《渺小一生》:他很努力地不要在夜里哭，但
He knew how to cook. He could only make a dozen or so dishes from start to finish, but he knew how to clean and peel potatoes, carrots, rutabaga. He could chop hills of onions and never cry. He could debone a fish and knew how to pluck and clean a chicken. He knew how to make dough, he knew how to make bread. He knew how to whip egg whites until they transformed from liquid to solid to something better than solid: something like air given form.
他会做菜。虽然只会十几道菜，但他知道如何清洗马铃薯、胡萝卜、芜菁甘蓝并削皮，也能切出一堆洋葱而不掉泪。他会去鱼骨头，也懂得拔鸡毛并清理。他会做生面团、烤面包，还会把蛋白从液体打成固体、再打成某种比固体更好的形态，就像有形的空气一样。
And he knew how to garden. He knew which plants craved sun and which shied from it. He knew how to determine whether a plant was parched or drowning in too much water. He knew when a tree or bush needed to be repotted, and when it was hardy enough to be transferred into the earth. He knew which plants needed to be protected from cold, and how to protect them. He knew how to make a clipping and how to make the clipping grow. He knew how to mix fertilizer, how to add eggshells into the soil for extra protein, how to crush an aphid without destroying the leaf it was perched on. He could do all of these things, although he was hoping he would get to garden, because he wanted to work outside, and on his morning runs, he could feel that summer was coming, and on their drives to the track, he had seen fields in bloom with wildflowers, and he wanted to be among them.
而且他会园艺。他知道哪种植物喜欢阳光，哪一种又不喜欢。他可以判定一棵植物是太干还是浇了太多水。他知道一棵乔木或灌木什么时候需要换盆，什么时候又强壮到可以移植到土地上。他知道哪种植物要防寒、如何防寒。他知道如何剪枝、插枝。他知道如何混合肥料，在土里加上蛋壳好增加蛋白质，如何掐死一只蚜虫而不伤到底下的叶子。他可以做这一切，虽然他比较希望是和园艺相关的，因为他想在户外工作，而且早晨跑步时，他可以感觉到夏天快来了，开车去田径场时，他看到了田野间开着野花，真想置身其中。
Brother Luke knelt by him. “You’re going to do what you did with Father Gabriel and a couple of the brothers,” he said, and then, slowly, he understood what Luke was saying, and he stepped back toward the bed, everything within him seizing with fear. “Jude, it’s going to be different now,” Luke said, before he could say anything. “It’ll be over so fast, I promise you. And you’re so good at it. And I’ll be waiting in the bathroom to make sure nothing goes wrong, all right?” He stroked his hair. “Come here,” he said, and held him. “You are a wonderful kid,” he said. “It’s because of you and what you’re doing that we’re going to have our cabin, all right?” Brother Luke had talked and talked, and finally, he had nodded.
卢克修士跪在他旁边。“你要做你跟盖柏瑞神父和其他两个修士做过的那些事。”修士说。然后缓缓地，他明白卢克的意思了。他往后退向床边，忽然满心恐惧。“裘德，现在会不一样的。”卢克没等他回答就说，“会结束得很快，我保证。而且你很擅长的。我会在浴室等着，确保不会出错，好吗？”他摸着他的头发。“过来这里，”他说，然后抱着他，“你是个很棒的孩子，”他说，“因为你和你所做的一切，我们就能拥有我们的小木屋了，好吗？”卢克修士说了又说，他终于点头。
The man had come in (many years later, his would be one of the very few of their faces he would remember, and sometimes, he would see men on the street and they would look familiar, and he would think: How do I know him? Is he someone I was in court with? Was he the opposing counsel on that case last year? And then he would remember: he looks like the first of them, the first of the clients) and Luke had gone to the bathroom, which was just behind his bed, and he and the man had had sex and then the man had left.
