《渺小一生》:“我以為他們會(huì)更友善一點(diǎn)。”

　 “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.”

“才不是這樣?！彼棺h道，“只不過我不認(rèn)為每次失敗都是沒有意義的，我也不認(rèn)為每個(gè)贏過我得到角色的人，都只是因?yàn)檫\(yùn)氣好?！?

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

杰比又沉默了好一會(huì)兒。“你太善良了，威廉?！苯鼙汝幊恋卣f，“你這樣下去，絕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.

“謝了，杰比?！彼f。他很少被杰比的意見得罪（通常他的意見都對(duì)），但這回，他不太想再聽杰比數(shù)落他的缺點(diǎn)，或悲觀地預(yù)測(cè)他若是不徹底改變個(gè)性，未來希望全無。他掛斷電話，清醒地躺在床上，覺得自己陷入困境，自憐自艾起來。

　 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.

總之，改變個(gè)性似乎根本不可能——現(xiàn)在不是太遲了嗎？畢竟，威廉不是現(xiàn)在才善良，而是從小就善良。每個(gè)人都注意到了：他的老師、他的同學(xué)、同學(xué)的父母?！巴@孩子真有同情心?！彼睦蠋焸儠?huì)在他的成績(jī)單上這么寫，而他父母匆匆看一眼，什么也不說，就會(huì)把成績(jī)單扔到那堆等著回收的舊報(bào)紙和空信封上頭。后來他年紀(jì)較長(zhǎng)，開始發(fā)現(xiàn)人們會(huì)對(duì)他的父母感到驚訝，甚至很不高興。有回一位高中老師脫口而出，說以威廉的性情，沒想到他父母會(huì)是那樣。

　 “Different how?” he’d asked.

“怎樣？”當(dāng)時(shí)他問。

　 “Friendlier,” his teacher had said.

“我以為他們會(huì)更友善一點(diǎn)?！崩蠋熣f。

　 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.

他不認(rèn)為自己特別慷慨或脾氣特別好。大部分東西對(duì)他來說都很容易：運(yùn)動(dòng)、學(xué)校、朋友、女生。他未必總是好心；他不想當(dāng)每個(gè)人的朋友，而且他受不了粗魯、小心眼和刻薄。他知道自己并不聰明，只是謙虛與勤奮?！耙靼啄愕纳矸??！彼赣H常這么跟他說。

　 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.

他父親就是如此。威廉還記得有一回，一場(chǎng)晚春的寒流讓他們那一帶好些初生的小羊凍死了，有個(gè)報(bào)社記者來采訪他父親，要針對(duì)這場(chǎng)災(zāi)害對(duì)當(dāng)?shù)啬翀?chǎng)的影響寫一篇報(bào)道。

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

“身為一個(gè)牧場(chǎng)主……”那個(gè)記者一開始這么說，但威廉的父親打斷了她。

　 “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.

“不是牧場(chǎng)主，”他的口音讓那些話聽起來格外粗魯，“是牧場(chǎng)的雇工。”當(dāng)然，他說得沒錯(cuò)：牧場(chǎng)主有特定的意思，指的是地主，因此他不是牧場(chǎng)主。只是那一帶鄉(xiāng)下還有很多人沒資格說自己是牧場(chǎng)主，但還是這么自稱。威廉從來沒聽過他父親議論別人不該這樣，他父親不在乎其他人怎么做，但這樣自抬身價(jià)不是他的作風(fēng)，也不是他妻子的作風(fēng)。

　 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.

或許因?yàn)槿绱?，威廉覺得他向來知道自己的身份和地位。這就是為什么等到他搬離家鄉(xiāng)、遠(yuǎn)離牧場(chǎng)和他的童年時(shí)，不覺得有壓力要改變自己或創(chuàng)造出新的形象。他求學(xué)時(shí)是大學(xué)的過客，是研究生院的過客，現(xiàn)在他是紐約的過客，是種種美麗與富裕生活的過客。他絕不會(huì)假裝他天生就該享有這一切，因?yàn)樗雷约翰慌洹Ｋ菓讯砻髦菸鞑恳粋€(gè)農(nóng)場(chǎng)雇工的兒子，他的離開并不代表以前的一切因此被抹去，被時(shí)間、經(jīng)驗(yàn)和周圍的富足蓋過。

　 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.

威廉是家里的第四個(gè)孩子，也是唯一在世的。他父母的第一個(gè)孩子是個(gè)女兒，叫布麗特，2歲時(shí)因白血病過世。這是威廉出生前許久的事情，當(dāng)時(shí)他父母還住在瑞典，他父親是冰島人，在瑞典的一個(gè)漁場(chǎng)工作時(shí)認(rèn)識(shí)了威廉的母親，她是丹麥人。然后他們移民到美國(guó)，生了個(gè)男孩亨明，天生大腦麻痹。三年后，又生了一個(gè)男孩阿克塞爾，死于嬰兒期的睡夢(mèng)中，沒有明顯的原因。

　 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.

