The Lesson Before I Quit Chapter 10

Pingchou Yuanfeng

Good seedlings and new ideas

Sitting in the east and sleeping in the west hall

The room of making but not telling

Mr. Wang had written calligraphy on several plaques that were to be hung in the memorial hall a few years ago. He had already made plans for all things involving paper and pen, such as inscriptions and signatures, so he would usually hide and finish them and put them away. For other things, Michael Mu was always hesitating and procrastinating whether he should do them or not. In the first few years of the new century, every time I went to New York to visit relatives and see him, the sink was filled with unwashed dishes. I wanted to wash them, but my husband always said flatly: "Don't do it! Let's talk." Then he looked at the words. In the meantime, he smiled quietly to himself:

How could Hamlet wash dishes every day? Do evil!

Michael Mu, what’s going on now, not just the dishes, is done one by one, but you can’t even see it. With the help of small children, in the past year, the three entrances of the south courtyard were finally turned into a family hall, a painting hall, and a literature hall. The exhibition walls of each hall were erected, and more than ten display cabinets were completed. Two places separated the three entrances. The small courtyard is planted with Hsinchu bamboo, plum trees, peach trees, and flourishing fresh grass. On the edge of the grass bed, a curved fence was woven by the town's gardener. The plaques in each hall and Michael Mu's calligraphy and paintings have been sent to be carved and framed. Fortunately, the manuscripts and relics are now ready. Kuang Wenbing, a student of Michael Mu in Zhaoming Academy, purchased more than 300 volumes of Republic of China edition books. In January next year After cleaning it up and starting to arrange it, I can already see the effect of putting these things in the display cabinets.

The important thing is the large number of manuscripts left by Mr. Wang. It is impossible for me to do it alone. Where are the scholars interested in this? Tong Ming, a long-term researcher of Michael Mu’s literature, is teaching in California. The only thing I can rely on is the publishing house. In mid-December, "New Weekly" awarded the annual book award to "Literary Memoirs". The ceremony was held in Wuzhen. Editor-in-chief Liu Ruilin, editors Cao Lingzhi, Lei Yun and Luo Danni went there together and spent three days cleaning up the manuscripts. .

On the day we arrived in Wuzhen, we were led upstairs to visit our husband. Everyone stood still and looked at the urn. Three ladies sobbed one after another and came forward to salute one after another. Except for the night of the award ceremony, we gathered day and night in the studio facing the north of Wanqing Xiaozhu. Each of us held a cup of hot tea in our hands and roughly classified my husband's fifty or sixty notebooks and thousands of pages of loose manuscripts. Dylan was loyal and attentive, and he paid attention to Michael Mu's scattered manuscripts on weekdays. After the funeral, he and Hazel Huang, the girl originally sent by the town to serve the husband, silently gathered all the manuscripts and waited for us to come. Now, it is necessary to go through a lot of trouble to identify which ones are scrapped and original manuscripts, which ones are early and late. Those that have been published and those that have not been published will have to be reviewed again and again in the future. On the night of December 15th, all the classified manuscripts were labeled, registered, and returned to the safe. The project of publishing the manuscripts was finally on its way.

The first time I read Michael Mu's manuscript was on the same day two years ago. At that time, my husband was locked in the intensive care unit of Tongxiang Hospital and was unconscious. We had nothing to do before the visit at 3pm. As I was flipping through it quietly, I suddenly realized that my husband's consent was not given. Another sharp realization quickly followed: There is no such thing as consent, it is completely gone.

Shocked, solemn, and confused, looking at the desk full of manuscripts, I seemed to be at a loss for Michael Mu's life. Over the decades, I watched my husband write, revise, discard, and start over again. The sixty-six pages of the manuscript he wrote in prison were carefully folded by him, sewn into his cotton trousers, and later taken out of the cell... Two years ago, yes, on this day, I realized that Michael Mu had abandoned his lifelong manuscript.

go Go

my book

You enter the world from now on

It's a bad thing but a bad thing...

That afternoon was the last time I saw Michael Mu alive. Six days later, he died. Now, I found the above short sentence from the manuscript.

Some of these messy but beautiful manuscripts were written on various manuscript papers, and most were written on notebooks sold in New York stationery stores, with price stickers on the covers. Michael Mu was particular about clothes and utensils, but he didn't mind using cheap notebooks for writing - the manuscripts were neatly copied in traditional Chinese characters, and the writing was careful, elegant and graceful, while the manuscripts in cursive scripts were full of erasures; he would write in Count the number of words at the end of each line of vernacular poetry and consider the rhythm. The annoying thing is that every poem, every sentence, and every manuscript was rewritten at least four or five times and distributed on different pages of the manuscript. It is really difficult to judge which one is the original manuscript that he is satisfied with.

