A fly flies across half the forest

1

　　He is dead. Maybe he's still alive. One can live in obscurity.

　　I know he will never come again.

　　Whenever the iron sheet creaks, whenever I see white bark, or see someone holding a handkerchief, my thoughts run wild, and I am reminded of something I did not see. Maybe I should think about the things that caught my eye, but I dare not. Who can tell me how long I have to think to remember the tragedy? What can I do to erase the memory of it from my mind?

　　I don't know if I should look at the white bark of the outer world or sink into the inner world.

　　I have been a factory worker for thirty-four years. I work the night shift and come home at dawn.

　　My living room is very cold and silent. Whenever I work the night shift, the carpet in the living room is covered with fluff, and the table is deeply sunken in the fluff at dawn. All furniture is lethargic.

　　Every table foot is falling asleep, how can I sleep at night? At night I escaped from the living room, went to work in the factory, and worked with screws. While other women were at home with their husbands, I was doing good deeds for these women in the factory.

　　At dawn I leave the night shift. On the way home, I looked up at the sky, and the bright moon was suspended above the big tree. The leaves are still asleep. The night sky was dusty and the leaves were very tired. The bare trees in winter are also very tired, and the bare wood looks unusually heavy.

　　At dawn, the moon hangs high over the bus station—and the rising sun hangs high over the cigarette factory. Two stars in the same sky are actually smaller than a toe. The cold moon started to warm up, and it moved away from the trees and came towards me. The morning sun started to cool, and it flew into the trees and floated behind my head.

　　Cold and warm are reversed, but this reversal is not because of me. Every morning I step out to start the day. The sun looks sleepily at the back of my head, and in front of me is my face, which has been up all night. The sky is bent over, wool is floating on the sky, and we can see the back of the sky in the city.

　　Two rows of toes appeared at dawn, belonging to two different pairs of feet. There are two people whose lives could have come to mind, living side by side, far apart. But I didn't think of these two people. My palate feels the thirst of the screws, a thirst reminiscent of worn velvet. When I saw those two toe-like stars, I suddenly remembered the tragedy. I said silently in my heart: Now you actually think of this matter.

　　Every morning on the way home I think of the tragedy. The tragedy was like a lump in my throat, and I had to swallow it.

　　Whenever I come in, my room is still asleep. When there is no one in the house, what else can a room do but lethargic? If someone walks in the living room, or sits in the living room, or looks around to see if the belongings in the home are still there, then the living room will present a different scene.

　　I am tireless, the return journey and the morning breeze are just passers-by in the hard work. When I got home I went to bed and my bed was lethargic and my pillow was lethargic. From night to dawn, the bedside table sank deeper and deeper into the pile of the carpet.

　　I work the night shift in the factory and it has become a habit for me to always have a bottle of milk before I go home. I put the milk bottle to my mouth and drank it down. The milk is as cool as snow, and it washes away the screws in my head. After drinking the milk, I paced up and down the factory floor. I lifted my feet and walked up and down like a jug with a tongue stuck to a long stick.

　　I lay on the bed and gradually fell asleep. But this dream is not my own. My bed has slept longer and deeper than I have slept, and in my lethargy I dreamed that I was wearing a colorless and transparent dress. If someone saw my body through the dress, the dress must be made of glass. But no one sees my body, either I'm not wearing a dress or people can't see through my body.

　　Whenever I dream, I dream that we are standing in a potato field on the outskirts of town. I was in a dress, and the potato seedlings were blooming with light blue flowers. He took my hand with one hand and pointed at the rolling hills with the other. The mountains are steep and pale, and the foothills are as thin as the peaks. I said: That is not a mountain, but a wall of a house, and your portrait is hung on the wall of the house. He said: Beneath the walls are mines. I retorted: it's the grave. He said: It's a mine. I thought to myself: it is a tomb.

　　On my way home one morning, I saw a boy standing around the corner of a cigarette factory with a red revolver in his hand. When the boy raised the revolver, I was unmoved. At this moment, a gust of wind blew along the long courtyard wall, making the factory's iron signboard creak, with a flashing trumpet painted on it.

　　If the wind hadn't made the tin signboard creak, I wouldn't have noticed a boy with a revolver standing around the corner of a cigarette factory in the early morning.

　　The wind was blowing, and a cloud of dust flew upwards, forming a vortex, which was slightly smaller than the shawl. The iron signboard with the trumpet painted on it made a short creaking sound. These scenes reminded me of him. I almost blurted out the words; the wind blows, the tin sign creaks, the wind blows, the trees rustle, the wind blows, the wind blows my hair up, but it doesn't blow the leaves, these The scenery has nothing to do with him, but you actually think of him at this moment.

