Chapter 8 Chapter two

...touches the soul... —Excerpt from a newspaper editorial in 1968 Brush, brush, brush... The torrential rain beats the earth, and everyone's heart.The blob of brown water that had seeped in on the back wall spread sinisterly around.We all know that as long as this earth wall is penetrated by rainwater, it will immediately collapse of its own accord.Thus, the water trail becomes a clock that marks the end of our life, a specter that devours people. boom--!Then there was the sound of crashing water waves.We looked at each other in horror.The wall of this house has collapsed.Falling walls usually face outwards, but above our heads there are pieces of cement slabs, each weighing more than 600 kilograms.They seemed about to overwhelm us, turning us into mangled corpses.

We ten "prisoners" first scurried about in the cell together with the mouse that had come out of the hole, but soon, the muddy flood rolled in from under the cell door, and the mouse was submerged until only its pointed nose and sparse beard remained. We had no choice but to go to the kang again and stand beside the dying "three anti elements". "Mother! They still call me a spy!" Xiao Shunzi, a young man sent to the countryside in Tianjin, couldn't bear it any longer. He jumped up from the kang, licked the muddy water up to his ankles, and rushed to the prison door to beat him: "Open the door! Open the door! Mom! Are you going to crush me to death?! Mom! Open the door! Open the door!..."

However, his shouts and knocking on the door were drowned out by the terrifying sound waves outside. "Hey! The big canal has burst! Hey! Evacuate everyone to the sheepfold...Hey! Evacuate everyone to the sheepfold..." The sound of the sudden torrential rain, the frantic sound of squirting water, the terrified cries of women, the frightened cries of children, the angry cursing of adults, and the restless neighing of animals, all mixed together and condensed into a large, overwhelming sound.Yes, a chunk.Each of us felt the weight of this piece of sound.Instead of weighing down on our bodies like cement slabs, it's now pressing directly on our souls, making each of us tremble as if we couldn't bear it.

Xiao Shunzi stopped, looked viciously at the door panel, and jumped to the window in panic to look out. Outside the window, which is welded with steel bars, is a thick, lead-gray rain curtain.At this time, the vision has no effect, and the horror of the outside world is only tormenting me through hearing.Suddenly, a donkey yelled again as if calling for help.This rough, beastly wail, like adding the last piece of silicon code to the weight we can no longer bear, completely crushed our hope of life all at once.We understand: the revolutionary masses have all run away; they have left us to die with this lost donkey.Xiao Shunzi burst into tears first:

"Mom! Mom! Mom... They call me a spy! Mom..." He is both cursing and calling his mother.It turned out that he and a group of young people raised a dog named "Najia", and the chief of staff of the Agricultural Construction Division went to the company to inspect it.Xiao Shunzi called Najia, "Come, come, stand up and shake hands with the head of the division." So he was regarded as "no leader" and put in a cell. I heard that when he was still free, his mother I came to see him from Tianjin, and hurried to the company.He jumped over happily and shouted: "Mum! You didn't come to pick you up yesterday, Mom! You didn't pick you up today. Mom!..." Now, he was in the midst of the "Mum's" curse, He really missed his mother.

"Hey, hey, hey! Troublesome, troublesome, troublesome!..." The "current counter-revolutionary" and "Mr. Messy" curled up in the corner of the kang, rolled his eyes in a funny way, and pointed a finger at us threateningly, "Hey, hey... many things, many things..." This accountant who was born in a rich peasant found the words "Long live Liu Shaoqi" written in chalk on an earthen wall one morning, and hurriedly reported it to the Military Control Commission. However, after repeated investigations, he himself became the biggest suspect.He also lost his mind during the long and difficult confession process.Now, he can only say: "Xi, Xi, Xi, troublesome, troublesome!" We all call him "Mr. Trouble".

"The sky is falling! The revolution and the counter-revolution are over!" "The remnants of the Kuomintang" - an old mechanic jumped up suddenly, shouting nervously and hoarsely. "Woooo...Ming..." This is Xiao Chen, who is curled up at the base of the wall to the west, crying in grief.He didn't want to say what he was charged with, but we all know it.He buried his face in his knees, put his head in his hands, and lost himself in the darkness of grief.Perhaps, in the darkness, the figure of his beautiful lover appeared in his heart again, he cried louder and louder, and finally turned into a loud howl, his howl, and Xiao Shunzi's innocent cry shout different.This is not just a nostalgia for life, but more a complaint about life.This cry from the depths of our hearts made us all shake and tremble.

