Excerpts from the text |
I was all too familiar with the mist of water in his voice. Many years ago, when he had just crawled out of the bathtub, draped in a bathrobe, barefoot, with a cigarette in his mouth, looking for a lighter in his empty home, he would have spoken to me in that misty voice.
Rain Hill Cemetery
□ Li Xingrui
This summer, after I was dismissed, I went back to my hometown, planning to rest for a while and spend a few days of leisure. I found my old phone, flipped my address book from A to Z, and beat them one by one. Except for a few names that made me hesitate, and about half of the empty numbers, everyone else greeted each other. "Hello, excuse me, I'm xxx, remember?" "Is it me who is me, are you at home?" I have time to play. "Cooked and uncooked, all come out to eat." Sometimes I invite guests, more often than not the other party pleases.
When I mentioned Homin, I was sitting across from two old classmates, bouncing soot on the heads of fish in the bowl. We didn't have to mention his name, but the meal had been around for more than an hour. We have talked about our respective work and life, the taste of the dishes, the experience of picking girls, the nostalgia for the student days, the fear of marriage, and the cigarettes have been smoked in a pack and a half. Originally, there was a classmate who was a salesman sitting next to me, always trying to introduce him to us further about his work, but unsuccessfully, he wanted to provoke a topic about the international situation, but he was also snuffed out by us, and finally picked up a phone call two minutes ago, apologized to us, and got up and left without checkout.
"It's not interesting," said the engineering classmate sitting on the inside, "I didn't like him when I was in school." The paralegal on the outside smirked at the phone screen and didn't respond to him.
The engineer pushed the glasses and looked at me. He was wearing farsighted glasses, and from my point of view, his eyeballs were like champagne squeezed into a glass bottle, about to squirt out of the frame.
He said, "I remember that you used to have a good relationship with Homin." ”
I said, "Well, before. ”
He grinned twice, his teeth so white that he didn't look like a smoker and drinker, "He has a debt of tens of thousands of yuan in my case, and I still went to his father to find him before I got this money back." ”
The paralegal looked up at him and muttered, "You're not being rude." ”
The engineer said, "You know what, you don't know him well." Right. ”
He turned to me again. "You should have seen it, he spends money like a brother, and I am also looking for his father without a clue." But that was all in the past, and he now seems to be a policeman. Do you want to call it out? ”
None of us have reason to object.
As Horming got into the paralegal's car, the base creaked and sank down like a crumbling dinghy. When I was in junior high school, he was my tablemate, white and tender, a small fat man who had not yet grown, hiding behind the castle made of textbooks every day and sleeping. When I couldn't do it, I would tuck my fingers into the folds of his stomach through his clothes, up and down three layers, undulating like smooth waves, fingers inside, and sink into the same dream as him. Today, the folds are filled with more flesh, connecting into a smooth, intact ball. More than ten years later, he has completely grown, his body is strong, and the wind and sand that has been blown have also been imprinted into the skin. Only the hand did not change at all. In middle school, the classmates, both men and women, squeezed Hawmin's hand. His knuckles are slender, his palms are soft, and he picks up a cigarette with a strange feminine feeling, reminiscent of a character in Osamu Dazai's novel. I used to tell him, you're a natural musician, you should go and learn the piano. But he didn't know much music, and he couldn't even blow his whistle well when he peed.
As soon as he saw me, he grabbed me by the neck with his arm and punched me, "How many years have you not come back, huh?" Not even a word. I propped my hand on the dirty cloth seat, not knowing what to say.
Realizing my embarrassment, he quickly withdrew his hand, turned his head, pulled a cigarette out of his trouser pocket, and sent one to each of us.
For the rest of that night, we scoured around and made boring jokes. Homming and I were buried in the frolic, bypassing many of the topics we should have talked about. Near midnight, the project workers sent us back one by one, promising each other that they would have time to contact each other so that I could look for them more when I was at home. After I promised, I naturally forgot about it.
The next morning, when I was queuing up at the breakfast shop in front of my house to buy hot dry noodles, Horming called and asked if I would have time to see each other again today. There was a low mist of water in his voice, not as excited as when the four of them were talking together last night.
I was all too familiar with the mist of water in his voice. Many years ago, when he had just crawled out of the bathtub, draped in a bathrobe, barefoot, with a cigarette in his mouth, looking for a lighter in his empty home, he would have spoken to me in that misty voice. "You Mo Guang is standing, come and help me find it." The moisture from his mouth and skin would slowly soak into the cigarette, making it weak and transparent.
At that time, we were still in high school, and we were in the same semi-closed boarding school, but we didn't have different classes. The so-called semi-closed means that students who can apply for a walking permit can enter and exit the school gate at will, and others will be warned or dispersed by the doorman as long as they are within twenty meters of the school gate. But none of the people I knew in my three years of high school ever got that mysterious day card.
Later, looking back on this matter, I think another way of interpreting it can better reflect the semi-enclosed meaning: there are two places on the school wall that are similar to gaps, one is at the south end, near the dormitory building, and the glass slag on the top of the wall has been finely ground with stones, which we call the south gate; one is at the north end, near the gate, there is a spike on the top of the iron railing that has been bent by people, which we call the north gate. The one at the south end is close to the Internet café, where people who go out all night at night go; the one near the restaurant at the north end, people who skip class or add meals come out from there.
This is a tacit understanding that even if the teacher or the doorman passes by here, he will turn his head and pretend not to see. Anyway, the gate is not allowed to go, and the bastards who have paid the tuition and do not want to study, if they want to go out to play, they have to rely on their own skills. Therefore, in our school, reading and climbing over the wall must always be the same. Moreover, in our conception, only those soft eggs who cannot learn to climb over the wall, or who do not have the courage to skip class, will bend down and study well to seek the more arduous road.
