Chapter 10 Section 9 Escape

My grandfather Lu Yanshi was a fugitive from November 16, 1963.He had prepared for this escape for two years, so it should be said that he was quite well prepared.The preparations consisted of the following three items: first, learning Tibetan fluently—language learning was my grandfather's amusement; I paid forty-six yuan and ninety cents; thirdly, I sewed two pure gold cuff buttons and a sapphire tie clip to the lining of the cotton-padded jacket with a piece of black cloth one foot square.The hardest was the third, because hiding a needle and a tangle of black thread was near-impossible in prison.We will soon find out how deadly black cloth and needlework will play.When he was ready, he waited for the opportunity every day, but after realizing the escape, he couldn't tell whether he had discovered the opportunity or the opportunity had discovered him.

The week before the old man ran away, he suddenly found that his fingernails were long, dirty and animalistic before going to bed, but he couldn't find anything to cut them.No knives or scissors are allowed inside the prison walls.He violated the prison rules, walked out of his cell, and visited each cell.He is a person who never stops by, and now he is stopping by for nails, asking who has nail clippers or scissors to borrow.Everyone is baffled: who remembers clipping nails?There are too many benefits to keeping nails. Use them to dig fern roots in the ground, rabbit holes on grassy slopes, and ready-made tools.Besides, the nails of the hands that do rough work all day are either automatically worn down, or automatically split or broken, so don't they automatically repair the nails?When he got to the sixth prison number, the People's Liberation Army on the watchtower scolded him and told him to go back to his own cell immediately.He asked the People's Liberation Army if they had any nail clippers or scissors to lend him. The People's Liberation Army avoided his question and warned him louder that they would be impolite if they didn't answer the call.He didn't fall asleep that night, feeling his nails growing at an alarming rate.The next day he applied for a pair of scissors or nail clippers with the group leader, and the group leader said he would submit his application.During the few days waiting for the approval of the nail clippers, he couldn't sleep every night, feeling that his nails were growing "swish", like the joints of spring bamboo, and the dirt inside was their fertile soil.He said to himself: I hope Wanyu will never know what his nails have done: planing rabbit holes, digging fern roots, pinching fat lice, picking dry excrement.

So on this afternoon in the early winter of 1963, everything was ready for my old couple, and the passion and rational preparations for escape were ripe.According to the activity of his own stomach, he estimated that it was around 4:30 in the afternoon.He and a dozen other prisoners had been dispatched to this area to remove "steel garbage" since the morning.Every time a new batch of prisoners arrived, they would point to the huge strange-shaped objects standing on the desert and ask, "What are those things?" freak. In 1958, the wild grass desert was not barren, green gave way to red, red flags and slogans, along with the carloads of ore with poor iron content came in from outside the mountain.It was revolutionary and romantic at all costs.People were digging on the grass everywhere, and finally they dug up coal, but it should be coal that can be called coal after 10,000 years.Immature coal is much more difficult to burn than cow dung, and it is bigger than wolf dung.Prisoners dug out such shattering coal, unloaded the iron ore, which became extremely expensive due to transportation costs, and filled it into the blast furnace.A few months later, the blast furnaces stopped one by one, and the smelting results appeared one after another on the grassy desert. The specious shapes roughly resembled the abstract sculptures that people recognized many years later.Gradually, people became honest and openly called them steel trash.Gradually, the corners of the blast furnaces were dug out, the bricks were transported away in pieces, and the iron and steel waste was useless to anyone, and no one could transport it.As they pile up, they also have life. They grow red moss like stones, layer by layer, like annual rings.

Some of the bricks removed from the blast furnace were built into the walls of the sugar factory, and some were built into the dormitories of the sideline team.My grandfather and two inmates came between the sideline team and the sugar factory that day.Lao Ji developed a habit during the two years of being tempted by fleeing. As long as he went to a place, he could not help but look at the terrain, measure the distance, where there is a hiding place, and how many steps it takes to run from point A to point B. Complete the calculation with a glance.At this moment, he half-heartedly calculated the distance between the sugar factory and the dormitory of the sideline team.The "between" I'm talking about here is different from the general concept of space. Standing at the position where my grandfather Lu Yanshi is at the moment, you can't see the sugar factory and the sideline team dormitory. At most, you can see a gray shadow (sideline team dormitory) and a red shadow (sugar factory).There was a sporadic metal sound on the grass: the prisoners first used gas to cut up the steel garbage, and then hammered it.Their job was to move the mountains and move the quasi-metal fragments to three carriages.

