Chapter 20 Chapter Four

In the morning, he and Miss Song went to Wangfujing Street with their father.He found that he was no longer used to city life.The ground here is supplemented by cement and asphalt, which is not at all like the land in the countryside, which is so soft and wet when you step on it; the streets are full of people who don't know each other, lively and indifferent.Moreover, the incessant noise that was going on everywhere soon fatigued his nerves. In the handicraft store, my father wrote out a check for 600 yuan and ordered a set of finely crafted Jingdezhen blue and white tableware.Instead, he picked a kimchi jar that cost more than two yuan in the china store.The jar is small and exquisite, with yellow and brown patterns in circles forming an antique pattern, just like the cultural relics unearthed from Han tombs.Such beautiful household utensils have never been seen in small counties in the northwest.Xiuzhi has long wanted to have a decent kimchi jar, and always talks about how good the kimchi jar in her hometown is.The one at home now is a tile product brought from Shaanxi by someone else. Xiuzhi spent several nights in exchange for five pairs of shoe soles. "Your wife must be very beautiful," Miss Song said to him with a charming smile when she returned to the hotel, "You love her so much, I'm so jealous!" She changed her clothes again today, a red and black silk shirt She wore a lavender cardigan over a gray tweed skirt.Steamed by the autumn sun, the fragrance of frangipani flowers is even stronger. "Marriage is always a contract and an obligation." The father sighed aside, slowly stirred the coffee in the cup, perhaps thinking of himself, carefully considered the words and said, "Whether you have feelings for your wife or not, You must abide by this contract and obligation to the end, or you will disturb your conscience and cause painful remorse. This time I ask you to go out, not only you, but you must take your wife and children with you."

"So, Mr. Xu, can you talk about your romance?" Miss Song said again, "Your love must be very touching. I don't believe that a handsome man like you has no women to pursue you." "Where can I have What love." He smiled apologetically, "I didn't know my wife when we got married, let alone a romance." "Ah!" Miss Song suddenly expressed an exaggerated surprise, and his father once again shrugged his shoulders in puzzlement.He wanted to tell them the details of his marriage to Soo-ji, but the background of this abnormal marriage was a catastrophe; a catastrophe which was a national disgrace.He was afraid that by telling them it would cause them to laugh at what was sacred to him.He hesitated, sipping his coffee silently.There is sweetness in the bitterness of coffee, and sweetness and bitterness cannot be separated.It is the combination of the two that creates this special, exciting and captivating scent.Father and Miss Song can taste the beauty of coffee, but can they understand the complexity of life?Marriage, like the rest of life, was utterly out of order in those troubled times, arranged and assembled by sheer blind chance.They can only see the absurd side of chance, and cannot appreciate that chance can also appear as a strange fate, which suddenly bestows happiness that is completely unexpected.Moreover, the more difficult the environment, the more precious this sudden happiness is.The strange marriage between him and Xiuzhi always aroused both sad and warm feelings when they recalled together, which is probably difficult for anyone else to understand.

It was an afternoon in the spring of 1972. As usual, he gave the animals water, secured the stables, and returned to the hut.As soon as he put down his whip, "Guo Yuzi" broke into the door. "Hey, 'Old Right', do you want a wife?" "Guo Tunzi" said excitedly, "If you want a wife, as long as you open Jinkou, I will bring it to you in the evening." "Then you send it," he replied with a smile.He thought "Guo Yuzi" was kidding him. "Okay! We gentlemen have a word. You are ready to prepare. The woman's certificate is already available. I just told your secretary. Your secretary said that as long as you agree, he will issue a certificate immediately. Okay, I will issue a certificate for you." , when you go home and pass by the field department, give the certificate to the political department, and bring it back when you come back, you can have a wedding night in the bridal chamber tonight!"