Homming and I are both people who can climb the wall. Not only can we climb over the wall, but we are also the best at being able to do it, so we don't even bother to walk through the north gate of the south gate, specifically looking for the wall near the teaching building that can be seen through the classroom window. Running a few steps, sinking into the lower plate, thinking of a nasty person, he flew against the wall, and his arms fluttered lightly on the edge of the wall. Stretch out a leg to the side, and the body can be thrown into the world outside the wall. Horming was taller and heavier than me, and he needed me to push him in the back during the leg extension. I don't know if it's because of this, he calls me almost every time he skips class.
Prime time is after the first class in the afternoon. If the time to go out early is too long, it is more dangerous, and the time to go out later is too short, and this risk is meaningless. Out of school, straight to his house, a kilometer or two away. I wanted to hang around, but Homing was a male brother with a temper and scolded me for slamming the door and not having to take a taxi. When paying the bill, he always groped around in his pants pocket, pretending not to see the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror. Finally I gave him money, complained to him twice, and he scolded me again for slamming the door, "The pants pocket is too deep, just touch it a few more times." Go up and ask you to drink ice water. ”
I spent many afternoons at his house. His grandmother sheltered us and promised to keep the secret of truancy for us. His house was a two-story structure, and we played games in the room on the spiral staircase, and every once in a while, Grandma would call him downstairs and give him something. Two glasses of water, or freshly washed fruit. She had trouble with her legs and feet, couldn't bend too much, and couldn't walk the narrow and steep stairs of her home.
The upstairs room was a place for Grandma that she had never set foot on, and she could only stay downstairs forever, walking back and forth between the hall, the kitchen, and her dark room, which was always curtained, and her footsteps shattered as if trembling. Or sit in the chair in front of the table for a while, get up and move the fruit plate placed at the head of the table to the end of the table, shake the folds in the corner of the quilt cover flat, and call out to Homin a few times, usually three times out of ten to get a response.
Instead, I would try to minimize my stay on the ground floor of his house. After entering the door and greeting my grandmother, I slipped to the second floor and did not go down unless Huo Ming dragged me downstairs to eat.
I hate the space on the ground floor. The cabinet pendulum next to the TV wall, like a dull sledgehammer, struck once a second, was so loud that it enveloped the whole room. As long as you stay there, you can't help but realize how hard and dangerous time is, and it snaps against the walls around it, like the knuckles of the god of death. Even if you are nestled in a room on the second floor and turn on the sound of the game to a great extent, you can still hear the afterglow coming through the door. I asked Homin why he didn't throw that stupid clock away, it was not good for his health. He told me to get used to it.
But I never told him that I had another reason not to go downstairs. I was a little afraid of his grandmother.
In fact, I can't say whether it is really a feeling of fear. It's certainly different from the fear of snakes, valleys, nightmares—an discomfort that once you get out of sight, you get into your head and you need to push it off.
The fear of facing his grandmother, like facing a crooked and rough mirror, made me cramped and confused. When I faced it, I couldn't see my face clearly, and I didn't know what kind of posture I should take. Therefore, every time before entering Homin's door, I had to pedal the sole of my shoe a few more times on the non-slip mat at the door, and after entering the door, I quickly bent down and took off my shoes, and began to be very interested in whether the tip of the shoe was aligned and whether the placement was neat.
"Come on, heck, I know how polite." His grandmother said so. I screamed at my waist and turned to pick up the folds on my socks.
"We want Coke, ice." Homin said.
When his grandmother had squeezed both of Horming's arms from top to bottom with her trembling hands, she would turn and walk toward the kitchen. At this time, we went upstairs, turned on the computer, put the bag on the bay window, and Huo Ming would go down to get water at the sound of his grandmother's shouting.
In fact, I would often secretly observe his grandmother. She was too short, and every time she saw her, she seemed to be a little shorter than the last time, as if she were shrinking back into a child's state little by little.
She suffers from a strange illness and can shiver all the time. When it comes to speaking, the intonation will be swinged by the head, and sometimes a tone has not yet been uttered, and it is thrown back into the mouth by the tongue, which sounds vague. Her hands and legs and feet were also trembling all the time, as if there was always a cold wind wrapped around her waist, making her shiver uncontrollably. When I first came, I wanted to ask Homin what was going on, but he didn't mean to explain anything to me, so I didn't ask.
His grandmother reminds me of my grandmother. But I don't actually have a grandmother. This is a matter of course for me. Mom said that when she was 17, she and her then-little boyfriend kissed in the shadows of the corridor between classes, touching each other and being bumped by the teacher who was preparing to go back to the office to pick up a book. In those days, premature lust was a terrible monster that could engulf a person's fate. Mom was fired. Whenever she talked about it, she felt as if she had returned to the moment when she left the campus with her school bag. She said that when grandpa came to take her home in dark oil-stained overalls that day, he said only one word to her: "Come to the factory tomorrow to report." ”
Grandma acted even more bitterly, arguing with her mother all night, cursing her with the harshest words. For many days afterwards, the whole house became a battlefield for them. Less than a year later, my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer and died soon after, when the factory was about to close and my mother had just come of age.
Even though we all said it had nothing to do with her, Mom always felt that the cancer cells appeared out of thin air on the night she was fired and nourished by the desperate quarrels.
I haven't seen my grandmother, not even the pictures. After listening to my mother's story, I imagined what my grandmother looked like for a long time. I suppose she must have been very thin, but her whole body was pressed inwards, appearing very heavy, and her breasts hung weakly, like two garbage bags that could not be thrown out. She should have been full of anger, but in the end she was stirred by life into despair.
Later, I stopped imagining it. After meeting Horming's grandmother, I started thinking again. But Horming's grandmother was clearly not the same as my grandmother—or my imaginary grandmother. She was shorter, more transparent, more like a shadow floating in a house.
Once I asked Horming what his grandmother's name was, and he was holding a cigarette in his arms, his head sticking out of the crack in the open window to suck it. He was stunned for a moment and said, "I don't know what problem you have." ”
I said, "You don't know what your grandmother's name is?" ”
He said, "I don't know, my father calls her mother, I call her grandma, and the person who buys vegetables calls her Grandma Wu." I had nothing to do by calling her name. ”
He extinguished his cigarette butt on the edge of the window, flicked his hand outward, pressed the power button, and asked me, "Which hero are you going to play today?" ”
We spent most of our time in the room on the second floor and were playing games. But there was only one computer there, and we had to play each other, one by one. Most of the time, he would lie on his skin and, at the end of the round, asked me to go to the drawer of his study to find a cigarette, the Yellow Crane Tower 1916, which had been turned over from his father. Or tell me to go downstairs and get some food for him, and take the opportunity to sneak another game.
