War Photographer's Notebook

Chapter 1960 The Small Iron Piece After Labor
On a night market street in Yan'an city, Wei Ran, Xia Shushi, and others sat on stools around a table that had been pushed together by the roadside, each with a spicy and sour lamb trotter and a large pitcher of ice-cold beer in hand.

On this pieced-together table, there were also various other lamb parts cooked in different ways, as well as some local delicacies such as potato fritters and Yan'an sizzling sauce.

Let's each set off first thing tomorrow morning.

As Xia Shushi spoke, he tossed a clean piece of lamb bone to the stray dog ​​lying at his feet, wagging its tail.

"I'm actually not very optimistic about your predictions."

With her mouth full of soup, Qin Qi said, "I used to be a geography teacher, after all. Your speculations are romantic enough, but they're actually too difficult."

"How to say?"

Sui Sui, whose mouth and hands were also covered in soup, had already picked up her fourth lamb hoof while speaking.

"What else can I say? Such a long distance, with one great bend after another in the Yellow River."

As Qin Qi spoke, she carelessly used the tip of her manicured nail to dab the soup from the corner of her mouth and casually drew a few curves on the table. "Nine bends and eighteen turns are not just a saying. The kind of '几' (ji) shaped bends I drew can be seen almost everywhere along the Yellow River."

It's easy to imagine that anything floating on the river could easily be washed ashore when it passes through these bends.

In other words, trying to get those two water bottles from Lanzhou to Yan'an is extremely difficult, and the probability of success is extremely low.

“The probability is indeed very low, but surely 70 years should increase it a bit?” Xia Shushi asked.

"It's hard to say," Qin Qi shook her head, giving up on explaining.

Putting the probability aside

Wei Ran picked up his wine cup and clinked it with everyone's. "Now that we have a direction, let's go look for it first. Also, how do we get to Yuncheng tomorrow?"

"Get some rest today."

I spent the whole afternoon with Wei Ran and the others at Yan Anxia Soseki, where I drank a beer. "I've already arranged a driver. I'll take you there after you wake up tomorrow."

"What about you? How are you getting to Lanzhou?" Sui Sui asked, clinking glasses with Qin Qi.

"Let's drive there and treat it as a road trip for sightseeing," Qin Qi said, coming up with a brilliant reason.

Taking this opportunity, the four of them also talked about their plans to go on a road trip together in the future.

As for the Kachenka sisters, they are completely engrossed in the lamb hoof-eating contest.

Needless to say, the roadside drinking party that night was a different story. The next morning, just as dawn was breaking, Wei Ran and Sui Sui, along with the Kajenka sisters and Su Zui, boarded a special car bound for Yuncheng.

As lunchtime approached, the vehicle finally arrived at a small village under Yuncheng's jurisdiction.

At this moment, the film crew, with Li Yizhong and Lu Yue as the focus of the camera, is in the courtyard of one of the houses, having a slightly difficult but very detailed conversation with an elderly man who looks to be in his eighties.

After observing through the car window, Wei Ran did not rush to get off the car, but instead waited patiently inside.

"Aren't we going down to take a look?" Sui Sui asked, puzzled.

"I'm not going down anymore, let's wait."

Wei Ran looked out the car window at the courtyard behind the low wall, at the old man in the courtyard who was speaking in dialect and occasionally wiping his eyes, and at Li Yizhong who was holding a heavy Pentax 67ii.

After a long while, he turned away and sighed, "Don't disturb the old man's memories. Let him tell more stories about those veterans."

"Then let's wait," Sui Sui said, leaning against Wei Ran.

After waiting for two hours, with Lu Yue's help, Li Yizhong took a picture of the old man with his heavy film camera.

Only then did Wei Ran roll down the car window and call out to Li Yizhong.

Thanks to his greeting, Li Yizhong and Lu Yue were able to find an excuse to politely decline the old man and his family's offer to stay for dinner and slip into the carriage.

"Brother Wei, you've finally arrived." Li Yizhong visibly breathed a sigh of relief as he closed the car door.

"What's wrong with you guys?" Wei Ran asked with a smile.

"We recently sent the ashes of a veteran to the neighboring village."

As Li Yizhong spoke, he changed the film on the large camera he was holding. "Later, an old man from the next village—I mean, another village next door—came to us and said that his father had been conscripted to Tai Island."

