K*****u
发帖数: 241 | 1 怎么一个故事写了两次，前后描述还有差异？恳请能看懂的人指点。
Nothing Has Changed by Colin Thubron
Colin Thubron started his career in documentary film and in TV. He made
his reputation, though, as a travel writer, especially in the Middle East.
He has more recently turned to novels. There is a journey in this story; it
is an exploration of the writer's own feelings when faced with both his loss
and someone else's. Whether the woman in the story really existed or not
does not matter; the situation is a very human one.
We writers seem condemned to scratch the ground for buried
unhappinesses, like pigs snuffling after truffles. Whether from catharsis or
masochism ─ suffering is our stock-in-trade. Love affairs, bereavements,
sickness ─ we pass through them all with, it is said, an embarrassing
excess of sensitivity. Then we utilize (and betray) everything that has
happened to us. We do business with our neuroses. We even grow rather fond
of them, in a proprietorial way. They become our distinction.
So I give you this woman, Lying in a hospital bed in Reading (I'm sorry
, but even neuroses come in cliches). Her face was always pale, so it's hard
to see if, in this clinical light, she is whiter than in ordinary life. The
room around her is white too, and the sky in the window. Even the ruffled
sheet and the pillows are mounded about her like a recent snowdrift.
When I take her hand she lets out a faint, irritated moan and suddenly
shivers in the bed, pushing her feet down like a dancer trying to lift
herself on point. Even after fourteen years she looks unchanged. The girl in
my memory is merely a little plumper and her boyish coronet of hair has now
flowered into an exotic auburn tangle which spreads blackly over the pillow
. As I remember, it is the face's bones which are important and strange:
they look evanescently fragile, as if they have lent their own whiteness to
the flesh that barely covers them. She is ─ indefinably ─ beautiful; and
the expression her face, as her eyes open and before she has recognized me,
holds the familiar look of unprotectedness, impossible to locate in any
particular feature.
She whispers: 'Oh Christ.'
'I'm sorry. Is it a shock?'
A faint smile. 'How the hell did you know?'
'By chance. Your parents. They said you were back in England. Operation
and convalescence, they said.'
She didn't answer. She lifted her hand tiredly from mine, then let it
fall. Its inert warmth dropped against my fingers. Her gaze was flickering
over my face (what was she seeing? Receding hair, some wrinkles) but avoided
my eyes. The room was filling up with questions. I didn't know which ones
to ask. None of them were my business, and she refused to make things easier
by saying anything, but simply lay faintly smiling and not looking at me,
even though our fingers were now entwined.
In the end I said: 'Is he still in Hong Kong then . . . your husband?'
I couldn't call him Robert.
'Yes. He wasn't able to get away.'
He wouldn't, I thought. Instead he'd paid for a private room in a top
hospital. When I glanced round, the only sign of affection I saw was a vase
of tulips wilting on a window-ledge beside a Get Well card from her mother.
But then she probably had few friends left in England, after so long.
I pressed her hand against my face, from pity or simply habit, I don't
know. How did she expect me to behave? I had only ever known one way of
being with her, and it seemed too late to evolve another.
She was staring at me. 'You haven't changed.'
I passed a hand across my face.
She added: 'You haven't married.'
'No.' My stomach seemed to be emptying. 'I don't think you've changed
either.'
She gave an odd laugh. She was looking at the shape of her thin body
under the sheet, touching her palms over her stomach. She said very quietly:
'I have now.'
'But the operation was successful.'
'Yes.'
Whether it was her pallor (a little frightening now) or her habitual
look of vulnerability or simply the angular fragility of her body under the
nightdress I don't know, but I felt a foolish rush of tenderness for her. I
half stood up, and clasped the softness of her shoulders in my hands. 'They
told me it wasn't cancer.'
'No. Endometriosis.'
I knew, of course. I'd looked it up. And I supposed it was that growth
(the medical books made it sound like black-spot) that had prevented her
conceiving children in the first place. 'Did they have to remove . . .
everything?'
In the silence the question grew huge, impertinent. I had not seen her
for fourteen years. A married woman. Her shoulders were trembling in my
hands. She looked up at me and said: 'Most of it. I can't have children, if
that's what you mean.'
Yes, my love, that is what I meant. Not only your children, but mine (
because after all these years I still love you, I couldn't marry anyone else
). You think my grimace of sorrow is only for you, of course, but it's for
me too, and for our unborn, our never-to-be-born sons and daughters. Your
whole body is shaking in my hands. Suddenly, realizing, you twist your head
and kiss my fingers. You say: 'I always wanted your children.' I see my
tears falling on to the sheet.
