Sit in the second class of the high-speed train and speed north. The high-speed rail is now crossing a large area of saline land. A large patch of white soil, occasionally with shallow puddles, a sparse grass yellowing in the green, these few barren elements with little vegetation to speak of, are connected to a monotonous late autumn earth.
From the so-called big city where I live today to my hometown county in the north, in between is such a barren land that made me feel desperate as a teenager.
More than thirty years have passed, and one of the important reasons is that for this small county surrounded by saline land, the most sensitive nerves are always touched, and it is a place that never wants to look back after leaving. If Xiao Bin hadn't been so ill, I don't know if I could have made up my mind to come back.
Wen 丨 Bao Linxuan
Now, the high-speed rail only needs to run for less than forty minutes to reach its destination. For me, this is also too fast, not even to take a nap, if you don't pay attention, you will miss the stop. More importantly, I hope that during the trip, I can leave a short period of thinking time as a buffer, and I feel that I need to settle down and think about it, or search in my memory, although I don't know what to search for for this long-lost county.
The high-speed rail is silent in operation, a kind of gallop in silence, which seems to lack the necessary sound, and there is an unrelated coldness and indifference in the calm.
The carriage was extremely quiet, and the train attendant who wanted to sell specialty dairy products, a Sven young man, just walked back and forth in the carriage without a word, holding two bags of finely packaged cheese products in his hand, with a sincere smile. Buy it or not buy it by you, he will never shout.
I think what a huge contrast this elegance is with the black smoke miasma and the boiling of people in the early years of the green-skinned train, and this contrast is historical. But at the same time, I feel that this carriage, like the era in which it is today, seems to be missing something, but what is missing? In this orderly and orderly life with a very strong sense of order, where is the fireworks in the world? The county life in the memory is exactly the same as the green leather carriage of that year, noisy, lively, and lacking, and the difference seems to be only that one is in the car and one is outside the car.
Coming out of the high-speed rail station, I went straight to the hospital to visit Xiao Bin, who was already in the advanced stage of stomach cancer. He was lying on the hospital bed, too thin to look, and when he saw me walk in, tears welled up in his eyes, and I sat down by the bed and held his craggy hand. Xiao Bin was the best classmate and best friend of my middle school days. Xiao Bin lost his father when he was a child, and it was his mother who pulled the three of them together. At that time, I went from the countryside to the county to go to high school, and because I liked novels and poetry, I had a lot of fun talking together and couldn't be separated.
Every weekend, Xiao Bin invited me to his house, and when his mother improved our food and made new clothes, she always brought out a set for me, and her mother had gray hair and sat in front of the sewing machine to concentrate on making clothes, as if it were just yesterday. We even showed up on campus wearing the same clothes, the same age, like a pair of brothers.
After graduating from high school, Xiao Bin stayed in the county seat and joined the work early. It was only then that Xiao Bin no longer talked to me about literature, and it seemed that he no longer danced and inked, but as a small clerk, he worked for more than thirty years. After graduation, he never left the county town for half a step, which can be described as an old pastoral. Xiao Bin is a humble man on the outside and arrogant on the inside, who does not have much contact with outsiders and has little contact with his classmates, and I am one of the very few people who have maintained long-term contact with him.
Sometimes when he mentioned other high school classmates, he always smiled and said that he didn't have much contact and passed. I know that his inner world is like a flower, but in the small county, how many people can understand his unique elegance and fun?
Xiao Bin's home is in Tiexi. A county town is not divided into any district, Tiexi is only a relatively independent area, and the family dormitory of railway workers is in this area. Therefore, the tiexi district and the main urban area of tiedong are on both sides of the railway, forming their own living circles, and the atmosphere is also different.
Xiao Bin and his elementary school classmates often ran to Tiedong to see movies and then fought with Tiedong's children. At that time, just like the backstreet boys in the movie, they were also a bunch of Tiexi's Tao boys. Xiao Bin was not a fuel-saving lamp at that time, a fighting king. He often came out strong, when he couldn't fight, he always let his friends withdraw, he stayed alone, until he was beaten to a blue nose and swollen face, but he did not dare to go home, hiding in the home of his classmates, causing his mother and two brothers to look for him everywhere, and after being found, he was beaten up by his mother.