　　2

　　I didn't see the postman. He never walked past me at dawn, and I never walked past him after dawn. To this day I don't know what he looks like. I never want to see him because I think he brings a news every day, a good news or a bad news, and he doesn't bring the news because of me, he brings the news completely voluntarily, even if I don't Existence, he will go on this postal route every day. It was very easy for him to deliver letters, but I never saw him slip a letter with a message into the opening of the mailbox. He didn't have to see my smiling face or my crying face. Maybe he forgot to pack the mail in his backpack and was just wasting his time with an empty bag. I don't know if he has any letters in his knapsack.

　　The passing years have washed away the difference between good news and bad news. I have lived alone for a long time, and I have long been insensitive to world affairs.

　　3

　　There is one scarecrow in every third garden at midsummer. I know how to make a scarecrow: first nail two branches together to make a cross, then insert the longer branch into the ground, build stones around the insertion, stabilize the branch, and give the top of the branch a cross. Put on a straw hat, then coat the shorter branches and outer pants for the longer branches. The maker brought a black coat, put the black coat on the cross, stuffed it with straw, and fastened the buttons on the black coat.

　　I slipped into the garden one night and ripped the scarecrow's black garment off the cross. When I stripped off the black clothes, the branches that made up the cross revealed their white bark. I just wanted to take off the scarecrow's black clothes and take off the scarecrow's straw hat from the branch, because I passed the garden every morning for several weeks, and the scarecrow in the garden aroused my association, and I think he is the prototype of the scarecrow. Neighbors were still awake at dawn, and the garden was full of night-cold raspberries, their reddish-red fruit rolling to the curb, ready to bleed. The shriveled kidney beans swayed and jingled in the morning wind, and the bright bean shells seemed to contain stones.

　　I threw the straw-stuffed black coat on the path in the garden, and the scarecrow disappeared, leaving only two branches with white bark exposed, and the black coat had nothing to do with him ever since. The bark has nothing to do with him, and I would never associate the bark with his skin. This association is pure self-deception.

　　But whenever I see the white bark, I feel cold all over.

　　When I take the train to another city, I have to suffer from boredom. The waves from the sky surged outside the carriage, and the fields and trees passed by in a flash. The rails are singing. Some passengers are talking. I don't know how it happened: when the rails roared, the interlocutors fell silent. Long conversations are impossible in a moving train. Even if someone is telling the story of his life, it is a long story short.

　　After the conversation, there was silence in the car.

　　Whenever we talk about prisoners, we always refer to trains and tracks. But trains and rails are not what I'm thinking about. There was a man on the train talking about his own marriage, he said he couldn't stand his third wife, he never went to see his second wife, he liked to go to his first wife's house, he had a weekly Once, he asked his first wife to allow him to spend the night at her home, and his first wife left him a bed. After he finished speaking, there was silence all around. The silence is not what I think about, nor the railroad track that sings alone. All this may have something to do with him, but they have nothing to do with him in my mind.

　　The man took a freshly ironed handkerchief from his purse. The handkerchief was what I was thinking about, and I said to myself: Now at last you are thinking of that tragedy, now at last you are thinking of him.

　　The man wiped the corners of his mouth and put the handkerchief back in his purse.

　　On the way to the next city, there are some small railway stations beside the tracks, and there are small villages behind the railway stations. The man was asleep, his cheek pressed against the windowpane. The train was still moving forward, and when it stopped at a small railway station ahead, I wanted to get off to get some fresh air. I wanted to walk through the waiting room into the village. Look at the fences and small windows of the farmhouse, do some shopping in the village, and buy something to eat while walking, such as a small piece of bread or an apple.

　　But when the train stopped at some small railway station, I didn't intend to get off. The man who had used the handkerchief could feel the arrival of the train in his sleep. He could feel the vibration of the train as it braked, and could feel that the tracks had stopped singing. I found him looking for the train station with closed eyes, his eyeballs were rolling, but his eyelids were not waking up, and his eyelids were so heavy that he couldn't open them. I noticed his eyes stopped moving. He squeezed his still eyes shut, and finally did not see the train station. I sat quietly in my seat, not even thinking about getting up and taking the first step forward. But as the train moved on again, the thought of going down at the next station was running around in my head for no reason.

