BLOODLINE(百年血脉--英文版)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：PATIGÜL

出版社：中译出版社

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

BLOODLINE(百年血脉--英文版)试读：

I awoke with heavy eyelids, and recalled a few details from my dream: a rough hand groping my breasts and between my legs. I tried to push it away, but didn't have the strength. I had a dim recollection of the fingers moving in rhythm, and suddenly wasn't sure whether it was a dream at all.

Su Feng was silent at first, just as he'd been at dinner. "You were all feverish, talking nonsense. Scared me half to death."

Now a freelance photographer for Qochek Today magazine, he had done military service in our lonely frontier town, just across from Kazakhstan, and stayed once it was over, setting up a studio and accompanying journalists on assignments. When he spoke, he had a heavy Zhejiang accent, which rendered his words as slow and sticky as his character.

"I've got a bit of a cold," I replied, and flung a string of snot out the window. It tangled with Su Feng's voice and was hurled back by the wind, sticking to my sweaty clothes.

He pressed a hand against my forehead. "It's gone down. Just now you were burning up."

I rubbed where his hand had been, trying to wipe away his damp fingerprints, and told him to pull over. With a grunt of its engine, the car stopped at the roadside. I threw myself out and was violently sick, crouching weakly, clutching a tire for support. By the time the desert wind had cleared my head a little, my back ached, my knees were weak and my vision had turned starry. Doing my best to ignore the dizziness, I climbed in the back seat. Su Feng tossed me a coat to use as a blanket.

Countless times, I'd imagined someone coming to rescue me from Qochek's suffocating confines. In my head, I re-wrote Su Feng as a romantic hero, swooping to my aid and carrying me off in an enormous truck. Thinking of it this way, the journey ahead didn't seem so threatening. The world outside the car windows was still shrouded in predawn darkness and the white poplar trees lining the road were bent double in the wind, straining as though they, too, wanted to uproot themselves and escape.

"Look at you, ready to blow away in the first gust of wind! You really want to go ahead with this?" Su Feng angled his face to look at me in the rear-view mirror, concern filtering through his words.

"I've lived here over a decade," I replied. "It's a onestreet town. I take ten steps down the street and meet twenty people I know. The men booze all day and prowl for women at night. It's boring as hell."

"All the men in the bar, then all the men and women in the dance hall. Today I'm with you, tomorrow he's with you, and round and round it goes." He laughed at the thought. "One new face on the dance floor and it stands out half a mile. I never go to those places."

"Neither do I. I don't dance."

"And yet here we are, a lonely man, a single woman, both a long way from our hometowns. Are you sure you won't come back to Qochek, once you've found your brother?"

"I'm not coming back, even if I don't find him." I closed my eyes, signaling an end to the conversation.

Before dinner, when I was still an employee at Qochek Today, I handed in a piece that I'd worked on with Su Feng. It was a feature about a local village chief and his attempted rape of a Hui Muslim girl. Worried about provoking ethnic tensions, the editor was sitting on the story. Su Feng and I had gone to the countryside to research the incident and, while I was looking over the crime scene, scouring the sheep pen, haystack and kang for clues, I sensed Su Feng's gaze on my body. He made no attempt to hide it, and was so brazen that even our interviewee noticed. The girl kept making excuses to leave, saying she was going out to collect firewood or to boil some water. I forced myself to stay calm and stuck closely to her, trying to avoid being alone with him, but he just clutched his camera and blundered along behind.

This unsettled me, and made getting through an already sensitive interview especially challenging. Once it was over, and we were in the car on the way back, I received a strange phone call.

"Guess who?" said the caller.

It sounded like a young man, his voice intentionally distorted.

"No idea."

"It's your big brother," he said. "It's Simayil! I'm in Guangzhou." Then he switched to Uyghur. "Is there any news from Lan Hua?"

It had been five years since I had heard Simayil's voice. He sounded soft and high-pitched, like a young boy. I struggled to believe that a voice could somehow regress over time. There was a new flippancy to his tone, and even his laugh was unfamiliar——a repeated, awkward snicker on his end of the line, as though he were pretending to be more relaxed than he was.

"You don't sound like my brother. And I don't know any Lan Hua."

"Lan Hua is my wife," he said, sounding a little hurt. "Your sister-in-law. I've told you about her! How can you not know who she is? If you don't believe that I'm your brother, I'll pass the phone to one of the traders on this street. He's from our hometown."

Another unfamiliar Xinjianger came on the line, speaking Uyghur. "Your brother's had a rough time of it here in Guangzhou. He just got out of the hospital. To be straight with you, he's not making a lot of sense. It'd be best if a relative came to get him."

I heard cursing on the other end. The man claiming to be my brother was shouting at the man I'd just spoken to. "You retard! You're the one who makes no sense!"

With one of his snickering laughs, he came back on the phone. "A few days ago, I was chased by some guys and I fell from two floors up," he said. "I smashed a front tooth in, so that's why it's a little whistly when I talk. There's nothing wrong with my brain, I just stayed in hospital for the shock. Then they sent me for some tests and found out I had low blood sugar."

