《渺小一生》:總之，那趟出差他撐過去了

　 After these visits he is always exhausted, but still he walks, seven blocks south and a quarter of a block east, to the Irvines’. For months he had avoided the Irvines, and then last month, on the one-year anniversary, they had asked him and Richard and JB to dinner at their house, and he knew he would have to go.

去看過呂西安之后，他總是筋疲力盡，但他還是繼續(xù)往南走七個街區(qū)，再往東走四分之一個街區(qū)，到歐文家去。有好幾個月，他都躲著歐文夫婦。上個月，馬爾科姆過世一周年的忌日，歐文夫婦邀請他、理查德和杰比去他們家吃晚飯，他知道自己非去不可。

　 It was the weekend after Labor Day. The previous four weeks—four weeks that had included the day Willem would have turned fifty-three; the day that Willem had died—had been some of the worst he had ever experienced. He had known they would be bad; he had tried to plan accordingly. The firm had needed someone to go to Beijing, and although he knew he should have stayed in New York—he was working on a case that needed him more than the business in Beijing did—he volunteered anyway, and off he went. At first he had hoped he might be safe: the woolly numbness of jet lag was sometimes indistinguishable from the woolly numbness of his grief, and there were other things that were so physically uncomfortable—including the heat, which was woolly itself, woolly and sodden—that he had thought he would be able to distract himself. But then one night near the end of the trip he was being driven back to the hotel from a long day of meetings, and he had looked out of the car window and had seen, glittering over the road, a massive billboard of Willem’s face. It was a beer ad that Willem had shot two years ago, one that was only displayed throughout east Asia. But hanging from the top of the billboard were people on pulleys, and he realized that they were painting over the ad, that they were erasing Willem’s face. Suddenly, his breath left him, and he had almost asked the driver to stop, but he wouldn’t have been able to—they were on a loop of a road, one with no exits or places to pull over, and so he’d had to sit very still, his heart erupting within him, counting the beats it took to reach the hotel, thank the driver, get out, walk through the lobby, ride the elevator, walk down the hallway, and enter his room, where before he could think, he was throwing himself against the cold marble wall of the shower, his mouth open and his eyes shut, tossing and tossing himself until he was in so much pain that his every vertebrae felt as if it had been jolted out of its sockets.

那是九月初勞動節(jié)后的那個周末。之前四個星期包括了威廉53歲冥誕，以及威廉的忌日，是他畢生最糟糕的時期之一。他早早就知道這段日子會很難捱，也設法規(guī)劃。事務所里需要有個人去北京，他知道自己應該留在紐約；他正在辦的那個案子比北京的案子更需要他，卻還是自告奮勇去了。一開始，他希望自己可以安全度過，時差帶來的糊涂麻木感有時跟悲慟帶來的糊涂麻木感差不多。還有其他狀況讓他身體很不舒服，包括當?shù)啬欠N熱，本身就讓人不舒服了，又加上下雨。他以為能因此分心，但旅程尾聲有天晚上，開了一整天會之后他乘車回旅館，途中他望著車窗外，看到路旁大樓上有一個巨大的廣告牌，上頭是威廉的臉。那是兩年前威廉拍的一個啤酒廣告，只限東亞地區(qū)使用。廣告牌頂端有幾個人從滑輪上懸吊下來，他恍然大悟，他們要畫上新的廣告，抹掉威廉的臉。忽然間，他覺得無法呼吸，差點要求司機停車，但當時也辦不到，他們在環(huán)線高架上，沒有出口也沒有辦法靠邊停車。于是他坐著完全不動，心臟猛跳，數(shù)著拍子抵達旅館，謝過司機，下車，走進大廳，坐電梯上樓，進入走道，回到房間，還來不及思考，他就朝淋浴間冰冷的大理石墻撞過去，他張著嘴巴，緊閉眼睛，一直撞一直撞，撞到他全身痛得好像每根骨頭都要散了。

