Chapter 3 Rose Island (3)

Su said, let's go to the market.The market is full of goods, from tea to flowers to dried goods to strawberries, and it is full of people and garbage.The huge sound waves merged into a tide, covering people until they couldn't breathe.hot.night.sweat.sound.cigarette.odor.The skin on the hands.food.The petals were trampled into mud.Su walked onto the overpass, leaned on the railing and took a bird's-eye view of the street full of people.There are old tall buildings on both sides, separated by a road illuminated by dim street lights, full of vendors and tourists.Messy, dirty, overcrowded.Su visibly became excited.The camera in her hand frequently flashed blindingly.

Let's go all the way to the end of the world.Su. In the middle of the night, she got on a plane to drive home from Beijing.My mother cried on the phone that my father was seriously ill.Her plane was delayed again and she waited at the airport until dark.A flight departing at the same time from Beijing to Dalian crashed into the sea an hour later. 112 people died.That day was May 7th. On the plane, she was so tired.She is hungry again.She is over 25 years old, still alone, without giving her father her wedding and children.Did not give my father any comfort.She wants to take him back to Beijing.Keep him by her side.Take care of him.She curled up in the seat and closed her eyes.Seeing my father's happy face at the airport.But she knew that this time, her father would not appear.He is critically ill.How happy he would be to see her.

Will be sleepless drowsy.Saw her father take her to buy clothes.The father told the mother that her daughter was in high school and she should wear some nice clothes.He took her on the street.Shop by shop.It's winter.She picked out two coats, an embroidered cardigan with wooden buttons.And scarves.The clerk held the changed clothes for her, and said, how could there be such a good father.Such a good dad.Love my daughter.My father was sitting on a nearby stool, his legs aching from walking.He watches her try on clothes.He never took her to the movies, never took her to the ice cream shop, never hugged her.That was one of the few times they were alone together.She remembered it so clearly.She has worn that cardigan for nearly 8 years.I like it so much.Until the pure wool is mothed with large and small holes.

When we arrived at the hospital, it was already past 11 o'clock at night.The father's bed was placed in the corridor outside the door of the duty room.She saw him for the first time.Seeing his blood-stained head swollen, seeing the oxygen tube in his mouth, and the white lightning flashing across his mind, he couldn't say anything.It's too late.She knew she couldn't take him away. Mother said, cerebral hemorrhage.After breakfast at 7 o'clock in the morning, nothing happened, just stood up for a moment.He was sent to the hospital for emergency treatment. After the blood was removed from the brain, he bleeds again.Doctors have given up on him.Say, the result is the same, do you understand.You are not clear.She said, I know.She insisted they have a second operation.Mother cries.Don't make him hurt anymore.He had to open his brain again, how could he bear it.She said we were going to have an operation.must move.must.

She spread a newspaper on the cement floor outside the operating room, sat on the ground and waited.The door was already full of people.The air was stale and stuffy.She leaned against the wall, silent, neither eating nor drinking, shedding tears silently.Waited 9 hours.She couldn't let him die.She is going to take him away. One last quarrel.She quit her job and found a job in Shanghai.She is leaving.She said to him, I want to leave this family.I must leave.She trembled with excitement.She doesn't eat.Insomnia all night.Father was silent.He didn't say anything, and there were lines on his face that suddenly became old.Powerless.grievable.It's like she wants to go back after going home for the New Year.The father sent her off and looked at her again and again, and when she entered the security check, he was still watching.Same look.She knew he was sad.He will regret again and again why he let her travel thousands of miles.She said to him, Dad, you will live with me in Beijing in the future.I will take you to the hospital to see a doctor.Let's go on a trip.He said, you stabilize yourself first.Still smiling happily.The whites of his eyes were cloudy.Such an old man.His smile is the same as in the previous black and white photos, with a wide forehead and an innocent mouth.That was the content of their last conversation.

They went to the food stall near the central square.Local residents lined up low wooden tables and small chairs to sell various foods: corn roasted on charcoal fire, fresh and fragrant, slightly burnt.Large pots of shells and snails, boiled with wild vegetables and ginger, 10,000 VND per plate, and eaten with beer.A whole barrel of fresh soy milk and corn paste, with sugar.Eggs in the shape of a chick are hatched, boiled and eaten with a spoon, and the internal organs and muscles can be seen.Rice noodles with sliced ​​beef, fresh shrimp and wild vegetable leaves.Young mothers are doing business with their children, and Vietnamese women are strong and hardworking.On the steps beside the square, there are beggars sleeping wrapped in sackcloth.A woman smoking a cigarette at a stall selling hand-woven silk shawls.

