Chapter 12 Chapter Two (7)

Although he is handsome and handsome, his brain is so stubborn and rigid, he must have been educated in a military academy.I sigh.I poured out my thoughts and told them all, but to no avail.The other side undoubtedly reinforced the worst perception of me: I was not only old-fashioned but mentally unsound.Do I really believe what I just said?Am I really willing to live like a savage?Dull, sluggish, and indifferent to sickness and death like them?If we disappear, will the savages spend their afternoons digging up our ruins?Will they keep census records and ledgers of grain transactions in glass cabinets?Or will they try to decipher our love letter?Is my righteous indignation more directed at the actions taken by the Empire?Or was it the bad temper of an old man who just wanted to live his last years of peace on the frontier without being disturbed?I tried to turn the conversation to more appropriate subjects, such as horses, hunting, weather, etc., but it was too late, my young friend was going away, and I had to pay for the evening's entertainment.

* * The children are playing in the snow again.She was among them, with her back to me, the girl in the hood.At that moment, every time I tried to walk towards her, she would disappear from behind the snow curtain.My legs sank so deep that I couldn't lift them up.Every step you take is a year older.This is the worst of all snow dreams. The kids stopped playing and looked at me as I struggled to get to them.They turned their gleaming faces to me solemnly, and white gas came out of their mouths in a mist.As I walked towards the girls, I wanted to smile at them and touch them, but my facial features were frozen, and I couldn't smile, as if there was a layer of frost covering my mouth.I wanted to raise my hand to wipe off the frost: but my hand, I found that my hand was stuck in the thick glove, and my fingers were frozen in the glove. I touched my face with the glove, but I didn't feel it.I dragged my bulky body through the pile of children.

Now I can see what the girl is doing.She was building a snow castle, a walled town, and I could make out every detail: battlements with four lookout posts, a guard's cottage on the side, streets and houses, a large square, barracks Around the corner of the square.Here is where I stand!But the square was empty, and the whole town was white, silent, and empty.I pointed to the center of the square: "You have to put someone here!" I wanted to say this.But no sound came out of my mouth, my tongue froze like a fish.She didn't respond.She knelt there and turned her hood towards me.I feared that, at the last moment, she would disappoint me and present me with a dull face, or a face that was bare and empty, like some internal organ that cannot be exposed to the light.Luckily not, this is herself, her face that I have never seen directly, a smiling child with gleaming teeth and black sparkling eyes looking over. "This is what I want to see!" I said to myself.I wanted to go and talk to her with my stiff, clumsy mouth. "How do you do such a neat job with mittens on?" I wanted to say.She smiled kindly at my slurred voice.Then she turned around and went to her snow castle.

When I woke up from the dream, I was completely frozen.With an hour to go before the first rays of dawn, the fire is out and my scalp is numb.The girl next to me was curled up like a ball.I got up and put on my coat and started the fire again. This dream has taken root in me, and night after night I return to the snow-covered and deserted square, struggling to walk towards the figure in the center, each time reconfirming that she is building a deserted place town. I asked the girl about her sisters.She said there were two sisters, and according to her, the younger sister was "very pretty, but brainless." "Don't you want to see your sisters again?" I asked.A rash idea strangely appeared between the two of them.We all laughed. "Of course I do," she said.

I also asked her about her release from captivity, and before she knew me, she was living in my jurisdiction in this town. "People were kind to me when I was separated from my people. My legs were a bit better and I was boarded in an inn for a while. There was a man who took care of me. He's gone now. He kept a lot of horses." She also said Mention was made of a man who gave her boots, the same boots I had on her feet when I first saw her.I asked if there were other men. "Yes, there are other men too. I have no choice, there is nothing I can do about it." Since that conversation, my relationship with the rank and file has become tense.In the morning when I left the apartment to go to the court, I walked through the back row of the soldiers, and I thought that some of these soldiers standing with straps on their legs and guns must have slept with that girl.I can't imagine them smiling, but I've never seen them look more serious than they do now - standing honestly in the windy yard.They have never looked more respectable than they do now.I know, given the chance, they'll tell me that we're all men and that every man can get carried away with a woman.But that night I deliberately went back later to avoid the men queuing at the kitchen door.

