Are You Listening? 你在听吗？

Conversations with my deaf mother.

——与我的聋人母亲的对话。

By André Aciman

March 10, 2014

（近期翻译稿。来自于《纽约客》的 Personal History 栏目。一篇文笔相当好的非虚构作品。）

1946年，订婚日当天的作者母亲。摄于亚历山大市。

I always knew my mother couldn’t hear, but I can’t remember when it dawned on me that she’d always be deaf. If I was told, I didn’t believe it. It was no different when I learned about sex. Someone may have sat me down for the facts of life, and although I wasn’t really shocked and probably already knew, I couldn’t bring myself to trust any of it. In between knowing something and refusing to know it lies a murky chasm that even the most enlightened among us are perfectly happy to inhabit. If anyone gave me the official report on my mother, it would have been my grandmother, who did not like her daughter-in-law and who found my mother’s deaf friends as repellent as ungainly fowls squawking in her son’s living room. If it wasn’t my grandmother, it would have been the way people made fun of my mother on the street.

我一直知道我的母亲听不见，但却记不清是何时我才意识到她过去就听不见，将来也永远听不见。如果有人告诉我这一点，我也不曾相信。这就像我初次了解到“性”一样。也许有人坐下来跟我好好聊了一聊有关生活的一些真相，即使我并没有因此感到震惊，也可能早就知道了这些事实，但我仍然无法相信这一切。在知晓某事，和拒绝承认它之间隐约有一条沟壑，即使是最明智的人也会乐于接受这样的模糊地带。倘若说是谁正式告知了我这一事实，那也一定是我的奶奶。她不喜欢自己的儿媳，并且认为，当我母亲的聋人朋友们在她儿子的客厅里发出嘈杂的声音时，他们就跟笨拙的家禽一样令人生厌。即便我奶奶没有如此取笑她，那些街上的陌生人也会这么做。

Some men whistled when she walked by, because she was beautiful and sexy and had a way of looking you boldly in the face until you lowered your eyes. But, when she shopped and spoke with the monotone, guttural voice of the deaf, people laughed. In Alexandria, Egypt, where we lived until we were summarily exiled, like all of the country’s Jews, that’s what you did when someone was different. It wasn’t full-throated laughter; it was derision, the stepchild of contempt, which is as mirthless as it is cruel.She couldn’t hear their laughter, but she read it in their faces. This must be how she finally understood why people always smirked when she thought she was speaking like everyone else. Who knows how long it took her to realize that she was unlike other children, why some turned away, or others, meaning to be kind, had a diffident way when they allowed her to play with them?

一些男人会在母亲经过时会吹起口哨，因为她性感漂亮，并且会直勾勾地盯着你看，直到你不好意思地移开目光。但是，一旦她开始购物，并用聋人特有的单调喉音说话时，人们就开始哄笑起来。在埃及的亚历山大，这座我们和这个国家的所有犹太人一样被驱逐前一直生活的城市，人们就是如此对待与众不同的人的。那并不是敞亮的大笑，而是嘲笑，不如说它是蔑视的继子，既可笑又残忍。她听不见那些人的笑声，但是她能读懂他们的表情。这一定是她如何开始明白，为什么她以为自己就跟其他人一样说话的时候，人们却总是傻笑的原因。谁知道过了多久她才意识到她与其他孩子不一样，为什么有些孩子会拒绝她，而另一些孩子好意地允许她与他们一起玩时，却用一种不同的方式对待她？

Born in Alexandria in 1924 in the wake of British colonial rule, my mother belonged to a middle-class, French-speaking Jewish family. Her father had done well as a bicycle merchant and spared no expense to find a cure for her deafness. Her mother took her to see the most prominent audiologists in Europe, but returned more disheartened after each appointment. There was, the doctors said, no cure. Her child had lost her hearing to meningitis when she was a few months old, and from meningitis there was no coming back. Her ears were healthy, but meningitis had touched the part of her brain responsible for hearing.

