“I’m sorry, Harold,” he said. Harold said nothing. “You’re so angry at me,” he murmured.
“对不起，哈罗德。”他说，哈罗德没吭声，“你对我很生气。”他嗫嚅道。
“I’m not angry, Jude,” Harold said. “I’m disappointed. Do you know how special you are? Do you know what a difference you could make if you stayed? You could be a judge if you wanted to—you could be a justice someday. But you’re not going to be now. Now you’re going to be another litigator in another corporate firm, and all the good work you could have done you’ll instead be fighting against. It’s just such a waste, Jude, such a waste.”
“我不是生你的气，裘德，”哈罗德说，“我是失望。你知道你有多特别吗？你知道你如果留下，可以改变多少事情吗？如果你想要，你可以成为法官，有一天还能当上最高法院大法官。但是现在不可能了。你到一间大型律师事务所当辩护律师，你原来可以完成那么多杰出的工作，如今却要站到敌对的那一方。这真是太浪费了，裘德，太浪费了。”
He was silent again. He repeated Harold’s words to himself: Such a waste, such a waste. Harold sighed. “So what is this about, really?” he asked. “Is it money? Is this what this is about? Why didn’t you tell me you needed money, Jude? I could’ve given you some. Is this all about money? Tell me what you need, Jude, and I’m happy to help you out.”
他又沉默了。他心中重复着哈罗德的话：太浪费了，太浪费了。哈罗德叹气：“所以你到底是为了什么呢？”他问，“是钱吗？就是为了钱吗？裘德，你为什么不告诉我你需要钱？我可以给你一些的。一切都是为了钱吗？告诉我你需要什么，我很乐意帮忙的。”
“Harold,” he began, “that’s so—that’s so kind of you. But—I can’t.”
“哈罗德，”他开口，“你真是太好心了。但是——但是我没办法接受。”
“Bullshit,” said Harold, “you won’t. I’m offering you a way to let you keep your job, Jude, to not have to take a job you’re going to hate, for work you will hate—and that’s not a maybe, that’s a fact—with no expectations or strings attached. I’m telling you that I’m happy to give you money for this.”
“狗屎，”哈罗德说，“你是不肯。我现在提出一个办法，让你不要辞职，裘德，不要接受一个你会痛恨的职务或工作——不是或许，而是一定——而且我不要求你回报，也没有附带条件。我是在告诉你，为了让你留在原来的地方工作，我很乐意给你钱。”
Oh, Harold, he thought. “Harold,” he said, wretchedly, “the kind of money I need isn’t the kind of money you have. I promise you.”
啊，哈罗德，他心想。“哈罗德，”他痛苦地说，“我跟你保证，我需要的钱，不是你给得了的。”
Harold was silent, and when he spoke next, his tone was different. “Jude, are you in any kind of trouble? You can tell me, you know. Whatever it is, I’ll help you.”
哈罗德沉默不语，再度开口时，他的口气变了：“裘德，你是惹上什么麻烦了吗？你知道你可以告诉我的。无论是什么，我都会帮你。”
“No,” he said, but he wanted to cry. “No, Harold, I’m fine.” He wrapped his right hand around his bandaged calf, with its steady, constant ache.
“不是，”他说，可是好想哭，“哈罗德，不是这样。我很好。”他用右手抓住贴了绷带的小腿，因为那里持续作痛。
“Well,” said Harold. “That’s a relief. But Jude, what could you possibly need so much money for, besides an apartment, which Julia and I will help you buy, do you hear me?”