那个男人走进来（多年后，这会是那些人里头极少数他记得的脸之一，有时他在路上看到某个男人，觉得眼熟，便想：我怎么会认识他？是我在法庭见过的人吗？是去年那个案子的对手律师吗？然后他会想起来：他看起来就像第一个顾客），卢克则去紧临他床铺后方的浴室里。接下来他和那男人性交，之后那男人便离开了。
That night he was very quiet, and Luke was gentle and tender with him. He had even brought him a cookie—a gingersnap—and he had tried to smile at Luke, and tried to eat it, but he couldn’t, and when Luke wasn’t looking, he wrapped it in a piece of paper and threw it away. The next day he hadn’t wanted to go to the track in the morning, but Luke had said he’d feel better with some exercise, and so they had gone and he had tried to run, but it was too painful and he had eventually sat down and waited until Luke said they could leave.
那天夜里他很安静，卢克对他和善又温柔，甚至拿了一块饼干给他，是一块脆姜饼干。他设法对卢克微笑，设法吃下去，但他没有办法。于是他趁卢克没注意时，用一张纸把饼干包起来丢掉。次日早上他不想去田径场跑步，但卢克说他运动一下会觉得比较好过，于是他去了，试着跑步，但实在太痛了，最后他就坐下来，直到卢克说他们可以离开了。
Now their routine was different: they still had classes in the mornings and afternoons, but now, some evenings, Brother Luke brought back men, his clients. Sometimes there was just one; sometimes there were several. The men brought their own towels and their own sheets, which they fitted over the bed before they began and unpeeled and took with them when they left.
现在他们的每日固定作息不一样了：上午和下午还是会上课，但现在某些夜晚，卢克修士会带男人回来，那是他的顾客。那些男人会带着自己的毛巾和床单，开始之前先铺在床上，离开时再带走。
He tried very hard not to cry at night, but when he did, Brother Luke would come sit with him and rub his back and comfort him. “How many more until we can get the cabin?” he asked, but Luke just shook his head, sadly. “I won’t know for a while,” he said. “But you’re doing such a good job, Jude. You’re so good at it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” But he knew there was something shameful about it. No one had ever told him there was, but he knew anyway. He knew what he was doing was wrong.
他很努力地不要在夜里哭，但有时忍不住，卢克修士会坐在他旁边，抚着他的背安慰他。“还要多少，我们才能盖小木屋？”他问，但卢克只是哀伤地摇头。“暂时还不知道。”他说，“但你做得很好，裘德。你很擅长这个。没什么好羞愧的。”但他知道这事情就是有什么可耻的地方。没有人跟他说过，但他就是知道。他知道自己做的是错的。
And then, after a few months—and many motels; they moved every ten days or so, all around east Texas, and with every move, Luke took him to the forest, which really was beautiful, and to the clearing where they’d have their cabin—things changed again. He was lying in his bed one night (a night during a week in which there had been no clients. “A little vacation,” Luke had said, smiling. “Everyone needs a break, especially someone who works as hard as you do”) when Luke asked, “Jude, do you love me?”
然后，过了几个月（中间他们换了很多汽车旅馆；每十天左右就会搬一次，全都在东德州。每次搬家，卢克就会带他去森林里，那里真的很美，然后到他们要盖小木屋的那片林间空地），事情又改变了。有天夜里他躺在床上（他每周有一天晚上不必接客。“度个小假期吧。每个人都需要休息一下，尤其是像你这么努力工作的人。”卢克微笑着说），卢克忽然说，“裘德，你爱我吗？”
He hesitated. Four months ago, he would’ve said yes immediately, proudly and unthinkingly. But now—did he love Brother Luke? He often wondered about this. He wanted to. The brother had never hurt him, or hit him, or said anything mean to him. He took care of him. He was always waiting just behind the wall to make sure nothing bad happened to him. The week before, a client had tried to make him do something Brother Luke said he never had to do if he didn’t want to, and he had been struggling and trying to cry out, but there had been a pillow over his face and he knew his noises were muffled. He was frantic, almost sobbing, when suddenly the pillow had been lifted from his face, and the man’s weight from his body, and Brother Luke was telling the man to get out of the room, in a tone he had never before heard from the brother but which had frightened and impressed him.
