Passing through the long tunnel at the county border, you will find the polar region. It was white under the night sky. The train stopped in front of the signal post.

A girl stood up from the seat across from her and opened the glass window in front of Ah Hua's seat. A blast of cold air swept in. The girl leaned out of the window and cried out as if calling into the distance:

"Mr. Stationmaster, Mr. Stationmaster!"

A man with a scarf wrapped around his nose and a hat pulled to his ear walked slowly through the snow with a lantern in his hand.

Ah Hua thought to himself: Is it already so cold? He looked out the window and saw that the wooden houses used as temporary dormitories for the railway personnel were scattered at the foot of the mountain, giving people a feeling of cold silence. The snow over there has long been swallowed up by darkness.

"Mr. Stationmaster, it's me. Hello!"

"Yo, isn't this Miss Yezi! Go home? It's a cold day again. ”

"I heard that my brother came here to work, and I would like to thank you for taking care of me. ”

"In a place like this, sooner or later it's going to be very lonely. It's a young age, it's pitiful!"

"He's still a kid, please Mr. Stationmaster always guide him, please. ”

"Okay. He's done a great job, and he'll be busy in the future. Last year, there was also heavy snowfall, and there were often avalanches, and as soon as the train broke down, the villagers were busy bringing water and food to the passengers. ”

"Mr. Stationmaster seems to be wearing a lot of clothes, and my brother wrote to him that he is not wearing a suit and vest yet. ”

"I'm wearing all four! The boys drank vigorously in the cold, and now they all caught a cold and lay there lying on their backs. The stationmaster shook the lantern in his hand towards the dormitory.

"Did my brother drink too?"

"Not really. ”

"Mr. Stationmaster, this is going home?"

"I was injured and went to the doctor every day. ”

"Ah, that's terrible. ”

The stationmaster, who was wearing a coat over his clothes, turned around as if he wanted to end the chatter quickly in the cold and said, "Okay, please take care of yourself on the road." ”

"Mr. Stationmaster, hasn't my brother come out yet?" Ye Zi searched the snow with his eyes, "Please take care of my brother, please." ”

Her voice was beautiful and almost mournful. The loud voice echoed in the snowy night for a long time.

The train was moving, and she hadn't retracted her upper body from the window yet. Waiting for the train to catch up with the stationmaster who was walking on the side of the railway, she shouted again:

"Mr. Stationmaster, please tell my brother to come home next time he takes a vacation!"

"Okay!" the station chief agreed.

Ye closed the window and covered his cheeks with his hands.

This is a mountain at the prefectural border, and there are three snowplows at the bottom of the mountain for use on snowy days. To the north and south of the tunnel, an electrically controlled avalanche alarm line was erected. Five thousand snowplows and two thousand youth members of the fire brigade were deployed.

The younger brother of this leaf girl has been working at the railway signal that will be covered in snow since this winter. After Ah Hua learned about this situation, he became more and more interested in her.

However, the "girl" mentioned here is just Ah Hua's opinion. Who the man next to her was, Ah Hua naturally didn't know. The two behaved a lot like husband and wife, and the man was obviously sick. When accompanying patients, it is easy to ignore the boundaries between men and women, and the more attentive they are, the more they look like husband and wife. When a woman cares for a man older than her own like a mother, she will inevitably be seen as husband and wife from afar.

Ah Hua watched her alone, and based on her demeanor, he deduced that she might be a girl. Maybe it was because he stared at this girl with an overly curious gaze, so he added a lot of sentimentality to himself.

It was three hours ago. Ah Hua was bored, staring at the index finger of his left hand in a daze. Because only this finger could make him feel clearly the woman he was about to meet. Oddly enough, the more anxious you are to recall her clearly, the more vague the impression becomes. In this confusing memory, there was only a few touches left by this finger that brought him to the woman in the distance. Thinking about it, he couldn't help but put his finger to his nose and sniffed it. When he unconsciously used this finger to scratch the windowpane, somehow, a woman's eyes were clearly reflected on it. He was so startled that he almost cried out. Probably because his heart flew into the distance. When he looked intently, there was nothing. Reflected in the glass window is the image of the woman seated opposite. It was dark outside, and the lights in the carriage were on. In this way, the window pane becomes a mirror. However, due to the heating, the glass was covered with a layer of water vapor, and the mirror didn't actually exist until he rubbed his fingers on the glass.

Only one eye of the girl was reflected in the glass, but she looked even more beautiful.

Ah Hua put his face close to the car window, pretending to be watching the twilight scenery with travel sorrow, and rubbed the window glass with his palm.

