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Spirit and Flesh

Zhang Xianliang

He is a man who was abandoned by the rich The son...

——Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables"

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.

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 that 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! ?

Spirit and Flesh 2

“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.

"No, not at all!" He waved his hand. This action is also exactly like his father's. "As you said: the past is past. This is something else entirely..." The dance music changed, this time it was low and slow, like water flowing through a long channel. The lights seemed to dim a bit, and he couldn't see clearly the yearning figures on the dance floor. The father lowered his head and kept wiping his forehead with his hand, showing that weak and painful expression again. "Yes, the past is in the past. But in retrospect, it is still painful... However, I do miss you very much, especially now..."

The father's murmur was accompanied by this The more elegant dance music also moved him emotionally. "Yes, I believe that." He said thoughtfully, "I have missed you too."

"Really?" Father raised his head.

Yes. Twenty years ago, on that autumn night, the moonlight passed through the window lattice, which was torn by heavy rain, and fell on a group of people who looked like piles of rags. A dozen people sleep in a low adobe room. He clung to the wall, and the moisture with the smell of earth and alkali soaked into his clothes. He was shivering from the cold and simply got up from the wet straw. Outside, the mud glistened like broken glass in the moonlight. There are remnants of rainwater everywhere. The air was filled with the smell of putrid water. He found the horse pen. It was still relatively dry there, and the horse excrement evaporated, giving off a smoky warmth. Horses, mules, and donkeys were all chewing hay in their troughs. He saw a section of the manger where no animals were tied, so he crawled in and slept in the wooden manger like the newborn Jesus. The moonlight slanted in, drawing a diagonal line that separated light and shadow on the gable of the stable. The heads of the animals hang down beside the manger, as if worshiping the moon. At this time, he suddenly felt very sad. The whole scene completely symbolically pointed out his lonely situation: people abandoned him and made him live with the animals!

He cried. The narrow manger squeezed his body, just like life was oppressing him from all sides. First, he was abandoned by his father and then his mother died. The uncle took away all the mother's things and left him alone. Later, he moved to the school dormitory and relied on the people's scholarship to attend school. The Communist Party took him in, and the Communist Party’s schools educated him. In the cheerful atmosphere of the 1950s, although he had a withdrawn, sensitive and taciturn character developed in a deformed family, he slowly melted into a large group. Like all middle school students in the 1950s, he also had a beautiful dream for the future. After graduation, the dream became a reality. Wearing a blue cloth uniform, he walked into the classroom with a textbook and a piece of chalk. He has his own path in life. However, just because the school branch secretary wanted to complete the target of catching rightists, he was pushed to live with his father. As if physical blood relationship must determine the inheritance of class, he became a member of the bourgeoisie again. In the past, the bourgeoisie abandoned him, leaving him with only an "asset" on his resume. Later, people abandoned him again, but put a rightist hat on his head. He became a person abandoned by everyone and was exiled to this remote farm to do a labor camp.

A horse finished eating the hay in front of him and moved towards him along the manger. She stretched her mouth as far as the reins could reach to his head. He felt a warm breath on his face. He saw a brown horse looking for rice grains at the bottom of the trough beside his head with its plump lips raised. After a while, the brown horse also spotted him. But it was not frightened. Instead, it turned its head to sniff his head with its wet nose and wiped his face with its soft lips. The solace made his heart tremble. He suddenly cried loudly while holding the long, bony horse's head, and wiped his tears on its brown mane. Then, he knelt and crawled in the manger, desperately scraping together the rice grains at the bottom of the manger, and piled them in front of the brown horse.

His depression, his sadness, and his grievances about fate also disappeared, and were replaced by his love for life and nature.

At noon, the horses waded out of the reeds one after another, with round bellies, fluffing their manes, and swishing their tails to drive away horseflies and gadflies. They gathered around him trustingly and affectionately, looking at their shepherd with large, kind eyes. Sometimes, the white-spotted No. 7 horse would bypass a few skinny animals and quietly walk to the lame No. 100, teasing and teasing it with its sparsely bearded lips. No. 100 didn't show any weakness, turned his butt, and bounced hard back with his lame leg that had never touched the ground. Horse No. 7 scurried away, raised its head, and spun around among the horses like a naughty child playing handkerchief, splashing sparkling silver water. Every time at this time, he would pick up the whip and shout sternly. Then, all the horses would prick up their ears and cast reproachful glances at Horse No. 7. Horse No. 7 also fell silent, standing in the knee-deep swamp like a scolded elementary school student, raising his lips and filing his long front teeth in boredom. At this time, he will feel that he is not living among a group of animals, but like a prince in a fairy tale, surrounded by a group of psychic gods.

