Читать книгу Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir - Amy Tan - Страница 9

My aunties once told me a story about the Breaker of Combs, an old woman who everyone shunned, except during the worst kind of tragedies. That’s when she was asked to break the comb of a ghost who was loved too much: a baby boy or a faithful husband, a scholar son, or a beautiful fiancée.

One family we knew called her when the wife hanged herself with the length of her own hair. Her daughter, who was to be married that year into a good family, discovered her mother’s body and cut her down. Then the family found them both, mother and daughter, one dead, one clinging, both with their eyes popped open. My aunties said long after the mother was buried, the girl wandered around the house with her tongue hanging out, gagging with grief.

When the Breaker of Combs arrived, she told the father to bring out the dead woman’s comb, the one the daughter had used to sweep through her mother’s hair every night. The old woman inspected the comb, a fine piece of golden jade, with many sharp teeth and the body of two phoenixes for a handle.

“As everyone knows,” began the old woman, “when a daughter combs her mother’s hair, she receives through its roots all her mother’s mistakes and sorrows.”

Then the old woman passed the comb over the girl’s head three times, and wiped it clean on a long white cloth. She tied the cloth into three large knots and commanded the girl with the hanging tongue to unravel them one by one.

When the first knot was undone, the Breaker of Combs cried, “We have loosened the girl’s connection to her mother’s past.” When the crying girl untied the second knot, the woman said, “We have let go of the mother’s connection to her daughter’s present.” When the third knot was undone, the Breaker of Combs announced, “Now the dead woman has no ties to this girl in this world or the next.” And as the girl began to wail loudly, the old woman laid the jade comb on the open cloth, picked up a stone hammer, and broke the comb into many pieces.

The girl instantly became quiet, all her grief shattered forever, just like that. Her grateful family sent the old woman away with one gold ingot and several extra coins, begging her never to speak of this tragedy again.

That was all my aunties told me, but that’s not the end of the story. I heard what really happened. That young girl took the jagged pieces of the comb and cut off her own long hair, short as a boy’s. Then she ran away, joined the Communists, and never combed her hair again.