At that time, I had just been admitted to the county town and lived in a collective dormitory, and Xiao Bin asked me, Who bullied you? I took someone to clean him up. I didn't even say yes, for fear that he would cause trouble. But Xiao Bin was very arrogant, and he still found that one of the people in the dormitory with me was very arrogant, and that person had a small conflict with me, but the matter was not so serious. One day after school, Xiao Bin took a few classmates, called him out of the classroom, and repaired him on the playground. But he didn't tell me before and after, I just found that this roommate was suddenly extremely kind to me, and even friendly, I was a little puzzled. After a long time, Xiao Bin said lightly that we had talked to him. Whatever you do, don't worry about him, I suddenly realized.
But Xiao Bin is not just fighting, he is very righteous, and he especially appreciates talented people. In high school, another classmate in our class was from Tiedong, and he fought with him when he was a child, of course, Xiaobin was the winner at that time. On high school day, they recognized each other, but neither spoke to each other. This classmate from Tiedong is also a bully, but he is a really gentle and elegant person, raising his hands and feet, almost can be described as weak, his composition is extremely beautiful, the image is strange, the words are beautiful, very imaginative, the language teacher is always praised in class, I and Xiaobin are very impressed.
Xiao Bin said to me privately that he wanted to reconcile with this classmate and asked me how? I said that's great. Xiao Bin heard my words, and he was not ambiguous, so he pulled me along at the end of class and stopped this classmate from Tiedong, who was still a little confused and thought he would have to fight another one. The three of us talked seriously for a few minutes in the small woods at the southern end of the playground, the time was very short, but Xiao Bin opened his words and sincerely said that he was not more troublesome in those years, and now the rivers and lakes are far away, but the green water is long, please bear with it. In the end, the two of us joined me and clapped their vows at each other, and they immediately released their previous suspicions, and the three of us became good friends from then on.
Xiao Bin in the hospital bed was very weak, but he still tried to talk to me. He said you haven't been back for many years, and the county has changed so much that you can't recognize it, right? I said it's okay, when you're better, we'll both go back to middle school, go back to Tiexi, and then ask a few classmates to have a beer. Xiao Bin nodded, but we all knew in our hearts that this seemed unlikely.
That year, after the end of the college entrance examination, I received the acceptance letter, and Xiaobin was sincerely happy for me, and ate at his house to celebrate. At that time, beer had just appeared on the market, it was barrel, and everyone didn't know much about beer. A few of us poor students, who could not afford to go to the restaurant, ran into the restaurant, bought a large barrel of beer and came back to drink, which seemed to be called draft beer.
It was the first time I and I had drunk beer, but I didn't find it delicious, but I felt sour, hard to swallow, and almost wanted to squirt. But many years later, whenever I drank beer, I always remembered the first bowl of beer I drank in my hometown, and I remembered the way I was drinking and arguing with xiaobin. At that time, his mother was laughing and moaning in the kitchen for the pleasure of a few of us, but she did not come into the house and let us children make trouble on their own.
Xiao Bin asked me if I noticed that the old station room of the railway station had changed its position, and I said that I knew, because the media made a special report at that time, because it was the news that happened in my hometown, and I also paid special attention to it. As a Russian classic building, the old station house carries the strong memories of generations of railway people and local counties, and is extremely well preserved, but at that time, when the high-speed rail was built, the old station house had to make way for it.
In order to protect this old building that cannot be copied, the railway construction party and the local government at that time cooperated and tried every means to finally use modern cutting-edge technology to move the old station house to the northeast corner of the original site without damage, and built an open-air memorial hall of the old station house for people to visit. It was a remarkable project, and now, over the years, it has become an important site for remembering a small county station along the railway line.
As a descendant of railway workers, Xiao Bin has a special affection for the old station house, when he was a child, his home was close to the railway station, and he could see it when he left home. For him, the old station house is not only a railway station house, not only a green-skinned train stop, but also a paradise for his childhood and adolescence, a happy paradise that can go straight to the past when he walks out of the house. Moreover, the popsicles in front of the train station cost three cents and five cents a piece, which is quite famous, and it is also the blissful dessert that his mother often gives him. Just as the Sanwei Bookstore was to the great writer who created the leap earth and the Xianglin sister-in-law, everyone has their own childhood totem place, and for Xiao Bin, the railway station and Tiexi are his totems.
Even more than that, the entire county town, the place where Xiao Bin never left in his life, was the totem of the whole process of his life. I once advised Xiao Bin to leave here, and with his personality and ability, he could have come out and gone to a big place with more opportunities and possibilities, or a big city, or the coast and the south, and start a new life, the so-called new wave life that keeps pace with the times.
