A silver Mercedes pulled off the wide, smooth highway and onto a side road that could only accommodate two cars in parallel, and from the side road to a rugged dirt road flanked by shoulder-high, verdant cornfields.

This car, which is rarely seen here, caught the attention of the young man: "Look at that car," he said to his father, who was walking beside him, "but it is beautiful, and if I had such a car, Manna would definitely be willing to go to the movies with me." ”

His father listened intently to the rustle of corn leaves, like the rubbing of silk cloth, and ignored him.

"Where do you think they're going?" The son asked with interest.

"I don't know," said the father.

"If he goes straight down, in a few minutes, he'll be in 'that place.'" The son was bold enough to say that "that place" was a wasteland, about twenty miles from here, and that at the edge of it stood a sign of "private land," but that he had never seen anyone but two faithful guards, and that the man who had bought it seemed to have forgotten it, and that he had neither built a factory on it, nor planted grapes in it, but left it as it was, motionless, and left it overgrown with weeds and barren fields. The young men, when they were bare-bottomed wild children, crawled in with a few daring accomplices, and they staggered and ran through the half-submerged weeds, waving their arms and calling hoarsely, and in their imagination, the grasshoppers and toads hidden deep among the grass stems and roots were insidious and cunning enemies, and the young warriors were to drive them out one by one—the children did not stop until they reached the long-crumbling stone house, and before the guards could come and blast them away, He also found several brass bullet casings covered in rust spots under a stone.

When they came home they were beaten more severely than any before, and the adults warned them harshly because the place was unlucky and dirty. The men spat at the mention of it, and the women trembled and crossed their chests.

"Is it because the owner of the land wants to develop it?" The young man said that he wished it was, because whatever the owner of the land intended to do with it. It's good for them, if it's a factory, he can go in and work, and the vineyard will need a lot of strong labor, and even if he whimily opens a hotel here, the guests of the inn can find an opportunity to sell them some small bits and pieces of their own work when they go out for a walk—the man from the big city who sees everything fresh, wants to buy everything, he has a skillful hand, and his mother's house is full of his masterpiece, a statue of Jesus made of thin strips of corn stalks. Lifelike insect specimens, tree roots carved into bowls and pots, and necklaces made from nut shells.

"Don't dream," his father rudely shattered his dream, "the curse on that land won't be removed even in another hundred years—those dolls...... Poor doll......" he said in a low voice, cooing. As if he was afraid of waking up something, he desperately spat on the ground until he spit all the water in his mouth.

***

"From here, we're going to go."

Anthony. Hopkins said.

He took his son's hand and led him forward, the silver Mercedes behind them.

The wide road has been lost to weeds, shrubs and small trees, and some of the tall trees on either side of the road have toppled over. More than that, they show a much more vitality than warm-blooded species, alive, leafy, deep-rooted, with dark gray canopies that obscure the sky.

Hey, Anthony doesn't need to open the Palace of Memory. I can recall how he ran in these dark green shades, wearing knee-high shorts, shirtless, but with a pair of fine lambskin boots on his feet—the slate on the road was clean, and the industrious gardener would go back and forth every day. Pulling out the newly sprouted grass from the cracks, he handed the tender grass to the cook, who raised a group of yellow pompom-like chickens, the chickens love to eat this, she threw the crushed grass directly on the black mud ground, the green grass, exuding a little pungent smell, the chickens with the fishy smell of eggshells, chirping and crowding a large group.

He had also smelled this smell on his sister's body, and the nanny put water in the copper basin to let the sun heat them, and then put the fat little girl in the basin and told her brother to take care of her.

He plucked the eggplant for Sasha, and the eggplant was hot and soft, and he held the eggplant as if he were holding Sasha's arm. Sasha was always hot and chubby in his memory, even on the last day.

When did eggplant not exist? In the spring of the following year, before the eggplant had time to turn his head down, war broke out, and their country was small, rich, and without a strong alliance, and his father leaned back by the fireplace with apprehension to listen to the radio, and hostile nations attacked them, and friendly nations attacked them, and the interior was still pouring into each other, and at most, the bullets of five nations were whistling in this small land, and the blood of the soldiers was watering the scorched land instead of rain— Their king held on as long as his weak, slender body could, quietly abandoning his plundered country at the dawn of early spring.

Their estate was just a small farmstead, but it was full of dogs, horses, sheep, cows, workers, gardeners, grooms, housekeepers, cooks, nannies, and the first to disappear were the prime men, because the army needed to replenish new blood, and then the young women were also requisitioned, the cattle and sheep were taken away, the cheese-colored, skilled hounds were boiled into dog broth, Anthony's father was left behind because his arm was injured in the early years of hunting, and he and Anthony's mother disappeared on their way to the city to listen to news and buy necessities, Some say there were robbers with loaded guns on the road, and they couldn't even find the bodies.

The hunchbacked groom and his cook's wife remained on the manor to take care of the two young masters, and there was very little to eat in the farm, and the rye, buckwheat, potatoes, and corn in the fields were wiped out by the hungry soldiers before they were ripe, and the groom took the place of the gardener, and he plucked the little grass from the middle and on both sides of the road, the kind they used to feed the chickens, mixed in the corn soup, and there were no chickens to feed anyway, and the ground grass, the kind of weeds that crisscrossed the ground and spread for miles, Its stems are born in the superficial soil, plucked up, knots, stripped of the outer thin seeds, and the inside is white and sweet, and its unspoiled flower spikes can be eaten; There are also twigs of chickgrass, amaranth, dandelion and rose, .......

Anthony. Hopkins walked forward calmly, his hand resting on Sand's shoulder, the stems and roots of the weeds shattering at their feet.

The farm had no gate, only a low wall, and two black cast-iron gates, which were later torn down by someone in one night, and which were solid iron, and could be exchanged for bread.

The low wall embraced a quiet, once beautiful courtyard, a square pond with white, flesh-colored and snow-blue water lilies, a large yellow trumpet daffodils beside the pool, and a trellis not far away hung with light purple vines, white and red roses, and roses, their spines were black and long, so sharp that they could almost be used to fork fruit, and their flowers were as big as a little sand face.

They were all plucked out, like the eggplant, cucumber, and tomato that the cook raised, because there was always someone who wanted to eat it, and one man hollowed out the roots of the water lilies, which he thought were the same thing as the roots of the lotus flowers, that is, the lotus roots.

They drained the pond of water and tried to dig frogs and loaches out of the mud to eat, but there were only one or two wild fish the size of a finger, and the cook and the groom had long since turned over the pond.

Dust, dead leaves and weeds filled the pond, and the statue standing in the middle of the pond, holding a water bottle on its shoulder, with one foot in the water, its serene face was broken into several pieces, and the arm holding the water bottle was missing, and its cracked face was sad and helpless towards a clump of ryegrass.

A hamster scurried past Sasha's feet, its earthy yellow, gills almost as large as its body.

The cook and the groom were good men and very good at using their brains, and the cook hid the last remaining salted meat and pickled fish under the cover of the manure tank, and the corn was ground into flour, salted, and made bricks, and coated with plant ash and built on the inside of the fireplace, and they dug out turtles, toads, and eels from the pond, beetles and earthworms from the dirt, and dug up the nests of hamsters and voles, and dried the little meat in the sun, rolled it into balls, and put it in their toy boxes.

But these have been found, and those who have not experienced extreme hunger cannot imagine that one day the nose and tongue of a human being will be able to exert extraordinary effects like dogs and snakes.

(To be continued)