Chapter 30 5. Escape in the rainy night

In Yancheng, Aunt San left me a beautiful nursery rhyme: Oh oh oh, the rooster crowed, and the Volunteer Army came. Fly the red flag, ride a white horse, and carry a sharp sword in your waist. You deliver the meal, I make tea, and everyone comes to entertain him.  After my mother went to Luohe Lixing Middle School to teach, I sang this nursery rhyme from Yancheng to Luohe. The children in No. 1 Luohe Youfang Hutong cannot sing this nursery rhyme.In that narrow and long courtyard, tenants of different identities live in sequence—a private school teacher who cooks with a bellows and teaches "Mencius' sayings" to his disciples. The widow who sews and supports herself, the bank clerk who goes to work on time, rain or shine, and keeps going despite the bombs falling from the sky, the prostitute who is not registered with the authorities and uses a small "nice plaster" on her temple as a sign of business.They were doing things that had nothing to do with the nursery rhyme.

One evening, the fat and white prostitute was still standing by the door, staring sideways at the passers-by in the alley with her reddish sleep-deprived eyes.A figure came from the other side of the alley. She twisted her waist like a well-wound clockwork, crossed her arms and held up her towering breasts in front of her chest, but she quickly unwound again, and her breasts were like clockwork. The deflated cloth bag drooped down.Walking towards him was a disheveled man with a broken shoe with a mouth open on one foot and a bare foot covered in mud on the other. I was competing with the bank clerk's kids in a "bell-banging" game -- knocking coppers against the facing wall to see whose coppers hit the farthest.I have a brilliant copper plate that bounced off the wall, rolled out of the gatehouse, jumped down the steps, walked around a bare foot covered in dirt, and lay on a proud The side of my big toe did not move.As I stooped to pick up the coin, my toe stuck at me, and someone called my name above the toe.I looked up and saw a face covered with black stubble, and with a flash of black eyes, I jumped up and called out: "Uncle!"

I don't know why my uncle became like this.All kinds of people in the courtyard turned around to look at him, like looking at a tramp begging along the way or a prisoner sent to the sky.My mother's expression changed after hearing his whisper, and hurriedly asked me to lead him to take a small path over the wall of the village, bathed in the Shahe River, changed into the clothes my father had left behind, and specially invited a hair-shaving picker to cut him off. The messy hair like a hedgehog turned into a neat "inch cut", and the black stubble on his face was also swept away.My mother hurriedly went to Yancheng, not far from Luohe, to look for my grandfather. 

From the whispers of my mother and my aunt, I knew that an accident had happened: a group of men with guns had captured my third aunt and were chasing my uncle.My uncle asked my mother to tell my grandfather immediately, asking him to try to rescue the third aunt, and left a sealed envelope for my mother. Before I had time to investigate whether I had used the slingshot to kill the rats or hit the devil's plane, I fell into a dream between me and the courtyard. time to leave quietly. Twenty-six years later, during the "Cultural Revolution", my mother said angrily, "Why are the "outside transfer" personnel endlessly pestering your uncle's escape from Nanyang to Luohe?Shoot me a table!

My mother said that my uncle escaped by chance from a middle school in Shiqiao, Nanyang.He and my third aunt fled there from Yancheng, where they hid as deans and Chinese teachers respectively, but lost contact with the party organization.One night when it was raining heavily, someone knocked on the door, and then heard the sound of chaotic footsteps rushing away through the muddy water. Feeling that the situation was abnormal, the door was not opened.They got it right.After liberation, two secret agents who were arrested stated that the Kuomintang spy agency got information from western Henan and hurried to Nanyang Shiqiao to arrest people, and even issued death orders.It was these two spies who knocked on the door on a rainy night.They heard that my uncle was a "two-gun general", so they didn't dare to break the door rashly, so they ambushed a squad of military police in the alley outside the door, knocked on the door and ran away, trying to lure my uncle and third aunt out. Caught in the alley.Uncle and third aunt did not open the door, but were trapped in the house and fell into a desperate situation.In the most critical moment, my uncle's eyes were fixed on the back wall of the house.It was an earthen wall, and when he saw a wet stain on the wall, his eyes lit up suddenly.It was the imprint of the bottom of the wall soaked by continuous rain.He hurriedly picked up a shovel, poked a transparent hole in the wall, and carried the baby under one year old with his third aunt and walked out through the wall.They didn't blow out the lamp, and they didn't even forget to drag a cabinet from the house to block the hole in the wall, and then ran quietly to a small thatched hut in a vegetable garden to hide.The spy confessed that they were still lying in ambush on both sides of the alley, "waiting for work at ease"!

