《渺小一生》:在某些方面，联邦检察官办公室会让他回想起少年之家

　 The holiday ended and the fall semester began, and it didn’t take him long to realize that over that weekend, one of his friends must have said something to Harold, although he was certain it wasn’t Willem, who was the only one to whom he’d finally told something of his past—and even then, not very much at all: three facts, each more slender than the last, all meaningless, all of which combined to make not even a beginning of a story. Even the first sentences of a fairy tale had more detail than what he had told Willem: Once upon a time, a boy and a girl lived with their father, a woodcutter, and their stepmother, deep in a cold forest. The woodcutter loved his children, but he was very poor, and so one day … So whatever Harold had learned had been speculation, buttressed by their observations of him, their theories and guesses and fictions. But whatever it was, it had been enough to make Harold’s questions to him—about who he had been and where he had come from—stop.

假期结束，秋天的新学期开始。没多久他就明白，那个周末，他的某个朋友一定跟哈罗德说了些什么，不过他确定不是威廉，他只跟威廉稍微提到一点自己的过去。即使在当时，提到的事情也很少，只有三项事实，一个比一个微小，全都没有意义，加起来连一个故事的开头都凑不出来。就连童话故事的第一句，都比他告诉威廉的三件事要更详尽：从前有一个小男孩和一个小女孩，跟他们的伐木工父亲和继母，住在一片寒冷的森林深处。伐木工父亲很疼爱子女，但他非常穷，于是有一天……所以，不管哈罗德得知了什么，都是其他人凭着观察而推测的，只是一些推理、猜想和虚构。但不管是什么，都足以让哈罗德对他的提问（关于他的过去和他的家乡）就此停止。

　 As the months and then the years passed, they developed a friendship in which the first fifteen years of his life remained unsaid and unspoken, as if they had never happened at all, as if he had been removed from the manufacturer’s box when he reached college, and a switch at the base of his neck had been flipped, and he had shuddered to life. He knew that those blank years were filled in by Harold’s own imaginings, and that some of those imaginings were worse than what had actually happened, and some were better. But Harold never told him what he supposed for him, and he didn’t really want to know.

随着几个月过去，然后是几年，他们发展出了一种默契，从不谈他15岁之前的事情，好像那十五年根本不存在。到了他去读大学时，有人把他从工厂的箱子里拿出来，按下他颈部的开关，他就颤抖着活起来。他知道哈罗德仅凭自己的想象，去填补那空白的十五年，某些想象的片段比他真正经历过的更糟，某些则更好。但哈罗德从没把自己想象的内容告诉他，他也不想知道。

　 He had never considered their friendship contextual, but he was prepared for the likelihood that Harold and Julia did. And so when he moved to Washington for his clerkship, he assumed that they would forget him, and he tried to prepare himself for the loss. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they sent e-mails, and called, and when one or the other was in town, they would have dinner. In the summers, he and his friends visited Truro, and over Thanksgiving, they went to Cambridge. And when he moved to New York two years later to begin his job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Harold had been almost alarmingly excited for him. They had even offered to let him live in their apartment on the Upper West Side, but he knew they used it often, and he wasn’t sure how real their offer was, and so he declined.

他从不觉得他们的友谊是因为环境而形成的，但他觉得哈罗德和朱丽娅可能会这么想，也有心理准备。于是他搬去华盛顿当法官助理时，以为他们会忘了他，也试着做好失去这对朋友的准备。结果这并没有发生。反之，他们写电子邮件、打电话给他，每次其中一人到华盛顿时就会找他一起吃晚餐。夏天，他和朋友会去特鲁罗度假；感恩节，他们会去剑桥市拜访。两年后他搬到纽约，开始在联邦检察官办公室工作，哈罗德简直替他兴奋到不行，甚至提议让他住他们夫妇在上西城的公寓，但他知道他们常去那里小住，而且他不确定这个提议有多认真，于是就婉拒了。

　 Every Saturday, Harold would call and ask him about work, and he’d tell him about his boss, Marshall, the deputy U.S. Attorney, who had the unnerving ability to recite entire Supreme Court decisions from memory, closing his eyes to summon a vision of the page in his mind, his voice becoming robotic and dull as he chanted, but never dropping or adding a word. He had always thought he had a good memory, but Marshall’s amazed him.

