《渺小一生》:“你知道我會還你的，對吧？”

　 The flights were expensive, much more than he’d anticipated. He researched bus routes, but it would take three days to get there, three days to get back, and he had midterm exams he had to take and do well in if he was to keep his scholarship, and his jobs to attend to. Finally, drunk that Friday night, he confided in Malcolm, who got out his checkbook and wrote him a check.

機票很貴，比他預期的貴太多了。他去查長途巴士，去程得花三天，回程再花三天，可是期中考就快到了，他不能缺席，還得拿個好成績，否則獎學金不保，此外他還得打工。最后，那個星期五晚上，他喝醉了，就跟馬爾科姆訴苦。馬爾科姆拿出支票簿，寫了一張給他。

　 “I can’t,” he said, immediately.

“我不能拿?！彼⒖陶f。

　 “Why not?” asked Malcolm. They argued back and forth until Willem finally accepted the check.

“為什么不行？”馬爾科姆問。他們爭執(zhí)半天，最后威廉終于收下那張支票。

　 “I’ll pay you back, you know that, right?”

“你知道我會還你的，對吧？”

　 Malcolm shrugged. “There’s no way for me to say this without sounding like a complete asshole,” he said, “but it doesn’t make a difference to me, Willem.”

馬爾科姆聳聳肩。“我怎么說都會像個徹頭徹尾的混蛋，”他說，“但是對我來說真的沒差別，威廉?！?

　 Still, it became important to him to repay Malcolm somehow, even though he knew Malcolm wouldn’t accept his money. It was Jude who had the idea of putting the money directly into Malcolm’s wallet, and so every two weeks after he’d cashed his check from the restaurant where he worked on the weekends, he’d stuff two or three twenties into it while Malcolm was asleep. He never quite knew if Malcolm noticed—he spent it so quickly, and often on the three of them—but Willem took some satisfaction and pride in doing it.

然而對他來說，設法把錢還給馬爾科姆是非常重要的，但他知道馬爾科姆不會收。后來裘德想出一個辦法：把錢直接偷偷放進馬爾科姆的皮夾里。于是每隔兩星期，他領到周末打工那家餐廳的薪水，就會趁馬爾科姆睡覺時，把兩三張二十元塞進他的皮夾。他從來不知道馬爾科姆是否注意到了（他花錢太快了，而且總是三個人里頭負責買單的），但是這么做，讓威廉獲得了某種滿足和自尊。

　 In the meantime, though, there was Hemming. He was glad he went home (his mother had only sighed when he told her he was coming), and glad to see Hemming, although alarmed by how thin he had become, how he groaned and cried as the nurses prodded the area around his sutures; he’d had to grab the sides of his chair to keep himself from shouting at them. At nights, he and his parents would have silent meals; he could almost feel them pulling away, as if they were unpeeling themselves from their lives as parents of two children and readying themselves to drift toward a new identity elsewhere.

另一方面，還有亨明。他很高興自己回家了（他通知母親說要回家時，他母親只是嘆氣），也很高興看到亨明，盡管同時他很擔心亨明變瘦了，擔心那些護士用手戳傷口附近時害他呻吟、哀叫；他還得緊握著椅子的扶手，才能忍住不要朝他們大吼。到了晚上，他和父母沉默地用餐，他幾乎可以感覺到他們在逐漸遠離他，好像從身為兩個兒子父母的生活中剝離，準備飄向別處的另一個新身份。

　 On his third night, he took the keys to the truck to drive to the hospital. Back east, it was early spring, but here the dark air seemed to glitter with frost, and in the morning the grass was capped with a thin skin of crystals.

到了第三夜，他拿了貨車的鑰匙開車去醫(yī)院。在他大學所在的東岸，此時已是早春，但家鄉(xiāng)的黑暗空氣似乎仍因為白霜而發(fā)亮，早晨的青草上罩了一層薄薄的冰晶。

　 His father came onto the porch as he was walking down the steps. “He’ll be asleep,” he said.

他下樓梯時，他父親來到門廊上?！八麘撍??！彼赣H說。

　 “I just thought I’d go,” Willem told him.

“我只是想去看一下?！蓖嬖V他。

　 His father looked at him. “Willem,” he said, “he won’t know whether you’re there or not.”

他父親看著他?！巴彼f，“他不會知道你在不在那里的?！?