There's word from the captain's two deserters.Thirty miles east of here, a trapper accidentally found them dead and stiff in a rough hiding place.The captain meant to just leave them there (thirty miles to go, thirty miles to return, such a horrible weather: do you think it’s worth the trouble for those two people who are no longer human?), but I advised him to send a team to get it back. "They've got to have a ceremony," I said. "Besides, it's for the sake of their companions. Otherwise people will think that maybe they'll die in the wilderness one day and be thrown away there. All we can do is ease their stress." Fear, there is a price to pay for leaving this beautiful land. After all, we are the ones who brought them into this danger.” A team set off, and two days later brought back two curled up frozen animals in a cart. corpse.It struck me strangely that a man might flee hundreds of miles from his home and return within a day for food and warmth.I can't delve deeper into this truth.In the snow-capped cemetery, the last ceremony was held. The companions who were much luckier than the two deceased stood aside with bare heads and watched the funeral. During this ceremony, I repeatedly said to myself, let these young people understand that death does not mean complete disappearance or complete annihilation. This is self-evident for us as the inheritors of life.However, am I really only doing this ceremony for the sake of those young people?Don't you want to comfort yourself at the same time?I offered to write to the parents of the two men separately, informing them of the unfortunate news. "If the person who died was an older person, maybe I can accept it more or less in my heart." I said.

** "Don't you want to do something else?" she asked. Her feet rest on my lap.I was absent-minded, holding her swollen ankle, lost in the rhythm of scrubbing and rubbing.Her question surprised me.It was the first time she had said something so pertinent.I shrugged and smiled, wanting to return to my drowsiness, not wanting to drive away the drowsiness, not wanting to wake up. The foot wriggled in my tightly clenched hands, became lively, and gently stretched towards my groin.I opened my eyes to the radiant naked body on the bed.She lay there with her head on her arms, looking at me with the slanted eyes I'm used to. This posture further accentuated her firm breasts and smooth belly, and her whole body was full of vitality and health.Her toes twitched, but there was no response in the slack body of the old man kneeling before her in a purple nightgown.

"Next time." I said.I spit out these words clumsily.I knew it was a lie, but I said it anyway: "Next time, maybe." As I spoke, I picked up her feet and put them aside, straightened my body and lay down next to her. "How should I put it, does the old man still need to keep himself clean?" It was a bad joke, and it was badly said, but she didn't understand.She lifted my robe and started fondling me.After a while, I pushed her hand away. "You went to another girl," she whispered. "You think I don't know?" I hastily gestured for her to shut up.

"Do you treat them the same way?" she whispered, sobbing. Although I take her seriously in my heart, there is nothing I can do about it.This turned out to be a kind of humiliation to her!She had to stagger and fumble to get dressed before leaving the room.She was even a prisoner as before.I patted her hand and sank deeper into the gloom. This is our last night in the same bed.I moved a camp bed to sleep by the fireplace.This is the end of the skin-to-skin relationship between the two of us. "For a while," I said, "after the winter is over. It's better this way." She accepted my story without answering a word.Every night, when I came home, she would serve me with tea on a tea tray.Then she went back to the kitchen, and an hour later walked softly up the stairs, followed by a girl with a dinner tray in her hand.we have meal together.After dinner, I went into my study, or went out, and resumed my neglected social activities: playing chess at a friend's house; playing cards with officers in an inn.Once or twice I went upstairs to the inn, but I always felt guilty about the indulgence.Whenever I came home the girl was asleep and I tiptoed in like a husband in error.

She complied with the new pattern of life without complaint.I said to myself that her obedience was due to her savage upbringing.But what do I know about the upbringing of a savage?What I call obedience and humility may be nothing but indifference.For a beggar, a fatherless child, does it really matter if I sleep next to her, as long as she has a roof over her head from the cold and a belly full of food?But I still hope that in her heart, in the passion that comes from clutching her ankles, she will see me as a real man.Hopefully, during those many nights of intimacy, during those breathless moments of silence, she could feel that my gaze on her body had also carried a physical weight.I prefer not to contemplate the possibility that the Savages may not have taught girls how to cater to men's perverted advances and pervertedly brushing her aside, but simply see the passion of sex as the essence of life, be it a horse or a sheep Or men and women, that is the clearest way of life and the clearest ending.Since the savages do not teach their girls this way, she was puzzled by the various behaviors of the old foreign man who picked her up from the street: let her live in his house, so he could kiss her sometimes. Her feet; sometimes frighten her with stern voice; sometimes smear her with oil of strange smell and color; for a while I can ignore her; for a while I sleep in her arms all night; only because of weakness, indecision, and a desire to escape from his own desires.When I stop seeing her as a crippled, scarred, and injured body, maybe her body has another new flaw, just like a cat originally had claws, and I don't see it anymore. Also don't think of the claws as fingers but only as claws.It's not so much that it makes sense, it's better to say that I like to think so.Maybe she also has her own way of thinking to find that I am also normal.