The old couple told the People's Liberation Army who came to guard that his gloves were worn out by the steel garbage, and he had a spare pair of gloves on the carriage, asking the squad leaders to allow him to pick them up.A total of two carriages and ten prisoners came. The two People's Liberation Army chose to guard nine young and strong criminals, and waved the gentle and weak old "Wuqi" to get the gloves by himself.The People's Liberation Army does not want criminals to stop working.Normally, the prisoners found a place to sit as soon as the guards left; they didn't do unwatched work.

That's when the old couple decided to run away.Man sometimes needs such a final impetus from a whim.He walked to the side of the carriage, and spent five or six minutes before getting rid of the blue and gray horse among the three horses.All the harness horses were big and big, that's right, but the old ones recognized the long-distance runners among them.The old man learned seventy-two skills by reading, and he also learned how to know horses by reading. Those were the idle books he read when he was learning polo in the United States.If he still couldn't get rid of the blue-gray horse, he might have let this opportunity go.But just when the People's Liberation Army suddenly discovered that the old couple had been gone for a long time, and the time was unpredictable, the cover was untied.In fact, a good opportunity is no longer good by this time, and has become a bad opportunity.Instead of taking a bad opportunity, it is better to admit defeat and admit defeat from the beginning.Now the old couple didn't even have time to tie the horse back, and a PLA was yelling and walking this way.Diagonally in front of the old couple is the red shadow of the sugar factory.Red shadows loomed behind a large blackthorn bush.This was his escape route.The sky will never be dark, and the terrible expanse of the sky and the earth will crush people and things flat.The elders on the green and gray horses rode flatly one by one like this, and went away in front of the eyes of the young People's Liberation Army.

The People's Liberation Army was stunned for a full five seconds before recognizing who the rider on the blue-gray horse was.He opened his voice and shouted: "Ah! . . . " The old couple fled all the way on the blue-gray horse that was honorably discharged.He didn't escape a famine.This year the famine has passed, and the number of people dying of starvation has decreased since 1962.For two consecutive years, the harvest of highland barley has been very good, and the leaders have set up enough satellites per mu. They no longer bury tens of mu of potatoes in one mu of land, and let the prisoners perform a bountiful potato harvest for the country and the province. The superiors read it.Because of the famine, the food handed in was reduced by the superiors, and the prisoner's ration ration increased by four catties per month.The highland barley stolen from the field is roasted inside the big wall, and the sound of the barley grains crackling and whipping in the lunch box can no longer lure so many unpromising saliva.Those prisoners who had no guts to steal barley from the fields stopped collecting bird droppings, and washed out the grains that the birds missed due to indigestion.The prisoners also lost interest in all kinds of dead bones abandoned in the wilderness, and no longer picked them up to boil the bones in the big wall.The swollen faces of the 30,000 prisoners shrunk and turned into wrinkled leather.On the morning when the old couple ran away, all the stories about the dead were told.The old prisoners always passed the story of the false company commander who was killed to the new prisoners. By this time, the story was old and could not be passed on.