　 He felt his face go hot. “I know you don’t fucking care about him,” he snapped at him, “but I do.” It was the first time he’d ever sworn at his father, and he was unable to move for a moment, fearful and half excited that his father might react, that they might have an argument. But his father just took a sip from his coffee and then turned and went inside, the screen door smacking softly shut behind him.

他忽然覺得臉上發(fā)燙?！拔抑滥闼麐尩牟魂P心他，”他朝父親兇巴巴地說，“但是我關心?！边@是他第一回跟他父親講臟話，一時之間他動不了，害怕又有點興奮地期待他的父親會有反應，兩人可能吵起來。但他父親只是喝了口咖啡，然后轉身走進屋里，紗門在他身后啪的一聲輕輕關上。

　 For the rest of his visit they were all the same as they always were; they went in shifts to sit with Hemming, and when he wasn’t at the hospital, Willem helped his mother with the ledgers, or his father as he oversaw the reshodding of the horses. At nights he returned to the hospital and did schoolwork. He read aloud from The Decameron to Hemming, who stared at the ceiling and blinked, and struggled through his calculus, which he finally finished with the unhappy certainty that he had gotten all of it wrong. The three of them had gotten used to Jude doing their calculus for them, working through the problems as quickly as if he were running arpeggios. Their first year, Willem had genuinely wanted to understand it, and Jude had sat with him for a string of nights, explaining again and again, but he had never been able to comprehend it.

他回家那趟剩下的時間，他們都跟往常一樣輪流去醫(yī)院陪亨明，威廉不去醫(yī)院時，就幫母親記賬，或幫父親檢查馬匹是否該重新釘蹄。晚上他會回到醫(yī)院一邊陪亨明，一邊做功課。他大聲念《十日談》給亨明聽，而亨明只是瞪著天花板眨眼；他努力寫完微積分作業(yè)，很不開心地確定自己全寫錯了。他們?nèi)齻€人已經(jīng)習慣讓裘德幫他們寫微積分作業(yè)，他解題快得像是在彈奏琶音和弦。他們大一那年，威廉曾經(jīng)真心想搞懂微積分，于是裘德連續(xù)好幾晚當他的家教，一遍又一遍地講解，但威廉從來沒能搞懂。

　 “I’m just too stupid to get this,” he’d said after what felt like an hours-long session, at the end of which he had wanted to go outside and run for miles, he was so prickly with impatience and frustration.

“我實在太笨了，根本學不會。”有回裘德教完后，威廉這么說，那天已經(jīng)惡補了好幾個小時，最后他只想出去跑上幾英里，不耐煩和挫折感讓他憤怒。

　 Jude had looked down. “You’re not stupid,” he said, quietly. “I’m just not explaining it well enough.” Jude took seminars in pure math that you had to be invited to enroll in; the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom what, exactly, he did in it.

裘德低著頭。“你不笨。”他低聲說，“是我教得不夠好?！濒玫滦蘖藥滋眉償?shù)學的專題研討課，那是數(shù)學高手才會受邀參加的，他們?nèi)齻€完全搞不懂他在那個研討課學些什么。

　 In retrospect, he was surprised only by his own surprise when his mother called three months later to tell him that Hemming was on life support. This was in late May, and he was halfway through his final exams. “Don’t come back,” she’d told him, commanded him, almost. “Don’t, Willem.” He spoke with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later, when a Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents, one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.

三個月后，他母親打電話來跟他說亨明接上人工呼吸器了。回顧起來，他只是驚訝當時自己居然會覺得驚訝。那是五月底，他的期末考正進行到一半?！安灰貋??！彼赣H告訴他，幾乎是命令，“不要，威廉?！彼匠８改付颊f瑞典語，直到多年后，一位合作的瑞典導演說他講瑞典語時，語氣就變得毫無感情，他這才發(fā)現(xiàn)自己以前跟父母講話時都不自覺地模仿他們，口氣變得不帶感情而直率。

　 Over the next few days he fretted, did poorly in his exams: French, comparative literature, Jacobean drama, the Icelandic sagas, the hated calculus all slurring into one. He picked a fight with his girlfriend, who was a senior and graduating. She cried; he felt guilty but also unable to repair the situation. He thought of Wyoming, of a machine coughing life into Hemming’s lungs. Shouldn’t he go back? He had to go back. He wouldn’t be able to stay for long: on June fifteenth, he and Jude were moving into a sublet off-campus for the summer—they’d both found jobs in the city, Jude working on weekdays as a classics professor’s amanuensis and on weekends at the bakery he worked at during the school year, Willem as a teacher’s assistant at a program for disabled children—but before then, the four of them were going to stay at Malcolm’s parents’ house in Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard, after which Malcolm and JB would drive back to New York. At nights, he called Hemming at the hospital, made his parents or one of the nurses hold the phone up to his ear, and spoke to his brother, even though he knew he probably couldn’t hear him. But how could he not have tried?