At this point, Li Yizhong put the film he had just taken out into a sealed tube, wrote the number "21" on it with a marker, and continued, "Since then, this is the 21st elderly man to contact us. His brother was conscripted during the Anti-Japanese War and his fate is unknown. He left behind only a wife and a child."

"You mean"

"yes."

Li Yizhong sighed, "I never imagined I would have the opportunity to face that battlefield from such a unique perspective."

These are 21 families, 21 elderly people. Some of them have a father or mother who did not return, while others have a brother or sister who did not return.

Some of their families never returned; some clearly went to the island of Turf, while many more went missing, their whereabouts unknown, whether they survived the war, or even who they served before it ended.

At this point, Li Yizhong had already put away the sealed tube containing the film. "They don't even know what we're here to do, or they do know, they know perfectly well that we're just taking an old soldier's ashes home."

But like the old man just said, what if? What if we run into someone who knew his brother, even if they only know where his brother is buried?

At this point, Li Yizhong looked at Wei Ran and said, "That old gentleman was the 21st veteran. We still have 16 more to visit. To be honest, I'm very scared."

"What are you afraid of?" Lu Yue, sitting next to me, asked instinctively.

"I don't know what the person they're looking for did during the war."

Li Yizhong's tone revealed undisguised bewilderment, "I don't know if they are innocent, I don't know if they have done as many bad things as Lin Ayong, and I don't know if I should go looking for them. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I will send the bad guys back to their homeland but fail to help those true heroes."

I cannot provide an answer to this question.

Wei Ran couldn't help but look out the window again; even for him, this matter was still too costly.

"I know"

Li Yizhong sighed, "No matter what, I want to take a picture of this person first, to record their regrets and everything about their family."

"Go do it," Wei Ran patted the other person on the shoulder. "Just do what you plan to do, time will always give you the answer."

"So this is what you're doing right now?" Sui Sui finally asked at this moment.

"I originally thought it was just a simple matter of sending a veteran's ashes home."

Li Yizhong sighed, "But this matter is starting to get out of control. I selfishly think that maybe this is a good thing."

Regardless of whether those veterans who couldn't return home were good or bad people during the war, they wanted to go home, and their families wanted them to go home.

This is a good opportunity, or at least an opportunity to prove that people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family.

I just don't know if this idea is right, and I suspect even my grandfather wouldn't be able to give a completely fair answer to this matter, so like Brother Wei just said, I think I should just do it myself.

"Then let's do it," Sui Sui generously and freely offered her support.

Although it took nearly four hours to get from Yan'an to Yuncheng, Wei Ran and Sui Sui only had a late lunch with Li Yizhong at a small restaurant in a town before hurriedly taking the Kajenka sisters to the airport and boarding a connecting flight to Vladivostok.

"Why are we in such a hurry?" Wei Ran asked, feigning ignorance, only after boarding the self-driving tropical fruit transport plane.

There's no need to rush.

Sui Sui seemed to have thought of an excuse in advance: "You'll be doing a lot of interviews this time, and there are some procedures you need to familiarize yourself with."

"Because of that rushed film, 'The Last Line of Defense'?"

"No!"

With a beaming smile, Sui Sui became even more smug and impatient. "In short, you'd better cooperate well when the time comes."

"Don't worry, I promise I'll do whatever you ask me to do," Wei Ran immediately assured him, patting his chest.

Sui Sui was undoubtedly very satisfied with Wei Ran's attitude, even though she had guessed that Wei Ran probably already knew what was going to happen next, and she also knew that Wei Ran knew that she probably knew he knew what was going to happen.

In a tacit understanding unique to the two of them, the transport plane, loaded with fruit and toy chips, flew over Siberia toward St. Petersburg.

These past few days have been exceptionally busy for Sui Sui and Wei Ran. Since Labor Day, one after another 28-star cafes across Europe, Japan, and Southeast Asia have completed their renovations and opened for business.

These cafes almost all chose good locations, and as promised, they all had at least two floors, and the baristas and waiters were all muscular men and alluring women.

The old saying "appearance-obsessed people are everywhere" is absolutely true. Even just for the sake of these waiters, these newly opened cafes have attracted a large number of diners.