Before dinner, Horming would take a shower in the bathroom on the second floor. He bathed twice a day. Hearing the sound of water, his grandmother went into the kitchen and began to cook dinner. Usually only the three of us cooked meals, if I saw that the dishes on the table were more hearty, I knew that tonight Huo Ming and his father would come back, and I would tacitly not stay overnight. After dinner, I took the bus back to school by myself and flipped back into the dormitory from outside the wall.
"Don't stay overnight on the night when his dad is going home", which has become a default rule between us. We follow this rule for no reason until that thing breaks it. And once this rule is broken, it is immediately invalid.
It was an indifference rule, and the thing that broke it was an indifference, but I don't know why, and many times afterwards I always think about that day over and over again.
It happened on a Friday and we had no intention of going to his house. As is the school's custom, the last friday afternoon is out of class and is dedicated to cleaning. It was the most popular period of time in the surrounding Internet cafes, the second section of the end of the class bell rang, the north and south gates were lined up with people, there was a feeling that the queue could not be queued, and even had the courage to try to rush to the back door of the school, hoping to squeeze out together when the doorman opened the door to the family of the teacher who lived in the school.
We said well with a few classmates in Huo Ming's class, go to the Internet café together to open the black, leave after the second class, some people have gone out in advance, and take a good position in the Internet café.
However, before class was over, he began to make trouble, in his words, "like someone had stuffed a rolling pin into his intestines." "After school, I asked his friend to go first, and we arrived later.
By the time he limped out of the toilet, the saxophone song "Homecoming" was already ringing on campus. The sweep was over, the people who wanted to leave the school had left, the others had returned to the classroom or dormitory, and there was an occasional sharp whistle on the playground in the distance, and someone was playing football over there.
"Are you still going?" I said, "I don't know if the location has stayed until now." ”
"Go check it out and say." It must have been unhygienic noodles in the morning, and I didn't eat it again. ”
"Let's go."
We went around to the nearest south gate to the Internet café, and there were still people queuing, probably a dormitory, pushing and shoving each other, twisting and turning among the fallen leaves at the base of the wall. We stood in the distance and smoked a cigarette. Huo Ming spat on the ground and dragged me to the other side of the teaching building.
Day, you don't have to occupy the door without that skill.
I skimmed my lips and stepped on the cigarette butt.
As I climbed down the escalator of memory back that afternoon, I inevitably remembered again and again the way from the South Gate to the wall we used to climb. Our minds were all on whether the seats in the Internet café had been taken away, and we were completely unaware of the strange silence.
Is there a wind? Are there any other pedestrians on the road? Did I notice the sound of quarrels floating out of the windows of the school building? I'm not sure. Only a feeling of drowsiness that seemed to have been soaking in the pool for a long time enveloped me. I yawned twice and shouted out in a singing-like tone. Homming urged me to go faster.
After running for two steps, Huo Ming jumped up against the wall, probably pulling all his strength into the toilet just now, and he didn't grasp it steadily and fell. "It seems that today is not suitable for leaving school." I say.
Less. He loosened his shoelaces, re-fastened them, pedaled again, and hit the wall. I was about to push him when I heard a "bang" behind me and looked back at the teaching building.
, what's that? He said with one leg on the edge of the wall. "Can't catch it, push me to scatter."
I didn't respond to him.
"Don't mess with me." He turned to look at me, and I was walking slowly in the direction of the teaching building. "Your mother..." He fell down and sat down in the mud, his eyes fixed on the direction of my steps.
There was a man lying there. Carrying a school bag and his face pressed against the cement floor, he looked a little cold. Her other shoe hung from the bushes below the school building, like a shot-down sparrow.
Horming got up and patted the mud on his pants and shouted something, which I didn't hear clearly. A scream came from the window of the teaching building, like a gathering whistle. I looked up to recognize how many floors she had fallen from. But unrecognizable, there were people probing on all the floors, and many people were walking towards this side from a distance. Homin shouted again, and this time I heard it, and when I looked back, he quickly stepped on the wall and flipped out alone. At that time, I was very close to the girl lying on the ground. But I turned and ran in the direction of Homin, and I had never been so afraid to be left behind by him.
The moment I climbed over the wall, I saw Horming crouching on the ground. I glanced in the direction of the girl, and the crowd was about to surround her. Through the gap, I saw that on her foot, which was not wearing shoes, her socks were curled up and her heels exposed. I don't know if anyone will help her pull her socks up. I thought about it this way, people had fallen to the ground outside the school and couldn't see anything.
No one mentioned anything about internet cafes again. Like two murderers fleeing the scene of the crime, we boarded a passing taxi and went straight to his house.
It turns out that people selectively forget as if they were protecting themselves in the face of traumatic memories, and this theory is probably wrong. No matter how many years have passed, I still remember the details of that afternoon. Or maybe, for two young people who are not yet involved in the world, a strange girl suddenly appearing on the cement floor of the school (almost like floating out of the ground) is the same thing as the eclipse I saw on the river embankment on a Sunday morning in the third year of junior high school. The riddle-like silence that enveloped me, not because of itself, but because it did not belong to our lives.
That night, his grandmother had a sumptuous dinner, but none of us mentioned leaving. His grandmother shouted at Huo Ming when she was cleaning up the dishes, but there was no response, and she went to wash the dishes with trembling.
We hid in his room, and no one turned on the computer. Huo Ming went to the shower earlier than usual, and when he returned from the bathroom, there was a warm mist floating on his body, and he sat at the head of the bed without a word, spraying a little Yunnan baiyao on his ankles, and the smell of choking medicine mixed with the smell of smoke. I opened a little window.