He rambled on and on, with no apparent logic to his thoughts. The more incoherent he seemed, the more skeptical I felt. But, if it really was Simayil, my long-lost brother, I was afraid this might be our only chance at a reunion. If I hung up on him now, he might vanish into the ether once again.

"Don't worry," he reassured me, as though reading my thoughts. "My mobile is on 24/7. I'll keep it charged, and you can reach me whenever you like."

For the rest of the journey, I kept creating new ways to test him, calling up and citing scenes from our childhood that only the two of us could know. Each time, he answered without missing a beat. Eventually, I spun it into a horror movie plot: some guy had abducted my brother and extracted detailed information about his life, in order to trick me. He was after Lan Hua. But, then again, why would he be going about it like this?

These feverish imaginings made things all the more perplexing. I lost all sense of what was true or false. The only way to confirm if this was Simayil was to go to Guangzhou and see him for myself.Night-time Departurey calls intrigued Su Feng. He saw how edgy I was every time I Mmade another one, and heard me running through my mysterious checklist of childhood incidents. Intuiting this was an important matter, he shut the windows and slowed the car to a crawl.

When we reached the magazine office, I hung up and told Su Feng I needed to go to Guangzhou, right away.

"It's urgent," I said. "The man on the phone says he's my older brother. We haven't heard from him in years and he's in a bad way. I need to buy a ticket, sort some things out, then catch the overnight coach to Ürümqi."

"But you can't just abandon everything," he replied. "What about your job, what about. . ."

Rather than dropping me at the side of the road as usual, he drove into the office courtyard. He insisted on coming to my room, to help me pack. I told him to help himself to anything he thought he could use.

I contacted Abul, my younger brother, and arranged for him to meet me at our aunt's house in Ürümqi.

"I'll drive you there tonight," said Su Feng solemnly, suddenly realizing that I was serious about leaving. "Wait while I sort a few things out. Then let's have dinner."

After he left, I went to the market to buy a suitcase. I stopped at a fortune-telling stand on the way, and had my fortune read by an elderly, black-bearded diviner. At the end, as I handed him a ten yuan note, he told me to remember one last thing: "Head for water and you'll survive." I knew ten yuan couldn't really buy me answers, but my luck could hardly get any worse. I was ready to put my faith in the old man's words.

I left a resignation letter, informing the magazine that whatever happened on this trip, I did not intend to return. In Qochek, almost everyone knew everything there was to know about my life, past and present, and I despised this. Even the tiniest shred of news tore through the town overnight. There I was, editor of a respected local publication, yet somehow everything about me was a topic for public conversation: my father had died, I was divorced, I'd lost my daughter, my mother had gone missing, my elder siblings had left Xinjiang to find work. While I was busy curating page after page of other people's stories for the magazine, my personal life was providing its own tragic newsreel for the townspeople. I dreaded meeting anyone I knew. I couldn't bear their cloying, deferential tones or the pitying way they looked at me, as though I were the survivor of some terrible catastrophe. It made me feel pathetic. I had no intention of carrying on this show forever, and I felt this was the moment I'd been waiting for——the chance to take charge of my own fate.

A matter of hours after that first phone call, I made my quiet exit from Qochek. I resolved to make a clean break with the past. You could call that a happy ending, I suppose. It's true that I was grateful to the phone call, for coming out of the blue and helping me draw a line under things. I could finally retrieve a little of the dignity that had been so lacking in my hitherto miserable life.

I knew, of course, that the next day the magazine staff would be gossiping about my disappearance. At the thought of their mouths hanging open in shock, I experienced a strange thrill. My last news story for Qochek would be about me.

As I got into his car, I crammed an enormous bundle between my seat and Su Feng's. Crumpled together and tied up in a bed sheet were skirts that hadn't seen the light of day since I married into the Mi family. The plastic suitcase I'd bought at the market was at my feet, jolting in tandem with the car, containing my portfolio of work and certificates for various prizes.

I'd thrown my luggage together in a frantic rush. There hadn't even been time to say goodbye to my daughter before we left. We managed to stop by Ma Fen's halal restaurant to leave a vague forwarding address, and that was all. When I told Ma Fen that I was leaving, she giggled and turned to exchange a look with her younger sister, who was chopping meat behind her. She looked back, cheerfully. The pair kept nodding at me, as though nodding were their way of showing me their support for my plan.

Ma Fen's was the place where I'd eaten my last meal with my ex-husband, Mi Fu, on the day we finalized our divorce. Then, as on this evening when I was leaving Qochek, their amiable demeanor had been wildly at odds with how I felt.When I said I was going to Guangzhou and never coming back, they seem to take it as some kind of joke. Perhaps they had no idea where Guangzhou was. I left quickly, only turning to look back when I reached the end of the street. The sisters were out in the restaurant yard, clutching the post where horses were usually tied up, bent over with laughter. When they saw me looking, they smiled broadly and gave me a little wave.

"You're lucky," declared Su Feng suddenly, interrupting the dreary noise of the car tires crunching over the sandy road. "It's lucky that Hui husband of yours kept the child after the divorce. Otherwise, with a young daughter and a sick mother, how on earth would you have coped?"

