My father is studying Chinese, and he teaches Chinese in four classes in two grades in high school. Not only that, because of the lack of high school physics teachers, he is also the top student in these four classes. He can do anything. He is the headmaster. When he came home from class, his sleeves and skirts were covered with white chalk dust, even in the stubble newly growing on his chin, like his beard turned white.
This is a photo from the mid-1970s.
We live in a teacher's dormitory, one belongs to my parents and the other belongs to my brothers and sisters. My bed is in my father's study. Father prepares lessons under kerosene lamps until late at night every night. When he is tired, he still wants to write. Afraid of affecting my sleep, I nailed the written words on the mosquito net to shade me. Sometimes when I am half asleep and half awake, I see that the back of rice paper is soaked with ink, and the cotton mosquito net is dyed black, like an insect crawling quietly and blooming, slowly forming, either solid or virtual, like the silhouette of a mountain, like the shape of the wind. ...
One night, I woke up in some whispers. Through the mosquito net, I saw that my father had a guest, Zhao Xuefeng, my brother's classmate, and my brother was there. They sat face to face with serious faces.
This Zhao Xuefeng is an orphan in Hunan and goes to school at a relative's home in Guizhou. He is almost as handsome as my brother, but he seems to be depressed all the time. He is releasing. I like his free and easy gestures, especially his warm greeting and serious talk to me. This kind of good attitude is the best gift the world can give a little girl. Father often invites him home for dinner, feeling that he is more valued than my brother. During those long holidays, he stayed in school nursing school. My father will arrange a classroom for these nursing students to talk about The Book of Songs, The Spring and Autumn Annals, Historical Records, as well as Tang poetry and Song poetry, and he will spare no effort to pour his feelings and education on classical literature into them. The moonlit night will also lead them to the east to welcome the long moon, to the Zongxi River, where they will sing and write poems and return at night. I'm the best listener. I've been spying on Zhao Xuefeng. He looked up as if he were asking for heaven, and the breeze brushed his face, and his side face was like a sculpture. After they graduated, my brother went to the countryside to be an educated youth. I heard that he went to Beijing.
Father dimmed the lights again, and the wick of the kerosene lamp has been dimmed to a flame the size of a grain of rice, but it is enough to see their faces clearly.
The atmosphere is tense.
When you open your eyes at night and look carefully, everything will become clearer and clearer, even the cracks in the wall can be clearly seen. Zhao Xuefeng is thin, with long hair and beard, and his cheeks are dark and sunken. He has completely changed. I woke up gradually, but I still pretended to sleep and listened to them. He has my brother's enamel tea urn in his hand, and white water vapor is floating around. He took a long sip of water and swallowed it. ...
The father said to his younger brother, you send him to Lijiazhai on the other side of Zongxi River.
Father took out his flashlight, picked up his trench coat and put it on Zhao Xuefeng. Brother gently pulled the door, but the door creaked uncontrollably. Father stopped suddenly: Xuefeng, keep those manuscripts for me!
I saw Zhao Xuefeng stop at the door, but he still gave his father a roll of paper.
The slight footsteps of my brother and Zhao Xuefeng soon disappeared in the pine forest behind the house. Vaguely, Lin Tao seems to have followed them all the way, and then swept across the horizon …
I haven't seen Zhao Xuefeng since. During those lonely and long holidays, I looked at the road connecting the school and the town all day. The flat road is spread out like a cloth, and occasionally there is black in the distance. I waited for him to take his time ... no, none!
I never saw Zhao Xuefeng again.
After he left, my father copied the poems on those papers every night and paced back and forth in the room, chanting "Clouds and water are boundless, and the night is silent." A poetic heart is a little cold plum blood, and it is important to cherish the eternal spirit ... "My father's emotions and voices infected me, and I felt both excited and sad.
Before I left home for college, I finally got a chance to ask my brother about his classmate Zhao Xuefeng, and pretended not to remember it carefully. My brother said happily that he was fine. Didn't he send my father a collection of Tiananmen poems before? Now, go south!
In September, Gengzi went to Shaoyang, Changde, Hunan Province, from Xupu, Huaihua to Chuanyanshan Forest Park, and punched in Fengxiang Yaozhai. It turns out that this park, this Yaozhai, is at the eastern foot of Xuefeng Mountain. Xuefeng Mountain, the largest mountain in Hunan Province, was called Kunlun Mountain in ancient times, then Huiji Mountain and Chushan Mountain, and Meishan Mountain in Song Dynasty. In the Republic of China, it was renamed Xuefeng Mountain, which stretches for thousands of miles, connecting Shaoyang in the south, Changde in the north, Yuanling in the west, Yiyang and Ningxiang in Changsha in the east, and it is everywhere in the central and western Hunan.
Located at the peak near 1.800 meters above sea level, the peaks at the foot are undulating and vertically covered with subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest and various Chinese fir. I seem to have returned to my hometown. Gray clouds float, and the sky is wider. The echo of the years is faintly audible. Father, my soul flies to you. When human suffering disappears with the flow of years, I will reunite with you!
Stretching his arms on his back, he finally breathed out the sigh in his chest when he was a teenager.