, it should have been twisted when I climbed over the wall. He said. His ankles were not swollen, but pale and bloodless, like the girl's feet. I turned my face to stop looking at him.
At midnight, I was woken up by the clanging sound of jingle bells downstairs, and it was supposed to be his father. After a while, an incredible snoring sound came up and was shredded by the pendulum of a metronome. I turned my back on Homin and listened in the darkness for a moment, and Homin didn't snore, and I couldn't tell if he was awake or not. Falling asleep at his house is a difficult thing, and I am afraid that I will lose sleep. I thought so, but I fell asleep quickly.
There was no monthly leave that weekend, but we stayed at his house for an extra day. His dad left before we got up, maybe he didn't even know that there was one more person in the house like me.
Homin went to take a shower as usual in the morning, and when I waited for him, I suddenly felt a little flustered. His house's pendulum would have to ring many more times to exhaust the day, and I didn't want him to walk into the room and talk to me about what to start out of boredom, nothing. So, when he came in with his slippers and looking for a hair dryer, I said, "Anyway, don't go to school today, go with my grandmother to buy vegetables." ”
He closed the cabinet door, pulled the hair dryer's line and said, "Whatever." ”
Ten minutes later, we helped his grandmother out the door, and I was on her right side, trying to pull the basket in her hand, and his grandmother said, "No, no." "We followed my grandmother and walked along her steps, and it took us four or five minutes to get from the front of my house to the little slope on the road. Huo Ming's stride was big, he always wanted to go faster, he didn't know the location of the vegetable market, he took a few steps and turned back.
I held his grandmother, her forearm as thin as a finger, gently pulling as she walked, as if trying to break free. I saw that she was a little panting, almost about to be dragged away by me, and I said, "You go slowly, we are not in a hurry." ”
"Filial piety, filial piety." She laughed, revealing a few stone-like teeth, "When you are old, you are easy to get tired, and you can't take a step." ”
Huo Ming said, "Or we will cook at noon, you rest, don't get tired." ”
"If you hurt your grandmother, skip some classes less, so that I don't have to worry." Grandma said, "You young people have a lot of things to do, so I'll cook or I'll cook." ”
"Then we'll give you a hand."
But we didn't do it. After going back, we went back to Horming's room and played two games, and the meal was ready.
On that day, we didn't talk about what happened yesterday, and in the midst of cigarettes, games, and intermittent silence, a new rule was crept up. We never talked about that.
After dinner, Huo Ming said, let's go back to school, I'm not there for a day, I'm afraid the teacher will sue. I said, ok. Huo Ming took the initiative to wash the dishes, I packed our school bags, just walked down the spiral ladder, his grandmother came over and said to me in a very small voice: "You are a good man, with a little clarity, don't let him learn badly." His father has little control, and he doesn't like to listen to people. She glanced in the direction of the kitchen, where Homin was putting the washed dishes back in the cupboard. She said: "When I play with you, I am obviously happier than usual." In the future, what do you want to eat, tell your grandmother, I will make it for you to eat. ”
In the car back to school, Horming had planned to sleep for a while, but I patted him and said, "How much do you care about your grandmother." ”
He said, "I still use you." ”
Since then, I've been going to his house more often, sometimes his dad is around, and we spend the night too. Horming said he had a question to ask me, so he pulled me over, and his father acquiesced.
I gradually began to adjust to the bells of his house, and there were more words between him and his grandmother.
When Hawmin makes excuses to dominate the game, I will sneak downstairs, sit at the dinner table and slowly peel an orange to eat, waiting for his grandmother to come over and pull me to tell me the story of what happened when she was a child. The story is intermittent, beginning with the desolate courtyard where she was born, to the drunken scolding of the men who have now disappeared when they were young, to the feet of women, the flames of smoke, steel, and the mother who has forgotten her face. Sometimes, she would suddenly diverge and talk about someone else who had heard that had happened at the same time. Speaking of rise, I'll peel another orange. Until Horming's shouts came from upstairs, we folded the page of memory and waited for the next time.
However, more than a month later, his grandmother died.
That night, less than a week before the final exam of the sophomore year of high school. I can't remember exactly what day of the week it was. From the time I listened to his grandmother tell stories, I probably went to his house four or five times, the temperature climbed very fast, the humid heat flew from afar like willows, and Horming and I bought a large bag of ice cream at the wholesale market near the school, stuffed it into his refrigerator, ready to spend the coming summer.
"Just one, and when you're done, write your homework." After dinner, Huo Ming was still chewing on the rice in his mouth, rummaging around downstairs for a lighter. I took it out of my pocket and handed it to him, and he ran upstairs barefoot.
"Don't you go playing?" His grandmother said. She walked slowly around the table, burping uncontrollably, rubbing her stomach with her hands crossed, as if to crush the scarce food in her stomach.
I sealed the leftovers on the plate in plastic wrap and put them in the kitchen so that horming and his father would come back in the evening to heat them up. I said, "It's almost time for the exam, so he'll have to do his homework when he rests for a while." The last time you said that after your father left, you didn't go to school. And then what. ”
"It's almost the exam, I'll talk about it when you're done, come and play more in the summer." His grandmother said, "In the summer I make mung bean soup for you to drink." Obviously, I said that what I made was better than what you made in your school, and every summer I had to make it, and I had to freeze it into a lump to eat. Grandma squeezed her mouth and laughed, and from her somewhat crooked face, I couldn't see any traces of youth.
I said, ok.
His grandmother said, "Go ahead, I'll go back to my room and finish watching yesterday's TV." ”
That was the last thing she had ever said. Many times after that, when I was smoking with Homing at school, he would knock on the side and ask me what the last thing my grandmother said was. I said, that's it. Again and again, I repeated the phrase until the cigarette was finished and we all stopped talking. I always felt that he vaguely hated me, and every time I said this ordinary sentence, his hatred would be even heavier.
I was woken up by Homin shaking on the table. After playing that game, he did play another game, and we played until the turning point, and Horming and his father were already asleep.
"There are still a few days left for the exam, what should I do?" I say.