But Xiao Bin did not agree, he felt that the county town was very good, in his mind, although the county town was also wrapped up in the times to go forward, just like the green-skinned train upgraded to a high-speed railway, the provincial capital city that used to take several hours to reach now only takes a little more than half an hour. Even the entire main urban area of Tiedong has long been unrecognizable.
However, Xiao Bin said, the county seat is very changeable, and like other places, is there a place in China that has not changed? Although I am not always used to it, or I will not get used to it for a lifetime, I am familiar with this place, there are my relatives, there are my little friends from elementary school, and the Tao boys can still be together often, as if they never graduated.
I always felt that this was the place where I could grasp it, to change places, the strangeness, the hard work process of re-adaptation, which made me hesitate. Xiao Bin smiled and said, I guard the homeland for you, you come back, I am still a concern for you, even if I have not been out of the ordinary in my life.
In my opinion, this small county town surrounded by saline and crop fields may be very different from Xiao Bin's cognition. I saw that the streets were full of sculptures of cattle, and the herds of cattle seemed to run rampant on the street, as if they had really become a paradise for cattle, and pedestrians were trying to walk around the cattle, and they could not avoid the cattle everywhere.
It has become a huge stage that fully interprets the cattle economy and cattle wealth, and even in front of the big shopping mall, there are cattle flocking to show their majesty to run. I wondered how peaceful and silent the real cows were, but these cow sculptures were the same image of pioneering cows, as if they were blindly angry.
I am afraid that these are all things that Xiao Bin is not happy to see. Xiao Bin's cognition of the county town is still the cognition of the descendants of a railway worker, and his gaze often seems to retract from the east side of the railway and turn to the area around the west of the railway and the old railway station. The lively market town of Tiedong is more like another circle that he never really intended to enter, he only stayed there for a short time and attended high school for two years.
The Tiedong area is clearly a market town drama of the agricultural and animal husbandry era, which absorbs the fireworks atmosphere of the surrounding townships, and puts the agricultural and sideline products on the shelves, creating another atmosphere completely different from Tiexi, the simple face and eyes, containing the mutual pull between stubbornness and enterprising, and finally in the trading stalls of the farmers' market, a certain fragile balance is reached. And this seems to be what Xiao Bin does not pay much attention to.
Coming out of the hospital, the streets I was familiar with at that time were still faintly recognizable, but they had become narrow and cramped without exception, and the brick bungalows and adobe houses on both sides were no longer there, replaced by high-rise residential areas, and there was no difference between them and other county towns and market towns. The old movie theater that Xiaobin and I used to skip class to visit has been replaced by a high-rise house.
I had no time to be sentimental, and I rushed back to the hospital, because Xiao Bin had an important request. Xiao Bin was asleep at this time, and his wife and I went to the corridor and told me that Xiao Bin had not stopped writing and painting after all these years of work, locked in a bookcase at home, but never showed anyone.
The other day he said to his wife, you don't know much about these things, and you don't necessarily have to keep them, or you can consider transferring them to me, let me see them, and you can dispose of them at will after reading them. Hearing this, I went to his house and opened the bookcase, which contained a large stack of his manuscripts, ink paintings he had created, and ancient poems he had written. I roughly read it through, and I have to say that his poems and paintings are not bad, and they have considerable artistic value.
And he himself is very finely organized, extremely well arranged, and does not require me to spend too much editing and editing, in fact, they are basically finished products. I hurried to the hospital, I want to tell Xiao Bin that his life in the county is worth it, his works are rare, I have never seen in the market, Xiao Bin has paid his life here, and will eventually achieve something. I'm going to tell him that, and I can do something for him, and I can do it.
Xiao Bin is a contemporary hermit, who seems to run counter to this utilitarian and impetuous era, never flaunted himself, never thought about what he wanted to make out of it, he just loved it, and wrote them out, drew them, in order to express his heart, nothing more, is there him? I don't want to praise anything too much, it's not a matter of praise, he makes my heart ache, it seems that I don't really know him, he never mentioned his creation to me, even once. That's what I'm going to ask him.
When I returned to the hospital, Xiao Bin had stopped breathing, and the last faint connection of the county town, which was closely related to my youth, seemed to have collapsed. After saying goodbye to Xiaobin at the end, I decided not to take the high-speed train anymore and made an appointment with an online car.
The car arrived on time, and I took Xiao Bin's heavy legacy, packed up the love and love of a county stubborn keeper who was born and grew up in Zizi and died in Zizi, and carefully placed it in the trunk. They will accompany me on my unfinished journey to my hometown.
Trainee Editor: Chen Siyu
Review: Yang Ye
Coordinator: Sun Jiawei Jiang Ming