Outside the City: Clouds Come from the Border Town

That spring, an army marched from Nanjing into western Hunan. Officer Jiang Yunzheng stood on the bow of the boat, looking at the rolling green mountains on both sides of the river, as if looking at a home he could not return to. Aqing, a girl from the ferry, squatted by the stream and washed her clothes. The mallet fell together, beating the days as calm as water. They met across a stream. He couldn't understand her folk songs, and she couldn't understand his official dialect. But he remembered her tune, and she remembered the way he lowered his head slightly when he played the flute. Yuan Shui Tang Tang Tang, Bai Pagoda is speechless. They wrote each other's names on the sand with their fingers, exchanged the clumsiest and most solemn promises in that war-torn era with a bowl of herbal tea and the sound of a piano. Later, the army quietly evacuated early one morning. Ah Qing didn't know where he went, or whether he was dead or alive. She only remembered that the last words he left were "wait for me". She waited for many years. The stream is still flowing, the ferry is still there, and the white pagoda is still there. It's just that that person may never come back, maybe he will come back "tomorrow". The river outside the city is still flowing. The mountains outside the city are still waiting. --- Tribute description: This story pays tribute to Mr. Shen Congwen's immortal masterpiece "Border Town". When I read about Cuicui's mother, the "shadow figure" who fell in love with a passing soldier and eventually died for her love, I couldn't help but wonder: What would have happened if the lovers had not been destroyed, and if fate had given them another possibility? Hence this article "Outside the City". It's the same landscape in western Hunan, and it's the same encounter between a girl and a young man. It's just that this time I want the river to flow slower, and then slower.