It pays to love and be loved

Looking back on that autumn morning many years later, I can vaguely remember that there was actually a calm in my mother's eyes, like a prophet who could see the end.

The day father died, in the living room, the old piano, the lid open.

That piano is the only thing of value in our family.

My mother later said that my father got up to play the piano near dawn. The piano sounds depressed, like a sad dream. My mother said she kept thinking she was dreaming, so she ignored it.

It was something my mother regretted for years to come.

My father had left nothing but a vague word that he had written late at night on the eve of his suicide.

From that year on, there was no more music at home. My father's piano was sealed by my mother with a big sleeve and tightly stitched with thread around it.

It was already a piano that could be painful.

Sometimes I came back from school early, I would see my mother standing in front of the living room window of the back, occasionally, I would see my mother standing in front of his father's piano, with a cloth gently wipe the fine dust on the piano sleeve.

When she saw me, she would immediately put away that look of concentration and remembrance, go to the kitchen and start preparing the family dinner.

In fact, I understand my mother's sadness. Or at the time, I thought I knew.My father is an educated youth from Wuhan. He is 4 years younger than my mother. When he came to the small town, his father became a music teacher in an elementary school. Father plays the piano very well. The old piano at home was bought by my mother and father when they got married, together with her savings and her mother's dowry money. It was an arrangement my mother insisted upon.

For as long as I can remember, my father used to sit on the wicker chair in the living room and play. That kind of concentration and intoxication, I often feel that he and our distance has a kind of unspeakable distant.

Many times I think of my father, are quiet and less language, as if full of trouble and worry. But he never seemed to talk to my mother, and he never had much conversation with my sister or me.

In the days leading up to his suicide, my father had started drinking at home and had been absent from work and school for no reason. His temper and the sound of the piano also began to become manic, my sister accompanied me in the room to do my homework, I could hear the sound of the piano was torn, father's hands suddenly beat the noise on the keys.

We don't even know why our father is like this.

It took me years to understand that my father's suicide was linked to depression. But at that time, there didn't seem to be such research and vocabulary.

My sister and I grew up and bought big houses in Shanghai.

We decided to send mother to live with us in Shanghai.

For some reason, however, her mother agreed to move to Shanghai, but she refused to sell the old house in her hometown. My sister and I were no longer reluctant.

On the day I returned to town to pick up my mother, I walked into the house and found it empty. My mother gave away everything except the piano and the wicker chair that my father used to sit in.

Father's piano that dusty for more than ten years, has been taken down by the mother.

I saw two enlarged photos above the unholstered piano. The young man in the photo was my father and the other young woman was not my mother.

I went to see my mother, puzzled, but she looked at me and smiled.

She brought me two letters. It was left by my father more than ten years ago. The paper has turned yellow. One was for a woman named Wan Wan who had been dead for many years, and the other was for my mother.

As I left town at dusk, I learned stories about my father that my mother had never told.

When my father was in Wuhan before he came to the small town, he loved a Hankou woman named Wan Wan. Wan Wan was born in a piano family. Her parents were both professors at the conservatory. The love of father and Wan wan suffers the unanimous opposition of Wan Wan's parents, Wan Wan's heart also begins to shake.

At that time, my father came to the town as an educated youth, in fact, is negative, did not think that it is so difficult to go back.

The next year, my father married my mother in an arranged marriage.

Although he married my mother and had my sister and me, my father always thought of Wan Wan.

Wan Wan is the father came to the town five years after the death, got a strange disease, before the death of tossed and turned to inquire father's address, wrote a letter to his father. In the letter, Wan Wan told her father that she had never married.

This news, and the news of Wan Wan's death soon after, made her father feel guilty. More than 10 years ago, on the night before his father committed suicide, he left Wan Wan this letter, in which he wrote seven pages full of thoughts and guilt that he had never stopped after his marriage with his mother.

After many years, I read this letter, and found that the miss and guilt in this letter has revealed some pathological. I knew it was the result of my father repressing it for too long.

In another letter to my mother, besides expressing endless apologies, my father told my mother to bring me and my sister up. In his letters he repeatedly asked her to sell the piano so that we could have a better life.

But my mother did not. She didn't do that in the worst times of our lives. She kept the piano as if it were a memory of her father.

Mother got up from the cany chair, walked to the front of the piano, watching my father photos of mild wan said gently, in my life, your father's only for a woman to play the piano, like his mind, he only lived a really loved a woman, and my heart, only lived a man who I really loved, I have no regret this half years.

In the light and shadow of the evening, my mother opened the cover of the piano and let her fingers glide gently over the keys.