他犹豫了。四个月前，他会骄傲又不假思索地立刻说是的。但现在，他爱卢克修士吗？他常常想这个问题。他想要爱他。修士从不伤害他，也不打他，更不会对他说刻薄话。他照顾他。他总是在墙后守着，好确定他没事。上个星期，一个顾客想逼他做一些事情，但卢克修士说那些事他如果不愿意就永远不必做，于是他挣扎着想叫，但他脸上蒙着枕头，知道自己的声音被闷住了。他慌了，差点哭出来。忽然间脸上的枕头被拿开，那男人压在他身上的重量不见了，他看到卢克修士叫那男人滚出房间，用一种他从没听过修士用的口气，让他害怕又佩服。
And yet something else told him that he shouldn’t love Brother Luke, that the brother had done something to him that was wrong. But he hadn’t. He had volunteered for this, after all; it was for the cabin in the woods, where he would have his own sleeping loft, that he was doing this. And so he told the brother he did.
但有别的事情让他觉得自己不该爱卢克修士，让他觉得修士对他做了非常糟糕的事情。但毕竟这是他自愿的，他会这么做是为了森林里的小木屋，为了他自己的阁楼卧室。于是他告诉修士他爱他。
He was momentarily happy when he saw the smile on the brother’s face, as if he had presented him with the cabin itself. “Oh, Jude,” he said, “that is the greatest gift I could ever get. Do you know how much I love you? I love you more than I love my own self. I think of you like my own son,” and he had smiled back, then, because sometimes, he had privately thought of Luke as his father, and he as Luke’s son. “Your dad said you’re nine, but you look older,” one of the clients had said to him, suspiciously, before they had begun, and he had answered what Luke had told him to say—“I’m tall for my age”—both pleased and oddly not-pleased that the client had thought Luke was his father.
他看到修士脸上的笑容时，一时间也很开心，好像看到了小木屋似的。“啊，裘德，”修士说，“这是我这辈子所得到最棒的礼物了。你知道我有多爱你吗？我爱你超过爱我自己。我把你当成是亲生儿子。”然后他也微笑了，因为有时候，他会偷偷把卢克想成他父亲，而他是卢克的儿子。“你爸说你9岁了，但是你看起来不止。”一个顾客开始之前曾疑心地跟他说，于是他照卢克教他的说：“我的个子比较高。”他很高兴那个顾客以为卢克是他父亲，但同时又觉得不高兴。
Then Brother Luke had explained to him that when two people loved each other as much as they did, that they slept in the same bed, and were naked with each other. He hadn’t known what to say to this, but before he could think of what it might be, Brother Luke was moving into bed with him and taking off his clothes and then kissing him. He had never kissed before—Brother Luke didn’t let the clients do it with him—and he didn’t like it, didn’t like the wetness and the force of it. “Relax,” the brother told him. “Just relax, Jude,” and he tried to as much as he could.
然后卢克修士跟他解释，当两个人像他们这么相爱时，就会睡在同一张床上，而且会赤裸相对。他听了不知该说什么，但他还来不及思考那是什么状况，卢克修士就移到他床上，脱掉他的衣服吻他。他从来没接吻过（卢克修士不准顾客吻他），而且他也不喜欢，不喜欢那种潮湿和力量。“放松，”修士告诉他，“放松就好，裘德。”他努力地尽量放松。
The first time the brother had sex with him, he told him it would be different than with the clients. “Because we’re in love,” he’d said, and he had believed him, and when it had felt the same after all—as painful, as difficult, as uncomfortable, as shameful—he assumed he was doing something wrong, especially because the brother was so happy afterward. “Wasn’t that nice?” the brother asked him, “didn’t it feel different?,” and he had agreed, too embarrassed to admit that it had been no different at all, that it had been just as awful as it had been with the client the day before.
