Chapter 56 Chapter 6 Birds singing in the forest

On such a morning, at around nine o'clock, three or four of us who recited English poems from the second grade came out of the Confucian Temple and walked from the stone steps on the left side of the square to Dingdong Street.There is an old man sitting there forever beside the stone steps, selling baked sweet potatoes.Buy a half-sized one and hold it in your hand. It will be warm all the way, and it will be just right to eat when you return to the dormitory.There is a small shop on the county street that sells homemade sesame cakes, which are fresh and crispy. You must buy a small bag every time you pass by.We walked through the Shuixi Gate to Baita Street, passed the gate of the Baptist Church compound, and saw Yu Jun striding over from the high west gate of the No. 6 Boys’ Dormitory.My companion left me and hurried into the dormitory, leaving me facing him.

On such mornings, when there was no wind in the cold spring, he would take me to the river to take a "boat" (flat-bottomed ferry) to cross the Dadu River or the Minjiang River.Go to the most beautiful embankment on the opposite bank, and the scenery of the four fields is all under your feet.On the right is the undulating outline of Mount Emei, and on the left is the Wuyou Temple of the Leshan Giant Buddha and the gently rolling foothills.This is my last March in this fairyland. The spectacular scenery can be described by more than just peanut trees and warblers flying! But it was the first time I got a close look and lost it forever.Holding the cold baked sweet potato and sesame cake in my hand, I listened to his talk of music with admiration.Only then did I realize that music can also be "speaking"! We walked up and down the embankment, and we always came across small teahouses in the countryside, with rough wooden tables and bamboo chairs.Hot scented tea is like heaven.At this time, he would ask me, "Where's your 'kitten cake'?" Only when I laughed at his Jiangsu-Zhejiang Mandarin, I felt more confident.

The student parade has never stopped since then, and I will "bump" him almost every week walking from the other end of Tower Street, and I am looking forward to it gradually. During those two months, he took me all over the suburban riverbanks, went to my favorite nanmu forest a few times, sat in a country teahouse that I had envied for a long time but hadn’t been in for a long time, and ate countless "kitten cakes".In addition to talking about music, we also talked about the "Bible": I participated in the Bible study class at that time, and I was more eager to learn more about the doctrine before and after my baptism.I still remember him sitting on the embankment and talking about the difference in the four tones, why it is not easy to compose the Psalms directly, and using tea on the wooden table in the teahouse to draw the layers of the seven seals in the "Apocalypse".Talkative tone.The bright description and the beating analysis are of course different from the Bible study class.What he said was the basics he grew up in a missionary family, and I was eager to learn and a good listener.Perhaps as I listened, he also relieved a kind of homesickness?

A few days before Easter, the fellowship held a nature worship trip in the mountains.After lunch, everyone moved freely, and he whispered, "I'll take you to the forest to listen to the birdsong." After a short walk, we came to a clearing in the forest, surrounded by big trees, not many birdsong, and there was silence. We sat down on a big tree stump.He began to whistle softly, and all the original bird sounds stopped. He continued to whistle, and suddenly all the birds in the surrounding trees sang together, like a question and answer, each with its own tune.It seems that there is a stage suspended in the sky, all kinds of musical instruments whose names I don’t know, can’t play together in the audition and tuning, but they are as bright as thousands of larks and nightingales, competing for each other in the blue sky of April The immortality of life comes with the friendship, love, suffering and redemption that come with life... As God inspired me, in the forest clearing at noon in April, I met the sound of nature that I would like to shout long live.

During the more than a hundred days from the beginning of winter to the end of spring, we traveled all over the place where we could go back and forth for half a day. Where young feet could reach, the light rain couldn't stop it (the best oilskin raincoat at that time was also very heavy. ), under the rough oil paper umbrella is still in high spirits.For him, and for me, these outings are the first and last opportunity to know the beauty of Leshan.He has just joined the class for two years, and he will graduate and return to Shanghai this summer. I will also go to Wuhan with the school. We all hope that when we go down the Yangtze River, we will pass through the magnificent Three Gorges of the Yangtze River.

