Chapter 11 The platform scale of Mr. Barack's house

In my grandfather's hometown, almost everyone worked in the flax mill for a living.For five generations, people have been dying by inhaling the dust that is blown up from the flax stalks every day.They are happy people who know their destiny. They eat goat cheese, potatoes, and a rabbit that is rarely slaughtered in a thousand years. At night, they spin, sing, and drink mint tea in their respective homes to enjoy themselves.During the day, they rolled flax stalks beside the ancient machines. They had no protection, allowing the dust to invade their bodies, and the heat waves from the drying ovens scorched them mercilessly.Each family’s hut has only one box-like wooden bed for the parents, and the children sleep on the surrounding benches.Every morning the hut smelled of batter soup, and scones were only served on Sundays.On special grand festivals, the mother pours some milk into the children's coffee pot with a smile. This is a kind of black "coffee" ground from oak nuts. "Coffee" gradually turned white, and the children's faces flushed with joy.

Parents go to work early in the morning, and all the housework is handed over to the children: sweeping the floor, tidying the house, washing dishes, and peeling potatoes. Potatoes are precious yellow food, and the peeled potato skins must be kept for parents to see. However, it proved that they did not waste anything and did not work sloppily. After school the children would go into the woods and pick mushrooms and weeds according to the season: woodruff and thyme, parsley and mint, and digitalis.In summer, they took hay from the barren meadows, and the children were busy sifting hay flowers①.Hay flower sold for one pfennig a kilo, and twenty pfennigs when sold to nervous women at the city pharmacy.The mushrooms were worth the money: twenty pfennigs a kilo, and twenty pfennigs for a mark in the shops in the city.In autumn, the children burrow into the deepest part of the foliage of the woods, when the humidity is strong and the mushrooms grow fast.Almost every household has its own place to pick mushrooms, which are passed down from generation to generation and kept secret.

The woods belonged to the Barack family, as did the linen mill.The Barack family has a mansion in my grandfather's hometown, and their head wife not only runs a dairy, but also always has a small shop, where the mushrooms, weeds, and hay flowers we pick are all weighed and sold for money.On the table in the shop was the big Barack scale, an old gilt with floral decorations.My grandpa's grandpa and grandma used to stand in front of the scale with their dirty little hands, holding a basket full of mushrooms or a paper bag of hay flowers, watching nervously how many weights Mrs. Barack placed on the pan , so that the shaking pointer points to the black line exactly—that thin fair line, which has to be redrawn every year.Then Mrs. Barrack took up the big brown leather-backed ledger, entered the weight in it, and paid the children; a few pfennies or dimes, rarely a mark.Back in my grandfather's time, there was still a big glass bottle filled with sour sugar, which was a mark per kilogram.When Mrs. Barlake, who was in charge of the hut, was happy, she put her hand into the big bottle and gave each child a piece of candy.Then the faces of the children flushed with joy, as on a special festival when the mother pours milk into the coffee pot, and the milk gradually brightens the dark coffee until it turns golden, and the girls' Like pigtails.

Master Barack's family set a rule for the whole village: no household is allowed to have a scale.This rule has been around for a long time, and no one thinks about when and why it was established.This rule must be followed carefully, anyone who violates it will be kicked out of the flax mill, and Master Barack's family does not buy his mushrooms, thyme, and hay flowers.Because the Ba Laike family is powerful, even the neighboring villages dare not hire this person to work, nor dare to buy his family's weeds.But from my grandfather's grandpa and grandma (they picked mushrooms from childhood, sold it to the landowner's family, and then resold it to Prague, so that the rich people bought it to add delicious dishes, or eat it in pies), it was No one wants to violate this rule, because there are liters for measuring rice and noodles, selling eggs is judged by size, and spun cloth is measured by rulers, and it seems that there will be no problem with the old gold-painted platform scale of the Barack family.It has been five generations who have trusted to that black, wobbly needle what their children have diligently gathered from the woods.

Although among these taciturn people there were some brave men who poached wild animals and made more in one night than a month's wages in a flax mill, but even these never thought of going to Buy a scale, or install one yourself.My grandfather was the first person who had the guts to test the fairness of the Barclays' business.The Barek family lived in a deep house with two carriages, and every year they donated money to sponsor a young man from the village to study at Prague Theological Seminary.Every Wednesday, the pastor went to their house to play cards for entertainment. During festivals, the captain of the gendarmerie in the area came to visit in a carriage decorated with the royal emblem.

