Snow Blindness Era
As the dust in the attic swirled in the beam of light, Ayu was wiping the rust off a tin box with her sleeve. Zhonghua was passing a cardboard box up the creaking wooden ladder when he suddenly heard her gasp—the tin box lid popped open, and a Seagull camera fell out. The gold-stamped "Made in Shanghai" lettering on the case was now faded and blurred, resembling the cracked bark of an old tree he had seen in Changbai Mountain last year.
"Film from 1998." Ayu pinched the edge of the film canister. The image of Mount Fuji printed on the plastic casing had been eroded by time, leaving only half of it, revealing the silver aluminum foil underneath. Zhong Hua took it and looked at it against the light. The film was curled into a spiral shape inside the canister, much like the sand patterns they had seen in the Mingsha Mountain in Dunhuang, except that each spiral pattern held twenty years of time locked within it.
The attic roof leaked, and the New Year pictures piled in the corner were already stained with mold. Ayu placed the camera on the windowsill. When the lens cap popped open, half a faded candy wrapper fell out, with a missing piece of Mickey Mouse's ear printed on it, exactly like the snack packaging in Zhonghua's childhood memories. "Was this what the alleyway in your hometown looked like before it was demolished?" She pointed to the embossed pattern on the camera case, where dust embedded in the diamond-shaped grid arranged itself into a floor plan of Zhonghua's old courtyard house when shaken off.
The owner of the film developing shop was an old man wearing round-framed glasses. His fingertips trembled as he took the roll of film. "This kind of old machine," he said, holding up the film canister to the light, "the last time I developed film was in 2000, back then..." His voice suddenly stopped because a yellowed note had fallen out from the gap in the film canister. The pencil writing read "Wait for the snow to stop," and the handwriting was exactly the same as the signature on Zhong Hua's father's medical record.
As the red lightbox lit up, the first negative floated in the developing solution. Ayu leaned closer to look, and in the blurry snow, there was a child in a cotton-padded coat, wearing a Lei Feng hat askew, clutching a carrot close to his hand—the posture reminded her of Zhong Hua squatting in the snow building a snowman in Changbai Mountain earlier this year, his nose red from the cold. "The buildings in the background..." Zhong Hua suddenly grabbed her wrist. The outline of the unfinished residential buildings on the negative overlapped perfectly with the old alleyway photos he had saved on his phone before their demolition, down to the exact angle of the scaffolding.
The second negative developed even more slowly. The old man gently turned it over with tweezers, and suddenly a snowflake-shaped spot of light floated to the surface of the developing solution—not bubbles from the developing solution, but actual hexagonal crystals. Ayu recalled the blizzard in Changbai Mountain; she had tilted her head back to catch snowflakes, and one had landed right on her eyelashes. In the instant before it melted, its structure was exactly the same as the spot of light on the negative. "The winter of 1998," the old man suddenly began, "that year the snow was particularly heavy, and many alleyways were demolished before we could even photograph them."
As the last negative was soaking in the fixer, Zhong Hua's phone suddenly vibrated. It was an old photo sent by his mother. In the blurry image, his young father stood at the entrance of the courtyard house, a snowman drawn in chalk on the brick wall behind him, the angle of the carrot nose exactly matching the one on the negative. A Yu leaned closer to look and noticed a child's back in the corner of the photo, wearing a Lei Feng hat, the shape of the patch on his cotton-padded jacket exactly matching the hole in the old down jacket Zhong Hua was wearing now.
"Alright." The old man turned off the red light and clipped the film onto the drying rack. In the interplay of light and shadow, Ayu saw a snowflake really landing next to the snowman's carrot nose—not a development defect, but a clear hexagon, each corner adorned with tiny ice crystals, just like the snowflake structure she had photographed under a microscope by the hot springs of Changbai Mountain. Zhong Hua reached out to touch it, his fingertips barely touching the film when he suddenly heard the wooden stairs in the attic creak, exactly like the sound his father used to make when he came home late at night during his childhood.
On the way home, Ayu placed the film negative on the car window. In the instant the streetlights swept by, the snowman on the film overlapped with the snowdrifts of Changbai Mountain, and the outline of the unfinished residential building gradually turned into the screen wall of Zhonghua's old home. The blurry figure of the child was turning around—the patches on the cotton-padded jacket connected in a line, which was exactly the pattern on Ayu's scarf when they were skiing in Changbai Mountain earlier this year.
"My dad always said that he built a snowman in the alley in the winter of 1998," Zhong Hua suddenly slammed on the brakes. The sycamore leaves by the roadside fluttered against the car window, their shadows cast on the film, forming the snowman's eyes. "He said the snowman's nose looked just like a carrot he had seen when he was a child. Later, the demolition team came, and the snowman disappeared along with the alley." His fingers traced the snowflakes on the film, the ice crystals pointing directly at where his father was standing in the photo.
While organizing the negatives late at night, Ayu noticed a string of blurry numbers along the edge of the third negative. After examining it closely with a magnifying glass, she was suddenly stunned—it was Zhong Hua's birth date. The way the numbers were written was exactly the same as his father's in his medical records, and the peeling edges of the medicine film around the numbers formed the outline of Changbai Mountain's Tianchi Lake. Zhong Hua leaned closer to look, his breath condensing into white mist on the negative. When the mist dissipated, they saw the shadow of a snowflake slowly moving beside the snowman's carrot nose, its angle matching the sunlight's projection on the snow on the day they skied in Changbai Mountain.
The next day, when Zhong Hua went to the film developing shop, the old man was cleaning lenses. "That roll of film from yesterday," he said without looking up, "someone actually asked about it ten years ago." Zhong Hua took the note he handed him; it had the same handwriting, "Waiting for the snow to stop," but with an extra date in the corner—2015, the year Zhong Hua's father passed away. The old man took out a metal box from a drawer, inside which were stacked more than a dozen identical negatives. The snowman was in a different position on each negative, but the outlines of the residential buildings in the background all matched the alleyways of Zhong Hua's hometown.
"The original owner of this camera," the old man pointed to the subtle pattern on the leather case, "was a photographer for a demolition office. He took many photos of the hutongs in 1998. Later, he fell ill and kept saying that the snowman's nose would change direction." The old man's glasses were reflective, making it difficult to see his expression. "The last time he came to develop the film was in 2015. He said he wanted to photograph the snow on Changbai Mountain, but the film was completely blank except for the last shot..."
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