Huang Yi: Traction

Bear with me

This is a hospital with a lot of history. Thick walls high roof, the floor paved with solid wooden floors, people walking on it emits an empty echo, the dark red paint on the floor has been mottled, and the places where people often walk reveal the true color of wood; and the roof of the corridor is arched, as if it is specifically to receive the echo of the floor, and has a good reverberation effect. Corridors are connected to corridors, like a person's blood, along which you can reach all corners of the hospital.

At this moment, I was walking in the corridor of this hospital, which was probably a section of the cecum—very few people came in and out of this small partial door that was about to be abandoned, and I touched it from this place. The echo of this empty corridor is particularly special, the sound of the first foot has not yet dissipated, the sound of the latter foot has followed, the whole corridor is filled with my grunting, the iron palm on my shoes is tapping on the wooden floor, and the dull and sharp sound is amplified a lot. No one in the city had nailed the soles of their shoes anymore, and with this footnote, it was enough to conclude that this man with a slightly slanted body and shoulders dangling around was from outside the city.

Indeed, I was still at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains, more than 1,800 kilometers from the capital city, and for the sake of my dear waist, I had to take a long-distance bus for a week to find a wise person or a person with high medical skills to heal my waist. In order to eliminate pain, people have to endure many things other than pain. In today's ubiquitous asphalt roads, the gravel paved roads of that time are more tortuous than history and more bumpy than the years. Tighten your waist with a belt and keep your upper body as straight as possible. If the sitting posture is not good and the sudden bump is added, then not only will the pain increase, but it may make the protruding part of the spine more prominent, or cause slippage or anything else. I also had to support my waist with both hands, restraining the drowsiness brought about by the monotonous long road, and as the ups and downs of the car made my body sink, I did not dare to have a little resistance, and my waist was not enough to compete with the strong inertia. I was afraid that the car would jump up once, and my waist would make a click, even the slightest sound would make me miserable. My biggest wish was to be able to lie down for a while, lay flat, and let the beam that I supported independently relieve some of the pressure. Everything about the little roadside shop is unforgettable. In the dim light, the stains on the sheets could still be recognized, the strange smell was wrapped in the quilt, and as I opened the roll, the beast that released the smell was released, and the roar of the monster echoed throughout the room; the most suspicious was the blurred color of the pillow towel, which was mostly used by travelers to dust or shine shoes. Regardless of this much, hold your breath, and the clothes drill into it, so that the back of the shoulder is pressed against the hard bed board, then the relaxed bone joints reveal a burst of soreness, especially the lumbar spine, moaning under the body, some unclear whispers, it is not clear whether it is from the waist or the bed board. People's feelings are really rich, and the smell alone can trigger the association of the end of the world, and the depth of pain can be determined from the sound. What is particularly frustrating is that there is a large pit under the waist of the bed board, presumably more than one passenger like me, who wants to adjust and restore the lumbar spine on this bed board, lift, lower, shift, twist, in short, let the waist be ironed as much as possible. After a long period of tossing and turning, how can the piece of the bed board not be deeply sunken? There are as many sunken bed plates as there are painful lumbar spines. Later, in countless roadside shops, I found that each bed board had a noticeable large pit.

Supporting my increasingly uncomfortable waist, I walked in this corridor with great echoes, fearful and lucky, to this hospital, which was said to be able to cure all diseases. This corridor is very sinister, and at the turn where the light cannot reach, it seems that something may jump out or something unexpected may happen at any time.

The director, surnamed Yan, is an expert in orthopedics. He had a dark face, looked much older than his actual age, was lean and had a faint look. Later, I came into contact with many bone therapy experts, and almost none of them were obese, which seemed to imply their professional characteristics - good muscles and bones are like everything.