　　I know: it is because I don't want to go down that I think of getting off. All I want is the thought of getting out of the car. The handkerchief the man had just ironed had nothing to do with anything else. But the handkerchief became the object of my thoughts, so I said to myself: now you finally think of that tragedy, now you finally think of him.

　　I must go to that city. The thought of getting off the bus washed me away like a flood, and the flood didn't bring him back. Even if I were to spend a whole day in a strange little village, the postman would not bring any news of him.

　　Every city is bigger than a freshly ironed gray handkerchief, every city is bigger than him, and yet he is nearer to me.

　　Back then I knew exactly what was good news and what was bad news.

　　4

　　Sometimes I get the good news mixed up with the bad news and everything turns upside down and isn't what it used to be. Only time will bring it back to its original state.

　　Every morning, as I dust my pillows, I think to myself: If I weren't a single woman, I'd be dusting two pillows by now. I put the pillow on the open window. Just before the sun rose, the morning breeze was very cool, and the foul air of the city had not yet filled the air. At this time, I found that there was no room for two pillows on the outer window sill. The morning breeze was not cool at this time, because the sun had already hung high above the tall trees on the other street. The morning breeze didn't have enough time to cool two pillows as noon was trotting our way.

　　I put the coffee pot with tap water on the stove. I have my own discretion when boiling water. The kettle only holds two cups of water. Too much water is a waste. Every time I pour the second glass of water into the jug, I think to myself: If I'm not a single woman, then I need four glasses of water. The boiling water sings alone at the bottom of the kettle. I put the third cup of water on top of the kettle. Every time I put a third cup of cold water on top of the boiling water. But I never pour his cold water into the kettle. I always pour a third cup of cold water down the sink. Under the third cup of cold water is my finger outstretched. I let the cold water in the glass run slowly down my fingers, and after the third glass of water was empty, the porcelain cup could hold a fourth glass of water. I let the third glass of water run slowly over my fingers, and I felt the constant infiltration of water, so I mistook it for the fourth glass of water.

　　I often take the basket of potatoes into the kitchen while cooking. I took out a large potato and started peeling it. Then I took out the second potato and let it turn in my hand. I thought to myself: If I wasn't a single woman, I'd be peeling two large potatoes. But I never cut a second potato, I just peel off the sprout and put it back in the basket.

　　People always mention potatoes when they talk about prisoners. But my potatoes have nothing to do with prisoners. I could have thought of cooked potatoes in the prison camps, but no such associations came to my mind. I played with the big peeled potato in my hand, and I knew that his big potato had escaped the fate of being cut today. Only tomorrow will his big potatoes be peeled.

　　I thought to myself: I only cook one of the two potatoes and keep the other. After half a year, the remaining potatoes can be used for him for a year. After a few years, there will be stars in abundance, reminiscent of the sprawling potato fields on the outskirts of cities. I knew he would be overjoyed if he saw the large potato fields on the outskirts of the city.

　　I always ate quickly, never savoring the potatoes carefully, just to be full. I sat on a chair and looked out the window at the street scene. Sometimes I stand by the window with a plate of Chinese food in my hand, looking at the passers-by outside the window. Sometimes I just stand, or yell, or look around, or stay silent.

　　Because I was able to observe pedestrians freely, I could eat well.

　　Pedestrians walking, standing, or looking around outside the window - I don't think they are so strange. From upstairs, they looked very small. I couldn't tell from their faces if they were my acquaintances.

　　I swallow food into my head with just a little bit of chewing, upward swallowing is my eating habit. Food covers my mind. My pupils began to warm up, I rolled my eyes a few times, and the warmth flooded my eyes.

　　There are two ex-convict men who love potatoes most, but they didn't like potatoes before they went to prison. Whenever I eat, I always wonder why these two men love potatoes. One of the men said that a hot potato is a warm bed. Another man said that a hot potato in his mouth is the sudden arrival of summer and weeks of cold. He went on to say that if he saw the flying red flag and heard the loud bugle now, he would go mad.

　　Like him, the two men also served hard labor in Aynakjevo. The two of them mined coal in the coal mine. The mines there are like two seasons, one white and the other black. Neither of them knew him because he was at the car factory and he couldn't talk to anyone.

　　He is a reform-through-labour prisoner.

　　A female passenger on the train had worked at the factory in Aynakjevo for five years. She told the woman sitting across from her that there was a car factory under their factory. There is a hole the size of a tree crown on the ground of the factory. Every day she looked down at the car factory through the hole, and she saw him, looking up. The two could not talk because she was under surveillance in the factory above, and he was also under surveillance in the underground car factory.