每个星期六，哈罗德会打电话问起他的工作，他会聊起他的上司，副联邦检察官马歇尔。他的记忆力好得吓人，能背出所有最高法院的决议，闭着眼睛就能随便念上一段，念诵时声音变得呆板而沉闷，但从来不会多一个字或少一个字。他总以为自己的记性很好，但马歇尔的记忆力令他惊奇。

　 In some ways, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reminded him of the home: it was largely male, and the place fizzed with a particular and constant hostility, the kind of hissing acrimony that naturally arises whenever a group of highly competitive people who are all evenly matched are housed in the same small space with the understanding that only some of them would have the opportunity to distinguish themselves. (Here, though, they were matched in accomplishments; at the home, they were matched in hunger, in want.) All two hundred of the assistant prosecutors, it seemed, had attended one of five or six law schools, and virtually all of them had been on the law review and moot court at their respective schools. He was part of a four-person team that worked mostly on securities fraud cases, and he and his teammates each had something—a credential, an idiosyncrasy—that they hoped lifted them above the others: he had his master’s from MIT (which no one cared about but was at least an oddity) and his circuit court clerkship with Sullivan, with whom Marshall was friendly. Citizen, his closest friend at the office, had a law degree from Cambridge and had practiced as a barrister in London for two years before moving to New York. And Rhodes, the third in their trio, had been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina after college. (The fourth on their team was a profoundly lazy guy named Scott who, it was rumored, had only gotten the job because his father played tennis with the president.)

在某些方面，联邦检察官办公室会让他回想起少年之家，大部分是男性，整个地方有一种特殊而持续的敌对气氛。只要有一群不相上下、好胜心强的人待在同一个空间，而且明白其中只有少数人有机会脱颖而出，自然就会出现那种隐隐的唇枪舌剑（不过在这里，他们不相上下的是成就；在少年之家，他们不相上下的是饥渴和向往）。两百个助理检察官似乎都出自同样的五六所法学院，差不多每个人都是各校的法学评论学刊编辑，当过模拟法庭辩论赛的代表。他这个小组有四个人，主要负责证券诈欺案件。他和组员各自有着不同的资历和特质，期望能凭借它们略胜别人一筹。他拥有麻省理工学院的硕士学位（就算没人在乎，好歹也让他与众不同），曾担任巡回法庭沙利文法官的助理，而马歇尔和沙利文法官是好友。办公室里他最要好的朋友西提任则在英国剑桥大学拿到法律学位，搬到纽约前曾在伦敦担任两年出庭律师。他们三人组里头的第三人罗兹，大学毕业后拿了阿根廷的富布赖特奖学金赴美深造。（他们小组里的第四人是个很懒的家伙斯科特，谣传他能得到这份工作，是因为他父亲是总统的网球球友）

　 He was usually at the office, and sometimes, when he and Citizen and Rhodes were there late, eating takeout, he was reminded of being with his roommates in their suite at Hood. And although he enjoyed Citizen’s and Rhodes’s company, and the specificity and depth of their intelligence, he was in those moments nostalgic for his friends, who thought so differently than he did and who made him think differently as well. In the middle of one conversation with Citizen and Rhodes about logic, he recalled, suddenly, a question Dr. Li had asked him his freshman year, when he was auditioning to be accepted into his pure math seminar: Why are manhole covers round? It was an easy question, and easy to answer, but when he’d returned to Hood and had repeated Dr. Li’s question to his roommates, they were silent. And then finally JB had begun, in the dreamy tones of a wandering storyteller, “Once, very long ago, mammoths roamed the earth, and their footprints left permanent circular indentations in the ground,” and they had all laughed. He smiled, remembering it; he sometimes wished he had a mind like JB’s, one that could create stories that would delight others, instead of the mind he did have, which was always searching for an explanation, an explanation that, while perhaps correct, was empty of romance, of fancy, of wit.

