That evening, I took off from Bailian Airport and landed at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport, taking the airport bus from Shanghai to Hangzhou.
I saw my face in the bathroom mirror at Hongqiao Airport. The mask cleverly avoided all the places where my beard grew, otherwise it would"ve grown into my flesh by now. Before, I always thought that I would look manly if I had a beard, but it seemed that not everyone was suitable for growing one. Especially now, I looked like the type of man on the street that picks up trash since my face was full of stubble and I wore clothes that didn"t fit me.
According to Xiao Hua, in ancient China, people wearing this kind of mask had to use a type of potion to destroy all the pores on their face, which was a painful process. Not growing a beard wasn"t a particularly tragic thing for people like me, but I"m glad we didn"t have to resort to that.
It was the last bus and there was only me and a girl who looked like a student riding it. The girl had been wearing headphones and looking out of the window with blurred eyes. Her hair was braided and very clean, and she looked like she had a very special temperament.
I couldn"t help thinking of Yunyun again, and the feeling in my heart was indescribable. From the moment I set off from Guangxi, I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but now as I looked at the street lamps flashing by, the various pains that haunted my heart were released bit by bit.
I closed my eyes and tried not to cry. Fatty"s wailing still reverberated in my ears. I thought of the picture we took with Yunyun the first time we went to Banai. Although our hearts were full of mysteries, we looked very happy, probably because our fate was still in our own hands at that time.
Ironically enough, everything we did next was to bring that fate to the present situation.
What was the fear I still had in my heart? Even in such a mood, I still felt that any entanglements in my heart hadn"t been resolved.
My demons hadn"t subsided, nor did I even think it was the end when I came back this time. I knew deep down that I just came back to be a pa.s.ser-by; things weren"t over, but continued without pause.
The last bus stop was Kaixuan Road, so I got off and took a taxi home. It was already midnight, and I looked at the familiar streets, comparing my mental state of returning to Hangzhou now with how I was the previous times. On those occasions, my first feeling when I returned was exhaustion: I"m never going to that place again, this time was the last time. This was a common thought at that time.
But not this time. I wasn"t tired, and even had a feeling like: if you go on like this, you"ll be very sick.
It is what it is. I lit a cigarette, got out of the car, looked at everything in front of me, and was suddenly shocked.
In front of me was Uncle Three"s shop.
Shouldn"t I be at home? I was in a trance and suddenly remembered that the address I told the driver when getting in the car was to Uncle Three"s home.
I couldn"t go back to my place. Even if I came back to Hangzhou, I had to live here.
I turned around and saw that the taxi had already left. Standing in the dark alley, I couldn"t help but laugh. I took the key Pan Zi had given me before from my pocket, went to the iron gate, took a deep breath, and opened it.
There were no lights on in the small house so I went into the yard and saw Uncle Three"s potted plants. Because of the gardener"s care, they had grown very well and were scattered all over the place. The tea table that Uncle Three usually used for drinking tea was placed in the middle of the courtyard.
This was where Uncle Three usually lived. I had stayed here for a few days before, but I didn"t think that I would come back to this place at this time.
I didn"t enter the house immediately because I didn"t know what to do, but I also didn"t want to wander around the place at midnight. I didn"t know why, but I was very resistant to start the next stage of my life, and if I could start later, I"d just start later.
Sitting in the tea chair, I wrapped my clothes tightly around me and looked at the night sky, motionless until dawn.
It was the gardener who came here every day that woke me up. When I opened my eyes, a baffled face was looking at me.
“Boss, you came back? Why are you sleeping here?"
“Uncle He?” I replied in a daze, immediately realizing my mistake, and quickly saying, “Old He, why are you here so early?”
“Go back to your room, Boss, it"s cold out here.” Old He said.
I nodded and looked at the house, noticing that the hourly workers hadn"t come yet. They usually cleaned here every day, but only on the third floor. The second and first floors were places to store goods.
Most antiques dealers didn"t particularly like clean and modern decorations and designs, and generally liked to leave everything in a mess. This was to satisfy the customers" mentality, because choosing goods from messy antiques will give people a more comfortable feeling. For the same reason, many regional antique shops liked to leave antiques on the ground and sell them. If you tried to imitate a jewelry store and found some salespeople to wear suits, you would only end up looking unprofessional.