"What are you crying about? Pustules! Why don't you give away your wife? What are you crying about? Why don't you give away your wife?..." Lao Qin, a technician from the Production Department of the Agricultural Construction Division, raised his head and cursed loudly at the young man. farm workers, and used extremely nasty swear words.He was a university graduate in 1962 and joined the party before he went to university.In the summer of the previous year, he responded to the call of "you must care about major national affairs" and organized a "Mao Zedong Thought Combat Team", but now he is imprisoned as a "bad leader".He has always been well-mannered, and his movements have the air of an actor pretending to be chic.But today, he suddenly behaved uncharacteristically.The teasing of fate, the humiliation of the body, the unfair treatment, coupled with the terror of death now, all of a sudden evoked from him the animal nature that has not been fully shed in human beings.On his thin face, only two threatening eyes and sharp white teeth bared.His body, like a wounded beast, curled up in pain.At this time, the remaining humanity he showed was only that he wanted to die peacefully.

"Hey, hey! So much, so much, so much!..." The shadow on the back wall expanded again.Its edges stretch out along the slits of the grass mud on the earth wall, like a pattern of the sun... Suddenly, the three "criminals" rushed towards Xiao Chen at the same time.One grabs his shoulders, one grabs his hair, and one covers his mouth. "... Damn! Howling is annoying! That's what Technician Qin said: You gave your wife to an official. You deserve it, you deserve it! Who told you to get a beautiful wife!..." They didn't attack hard, All of them had crazy smiles on their faces.They are simply trying to vent their remaining energies at the end of their lives, when a pathetic, deep-rooted slavishness still controls us.None of us thought of asking everyone to work together to break open the prison door and run to a safe place, at least to go to the sheepfold on the sand dunes with the revolutionary masses, but we humiliated ourselves in this dead house.

"This is wrong! We should be moved to a safe place too! This is intentionally killing people..." Dr. Li kept babbling in Mandarin with a Hunan accent.Trembling, he glanced at the specter on the wall with dull eyes from time to time.The piece of white nylon cloth cut from a Japanese urea bag with the words "Bourgeois Reactionary Authority" quivered on his chest like a shroud. It was just me, sitting quietly with my back against the wall, my head on my curled knees.However, an extremely evil thought was churning in my mind: Mom, you have to die quickly!dying!dying!Die before me!My heart clenched and writhed like a seized snake at the thought that she would see my mangled body.Yes, now my heart is like a viper.I can feel the venom spreading from the heart along the blood vessels to the whole body.It not only makes my hands and feet cold, makes me clenched my fists, makes me gnash my teeth, but also erodes my kindness to people little by little, turning my original simple, innocent and passionate cells into a mass of cancerous tissue.