　 That night he cut himself wildly, uncontrollably, and when he was shaking too badly to continue, he waited, and cleaned the floor, and drank some juice to give himself energy, and then started again. After three rounds of this he crept to the corner of the shower stall and wept, folding his arms over his head, making his hair tacky with blood, and that night he slept there, covered with a towel instead of a blanket. He had done this sometimes when he was a child and had felt like he was exploding, separating from himself like a dying star, and would feel the need to tuck himself into the smallest space he could find so his very bones would stay knit together. Then, he would carefully work himself out from beneath Brother Luke and ball himself on the filthy motel carpet under the bed, which was prickly with burrs and dropped thumbtacks and slimy with used condoms and strange damp spots, or he would sleep in the bathtub or in the closet, beetled up as tight as he was able. “My poor potato bug,” Brother Luke would say when he found him like this. “Why are you doing this, Jude?” He had been gentle, and worried, but he had never been able to explain it.

那天夜里他無法控制地瘋狂割自己，直到他抖得沒法再割下去，他就等著，清理地板，喝點果汁補充體力，然后再割。割了三回合之后，他爬到淋浴間的角落坐著哭，手臂抱著頭，頭發(fā)都沾上了血。那一夜他就睡在那里，身上蓋了毛巾而不是毯子。他小時候有時會這樣，覺得自己快爆炸了、像垂死的星球般要炸開來的時候，就必須找個最小的空間把自己塞進去，這樣全身的骨頭才不會散開來。于是，他小心翼翼從盧克修士身子底下爬出來，蜷縮在汽車旅館房間的床底下，那骯臟的地毯被草刺和掉下的圖釘弄得刺刺的，還有用過的黏答答的保險套和奇怪的潮濕斑點；或者他會睡在浴缸里或衣柜里，盡可能緊縮成一團。“我可憐的小蟋蟀，”盧克修士發(fā)現(xiàn)他這樣后會說，“你為什么要這樣，裘德？”盧克修士擔心地柔聲說，但他從來無法解釋。

　 Somehow he made it through that trip; somehow he had made it through a year. The night of Willem’s death he dreamed of glass vases imploding, of Willem’s body being projected through the air, of his face shattering against the tree. He woke missing Willem so profoundly that he felt he was going blind. The day after he returned home, he saw the first of the posters for The Happy Years, which had reverted to its original title: The Dancer and the Stage. Some of these posters were of Willem’s face, his hair longish like Nureyev’s and his top scooped low on his chest, his neck long and powerful. And some were of just monumental images of a foot—Willem’s actual foot, he happened to know—in a toe shoe, en pointe, shot so close you could see its veins and hairs, its thin straining muscles and fat bulging tendons. Opening Thanksgiving Day, the posters read. Oh god, he thought, and had gone back inside, oh god. He wanted the reminders to stop; he dreaded the day when they would. In recent weeks he’d had the sense that Willem was receding from him, even as his grief refused to diminish in intensity.

總之，那趟出差他撐過去了；總之，他撐過了一年。威廉忌日那天晚上，他夢到一堆玻璃瓶內(nèi)爆，夢到威廉的身體飛過空中，夢到他的臉在樹上撞碎了。他醒來時好想念威廉，想念到他覺得自己快瞎了?；氐郊~約次日，他出門時看到《快樂年代》的第一批海報，這部電影又改回原來的片名《舞臺上的舞者》。有些海報是威廉的臉，頭發(fā)比較長，像努里耶夫一樣，他的頭往前彎下，脖子長而有力。有的海報只有一只巨大的腳（他正好知道，那是威廉的腳），穿舞鞋踮腳而立的姿勢，那特寫畫面可以讓人看到上頭的血管和毛，還有繃緊的肌肉和鼓起的肌腱。感恩節(jié)上映，那海報上印著。啊，老天，他心想，趕緊轉(zhuǎn)身回到公寓里，天啊。他希望不要有這些提醒的東西，讓他滿心懼怕。最近幾個星期，他有個感覺，覺得威廉從他身邊越退越遠，即使他的悲慟仍不肯減少強度。

　 The next week they went to the Irvines’. They had decided, in some unspoken way, that they should go up together, and they met at Richard’s apartment and he gave Richard the keys to the car and Richard drove them. They were all silent, even JB, and he was very nervous. He had the sense that the Irvines were angry at him; he had the sense he deserved their anger.

