see Astrabub kissing the brats that have cut our heads off, you don't know Astrabub, you don't know those kids either, but one thing is sure, those kids were born under the Empire and now they're poking around in their flies . . . well anyway, the hunt for parachutists was going strong . . . the Iron Cross wasn't the only attraction, the kids could get a reward of 100,000 marks and the "Super-Siegfried" certificate . . . a hell of a jam . . . we were really surrounded . . . the people who'd left the station came back from the street to see us . . . getting captured by the Hitlerjugend! . . . no joke! the crowd set up a chorus and not only Boches, foreigners tool every language! Say, that sounds friendly: Da! da! they love us! . . . da! da! they hug us and kiss us! happy as larks! . . . paraschutt! they think we've fallen from the sky just for them! . . . a family, two families . . . with "OST" badges . . . da! da! they're like Ivan, brought back from the East by the German Army to work in the fields, to clear mines, clean up the streets, the rubble . . . we were their deliverance! our duffel coats! . . . that's all they saw . . . American saboteurs, what else could we be? . . . actually our coats were straight out of Paris, from Lili's dressmaker on rue Monge, Mademoiselle Brandon . . . I shout at them: von Paris! von Paris!  . . . go fly a kite! they want us to be Canadians! . . . the whole platform! the whole mob from two platforms! . . . three trains! hopeless! they should look at our coats! the label on the collar! . . . not from New York! . . . from rue Monge! . . . "they've come to set the harvests on fire! to blow up the railroads'' . . . Try and argue! they'd made up their minds . . . on one side: hurrah! . . . on the other: kill them! . . . all steamed up . . . kids, grownups . . . they're going to skin us alive . . . give them the slip? not a chance . . . and still more coming, hordes on hordes! . . . if it was the police at least, we might be able to explain . . . but not a schupo in sight! maybe the girl with the raspberry cap has gone for help . . . anyway we're in bad shape . . .