In fact, even if everyone knew a little about antiques, the truth was that there were too few collectors who really knew. In this line of work, 99% of the people we met every year were fake connoisseurs. These kinds of shoppers were especially concerned about their feelings.
I bypa.s.sed the antiques and went through several doors to the third floor. Everything on the first floor was worthless, but there was a safe on the second floor where things were slightly better. The really good things were kept in a secret room on the third floor when the shop wasn"t opened. The guarded entrance on the third floor looked worn out and tattered, but it was actually made of tungsten steel. It used a lock designed by an old locksmith whom Uncle Three found. The mechanism was inside the wall and the average person couldn"t open it unless he blew it up with explosives.
The third floor was a large suite, and although he didn"t look it, Uncle Three was a man who had many pleasures. But he wasn"t interested in playing around with any modern things. All the mahogany items in this big suite were very expensive, but I actually preferred a soft sofa. I knew that since I wanted to stay here for a long time, I had to add something.
In fact, the last time I stayed here, I had already found that Uncle Three actually lived a very miserable life. For people like him who experienced too much and enjoyed too much when they were young, any women, wealth, and status had completely lost their attraction to him. His whole room was full of furniture, calligraphy and painting, The Four Treasures of the Study (writing brushes, ink sticks, paper, and ink-stones), and various other toys. In fact, if you opened his drawers, you"d find that almost all of them were empty and coated in a thin layer of dust.
This showed that these drawers had never held anything since they were bought.
There was no life here.
A single old man, in addition to his own inventory of some things: books, cups, tea, and many ancient books used for decoration. The books were all genuine, but I could see that they had hardly been flipped through. The thing you could find the most of in his room was all expired newspapers.
This place was too big for him and he clearly didn"t have enough content to fill all these drawers.
After I came back from Xisha, I made a thorough search here, so I knew where the items I was interested in were. The archaeological team"s doc.u.ments were basically useless, but I still intended to read them again, just not now.
I sat in front of his desk, on which there was a desk lamp, an incense burner, a telephone, and some pens and paper. Just like before I left.
There was also a computer that Uncle Three usually used to play card games and read some e-books, but it was very old-fashioned with only a 15 inch monitor. He didn"t know how to use a computer, and could only use a mouse to do some simple operations. The system inside was also the original Windows 2000. He didn"t even have a network card and couldn"t surf the Internet at all.
I closed my eyes to see if I could sleep. Although I felt a little tired, perhaps it was the intense activities in the tombs during this period of time that made me accustomed to such high-intensity fatigue. I didn"t feel sleepy at all.
I took out my cell phone and sent everyone a text saying that I had already arrived. After taking a deep breath, I suddenly didn"t know what to do.
Was it true that Uncle Three did the same thing every day, imagining things behind this table?
No wonder he was so entangled. If he were so poor that he couldn"t even pay the water fee, he might not have come to such an end.
Man was really a strange creature. Their most important aim was to survive, but survival was often not their greatest worry. When people meet all their needs, they"ll often find insurmountable trouble for themselves.
People were born to worry, and it was useless to think through the problem. There were always some troubles that people had to provoke even if they understood the truth, just like me now.
I touched my face and knew that I had to find something to do for myself during this period of time, otherwise I would be driven mad by various memories. Pan Zi was no longer around, and although I wasn"t going to announce his death, many things wouldn"t go smoothly without him.
There was also Mute Sister and Uncle Two to think about. The former I have to convince, the latter I have to avoid. Because he was too smart, I absolutely wouldn"t be able to deceive Uncle Two if we met. There were still seven days before I could take off my mask and in order to cope with emergencies, I should have something to do.
I went to Uncle Three"s bathroom, shaved my beard, took a bath, and then called one of my shop a.s.sistants and told him that I didn"t want to see any customers and that I wanted to sleep for a day. Then I climbed into bed, turned on the TV, and watched cartoons until I fell asleep.
I slept very poorly and woke up more than once because of various dreams. On several occasions, I even felt that Pan Zi was standing beside me covered in blood.
I didn"t feel any fear, only despair, the kind of despair which ate at me all the time.
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