《毕业翻译材料》Longley

7、WRE 6

　　6 What a Fine Autumn

　　How are you today? I said. It was an inane question but I was too sad to look for a better opening.

　　Why don’t people start a conversation by saying, Who are you today? Nikolai said. How anyone is matters less than who he is, don’t you think?

　　Who are you, I said. It sounds intrusive, does it not?

　　How are you—is it less intrusive? If someone does want to know the answer it’s intrusive too.

　　Who are you? I went over the question in my head. I suppose people would have a harder time saying who they are, truly, I said. Or there are so many possibilities it’shard to give one and neglect the other twenty.

　　When you see a tree, do you say, How are you today? Mediocre, the tree may think, because it’s a windy day. But it’s obliged to reply, I’m good, thank you, and you? No, when you see a tree you think, Here is a tree.

　　People are more complex than trees, I said.

　　We think we are, he said. So, who are you today?

　　I’m your mother.

　　See, you don’t have a problem answering it right away.

　　But I wouldn’t give the same reply if someone else asked me, I thought.

　　What if someone else did ask, Nikolai said. Say you go to a coffee shop and the guy at the counter says, Who are you?

　　Iwould say—I’m nobody.

　　How very imaginative.

　　But that’s the problem, I said. Who are you is a question already asked and answered for us by a poet.

　　Dare we not make up a new and better answer?

　　Who are you? I said.

　　I’m somebody, he said, like nobody’sbusiness.

　　And nobody’s fool, I said.

　　I’m somebody who’s nobody’sfault.

　　I wondered what the difference was between somebody and nobody. Any person with a solid physical form could not avoid having some body, which would make the statement I’m nobody a misclaimer.

　　Misclaimer for everyone but me. I can certainly claim that disclaimer. I’m nobody, he said. But I won’t.

　　It was seven weeks since Nikolai had died. In Buddhist tradition, a soul leaves this world for the next after forty-nine days. I did not believe in this or the other world, the soulful or the soulless, the forty-nine-day gap where the departed retained their senses with an intensity that no living body could achieve. Still, what if he would not be here tomorrow? What if when I speak tomorrow, nobody replies?

　　That’s silly, he said. Whether I’m here or anywhere is not decided by some tradition you don’t even believe in.

　　Fear doesn’t speak reason or logic, I said.

　　Phobia is irrational, he said. You can be reasonable and logical in your fears.

　　I counted my fears. Perhaps I should make a list of them and write the ways to be reasonable and logical next to each one.

　　What are days for me in any case? he said. Have you thought it may very well now be today and today and today and today?

　　I had thought about that. That, too, was my fear. Would one, plucked out of a timeline of yesterday and today and tomorrow, become a fish out of water?

　　A fish out of water, Nikolai said. Really, Mommy, the clichés you use these days, and not even to the point.

　　I would rather, I thought, have all the clichés in the world to make a tepid pond for myself.

　　So you could swim around like a sluggish koi fish? he said.

　　I protested athis unkind imagination.

　　A fish has only three seconds of memory, he said.

　　So you told me many times, I said.

　　Now that’s called living in the moment.

　　I shuddered.

　　I know, he said. People say that all the time: You should live in the moment. Why, I used to want to ask, to live like a koi fish?

　　I must have been among the people who had said that to him, I thought.

　　Yes, you are, and I bet you ten dollars you don’t even understand it yourself.

　　Five dollars? I asked. We used to bet on many things. Nikolai had collected a stack of IOUs from me.

　　Seven?

　　Okay, I said. You won. I don’t understand it, and I don’t believe it, either.

　　Are all parents expert equivocators?

　　I suppose the best among them are, I said. I’m not.

　　Why not? You’re a good mother.

　　Not good enough to make you stay, I thought.

　　Well, I live in the moment now, he said.

　　In the moment: a life made of today and today and today and today. If that’s all he has now, is it all I have, too?

　　If you don’t mind my saying, what I have has nothing to do with what you have. Why put a bet on a nobody? You should make up your mind about what you want.

