《渺小一生》:“你知道我会还你的，对吧？”

　 The flights were expensive, much more than he’d anticipated. He researched bus routes, but it would take three days to get there, three days to get back, and he had midterm exams he had to take and do well in if he was to keep his scholarship, and his jobs to attend to. Finally, drunk that Friday night, he confided in Malcolm, who got out his checkbook and wrote him a check.

机票很贵，比他预期的贵太多了。他去查长途巴士，去程得花三天，回程再花三天，可是期中考就快到了，他不能缺席，还得拿个好成绩，否则奖学金不保，此外他还得打工。最后，那个星期五晚上，他喝醉了，就跟马尔科姆诉苦。马尔科姆拿出支票簿，写了一张给他。

　 “I can’t,” he said, immediately.

“我不能拿。”他立刻说。

　 “Why not?” asked Malcolm. They argued back and forth until Willem finally accepted the check.

“为什么不行？”马尔科姆问。他们争执半天，最后威廉终于收下那张支票。

　 “I’ll pay you back, you know that, right?”

“你知道我会还你的，对吧？”

　 Malcolm shrugged. “There’s no way for me to say this without sounding like a complete asshole,” he said, “but it doesn’t make a difference to me, Willem.”

马尔科姆耸耸肩。“我怎么说都会像个彻头彻尾的混蛋，”他说，“但是对我来说真的没差别，威廉。”

　 Still, it became important to him to repay Malcolm somehow, even though he knew Malcolm wouldn’t accept his money. It was Jude who had the idea of putting the money directly into Malcolm’s wallet, and so every two weeks after he’d cashed his check from the restaurant where he worked on the weekends, he’d stuff two or three twenties into it while Malcolm was asleep. He never quite knew if Malcolm noticed—he spent it so quickly, and often on the three of them—but Willem took some satisfaction and pride in doing it.

然而对他来说，设法把钱还给马尔科姆是非常重要的，但他知道马尔科姆不会收。后来裘德想出一个办法：把钱直接偷偷放进马尔科姆的皮夹里。于是每隔两星期，他领到周末打工那家餐厅的薪水，就会趁马尔科姆睡觉时，把两三张二十元塞进他的皮夹。他从来不知道马尔科姆是否注意到了（他花钱太快了，而且总是三个人里头负责买单的），但是这么做，让威廉获得了某种满足和自尊。

　 In the meantime, though, there was Hemming. He was glad he went home (his mother had only sighed when he told her he was coming), and glad to see Hemming, although alarmed by how thin he had become, how he groaned and cried as the nurses prodded the area around his sutures; he’d had to grab the sides of his chair to keep himself from shouting at them. At nights, he and his parents would have silent meals; he could almost feel them pulling away, as if they were unpeeling themselves from their lives as parents of two children and readying themselves to drift toward a new identity elsewhere.

另一方面，还有亨明。他很高兴自己回家了（他通知母亲说要回家时，他母亲只是叹气），也很高兴看到亨明，尽管同时他很担心亨明变瘦了，担心那些护士用手戳伤口附近时害他呻吟、哀叫；他还得紧握着椅子的扶手，才能忍住不要朝他们大吼。到了晚上，他和父母沉默地用餐，他几乎可以感觉到他们在逐渐远离他，好像从身为两个儿子父母的生活中剥离，准备飘向别处的另一个新身份。

　 On his third night, he took the keys to the truck to drive to the hospital. Back east, it was early spring, but here the dark air seemed to glitter with frost, and in the morning the grass was capped with a thin skin of crystals.

到了第三夜，他拿了货车的钥匙开车去医院。在他大学所在的东岸，此时已是早春，但家乡的黑暗空气似乎仍因为白霜而发亮，早晨的青草上罩了一层薄薄的冰晶。

　 His father came onto the porch as he was walking down the steps. “He’ll be asleep,” he said.

他下楼梯时，他父亲来到门廊上。“他应该睡着了。”他父亲说。

　 “I just thought I’d go,” Willem told him.

“我只是想去看一下。”威廉告诉他。

　 His father looked at him. “Willem,” he said, “he won’t know whether you’re there or not.”

他父亲看着他。“威廉，”他说，“他不会知道你在不在那里的。”

　 He felt his face go hot. “I know you don’t fucking care about him,” he snapped at him, “but I do.” It was the first time he’d ever sworn at his father, and he was unable to move for a moment, fearful and half excited that his father might react, that they might have an argument. But his father just took a sip from his coffee and then turned and went inside, the screen door smacking softly shut behind him.