"Get up early tomorrow morning, write together and then go to school." He squinted his eyes and slipped into the quilt.
"I was panicked and couldn't sleep. If we continue like this, we won't be able to go to college. ”
"Isn't there still a year left?" I have an older brother who was admitted to Zhejiang University and told me that sprinting before the exam is more important than anything else. "He pulled his phone into the quilt, his slender fingers flipping quickly, like playing the piano." Go to bed quickly and wake up early tomorrow to study. With that, the light on the screen went out.
I stood in the darkness when I suddenly felt the pressure of the future pressing down on me in advance. I muttered, "I'm not like you, I have no way back." I went downstairs and poured myself a glass of water and placed it next to the ashtray. Pull away the chair, sweep the keyboard aside, spread out the homework, turn on the lamp.
"Neuropathy." The bulging quilt said, and then fell silent.
When I was woken up by Horming's shaking, I felt half of my face go numb, and my neck felt as if it had just been picked up after being broken. The work at hand was wet, printing overlapping characters. I glanced at the clock, at half past two. "Why?"
"I had a dream that my grandmother was calling me." He looked flustered, "No, no, I don't know if I was dreaming or actually hearing it." ”
"You slept so deadly, how could you possibly hear your grandmother's voice so small?" Tell me what to do in the middle of the night. I turned my ear sideways and listened for a moment. In the silent night, the pendulum and snoring were particularly close to the room, almost like the devil laughing eerily at the door. I shivered.
"No, no, it's a little weird, I'll go down and have a look." He put on his slippers and ran downstairs.
"Dreaming is stupid." You lighten up, don't argue with the old man. I went to sleep first. "I turned off the lamp and climbed into the quilt, trying to fall asleep early in the hazy state. The place where Homin slept was warm and dry, and I dug into the warmth.
Not yet fully asleep, I was woken up by the sound downstairs. I sighed and rolled over. The snoring stopped, and I heard Homin calling out to me.
"Why?" I propped up my upper body with my hands.
"Grandma's gone." Horming shouted.
"Huh?" I say.
"You don't have to talk nonsense." Horming's dad let out a low roar and began to call people.
I got up from bed, didn't turn on the lights, and prepared to go downstairs. I saw all the lights downstairs come on.
"Wait a minute, help me get my coat." Horming shouted.
I turned and ran into the room again, pressing the switch on the top light, and before it could fully light up, through the light outside the window, I caught a glimpse of Homming's coat piled up on the nightstand. I picked it up and ran downstairs, and there was the sound of ceramics breaking next to me. I knocked down the ashtray and the cup of water on the table, and in the light that had just come on, the soot rose like ashes, mixed with the clear water and flowed down, spilling on the sheets, the floor, and Horming's coat.
"Wait a minute." I shouted and slapped his coat, not knowing what to do for a moment.
No one responded. The door slammed shut. I ran downstairs, and there was no one. Ran upstairs again and opened the window. They carried their grandmothers to Horming's father's car, like carrying a piece of dry wood. I ran downstairs, opened the door, and wanted to follow along.
Didn't catch up. The headlights are getting smaller and smaller on the road, blending in with the flickering yellow lights not far away. I stood by the flower bed for a while, and suddenly I felt a little cold. On the night of early June, there was almost no wind, and the warm current of the day sank and seeped into the ground. I put on Homin's coat and pulled the zipper to the top to feel better. His clothes were too big for me, and I straightened my arms and couldn't catch the cuffs.
I walked down the slope to his house, which was a dark road, not far, but completely dark. I stomped a few feet fiercely, and the sensor light did not come on, but it disturbed the dog who did not know whose house, and it barked hoarsely. The moment I turned into the corridor of his house, I caught a glimpse of a bright light in the distance. In the newly built tall building nearby, the windows of whose houses are still lit. Just now I thought it was the moon. Squinting at the past, there was a figure floating in the light, which should be taking a bath. Somehow, I felt like the shadow was singing.
After cleaning up Homin's room, I had nothing to do and wandered downstairs again. The lights were so bright that I turned off two lights and went into his grandmother's room. That was the first time I walked into this room. Dark red curtains were tightly closed, and a black plasma television hung on the wall like a frame with a lost painting. I touched it, cold. The bed was narrow, the sheets were embroidered with large clouds, and the fat-headed and big-eared gods laughed and flew on the clouds. The quilt was lifted in the corner, piled up in a line, and it looked as if his grandmother was still sleeping in it. In contrast, there are hardly any indentations in the middle of the bed where someone has slept.
I withdrew and sat down at the table peeling oranges to eat. At this moment, it occurred to me that the story of his grandmother had just finished telling his childhood.
The sound of the pendulum was getting louder and louder, like a wave, and I felt my bones clicking with it. After a moment, I stood up, put the chair back in place, threw the orange peel into the trash, walked over to the cabinet clock, unplugged a battery, and put it in my pocket. The sea returned to calm. But the voice still seemed to be beating in my head.
I went upstairs to pack my bag, folded the quilt, left his house, and walked along the flower bed on the side of the road in the direction of the school.
Hawmin naturally did not take the exam. We didn't contact each other all summer. After the school starts, I occasionally meet at school, and we will go to the toilet together to smoke a cigarette and talk about some of the things that are not. No one mentioned going to his house again.
After graduating from high school, I went to study abroad and stayed there after graduation. Until this time, we were resigned home, and we hadn't seen each other for seven years.
So, the morning he called and asked if I had time to meet today, I was hesitant. As a teenager, Huo Ming has come to an end, what does this young man with the same name want me to do? I could easily guess. It's nothing more than filling in the gaps and talking about the past. Moreover, we probably inevitably talk about his grandmother, and maybe even the girl has to be forced to talk about it.
I was making up excuses, and he cleared his throat on the other end of the phone, as if he was aware, "Yesterday they said you resigned and came back to rest, you should have time." ”
I said, "It's dismissal." ”
He seemed to be tripped up, paused and said, "Then I'll pick you up at your door at two o'clock in the afternoon." Blow your hair off. ”
Homming was driving a dark brown Volkswagen sedan, old and with scratches on the body, and I suddenly remembered that it was the one his father had driven that night. He sat in the driver's seat smoking a cigarette, and from a distance he looked more and more like a tired middle-aged man.
