Chapter 11 tired people

Around the summer of 1971, when I was still a farmer, we were harvesting wheat in the field, when we suddenly heard loud noises from the west.Everyone held their sickles and raised their heads to look west.After a while, there was a news: Qingqiao from the Li family in the west fell asleep while threshing on the field, threw his body forward, and was interrupted when he put his arm into the threshing machine. I dropped the sickle and ran diagonally across the wheat field towards the road.Li Qingqiao and I went to the same middle school, one grade higher than me, and we were good classmates who went back and forth together.

The people in the field also threw away their sickles and ran westward. Li Qingqiao and I are not in the same brigade.When we got there, he had been carried to the pump boat.All I saw was his pale, dead face and blood everywhere, and the pumping boat drove away. The people standing by the river saw that the boat was far away, so they turned around and walked to the threshing field. The threshing machine that bit off Li Qingqiao's arm was standing silently under the scorching summer sun with its mouth wide open. Someone pointed with his finger: "That's the thresher." A few girls are still in lingering fear, one is crying but has no tears, the other two or three are either dumbfounded, or trembling like leaves in the wind, or losing control - they keep rushing towards the crowd who flocked here. People said: "He was so sleepy that he always dozed off, so when he fell forward, he heard a scream, and the threshing machine jumped up...

I looked down and saw that the wheat on the ground was stained red with blood, and each one was shocking. Many people fell asleep under the wheat stack or lying at the foot of the wall of the team room. Everyone in the field was as thin as a stick and looked exhausted.They are standing, sitting or leaning on the old trees on the sidelines here, staying together for a long time.Occasionally someone could be heard talking, and more people were silent with dull eyes. Someone in the crowd shouted: "The members of the eighth team have gone back, gone back, gone back to harvest wheat..."

I glanced at the red wheat on the ground, stepped out of the crowd, and walked back.The road is sparsely gone—pedestrians. —On the way, I always think about Li Qingqiao—— Li Qingqiao doesn't look like a rural person, he is very fair, and he is a "beautiful boy" in the words of an ancient book.What impressed me most about Li Qingqiao was his arms.His arms seemed longer than normal.In summer, when he only wore a vest, his arms were completely exposed.Long, thick where it should be, thin where it should be thin, a pair of very delicate and powerful arms.This pair of arms often attracts girls to look secretly. After seeing it, she blushes and turns her face away, but after a while, she turns her head to look secretly again.Girls all like Li Qingqiao, partly because of those beautiful arms.Li Qingqiao is on the school basketball team, and he plays basketball very well.He ran on the field, grabbing, catching, and delivering the ball, his arms flickering in the crowd, like a white jumping fish in local water.When shooting, the two arms are raised high in the air, the two graceful lines are very charming.With a light tap of his wrist, the ball flew into an arc, swiped into the net, and always got applause from inside and outside the court.I like staying with him.When you're together, you can't help admiring his arms.When he talks to you, he stands still, his arms are naturally crossed and placed on his chest, looking very elegant.When walking, the two arms swing gently and rhythmically, which makes people have an illusion: if the pair of arms swing vigorously, they can be like a pair of wings, taking him into the air.That day, we walked under a mulberry tree.At that time, the mulberries were already red, and each grain was like a teat.I looked up, and there was greed in my mouth. "Want to eat?" he asked me.I nodded and prepared to find a bamboo pole. "I can reach it." He grabbed me with one hand, stood on tiptoe, stretched out his right arm, and unexpectedly reached a lot of mulberries.His hand was like a bird's beak, picking off the mulberries for me one by one.When he stretched out his right arm, the sleeve slipped down slightly.The year before last, I participated in the opening ceremony of a friend’s sculpture exhibition. One of his sculptures was covered with silver silk. His eyes lit up.At that time, for some reason, I suddenly thought of this arm that was long enough for mulberries.

And now, what he lost was the arm that helped me get mulberries back then.When I got back to the field, I didn't want to work, and I was really unable to work.I no longer care about whether I can finish the task of harvesting wheat today, and I fell under the neem tree on the ground—heavily exhausted. When I graduated from high school, I was only seventeen years old (Qingqiao was one year older than me, so he was only eighteen).Labor at that time was no different from servitude.I think the lyrical words and praises of labor in the textbooks are hypocritical, and they are the nonsense of a group of bastard literati who don't do farming or only occasionally do it.If it is not nonsense, now that they are dispatched to the countryside, they are just working like local farmers, why are they baring their teeth and screaming in agony?There is also Mr. Tao Qian, a contented and indifferent person who "plants beans under the South Mountain", has such an elegant taste and artistic conception of field work, probably because the work is casual, and it belongs to doing what you want and doing what you don't want. The kind of labor that does not do it.If you can get him to the Eighth Production Team where I am learning from Dazhai or the Fifth Production Team where Li Qingqiao is, it won’t take long, just give him three or two days of suffering, and look at this elegant scholar who walks lightly Can you still "see Nanshan leisurely"?