The appearance of the false company commander walking out of the prison gate as a well-trained soldier on an afternoon in the spring of 1961 was gradually forgotten by the prisoners.It was the height of the famine, when physical labor had ceased, and the little food eaten was barely enough to maintain a dying metabolism.The famine has eliminated many lives, and the eyes of the prisoners who survived the elimination are shining like beasts.The spring famine, which is more terrible than the winter famine, is coming.It was the afternoon when the spring famine came, and the prisoners were reading the newspaper and studying, and somehow the topic of discussion changed to eating.A prisoner in Xi'an started to speak, and it was a wonderful speech about the authentic method and eating method of mutton steamed buns.Next, the speeches became lively. The Jiangsu prisoners talked about Wuxi pork ribs, and the Huizhou prisoners talked about stinky mandarin fish.The false company commander left the meeting around the time a Sichuan prisoner was speaking.The Sichuan inmates gave the most enthusiastic speeches, talking about a kind of sweet food called "Sanheni", walnut puree, sesame puree... the summary is "it's delicious"!The pseudo-company commander probably left when the Sichuanese invited everyone in the lively Sichuan language.Nobody noticed him.The person who supervised the study was the group leader, a robber who was sentenced to five years in prison, and he didn't notice the anomaly of the false company commander. Just like he didn't want to miss a material delicacy, he didn't want to miss a spiritual delicacy.The departure of the false company commander probably only alarmed one person, the old couple.Having been among the prisoners all these years, for the elders, respect is not respect, but no ill feeling.No resentment is the score that the old couple gave the false company commander's character in his heart.After the false company commander went out, the old couple silently timed him in his heart.The old couple without a watch is like a clock. He can accurately judge the time according to the movement of the stomach: the movement of the stomach varies from slow to fast. Give up, the process made his clock quite accurate.He became uneasy an hour after the false company commander left, and he knew it was broken after an hour and fifteen minutes.After a while, the sentry on the watchtower at the gate shouted: "Stop! Don't stop and shoot!..." The sentry's roar made the straw curtains of every cell open.For a while, every doorway was crowded with the swollen faces of prisoners.Those who can see clearly tell those who cannot see clearly: the false company commander is now dressed in a new suit, and is walking towards the open field outside the gate.The gate was open during the day, and the false company commander walked out more than 20 meters before the sentinel saw it.Hearing the roar of the sentinel, the pseudo-company commander said, "Turn back—go!" Then he began to stride back, face the sentinel, and shouted the command command to let the sentry take good aim, save bullets, and strive for two or three shots. Him, don't beat him rolling all over the floor.The sentinel got the order to start shooting, the first shot was a bureaucratic warning, and it was fired according to the haze above the head, and the second shot was used to eliminate the false company commander.The sentinel had good marksmanship, and the third shot knocked down the false company commander.The other sentries from the watchtowers at the four corners of the big wall ran along the path on the top of the wall, and the four automatic rifles emptied four magazines.That shooting was equivalent to prolonging the Anti-Japanese War for more than ten years: the pseudo company commander was the last Japanese and puppet element in the resistance to be wiped out.The corpse of the pseudo-company commander was beaten to the point where dozens of bullet holes blasted gray cotton wool on the padded jacket, and the secrets in his stomach were revealed along with the leaking intestines: they were some whole grains of highland barley.People who are full of spring famine and still have barley grains in their stomachs are said to be the most capable and skilled in stealing.It is said that the false company commander with unique skills should be able to survive.

With the end of the famine, the prisoners also forgot about "Zhang Xingxing".An active counter-revolutionary in Jiangxi.When the dead are the most, as long as fresh corpses are parked in the prison yard, Zhang Xingxian will definitely be dispatched at night.He took off the cotton trousers of the corpse, cut off the leg flesh with a piece of bowl stubble, and put the cotton trousers back on the corpse.His secret butcher worked for more than half a year, and no one noticed any changes in the weight of the corpses, and they lost two or three catties overnight.His exposure was the result of his good intentions: one day he gave away a piece of secretly cooked meat as "wild horse meat" to a severely bloated cellmate.The inmates knew that the wild horses had already moved west in large numbers, and even if they encountered one or two occasionally, they were not something the nearly starved Zhang Xing could hunt.Therefore, in addition to the "current" crimes, Zhang Xing added a new crime that is not easy to define.New and old crimes caused Zhang Xing to be taken away by the ambulance of the mental hospital.

With more globs of beet soup, large game hunts are reduced.The prey is almost all hunted.My grandfather's memoirs documented such large hunts in such vivid detail that I could literally see the famine-fueled bravery and brutality of the crowd.Every summer and autumn, tens of thousands of inmates are summoned out of the prison by hunting, followed by thousands of correctional officers, and together with family members and children, they pull up a semicircular hunting line 80 to 90 kilometers long.Regardless of prisoners or non-prisoners, everyone held washbasins, lunch boxes, and large tea mugs in their hands, and beat them with sticks while shouting in unison.The hunting line closed at the edge of Qinghai Lake, and the animals that were surrounded jumped into Qinghai Lake in despair, and jumped back again unwilling to drown.Those sick, old and young gazelles and wild horses left behind by the great migration are flopping in Qinghai Lake, and the waves one or two feet high are white.They choked on the salt water and realized that the water was also a hopeless situation, so they turned around and rushed towards the crowd.The gazelle raised its horns, and the wild horse raised its front hooves, wanting to fight the humans who roared with "vomit": fight them.At this moment, gunshots rang out.Thousands of discipline cadres shot and killed the unyielding livestock, but a small number always tore through the meticulous hunting nets and escaped.Those are the best members of the livestock, brave, strong and vigorous, they can jump higher than a human head, run faster than a bullet, and always go away freely after trampling or trampling to death one or two human members.

