I walked towards the Registrar's Office with a leave of absence application in my hand.

I asked for a year off. I wrote an application for a leave of absence. At the same time as I submitted the written application to the class teacher, I also verbally stated the reasons for the suspension, and found that the oral statement of the reason for the suspension was more embarrassing than the written statement. Fortunately, the head teacher understood the same reason for my verbal and written statements, and without too many inquiries, he signed the opinion "I agree to the student's leave of absence for one year" in the blank space at the bottom of the application, and naturally signed his name and time. He then asked me to wait, and went out with the application I wrote, and when I came back, the application was signed by the principal, which was less than the head teacher's signature, and naturally more concise, only the word "agree", and even the name was so concise that there was only one surname, and the name was omitted. The head teacher said to me, "You can go to the Academic Affairs Office now to go through the formalities and issue a certificate of suspension." ”

I knocked on the door of the Registrar's Office. After receiving permission, he pushed the door open, and a young woman was hunched on a beige desk, holding a long rod dipping pen in her hand and writing something on a thick book, without looking up. I know that the Registrar's Office is busiest when it comes to registration, and it is busy with many forms to fill out. I walked over to her desk and bowed, "Teacher, give me a certificate of suspension." Then he handed the application with the names of the class teacher and the principal and their opinions on the table.

She looked up, gave me a surprised look, picked up my application and looked at it, the long rod dipped in the pen still between her fingers. She quickly finished reading it, and then focused on the line of opinions signed by the head teacher at the bottom of the page and the more concise opinions of the principal, as if the opinions of the two people, including their names, seemed to take more time than my half-page application. She finally looked up and asked:

"Are these reasons you wrote?"

"That's right. ”

"Can't you stop school?"

"No, I can't. ”

"Can't all the relatives help?"

"Relatives...... They are all poor. ”

"But...... If you take a year off from school, your family's financial situation may not change, so how can you guarantee that you will return to school after a year?"

So I confidently told her my father's precise plan: when my brother graduated from junior high school next year, my father planned to let him apply for a normal school, and the tuition and miscellaneous expenses and food expenses of the normal students would be provided by the state, and it was said that he would also be given three yuan in pocket money. At that time, I can go back to school and go to junior high school. I explained to her my father in an attempt to dispel her doubts about whether I would be able to return to school: "My uncle said that he could only afford one middle school student, and that he could not afford my two brothers to attend secondary school at the same time. ”

I didn't explain any more. My face-loving weakness has already been formed. I don't want to repeat to anyone the plight of our family. His father was a pure farmer and supported two sons who were studying in secondary school at the same time. My brother is in a county middle school more than 40 miles away from home, and I am studying in a newly built middle school in Xi'an, which is more than 50 miles away from home. At home, my brother and I can put together a quilt, and it doesn't matter if it's old. First my brother, then I had to leave home to go to boarding schools in the county and provincial towns to go to middle school, and each of them had to have a set of bedding, tuition, miscellaneous expenses, food expenses, and all kinds of expenses increased unprecedentedly. In fact, when it was my turn to be admitted to junior high school, it was no longer the glory and joy of showing off my talent in the examination, but instead it became a thick cloud of gloom and gloom over the courtyard of my home. My outfit was no longer like my brother's, with a new set of quilts, mattresses and sheets, and was reduced to a single old quilt rolled into a small roll and carried to the school in the city. My slippery bed was bare all day long, with wide gaps in the wooden board, and at night I spread half and half covered the quilt. I can't have my father deliver a whole bag of flour to the school stove like my brother did, but I have to go home every Saturday and carry a bag of mixed noodles to school, because the school stove management system stipulates that all wheat noodles should be handed over, and our family is always short of wheat noodles and there is plenty of grain noodles. I didn't realize that there was anything wrong with this kind of life, because the number of students who went to school with steamed buns far exceeded the number of students who could afford to build a stove, and every three meals, the students with steamed buns lined up in front of a row of water taps on the boiling stove in five or six long lines, and packed the broken buns of various colors into their own large enamel jars, soaked in boiling water, and then ate in groups of three or five around the table tennis table"Aristocracy".

