《渺小一生》:这是个很棒的故事
“It wasn’t that bad, Harold,” he smiled. “I have very fond memories of this place, actually.” And then the mood turned again, and we both stood there staring at the building and thinking of you, and him, and all the years between this moment and the one in which I had met him, so young, so terribly young, and at that time just another student, terrifically smart and intellectually nimble, but nothing more, not the person I could have ever imagined him becoming for me.
“没有那么糟糕啦，哈罗德，”他微笑，“其实呢，这个地方有我非常珍爱的回忆。”他的心情又转变了，我们站在那里，瞪着那栋大楼，想到你，想到他，还从这一刻往前推、直到我认识他的那一刻。当时他那么年轻，年轻得不得了，只是我众多学生之一，超级聪明，脑子灵光，但也就如此而已。我绝对想象不到他有一天会变得对我这么重要。
And then he said—he was trying to make me feel better, too; we were each performing for the other—“Did I ever tell you about the time we jumped off the roof to the fire escape outside our bedroom?”
然后他也想让我开心一点，我们都在为对方表演。他说：“我跟你说过那回我们从屋顶跳下来，跳到卧室外头的防火梯上吗？”
“What?” I asked, genuinely appalled. “No, you never did. I think I would have remembered that.”
“什么？”我问，真的吓到了，“没有，你没说过。要是说过的话，我想我会记得的。”
But although I could never have imagined the person he would become for me, I knew how he would leave me: despite all my hopes, and pleas, and insinuations, and threats, and magical thoughts, I knew. And five months later—June twelfth, a day with no significant anniversaries associated with it, a nothing day—he did. My phone rang, and although it wasn’t a sinister time of night, and although nothing had happened that I would later see as foreshadowing, I knew, I knew. And on the other end was JB, and he was breathing oddly, in rapid bursts, and even before he spoke, I knew. He was fifty-three, fifty-three for not even two months. He had injected an artery with air, and had given himself a stroke, and although Andy had told me his death would have been quick, and painless, I later looked it up online and found he had lied to me: it would have meant sticking himself at least twice, with a needle whose gauge was as thick as a hummingbird’s beak; it would have been agonizing.
尽管我从没想到他会变得对我这么重要，但我知道他会怎么离开我：就算我一再希望、一再恳求、一再暗示，还有威胁和异想天开，但我就是知道。五个月后，六月十二日（不是什么特殊的周年纪念日，就只是一个不重要的日子），他离开了。我的电话响起，时间不是晚得离谱，事后回想起来也看不出任何预兆，但当时我知道，我就是知道。电话另一头是杰比，他呼吸不稳，非常急促，而他还没开口，我就知道了。他死于53岁，离满53岁还不到两个月。他把空气注射到动脉里，让自己中风。虽然安迪跟我说他应该死得非常快，没有痛苦，但我后来上网查，发现安迪没跟我说实话：那表示他用一根针头粗得像蜂鸟喙的注射针，朝自己扎了至少两次，而且会痛苦不堪。
When I went to his apartment, finally, it was so neat, with his office boxed up and the refrigerator emptied and everything—his will, letters—tiered on the dining-room table, like place cards at a wedding. Richard, JB, Andy, all of your and his old friends: they were all around, constantly, all of us moving about and around one another, shocked but not shocked, surprised only that we were so surprised, devastated and beaten and mostly, helpless. Had we missed something? Could we have done something different? After his service—which was crowded, with his friends and your friends and their parents and families, with his law school classmates, with his clients, with the staff and patrons of the arts nonprofit, with the board of the food kitchen, with a huge population of Rosen Pritchard employees, past and present, including Meredith, who came with an almost completely discombobulated Lucien (who lives, cruelly, to this day, although in a nursing home in Connecticut), with our friends, with people I wouldn’t have expected: Kit and Emil and Philippa and Robin—Andy came to me, crying, and confessed that he thought things had started really going wrong for him after he’d told him he was leaving his practice, and that it was his fault. I hadn’t even known Andy was leaving—he had never mentioned it to me—but I comforted him, and told him it wasn’t his fault, not at all, that he had always been good to him, that I had always trusted him.
最后我终于去了他那间公寓，里头很整洁，他的书房里堆着一箱箱东西，冰箱被清空了，他的遗嘱和留下的信件叠放在餐厅的桌上，像是婚礼的座位卡。理查德、杰比、安迪，你和他所有的老朋友都陆续赶来。我们走来走去，彼此招呼、交谈，震惊却又不是那么震惊，只惊讶我们居然会这么惊讶、这么难过、这么挫败，尤其是这么无助。我们漏掉了什么吗？我们可以做什么改变这个结果吗？他的葬礼来了好多人，有他的朋友、你的朋友和这些朋友的父母及家人，有他的法学院同学，有他的客户，有那个非营利艺术团体的员工和赞助人，有那个慈善厨房的委员会成员，有一大堆罗森·普理查德律师事务所过去跟现任员工。梅瑞迪丝也带着几乎完全糊涂的吕西安过来（残酷的是，他还活到现在，不过已经住进康涅狄格州的一家老人院），还有我们的朋友，以及我没想到的一些人，像基特、埃米尔、菲丽帕和罗宾。葬礼过后，安迪过来找我，哭着坦承，他觉得事情真正不对劲，是从他告诉他自己准备退休开始的，说都是他的错。我之前根本不知道安迪打算退休，他从来没跟我说过，但我安慰他，说不是他的错，完全不是，说他一直对他很好，而我一直信任他。
“At least Willem isn’t here,” we said to one another. “At least Willem isn’t here to see this.”