威廉出生時(shí)，亨明已經(jīng)8歲了。他不會(huì)走路或講話，但威廉很愛他，只覺得他是哥哥，從來沒有別的想法。不過亨明會(huì)微笑，他一只手朝臉上舉，手指的指尖聚攏，比成一個(gè)鴨嘴夾的形狀，同時(shí)嘴唇往后咧，露出粉紅色的牙齦。威廉學(xué)會(huì)爬，然后學(xué)會(huì)走和跑，但亨明始終坐在輪椅上。等到威廉夠大也夠強(qiáng)壯時(shí)，他就會(huì)推著亨明那臺(tái)配有粗大且難推輪子的沉重輪椅（這張輪椅的設(shè)計(jì)是要讓人靜坐在上頭，而不是在草地或泥土路上行進(jìn)），在牧場(chǎng)里面到處轉(zhuǎn)。他們與父母住在山腰的一棟小木屋里，往上是長(zhǎng)而矮的牧場(chǎng)主屋，外圍環(huán)繞著一圈深深的門廊；往下則是父母親白天工作的馬廄。中學(xué)時(shí)期，他是亨明的主要看護(hù)，也是同伴：早晨他總是第一個(gè)醒來，幫他爸媽沖咖啡，燒水幫亨明煮燕麥粥；傍晚時(shí)，他會(huì)站在大馬路旁，等著一小時(shí)車程外一家日托中心的面包車把哥哥送回來。威廉總以為他們長(zhǎng)得很像，一看就知道是兄弟——兩人都有父母親明亮的淺色頭發(fā)，還有父親的灰眼珠，而且兩個(gè)人嘴巴左邊都有一道凹痕，像拉長(zhǎng)的圓括號(hào)，讓他們顯得特別容易開心，隨時(shí)準(zhǔn)備要笑——但是其他人似乎都沒注意到。他們只看到亨明坐在輪椅上，嘴巴總是張著，形成一個(gè)濕紅的橢圓形，還有他的眼睛偶爾會(huì)往上飄，盯著只有他看得到的一團(tuán)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？”晚上出門散步時(shí)，他有時(shí)會(huì)問他。當(dāng)然，亨明從沒回答過。

　 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.

他的父母照顧亨明有效而稱職，但并不特別關(guān)愛。威廉有時(shí)因?yàn)樽闱蛸惢蚓毺飶揭趯W(xué)校待得晚些，或者必須在雜貨店值班，他的母親就會(huì)在車道盡頭的大馬路邊等亨明回家，抱亨明進(jìn)浴缸洗澡，喂他吃雞肉粥晚餐，幫他換尿布，然后讓他上床。但她不會(huì)讀書給他聽，不會(huì)跟他講話，也不會(huì)像威廉那樣推他出門散步?？粗改刚疹櫤嗝髯屗芾_，一部分原因是他們雖然從來沒有表現(xiàn)出反感，但他感覺得出來他們只是把亨明視為責(zé)任，僅此而已。然后他會(huì)在心中反駁自己，你頂多也只能期待他們這樣了，多做的都是幸運(yùn)。但是啊，他真希望他們更愛亨明一點(diǎn)，只要一點(diǎn)點(diǎn)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.)

（或許要他父母付出愛是太過奢求了。他們已經(jīng)失去了那么多小孩，或許因此再也不會(huì)或者無法全心全意去愛他們眼前擁有的小孩。終有一天，他跟亨明也會(huì)自愿或非自愿地離開，然后他們就會(huì)完全失去他們了。但要到至少二十年后，他才有辦法這樣看。）

　 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.

他上大學(xué)的第二年，亨明因?yàn)殛@尾炎緊急開刀?！八麄冋f還好及時(shí)發(fā)現(xiàn)?！彼赣H在電話里告訴他。她的聲調(diào)平淡，非常實(shí)際。沒有解脫，沒有憤怒，也沒有任何失望（盡管他不愿意，甚至害怕去想，還是逼自己留意）。亨明的看護(hù)（當(dāng)?shù)氐囊粋€(gè)女人，因?yàn)橥呀?jīng)離家，他父母雇她在夜里照顧亨明）注意到他抓自己的肚子并發(fā)出呻吟，從他下腹部的腫塊判斷，是闌尾炎。亨明開刀時(shí)，醫(yī)師們發(fā)現(xiàn)他大腸里有一個(gè)幾厘米大的瘤，于是做了切片檢查。X光證實(shí)那個(gè)瘤還在長(zhǎng)大，他們打算把那個(gè)瘤也切除。

　 “I’ll come home,” he said.

“我會(huì)趕回去?！彼f。

　 “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?！彼赣H說，“你來這里也做不了什么。如果情況變得嚴(yán)重了，我們會(huì)告訴你的?！碑?dāng)初威廉被這所大學(xué)錄取時(shí)，他的父母親困惑極了，因?yàn)閮扇硕疾恢浪ド暾?qǐng)，但如今他去讀了，他們判定他應(yīng)該畢業(yè)，盡快忘了這個(gè)牧場(chǎng)。

　 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.

但那天晚上他想著亨明孤單地躺在醫(yī)院病床上，想著他會(huì)多害怕，哭著想聽到他的聲音。亨明21歲時(shí)曾因?yàn)轲逇忾_刀，當(dāng)時(shí)他不斷啜泣，直到威廉握住他的手才停下。他知道他得回去。