Text/Zhong Guangwu
When I wrote this topic, I felt that the pen in my hand was so heavy, there was a kind of cone pain, as if penetrating my body, whistling into a cold and bone-chilling wind, walking through the lonely treetops...
More than fifty years ago, in just one month apart, my grandmother and aunt passed away one after another, and they walked in such a hurry and helplessness, without leaving a single photo, and they walked so pathetically and desolately, just like the few dead leaves on the branches of the trees in winter, blown by the cold wind, and quietly left. When my grandmother and aunt left, I had not yet been born, and the stories about them were all heard from my parents and my eldest brother, who had just learned at that time.
First, about the grandmother
My grandmother's mother's family was Jujiazhuangzi, north of Jingzhi Town, Anqiu County (City), Shandong Province. Twenty years ago, my father and I and my brothers and I had to go there almost every New Year's Day to visit relatives, and my father went to visit his elderly uncle and uncle, and we called them uncle and uncle. At that time, looking at the kind smiles and staggering steps of my uncles and grandfathers, I vaguely saw the figure of my living grandmother.
Looking from Zhuzi Village in the direction of Jujiazhuangzi, the undulating figure of Gaigong Mountain obscured my vision. Occasionally, one or two outlier geese struggled to track their companions in the lonely sky, whispering and flying over the top of the mountain. From this, I thought of my grandmother's miserable life. The distance between our Zhuzi Village and Jujiazhuangzi is less than thirty miles, and today it can be reached by car for at most twenty minutes. But at the beginning of the last century, people traveled on foot, and they also walked some rugged and difficult sheep gut trails over the mountains. I think that when my grandmother was young, she must also be a young girl with a mirror appliqué, and with her vision and yearning for a better life, she used her three-inch golden lotus to follow my grandfather all the way north, through spring, autumn, winter and summer, to zhuzi village on the other side of her happiness. My grandfather was sixteen or seventeen years old on the wine pot in Zhuzi Village, he worked hard, hard-working, learned a first-hand winemaking skill, is a well-known winemaking master (now a senior winemaking engineer), and jujiazhuangzi is close to the traditional wine town of Jingzhi, I guess my grandfather and grandmother's marriage may be because of wine.
Later, with the birth of my aunt and my father, the burden of family life became heavier and heavier, looking at the children who were waiting to be fed, my grandfather resolutely took his wife and his wife to leave Jiaodong and work as a shochu brewery in Jiaozhou, Lancun, Gaomi, Xiazhuang, Zhangling and other places to support the family. While taking care of her children, the hard-working grandmother also pushed and grinded the noodles for others in order to earn some wheat bran for rations. My grandmother was a foot-bound, and because she had been busy in the mill for a long time, a string of blood bubbles had been grinding on her feet, and every step she took was the pain of drilling the heart. But she gritted her teeth and refused to stop. The grinding road was long, and I don't know how many of my grandmother's bitter tears and sweat were soaked.
Looking at my grandmother's emaciated face, my distraught grandfather finally sent my grandmother and my underage aunt and father back to my hometown of Zhuzi Village, relying only on him to work outside alone, with a meager income, to help the family's life. However, in that era of social unrest, rampant banditry, and harsh taxes and fees, grandmothers and aunts, like fathers and many villagers, were always in the depths of the water. At that time, in order to prevent bandits from attacking and harassing, the village office stipulated that each family must take turns to watch the night on the wall around the village. Since my grandfather was away for many years, my grandmother had to take my father, who was not yet ten years old at the time, to the guard. In the face of the biting cold wind and the endless night, the great fear made the father sigh every time he mentioned it later.
The endless bitter days had not yet come to an end, and in 1938, the iron hooves of Japanese devils stepped into the banks of the Weihe River. Wherever these beasts went, they burned and plundered without evil, and the people suffered terribly. In order to avoid the clutches of the devil, the grandmother took the aunt and father to hide in Tibet, and went through all the hardships, due to excessive fright and fatigue, the grandmother fell ill with heartache from then on.
Finally, looking forward to the stars, hoping for the moon, the poor people looking forward to the sun. By 1946, the people's army led by Chairman Mao's Communist Party had eliminated all reactionaries, Zhuzi District had been liberated, the gongs and drums of victory echoed on both sides of the Weihe River, the masses of the people had turned themselves into masters, and grandmothers were overjoyed. She actively responded to the call of her superiors, grinding military food, collecting soles, and making military shoes for the frontline soldiers, because she rubbed the twine on the calf for a long time, the legs were cracked with blood, and the red blood was rubbed into the twine and into the sole of the frontline soldier's shoe. When others saw her, they advised her to take a break, but her grandmother smiled and said, "Minor injuries can't get into the line of fire!"