修士第一次要他性交时，跟他说这跟他和顾客做不一样。“因为我们相爱。”他说。起初他相信了，等到最后他却发现感觉是一样的——同样疼痛，同样难熬，同样不舒服，同样可耻——他猜想自己的感受不对，尤其因为修士事后那么开心。“那不是很美好吗？”修士问他，“感觉不是很不一样吗？”于是他附和了。要他承认根本没什么不同，就跟前一天和顾客做一样糟糕，实在太难为情了。
Brother Luke usually didn’t have sex with him if he’d seen clients earlier in the evening, but they always slept in the same bed, and they always kissed. Now one bed was used for the clients, and the other was theirs. He grew to hate the taste of Luke’s mouth, its old-coffee tang, his tongue something slippery and skinned trying to burrow inside of him. Late at night, as the brother lay next to him asleep, pressing him against the wall with his weight, he would sometimes cry, silently, praying to be taken away, anywhere, anywhere else. He no longer thought of the cabin: he now dreamed of the monastery, and thought of how stupid he’d been to leave. It had been better there after all. When they were out in the mornings and would pass people, Brother Luke would tell him to lower his eyes, because his eyes were distinctive and if the brothers were looking for them, they would give them away. But sometimes he wanted to raise his eyes, as if they could by their very color and shape telegraph a message across miles and states to the brothers: Here I am. Help me. Please take me back. Nothing was his any longer: not his eyes, not his mouth, not even his name, which Brother Luke only called him in private. Around everyone else, he was Joey. “And this is Joey,” Brother Luke would say, and he would rise from the bed and wait, his head bent, as the client inspected him.
如果他当晚接了客，卢克修士通常就不会要他性交，但他们总是睡在同一张床上，总是会接吻。现在他们的一张床用来接客，而另一张床是属于他们的。他逐渐痛恨起卢克嘴里的味道，那种不新鲜的咖啡臭，他舌头又滑又湿，猛地往他嘴里钻。到了深夜，修士在他旁边睡着，挤得他整个人紧挨在墙上。他有时会哭，但没哭出声，暗自祈祷被带走，带到其他地方，哪里都好。他再也不会想到小木屋了；现在他梦想着修道院，想着当初自己离开是多么愚蠢。那里毕竟好一点。他们早晨出门时会经过其他人，卢克修士总是叫他垂下眼睛，因为他的眼睛太特别了，要是那些修士们在找他们，他的眼睛就会泄底。但有时他想抬起眼睛，好像光凭他眼睛的颜色和形状，就可以发出讯息，跨越几千里、几个州传给修士们：我在这里。救我。拜托带我回去。再也没有什么是属于他的了：他的眼睛、他的嘴巴，甚至他的名字，卢克修士只有私下才喊他，在别人面前，他是乔伊。“这位是乔伊。”卢克修士会这么说，而他会从床上站起身等待，垂着头，让顾客打量他。
He cherished his lessons, because they were the one time Brother Luke didn’t touch him, and in those hours, the brother was who he remembered, the person he had trusted and followed. But then the lessons would end for the day, and every evening would conclude the same as the evening before.
他珍惜上课的时间，因为上课的时候卢克修士不会碰他，而且在那些时间里，卢克修士一如他所记得的那样，是他信任而遵从的人。但之后一天的课上完了，每天晚上又会跟前一晚一样。
He grew more and more silent. “Where’s my smiley boy?” the brother would ask him, and he would try to smile back at him. “It’s okay to enjoy it,” the brother would say, sometimes, and he would nod, and the brother would smile at him and rub his back. “You like it, don’t you?” he would ask, and wink, and he would nod at him, mutely. “I can tell,” Luke would say, still smiling, proud of him. “You were made for this, Jude.” Some of the clients would say that to him as well—You were born for this—and as much as he hated it, he also knew that they were right. He was born for this. He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used.
