巴黎恐懼和午餐 Fear and lunching in Paris
Paris remains eerily quiet. Straight after the terrorist attacks, on November 13, the tourists disappeared. Now, in grey January, the world’s formerly most visited city still feels empty. In the silence, Parisians can gauge where the attacks have left us.
巴黎依然安靜得出奇。去年11月13日的恐怖襲擊之後，遊客消失了。如今，在灰色的1月，這個以前全球遊客最多的城市仍然感覺空蕩蕩的。在沉默中，巴黎人掂量着恐襲給自己造成的影響。
My office is in the eastern 11th arrondissement, focal point of both sets of 2015 attacks. The little local post office now has a full-time guard to check customers’ bags. A few doors down, the Belle Equipe café — where 19 people were murdered in November — is boarded up, to reopen God knows when. My favourite local restaurant is offering an unchanging daily menu all week, presumably because with almost no customers there’s little point buying food every day. But you can get a table any time, and eating is still much of the point of Paris, so you sit there instinctively calculating where you’d run if gunmen walked in.
我的辦公室位於巴黎東部第11大區，是2015年兩次恐怖襲擊的發生地。當地的小郵局現在配備了一位全職保安，檢查客戶的包包。走過幾個門，就到了11月有19人遇難的Belle Equipe咖啡館，這裏現在被木板封住，天知道何時才恢復營業。我最喜愛的一家當地餐廳菜單整週不變，大概是因爲幾乎沒有客人，每天買菜已沒有意義。但任何時候你都能找到空桌，飲食仍然是巴黎生活的一件重要事情，因此你坐在那裏，本能地思忖如果有槍手走進來，你要往哪跑。
Perversely, the horrors have helped give Paris’s east side an identity. The historically poorer east, even after gentrification, was always the neglected Paris. It ranked below les beaux quartiers (“the beautiful neighbourhoods” in the west and on the Left Bank), just as Brooklyn ranked below Manhattan. The local Place de la République, for decades a big roundabout with a dirty old statue of Marianne, symbol of the republic, was Paris’s drabbest square.
變態的是，恐怖事件幫助巴黎東部獲得了一種身份認同。自古以來，東部地區較爲貧困，即便在中產階級化之後也是巴黎受到忽視的部分。它的地位低於幾個美麗的鄰近地區（包括位於西部和左岸的“美麗地段”），就像布魯克林的地位低於曼哈頓那樣。幾十年來，當地的共和國廣場(Place de la République)是一個大型環島，矗立着髒髒的法蘭西共和國象徵瑪麗安娜(Marianne)的舊雕像，是巴黎最沒有生氣的廣場。
But last year’s attacks targeted the east’s nightlife, its partially Jewish heritage and its bohemian classes as represented by Charlie Hebdo magazine. The evening of the Charlie attacks last January, thousands of people filled République — which, by chance, had recently been redesigned. The crowd chanted, “Liberty of expression!” (only in Paris) and honoured the murdered cartoonists. Days later, western heads of government shuffled east together from République down the unlovely Boulevard Voltaire, looking terrified.
但去年的恐襲瞄準了東部地區的夜生活、其一定程度上的猶太傳統以及以《查理週刊》(Charlie Hebdo)爲代表的放蕩不羈的階層。去年1月《查理週刊》恐襲當晚，數千人涌入共和國廣場，碰巧的是，那個廣場剛被重新設計。人羣高唱“言論自由！”（只是在巴黎），向遇難的漫畫家致敬。幾天後，西方政府首腦手挽手從共和國廣場向東走上伏爾泰大道(Boulevard Voltaire)，神色恐懼。
République is now again a site of pilgrimage. In the evenings you see people lighting candles around the statue, scrawling the strangest messages, or singing John Lennon’s “Imagine”. The poet Jacques Prévert said of late 1940s Saint-Germain, “Perhaps it takes a war to launch a quartier.” Now terrorism has launched République.
共和國廣場現在再次變成了一個朝聖之地。晚上，你會看到人們在瑪麗安娜雕像周圍點燃蠟燭，寫下最奇怪的留言或者唱起約翰列儂(John Lennon)的《想象》(Imagine)。詩人雅克渠萊維爾(Jacques Prévert)在談到上世紀40年代末的聖日耳曼時表示：“或許這需要一場戰爭來創建一個地區。”如今，恐怖主義創建了共和國廣場。
But eastern Paris is scared. Two days after the November attacks, the ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud boasted (according to a witness) that “there will be other [attacks]”. These “would do even worse in the neighbourhoods near the Jews”, including “diversions on transport and in the schools”. Perhaps this was just a terrorist pipe dream but it’s stressful if you have kids in local schools. Parents and the headmaster of our school are currently debating whether or not we need an armed policeman in front.