They are indeed foodies, because these cafes not only offer tea from China and high-quality coffee, but also quite delicious and affordable pasta.

Of course, there's also free Wi-Fi and a variety of classic songs that evoke a sense of nostalgia.

In addition to the above, one of the standard features of these cafes is the several small screens embedded in the tabletops, as well as the large screens around the bar counter.

It's hard to say whether the bottle-scooping game designed by Anfia herself on those small screens plagiarized a social mini-game from an Antarctic biologist.

However, it is undeniable that these diners are keen to get a chance to retrieve a bottle by buying a cup of coffee.

These retrieved bottles naturally contained neither the little girl selling tea with her grandfather, nor the mercenaries about to go to war.

These bottles, which only circulate within the internal network of the 28 Stars Café, contain stories of World War II veterans translated into local languages.

During these days, the bottles that were fished out contained stories of the hungry children in Leningrad, stories of the equally hungry cooks and young lamas on the Long March, and even stories of fools from the basement of a dentist's clinic in Berlin.

Of course, there are also cannibalistic Wendigos, bulldozer drivers planning to attack Paradise, and Edelweiss that withered away forever in Beirut, and so on.

In addition to the stories of these ordinary people, the 28 star-shaped cafes that opened one after another on Labor Day also launched a free storage service for the ashes of World War II veterans, as planned.

Also during this holiday season, Ninell, who had returned to the United States, established several completely legal private security companies with a few trusted confidants.

Among these security companies, some specialize in providing security services for the wealthy, some provide intelligence services, and others are simply construction contractors or even mechanical repair service providers.

Even Cha Xifeng's Dongfeng Mine Clearance Company has reached completely legal, compliant, and sufficiently transparent cooperation agreements with some security companies that Niner openly or covertly controls.

On this same holiday, Ms. Daofeng, a hardworking woman, also successfully harvested her first batch of Taima that met the sales standards.

Similarly, in the Sheepfold Country, where even American missiles cannot penetrate its airspace unless bombed, the mining business, secretly controlled by Sui Sui, protected by Uncle Big-Eared Chabu, and guarded by Greva's gang, began to expand exponentially with each investment.

Even within China, Qin Ershi, who has been extremely busy lately, has begun negotiations regarding some business investments.

All of this almost entirely transparent investment activity took place during the Labor Day holiday.

Similarly, on May 8th, after the holiday ended, Wei Ran also attended the medal-awarding ceremony at Victory Square in St. Petersburg.

When that so-called "senior uncle" pinned the friendship medal to his chest and broadcast it through the news, it naturally made some people grit their teeth at Wei Ran, who was clearly just a mascot, but also more wary of the forces hiding behind him.

Perhaps it was precisely because the person in charge of the hammer punishment who was openly standing behind him was too undisguised that some people who saw Wei Ran in the news almost subconsciously overlooked the fact that this historian with a warm smile was actually a monster with sharp teeth.

After the rather simple awarding ceremony ended, Wei Ran shook hands, took photos, and said goodbye. Looking at the medal still hanging on the chest of his Zhongshan suit, he couldn't help but let out a soft sigh.

Once upon a time, Brezhnev dreamed of forging a suit of armor from his medals, but to no avail. Now, however, he has received this small piece of iron, which is equivalent to armor, a sense of absurdity that makes him want to laugh.

"how do you feel?"

Sui Sui, who had been standing outside the camera's view, came closer, examining the medal and its accompanying certificate while asking questions with a sense of pride.

"You deserve half of the military medal, more than half."

As Wei Ran spoke, he took off the medal pinned to his chest and hung it on Sui Sui's evening gown. "What did you exchange it for?"

"Historical stories alone are far from enough."

Sui Sui looked at the medal hanging on her chest, and while taking a selfie, she explained, "This small piece of metal may not mean much to that old man, but it can bring jobs to many poor people, give them the opportunity to revitalize several cities, and even allow them to move forward."
"Ahem, anyway, he doesn't lose out, and neither do I. With this little metal piece around, at least I don't have to worry about your safety here."

"What about you?" Wei Ran asked as he put his arm around the other person and walked out.

"Of course I'm counting on you. Let's go, we've been invited to watch the Victory Day parade, and we need to get to Moscow today."

Sui Sui gave her answer as if it were a matter of course, but it was also as if she knew nothing at all.