他平常都待在办公室。有时，跟西提任和罗兹加班到很晚，吃着外卖食物时，他会想起在虎德馆的套房里和室友共度的日子。尽管他也很喜欢跟西提任和罗兹在一起，而且很尊敬他们独特的、具有深度的智慧，但那些时刻，他总会怀念起他的好友。他们的想法跟他截然不同，让他也跟着跳脱框架去思考。有回他跟西提任和罗兹讨论逻辑到一半，忽然想起他硕一那年，为了参加李博士开的纯数学专题研讨课前去面试时，被问到一个问题：为什么人孔盖是圆的？这是个简单的问题，很容易回答，但是当他回到虎德馆，把李博士的问题转述给室友听时，他们全都沉默不语。最后杰比终于开口，用流浪说书人那种柔和的口吻说：“很久很久以前，长毛象在地球到处漫步，它们的脚印在地上留下了永恒的圆形凹印。”他们全都大笑起来。想到这件事，他露出微笑，有时他真希望自己有个像杰比一样的脑子，可以编出让别人开心的故事，而不是像他自己这样，总是在寻找解释。解释可能是对的，却缺乏浪漫、想象力，以及才思。

　 “Time to whip out the credentials,” Citizen would whisper to him on the occasions that the U.S. Attorney himself would emerge onto the floor and all the assistant prosecutors would buzz toward him, mothlike, as a multitude of gray suits. They and Rhodes would join the hover, but even in those gatherings he never mentioned the one credential he knew could have made not only Marshall but the U.S. Attorney as well stop and look at him more closely. After he’d gotten the job, Harold had asked him if he could mention him to Adam, the U.S. Attorney, with whom Harold was, it happened, longtime acquaintances. But he’d told Harold he wanted to know he could make it on his own. This was true, but the greater reason was that he was tentative about naming Harold as one of his assets, because he didn’t want Harold to regret his association with him. And so he’d said nothing.

“该去秀一下我们的资历了。”每逢联邦检察官本人来到这一楼，西提任就会偷偷这么跟他咬耳朵。此时，所有助理检察官都会匆忙涌上去，一大群灰色西装像飞蛾见到火似的。他们两个和罗兹也会加入，但即使在那些时候，他也从来不曾提起他的王牌资历，明知这资历不但可以让马歇尔印象深刻，也会让联邦检察官停下来多看他两眼。在他得到这份工作后，哈罗德曾问他可否在亚当（也就是联邦检察官）面前提起他，因为哈罗德碰巧跟亚当认识很久了。但他跟哈罗德说他想靠自己。这是实话，但更重要的理由是，他不确定该把哈罗德的名字当成自己的资产，因为他不希望让哈罗德后悔跟他来往。于是他什么都没提。

　 Often, however, it felt as if Harold was there anyway. Reminiscing about law school (and its attendant activity, bragging about one’s accomplishments in law school) was a favorite pastime in the office, and because so many of his colleagues had gone to his school, quite a few of them knew Harold (and the others knew of him), and he’d sometimes listen to them talk about classes they’d taken with him, or how prepared they’d had to be for them, and would feel proud of Harold, and—though he knew it was silly—proud of himself for knowing him. The following year, Harold’s book about the Constitution would be published, and everyone in the office would read the acknowledgments and see his name and his affiliation with Harold would be revealed, and many of them would be suspicious, and he’d see worry in their faces as they tried to remember what they might have said about Harold in his presence. By that time, however, he would feel he had established himself in the office on his own, had found his own place alongside Citizen and Rhodes, had made his own relationship with Marshall.

然而，感觉上哈罗德好像还是在他身旁。办公室里大家最喜欢的娱乐，就是回忆法学院（还有他们当时参加的活动，吹嘘着各自在法学院的成就）。由于很多同事都跟他上过同一所法学院，其中不少人也认识哈罗德（还有一些人认识他），有时就会听见他们谈到自己修过哈罗德的课，或是为了这门课要做多少准备，听到这些他深以哈罗德为荣，也以自己认识他为荣（虽然他觉得这样很傻气）。次年，哈罗德有关宪法的那本书即将出版，办公室每个人都会读到致谢辞，看到他的名字，知道他当过哈罗德的研究助理，很多人会开始起疑心，他会看到他们一脸担心，努力回想曾在他面前说过哈罗德什么。然而到那时，他会觉得已经靠自己在这个办公室巩固了地位，跟西提任和罗兹找到了自己的位置，和马歇尔建立了关系。

　 But as much as he would have liked to, as much as he craved it, he was still cautious about claiming Harold as his friend: sometimes he worried that he was only imagining their closeness, inflating it hopefully in his mind, and then (to his embarrassment) he would have to retrieve The Beautiful Promise from his shelf and turn to the acknowledgments, reading Harold’s words again, as if it were itself a contract, a declaration that what he felt for Harold was at least in some degree reciprocated. And yet he was always prepared: It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of the month: Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month. He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong.