1924年，我母亲在英国殖民统治下的亚历山大市出生。她来自于一个说法语的犹太中产家庭。她的父亲是个成功的自行车商人，不惜一切代价的想要治好她的耳聋。她母亲带她去看全欧洲最有名望的听力矫治专家，但每次看诊的结果，却都只是加深了失望。医生说她的耳聋无药可医。她在只有几个月大时，因为得脑膜炎失去了听力，而脑膜炎导致的耳聋无法逆转。她的耳朵功能健全，但是脑膜炎损害了她负责听力的那部分脑区。

In those days, there was nothing resembling deaf pride. Deafness was a stigma. The very poor often neglected their deaf children, condemning them to a lifetime of menial labor. Children remained illiterate, and their language was primitive, gestural. In the snobbish view of my mother’s parents, if you couldn’t cure deafness, you learned to hide it. If you weren’t ashamed of it, you were taught to be. You learned how to lip-read, not sign; you learned to speak with your voice, not your hands. You didn’t eat with your hands; why on earth would you speak with them?

在那个年代，没有类似于“聋人的尊严”这样的观念。失去听力是种耻辱。穷人总是忽视他们的聋人孩子，惩罚他们一辈子从事最卑微的劳作。这些孩子不会读写，他们的语言功能停留在最简单的，打手势交流的程度。在我祖父母势利的想法中，如果你不能治疗好耳聋，那么你就要学会隐藏这一点。如果你不因为耳聋感到羞愧，那你要学会如此。你要学会读懂唇语，而不是手势语言；你要学会用嘴巴说话，而不是用手。既然你不用你的手吃饭，那为什么你要用它们说话？

My mother was initially enrolled in a Jewish French day school, but within weeks her parents and the teachers realized that the school couldn’t accommodate a deaf child, so she was shipped off to a specialized school in Paris, overseen by nuns. It turned out to be more of a finishing school than a school for the deaf. She was taught good posture by walking with a book on her head and by holding books between her elbows and her waist when she sat at a dinner table. She picked up sewing, knitting, and needlepoint. But she was a volatile, rambunctious child and had grown into a tomboy who collected bicycles from her father’s shop. She didn’t like to play with dolls. She had no patience for Frenchsavoiror for French grace and deportment.

我母亲最初入读了一所招收犹太裔法国人的日校，但是没过几周她的父母和老师意识到聋人儿童无法适应这样的学校。于是她转学去了巴黎的一所特殊学校，由修女照看。事实证明这所学校更像女子精修学校，而非为聋人办的学校。学校教她把书顶在头上走路，坐在餐桌前时用胳膊肘和腰部夹住书，她由此习得了优雅的身姿。她学会了缝纫、编织和刺绣。但是她是那样一个性情不定、难以管教的孩子，后来长成了一个从她父亲的店子里收集自行车的假小子。她不喜欢玩布娃娃，对法国学问和法式礼仪举止全无耐心。

She came back to Alexandria two years later, where she was turned over to a well-intentioned and innovative Greek woman who ran a French private school for the deaf in her villa. The school was welcoming and forgiving, and vibrated with a sense of its mission. Classwork, however, consisted of long, gruelling hours learning how to mimic sounds that my mother would never be able to hear. The rest of the time was devoted to lipreading sessions: frontal lipreading and, in my mother’s case, because she was a quick learner, profile lipreading. She learned how to read and write, acquired a rudimentary knowledge of sign language, was taught history and some literature, and at graduation was awarded a French bronze medal by a general who happened to be passing through Alexandria.

她两年后回到了亚历山大，在那里她被一位好心且富有创新意识的希腊女士接手，那位女士在自己的别墅里为聋人开办了一所法语私立学校。这所学校有着热情包容的氛围，充满使命感。然而学校教授的功课却冗长且十分折磨，教授学生如何模仿那些他们永远都无法听见的声音。其余的时间被用于学习唇读：与人面对面时的唇读，由于我母亲的超强学习能力，她还需要学习如何从人的侧脸进行唇读。她学会了读写，掌握了基本的手语，并且学习了历史和一些文学作品。在她毕业之际，一位正好路过亚历山大的将军还授予了她一枚法国铜制奖章。

Still, she had spent her first eighteen years learning how to do what couldn’t have seemed more unnatural: pretending to hear. It was no better than teaching a blind person to count his steps from this pillar to that post so as not to be caught with a white stick. She learned to laugh at a joke even if she would have needed to hear the play on words in the punch line. She nodded at precisely the right intervals to someone speaking to her in Russian, to the point where the Russian was convinced that she understood everything he’d been saying.

