402: Chapter 402 A Tribute Only She Could Understand

Rain tapped against the glass, making a faint, crisp sound.

Mrs. Zola pushed her reading glasses up the bridge of her nose and turned to the first page.

The paper of the French translation was thin, and the edges were unevenly cut; it was clearly the cheapest kind of paperback.

But the text was neatly typeset with wide line spacing, making it easy on the eyes.

The first paragraph described China in 1975, in the large courtyard of a county middle school.

Rain and mud mixed together, flowing across the uneven ground.

Zola frowned.

Having taught English literature for twenty years and reviewed thousands of student essays, she had an almost instinctive pickiness about writing.

Any affected rhetoric or sickly sentimental lyricism couldn't survive three lines with her.

But this passage lacked any such rhetoric.

Mud was mud; rain was rain.

No one stood by to lament to the reader about how cold the rain was or how desolate the muddy ground felt.

It was simply laid out there.

Zola's finger paused on the edge of the second page before she turned it.

The scene of lunch in the canteen unfolded.

The students were divided into three tiers based on their family background, with separate lines for Grade A, Grade B, and Grade C dishes.

Those at the front holding white flour buns were the best off; in the middle were corn flour buns, and at the very back were two coarse black sorghum buns.

A teenager named Sun Shaoping stood in the very last line.

He waited until everyone else had left before walking over with his head bowed, ladling a bowl of clear soup from a basin that didn't even have a trace of oil.

Zola's eyes moved slowly over the text.

She noticed a detail.

The translation used the French word "furtivement," which meant something close to "furtively."

But considering the context of the entire passage, she felt that word wasn't quite accurate there.

There was no element of "stealing" in the boy's actions.

He was simply hiding.

He wasn't hiding from the food, but from the gazes of others when he took the black flour bun.

Zola's back sank an inch into the sofa cushion.

She remembered something.

The winter of 1992.

When the siege had reached its eighth month, the city's supply lines were cut off.

Bread went from being rationed to being fought over.

UN relief supplies were snatched up the moment they arrived at the distribution point,

and what one received was often just half a loaf of black bread, hard enough to kill a man, with green patches of mold inside when broken open.

She remembered the bank clerk from the building next door.

A man in his forties who, before the siege, wore a suit and tie every day, his leather shoes polished to a mirror shine.

When lining up for bread, he always stood at the back of the queue.

After receiving that half-loaf of moldy bread, he wouldn't eat it on the spot.

He would take it home, close the door, and use a knife to carefully cut away the mold,

then break the remainder into small pieces and arrange them on a plate, sitting alone at the dining table to chew slowly, as if it were a formal dinner.

Later, that man died in a shelling.

Zola took off her glasses, wiped the lenses, put them back on, and continued reading.

The light flickered and dimmed.

The apartment's wiring was old and unstable on rainy days.

Zola looked up at the light bulb on the ceiling that Lin Que had changed,

muttered "Damn wires," got up to find a candle in the cabinet, lit it, and placed it on the corner of the coffee table.

The candle flame flickered twice, casting a dancing shadow on the wall.

She sat back down and brought the book closer.

Sun Shaoping began working in the coal mine.

The passages describing the physical labor were suffocatingly dense.

Carrying stones, pulling coal carts, crawling with bent backs through low, stuffy tunnels.

Sweat soaked his shirt, dried, and then soaked it through again.

The calluses on his back were as thick as shoe soles.

Yet, after a day's work, the boy would read in the dormitory by the light of a miner's lamp.

The light was too weak and the words on the pages were blurry, so he would bring his face within a few centimeters of the wick.

His eyes would be reddened by the smoke, and the next day, two dry tear tracks would be visible on his coal-stained skin.

Zola's page-turning speed unconsciously quickened.

Berger let out a dissatisfied sound at her feet, likely complaining that she had stepped on his tail when she shifted her posture.

Zola looked down at him, but instead of scolding him as usual, she simply shifted her feet aside.

The rain continued to fall.

The folk song on the radio was playing for the third time, but Zola didn't notice at all.

The timeline in the book moved forward, with people there rolling in the mud like ants.

Building cave dwellings, laying brick walls, using brute, animal-like strength to scratch each day out of the earth.

No one cried. No one complained of exhaustion.

Chewing on the coarsest grain, their backs bent by the weight of life, they moved their days forward, step by step, across land so barren that not even grass would grow.

Zola's breathing was much heavier than it had been half an hour ago.

She realized she could no longer tell them apart.

The faces of the farmers in the book, squatting to eat in front of their loess cave dwellings, and her neighbors in Sarajevo, sharing canned food by a shell crater, completely overlapped in the firelight.

It was the same broken world.

The same people stripped of their dignity.

The same backs, held stubbornly straight after swallowing bitterness.

Separated by thousands of kilometers of mountains and rivers, by completely different languages and skin colors, she caught a familiar scent in this book.

It wasn't the scent of suffering itself.

It was the scent of what lay beneath that suffering.

Stubbornness.

The rain outside the window had stopped at some point.