Second, about the aunt
My aunt was the same age as my mother. My mother said that the reason why I called her my aunt was because I once had a sister-in-law who had a serious illness when she was nine years old and died early. In the old society of poverty and turmoil and the lack of medical treatment, the health of the people was not guaranteed at all.
In 1948, the aunt who was spending the same amount of time reached the age of talking about marriage. After the words of the matchmaker, the eldest aunt married a family surnamed Zhao in Zhao Yan Village, which was three away from home and returned to the land. My uncle was also a farmer, not verbal and selfish. Since the eldest aunt married into the Zhao family, the happy life she expected was like a bubble, worrying about family chores every day, worrying about firewood and grain, tossing and turning in the strange, undulating between the stoves. The anticipation and joy before marriage, the disappointment and loneliness after marriage, made the aunt disheartened.
The conceptual memory of the title of great aunt began in the early seventies when my mother led me and my third brother to give my aunt a nine-year death grave. The village of Zhao Yan, the home of the great aunt, is in the southwest direction of Zhuzi Village, and Tongxiang is to take the winding sheep intestine trail over the majestic Gaigong Mountain. Vaguely remember that it was a season at the turn of spring and summer, although my third brother and I were still young and did not understand things at that time, but we had never been to the house of the great aunt of Zhao Yan Village, and we followed our mother on the bumpy and undulating path, and there was an inexplicable depression and sadness in our hearts. I don't know how many helpless footprints and bitter tears my poor aunt left on this path that connects her mother's family and her in-laws' family, but I felt that this path was like an invisible rope, tightly choking the throat of my sister-in-law's fate.
The first time I went to my aunt's house, I saw an uneven courtyard wall made of rubble and broken bricks surrounding three low, dilapidated adobe huts. A dilapidated wooden fence door slumped weakly to one side, and my uncle, who was less than fifty years old, was dressed in a disheveled robe, his eyes were dark, his beard was disheveled, and he looked more like an old man of sixty or seventy years old. As the saying goes, a child without a wife is like a grass, and although the eldest cousin and the three cousins that my aunt left behind when she left, they are also ragged and poor and helpless. According to the local customs here, after the death of a person, the grave of the fifth and seventh, one hundred days, one year, three years, and nine years is an important day to mourn the dead, which is very ritualistic. In a bush of barren grass at the foot of the southern slope of Gaigong Mountain, a small tomb sleeps alone with the wind all day long, sleeping with the sun and the moon. The aunt had been sleeping there for nine years. Seeing my uncle and my cousins crying and crying in front of the grave, my eyes couldn't help but fill with tears.
Shortly thereafter, my troubled uncle resolutely led my cousin and cousins down to Kanto to find another way out. On the premise that the eldest cousin married the son of the local village secretary who was more than ten years old, she settled down on the banks of the Songhua River in a remote and strange and vast and cold Jilin Province. After that, there were a few occasional letters, knowing that my cousin and cousin had become a family, that there was enough food to eat, and that I would no longer suffer from hunger. In the vast northeast plains, between the words written on the letters from cousins and cousins, what I felt most was their deep nostalgia and deep longing for their deceased aunts.
In the past few years, cousins and cousins who are far away in the northeast have come back to visit their relatives. We have not seen each other for more than thirty years, they are all more than half a hundred years old and gray, but I feel that there is a strong family affection like an invisible bond, which binds our hearts together tightly, which is probably the reason why blood is thicker than water. Seeing their strange and kind faces, I clearly felt that the aunt who had not been masked for many years was standing in front of my eyes.
3. Grandmother and aunt
Listen to my parents, during the three years of natural disasters in the early 1960s, life was extremely difficult and difficult. Due to the long-term war and turmoil of the grandmother, coupled with the hunger of eating chaff and throat vegetables, she suffered from a serious stomach disease, which later worsened into stomach cancer.