More than a month ago, the "Joint Committee" of the Agricultural Construction Division ordered me to come to this regiment to "hold a study class".Although this armed company is famous for detaining all kinds of prisoners in this division, I have an ominous premonition, but I still hold good intentions——I, a young "capped rightist", should take part in this unprecedented great Clean up the mud and muddy water on your body during the exercise, and completely transform yourself.That day, my mother scrambled a bowl of fried rice with eggs and made a bowl of soy sauce soup for me. In order not to spill the soup, she kept holding the rickety broken table with her hand to watch me finish eating.I stepped out of the courtyard wall and got into the jeep waiting for me at the door.Ma stood like a statue in the middle of the gap in the broken wall, with only a lock of white hair blowing in the breeze.Her sad eyes stared at me from under the droopy eyelids, giving me the last radiance of maternal love. I once again visually measured the distance from the tap water station at the entrance of the alley to the big tank in my house, and saw the road paved with broken bricks. The bumpy road, thinking of the hardships of my mother's life in the future, my eyes are wet.But it never occurred to me that this was the farewell.I was labeled a rightist in my freshman year for publishing a poem praising humanitarianism in Poetry Magazine.start.Although I had doubts about the hat given to me, the criticism over and over again finally destroyed my self-confidence.In my mind-examination, I pushed my self-condemnation to such an extreme that I finally really thought I was a sinner.I was heartbroken and thought that only by rectifying the mistakes of the past and being a new person in the future can I repay the care of the party and Chairman Mao.Therefore, no matter before or after I took off my hat in 1960, I was praised by the leaders for my hard work in reforming the world outlook and hard work in the school and the agricultural administrative department of this province.Later, more than a dozen farms joined together to form a paramilitary organization—the Agricultural Construction Division, and I was still a competent officer.I have always been careful to live in the designated circle, never stepping out of the house to go to the government office; since the Cultural Revolution, I have not been involved in any factional struggles.This time, I still thought it was another form of test and education from the Party and Chairman Mao.When I came to this small armed company, I was fascinated by the beautiful scenery here.Surrounded by green trees, the canal is gurgling.The wide strips of fields full of summer and autumn crops are spread flat on the wilderness that can't be seen at a glance.The country road with fluffy green grass on both sides meanders gently under your feet.No matter where you go, you can smell the hot aroma of green plants in the sun.Despite the endless labor tormenting me, I can still enjoy the vivid, fresh, unadorned beauty of nature.These palpable and beautiful entities are certainly more moving than the delicate landscape paintings of Constable or Corot.It often makes me feel refreshed, forget fatigue, and immerse myself in thinking. However, at this moment, life suddenly revealed her other side to me. The people living in this beautiful land are ugly, ferocious, and crazy.The reality of life is the viciousness and hatred between people, so that when natural disasters come, we will be abandoned in this dead house, and we will be tortured by fear for the last time before we die. Cruel thing. Therefore, according to the same mechanical principle of action force and reaction force, the same degree of resentment towards people was also aroused from my heart: let's go!Go!Destroy all the world!What wide strip fields, what grassy paths, what armed companies, agricultural construction divisions, together with my body, hopes, worries, reveries... all washed away!Now that people have cursed their mothers, what kind of evil thoughts can't come out? ! I'm crazy too! "Hey, hey, hey! So many things, so many things!..." The sky darkened imperceptibly, and the leaden gray light coming in from the window slowly turned into a gloomy black shadow.A group of "prisoners" also gradually exhausted their physical strength in the terrifying tension and felt physically tired.At this time, we discovered that the large condensed voice pressing on our hearts had been removed at some point, leaving only some muddy endings.We suddenly felt a terrible emptiness, the loneliness of being abandoned, and a kind of disorientation, like drifting in a broken ship on the vast sea.Suddenly, we fell silent as if we had heard an order. This cell was originally the company's fertilizer warehouse, and the humid air exuded a strong smell of ammonia. The burden on hearing was relieved, and the sense of smell recovered.At this time, we felt like a pot of fire was burning in our lungs, scorching our throats upwards.We all gasped for breath.Although ammonia is still inhaled, it feels cool after all.Inhaling the ammonia for a bit of coolness; the ammonia heats up the lungs even more.Our respiratory system is in such a vicious circle to let out the old and inhale the new... "Hey! Come and see, the rain is much lighter!" Suddenly, Xiao Shunzi shouted from the window, his voice full of joy of being saved. The people on the kang didn't go down, but they all straightened their necks.Yes, the sound of the rain outside is no longer complete, and occasionally the sound of bubbling on the water can be heard.Pop, pop, pop... The blisters burst one by one, like groups of beautiful arpeggios.Everyone in the cell breathed a sigh of relief, wiped off the cold sweat from their heads, and their nerves and muscles began to relax. "Hey! What are you doing? Come and see! The rain has stopped, the rain has stopped! Deerlong's thump..." Xiao Shunzi jumped over the water dancing with his hands and feet, and threw himself on the edge of the kang, slapping and pulling one by one. Then, he also sang "Tianjin Time Tune". But none of the people on the kang paid attention to him.As the threat of death gradually disappears, humanity slowly awakens in the heart.We dared not look at each other, and each of us felt a gnawing shame gnaw at us, as if we had displayed in public the hidden things of life that are usually not seen by others.Lao Qin wriggled in the bed, and finally curled up to be as small as a pillow. At the same time, he let out a long, creepy sigh from the depths of his chest. It's too late.The weakness in human nature - the remaining primitive animal nature has been exposed.Man, going through purgatory is very different from not going through purgatory; people who survive purgatory always bear the shadow of ghosts.Every time I think of such vicious thoughts in my head, I become a complete skeptic, suspecting that behind everything good, beautiful, and true, there is an evil, ugly, and fake side...