接下來幾天他煩惱極了，考試很糟：法語、比較文學、詹姆士一世時期的戲劇、冰島英雄傳奇、討厭的微積分，全都攪成一團。他跟大四快畢業(yè)的女朋友大吵一架。她哭了，他覺得內(nèi)疚，但也無力挽回。他想著懷俄明，想著呼吸器把生命注入亨明的肺里。他該回家嗎？他非回家不可?；厝]辦法待太久：六月十五日他和裘德就得搬到校園外的分租房間——兩個人都在紐約市找到了工作，裘德周一到周五去幫一個古典文學教授當抄寫員，周末則去他平常打工的面包店；威廉則是在某個專為身心障礙兒童設計的課程當助教。在此之前，他們四個要去馬爾科姆的父母位于馬撒葡萄園島阿奎納的別墅住幾天，然后馬爾科姆和杰比會開車回紐約。夜里，他打電話到醫(yī)院給亨明，要父母或照顧的護士把話筒湊到亨明耳邊，讓他跟哥哥說話，即使他知道他大概聽不到。但他怎么可以不試試看？

　 And then, one morning a week later, his mother called: Hemming had died. There was nothing he could say. He couldn’t ask why she hadn’t told him how serious the situation had been, because some part of him had known she wouldn’t. He couldn’t say he wished he had been there, because she would have nothing to say in response. He couldn’t ask her how she felt, because nothing she said would be enough. He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something—some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming’s death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn’t care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without aching for them.

然后，一星期后的早晨，他母親打電話來告訴他：亨明死了。他沒有什么話可說。他無法問她為什么沒告訴他狀況有多嚴重，因為他心里早就知道她不會講的。他無法問她有什么感覺，因為她說什么都不夠。他想朝他父母大吼，想打他們，想引出他們身上的一些什么——某種溫柔的哀慟、某種失態(tài)，讓他看得出有大事發(fā)生，顯示亨明的死讓他們失去人生某種重大而不可或缺的東西。他不在乎他們是不是真有這樣的感覺，他只是需要他們說出來，需要感覺到他們的沉著冷靜之下還有別的，希望在他們心底有一道湍急、冰涼的水流，充滿細小的生命，像是小魚、青草和小白花，柔軟又容易受傷，脆弱得你必須極其渴望才看得到。

　 He didn’t tell his friends, then, about Hemming. They went to Malcolm’s house—a beautiful place, the most beautiful place Willem had ever seen, much less stayed in—and late at night, when the others were asleep, each in his own bed, in his own room with his own bathroom (the house was that big), he crept outside and walked the web of roads surrounding the house for hours, the moon so large and bright it seemed made of something liquid and frozen. On those walks, he tried very hard not to think of anything in particular. He concentrated instead on what he saw before him, noticing at night what had eluded him by day: how the dirt was so fine it was almost sand, and puffed up into little plumes as he stepped in it, how skinny threads of bark-brown snakes whipsawed silently beneath the brush as he passed. He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant.

當時他沒告訴其他三位好友亨明的事情。他們?nèi)チ笋R爾科姆家的漂亮房子，那是威廉這輩子見過最美的房子，更別說住進去了。每個人都有一間房，還帶有各自的浴室（那棟房子就是這么大）。到了深夜，其他人都睡了，他躡手躡腳溜出去，在房子周圍的道路散步，走上好幾個小時，月亮好大好亮，像是某種液體結凍而成。散步時，他很努力不去想任何特定的事情，專注在眼前事物上，他注意到白天沒看到的：路上的泥土好細，簡直像沙子，他踩在上頭時會揚起一朵朵小煙云；經(jīng)過灌木叢時，細瘦的褐灰色小蛇在樹下悄悄蜿蜒爬過。他走到海邊，頭上的月亮不見了，躲進破碎的云間。有好一會兒，他只聽得見水聲，但是看不到，天空充滿溫暖的潮氣，仿佛這里的空氣更濃密、更重。

　 Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn’t so bad after all, and felt better.

或許死掉就是這么回事，他心想，然后明白其實也不算太差，于是比較釋然了。