This kind of study life is finally unsustainable. My father provided the breadwinner for the two middle school students, one was selling grain and the other was selling trees, and I was most impressed by selling trees. My father liked to plant trees since he was young, and along the irrigation canals at the head of four or five tidal lands in our family, there was a pure color of the fastest growing poplar tree, dense enough to be less than a step, thick enough to make purlins, thin enough to be used as rafters. My father's sale of trees has long broken the common rule of first big and then small, then thick and then thin, and everything depends on the needs of the buyer. If you need purlins, you can choose the thick ones, and if you need the rafters, let them cut down the thin ones. All the tickets I received were handed over to the school by my brother and me, or in exchange for books, textbooks, homework books, and my brother's food tickets and my boiling water bill. After the tree was sold, my father couldn't wait to dig up the roots, and the finger-thick hair roots were not easily discarded, so he split the roots into small pieces and dried them, and then put them in two large bamboo cages and picked them up to go to the market, and sold them to those restaurants, pharmacies or supply and marketing cooperatives in the market town. The highest current price of a hundred catties of chopping wood was five cents a piece, and the money obtained was spent through the same channels mentioned above. Until all the poplar trees on the beach were cut down in just three or four years, and the roots of the trees were dug up in the ground, leaving a row of newly planted poplar branches or small trees the thickness of a wrist on the bank of the canal......

After the first semester of junior high school, I returned home from winter vacation and had a premonition that something important was about to happen. The festive atmosphere that pervades the village streets of the New Year contrasts sharply with the deep-seated anxiety that my father's brow is so strong that it was not until the evening of the first day of the new year that my father made a long-planned decision: "You have to take a year off from school, a year." He emphasized the one-year time frame. I wasn't too surprised. Throughout the semester, I longed to be home on Saturday and dread to be home on Saturday. I had just turned thirteen years old, and I had never traveled far away, and when I did, I was in a strange city more than fifty miles away, and I could only go home on Saturday to carry the steamed buns, not to mention the desperate craving for a bowl of noodles caused by boiling water three times a day. However, every Saturday after eating a bowl of fragrant noodles, I went into a relationship crisis, and I had to name the amount of money I would have to take when I returned to school tomorrow, a one-dollar class due, or a five-cent collective purchase of haircutting tools. I know that a rafter five zhang long can only be sold for five cents a piece, and a rafter long one zhang only has a floating area of eight cents to a piece. I often folded it up before I asked for the amount of money, and this time I had to carry away one or two rafters from my father, or how many catties of tree roots were used to chop wood. I had to withdraw the money in advance on Saturday night so that my father could go and borrow it calmly. Whenever this happens, I see my father's suddenly gloomy face and eyes, mixed with a short sigh. I bowed my head or turned my face away from my father's face. My mother's face was equally sad, and I seemed to be able to see it, but once my father's face was like that, I could not bear to look at it or dare not look at it. My father was born with a majestic complexion, high eyebrows, big eyes, a straight high nose bridge and two powerful grooves on both sides of the nose, and the sorrow knotted on such a face seemed to be unbearable...... I have thought more than once, why do I have to go to middle school? Aren't there many peers in the village who are still happily mowing the grass for the cows and collecting firewood from the stove before they have passed the junior high school examination? Why should I periodically create sorrow on my father's face...... My father then told me about his strategy for getting my brother to apply for the teacher training exam in a year's time, so that I could go back to junior high school. He was afraid that it would affect the family's New Year's celebration, so he didn't say it until the first day of the new year. I said, "Hugh." My father comforted me and said, "It doesn't matter if you take a year off, you're young. "I don't think it's too serious to take a year off, because many of the more than 50 male and female students in my class have been married, both fathers and mothers. This was not surprising in the early fifties, when there was no age limit for rural youths who were given the opportunity to go to school after liberation. I was the youngest and shortest in the class, and I sat at the first desk. I said lightly, "When I get taller in a year, I won't sit at the front desk in the front row - my neck hurts ...... twisted in class."

She put down the long wooden pole between her fingers, dipped her pen, closed a very thick and long register, stood up and said, "You wait, I'll come." I sat in a chair and waited, wondering what she was going out for. After a while she returned, a little excited and a little excited, and as soon as she sat down in her chair, she said, "I'm going to find the headmaster...... and I understood where she was, and seemed to verify one of my several conjectures, and my heart fluttered. She didn't say what she said to the principal, or what the principal told her. She now leaned her hands on the edge of the table and lowered her eyes, not saying a word for a long time. She breathed a sigh of relief, and when she raised her head, I found that the excitement had receded, and the gentle and charming complexion gradually returned to the corners of her eyes and eyebrows, and there seemed to be a faint hint of helplessness.

She breathed a sigh of relief again, opened the drawer, took out a copy of the official text, flipped it on the table, took out the wooden rod from the pen holder, dipped the ink bottle in the inkwell, and then stopped, and asked, "You can't think of a way at home?" I looked at the melancholy eyes, and suddenly thought of my sister's eyes. Such a look is enough to calm any heart tormented by pain, enough to soothe any soul that is exhausted by pain, enough to make a person quietly endure pain and calamity without sinking. It dawned on me that the simplest reasoning that she was in a bad mood because of my suspension of school was the least desirable among the principal, the class teacher, and her. She was a young staff member in the Academic Affairs Office, and I barely spoke to her, and I still can't remember her name. I said, "Teacher, it's okay. It doesn't matter if you take a year off, I'm young. She said, "It's a pity to delay for more than a year in vain!" and then said in a different tone, "I know your name and I know you." I know the top three students in each class. My mood suddenly darkened and I didn't speak again.

