Night is thick no stars anyplace but sudden the moon moves.The chafe of needles is too much hurt and there is no resting there at all.I get down and look for a better place. By moonlight I am happy to find a hollow log, but it it wavy with ants. I break off twigs and small branches from a young fir,pile them and crawl under.The needle prick is smaller and there is no danger of falling.The ground is damp,chill.Night voles come close,sniff me then dart away.I am watchful for snakes that ease down trees and over ground,although Lina says theydo not prefer to bite us or swallow us whole.I lie still and try not to think of water.Thinking instead of another night,another place of wet ground.But it issummer then and the damp is from dew not snow.You are telling me about the making of iron things.How happy you are to find easy ore so close to the surface of the earth.The glory of shaping metal.Yourfather doing it and his father before him back and backfor a thousand years.With furnaces from termite mounds.And you know the ancestors approve when two owls appear at the very instant you say their names so you understand theye are showing themselves to bless you.See,you also,you tell me.Do they bless me too,I ask.Wait,you say.Wait and see.I think they do,because I am coming now.I am coming to you.
Lina says there are some spirits who look after warriors and hunters and there are others who guard virgins and mothers.I am none of those. Reverend Father says communion is the best hope,prayer the next.There is no communion hereabouts and I feel shame to speak to the Virgin when all I am asking for is not to her liking.I think Mistress has nothing to say on the matter.She avoids the Baptists and the village women who go to the meetinghouse.They annoy her as when we there,Mistress,Sorrow and me,go to sell two calves.They are trotting behindus on rope to the cart.we ride in. We wait while Mistress dose the trader’s post where a village woman slaps her face many times and screams at her.When Mistress discovers what is happening,both her face and the village woman’s burn in anger. Sorrow is relieving herself in the yard without care for the eyes of others.The argue is done and Mistress drives us away.After a while she pulls the horse to a stop.She turns to Sorrow and slaps her face more,saying Fool.I am shock.Mistress never strikes us.Sorrow does not cry or answer.I think Mistress says other words to her.,softer ones,but I am only seeing how her eyes go.Their look is close to the way of the women who stare at Lina and me as we wait for the Ney brothers.Neither look scares,but it it a hurting thing.But I Know Mistress has a sweeter heart.On a winter day when I amstill small Lina asks her if she can give me the dead daughter’s shoes.They are black with six buttons each.Mistress agrees but when she sees me in them she sudden sits down in the snow and cries.Sir comes and picks her up in his arms and carries her into the house.
I Never cry.Even when the woman steals my cloak and shoes and I am freezing on the boat no tears come.
These thoughts are sad in me ,so I make me think of you instead.How you say your work in the world is strong and beautiful.I think you are also.No holy spirits are my need.No communion or prayer.You are my protection .Only you.You can be it because you say you are a free man from New Amsterdam and always are that.Not like Will or Scully but like Sir.I don’t know the feeling of or what it means ,free and not free.But I have a memory.When Sir’s gate is done and you are away so long,I walk sometimes to search you .Behind the new house,the rise ,over the hill beyond.I see a path between rows of elm trees and enter it.Underfoot is weed and soil. In a while the path turns away from the elms and to my right is land dropping away in rocks.To my left is a hill.High, very high.Climbing over it all,up up,are scarlet flowers I never see before.Everywhere choking their own leaves.The scent is sweet,I put my hand in to gather a few blossoms.I hear something behind me and turn to see a stag moving up the rock side.He is great.And grand.Standing there between the beckoning wall of perfume and the stag I wonder what else the world may show me. It is as though I am loose to do what I choose,the stag, the wall of flowers. I am a little scare of this looseness.Is that how free feels?I don’t like it. I don’t want to be free of you because I am live only with you.When I choose and say good morning, the stag bounds away.