“唔，”哈罗德说，“那我就松了口气。但是裘德，你怎么可能需要那么多钱呢？除了买房子。这个朱丽娅和我会帮你的，你听到了没？”
He sometimes found himself both frustrated and fascinated by Harold’s lack of imagination: in Harold’s mind, people had parents who were proud of them, and saved money only for apartments and vacations, and asked for things when they wanted them; he seemed to be curiously unaware of a universe in which those things might not be givens, in which not everyone shared the same past and future. But this was a highly ungenerous way to think, and it was rare—most of the time, he admired Harold’s steadfast optimism, his inability or unwillingness to be cynical, to look for unhappiness or misery in every situation. He loved Harold’s innocence, which was made more remarkable considering what he taught and what he had lost. And so how could he tell Harold that he had to consider wheelchairs, which needed to be replaced every few years, and which insurance didn’t wholly cover? How could he tell him that Andy, who didn’t take insurance, never charged him, had never charged him, but might want to someday, and if he did, he certainly wasn’t not going to pay him? How could he tell him that this most recent time his wound had opened, Andy had mentioned hospitalization and, maybe, someday in the future, amputation? How could he tell him that if his leg was amputated, it would mean a hospital stay, and physical therapy, and prostheses? How could he tell him about the surgery he wanted on his back, the laser burning his carapace of scars down to nothing? How could he tell Harold of his deepest fears: his loneliness, of becoming the old man with a catheter and a bony, bare chest? How could he tell Harold that he dreamed not of marriage, or children, but that he would someday have enough money to pay someone to take care of him if he needed it, someone who would be kind to him and allow him privacy and dignity? And then, yes, there were the things he wanted: He wanted to live somewhere where the elevator worked. He wanted to take cabs when he wanted to. He wanted to find somewhere private to swim, because the motion stilled his back and because he wasn’t able to take his walks any longer.
有时，哈罗德缺乏想象力的程度让他懊恼又惊奇。在哈罗德的心目中，人人都有以自己为荣的父母，存钱只是为了买房子或度假，想要什么开口就是了。他似乎没意识到在某些人生活的世界里，这些东西不见得是与生俱来的，也不是人人都有同样的过去和未来。但是这样想太不厚道了，他很少这么想。大部分时间，他都欣赏哈罗德坚定的乐观，他没办法或不愿意变得愤世嫉俗，不愿意去寻找不幸或悲惨的一面。他很爱哈罗德的纯真，尤其是想到他所教授的、他所失去的，就更觉得他了不起。所以他怎么能告诉哈罗德，自己必须考虑到每隔几年就得换新，而且保险不完全给付的轮椅？他怎么能告诉哈罗德，安迪的诊所没跟保险公司合作，从没收过他医疗费，但有一天可能开始要收；如果是这样，他当然不能不付钱？他怎么能告诉哈罗德，他最近腿上的这个疮，安迪提过要他去住院，而且有一天或许要截肢？他怎么能告诉哈罗德，如果他截肢，就得花钱住院，做物理治疗、装义肢？他怎么能告诉哈罗德，他想动背部手术，用激光把那些疤痕清除得一干二净？他怎么能告诉哈罗德他最深的恐惧：他的寂寞，他害怕成为一个装了导尿管、胸部瘦骨嶙峋的老人？他怎么能告诉哈罗德，他梦想的不是婚姻或子女，而是有一天如果有需要，有足够的钱雇人来照顾他，这个人会对他很和气，同时给他隐私和尊严？没错，还有一些他想要的东西：他想住在一个电梯不会坏的地方。他想随时想坐出租车就能坐。他想找私人游泳池，因为游泳能平抚他的背痛，而且他现在再也没法到处乱走了。
But he couldn’t tell Harold any of this. He didn’t want Harold to know just how flawed he was, what a piece of junk he’d acquired. And so he said nothing, and told Harold he had to go, and that he would talk to him later.
但是这些他都不能告诉哈罗德。他不想让哈罗德知道他的毛病这么多、知道他收养的根本是个废物。于是他什么都没说，只跟哈罗德说他得挂电话了，说下回再跟他谈。
Even before he had talked to Harold, he had prepared himself to be resigned to his new job, nothing more, but to first his unease, and then his surprise, and then his delight, and then his slight disgust, he found that he enjoyed it. He’d had experience with pharmaceutical companies when he was a prosecutor, and so much of his initial caseload concerned that industry: he worked with a company that was opening an Asia-based subsidiary to develop an anticorruption policy, traveling back and forth to Tokyo with the senior partner on the case—this was a small, tidy, solvable job, and therefore unusual. The other cases were more complicated, and longer, at times infinitely long: he mostly worked on compiling a defense for another of the firm’s clients, this a massive pharmaceutical conglomerate, against a False Claims Act charge. And three years into his life at Rosen Pritchard and Klein, when the investment management company Rhodes worked for was investigated for securities fraud, they came to him, and secured his partnership: he had trial experience, which most of the other associates didn’t, but he had known he would need to bring in a client eventually, and the first client was always the hardest to find.
