在遥远的武汉，春天给汉江两岸披上了绿色。但这是一个许多人看不到的春天。这是一个春天，临终的人无法从他们所爱的人那里得到最后一吻。一千三百万武汉人在春天擦肩而过。

我的心在武汉，我在柏林，被自己囚禁在院子的铁栅栏后面。我也错过了春天的到来。野花已经开了，最近开的是勿忘我，一束小小的蓝色花朵，宁静，略带忧郁，仿佛很清楚，“勿忘我”是一个徒劳的希望，因为我们人类是如此的善变和健忘。我们怎能不忘记呢?如果我们的人民有良好的记忆力，足以记住过去的灾难，我们的记忆磁盘早就爆裂了。

对我的家人来说，这是我们分娩的第三周。我觉得我们都是同舟共济的，武汉和湖北的人民，我在世界各地的自我隔离的朋友和同胞，还有武汉的博主方方。上星期六，在离我们家半公里的奥林匹克体育场，一场像往常一样热闹的足球赛正在进行。我在栏杆后面看到成群结队的柏林人穿着支持者的衬衫沿街而行，他们又喊又笑，扔掉啤酒瓶和空薯片袋，一如既往地彬彬有礼。但没有人会介意，尤其是这是他们在秋天之前的最后一次出游。此后，柏林的所有公共活动都被取消了。我为他们感到难过。德国人是如此的保守和安静，只有在这种时候他们才能真正地发泄情绪。

去年12月底，一位中国朋友给我发来了关于冠状病毒的第一个消息，是一张医生警告一些年轻护士的截图。我把这个消息告诉了我在柏林的武汉女友，因为她的母亲和兄弟姐妹还在武汉。然而，我怀疑她可能没有立即将我的担忧转达给她的家人。每当有不好的事情发生，中国人都会本能地掩盖起来。我们每个人都为此感到内疚，你，我，每个人……没人想给别人带来坏消息。这有时是出于好意，但也因为我们想避开麻烦。收到坏消息的人会表现出恐惧、恐慌、悲伤，甚至歇斯底里，而这一切对送信的人来说都是极其烦人的。唯一愿意说出来的人是那些责任感比他们避免麻烦的愿望更强的人。但我们的掩盖倾向仍然让我感到困惑。

让我们把坏消息掩盖起来，免得破坏了一顿丰盛的晚餐。让我们庆祝新年，然后再讨论它。为什么不让每个人都玩得开心，让他们沉浸在幸福的无知中。一切都在适当的时候。如果我们把坏事藏得够久，也许它们就会消失。大问题将变得更小。让我们继续掩盖。但这种病毒只有三微米，而且速度极快，你不能用手把它盖住，它会从下面溜走。所有那些死于掩盖的人通过他们的死亡告诉我们，真相是无法掩盖的。

当冠状病毒的告密者李文亮医生即将去世时，我的武汉女友让我与她的朋友取得了联系，我得以跟踪他的最后几个小时。在那几个小时里，我默默地为医生祈祷。我甚至承诺，如果他活下来了，我就不喝红酒了，我喜欢红酒。然而，我们后来发现，即使是那几个小时也是在掩盖事实。李医生早在被宣布去世之前就已经去世了。全世界的人都对他所遭受的不公正感到愤怒，真相被隐瞒了。这件事瞒着他的母亲，他的儿子，他深爱的妻子还有她腹中还会有几个月的孩子。明年春天或初夏，当那个孩子说出他或她的第一句话时，其中一个应该是“爸爸!”但不是现在。李医生的母亲，也就是孩子的祖母，想到这一点非常伤心。 “What will I tell our baby?” she wailed. The head of the hospital not only covered up the actual time of Dr. Li’s death, he ordered that Dr. Li’s heart be kept going with a resuscitation machine, pumping his chest for hours and hours, even though he knew it was useless. Just imagine what that pressure on his chest did to his ribs? Ribs are not made of reinforced concrete! Dr. Li’s were shattered in a vain attempt to revive a heart that had long gone cold. First death, then mutilation. Clearly, the hospital authorities were seriously worried. They feared their wrath of the authorities, and losing their jobs, and they feared being slammed by public opinion. And indeed, during those two days, the Chinese people swore that they would never forget the whistle-blower Li Wenliang. But how long will their memories last? Will they still remember when the forget-me-nots are over?

