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.

那些词都还在。可笑之处就在这里——如果这算得上是个玩笑的话，而Walter Bell向来都不擅长开玩笑。面包、烤箱、面粉、Mary、儿子。他能看见它们，就像隔着烤箱门的玻璃能看见两大块面包一样，发酵蓬松，烤得焦黄，已经熟了。可是当他伸手去够它们时，他的手却只抓到了一团空气。

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.

不，那不是他的手了。他的手如今变成了别的什么东西。他的右手搭在毯子上，像个被人错落在那里的包裹，沉甸甸的，不太属于他。两年来，这只手一直抖得很厉害，甚至连黄油都切不了；现在它完全不抖了，而他宁愿付出任何代价——面包店、房子、过去的十五年——只求能让它再次颤抖。

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.

在这个地方，时间变得不规矩起来。眼前是一扇窗户，窗外是一个停车场，停车场再过去是起伏的群山。在面包店夺走他们所有的星期天之前，Mary曾喜欢在星期天去上山散步。有时窗外的光线是白色的，有时又是路灯映照下的橙色，他常常记不清光线究竟是如何从一种颜色变成另一种颜色的。

Mary came, sometimes, in the orange light. Not really. He was not a fool, even now. But she sat in the plastic chair with her hands in her lap, in her blue Sunday coat, the way she had sat beside his bed the time he broke his ankle falling off the flour sacks, and she looked at him with that expression she had kept for when he had been stupid in a way that was not quite forgivable but would, eventually, be forgiven.

Mary有时会来，在那橙色的光线中。并不是真的来。即便到了现在，他也并非一个疯傻之人。但她确实坐在那把塑料椅子上，双手搭在膝上，穿着她那件周日穿的蓝色大衣，就像当年他从面粉袋上摔下来摔断脚踝时，她坐在他床边一样。她看着他，神情就像是在看他犯了某种算不上不可饶恕、但最终总会被原谅的蠢事。

Well, Walter, she said, or he said for her. Well. Look at the pair of you.

“哎，Walter，”她说，或许是他替她说的，“哎。看看你们俩。”

Because they came, both of them. That was the other thing. The boy came and sat in that chair for hours, tall and grey and thin as a rake, with flour on his knees from the bakery where he now worked at night, and said very little, which was a family talent. And the girl came after school and sat on the other side, and sometimes she held his good hand and sometimes she did not, and he understood that both were answers.

因为他们俩都来了，两个人都来了。那是另一回事。那个男孩来了，在那把椅子上坐上好几个小时，个子高高的，头发灰白，瘦得像一把耙子，膝盖上还沾着面粉——那是他在面包店值夜班留下的。他几乎不怎么说话，这是家族遗传的本事。而那个女孩放学后也会过来，坐在另一侧，有时她会握住他那只完好的手，有时不会，他明白这两种举动都是一种回答。

The boy. He was forty-five. Walter kept forgetting that and then remembering it again, and every time it went through him like a draught under a door. In his head the boy was thirty, standing in the street in the smoke with his back to the shop, telling the whole of Bridge Street a lie in a clear loud voice. In the chair he was forty-five, and there was grey in his beard, and his hands, Walter noticed, had begun very slightly to shake.

那个男孩。他已经四十五岁了。Walter老是忘记这一点，然后又想起来，每一次想起来，这种感觉都像门缝底下吹进来的穿堂风一样刺骨。在他脑海中，那个男孩只有三十岁，站在街上的浓烟里，背对着店铺，用清晰响亮的声音对整条Bridge Street撒着谎。坐在椅子上的他却已经四十五岁了，胡子里夹杂着白发，Walter注意到，他的手已经开始微微发抖了。