无言

无言

No Words

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。

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.

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。

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.

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。

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.

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。

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.

“哎，Walter，”她说，或许是他替她说的，“哎。看看你们俩。”

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

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。

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.

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。

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.

如果非要选出最糟糕的一点，那就是最糟糕的事了。不是这条手臂。也不是这条腿——那位性格开朗、前臂粗壮得像两块大面包的年轻理疗师，每天硬让他从床上把腿抬起来两次，而Walter只能默默流汗、无声咒骂。甚至也不是那些说不出口的词汇。而是在儿子用水壶倒水时，看见他手指上那轻微的颤抖，并且清楚地知道这颤抖因何而来，却无法开口说：那件事，我也很抱歉。

That was the worst of it, if he had to choose a worst. Not the arm. Not the leg, which the physiotherapist, a cheerful young man with forearms like loaves, made him lift off the bed twice a day while Walter sweated and swore without sound. Not even the words. It was seeing that faint tremor in his son’s fingers as he poured water from the jug, and knowing exactly where it came from, and being unable to say: I am sorry for that too.

他曾经说过一次。在台阶上。他死死抓住那段记忆，就像当初走向门口时死死抓住桌角一样。无论接下来还会发生什么，无论那些拿着写字板的医生们对寻找词汇的前路作何论断，他至少已经说过一次了，大声地说出来，当着那个男孩的面，在厨房的灯光下，装着面包的袋子就放在他脚边。“是我。”迟到了十五年，随后地面便迎面扑了上来。但他确实说出口了。

He had said it once. On the step. He held on to that the way he had held on to the edge of the table on his way to the door. Whatever else happened, whatever the doctors with their clipboards decided about the road to the words, he had said it once, out loud, to the boy’s face, under the kitchen light, with the bread in its bag at his feet. It was me. Fifteen years late, and then the floor had come up to meet him. But he had said it.

那个女孩已经读过了他的信。他知道这一点，因为她是带着信进来的，脸色白得像面粉一样，坐下来，把他到底是个什么样的人全都说了出来。他就躺在那里由着她说。奇怪的是，那感觉就像是他们之间第一次坦诚相对的交谈，尽管他们当中只有一个人能够开口说话。她说她不知道该如何同时面对这两件事。他也不知道。十五年来，他一直竭力只做一件事——做那个把她从大火中抱出来的人，但这一切并没有奏效。

The girl had read his letter. He knew because she had come in with it, white as flour, and sat down, and told him what he was. He had lain there and let her. It had felt, strangely, like the first honest conversation they had ever had, although only one of them could speak. She had said that she did not know what to do with both. He did not know either. He had been trying for fifteen years to be only one thing, the man who carried her out of the fire, and it had not worked.

到了第三天或第四天，也许是第五天，那个男孩和那个女孩同时都在房间里。他不知道这是谁安排的。也许根本没人安排。女孩坐在左边，男孩坐在右边，他们隔着床正在交谈，不是对他说话，而是相互交谈，聊着一些跟桥有关的事情。他听不明白。他也没必要明白。他躺在他们中间，半闭着眼睛，倾听着那声音——儿子低沉谨慎的嗓音，和孙女轻快尖锐的话语——他心想，这辈子他还从未听过如此美妙的声音，就连Mary在搅拌机旁唱歌的声音也比不上。

On the third or fourth day, or perhaps the fifth, the boy and the girl were both in the room at the same time. He did not know who had arranged it. Perhaps nobody had. The girl sat on the left and the boy on the right, and they were talking, not to him, but to each other, across the bed, about something to do with a bridge. He could not follow it. He did not need to. He lay between them with his eyes half closed and listened to the sound of it, his son’s low careful voice and his granddaughter’s quick sharp one, and thought that he had never heard anything so beautiful in his life, not even Mary singing over the mixer.

小镇的人也以他们的方式来了。Priya每天下午都会带一个铁盒装的东西过来，嘴里说个不停，这真是一桩幸事，因为这意味着他除了倾听之外什么都不用做。Daniel穿着他那身公交公司的夹克过来，在横跨病床的小桌子上跟他下国际象棋，每当Walter看一眼某个格子，Daniel就替他移动棋子，而且每一局都输得极其惨烈，以至于Walter深知他是故意的，却找不出词汇来表示抗议。

The town came, too, in its way. Priya came every afternoon with something in a tin and talked without stopping, which was a mercy, because it meant he did not have to do anything but listen. Daniel came in his bus-company jacket and played chess on the little table across the bed, moving Walter’s pieces for him whenever Walter looked at a square, and lost every game so badly that Walter knew he was doing it on purpose and did not have the words to object.

还有Ana也来了。那个来自远方的女孩，一头短短的黑发里沾着面粉，在凌晨三点敲响了他家的大门，而他自己的亲生儿子当时却做不到这一点。她跟他聊起了面包。她告诉他，Michael已经接管了夜班，他们两个人一起在那张旧桌旁干活，Michael照着老法子翻动面包，而她也不再假装那是自己从视频里学来的技巧了。要是Walter还能找到自己用来发笑的力气，他本会笑出声来的。

And Ana came. The girl from far away, with flour in her short black hair, who had knocked on his door at three in the morning when his own son could not. She told him about the bread. She told him that Michael had taken over the night shift, that the two of them worked at the old table together, that Michael turned the loaves the old way and she had stopped pretending she had learned it from a video. Walter would have laughed at that, if he could have found where he kept his laugh.