On hearing a piercing woman scream and cry coming from downstairs, mum went downstairs to see if there was a family brawl. She might then acted as a mediator, for as far as I know, she is getting on quite well with that family.
Half an hour’s later, mum came back, with a sullen look on face. “You know, her husband is a real beast, and she was wounded all around, with mouth, nose and chest all in blood,” she tried to leash anger:” His mother threw bloodstained face-tissues hurriedly into the waste basket the moment she saw me, and his father was still sleeping, giving without any heed to their bitter quarrel. After mum’s stopping the husband’s punching her out of control, she moaned a prayer to mum: Please call my mother and ask her to bring me home. I can’t stand it any more”. “She is as old as you. Her husband is a real beast. I can’t bear anyone to treat my daughter like that.” As a mother, she was provoked, full of disgust for not only the husband, but also his parents.
However, Mum didn’t call her parents being afraid of offending this family upstairs, according to some rules in local human relations which I still can’t understand. She reminded her to call her parents herself and also persuaded her to go to my home and stay until the war blow over, but she just kept wailing without any other reaction.
Mum also told me that: During only these three months after the wife’s giving birth to the first baby, there have broken out many times’ war between them, and she was beaten nearly to death several times just like this one; unbelievable, they became on terms of intimacy again the next morning after the war, maybe largely because of his touching confession, and a few days later, it’s all over again.
With the mobile phone close at hand, she had been given opportunities to call families for help; or she even should have broken up with this family immediately after the first time when suffering from cruelties. Though she might be deeply attached to her husband, as a spectator, I think such terrible domestic violence can’t be pardoned on this way, especially after done time after time.
For those onlookers, if they still had sympathy for this woman and tried to reach out support hands to her at first, now, there’s only neglect and indifference left after her refusal to help. However, there’s no excuse for us not to blame ourselves for abepithymia and cowardice.
In my childhood, a woman who is the mother of one of my classmates destroyed herself by taking poison after suffering from her husband’s years’ maltreatment. Tears of sympathy returned to villagers’ face at the funeral, and after that, for the perpetrator of violence and cold onlookers, they came back to normal life and kept silent again.