甚至在跟哈罗德谈论之前，他已经准备好，面对新工作要逆来顺受，不要期望什么，但先是让他不安、继而让他惊奇、接着让他开心、最后让他有点厌恶的是，他发现自己乐在其中。他当联邦助理检察官时，处理过药厂的案子，于是刚到律师事务所时，承办的案子很多都跟药厂有关：有家药厂新设立了亚洲分公司，要发展一套反腐败政策，于是他和一位资深合伙人律师出差去东京，这是一个清楚、好解决的小案子，并不常见。其他案子都比较复杂，拖得比较久，有时还会拖到地老天荒，他大部分时间都在忙着为另一个客户（某大型制药集团）汇整出针对“诈领法案”的辩护依据。进入罗普克律师事务所不久，罗兹工作的那家投资管理公司因为证券诈欺案被调查，于是来找他，也因此确保了他能升任合伙人：他有出庭经验，这是事务所里大多数普通律师没有的，但他知道自己必须带来客户，而第一个客户总是最难找的。
He would never have admitted it to Harold, but he actually liked directing investigations prompted by whistle-blowers, liked pressing up against the boundaries of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, liked being able to stretch the law, like a strip of elastic, just past its natural tension point, just to the point where it would snap back at you with a sting. By day he told himself it was an intellectual engagement, that his work was an expression of the plasticity of the law itself. But at night he would sometimes think of what Harold would say if he was honest with him about what he was doing, and would hear his words again: Such a waste, such a waste. What was he doing?, he would think in those moments. Had the job made him venal, or had he always been so and had just fancied himself otherwise?
他永远不会向哈罗德承认，不过他真心喜欢调查由内部吹哨人检举的起诉案，喜欢设法挑战“海外反腐败法”的适用范围，喜欢有机会延展法律，像延展一条橡皮筋，拉到超过自然最大张力的点，让它弹回来刺痛你。白天他会告诉自己，这是一种智力的投入，他的工作不过是表达法律本身的弹性。但夜里，他有时会想到，如果老实跟哈罗德谈自己的工作，哈罗德会说些什么，于是耳边又响起他的话：太浪费了，太浪费了。那些时刻他会想，他在做什么？这份工作让他见利忘义了吗？或者他其实一直是这样，只不过把自己想成另一个样子了？
It’s all within the law, he would argue with the Harold-in-his-head.
一切都在法律的范围内，他会这么跟脑袋里的哈罗德辩驳。
Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, Harold-in-his-head would shoot back at him.
只因为你做得到，不表示你就该去做，他脑袋里的哈罗德会这么反驳他。
And indeed, Harold hadn’t been completely wrong, for he missed the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He missed being righteous and surrounded by the passionate, the heated, the crusading. He missed Citizen, who had moved back to London, and Marshall, whom he occasionally met for drinks, and Rhodes, whom he saw more frequently but who was perpetually frazzled, and gray, and whom he had remembered as cheery and effervescent, someone who would play electrotango music and squire an imaginary woman around the room when they were at the office late and feeling punchy, just to get him and Citizen to look up from their computers and laugh. They were getting older, all of them. He liked Rosen Pritchard, he liked the people there, but he never sat with them late at night arguing about cases and talking about books: it wasn’t that sort of office. The associates his age had unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends at home (or were themselves unhappy girlfriends or boyfriends); the ones older than he were getting married. In the rare moments they weren’t discussing the work before them, they made small talk about engagements and pregnancies and real estate. They didn’t discuss the law, not for fun or from fervor.