他很愿意、也很渴望成为哈罗德的朋友，但他还是很谨慎地避免这么宣称。有时他担心两人之间的亲近根本是他自己想象出来的。因为太过期望，才会在心里让这份交情膨胀，这时他就会（很尴尬地）把哈罗德《美丽的承诺》这本书从书架上抽出来，翻到致谢辞那一页再读一次，好像那致谢辞本身就是一份契约，宣告他对哈罗德的感觉至少在某种程度上是相互的。然而他一直准备着：这个月就会结束了，他会告诉自己。然后，到了月底：下个月，他下个月就不会想再理我了。他设法让自己持续处于准备好的状态，他设法让自己做好失望的准备，即使他很渴望最后证明自己是错的。

　 And still, the friendship spooled on and on, a long, swift river that had caught him in its slipstream and was carrying him along, taking him somewhere he couldn’t see. At every point when he thought that he had reached the limits of what their relationship would be, Harold or Julia flung open the doors to another room and invited him in. He met Julia’s father, a retired pulmonologist, and brother, an art history professor, when they visited from England one Thanksgiving, and when Harold and Julia came to New York, they took him and Willem out to dinner, to places they had heard about but couldn’t afford to visit on their own. They saw the apartment at Lispenard Street—Julia polite, Harold horrified—and the week that the radiators mysteriously stopped working, they left him a set of keys to their apartment uptown, which was so warm that for the first hour after he and Willem arrived, they simply sat on the sofa like mannequins, too stunned by the sudden reintroduction of heat into their lives to move. And after Harold witnessed him in the middle of an episode—this was the Thanksgiving after he moved to New York, and in his desperation (he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it upstairs), he had turned off the stove, where he had been sauteeing some spinach, and pulled himself into the pantry, where he had shut the door and laid down on the floor to wait—they had rearranged the house, so that the next time he visited, he found the spare bedroom had been moved to the ground-floor suite behind the living room where Harold’s study had been, and Harold’s desk and chair and books moved to the second floor.

然而，这份友谊一直持续下去，像一条湍急漫长的河，把他卷入水流中，带着他往下，来到预想不到的地方。每当他觉得到达两人关系的极限时，哈罗德和朱丽娅就会打开另一个房间的门，邀请他进入。有一年的感恩节，朱丽娅的家人从英格兰来访，他因此认识了朱丽娅的父亲（一位退休的胸腔内科医生），以及哥哥（一位艺术史教授）。而哈罗德和朱丽娅来纽约时，会带他和威廉出去吃晚餐，去一些他们听过但吃不起的餐厅。他们夫妇也看过利斯本纳街那间公寓（朱丽娅的态度保持礼貌，哈罗德则吓坏了），恰好那个星期，公寓暖气不知为何刚好坏了，他们把上西城公寓的钥匙给了他一份。他和威廉一进去，就发现里头实在太温暖，刚到的第一个小时，他们就像两个假人似的坐在沙发上，因为暖气重回他们的生活而惊讶得无法动弹。而在哈罗德目睹他疼痛发作的样子之后——事情发生在他搬回纽约后的那个感恩节，当时他正在厨房炒菠菜，绝望中（心知自己绝对没法爬上二楼）他关掉炉火，拖着身子进入食品贮藏室，关上门躺在地板上等待——他们夫妇就重新安排了房子的格局，下回他去拜访，发现楼上客房的家具被移到了一楼客厅后方的套房里，那原先是哈罗德的书房，而那里面的桌椅和书都被搬到了二楼。

　 But even after all of this, a part of him was always waiting for the day he’d come to a door and try the knob and it wouldn’t move. He didn’t mind that, necessarily; there was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return. He tried to give them what he could; he was aware it wasn’t much. And the things Harold gave him so easily—answers, affection—he couldn’t reciprocate.