隔周他們?nèi)W文家。在一種無言的默契之下，他們決定大家應該一起去，于是三個人在樓下理查德的公寓集合，他把車鑰匙交給理查德，由理查德開車。他們一路沉默，連杰比也不例外。他心里非常緊張，因為他隱隱覺得歐文夫婦在生他的氣，而他覺得自己活該。

　 Dinner was all of Malcolm’s favorite foods, and as they ate, he could feel Mr. Irvine staring at him and wondered whether he was thinking what he himself always thought: Why Malcolm? Why not him?

晚餐全是馬爾科姆最喜歡的菜。他們吃的時候，他可以感覺到歐文先生盯著他看，很好奇他在想的是不是自己常想的：為什么是馬爾科姆？為什么不是他？

　 Mrs. Irvine had suggested that they all go around the table and share a memory of Malcolm, and he had sat, listening to the others—Mrs. Irvine, who had told a story about how they had been visiting the Pantheon when Malcolm was six and how, five minutes after they had left, they had realized that Malcolm was missing and had rushed back to find him sitting on the ground, gazing and gazing at the oculus; Flora, who told a story about how as a second-grader Malcolm had appropriated her dollhouse from the attic, removed all the dolls, and filled it with little objects, dozens of chairs and tables and sofas and even pieces of furniture that had no name, that he had made with clay; JB, the story of how they had all returned to Hood one Thanksgiving a day early and had broken into the dormitory so they could have it to themselves, and how Malcolm had built a fire in the living room’s fireplace so they could roast sausages for dinner—and when it was his turn, he told the story of how back at Lispenard Street, Malcolm had built them a set of bookcases, which had partitioned their squish of a living room into such a meager sliver that when you were sitting on the sofa and stretched your legs out, you stretched them into the bookcase itself. But he had wanted the shelves, and Willem had said he could. And so over Malcolm had come with the cheapest wood possible, leftovers from the lumberyard, and he and Willem had taken the wood to the roof and assembled the bookcase there, so the neighbors wouldn’t complain about the banging, and then they had brought it back down and installed it.

歐文太太提議讓所有人輪流分享一段關于馬爾科姆的回憶。他坐在那聽著其他人說。歐文太太說起馬爾科姆6歲那年，他們?nèi)⒂^羅馬萬神殿，離開五分鐘后，發(fā)現(xiàn)馬爾科姆不見了，于是趕緊回頭找。這才發(fā)現(xiàn)馬爾科姆坐在地上，目不轉(zhuǎn)睛望著屋頂中央的窗洞；弗洛拉說了馬爾科姆小學二年級那年，去閣樓里偷走她的娃娃屋，把里頭所有的玩偶拿出來，改放進幾十個小東西，包括桌椅和沙發(fā)，還有一些講不出名字的家具，都是他用黏土做的；杰比講起大學有一年，他們感恩節(jié)假期后都提早一天回到虎德館，設法闖進關閉的宿舍，馬爾科姆還在客廳的壁爐生火，讓大家烤香腸當晚餐。輪到他時，他說起住在利斯本納街時，馬爾科姆幫他們做了一個書架，把本來就很小的客廳擠得更小，如果坐在沙發(fā)上伸直兩腳，就會伸到書架里。但他想要這個書架，威廉也答應了。所以馬爾科姆就去鋸木廠找來最便宜的剩余木板，和威廉一起搬到屋頂上，在那里釘成書架，免得鄰居抱怨他們太吵。組好之后，再把書架搬下樓放好。

　 But when they did, Malcolm had realized that he’d mismeasured, and the bookcases were three inches too wide, which caused the edge of the unit to jut into the hallway. He hadn’t minded, and neither had Willem, but Malcolm had wanted to fix it.

