Chapter 3 2. Mynah's Prophecy

My memory also has a great defect, that is, I have no memory of the time and place of my birth.When I returned to Kaifeng at the age of 11 after wandering in my childhood, my mother led me to an old street called "Behind Sansheng Temple", pointing to a dilapidated gatehouse and the back wall of an old house , and said, "Ban'er, you were born here." On the back wall of the old house with pits and holes, I saw the iron-blue house slope.The incomplete tiles are like fish scales scraped by a blunt knife, and the tile edges are full of old tile pine, which reminds people of the black pine forest in ancient times.Near the eaves, I saw a small window.The first ray of sunshine that this world gave me was through this window and shone on my face miserly.My mother suffered so much for my childbirth under this window.My mother said, I was not so willing to come to this world, and I tossed and tossed all night. When the blood-red dawn appeared in the window, I had to use scissors, and my first cry came from the old house. "You were born weighing eight catties and three ounces!" My mother repeatedly boasted about a record I brought to the world, and then sighed, "If you listened to the obstetrician, you would not exist!" When I When I grow up, when I live a very fragile life, I will remember that my life is an unrecognized accident, but then I will think of the pain my mother endured for me, and I will feel that my mother is an eight-year-old. The heavy life is entrusted to me, and it is my mission to live hard.

I wanted to see the old house that had graciously accepted me. I pushed open a door with mottled paint, but a fat black dog rushed out and barked loudly.It was raining lightly that day, and my mother and I fought against the attack of the black dog and retreated. The umbrella hit the old wall with a loud "bang bang" sound, and the mud in the ditch was splashed on our bodies. Sadness that does not belong to this ancient city.I know that my parents had paid rent to more than a dozen landlords, and we were just tenants wandering around in the alleys of this ancient capital. It wasn't until my grandfather recognized my father's legitimacy that a green cloud appeared above my head.Green shade covers a small courtyard deep in the alley.The name of the alley is Xixiaoge.The leaves swayed in the small courtyard, and sprinkled the shattered sunlight on my first memory.The reason why I say it is "first memory" is because no matter how clear and vivid my memory of "Western Carriage" is, my mother insists that I have transformed other people's legends into my own memory.Mother recognized the green shade, saying that it was the green shade of an old pagoda tree.So, I saw the pure white Sophora japonica trees all over the tree again, and smelled the first ray of refreshing fragrance given to me by the world.And my old lady, she is my nanny.The spinning top whirled under her hand.The little-footed women next door came to visit her more delicate little feet.She took off her little triangular shoes, turned up her little feet wrapped like rice dumplings, and twisted them left and right for others to see.The women next door stared round in surprise and opened and closed their mouths, but I couldn’t remember the sounds they made. My first memory of “Xiaoge” was a silent movie with exaggerated movements.

The first sound I caught was that of a mynah.The mynah, with its jet black and glossy feathers, dozed lazily in a cage under the eaves of the neighbor's house.When someone passed by under the cage, the mynah would shake its head and cheer up, and greeted in a hoarse voice: "Hey, have you eaten yet?" He replied confidently: "Haha, let's eat, let's eat!" Whenever the parents go to school and just walk out of the small courtyard, the starlings will raise their heads and give orders: "Lao Cai, Liu Xiang, get out of the car, get out of the car!" Lao Cai or Liu Xiang would run out from a dark doorway.Both of them are rickshaw drivers.People in Kaifeng call rickshaws "foreign cars".Their "foreign cars" were parked side by side under the green shade of a small tree. The body, handlebars and copper headlights were all polished, like a pair of decent twins.Lao Cai and Liu Xiang are quite different.Lao Cai was dark and thin. He often wore a pair of purple floral shorts, pulled a cart with his back bare, ran panting, and wiped his sweat with a jet-black towel hanging over his shoulders.Liu Xiang was young, cheerful and strong, with a shaved head like a well-developed gourd shining with a dazzling blue light.He likes to wear a white waistcoat with his arms open, and his black trousers tie up his overly wide trouser legs. He pulls up the car and trots, with the trouser legs bulging like a lantern.From time to time, he squeezed the rubber balloon on the handlebar, and a shiny brass horn would call out "Wooooowah".

The biggest difference between Liu Xiang and other coachmen is that he likes to sing, and he can sing a song with special content in the popular "Land Boat Tune" in Kaifeng's small alleys.Sitting in the car with my mother, I heard him singing while running: "abcdefg, hijklmnop, qrstuv, thump, thud, w, x, and yz!" My mother laughed while listening.As he was running, he turned his head and asked, "Mr. Meng, how is my singing?" His mother said, "It's a good singing. It's a pity that you shouldn't have interrupted your studies!" Liu Xiang said, "If my father If I can live a few more years, I can study for a few more years, maybe I will sing this song, take my mother and starlings, and go to London to pull a rickshaw. London does not eat corn buns, but bread.”

