Chapter 64 Suspected footprints

I heard a rattling sound, ran to the yard and looked around, and saw the branches and leaves shaking in the bamboo forest, and there was a faint black figure that seemed to be hiding.Who is it?I picked up a shovel and yelled, there was a moment of silence, and then a head covered with cobwebs and grass whiskers appeared. "Let me chop some bamboo." He showed two yellow teeth. "Who are you? How did you cut it into my yard?" "These bamboos are useless." "You say it's useless, but I do." I was a little angry, thinking that this person was really rude. I don't know when he broke into my private house and ruthlessly attacked my garden. Will he come to demolish the walls and tiles in two days?Pity the piece of green that I carefully preserved, the second or third green curtain that is indispensable in the yard, has been torn apart by him.The red bricks of the wall were exposed, and the impact caused gold stars to appear in front of my eyes.

His lips were thick and heavy, and he was covered with a thick and dense beard, which was inconvenient to carry, and any words he uttered were like a pot of gruel.He said his name but didn't seem to say it, said where his home is but didn't seem to say it, and said that Maozhu is not Nanzhu, so it can only be cut down and sold to a brush factory to make pen holders, etc., but I didn't hear it clearly. .I ordered him to stop immediately and leave here immediately.He froze for a moment, then nodded hesitantly.But when I think about it now, I feel that he didn't answer clearly at that time, let alone be sure, or he didn't answer at all.

"These bamboos can only hide snakes. What are you keeping them for? Useless, useless." Still muttering, he gathered the felled bamboo poles into a bundle, carried them on his shoulders, and finally walked out the door. One day not long after, I came home from outside, and as soon as I entered the courtyard, I found that there was already an owner here—that beard stump again, like a brush with few hairs left; there were also two big lips, facing me After a lot of shivering and crowding, he managed to squeeze out a few spittle, happily saying, "Are you back?" Behind him, the two cows also had the ease of their masters, gnawing on the grass and wagging their tails. , pulled down the steaming cow dung, and disturbed the gadflies flying up and down.I was dazed for a moment, thinking that I had gone to the wrong place, but when I took a closer look, the road that had just been paved with stone slabs, the vegetable field that had just been reclaimed, and the grape trellis that had just been erected were clearly still warm from my hands.The big tree outside the fence and the two-story ridgeline in the distance are clearly my familiar sights, so why do I feel nervous about turning myself into a guest right now?

"What do you want from me?" I asked. He pointed to a piece of vegetable soil excitedly: "The ground here is wet, you can't grow tomatoes, you can only grow taro and ginger. You have to listen to me." He pointed to the camphor tree and said, "There are two good herbs under there, Wuyueyang, don't hoe them, I will dig them again in autumn." I don't understand Mayyang at all, and I don't care who poached the two herbs and when, but I can't tolerate his high spirits, his tone of ignoring the law and disrupting society. "Who the hell are you? Let me tell you, this is my yard, the yard I bought, and the yard I have applied for the land certificate. You don't understand this meaning, do you? You have to dig herbs, herd cattle, and chop Mao Zhu, you can go outside. If you want to enter this courtyard, you have to get my permission. Do you understand? Do you want me to show you the land certificate?"

He was stunned, as if it was difficult to understand such a profound and complicated truth again, "You mean, you mean..." "I mean, you don't come here to herd cattle in the future." "Can't cattle be herded here?" "You think this yard can let you herd cattle?" "Cows like to eat thatch the most. It's useless for you to keep it anyway..." "It's up to me to stay or not, right?" "You want to stay? If you want to stay, you should have said it earlier. I didn't know you wanted to stay. I don't know. If you had said something earlier, I wouldn't have come."

