《毕业翻译材料》Longley

15、WRE 15 15

　　15 Never Twice

　　It’s that time of the year, I said. I’m thinking about my New Year’s resolutions.

　　Do you remember last year’s resolutions, or the year before last’s? Nikolai said.

　　If I go back and look for them in my journal, I said.

　　Ha.

　　But I’m still making a list.

　　Let me see, he said. You’re going to bake a lot of cakes.

　　How do you know? I said.

　　Because I know how unimaginative you can be, he said. If you said horseback riding or beer-brewing or beekeeping or stargazing, I might not have guessed.

　　It doesn’tbother you, my taking up baking?

　　What do you think? Baking is my territory, he said. Cooking is yours.

　　But you are learning to cook, too, I said. I was keenly aware that we were both using present tense.

　　Baking is my meditation, he said.

　　I know, I said. He used to bake when he was agitated.

　　What is baking to you? You can’t meditate my meditation, he said.

　　Remembrance, I thought.

　　Baking doesn’tallow revision, don’t forget, he said.

　　Knitting does, I said.

　　You’re going to knit too?

　　When I was a small child, I had been trained to knit every summer, with old yarn that had already lost its elasticity. I had hated the rusty-red stringy yarn, scratchy on my sweating arms. I had hated that my mother would examine my work at the end of the day. And I had hated, most of all, that after the ball of yarn was used up I had to unravel it and start all over again. But these things I had never told him. The first time he discovered that I could knit he had been impressed.

　　Only because you don’t look like a knitter at all, he said.

　　Why not?

　　We knitters find joy and comfort in repetition, he said. Can you write the same sentence over and over?

　　What if life requires a certain amount of repetition, I said. I can’t write the same sentence or story over and over, but maybe I can use knitting to meet the requirement.

　　At least you’re better at knitting than baking, he said. It’s possible for you to knit and achieve something even if you can’t, like any self-help book would advise you, enjoy the process.

　　Thankyou for your rare praise.

　　Remember the octopus you knitted? he asked.

　　I had almost forgotten. In middle school, for Secret Santa, Nikolai had asked me to knit an octopus. Two days, he had said. No way, I had said. Yes way, he had insisted. By the end of the two days I had given him an octopus, which had an opal-white body, light-blue tentacles, and beady eyes that did not match in color or size. The next day he had come home and demanded seven more octopuses for friends.

　　Octopi, he said now. I hate when people say octopuses.

　　Fine, octopi, I said. Etymologically we’re equally right on this.

　　Octopi sounds more erudite, he said. So you’re considering starting to knit again?

　　I did knit a little.

　　When?

　　Oh, a while ago, I said. For days and weeks after Nikolai’s death, I had spent much of my time in his room, knitting, unraveling, knitting, unraveling.

　　Which yarn did you use?

　　The canary-yellow.

　　What did you make?

　　Nothing.

　　What were you planning to knit before you made nothing?

　　I thought I would knit a scarf like you did, I said, but I kept messing up my counts and starting all over.

　　Nikolai had knitted several scarves. He had worn them in Tibet when he had visited there in the summer, and had planned to wear them this winter, too.

　　Sometimes you can revise as much as you want, but it still doesn’t come out right, he said. Which can make knitting worse than baking.

　　Your scarves all came out so nicely.

　　That’s because I’m good at counting, he said.

　　I helped, didn’t I? I said. He used to shout random numbers for me to remember. I still had series of numbers typed in my phone.

　　I don’t think you’re good enough to put those numbers to use, he said.

　　So should I put knitting on my list of New Year’s resolutions? I said.

　　I would say if you include both knitting and baking, that would be overly sentimental, he said. I expect more of you than that.

　　What about music? I asked.

　　Gosh, you’re too old to learn oboe!

　　Not oboe, I said. Piano.

　　So someday you can play Für Elise?

　　There was a time in my childhood when our doorbell and the doorbells of the two neighbors’ apartments all played Für Elise in the worst rendition, like old musical greeting cards running out of battery. I can’t stand that piece, I said.

　　I know, he said. Many piano students have to play it, so that prospect, let’s hope, will discourage you from piano.

　　Maybe I can go back to my accordion.

　　That’s a good thought, he said. You can even go to a pub to play. Loud and cheery. With some rouge and a bohemian flair.

　　How you make a point to oppose every pursuit of mine.

　　I’m only being realistic and responsible, he said, so you don’t fail by January tenth.

　　I bought a dictionary for myself, I said. And it’s my resolution to study it every day.

　　Because you need to brush up on your vocabulary to be on par with me?

　　A Dictionary of the English Language, I read to him,by Samuel Johnson.

　　Okay.

　　You said okay because you don’t know who Dr. Johnson was, I said.

　　Dr. Who? he said. Oh fine, I don’tknow.

