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Madame!—it began, like a command—Your letter has reached the writer safely.
信像一道命令一样开头：夫人！您的信安全地到了笔者手中。
A friend of our cause will call upon you very soon. He is a man of honour and he will identify himself by handing to you the other half of the enclosed postcard. I urge you to speak to nobody concerning this matter until he arrives.
我们事业的一位朋友很快就会拜访您。他是个正人君子。他会把所附明信片的另一半交给您，以表明自己的身份。在他到来之前，我强烈要求您不要与任何人谈论此事。
He will come to your apartment between eight and ten o’clock in the evening. He will ring your doorbell three times. He has my absolute confidence. Trust him entirely, Madame, and we shall do everything to assist you.
他会晚上八点到十点之间来到您的公寓。他会按三次门铃。我对他绝对信任。完全相信他，夫人，我们会尽全力帮助您。
Even in her relief, she was secretly entertained by the writer’s melodramatic tone.
她如释重负，并对写信人夸张的语气暗暗感到好笑。
Why not deliver the letter directly to her flat? she wondered; and why should I feel safer because he gives me half an English picture?
她想，为什么不把信直接送到她的公寓呢？为什么给了我半张英国风景明信片，我就会觉得更安全呢？
For the piece of postcard showed a part of Piccadilly Circus and was torn, not cut, with a deliberate roughness, diagonally. The side to be written on was blank.
那是一张印有皮卡迪利广场（伦敦最有名的圆形广场————译注）的明信片，特意不用刀裁，而用手沿对角线不规则地撕成两半。明信片写字的那面是空白的。
To her astonishment the General’s envoy came that night.
令她吃惊的是，将军的特使当晚就来了。
He rang the bell three times, as the letter promised, but he must have known she was in her apartment—must have watched her enter, and the lights go on—for all she heard was a snap of the letter-box, a snap much louder than it normally made, and when she went to the door she saw the piece of torn postcard lying on the mat, the same mat she had looked at so often when she was longing for word of her daughter Alexandra.
他按照信中的约定按了三下门铃，但他肯定知道她在自己的公寓里。他必定是看着她进门，看着灯亮起来。因为她只听到门上的送信口（房屋或其他建筑物入口附近的门上或墙上的长方形孔洞，用于传递信件等，上盖有可翻转的金属片。常见于英国————译注）"啪"的一声，比平时响亮得多。当她走到门边时，看到那半张的明信片躺在门垫上。她盼望收到女儿亚历山德拉的消息时，就经常看这门垫。
Picking it up, she ran to the bedroom for her Bible, where her own half already lay, and yes, the pieces matched, God was on her side, St. Joseph had interceded for her. (But what a needless piece of nonsense, all the same!)
她捡起明信片，跑到卧室去拿《圣经》，里面夹着她的那半张明信片。是的，两片是吻合的，上帝站在她这边，圣约瑟夫已经为她求过情了（不管怎么样，这是什么不需要的胡思乱想啊）。
And when she opened the door to him, he slipped past her like a shadow: a little hobgoblin of a fellow, in a black overcoat with velvet tabs on the collar, giving him an air of operatic conspiracy.
当她给他开门时，他像影子一样从她身边溜过去了，好像一个小妖精，穿着黑色大衣，领子上有天鹅绒标签，给人一种歌剧里搞阴谋的人物的感觉。
They have sent me a midget to catch a giant, was her first thought.
她的第一感觉是：给我派了个侏儒来抓巨人。
He had arched eyebrows and a grooved face and flicked-up horns of black hair above his pointed ears, which he prinked with his little palms before the hall mirror as he took off his hat—so bright and comic that on a different occasion Ostrakova would have laughed out loud at all the life and humour and irreverence in him.
他弯弯的眉毛，脸上沟壑纵横，尖尖的耳朵上长着一撮撮黑发。他摘下帽子，用小手掌在大厅的镜子前整理一下头发--他是那么有活力和滑稽，换个场合，奥斯特拉科娃一定会被他身上的活力、幽默和不拘小节逗得哈哈大笑。
But not tonight.
Tonight he had a gravity that she sensed immediately was not his normal way.
但今晚不会。
今晚他神情凝重，她马上感觉到这不是他平时的模样。
Tonight, like a busy salesman who had just stepped off an aeroplane—she had the feeling also about him that he was brand new in town: his cleanliness, his air of travelling light—tonight he wished only to do business.