但是搬進屋子之后，馬爾科姆才發(fā)現(xiàn)他量錯了，那個書架寬度多出了三英寸，邊緣伸到走廊上。他不在意，威廉也無所謂，但馬爾科姆想修改好。

　 “Don’t, Mal,” they had both told him. “It’s great, it’s fine.”

“不要了，馬爾?！彼麄儍蓚€都跟他說，“這樣很棒，很好的。”

　 “It’s not great,” Malcolm had said, mopily. “It’s not fine.”

“才不棒，”馬爾科姆悶悶不樂地說，“才不好?！?

　 Finally they had managed to convince him, and Malcolm had left. He and Willem painted the case a bright vermilion and loaded it with their books. And then early the next Sunday, Malcolm appeared again, looking determined. “I can’t stop thinking about this,” he said. And he’d set his bag down on the floor and drawn out a hacksaw and had started gnawing away at the structure, the two of them shouting at him until they realized that he was going to alter it whether they helped him or not. So back up to the roof went the bookcase; back down, once again, it came, and this time, it was perfect.

最后他們設法說服了他，馬爾科姆就離開了。他和威廉把書架漆成亮紅色，把他們的書放進去。下個星期天一早，馬爾科姆又跑來了，一臉堅定。“我一直在想這件事。”他說，然后把包包放在地上，拿出一把弓鋸，開始鋸那個書架。他們兩個人一直朝他大叫，最后他們明白無論幫不幫忙，馬爾科姆都非改不可。于是書架又被搬到屋頂上，弄好后才被搬下樓，這回很完美了。

　 “I always think of that incident,” he said, as the others listened. “Because it says so much about how seriously Malcolm took his work, and how he always strove to be perfect in it, to respect the material, whether it was marble or plywood. But I also think it says so much about how much he respected space, any space, even a horrible, unfixable, depressing apartment in Chinatown: even that space deserved respect.

“我常常想到這件事，”他說，其他人認真聽著，“因為這充分說明了馬爾科姆對他的作品有多么認真，而且他是多么力求完美，多么尊重材料，無論那是大理石或三夾板。但我覺得，這件事也充分說明他有多尊重空間，任何空間，即使是唐人街一戶糟糕透頂、無藥可救、令人喪氣的公寓，即使是這樣的空間，都應該受到尊重。

　 “And it says so much about how much he respected his friends, how much he wanted us all to live somewhere he imagined for us: someplace as beautiful and vivid as his imaginary houses were to him.”

“這也充分說明他是多么尊重他的朋友，他多想讓我們所有人住在他為我們設想的空間里：就跟他心中想象的宅邸一樣美觀、生氣勃勃。”

　 He stopped. What he wanted to say—but what he didn’t think he could get through—was what he had overheard Malcolm say as Willem was complaining about hefting the bookcase back into place and he was in the bathroom gathering the brushes and paint from beneath the sink. “If I had left it like it was, he could’ve tripped against it and fallen, Willem,” Malcolm had whispered. “Would you want that?”

他暫停下來。他想說的是（但不認為有辦法說出來），那天他們兩個把書架從樓頂搬下來時，他正好在浴室里，要把油漆和刷子從水槽底下拿出來，無意間聽到威廉在抱怨很麻煩，馬爾科姆回答道：“威廉，如果我讓這書架就這樣凸出一塊，他有可能因為絆到而摔倒，”馬爾科姆那時低聲說，“你希望這樣嗎？”

　 “No,” Willem had said, after a pause, sounding ashamed. “No, of course not. You’re right, Mal.” Malcolm, he realized, had been the first among them to recognize that he was disabled; Malcolm had known this even before he did. He had always been conscious of it, but he had never made him feel self-conscious. Malcolm had sought, only, to make his life easier, and he had once resented him for this.