他忽然觉得脸上发烫。“我知道你他妈的不关心他，”他朝父亲凶巴巴地说，“但是我关心。”这是他第一回跟他父亲讲脏话，一时之间他动不了，害怕又有点兴奋地期待他的父亲会有反应，两人可能吵起来。但他父亲只是喝了口咖啡，然后转身走进屋里，纱门在他身后啪的一声轻轻关上。

　 For the rest of his visit they were all the same as they always were; they went in shifts to sit with Hemming, and when he wasn’t at the hospital, Willem helped his mother with the ledgers, or his father as he oversaw the reshodding of the horses. At nights he returned to the hospital and did schoolwork. He read aloud from The Decameron to Hemming, who stared at the ceiling and blinked, and struggled through his calculus, which he finally finished with the unhappy certainty that he had gotten all of it wrong. The three of them had gotten used to Jude doing their calculus for them, working through the problems as quickly as if he were running arpeggios. Their first year, Willem had genuinely wanted to understand it, and Jude had sat with him for a string of nights, explaining again and again, but he had never been able to comprehend it.

他回家那趟剩下的时间，他们都跟往常一样轮流去医院陪亨明，威廉不去医院时，就帮母亲记账，或帮父亲检查马匹是否该重新钉蹄。晚上他会回到医院一边陪亨明，一边做功课。他大声念《十日谈》给亨明听，而亨明只是瞪着天花板眨眼；他努力写完微积分作业，很不开心地确定自己全写错了。他们三个人已经习惯让裘德帮他们写微积分作业，他解题快得像是在弹奏琶音和弦。他们大一那年，威廉曾经真心想搞懂微积分，于是裘德连续好几晚当他的家教，一遍又一遍地讲解，但威廉从来没能搞懂。

　 “I’m just too stupid to get this,” he’d said after what felt like an hours-long session, at the end of which he had wanted to go outside and run for miles, he was so prickly with impatience and frustration.

“我实在太笨了，根本学不会。”有回裘德教完后，威廉这么说，那天已经恶补了好几个小时，最后他只想出去跑上几英里，不耐烦和挫折感让他愤怒。

　 Jude had looked down. “You’re not stupid,” he said, quietly. “I’m just not explaining it well enough.” Jude took seminars in pure math that you had to be invited to enroll in; the rest of them couldn’t even begin to fathom what, exactly, he did in it.

裘德低着头。“你不笨。”他低声说，“是我教得不够好。”裘德修了几堂纯数学的专题研讨课，那是数学高手才会受邀参加的，他们三个完全搞不懂他在那个研讨课学些什么。

　 In retrospect, he was surprised only by his own surprise when his mother called three months later to tell him that Hemming was on life support. This was in late May, and he was halfway through his final exams. “Don’t come back,” she’d told him, commanded him, almost. “Don’t, Willem.” He spoke with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later, when a Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents, one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.

三个月后，他母亲打电话来跟他说亨明接上人工呼吸器了。回顾起来，他只是惊讶当时自己居然会觉得惊讶。那是五月底，他的期末考正进行到一半。“不要回来。”他母亲告诉他，几乎是命令，“不要，威廉。”他平常跟父母都说瑞典语，直到多年后，一位合作的瑞典导演说他讲瑞典语时，语气就变得毫无感情，他这才发现自己以前跟父母讲话时都不自觉地模仿他们，口气变得不带感情而直率。

　 Over the next few days he fretted, did poorly in his exams: French, comparative literature, Jacobean drama, the Icelandic sagas, the hated calculus all slurring into one. He picked a fight with his girlfriend, who was a senior and graduating. She cried; he felt guilty but also unable to repair the situation. He thought of Wyoming, of a machine coughing life into Hemming’s lungs. Shouldn’t he go back? He had to go back. He wouldn’t be able to stay for long: on June fifteenth, he and Jude were moving into a sublet off-campus for the summer—they’d both found jobs in the city, Jude working on weekdays as a classics professor’s amanuensis and on weekends at the bakery he worked at during the school year, Willem as a teacher’s assistant at a program for disabled children—but before then, the four of them were going to stay at Malcolm’s parents’ house in Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard, after which Malcolm and JB would drive back to New York. At nights, he called Hemming at the hospital, made his parents or one of the nurses hold the phone up to his ear, and spoke to his brother, even though he knew he probably couldn’t hear him. But how could he not have tried?

