Lovers (novella) Zhang Baotong

My father died of a work-related injury, my sister died of illness on the banks of the Wei River, and my mother was the most tragic woman in our Agency. My stepdad crawled out of the pile of dead. When I told people about these things, they were stunned, as if I was telling a tragic story that was far from reality. In fact, the tragic story of our family is not only these at all, there are many, many more to be told.

My brother was also very unlucky. He almost left our family since he was in elementary school, attending primary school in Pinglongmiaoji Town, more than ten miles away from Luohe Bridge, and later in Xianyang Tiezhong Middle School. He spent so little time with us that in the long river of my long memory, his figure came and went like a passerby, hurrying away, and rarely left a mark on my memory. When I was in the third grade, he came back once during the summer vacation, when my family had moved from Nanping, Fujian Province to Miluo, Hunan. He was skinny and skinny, and he suffered from a severe nervous breakdown, and he had to wet the bed every night. My mom barely recognized him when she saw him. He told my mother that because he was small, he was always pushed aside by high school students when he was queuing to buy food, and when he got to the window, the food in the cafeteria had already been sold out, so he often couldn't eat, so he was hungry. As soon as my mother heard this, she immediately transferred him from Xianyang Tiezhong to Miluo County No. 1 Middle School.

My brother was a very talented man, he wrote well in words and articles, and played the flute and harmonica well, and the adults in the family area said that he would be very good in the future. His figure and appearance were the same as those of my dead father, slender and straight, with a dignified appearance. Perhaps he was excellent in all aspects, so he served as the propaganda minister in the rebel organization of the school. However, because of a statement by a central official, the organization of their faction was designated as an illegal organization. As soon as the rebel groups on the other side came to power, they began to liquidate their faction from the top down in the province. My brother and a few classmates fled like criminals. For this reason, our family was also implicated, and the rebels raided the house twice in a row, and the cabinets, boxes, drawers, and beds in the house were turned upside down. My brother and two other classmates climbed into coal trucks to Wuhan and then to Anqing, begging on the streets during the day and sleeping at the station or on the side of the road at night. In those days, my stepfather took me around all day to inquire and search for his whereabouts. But after a month of searching, there was no news at all.

Half a year later, my stepfather learned from one of my brother's classmates that they were in Nanjing. So, my stepfather asked the classmate to contact my brother, saying that the rebel organization in the family district and the school had made a promise that he would not continue to pursue him as long as he came back to check and confess honestly. In fact, he was only a junior high school student, and he had never participated in any cultural offensive and military defense, let alone attacked organs or snatched weapons, but just wrote slogans and big-character posters all day long, and organized propaganda team performances.

Later, my brother got the news and came back from Nanjing. He had come back that night, and his hair was long, messy, dirty, and sticky in pinches, covering his face. He couldn't see the color of his clothes at all, and one of his pockets was ripped open. The whole clothes and pants were dirty and they were picked up from the garbage, and the two shoes were exposed with four toes. I poked my head out of the covers and looked at him with strange eyes. He timidly and cautiously went into the house and looked at my mother. My mom looked at him for a long time and said how did you get it like this. He didn't speak, just burst into tears. My mom hurriedly cooked for him and boiled the bath water.

Because he had a lot of lice in his hair and clothes, as well as fleas, his body was covered with patches of red bumps and scratches. After taking a shower, my mother took off a roll of his clothes inside and out, put them in the stove, and burned them. The next day, he took him to clean his hair, and then asked his stepfather to take him to the rebels. Fortunately, the rebels really spared him, did not interrogate and beat him, but only made him honestly confess and deeply reflect. But he was deprived of his ability to attend high school, so he had to graduate from junior high school and leave school. After my dad was injured at work, Xi'an Railway Station promised that all three of our children would return to work at Xi'an Railway Station when they grew up, but because it was during the Cultural Revolution, all units basically did not recruit workers, so my brother had to work as a worker in a local grain store.

At that time, there was a girl who fell in love with my brother. This girl and my brother are classmates, and she is a quiet, delicate, slim girl, and a girl from a cadre family of our Agency. Among the girls in our Agency, she is one of the more outstanding and eye-catching. My brother and she were secretly in love, and often got some refined noodles and glutinous rice from their grain store to secretly give to others. We were reluctant to eat these things even in our own homes, because they were not available at the time, and we could only get some from inside the grain store. I have seen my brother deliver things to other people's homes several times, but we all understand because our family does not have anything that no one wants, and my brother works in the local area, and the salary of the locals is generally more than 20 yuan, while the salary of our UNRWA workers is at least 50 yuan, and the cadres at the section level can get more than 100 yuan. So, like the British aristocracy, we in the Agency looked down on the locals. No one, male or female, wants to find a partner in the local area. So, even if my brother gave things to others, I always felt that their relationship was very unreliable. Sure enough, a year later, the girl went to the Agency, and that was the end of their relationship.