今晚，他就像一个刚下飞机的忙碌的推销员--她还感觉到，他刚到这个城市。他很整洁，没带很多行李旅行的样子，说明今晚他只想办正事。
“You received my letter safely, madame?” He spoke Russian swiftly, with an Estonian accent.
“太太，你安全地收到我的信了吗？”他的俄语说得很快，带着爱沙尼亚口音。
“I had thought it was the General’s letter,” she replied, affecting—she could not save herself—a certain sternness with him.
“我还以为是将军写的信。”她回答道，不由自主地表露出严厉的语气。
“It is I who brought it for him,” he said gravely. He was delving in an inside pocket and she had a dreadful feeling that, like the big Russian, he was going to produce a sleek black notebook.
"是我给他送的信，"他严肃地说。他在衣服暗袋里找什么东西。她有一种可怕的预感，就像那个大个子俄罗斯人一样，他会拿出一本锃亮的黑色笔记本来。
But he drew out instead a photograph, and one look was quite enough: the pallid, glossy features, the expression that despised all womanhood, not just her own; the suggestion of longing, but not daring to take.
但他拿出来的是一张照片。只看一眼就够了。苍白、油光光的脸庞，不仅仅对她，而是对所有女人都鄙视的表情；一副渴望但不敢接受的模样。
“Yes,” she said. “That is the stranger.”
Seeing his happiness increase, she knew immediately that he was what Glikman and his friends called “one of us”—not a Jew necessarily, but a man with heart and meat to him.
"是的，"她说 "就是那个陌生人。"
看到他开心起来，她立刻明白，他就是格里克曼和他的朋友们所说的 "我们中的一员"。他不一定是犹太人，但他是个有情有义的人。
From that moment on she called him in her mind “the magician.” She thought of his pockets as being full of clever tricks, and of his merry eyes as containing a dash of magic.
从那时起，她就称他为 "魔术师"。她觉得他的口袋里装满了巧妙的把戏，还有那双快乐的魔术师的眼睛。
For half the night, with an intensity she hadn’t experienced since Glikman, she and the magician talked.
整整半夜的时间，她都在和魔术师交谈。自从格里克曼之后，她还从来没有表露过这样强烈的感情。
First, she told it all again, reliving it exactly, secretly surprised to discover how much she had left out of her letter, which the magician seemed to know by heart.
首先，她把事情从头讲了一遍，就像重温了一次过去的经历。她暗暗吃惊，原来自己在信中遗漏了那么多内容，而魔术师却似乎对这些内容了如指掌。
She explained her feelings to him, and her tears, her terrible inner turmoil; she described the crudeness of her perspiring tormentor.
她向他解释了自己的感受，流下的眼泪，内心乱作一团，糟糕透了的感觉，还描述了那个粗鲁的，把她折磨得汗流浃背的人。
He was so inept—she kept repeating, in wonder—as if it were his first time, she said—he had no finesse, no assurance.
他是如此无能--她不断重复说，不禁啧啧称奇--就好像他是第一次干这事--他没有技巧，没有信心。
So odd to think of the Devil as a fumbler! She told about the ham omelette and the frites and the Alsatian beer, and he laughed; about her feeling that he was a man of dangerous timidity and inhibition—not a woman’s man at all—to most of which the little magician agreed with her cordially, as if he and the gingery man were already well acquainted.
想象魔鬼居然是个笨蛋，感觉是不是很怪！她说了火腿煎蛋、炸薯条和阿尔萨斯啤酒的事，他笑了起来。她觉得他很胆小，畏畏缩缩，完全不是女人喜欢的男人。她的大部分评价，小魔术师都非常赞同，好像他和这个姜黄色脸的男人很熟似的。
She trusted the magician entirely, as the General had told her to; she was sick and tired of suspicion.
她象将军要求的那样，完全信任魔术师。她已经厌倦了猜疑。
She talked, she thought afterwards, as frankly as she once had talked to Ostrakov when they were young lovers in her own home town, on the nights they thought they might never meet again, clutching each other under siege, whispering to the sound of approaching guns; or to Glikman, while they waited for the hammering on the door that would take him back to prison yet again.
事后她想，她说得很坦率，就像当初和奥斯特拉科夫说话那样。当时他俩在她的故乡，是一对年轻恋人。城市已被团团包围，他们说不定再也不能见面。他们在黑夜里紧紧拥抱，伴着逼近的枪炮声窃窃私语。或者是当初和和格里克曼说话那样。当时他们正等待着再次把他送回监狱的敲门声。
She talked to his alert and understanding gaze, to the laughter in him, to the suffering that she sensed immediately was the better side of his unorthodox and perhaps anti-social nature.