My uncle and third aunt hid in the vegetable garden, but they couldn't hear any movement in the school.My uncle thought, if nothing happened, wouldn't he expose himself by running away through the wall like this?So I left my third aunt in the vegetable garden and sneaked into the school alone to see what happened.He had just entered the school gate when a group of spies broke in and ran around the school with lanterns.My uncle avoided the lanterns far away, and went around with the secret agent in the dark, but bumped into a co-worker in the dark.The worker was shocked and said: "You run away! They took your wife away and beat her with a whip. I heard it!" The uncle thought that the third aunt had suffered misfortune in the vegetable garden, so he stepped on the worker's shoulders and jumped over the wall. and flee.

Those days, people in my grandfather's family and our family were in panic. The nursery rhyme "Hit the red flag, ride a white horse" circled endlessly in my head.One night, the third aunt came to No. 1 Youfang Hutong with a baby in her arms.She is sallow and thin, with disheveled hair, swaying like a willow in the wind and rain.When she learned that her uncle had been here, the unexpected surprise made her limp and leaned into her mother's arms.The mother asked, and the school worker said, what about you?The third aunt said: "The workers misunderstood. It was the spies who tortured an old lady in the same hospital and asked about our whereabouts. I was in the vegetable garden and waited until midnight, but he didn't come back. I thought something happened to him!"

The mother said that the third aunt experienced another "near escape".She escaped from the vegetable garden with the baby in her arms, and ran to the home of her cousin who had fled from the provincial capital to Shiqiao, but spies followed one after another.The third aunt jumped out of the wall again with the child in her arms, and hid in the air-raid shelter under the wall of the village.The secret agents also followed into the air-raid shelter.The third aunt thought, this time it is really impossible to escape!However, they found several coffins in the air-raid shelter, and the innermost one was a coffin that had already been emptied by thieves.The third aunt got into the coffin with the child in her arms and had the experience of pretending to be dead.A skeleton who was cuter than Wu Wu accepted her quietly.The secret agent sealed off the air-raid shelter, raised the lantern and shook it a few times, probably smelling the smell of rotting corpses, and walked away cursing and screaming through the mud.The third aunt came out of the air-raid shelter, spitting from the wall of the village into the ditch where the water accumulated.

The third aunt said, there is another miracle!Da Mao in her arms was suffering from "whooping cough". Before the secret agent knocked on the door, Da Mao was still coughing and ate a pack of "Cough Relief". The cute little cousin fell asleep in the arms of the third aunt.When the third aunt hugged him from the wall of the stronghold to the field and finally escaped from the clutches, he took revenge for the long-lost freedom to speak, coughing and coughing like rapid-fire guns in the field shrouded in darkness. . Both the mother and the aunt were startled and stroked their hearts and said, Oh my God!God!

The mother said that their lives are miracles made up of "chances". The "outside transfer" personnel closed their notebooks and said, don't sing praises for them! Mother said that not only them, but many revolutionaries had the experience of "missing" death before seizing power. The "outside transfer" personnel said, but we know that you are a rightist. My mother said, yes, yes, I got this title only after the revolutionaries took power. The "outside transfer" personnel said, you used to be a language teacher, and you are very good at making up stories!

Mother closed her eyes and said, then, why do you bother me to listen to stories? The mother was not interested in explaining to the "outsiders" that she had given an envelope left by her uncle to the third aunt, and what happened next was closer to, or in other words, a complete legend.But I remember that after the third aunt tore open the envelope, she and the baby in her arms disappeared without a trace. After liberation, my third aunt told my mother that when she and my uncle were hunted down and had nowhere to go, my uncle took a "dangerous move" and left my house from Luohe to go straight to a place that the Kuomintang spies would never have thought of. Place - Zhengzhou Garrison Command.Uncle's cousin He Shi is the major's confidential staff there.When I follow my uncle to look back at history, I also follow a heart-pounding suspense-how will the brotherhood of two brothers be accommodated in the political camp that is at odds with each other?