I opened the co-pilot's door, and he said wait, then unfastened his seatbelt and threw the bag of merchandise, half a pack of potato chips, and mineral water bottles piled up in the passenger seat into the back seat.
"I don't have time to pack." He said, "Sit. ”
Between the driver's seat and the passenger seat, there is half a bottle of Coke, half a box of smoking paper, and half a pack of cigarettes. The ashtray was stuffed to the brim, and some ash was scattered and attached to the gear lever like snow piled up on the treetops. There was a dark stain on the carpet under his seat, presumably the sugar that had condensed after the volatilization of Coke.
The car smelled of second-hand smoke, shower gel and lighter oil. Seven or eight years ago, Horming's room was filled with the same smell, but it was not as thick, dull, and suffocating as here.
I sneezed and opened the car window to the maximum, "Rhinitis." ”
He snuffed out his cigarette butt, started the car, glanced me quickly in the rearview mirror, and said, "Find a café to sit in?" ”
I said, "Just get in the car." ”
He said, "Okay, go to a quiet place." ”
The car stopped by the river embankment, and we went to a nearby convenience store to buy two bottles of water and a watermelon-flavored chewing gum and sat back in the car.
"How are you, boy?" He said.
"Come out of me just to say this?" I said, and before he could say anything back, I said, "Forget it." I heard you became a cop? ”
"What a cop." He said, "It's the police, the errands." ”
"Don't want to take the official editor's exam?" I say.
"Last year, I took the exam once, but I didn't get in, and this year's estimate is also hanging." He opened the car door and prepared to light a cigarette. Someone was dancing square dancing in the open space not far away. He pointed in the opposite direction and said, "Let's go over there." ”
"You're addicted to smoking now." I say.
He laughed dryly, "No way, my colleagues are smoking fiercely." ”
To avoid the sun, we descended to the other end of the embankment and walked slowly along the shadow of the trees. The sound of wheels rolling over the asphalt road and the whispers of leaves in the forest gradually converge, merging into a background that approximates emotion. In summer, the river water walks tens of meters toward the shore, becomes wide, and stops on the other side of the tree. There was a car parked there, a middle-aged man with two girls playing by the river, next to a sign that read: Please do not come near, prevent schistosomiasis.
We walked along such a view. Horming kept wiping the sweat from his forehead as he poured out and said a lot of things he had encountered recently.
He found a girlfriend, a high school girl, who he later bumped into again in the only mall in his hometown. He was addicted to charging money into the game for several years, and he owed a lot of debts for it, and only recently paid it all off. He still kept in touch with his high school classmates who liked to surf the Internet, and every weekend he had a day to go to the Internet café together. There were also trivial things that I didn't listen to too seriously.
We soon reached the end of the woods, beyond which the newly built pavilions, roller skating tracks, and dancing squares were all exposed to the scorching sun. We turned back and walked down the road in the direction of parking.
"Tell me about your experience as a policeman." I say.
He said, "It's actually boring. The master who took me often had other things to do, and I drove out with another assistant police officer, and I needed to patrol until night. To have some fun, we looked for a car parked around a corner with few people. You know. As soon as we saw that there was a car shaking, we would knock on the glass with the flashlight, shout 'What to do, policeman', and after a while the window would roll down, poke our heads out and apologize. I've encountered it many times. He laughed and sighed again.
"But one time I was impressed." He said.
"Because you know the woman?" I say.
"What?" He was stunned, "No, I said something else. Once it was exactly noon, the master went out, I was alone, playing with the computer, a couple came in with a little boy of about ten years old, probed the brain, said there are police comrades. I said is there something wrong, I was about to call the master, the man said, it's okay, just want the police comrades to educate his son. ”
Homin took out another cigarette and shook the cigarette case. The last one. He looked at me and I said, "You smoke, I don't." ”
He continued: "I thought something had happened when the man pulled me aside and said that his son had bullied other children at school and locked the boys in the same class in the toilet cubicle. He didn't listen to him, he was very arrogant, and he thought of bringing him over to let the police take care of him, and it was okay to scare him. ”
Thinking of that scene, I found it funny and asked him, "Then how do you educate him?" I didn't expect you to have another day to educate others. ”
"Yeah, when I went online on the weekend, I told them about it, and they all laughed. Obviously, I am the one who was educated from an early age. "I'll take him to the conference room." I wanted to scare him, but the child was so nervous that he was about to cry. I asked him why he did it. He said he didn't actually know the boy. It was a friend who told him to do it, and if he didn't do it, he wouldn't play with him. I just casually said a few words and told him not to make bad friends, those people are good to you, just to take advantage of you. Distinguishing between good and evil is more important than friendship. Then I told him to study hard and so on. ”
I wanted to tease him twice, but when I turned my head, I found Thatomin looked depressed, his side face shrouded in the smoke he had just spit out. I asked him, "What's wrong?" ”
He said, "Oh, nothing, but after I said it, I remembered that my grandmother had told me that before." ”
We got back in the car, and he turned on the air conditioner, shook the empty cigarette case again, and threw it out the window. "Go pick up my girlfriend." He said.
The sunlight began to soften, turning from white to yellow, the air cooling was too much, and I grabbed the armrest on my head, a little disgusted.
"Actually, there is another thing that I am quite impressed with, but I have not told anyone else about this." He turned the music down, "A case I heard when I first entered the house. One person died in a lake next to our school. ”
"Did a student commit suicide?" I say.
"No, it's not. Drove into the lake. He cleared his throat, "That's the thing. One night, I thought, it should still be summer. A man drives from the city back to his home in the suburbs, and he passes through that section of the road every day. At the age of nineteen, I checked the records, it should be just finished freshman year, pretty good school, it seems to be a 211. Driving is his dad's black Honda. Usually he doesn't drive, always takes the bus back, but it drove that day. I think it should be for the sake of the girl. ”
As he told the story, his voice began to grow calm. That's not the tone I remember when he called me to an Internet café outside the window of my high school classroom. Every day, he wore an ill-fitting uniform and sat in the police station talking to people in that tone. I suddenly felt that Huo Ming had grown up, and that tone of voice was more significant than his figure. Maybe he could be a good cop.
