Chapter 26 Apartment Life Memories

Read the words "I want to ride the wind to go home, but I'm afraid that Qionglou Yuyu, the heights are too cold", most of the residents on the upper floors of the apartment house will feel horrified.The taller the room, the colder it gets.Ever since coal became expensive, hot water has long been a mere ornament.The letter H on the hot water faucet is naturally an indispensable part of the pattern beauty of the bathroom; in fact, if you put cold water and turn on the wrong hot water faucet, there will be a hollow and sad rumbling sound coming from under the nine springs. Let it out, that is the apartment complex, and the hot water piping system, which is particularly thoughtful, lost its temper there.Even if you don't go to Taisui to break ground, the god of thunder will appear at any time.For no reason, I only heard the malicious "嗡..." which lasted for a while and then "娇娇" twice, as if the plane hovered overhead for a while and dropped two bombs.I was scared out of my nerves in Hong Kong during the war, and when I first returned to Shanghai, I was often scared out of my wits.If it had worked hard to transport the hot water up to the sixth floor when it was working seriously, it would have grunted twice, which is understandable.Now there is a lot of thunder, but little rain, and two drops of rusty yellow syrup are rarely seen... But it's hard to say, the unemployed are always very irritable.

During the rainy season, due to the heavy pressure and the subsidence of the foundation of the tall house, the water accumulated in front of the door is the deepest.The streets are completely dry.We had to spend money to hire rickshaws to cross the white moat, and when it rained heavily, the house flooded.We took turns to rescue them. We took old towels, sacks, and bed sheets to block the window seams. The barriers got wet, wringed them out, and replaced them. The sewage was folded into the washbasin, and the water in the washbasin was poured into the toilet.After working for two days and nights, the palms of my hands have worn off a layer of skin, the base of the wall is still full of water, and the flower paper pasted on the wall is still stained with spots of water marks and mildew.

If the wind is not blowing this way, the rain on the tall buildings is lovely.One day, it rained all night, and I forgot to close the window when I went out. When I came back, I opened the door, and the wind and rain smelled in the room. Looking out, it was a blue night, and there were faint lights flickering in the distance. People haven't lit the lights yet. I often find it incomprehensible that the noise on the street can be heard very clearly on the sixth floor, as if it is right under the ear, just as a person gets older and farther away from childhood, and the trivial memories of childhood gradually become more intimate and clear.

I like to listen to the sound of the city.People who are more poetic than me listen to the pine waves and the tsunami on their pillows. I have to hear the sound of the tram to fall asleep.On the hills of Hong Kong, only in winter, the north wind blows the evergreen trees all night, and there is still a bit of tramway charm.People who have lived in the downtown area for many years probably have to get out of the city to know what they can't live without.The thoughts of city people, the background is the curtain of striped cloth, and the faint white stripes are the running trams—parallel, even, and noisy rivers, bubbling into the subconscious.

Our apartment is next to the tram depot, but I still haven't figured out what time the tram goes home. The phrase "tram home" doesn't seem quite right—it's accepted that a tram is a soulless machine, and the word "home" has countless emotional associations.But have you ever seen the special situation when a tram enters the factory?One after the other, like children lined up, noisy, shouting, happily ringing the hoarse bell: "Kling, Klay, Kray, Kray!" The tame ones are the ones who are about to go to bed, waiting for their mother to scrub them.The lights in the car were brightly lit.Vendors who specialize in the business of off-duty conductors peddled bread.Sometimes, all the trams entered the factory, and only one remained, mysteriously, as if it had been abandoned, and stopped in the middle of the street.Looking down from above, I saw it revealing its white belly in the moonlight at midnight.

The food sold by the hawkers here is not much elegant.We never put down the basket to buy anything either. (I think of Gu Lanjun in "Nongben Infatuation". She tied the rope with silk stockings, tied the paper box, and hung down the window to buy soup noodles. If the socks are not broken, they are not silk stockings! In the present time of saving materials, this is to use Heart-stopping luxury.) Maybe we should try hanging the basket too.Anyway, when I heard a seller of dried stinky tofu coming from the door, I grabbed a bowl, ran down the six flights of stairs, followed him, and found the whereabouts of the dried stinky tofu on a street far away. , and then take the elevator up, always seems a little ridiculous.

Our elevator driver is a character, well-educated, well-mannered, and he has a clear account of the daily life of every family in the apartment.He disapproved of his son's job as a tram conductor - he thought it was not a very good job.No matter how hot the day was, no matter how people rang the bell loudly, he still had to put a smooth ironed silk jacket on top of his undershirt to show up.He refuses to operate elevators for unkempt guests.His thinking may be too gentlemanly, but he is a thinking person after all.But he left his own hut and stepped into the elevator hut—I'm afraid he won't be able to get out of these two huts in his life.As the elevator ascends, outside the herringbone-patterned copper fence, layers of darkness move down, brown darkness, reddish-brown darkness, black darkness... against the alternating darkness, you can see the gray head of the driver.

When he is free, he cooks pancakes in a small stove in the back patio.He taught us how to cook red rice: bring it to a boil, turn off the heat, and cook for ten minutes. Ask him to buy tofu paste and give him an old milk bottle.After buying it for two weeks, he simply reported: "The bottle is gone." Whether it was smashed or stolen is unknown.After a while, he brought tofu paste in a smaller milk bottle, and we asked, "Huh? There's another bottle?" He replied, "Yes." The new bottle is for compensation Whether it is ours or lent to us, we do not know.This sort of move is somewhat socialist.