她仍旧花了最初的18年用于学习如何做一件看起来相当不自然的事情：假装她在听。这就如同教盲人数从这根柱子到那根柱子的步数，这样他就不会被别人看见他使用盲杖。她学习了如何笑着回应笑话，即使她本需要听见才能理解其中的笑点。她能够在有人对她说俄语时，准确找到说话的间隔点头，以至于那个俄国人深信不疑她能听懂他说的每个字。

The Greek headmistress was idolized by her students, but her method had disastrous consequences formy mother’s ability to process and synthesize complex ideas. Past a certain threshold, things simply stopped making sense to her. She could talk politics if you outlined the promises made by a Presidential candidate, but she was unable to think through the inconsistencies in his agenda, even when they were explained to her. She lacked the conceptual framework or the symbolic sophistication to acquire and use an abstract vocabulary. She might like a painting by Monet, but she couldn’t discuss the beauty of a poem by Baudelaire.

希腊女校长深受学生们崇拜。但是她的教学方式却给我母亲处理和抽象复杂概念的能力带来了灾难性的后果。过了某个临界点，事情对她来说就没有意义了。如果你给她概述某位总统候选人的政治承诺，那么她也能与你讨论政治话题。但她无法看透他的议程前后矛盾之处，即使你已经给她解释过了。她缺乏概念框架和复杂象征思维能力，因而无法学习并使用抽象词汇。她也许会喜欢莫奈的画，但却无法辨析波德莱尔的诗歌之美。

When I asked her a question such as “Can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift?” or “Is the Cretan lying when he says that all Cretans are liars?,” she did not understand it. Did she think in words? I’d ask. She did not know. If not in words, how did she organize her thoughts? She did not know that, either. Does anyone? Asked when she realized she was deaf, or what life was like without hearing, or whether she minded not hearing Bach or Beethoven, she’d say she hadn’t really thought about it. You might as well have asked a blind person to describe colors. Wit, too, eluded her, though she loved comedy, jesting, and slapstick. She was an accomplished mimic and was drawn to the voiceless Harpo Marx, whose jokes were rooted not in speech but in body language.

当我问她诸如“上帝能否创造一块他自己都举不动的石头”或是“在一名克里特岛人说所有克里特岛人都说谎时，他是否在说谎”的问题时，她无法理解它们。我会问，她是否在用语言思考？她不知道。如果不是在用语言思考，那么她如何组织她的思维？她也不知道。会有人知道这些问题的答案吗？如果她被问到具体是什么时候她才知道自己无法听见，听不见的生活是什么样的，或者她是否在意她听不见巴赫和贝多芬的旋律时，她会说她从没有思考过这些。你还不如让一位盲人描述颜色。智慧也离她远去，即便她如此喜爱喜剧和闹剧。她是个娴熟的模仿者，被哈珀马克思的默剧吸引，他的笑话都根植于肢体语言，而非话语。

She had a circle of devoted deaf friends, but unlike a deaf person today, who might be able to finger-spell every word in the Oxford English Dictionary, they used a language without an alphabet, just a shorthand lingo of hand and facial signs whose vocabulary seldom exceeded five hundred words. Her friends could discuss sewing, recipes, horoscopes. They could tell you they loved you, and they could be unsparingly kind with children and old people when they touched them, because hands speak more intimately than words. But intimacy is one thing, and complex ideas quite another.

她周围有一些忠实的聋人朋友，但是与现在那些能用手指拼写牛津辞典的每一个词的聋人不同，他们的语言里没有字母表，只有一些使用手部动作和脸部表情的速记行话，这样能表达的词汇不会超过500个。她的朋友能讨论缝纫、菜谱和占星术。他们能表达他们爱你，当他们触摸孩子和老人时不吝善意，因为手势比话语更亲近。但亲密是一回事，复杂的概念又是另一回事。

After leaving school, my mother volunteered as a nurse in Alexandria. She drew blood, gave injections, and eventually served in a hospital, caring for wounded British soldiers during the Second World War. She dated a few of them, and would take them out for a spin on the motorbike that her father had given her on her eighteenth birthday. She liked to go to parties, and had a surprising gift for fast dancing. She became a coveted partner for anyone who wanted to jitterbug or go for an early-morning swim at the beach.

在离开学校后，我母亲自愿在亚历山大做护士。她抽血、打针，最终在一家医院工作，在二战中护理受伤的英军士兵。她与其中的一些病员约会过，会骑着她十八岁生日时她父亲送给她的摩托车，带他们去兜风。她喜欢参加派对，在快步舞上表现出了惊人天赋。她成为了每个想要跳吉巴特舞和清晨去沙滩游泳的人梦寐以求的伴侣。

When my father met her, she wasn’t yet twenty. He was stunned by her beauty, her warmth, her unusual mixture of meekness and in-your-face boldness. That was how she compensated for being deaf, and it sometimes made you forget that she was. She charmed his friends and his family, except for his parents. Her future father-in-law called her “the cripple,” his wife “a gold-digger.” But my father refused to listen to them, and three years later they were married. In her wedding pictures, she is beaming. Her Greek teacher applauded her triumph: she had married out of the deaf ghetto.