Director Yan's grip must be extraordinary, the eagle's claw-like fingers are placed on the table in an arc, and without moving, I have felt some kind of strength. He took the X-ray I had carefully handed over, only to dangle it twice in front of his eyes, and then tossed it aside, as if he knew what was going on without looking, and looking at it was nothing more than proof that he could not go wrong. He also didn't want to hear my statement about the cause. Every patient mistakenly thinks that the more carefully and clearly the doctor tells the better, for fear of missing something will delay their own diagnosis and treatment, this attitude of being completely responsible for themselves can only move yourself, and the doctor will not be moved. The doctor is always taller than the patient, and everything you talk about is already familiar to him, and he has long anticipated, and his imagination and experience, coupled with a little expertise, have long foreseen all your pains in advance. Therefore, it is often the case that you think that the disease that the sky is going to fall down seems to them to be worthless. The coldness of the doctor is manifested in the indifference to familiar things and the indifference to strange things.

Director Yan said he knew. He said to look at tuina first, he said that tuina has big tuina and small tuina. He seemed to be talking to himself and asking me which kind of tuina I wanted to use. The other patients were temporarily invited outside, the noisy room was suddenly quiet, I was alone with him, a little overwhelmed, his scattered eyes gradually gathered, fixed on me, I was a little out of breath, my heart suddenly jumped fast, I even wanted to escape. Taking off my shoes and untying my trouser belt, I lay on my stomach on the narrow tuina bed with open arms, like a skinned field chicken.

He didn't seem to be in a hurry to get his hands on it, but looked around me twice, as if judging whether the body was worth it. "You put up with it." He suddenly came up with a sentence, and my whole body suddenly tensed, "Don't be nervous, don't be nervous," he patted my back and smiled. His hands began to wander behind my back. He wanted my tense muscles to relax first, and then to use tough tactics. His fingers were cold, as if there were suction cups on his stomach, and the muscles were full where the muscles were weak, and where the muscles were full, they collapsed. Gradually, there was some warmth in my back, the blood flow rate was much faster, and those pain points were slowly blurring, and I had some sleepy feelings... Suddenly, two steel nails wedged straight into my back, his two thumbs pressed side by side against my injured lumbar spine. Before I could utter a scream, another thrust of more thrust made me almost shut up. I could no longer express my pain with a single "ah", the back of my hand blocked my mouth, and two rows of deep tooth marks were staggered on the back of my hand.

"Bear with me, I'll reset you, bear with me!" His voice seemed to come from a distant air, and I didn't know if I could hold back or how long I would continue to endure. Reset means restoration, the original thing is wrong or wrong, existence determines everything, the struggle between bones, far from over.

Looking at me who was almost paralyzed, Director Yan's face was calm, his breath was not chaotic, and I was already sweating heavily, and the atmosphere was in and out, as if I had just finished tuina for him. Director Yan warned me, "Go back and lie down honestly, don't run around." Hold on, hold back! ”

I know I'm going to endure a lot from now on, painful or non-painful, or pain-related. I am reminded of a sentence: The big husband can endure the things that ordinary people can't tolerate, am I the big husband?

It's just that I still haven't figured out whether Director Yan implemented big tuina or small tuina for me.

traction

I don't know whether to believe in humans or machines? Director Yan's implementation of the big tuina and small massage did not make my waist completely straight, but several patients in the ward, their condition made me greatly stimulated. These are a few patients who have developed ankylosing spondylitis because of minor problems in the spine, and it is said that their spine has been almost stiffened, and the joints have been rusted to death, and there are almost no gaps. Their waists are bent like the horns of a goat in a fixed shape, and their necks can no longer be rotated at will, and when they look at people, their entire bodies must be turned around.