The girl leaned slightly and looked down at the man lying in front of her with all her attention. Her cautious movements, her unblinking serious gaze, all showed her sincere feelings. The man lay his head by the window, resting his bent legs beside the girl. This is a third-class carriage. Their seats were not directly opposite Ah Hua, but diagonally opposite. So only half of the face of the man lying on his side was reflected on the windowpane.

The girl was sitting diagonally opposite, and Ah Hua could have seen her directly, but when they first got into the car, his charming beauty surprised him, and he couldn't help but lower his gaze. At this moment, Ah Hua saw the man's sallow hand tightly gripping the girl's hand, and he was embarrassed to look at the other side again.

The man in the mirror, only when he looked at the girl's chest, did his face look serene and calm. The emaciated body, though weak, carries with it an atmosphere of peaceful harmony. The man put the scarf under his head, went around his nose, and tightly covered his mouth before covering his cheeks upwards. It's like a way to protect your face. But the scarf sometimes comes loose and sometimes covers the nose. At the moment when the man's eyes were about to move but did not move, the girl used gentle movements to re-wrap the scarf. The two innocently repeated the same action, which made Ah Hua look a little anxious. In addition, the hem of the coat that wraps around the man's feet is loosened and pulled down from time to time. The girl immediately noticed this and re-wrapped him. It all seemed very natural. That gesture almost made one think that they had forgotten the distance and walked towards the boundless distance. Because of this, Ah Hua saw this sorrow and did not feel bitter, as if he had seen a phantom in a dream. Probably because they were conjured up in an illusory mirror.

The view of dusk moves behind the mirror. In other words, the virtual image reflected in the mirror and the real object behind the mirror are shaking like overlapping shadows in a movie. There is no connection between the characters and the background. Moreover, the figure is a transparent illusion, and the scenery is a hazy undercurrent in the night haze, and the two dissolve together, depicting a world of symbolism beyond the human world. Especially when the lights in the mountains and fields were reflected on the girl's face, the indescribable beauty made Ah Hua's heart almost tremble.

Above the distant mountain tops, there is still a faint afterglow of the sunset. The silhouette of the scenery seen through the window glass has receded into the distance, but it has not disappeared, but it has been eclipsed. Although the train continued to run forward, it seemed to him that the ordinary posture of the mountain field seemed more ordinary. Since nothing caught his eye very much, there seemed to be a huge emotional torrent in his heart. This is naturally due to the fact that the girl's face appears in the mirror. Only the part of the figure reflected on the windowpane obscures the twilight outside the window, but the scenery is constantly moving around the girl's silhouette, making it seem that the girl's face is also transparent. Is it really transparent? It's an illusion. For the twilight that passed from behind the girl's face seemed to flow through the front of her face. I looked at it, but I was confused. The carriage is also not too bright. The reflection on the window pane is not as clear as a real mirror. The reflection is gone. This made Ah Hua look into his eyes, and he gradually forgot the existence of the mirror, and only felt that the girl seemed to be floating in the passing twilight.

At this moment, the girl's face flashed with light. The clarity of the image in the mirror does not diminish the lights outside the window. The lights did not erase the image. The light flashed across her face, but it didn't illuminate her face. It was a cold light from afar, dimly illuminating the surroundings of her eyes. The moment her eyes overlapped with the lights, she was like a berossing and beautiful glow-in-the-dark insect flying in the afterglow of the setting sun.

Ye Zi naturally didn't notice that others were observing her like this. Her heart was all about the patient, even if she turned her face to Ah Hua, she would not see her figure reflected in the windowpane, let alone pay attention to the man looking out the window.

Ah Hua peeked at the leaves for a long time, but he didn't think that it would be rude to her to do so, he was probably attracted by the illusory power of the twilight scene in the mirror. Perhaps Ah Hua was a little too serious when he saw her calling the stationmaster, and since then he has developed an unusual interest in her.

By the time the train passed through the signal station, it was already dark outside the window. As soon as the scenery flowing on the window pane disappeared, the mirror lost its attraction completely, and although Ye Zi's beautiful face was still reflected in the window, and the expression was still so gentle, Ah Hua found that she seemed to be very indifferent to others, and he did not want to wipe the blurred mirror.

About half an hour later, he didn't expect Ye Zi and the others to get off at the same station as Ah Hua, which made him feel as if something else would happen to him, so he turned his head away. A chill rushed from the platform, and he was immediately ashamed of his indecent behavior on the train, and walked in front of the locomotive without looking back.