我父亲遇见她时，她还不满二十岁。他惊异于她的美貌，她的热情，还有她身上不寻常的温驯和大胆放肆的混合特质。这些都弥补了她听不见的缺陷，有时还使人忘记她是个聋人。她迷住了父亲的朋友和家人，除了他的父母。她未来的公公称她为“那个残疾人”，未来婆婆则称她为“一个捞女”。但是我的父亲不听他们的。三年后他们结婚了。在她的结婚照上，她容光焕发。她的希腊老师为她的成功喝彩——她嫁给了犹太聋哑人群体以外的人。

Now I can see that with a better education she might have become someone else. Her intelligence and her combative perseverance in the face of so many obstacles in Egypt as a Jew—and, after Egypt, in Italy and then the U.S.—would have made her a great career woman. She might have become a physician or a psychiatrist. In a less enlightened age, she remained a housewife. Even though she was well off, she was not only a woman but a deaf woman. Two strikes.

现在我明白，如果受过更好的教育，她也许会成为另外一个人。作为一名在埃及的犹太人（以及之后在意大利和美国），她在面对如此多的的困难时表现出的斗志和韧劲，加上她的才智，本会使她成为一位伟大的事业型女性。她也许本该成为一名内科医生或是精神科医生。但在那个没那么开明的年代，她只能继续做一名家庭主妇。尽管她富有，她也只是一名女性，而且还是一名聋人女性。这是双重打击。

She spoke and understood French, learned Greek and basic Arabic, and when we landed in Italy she picked up Italian by going to the market every day. When she didn’t understand something, she pretended that she did until she got it. She almost always got it. In the consulate in Naples, weeks before immigrating to the United States, in 1968, she had her first encounter with American English. She was asked to raise her right hand and repeat the oath of allegiance. She babbled some soft-spoken sounds that the American functionary was happy to mistake for the oath. The scene was so awkward that it brought out nervous giggles in my brother and me. My mother laughed with us as we walked out of the building, but my father had to be told why it was funny.

她会说和理解法语，学过希腊语和简单的阿拉伯语，当我们到了意大利后，她在每天去集市时还学会了意大利语。当她无法理解某事物时，她假装她懂了，直到她真正明白为止。她几乎总是能理解新事物。1968年，距离我们移民去美国的数周前，在那不勒斯的领事馆里，她被要求举起右手，跟读效忠的誓词。她低声嘟囔了几句，美国官员很乐意把这些误认为是誓言。这场面太尴尬了，我和弟弟都紧张得傻笑了起来。当我们走出大楼时，我母亲和我们一起笑了，但我们不得不告知父亲这为什么很有趣。

Her deafness had always stood like an insuperable wall between them, and the longer they stayed married the more difficult it was to scale. In retrospect, it had always stood there. My father loved classical music; she had never been to a concert. He read long Russian novels and modern French writers whose prose was cadenced and brilliant. She preferred fashion magazines. He liked to stay at home and read after work; she liked to go dancing and have friends over for dinner. She had grown up enjoying American movies, because in Egypt they had French subtitles; he preferred French films, which had no subtitles and were therefore lost on her, because lipreading actors on the screen proved almost impossible. His friends spoke about the most rarefied things imaginable: the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis, the archeological digs around Alexandria, the novels of Curzio Malaparte; she loved gossip.

她的耳聋总像隔阂在他们之间一堵无法逾越的墙，且他们结婚越久，就越难跨越。回想起来，这堵墙似乎一直在那里。父亲热爱古典音乐；而母亲从未能听一场音乐会。他亲喜爱读俄国的长篇小说，现代法国作家的散文（这些作家的散文抑扬顿挫，妙趣横生）；她则更喜欢读时尚杂志。他喜欢在下班后呆在家里阅读；她喜欢去跳舞，并且邀请朋友们来家中吃晚饭。她从小就喜欢看美国电影，因为在埃及播放这些电影都会配有法语字幕；他喜欢没有字幕的法国电影，而她看不懂，因为对银幕中的演员进行唇读几乎不可能做到。他的那些朋友喜欢高谈阔论那些想象力所能企及的最精妙的事物：希腊-埃及的神祗塞拉皮斯、亚历山大周围的考古学发掘、库尔齐奥·马拉巴特的小说；而她只爱八卦。

