《渺小一生》:“我以为他们会更友善一点。”

　 “That’s not true,” he’d protested. “It’s just that I don’t think that every rejection is meaningless, and I don’t think everyone who gets a job over me does so out of dumb luck.”

“才不是这样。”他抗议道，“只不过我不认为每次失败都是没有意义的，我也不认为每个赢过我得到角色的人，都只是因为运气好。”

　 There had been another silence. “You’re too kind, Willem,” JB said, darkly. “You’re never going to get anywhere like this.”

杰比又沉默了好一会儿。“你太善良了，威廉。”杰比阴沉地说，“你这样下去，绝不可能有什么成就的。”

　 “Thanks, JB,” he’d said. He was rarely offended by JB’s opinions—often, he was right—but at that particular moment, he didn’t much feel like hearing JB’s thoughts on his shortcomings and his gloomy predictions about his future unless he completely changed his personality. He’d gotten off the phone and had lain in bed awake, feeling stuck and sorry for himself.

“谢了，杰比。”他说。他很少被杰比的意见得罪（通常他的意见都对），但这回，他不太想再听杰比数落他的缺点，或悲观地预测他若是不彻底改变个性，未来希望全无。他挂断电话，清醒地躺在床上，觉得自己陷入困境，自怜自艾起来。

　 Anyway, changing his personality seemed basically out of the question—wasn’t it too late? Before he was a kind man, after all, Willem had been a kind boy. Everyone had noticed: his teachers, his classmates, the parents of his classmates. “Willem is such a compassionate child,” his teachers would write on his report cards, report cards his mother or father would look at once, briefly and wordlessly, before adding them to the stacks of newspapers and empty envelopes that they’d take to the recycling center. As he grew older, he had begun to realize that people were surprised, even upset, by his parents; a high-school teacher had once blurted to him that given Willem’s temperament, he had thought his parents would be different.

总之，改变个性似乎根本不可能——现在不是太迟了吗？毕竟，威廉不是现在才善良，而是从小就善良。每个人都注意到了：他的老师、他的同学、同学的父母。“威廉这孩子真有同情心。”他的老师们会在他的成绩单上这么写，而他父母匆匆看一眼，什么也不说，就会把成绩单扔到那堆等着回收的旧报纸和空信封上头。后来他年纪较长，开始发现人们会对他的父母感到惊讶，甚至很不高兴。有回一位高中老师脱口而出，说以威廉的性情，没想到他父母会是那样。

　 “Different how?” he’d asked.

“怎样？”当时他问。

　 “Friendlier,” his teacher had said.

“我以为他们会更友善一点。”老师说。

　 He didn’t think of himself as particularly generous or unusually good-spirited. Most things came easily to him: sports, school, friends, girls. He wasn’t nice, necessarily; he didn’t seek to be everyone’s friend, and he couldn’t tolerate boors, or pettiness, or meanness. He was humble and hardworking, diligent, he knew, rather than brilliant. “Know your place,” his father often said to him.

他不认为自己特别慷慨或脾气特别好。大部分东西对他来说都很容易：运动、学校、朋友、女生。他未必总是好心；他不想当每个人的朋友，而且他受不了粗鲁、小心眼和刻薄。他知道自己并不聪明，只是谦虚与勤奋。“要明白你的身份。”他父亲常这么跟他说。

　 His father did. Willem remembered once, after a late-spring freeze had killed off a number of new lambs in their area, his father being interviewed by a newspaper reporter who was writing a story about how it had affected the local farms.

他父亲就是如此。威廉还记得有一回，一场晚春的寒流让他们那一带好些初生的小羊冻死了，有个报社记者来采访他父亲，要针对这场灾害对当地牧场的影响写一篇报道。

　 “As a rancher,” the reporter began, when Willem’s father had stopped her.

“身为一个牧场主……”那个记者一开始这么说，但威廉的父亲打断了她。

　 “Not a rancher,” he’d said, his accent making these words, as all words, sound brusquer than they should, “a ranch hand.” He was correct, of course; a rancher meant something specific—a landowner—and by that definition, he wasn’t a rancher. But there were plenty of other people in the county who then also had no right to call themselves ranchers and yet did so anyway. Willem had never heard his father say that they shouldn’t—his father didn’t care what anyone else did or didn’t do—but such inflation was not for him, or for his wife, Willem’s mother.

“不是牧场主，”他的口音让那些话听起来格外粗鲁，“是牧场的雇工。”当然，他说得没错：牧场主有特定的意思，指的是地主，因此他不是牧场主。只是那一带乡下还有很多人没资格说自己是牧场主，但还是这么自称。威廉从来没听过他父亲议论别人不该这样，他父亲不在乎其他人怎么做，但这样自抬身价不是他的作风，也不是他妻子的作风。

　 Perhaps because of this, he felt he always knew who and what he was, which is why, as he moved farther and then further away from the ranch and his childhood, he felt very little pressure to change or reinvent himself. He was a guest at his college, a guest in graduate school, and now he was a guest in New York, a guest in the lives of the beautiful and the rich. He would never try to pretend he was born to such things, because he knew he wasn’t; he was a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming, and his leaving didn’t mean that everything he had once been was erased, written over by time and experiences and the proximity to money.