The man grabbed the leaf by the shoulder, and was about to cross the track, when the station attendant raised his hand from the opposite side to stop him.

In the blink of an eye, a long line of trucks appeared out of the darkness, blocking them.

The innkeeper who came to solicit customers put on a strict winter coat, covered his ears, and wore long rubber boots, like a firefighter on the fire ground. A woman stood by the window of the waiting room, looking out over the tracks, wearing a blue cloak and a turban.

Since the heating brought down from the car has not completely dissipated from Ah Hua's body, Ah Hua has not yet felt the real cold outside. It was the first time he had encountered this polar winter, and he was intimidated by the way the locals dressed up.

"Is it cold enough to wear this?"

"Well, it's already a complete winter attire. The first night after the snow clears was particularly cold. It could drop to minus zero tonight. ”

"Is it already below zero?"

Ah Hua looked at the popular icicles in front of the eaves and got into the car with the innkeeper. Under the cover of snowy nights, the low roofs of every house seem to be lower and lower, as if the whole village is quietly immersed in a bottomless abyss.

"No wonder Luo, no matter what his hands touch, he feels very cold. ”

"Last year's coldest was more than minus 20 degrees. ”

"Where's the snow?"

"The snow is usually seven or eight feet thick, but when it gets bigger, I'm afraid it's one foot or two or three feet. ”

"The snow is still to come?"

"yes, it's the back of the road. This snow had fallen a few days ago, and it was only a foot thick, and it had melted almost. ”

"Can it melt away?"

"Maybe there's another big one sometimes. ”

It's already early December.

Ah Hua's cold is not always good, and at this moment, the cold air suddenly rushed from the unventilated nostrils to the heart of the brain, and the snot flowed non-stop, as if all the dirt was washed out.

"Is the girl from the master's family still there?"

"Well, it's still there, it's still there. Don't you see it at the station? ”

"That's her?...... Can you invite her when you come back?"

"Tonight?"

"It's tonight. ”

"The young master who said it was the old master came back on the last train, and she picked up the car. ”

The patient who saw Ye Zizhao in the twilight mirror turned out to be the son of the woman's master whom Ah Hua had come to meet.

Upon learning this, Ah Hua felt as if something had crossed his mind. But he didn't find it strange about this wonderful cause, but he didn't find it strange for himself.

Somehow, Ah Hua felt deep down in his heart that there would be a connection between a woman who remembered by the touch of her fingers and a woman with a light shining in her eyes, and what might happen. This is probably because he has not yet woken up from the mirror of the twilight scene. He muttered to himself for no reason: Are the passing of those twilight scenes a symbol of the passage of time?

Before the ski season, the hot spring inn is the time when there are the fewest customers, and Ah Hua came up from the indoor hot spring, and it was already lonely. He was in the dilapidated hallway, and with every step he took, the glass door crept slightly. At the corner of the tent at the end of the corridor, Tingtingyu stood a woman, the hem of her clothes spread out on the dark floor, giving people a cold feeling.

Seeing the hem of her clothes, Ah Hua couldn't help but be surprised: is she still a geisha after all? But she didn't come this way, nor did she move her body to make a delicate gesture to welcome customers. Looking from afar, her graceful posture made him feel a sincere feeling. He hurriedly walked over and stood silently beside the woman. The woman also wanted to open her face with thick powder, but it backfired and turned into a mournful face. The two of them walked silently towards the room.

Although that kind of thing happened, he didn't write from him, he didn't go on a date, and he didn't keep his promise to send a book on dance styles. In the woman's opinion, she must have thought that he laughed it off and forgot about himself. It stands to reason that Ah Hua should apologize or explain to her first, but Ah Hua didn't even look at her and kept moving forward. He sensed that she had not only not meant to reproach herself, but was admiring herself. This made him feel more and more that no matter what he said at this time, he would only be considered insincere. He was intimidated by her, and was immersed in wonderful joy, until he reached the top of the staircase, when he suddenly stretched out his left fist in front of the woman's eyes, raised his index finger, and said:

"It remembers you best. ”

"Really?"

The woman grabbed his fingers, did not let go, and went upstairs hand in hand. In kotatsu [Japanese heating equipment. Before putting a wooden frame on the charcoal stove and covering it with a quilt, when she let go of his hand, even the base of her neck turned red. In order to conceal this, she grabbed his hand again in a panic and said:

"Do you mean it still remembers me?"

He took his right hand from the woman's palm, put it into the hearth, and then stretched out his left fist and said:

"It's not the right hand, it's this!"