的确，哈罗德当初说的话还是有几分道理，因为他想念联邦检察官办公室。他想念站在正确的那一方，身边环绕着热情、愤怒、热衷于改革的同伴。他想念搬回伦敦的西提任，想念现在偶尔会跟他碰面喝酒的马歇尔，还有比较常见到面的罗兹。罗兹现在常年一副疲惫苍白的样子，他记得以前的罗兹总是欢乐且充满活力，他们在办公室加班到很晚、累得头昏眼花时，他会播放电子探戈音乐，然后跟一个想象中的女人在办公室里回旋起舞，只为了逗他和西提任从电脑上抬头，并且在看了之后大笑。他们渐渐老了，所有的人都一样。他喜欢罗普克律师事务所，他喜欢里面的人，但他从来不曾跟他们加班到深夜、讨论案子、聊起彼此看的书，这里不是那种办公室。他这个年纪的普通律师，家里都有不快乐的女友或男友（或者他们本身就是不快乐的女友或男友）；年纪比他大的都结婚了。少数不讨论手上工作的时刻，他们会聊一下订婚、怀孕、买房子。他们不会为了好玩或热情而讨论法律。
The firm encouraged its attorneys to do pro bono work, and he began volunteering with a nonprofit group that offered free legal advice to artists. The organization kept what they called “studio hours” every afternoon and evening, when artists could drop by and consult with a lawyer, and every Wednesday night he left work early, at seven, and sat in the group’s creaky-floored SoHo offices on Broome Street for three hours, helping small publishers of radical treatises who wanted to establish themselves as nonprofit entities, and painters with intellectual property disputes, and dance groups, photographers, writers, and filmmakers with contracts that were either so extralegal (he was presented with one written in pencil on a paper towel) that they were meaningless or so needlessly complicated that the artists couldn’t understand them—he could barely understand them—and yet had signed them anyway.
事务所鼓励大家从事公益服务工作，于是他开始去一个非营利的艺术家团体当义工，提供免费的法律咨询服务。那个组织的办公时间是每天下午和晚上，艺术家会来找律师咨询，因此他每周三晚上会早些下班，7点就离开，到苏荷区的布鲁姆街，在那个团体地板破烂的办公室里坐三小时，协助专门出版激进学术著作的非营利小出版社、有知识产权纠纷的画家，或是拿着各式各样合约前来咨询的舞蹈团体、摄影师、作家。那些合约要不就因为超出法律范围（他看过一份用铅笔写在纸巾上的合约）而没有意义，要不就是复杂得没有必要，害那些艺术家看不懂（连他都看不太懂了），但上面却有他们的签字。
Harold didn’t really approve of his volunteer work, either; he could tell he thought it frivolous. “Are any of these artists any good?” Harold asked. “Probably not,” he said. But it wasn’t for him to judge whether the artists were good or not—other people, plenty of other people, did that already. He was there only to offer the sort of practical help that so few of them had, as so many of them lived in a world that was deaf to practicalities. He knew it was romantic, but he admired them: he admired anyone who could live for year after year on only their fastburning hopes, even as they grew older and more obscure with every day. And, just as romantically, he thought of his time with the organization as his salute to his friends, all of whom were living the sorts of lives he marveled at: he considered them such successes, and he was proud of them. Unlike him, they had had no clear path to follow, and yet they had plowed stubbornly ahead. They spent their days making beautiful things.