I didn't know that Liu Xiang was singing the "English Alphabet" song he made up himself, but I knew that he really didn't eat bread.Every morning, he hangs the dry rations filled with nests on the handlebars of the car, and when he pulls the cart and walks towards the entrance of the alley, the starlings will flap their wings and shout: "Hu spicy soup, Hu spicy soup!" Selling Hu spicy soup The short fat man at the entrance of the alley responded, "Stop barking, I'll serve it to your brother!" Liu Xiang pays great attention to the nutrition of starlings, and often mashes boiled egg yolks and mixes them in bird food jars to feed starlings.At night, with a flashlight in his hand, he would go into the weeds in the backyard to catch grasshoppers. He said that the starlings lived happily only after eating this "live meat".Lao Cai scolded and said, "What have you spoiled mynah? It's your daughter-in-law?" Liu Xiang said, "It's not much different from my daughter-in-law. It's the only one that can talk to me when I pull the cart back every day."

One rainy day, Liu Xiang didn't leave the car.I saw him holding the birdcage in his hand, teaching mynah to say "Gude Maoning", correcting mynah's pronunciation over and over again, and tossing for a long time.Many years later, I learned that "Good m orning" turned out to be "Good m orning".When mynah was finally able to bow his head and greet everyone in the style of a British gentleman, Liu Xiang patted my head again and said: "If I can't go to London for a while, when your father sends you abroad, you can take this one Mynah wears it, and also tells it to wear a doctor's hat."

Myna, however, failed Liu Xiang's teachings.One day when he came back from pulling the cart, the myna stretched his neck and shouted, "Liu Xiang, Bage Yalu!" Liu Xiang looked at myna in a daze, "What are you talking about?" The mynah flapped its wings again to show off its second foreign language: "Bageyalu, Bageyalu, haha!" Liu Xiang gritted his teeth and scolded: "The little Japanese hasn't called yet, you kid is fucking ready to call me!" Becoming a traitor? Watch me kill you!" Lao Cai said, "Why are you angry at it? It's not an oriental bird, no one instigates it, so how can it curse people in oriental dialect?" Liu Xiang picked up a broken one While knocking on the copper basin, he yelled: "Neighborhood neighbors, listen, whoever wants to be called 'Bageyalu', go to the little Japanese boy 'Bageyalu', don't 'Bageyalu' in front of our house." I’m feeding a genuine Chinese bird, don’t dirty the bird’s mouth!” Lao Cai said, “This is a genuine Chinese bird, how do you teach it to say ‘Gude Maoning’?” Liu Xiang argued : "That's telling it to learn from Westerners and greet us Chinese, do you understand?"

I don't know how Liu Xiang punished myna.That night, I heard him yelling in the doorway, calling mynah a "little slut" and a "traitor".The mynah flapped its wings and screamed to him for mercy.Early the next morning, Liu Xiang said to mynah, "gargle your stinky mouth!" Mynah obediently put the sharp mouth shell into the small pitcher, drinking water again and again, but refused to rinse his mouth again and again. He raised his neck again and again and swallowed the water.Liu Xiang scolded myna again: "If you don't give me the dirty words, you are not a good bird in China!"

All day long, the starling shrank in the cage, dazed about its nationality. I am reminded of "Baota Sugar".I ate "Baota Candy" to knock out the roundworms in my stomach, so I said to my myna, "You want to eat 'Baota Candy'." Mynah stretched his neck and said, "Eat it, eat it, eat it. Ha ha!" I remember that it was after mynah spit out Oriental dialect that the world was in trouble. But the godmother said that it was the little hen who led the trouble. The godmother's family is in the countryside in the northern suburbs.She said it would be a pity to throw away the leftovers, so she brought back two chicks from the countryside with a cardboard box.They were two fluffy little round balls, screaming "Jiuer Jiuer", rolling around in the yard.The leftovers raised the chickens, but the godmother recognized one as a rooster, and said that there was an alarm clock in the city, and there was no need for the rooster to crow, so she killed the little rooster and made "spicy chicken".I remember the godmother cut the rooster's throat with a kitchen knife, and the bright red blood flowed out steaming.The little rooster kicked its legs and flapped its bloody wings.That was the first time I witnessed the death of a small creature.During lunch, no matter how my godmother coaxed me, I just cried and shook my head, keeping my mouth shut.The godmother said to my mother with a sad face: "This child has a soft heart, and he will be bullied when he grows up!"

