由Alice Munro 的小说"Nettles"改写

Adaptation From Nettles

(in the form of diary)

When Girl

August 3rd 1939 boiling hot
There is a saying that “paper is more patient than man’, it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days, while I sat chin in hand feeling too bored and limp to do anything. Then I decided to keep a diary, through which I would bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart and hence you the diary. I want the diary itself to be my friend and I shall call my friend, Kitty. And I hope you will be a great source of support and comfort to me. Now I come to the story of my life.
It is burning up outside these days and again there comes a boiling day today. But, god has made a blessing for my family this time, since the water actually still runs frisky in our delicate well. Everyone should have known about our well of its repeated go-dry in the summer. It did once turn out to be the biggest vexation for my family, plus our thirsty penned animals, some creatures really in need of a good supply of water. Truly or not, as the case may be, it was the well-driller, Mike McCallum, I suppose, who made the wonder. Our adorable well-driller arrived here days ago with impressive equipment and started this arduous work on our well-hole extending. At first, I have doubted his ability for this challenging job, but finally he made it. It’s so awesome and amazing! He seems to become a sign of “safe”, which has the ability to secure us from the shortage of water.
He is out of question a great guy. I like him.
Now I must stop. Bye-bye, we’re going to be great pals!
Yours Alice

August 5th 1939 a downpour
Dear Kitty:
McCallum was proved to be a good guy, and so did his son. His son is lovely, smart and full of amusing ideas and more than that he is unusual. As far as I concerned, he has never settled down in a place for long and lives in hotel rooms or boarding houses wherever his father is working and go to whatever school is at hand. In this point, he is a boy with actually no roots, with unstable house, unstable school and on top of that unstable friends. Due to all these “unstables”, I presume we won’t know each other forever as he will definitely leave one day or even tomorrow. Mum had told me that they will leave here as soon as the well-driller finishes his job. But anyway here he comes to my life.
We had a good time today, though a downpour hit our place for a sudden when we did have fun outside in our farm. But it turned out to be the instruction of another fun, the one I’d like to call a splendid “cab-fun”.
First it was just sprinkling, and then the sudden arrival of a heavy downpour. I was all in a fluster at that moment but his response was fairly quick. He took me toward his father’s truck and by the very moment we got there, we quickly climbed into the lovely “cab-shelter”. It was a disorderly stuffed miniature room—filled with their work clothes and tools and tobacco and mucky boots and sour-cheese socks. Also with damp longhaired dog, because we took my dog, Ranger, in with us. Believe it or not, I have never felt that cool in this small world—with a draped window, a painting of a landscape in such a downpour outside and a racket like stones on the roof. It was more than in a truck cab but in a cablike outer-space. Anyway, we were beguiled by all these absolute beauties, fantastic and wonderful.
Oh, I forgot to tell you his name. He is also named Mike McCallum. He was nine and I was eight.
Alice

August 8th 1939 sunshine
Dearest Kitty! Let me get started right away. It's nice and quiet now. Mike McCallum (Mike’s father) has just finished his work and meal here and left with Mike. Mike and his father have come to our house everyday since the start of the well-drilling work. So these days we always have two more members sharing the delicious noon meal prepared by mum. Also a playmate, Mike for me.
Mike likes to put ketchup on his bread, which I don’t feel any special taste. His father will talk to my father during the meal and the talks are mostly about wells, accidents, water tables. A serious man. All work, my father said. Mike however barely talks or looks at me and so do I. But otherwise he is more interesting and funny than he does at the table, when we are outside, playing in our small, nine-acre farm.
The door’s knocking, Someone's here, time to stop.
Alice

August 11th 1939 sunshine
Dear Kitty:
Cute things always happen to cute creatures. My dear dog, Ranger is the one among these amusing cuties. When he was just with us under the maple playing, he suddenly turned to chase a skunk and the skunk turned and sprayed him. Ranger looked so funny and pitiful in this dog-and-skunk war. Right after my mum knew about our little pitier’s frustration, she drove into the town and got several large tins of tomato juice, thus producing the chance for Mike and me to make a “blood-wash” for Ranger.
Mike is an able washer. He easily persuaded Ranger to get into a tub and brushed the tomato juice over him. I also helped but evidently Mike is more capable. And another thing you should know is our blood-stuffed tub. The tomato juice does have this bewitchment to turn the water from being transparent into lifeblood.
Alice


未完待续....

