No Words

The words were all still there. That was the joke of it, if it was a joke, and Walter Bell had never been much good at jokes. Bread, oven, flour, Mary, son. He could see them, the way you can see loaves through the glass of an oven door, risen and golden and ready. But when he reached for them, his hand closed on air.

言葉がない

No, not his hand. His hand was something else now. His right hand lay on the blanket like a parcel somebody had left there by mistake, heavy and not quite his. For two years it had shaken so badly that he could not cut butter; now it did not shake at all, and he would have given anything, the bakery, the house, the last fifteen years, to feel it tremble again.

言葉はまだすべてそこにあった。それがこれの滑稽なところだった、もしそれが冗談だというのなら。そしてWalter Bellは冗談を決して得意としたことはなかった。パン、オーブン、小麦粉、メアリー、息子。彼にはそれらが見えていた。オーブンの扉のガラス越しに、ふっくらと焼き上がり、黄金色に色づいて準備の整ったパンが見えるように。だが手を伸ばしたとき、彼の手が掴んだのは空だった。

Time did not behave properly in this place. There was the window, and beyond the window a car park, and beyond the car park the hills where Mary had liked to walk on Sundays before the shop took all their Sundays away. Sometimes the light in the window was white, and sometimes it was orange from the street lamps, and he could not always remember how it had got from one to the other.

いや、彼の手ではなかった。彼の手は今や別の何かになっていた。彼の右手は、誰かが手違いで置き忘れた小包のように毛布の上に置かれ、重く、まったく自分のものではないかのようだった。二年のあいだ、右手はあまりにもひどく震えていたため、バターを切ることすらできなかった。今ではまったく震えなくなっており、彼はそれが再び震えるのを感じられるなら、ベーカリーも、家も、この十五年間のすべてでも、何だって差し出しただろうに。