21 May — the report from Day 4.
Three days after the start, we were still held up in China.
Every day was a fight, the car’s problem was not solved, and the deadline for retirement was closing in.
If we could not leave today, if we could not rejoin the main convoy, we might not be able to cross the border. We had to get going — as soon as humanly possible.
Anxiety, dread, fear: every kind of feeling turning over inside me.
Going to the workshop again this morning, the work was still going on. Nobody had slept.
“My husband hasn’t slept for three days,” the Chinese wife told me, worried.
Able only to sit in a corner of the workshop and watch, and unable to bear it, we went out for a walk.
I had not slept for days, so I lay down on a bench in a nearby park to rest in the shade — but a bench is no place to sleep.
And for some reason there were flamingos there.
I lay down on the grass and closed my eyes, but between the heat and the worry and the anxiety, sleep would not come.
In the evening we tried the car again, and again it came back after a few hundred metres. This is finished.
The tears came and I ran out of the workshop. There was nothing to be done; they would not stop.
“We’re out. It’s over.” For the first time I said it out loud.
But I owed the Chinese who had worked so hard a proper thank-you, with a smile. When I went back a little later, there was a commotion again.
They had found it. It was a small thermostat.
With dusk coming on, the fault was fixed and we could see our way to leaving.
Can a thing like this really happen?
The workshop owner and his wife said they would drive alongside us for a 100 km test to make sure. That they would go that far for us.
So we set off with the Chinese couple following behind, watching over us.
Fifty kilometres, a hundred — the pre-war Buick ran beautifully, as though the whole thing had been a lie.
It is all right now. We stopped at a petrol station, and the moment of parting came.
Four days of held-back tears came out at once.
It was not only we who had fought. Everyone at that workshop had fought alongside us.
I had no idea tears of gladness could come like that.
I used the translation app to say what I felt.
“你们的梦想将再次延续” — your dream goes on again.
We held each other, and said thank you, thank you, and could not bear to part.
With dusk closing in, we had a convoy to catch. Stopping again and again for maintenance, we pressed on through the pitch dark.
So — will we make it back to the convoy? No more hesitating. Just go.
The rest in Day 5.