One day, after finishing their homework, they listened to a record. It was Tchaikovsky's Violin Quartet in G Major, and Rong was enraptured. He remembered clearly that they were silent for a long while. Suddenly, he said he wanted Rong to know that the ink in the bottle on the table was not blue. Rong said, to be more accurate, it was ink-blue. But, he argued with Rong, when people saw this color and said it was blue or ink-blue, it established an agreement or a convention that gave it a common name, but, in fact, the color seen by each person was not necessarily the same. Rong disagreed, saying that however either one of them saw it, the color didn't change. The color, of course, did not change, but whether or not the color seen in the eyes of each person was the same, no one could know. Rong said there had to be an explanation. What was communicated was simply the term "blue," or "ink-blue," and, in fact, the visual perception conveyed by the same word was different. Rong asked what was the color of the ink in the bottle? He said who knows? Rong was silent for a while and then said he found it all a bit scary.
The yellow-orange rays of the afternoon sun were shining on the floorboards of the room. Years of washing and scrubbing had made the grain of the wood stand out. Suddenly, he was infected by Rong's terror. With the sun shining on them, even those very real floorboards became odd, and he began to wonder if they were actually so real after all. People could not comprehend the world, and the existence of the world depended on an individual's perception of it. If, when a person died, the world, too, became murky, or perhaps no longer existed, then what definite meaning did being alive have?
Afterward, he went to university while Rong stayed on in the village and worked as a technician in a small hydroelectric plant. They corresponded and continued such discussions for quite some time. This sort of awareness threw into question their entire school education; it was completely at odds with the unwavering certainty of the ideals of serving the people and the construction of a new society. He came to fear that his life was disappearing, it was as if there was no place for his sense of mission or responsibility to life. Now, however, even just being able to stay alive had become a serious problem.
He knocked for more than half an hour on the door of the county post office, and even knocked on all the windows facing the street. Finally, lights came on, and someone opened the door. He explained that he was from the cadre school and had to send an official telegram. Writing the message was not easy, and it had to be written in the fancy jargon prescribed for personnel who had been sent to the countryside. Also, he had to get this schoolmate of his, whom he had not contacted for a long time, to understand the gravity of his predicament so that he would speedily find him a commune to settle in and immediately telegraph an official document accepting him as a peasant. He also had to be sure not to arouse the suspicions of the person in the post office sending the telegram.
The road back went by the railway station. A few cheaply built single-story buildings stood alongside the desolate platform, lit by some weak yellowish lights. Two months earlier, the army officer had assigned him and about ten other sturdy youths to go there to meet a large batch of new arrivals from his Beijing workplace. Office staff, laborers, cadres, and their families were all there. No one had the good fortune of being excluded, not even the old, the sick, and the children. It was a special train with many carriages, and the platform was full of offloaded bedding rolls, suitcases, tables and chairs, furniture like wardrobes, and also big earthenware vats for pickling vegetables in brine. They looked like refugees. The army officer called it "war-preparation deployment." There was the heavy smell of gunpowder in Beijing due to the armed conflicts on the China-Soviet border in Heilongjiang province, and the Number One War Preparation Mobilization Command signed by Deputy Commander-in-Chief Lin Biao had arrived at the cadre school.
In the unloading, a big vat was cracked, and brine seeping out made the whole place stink of rancid fermenting vegetables. Taking advantage of his laborer family background, the old man who used to be gatekeeper in the back courtyard of the workplace building, started to swear loudly. Whom he was swearing at wasn't clear, and no one tried to stop him. Anyway, the man's supply of salted vegetables for a whole winter had been ruined. With their heads pulled into their scarves against the chilly wind, people kept watch on their own little piles of "home" as they sat on bedding rolls or suitcases waiting to be assigned to some villages near the cadre school. Not daring to cry aloud, children with faces red from the cold quietly sobbed by the side of the grown-ups.
Three hundred big carts mobilized from several communes had assembled outside the station, and braying mules, neighing horses, and cracking whips created a greater ruckus than the village market. A small car was stuck among the mules, horses, and carts, and could move neither forward nor backward. Finally, with bright red badges on his collar and cap and his greatcoat draped over his shoulders, Officer Song emerged from the car. He walked to the platform, climbed onto a wooden crate, and started waving his arms about. Officer Song, who was in charge of the cadre school, had an army-bugler background and no significant revolutionary credentials.
While he had played a role in spurring on the troops on frontier battlefields, he couldn't shift these peasants' carts, and the chaos simply got worse.
From noon until dark, cart after cart had finally removed all the people, but the platform was still piled with furniture and crates. He and a few others were told to stay behind and guard these. The others all went into the waiting room to get out of the wind. However, he stacked some crates and wardrobes into a wind shelter, and bought himself a bottle of liquor as well as two steamed buns. The buns were made of a mixture of corn flour and wheat flour and were frozen solid by the cold. In his little corner that he had covered with a sheet of canvas, he gazed at the weak yellowish lights on the platform and thought about finding a wife. With a wife and a child, he would be the same as the others with families and children, and he would be able to get lodgings in a peasant home in one of the villages. He would still be working on the land, but at least he would have a small mud hut and be able to get away from the collective lodgings where people were staring right at one another all the time, and one was afraid of being overheard while having a dream.
He thought back to the previous year, when armed battles were raging, before the army took control of the factories and schools, to that night in the small inn on the embankment of the Yangtze he spent with a university student when there was nowhere else to stay. "We are the generation that fate has decreed should be sacrificed." When the woman had the courage to write this in her letter, he knew that her situation must have been hopeless.
There were no battlefields now, but enemies were everywhere. Defenses were up all over the place, but defense was impossible. He could retreat no further. No longer wildly hoping for anything more, all he wanted was a house in a village, where he could settle down with a wife, but even that possibility was about to vanish.
Before dawn, he got the bicycle back to the village. Huang and his wife had waited for him and didn't go to sleep; they were dressed. The coal stove they had brought with them from Beijing was burning, and the house was warm. Huang's wife had prepared dough and was making soup noodles for him. He didn't decline. Having had no dinner, he had pedaled hard and fast for forty kilometers, there and back, and he was utterly famished. They watched him devour a big bowl of noodles. Before leaving, he waved to them and said that he hadn't been there. They said, of course you haven't, of course you haven't. He had done all he could, the rest was up to fate.