Now I am thinking of another thing.Another animal that shapes choice.Sir bathes every May.We pour buckets of hot water into the washtub and gather wintergreen to sprinkle in. He sits awhile. His knees poke up,his hair is flat and wet over the edge.Soon Mistress is there with first a rock of soap,then a short broom. After he is rosy with scrubbing he stands.She wraps a cloth around to dry him. Later she steps in and splashes herself. He does not scrub her.He is in the house to dress himself.A moose moves through the trees at the edge of the clearing. We all, Mistress,Lina and me,see him,He stands alone looking.Mistress crosses her wrists over her breasts.Her eyes are big and stare.Her face loses its blood.Lina shouts and throws a stone.The moose turns slowly and walks away.Like a chieftain. Still Mistress trembles as though a wicked thing has come.I am thinking how small she looks.It is only a moose who has no interest in her .Or anyone.Mistress does not shout or keep to her splashing. She will not risk to choose. Sir steps out.Mistress stands up and rushes to him . Her naked skin is aslide with wintergreen.Lina and I look at each other . What is she fearing ,I ask.Nothing,says Lina.Why then does she run to Sir?Because she can,Lina answers.Sudden a sheet of sparrows fall from the sky and settle in the trees.So many the trees seem to sprout birds ,not leaves at all.Lina points. We never shape the world she says.The world shapes us.Sudden and silent the sparrows are gone.I am not understanding Lina.You are my shaper and my world as well . It is done. No need to choose.
How long will it take will she get lost will he be there will he come will some vagrant rapeher ?She needed shoes,proper shoes,to replace the dirty scraps that covered her feet,and it was only when Lina made her some did she say a word .
Rebekka’s thoughts bled into one another,confusing events and time but not p[eople.The need to swallow,the pain of doing so, the unbearable urge to tear her skin from the bones underneath stopped only when she was unconscious—not asleep,because as far as the dreams were concerned it was the same as being awake.
“I shat among strangers for six weeks to get to this land.”
She has told this to Lina over and over.Lina being the only one left whose understanding she trusted and whose judgment she valued.Even now,in the deep blue of a spring night,with less sleep than her Mistress,Lina was whispering and shaking a feathered stick around the bed.
“Among strangers,”said Rebekka. “There was no other way packed like cod between decks.”
She fixed her eyes on Lina who had put away her wand and now knelt by the end .
“I know you ,”said Rebekka, and thought she was smiling although she was not sure.Other familiar faces sometimes hovered,then went away: her daughter;the sailor who helped carry her boxes and tighten their straps;a man on the gallows.No. This face was real .She recognized the dark anxious eyes,the tawny skin.How could she not know the single friend she had?To confirm to herself that moment of clarity,she said. “Lina.Remember ,do you? We did’t have a fireplace.It was cold. So cold.I thought she was a mute or deaf, you know.Blood is sticky.It never goes away however much…”Her voice was intense ,confidential as though revealing a secret.Then silence as she fell somewhere between fever and memory.
There was nothing in the world to prepare her for a life of water,on water,about water;sickened by it and desperate for it.Mesmerized and bores by the look of it,especially at midday when the women were allowed another hour on deck.Then she talked to the sea.”Stay still,don’t hurtle me.No.Move,move,excite me.Trust me,I will keep your secrets:that the smell of you is like fresh monthly blood;that you own the globe and land is afterthought to entertain you;that the world beneath you is both graveyard and heaven.”