　　Each time she pretended to tie her shoes so she could look down at the car factory. Her shoes are small and tight.

　　She will feel more comfortable if the shoes are unlaced. The laces on these shoes are not real laces. The so-called shoelaces are just the thread on the burlap sack, and the hemp thread shoelaces can only be used for one day and will break the next day. Every morning before she goes to work in the factory, she laces her shoes with twine, so that at least once a day she can go to the hole the size of a tree canopy, where she can pretend to be tying her shoes and look down at the man in the car factory.

　　Sometimes she threw a large potato through the hole into the underground car factory. Sometimes she walked to the hole the size of a canopy, only to find a large potato next to the hole in the ground that the man had thrown up to her from the car factory.

　　The female passenger went on to say that a piece of hot potato was like a glove on both hands. The warm covers the fingers of one hand with cotton, the cold wraps the fingers of the other with wire. She said she had atrophic gastritis and would be full on a large potato. After a large potato filled her shriveled stomach, the crying rippled slowly toward her, and she wept bitterly, tears falling like grains of sand through an hourglass. She is thin and bony, but in the factory she can lift iron. When she was crying in the wooden house, the tears actually scratched her cheeks, as if the tears had turned into stones. The female passenger said sadly that when she was full, her thin soul felt lonely, and she stood alone like the god of death.

　　The woman told me the story of the female passenger. She listened to her experience from a female passenger on a train bound for another city that happened to travel the same route I sometimes travel by.

　　The female passenger got on the train after the woman who lived in some small village behind the small railway station. The woman did not notice at which small train station the female passenger got on the train, because the female passenger did not immediately tell her story after getting on the train. She sat on the train for a long time before she began to tell her story, and she spoke faster and faster as the speeding train got closer and closer to the city she was going to. It would be reckless to tell such chilling stories to strangers on the train after the female passenger did not give her name. She hadn't intended to talk about her experience. Everyone listened intently as she told her story, and she felt so frightened that she wanted to swallow every word that came out. Everyone doesn't know where the female passengers have the courage to tell such stories. This has gone against her original intention.

　　The female passenger said that one day she saw a big potato next to the hole the size of a tree crown. Pretending to tie twine shoelaces, she bent down to pick up potatoes, taking the opportunity to look down at the underground auto factory. When she held the potato with her hands, she felt that there was a thread binding the whole potato. Then she saw a cut around the potato skin. She stashed the potatoes in her pocket and looked down at the underground car factory through the hole. She didn't see the man. Just where he had stood stood an uncovered drum filled with glowing black motor oil. The engine oil reflected her face, the image of her face was illusory, only the eyes were clearly discernible, and her cheeks were as thin as a flower. Hunger flickered through the oil, and she backed away in terror.

　　When the female passenger returned to the cabin at dusk, she bit off the thread that bound the big potato, and the potato was immediately split in two, and there was a piece of paper between the two halves of the potato. To the right of the line there is a faint blot which conceals a message, perhaps with the prisoner's name written on the blot. After that was written "Wife," and another blurred blotch, where perhaps his wife's name, or a village address, or a house number was written.

　　The potato starch erodes the writing on the paper. The female passenger cooked the two potato halves and began to eat them. She knew it all too well: she ate a message, she swallowed a person's name, a village, a cottage.

　　The female passenger said: The next day she never saw the prisoner in the underground car factory again. Surely he hadn't died in the underground car factory, because she had seen him standing alive under the hole just the day before the potato had been cut in half.

　　5

　　If I take the train to another city on the right day at the right time, if the female passenger takes the same train to the same city on the same day and at the same time, if she gets on the train at some small station, if The faces of the strangers sitting around her were so friendly that she told her own story lightly against her own will, then maybe I could meet her.

　　Maybe I really got on the right train on the right day, and the lady passenger was on the same train on the same day, but she got on a different car and told her own story again against her will, And I just wasn't in this compartment.

　　Although I know that I may only meet her once, but the idea of ​​meeting her is still lingering in my mind.

　　Maybe I should take the train every day, and I should get off at a different little train station every day. Maybe I should be away from home for days at a time so the postman has more time to stuff the mail with good or bad news into the mailbox. Maybe I should ask about the sequence of all the small train stations.

　　But at the same time I got off the train, the woman I was looking for might just be on the train. Or when I looked for her, she had become the female passenger.

