Chapter 14 Section 13 Long Distance Calls

Lu Yanzhi met Daji in a town.Northwest farmers are preparing food for the winter solstice.He spent two cents to buy a bowl of Hu spicy soup, and the stall owner ran for more than ten minutes to change his five yuan.The market sells everything, including presbyopic glasses and plastic colored hair ties for little girls.He bought a pair of light-prescription reading glasses for twenty cents, with one frame higher than the other, but wearing them effectively distorted his shape, and that was all he wanted.Well now, he can get a ride.He stood on the side of the road holding a dime, and the car was easy to ride.In two or three days, Lu Yanshi took all the means of transportation in the Chinese countryside, including mule carts, horse carts, donkey carts, ox carts, tractors, three-wheeled motorized pickup trucks, and even wheelbarrows, spanning three thousand years of vehicle invention and manufacturing history. .He has only been a fugitive for only a month, and he is already a fairly mature fugitive. It is rare for him to tell the truth a day, and he has learned to see the effect of his lies, and he can see the impression he left on various people in their eyes.Those who let him hitchhike saw Lu Yanzhi as an old teacher and old doctor.In this way, he passed the most difficult mountain road.

When he arrived in a decent county, he decided to live there.There is a long-distance bus station in Chengguan, and there is a waiting room full of human feces.It was only after dark that he realized that he was not the only boarder here, but that he had four homeless roommates.Originally, he wanted to write a letter to Wanyu, but he thought of the eyes behind ××'s mailbox, so he canceled this plan.There is a post office in the county seat, with a big clock hanging on it, keeping track of the time of all the people in the county without a clock, and a telephone, which is the only telephone besides the three telephones of the county government.Long-distance calls can be made 24 hours a day, and at night the phone is placed in a small window that connects both indoors and outdoors.Lu Yanshi circled around the dusty telephone a few times.He calculated that the money in his pocket was probably enough for him to say a few words. If the line was bad, he would have to "hello" all the time, so how much would it cost him to "hello".

At eight o'clock in the evening, all the shops and families on the only street in the county town closed their doors and turned off the lights.The small telephone window of the post office, like any window in any house, is completely dark.When I got closer, I could hear a radio looking for a band inside.He knocked on the window.The night operator was a young man in his twenties who felt ostentatious in the post office's green uniform: a people's postman.He asked Lu Yanzhi what business he had to knock on the window.Lu Yanzhi smiled, it was dark, and for a moment he couldn't see who he was from the young man's eyes, whether he was worthy of a not-so-good image of the people.The young man told him that the call was calculated by the minute, and he could also send a telegram if he thought it was not worthwhile.He handed out a telegraph paper.Lu Yanzhi pushed back the manuscript paper respectfully, and asked the young man if he could please call the Shanghai Telephone Office first.

"The Shanghai Telephone Office is here." The young man said a minute later. The voice of Shanghai crawled through thousands of kilometers of telephone wires and passed through the dust accumulated over the years on the microphones.Lu Yanzhi put the earphones on his ears and heard the dusty Shanghai Mandarin. The Shanghai female operator soon found out the paging phone number in Wanyu Lane according to Wanyu's address provided by Lu Yanshi. He copied the phone number in his head, and he couldn't move.Anything is possible.Wan Yu may live far away from the paging phone, and the time to come to answer the phone just ran out of his phone budget.The paging phone might already be a trap, he made one call, and when Wanyu answered it, it happened to catch a pair.What else is possible?Wan Yu was no longer at home and was taken away by a police car.He found himself squatting under the small window of the phone, squatting firmly like an old farmer.As a prisoner for so many years, during breaks between work, eating, daze, and sitting without a stool, I always sit on my own heels.

The operator on duty asked at the window if he was still on the phone? He stood up and gave the boy the paging number.Then he asked for a pen and a piece of paper, wrote down Wanyu's name and house number, and asked the young man to ask the Shanghai pager to call the lady on the paper to answer the phone.This can somewhat avoid some traps.The young man looked at the paper for a while, read every word, and humbly accepted the correction.The young man is used to being idle here, and he is very energetic about some things, and he can speak Mandarin.When the operator said "Feng Wanyu" into the microphone, he glanced at him brightly, proud of the fact that he had just talked to Dashanghai.Then he told his customer that the pager had called for someone.Lu Yanshi asked him to hang up the phone immediately, the young man looked puzzled and hung up the phone hesitantly.