My grandfather watched them go away, just like watching himself go away, full of tragic and moving.After the hunt, the prisoners always waited for the sheep intestine soup.To be more precise, it is sheep intestine smell soup.Prisoners vary in strength and weakness, and the weak are like the old ones, who don't even have a share in smelling. But that's all in the past.Gone are the days when you couldn't even smell sheep guts. Therefore, when the old couple fled on horseback towards the steel trash, these people and things were being forgotten by the prisoners.The old couple is not fleeing famine.There are many factors that made Lao Ji a fugitive, the most important being my grandmother Feng Wanyu.Wanyu's letter is one letter per month, talking about sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, grandchildren, and granddaughters.She spoke in great detail, all the details. When I was two years old, I put a plum in my mouth by mistake and made such a funny face. husband.He didn't miss the growth of the children at all.The lives of members of the family have never left him behind.In Wanyu's letters, half of them are about the present, and the other half are about the past.The pasts of Yan Shi, Wan Yu and En Niang are fully backed up by Wan Yu.A certain thing, where it happened, how it happened, do you remember?When reading the letter, Lu Yanzhi found that Feng Wanyu always remembered the good half of things, or in other words, the things that happened to them at the same time can be seen as beautiful or mediocre.Wan Yu relived those days with him in her letter and made them a good one. Wan Yu always asks this question in letters, Yan Shi, remember...?He wanted to tell her that what he remembered was only different from what she remembered.But he never told her so in his reply.He also wanted to tell her that the past of the two of them, beautiful or mediocre, was their own, private, and should not be seen by the eyes behind the mailbox.The old man was searched naked several times, but the eyes behind the ×× mailbox made him feel even more naked with Wan Yu. Lao Ji relied on his memory to archive Wanyu's letters, number them by year, month, and day, and keep every letter without omission, and then burned the actual letter paper.It is helpless for the coquettish words to be revealed to the eyes behind ××’s mailbox, but they must not be seen by others; what kind of eyes are those——have seen murder and atrocities, and are used to seeing blood and dung, It is full of dirty faces and dark nostrils that my companions haven't washed for many days. Maybe his escape was for this purpose: to tell Wanyu face to face that he remembered everything, and because of remembering, he now knew that he had misunderstood himself and Wanyu for so many years.He wanted to euphemistically forgive him for not giving her his best years.He must euphemistically forgive him for being absent-minded to her, and he is only present with a smile by her side. As soon as the old couple ran out of the blackthorn forest, they heard shouts from behind.After the young People's Liberation Army shouted "Ah!" in a loud voice, he remembered what he should have called.So he came with the majesty of a soldier: "Stop! If you run again, I will shoot!" I always thought that there were a dozen or so prisoners, and it was impossible for the People's Liberation Army to let them go after him alone.The People's Liberation Army's gun was raised, and the 62-year-old felt that the front sight locked his gray head.Now he felt the back of his head condensed into a point, and the front sight was burning the vitals under the gray curly hair from a wider and wider distance.Just under the sparse gray curly hair and thin skull, his memories of many manuscripts and hundreds of euphemistic family letters are being locked by the front sight at this moment. Any one-thousandth of a second, the bullet will burst those wonderful memories. , flowing warmly onto the dry and whitish grass.But the old couple still decided to gamble with the bullets. "Crack!" A shot.The black thorn behind the old couple was shot, and a section of the treetop flew out.Another two shots in a row, Lao Ji felt that his spine was now in the front sight of the PLA, because it was moved there due to thermal expansion. A People's Liberation Army also mounted a horse and chased after Lao Ji.The old couple's little knowledge about horses helped him a lot.The gray horse is the right choice.The blue and gray horse also has a competitive nature, as long as there is someone chasing after it, it will feel satisfied.The distance between the blue and gray horse and the black horse that was chasing was getting wider and wider. At this moment, twilight suddenly rolls in from the snow-capped mountains around the grassland. Another People's Liberation Army drove a dozen prisoners to form an infantry pursuit team.The