They sat down and ordered two plates of snails whose names they didn't know.The cool wind blowing from a distance rattled the tent.In the night on the high mountain, I began to feel a slight chill in the wind.They drink.Smoke local cigarettes in Vietnam. Sue said, do you feel uneasy? She said that here are all locals, and there are too few ghosts.They don't come here.They don't come to dangerous places. Su said, you are not used to getting along with others without distance.Maybe they are too close to you.She said, I don't know. You come out and never talk to other people?

I don't know how to start... Look at the kids from Japan who travel alone, they are always silent and serious.Orientals are used to restraining their emotions. I have seen three sentences before, which are like this: When you are working, you don’t care about the reward; when you are in love, you can’t remember the hurt you have suffered; would you do that. I have been out of work for a long time.It has also been a long time without love and dancing.she says.so what do you do. walk.Just walk.Walk without speaking. The scene in the movie is like this: in a small town on the top of a high mountain in a foreign land, two strange women who meet by chance are sitting in a big stall with dim lights and loud noises.Beside the heat of food, children, women, long-stemmed roses dying, tobacco between women's fingers, empty beer bottles.Howling wind and the sound of Vietnamese.

They travel alone, each has histories and past events, but never mentions them, like all sober travelers with blank expressions.A woman sheds tears in a dark and stuffy theater.Another woman photographs a chaotic and dingy market from a flyover.They are silent.Confidence becomes the flickering sunlight between the lips, through a vast dark forest. Language is taboo in the end.It is abandoned, contained, repressed.We speak to ourselves, or to strangers.Language cannot travel through time.Only pain can pass through all eternity. The night before her father died, she stayed by his side until late.At the end of the corridor, there is a window where you can see the rain pouring down.In the middle of the night, another patient was rushed in. It was a man who was hit by a truck.There was blood on his head, but his body appeared intact.Doctors quickly put him on oxygen and gave him fluids.His stroller was near his father's hospital bed.The man has no shoe on one foot.

Just like that, she saw his tidal breathing.Breathing so hard, it seemed to burst the diaphragm in his chest.It seems to release the soul.In the silent corridor, apart from the sound of raindrops, it is the regular ups and downs of breathing. Five minutes later, the man was covered with a white cloth. At that time my father was still dying.His breathing was still strong, and the oxygen tube in his mouth was shaking with his head.She began to feel that maybe he really wouldn't open his eyes again.She stands by his bed.They are separated by a vast life and death.He wants to leave her alone.All the blueprints of her plan fell through, and the time for atonement and compensation that she thought would be there, slipped from her fingers like running water, and disappeared one by one.There won't be any more.

