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Chapter 43 2/2
Some time later, he walked with her side by side, the guitar strapped to his back, and his hand holding her slim shoulder. The intimacy they were exhibiting was indeed a bit ostentatious. But since the path they took was a short cut to the outskirts of the campus, they wouldn’t likely run into any students or teachers. Following the narrow, sinuous track down a hill, they came to a ridge between rice fields. In June, the rice crops were either ‘pregnant’ or still flowering. They saw a number of white ducks; some of them, with their brown beaks, were busily ploughing the water field, while others unperturbedly took their rest on the ridge. Now and then, one of them might suddenly jerk its neck up to the air, flap its fan-like wings and utter a series of quacks that sounded so happy and hilarious.
For a moment, he felt as if he was treading the fields in his home village. To imagine that just minutes away from the university, where the students and the highbrowed professors had their unsoiled habitation, lay such a village, and to imagine the village’s composition was manure, chickens, ducks, cows, sweating peasants, and mud-houses, and the drop-toilets…
‘Where is it?’ Qiuyan snapped his moment of meditation, ‘this is just a rice field.’
Bing pointed, ‘Over there, a river, another ten minutes.’
‘River? Are you kidding? There is no river here to my knowledge.’
‘No, there is a big, wide and deep river, I go swimming over there every week in summer,’ he looked at her, ‘naked.’
At his joke she giggled like a little woman, her small breasts teetering within her shirt. ‘Haha, you are very yellow - pornographic, don’t you fear your female students may catch sight of you?’
‘Yellow? Not yellow, I am just sexy,’ he teased, ‘if you like, I can swim in front of you, after all, you are one of my female students.’
She removed his hand from her shoulder, ‘You, yellow man, yellow teacher, I wonder how many female students you have ever attempted to woo over.’
‘You want to know the number?’
She turned to him, as serious as a green but hot chilli, ‘Yes, how many?’
‘Many a one.’
‘Many a one?’ She halted her steps, sharp eyes staring at him.
‘Yes, many, many, many, and then one.’
Her spicy eyes glared, ‘If you dare tease me again ….’
‘Okay, the real answer is nobody but you,’ he admitted.
She moved on, giving her words emphasis, ‘But me, you must stick to it.’
At this time, the river was in their sight.
‘What,’ Qiuyan said aloud, ‘you say this is a river? Just a stream!’
‘Well, in spring, when the water is plenty and rushing, it is a river,’ he then pointed at the bridge, ‘look at the bridge, isn’t it nice?’
Seeing that, Qiuyan was trotting towards to it. ‘Oh, this is an Iron Cable Bridge. So beautiful, I didn’t know there was such a bridge in this place.’
She stepped on it, the bridge was immediately bouncing; she deliberately stamped her feet, the bridge was briskly animated and creaking. Until she reached its middle, she bent over the rail, looking at the water underneath.
He went over to join her, stamping with a force enough to cause a spring. But she wasn’t scared as he had expected, keeping her water-contemplating stance unchanged.
The water was very clear, the plants on its fringes were flourishing, the grasses submerged in the water were wavering graciously with the flow. For a long minute, side by side, they were both enraptured in the tranquil scenery. Then she straightened her back, her eyes travelling along the length of bridge. ‘How long is it?’
‘About twenty five meters,’ he gave a number he had estimated with his feet before, ‘about one quarter of the famous Luding Iron Cable Bridge, for which the Red Army fiercely fought during the Long March (of Chairman Mao).’
The rail fence was rusty, but the whole structure remained lean and strong with a tenacity suggestive of a formidable history. How many years had it survived the weather and weight of people crossing? Twenty? Or more than his own years? Then he noticed, on the surface of the water, lay the shadow of the bridge and the shadows of them. He turned his head and found the sun, half shaded by the cloud, was there smiling.
A happy feeling, romantic and poetic, suddenly stirred in his heart. The body of Qiuyan, slim yet inwardly strong, now in his eyes, seemed to bear the tantalising aspects of the bridge. A passion awoke; a flow of warmth began to course through his frame. He stepped over, reached her back, shoved away the guitar, and with two hands crossing over her front, he embraced her.
She was quiet. The moment was a paradise. She was small, felt easier in his arms than his remembered experience of women. He knew she had a fire that would ignite any second, but when she was gentle and placid like this, she had all the tenderness and softness he willed to desire and imagine.
He felt himself growing, slowly and steadily, with a life so acutely awakening. If only he could make love now with her on the bridge!
In no time his hands were daring to close at her breasts. And the guitar, now such a nuisance, slipped over to his side, and he had to shove it away to his back. At this moment, she reacted and raised her body. Quietly removing his hands, she turned away from him. His excited device was now alone, losing the kind of anchorage without which a man can no longer thrive.
Without a word, she moved on, and he followed.
Then she said plainly, ‘Where do we go?’
‘There, on the side of the river,’ he replied, walking faster to precede her.
At the other end of the bridge, there was a small path leading down to the stream. Both sides of it were thick with grasses and some small plants with tiny flowers. A lot of butterflies, coloured marvellously, disturbed by their adventure, skipped between the leaves, jumping, whirling, perching over flower tips.
Turning over, he smiled to her, whose face, at the moment, was displaying an expression of his first impression of her. She smiled demurely, with a beautiful sadness, but not so much as she might have wished to assume, for, in her eyes, he could see the flutter of her heart. She had a beauty, like the little rice flowers, opening at particular hours to special sunrays, blossoming at particular days to special breeze.