prisoners ran first, and the People's Liberation Army ran last with their rifles in hand.After all, the famine has just passed, and the prisoners' physical deficit cannot be made up for a while.The old couple heard a certain prisoner crying, complaining that he couldn't run anymore.The People's Liberation Army also cried out, saying that they would shoot if they couldn't run.The old man heard his sixty-two-year-old chest rumbling, his trachea became the piston of a bellows, but no air could be drawn from his lungs.His mind was on and off, and he knew that he would die from lack of oxygen at any time.Does he have any choice?If he surrenders now, the People's Liberation Army can kill him in a fit of anger.What should Wan Yu do if he kills his elder brother?Wan Yu couldn't hear his regret anymore.He must tell Wan Yu that such a high price will be paid for the return of a prodigal son. The red brick walls of the sugar factory emerged behind a grassy slope.Old Ji wanted to run back panting like this and tell Wan Yu that this prodigal son with white curly hair loved her.After a run along the fence, he reined in and the horse slowed.The son-in-law's upbringing in the first half of his life helped him again: his dismount was very beautiful and capable.He gave the horse a vicious slap on the rear while jumping off the horse, and the horse lost its rider and continued to run forward. The red brick wall of the sugar factory is one and a half meters high, and the old couple put their feet on the edge of the bricks and clasped the top of the wall with their hands.The glass shards on the top of the wall pointed at the sky angrily, and they were arranged very densely. The old couple had no choice but to let them cut into the palm of their hands.Under the tattered gloves are the accumulated dirt and calluses from more than ten years of grinding, which somewhat block the sharpness of the glass.The old couple had already stepped into the wall with one foot. Lao Ji got into the shed next to the factory building through a broken window, and fell into a steaming pool as soon as he entered.The blackened liquid in the pool was bubbling, and the surface was covered with a thick white vapor.The old couple's reaction finally caught up: the blackened liquid was syrup.Fortunately, it was cold, and the heat of the syrup dissipated as soon as it came out of the oven, otherwise the old couple must have been cooked.Fortunately, his padded jacket and trousers are thick, and the thick syrup cannot be soaked for a while. Hearing over the rumbling noise of machinery, one can hear the sound of gunfire passing through the sugar mills, following the galloping blue and gray horses into the distance.The old man climbed up from the syrup pool, and he was so heavy that he couldn't take a step.The mate soaked in syrup became a lead-filled mate, moving to a corner with steps like lead.There are many tattered pockets piled up in the corner, waiting to be mended before they can be filled with raw sugar, and the old couple hides in the pile of pockets. The People's Liberation Army on horseback still has to spend a little effort to catch up with the green and gray horse.Even if he catches up, he may not immediately think that the scheming old couple has already escaped from his shell in the sugar factory. About ten minutes later, the old couple heard the prisoners in the sugar factory change shift, and someone was walking towards the shed.He hurriedly moved to the yard with leaden steps.The yard is a mess, waste machinery, broken machine tools, large bundles of dried beets, any shadow is huge and wide enough to embrace the old couple into a black embrace.It was completely dark.The day shift in the sugar factory has been replaced by a night shift.The old man squatted and hid, and when he wanted to stand up, he found it almost impossible: his squatting posture had solidified with the syrup filled with cotton-padded jacket and trousers, and he was cast into a squatting sugar figure.The thick cotton wool soaked in syrup is as hard as steel, and it has to take whatever shape it wants the flesh inside to take;The old couple squatted and took a step, and found that their feet and legs were completely numb.He exercised the muscles of his toes and legs vigorously, and his sensation came back a little.He squatted and walked slowly to one side, just a few steps, and his energy was no less than that race against bullets.But he didn't dare to sit down, for fear that once he sat down, he would become a sugar figure in a sitting position again, and he would never be able to stand up again.The moonlight was very good, and Laoji saw a stick in the moonlight, and he started to move there.He finally moved up to the stick.Since the sleeves of the quilted jacket shaped his arms into a knee-hugging position, it was difficult for him to stretch out, and he happily beat the