In so many days of traveling together, others would not believe it, and I myself have understood it for many years, that is, we have never talked about love.In all ages, this "reason" is hardly convincing, chiefly, I think, because my childish honesty hurt his strong pride. During our first outings, he would sometimes ask me about my Bible study, and I was about to tell him about my biggest confusion.I said I didn't understand why God would test Job so cruelly, depriving him of his children and family property, and making him covered with sores all over his body.Sitting in the ashes.Scrape your body with tiles, you can't survive, you can't die...Yu Jun's answer is the same as all the answers I encountered later, it is necessary to understand that the whole "Job Story" is a story of temptation, doubt and perseverance, and the focus is after the debate between Job and his friends.The LORD replied from the whirlwind, "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...Can you lift up your voice to the clouds so that the pouring rain will cover you?" Job was able to hold his faith firmly See new children and grandchildren until the fourth generation, and live another hundred and forty years.Die content.But the answer of this original text could not convince me at the time and for many years afterwards.

he ask me.Why are you so indignant? I told him that Zhang Dafei lived a miserable, short but pious life from the age of fourteen to twenty-six, and there was no redemption until his death. (Maybe he has his own redemption?) He asked me again.Why were you baptized after his death? I said that I hoped to experience the meaning of Christianity with my own beliefs and understand all the miseries I had seen since I was a child. I insisted on applying for the Department of Philosophy to seek the meaning of life.In my commentary, there is an obvious object of thought.He later told me he couldn't "compete" with a dead hero.He hadn't even seen a real war, and he felt less manly because he didn't have "Top Gun."At my age, when I made this confession, I violated the taboo of "having a shallow friendship that cannot be described deeply".Then they went all over the world, without thinking of the consequences.

So he and I talked about music, about the Bible, about some novels and movies, not about personal feelings, not about love.He took me to protect me when going up and down the embankment, and when the wind was strong, he took my hand and held it in his coat pocket, but he never said a word of love. We were all busy with exams in May, and his graduating class took the exams earlier. Both the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Foreign Languages ​​had heavy homework.The offices of the Confucian Temple are all packing boxes, official documents, files, and students' academic materials all have to be shipped.

At the beginning of June, the library was also empty, and the dormitories were mostly half-empty. Thousands of teachers, students, and family members of Wuhan University, which once kept singing under the threat of bombing, starvation, and war, will disappear from this beautiful mountain city.I also packed my luggage for three years. It was a small box. The cutest box in it was a gift Zhang Dafei brought me back to Chongqing after his training in Colorado, USA. It was a small blue leather box with a zipper. Small bottles of rouge, lipstick, and two embroidered handkerchiefs.Few people looked at these things during the war, and they were kept in a damp box under the bed, and they were only taken out to touch them when no one was around, and then put back and carefully covered.My quilts and pillows have been given away to others, leaving only the dark blue embroidered quilt cover that I asked my mother for when I left home, and I keep it with me all the time.A few years later, one day in the single dormitory of National Taiwan University on Wenzhou Street, I opened a small box to pack all my "properties" under the sun. The tears from crying on the upper bunk of the dormitory are the traces of young and abundant tears when I was half asleep and half awake!

This summer.Lu Qiaozhen also graduated from the Department of Economics. She returned to Chongqing a few ships earlier than me, and she often had to interview for a job.My new roommate Tang Jingyuan also graduated and left, so Qiaozhen stayed in my room for one night before boarding the boat, and talked at night together in bed, talking for a whole night. We've all had some emotional debt in our lives this year.Of course, she has many admirers, among them is Chen Xuzu, a Nankai alumnus, who is simple and polite, one of the few classmates whose ancestral home is Leshan, and people often use Leshan dialect to anger him.In our small circle, he called her "Little Fish Day".We were all moved by the way he silently looked at her.But can't help.Once, he invited me and Xiaoyu Ri to his house for lunch.It was the first time for us to visit his ancestral home, which was scolded by his classmates as local evil forces. The house on the other side of the Minjiang River was bigger and more elegant than the old house I saw in Yibin.The row of floor-to-ceiling windows in Linjiang was newly installed after the bombing in 1939, and the room is full of calligraphy, painting and cultural relics.Parents speak strong Jiading dialect, but they are very elegant people.The aura of the mountains and rivers seen from the railing in front of the court after the meal is really unimaginable for us living in the dormitory.Chen Xuzu told us that when his parents were evacuated and returned to their hometown during the Chongqing bombing, they found that the garden here was not as elegant as outside.There are many ways to live in life, just stay at ease.Qiaozhen had no relationship with him from the beginning.After that, there is probably no possibility of meeting in life, but I sometimes think of their enviable way of life amidst the hustle and bustle of the world.After the CCP came to power, they might not be able to escape the persecution.The sad Chinese often cannot choose their own way of life.