He continued. The nineteen-year-old boy, who had been wandering around the brightly lit city for a long time, sat in the leather chair where his father usually sat, holding the steering wheel that dominated his life, which must have made him sweat.
It was getting late, and he was parking next to a barbecue stall, unclear whether he smoked or not, and what music he was listening to. Anyway, after a long time, a girl got into his car. We don't know if they know. Maybe it's a girlfriend, maybe it's a lover. The probability of ordinary friends is not high. The girl works in an old men's clothing store in the pedestrian street and previously worked as a milk tea clerk, flyer dispenser, kindergarten nurse and telephone salesman. That night, she drank, pushed aside the arms of several men at the next table, and got into his car. No seat belts.
They had little to say, and there was, and there was no one to prove. The car drove down a dark road without lights, as if heading for some kind of fate. The darkness of the pavement and the pitch blackness of the lake eroded each other, paving the same plane, and he needed to turn on the dazzling high beam lamp to distinguish it.
The two of them would have died together, but at a bus stop where there was no one but toothpaste billboards still lit, he kicked the girl off the bus and went on her own. Thrown on a pitch-black platform with the sound of frogs, the girl must have trembled with fear, and there was a loud curse on the boy to die. Five minutes later, the Honda pulled into the lake, splashing black water, making a few bubbles that only frogs could see, and then sank to the bottom of the lake.
After we finished speaking, we fell silent. Homming twisted the music louder and faster.
I said, "Suicidal?" ”
He said: "I don't know, it may be an accident, it may be suicide." The body was found the next evening by people preparing for night fishing. I had just been to the house and had never seen a corpse. He paused, "I didn't see it anyway, I just listened to what my master said." I just maintained order on the side. I just kept thinking about it. I think he should have committed suicide. Otherwise, why did he suddenly put the girl down halfway through. However, I also felt that he was not committing suicide, otherwise why would he deliberately take her for a ride. Later, the girl was called to the office to inquire and said nothing. Because at least he didn't kill him, we didn't have to ask deeply. ”
He sighed, turned on the turn signal, and stopped at the door of a rural credit union on the left. He said, "It's time for my girlfriend to work here. ”
I said, "No one is intentionally evil." ”
"What?" He frowned.
"Nothing. Is it her? ”
We looked in the rearview mirror and watched his girlfriend get in the car. Very shy, said hello to me, and buried my head in playing with the phone. Horming explained: "Tired, talking at the counter for a day. ”
He sent his girlfriend home, and it was the same neighborhood as my house. I saw her get out of the car and said to Huo Ming, "It's not early, I'll be back." ”
He said, "Wait a minute. ”
His girlfriend glanced at him and said, "Go to the Internet café again." Don't play too late, go back early. Then closed the car door.
"I don't want to go to an Internet café." I said, adding, "Don't go to your house either." ”
"I didn't want to tell you to go." He went to the commissary next to him and bought a pack of cigarettes, closed the car door and said, "What do you think?" Maybe I'm getting married next year. ”
I said, "That's fine. Then he said, "I'll see what's going on in a moment." You just think it's good. ”
"Live your life. Pretty good. He started the car.
"So why are you going?"
"You'll know it when you go."
Shops on the street are getting ready for the night. Printing shops, kiosks, hardware stores turn off the lights and pull down rusty roller shutter doors, while others start waking up. The barbecue shop pointed the blower at the street and drove to the maximum, letting the cumin-flavored fumes drift farther away, and the supper shop lit up neon lights in the shape of crayfish, set up tables, covered with white tarpaulin and plastic paper, and propped open the huge umbrella to cope with the summer showers that could come at any time.
Outside of these fragrant places, the hometown is inevitably sleepy. Cars and people are hidden in spaces that are not so easy to find. Since there were no tall buildings, the night was not shrouded, but flooded the city and spread over the shoulders of pedestrians. The more Homming's car drove deep into the suburbs, the thinner the twilight became. In a few moments, anyone who is still exposed to the air will drown in darkness.
"Where the hell are you going?" I said, "If you want to learn from that boy, throw me to a station in the suburbs and commit suicide in a lake, I'll catch you and kill you before you die." ”
"If you think too much, I'll just carry you into the lake." He tore open the seal of the cigarette box, took out a light, and hung his hand out of the window, the spark of the cigarette butt like a mirror reflecting the setting sun, "Take you to see my grandmother." ”
The car drove for more than twenty minutes. Halfway through, he took the wrong fork in the road, retreated, searched for "Rain Mountain" with his mobile phone, and then obediently pressed the navigation to find it. Curiously, the sunset was still struggling at the end of the sight, not completely disappearing.
"For a while I often came alone, but lately I came less, and I can't remember the road." Horming stopped on a bumpy dirt road, broke two strong branches from the tree next to him, ripped off the leaves, and handed me one, "Go, go up the hill." ”
He walked ahead, picking up branches with branches and looking at the trail below. We took three turns, looking for the right direction on this lush mound. The light was getting colder, and it was time for the frogs, and perhaps snakes and weasels, hiding in the shadows of the bushes. Relying on the light of the flashlight of our mobile phone, we found the slightly opener platform. Several low tombstones stand among the vines, like lost shrines.
"Grandma, I'm back." He sat cross-legged in front of one of the tombstones.
"Grandma is good." I wiped the soil on the ground, inserted the branches into the mud, and sat down too.
The tombstone was a little dirty, and Huo Ming took out a pack of napkins, rubbed down the words on the stele, and then squeezed the paper in his hand and pulled out the miscellaneous branches next to it. By the moonlight, I saw the name on the monument: Wu Xiumei.