李医生死前受到了恶劣的待遇。他每一次都被冤枉:先是被他的老板，然后是警察，最后是当对他的指责在国家电视台播出时。然而，他的死向所有冤枉他的人证明，他说的全是真话。这是一个非常痛苦的事实。他说出来只是为了我们好，但我们已经成为一个不再关心真相的民族。他死后，武汉和全中国的人民吹响了口哨，向他致敬，并解放了自己的灵魂。李文良是一个非常平凡的人。他爱他的妻子和孩子，也爱他的食物。当第二个孩子的禁令被取消时，他很高兴，就像其他许多父亲一样，他们终于可以给儿子找个玩伴了。然而，他的死却有几分神圣:他献出自己的生命，是为了让别人活下去。 The martyrdom of saints both inspires us, and redeems our sins. And there have been a multitude of sins. Countless people have lost their lives, countless families have been destroyed. From the top to the very bottom of society, an awful lot of people did things that were very wrong, one wrongdoing compounded by another. People were sealed into their homes. A toddler starved to death. A family group playing cards to while away the time was brutally dispersed, and each of them beaten up. Will we forget all this? Who knows?

我很难想象自己死于肺炎是什么感觉，但医生和护士谈到了危重病人的呼救声。“救救我，医生，救救我!”他们的描述让我想起了我的前岳母和父亲是如何去世的。他们都80多岁了，心脏和肺都在衰竭。我记得我的前岳母向她的女儿求救。当时，她的血氧含量一定低于60。这就像有人溺水而无法向岸上的人求救。但肺炎要严重得多。溺水只持续一到两分钟，而这种肺炎患者可能会连续几天窒息，每一秒都是痛苦的。他们感觉自己被勒死了，窒息了，窒息了。 Every breath is a gigantic struggle. It is too horrible to think about. I try to banish the image from my mind but it keeps coming back: my father’s face under the oxygen mask, his mouth gaping wide, as he struggled mightily to take in air. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get oxygen into his lungs. He was a pitiful sight, gasping like a stranded fish. In the end, he died when his brain was starved of oxygen. The process was pure torture. It lasted for a day and night, during which he slowly suffocated, as the invisible noose around his neck tightened. I could turn the clock back, if I had a choice, I would want my father to have his life shortened by a day rather than endure the last twenty-four hours in which he slowly decayed from a human being into a fish. True, he was going to die, but I wish I could have spared him this slow suffocation, one which I am quite sure was also inflicted on all the patients who died in Wuhan, Dr. Li Wenliang included.

更糟糕的是，在痛苦中死去的冠状病毒患者身边没有一个人，没有一张熟悉的面孔给他们勇气，告诉他们这一生将会被多么的思念，握着他们的手最后一次温暖它。他们孤独地死去，心灰意冷，惊恐万分，被塞进一个装尸袋里。在人的临终时刻，我们能给予的最珍贵的承诺是:“走吧，我们爱你，我们永远不会忘记你。”而这一承诺被武汉的死者否定了。

李文亮医生并没有在哭泣的母亲、妻子和孩子的陪伴下死去。然而，他的遗言被记录在了他的微博上，这让他在另一个维度获得了新生。人们不想忘记他，他们希望他活在他们的想象中。正如博主方方所说，他的账户已经成为了中国的哀号墙。我查看了人们给李博士的留言;他们无所不谈，东说西说，谈食物，谈爱情，就好像李大夫是他们的顾问，或者是友好的邻居。他们中的许多人说，他们永远不会忘记李博士。我衷心希望这堵无形的哭墙永远不要被推倒。愿它与幸存者同在，愿他们永远不会忘记。

