Spirit and Flesh

Zhang Xianliang

He is a son abandoned by a rich man...

——Victor Yu "Les Miserables"

1

Xu Lingjun did not expect to see his father again.

This is a well-furnished living room on the seventh floor of this high-end hotel. Outside the window, there was only an empty blue sky with a few sparse white clouds. And there, on the farm on the Loess Plateau, outside the window were green and yellow fields, open and substantial. When he arrived here, it was as if he had suddenly risen to the clouds. He had a swaying feeling. In addition, the green smoke from his father's pipe floated in the room like mist, making everything in front of him even more like an elusive hallucination. . However, his father still smoked the kind of pipe with the image of an Indian chief on it. The slightly sweet aroma of coffee that he often smelled when he was a child confirmed from the smell that this was not a dream, but something real. Reality.

"Let bygones be bygones!" The father waved his hand. After earning his bachelor's degree at Harvard in the early thirties, he had retained the air of his days at Kenbridge. Now he was wearing a tweed suit and sitting on the sofa with his legs crossed. "As soon as I arrived in the mainland, I learned a political term called 'looking forward'. You'd better prepare to go abroad as soon as possible!" The furnishings in the room and his father's clothes made him feel inexplicably depressed. He thought, the past is in the past, but how can we forget it?

Exactly thirty years ago, on such an autumn day, he took the address written by his mother and found a garden house on Xiafei Road. After the shower, the yellowed leaves looked even more haggard, and drops of water dripped from the plane trees in the wall. The fence was stretched with barbed wire; the gate was also iron and painted a grim gray paint. He rang the doorbell for a long time before a small window opened on the iron door. He recognized this concierge as the one who often sent letters to his father. The concierge led him through a cement road lined with holly and entered the living room of a two-story bungalow. At that time, my father was of course much younger than he is now. He was wearing a beige woolen waistcoat, leaning on the fireplace with his elbows and smoking a pipe with his head lowered. On the high-backed sofa in front of the fireplace sat the woman whom my mother had cursed all day long.

"Is this that child?" He heard her ask her father, "He looks quite like you. Come, come!" He did not go over, but glanced at her involuntarily. He remembered seeing a pair of bright eyes and two very red lips.

"What's the matter? Huh?" The father raised his head.

"Mom is sick, and she asks you to go back."

"She is always sick, always..." The father left the fireplace angrily and walked back and forth on the carpet. The carpet was green with white patterns woven on it. His eyes followed his father's footsteps and he fought back tears.

"Tell your mother that I will go back in a moment." His father finally stood in front of him. But he knew this answer was unreliable. His mother had heard it on the phone more than once. He demanded timidly and stubbornly: "She wants you to go back now."

"I know, I know..." His father put his hand on his shoulder and gently pushed him towards the door. "You go back first and take my car back. If your mother is seriously ill, ask her to go to the hospital first." His father sent him to the front hall. Suddenly, he touched his head tenderly and whispered, "You It would be nice if you were older, you would understand...it's hard to get along with your mother. She's like that, like that..." He looked up and saw his father frowning and wiping one hand constantly. He rubbed his forehead, showing a weak and painful expression, which made him feel a little pitiful for his father.

However, when he was sitting in his father's Chrysler and walking through the French Concession with golden leaves rolling, his tears suddenly burst out. A sudden feeling of humiliation, self-pity, and loneliness came over me. No one is pitiful! Only you are pitiful! He didn't receive much caress from his mother, who stroked mahjong much more often than he stroked his hair; he didn't receive much teaching from his father. As soon as his father came home, his face would be gloomy, frustrated, and bored, and then he would The mother began to argue endlessly.

His father said that if he were older, he would be able to understand... In fact, at the age of eleven, he already vaguely understood something: what his mother needs most is his father's warmth, while what his father needs most is To get rid of this eccentric wife. Neither his mother nor his father needed him! He is just the product of an unfree marriage between an American international student and a landowner girl. Later, my father did not come home. Soon, his mother learned that his father had left the mainland with his wife and died in a German hospital within a few days.

At this moment, the People's Liberation Army entered Shanghai...