接下来几天他烦恼极了，考试很糟：法语、比较文学、詹姆士一世时期的戏剧、冰岛英雄传奇、讨厌的微积分，全都搅成一团。他跟大四快毕业的女朋友大吵一架。她哭了，他觉得内疚，但也无力挽回。他想着怀俄明，想着呼吸器把生命注入亨明的肺里。他该回家吗？他非回家不可。回去没办法待太久：六月十五日他和裘德就得搬到校园外的分租房间——两个人都在纽约市找到了工作，裘德周一到周五去帮一个古典文学教授当抄写员，周末则去他平常打工的面包店；威廉则是在某个专为身心障碍儿童设计的课程当助教。在此之前，他们四个要去马尔科姆的父母位于马撒葡萄园岛阿奎纳的别墅住几天，然后马尔科姆和杰比会开车回纽约。夜里，他打电话到医院给亨明，要父母或照顾的护士把话筒凑到亨明耳边，让他跟哥哥说话，即使他知道他大概听不到。但他怎么可以不试试看？

　 And then, one morning a week later, his mother called: Hemming had died. There was nothing he could say. He couldn’t ask why she hadn’t told him how serious the situation had been, because some part of him had known she wouldn’t. He couldn’t say he wished he had been there, because she would have nothing to say in response. He couldn’t ask her how she felt, because nothing she said would be enough. He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something—some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming’s death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn’t care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn’t see them without aching for them.

然后，一星期后的早晨，他母亲打电话来告诉他：亨明死了。他没有什么话可说。他无法问她为什么没告诉他状况有多严重，因为他心里早就知道她不会讲的。他无法问她有什么感觉，因为她说什么都不够。他想朝他父母大吼，想打他们，想引出他们身上的一些什么——某种温柔的哀恸、某种失态，让他看得出有大事发生，显示亨明的死让他们失去人生某种重大而不可或缺的东西。他不在乎他们是不是真有这样的感觉，他只是需要他们说出来，需要感觉到他们的沉着冷静之下还有别的，希望在他们心底有一道湍急、冰凉的水流，充满细小的生命，像是小鱼、青草和小白花，柔软又容易受伤，脆弱得你必须极其渴望才看得到。

　 He didn’t tell his friends, then, about Hemming. They went to Malcolm’s house—a beautiful place, the most beautiful place Willem had ever seen, much less stayed in—and late at night, when the others were asleep, each in his own bed, in his own room with his own bathroom (the house was that big), he crept outside and walked the web of roads surrounding the house for hours, the moon so large and bright it seemed made of something liquid and frozen. On those walks, he tried very hard not to think of anything in particular. He concentrated instead on what he saw before him, noticing at night what had eluded him by day: how the dirt was so fine it was almost sand, and puffed up into little plumes as he stepped in it, how skinny threads of bark-brown snakes whipsawed silently beneath the brush as he passed. He walked to the ocean and above him the moon disappeared, concealed by tattered rags of clouds, and for a few moments he could only hear the water, not see it, and the sky was thick and warm with moisture, as if the very air here were denser, more significant.

当时他没告诉其他三位好友亨明的事情。他们去了马尔科姆家的漂亮房子，那是威廉这辈子见过最美的房子，更别说住进去了。每个人都有一间房，还带有各自的浴室（那栋房子就是这么大）。到了深夜，其他人都睡了，他蹑手蹑脚溜出去，在房子周围的道路散步，走上好几个小时，月亮好大好亮，像是某种液体结冻而成。散步时，他很努力不去想任何特定的事情，专注在眼前事物上，他注意到白天没看到的：路上的泥土好细，简直像沙子，他踩在上头时会扬起一朵朵小烟云；经过灌木丛时，细瘦的褐灰色小蛇在树下悄悄蜿蜒爬过。他走到海边，头上的月亮不见了，躲进破碎的云间。有好一会儿，他只听得见水声，但是看不到，天空充满温暖的潮气，仿佛这里的空气更浓密、更重。

　 Maybe this is what it is to be dead, he thought, and realized it wasn’t so bad after all, and felt better.

或许死掉就是这么回事，他心想，然后明白其实也不算太差，于是比较释然了。