　　Or after I got off the train, I was looking at the fences and small windows of the farmhouse in the village, but she was telling her own story against her own intention on the speeding train.

　　6

　　I have never been watched. Later I became a worker in a gold jewelry factory. I think the work in the gold jewelry factory is clean and easy, because there is not much gold in the gold jewelry factory, but there are as many screws in the cigarette factory. A man who came back from Russia told me: Russians call coal black gold. Maybe I went to work in a gold jewelry factory because I listened to him. A policeman came to the gold jewelry factory three times a day. His duty was to take notes of which customer brought how much gold and what kind of jewelry the gold was processed into. Every morning, noon and night he took as many notes as he could. Gold was often made into thin necklaces with sleek crosses or thick necklaces with a crucified image of Jesus. Officially neither permits nor prohibits gold jewelry factories from making cross necklaces. The crucified Jesus reminded me of garden scarecrows, nailed-together cruciform branches, and straw-stuffed black garments.

　　Gold is no better than iron. I never wanted to steal gold. I often steal iron if need be. Iron screws fetch a good price in the city.

　　In early spring the permafrost in the city was still very hard. Just then a woman from a small village brought an earring wrapped in crumpled newspaper. She also sent a broken eyeglass arm, as thin as cotton thread, with the tiny screw missing from the hinge.

　　This woman is about my age.

　　What I want to talk about is not the frozen soil outside, nor the temples of glasses, but earrings. The earrings are inlaid with three dark green gemstones. The lower points of the three gemstones meet together, and the upper points of the three gemstones are separated from each other. I put the earring in my hand and straighten my arm so that the earring is far away from me, with the stones on the earring tilted inward. The emeralds were so bright that I had to close my eyes. My eyelids felt the presence of emeralds.

　　The tips of the three gemstones are separated from each other, and their shape reminds one of shamrocks, of frozen clover. I could have imagined that there were two co-existing beings inside the gem, with a Time Stone in between. But no such fantasies were in my head, and I was not willing to deceive myself. I didn't miss him, or I didn't miss him enough, so I can't say at this point, now you're thinking about that tragedy again, now you're thinking about his tragedy again.

　　When people talk about internment camps, they often refer to frozen clover. But in my head Clover has nothing to do with him. The frozen clover fell into my eyes unconsciously. Although the police have entered the factory, the clover is still stubbornly in my eyes.

　　The factory building at night is not dark, because a factory building without lights is brighter than an emerald.

　　The policeman walked into the gold jewelry factory in the evening. He put the earrings and temples on the scale and weighed them. The tiny screws on the temples slipped into the center of his nails. He dug the center of his nail with the point of the file, and the little screw fell into the scale. He began to weigh it, and the needle on the scale kept pointing to zero, and finally to one.

　　After registering the weight of the small screws, he ordered us to be stripped naked for inspection because he said someone had stolen the gold. We had to shake our hair over the table, and he ran a fine-toothed comb through our pubic hair from top to bottom.

　　The short weight on the balance has long since fallen into my eyes. I have emeralds in my eyes.

　　I have only worked in the gold jewelry factory for two months, and I want to go back to the cigarette factory to turn my screws.

　　7

　　Sometimes I sing to myself. I sang: My life is like a thimble. It's not really a song, but I just love singing it. We can sing in silence, just as we can speak in silence.

　　When I hum softly in the workshop, I can't hear my singing. But when I hummed "My Life Is Like a Thimble" silently at home, I actually heard me singing. I never sing "His life was like a thimble," and I don't say it, I just think about it.

　　A thimble and another thimble, only they were put on two different hands. My hand is almost fifty-eight years old, and his is only twenty.

　　8

　　Sometimes I sing: My life is a passage. After singing, I fell into silence. There is a shiny horn in front of my mouth.

　　A fly flew across half of Sensen.

　　Then what?

　　A fly flies across the forest. It flew through the next forest, flew through another forest.

　　Then what?

　　The elevator in the stairwell sometimes travels upwards. There was a screeching sound from the ascending elevator, and I listened with bated breath, only to realize that no one had come out of the elevator. I went to the stairwell, opened the elevator door, and found that there was only a small yellow light in the elevator, and the small light was shining brightly. From then on, I understood a truth: it takes a long time to get from the eyes to the mouth.

　　9

　　If tomorrow night he stands in the elevator, then I am just a stranger, like a strange street corner. Maybe I was just an erratic date and he was a frightening blessing. There is a river of time between me and him. I think I have told him when we met, but never where. (over)