《毕业翻译材料》Longley

6、WRE 5 5

　　5 Catchers in the Rain

　　Today’s weather, I said, you would really like it.

　　Was there still weather for him, did he still feel it? It didn’t matter. We used to often talk about weather, not as a substitute for real conversation, as weather was easily abused. Anything we had would continue tobe ours.

　　Rainy? Nikolai said.

　　And gray and cold. Gloomy.

　　Precisely the weather I love, he said. I wish I could bake something.

　　A pumpkin pie would be perfect, I said. I didn’t want to pause in case he and I both noticed that he had chosen the word wish. “To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect”—I had once shown him the line Jane Austen used to describe the folly of two women.

　　Pumpkin pie? Too prosaic, he said. I would rather make pumpkin mochi.

　　Sounds like haiku, I said. I had forgotten the pumpkin mochi, which some of his friends, I now remembered him telling me, had looked at with suspicion at first but had relished after all. Baking had been a triumph of Nikolai’s life when the results had been shared with friends. No matter how many batches of cookies and brownies and how many pies and cakes had been baked, someone would ask for more. Many of his friends had written to me, all of them mentioning his baking. Children are hungry on schooldays, I thought.

　　How patronizing, he said.

　　Oh, only because I just taught a story and I liked its title, “Children Are Bored on Sundays.”

　　Children hate to be called children, he said. Besides, it’s not about feeling hungry. The joy of baking and the joy of being baked for, you’ll never understand.

　　I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

　　Fine, Nikolai said. You don’t care to understand— how about that? Good enough for you?

　　I used to get nervous on the days when he baked. Rarely was perfection achieved. A few times I had suggested that perhaps cooking would serve as a better— more forgiving—hobby. He had pointed out rightly that he couldn’t possibly bring a platter of something that had had to sit overnight to the English class where they read Wilfred Owen or W. S. Merwin together.

　　Someone just sent a Merwin poem to me, I said. Since Nikolai’s death I had asked people to send poems. They came like birds from different lands, each carrying its own mourning notes.

　　So?

　　I wondered if he still liked poetry.

　　Grownups make the same mistake over and over, he said. You like W. S. Merwin? What a coincidence—I just read a poem by him. You went to China this past summer? I did too, in 1987. Do you play any instrument?

　　Oboe, how interesting, is that the instrument that looks like the other? Ah yes, clarinet! How wonderful you know exactly what I’m talking about.

　　Nikolai had a dislike for people who mistook the oboe for the clarinet. Not knowing is okay, he had once said, but pretending to know is not. How about I talk back and say, How interesting, sir, you must be Jones or Smith because you also have a head and four limbs.

　　I laughed. Critical as ever, I said.

　　I used to have this fear that when I grew up I would be like you, he said. I vowed to myself that I would never forget what it felt like to be a child.

　　You as me, your mother, or you as us, grownups?

　　Grownups as a species, he said. You’re better than most.

　　Thankyou.

　　That doesn’t make you fundamentally different.

　　Disappointing all the same?

　　No offense, but yes.

　　I remembered my mother used to say: The salt a parent has eaten weighs more than the rice a child has eaten. Having lived longer…I said, not knowing where my thought was going.

　　Means little in the big scheme of things, Nikolai said.

　　I concur, I said. I had been listening to a song the day before—he had saved all his music on my phone, enough to last me days. And don’t you see I want my life to be something more than long, I sang.

　　Sometimes you do make sense, he said.

　　It was silly how it made me happy, that little praise. We moved, I said, bringing up the topic I had not known how to broach with him. A week earlier we had moved out of the place we had rented temporarily and into a house with which Nikolai had fallen in love. Everything is good, except we miss you dearly, I said.

　　He became quiet. I realized that our exchange, however willfully sustained, was mere words. If he shed tears for us I would not have known. Tears we shed would be like weather to him, intelligible because they were concrete memories.

　　The kitchen is all set up and running, I said. It’s warm and bright. It has the kind of oven you like. Perhaps I should start learning to bake.

　　That’s nice, he said.

　　I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed or bored or sad or angry. Tones were what we were missing now, and without tones words were floating, gravity-less, missing one another or, worse, clashing without a warning.

　　I wish I could show you the house, I said. I was treading dangerous water, but wasn’t that what a mother should be doing, dreading the worst and hoping things would turnout better?

　　I have seen the house, he said.

　　With someone else’s furniture staging someone else’s life, I thought. Yet I shouldn’t have had that thought. Nikolai had not relied on other people’s furniture as placeholders. He had made plans for the kitchen and the garden and his bedroom.

　　Wouldn’t it be nice if you lived in the house with us, too? I said, so softly that it was almost only a passing thought.

　　It doesn’t matter, he said.

　　Why not?

　　It’s still our house.

　　Ours, yes, but it was also a house of chutes and ladders, with empty walls and yet unpacked boxes making up the grids. Each box I opened let out memory that no space could contain. Each box that remained sealed retained its power to trip and trap. To throw or not to throw the dice: It makes little difference. In a game of luck, luck is already determined.

　　Since when have you become an avid consumer of inane analogies and inept metaphors? Nikolai said.

　　The adjectives you indulge yourself with, I complained.

　　At least I’m consistent. I’ve never said anything negative about adjectives. But you, you’ve been dismissive of analogies and metaphors.

　　I’ve started to understand the point of them, I said. They take up space, they distract, they make the difficult less difficult, they even fluff things up a little. And they can be a shortcut, too, the ladders, you know.

　　You’re becoming a bad writer.

　　Does it matter? I said. I want a game with more ladders than chutes.

　　If you’re protesting by becoming a bad writer, I would say it’s highly unnecessary.

　　Dying is highly unnecessary too, I said.

　　Oh, people always die, sooner or later.

　　Always, ever, never, forever—had he lived to my age, would he have abolished these words, too?

　　There are plenty of bad writers, I said. What’s so terrible about being one of them?

　　You sound like a child throwing a tantrum, he said. I don’t get a chocolate. Why am I not getting a chocolate? It’s so unfair I don’t know how to button my coat anymore. It’s so unfair I have to put my left shoe on my right foot and my right shoe on my left foot. And I have to stamp my feet until my toes hurt. And I have to punch the wall until my knuckles are bruised. And I have to shut my eyes so I will stumble and fall.

　　When I was a child, it was grownups who had the liberty to throw a tantrum, but this I did not tell Nikolai.

　　Still you don’t get the chocolate, he said. Oh, poor, poor you.

　　You are not a mere piece of chocolate, I protested.

　　Why can’t I be as daft as you and toss around metaphors and analogies?

　　By all means, please do, I said.

　　Then what? he asked.

　　I gave up. I was slow when we argued.

　　Then we become catchers in the rain.

　　Cold, wet, soles of our shoes slippery, our fingers numb, what could we catch? Any seasoned parent was an expert at catching: toppling babies, somersaulting spoons, half-eaten bananas and apples, half-ripe blood berries. Everything breakable and unbreakable belonged to a parent’s field, but what could I catch on this gray, wet morning? Not the smile on your face, not the light in your eyes, not a blue cat, not a purple penguin, not dust in the wind, not a thought whispering in your ears, so loud that it had drowned out all the music of the world. What, my child, can I catch now, when all has become invisible?

　　Words, mother dear, Nikolai said. We will be catching each other’swords, don’t you see?