Lovers (novella) Zhang Baotong

Although I love her very much, she is also very delicate and beautiful, but she is a peasant, and I can't marry a rural girl anyway, in that way, I will be opposed by my family and made fun of by acquaintances, so that our love cannot have any results, just so that I can have a spiritual sustenance and a happy mood in addition to heavy labor. It's a selfish act, so I often feel very affectionately grateful to her. Whenever I hear the song "There is a girl named Xiaofang", I will think of her again, she is Xiaofang in my heart, and I want to thank her for the love she gave me and let me get through that difficult era.

That day, I bought some fruit and pastries and rode my bike to her house. She is no longer in the brigade headquarters, and the brigade headquarters has been changed to the village committee. She works as a farmer at home and already has two girls, one two-year-old and one four-year-old. She looks much older, not at all like a young daughter-in-law in her early twenties, but more like a middle-aged woman in her thirties. In her, I can't find the vivid, bright, delicate brilliance and breath of the past. Time is really merciless, and in just a few years, a sixteen or seventeen-year-old girl has been transformed into a woman with a face full of vicissitudes and bitterness. This made me feel a little discouraged and disappointed.

She was pleasantly surprised by my arrival and showed me some of the places we had visited. We have been together for a year and a half, we have been to the reservoir together in the spring rain to see the red mountains all over the mountains, in the summer dusk together to sit by the river to watch the sunset and sunset, in the autumn wind together to go up to the hill to see the golden pieces of wild chrysanthemums. In the winter, we go to the village to have dinner and tea with friends. It's been six or seven years since I left here, but some of the things here haven't changed much. As we sat on the edge of the high reservoir, we watched the sunset turn the clouds red. She told me about her failed marriage. She fell in love with a young man who worked in the county, and the two fell in love to death, but the boy's parents did not agree with him to find a peasant girl, and although the boy fought for a while, he still failed to defeat his parents. This hit her hard, made her lose faith in love, and then her parents forced her to marry her current husband. She was forced to comply. Because she is so beautiful, people often come to seduce her and harass her, so her husband does not dare to go out to work, and does not let her go out to work, so their family is now the poorest family in the whole village, and they have not even built a new house.

She lamented that her life was too bitter, and began to cry as she spoke. I wanted to comfort her and wipe her tears with a handkerchief. She suddenly put her arms around me, saying that she had always missed me and loved me very much, and kissed me like crazy. I have a deep sense of guilt and a lot of responsibility for the outcome of her life. Since I couldn't marry her, I shouldn't have been in love with her, but I was very hard, very depressed, very lonely, and she was so beautiful that I couldn't resist it. Seeing her so sad and sad, I couldn't refuse her, I could only comfort her so that she could feel better.

After a while, her mood slowly calmed down. I asked her if Cai Zhijun, a demobilized soldier, didn't like you very much. She told me that he was already the principal of the primary school in the village, and he was married to a female teacher in the school, but the female teacher was not beautiful at all, so he didn't like it very much, so he was still secretly in love with her, and her husband went out to work in the county last year, and during that time, Principal Cai often played mahjong in the school until late at night, and then entered her house through the back door. However, now that my husband is no longer out, they haven't been in contact for a long time. I was amazed that she was able to tell me such a secret, and I thought that such a thing should not be said to anyone, but she regarded it as a kind of dazzling. I think the reason why she did this was a kind of self-abandonment and self-consolation for her unhappy marriage. I have read many books on love tragedy, such as "Anna Karerina" and "Madame Bovary", etc., and I know that women cheat emotionally because they are dissatisfied with real marriages and want to satisfy their infatuation and pursuit of romantic love through extramarital affairs. I never dislike or despise such women, on the contrary, I feel that they are very unfortunate and pitiful. The same is true of Cui Yunxiu, she should have married a national worker or cadre, but she married a peasant who had no income. This is indeed the greatest tragedy of her marriage and love.

I haven't been to her since. About 10 years ago, I went back to the countryside again, and I drove there with a few educated youths. When I arrived in the village, the first thing my friend who became the village chief said to me was that Cui Yunxiu was dead. As soon as I heard it, I felt a thunderbolt ringing in my ears. I asked how he died. He told me that he had lung disease and had been dead for several years. I said that now that medicine is so advanced, even some cancers can be cured, how can you die if you get lung disease? My friend told me that her family was very poor, and she couldn't afford to see a doctor, so she kept fighting when she was sick, and finally slowly survived to death. Tears welled up in my eyes as I heard this. I thought to myself, if I knew that she had this disease and had no money to treat it, I would try to send her some money to treat her anyway. In the evening, when we were driving back to the county seat, my friend dropped us off at the river, and when we passed by her house, my friend pointed to the only bungalow in the village and told me that it was her house. The rest of the village is a two- or three-story building. In front of the door of the bungalow, a man on crutches was collecting a pile of grain. My friend told me that it was her husband, who almost died of a cerebral infarction two years ago, and he was sick but one leg was a little paralyzed. I wanted to go up to her grave on the hill to see her, and pick a bouquet of flowers to offer her, but I couldn't do so because of the presence of other classmates.

She is not my loved one and family, but she is someone I have loved. In the most difficult and difficult time of my life, she knew that I could not marry her, but she gave me so much love with her innocence and affection, so that I could gain enough strength and good feelings in hard work and loneliness. Her death added a tombstone to my heart, a heavy gray, and made me often cry when I thought of her, and felt a cold wind blowing sadly in the depths of my memory. In fact, in my heart, she has long been my dearest and dearest relative.