Not long after they were married, they bothrealized how utterly unsuited they were. They loved each other until the very end, but they misunderstood and insulted each other, and quarrelled every day. He often went out when her deaf friends visited. In the nineteen-sixties, he left home altogether for a few years, coming back just weeks before we were to leave Egypt. Those of her friends who married out of the deaf community had tumultuous marriages, too. Only those who stayed with the deaf seemed to find as much happiness as the hearing.

在他们结婚后不久，他们都意识到了两人是有多么不合适。他们至死不渝地爱着彼此，但是他们也相互误解和攻击，每日争吵不休。父亲会在母亲的聋人朋友拜访时出门。在1960年代，他离开家好几年，直到我们离开埃及的前几周才回来。母亲那些在聋人群体之外择偶的朋友，他们的婚姻也都很不平静。只有那些选择与聋人相伴的朋友似乎找到了如同获得听觉一般的幸福。

My mother never really did learn English. Lip movements were not clear or declarative enough, unless you seemed to parody what you were saying for comic effect. She didn’t like it when I exaggerated my lip movements to her in public, because they proclaimed her deafness. Many pitied her, and some made an effort to cross the barrier. Some well-meaning people tried to communicate with her by mimicking the speech of the deaf, aping a raucous voice and making distorted faces. Others spoke loudly, as though raising the decibel level might get their point across. She could tell they were yelling. Then there were those who, try as they might, were never able to understand what my mother was saying to them, and those who didn’t care to make the effort. They refused to look her in the face or even to acknowledge her presence at the dining table.

我的母亲从未真正学过英语。唇部的活动似乎并不够清晰明白，除非你是为了喜剧的效果，对你刚刚的话进行拙劣的模仿。她不喜欢我在公众场合对她夸大唇部动作，因为这些夸张表情仿佛在向周围人宣告她耳聋。许多人同情她，其中一些人努力想跨越壁障。一些善意的人试图与她沟通，他们模仿聋人的语言，粗声粗气的说话，面部扭曲。有一些人大声说话，仿佛提高分贝就能使她听见。她能分辨出他们在大喊大叫。另外一些人尽管尽了最大努力也无法听懂我母亲说的话。还有一些人根本就不愿意费这个力气。他们不愿意正视她，甚至不愿意承认她也坐在餐桌上。

Or people just laughed.

也有的人只是嘲笑她。

When friends at the playground asked why my mother spoke with that strange voice, I would say, “Because that is how she speaks.” Her voice didn’t sound strange until it was pointed out to me. It was Mom’s voice—the voice that woke me up in the morning, that called out to me at the beach, that soothed me and told me tales at bedtime.

当朋友们在操场上问我，为什么我的母亲用那样奇怪的声音说话时，我会说：“因为她就是那样说话的。” 我不曾意识到她说话的声音听起来很奇怪，直到他们向我指出这一点。那是母亲的声音——这个声音早晨叫我起床，在海滩呼唤我，在睡前安抚我并且给我讲故事。

Sometimes I tried to persuade myself that she was not really deaf. She was a mischievous prankster, and what better way to keep everyone hopping than to pretend she was deaf, the way every child has, at one point or another, pretended to be blind, or played dead? For some reason, she had forgotten to stop playing her prank. To test her, I would slide behind her when she wasn’t looking and yell in her ear. No response. Not a shudder. What amazing control she had. I sometimes ran to her and said that someone was ringing the doorbell. She opened the door; then, realizing I had played a low trick on her, she would laugh it off, because wasn’t it funny how the joy of her life—me—had hatched this practical joke to remind her, like everyone else, that she was deaf. One day, I watched her get dressed up to go out with my father and, as she was fastening a pair of earrings, I told her she was beautiful. Yes, I am beautiful. But it doesn’t change anything. I am still deaf—meaning, And don’t you forget it.