As a rule, I avoided discussing my life with outsiders. But the endless expanse of road was like a belt, tying me to this man with whom I'd never exchanged more than a few pleasantries. Now that we were leaving Qochek, I wanted my misfortunes to shake out and grind to dust beneath our wheels, where they could torment me no longer. I talked to fill the time, and felt as unstoppable as a weight hurled into a black hole, pouring out all the sad events of the past years to a man I would probably never see again.

"My father passed away, leaving behind our mentally ill mother and a younger brother only good for squeezing money out of me and my sister," I began. "The Mi family were unwilling to take on extra burdens, especially once my daughter was born. And I didn't think it was really their place to do so. That's why I moved out of their house and into the magazine's dorm, taking my mother and daughter with me. They were my flesh and blood; I couldn't abandon them.

"As soon as my father was buried, my older brother and sister left town to find work. There was a big pile of affairs to sort out after the death, and it all came down to me. When I suggested a divorce, my in-laws agreed right away.

"But the divorce dragged on for a year, because we were arguing about who would get possession of the child. They could see I was overwhelmed, and argued there was no way I could take proper care of her. Mi Fu said I should never have had a child in the first place. He acted desperate to keep her, but he wasn't even planning to look after her himself. He intended to give her to his sister, a thought I couldn't abide. This was my daughter, and I was determined to raise her myself. I left her at the magazine's nursery during the day, and picked her up after work in the evenings.

"The Mi's named her Mi Ban, but I ignored the surname and called her Ban Ban. Ban Ban would blow on my hands to warm them up when they were cold, and feed me and her grandmother cookies. It was tiring, of course, looking after her and my mother all by myself, but Ban Ban kept me company. Gradually, I felt the pain of my father's death and my mother's sickness starting to ease a little.

"We lived like this for about six months. Then Ban Ban caught acute pneumonia and had to go into hospital, where they discovered she was also anemic and needed a blood transfusion. I offered my own, skinny arm. But the doctor, a man with a drooping moustache, said that judging by my complexion, I was anemic and malnourished myself. He told me to buy her the blood.

"I couldn't forgive myself my weakness. What kind of mother can't provide her child a drop of blood, in the moment when she needs it most? I was racked with guilt.

"My in-laws arrived at the hospital and the problem escalated from blood transfusions to a custody battle. Even if she survived my neglect, they said, she'd still be living with her deranged grandmother. Who knew the damage this would do to her intellectual development?

"In the end, for Ban Ban's sake, I let them take her. She could forget about me, and live a calm and happy life. The next time I went to see her, she called me 'Auntie,' and my sister-in-law 'Mama'. The family tried to hurry me out but Ban Ban pulled up a stool and said, 'Auntie, stay for dinner!' That was when the tears came streaming down. I couldn't help it! But I knew I was only making things harder for the child, and that I shouldn't go back again."

Su Feng sighed. The wind was picking up, howling loudly outside the windows, and the temperature inside the car was dropping. He said nothing for a while, then asked, "But don't you have three siblings? Couldn't they look after your mother, too?"

I was lost for a reply. The Mi family had posed the same question. We all four had the same mother, so why was I solely responsible for looking after her?

In fact, each of us had our own reasons for resenting her. Simayil and Maryam, my older brother and sister, recast themselves as orphans the second they made it out of our hometown.

From then on, Maryam would only get in touch when she was in trouble. Once things were on track again, the only family members she cared about were our two brothers. When things were tough for me, she didn't want to know. It wasn't that she hated me, she was just afraid that through me, our mother would somehow infiltrate her life. Mother. A word we could never mention, never touch, and never expose. A knife poised, at any moment, to sever the tenuous familial bond between us.

As for Simayil, he used to call whenever he needed money, until the time I suggested he take over looking after our mother. He slammed down the phone and never called back. That was five years ago. Five years without any contact whatsoever.

My parents sent Abul, my younger brother, to live with our maternal aunt when he was still a baby. As a result, he always felt like we owed him something. He was more than willing to let us older sisters run around trying to make it up to him, but he couldn't be counted on to lift a finger for either of us.

So, aside from me, there was no one willing to care for our mother. The way they saw it, she was an obstruction, plain and simple——a stumbling block——and once she tripped you up, you'd never get away. I'd never been able to explain this to my in-laws, not even as they'd watched me wade deeper and deeper into difficulty. Was it worth trying to explain it to Su Feng?

I pulled my black windbreaker closer, to ward off the chill forcing its way through the seams of the doors and windows. I pulled those icy memories closer, too, stowing them away inside my body. I looked out of the window and then across at Su Feng, who had his eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.

Finally, he broke his silence. "You never told me where your mother went."

"She has some mental problems. She went missing three months ago. I don't know where she is." I turned away again, back towards the window.

Deviating from the gentleness of his earlier tone, Su Feng turned stern. "From now on, let's not talk about the past. Don't blame me if I've said something wrong here on the road. Once you're in Guangzhou, we should stay in touch. If there's any news of your daughter, I can make sure it reaches you. Don't forget you have a friend here in

试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]

下载完整电子书