"Well, I know. ”

She pretended to be nonchalant and laughed as she pouted as she split his fist and pressed her face against it.

"Do you mean it still remembers me?"

"Oh, it's so cold! It's the first time I've ever touched my hair so cold. ”

"Isn't it snowing in Tokyo yet?"

"Even though you said that at the time, I always felt that it was against my will. Otherwise, at the end of the year, who would come to such a cold place?"

At that time, it was past the avalanche danger period, and it was green everywhere, and it was the season for mountain climbing.

It won't be long before there will be no fresh grass fruit on the dinner table.

Ah Hua has nothing to do, and the best way to regain his sincere feelings for nature and his own easy loss is to climb a mountain. So he often went to climb the mountain alone. He spent seven days in the mountains of the prefectural district, and as soon as he arrived at the hot spring baths that night, he had people call him a geisha. But the maid replied that it was a celebration of the completion of the new railway, and that the cocoon houses and theaters in the village were used as banquet venues, and that it was very lively, and that there were no more than twelve or thirteen geisha, so how could they be called? Ah Hua asked more carefully, and the maid made this brief explanation: Although the girl in the house of the shamisen and the dancer was not a geisha, she was sometimes called to some large banquets or something. There are no young people here, but there are many middle-aged people, but they don't want to dance. In this way, the girl is even more precious. Although she doesn't often go to the inn guest's room alone, she can't be said to be a flawless lady.

Ah Hua thought this was unreliable and didn't take it to heart at all. About an hour later, the maid brought the woman in, and Ah Hua couldn't help but be stunned and sat upright. The woman grabbed the sleeve of the maid, who was about to leave, and told her to sit down.

The impression of the woman is surprisingly clean, even suggesting that the crooks of her toes are probably clean. Ah Hua couldn't help but wonder if his eyes were due to the fact that he had just seen the mountains in early summer.

Although she was dressed like a geisha, the hem of her dress did not drag on the floor, and she wore only a soft single dress that fitted well. Only the belt is very disproportionate and looks expensive. This looks a little pitiful.

The maid took advantage of the two of them talking about the mountains, got up and left. However, even the names of the mountains that could be seen from this village could not be fully described by the woman. Ah Hua couldn't afford to drink, but the woman unexpectedly talked frankly about the fact that she also grew up in this polar region, and was ransomed while working as a waitress in a tavern in Tokyo, and planned to become a Japanese dance master in the future to make a living, but just a year and a half later, her benefactor passed away. Perhaps the experience from the person's death to today is her true life experience. She didn't want to confess it right away. She said she was nineteen. If so, the nineteen-year-old looked like he was twenty-one or twelve. Ah Hua was relieved a little and began to talk about things like Kabuki. She knows the actor's art style and anecdotes better than he does. Maybe she was longing for such a companion, so she relished it. Talking and talking, revealing the frank nature of a woman from Fireworks Alley. She seems to have a good grasp of men's psychology. Despite this, Ah Hua regarded her as a good girl from the beginning. In addition, he hadn't had a good conversation with others for almost a week, and his heart was naturally full of enthusiasm, and he first showed a kind of attachment to her. The sentimentality he brought from the mountains also soaked the woman's body.

The next afternoon, the woman put the bath in the hallway and ran to his room to play.

She was about to sit down when Ah Hua suddenly asked her to help find a geisha.

"You mean help?"

"Do you need to ask?"

"I never dreamed you'd ask me to do such a thing!"

She stood indifferently in front of the window, looking at the mountains on the county border, and her cheeks turned crimson.

"There's no such person here. ”

"Lying. ”

"It's true. As she spoke, she suddenly turned around and sat down on the windowsill,

"You can't force an order. Everything is at the convenience of the geisha. Seriously, our inn doesn't help with that. If you don't believe me, just ask someone directly. ”

"Look for me. ”

"Why do I have to do such a thing for you?"

"Because I think you're a friend. Treat each other as friends, not as pleasers of pleasure from you. ”

"Is this called a friend?" the woman finally came out with a childish remark. Then he said, "You are so amazing that you actually entrusted me with such a thing." ”

"What does it matter? I'm getting better on the mountain. But my brain is still confused, just talk to you, and the mood is not so happy. ”

The woman lowered her eyes and remained silent. In this way, Ah Hua simply showed the shameless appearance of a man. She has probably developed a habit of being reasonable and obedient to this. Because of the deep eyelashes, her drooping eyes appear more docile and delicate. Ah Hua looked at it, and the woman's face shook slightly to the left and right, and a blush appeared again-