她说的时候，他时而警觉，时而凝视着她，表示理解，时而大笑，时而露出痛苦的表情，她一看到这种表情，就马上意识到这体现了他非正统的，甚至可能是反社会的天性中好的一面。
And gradually, as she went on talking, her woman’s instinct told her that she was feeding a passion in him—not a love this time, but a sharp and particular hatred that gave thrust and sensibility to every little question he asked.
她不断地说下去，渐渐地，她女人特有的直觉告诉她，她正在唤起他的激情--这次不是爱，而是一种强烈地，特别的恨，这种恨让他提出的每一个小问题都变得尖锐而敏感。
What or whom it was that he hated, exactly, she could not say, but she feared for any man, whether the gingery stranger or anybody else, who had attracted this tiny magician’s fire.
她说不清楚他到底恨什么或恨谁，但无论是那个姜黄色脸的陌生人，还是其他任何人，只要他激起了这个小魔术师的怒火，她都替他们担心。
Glikman’s passion, she recalled, had been a universal, sleepless passion against injustice, fixing itself almost at random upon a range of symptoms, small or large. But the magician’s was a single beam, fixed upon a spot she could not see.
回想起来，格里克曼的愤怒是针对一切不公的现象，不管什么样事情，不管事情是大是小，都一直倾注活跃的激情。而魔术师的怒火却象一束光柱，聚焦在一个点上，尽管她不知道是什么点。
It is in any case a fact that by the time the magician left—my Lord, she thought, it was nearly time for her to go to work again!—Ostrakova had told him everything she had to tell, and the magician in return had woken feelings in her that for years, until this night, had belonged only to her past.
当魔术师离开的时候，她想，老天，又快到了该去上班的时间了！不管怎么样，奥斯特拉科娃已经把要说的一切都跟他说了，而魔术师也唤醒了她的情感。多少年来，在这个夜晚之前，这些情感只存在记忆里。
Tidying away the plates and bottles in a daze, she managed, despite the complexity of her feelings regarding Alexandra, and herself, and her two dead men, to burst out laughing at her woman’s folly.
她茫然地把盘子和瓶子收拾好。想起亚历山德拉，想起她自己，想起两个死去的男人，她百感交集。但她还是忍不住笑出声来，嘲笑自己作为女人的不切实际的想法。
“And I do not even know his name!” she said aloud, and shook her head in mockery. “How shall I reach you?” she had asked. “How can I warn you if he returns?”
“我甚至不知道他的名字！”她自嘲地摇摇头。“我怎么联系您？”她问过魔术师，“如果他又来找我，我怎么给你发警报？”
She could not, the magician had replied. But if there was a crisis she should write to the General again, under his English name and at a different address.
不可以。魔术师是这样说的。不过如果有危机发生，她应该再给将军写信，收信人用他的英文名字，寄到另外一个地址。
“Mr. Miller,” he said gravely, pronouncing it as French, and gave her a card with a London address printed by hand in capitals. “But be discreet,” he warned. “You must be indirect in your language.”
“米勒先生，”他严肃地说，把名字用法语拼出来，并给她一张卡片，上面用大写字母手写了一个伦敦的地址。“一定要小心，”他说，“话必须说得隐晦。”
All that day, and for many days afterwards, Ostrakova kept her last departing image of the magician at the forefront of her memory as he slipped away from her and down the ill-lit staircase.
他从她身边溜过去，走下光线昏暗的楼梯而去。整整一天，以及接下来的好几天，魔术师离去的景象都在奥斯特拉科娃的脑海里萦绕。
His last fervid stare, taut with purpose and excitement: “I promise to release you. Thank you for calling me to arms.”
他离别前凝视着她，目光坚定，充满激情地说：“我保证解救您。感谢您召唤我战斗！”
His little white hand, running down the broad banister of the stairwell, like a handkerchief waved from a train window, round and round in a dwindling circle of farewell, till it disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel.
他那白皙的小手扶着楼梯间宽阔的栏杆而下，就像火车窗外和别人再见时挥动的手帕，挥出一个又一个的圆圈，渐行渐远，直到消失在隧道的黑暗中。
总算译完了第一章 |
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发表于 2023-12-23 07:00:34