但巴黎東部感到恐慌。在11月恐襲兩天後，主謀阿卜杜勒哈米德阿巴伍德(Abdelhamid Abaaoud)曾誇耀稱（據一位目擊者稱）“還會有別的‘襲擊’”。“在鄰近猶太人的地區會更嚴重”，包括“對交通和學校的佯攻”。或許這只是恐怖分子的白日夢，但如果你的孩子在當地學校上學的話，你會感到緊張力了。我們家孩子學校的家長們和校長正在辯論是否需要申請在校門口安排一名佩槍的警察。
The new fear overlies the longstanding French morosité: national discontent with the country’s path (or lack of path). Over lunch recently, I listened to a high-status Parisian deliver the ritual rant about the government that ends with, “C’est n’importe quoi” (roughly, “It’s a mess”). I’ve been hearing this speech since moving to Paris in 2002 but, for the first time, I thought: “Yes, it really is that bad.”
新的擔憂疊加在法國的長期愁雲上：對國家道路（或者說沒有道路）的全國性不滿。在最近的一次午餐中，我聽到一位身份很高的巴黎人針對法國政府發泄老一套的抱怨，最後說“這是個爛攤子”。自2002年我搬到巴黎以來，我一直在聽這種演講，但這一次我終於認爲：“沒錯，真的有那麼糟糕。”
I had previously believed French morosité was exaggerated. True, France was struggling, but so were all western nations after the crisis of 2008. Now, though, France is doing worse than others. Before, it could look at Italy and think, “There’s a country that really hasn’t adjusted to modernity.” But, lately, Italy has reformed its rigid labour market, cutting unemployment. So has Spain. France has done much less, so far at least.
我曾認爲法國的愁雲被誇大了。沒錯，法國苦撐了幾年，但2008年金融危機後的西方國家都是如此。然而，法國當下的表現比其他國家更糟糕。以前，它可以看着意大利，心裏想：“還有一個國家真的沒有適應現代性。”但意大利近來改革了本國僵化的勞動力市場，降低了失業率。西班牙也是如此。法國在這方面做得少很多——至少迄今如此。
The brainy people who run this country mostly know what needs changing. In the office of one senior government aide, I saw a whiteboard on which someone had written a sort of national mea culpa, in English: “If it moves, tax it. If it still moves, regulate it. If it doesn’t move, subsidise it.”
統治這個國家的聰明人士基本上了解什麼方面需要改變。在一位政府高級助理的辦公室，我看到一塊白板，有人在上面用英文寫了一段類似國民自嘲的話：“如果動，就對它收稅。如果還動，就進行監管。如果不動了，就給它補貼。”
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But French governments dare not reform. They presume (perhaps rightly) that most French voters think that the status quo is terrible but must never be changed. And so unemployment keeps rising, recently reaching a new record of 3.59 million. Now President Hollande has come up with a brilliant scheme to cut joblessness: shift 500,000 unemployed people into training programmes.
但法國政府不敢改革。他們假定（或許是正確的）大多數法國選民認爲，雖然現狀很糟糕，但絕不能改變。因此，失業率持續上升，最近達到了創紀錄的359萬。如今，總統弗朗索瓦攠朗德( Hollande)想出了一個減少失業的妙計：將50萬失業人士轉移至培訓項目。
Another brilliant Hollande scheme (soon backtracked from, like most Hollande schemes) was to strip convicted dual-national terrorists of French citizenship. This fantastically pointless gesture has already spawned weeks of furious debate. Meanwhile, the land of liberty lives under a state of emergency expected to continue (according to prime minister Manuel Valls) until Isis is defeated. Even George W Bush didn’t go that far after the attacks of 9/11.
奧朗德的另一項妙計（像他的多數計劃那樣，很快就被放棄）是剝奪被判有罪的、擁有雙重國籍的恐怖分子的法國國籍。這一幾乎毫無意義的舉動已經引發了數週的激烈辯論。與此同時，總理曼努埃爾瓦爾斯(Manuel Valls)表示，這塊自由之地上的緊急狀態還將持續，直至“伊斯蘭國”(ISIS)被擊潰。即使美國前總統喬治圠布什(George W Bush)在9/11恐怖襲擊之後也沒有做得這麼極端。
Add on the damage from terror to race relations, plus the first fall in French life expectancy since 1969, and no wonder France’s far right is at a postwar high. Next year’s election may pit Hollande and former president Nicolas Sarkozy — two bad films we’ve already seen — against the far right’s Marine Le Pen, a horror movie that surely won’t get made.
恐怖襲擊破壞了種族關係，加上法國人的預期壽命出現了自1969年以來的首次下降，這也難怪法國極右勢力達到了戰後的高點。明年大選，我們或許將看到奧朗德、前總統尼古拉薩科齊(Nicolas Sarkozy)——我們已經看過的兩場糟糕電影——對壘極右翼的馬琳勒龐(Marine Le Pen)——令人不堪設想的恐怖電影。
For now we sit in cafés, enjoying what is still the best daily life in human history, and hope that one day we will look back and think: and just at that moment of maximum bleakness, France turned itself around.
現在，我們坐在咖啡館裏，享受人類歷史上最美好的日常生活，並希望有一天我們可以回顧並思考：正是在最黯淡的時刻，法國實現了轉變。