Immediately upon landing Rebekka’s sheer good fortune in a husband stunned her.Already sixteen,she knew her father would have shipped her off to anyone who would book her passage and relieve him of feeding her.A waterman,he was privy to all sorts of news from colleagues,and when a crewman passed along an inquiry from a first mate—a search for a healthy ,chaste wife willing to travel abroad –he was quick to offer his eldest girl.The stubborn one,the one with too many questions and a rebellious mouth.Rebekka’s mother objected to the “sale”—she called it that because the prospective groom had stressed “reimbursement”for clothing,expenses and a few supplies—not for love or need of her daughter,but because the husband-to-be was a heaven living among savages,Religion,as Rebekka experienced it from her mother,was a flame fueled by a wondrous hatred.Her parents treated each other and their children with glazed indifference and saved their fire for religious matters.Any drop of generosity to a stranger threatened to douse the blaze.Rebekka’s understanding of God was faint,except as a larger kind of king,but she quieted the shame of insufficient devotion by assuming that He could be no grander nor better than the imagination of the believer.Shallow believers preferred a shallow god .The timid enjoyed a rampaging avenging god.In spite of her father’s eagerness,her mother warned her that savages or nonconformists would slaughter her as soon as she landed,so when Rebekka found Lina already there,waiting outside the one-room cottage her new huaband had built for them,she bolted the door at night and wouls not let the raven-haired girl with impdssible skin sleep anywhere near.Fourteen or so,stone-faced she was,and it took a while for trust between them.Perhaps because both were alone without family,or because both had to please one man,or because both were hopelessly ignorant of how to run a farm, they because what was for each a companion.A pair,anyway,the result of the mute alliance that comes of sharing tasks.Then, whenthe first infant was born,Lina handled it so tenderly,with such knowing,Rebekka was ashamed of her early fears and pretended she’d never had them.Now,lying in bed, her hands wrapped and bound against selfmutilation,her lips drawn back from her teeth,she turned her fate over to others and became prey to scenes of past disorder.The first hangings she saw in the square amid a happy crowd attending.She was probably two yearsols,and the death faces would have frightened her if the crowd had not mocked and enjoyed them so.With the rest of her family and most of their neighbors,she was present at a drawing and quartering and,although she was too young to remember the details,her nightmares were made permanently vivid by years of retelling and redescribing by her parents.She did not know what a Fifth Monarchist was,then or now,but it was clear in her household that execution was a festivity as exciting as a king’s parade.
Brawls,knifings and kidnaps were so common in the city of her birth that the warnings of slaughter in a new, unseen world were like threats of bad weather.The very year she stepped off the ship a mighty settlers-versus-natives war two hundred mils away was over before she heard of it .The intermittent skirmishes of men against men,arrows against powder,fire against hatchet that she heard of could not match the gore of what she had seen since childhood . The pile of frisky,still living entrails held before the felon’s eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames;fingers trembling for a lost torso;the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame.Compared to that ,death by shipwreck or tomahawk paled.She did not know what other settler families nearby once knew of routine dismemberment,but she did not share their dread when,three months after the incident ,news came of a pitched battle .a kidnap or a peace gone awry.The squabbles between local tribes or militia peppering parts of the region seemed a distant ,manageable backdrop in a land of such space and perfume.The absence of city and shipboard stench rocked her into a kind of drunkenness that it took years to sober up from and take sweet air for granted.Rain itself became a brand-new thing:clean,sootless water falling from the sky .She clasped her hands under her chin gazing at trees taller than a cathedral,wood for warmth so plentiful it made her laugh,then weep ,for her brothers and the children freezing in the city she had left behind,She had never seen birds like these,or tasted fresh water that ran over visible white stones.There was adventure in learning to cook game she’d never heard of and acquiring a taste for roast swan.Well,yes,there were monstrous storms here with snow piled higher than the sill of a shutter.And summer insects swarmed with song louder than chiming steeple bells.Yet the thought of what her life would have been had she stayed crushed into those reeking streets,spat on by lords and prostitutes,curtseying,curtseying, curtseying,still repelled her.Here she answered to her husband alone and paid polite attendance(time and weather permitting )to the only meetinghouse in the area.Anabaptists who were not the Satanists her parents called them ,as they did all Separatists,but sweet ,generous people for all their confounding views.Views that got them and the horrible Quakers beaten bloody in their own meetinghouse back home.Rebekka had no bone-deep hostility.Even the king had pardoned a dozen of them on their fury at an easily swayed monarch.Her discomfort in a garret full of constant argument,bursts of enraged envy and sullen disapproval of anyone not like them made her impatient for some kind of escape.Any kind.