即使在这一切之后，一部分的他还总是等待有一天自己会被关在一扇门外，门把转不开。那样他也未必会太介意，因为置身在一个毫无禁区、为他提供一切却不要求回报的空间里，其实有点可怕，又让人焦虑。他设法尽可能地对他们付出，但能给的实在不多。而哈罗德那么轻易地给予他的一切，无论是答案或关爱，都是他无法回报的。

　 One day after he’d known them for almost seven years, he was at the house in springtime. It was Julia’s birthday; she was turning fifty-one, and because she had been at a conference in Oslo for her fiftieth birthday, she’d decided that this would be her big celebration. He and Harold were cleaning the living room—or rather, he was cleaning, and Harold was plucking books at random from the shelves and telling him stories about how he’d gotten each one, or flipping back the covers so he could see other people’s names written inside, including a copy of The Leopard on whose flyleaf was scrawled: “Property of Laurence V. Raleigh. Do not take. Harold Stein, this means you!!”

认识他们将近七年的那个春天，有一天他在他们家。那是朱丽娅51岁的生日，前一年她50岁生日时去了奥斯陆参加学术会议，于是决定今年要好好庆祝一番。那天他和哈罗德正在打扫客厅，其实是他在打扫，哈罗德任意从书架上抽出一本书来，告诉他那本书是怎么得到的，或是翻开封面，让他看看其他人写在里头的名字。其中有一本《豹》，书前的扉页写着“劳伦斯·瑞里的财产。不准拿走。哈罗德·斯坦，我就是在说你！！”

　 He had threatened to tell Laurence, and Harold had threatened him back. “You’d better not, Jude, if you know what’s good for you.”

当时他威胁要告诉劳伦斯，哈罗德也威胁他：“你最好不要，裘德。这样对你可没有好处。”

　 “Or what?” he’d asked, teasing him.

“不然呢？”他问，逗着他。

　 “Or—this!” Harold had said, and had leaped at him, and before he could recognize that Harold was just being playful, he had recoiled so violently, torquing his body to avoid contact, that he had bumped into the bookcase and had knocked against a lumpy ceramic mug that Harold’s son, Jacob, had made, which fell to the ground and broke into three neat pieces. Harold had stepped back from him then, and there was a sudden, horrible silence, into which he had nearly wept.

“不然——这个！”哈罗德说着便朝他扑过去，他还没来得及搞清楚哈罗德只是在玩闹，就猛然往后缩，转身想避开哈罗德，却不小心撞上了书架，撞到一个凹凸不平的瓷杯，那是哈罗德的儿子雅各布做的。结果杯子掉到地上，摔成干净利落的三片。哈罗德往后退，接着是一段可怕的沉默，他差点哭了出来。

　 “Harold,” he said, crouching to the ground, picking up the pieces, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” He wanted to beat himself against the floor; he knew this was the last thing Jacob had made Harold before he got sick. Above him, he could hear only Harold’s breathing.

“哈罗德，”他说，蹲在地上，捡起那些碎片，“我好抱歉，我好抱歉。请原谅我。”他真想把自己打趴在地板上，他知道这是雅各布生病之前帮哈罗德做的最后一件东西。在他上方，他只听到哈罗德的呼吸声。

　 “Harold, please forgive me,” he repeated, cupping the pieces in his palms. “I think I can fix this, though—I can make it better.” He couldn’t look up from the mug, its shiny buttered glaze.

“哈罗德，请你原谅我。”他又说了一次，手里捧着那些碎片，“不过我想我可以修好，我可以弄得好一点。”他看着马克杯发亮的乳白色釉面，不敢抬头。

　 He felt Harold crouch beside him. “Jude,” Harold said, “it’s all right. It was an accident.” His voice was very quiet. “Give me the pieces,” he said, but he was gentle, and he didn’t sound angry.

他感觉到哈罗德蹲在他旁边。“裘德，”哈罗德说，“没关系，这是意外。”他的声音很轻，“把碎片给我。”他说，但他的动作很轻柔，听起来也不像生气。

　 He did. “I can leave,” he offered.

他照做了。“我可以离开。”他说。

　 “Of course you’re not going to leave,” Harold said. “It’s okay, Jude.”

“你当然不能离开。”哈罗德说，“没事的，裘德。”