Evening. Driving back to London, I pass her old house. I must have done
this once a month for fourteen years (whenever I return from seeing my
parents) and have scarcely given it a glance. Her family left it years ago,
and in any case the yellow-brick facade, with its Victorian windows, is like
a theatre set. Its memories lie unseen behind: in the passages, the sitting
room, the enclosed garden.
I stop and ring the doorbell. Whoever opens the door will seem an
impostor, of course, a caretaker. I ring the bell again. It makes the same
noise as fourteen years ago: a dry shrillness in the bowels of the house. I
know now that nobody will come, and that seems right. Nobody to replace the
nineteen-year-old girl, who used to throw open the door so quickly that it
might have been done by someone invisible. And always the surprised 'It is
you!' as if she had expected somebody else, or been afraid I wouldn't come.
I walk round to try the garden gate . It opens . In the fragrant
enclosure nothing has changed. Two flagstoned steps descend from the French
windows into a tangle of spring-flowering shrubs. The neighbours' wall at
the end shows the same patina of grey-blue lichen. The whole garden is
barely thirty foot deep, and narrow. Behind my back the house windows hang
dark. I close the garden door softly behind and stare down the shrub-avenue.
For some reason I'm frightened. Close to where I entered, everything is all
right. She is watering plants in a summer dress (it's always summer),
swinging the can back and forth in her long, impatient fingers. But a few
paces beyond, just out of sight of the house windows, a grass clearing laps
against the patinated wall. I remember it perfectly, althoughI can't see it
yet. I pause among the sheltering shrubs. I feel cold and slightly sick.
Because there, by the wall, in the clearing (which I haven't entered
yet), her back is turned. She is tense, angular, nineteen. She wears an old
check coat and jeans. She won't look at me. Her hands are thrust into her
pockets and she stands perfectly still as if she were gazing across fields.
I say: 'It's Robert, isn't it?'
She half turns round, but keeps her eyes averted. The slope of one
cheekbone shows white and hard. She says: 'I'm going away.'
Then I hear my voice as if it were someone else's: it's oddly vibrant.
I'm twenty years old: tender and resolute. 'I'll be here when you get back.'
I'm conscious of standing under the copper beech, the tallest tree in the
garden, the only real tree. It's spread above me like my own strength . I
half raise my arms, to partake of it . I see myself in her eyes, under the
copper beech: its trunk, my body. 'You know I love you.' She's looking at me
now. 'Always.' I was young, of course, too young to know about Always (but
I was right just the same).
She said: 'You can't.'
I want to reach out to her, but the distance is enormous, and suddenly
she looks foreign, neuter even, and I'm still saying 'I love you' when she
walks away.
This part of the garden was always different from the rest. It is
dominated by the lichened wall. I stare back at the house to make sure I'm
not seen. I'm a trespasser here now, in my past. I walk backwards for a few
seconds looking up at the empty windows, and then turn into the clearing. It
is so very simple. There is nothing that could have changed: just brick and
grass.
But there is no tree.
There is no room for any tree, let alone a full-grown copper beech. I
stare at emptiness. I am not exactly surprised. But I feel a heavy distant
shock as if something had fallen in another room. I search the grass for a
bole, but I know already that there won't be one. There has never been one.
That's the trouble with us writers. We write these fictions into our
lives for our protection. (The imaginative person, after all, can believe
anything.) But only now am I shocked by the gathering of the memory, the lie
. All these years. In place of the beech there is only a circle of cold sky.
This is unaltered.
So I will try to find the truth again before it goes. As I stand here,
the f acts of the place ─ wall, grass ─ encase even me (the slippery
writer) in a frame of honesty. What is really remembered? Something young
and desolately commonplace.
Fear. We are moving too fast to the finality of marriage, and I can't (
I am still living in an adolescent world of infinite possibility: I will
live for ever). I talk about a trial separation. I am too self-accusing to
be gentle. My words rasp and stumble in the clearing, while her upturned
face flinches and I watch her close herself off. Her eyes, and then her
whole body, slowly turn themselves away, and suddenly her narrow back in the
check coat is formidable with its wound, and the five feet between us are
immeasurable. My voice is a bleat. 'You know I love you.' (Trying to save
dignity.)
She says: 'I'll go away.'
I'm leaning against the wall like a rag doll. 'Robert . . .'
But this makes her angry. She doesn't turn round but shouts into the
shrubs. 'You know I don't care for him! Don't make him your excuse!'