他变得越来越沉默。“我爱笑的小男孩哪里去了呢？”卢克会微笑地问他。他会试着报以微笑。“享受这个没关系的。”修士有时会说，而他会点点头。修士就朝他微笑，抚摸他的背。“你喜欢做这个吧？”他会问，然后挤一下眼睛。他点头，不讲话。“我看得出来，”卢克会说，还是微笑，很以他为荣，“你是天生好手，裘德。”有的顾客也会跟他说，你生来就是要做这个的。尽管他很讨厌听到这句话，但他知道他们说得没错。他生来就是要做这个的。他出生了，被遗弃，被发现，然后就被拿来做他生来该做的事情。
In later years, he would try to remember when exactly it was that he must have realized that the cabin was never going to be built, that the life he had dreamed of would never be his. When he had begun, he had kept track of the number of clients he had seen, thinking that when he reached a certain number—forty? fifty?—he would surely be done, he would surely be allowed to stop. But then the number grew larger and larger, until one day he had looked at it and realized how large it was and had started crying, so scared and sick of what he had done that he had stopped counting. So was it when he reached that number? Or was it when they left Texas altogether, Luke promising him that the forests were better in Washington State anyway, and they drove west, through New Mexico and Arizona, and then north, stopping for weeks in little towns, staying in little motels that were the twins of that very first motel they had ever stayed in, and that no matter where they stopped, there were always men, and on the nights there weren’t men, there was Brother Luke, who seemed to crave him the way he himself had never craved anything? Was it when he realized that he hated his weeks off even more than the normal weeks, because the return to his regular life was so much more terrible than if he had never had a vacation at all? Was it when he began noticing the inconsistencies in Brother Luke’s stories: how sometimes it wasn’t his son but a nephew, who hadn’t died but had in fact moved away, and Brother Luke never saw him again; or how sometimes, he stopped teaching because he had felt the calling to join the monastery, and sometimes it was because he was weary from having to constantly negotiate with the school’s principal, who clearly didn’t care for children the way the brother did; or how in some stories, he had grown up in east Texas, but in others, he had spent his childhood in Carmel, or Laramie, or Eugene?
很多年后，他会试着回想自己到底什么时候才真正明白，永远不会盖那个小木屋，他梦想的生活永远不会是他的。刚开始，他会记录他接了多少客，想着等达到某个数字（四十？五十？）时就一定够了，一定可以停止。但接着那数字越来越大，大到有一天他看着那数字，明白有多么大，开始哭了起来，对自己做的事既害怕又作呕，从此再也不算了。所以是他达到那个数字的时候吗？或是他们一起离开德州的时候？（当时卢克跟他保证华盛顿州的森林更棒，于是他们开车往西，经过新墨西哥州和亚利桑那州，然后往北，中途在一些小镇停留几星期，住在小汽车旅馆里，跟他们住过的第一家旅馆一模一样。无论他们在哪里停留，总是有男人；夜里没有男人时，就有卢克修士，修士对他的那种渴望，是他自己对任何事物都不曾有过的。）或是当他明白自己痛恨每周的休息日更甚于正常工作日，因为回到正常生活比没有假日更可怕？是他开始注意到卢克修士故事中的不一致的时候吗？有时修士以前深爱的不是儿子，而是外甥，也没有死掉，而是搬走了，从此卢克修士没再见过他；有时他说他教书教到一半放弃，是因为他感觉到上帝召唤他加入修道院，但有时又因为他厌倦总是得跟校长谈判，因为校长显然不像修士那么关心学生；在某些故事里，他在东德州长大，在其他故事里，他的童年又是在加州卡梅尔，或是怀俄明州拉勒米，或是奥瑞冈州尤金市度过的。
Or was it the day that they were passing through Utah to Idaho, on their way to Washington? They rarely ventured into actual towns—their America was denuded of trees, of flowers, theirs was just long stretches of roadway, the only green thing Brother Luke’s lone surviving cattleya, which continued to live and leaf, though not bud—but this time they had, because Brother Luke had a doctor friend in one of the towns, and he wanted him to be examined because it was clear he had picked up some sort of disease from one of the clients, despite the precautions Brother Luke made them take. He didn’t know the name of the town, but he was startled at the signs of normalcy, of life around him, and he stared out of his window in silence, looking at these scenes that he had always imagined but rarely saw: women standing on the street with strollers, talking and laughing with one another; a jogger panting by; families with dogs; a world made of not just men but also of children and women. Normally on these drives he would close his eyes—he slept all the time now, waiting for each day to end—but this day, he felt unusually alert, as if the world was trying to tell him something, and all he had to do was listen to its message.