或许因为如此，威廉觉得他向来知道自己的身份和地位。这就是为什么等到他搬离家乡、远离牧场和他的童年时，不觉得有压力要改变自己或创造出新的形象。他求学时是大学的过客，是研究生院的过客，现在他是纽约的过客，是种种美丽与富裕生活的过客。他绝不会假装他天生就该享有这一切，因为他知道自己不配。他是怀俄明州西部一个农场雇工的儿子，他的离开并不代表以前的一切因此被抹去，被时间、经验和周围的富足盖过。

　 He was his parents’ fourth child, and the only one still alive. First there had been a girl, Britte, who had died of leukemia when she was two, long before Willem had been born. This had been in Sweden, when his father, who was Icelandic, had been working at a fish farm, where he had met his mother, who was Danish. Then there had been a move to America, and a boy, Hemming, who had been born with cerebral palsy. Three years later, there had been another boy, Aksel, who had died in his sleep as an infant for no apparent reason.

威廉是家里的第四个孩子，也是唯一在世的。他父母的第一个孩子是个女儿，叫布丽特，2岁时因白血病过世。这是威廉出生前许久的事情，当时他父母还住在瑞典，他父亲是冰岛人，在瑞典的一个渔场工作时认识了威廉的母亲，她是丹麦人。然后他们移民到美国，生了个男孩亨明，天生大脑麻痹。三年后，又生了一个男孩阿克塞尔，死于婴儿期的睡梦中，没有明显的原因。

　 Hemming was eight when Willem was born. He couldn’t walk or speak, but Willem had loved him and had never thought of him as anything but his older brother. Hemming could smile, however, and as he did, he’d bring his hand up toward his face, his fingers shaping themselves into a duck’s bill claw, his lips pulling back from his azalea-pink gums. Willem learned to crawl, and then walk and run—Hemming remaining in his chair year after year—and when he was old and strong enough, he would push Hemming’s heavy chair with its fat, stubborn tires (this was a chair meant to be sedentary, not to be nosed through grasses or down dirt roads) around the ranch where they lived with their parents in a small wooden house. Up the hill from them was the main house, long and low with a deep wraparound porch, and down the hill from them were the stables where their parents spent their days. He had been Hemming’s primary caretaker, and companion, all through high school; in the mornings, he was the first one awake, making his parents’ coffee and boiling water for Hemming’s oatmeal, and in the evenings, he waited by the side of the road for the van that would drop his brother off after his day at the assisted-living center an hour’s drive away. Willem always thought they clearly looked like brothers—they had their parents’ light, bright hair, and their father’s gray eyes, and both of them had a groove, like an elongated parentheses, bracketing the left side of their mouths that made them appear easily amused and ready to smile—but no one else seemed to notice this. They saw only that Hemming was in a wheelchair, and that his mouth remained open, a damp red ellipse, and that his eyes, more often than not, drifted skyward, fixed on some cloud only he could see.

威廉出生时，亨明已经8岁了。他不会走路或讲话，但威廉很爱他，只觉得他是哥哥，从来没有别的想法。不过亨明会微笑，他一只手朝脸上举，手指的指尖聚拢，比成一个鸭嘴夹的形状，同时嘴唇往后咧，露出粉红色的牙龈。威廉学会爬，然后学会走和跑，但亨明始终坐在轮椅上。等到威廉够大也够强壮时，他就会推着亨明那台配有粗大且难推轮子的沉重轮椅（这张轮椅的设计是要让人静坐在上头，而不是在草地或泥土路上行进），在牧场里面到处转。他们与父母住在山腰的一栋小木屋里，往上是长而矮的牧场主屋，外围环绕着一圈深深的门廊；往下则是父母亲白天工作的马厩。中学时期，他是亨明的主要看护，也是同伴：早晨他总是第一个醒来，帮他爸妈冲咖啡，烧水帮亨明煮燕麦粥；傍晚时，他会站在大马路旁，等着一小时车程外一家日托中心的面包车把哥哥送回来。威廉总以为他们长得很像，一看就知道是兄弟——两人都有父母亲明亮的浅色头发，还有父亲的灰眼珠，而且两个人嘴巴左边都有一道凹痕，像拉长的圆括号，让他们显得特别容易开心，随时准备要笑——但是其他人似乎都没注意到。他们只看到亨明坐在轮椅上，嘴巴总是张着，形成一个湿红的椭圆形，还有他的眼睛偶尔会往上飘，盯着只有他看得到的一团云。

　 “What do you see, Hemming?” he sometimes asked him, when they were out on their night walks, but of course Hemming never answered him.