“不，”威廉暫停了一下說，口氣很羞愧，“不，當然不希望。你是對的，馬爾?！庇谑撬靼祝R爾科姆是他們之中第一個認清他是殘障者的人；甚至比他自己還早。馬爾科姆一直意識到這一點，但從來沒有害他不自在過。馬爾科姆只是想讓他的人生輕松點，他卻因為這一點而怨過他。

　 As they were leaving for the night, Mr. Irvine put his hand on his shoulder. “Jude, will you stay behind for a bit?” he asked. “I’ll have Monroe drive you home.”

他們那天晚上離開時，歐文先生把一只手放在他肩膀上?！棒玫?，你能不能多留一會兒？”他問，“我晚點會請門羅開車送你回去。”

　 He had to agree and so he did, telling Richard he could take the car back to Greene Street. For a while they sat in the living room, just he and Mr. Irvine—Malcolm’s mother remained in the dining room with Flora and her husband and children—talking about his health, and Mr. Irvine’s health, and Harold, and his work, when Mr. Irvine began to cry. He had stood then, and had sat down again next to Mr. Irvine, and placed his hand hesitantly on his back, feeling awkward and shy, feeling the decades slip away from beneath him.

他非答應不可，于是叫理查德自己開車回格林街。有一會兒，他坐在客廳里，只有他和歐文先生，馬爾科姆的母親、弗洛拉和她的先生、小孩都還在餐廳里。他們聊著他的健康狀況、歐文先生的健康狀況，聊哈羅德，還有他的工作。接著歐文先生開始哭了。他站起來，到歐文先生旁邊坐下，一手猶豫地放在老人的背部，覺得尷尬又難為情，感覺幾十年的時光就在他手底下溜走了。

　 Mr. Irvine had always been such an intimidating figure to all of them throughout their adulthoods. His height, his self-possession, his large, hard features—he looked like something from an Edward Curtis photograph, and that was what they all called him: “The Chief.” “What’s the Chief gonna say about this, Mal?” JB had asked when Malcolm told them he was going to quit Ratstar, and they were all trying to urge temperance. Or (JB again): “Mal, can you ask the Chief if I can use the apartment when I’m passing through Paris next month?”

在他們的成年時期，歐文先生一直是個令人望而生畏的人物。他的高個子、他的沉著、他大臉上堅定的五官——看起來就像是攝影家愛德華·柯蒂斯[1]照片里那些美洲原住民，他們四個私底下都喊他“酋長”?！榜R爾，這件事酋長會怎么說？”杰比這樣問過馬爾科姆。那是在馬爾科姆打算從瑞司塔建筑師事務所辭職時，他們都設法適度地鼓勵他?；蛘撸ㄓ质墙鼙龋骸榜R爾，我下個月會經(jīng)過巴黎，你可以幫忙問酋長一聲，看我能不能住那邊的公寓嗎？”

　 But Mr. Irvine was no longer the Chief: although he was still logical and upright, he was eighty-nine, and his dark eyes had turned that same unnamable gray that only the very young or the very old possess: the color of the sea from which one comes, the color of the sea to which one returns.

但歐文先生如今再也不是酋長了。雖然他頭腦清楚、身體硬朗，但他89歲了，黑色的眼珠已經(jīng)轉(zhuǎn)為一種難以名狀的灰色，只有非常小或非常老的人才會有：我們從這片海水的顏色而來，也將歸于這片海水的顏色。

　 “I loved him,” Mr. Irvine told him. “You know that, Jude, right? You know I did.”

“我愛他，”歐文先生告訴他，“裘德，你知道吧？你知道我愛他?！?