有时我试图让自己相信她并不是真的听不见。她是一个调皮的恶作剧者，还有什么方式比装聋作哑，就像孩子在某时某刻装瞎或者装死那样，更加能让大家都气得跳脚呢？出于某种原因，她忘了停下这个恶作剧。为了测试她，我会在她没看见的时候，偷偷溜到她背后对着她的耳朵大喊大叫。没有任何反应。没有被吓到战栗。多么惊人的控制力啊。我有时会跑向她，告诉她有人在摁门铃。她打开了门，然后才发现我跟她开了一个卑鄙的玩笑，她会一笑了之。因为她一生的欣喜——我——策划了这个恶作剧，就为了像其他人一样提醒她，她听不见。这难道不是很有趣吗？有一天，我看见她盛装打扮，准备与父亲一同出门。在她戴上耳环的时候，我告诉她，她很美。是的，我很美。但这改变不了任何事，我还是听不见——意思是说，你可别忘了这一点。

It was difficult for a child to reconcile her ready smile, her love of comedy and good fellowship with her enduring grief as a wife and a deaf person. She always cried with her friends. They all cried. But those of us who have lived with the deaf stop feeling sorry for them. Instead, one jumps quickly from pity to cruelty, like a pebble skittering on shallow water, without understanding what it means to live without sound. I seldom have been able to sit still and force myself to feel her seclusion. It was much easier to lose my temper when she wouldn’t listen, because she never listened—because part of understanding what you said seemed to involve a mixture of guesswork and intuition, where the shading of facts meant more than the facts themselves.

对于一个孩子来说，很难把她那时刻挂着的微笑、她对喜剧的热爱和她对作为一名妻子和聋子所需要承受的悲痛所联系在一起。她总是和朋友一起哭，他们都哭过。但是我们这些习惯于和聋人生活在一起的人早已不再为他们感到难过。取而代之的是，我们很快从同情转向了残忍，就像在浅水中跳动的鹅卵石，却不明白生活在无声的世界里意味着什么。我几乎无法安静坐着，逼着自己去感受她所需忍受的静默。对我来说，由于她听不见而大发脾气要容易的多，因为她从来都听不见——因为理解你所说的话中似乎有一部分要靠猜测和直觉，这时，事实的隐晦之处超过了事实本身。

Nothing was a greater ordeal than making phone calls for my mother. She often asked my brother or me to help her, dialling the number and speaking for her as she stood there, watching every word. She appreciated it and was proud that at so young an age we were able to call the plumber, her friends, her seamstress. She told me that I was her ears. “He is her ears,” her mother-in-law would proclaim. She meant, Thank the good Lord there was someone to do her dirty work for her. Otherwise, how could that poor woman survive?

没有什么事能比帮助母亲打电话更折磨人。她总是要求我或者弟弟帮助她，替她拨号，或者帮她传话，让她在边上“看”每个词。她很欣赏也很自豪我们这么小就能帮她打电话叫水管工、她的朋友和她的裁缝。她说我就是她的耳朵。“他是她的耳朵”，她的婆婆会对人这么说——她的意思是，谢天谢地有人替她做这些脏活。否则那个可怜的女人要怎么生存呢？

There were two ways to get out of making phone calls. One was to hide. The other was to lie. I would dial the number, wait a while, and then tell her that the line was busy. Five minutes later, the line was still busy. It never occurred to me that the call might be urgent or, when her husband failed to show up for dinner, that she was desperate to talk to a friend or a relative, anyone to shield her from her loneliness. Sometimes men called, but, with my brother and me as go-betweens, the conversations were awkward. The men never called again.

有两个方法可以逃避替母亲打电话这件事。一种是躲起来，另一种是撒谎。我会在拨号后假装等上一会儿，然后告诉她另一头忙线。五分钟后，另一头还是忙线。我似乎从没有想过，她让我打的电话也许是有很紧急的事，或者，当她的丈夫没能回家吃晚饭时，她会非常想要打电话给朋友或者亲戚，来排遣孤独感。有时会有人打来电话，却因为我和弟弟作为中间人的缘故，对话会变得十分尴尬。这些人也就再也不会来电话了。

When I went to graduate school, it fell to my brother to stand by as a middleman. I would speak to him, he would relay the message, and in the background I would make out her voice telling him what to say, which he would relay back to me. Sometimes I would ask him to put her on the phone and let her tell me whatever came to mind, becauseI missed her voice, and wanted to hear her say the things she had always said to me, slurring her words a bit, ungrammatical, words that weren’t necessarily words even, just sounds that reached far back to my childhood, when I didn’t know words.