Now, after thirty long years, it has never been accommodated in any thirty years in history. After so many changes, this father suddenly came back and wanted to take him abroad. The whole thing was so incredible that he couldn't quite believe that it was his father sitting before him, and that it was himself sitting before his father. Just now, when Song, a female secretary with his father, opened the storage room to get clothes for his father, he saw boxes of all sizes covered with colorful hotel trademarks: Los Angeles, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and so on. There is a TWA oval label with a Boeing 747 printed on it. A vast world opens up from this small storage room. As for him, he only got here three days ago after being notified by the international travel agency transferred by the leader, and it took two days and two nights of bumpy buses and trains to get here. The gray leatherette bag he had brought was placed on the corner of the couch. This kind of bag is quite "foreign" in the farm, but when it comes to this living room, it seems to be shy and curled up pitifully. On top of the bag was his nylon mesh bag, which contained his dental equipment and a few tea eggs left over from eating on the road. He looked at the tea eggs that were grinning in surprise and huddled together in fear. He recalled that Xiuzhi had asked him to bring more tea eggs for his father to eat the night before leaving, and he couldn't help but smile bitterly. The day before yesterday, Xiuzhi must take Qingqing to the bus station in the county to see him off. He had not left the farm since their marriage, and his trip was an epoch-making event for their little family.

"Dad, where is Beijing?"

"Beijing is in the northeast of the county seat."

"Is Beijing as big as many county seats?"

"There are many, many county towns."

"Are there malanthera?" "No." "Are there rhododendrons?" "No." "Alas——" Qingqing Xiang She let out a long sigh like an adult and held her chin with her hand, looking very disappointed. She thought that a good place should have malan flowers and angustifolia.

“Silly girl, Beijing is a big place!” Old Zhao, who was driving the car, teased her, “Your father is going to fly far away this time! Maybe he will go abroad with your grandfather. Isn’t that right, Teacher Xu? ?" Xiuzhi sat behind Lao Zhao with her legs curled up and smiled at him. She said nothing, but her smile alone showed her trust and loyalty. She couldn't imagine him going to other countries, just like Qingqing couldn't imagine how big Beijing was.

The rutted dirt road is bumpy and uneven, and the animals stumble on it. To the north of the road is a neat field, and to the south of the road, in the misty distance, is the pasture where he used to keep his horses. Everything here seems to have a magnetic attraction, and it seems so strenuous to pull a cart with three horses. Yes, every plant and tree here can bring back endless memories for him. When he is about to leave them, he suddenly feels more intimate. He knew that there was a thick Elaeagnus jujube tree behind three poplar trees. He got out of the car and broke off a branch, and several people ate it one by one in the car. This is a sour and slightly sweet wild fruit unique to the northwest. During the famine in the 1960s, he once relied on this wild fruit to survive. I haven’t eaten it for many years, but now I taste it with a particularly nostalgic local flavor. No wonder Qingqing wanted to ask if there are anatomy in Beijing! "Her grandpa has never eaten angustifolia!" Xiuzhi said with a smile as she spat the core out of the car. This was when she used her best imagination to imagine this father-in-law who had returned from abroad.

In fact, there is no need to imagine, the father and son are so similar, even Xiu Zhi would recognize them when they meet on the street.

Both people have slender eyes, slender, straight nose bridges, plump lips, and even the way they raise their hands and feet show traces of genes. The father does not look old. Although his skin is as dark as his son's, it must have come from being tanned on a beach in Los Angeles or Hong Kong. He is not haggard at all. My father is still so particular and pays attention to his appearance. Although his hair is gray, it is not messy. Although there are age spots on the back of his hands, his nails are perfectly manicured. On the coffee table, around the exquisite coffee cup, there are three B brand pipes, Moroccan sheepskin tobacco bags, gold lighters and diamond-encrusted lapel pins scattered around. How could he have ever eaten angustifolia! ?

Two

"Ah, you can still hear Danny Goodman's "Moonlight on the Ganges" here!" Miss Song can speak pure Mandarin. She was tall and plump, and exuded the fragrance of frangipani. Her long black hair was tied back by a purple ribbon, swinging like a ponytail from time to time. "Chairman, you see, Beijingers dance disco better than Hong Kongers. They are also modernized now!"