或者是在他们要去华盛顿州途中，经过犹他州、进入爱达荷州那天？他们很少冒险进入真正的市区（他们的美国没有树、没有花，只有漫长延伸的公路，唯一的绿色就是卢克修士当初带出来唯一存活的那株洋兰，一直活着，还长着叶子，但是不开花），但这回他们破例了，因为卢克修士在某个镇上有个医生朋友，要带他去检查。他显然被某个顾客传染了某种疾病，尽管卢克修士要求他们采取预防措施。他不知道那个镇的名字，但种种正常的迹象和周遭的生活让他很惊讶。他沉默地注视车窗外，看着那些他总在想象但很少亲眼看到的景象：女人们推着折叠式婴儿车站在街上，彼此谈笑；一个慢跑者喘着气跑过去；牵着狗的家庭；这个世界不光是由男人组成，还有儿童和女人。通常在这些车程中，他会闭上眼睛——现在他随时都在睡觉，等着每天告终——但这一天，他却异常地警觉，好像这个世界正设法告诉他什么，而他唯一要做的就是倾听这个讯息。
Brother Luke was trying to read the map and drive at the same time, and finally he pulled over, studying the map and muttering. Luke had stopped across the street from a baseball field, and he watched as, if at once, it began to fill with people: women, mostly, and then, running and shouting, boys. The boys wore uniforms, white with red stripes, but despite that, they all looked different—different hair, different eyes, different skin. Some were skinny, like he was, and some were fat. He had never seen so many boys his own age at one time, and he looked and looked at them. And then he noticed that although they were different, they were actually the same: they were all smiling, and laughing, excited to be outside, in the dry, hot air, the sun bright above them, their mothers unloading cans of soda and bottles of water and juice from plastic carrying containers.
卢克修士一边开车，一边试着搞清楚地图，最后把车停在路边，审视地图，念念有词。此处街道对面就是一个棒球场，他观察着，仿佛突然间，球场里头开始充满人群：大部分是女人，还有奔跑大叫的男孩。那些男孩身穿白底红条纹的制服，除此之外，他们看起来都不一样——不同的头发、不同的眼睛、不同的皮肤。有些很瘦，跟他一样，有些则胖胖的。他从来没有一口气看到这么多跟自己同龄的男孩，于是朝着他们看了又看。然后他注意到，尽管不一样，他们其实也有共通点：他们都在笑，很兴奋能在户外活动，在这干热的空气中，头上有晴朗的太阳，他们的母亲从塑料置物盒里拿出一罐罐汽水、一瓶瓶水和果汁。
“Aha! We’re back on track!” he heard Luke saying, and heard him fold up the map. But before he started the engine again, he felt Luke follow his gaze, and for a moment the two of them sat staring at the boys in silence, until at last Luke stroked his hair. “I love you, Jude,” he said, and after a moment, he replied as he always did—“I love you, too, Brother Luke”—and they drove away.
“啊哈！找到地方了！”他听到卢克说，然后听到他折起地图。但发动引擎前，他感觉卢克顺着他的目光看过去，一时之间两个人只是默默望着那些男孩，直到最后卢克抚摸他的头发。“我爱你，裘德。”他说。过了一会儿，他如常回答：“我也爱你，卢克修士。”之后他们就开车离开了。