Although my brother is both talented and talented, our family can't help him, and his own work is not very good, so the girl he likes refuses to marry him, and he doesn't look down on the girl who likes him. Just when he was a little disheartened about his marriage, a local girl approached him. The girl is not tall and good-looking, and she is a female worker in the county material bureau. But the girl's parents were very snobbish and asked for things from our house twice in three days. For the sake of my brother's marriage, we always find a way to be satisfied. However, on the day of the wedding, my brother took someone to their house to marry, and the girl's mother asked my brother to give them another 600 yuan as a bride price. The locals in Hunan are verbose and pay too much attention to it, and they feel that all of our projects are landlords and money, and they want to ask our family for more money through their daughter's marriage. However, our family itself does not have much money, and we have spent one or two thousand yuan on gifts and gifts to their family in advance, and now we have to give them another 600 yuan, which is simply too much.

My brother was a little reluctant about this marriage, but when he saw that his mother-in-law was insatiable, he made it difficult for him at this time, so he immediately became angry, and he didn't marry his relatives, so he turned around and left. My stepfather and my mother were very surprised when they saw that my brother had not brought back the bride, and when they heard my brother say that their family was making trouble again, they were very angry and said that the marriage was not married.

This kind of failed marriage can be said to be unprecedented in our Miluo, and it is the first time that it has opened the world. But this kind of thing is also spread out in our house. It's really weird. But that's the way it is, there's nothing that can be done. Our family beckoned relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who came to participate in the celebration to have a meal and drink. After the guests had left, my family sat in my brother's new room, frowning and seeing how it would end. My stepfather said that he would ask their family to return all the money and gifts given by our family, and not a single cent should be missing. But my brother seemed a little embarrassed, first, he felt ashamed, and his family was afraid that he would not return it smoothly. My mom said that the money had to be returned, and that the things that couldn't be counted were forgotten. And my brother and I thought the same thing, I thought that money was really nothing, and I was really worried that it would make our family lose face and become a joke.

When we were at a loss, the bride came to our house crying, saying that she had fallen out with her parents and would never return to their parents' house. This surprised and touched my brother and my family. Although the wedding did not take place, the bride still married home, although this matter will cause people to talk, but at least our family did not lose much face, and did not cause much loss.

After we got married, my brother and my sister-in-law were doing quite well, but it didn't take long for the unit to carry out reforms, and both the grain bureau and the material bureau had to implement the individual contracting system, and the stores of the units had to be contracted out, and those who did not contract would automatically lose their jobs, because the units were about to be disbanded and no longer existed. My brother and sister-in-law contracted a store with more than 40 square meters and opened a small restaurant to serve breakfast foods such as rice noodles and dumplings. However, as soon as the business picked up, the unit asked my brother to come up with 20,000 yuan as a contract fee. However, my brother and his family have just borrowed a lot of money to buy the two-bedroom apartment they live in, so how can they have the money to pay the contract fee. Because he couldn't pay the money, the store asked the unit to take it away and gave it to someone else. My brother and sister-in-law really have nothing to do, and the unit has long stopped paying salaries. Their families were immediately left without a livelihood. My brother was introduced to a middle school by an acquaintance as a hired employee in the student cafeteria. The work of a hired worker is tiring and the pay is low, but in order to support the family, my brother can't take care of it so much.

After about two or three years of cooking, my brother's home-cooked cooking skills far surpassed that of the local first-class chefs. The largest restaurant in Miluo County is run by a Taiwanese owner, and my brother can basically cook the dishes made by the chef of the hotel, and he makes them better than theirs. So, a hotel restaurant hired my brother as a chef. Of course, the salary was relatively high, but my brother didn't work long before he became ill and was admitted to the hospital. Because he has lacked food and clothing since he was a child, he often can't eat at school and is hungry, so his body has always been relatively weak, he can't do heavy work, and he is easy to get sick when he does heavy work.

Since then, my brother's body has been a little weak, and he feels flustered and short of breath when he is overworked, and he has to rest for a long time to recover. Therefore, my brother can only cook for some small canteens of twenty or thirty people. However, such a salary is very low, and the life of the family is very tight. The couple often chattered and quarreled over lack of money, and life was not smooth. Therefore, my brother and my sister-in-law spent all day struggling to receive their retirement salaries as soon as possible.