She remembered kneeling on the concrete floor next to her father's bed, buried her head in the bedsheets in the empty corridor late at night, and prayed, God, please forgive my sins.She heard her own voice, vague and deep, piercing the dust. Poor man.Poor man.In this world, we are so humble, vulnerable, and struggling in vain. We know nothing but obedience to fate. Su, for everything we have paid, there will be no redemption. She raised her head to look at Su.Her eyes were bright and soaked with water, as if they were always twinkling with tears.She said, we want another plate of fried snails, as long as you are not afraid of diarrhea. No, I have medicine with me.Su said that if we fear too much, many things cannot be crossed.There is an American photographer, Joel Peter Witkin. He grew up in a poor area of ​​Brooklyn, New York. When he was 6 years old, he witnessed a car accident. The head of the little girl who was crushed rolled to his feet. This childhood experience affected him in the future. All of his works explore violence, pain, death, and point to deformities and human morbidity.A reporter asked him why he didn't want to shoot innocent things, did he think it would be vulgar?He said that pleasing things are easy to do, but like with an automatic camera, I can't get enough.My works are in the need of going to the light, but they must first go through the darkness. I like this sentence very much.Sue said.I'm also a photographer, but I don't take pictures like Joel does.I don't photograph men who hang themselves with their testicles, dead dogs with fruits and vegetables in their wounds, living people without limbs, and dead heads kissing.Too long a period of darkness can make us feel cold.What you have always wanted to photograph. the sea.Except the sea.Or the sea. They said that from Hue to Hoi An, they will pass through Da Nang.And the journey from Da Nang to Hoi An belongs to the 50 places that must be seen once in a lifetime. The bus has been circling on the winding mountain road.On the other side of the mountain is the dark green, empty and silent sea.There is a faint sunshine in the sky, and the sea is dark and cool, like hell.It reflects the rolling green peaks of the mountains.As we got to the top of the mountain, the air became more humid and cold, and large clouds and mist shrouded the valley. When the car passed through, the mist hit our faces.beach.high mountains.Clouds on the top of the mountain.Woods in different shades of green.fishing village.Sunlight on the sea. The journey in Vietnam has actually been walking along the long and narrow coastline.Along the sea, from north to south. That's something close to our soul, Sue said.In other words, we have to live in it all the time. last night.All the instruments surrounding my father stopped working.Due to edema, my father's head swelled much larger than ordinary people.The white cotton net bag on the head was torn one by one because it was too tight.On the left side, there are sutures left by the operation, which have been soaked black with blood.The operation damaged a nerve, his left eyelid bulged purple, and an oxygen tube was inserted into his mouth.His lips turned white as the nurse tore the tape off the oxygen tube from his face.And there is no way to close it.The doctor on duty took the electrocardiogram for his father, and there was a straight line on the narrow white paper.This is the hospital as proof of death. Standing straight to one side, she put her hand on her father's chin, trying to close his lips.The patch of skin where the palm touched was still soft and stubbly.In an instant, a bottomless silence enveloped her.She heard the doctors and nurses in the duty room talking and laughing.The patients in the next room were shouting and crying, and the country woman, who was in so much pain after her operation, cursed all her loved ones around her.There is dust and the humidity of rain in the air.But the only clear voice she heard was the man saying, darling, stroking father's beard.When she was taking a nap in summer when she was a child, her father asked her to lie on his body and touch his chin.The short, hard blue beard stubble tickled the palms of his hands.They live in their old house in the alley, with mats on the wooden floor.The father is a young man.Such a clean and handsome man. That was the shortest time they had ever brought each other joy and comfort.She grew up quickly and became a rebellious woman.Father was soon silenced by his burden and toil, and spoke no more. Surrounded by a crowd of crying people.She dresses her father.Father's body quickly became heavier.The body temperature is still there.She tied a cotton scarf around her neck around her father's waist.She wished he could walk in his favorite old clothes, but they bought new shrouds.The old man in the mortuary put the father on the cart.Push through a hallway, push an elevator, push out a gate, push down a rainy concrete road, push through a dusty construction site, and finally push into a dilapidated building behind the hospital.As the car moved, his father's body shook whenever there was a bump.She protected his head, afraid that his body would fall down due to its weight.The father seemed to have nothing to rely on. The morgue was as empty as a warehouse.There was a large freezer, enameled basins for baking tinfoil, old tables for offerings, and a long row of empty chairs.They put the father on the concrete table.There are two ventilation fans on the wall, the blades rotate slowly, and the rainwater hits them, making a ding ding sound.The door is open, and the damp cold wind blows in, and you can see the leaves that have been washed bright by the rain, and the road in the middle of the night that is gradually becoming silent. Everything can be over. They drank the last bottle of wine.The ground is a mess of cigarette butts.Su said, I will take you to see the church.Da Lat has a Catholic church built in 1931, and you don't get many chances to see the church on the top of the mountain. She bought a roasted corn.Break it in half with your hands and give it to Su.The corn emits a fragrant heat, chewing between the lips and teeth, it is soft and waxy.She ate them one by one, just like she did in her childhood.A little joy welled up in my heart.The kind of ordinary indifferent simple happiness.Su put his hand on her shoulder.She is also happy.But both of them are people who don't know how to express happiness, so they just walk quickly on the dark mountain slope. She remembered that she had no friends for a long time.Not one close person. Su.I never thought that the most peaceful and longest time I spent with my father was in the simple and cold morgue of the hospital. In the middle of the night, it was just me and him.Every hour, one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock... I would get up and give him a discount.For, according to the custom, the father had already set off, and was going further and further away.He wants to eat, drink some water, and take some money with him.So I kept burning tinfoil, continued offering incense, and kowtowed farewell to him. We are so peacefully together.Su.The father was covered with a quilt.He looked like