"In this way, the phone bill can be saved." Lu Yanzhi explained to the young man, and his tongue returned to that of Professor Lu in the classroom.He has been pretending for so many years, but fortunately he only stutters when he speaks, and he doesn't stutter at all when he thinks about problems. "Shanghai is very big. It takes a long time for one person to call another person, going up and down the stairs. People are running on the road, and the phone bill here has to be charged. It doesn't make sense, right?" I squandered half my life. Grandfather was terribly smart at this time, taking advantage of the young man's ignorance, he had already scratched the post office a lot.

Wan Yu finally came.The voice is very small, which is euphemism.She asked, who is it?In front of the young man who was the operator, and also considering that getting excited would cost the phone bill, he asked her in calm Shanghai dialect, are you okay?Wan Yu only took a wrong breath, adjusted immediately, calmed down, and said thank you, it's pretty good, how about you?Even the two old neighbors who see each other every day while basking in the sun and visiting the vegetable market can't speak more normally than they do.It sounds like they are the kind of old acquaintances who are not much better, and will miss each other even if they don't meet. They are so familiar with each other that they have never noticed why each other has wrinkles and how they are so old.He told Wanyu the address he had memorized in advance, and asked her to send the letter there.For the rest, I have to trouble Wanyu to analyze it by herself.Wan Yu seemed to be writing on the palm of his hand while asking other gossip.How are you doing this time?Have a good appetite?You can't take too much sleeping pills.Her self-talk must have stabilized the caller.Wan Yu did a good job of deceiving, and it was all for him.She would rather protect him if her character is stained.He finished speaking the address and suddenly couldn't control himself.

"I saw the little girl." He pointed at Dan Jue, "It's in the science and education film." Seriously?You can see the movie there too!Lu Yanshi thought that his phone bill was not enough for him to tell Wanyu the price he paid to watch his young daughter in the educational film, let alone describe what that night was like.The money for the phone call is only enough. He said that Dan Jue is very similar to Wan Yu.Wan Yu said that Dan Jue looks much better than when she was young.He said it would be nice if we could see each other.Wan Yu suddenly fell silent.At this point he hung up the phone.

He pressed the microphone and thought, Wan Yu must understand what he said.What he said should sound like this: As long as I can see you once, I can die.Or, I ran away for nothing else but to see you; I've had this idea since I watched Dan Jue's science and education film.He paid the money, thanked him, and squatted down under the small window again.He heard the operator put the phone in the window, close the window again, and go on to his radio.Lu Yanzhi asked himself to move, don't keep squatting under the window, it would be easier to walk around.Still not working, he couldn't help it anymore, buried his head in his knees, and began to cry.The wavelength of his cry merged with that of the operator's radio, so the operator did not hear his cry.

At nine o'clock at the most, the county town was so dark that it became the bottom of the pot.Back at the long-distance bus station, a few homeless men had beaten a wild dog and was cooking it in a washbasin.After eating dog meat, they defecated in the waiting room, and the excrement became bait for dogs. A cruel food chain was formed in this twenty-square-meter world.The smell of human excrement was covered by the smell of the whole room, and Lu Yanzhi also got a piece of dog meat.The famine passed, and the wild dogs grew a layer of flesh.The tramps have nothing to worry about, there are always wild dogs and dogs for them to fight.He can also have everything, steal crops from the fields, hunt wild dogs, rabbits and voles, lure out dogs and rabbits if there is no wild one, the life skills of a tramp combined with the forbearance and optimism of a prisoner can make him live free day.If Wanyu doesn't mind, he can take her wandering.Euphemistically, what is most lacking in this life is freedom.