我住在柏林，一个拒绝忘记的城市。许多街道铺满了Stolpersteine石，鹅卵石间散布着黄铜牌匾，上面刻着“某某犹太人(或他们的家人)被从这条街上某某建筑里带走……”匾额上还写着这些犹太人被带到哪里，其中大多数人被带到集中营，他们在那里死亡。弗拉托瓦利(Flatowallee)是一条通往奥林匹克体育场主入口的街道，离我家不远，它是以两位犹太运动员阿尔弗雷德(Alfred)和古斯塔夫·费利克斯·弗拉托(Gustav Felix Flatow)的名字命名的。他们是表兄弟，曾参加雅典奥运会，为德国夺得金牌，但后来被驱逐出境，并在特莱西恩施塔特去世。据我们隔壁的老邻居说，第一个拥有我房子的人也是犹太人，但战后没人来要回房子。它随后被收归国有，然后被拍卖，然后又回到私人手中。我的房子始建于1922年，外观漂亮、坚固。毫无疑问，这是为了延续几代人而设计的，但没有一个家族幸存下来。没有人找到过哪怕是远亲的踪迹。 The library of Humboldt University in Germany once had all its books burned by the Nazis. Those bookshelves are now left empty, so that the outrage should never be forgotten. This is one way in which the Germans have repaid their debts to the Jews and humanity. It is of course painful to keep these memories alive, but if they do not, they will not be able to preserve their sense of national shame. Honour and shame are two sides of the same coin. One does not exist without the other. The German people would rather suffer than lose their honour. They believe that only by remembering their shame can they prevent it from happening again.

李文亮死后，另一名告密者艾芬博士出现了。艾未未说，她后悔没有更大声地吹口哨。她说，也许如果她这么做了，情况就不会恶化到现在的地步。艾博士是一位勇敢的女性，一位真正的英雄。武汉人就是这样。默默忍受是高尚的，但英雄主义更高尚。武汉到处都是这样的英雄，随时准备大喊:“假的!”当他们发现假货的时候。现在，他们正在承受掩盖冠状病毒的后果。在过去，灾难对子孙后代是隐藏的，但我们正在对自己进行掩盖。这是荒谬的。 As a result, only seventeen years after the SARS epidemic, the Chinese people are having to battle with Covid19. If you cover something up, you can avoid holding anyone accountable, which would mean blaming those who covered it up. And yet how can we expect to remember if we do not hold anyone accountable? What are we remembering if we do not get to the core of the tragedy? We have become an amnesiac people. The Nanjing Massacre, the Three Years of Famine, and the Cultural Revolution, we do everything in our power to hide them from ourselves. Bringing things out into the open is regarded as negative. We don’t bother with distinguishing right from wrong, we don’t bear grudges, and we present this as a sign of how tolerant we are, as a people, and how ready to forgive. But we are also a people who cover things up. We cannot conceal the truth from the next generation of Chinese people. We owe them an honest explanation, we need to tell them why Doctor Li Wenliang was publically disgraced and how he died, why so many innocent people from Wuhan and Hubei, and the rest of the country, were locked down, left to die, and tossed into coffins. We cannot cover up the figure of one hundred and seventy deaths yesterday in Italy. We must ask ourselves, why are we covering up for those who have harmed us? Why are we covering up their shame? Many times throughout history, we should have made them acknowledge their shame and apologize to the people whose deaths they caused. But we let it drop. These tragedies always come to an end with no real conclusion. And not long afterwards, they are re-enacted. The plot is plagiarised. The cover-up continues.

我们的人民受苦是因为两千年来我们从来没有给自己时间哀悼。用唐代诗人杜牧的话说，我们把它留给了后来人哀悼，当后来人哀悼而不反省时，他们的后来人也会哀悼。我不知道杜牧是否也预见到了一个被强迫遗忘的社会，越来越少的后代愿意为他们的父辈所遭受的痛苦而悲伤。

经燕歌苓牡丹文学社特别许可出版。保留所有权利。

笔记

这篇文章的标题，严歌苓取了唐婉的最后一行诗唐婉在信中，她向前夫哀叹，他们不得不隐藏他们的爱情。关于唐望和陆游的悲剧爱情故事，请看杜赞的文章在这里．*