It was just dark, and he was sitting on a small bench watching "Liberation Army Literature and Art", when he heard a group of children shouting outside: "The wife of 'Lao You' is here! The wife of 'Lao You' is here!" Then, the door slammed, "Guo Yuzi" broke in again like in the afternoon. "Okay! I won't drink you a sip of wine, but you have to give me a sip of water, right? It's so bad! I ran back and forth for 30 miles in one afternoon without touching the ground." He reached out to scoop up a ladle of well water from the aluminum bucket, gurgling He drank it all, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve, let out a long "hi", and then called out the door, "Hey! Why don't you come in? Come in, come in! This is your home. Come and get acquainted, this is The 'Old Right' I am talking about is called Xu Lingjun. He is good at everything, but poor, but the poorer he is, the more honorable he is!"

Only then did he see a strange girl standing in front of a group of children outside the door, wearing a crumpled gray blouse and carrying a small white bundle, looking coldly and carefully at the dusty room. The small earthen house with pot smoke, as if she really planned to live here. "This... how can this work!" He was taken aback, "You are making too much of a joke!" He patted the edge of the Kang, "The proofs are all here, this is the law. Do you understand the law? I told the Political Department that you went to herd the horses and asked me to collect it for you. If you quit, you will It's so boring. Do you hear that, 'Old Right'?"

"How can this be done? How can this be done?..." He spread his hands and asked "Guo Yuzi" again and again.But the girl came in, and sat calmly on the little bench he had just sat on, as if what the two of them said had nothing to do with her. "How can I do it? Ask me about the two of you, who should I ask?" "Guo Yuzi" put the "law" back on the kang. "Okay, let's have a good time! You will have a fat boy next year, so don't forget to treat me to a wedding wine." He walked to the door, spread his hands, and slammed the child away like a chicken, "What are you looking at, what are you looking at? No Have you ever seen your father marry your mother? Go back and ask your father to marry your mother, go, go, go!..."

"Guo Yuzi" just walked away with a shake of his hand. Under the dim light, he quietly looked at the girl.She was not pretty, with thin freckles around her small upturned nose and yellow, dull hair.He looked tired and looked haggard.For some reason, he felt deep pity for her, so he poured a glass of water and put it on the wooden box and said, "Drink it, after walking such a long way..." She raised her head, saw his sincere gaze, and silently After drinking a glass of water, she seemed to have regained some strength, so she knelt on the kang and folded the quilt, then pulled up a pair of trousers, spread the worn parts on her knees on her thighs, and untied the little white clothes she had brought. Baggage, took out a small square of blue cloth and needlework, and mended it with his head down.Her movements were methodical, and there was a pent-up anger about her.It seemed that this anger could not be expressed in herself, but could only be expressed in the things that had been arranged by her hands.With a dull appearance, she tidied up the upper room a little, and everything immediately became brighter.Her dexterous fingers touch the quilt, mattress, clothes, etc., just like pressing the keys of different scales, and a series of very harmonious notes will sound in the upper room.

Suddenly, he thought of the brown horse, and felt a pang of sweetness in his heart.He felt that he not only knew her long ago, but also waited for her for many years.A feeling of ecstasy that he had never felt before overwhelmed him, and he couldn't help but fell down beside the girl.He covered his face with his hands, unable to believe that he had really found happiness, worried that this fluke would bring him new misfortunes, and at the same time desperately wanted to enjoy this new feeling carefully in the darkness of his hands.At this time, the girl stopped the needle and thread in her hand.Her intuition told her: This is a person who can be relied on for life.She didn't feel strange to him at all, she put her hand on his hunched back very naturally.So, the two of them sat on the edge of the kang covered with broken sacks, and talked until dawn.

Xiuzhi was originally from Sichuan.In those few years, the Land of Abundance made it impossible to even eat sweet potatoes, and a large number of hungry farmers had to leave.It's easier for the girls to find a random partner in other places and marry them.As long as there is a girl in a village who has a family in another place, she will support her sisters and sisters in her hometown one by one.In this way, strings of girls left Bashan Shushui with their poor little burdens, broke through Yangping Pass, crossed Qinling Mountains, and went through countless long and short tunnels to Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, and Ningxia. , Go to Xinjiang to run their future.If the family can afford money, they buy a ticket, and if they don't have money, they sneak on the train from station to station.Their small bags only contain a few patched clothes, a small round mirror and a wooden comb. With these equipments, they bet their beautiful youth on the casino of life.They may win happiness, or they may lose everything... This kind of eight-cent marriage has long been popular in the farms in Lingjun.Unmarried young men and old bachelors could not afford the bride price to marry local girls, so they begged women from Sichuan.These Sichuan women seem to carry a stack of personnel cards with them. They can think of one at random, and as long as they send a letter back, they will come and marry immediately.Xiuzhi was one of the summoned ones.She came to find a guy from the seventh team who drove a tractor.But when she carried the brigade's certificate and moved to this farm one stop at a time, the young man overturned his car three days ago and unfortunately died.She didn't even go to the crematorium, and she didn't have to go, and she owed nothing to anyone.She was also embarrassed to go to that fellow countryman's home, she knew that fellow countryman was also in difficulty, her husband was disabled, and a child was born in the second year of marriage.She could only sit blankly in front of the stables of Team Seven, looking at her slowly moving shadow like a sundial.

