When I woke up, the rat was galloping on the roof.

A rat runs like a wild horse galloping across the grassland, and a flock of rats runs, chasing, fighting and biting, like a thousand horses galloping.

I had just woken up from a dream, sweating profusely, the moon shining on the pane of the south window, the room was so quiet that I could hear the breath of the earth outside the window, and the chase and screaming of rats had ruined everything to the fullest.

I felt the smoke in the darkness, I felt the match, and the moment the match struck, the rats on the roof retracted. I smoked a cigarette and lay down with my eyes closed, waiting for the dawn......

After I was rehabilitated, my children went to work instead of me, my daughter had already married, and my wife and I were the only ones left in the house. My wife has long since stopped calling me husband, and I no longer look timid, she put her hands in her thick waist, and instructed me to go to the land, and do all the housework that she used to consciously undertake, at first there was a sense of revenge, and then it became a habit.

"What are you doing all day sighing?" she asked me, "Do you miss that wild woman?"

I said that I was carrying the burden of the right, and sighing became a habit.

"What are rightists afraid of? As long as you are paid, what factions are not the same!" she said indifferently, "I think it's not bad to be a rightist, but you have become well-behaved, and you don't dare to ...... with the wild anymore."

I can't get angry. If I had to open my mouth, she would shout and scream, deliberately so that the neighbors could hear me.

"Shall you go do the laundry?" she told me, "I have a back ache." ”

In the countryside, the habit of men washing clothes is not common, and when I walked to the well with my clothes in my arms, men and women were glancing at me. I just got over it.

"Roll out the dough. She said.

I learned to cook.

I understand that she's not just for enjoyment, but she's not a lazy woman. She asked me to do laundry and cook for me, and she would raise her status among the villagers, especially the women, who felt that the situation in the past was too much for others to look down on her.

After I retired and came home, she also got better: "We planted those two acres of land, which was enough to eat." The retirement money you received is enough to spend. As long as you don't want to be wild again...... I'll treat you well, and we'll be happy until we die......"

A year after saying this, she died suddenly, fell and suffered a myocardial infarction.

I lay alone on the kang in this ancestral house, listening to the rats galloping on the horses.

Someone else introduced me to the next woman. Even my children objected, saying that I was almost 60 years old, so I didn't even care about saving face? Uncle Wa was even more angry, saying that I had ruined the Xu family's style of reading and etiquette......

My elder sister and younger sister saw that my life was difficult, and persuaded my son and woman, plus you to do work for my eldest daughter, and finally reluctantly agreed.

I should have done this. But when it came time for me to do it, I wavered again. I can't tell why? I can't tell...... I always felt like I was still curled up in the small warehouse of Niuwangtou Primary School. That small storeroom does not allow others to enter and break the condensed air inside. In the same way, I felt uncomfortable leaving somewhere other than that little storeroom. Even though I retired and returned home, my heart seemed to be curled up in that little storeroom, unable to stretch out. Tian Fang was able to remove my blue robe, but now he couldn't stretch my curly spine......

I sent my Mr. Enlightenment down the hill.

The spring breeze blows the green river, but also blows the green slope, and it is the spring March when the apricot blossoms are full of peach blossoms. The wheat seedlings on the slope are green and lush, the weeds on the ridge are vigorous, and only the red stone soil color of the cliff between the ditch walls shows the dilapidated and ugly appearance of the Loess Plateau.

He walked up the slope and went back to the village of Yangxu where he had been on the ground. His back was hunched, and he walked slowly up the winding slope path one step at a time.

My heart seemed to be held in the hands of something.

From August to November 1985, it was drafted in the eastern suburbs of Xi'an