He has to go through our news every morning as a routine before delivering it to us.He read the tabloids more carefully, so we didn't get our turn until eleven or twelve o'clock.He doesn't read newspapers in English, Japanese, German and Russian, so he rolls them up and sticks them in crooked door knobs early in the morning. No one stole the newspaper, but the steel plate on the electric bell was pried away.There are actually two patrolmen guarding the door, although they are not twins, both of them have wood-slag yellow faces in their lapels, and wood-slag yellow knees are exposed between shorts and stockings; He was sleeping on a rattan chair, blocking the mailbox.Every time you go to check the mailbox, you have to approach his cheek graciously, as if to ask: "Is the wine sting better?"

Only women, I am afraid, can fully understand the special advantages of apartment life: the servant problem is not so serious.With such a high standard of living, even if you can afford to hire people, you have to be prepared to be angry."Living at home" in an apartment is relatively simple.Find a cleaning company to clean up every two weeks, so you don't need to do chores.Without servants, life is a joy.Putting aside all the principles of equality, if someone who has not eaten stands by and watches helplessly while eating, waiting to add more food for you, although it will not make people unable to eat, it is somewhat annoying.Many of the chores around us have their own pleasant quality.If you can’t see the eggplants in the field, it’s good to go to the vegetable market to have a look - such complex, oily purple; fresh green peas, ripe peppers, golden gluten, like soap bubbles in the sun.After washing the spinach and pouring it into the oil pan, one or two pieces of broken leaves would stick to the bottom of the basket and could not be shaken off; facing the light, the green branches and leaves fluttered on the square grid made of bamboo slices. , reminiscent of lentil flowers on a hedge.In fact, why "Lenovo"?Isn't the beauty of the bamboo basket enough?I am not allegiance to the National Socialist Party, trying to persuade women to go back to the kitchen.If you don't persuade him, you can just persuade him. If you persuade him, you also have to persuade the man to go to the kitchen for a while.Of course, there is a cook in the house and the master goes to the kitchen from time to time, which will arouse the strongest resentment from the cook.We have to pay attention to these places, and we can't be too blind.

Sometimes I also feel the pain of not having a servant.There were worms in the rice tank, so I mixed some pepper into the rice—it is said that the rice worms don’t like the pungent smell very much, so they have to pick out the pepper before washing the rice.I pinched the head of a fat and white meat worm to use as pepper. When I realized the mistake, I couldn't help screaming, left the rice cooker and left.Meeting a snake in Hong Kong was nothing more than that.I only saw the upper half of the snake. It came out of the hole and stood about two feet long. I hurried down the mountain with a stack of books in my arms.Just had a face to face with it.It looked at me quietly, and I also looked at it quietly. After looking at it for a long time, it just screamed, turned over and ran.Speaking of insects, there are almost no flies on the sixth floor, and there are a few mosquitoes.If they were imaginative, they would faint if they flew to the window and looked down.Unfortunately they are as indifferent and self-sufficient as the British - who live in the forests of Africa and wear tailcoats to dinner as usual. An apartment is the most ideal escape.People who are tired of the metropolis often miss the peaceful and quiet countryside, longing for the day when they can retire to the fields, raise bees and grow vegetables, and enjoy some happiness, but they don’t know that buying half a catty of bacon in the countryside will cause a lot of gossip. On the top floor of an apartment house, you can stand in front of the window and change clothes! Yet once a year, the secrets of everyday life must be revealed.In summer, the doors of every household are wide open, and a rattan chair is moved to sit in the air vent.The people here were on the phone, and the servant Ou from the previous family was ironing his clothes, and at the same time translated the dialogue on the phone into German for his little master.Downstairs there was a Russian teaching loudly Japanese.The lady on the second floor had a mortal hatred for Beethoven, and beat him all morning with gnashing of teeth; a bicycle was leaning on the piano.I don't know which one is simmering beef soup, and which one is soaking Jiao Sanxian. Human beings are inherently nosy.Why don't we take a sneak peek into each other's private lives, since the lookee has little to lose and the looker obviously gets a moment's pleasure?Everything involves the giving and receiving of happiness, so there is no need to worry about it.What are you competing for? ——What is long is suffering, and what is short is life. There are often children skating in the roof garden. When they are in high spirits, they file and file on our heads from morning to night, like the rubbing of porcelain, or like sleeping people grinding their teeth there. The teeth are sour in the tooth kernels like pomegranate seeds, and they will fall off if you pick them.An exotic gentleman next door came upstairs aggressively to interfere.His wife reminded him: "If people don't understand your words, it's useless to go." He shook his fists and said, "It doesn't matter, I will make them understand!" After a few minutes, he died down and came down.The above children are not young, and they are female, and they are beautiful. When it comes to public morality, we are not necessarily better than others.We swept the dust on the balcony directly to the balcony downstairs. "Ah, there are carpets drying on the railings - it's too weird, wait until they take the carpets in and then sweep them!" With a thought of kindness, a brilliant round light appeared on the top.Such is our half-hearted morality.