The patient, Liu, was a soldier, small in stature, with a thin body, and his waist was stoned while building roads in Kunlun Mountain. He was originally a very flexible person, but now he seemed clumsy everywhere, but his eyes were dripping and turning, and he was always sprinkled with a living light. No matter what kind of illness a person has, as long as his eyes do not stop wandering around, it means that his heart is not dead, and he is not completely disappointed in life. When the female nurse entered our ward, Xiao Liu even if he lay down on the bed and could not turn his neck at will, it could not reduce his enthusiasm, often we had not yet seen who was entering the door, his eyes had turned three or four times on people, and it was first to look at the top and then look below, casually shouting out the name of a nurse, often preceded by the word "small". For this reason, the patient Friend Lao Hu specifically consulted him, and Xiao Liu pretended to squeeze his eyes mysteriously: "I can foresee and foresee." In fact, he had only figured out the shift time of each nurse before, and predicted it in advance based on his footsteps.

Xiao Liu also often crooked his body and neck straight to go to the next door to the women's ward to visit the door, as soon as he went to the next door, he flew out of the room full of laughter from time to time, a sharp laughter, can not hear Xiao Liu's laughter, only his unhurried speech. Say, laugh, say, laugh again. If you don't see his person, just by his words and his being obliterated from time to time by hilarity, no one can imagine that this is a person who is carrying great pain. Ankylosing spondylitis so far the world has not yet had a complete cure, the beginning of the disease is that every section of the spine is rusted to death, and finally all the joints of the whole body are rusted and locked, the whole person can not move, or even sleep on the side, because the last rusty spine is bent like a bow, and people can no longer lie flat. But Xiao Liu often comforted me and said to me brother, don't be discouraged, your little illness is still far from death, and there is also a way to drive me. People are based on themselves to measure others. Yes, this disease of mine cannot be compared, but if you compare me with all healthy people, in their eyes I am not the same as Xiao Liu? Just as man cannot compare life and wealth, pain cannot be compared.

Since the big and small tuina did not work much for me, I followed the doctor's advice and changed to other treatment methods. People have been admitted to the hospital, what choice do I have, at your mercy. Just like telling me that tuina worked for me, the doctor said that traction was my only option at the moment.

The so-called traction is to tie a person to a metal mechanical bed with several wide and strong cowhide belts. The bed consisted of two parts, programmed into some sort of program, with the button pressed, the red light flashing, accompanied by the rumbling of the machine, and the metal mechanical bed slowly pulled apart like the drift of continental plates. The man who was fixed to this bed by the cowhide belt was also pulled by the two completely opposite forces towards the head and feet, like a large rope in the hands of two teams of tug-of-war people, and the gravity gauge swung from thirty kilograms all the way up. It is said that this continuous increase in force can pull the lumbar spine apart to reduce the compression of the nerves by the herniation, thereby also relieving the pain in the waist and the numbness of the legs.

The distance between the metal beds that were gradually separating became wider and wider, and my bone joints began to roll soundly. I could imagine my bones being forcibly pulled apart, and every joint made the muscles sink down, and I couldn't help but think of the uniform snake when I was a child, as long as I pinched its tail upside down and lifted its wrist and shook it, its entire spine bone was shaken apart and disjointed, paralyzed on the ground like a pile of rotten grass rope, and it could no longer bump left and right, spiral and spit cores and bite people; it also made me think of shang martingale or some ancients, the thrill of being divided by five horses, thinking that I was also a little tall. Of course, what comes to my mind more is why should my bones compete with inhuman machines? Can my flesh and blood triumph over steel? If the program is messed up, if it suddenly gets out of control, if it doesn't act according to man's will, am I not likely to be dragged in two alive? Like a mighty monster tearing up a small hairy thief who has strayed into its territory, effortlessly, or like the kidnappers' usual trick of "tearing up the ticket"? I don't know whether I should trust machines or people?

I was kept on a baseline of pain—the pain of the shallow layer of flesh being pulled and the deep pain released between the bones. Time is the weight that makes the pain clearer and clearer.

To be free from suffering and to endure greater suffering. Finally, after experiencing dozens of such horrors, after the machine bed did not always function as I had imagined, after the gravity gauge reached more than a hundred kilograms countless times, I had to stop the treatment. I suddenly realized that this is not a therapy to cut the grass and remove the roots, but only to make me have a deep psychological dependence on it, how should a person who relies on pain to deal with another kind of pain survive this life?