There had been an early rescue,however,and the possibility of better things in Church School where she was chosen as one of four to be trained for domestic service.But the one place that agreed to take her turned out to require running from the master and hiding behind doors.She lasted four days.After that no one offered her another place.Then came the bigger rescue when her father got notice of a man looking for a strong wife rather than a dowry.Betwwen the warning of immediate slaughter and the promise of married bliss,she believed in neither.Yet without money or the inclination to peddle goods,open a stall or be apprenticed in exchange for food and shelter,with even nunneries for the upper class banned , her prospects were servant,prostitute,wife ,and although horrible stories were told about each of those careers,the last one seemed safest.The one where she might have children and therefore be guaranteed some affection .As with any future available to her, it depended on the character of the man in charge.Hence marriage to an unknown husband in a far-off land had distinct advantages:separation from a mother who had barely escaped the ducking pond;from male siblings who worked days and nights with her father and learned from him their,dismissive attitude toward the sister who had helped rear them;but especially escape from the leers and rude hands of any man,drunken or sober,she might walk by.America.What ever the danger,how could it possibly be worse?
Early on when she settled on Jacob’s land,she visited the local church some seven miles away and met a few vaguely suspicious villagers.They had removed themselves from a larger sect in order to practice a purer from of their Separatist religion,one truer and more acceprable to God.
Among them she was deliberately softspoken.In their meetinghouse she was accommodating and when they explained their beliefs she did not roll her eyes.It was when they refused to baptize her firstborn,her exquisite daughter,that Rebekka turned away.Weak as her faith was,there was no excuse for not protecting the soul of an infant from eternal perdition.
More and more it was in Lina’s company that she let the misery seep out .
“I chastised her for a torn shift,Lina,and the next thing I know she is lying in the snow.Her little head cracked like an egg.”
译文