　　My mind is made up, I thought. It has always been. I want yesterday and today and tomorrow, all with Nikolai in it.

　　You often complain I want too much, he said.

　　Any parent would want what I want, I said.

　　Not necessarily.

　　Any reasonable parent.

　　Your argument doesn’t stand, he said. A reasonable person can still want too much.

　　But a little more time, how can that be called too much? I said, though I knew I risked losing the argument. Are five years considered a little more in a lifetime? Ten?

　　Time is like money. Don’t get into debt by spending what you don’t have, he said.

　　I thought about the class he was to take in the spring, personal finance, which he had been looking forward to. What circumstance permits one to ask for tomorrow on trust?

　　None, he said. Time is a difficult debt to pay off. Impossible.

　　How do you know?

　　Because I’ve done that.

　　Did he mean that he had overdrafted his tomorrows? I remembered, when he was little, I had flinched whenever people called him precocious.

　　You kept saying, Be patient, he said. Many times I thought, Okay, let me believe you this once and wait, and things may change, and I may feel differently.

　　Most people do that, I said.

　　I suppose most people don’t want to admit failure so they keep taking more credits from more tomorrows and get into deeper debt.

　　What if that is what people call patience? I said.

　　I wasn’t a patient person. Neither was Nikolai. The root of patience comes from Latin, to suffer or suffering. What are other words that link pain to time, time to pain?

　　Nostalgia? Nikolai asked.

　　Nostalgia: home plus pain. Does he ever feel nostalgic, I thought.

　　I didn’t leave home, Mommy, he said.

　　Still, I wish I had taught you how to postpone suffering.

　　If you haven’t learned it yourself you can’t teach me, he said.

　　A parent’s folly, I thought, is to want to give a child what she does not have. A parent has to be quixotic. The word reminded me what I had forgotten all these weeks, that on the day Nikolai had died, when I had not known it would happen, I had been listening to Don Quixote on a long drive. I had been laughing to myself in the car. I had laughed at times since then, but that laughter in the car—quixotic—would never be mine again.

　　Are you not speaking because you’ve lost another argument? Nikolai asked. It was an odd relief that he would not see my tears. He had seen me cry only three times in his life.

　　No, just feelingsad, I said.

　　Still?

　　Still? I said. Sometimes I’m so sad I feel like a freak.

　　That sounds like self-pity unrestrained, he said.

　　I thought about my language. Indeed he was right. Not only was it immoderate but it was imprecise. How do you compare sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano to sadness that stays inside one, still as a stillborn baby? People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.

　　Let me revise, I said. Sometimes sadness makes me unable to write.

　　Why write,he said, if you can feel?

　　What do you mean?

　　I always imagine writing is for people who don’t want to feel or don’t knowhow to.

　　And reading? I asked. Nikolai was a good reader.

　　For those who do.

　　For weeks I had not read well. I picked up books and put them down after a page or two, finding little to sustain me. I was writing, though, making up stories to talk with Nikolai. (Where else can we meet but in stories now?)

　　See my point? he said. You cannot not write. You don’t even mind writing badly.

　　Because I don’t want to feelsad or I don’t knowhow to feel sad?

　　What’s the difference? he said. Does a person commit suicide because he doesn’t want to live, or doesn’t knowhow to live?

　　I could say nothing.

　　I can always win an argument against you—do you notice that? he said.

　　Had I argued better, would he have stayed longer in this world? I didn’task him the question. Like sadness, it was there all the time.

　　Instead I read him a poem I had translated from Chinese, one I had memorized when I turned twelve but only began to understand now.

　　When young, I knew not the taste of sorrow

　　But loved to climb the storied towers

　　I loved to climb the storied towers

　　To compose a new poem, faking sorrow

　　Now I have known the taste of sorrow

　　and want to talk about it, but I refrain

　　I want to talk about it, but refrain

　　And say merely: a chilly day, what a fine

　　autumn

　　Is it a fine autumn? he asked.

　　Yes, I said. And a chilly day.