I stopped the treatment. Although the waist is still faintly painful, but it seems to be much more relaxed, this kind of physical relief of pain makes me convinced: control a person, you give him something special to the flesh, the effect will be unexpected.

birth

When I was a child, I went to school and was most afraid of opening school after the holidays.

It is not because the fairy days of stealing melons and picking vegetables and playing fish in the summer vacation can no longer continue, nor is it the happy time of ice skating and skiing and cockfighting and wrestling in the winter vacation is over, but every time the new teacher registers for the class, the new teacher must fill in the student's relevant information on the roster of new students, such as age, gender, place of origin, ethnicity and family origin. What I was most afraid of and hated the most was that the teacher asked about his family origin in public, and whenever he encountered this situation, he would be embarrassed, and he couldn't help but answer, and after answering, he was extremely scared! If it is a teacher who deliberately makes things difficult, the situation is even worse. The teacher asked: Family origin? I looked away from his voice and whispered in a very weak voice: Landlord. Teacher: Such a small voice, can't hear clearly, say it loudly again! I just had to open my mouth as he asked, and the world would be different at once.

The students who came to report to the school and did not know each other immediately automatically divided me into another camp, and they disdained to be with people like us. There are a few students in each class who have a bad composition, some are landlords, rich peasants, capitalists, some are businessmen and may even be warlords (those who have served in the Kuomintang troops seem to apply this); there are also several components, such as middle peasants, intellectuals, etc., which are relatively vaguely divided, belonging to the elements that are inferior to the top and have more than the bottom; the most cattle component is the poor and lower middle peasants, that is, the class composed of poor peasants and lower middle peasants, among which the more important is the hired peasants, which is an ingredient that is even poorer than the poor peasants. It is the subject on which the dictatorship of the proletariat, like the working class, depends most heavily on, and it has the duty and duty to supervise us puppies. Although we are defined as a generation that can be educated well, we are also such an uneasy generation.

More than once I have complained in my heart about why our family is a landlord. Even a kulak or a merchant! If you add a "small" word in front of it, such as a small owner, a small businessman or something, it is simply a kind of happiness. And what is a landlord? Huang Shiren, Liu Wencai, and Nan Batian, who eat people and do not spit bones, are all representatives of the landlord class, and they associate us with these people as if we are all relatives, and will they not be spurned by their classmates?

There was a school worker named Li Lame Zi who was often invited to the stage to give us a report on the memory of bitterness and sweetness, and the so-called memory of bitterness and sweetness is to remember the bitterness of the old society and the sweetness of the new society, thus arousing hatred for the landlord class and love for the new society. Every time Li Lame Zi began to carry work for the landlord when he was nine years old, until he was seventeen years old, he had a daughter-in-law, he was forcibly occupied by the landlord, he went to reason, was broken by the landlord,and since then he has been disabled for life. At this point, Li Lame was in tears, and at this time someone was guaranteed to stand up and shout slogans, and the slogans were nothing more than: do not forget the class bitterness and remember the blood and tears of hatred to fight the old society of all evils. When I followed them and shouted slogans, my heart was always empty, as if I was denouncing myself, and the slogans I shouted out were too loud for others to hear as a false element; if I shouted too weakly, I would be accused of not being willing to draw a line with the landlord component and unwilling to accept reform.