solidified syrup on the joints of the quilted jacket with a stick.He changed his strategy and started beating the buttons on the front of his jacket with a stick.A piece of candy was knocked off, and the old couple stuffed them into their mouths.He gasped and chewed, and streams of sweet water flowed into his stomach, becoming fuel.The fuel started the old couple, and he worked hard again and again, finally peeling himself off from the sugar-coated cotton jacket.The temperature is several degrees below zero, thanks to the huge amount of exercise of the old man, and thanks to the sugar to cheer him up.About ten minutes later, the elders knocked the sugar off the joints of the cotton coat and trousers.He touched the things hidden in the padded jacket.Good stuff, no syrup on it.That was his last stock: forty-six dollars and ninety cents, a pair of solid gold cufflinks, a sapphire tie clip. When the moon reached the top of the mountain, Lao Ji started stiffly on the road.Can't take the main road, the main road is busy at the moment, the People's Liberation Army arrives one by one, shouting "stop!"He cuts his way through the grass, his photographic memory is at hand now, and his knowledge keeps him from getting lost.He walked unhurriedly, with a journey of two hundred kilometers, there was no rush. The next day he spent most of the day peeling off the sugar from the cotton-padded jacket and trousers and putting it into the pocket he had stolen from the sugar factory.Then he took off the cotton-padded jacket, and removed the piece of black cloth sewn on the lining and the ball of black thread with the needle in it.He sewed black cloth onto the back of the padded jacket.The black cloth is neither too big nor too small, just to cover the word "labour reform" and the number of the prisoner below.The needle point of the quilted jacket soaked in syrup could not penetrate at all, and his hands were tied into a pair of bloody hands before he roughly finished sewing. After that, the days of fleeing were roughly like this. I used to march at night and sleep during the day.The prison was built on the desert of the wild grass, and the loose supervision of the prisoners was based on a belief: if there is no food, you will not be able to escape if you are allowed to escape.The old couple made an exception.His exception was an accident, a miracle.The sugar flakes from the padded jacket and trousers can make up for his provisions, and he can sleep anywhere on the grass. During the day, the sun makes the big grass desert look like spring.The sugar was enough for him to eat for three years, and the sugar he ate turned into vinegar in his stomach. When he breathed a little deeper, he pumped up the old vinegar, and sprayed it down the esophagus. It's time to pour acid.After a few times, my throat was marinated, and every sip of sugar, or every sip of vinegar, left a burning sting. Occasionally, nomadic Tibetans who dropped by on the way returned to their winter grazing base camp, he would joke with them in casual Tibetan, and then use some sugar tablets as a gift, and sit on the back of a yak for a while, resting his blood from walking feet.Once he met a fellow Dongxiang family, and he exchanged sugar with them for a snow chicken, and imitated their example and grilled it on the bonfire together with the snow chicken's exquisite feathers.That was the only non-sweet meal during his more than 20 days of fleeing. After eating the snow chicken, Laoji bid farewell to fellow Dongxiang people.The old prodigal son was in a good mood. There was a song from his overseas student days that made his throat itch, but he still pressed it back.The old ones figured out how many days the old prodigal son would be able to appear in front of Wan Yu.The old prodigal son should hug Wanyu well, and let Wanyu know that this time he hugs her as the only Wanyu in the world, not just a female body; his body and mind are specially moved by Wanyu Yes, just because she is Wanyu and not any other woman.Those careless hugs in their twenties, thirties, and forties don't count, it's just due diligence.Not even very conscientious, often perfunctory, often lazy. On the day when all the blood bubbles on his feet burst and all the candies were about to be eaten by him, he had already almost walked behind the huge desert of grass.That evening, he came across a shallow stream, and the horse lay down in the stream like drinking water to fill his belly, and then washed his face well, leaving the face that belonged to Da Caomo to Da Caomo. At least one week before he will meet Wanyu.He wanted to tell her that the old prodigal son came back at the risk of beheading.He was seduced by your euphemistic eyes from many years ago.He is too dull, it took him so many years to understand the lust in those eyes.It will be too late, too old, if he doesn't come back. Too old to love.