I repeat feebly, without belief: 'I do love you.'
But she says 'You can't', and when she turns, her face is irreparably
changed. Her voice too: it contains a kind of premonition. It is as if she
had known everything before. 'This is all fantasy to you, isn't it? It's not
real. It's just words and attitudes. Just romanticism. You don't really
feel or need anything or anyone, do you?' She glances bitterly at the sky. '
Do you?'
The suffering of those who can't love is ignominious, so impure. But
since I have come this far already, I will try to see her again in the
hospital, as she really was.
The face on the pillow, it is true, has changed very little in a way:
the same fineness of bones threatens to break through the fragile-seeming
skin. Yet something has drained away. The auburn hair shows a strand of
premature grey. Now there is a circumspection, even a meanness, about the
mouth. She is no longer beautiful, if she ever was. (Was she?)
I sit beside her. I stare at her in her sleep, but surreptitiously, as
if she were naked. Her mouth is half open in a thin-lipped oval of distress,
through which the breath whistles in short gasps . The dark crescents of
her eyelids, closed now for fifteen hours, join the grey halfmoons beneath
the eyes to create two voids where the irises should shine ─ a desert of
dying-looking skin, crossed by tiny purple veins. The cruelly plucked
eyebrows (she never did let them grow enough) label this mask with a lonely
pair of reflex-accents . It is a face no longer even young.
To talk with somebody half emerged from anaesthesia is like talking to
a drunk. The barriers are all down. The words come in a passionless whisper.
And now her eyelids fly open without warning and the grey eyes are staring
at me, but disorientated.
She murmurs: 'Oh Christ. How the hell did you know I was here?' She
smiles bleakly. 'Typical of you. The grand romantic gesture. Did you think I
was dying?'
Our fingers are meaninglessly entwined. We talk platitudes about her
convalescence. She looks down with distaste at her body. Her flippancy (if
that is what it was) has gone, and it leaves her almost lifeless.
When I lean forward to hold her shoulders, I am trying to remember my
half-love for her.
'Did they have to remove . . . everything?'
'I can't have children, if that's what you mean.'
Yes, she's trembling. I look down at her and try to imagine what that
sterility is like. Children, in reality, mean nothing to me: I can't
envisage my own. The flesh of her arms is thin and warm in my hands. I can't
find anything to say. It is only her own pain that we are momentarily
sharing. Then she starts to shake, from deep inside, like the tremors of a
motor stopping. 'I always wanted your children.' (Yes, she did say that.)
She doses her eyes, as if to blot out the reality of my expression, and
turns her head to kiss my fingers. I see her tears falling on to the sheet. | b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 2 就是说文艺青年很会颠倒黑白。把这段未了情失败的原因归于女方（第一个版本），其
实真实情况是本来是这个男的错，男的是责任方（第二个版本）。
文学青年的自我批评……
made
.
it
loss
or
【在 K*****u 的大作中提到】
: 怎么一个故事写了两次，前后描述还有差异？恳请能看懂的人指点。
: Nothing Has Changed by Colin Thubron
: Colin Thubron started his career in documentary film and in TV. He made
: his reputation, though, as a travel writer, especially in the Middle East.
: He has more recently turned to novels. There is a journey in this story; it
: is an exploration of the writer's own feelings when faced with both his loss
: and someone else's. Whether the woman in the story really existed or not
: does not matter; the situation is a very human one.
: We writers seem condemned to scratch the ground for buried
: unhappinesses, like pigs snuffling after truffles. Whether from catharsis or
| w******a
发帖数: 2057 | 3 滔滔井水滔滔井水...
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 就是说文艺青年很会颠倒黑白。把这段未了情失败的原因归于女方（第一个版本），其
: 实真实情况是本来是这个男的错，男的是责任方（第二个版本）。
: 文学青年的自我批评……
:
: made
: .
: it
: loss
: or
| m*****n
发帖数: 7450 | 4 even neuroses come in cliches. 受不了这种神神叨叨的作者。
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 就是说文艺青年很会颠倒黑白。把这段未了情失败的原因归于女方（第一个版本），其
: 实真实情况是本来是这个男的错，男的是责任方（第二个版本）。
: 文学青年的自我批评……
:
: made
: .
: it
: loss
: or
| b*s
发帖数: 82482 | 5 人家都承认了是文青了……
even neuroses come in cliches. 受不了这种神神叨叨的作者。
【在 m*****n 的大作中提到】
: even neuroses come in cliches. 受不了这种神神叨叨的作者。
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