“亨明，你看到什么了？”晚上出门散步时，他有时会问他。当然，亨明从没回答过。

　 Their parents were efficient and competent with Hemming, but not, he recognized, particularly affectionate. When Willem was kept late at school because of a football game, or a track meet, or when he was needed to work an extra shift at the grocery store, it was his mother who waited for Hemming at the end of the drive, who hefted Hemming into and then out of his bath, who fed him his dinner of chicken-and-rice porridge and changed his diaper before putting him to bed. But she didn’t read to him, or talk to him, or go on walks with him the way Willem did. Watching his parents around Hemming bothered him, in part because although they never behaved objectionably, he could tell that they viewed Hemming as their responsibility but no more. Later he would argue with himself that that was all that could reasonably be expected of them; anything else would be luck. But still. He wished they loved Hemming more, just a little more.

他的父母照顾亨明有效而称职，但并不特别关爱。威廉有时因为足球赛或练田径要在学校待得晚些，或者必须在杂货店值班，他的母亲就会在车道尽头的大马路边等亨明回家，抱亨明进浴缸洗澡，喂他吃鸡肉粥晚餐，帮他换尿布，然后让他上床。但她不会读书给他听，不会跟他讲话，也不会像威廉那样推他出门散步。看着父母照顾亨明让他很困扰，一部分原因是他们虽然从来没有表现出反感，但他感觉得出来他们只是把亨明视为责任，仅此而已。然后他会在心中反驳自己，你顶多也只能期待他们这样了，多做的都是幸运。但是啊，他真希望他们更爱亨明一点，只要一点点就好。

　 (Although maybe love was too much to ask from his parents. They had lost so many children that perhaps they simply either wouldn’t or couldn’t surrender themselves wholly to the ones they now had. Eventually, both he and Hemming would leave them too, by choice or not, and then their losses would be complete. But it would be decades before he was able to see things this way.)

（或许要他父母付出爱是太过奢求了。他们已经失去了那么多小孩，或许因此再也不会或者无法全心全意去爱他们眼前拥有的小孩。终有一天，他跟亨明也会自愿或非自愿地离开，然后他们就会完全失去他们了。但要到至少二十年后，他才有办法这样看。）

　 His second year of college, Hemming had had to have an emergency appendectomy. “They said they caught it just in time,” his mother told him over the phone. Her voice was flat, very matter-of-fact; there was no relief in it, no anguish, but neither was there any—and he’d had to make himself consider this, even though he hadn’t wanted to, was scared to—disappointment either. Hemming’s caregiver (a local woman, paid to watch him during the night now that Willem was gone) had noticed him pawing at his stomach and moaning, and had been able to diagnose the hard truffley lump under his abdomen for what it was. While Hemming was being operated on, the doctors had found a growth, a few centimeters long, on his large intestine and had biopsied it. X-rays had revealed further growths, and they were going to excise those as well.

他上大学的第二年，亨明因为阑尾炎紧急开刀。“他们说还好及时发现。”他母亲在电话里告诉他。她的声调平淡，非常实际。没有解脱，没有愤怒，也没有任何失望（尽管他不愿意，甚至害怕去想，还是逼自己留意）。亨明的看护（当地的一个女人，因为威廉已经离家，他父母雇她在夜里照顾亨明）注意到他抓自己的肚子并发出呻吟，从他下腹部的肿块判断，是阑尾炎。亨明开刀时，医师们发现他大肠里有一个几厘米大的瘤，于是做了切片检查。X光证实那个瘤还在长大，他们打算把那个瘤也切除。

　 “I’ll come home,” he said.

“我会赶回去。”他说。

　 “No,” his mother had said. “You can’t do anything here. We’ll tell you if it’s anything serious.” She and his father had been more bemused than anything when he had been admitted to college—neither of them had known he was applying—but now that he was there, they were determined that he should graduate and forget the ranch as quickly as possible.

“不用了。”他母亲说，“你来这里也做不了什么。如果情况变得严重了，我们会告诉你的。”当初威廉被这所大学录取时，他的父母亲困惑极了，因为两人都不知道他去申请，但如今他去读了，他们判定他应该毕业，尽快忘了这个牧场。

　 But at night he thought of Hemming, alone in a hospital bed, how he’d be frightened and would cry and listen for the sound of his voice. When Hemming was twenty-one, he’d had to have a hernia removed, and he had wept until Willem held his hand. He knew he’d have to go back.

但那天晚上他想着亨明孤单地躺在医院病床上，想着他会多害怕，哭着想听到他的声音。亨明21岁时曾因为疝气开刀，当时他不断啜泣，直到威廉握住他的手才停下。他知道他得回去。