By April of the 1964 lunar calendar, my grandmother was so bloated and bedridden that it was difficult to swallow any food, and she could only drink a few spoonfuls of rice soup to survive. But my grandmother thought to herself because she couldn't see my great aunt: "Zhao Yan (in the past, we had a custom here, and the woman who married out generally did not call her by her name, but called her in-laws' village name, because my great aunt's family belonged to Zhao Yan Village, so she was called Zhao Yan) Is it coming?" My aunt and my father are a pair of children raised by my grandmother in my life, my grandmother's dearest love, my father is next to my grandmother, both able to see and reach out, and to be able to meet the aunt who has been married for many years has become my grandmother's greatest wish at this time.
It was also at this time that the fifth child of the thirty-nine-year-old aunt was about to give birth. On the night of april 25 of that year's lunar calendar, the rain was continuous and the night was endless. The aunt who gave birth at home was already dying due to difficult childbirth. What is infuriating is that my uncle did not hurry to find a way to send the aunt who had difficulty giving birth to the commune health center not far away, but rushed to my house in a hurry to find my father, who was waiting for my critically ill grandmother at the bed, to find a way, my father listened and was angry and anxious, but he was afraid that the seriously ill grandmother would not dare to hear it, and hurriedly stumbled with his uncle on the bumpy path and rushed all the way to Zhao Yan.
However, it was too late. By the time they arrived, the aunt had lost the breath of life, and had left this world along with the unborn child. When the father saw the situation, he was suddenly filled with grief and indignation, and he cried bitterly, and when he saw that his sister, who had been with him since childhood, had died in pain and despair, his father angrily incited his uncle to slap him twice! But everything is already powerless!
That day, when my father finished dealing with my aunt's affairs and came home, it was very late. My grandmother, who was seriously ill, suddenly woke up that night, and she intermittently asked my father, who had just returned home: "Did Zhao Yan come just now?" She said that a person holding a child walking at night was afraid, she asked me to accompany her, did you see Zhao Yan? Looking at the grandmother on the hospital bed, thinking of the poor aunt who had just passed away, the heartbroken father could only lie: "Zhao Hitomi gave birth to a child today, and she said that she would come to see you when the full moon was over." "That's good, that's good..." grandmother murmured, a look of relief on her face, and a glimmer of light flashed in her cloudy eyes.
On the 24th day of the fifth month of the lunar calendar that year, it was also a whole month after the death of the great aunt. That day, my grandmother, who had not been dripping water for more than ten days, suddenly woke up from her coma, opened her dizzy eyes and looked at my father, and the corners of her mouth squirmed a few times, but she could no longer speak. My father understood what my grandmother wanted to say and ask, because in my grandmother's heart, today was exactly one month since my eldest aunt gave birth, and it was time to come to my mother's house to live in the full moon. My father looked at his dying grandmother, his heart was like a knife, he forced himself to hold back the tears in his eyes, leaned down, and leaned close to his grandmother's ear and said: "Mother, you don't wait for Zhao Hitomi, she has been gone in front of you, walked for a whole month..." The grandmother clearly understood my father's words, the corners of her mouth squirmed a few times, sighed lightly, and two drops of dark red blood tears slowly slipped from the corners of her eyes, and her head was crooked, and she passed away!
Later, listening to the eldest brother who had just learned things at that time, I told me that the two last drops of blood and tears that fell when my grandmother left had not dried up on her coarse cotton pillow for a long time. I think it is the boundless love that makes the sick grandmother fight against death with extraordinary will and perseverance, and it is the licking feelings of the fist that support the grandmother's belief that she wants to see the last side of the aunt. The two drops of blood and tears shed before her grandmother died were the final thoughts and expectations left by her old family to her relatives, and one drop was full of reluctance! A drop full of worries!
(Image from the Internet)
【About the author】Zhong Guangwu, pen name Weishui Chenzhong. A native of Weifang, Shandong Province. He has published more than 200 works in various paper journals and online media such as "Chinese Countryside", "Contemporary Essays", "Today's Headlines", "Weifang Radio and Television News" and so on. Among them, the essay "Weiheyuan" won the gold medal of the Sixth "Chinese Love" National Poetry and Prose Competition.
Sponsored by the Shandong Provincial Prose Literature Society, Contemporary Prose is a bimonthly prose journal, which mainly publishes the works of members of the Shandong Provincial Prose Literature Association, and welcomes Shandong prose writers to apply to join the Shandong Provincial Prose Association. The Shandong Provincial Prose Literature Association holds various prose activities throughout the year to provide book publishing services for writers. Contact number: 18653131587; submission email: [email protected]
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