a child, left in the dark night, silent, good-natured child, lonely child.I stood beside him and touched his body.His shoulders, chest, hands, feet, sick legs, bloody head with stitches.I stroked his face again.His forehead, nose, eyes, lips, chin.The bones, muscles, and outlines that have not disappeared are still so clear, but there is no temperature and smell.He is so heavy.so cold. The dawn of the early hours is approaching.Father should have reached the other side.Our farewell is coming to an end.I touched him over and over again.Hug him and press your face against his chest.Through the white cloth, I could feel the coldness seeping out of his body.This is physical evidence of the affection he once gave me.a corpse.God took him back.This is the only man who cares about me and doesn't give up on me.The man who gave me my flesh and blood.This man who carried me to the hospital late at night when I had a fever.The man who took me by the hand and took me to school.This man who was exiled by me and traveled thousands of miles in his hometown.This hardworking and lonely man.This man I have given nothing in return or comfort.He was taken away.We will no longer be indifferent and stalemate.There will be no more encounters and farewells.He is dead.I am so reluctant.Su. I can't do anything.Su. Part of my body is dead too.Again no response.Su, when the sky outside the door began to light up, I saw that the whole city had turned into a slightly blue, damp container.empty.nothing.A new day is at hand.I feel so alone. Su.You know that loneliness when it's just you.Everyone has nothing to do with you.All of them disappeared. So I can only cry. ………… Church at night.The cross on the spire was like a star in the dark.They opened the iron gate and walked up the wide concrete steps.The wind howled past.Su said that there are green and yellow stained glass inside the church, with pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus engraved on it.The zenith is very high, and the sun shines in during the day, as if it is a road opened from heaven.During the day I came to take pictures. Sue asked her, do you believe in God. She said, I believe in fate.Believe in the great power that holds us.A force that never allows us to defy and escape. Su said, listen to the voice in the dark.listen.what did you hear. She stood silently on the steps.She reached out and touched Su's finger.Their hands are intertwined.Sue said, I can only hear the sound of the sea.When I was a kid my mother owned a grocery store in a small town, and I slept on the counter of the store, and she and my stepdad slept in the little room inside.Later, I was in the city, living in a single apartment, cooking instant noodles late at night, too tired to take a shower, and lying on the bed.I have always, only, heard the sound of the sea. Have you not seen your father? He died before I was born.He has been living with his mother and stepfather.The concept of a father does not exist for me.So you never miss him. yes.Never. In the funeral home, she watched her father being wheeled into the incinerator.She was standing in that huge booming house with dry powder all over the floor.The worker told her that this is where each of us will come.The last place to come.let's go.Don't stay here much. The father's face before being pushed in felt very strange.He was kept in the freezer overnight, and a little rouge was applied on his face because of makeup to make his face look rosier.There was no trace of her memory on her father's face.She believed he was gone.Go very far.He won't be here.And what they want to burn is just a corpse. In the open space covered with firecrackers and shredded paper, she saw thick black smoke coming out of huge chimneys.Black smoke hovered in the gray sky, and then gradually faded until it disappeared. When she took the ashes out of the window, she felt the heat on her hands.She sealed some of the ashes in an envelope and prepared to take them back to Beijing.physical evidence.If she wants to leave a physical evidence of this feeling, she can't have nothing in her hands. According to custom, the ashes must be placed in the tomb before 12 noon.When the car passed the village, my mother called and said that this was the place where my father had taught for many years, and some firecrackers would be set off on the road.It was raining heavily.There are already villagers waiting by the roadside holding umbrellas and carrying wreaths.My father used to teach in elementary school in this remote and beautiful small village and spent his youth.After graduating from high school, he had no chance to enter university because the Cultural Revolution started and he had to go to the countryside.When he returned to the city and really started his business, he was already 30 years old. No one can choose their own life.you know. The car is parked on the road.Walking along the muddy field path, there is a long queue.The empty mountains and rice fields are filled with rain and fog.The rain was too heavy, so she took off her coat to wrap her father's urn.Holding the urn in my arms, it is so heavy.She felt as if she was trying to support her father's weight with all her strength.The weight of a pile of white ash. A series of rituals.In rural areas, funerals already carry sacred religious connotations.Every custom is used to comfort the sorrows of the living, unwilling to admit the disappearance of the dead.It's like when the funeral home's hearse came to pick up her father's body, they told her to throw tin foil along the way, which was the road money.When crossing the bridge, you should tell your father that you have crossed the bridge.The incense in your hand cannot be extinguished, it must be continued and continued.It was as if the father's soul rested on this faint incense.But she watched as they wrapped her father's body in a piece of cloth, tied it in a knot, and stuffed it into the empty space in the bottom of the white van.Father was wrapped like a stump. At 11:48, my father's urn was put into the tomb, together with the pens he had been using, briefcase, comb, the cashmere sweater and shirt she bought for him, and the books she had published.Father can only take these.The muddy ground in the rain was filled with burning incense.They started burning piles of tinfoil, Father's other clothes.The fire rattled in the wind.The rain suddenly became lighter. On the way home, the car waited at the pier for the ferry.Waited a long time.she fell asleep.Lots of messy and weird dreams.In the dream, I saw trees with pears hanging from ropes.One by one, hanging there long.It was an empty orchard.There is no end in sight.The rolling green hills.On the empty field ridge path, a man walked past.Turn around and smile at her.Face of joy.Such a happy smile. She woke up and found herself shaking uncontrollably.She reached out and looked at her palm.Her fingers curled up like a half grip. Outside the window is the twilight of the city.It was as silent as ever.Clouds on a rose-grey horizon.The expressions of the people on the road were flat.Life goes on as it always has.The dead disappeared.Time quickly filled everything up.It's like sea water covers all the hollows of the earth.