Passing by Donna's house, I never heard her guitar sound again. I often went into the mountains for logging, and each trip took several days. I indulged in novels, which showed me the vastness of the world, a dream-like life, and mysterious love. Sometimes I couldn't help but imagine Donna in it. I also learned from Dashang, carrying a drawing board on my back, drawing a bit of this and a bit of that, and I started to have a feel for the art. When Dagui went to Beijing to visit his family, I asked him to buy some guitar strings for me, waiting to surprise Donna.
Occasionally, I met her by the well or in the big dining hall, but she seldom spoke to me. At most, she said a word or two or smiled at me and left. Each time I saw her in her patched pants, hugged by the sun, or heard her distinctive footsteps, I felt that she was more charming then. It always made my heart feel like a little lotus blooming. I remembered the words from the famous book, "beautiful maiden with an air of joy and sadness," and it was fitting for her. She's like a flower in the sun, wafting in front of you then disappearing and waiting for days to come before being bright again.
I wanted to have the opportunity to ask her how I could spend the long days in that large rubber forest. Could you share the taste of freedom and loneliness with the morning mist and the dance with the star dew?
Since Donna's father died a year ago, her mother's income had not been able to support her four sisters. To take care of her family, the farm agreed that Donna could drop out of high school to work as a rubber tree worker to get a salary though she was underage. Thus, she managed a large rubber forest on the mountain.
Her father was a company commander. Last year, he led a team to bomb a mountain, but one of the explosive packs failed to explode, and a Zhiqing under his command rushed recklessly to clear the mine. To stop the young man, Donna's father chased after him, but the explosive went off, causing a major accident in which two people died. Her father died for a good reason but was not treated as a martyr.
When it came to that Zhiqing, everyone shook their heads. He often did some wild things. He liked to ride his bike to chase a truck, hitting the rear of trucks more than once. They would ask him to pick up the bricks on the scaffolding at the construction site as punishment. He didn't know how to stop his reckless behavior. He asked people on the ground to pass bricks to him until the structure was crushed, and he and the bricks fell from the air.
Donna lost her father, and her fate changed because of this. Other teenagers were still playing in the school, and she had already taken up the responsibility of supporting her family.
***
The stories I wrote about the labor of the logging team were broadcast on the battalion headquarters' loudspeakers, and some of them were even included in the regiment's propaganda publications. Colleagues in the logging unit were thrilled that their hard work was noticed. They took me to drink, taught me to smoke, talked to me about women, and asked me to continue the writing, saying that the logging unit needed female workers - even one would do. I agreed, but I didn't know how to write a claim. The guys were so naughty. How could the female workers go up the mountain with them?
Fortunately, the battalion's middle school principal fancied me and asked me to work at the school as a junior high school teacher, so I put behind the need for female workers in the logging unit. Siyan said, "It is good to change your place. The guys would spoil you in no time."
The principal brought a stack of textbooks and put them on my desk, letting me decide what I was going to teach. I asked him to assign which one needed a teacher and which one I was going to teach.
Now, I had more opportunities to sit down. Preparing the classes for junior high school was relatively easy for me. It didn't take much time to memorize textbooks. Therefore, I had more time to read Siyan's collection, always looking for the shadow of Donna in those romantic stories and worshiping the beautiful and brave, loyal and romantic heroine. My sketching had also improved a lot. I had drawn my students repeatedly, and I had drawn Donna more than once in my heart.
***
A few months later, someone took a fancy to my cleverness again. I was teaching German geography, and the principal brought a dozen people into the classroom and stood behind the students. I didn't pay much attention to them and continued to lecture. After class, I learned that those people were from the regiment headquarters, the Teaching Observation Group. They asked me for my consent to transfer me to the regiment headquarters middle school. The salary could be increased from forty to fifty yuan.
"How did you do it?" the head of the observation group asked me, "You only need a map, no lecture notes. The mountains, rivers, landforms, resources, and humanities are all in your mind." Truthfully, I didn't know how I did it. A geography class, to me, was like telling a story that didn't need much effort.
I turned down her proposal without much thought. Other teachers felt sorry for me giving up such a good salary, but I was full of fantasies about waiting to listen to Donna's guitar music.
My father noticed my writing skills and asked me to write a speech for him one day to welcome a veteran of the Navy, Zhongwei Gao. He initially requested Jialin Chen to write it, and it was her job. But she was in a good mood and talked too much that day. She told my father a joke: "Commander, no need for a manuscript for this kind of speech!" She was transferred to the Animal Husbandry unit the next day without a chance to explain, and I became an amateur writer.
***
At noon one day, I was having lunch with my family when Donna suddenly showed up in my kitchen. She eagerly said to my mother, "Is the battalion commander here? My uncle and the people from the tribe are arguing with the Commissioner in the office about the mountain fire."
My mother felt that the matter was serious and told her, "The battalion commander has gone to the training at the regimental headquarters. You check with your uncle first, and I will search for the deputy battalion commander."
Donna looked at me as if she wished I were the battalion commander. She stomped her feet involuntarily. The uneven dry soil under her feet cracked a piece. She ran her fingers around her hair and left my house disappointed. I put down the bowl, caught up with Donna, and told her I'd go take a look, thinking of doing something for her.
When Donna and I got there, we saw her uncle Kerte and some of the men from the tribe huddled in the Commissioner's office, surrounding him with muskets slung over their shoulders and trails of sparks that had been rubbed out of the air. The Commissioner called the commander of the affiliated company and asked him to bring some armed militiamen. The Commissioner was in his forties, and he was also a retired soldier. He always had a sullen face, as if he had never seen a sunny day, and his front teeth were yellowed by his smoking. He had always been at odds with my father, and unlike an all-around political cadre, I heard that he got connections at the top ranks.
When I was four or five years old, whenever he saw me, he would widen his eyes, use his fierce look to frighten me, and ask me loudly, "Are you afraid?" I had to avoid a scary him at a distance. Until one day, he asked again, and I replied, "I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid of ghosts even!" From then on, he couldn't do anything about me.