夜色很浓，月亮突然移动，天空中看不到星星。杉树上的针叶刺痛了我，而且那里也没有其他的地方可以呆。我跳下来寻找一个更好的地方。借着月光，我惊喜的发现了一棵中间空了的树木，它是波浪状的，里面爬满了蚂蚁。我从一颗杉树上面折下一些细枝和小的树枝，把它们堆放好，然后在上面匍匐前进。树上的毛刺变得小了一些，这样就没了失足的危险了。地面是潮湿阴冷的，夜间田鼠的鼻子嗅了上来，在我身上嗅来嗅去的，然后跑开了。我小心翼翼地提防着那些缠在树上和躺在地上的蛇，尽管Lina说它们不会伤害我们。我躺下试着不去想水的事情，思考着另外一个夜晚，另外一个湿润的地方。但是，现在是夏天，潮湿的空气来自露水而不是融化的冰雪。你告诉我一些关于铁制物品的制作流程的事情。当你发现一种普通的砂石和地表面上的如此相似的时候，你是如此的开心。你和他的父亲们世世代代地从事着这项工作。 你所知道的。我们的祖先认定当两头猫头鹰一起出现的时候，你会说他们的名字这样你就能理解他们正在向你表示祈祷祝福。看，你说，看他们在转动他们的脖子，他们在喜欢你，你告诉我。他们也在保佑祈福我。我认为他们是的。因为我来了，来到你的身边。
Lina说有一些神灵在照顾着我们的勇士和猎人，还有一些神灵在守卫着我们的女性，我不是他们中的一员。令人尊敬的首领说教会是最好的希望，祈祷者其次。这附近没有教会，我对告诉 这件事感到难以开口。我认为，Mistress在这件事上没有什么要说的。她避开那些进入教堂的浸教会教徒和村妇。他们在Mistress,Sorrow,我我们三个去卖两头牛时，惹怒了我们。他们用绳子套在我们所驾驶的马车跟在我们后面小跑。我们等着Mistress和他们讨价还价。Sorrow跳下车，走到交易者的商埠后面，一个农村妇女在那个地方打过她的脸。她对着她大喊大叫。当Mistress发现了正在发生的事时，她和那个农村妇女都面带怒色。Sorrow不在乎别人的眼光把她自己从这场争吵中解救出来。这场争吵结束了。Mistress带着我们离开了。过了一会，她把马车停下，开始打Sorrow的脸，边打边说“愚蠢”。我被眼前的场面吓呆了，Mistress从不打我们。Sorrow即不哭也不应答。我想Misress该对Sorrow说一些其他柔和一点，不那么强硬的话。但是，我只看到她的眼神在动。他们的表情和我在Lina在等Ney兄弟时，有个妇女盯我们的表情一样。看起来不那么恐惧，但是很令人受伤。然而，我知道Mistress有一副好心肠。但我还是个孩子时，冬天里的一天，Lina问Mistress是否能给我一些她死去女儿的鞋子时，Mistress同意了。鞋子是每边各有六个黑色纽扣的那种。但是当她看到我穿上那双鞋子时，她突然坐在雪地里哭了起来。先生走过来把她抱在怀里然后进屋了。
我从不哭，即便是一个妇女偷走了我的披风和鞋子害得我在船上冻得发抖，我也没有掉一滴眼泪。
回忆这些事情让我很难受，我转而想到了你，你说你的工作在世上既体面又有保障。我认为你这个人给我的感觉也是如此。我心仪的不是有神圣品质的不是圣餐，也不是虔诚的教徒。你是我的保护神，只有你。这样做是因为你说你是来自阿姆斯特丹的自由人，而且将会一直是。除了像先生，不像Will,不像Scully，我不知道这种感觉意味着什么，自由抑或不自由。但是，我有一种回忆。当先生的门做好，你走了很长时间后，我很多次都出去找你。新房子后面，斜坡，山顶上，我看见在榆树丛中有一条小道，就走了进去。脚下都是杂草和土壤。走了一会，就将榆树林甩在了身后，在我右边的是在岩石中 。我的左边是一座高山。爬上山顶，放眼望去是一片我以前从未见过的花，到处飘的都是它们的花瓣。香味怡人。我摘了一些花朵。我听到有东西在我身后，我回头一看是一头雄鹿正在跑向石头。它很高很健壮，站在它和芬香四溢的花丛之间，我惊奇的发现，这个世界给我展示了一些其他东西，就好像我无拘无束地去做我所选择的事情，雄鹿，花丛，我对这种无拘无束突然感到恐惧，自由，无拘无束的，感觉是一种什么样的感觉，我不太喜欢。我不想无拘无束，自由自在。因为我只想和你生活，就在我做选择，说早上好时。这头雄鹿跑开了。
现在，我正在思考另外一件事，其他都能做出选择的动物。先生每年五月都会洗澡，我们把一桶桶的热水倒进水盆，收集鹿蹄草洒进水盆里。他在里面坐了一会，他把膝盖蜷起来，她的头发光滑，头发边上湿漉漉的，过了一会，Mistress拿着一盒香皂，一个短扫把，在先生站着愉快地洗完之后，Mistress也进去洗了，先生并不帮她。他站在房间里打扮着自己。一头驼鹿从空地旁边的树丛中穿过，Mistress ,Lina ,我，我们三个看见先生独自站在那里看，Mistress把她的手交叉着放在胸前。她眼睛睁得大大的。她的脸没有血色，煞白煞白的。Lina扔了个石头过去。驼鹿慢悠悠转过头来然后逃走了。Mistress颤抖起来，好像发生了邪恶的事情。我想她看起来多么脆弱，那仅仅是一头根本就没有在意她的驼鹿。 先生走出去了，Mistress站起来然后扑向他，她裸露的皮肤上还粘着鹿蹄草。Lina和我相互对视，“究竟她害怕什么？”我说。“没事”Lina回答道。“那为什么她跑向先生？”“她想”Lina干脆地回答道。突然一大群麻雀从天空中俯冲下来落在树上。“这些树看起来好像长出的是鸟，而不是树叶。”Lina说。我们从来没有影响塑造Lina所说的这个世界，这个世界影响塑造了我。突然间，麻雀不知不觉间悄悄地飞走了，我不懂Lina。你影响塑造了我，你是我的全部，就这样了，不用在抉择了。
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