Having done all this, he sat down again and lit a cigarette in front of his grandmother. I said, "If you're wearing a bathrobe, you'll feel better." ”
He smiled a little, turned to his grandmother and said, "I'm taking my classmates to play again." You should remember him. He went to Beijing and didn't come back for years. He looked at me.
I tried to remember what his grandmother looked like, but I couldn't remember clearly, and I said, "I may have to go over there again in a while to find a job." I adjusted to a more comfortable sitting position, took a cigarette from Horming's hand, and began to tell his grandmother how I had been thrown into a huge city, how I had found a place there, a girl, and how I had lost them.
Halfway through the conversation, the sound of the clock tower chiming in the distance sounded. I woke up and glanced at my phone, at eight o'clock.
"By the way, is that clock still in your house?" I say.
"Thrown away earlier, the queen mother is noisy." He said.
I was silent for a moment and said, "It's eight o'clock, and we haven't had dinner yet." ”
"You wait for me." He stood up, patted the dirt on his pants, and disappeared into the bushes, motionless.
Heaven and earth enveloped me, and even the tombstone of his grandmother in front of me was only a silhouette. A layer of goosebumps quickly appeared on my arm, "Homming. "I turned on the flashlight on my phone, and there were a lot of shadows growing around me, and I turned it off again." Homin. ”
"Here it comes." He emerged from the bushes with some mulberries in his hand. "This tree is still there, I picked it many years ago."
I took half of them and put them in my mouth one by one and chewed them. I told Homin stories about his grandmother's past, which he had never heard, but I could only tell them until the end of my childhood.
He said, "Grandma really likes you." ”
I said, "She's your grandmother." ”
He said, "You are my brother. ”
We finished eating the mulberries, wiped our hands on the leaves next to us, and smoked a few more cigarettes. The coolness became heavier and heavier, and the sleepiness also struck. It's a pity we couldn't spend the night here.
Horming stood up, poured out the few remaining sticks from the cigarette box, and laid them flat on the tombstone next to him. When a stele was half broken, he placed a cigarette in front of it. We looked around with flashlights, a few a little farther away, and it was dangerous to walk past, so we had to give up.
I looked around and there were seven monuments nearby. Seven people who had once lived were lying beneath this mound. How many places there are not lit, I don't know.
"It is said that this place has good feng shui, and many people have moved the tomb to this side, which is much quieter than the regular cemetery." He said, "However, the nearby is doing economic development zones, and it may have to be moved again in two years." ”
Horming pulled out the branch that had been inserted in the soil and handed it to me, saying, "It's too late, come back next time." We patted each other on the dirt on each other's pants and he said, "Go, down the hill." ”
So we went down the mountain in the dark and left everything about death on this night.
Creative talk
Li Xingrui: Stepping on the border of wanting to talk and stopping
Before writing Rain Mountain Cemetery, I hadn't written a novel for about two years.
Of course, the explanation to the friend is how to be reasonable and how to come: I am very poor at writing novels, and I have no time to go to work. The real reason is cumbersome to explain. It was as if I had met a person on the train by chance, and under the impetus of passion, I poured out some but brainless moods, and a little ambiguous atmosphere sprouted. After getting up and going to the toilet, I sat down again, but the conversation suddenly rolled away without a trace.
"What should I say next?" Presumably, this is the most awkward gap between people.
In the past two years, I have had many ideas, and I have never written them. Still using the metaphor of the train encounter, re-entering the seat, the two have a preliminary understanding, and the topic should lead to a deeper place. But how to introduce it? Routines are naturally not good, like a rogue with a slippery tongue. It is not good to dig out the heart socket excessively, once the abrupt and sincere words are spoken, I am afraid that I will be secretly annoyed afterwards, so I have to shut up and wait for this embarrassment to dissipate.
Looking back at my original novel, there are too many dissatisfactions. Obsessed with telling a complete story; there are always some elements of déjà vu in the plot, and archetypes can be found here or there. That's not a short story I appreciate. According to my reading experience, a good short story should have no beginning and no end, like an irregularly shaped piece of a puzzle, the complete model has been lost, and only the fragment itself can be imagined as a whole. It is better that even the fragment itself is blurred, as if stepping into the boundary of opening its mouth and stopping talking.
Talk about Rain Mountain Cemetery. In a word, it begins with a vague thought: three deaths, not far from us.
In fact, it was the first time I'd ever tried to jump out of a full story and pluck up the courage to get close to the blur and get as close as possible to the feeling of "not saying anything." But it's also a fact, what can we say about death? For a young man who is (seemingly) far removed from death, when "death" is discussed as a proposition, it is easy to fall into the illusory conceptual trap of recognizing it as a being similar to the "meaning of life". The death of someone too close, the impact is too strong, we will only fall into emotions, not talk about death itself.
This is not the relationship between death and daily life. Everyday deaths are often like this: when chatting with my mother, I learn that the husband of the aunt next door to her childhood has cancer and has left. While waiting for traffic lights in the taxi, the driver said there had been a car accident at the intersection three days earlier, killing two people. When I hear something like this, I always feel as if I should say something, but what to say, feeling that life is impermanent? Forget it. Think about it, or stay silent as well. What happened in the middle from "as if I should say something" to "Forget it"? Chewing on such a moment is an interesting thing, but at the same time a matter of no conclusion.
Before reading Shuang Xuetao's interview, the interviewer asked him, "What do you want to express in this novel?" He took a puff of his cigarette, was distracted for a few seconds, and then replied slowly, "I don't know." ”
It reminds me of when I talk to people about my previous novels, and friends who have seen it can always sum it up lightly, "Oh, the one you wrote xxx." "It left me with an indescribable sense of frustration. In the future, if you talk about "Rain Mountain Cemetery", if someone asks "what do I want to express", I can finally light a cigarette and answer him in a mean manner, "I don't know".
—END—
Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 4, 2022
Responsible Editor | Zhang Shuang
▲Li Xingrui |
Li Xingrui, born in 1995 in Huanggang, Hubei Province, has written novels and film reviews, and his works have been scattered on online platforms such as "Yangtze River Literature and Art", "Special Zone Literature", "ONE One", and Riot Literature and Art.