“至少威廉不在了，”我们彼此安慰，“至少威廉不会看到这个。”
Though, of course—if you were here, wouldn’t he still be as well?
当然——如果你还在的话，他不也还会活着？
But if I cannot say that I didn’t know how he would die, I can say that there was much I didn’t know, not at all, not after all. I didn’t know that Andy would be dead three years later of a heart attack, or Richard two years after that of brain cancer. You all died so young: you, Malcolm, him. Elijah, of a stroke, when he was sixty; Citizen, when he was sixty as well, of pneumonia. In the end there was, and is, only JB, to whom he left the house in Garrison, and whom we see often—there, or in the city, or in Cambridge. JB has a serious boyfriend now, a very good man named Tomasz, a specialist in Japanese medieval art at Sotheby’s, whom we like very much; I know both you and he would have as well. And although I feel bad for myself, for us—of course—I feel most bad most often for JB, deprived of you all, left to live the beginnings of old age by himself, with new friends, certainly, but without most of his friends who had known him since he was a child. At least I have known him since he was twenty-two; off and on, perhaps, but neither of us count the off years.
我没办法说我没想到他会死，但我可以说，当时有太多我没想到的事情，一点都没想到。我没想到安迪会在三年后死于心脏病发，也没想到过了两年，理查德会死于脑肿瘤。你们都那么年轻就死了：你、马尔科姆、他。伊利亚是60岁中风过世；西提任也是60岁，死于肺炎。到最后只剩下杰比，加里森的房子留给了他，现在我们还常见面——在加里森、纽约市区或剑桥市。杰比现在有一个认真交往的男朋友，是个很好的人，叫托马斯，是苏富比拍卖公司的日本中世纪美术专家，我们非常喜欢他；我知道你和他也会非常喜欢他的。我当然为自己、为我们夫妻难过，但我最常为杰比感到难过。他失去了你们三个，只剩他自己面对老年的开始，他当然有新朋友，但大多数成年前认识的朋友都没了。至少我是在他22岁认识他的；或许中间有时疏远，但那些疏远的年代，我们都不去算了。
And now JB is sixty-one and I am eighty-four, and he has been dead for six years and you have been dead for nine. JB’s most recent show was called “Jude, Alone,” and was of fifteen paintings of just him, depicting imagined moments from the years after you died, from those nearly three years he managed to hang on without you. I have tried, but I cannot look at them: I try, and try, but I cannot.
现在杰比61岁，我84岁了。而他已经过世六年，你也过世九年了。杰比最近的一次个展名叫“裘德，孤单”，里头有十五件画作，只画了他，描绘杰比想象中、你死后那段时间的一些时刻：在那近三年里，他设法在没有你的世界撑下去。我试过了，但我实在没办法看那些作品；我试了又试，但就是没办法。
And there were still more things I didn’t know. He was right: we had only moved to New York for him, and after we had settled his estate—Richard was his executor, though I helped him—we went home to Cambridge, to be near the people who had known us for so long. I’d had enough of cleaning and sorting—we had, along with Richard and JB and Andy, gone through all of his personal papers (there weren’t many), and clothes (a heartbreak itself, watching his suits get narrower and narrower) and your clothes; we had looked through your files at Lantern House together, which took many days because we kept stopping to cry or exclaim or pass around a picture none of us had seen before—but when we were back home, back in Cambridge, the very movement of organizing had become reflexive, and I sat down one Saturday to clean out the bookcases, an ambitious project that I soon lost interest in, when I found, tucked between two books, two envelopes, our names in his handwriting. I opened my envelope, my heart thrumming, and saw my name—Dear Harold—and read his note from decades ago, from the day of his adoption, and cried, sobbed, really, and then I slipped the disc into the computer and heard his voice, and although I would have cried anyway for its beauty, I cried more because it was his. And then Julia came home and found me and read her note and we cried all over again.
