Chapter 18 Chapter two

"Ah, Danny Goodman's "Moonlight on the Ganges" can still be heard here!" Miss Song could speak pure Mandarin.She was tall and plump, smelling like frangipani, and her long black hair was tied back by a purple ribbon and swung from time to time like a ponytail. "Chairman, look, Beijingers dance disco better than Hong Kongers, and they are modernized now!" "No one can resist the temptation of pleasure." Father smiled like a philosopher who has seen everything through. "They don't admit that they are ascetics anymore." After dinner, his father and Miss Song took him to the ballroom.He didn't expect that there is such a place in Beijing.When he was a child, he also went to Shanghai's "Titis", "Paramount" and "French Nightclub" with his parents. Now it should be like revisiting the old places, but when he saw the soft milky white lights, And while women like men and men like women wandered about him like ghosts in the moonlight, he felt uneasy, like a spectator who was suddenly drawn onto a stage to be an actor, out of his reach for him to play. character of.In the restaurant just now, he saw some dishes and took them back after only moving a few chopsticks, and he felt a spasm-like disgust from his stomach.In his place, the state-run canteens in the upper county all brought an aluminum lunch box to take the leftovers home.

Music was playing in the hall, and several couples of men and women danced in strange shapes.Instead of cuddling together, they tease each other face to face like fighting cocks, leaning forward and back.This is how these people use up their excess energy!He thought of the people who were harvesting the scorching rice fields right now.They bend over, swing their upper limbs from right to left, and from left to right.Occasionally, they raised their heads and shouted hoarsely at the distant burden: "Hey, water, water..." Ah, if only he could lie in that green shade now, by the bubbling yellow water of the canal, smelling full of water. A breeze of straw and clover aromas, how nice that would be...

"Can you dance? Mr. Xu." Suddenly, he heard Miss Song asking him beside him.The little smell he had just caught was gone in no time.He glanced back at her: she had bright eyes and red lips, too. "No, no," he smiled at her absently.He can herd horses, plow the field, reap the harvest, and raise the field...why should he be able to dance? "Don't embarrass him," his father said to Mi Si Song with a smile, "Look, Manager Wang is here to invite you." A handsome man in a gray suit walked around the table and smiled at Mi Si Song. Waist, the two lightly got off the dance floor.

"What else do you have to think about? Huh?" My father lit his pipe again. "You know better than I do that the Communist Party's policies are constantly changing. It's relatively easy to get a visa now, but it's hard to say what will happen in the future." "I have something I miss too." He turned to face his father. "Including those pains?" Father asked meaningfully. "Only in the presence of pain can happiness show its value." "Huh?" His father stared at him, shrugging his shoulders puzzled. A sudden melancholy flashed through his heart.Only then did I remember that my father also belonged to this strange and incomprehensible world.Physical similarities cannot eliminate spiritual barriers.He also looked at his father the way his father stared at him, and neither of them could see through the other's retina to see what was deep in the eye.

"Is it... still resentment?" Finally, the father lowered his eyes. "No, not at all!" He waved his hand.This action is also exactly like his father. "As you say: the past is past. It's something else entirely..." The dance music changed, this time low and slow, like water running down a long channel.The lights seemed to be dimmed, and he couldn't see the figures on the dance floor clearly.Father lowered his head, wiped his forehead with his hands, and showed that weak and painful expression again. "Yes, the past is in the past. But looking back, it is still painful... But, I do miss you very much, especially now..."

His father's murmured whispers paired with this more elegant dance music also moved him. "Yes, I believe that," he said thoughtfully. "I missed you too." "Really?" Dad looked up. Yes.Twenty years ago, on that autumn night, the moonlight passed through the window lattice whose window paper was torn by heavy rain, and sprinkled on a group of people like piles of rags.A dozen people slept in a low adobe room.He clung to the base of the wall, the earthy damp soaking through his clothes.He shivered from the cold, and simply got up from the wet straw.Outside, the mud shone like broken glass in the moonlight.There are remnants of rainwater everywhere.The air was filled with the stench of rotting water.He found the stables.It was still relatively dry there, and the horse manure evaporated a smoky heat.Horses, mules, and donkeys were all chewing hay on their troughs.He saw that no animals were tied in front of a manger, so he climbed in and slept in a wooden manger like the newborn Jesus.The moonlight slanted in, drawing a diagonal line separating light and shadow on the gable wall of the stable.The heads of the animals hung down by the manger, as if they were worshiping the moon.At this moment, he suddenly felt very sad, and the whole scene pointed out his lonely situation completely symbolically: people abandoned him and made him live among the cattle!

He cried.The narrow manger clamped his body, just as life oppressed him from all sides.First abandoned by his father, his mother died.The uncle swept away everything that belonged to the mother, leaving him alone.Later, he moved to the school dormitory and went to school on the people's stipend.The Communist Party took him in, and the Communist Party’s schools educated him.In the cheerful atmosphere of the 1950s, although he had a withdrawn, sensitive and taciturn character developed in a deformed family, he gradually melted into a large group.Like all middle school students in the 1950s, he also had a beautiful dream about the future.After graduation, the dream became a reality.He walked into the classroom wearing a blue cloth uniform, carrying textbooks, and holding chalk.He has his own way of life.However, just because the school branch secretary wanted to fulfill the target of arresting rightists, he was pushed to his father again.As if the blood relationship in the body must determine the succession of the class, he became a member of the bourgeoisie again.In the past, the bourgeoisie abandoned him, leaving him only an "asset" on the resume, and later, people abandoned him, but put a rightist hat on his head.He became a person abandoned by everyone, exiled to this remote farm for labor education.

A horse had finished eating the hay in front of him and was moving towards him along the manger.It put its beak as close to his head as far as the reins could go.He felt a warm breath on his face.He saw a brown horse moving its fat lips around his head looking for grains of rice at the bottom of the trough.After a while, the brown horse also spotted him.But it was not frightened. Instead, it turned its head to sniff his head with its wet nose, and wiped his face with its soft lips.Such comfort made his heart tremble.He suddenly burst into tears hugging the long, bony horse and weeping on its brown mane.Then he knelt and crawled in the manger, desperately scraping together the rice grains at the bottom of the trough, and piled them in front of the brown horse.

Ah, father, where were you then?