At noon, "Guo Yuzi" returned to the horse pen with a kettle to fill with boiling water. When he knew her situation, he threw a group of horses on the pasture and went door to door to find a way out for her.Team Seven now has only three bachelors. They went to the front of the stables to watch one by one, but this short, skinny girl did not attract their interest.Finally, "Guo Yuzi" thought of Lingjun who was already thirty-four or five years old. That's how he got married.This is his romance! "'Lao You' got married!" This became a big event in the production team.These people who are tired of "grasping the revolution" are also happy to be temporarily freed from the entanglement of factionalism. Molecule" expressed sympathy.After all, people are human, and they secretly felt the warmth in the warmth they gave to Lingjun, feeling that they had not lost all of their humanity in the "minimum loss" revolution.Some of them gave him a pot, some gave him a few catties of food, and some gave him a few feet of cloth... And it was initiated by a young veterinarian: each family gave 50 cents to help him build a family. .Even the branch meeting saw a unification not seen since the "Cultural Revolution," unanimously passing a resolution—

According to the system, he was given three days of marriage leave.People, after all, are beautiful, even in the dark sun and moon!From the sympathy that people gave them, the two of them started their family. Xiuzhi turned out to be an optimistic and diligent woman.She only studied in the primary school in her hometown of Bashang for two years, so she could not express poetic feelings about life.On the second night of her visit, the projection team screened "Lenin in 1918" on the drying yard.Since then, one of Huaxili's lines has become her mantra. "There will be bread, and there will be milk," she always said with a smile.She was born with slender eyebrows and small eyes, and when she smiled, her eyes would narrow into crescent-like slits, coupled with her two small dimples, there was a special charm. Lingjun let his horses go and was not at home during the day.She was alone in the scorching sun at noon, making clay and making molds, and took off more than a thousand pieces of adobe.Then, she pulled back a cartful of dried adobes and built three walls in front of their door. In the 9.6 million square kilometers of land, she suddenly set aside 18 square meters of land for her own use.She said: "In our hometown, there are trees at the door of every house, and you can see the sky when you go out!" So she planed two poplar trees with the mouth of a bowl in the wild, and dragged them down with amazing strength. Come back and plant on both sides of the yard.With the yard fenced in, she raised poultry.She raised chickens, ducks, geese, and rabbits, and later fed several pairs of pigeons, and won the nickname "Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Army, and Air Force" among the people.State-run farms do not allow workers to raise pigs by themselves. This is her greatest regret. She often lies on her pillow and tells Ling Jun that she dreamed that the pigs she raised had grown so much. The remote farm where they live is like a pool of stagnant water. The leaders are not effective in implementing the right things, and they are not active in implementing the wrong things. Despite the pressure of "cutting the tail of capitalism", Xiuzhi can also be like Like a tenacious grass, it sticks out its own green stems in the cracks of the stone slabs.The little animals she raised, just like in the magician's box, multiplied rapidly. "There will be bread, and there will be milk." Sure enough, a year later, their lives have changed a lot.Although their wages are still so meager, they are already able to have ample food and clothing.Xiuzhi really has the ability to reverse the law of social development. When others shouted to transition to communism, she completed the restoration of the natural economy to the commodity economy in their home.Everything is produced from Xiuzhi.When she came back from work, the chickens, ducks, geese, and pigeons all followed her back.Daughter Qingqing is carried on her back, chickens, ducks and geese surround her feet, and pigeons stand on her shoulders; firewood is burning in the hearth, and water is burning in an iron pot. Although she has never studied "operational research", she still Just like Avalokitesvara, there is no rush, orderly, and comprehensive. This woman who grew up eating sweet potatoes not only brought him the warmth of