哈罗德其实不太赞成他做这份义务工作，他感觉得出来，哈罗德认为这份工作很琐碎。“这些艺术家里有真正优秀的吗？”哈罗德问过他。“大概没有吧。”他说。但这些艺术家优秀与否轮不到他来判断，因为已经有其他一大堆人在做了。他去那里，只是提供一些艺术圈里非常缺乏的协助，因为那个圈子有太多人都活在对实用性充耳不闻的世界里。他知道自己这样想太浪漫了，但他欣赏他们。他欣赏可以一年又一年只靠着自己被急速消耗的希望活下去的人，即使他们每一天都变得更老，也变得更卑微。而同样浪漫的是，他觉得自己去这个组织当义工的时间，等于是在向他的朋友们致敬。这些人都过着令他惊异的生活，他觉得他们非常成功，也以他们为荣。不像他，这些人没有清楚的路径可以遵循，却依然顽强地开路前进，他们把自己的时间用来创造美丽的事物。
His friend Richard was on the board of the organization, and some Wednesdays he’d stop by on his way home—he had recently moved to SoHo—and sit and talk with him if he was between clients, or just give him a wave across the room if he was occupied. One night after studio hours, Richard invited him back to his apartment for a drink, and they walked west on Broome Street, past Centre, and Lafayette, and Crosby, and Broadway, and Mercer, before turning south on Greene. Richard lived in a narrow building, its stone gone the color of soot, with a towering garage door marking its first floor and, to its right, a metal door with a face-size glass window cut into its top. There was no lobby, but rather a gray, tiled-floor hallway lit by a series of three glowing bare bulbs dangling from cords. The hallway turned right and led to a cell-like industrial elevator, the size of their living room and Willem’s bedroom at Lispenard Street combined, with a rattling cage door that shuddered shut at the press of a button, but which glided smoothly up through an exposed cinder-block shaft. At the third floor, it stopped, and Richard opened the cage and turned his key into the set of massive, forbidding steel doors before them, which opened into his apartment.
他的朋友理查德是那个组织的理事，最近搬到苏荷区了，有时星期三回家途中会顺道过来。如果他刚好有空，两人会坐在一起聊一下；如果他正好在忙，理查德就远远跟他挥个手。某天晚上咨询结束后，理查德邀他去自己家喝杯酒。他们从布鲁姆街往西走，经过中央街、拉斐特街、克罗斯比街，以及百老汇大道、默瑟街，然后在格林街向南转。理查德住在一栋窄长的大楼内，石材已经转为煤灰色，一扇高耸的车库门占据了一楼。车库门右边还有一道金属门，门的上端嵌了一面像脸那么大的玻璃窗。这栋大楼没有大厅，只有一道铺了瓷砖的灰色走廊，上方用电线吊着三颗灯泡。沿着走廊往右转，是囚室般的工用电梯，就像利斯本纳街他们原始的客厅那么大，按一个钮，栅栏式的电梯门会颤抖着哗啦哗啦关上，但却能在裸露煤渣砖的电梯井里顺畅运作。到了三楼，电梯停下，理查德打开电梯门，把钥匙插入面前那道巨大得令人生畏的钢制双扇门，门后就是他住的公寓。
“God,” he said, stepping into the space, as Richard flicked on some lights. The floors were whitewashed wood, and the walls were white as well. High above him, the ceiling winked and shone with scores of chandeliers—old, glass, new, steel—that were strung every three feet or so, at irregular heights, so that as they walked deeper into the loft, he could feel glass bugles skimming across the top of his head, and Richard, who was even taller than he was, had to duck so they wouldn’t scrape his forehead. There were no dividing walls, but near the far end of the space was a shallow, freestanding box of glass as tall and wide as the front doors, and as he drew closer, he could see that within it was a gigantic honeycomb shaped like a graceful piece of fan coral. Beyond the glass box was a blanket-covered mattress, and before it was a shaggy white Berber rug, its mirrors twinkling in the lights, and a white woolen sofa and television, an odd island of domesticity in the midst of so much aridity. It was the largest apartment he had ever been in.
“老天。”他边说边走进去。理查德开了灯，地上是刷白的木地板，墙面也漆成白色。上方挑高的天花板，每隔约三英尺就有一座枝状吊灯——古老的、玻璃制的、新的、钢制的——高度不等，他往前深入时，可以感觉到玻璃的喇叭形灯罩轻轻擦过他的头顶，而理查德的个子比他还高，就得弯下身子，免得撞到额头。整间公寓没有隔间，但快到尽头之处，有一个浅浅的、独立的玻璃箱，高度和宽度就跟前门一样。他走近时，发现箱子里是个巨大的蜂巢，形状就像优雅的柳珊瑚。玻璃箱再过去，有一张罩着毛毯的床垫，床垫前铺着一张白色粗毛的柏柏尔地毯，几面镜子映照着灯光，还有一张白色羊毛沙发、电视机，像是广大荒漠中的小孤岛。他从没见过面积这么大的公寓。