Walking further, he arrived at his place, where a large boulder raised up from the shore. He turned and said to her, ‘Here it is.’
He sat onto the surface and freed the guitar. Then he patted on the clean stone to his left, giving her a signal to sit beside him. She sat down, leaving a little gap between them.
The stream was shallow because he could make out the stone tips even in its middle. There was a bird, slightly bigger than a sparrow, flying very low over the water surface. He sincerely hoped the bird would stay on one of the stone tips, but it didn’t, merely keeping its low flying, back and forth above the water. Small as it was, it couldn’t possibly catch any fish from the stream.
Then what was its purpose of flying like that?
On the water’s edge, there were clutches of shrubs blossoming with yellow flowers, their petals like the wings of a butterfly. He rose and walked to the shore, wishing to see in the water the fish he used to see. The fishes were very small, dashing away as soon as his shadow touched the skin of the water. He called her, ‘Qiuyan, come over.’
Before she came to him, the shoal began to swim back towards the bank, and shot away again the moment Qiuyan stood over them. But soon they swam back as if to entertain the human couple, who would either keep quiet and motionless, or frighten them by suddenly lifting their hands or dabbling the water to wrinkle its surface. And, the fishes, after only a short moment of no-alarm, would always come back to them, as if they need a companion from the land, longing for the excitement and amusement the couple had been enjoying.
A little bee was landing on a yellow flower, he said, ‘Look, a bee.’
Alarmed evidently, she suddenly held his arm, raising her eyes and searching about, ‘where?”
‘Over there, are you so afraid of bees?’
‘Yes, they always scare me,’ her grasp was tightening, ‘when I was little, I was bitten by one, I still remember how swollen my finger were.’
‘Really? Then we must be very careful,’ he said, ‘the bee over there, I know, is the deadliest.’
She gripped him so hard that he could feel a little pain, though it couldn’t be more sweet of that. He went on, ‘Now, move up very, very slowly…’
She moved up very, very slowly. In the meantime, he continued to stifle his laughter. And when he did at last, laugh, his cackling was as if burst from his stomach, breaking the serenity of the stream. As she came to realize his trick, she pulled back swiftly from him. ‘You dare…’ But he used a bit of man power to hold her back, and led her back to their seats. Sitting down, now with the side of her body seamlessly with him, he said to her, ‘Let me play a song to you.’
A lot of songs he could play, but he thought he should play something simple, one she might know. He thought of the ‘Romance’, but banished it immediately as Vivian’s image sneaked into his mind, and decided for the Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet: ‘Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai’. He didn’t tell her the title of the music. He picked up the guitar, and asked her to sit on his right so that the back of the guitar would not point at her.
The music was like the running water, like a couple of butterflies, like flying birds, like swimming fishes; the melody was like an iron cable bridge, like the Emei Mountain, like the Happy Mountain, like the 157 steps, like the bamboos and her sad eyes, like her small breasts, like her blushing face…
He felt her hands wrapping around his waist, holding him, leaning into his shoulder; he adjusted the position of the guitar, without discounting the least of his buoyant expression.
When the music faded into the pure chuckle of the stream, he found her asleep. He wanted to kiss her, but hesitated lest he disturb the moment of tranquillity. Leaving her as she was, for the next several minutes, he studied her features. An eyelash was the tiniest brush, a screen of delicacy; her nose was a miniature bridge, thin, with a bony character; her mouth, dewy, had the shape of a half-folded bamboo leaf; her cheeks, tinted with light of the sun, were like…All of sudden, she opened her eyes, and pursing her lips, she chided, ‘What are you looking at?’
‘Hehe, I am not looking, I am thinking…’
‘Oh, you, a Yellow teacher.’
‘Hehe… then you are a Yellow student.’
She separated from him, yawning, ‘I am sleepy.’
He took the chance, lay aside his guitar, and stood up, swapping the seats with her, for he felt more comfortable with her on his left.
Then, holding her tightly, in a little of her struggle, he kissed her, for the first time, on her lips.
…..
A couple of months later, he married her. His parents were happily surprised, unable to remove their eyes from her when he brought her home. Nobody ever imagined he could have just married unannounced in his university, even some months before his sister’s scheduled marriage.
On the night after the wedding banquet in his village, he was drunk. In the bed full of colour, prepared scrupulously by his parents, he worked for a long time on and inside her body, for more than two hours if he had the sense to remember. It was strange he couldn’t feel the coming, until she clawed deep into his back, whispering in his ears, ‘pain’, before he persuaded and forced himself to shower his love, naked and swelling, into her small container.
After a year of their marriage, she agreed to quit her job to live with him in the university.
In another year, inspired by one of his colleagues going to Canada, he began to speculate on a chance of going abroad. He asked his acquaintances, doing some slow research over the dial-up internet, working out the best way for his overseas adventure.
At last, after comparing the three then most popular target countries, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, he decided on Australia. Canada, too cold; New Zealand, too small; Australia, sunshine, and with kangaroos, seemed best fit to a purpose. And because his major study of English was not eligible as a skill category for immigration, he would have to do IT study first if he hoped to get permanent residency later on. The choice of university was the least of his worries; he simply picked Deakin University when it was once referred in an internet forum.
He did English IELTS (International English Language Test System), and obtained high marks on his first try, listening (7), reading (8), writing (9), speaking (8).
--End of Chapter 43-- |
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【航航第一次拿起擀面杖——糖酥饼】 (2011-8-27) 航迹云 
发表于 2014-6-8 15:40