My grandfather is a hardworking and intelligent man.He went deep into the woods, to places no other children of his family had gone.He went all the way to the jungle where the legendary giant Birgan lived.There Birgan guarded the treasures of the Valdrians.But my grandfather was not afraid of Birgan, he used to go into the jungle as a child and bring back a lot of mushrooms.He could even gather wheat mushrooms, which sold to Mrs. Barrack for thirty pfennigs a pound.Whatever my grandpa sold to the Barracks was on the back of a calendar: per pound of mushrooms, per gram of thyme, and on the right he wrote in childish handwriting the amount he received for the sale; From the age of twelve to twelve, he remembered everything clearly.He was twelve years old in 1900, and because the Baracks had been enshrined as nobles, they gave every family in the village a quarter pound of real coffee from Brazil; the men had beer and tobacco; A feast is held in the courtyard, and the carriages meet end to end on the poplar tree-lined road leading to the courtyard.

But the day before the celebratory feast, they served coffee in the shed where the Barack family had kept their scales for nearly a century.They are called Barek von Bergan now, because the tall mansion of the Barek family was built on the site of the legendary Bergan Palace. Grandpa used to tell me how, after school, he would go to the cottage to get coffee for four families, the Saikers, the Weidlers, the Furras and his own family, the Blüchers.It was the afternoon before New Year's Eve. Since each household had to decorate their rooms and cook New Year's dishes, the four families could not send a child to the landlord's yard to get a quarter-pound of coffee. .

So my grandfather sat on the narrow wooden bench in the hut, watching Gertrude, the landowner's maid, count out the coffee bags to him, four bags in total, one-eighth of a kilogram each.At that time Grandpa saw a half-kilogram weight on the left side of the scale, and Mrs. Barek von Bergan was busy preparing a banquet, and Gertrude was about to reach into the large glass bottle and take a piece of When the sugar was given to my grandfather, she found that the bottle was empty, and that bottle was filled once a year, one kilogram at a time, worth one mark. Gertrude smiled and said, "Wait a minute, I'll get the sugar." My grandfather just looked at the four packs of one-eighth kilograms of coffee (which were packaged and sealed by the factory), stood in front of the scale, and a There is a half kilogram weight on the weighing pan.That's when Grandpa picked up four packets of coffee and put them on that empty weighing pan.When he saw that the black fair needle was not moving to the left of the fair line, the weighing pan with half a kilogram of weight was tilted below, and half a kilogram of coffee was raised high, his heart was beating wildly at that time, as if He hid behind the forest bushes and waited for the giant Bilgan to appear.He took out a few small stones from his pocket, which he always carried with him, and was going to use the slingshot to hit the little birds that were pecking at the vegetable field planted by his mother. ——Put three, four, or five pebbles on the weighing pan containing coffee pockets, and the weighing pan containing half a kilogram of weight slowly rises, and the pointer finally points steadily on the black line .Grandpa took the coffee out of the weighing pan and wrapped five pebbles in a sack.Then Gertrude produced a big one-kilo sack full of sour candies, enough to last a year and make the children flush with joy.Gertrude splashed the candy into the glass jar, and my grandpa, the pale little fellow, stood aside, impassive.He took only three packets of coffee, and to Gertrude's surprise and horror, she saw the pale little boy throw the sour candy on the floor and stamp on it, saying, "I'm going to find Ba Mrs. Lake speaks."

"You should call her Barack von Burgun," said Gertrude. "Okay, Mrs. Barack von Birgun." But Gertrude just laughed at him, and my grandfather went back to the village in the dark to deliver coffee to the Sekes, the Weidlers, and the Fowlers. Lajia, then Grandpa pretended to go to the pastor. In fact, with five stones wrapped in sacks in his pocket, he walked into the dark night.He had to go a long way to find anyone with scales, someone who might have scales, and he knew that there was no one in Braugau or in Bernau who had scales.Grandpa passed through the villages and walked two hours to a small town called Dürrheim, where lived a pharmacist named Hornig.The Hornish house smelled of freshly baked desserts.Hornig opened the door for the frozen little boy, who smelled of alcohol and held a moist cigar between his thin lips.He held the little boy's icy hands tightly for a while, and said, "Mum, is your father's lungs not feeling well again?"

"No, I'm not here to buy medicine. I want to..." My grandfather untied his sack, took out five small stones, held out his hand to show Hornig, and said, "I'm going to weigh it ’” He looked timidly into Hornig’s face.Hornig said nothing, he neither lost his temper nor asked why.My grandpa said: "This is the missing weight on the fair scale." Only then did my grandpa feel that he had entered the warm little room, and his feet were already wet.The snow got into his worn shoes, and the snow from the branches in the forest fell on him, and now that the snow had melted, he was hungry and tired, and suddenly burst into tears.Because he remembered how many mushrooms, how many weeds, how many hay flowers