As he aged, his handwriting slowly changed: as the new century progressed, the strokes became crooked and the breath became weaker; throughout the 1990s, his writing was vigorous and full of energy, either in block letters the size of a grain of rice, careful and straight, or in vertical cursive writing. , the words and line spacing are tight, and the front and back of the page are filled arbitrarily; several notebooks only have three or five pages, and the entire volume is blank, while a large number of notebooks are filled with words, full, and additions are added horizontally and vertically between the pages. ---In 1983, I had an intensive relationship with my husband and saw his first batch of manuscripts after he resumed writing. After searching, I found nothing: no "No Walking Tomorrow" and no "Reflection of Colombia". , and there is no "Windsor Cemetery".

"I've written another article." He said on the phone. During those years, Michael Mu came to report every now and then.

"Oh, that's terrible, you are fierce..." "Jie" means "powerful" in Shanghainese.

"It's like spreading a pie, there's another one!"

"How was the writing?"

"Okay, it's okay."

There are usually three meeting places: one is the place where we "study abroad" at that time, the "Art Students League" cafe on 57th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan; the other is Central Park at the north end of the school; if it is winter, Michael Mu will come to my apartment. . Now that I think about it, it’s unbelievable: in those years, I read my husband’s manuscripts repeatedly. The first few times, like a child, he leaned over and read with me from the first line, pointed out some scrawled simple characters, explained the words I didn't understand in a few words, and then urged me to read on ---When looking at paintings and reading articles, I would shout: "Ah Michael Mu, this is a good sentence!" His response would be to quickly retreat to his upper body, stare at me, hold back his laughter, and try his best to say sternly: "Ah---Hey---Hey, you see it! "... Or he was stunned and murmured: "Hey, how do you know?"

The probability of this is not very high. Most of the time, I see that I have passed the passage that he is proud of, then he stops and points his finger somewhere on the manuscript: "Look here, do you see it?" Then he starts reading to himself. What sentence is it? It’s been so long that I can’t remember it. At that time, I was in my early thirties and my heart was fifty-eight or nine.

There were a few manuscripts that I unintentionally prodded, but he actually wrote them --- Go to Lincoln Center. I said, "Coughing at a concert venue, I don't have the ability to write about it." After the show ended, he still remembered it and murmured: "Coughing is not easy to write about." So there was "S. Bach's Cough Song". During the New Year, flowers bloomed in Central Park. Michael Mu slowly named the flowers and plants. I said it's strange, the flowers in America are not fragrant, how do you write that? ! He pretended to smell the flowers, and suddenly his expression was full of excitement: "The sweet-scented osmanthus bloomed in Hangzhou, oh---yo! The whole world is so fragrant that I fainted with the fragrance!" A few days later, he wrote "The Ninth Day of September"---It’s written, come and see me urgently. That day was at Jin Gao's house, and there was a room full of people talking noisily. He saw me reading silently to the wall, and suddenly he came over with a snicker on his face and whispered: "You are serious about this, I will be happy with you, I will be happy with you!" "As he said that, he handed over the cigarettes---Every time we break up, we often give each other a ride. One afternoon, by the way, it was in Jackson Heights. When I arrived at the station, Michael Mu said, let’s go for a walk. The long open-air platform, the street below, the rumble of cars, an old man and a young man standing in the wind, each lighting a cigarette - New York had not completely banned smoking at that time, it was like heaven - we were talking about people that day. In the loneliness of a foreign country, he refused to rest. When he was gagging on good sentences, Michael Mu stopped frustrated and looked at me with burning eyes. He held a cigarette and a lighter in both hands and said word by word: "People are afraid of loneliness, and they are so afraid that they are shameless." The point!" When he got home that day, he wrote "Bamboo Show".

It's been a long, long time. I remember. "...So Nietzsche Schopenhauer, how do you teach the Dharma?" It was at the Manhattan Central Subway Station. Michael Mu and I were still chatting in the dark: "Hey! One is Yin, one is Yang, and the other is borrowed from Buddhism. , one went to Greece...Have you ever seen two dogs mating? When it was done, his whole body trembled. "At the same time, his cheeks trembled, and he imitated the dog, "This is the will of life!"

The subway roared into the station, and the crowd got off and boarded in excitement. "So, only in the moment of coitus, people fight against death..." Michael Mu continued, while I escorted her into the carriage, sandwiched between the chests and backs of various passengers.