Instead of shouting slogans, the reminiscences after the bittersweet conference are even more difficult for us puppies to know how to be good. The so-called bitter rice is made of wheat bran mixed with some old cabbage gangs and rotten radishes, boiled into a pot of non-dry and not thin food, the smell is hot and sour, and it is almost vomiting out before it is ingested. But at this time, there must be no complaints, otherwise the consequences are self-evident, neither can you eat with relish, nor can you show that it is difficult to swallow, keep chewing at a uniform speed, swallow at the right time, the key is that the expression should be serious, and there is a solemnity that falls into the memories of the past. The most feared thing is that people ask if it is good to eat, no matter how you answer it will be caught by others, if you answer delicious, they will say that this is the poor and lower middle peasants to do cattle and horse work, eat pig and dog food, how can it be delicious? What position are you speaking from? If you say it is not delicious, then you are most likely to be said to have no class feelings, and the working people rely on this to fill their stomachs all year round, how can it be difficult to eat in your mouth? The attitude towards the remembrance of bitter rice is an excellent means of testing everyone like us who is not from a good background, and a single test can reveal major problems.

One of my brother's classmates, because he couldn't help vomiting while eating a bitter meal, was accused of being sent to the Workers' Propaganda Brigade, which became a very serious political incident, and then carried out an in-depth investigation of the whole of their family, and finally found out that their family was a large landowner who had been arrested, and the home was also raided, and many things from their family were exhibited in a large conference room. We were all asked to visit and no one could escape. In the makeshift exhibition hall, a long wire was covered with clothes, and a table was full of rare things. The first time I saw the real tiger skin, it was a coat worn by his grandfather, which was much more beautiful than Yang Zirong's tiger skin shoulders in the model play "Wise Tiger Mountain", gorgeous and restrained, colorful and agile, as if a real tiger was hung there. It turns out that the legendary ginseng is like this, like the soap head left over from the hand washing, yellow and white, there is no appearance under the fame of the precious tonic, but the golden velvet box containing the ginseng, showing a bit of luxury; the most incredible thing is a pair of metal utensils with three legs like an incense burner, but unlike the incense burner, its surface is straight, a few clusters of sharp corners stand in the center, no one can understand what it is, the narrator said that it is a punishment device, something that specially makes people kneel, isn't it? The size is exactly the same as the knee, and the sharp corners on the top are also just right for the knees that are not soft. We were completely stunned! The landlord bully is really too hateful, the poor and lower middle peasants work hard for four seasons but are not clothed, the landlord is rich but wears a tiger skin coat; the poor and lower middle peasants eat chaff vegetables, but they drink bird's nest and eat ginseng; against those poor peasants, they will come up with such terrible torture devices, it is simply inhumane!

My grandfather was a landlord, did he treat his peasants in the same way? Is our hometown also hiding a large amount of shocking evidence of incriminating evidence? And I was always glad that my father did not stay in the countryside to inherit the land, otherwise it would be inevitable to be knocked to the ground and then step on a foot in the future, and fate would certainly not be much better.

My father was a revolutionary soldier. Our family has a photo of my father in 1950 when he was studying at the Central South Military and Political Academy of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, it was a group photo similar to graduation, there were hundreds of people in the photo, all of them had a large brim hat in the breeches, my father was particularly eye-catching, in addition to the thick eyebrows, big eyes, the handsomeness of the lip line, and then there was a ribbon-like thing hanging obliquely from the shoulder (later my father told me that it was called the duty belt, and he happened to be the duty officer on the day of the photo), and the background was the famous Seven Star Rock in Guilin, Guangxi, although it was a black and white photo, However, the grandeur of the mountain set off the extraordinary spirit of the proud sons of the army, and each one of them was a fierce posture of dragon spirit and tiger.

After leaving the military academy, his father went into Xinjiang with the army and became a young officer of the Sixth Division of the Shache Cavalry. However, it did not take long for the collective transfer to the Corps, which at that time was a semi-military and semi-local structure, and its main task was to open up land and produce grain. Fortunately, his father had entered the academy, and compared with the veterans who put down the gun on their shoulders and carried the cantuman, they were considered to be great intellectuals, and they were sent to the Bayi Agricultural College to learn machinery, and agricultural machinery accompanied him throughout his life.