当我去读研究生时，开始由我弟弟担当我与母亲的中间人。我会对他说话，由他转述给母亲。我能从听筒里听见母亲告诉他该说什么，他再向我复述。有时我会要求弟弟让母亲接电话，让她想到什么就说什么，因为我思念她的声音，想要听她说那些常对我唠叨的话，那些含混不清、也不合语法、甚至不一定是话语的话，只是一些我童年尚且不太会说话时就开始听到的声音。

As a child, I had fantasized that someday someone would invent a gizmo that would allow my mother to telephone another deaf person. The miracle occurred about thirty years ago, when I obtained a teletypewriter for her. For the first time in her life, she was able to communicate with her deaf friends without involving me or my brother. She could type long messages in broken English and arrange to see them. Then, seven years ago, I installed a device on her TV that allowed her to communicate visually with friends around the country. Most were too old to travel, so this was a godsend.

当我还是一个孩子时，我幻想过有一天，会有人发明一种设备，能让我母亲给其他盲人打电话。这一奇迹在30年前发生了，当时我为她搞到了一台电传打字机。她人生中第一次与她的聋人朋友单独交流，不需要我或者弟弟参与。她能用蹩脚的英语打出长长的话，然后安排与朋友会面。然后在七年前，我在她的电视机上安装了新设备，让她能够与全国各地的朋友视频通话。她的多数朋友年事已高，所以这一新发明是天赐之物。

Open to any new experience, she fell in love with each technological advance. (My father, ever reluctant to approach anything new, remained attached to his shortwave radio.) Several years ago, when my mother was in her mid-eighties, I bought her an iPad, so that she could Skype and FaceTime for hours with friends abroad, people she hadn’t seen in ages. It was better than anything I had imagined as a boy. She could call me when I was at home, at the office, at the gym, even at Starbucks. I could FaceTime with her and not worry where she was or how she was doing. After my father died, she insisted on living alone, and my biggest fear was that she would fall and hurt herself. FaceTime also meant that I was spared having to visit her so often, as she well understood: “Does this mean that you’re not coming over tonight because we’re speaking with my iPad?”

母亲乐于接受所有新体验，爱上了每一项技术进步（而父亲总是不愿意接触新事物，还在对他的短波收音机恋恋不舍）。几年前，我母亲80多岁时，我给她买了一台iPad，那样她就能和在国外的朋友用Skype或FaceTime聊上好几小时，这些人她多年没见到了。这已经超越了我童年时的一切幻想。无论我是在家，还是办公室或健身房，甚至是星巴克，她都能与我视频通话。我也能随时与她视频通话，而不必担心她在哪儿或者她过得怎样。在我父亲去世后，她坚持独自居住。我对此最大的担忧是她会摔倒受伤。使用FaceTime也意味着我能不用经常去看望她，正如她也很清楚：“因为我们现在在用iPad对话，所以你今天晚上不会过来了是吗？”

My mother, for all her deficits, was among the most sagacious people I have known. Language was a prosthesis, a grafted limb that she had learned to live with but that remained peripheral because she could do without it. She had more immediate ways of communicating. She was acutely discerning and had a flair for people and situations—from the Latin verbfragrare, to scent. Her radar was always on: whom to trust, what to believe, and how to read an inflection. She made up in scent what she had lost in her deafness. She taught me spices, naming them in a grocery store by dipping her palm into the burlap bags and letting me sniff each handful. She taught me to recognize her perfumes, the smell of damp wool, the smell of leaking gas. When I write about scent, I am channelling not Proust but my mother.

我的母亲即便身上有她的那些缺陷，但还是我所认识的最睿智的人之一。语言就像假肢，她已经学会了跟它在一起生活，但是对她来说仍然是一种外接设备。没了它，她也可以生活。她有更直接的交流方式。她有着极敏锐的判别力，对各种人和情况有鉴别能力——从拉丁语动词“fragrare”，到气味。她的雷达总是时刻工作：谁值得信任，什么可以相信，如何解读细微的变化。她用嗅觉弥补失去的听觉。她教我认识调味品，把手伸进杂货店里的麻袋中，然后让我细嗅它们的气味。她教我分辨她的香水味、潮湿的羊毛味，还有泄露的煤气味。当我写关于气味的文字，我想到的不是化学家普鲁斯特，而是母亲。

People were often immediately drawn to her. You might attribute this to the expansive good cheer she radiated whenever she went out. But my mother was a profoundly unhappy soul. I think it was her unhindered capacity to let intimacy happen at a glance, with everyone—rich, poor, good, bad, butcher, postman, grandee, or Senegalese workers at supermarkets on the Upper West Side who helped her without knowing that she, too, was a native French speaker. If she had been dropped into Kandahar or Islamabad, she would have had no trouble finding the cut of beef she wanted and haggling over the price until she prevailed, while making friends with others in the marketplace.