　　There was no joy, however, in having scored a small point. There were so many things I wished he could get to know and love someday. A week before his death he had told me he was looking forward to studying Macbeth in English. Once in a while I had asked him to give War and Peace another try—he had read a hundred pages in seventh grade, and had reported having understood nothing. Later I realized that he had been unaware of the fact that the dialogues in French had English translations in the footnotes. Who reads the footnotes when the book is already so thick? he had protested. A friend had read a Wallace Stevens poem at Nikolai’s memorial, but it was not a single Stevens poem, but all his poems, the work of a lifetime, that reminded me once and again of Nikolai. A mind that sees no path or direction to flee despair can be expanded nevertheless. Who can say if expansion may not one day make despair sufferable? I wished I could still leave some books on his desk, a Wallace Stevens collection among them.

　　Oh don’t wish, he said. Wishing only wounds the heart.

　　What’s the harm of spending a few minutes lost in wishing, I thought, when the deepest wound would remain open, day and night.

　　Then find some distractions, he said. Wishing is not a good way to distract yourself.

　　I read him a quote from Marianne Moore. “If nothing charms us or sustains us (and we are getting food and fresh air) it is for us to say, ‘If not now, later,’ and not mope.” Often I had gone back to the quote, saying to myself, If not now, later.

　　I never mope, Nikolai said, if you haven’tnoticed.

　　Of course I have, I said.

　　His joy and his suffering, neither in minor key, precluded moping. Yet what if, I thought, moping is a bridge to reach Moore’slater?

　　There is no later, he said. For some people it’s now and now and now and now.

　　Tell me about it, I thought. It was exactly three months since his death. Seasons have changed. All lives in nature have changed themselves, as ordained by the seasons. It’s later and later and later and later for them, helpless as they are to want to make permanent any kind of now. A dear friend says we only count days and weeks and months with this intensity for two reasons: after a baby’s birth, and after a loved one’s death. Three months feel as long as forever, yet as short as a single moment when it’s now and now and now and now, so I must tell my friend that there is a difference between life and death. A newborn grows by hour, by day, by week. The death of a child does not grow a minute older.

　　Does this count as moping? Nikolai asked.

　　What?

　　Your going over useless thoughts.

　　Useless according to whom? I snapped.

　　Sometimes you sound like me, he said. Very un- Mommy-like.

　　Sometimes you sound like me, I said.

　　What a terror, he said. No child likes to detect any trace of his parents in himself.

　　Not even the good things? I asked.

　　When bad things have to come along, too? he said.

　　A few times Nikolai had commented that he had got the mathematics and science genes from his father, talent with language and good work ethic from his mother, music and sport and a sense of humor from himself, admiration from his little brother—yet it was so rare that he could look at himself that way. Contentment was never a word in his dictionary.

　　Sometimes, I said, only sometimes, I do think you have a point in questioning why parents give children lives.

　　Why do they in any case?

　　Blind hope, I said, or wishful thinking.

　　See, you’re moping now.

　　No, this is not moping. I don’t mope, either, if you haven’tnoticed.

　　Okay, I’ll give you that, he said.

　　Yet what if moping is the exact thing that is needed for those who don’t mope, I thought. One doesn’t kill oneself while moping.

　　I would say stick with any virtue or vice that you can’t change, he said. If you’re a migrant bird you can’t be flightless. If you’re a flightless bird you can’t leave New Zealand.

　　Or Australia? I said.

　　Any island, he said.

　　We never did visit Australia together, I said. Remember Rosie?

　　Rosie had grown up on an Australian farm, and had visited us when she was five. J. was six, and Nikolai was nine. The day she left, walking up the driveway of our old house, she had turned around with tears in her eyes and waved at the boys. Come visit me soon, she had shouted at them. Don’twait till we’re old.

　　You can’t go back to every little memory and cry, Mommy.

　　How do you know I’m crying?

　　Because Rosie represents the quintessential never- lastingness of good old time.

　　Quintessential, I said. Do you know it shares a root with Quintus?

　　Quintus had joined the household when he had been nine weeks old. Nikolai had been the one to name the dog The Fifth in Latin, after the four human beings in the family.

　　Nikolai did not speak. Did he miss Quintus?

　　You can’t step into the same river twice, he said.

　　Sometimes once is hard enough, I said. I admire you for having done that, and you have done more beautifully than many people I know.

　　Oh Mommy, don’t make it sound like an elegy.

　　No, it’s not an elegy, I thought. No parent should write a child’selegy.

　　Don’t be so sad, he said. Don’t mope.

　　Can I read you a poem? I said.

　　If that makes you feel better.

　　So I read him a poem by Wallace Stevens.

　　??This Solitude of Cataracts

　　??He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,

　　Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

　　Through many places, as if it stood still in one,

　　Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks

　　fluttered,

　　Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.

　　There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

　　There was so much that was real that was not real at all.

　　He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

　　He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,

　　To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

　　Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.

　　He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

　　In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks

　　Or mountains that were not mountains, just to knowhow it would be,

　　Just to knowhow it would feel, released from destruction,

　　To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

　　Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,

　　Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury

　　centre of time.