The little hen was also mourning the loss of her only mate.In the evening, when it entered the nest, it lingered by the chicken coop.The godmother grabbed it and stuffed it into the chicken coop.The little hen misses her relatives when she sees things, and comes out of the chicken coop with flapping wings.The godmother chased it all over the yard, and it screamed "quack" and went around in circles with the godmother.The godmother pounced on it, but it was emptied; she pounced on it again, but it was emptied again, and the yard was filled with pure white feathers like crystal clear snowflakes.The godmother finally squeezed the hen to the corner of the wall, and the hen broke free again, flapped its wings and flew up the branch, standing tremblingly on the high branch and screaming.I understood the cry of the little hen, which was sad and loud: "Brother, brother!"

My memory of my father always resurfaces here again.He stood on the steps of the main room, looking up at the hen on the tree, and his glasses flickered with the crowing of the hen. "Don't catch it!" said the father. "The ancestors of the chicken used to live in the trees. After being domesticated by human beings, they became poultry. Tell it to stay in the tree. It is like this." "What? I'm not afraid that weasels will eat it!" said the godmother. "It is the same for a chicken," said the father, "that a man eats it as the weasel eats it." At night, I heard the little hen crowing in the tree. The starlings next door also echoed each other, calling "Gude Maoning" in the middle of the night. The godmother got up many times and ran to the yard to look at the sky, "God, what's wrong?" The wild dogs in the alley were also barking "bark". At dawn, both parents go to school.A group of mice blatantly jumped onto the desk, looked around with their bony black bean-like eyes, then raised their beards and front paws, squatted down on the desk for a meeting, and plotted in a mouse language I couldn't understand.There was the cry of mynah outside the door, and the mice seemed to have been whipped, jumped up and jumped up and down the room.The wily rat knocked over a blue ink bottle first, and then knocked over a red ink bottle, and rivers of blue and red flooded the desk.The little mice dipped their paws and the tips of their tails in ink, and began to paint on the white sheets and beige curtains, drawing beautiful patterns in the shape of bamboo leaves and tadpoles.I must admit that they are better and more advanced than what I have drawn with crayons on "stick paper", probably the works of early abstractionists.When the situation developed to the point where the little cat had to come out to clean up the mess, the little cat jumped up to the eaves in panic, then jumped up the slope of the house, hiding under the ridge and screaming "meow". The godmother ran over, quelled the rat rebellion with a broom bump, stopped the flood on the desk with an apron, took me out from under the desk, raised her face and asked the sky again: "God, what's wrong with you?" In the afternoon, the old man pushing the water cart brought water.According to the adults, what he recommended was good water from an ancient well in "Tianshuijing Street".He carried two buckets of good water across the threshold and across the yard, poured the water into the water tank, took a bamboo "water sign" from the wire hook outside the kitchen door, and walked two steps outside the door, thinking again. He stopped heavily, staring at the godmother with bulging eyes. "Master, what's the matter with you?" Godmother asked him. The old man shook the "water card" and shook his head. "Are you asking me to continue the 'Water Card'? There are still miles on the wire hook!" "In the well, the water splashed all night, bubbling and bubbling..." "Did someone fall into the well?" "Under the ground, Qinglong turned over..." "Blue Dragon?" "The world is going to be in chaos!" The godmother hugged me blankly, looking at the back of the old man pushing the cart away. "It's gone evil!" Lao Cai came over from the alley with a rickshaw, "Yang Family Lake is like boiling water, and the fish are also jumping out of the water, whizzing straight into the water!" The godmother hugged me tightly again, and looked at Lao Cai anxiously. "On the main hall of the Dragon Pavilion, there is a big blue and white python as thick as a bucket wrapped around the girder." Lao Cai parked the rickshaw under the tree, "Dou Da's head sticks out and hisses out the message." Lao Cai looked at the birdcage again Dazed, "Look at this starling! The bird food jar added early in the morning is still full. It doesn't eat or drink, it doesn't 'Ba Ge Ya Lu', and it doesn't 'Gude Mao Ning' anymore!" Fluttered its wings, hung itself upside down in the cage and looked around.Lao Cai was surprised again, "What's the matter with you? Hanging your head upside down, you're getting impatient?" In the evening, my father paced the small courtyard with a gloomy face.When his mother came back, he asked, "Have you heard?" Mother nodded and said with the same gloomy expression, "Xuzhou is lost!" "Xuzhou" must be a very important thing.It was lost, and myna and hen, mice and tabby cats were all anxious. The night clattered and covered the small courtyard. The dogs were barking again in the streets and alleys. The violent concussion almost knocked me off the bed.Both the ground and the hut were shaking.The godmother hurriedly wrapped me in a quilt and stuffed me under the bed.I heard chaotic footsteps. Father shouted in the yard: "Come out, there's an earthquake!"