The picture shows the author in front of Tirana Hoxha's office back then.
(Author Liang Enming: Private entrepreneur, advisory member of China Practice Think Tank, vice president of Sichuan Prose Literature Association, his works have won the "National Bingxin Prose Works Award".) This article was written at the end of 2018).
Red pine forests
There are red pine forests here, and there is a small town deep in the mountains.
During the day, the antique town and the green lakeside are full of people coming and going; Late, the dark forest belt, insects chirp faintly.
The wooden house on the edge of the town, the cool breeze, had a good night's sleep.
When I woke up the next day, the sun was shining through the forest, and the golden wisps were forming a net; The loose rod in the light and shadow is more and more red and bright; The flowers on the lawn are even more colorful.
After breakfast, we visited a deep cave and took a cable car to the top of a ski resort.
High in the dense forest, it is very quiet, and only the sound of wind and birds is heard. Several steep ski slopes, down the trend, the atmosphere, if the autumn leaves and winter snow, and then dotted with some red makeup, here will be wonderful. It's a pity that it is out of place, and there are very few people who go up the mountain in summer, and the ropeway only starts running at 11 o'clock.
The scorching sun on the top of the mountain, bright and cold, the summer clothes we wore could not withstand the mountain cold, we strode to keep warm, and hurriedly watched the scenery. In fact, on the top of this forest, the barren grass is green, and the birds and birds are jumping, and there is no view. The scenery is all around: "A glance at the mountains".
On the edge of the cliff, there is a lookout platform built of logs, and the tour guide Xiao Yang said: Climb up, you can see the great scenery of the Three Kingdoms.
We went up, but we couldn't tell the three kingdoms in the big picture?
Looking into the distance, the mountains and ravines under the eyes are reckless, like the sea under the blue sky, mighty and mighty, wave after wave, the peaks are coming, we are like standing on the surging cruise ship, clothes swinging with the wind.
It was originally the hinterland of a country, but now it has become the border of the "Three Kingdoms". Fortunately, on the border, there are no guards such as iron fence posts. When we came to cross the border, in front of the flower pole of the car parked in the mountain pass, I also saw an old man wearing ** walking out of the kiosk to look at our passports, as if playing at home.
This may be the germination of legal civilization in this mountain forest, but it is getting farther and farther away from returning to the basics of "the unity of heaven and man".
This mountain forest does not belong to human beings in the first place, it is human possessiveness that tears it apart. On the day our ancestors walked out of the jungle, which one did they belong to? The more you enter the modern era, the more detailed the division, nature is torn to pieces by human beings, but the pheasants and wild foxes here are still happy to blend in the peach blossom source where heaven and earth are unified.
Tirana
Europeans of the same skin color, walking on the street, are very different. The self-esteem and self-confidence of Western Europeans is rare for Eastern Europeans, and even less so for the Balkans of Southern Europe. We saw Albanians on the same plane to Tirana at the Serbian airport, and we could tell at a glance.
The plane I took was a small propeller plane half a century ago, and the escalator was pushed by hand, and when I went up a few steps, I had to pay attention to the distance between my head and the suitcase, and I couldn't stand straight.
When I arrived at Tirana airport, I was in trouble again, I was interrogated at the exit window, and I was taken to a nearby hut, and I don't understand their chatter, I just think they are like thieves and are not friendly to the Chinese. My little friend Feng Feng was able to communicate with them in English, and it took a lot of time to dispel their doubts. When I left the airport, I saw the guide Khaki who had been waiting for us for a long time, and I learned that a few days ago, eight Chinese, who had come to Albania to Greece without a visa, and smuggled them into the European Union.
The airport in Tirana is very simple, and the car that picked us up was a German Mercedes-Benz. The tour guide showed off that they were running all over the street with Mercedes Benz. It's true. However, if I look closely, they are all second-hand cars, just like at the beginning of our reform and opening up, the city was full of Japanese refurbished "rags".
The tour guide is a Chinese expert who goes to China to do business all year round. Today's Albania has not many factories, a lot of goods are imported, and the resources that can be exchanged for foreign exchange are oil and chrome ore. A large number of their young and middle-aged people were exported to Western Europe, and the pedestrians on the streets, like the buildings on the streets, were lifeless.
When I stayed in the hotel, I turned around and inquired about the statue of Clinton, and after the tour guide understood, he was embarrassed to say that it was in Kosovo. However, he tried to stress that Kosovo is their territory, and historically, as we said back then, the treasure island.