The radio finally succumbed to the strain of continuous operation, emitting a crackling static. Zola turned to glance at the wall clock.

2:17 AM.

She froze.

This was four whole hours past her usual bedtime.

In the past twenty-plus years, she had never broken the routine she had set for herself.

Even on the most intense nights of the siege, with shells landing three hundred meters away,

she would still blow out her candle at ten o'clock sharp, lie down in bed, and close her eyes.

Tonight was the only exception.

Zola turned off the radio, walked into the kitchen to pour a glass of cold water, took a few gulps, then walked back and sat down on the sofa again.

The candle had burned down more than halfway, and the wax had pooled into an amber ring along the edge of the brass candlestick.

She continued to read.

It wasn't because she wasn't tired.

Her eyes were aching, and the nose pads of her reading glasses had left two red indentations on the bridge of her nose.

But she couldn't stop.

That feeling of being pinned down by the words—she had thought she would never experience it again in her life.

The darkest time before dawn had passed.

A layer of grayish-white light began to surface on the windowpane, and mist slowly rolled down from the hillside, blurring the contours of the white tombstones in the distance into a formless mass.

Zola reached the final chapters of the novel.

Sun Shaoan was broken by exhaustion; Sun Shaoping was injured.

Those people who had struggled desperately in the mud for decades did not wait for any miracle to defy their fate, nor did anyone reach down from the sky to give them a hand.

They simply gritted their teeth, chewed the bitterness, swallowed it, and then looked up at the sky.

The sky was still gray.

But their backs were still straight.

When she finished the final line of the text, Zola's fingers lingered on the edge of the page for a long time.

She felt something pounding in her chest, hitting her ribs, one thud after another.

She couldn't say what it was.

It was heavy, and burning hot.

Habitually, she flipped to the back.

The translator's afterword in the French edition spanned two pages.

The translator's prose was far more flamboyant than the main text, citing a wealth of opinions from European critics,

calling the work "the pinnacle of Eastern realism,"

and proclaiming the author, Jian Shen, to be the most astonishing phenomenon in Chinese literature in recent years.

At the end of the afterword, the translator mentioned something.

"The author, Jian Shen, left a handwritten message on the final page of the manuscript, which the publisher insisted on retaining exactly as it was.

During the translation review process, this text left several senior European editors and literary consultants, who had received advance copies, completely baffled.

They tried to interpret it through the lens of classical Chinese aesthetics or even political metaphor, but they never reached a consensus."

Zola's gaze shifted down half an inch.

The afterword ended, and the next page was blank.

No, not entirely blank.

In the very center of the page, a single line of bold French text was printed.

The font size was one size larger than the main text, surrounded by vast white space, as if to deliberately let that sentence stand alone in the emptiness.

Zola leaned closer to the candle.

The flickering flame illuminated the words, making them dance in light and shadow.

"Dedicated to those who, amidst the ruins, still insist on using an enamel mug to iron out every wrinkle in their white shirt."

Her hand froze.

The next line read:

"To suffer with dignity is, in itself, a form of heroism."

The candle flame flickered.

Zola sat motionless on the sofa.

Berger lay at her feet, his fluffy belly rising and falling in a steady rhythm with his breath.

The radio was off, the rain outside had stopped,

and the entire apartment was so quiet that only the faint crackle of the burning candle remained.

An enamel mug.

A white shirt.

Wrinkles.

The European critics, of course, wouldn't understand that sentence.

They had never seen that enamel mug.

They hadn't seen, amidst the ruins without water or electricity, an old woman using the hot wall of that mug to slowly, bit by bit, iron out a white shirt that no one would ever wear again.

So, they couldn't possibly understand.

But Zola understood.

Because that story had only been told to one person.

On a rainy night, sitting on this velvet sofa,

talking to a young man she had called "the Eastern boy" for over twenty days.

Zola's lips began to tremble.

She had thought he would forget.

Young people came and went, staying for a few days before leaving, taking photos and memories with them, leaving nothing behind.

She was used to it.

Hundreds of feet had stepped on the doormat at her door, and not one of them had remembered the way back.

She had thought the story of the white shirt was the same—once told, it would dissipate like the city's fog, gone with a gust of wind.

Yet he had written it into the book.

He hadn't just mentioned it in passing, nor had he treated it as some exotic anecdote from a faraway land to be glossed over.

He had placed it on the final page of the entire book.

He had placed it after the farmers on the loess land, after those who had gritted their teeth through the suffering.

He had placed it in the most significant position.

He had given it the greatest weight.

Zola's hand clutched the page tightly.

The shell that had hardened over twenty years cracked open from the very core at that moment.

A tear splashed onto the page.

The water stain spread across the bold French letters, blurring the ink of the word "shirt" into a small, dark smudge.

Berger was startled by a muffled sound from above; he looked up to see his owner rip her reading glasses from her face,

her hands holding the floral apron—washed until it was faded, yet one she had never been willing to let get dirty—pressing it against her face.

This old woman, who had not shed a single tear even when she sent her husband and two sons off to war,

hunched over, her shoulders heaving as she trembled,

muffled sobs escaping from behind the apron.