She finally put pen to paper, filled out the official letter, took out the official seal and stamped it underneath, and stamped a seam seal on the cutting line, squeaked it off and did not hand it to me, put it on the table, and then smeared my application for leave of absence with paste and pasted it on the official document stub. After all this, she picked up her leave certificate again, handed it to me and said, "Load." Come to me with it when you return to school next year. "I folded the cardboard certificate twice and put it in my pocket. She walked around the table, took it out of my pocket and stuffed it into my bag, and said, "You must come back to school next year." ”

I bowed deeply to her and walked out the door. I heard the sound of the door closing behind me, and at the same time I heard a "wait". She walked toward me with her shoulder-length neat hair, and walked side by side with me on the steps under the eaves, her hands in the pockets of her coat. Walking through one window after another, walking through the front and back doors of one classroom after another, male and female students entering and exiting the campus and classrooms, some were busy registering to pay fees, some had already walked into the classroom with stacks of new textbooks and new homework books, and there were latecomers who had just come in from the school gate with bags of rolls on their backs. I was suddenly in a very uncomfortable mood, and I was relieved after obtaining a leave of absence? I did not want to see the familiar faces of my classmates, so I lowered my head and hurried up, and I could tell by feeling that she also quickened her pace, and walked out of the school gate almost at the same time as me.

A group of students from remote areas gathered at the school gate, and familiar classmates asked me again and again, "You came early! She shouted "Wait" again. I stopped. She walked over and patted my bag: "Sensei lost her leave of absence." I nodded. Only then did she have a word of comfort for me, "I agree with your plan, it doesn't matter if you take a year off, you are young." ”

I looked up at her, and suddenly I saw tears overflowing from the long eyelash sockets, like a lake overflowing in the rain and mist, and the tears swirled in the eyes, crystal clear. I immediately lowered my head away from her gaze. If I had stayed in her eyes for a second longer, I would have burst into tears. I bit my lip with my head down, blindly fiddling with a broken tile under my feet to suppress my emotions, and felt a hot sour stream pouring from my nose into my throat. I have had this kind of reflux many times throughout my life, and the channel of reflux was first opened in the ring of life when I was thirteen years old. The channel of the back-flowing acid water that was dredged for the first time must have been narrow, and it could not withstand so much acidic water, so there was still a small stream that came out of the eyes, blurred the eyes, and was easily wiped off with the sleeve. I finally raised my head and puffed up my energy and said, "Teacher...... I'm going to ......."

Her hand gently put on my shoulder: "Remember, I will report to school today next year." "I saw two crystalline tears slip down my eyelashes and fall on the valley between my face and nose, and slowly flow through them and hang on either side of my nose. I bowed deeply again reverently, and then turned and walked away.

……

Twenty-five years later, when my father, who sold trees and roots (chopping wood) for my education, was dying of cancer, he said to me, "I can't stand you for one thing......

I was overwhelmed with surprise.

"I shouldn't have let you take that year off from school!"

I shuddered and was speechless for a long time. I flew into the sky like I had been blown into pieces by a ton of fierce TNT, and I seemed to have fallen into a thousand-year-old ice cellar and froze my limbs and my body and heart. In the boundless hesitation and depression of my high school graduation and return to the countryside, I used to complain like a monkey: "All of them were unlucky to ......study in that year" My graduation in 1962 coincided with the most difficult years of China's economy, the number of college admissions was greatly reduced, our class was shaved, and the four classes only scored a single digit, and among the graduates of the previous year, 50% of the students in our non-key school were admitted to university. If I hadn't taken a year off, I would have graduated in 1961...... The father said, "Miss a year...... Twenty years missed you...... And now you're still making a name for yourself......"

I felt that the fragments of the explosion came back to the original me, and when the frozen limbs were free, the frozen body was flexible, and the frozen heart jumped again, and suddenly remembered the crystal tears that overflowed the eyes and hung on the wings of the nose when I took a break from school. I told my father, who had already taken half a step into the Yellow Springs Road and still confessed to me, about the teardrop experience, and my father, whom I called Uncle, closed his eyes peacefully and murmured, "But you ...... How...... Don't give me ...... sooner Say this gentleman is ......."

When I finally write about this experience nearly forty years ago today, I am praying to myself. When all kinds of desires swell into a powerful turbidity current that hits all the doors and windows and every heart, I hope that the tears of my own tears like a female teacher will not be clogged and dare not be exhausted, which is the source of nourishing the soul of life and the source of nourishing the national spirit......