Weighed on that scale, this scale will lose the weight of five stones for every half kilogram.Hornig shook his head, five pebbles in his hand, and called his wife out, when Grandpa remembered his parents' generation, his grandparents' generation, they all weighed their mushrooms on that scale and hay flowers.Thinking about it, a huge wave of resentment hit his heart, and he cried even harder.No one asked him to sit down, so he sat down by himself, in a chair at the Hornigs' house.The kind-hearted plump Mrs. Hornig brought him a dessert and a cup of hot coffee, and Grandpa didn't even look at it.Hornig came back from the front shop by himself, shaking the small stones in his hand, and said softly to Mrs. Hornig, "Fifty-five grams, no more, no less." Only then did my grandfather stop crying. Grandpa walked for another two hours, came back through the woods, and was beaten at home and asked why he didn't bring the coffee home, but Grandpa wouldn't say anything.All night, he calculated on the piece of paper that recorded the sale to Mrs. Barrack.When the clock strikes twelve o'clock, the New Year's salute is fired in the landlord's courtyard, the whole village is boiling, the drums are tinkling, relatives kiss and hug each other, and the New Year is here.When everything was quiet, Grandpa said to himself: "The Barack family swallowed me eighteen marks thirty-two pfennies." He remembered how many children there were in the village, and he thought of his brother Fritz, He had picked many mushrooms, and he thought of his sister, Ludmila, and the hundreds of children who had gathered mushrooms, weeds, and hay flowers for the Baracks.This time he stopped crying and told his parents, brother and sister about his discovery. On New Year's Day, Barek von Birgun came to the church for high mass, and the carriage was already loaded with the gold and blue noble coat of arms-a giant squatting under the fir tree.The Barack family saw people staring at them blankly, their faces pale and cold.They had expected that the people of Girlanden would gather at the entrance of the village early in the morning and sing a serenade to them, shouting long live and cheering them up.But as they drove through the streets, the village was dead.In the church, people turned their pale faces and stared at them with silent hostility. The pastor stepped onto the pulpit to deliver a New Year's sermon, and he also felt how indifferent those usually quiet and gentle people were today.He laboriously scribbled through the sermon and walked back to the altar, sweating profusely.After Mass, Barek von Berghan was about to leave the church, and they passed the crowds that lined the aisles, people with pale faces and expressionless faces.But the young Mrs. Barek von Berghan stopped in front of the children's bench, and she looked for my grandfather, Franz Blücher Jr., and asked him in public: "Why don't you replace me?" Your mother took the coffee back?" My grandfather stood up and said, "Because you swallowed up enough money to buy five kilograms of coffee." He took out five stones from his pocket and handed them to the lady.Grandpa said: "This is fifty-five grams. Your platform scale is short of these weights every half a catty." Before the lady had time to speak, the men and women in the church sang a song in unison: "Justice and justice in the world, O Lord Jesus, it killed you..." While the Baracks were in church, William Fuller, the poacher, went into the cabin and stole the scale and the thick leather ledger.The account book recorded every kilogram of mushrooms, every kilogram of hay flowers, and everything else that the Barek family bought in the village.During the whole afternoon of New Year’s Day, the men in the village sat at my great-grandfather’s house to settle the accounts. Based on one-tenth of what the Barek’s family purchased, there were several thousand talers.But before the count was over, the gendarmerie from the district gendarmerie had already rushed into my great-grandfather's house, firing guns and stabbing them randomly with bayonets.The gendarmerie took away the scale and ledger.Grandpa's sister, Ludmila Jr., was shot dead, and some men were wounded.There was a gendarme who was stabbed to death by William Fowler, the poacher. Insurrections broke out not only in our village, but also in the villages of Braugau and Bernau.The flax mill was closed for a week.But a large number of gendarmes came to suppress it. The gendarmes threatened the men and women of the village and put them in prison.The Baracks forced the village pastor to display the scales in the village's elementary school, and asked him to prove that the scales of Master Barack's were indeed fair scales.Later, the people of the village went to work in the flax mill again—but no one went to the school to see the priest perform: he was there alone, distraught and depressed, looking at the weights and the scales and the sacks of coffee. The children went mushroom picking again, and gathered thyme, wildflowers, and digitalis.But every Sunday, as long as the Barek family walked into the church, people sang: "The fairness and justice in the world, O Lord Jesus, it killed you." Announcement: Do not sing this song. My grandfather's parents were forced to bid farewell to the tomb of their youngest daughter, who had just buried them, and left their hometown to wander around.They became basket weavers, but they did not stay long anywhere, for they saw that everywhere and in every village the hands of the landowners on the scales of justice were false.It makes them sad.Their old ox cart slowly crawled on the dirt road, and a skinny sheep was led behind the cart.If someone passed by their car, they might be able to hear singing in the car: "The justice of the world, O Lord Jesus, it killed thee." Anyone who wants to can hear Barack von Bergan's story: The so-called fairness and justice of their family is to swallow up one-tenth of other people's money.But almost no one wants to listen to them. Translated by Ni Chengen Xiao Maosao's "Selected Novellas and Short Stories by Burr", published by Foreign Literature Publishing House in 1980 ------------ ① According to European soil recipes, it can be used as herbal medicine to treat diseases. —— Annotation