[ 本帖最后由 kittiedwj 于 2008-4-13 20:35 编辑 ]

继续努力！

August 16th 1939 lovely day
Dearest Kitty:
I find myself a little bit keen on Mike’s crying by my name. Every time the cry comes, there seems a wire zinging through my whole body. I completely enjoy this nice voice when he cries “Alice”.
We girls as well as the boys are fond of a war game. Two divided armies. Boys are the soldiers fighting each other from behind barricades made of tree branches and water weeds. Girls however work for particular soldiers, producing the piles of clay-made ball-sized weapons and waiting for their soldiers’ calling when they fall wounded. When a boy calling out a girl’s name, she will drag him away and dress his wounds as quickly as possible. These are the most expecting and joyous moments to my mind. Mike lying limp and still, never opening his eyes, I press slimy large leaves to his forehead and throat and to his pale tender stomach, with its sweet and vulnerable belly button. Sweet moments. Haha. There you are. We've now laid the basis for our friendship.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Yours, Alice

August 17th 1939 cloudy
Dear Kitty:
Today is a doomed misery. Mike left and will never come back.
Mum said they just packed up yesterday and went to places where other jobs lined up there for them as a living. I must have known that, but it is just that I have no idea, until he now disappears, of what absence could be like. No funny guy will company me playing that happily any longer and our loving Ranger will also lose a nice friend. What kind of tomorrow it will be? Will it remain that happy without Mike here? I just don’t feel good.

Love you, a sad Alice

September 20th 1939 fine
Dearest Kitty:
Today I have once again mistaken another person for Mike, which I have done a lot of times before. When I was standing by the door of the shoe store waiting for my mother trying on shoes, I heard a woman running past the store call, “Mike!” I was suddenly convinced that this woman must be Mike’s mother. I ran out of the store—thinking only that in another minute I would see him. But it turned out that I was badly mistaken. There was only a boy of five years old or so, stupid flat-faced guy with dirty blond hair. Such a disappointment. Mike seems never back.
Yours, Alice
(Comment added by Alice in August 4th 1979): I remember this day when I sadly sealed the diary up in an antique box and decided to kiss goodbye to all these memories of Mike. These are all innocent types. A girlish affection, sweet and pure.)

未完待续。。。

[ 本帖最后由 kittiedwj 于 2008-4-13 20:37 编辑 ]

very good!

When Matron

July 6th 1979 a coming-new day
I left my husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage (except, of course, the children, who are to be parceled about). I hope for a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame. And I want again to write, to record all the future moments that I might treat in a completely different way, in this old diary I once sealed ages ago.
Just now I have settled things all down here on the second floor of this old brick house in Toronto. My new houses here are occupied by olive- or brownish-skinned people who speak English in a way that was unfamiliar to me and who filled the air day and night with the smell of their spicy-sweet cooking. It makes me feel as if I have made a true change, a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage.
So here my expecting life is approaching.

July 9th 1979 rainy
My brand-new life is not as smooth as I supposed. It is too much to expect, I have found, of my daughters to feel the same way as I do. I could sense their dissatisfaction about the surroundings here, the smells of the streets and the noise outside, which they might feel sickening and frightening. I never want my daughter to bear any miseries and even nor hear their blames on me for causing their grief. But how come my daughter could feel happy without a healthy and full family? I hope they had no complaints and feelings of misery. But it could only be in mind, never in reality.
These days seem no less irritating than before.

July 20th 1979 sprinkling
Days ago I made a monumental decision to send my daughters back to their father. When I went back, I gathered up all reminders of them and stuffed them into a garbage bag, for I need some time to snap my mind shut with them. So here I am, all alone, trying to escape from those grievous memories, longing for a new life, but yet a kind of lonely.
Every night, there seem a regular party from the back-yard outside the windows. I have always heard these shouting, music and provocations from the dark outside, which is the most frightening and lonely moments that afflict me a lot. This is truely not a matter of any hostility but of a kind of nonexistence.

August 4th 1979 a nice day
I have spent the last weekend in the house of Sunny, intending to blow away these gloomy moods. Inconceivably, I met Mike McCallum there, who was gone without any connection for decades. So it is nearly a miracle for me to meet him again.
Mike was one of Sunny’s inviters for this weekend, or rather her husband’s. So this time it was genuinely a reunion of parted friends between Mike and me rather than a Sunny-and-I weekend.
He and I are no longer the little Alice and Mike but a mother and a father; however, the childhood memories still became a shove to bring out a little intimate emotion between us.
The second day of our reunion, Mike and I survived a curtain-like rainstorm when going round the golf course. We kissed and pressed together as a ritual of survival. And since then our relationship was greatly improved. Mike revealed to me a miserable secrete that he should have deeply concealed, that he once accidentally ran over one of his sons by backing out of the driveway. Instead of elaborating it in a more sorrow way, he told briefly and soon stopped and stared ahead.
I didn’t say anything—not one kind, common, helpless word. I knew he have hit rock bottom and shared with his wife a knowledge of it—that cool, empty, locked and central space, which probably bond them.
I am not one of the people among whom they would make their new, hard, normal life. I am a person who knew—that was all; a person he had, on his own, who knew.
Well. It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn’t. Love that is not usable, that knows its place. Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal.


完