a family that he had never enjoyed before, but also made the roots of his life go deeper into the land, and the nutrition the roots absorbed was their own labor. .The combination of her and him strengthened his feelings for this land, and made him feel more clearly the simplicity, purity and legitimacy of the labor-based lifestyle.He got the pleasant satisfaction he had sought all those years ago. On the day Deputy Director Dong announced that his problem had been corrected, when he issued a certificate, took out the 500 yuan subsidized to him from the finance department according to the policy and returned home, and told Xiuzhi everything that happened, Xiuzhi's face was full of embarrassment. Also released a strange brilliance.She wiped her hands on her apron and counted the brand-new bills one by one. "Hey, Xiuzhi, from now on we will be the same as others!" He washed his face in the room, and shouted happily to Xiuzhi in the boy's room, "Hey, Xiuzhi, why don't you talk? What are you doing? "What the hell!" Xiuzhi said with a smile, "I can't even count it! I counted it several times, so much money!" "Oh! You are really... what is money? Worth it Glad I've been reborn politically...” "What political freshmen, political freshmen! In my eyes, you are still you! I used to say that you were a rightist, but after most of my life, I said I got you wrong; I said I made you wrong, and I told you not to do it again for two days. Mistakes, you know what you’re doing! Which one is it? Don’t make any more mistakes! We used to bang in the past, and we’ll still bang in the next two days. Only with money can we be at ease. Don’t bother me, let me count it again.” Yes, Xiuzhi, who was fifteen years younger than him, never saw him as different from others, and she always maintained the simple reason of a farmer.What is right is not right, this concept has not entered her little head at all.All she knew was that he was a good, honest man, and that was enough.When she was working, she often said to other women: "We know that her father is an honest and miserable person. He can't kick a fart with three legs, and he doesn't worry if the wolf gets behind his ass. If you bully such a person, What a crime, I'll have to recite time for the rest of my life!" Yes, Xiuzhi loves money, and usually wants to break a nickel in half to spend.A mere five hundred dollars satisfied her so much that her fingers trembled and her eyes burst into tears of joy.However, when she knew that his father was a rich "foreign capitalist", she didn't mention a word of money, but asked him to bring more spiced tea eggs for his father to eat.She often taught Qingqing, who was only seven years old: "Money can only be spent if you earn it yourself, and you can spend it with peace of mind. When I bought salt, I knew it was the money I got from selling eggs; I bought salt." When it’s spicy, I know it’s the money I got from harvesting rice; when I buy you a book, I know it’s the money I got from working overtime…” She didn’t have any abstract theories, nothing profound Philosophy, but these simple, clear, and reassuring words have made the smallest member of their family realize that labor is noble; only the reward of labor can make people happy; Money is a disgrace! Soo Ji can't sing.During the full moon in Qingqing, the family of three took a truck into the county to take a "family portrait" at the only photo studio in the county.On the streets of the county seat, there were popsicle sellers who shouted, "Ice-stick! Ice-stick!" After that, "ice-stick" became Xiuzhi's lullaby.While clapping Qingqing, she imitated the Northwestern accent and sang softly: "Ice-stick! Ice-stick!..." That monotonous, distant and dreamlike sweet singing voice not only brought Qingqing's introduction to dreamland also made him who was reading a book feel a kind of happiness that was so simple that it was almost primitive, and entered a realm of pure beauty. There are also popsicle sellers on Wangfujing Street, but they don't shout, just sit in the shop with a straight face, how boring!He misses the dreamlike sweet lullaby, and misses the smile with an optimistic spirit of "there will be bread and there will be milk".No, he cannot stay here.He wants to go back!There are people who have helped him in times of trouble, and now they are looking forward to his help; there is the land soaked in his sweat, and now his sweat is shining on the harvested fields; there is his wife who loves each other and daughter; there is everything to him; there is the root of his life!