Chapter 9 Summer is Collapsing - Chapter 9: Boyhood Straight to the Land (Part 1)

Summer is Collapsing - Chapter 9: Boyhood Straight to the Land (Part 1) The red house on North Urumqi Road is very old. There are three floors in one house, and there are three families living in it. There are pavilions, common kitchens and toilets. The house on No. 28 is facing the cross of Mu En Church, which is opposite. Every Sunday morning, I wake up to the singing of worship service. Next door is a small school with an old children's playground.Shen Han and his grandmother live on the ground floor, sharing a very narrow patio filled with various bonsai, and there is an oleander tree at the door, which will bloom pink flowers.Everything is the same as it was when Mom was alive.The bonsai are all planted by my mother. After her mother died, Shen Han also learned to take care of them, so none of them changed, and the inside of the house was still warm in winter and cool in summer. Even the bamboo curtains remained the same as when her mother was there. .

Shen Han is an illegitimate child, he was born in summer, a Leo boy, and he never knew who his father was, and his mother kept silent about this matter, he had begged his mother to tell him many times, even he cried I begged her on my knees, but my mother was very hard-hearted, and she kept silent until she died. Shen Han has been bullied by other boys since she was a child, because people in the alley have been rumoring that he is a bastard without a father, who was brought back by her mother when she jumped the queue and settled down, and her mother was never married , but with such a child, no one thinks highly of their family members.Shen Han lived in fear since he was a child. Children of the same age ignored him, or just scolded him with the vicious language of children, but he was afraid of being beaten. They always played with him and locked him in the iron sheet of the trash can. In the house, they robbed him of his money and his homework, and made him always be scolded at school. All the teachers didn't like him. He was afraid of going out and just wanted to stay in his red house and guard Those bamboo curtains, stay with my mother, accompany my mother to listen to music, cook, and talk.

Until when he was in junior high school, one day in an alley, Shen Han was stopped by a few hooligans and asked for points. The money on him was to buy his mother a birthday cake, so he fought back for the first time. The crazy child cried and howled and wrestled with the three little hooligans. He bit their arms and frantically resisted the fists flying on him on the ground. Finally, he touched a Picking up the abandoned steel pipe, he smashed it on the head of one of them, that person passed out on the spot, and the other two immediately ran away when they saw it. Thirteen-year-old Shen Han looked at the boy on the ground bleeding from his forehead. He fell to the ground with a bang, and his youth also fell heavily to the ground. He burst into tears in this dead-end alley where no one was alive. Years of grievances and fears were stinking in this dark place. The water in the alley was vented, he cried loudly, and kicked the unconscious boy on the ground hard.From that day on, there was always a short steel pipe and a knife in his schoolbag, so no one dared to touch him again. He was famous for fighting, and he always fought alone. The boys who scolded his mother and locked him in the dark garbage room for a whole night were all revenged by him, and they all began to fear him. Smelly cul-de-sac.In junior high school, everyone was afraid of him, except Ke Ke and Xiao Qiao, who sat in the front seat of him, and for some reason, they were very kind to him, and there were always gauze and band-aids in the bag, as long as he got hurt , They will definitely appear in front of him.

This may be the happiest time he has ever had since childhood. Every day after school, the three of them go home together, riding bicycles quietly and silently. They also chat on the roof of the school, lying on the summer evening On the playground, I watched the sun slowly sinking between the tall buildings in the distance, like salted duck eggs. But this period of time is too short, too short, so short that it is no longer true when I think about it now. One day three years ago, my mother took the quilt and sheets to Shen Han and told Shen Han that they would take them to the balcony to dry them. Shen Han wanted to help but was stopped by his mother and told him to do math problems with peace of mind. The graduation exam would be in a week.But this time, it took too long for my mother to dry the quilt. The sun went down in the evening, and grandma had already set the dishes on the table, waiting for dinner. Mom still didn't come back, so Shen Han ran to look for her on the balcony. There is no one, only two cotton beds that have been drying for a day, full of the warm smell of the sun, and the sheets are also floating lonely on the drying rod, Shen Han shouted at the alley filled with the smell of pots and fried small yellow croakers "Mom", no one answered him again.

At noon that day, after drying the quilt, my mother walked slowly to the elementary school next door. She walked up the stairs lonely, to the top of the teaching building on the seventh floor, and stood on the water tank to look at Urumqi North Road. The red house in the church, the service in the church just ended, some old people came out from inside, and music poured out from the open door. My mother died by jumping off a building, and when she was discovered the next morning, there was a big pool of blood dripping beside her, and there was no suicide note. Grandma ran into the school and told Shen Han that his mother was dead. He didn't believe it. He ran in circles on the school playground and saw a boy who had scolded his mother playing basketball under the basketball hoop, so he rushed up I wrestled with him, feeling desolate in my heart.And that boy was also a stubborn boy that Shen Han had never met before. Soon the players who played basketball dispersed, and the two of them were still rolling together on the playground. In the end, both of them were exhausted and cried. While still fighting, all the buttons of the clothes were ripped off, and the boy was still muttering: "You just don't have a father, you don't have a father, you don't have a father."

Shen Han no longer had strength, and they all had no strength. Shen Han pulled out a knife from the back of his trousers pocket, and stabbed it into the boy's body without direction, exhausting all his strength. When he was sorting things for his mother, he found a photo. In the photo, a man with a strange face was holding his mother's shoulders. It was a photo taken a few years ago. At that time, his mother was still a woman with shawl and long hair. A woman with curly bangs, and the back of the photo says "Cheng Jianguo, in spring". Grandma was worried that Shen Han would be responsible for what happened to the boy, so she asked Shen Han to hide in the countryside for a while, and come back if no one came to find him, and three months later, when Shen Han returned to Shanghai again , that summer has passed, the leaves of the ginkgo trees covered the ground, the flowers of the oleander had already withered, and all the students in the school had graduated, and as soon as they graduated, they lost their direction and disappeared without a trace. The boy who was stabbed never came to look for Shen Han.It's just that grandma's eyes are blind, and the eyes soaked in tears all day long will naturally go blind. Grandma needs someone to take care of her, and the family needs money. Shen Han no longer goes to school.

In the past three years, he has done everything. He wobbled on the back of his bicycle full of old TV sets and ran to the pier. He worked as a bartender in a bar for a while, and also worked as a taxi driver for a while. , They all changed after a while, and he had seventeen or eighteen jobs before and after, and now he is a courier, and collects debts for people to make a little money.The only thing that remains the same is that he still fights, and the jackknife never leaves his body. In the area of ​​Wanhangdu Road, he is still well-known for his fights. He can forget many things during fights, and his blood flows to Every part of his body, while his brain became empty, he no longer felt sad.He never stopped wanting to find Cheng Jianguo, maybe this person was his father whom he had never met, Shen Han hated him, he had imagined thousands of things that might happen after seeing him, he might cry again, or maybe Stabbed him fiercely. Among all the possibilities, he never thought that Cheng Jianguo was dead and disappeared from this world so easily.

Every noon, Shen Han would ride her bicycle home to cook lunch for her grandma, and then she would just sit on a wicker chair in the small courtyard for a whole afternoon, and in summer, she would wear a pair of jackets all day long. The shirt, dressed very neatly, eyes half-opened and half-closed, but the eyeballs are cloudy, surrounded by a pile of lush bonsai, the dead leave nothing but the sadness of the living.