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.

无言

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.

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。

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.

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。