Under the noon sun, in the distance, cloud shadows moved slowly at the foot of the mountain; in the swamp, a water bird called the "buffalo" also felt the heat and began to coo at the reed roots with its beak. The ground chirps. Here, there is not only the vastness of wind-blown grass and cattle and sheep, but also the beauty of green mountains and green waters. Motherland, such an abstract concept, will be condensed in this limited space, showing all her magnificent forms. He felt satisfied: life is beautiful after all! Nature and labor gave him many things that he could not get in the classroom. Sometimes, showers will rush towards the grassland. It first hangs transparent raindrops on the hillside like a curtain woven from black gauze, turning the bright sunshine into a pleasant golden yellow and spreading it on the vast grassland. Then, the rain feet slowly drifted in the wind and moved down the hillside. After a while, big raindrops fell obliquely, and the whole grassland was like a puff of white smoke. Before that, he had to drive the grazing horses into the forest belt. He was riding a horse, holding a long whip, and opening his clothes like wings, facing the rain and wind, galloping around the horses, scolding and commanding the stray horses. As a result, he will feel that his body is full of hot power. He is not small and useless. In the battle with the wind, rain, and the gathering gnats, he gradually regains his confidence in himself.

Only at this time can the herdsmen of each team gather together. The shacks set up for them to shelter from the rain are anchored on the poplars like a flat boat in the white mist. The shack was cool and damp, filled with the smoke of low-quality tobacco. He listened to the witty conversations and rough banter of the herdsmen, and was surprised that they did not have as complex emotions as he did, and they had no new sensitive experiences of labor and life. It turns out that they are simple and simple; although life is difficult, they always hold happy satisfaction. He began to envy them.

Once, an old herdsman in his sixties asked him: "People say you are a rightist. What do you mean by a rightist?" He lowered his head in shame and said nonchalantly: "A rightist... a rightist is People who made mistakes. "The rightists were the ones who told the truth in 1957," said the herdsman of the seventh team. , usually likes to joke, people call him "Guo Qianzi".

"Telling the truth is called 'making mistakes'. If you don't tell the truth, the world will be in chaos." The old herdsman smoked his pot and said thoughtfully, "But after all, it's better to work. , Don’t be a cadre. I am almost 70 years old, my eyesight is not blurred, my ears are not deaf, my waist is not bent, and I eat fried beans..." "So you will have to work in the next life!" "Guo Qianzi" smiled. Interrupt him.

"What's wrong with working in the next life?" the old herdsman said solemnly, "Without labor, no one can live, no one can be an official, no one can study..."

Such short, sincere and intermittent words often arouse a beautiful emotion in his heart like a rainbow after a shower, making him long to return to ordinary simplicity, like a rainbow. They also get that joyful satisfaction.

In the long-term physical labor and the continuous material transformation between man and nature, he gradually acquired a fixed living habit. Habit stubbornly molds him after its own pattern. Over time, everything in the past faded into a vague dream, and it seemed like a story about someone else that I read in a book. His memory was also broken by this fixed living habit and a completely different lifestyle from before. The life in the big city has become illusory, and only now is it real. Finally, he becomes a man suitable for living on this land and only on this land: he becomes a real herdsman! By the year when the "Cultural Revolution" began, people had long forgotten his past. It was only in the fanatical stage that someone remembered that he was still a rightist and needed to pull him out to show off. However, at this time several teams of herdsmen gathered in the shack and after some discussion, they decided that the grass condition down the slope was not good. They greeted the farm management and drove the animals up the hillside with a whoosh. Of course he had to go along, because no revolutionary mass was willing to give up the revolution to take his place since he could not go home for several months. The herdsmen helped him put his simple luggage on the horse, mounted the horse, and wandered away from the noisy place of right and wrong. On the road, the herdsmen shouted happily: "Go! Let's go up the mountain, no matter who their mother marries!" They blew sharp whistles one after another, and kept making short shouts. Yellow clouds of dust rose on the road. In the distance, there are hillside pastures that sparkle like emeralds... This day will always be regarded as an extremely special kind of tenderness, so deeply engraved in his memory.

Here is his pain, his joy, and his experience of all aspects of life. However, without the contrast between his joy and pain, it will become eclipsed and worthless. Last spring, he was suddenly called back to the field from the mountain pasture. Holding a straw hat, he anxiously walked into the office with the sign "Political Division" on it. Deputy Director Dong read a document to him, and then told him that he had been mistakenly classified as a rightist in the past, but now he had been corrected, and he would be arranged to teach in a farm school. Deputy Director Dong's face was solemn and expressionless. An early fly buzzed around the office, stopping on the wall and on the filing cabinet. Deputy Director Dong's eyes followed it. Holding a magazine in his hand, he was eager to try it.