《大鱼奇缘》

张文

On one of our last car trips, near the end of my father’s life as a man, we stopped by a river, and we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an old oak tree.
After a couple of minutes my father took off his shoes and his socks and placed his feet in the clear-running water, and he looked at them there. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. I hadn’t seen him smile like that in a while.
Suddenly he took a deep breath and said, “This reminds me.”
And then he stopped, and thought some more. Things came slow for him then if they ever came at all, and I guessed he was thinking of some joke to tell, because he always had some joke to tell. Or he might tell me a story that would celebrate his adventurous and heroic life. And I wondered, what does this remind him of? Does it remind him of the duck in the hardware store? The horse in the bar? The boy who was knee-high to a grasshopper? Did it remind him of the dinosaur egg he found one day, then lost, or the country he once ruled for the better part of a week?
“This reminds me,” he said, “of when I was a boy.”
I looked at this old man, my old man with his old white feet in this clear-running stream, these moments among the very last in his life, and I thought of him suddenly, and simply, as a boy, a child, a youth, with his whole life ahead of him, much as mine was ahead of me. I’d never done that before. And these images—the now and then of my father—converged, and at that moment he turned into a weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying and newborn.
My father became a myth...
In Which He Speaks to Animals
My father had a way with animals, everybody said so. When he was a boy, raccoons ate out of his hand. Birds perched on his shoulder as he helped his own father in the field. One night, a bear slept on the ground outside his window, and why? He knew the animals’ special language. He had that quality .
Cows and horses took a peculiar liking to him as well. Followed him around et cetera . Rubbed their big brown noses against his shoulder and snorted, as if to say something specially to him.
A chicken once sat in my father’s lap and laid an egg there—a little brown one. Never seen anything like it, nobody had.
His Great Promise
They say he never forgot a name or a face or your favorite color, and that by his twelfth year he knew everybody in his home town by the sound their shoes made when they walked.
They say he grew so tall so quickly that for a time—months? The better part of a year?—he was confined to his bed because the calcification of his bones could not keep up with his height’s ambition, so that when he tried to stand he was like a dangling vine and would fall to the floor in a heap.
Edward Bloom used his time wisely, reading. He read almost every book there was in Ashland. A thousand books—some say ten thousand. History, Art, Philosophy. Horatio Alger . It didn’t matter. He read them all. Even the telephone book.
They say that eventually he knew more than anybody, even Mr. Pinkwater, the librarian.
He was a big fish, even then.
在我父亲快要走到生命终点之时，我们驾车出游过几次。其中一次，我们停在一条河的附近，我们步行到河岸边，在一棵老橡树的树阴下坐了下来。
几分钟之后，我父亲脱下鞋和袜子，把双脚伸进清澈的水流中，看着它们。然后他闭上双眼，脸上露出了微笑。我有段时间都没见他这么笑过了。
突然，他深吸了一口气，开口说道：“这提醒了我。”
随后他就停了下来，还在想些什么。那时，他想事情总是很慢，如果最后他能想出来的话。我猜，他可能想说一个笑话，因为他总是有笑话可说。或者，他也许想给我讲个故事，颂扬他那充满冒险和英雄色彩的一生。我很好奇，（此情此景）究竟提醒了他什么？是不是令他想起了五金店的那只鸭子？又或是酒吧里的那匹马？那个只及蚱蜢膝盖高的男孩？还是让他想起了那个他曾经找到却又遗失的恐龙蛋，或是他曾经统治了大半个星期的国家？
“这让我想起了，”他说道，“我还是个小男孩的时候。
我看着这位老人，我的父亲，他那双又老又白的脚浸在清澈的河流中——在他生命最后时期的这些时刻中，我还突然想到了他的一生，仅仅是作为一个男孩，一个少年，一个青年，他的一生就这样在他的面前展开，就像我的一生铺展在我面前一样。我从来没有以这样的方式看待过父亲。这些形象——我父亲的过去和现在——重叠在一起，就在那一刻，（在我眼中）他变成了一个神秘奇妙的生灵，带着些许野性，既年轻又苍老，正迈向死亡，却又迎来重生。
我父亲成为了一个神话……
他与动物说话
我的父亲善于跟动物们打交道，大家都这么说。当他还是个孩子时，浣熊们舔食他手上的食物。当他在田里帮自己父亲干农活时，鸟儿们会落在他的肩上。一天夜里，一只熊睡在他窗外的地上。为什么会这样呢？因为他懂得动物们的特殊语言。他有这种能耐。
母牛和马儿们也特别喜欢他，比如会跟在他后面团团转，等等。它们用自己的褐色大鼻子蹭着他的肩膀，呼哧呼哧喷着鼻息，好像要对他说些特别的悄悄话。有一次，一只母鸡蹲在我老爸的膝上，下了一个蛋，那是一个小小的、褐色的蛋。从来没见过这样的事，没有人见过。
他的远大前程
他们说，他从不会忘记一个名字、一张脸，或是你最喜爱的颜色。因此，当他12岁时，他就能通过走路时鞋子发出的声音来认出自己家乡的每一个人。 他们说，他在一段时间内长得很高很快——可能几个月？或大半年？——他被迫呆在床上，因为他骨头的钙化速度跟不上他个头的增高，以至于当他试着想站起来的时候，他就像一根摇摆的蔓藤一样，会摔倒在地板上，瘫成一团。
爱德华•布鲁姆很明智地利用了这段（躺在床上的）时间，他都用来读书了。他几乎读遍了阿什兰镇的每一本书。有一千本，有人说是一万本。历史、艺术、哲学，还有霍雷肖•阿尔杰的书。无论什么书，他都会去读，甚至是电话簿也不例外。
他们说，最终他知道得比任何人都多，甚至超过了图书管理员平克沃特先生。甚至到那时，他就已经成为一条大鱼了。