As soon as he arrived in this county, he bought the owner of a herbal medicine shop with ten yuan and asked him to be the recipient of Wanyu's letter.Wan Yu didn't receive a letter, but what came was a money order.At the same time, a warrant for the wanted fugitive Lu Yanshi was posted in the county seat.The people in this county are all good people, and they don't know how to change their natural appearance by implementing some tricks, such as a pair of wide-rimmed glasses and a beard, which are common tricks used by spies all over the world.Lu Yanzhi hadn't shaved since he fled, and he wore those reading glasses, so people in this county no longer mistook him for a 70-year-old rightist, but an 80-year-old birthday boy.When Lu Yanshi came to pick up the remittance, the owner of the Chinese medicine shop was tearing off a wanted warrant from the door panel and handing it to his son who was defecating on the side of the road. Wanyu's remittance amount is not small, one hundred yuan.He bought a set of underwear, a gray wool blend Mao suit, a pair of thick black cotton shoes, and two pairs of cotton socks.There is a public bathhouse in the middle of the main street of the county seat, which has the only large bathing pool in the county for hundreds of miles.There is a wooden wall on the pool to divide the men's and women's circles, but the water below is connected, and a towel can float across the boundary if it can't be caught.There is a thick layer of gray and white clothes floating on the water surface of the pond, which is similar to the porridge skin on rice porridge.He made a hole in the porridge skin before entering the hot water, and when he got up from the pool three hours later, the porridge skin had added considerable thickness.A circle of men after bathing sat by the pool, all of them concentrating on catching lice on their clothes.As soon as the hot air smoked, the lice couldn't stay in the seams of the cotton clothes, and they all fainted, so they caught them one by one.Soon Lu Yanzhi also joined the lice-catching group.When he was dressed, he walked between the men's and women's pools, and found a mirror in the hallway, big enough to fit his big body in.If he didn't know his own big man, he wouldn't know the person in the mirror.Having been a prisoner for nearly ten years, this was the first time he looked in the mirror.During these days of living in the county seat, the skin that Gaoyuan Rizhao gave him is receding, but it is not receding well. The tip of his nose has faded to a light color, and several pieces of skin of different sizes have fallen off each of his two cheekbones. Tear along the curling edge, the light color gradually expands.The dark skin that has been soaked for three hours is actually floating, tearing off a piece.He looked in the mirror and saw that the old man's face was gradually torn off, revealing a smoother face.It was still an unfamiliar face, no wonder no one compared it with the face of the person on the arrest warrant.If you look closely at the peeled area, it is spotted like the skin color of a python.He wants to wear this skin color to meet Wanyu.Then he started to fasten the style buttons on the neckline of the blended woolen tunic, and found that the collar was high on one side and low on the other, and the front of the collar was torn off when he put on the style buttons.There are sharp creases on the blended fabric, not only does it look like the clothes have been folded in the box for a long time, but his whole body seems to have been folded and pressed at the bottom of the box for many years.But already very presentable.One-third of Wanyu's remittance was spent on this outfit.Wan Yu dressed him up thousands of kilometers away. He sat in what was said to be a time-honored restaurant in the county, and ordered himself a fried tofu, a steamed bun, and an egg drop soup.Wan Yu treated him to such a delicious meal thousands of kilometers away.On this restaurant table, he wrote a letter.This is a difficult letter to write, even he, a doctor of languages, can't come up with a suitable language to write, and the wording makes the bench with three long legs and one short leg stumble under his buttocks, more anxious than himself.Written so that the shopkeeper of the restaurant feels sorry for the lamp oil.The shopkeeper of the restaurant asked him if he wanted anything to eat and drink, and if he didn't, he closed.He became flustered and ordered two taels of soju.The liquor was gone, and his letter was finished.Then he respectfully wrote the code name of the mailbox on the envelope, chewed a small piece of steamed bun that he left on purpose in his mouth, mixed it into paste with his tongue, sealed the envelope, and pasted the pre-purchased stamp. When he put the letter into the mailbox at the door of the post office, he moved his shoulder blades tensed with tension.He finished the letter with the help of alcohol.The letter said that he was very sorry and left without saying goodbye, asking the leader to forgive him for not being a good prisoner from the beginning to the end.He said that the main reason for writing this letter was that he had a new discovery: about 12 or 13 kilometers away from the Qinghai-Tibet Highway, he found a grass with a high starch content.Next, he put forward a bold idea: if starch can be extracted from wild pastures, then the famine would cause much less damage to the whole of China and the world. Walking in the dark county town, two liang of soju was burning in his mind.This is the wine that Wanyu invited him to drink thousands of kilometers away. The next day there was a long-distance bus to Lanzhou.He will board a train to Xi'an at a small station outside Lanzhou City, and then from Xi'an to Shanghai.He lay down in a haystack behind a horse shop all night, looking at the sparse stars in the sky through the cracks in the grass.Star shivered.At this moment, Lao Ji didn't think about it. In fact, his situation at this moment was doomed long ago, as early as October 1936.