People are like a flock of sheep being driven away, with a whip hanging over their heads, and their ears are always ringing: "Get up! Get up!" The ridges are made and made, as if they are not used for walking, but just for walking. For people to watch.Even if you think you have done a good job, you will be ordered to redo it by the cadres who are always wandering around the fields: "Before the inspection team arrives the day after tomorrow, you must redo a field ridge!" It is the entropy used for flowing water, which is as straight as if drawn with a giant ruler.All of this is for nothing else, just for the endless stream of inspection teams of various levels once every three days and once every five days.If the inspection team came that day, it happened to be raining, the road was muddy and difficult to walk, people were as dense as ants, and the road was busy spreading rice husks and laying wheat straw.Fertilizing, weeding, muddying, threshing ice grass, making green manure ponds...all of these are no longer the very economical operations of farmers in the past, but have been formalized.They became -- pointless demonstrations that put people in a non-stop spin.People only have to spend a lot of labor to compete with each other through meticulous carving and creation in various forms.The number of people working in the fields and whether they are willing to work hard when working have all become a comprehensive index of the "political achievements" of a party's cadres.A lot of work is just dismantling, dismantling and re-doing, re-dismantling, doing a kind of endless tossing that goes back and forth.At the turn of spring and summer, there is always the sound of gongs urging people to work everywhere.The sound of the gong made people panic.The tweeters in the fields and villages are always calling out again and again: Go to work in the fields!Go to work!In those days, people could only sleep two or three hours a day.After the busy farming season is over, people still can't get a rest, and almost all of their time has been filled up by various arrangements.Everywhere you see it - exhausted.I saw with my own eyes a commune member fall off a high diving board while pouring grain into the rice storage.I personally witnessed a family in the back village, because they were too lazy to check the stove after dinner, and a fire broke out, and all their belongings were burned.That day, I was sitting on the back seat of someone else's bicycle and went to the town to buy pesticides. I fell asleep and fell off the car on the road.

Boundless fatigue enveloped the fields. Qingqiao lost an arm just like that. When I saw Qingqiao again, it was already a month later, and he came out of the hospital.When I went to see him that day, I saw him standing there, and when the breeze blew, one of his empty sleeves fluttered in the wind. We stayed together for a long time, but didn't say a few words. Two years later, I got rid of the field like a nightmare and went to Beijing to study.When I went back during the summer vacation, my mother told me that Qingqiao would not learn well.I asked her: "Why did you say that Qingqiao didn't learn well?" My mother said: "He learned to drink, he is an alcoholic. He stole almost all the things in the house and sold them." "Why is he like this?" "He can't find it." It's my wife." Wasn't he engaged in the first place? "" The family ruined the relationship. "

After two days, I went to see him.I didn't see him drunk, but he looked very gloomy.He already has a yellow beard.His face was a little livid.The body was extremely weak by the empty sleeve. Later, for many years, I never went to see him again, but I knew intermittently from my mother that he was still living alone.One day I went to the town to see my eldest sister who was a doctor in the hospital. I was walking in the town when someone said, "Isn't that Wenxuan?" I turned around and saw it was Qingqiao.I hurried over.He also ran towards me, stretched out his only hand from a long distance, and held me tightly: "Wenxuan, it's Wenxuan, I didn't expect it to be you!" I asked him: "Are you going to town?" Come up and walk—go?" He said, "I'm not afraid of your jokes, I have a small business." He grabbed my hand, pulled me to the side of the road, and pointed to a big wooden basin: "I'm selling fish." I saw that the wooden basin was half filled with clear water, and crucian carp were swimming in the water with their bluish-black backs exposed.He said: "People sell it to me, and I sell it to others. Anyway, if you are idle at home, you are idle." We talked for a long time.

There is still a long way to go to my sister's hospital.Along the way, I saw young people hanging around the town.Either there are simple billiard tables on the side of the road, or there are taverns and tea shops next to each other.Some old people set up the mahjong table under the shade of a tree by the side of the road, playing there without knowing the time and passing of time, and put some small money on the table with a teacup... Walking in the small town, I always think of an old saying in my heart: rest and recuperate, rest and recuperate... —April 10, 1997 at Yanbei Campus, Peking University