人们总是会立即被母亲吸引。你可以把这归功于她每次外出时所流露出的那种爽朗的愉快心情。但她内心极度郁郁不乐。我觉得那是源于她那不受控制的能力，她能让亲密发生在一瞥之间，无论对方是富人，穷人，好人，坏人，屠夫，邮差，显贵，还是在上西区的超市里帮助她的塞内加尔员工（他们并不知道她的母语也是法语）。如果把她放在坎大哈或者伊斯兰堡，她也能毫不费力地找到她想要的那一块牛肉，或是跟人讨价还价直至她大获全胜，同时还能在集市上交到朋友。

She made you want to offer intimacy, too. Better yet, she made you reach into yourself to find it, in case you’d mislaid it or never knew you had it in you to give. This was her language, and, as with prisoners in separate cells learning to tap a new language with its own peculiar grammar and alphabet, she taught you to speak it. Sometimes my friends, within an hour of meeting her, forgot that she couldn’t hear them and came to understand everything she said, even when they couldn’t understand a word of French, much less French spoken by a deaf person. I’d try to step in and interpret for them. “I get it,” my friend would say. “I understand perfectly,” my mother would say—meaning, Leave us alone and stop meddling, we’re doing just fine. I was the one not understanding.

她会让你想要去亲近她。甚至进一步，她能让你深入内心找到亲密的愿望，以防你误入歧途，或者根本不知道自己有能力付出。这就是她的语言，而且，就如同被关在不同牢房的囚犯学习使用一种特殊语法和字母的语言一般，她还教会你如何使用它。有时，我的朋友们在才认识她不到一小时的情况下，就忘了她听不见他们的声音，而且开始明白她说的所有话。甚至是在他们不懂一个法语单词，更别提是聋人说的法语的时候。我会试着介入，为他们双方翻译。“我能听懂”，我的朋友会这么说。“我完全能明白”，我的母亲会这么说——意思是别管我们，不用掺和，我们好着呢。这时，我才是那个听不懂的人。

One day a few years ago, I stopped by my mother’s apartment during a jog on a very cold day, to warm up and catch my breath, and see how she was doing. She had been watching TV. I sat next to her and explained that I wasn’t able to come to dinner that night because I was going out with friends, but that I might drop in the next day for our ritual Scotch and dinner. She liked that. What did I want her to cook? I suggested her baked ziti, with the top slightly crisp. She thought it was a great idea. I had forgotten to remove my ski mask, and the entire conversation took place with my lips covered. She was listening to me by following the movement of my eyebrows.

在几年前，非常冷的一天，我在慢跑时路过我母亲的住所，想停下喘口气，并暖和一下，顺便看看她怎么样。她正在看电视。我坐在她身旁，解释我晚上要跟朋友外出，不能过去跟她一起吃晚饭。但是我也许会在第二天过去，与她共进例行的晚餐，喝苏格兰威士忌。她觉得那样很好。我会想要她做什么菜呢？我建议她做烤意大利通心粉，上面要稍微有点脆。她觉得这主意好极了。我已经忘了整个对话中我没有摘下我的滑雪面罩，从头到尾我的唇部都是被遮住的。她是用观察我眉毛的活动来“听见”我说了些什么的。

In the new world where my mother ended her days, you got respect and had equal rights, you thrived with dignity and security. She liked it better than the Old World. But it wasn’t her home. Now that I think of what Shakespeare might have called her “unaccommodated” language, I realize how much I miss itsimmediate, tactile quality, from another age, when your face was your bond, not your words. I owe this language not to the books I read or studied but to my mother, who had no faith in, and no talent or much patience for, words.

在我母亲度过晚年的新世界里，你们得到了尊重和平等权利，你们带着尊严和安全茁壮成长。她更喜欢这一切，超过旧世界。但那不是她的归属。现在我想到了莎士比亚会如何称呼她那“不适应”的语言，我意识到了我多么怀念这种语言直接、可触及的品质，从那个时代而来，那时你的脸庞才是纽带，而不是话语。我感激我那对话语没有信心、天赋、和耐心的母亲，是她，而不是我读过学过的书本，教会了我这种以脸庞为纽带的语言。