He didn't hold me accountable for not proclaiming, prohibiting, teaching, and punishing me. With a yell, he drove the two cows out of the courtyard gate. A large bundle of cow grass dangled behind his shoulder, and the tip of the leaves scraped the road in a rustling manner.He certainly didn't take his dung and gadflies with him. I added a lock to the courtyard door. I didn't know his origin until I added the lock.His name is Li Dexiao, nicknamed Xiaolao, and he is a farmer nearby.It's just because the land I bought was originally allocated under his name, and it has been familiarized by him for more than 20 years, even by his cattle.As soon as the rope is released, there is no need to drive it away, and the cow will come straight here obediently.Right now, it's not that he doesn't know that things have changed. It's not that he doesn't know that this land was expropriated by the township government and finally sold to me, an outsider.But when he was chopping bamboo or mowing grass, he couldn't help running to the land.Think about it, he is familiar with the thatch bamboo here, the thatch grass here, and the Wuyueyang in a certain corner of this place, and he even used to run here habitually to fertilize the live soil.How can he give up for a while?He can smell the smell here from a distance, he can hear the creaking sound of germination or seed falling here from a distance, and even when he is in a daze, he can feel that it is sunny after the rain or warm and cold here A twitch or jerk from time to time.For him, these are of course more important than a land certificate.Someone told me that since I kicked him out of the house twice not long ago, he was still a little half awake. He came to the gate of my house several times with a hoe on his shoulders. Or linger, and finally turn around and leave, mumbling in their mouths and don't know what to say.

He didn't knock on the door yelling, even if he was sober and calm enough.I believe that for a long time, he will still be in a trance in front of an iron lock, like sending a son to someone else, but it is difficult to regard this son as someone else's flesh and blood, and if he is not careful, he will still be in a daze. What baby name is called. The above is an excerpt from my short story "The Land", which is generally well-founded.However, the protagonist's prototype is not surnamed Li, but surnamed Wu.His wife did divorce him, but it wasn't because she hated the poor and loved the rich, but because she hated her husband's stuttering, stinginess, and being unmanly in bed-the reason is actually not very clear.

This novel is written in response to the request of a French cultural project, and "Land" is also the proposition of the project host.Probably due to the deep love for the land in the Chinese literary tradition, I also involved the romantic flow of pastoral poems and landscape prose, emphasizing the protagonist's concern and entanglement for his hometown.In fact, Wu has both affection and ruthlessness for the land. For example, he has no regrets about the transfer of the land, and is even a little elated.He once pulled me to his house, led me to the mountain to see, asked me if I needed more land, and asked me if I had any friends or relatives to develop it—he still had a piece of mountain where he needed water and roads. With a road, it is a good site to build a house or open an orchard.

He thought I was a developer, someone eager to sell land.According to him, he just wanted to get a little more compensation, and then go to the city to open a shop to make tofu—this is something I didn’t write in the novel. In fact, he did leave Baxidong later, but instead of going to the city to make tofu, he went to the coal mine to dig coal.When I was in Paris to participate in a seminar on the novel "Land" by Chinese and French writers with the same title, I happened to hear that a major mining disaster had occurred in a coal mine in China.From the CNN TV news in the hotel, I saw the bodies of casualties at the mouth of the mine, as well as busy rescuers and ambulances with flashing blue lights.For some reason, I was worried about seeing a familiar face on the screen, worried about the camera quickly locking and zooming on this face.

At that time, an enthusiastic French reader wanted coffee and kept asking me what "Mayueyang" was, saying that he could not find the name of this medicine in the Chinese plant dictionary; he also said that many plant names in "Land" are very beautiful, It was also profound, reminding him of ancient African cultures... He must have noticed that I was staring at the TV news, and he probably couldn't understand why I was absent-minded about academic exchanges. After returning to the mountains, I heard that Mr. Wu was fine. Not long ago, he came back once, entertained the neighbors with high-end cigarettes, and took his son who graduated from middle school to dig coal.

I haven't seen him again, maybe it will be difficult to see him again in the future.It is worth mentioning that although the gate of my house must be locked every night, it seems that someone has come by at night several times, leaving footprints in the vegetable garden early in the morning.These footprints are deep and large, a circle bigger than my feet, which made me think of the big feet of the prototype characters in "The Land" that once appeared in front of the courtyard.I asked my wife to come and see.My wife said don't scare me, what kind of footprints are those?It's just a sunken puddle in the rain. Maybe what the wife said was right. Maybe no one really came on a dark and windy night, let alone wandering alone in the vegetable field.I had to convince myself of that.