It is reasonable to think that the academic qualifications like my father in that era were very advantageous in all aspects, just because of the problem of birth, my father has been depressed, only to learn is not enough, and learning is also unreliable, a poor middle peasant with calluses on his hands is definitely more reassuring than those guys who chew words. Fathers in successive movements have been the object of censorship, especially the "Cultural Revolution", the father's origin problem not only affected himself, but even his brothers and sisters joined the army, recruited workers, and went to college. And my father never complained about anything, I guess it wasn't that he was highly qualified, but he really didn't dare to dispute his origins. Birth cannot be changed, birth and lineage cannot be chosen, and confession of life may be the safest and most practical way.

At that time, some radical young people, because of the influence of their birth problems, openly declared that they had broken away from their father-son relations with their fathers, and even added up to their old sons, just to prove that they had completely broken the line with the landlord class.

In the 1970s, my father returned to guangxi for the first time after more than 20 years of absence. What he did not expect was that because of the composition problem, none of the relatives in his hometown were exempt from being implicated, and it was common to be pulled out every three or five minutes to criticize the fight. My grandmother, who was in her old age, was also forced into labor reform, and what was even more frightening was that the whole village could physically punish any one of our relatives at will. All of this seemed more difficult for him to accept than the grievances his father had suffered in the Xinjiang Corps. He dressed the khaki military uniform without a hat badge and a pair of white thread gloves, went to the commune to find the secretary of the commune, and his father took a brown paper envelope from one of the four pockets of cadre uniforms and handed it to the secretary of the commune a letter of introduction stamped with a big red seal. At that time, there was no identity card, everyone had to open a letter of introduction from the unit when they went out, and the father's letter of introduction was a certain company of a certain regiment of the Agricultural Third Division of the Xinjiang Military Region Construction Corps of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and the rank was a company commander, and the red circular official seal with the word eight was clearly transmitted to a certain prestige, and the father, who had always been clumsy, was said to have behaved exceptionally bravely that day. The general idea of what my father said was that he was defending the border and that his family had been treated so unjustly for a long time was a persecution of the revolutionary army's subordinates and must be stopped, otherwise it would be necessary for him to report the matter to his superiors.

The point is that when father said these words, he used his white-gloved fingers to point at the commune secretary from time to time. The secretary of the commune was suddenly a little dizzy, and he had seen such a position and was flustered by the white gloves. At that time, the social status of soldiers was very high, and ordinary people could not understand the difference between regular troops and corps, and soldiers did not dare to provoke, which was the consensus of society at that time. The secretary of the commune immediately stooped down in front of the white gloves and promised to deal with the matter immediately, but he really couldn't understand what this "superior" that his father had threatened to report the matter to his superiors, whether it was the county, the province, or the troops. Anyway, his father shook him. In the years that followed, relatives, including grandma, were largely never hit more badly by ingredient problems.

Many years later, when I met Fa Xiao and learned in small talk, Li Lame, a school worker who had given us bitter memories since childhood, his leg was not broken by the landlord because he was looking for a landlord to evaluate, but he was lying on the roof peeping and was found, and he fell down and broke his leg in a hurry. And the classmate of the brother who was raided was not a big landlord, but a returned overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia, and it is not surprising that their family has so many strange things. I just couldn't figure out what that pair of incense burner-like things were for? (Transferred from the "Shuofang" public account)

【About the author】Huang Yi, post-60s, a native of Xiayedi, Xinjiang. He is a first-class writer, a member of the Chinese Writers Association and a member of the China Literary and Art Critics Association. Librarian of Xinjiang Museum of Culture and History. He has published four books, including the poetry collection "Waiting for the Avalanche", eight books such as the prose collection "Xinjiang Time", and a number of film and television literary works. His works have won the National "Five One Project" Award, the Tianshan Literature and Art Award, the Western Literature Award, the National Ethnic Minority Literary Creation Horse Award, etc., and individuals enjoy special allowances from the State Council.