Chapter 11 eleven

When I woke up the next morning, I felt hunger and pain all over my body.From experience, I know it's starting to get better now. Being able to feel hunger and pain is a sign of vitality.I'll find an excuse to stay at "home" anyway. After breakfast, I pointed out to the team members that the mud cracks on the adobe stove had been dry and cracked after a day and a night of baking. If you don't paste it, gas will come out of the crack. "This is not a joke. Don't just leave the labor camp and enter the Palace of the King of Hell." I asked them to tell Captain Xie, and I stayed at "home" to mud the stove again.

I am now the "team leader", and more importantly, this stove has become a treasure that everyone cares about.The lieutenant said: "Okay, don't go, I'll go and say hello to the bearded captain." I expected that the captain would never let me go just because of their words.I first brought a bucket of water slowly, dug a few shovels on it, and just made up the mud, as expected, Captain Xie came with a shovel. "Dark monster!" He looked inside and out of the smoke stove expertly, admiring it, squatted down beside the stove and baked his hands, "you can still make such a stove; it saves material and is simple, The fire is burning again." ① Lazarus is a leprosy beggar in the Christian "Bible". After death, he was resurrected by the power of Christ and became the patron saint of the sick. "There is nothing difficult in the world, as long as there is a heart." I smiled and told him who I learned from. "Monsters! You 'rightists' are full of capable people!" He spat on the hay, "We Daer people, how did you turn on the stove in the past life, and how do you turn on the stove now. Fei Mi The billet is as thick as a city wall, and the heat cannot come out."

Captain Xie warmed up, and tears and snot flowed out.He grabbed a handful on his face and wiped it on his jacket sleeve.There are deep cracks in the big rough hands.Years of outdoor labor have left indelible marks on his hands and face; I suddenly feel that he is very old, and there is an old-fashioned tolerant expression on his thin, wrinkled face, which looks very kind. "Captain Xie, if your stove doesn't work well, let me refit it for you." I said flatteringly. "No need." His tone was very calm, and he pulled away the usual words, "My house burns a wood stove. Who can afford coal! You are single workers, and according to the regulations, you should burn the stove for you. Others, you didn't see Every household in the team is equipped with firewood stoves. After cooking, they burn the kang. When it’s dark, add more firewood, and it’s warm all night. My stove was made by Xixizi. The donkey’s day, It's also a little bit capable!"

"Isn't Hai Xixi a cadre?" I hooked the crack of the stove and asked him, "He picked us up yesterday, and we still treat him as a cadre." "Qiao cadre!" Captain Xie smiled faintly, "He came from Gansu in the early spring of this year. I heard that he was a Manla in a temple when he was a child, but he didn't study hard, so he went to many places. Work, or save money He is strong. His physical strength is not bad. That’s what I think about him. He can withstand hunger even when he travels far away. Hehe!” ① Manla refers to students who study Islamic knowledge in mosques. Be an imam.

Captain Xie laughed out loud, but I didn't understand what was so ridiculous about it.After pausing for a while, he said again: "The black salary will be paid tonight, and I will rest tomorrow. You can go wherever you want." "Is it okay to go to Zhennan Fort?" After all, I am young, and I still want to enjoy the freedom of being able to move around. "Why not? You can go anywhere. " I think he didn't say this casually, maybe he was consciously trying to let me know that I am different from my past identity.But I don't quite believe that a man with such a vulgar appearance can be considerate of others.I glanced at him.His expression remained unchanged, and he was focused on roasting the fire.But in any case, his words moved me deeply.

He asked me where I used to work and who else was in the family. Then, as if remembering something, he picked up the shovel and left. "Okay, make a fuss." He said, "Don't be too hot, be careful of the soot, and you'd better dig a hole in the newspaper." He didn't tell me to go to work after the mud was finished. As soon as he left, I hooked up the cracks in the stove, cleaned the shovel, put it on the stove, took off the newspaper bag hanging on the wall, picked up the can, poured it into the weed flour, and fried the weeds like yesterday. Pancakes came... the barnyard noodles were gone, I shook out the newspaper and nailed it to the wall next to my straw shop.In this way, I have a clean wall around.I didn't dare to run out to see any horses anymore, lit the half of the cigarette left over from yesterday, and lay down comfortably on the grass bed surrounded by newspapers.Next to my head, Castro is ambitiously agitating for world revolution, Kennedy is proclaiming his "new frontier" policy, Western countries are using the slogan of "welfare state" to confuse the masses, and a "milk queen" is elected in a certain place. "...these are very, very far away from me.So, what is this new existence like in which I now live?I feel that in this deserted village, so poor, so rough, so backward, as if forgotten by the world, abandoned by civilization, and despised by any newspapers and books, there is a very vague feeling that cannot be expressed in words. Stuff makes me feel fresh, feel familiar, feel warm.When I was a child, my grandfather like Mrs. Gao and my uncle like Wu Sunfu and my father who taught me would scold me when I occasionally went to play in the servants' room: "You always like to be with those rough people. !” The intellectuals who came into contact with them later had an artistic image of the working people in their minds—wearing white shirts, blue overalls, and octagonal hats, with red faces, full muscles, and high spirits, always walking in the same direction. On the straight and wide golden road.The "working people" that the leader who gave me the report called on me to learn from always seems to be an empty concept in my mind-sacred though sacred, I still don't know what it looks like.There are no "working people" in the labor camps. There are either intellectuals or wolf children.Here, I am finally among the "working people".

What struck me first was that there was an air of optimism and unscrupulousness that was absent from the labor camps.In such a poor and backward deserted village, how precious and unbelievable it is to be optimistic and unscrupulous!Although the optimism and unscrupulousness are expressed in a vulgar form, it also reveals the simplicity and innocence.Recalling what I saw and heard while working yesterday, I smiled from the bottom of my heart.