Last summer, my mother's tombstone was not ready yet, so it was scheduled to be done in New York this spring. When I left the airport, I secretly prepared to be very sad. Unexpectedly, I entered the house and put down my luggage. In the silence, my mother was everywhere. I was instantly embraced by the overwhelming kindness. I was so happy that I never cried. I curled up in my mother's arms at night. Go to bed and fall asleep immediately. It's ridiculous that people subconsciously search for the deceased. The only identification is actually the residence of the deceased. Then I understood why every time I went to Wanqing Xiaozhu, I didn't feel particularly uncomfortable. Just the shadows in the corridor and the sound of the floorboards suggested that my husband was there, not to mention that his urn was on the second floor.

That Michael Mu in New York has long since passed away. But the same platform, corner, stationery store, cigarette paper shop in Jackson Heights... I had been there countless times with my husband back then. After dinner, I took a walk and walked for a while. I came to the old residence where he wrote literary lectures and stood there blankly. The hallucination I had outside the incinerator two years ago no longer comes back - I have never dreamed of Michael Mu. If he lowers his hat, turns into a ghost, hides in the corner, and suddenly lets me see him, that would be enough friendship! Now I have searched for it, and the only one left who can be sure that he is facing him is this pile of manuscripts.

But the manuscript is not his. The reader imagines that Mr. is the "literary man" in the book and the photo. The one I miss is Sun Michael Mu. No one speaks this kind of old-fashioned Shanghainese to me anymore. What I write here can only be written Mandarin: "...No more? Then think about it and say a few more words, okay?" Read After reading the manuscript, having a painful chat, and being quiet for a while, he would smile playfully like this, shake off the ashes from his cigarette, and come to me to ask for compliments.

Who is not annoyed by people who are getting older and slower year by year? I am the only one who knows about all the difficulties, calculations, and difficulties in getting along with Michael Mu. I had to worry about and do chores for him along the way. Although I was willing, it was still very difficult. That year, I helped him move to Wuzhen and settle down. I was relieved. From then on, he had someone taking care of him, and I could rest far away. After that, I rarely called or visited him. To be honest, I was not as well known to the outside world. So good to Mr.

he knows. The temper of Zhejiang people, Michael Mu, my mother, is always unwilling to trouble others, and she is unwilling to tell the truth. Usually he knew that I was busy in Beijing, but he just kept silent. One time when we met and talked about "Retrograde Collection", the teacher suddenly said: "What you are doing is white-phase Mahayana." I was ashamed at the moment, and I didn't know what to do. Once again, we didn't talk to each other for a long time. When I called him, he said with a rare smile like before: "Well... if you have time, please call me and have a few words." I knew that he had something to confess and was holding back. , finally came to ask me for help.

What's the use of talking about this now! Seeing him lying on his back talking nonsense and about to die, I was like all the confused juniors who had to give up everything until this moment came. The first time I met him, we were crowded on the subway. The friend who accompanied him introduced us to each other, and he raised his eyes and looked at me intently. Now I look at the little B@st@ard who is two rounds younger than me, and I understand what happened back then. Sun Michael Mu---No matter how long human friendship lasts, whether it is years or decades, the beginning is always the best. Twenty-six years ago, on February 14, 1987, I cooked food in the newly purchased apartment to celebrate Michael Mu’s birthday. On that day, he turned sixty:

Like a seed, it thrives like a spring.

It is said that drums are at dusk and bells are at morning

The words of ambition are strong and the road is full of passion.

Do it but not express your longing but don’t dwell on it

A few days ago I asked, what flowers should I choose? He said, iris, so I bought six. It was a sunny day. When my husband came in and saw the flowers, he said they were very nice. When he saw the flowers, he would take a closer look and be silently surprised. Then he took out a hard copy with a gray and blue cover. Give me a notebook, open the front page, and there is this four-character poem ---

Dead Lin’s final poem: Ni’s father’s heart

Dian Lin Fenbi, this boy is so sad

Knock on the famous mountain before and pay homage to the person later

Get branches and hang corners to cross the river and leave flowers

Take the white eyes and reveal the history

Fortunately even Zaizai sings sincerity

Above and below: These two birthday photos were recently found among Michael Mu’s belongings. He still had long hair at that time, and now he looks so young, but at that time I thought to myself: Oops, Michael Mu has become an old man. In the photo, I saw those hair sticks from more than 20 years ago again. Iris, but forgot to buy a birthday cake with six small candles on it.