When I went to Tirana Square, the glorious image I saw in the movies of my youth was gone, and the bronze statue of the sword was the national hero of their history, Skanderbeg. The square is surrounded by mosques, old royal palaces, ......The remnants of red are still a group of sculptures of the guerrillas entering the city during World War II, which is a record of the second-in-command of the Arab Communist Party, Xie Hu, who led his troops to attack the city of Tirana.
Most of the second-in-command of authoritative social forms of the state have a difficult death, and Xie Hu is no exception. Shehu's suicide was caused by his son marrying a daughter of a different class. Just such a small thing, the final arrest and purge, is enough to prove the cruelty of the palace infighting. According to the tour guide, the initiator was caused by Hoxha's wife who interfered in politics and wanted to support another cronie to be a ** person. This history has long been sealed. The official residences of Hoxha and Shehu are still there, just next to the street, and we went to watch, and we saw a few middle school students sketching there, and on the sketch boards, the rising high-rise buildings had submerged the two villas.
This city is not big, there is a casino in the center of the city, but it is not small, and it is run by Taiwanese.
Gamblers are born in poor countries, and poor people are eager to get rich overnight. We also want to try our luck, we can go to the bay for dinner and run into a big traffic jam on the way back. The corners and alleys are full of cars, open-air karaoke all the way, food stalls and restaurants, and people are longing and lively. The 10-kilometer journey took more than two hours.
Why are so many people popping up on the street at night? "I'm curious.
The tour guide said: "The people who went to the bay to bask in the sun are back, the Italians, and the Germans. ”
They don't have the sun there? ”
Their sun is more expensive than ours. ”
Oh "Silver bullets are better than bullets." The once ravaged have come to see their long-cherished enemies as saviors.
Quirocaster
This is a stone city, built on the mountain, with stone walls, stone houses, and stone buildings, just like the earliest dwelling place for human beings to come out of the cave; Even the roof is made of stone chips, and people can walk on it, and they can fly the eaves and walk the ridge. The lanes, also paved with granite stones, crisscross the buildings like river forks, and connect with the hilltop castle high above.
The ancient castle, which resembles a ship, I saw it in my early years, in the famous Albanian movie "I'd Rather Die than Yield", I heard that it was first a church, and later it became a fortress and a prison. Walking in, the yin qi is dignified, and the hole with open and transparent light is stretched out with a bronze cannon; On the second floor of the elevator, the long tunnel opens the door to a stone prison, and in the dim prison, the walls are covered with inscriptions of righteous people resisting violence. The two heroic girls portrayed in the film are indeed their own people, and the two statues in the aisle are the prototypes of real people. As soon as I saw them clenching their fists and shoulder-to-shoulder, I immediately remembered the two oaths they had made when I was a teenager: "Destroy fascism, and freedom belongs to the people." ”
In fact, what belongs to freedom is as simple as the girl longs for, this prison, after the German and Italian fascists, has also been used by the red regime. Even now, freed from the shackles of their spirits, they are still paying off the debts of material deprivation during the period of unfreedom. As we went, we saw only the ruins of countless bunkers and submarine bases dug into the mountains along the coastline, but not a single factory. The aid we gave them back then, they were mostly used to prepare for war when they could neither eat nor wear, and even the industrial base that was built was also labeled red and reformed by today's new **. Thankfully, they have a long coastline on the Adriatic Sea, cheap sunshine, a lot of sandy beaches, and nowadays, they mostly make a living from tourism.
This stone town has a resident population of less than 40,000, but it can receive 100,000 foreign guests. Every family runs a hostel restaurant. The night alleys with lanterns are like rushing to the market, and the figures on the streets, like a trickle, are scattered everywhere. We went to a restaurant with a pergola, and there were a lot of people waiting in line, and the guide, Khaki, jokingly said that it was much better than when they got up in the middle of the night to get milk and queue up until dawn.
I know what he didn't say was the pain we went through after we stopped helping them. They have also issued tickets, and they have also endured the bitter days of not having enough food to buy a pound of meat per person a month......Even their current dishes, I also feel that the taste is very strong, like the salt dishes we used to eat.
In the age of food shortages, salt is indispensable. Why? A few years ago, we had a rush to buy. The old people have to stock up on salt. Only those who have lived through a year of famine know the important ...... of salt water to sustain life
This night, I wandered alone in the streets and alleys where I had lost my way, listening to the bell of the castle ringing regularly, and somehow changed the ancient poem
Confidants in the sea, and a common destiny at the end of the world.
I hope that the thousand-year-old churches, the bells of ancient temples, and the gospel will not be lost in the silence of prison again.
Editor: Qin Zheng