"No one can resist the temptation of pleasure." My father seemed to have seen through everything. Smiling like a philosopher. "They don't admit that they are ascetics now." After dinner, his father and Mistress Song took him to the ballroom. He didn't expect that there was such a place in Beijing. When he was a child, he also went to Shanghai's "Titus", "Parlem" and "French Nightclub" with his parents. Now it should be like revisiting the old places, but when he saw the soft milky white lights, When women like men and men like women wandered around him like ghosts in the moonlight, he felt uneasy, like an audience member suddenly pulled on the stage to become an actor, and he could not enter it. role. Just now in the restaurant, he saw some dishes being brought back with only a few chopsticks, and he felt a spasm of disgust in his stomach. In his place, you have to bring an aluminum lunch box to the state-run canteen in the county town to take the leftover food home.

Music was playing in the hall, and several couples of men and women danced in strange shapes. They were not hugging each other, but facing each other like cockfighting, teasing each other, leaning forward and back. This is how these people use up their excess energy! He thought of the people now harvesting in the hot rice fields. They bent over and moved their upper limbs from right to left and from left to right. Occasionally, they raised their heads and shouted hoarsely to the distant burden: "Hey, water, water..." Ah, if only he could lie under the green shade now, by the gurgling yellow canal water, smelling the fullness How nice it would be to smell the breeze of straw and alfalfa...

"Can you dance? Mr. Xu." Suddenly, he heard Miss Song asking him next to him. The little smell he had just caught disappeared immediately. He turned his head and glanced at her: she also had bright eyes and two very red lips.

"No, it won't," he smiled absently at her. He can herd horses, plow fields, harvest, and raise fields... Why does he need to be able to dance?

"Don't embarrass him," his father said to Miss Song with a smile, "Look, Manager Wang is here to invite you." A handsome man in a gray suit walked around the table, smiling. He bowed to Miss Song Yi, and the two of them walked off the dance floor gracefully.

"What else do you have to consider? Huh?" My father lit up his pipe again, "You know better than me that the policies of the Communist Party of China change frequently. It is relatively easy to apply for a visa now. It's hard to say what will happen in the future."

"I also have my nostalgia." He turned to face his father.

"Including those pains?" The father asked meaningfully.

"Only when there is pain, happiness becomes more valuable."

"Huh?" His father stared at him and shrugged in confusion.

A sudden melancholy passed through his heart. Then I remembered that my father also belonged to this strange and incomprehensible world. Physical similarities cannot eliminate mental differences. He stared at his father as his father stared at him, and neither man's gaze could see beyond the other's retinas to see what was deep in the eyes.

"Are you still... still resentful?" Finally, the father lowered his eyes.

Each of them suppressed the urge to say goodbye, and watched his carriage in silence as he crossed the Junken Bridge, passed the poplar forest, and disappeared on the other side of the wasteland... Sometimes, the herdsmen would leave from more than a dozen people. Come see him inside and out. The old herder is now in his early eighties, and his legs and feet are still strong. He sat on the kang, holding Ling Jun's "Modern Chinese Dictionary" and rubbing it: "It is still possible for a knowledgeable person to read such a thick book. I'm afraid it will take a lifetime!" "This is a dictionary, for word search. "Guo Qianzi" told him, "You are really confused!" "Yeah, I have been blind all my life. I can't even recognize a name when I watch a movie." "Herding." Members lamented that in this new era, there has been a need for culture. "You must be educated in everything you do. Last time I gave medicine to the animals, I almost fed the external medicine to the animals." "Guo Qianzi" said: "'Lao You,' you came out of our pile. We people are finished. Our children can be entrusted to you..." "Yes," said the old herdsman, "if you can teach my little grandson to read such a thick book, he will live up to our poor brothers who rolled out on the pasture. Friendship..."

These uneducated words vividly illustrate the significance of his work and make his hopes for the future more clear. He smelled the smell of horse sweat on them, the smell of juicy grass, and the strong scent of nature; they gave him such a familiar and friendly feeling, completely like being with his father and Mistress Song. The feeling of depression was completely different.

He saw his value in their eyes, in the eyes of the students, and in the eyes of the comrades who worked with him. What could be more valuable and happier than seeing your own value in the eyes of others?

Because there are still some that I can’t post, so I’d better give me your email number and I can send it to you~~