还有其他事情是我原先没想到的。他当初猜得没错，我们搬到纽约完全是为了他，所以处理完他的遗产后（理查德是他的遗嘱执行人，我也帮了忙），我们就搬回剑桥市的家，离我们的老友近一点。之前我做了太多整理和分类的工作——我和理查德、杰比、安迪一起处理了他所有的私人文件（并不多）和衣服（看着他的西装越来越窄，真是让人心碎），还有你的衣服；我们一起看过你在灯笼屋的档案，花了很多天，因为我们总是停下来哭或大喊或传阅一张我们没人看过的照片。等我们回到剑桥市的家，整理东西成了一种本能。有个星期六，我坐下来清理书柜，这个计划一开始充满野心，但很快我就失去了兴趣。此时我发现了一个信封，塞在两本书之间，上头是他的笔迹，写着我们夫妻各自的名字。我打开我的信封，心跳加速，然后看到我的名字——亲爱的哈罗德。阅读他二十几年前在收养那天写的短笺，我哭了，其实是啜泣。然后我把那张光碟放进电脑里，听着他的声音。光是听到那么美的声音，我无论如何就会哭了，但我主要是因为听到他的声音而哭。后来朱丽娅回家看到我，也读了她的那张短笺，我们又哭了一次。
And it wasn’t until a few weeks after that that I was able to open the letter he had left us on his table. I hadn’t been able to bear it earlier; I wasn’t sure I would be able to bear it now. But I did. It was eight pages long, and typed, and it was a confession: of Brother Luke, and Dr. Traylor, and what had happened to him. It took us several days to read, because although it was brief, it was also endless, and we had to keep putting the pages down and walking away from them, and then bracing each other—Ready?—and sitting down and reading some more.
又过了几个星期，我才打开他放在格林街公寓餐桌上留给我们夫妻的那封信。之前我实在没办法鼓起勇气；其实现在我也不确定自己受得了。但我还是打开来读。那封信有八页，是打字机打印的，那是一份告解：有关卢克修士，有关特雷勒医生，还有曾经发生在他身上的事情。我们花了好几天才看完。虽然他写得很简略，但同时也漫长得仿佛永无止境，我们不时得放下来离开，然后彼此打气——准备好了吗？坐下来再看一点。
“I’m sorry,” he wrote. “Please forgive me. I never meant to deceive you.”
“对不起，”他写道，“请原谅我。我从来无意欺瞒你们。”
I still don’t know what to say about that letter, I still cannot think of it. All those answers I had wanted about who and why he was, and now those answers only torment. That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself—after you, after me, after all of us who loved him—makes me think that my life has been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted. It is then that I talk to you the most, that I go downstairs late at night and stand before Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, which now hangs above our dining-room table: “Willem,” I ask you, “do you feel like I do? Do you think he was happy with me?” Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it. But you only smile, not at me but just past me, and you never have an answer. It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.
关于那封信，我至今还是不知道要说些什么，还是无法去想。所有关于他是什么样的人、为什么，现在都有了答案，而那些答案只会折磨人罢了。他死时孤单得远超过我所能想象的；他死时还觉得该向我道歉，这是最糟糕的；尽管你、我、我们所有爱他的人多年来这么努力，他死时依然固执地相信他小时候被教导的、关于他的一切，这一点让我觉得自己的人生还是失败了，在最重要的事情上失败了。此时是我最经常找你讲话的时候，我会在深夜下楼，站在《威廉听裘德说故事》面前，这幅画现在挂在我们餐桌旁的墙上。“威廉，”我问你，“你的感觉跟我一样吗？你认为他跟我在一起快乐吗？”他有资格得到快乐的。我们没有一个人能保证，但他实在有资格得到快乐。可是你只是微笑，不是对着我，而是掠过我，从不回答。此时，我真希望自己相信死后会有某种生活，相信在另一个宇宙里，或许是个小小的红色星球，那里的人没有双腿，只有尾巴，大家都像海豹一样在大气中划着水，那里的空气就能提供我们所需的养分，含有无数蛋白质和糖的分子，我们只要张开嘴巴吸入，就可以健康地生存下去，或许你们两个就在那里团聚，在那里漂浮着。也或许他离我更近：或许他是最近开始坐在我邻居房子外头的那只灰猫，我一朝它伸手，它就发出满足的呼噜声。或许他是我另一个邻居最近新养的那只幼犬，在牵绳的一端拉扯着；或许他是我几个月前看到、跑过广场的那个学步小孩，他父母气呼呼地追在后头，他则兴奋地尖叫；或许他是我早以为枯死的那丛杜鹃里忽然绽放出来的那朵花；或许他是那朵云、那道海浪、那场大雨、那阵薄雾。重要的不光是他死了，也不光是他的死法，而是他至死仍然相信的。于是我设法对我见到的万事万物心怀善意，而在我看到的每件事物中，我都看见了他。
But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.
但回到当时，我们站在利斯本纳街那天，有太多事情我还不明白。当时，我们只是站在那里，抬头看着那栋红砖楼房，我假装我从来不必替他担心，他也让我假装，包括他可能做出的种种危险行径，他可能让我心碎的种种方式，那些都过去了，都成了故事的材料；过去的时光虽然可怕，但眼前的岁月并不可怕。
“You jumped off the roof?” I repeated. “Why on earth would you have done such a thing?”
“你们从屋顶跳下来？”我又问了一次。“你们到底为什么要做这种事？”
“It’s a good story,” he said. He even grinned at me. “I’ll tell you.”
“这是个很棒的故事，”他说，甚至朝我咧嘴笑了，“我会告诉你的。”
“Please,” I said.
“说吧。”我说。
And then he did.
然后，他说了。
