Priya had owned the secondhand bookshop for six years before she noticed the handwriting.
普丽娅开这家二手书店已经六年了，才注意到那些笔迹。
It appeared first in a battered copy of an old travel memoir: a single line in blue ink, cramped and slanted, disagreeing with something the author had written about the loneliness of long journeys. A few shelves over, in an entirely different book by an entirely different author, the same hand had written something else, this time about grief. It read as if continuing a conversation no one else had been invited to. Having sorted secondhand stock for years without once paying attention to marginalia, Priya found herself, almost against her will, reading the edges of every book that came through the door.
它最早出现在一本破旧的旅行回忆录里：蓝墨水写的一行字，局促而倾斜，对作者写的关于漫长旅途的孤独有不同意见。隔了几排书架，在另一位作者的另一本完全不同的书里，同一只手写下了别的话，这次是关于悲痛。读起来，像是在延续一场没有邀请过任何其他人的谈话。多年来她整理二手书，从没留意过页边的批注，如今她却几乎是不由自主地，读起每一本进店的书的边缘来。
Not until the sixth book did she realize the two hands were arguing with one another, rather than simply annotating alone. What unsettled her was not the handwriting itself but the fact that it argued with a second hand. In a paperback of poems, the blue ink had underlined a stanza and written, "This is sentimental and Marta knows it." Three books later, a looser hand, in pencil, replied in the margin of an entirely separate novel: "Sentimental is not the same as false. You always did confuse the two." Neither writer signed a name. Neither, as far as Priya could tell, had ever left so much as an initial.
直到第六本书，她才意识到，那两只手是在互相争论，而不只是各自在做批注。让她不安的，不是笔迹本身，而是它在和另一只手争论。在一本诗集的平装本里，蓝墨水在一节诗下面划了线，写道：“这太伤感了，玛尔塔自己也知道。”三本书之后，另一只更随意的手，用铅笔在一本完全不相干的小说的页边回答：“伤感不等于虚假。你总是把这两样搞混。”两个写字的人都没有署名。据普丽娅所见，两人也都从未留下哪怕一个字母的缩写。
She began keeping the books aside instead of shelving them, a small and growing pile on the counter that her assistant teased her about. It was the dates, once she started checking them against the shop's old purchase records, that told her the truth. The exchange had run for the better part of nine years. Two readers had been buying and presumably trading these same secondhand books, arguing in the margins across a decade without, so far as she could reconstruct it, ever meeting in person.
她开始不再把这些书上架，而是留在一边，在柜台上堆成一小摞，越堆越高，助手为此取笑她。是日期告诉了她真相，当她开始把日期同店里旧的收购记录对照的时候。这场交流持续了将近九年。两位读者一直在买、大概也在交换这些二手书，在页边争论了十年，据她推断，两人始终没有见过面。
Then, as abruptly as it had started, it stopped. The last book she found, a thin volume of essays bought at an estate sale eighteen months ago, carried only the blue ink. It held only one line: "I don't think you're going to read this one. I'm leaving it here anyway."
然后，就像开始时一样突然，它停了。她找到的最后一本，是一本薄薄的散文集，十八个月前从一场遗物拍卖会上买来的，只有蓝墨水的字迹。只有一行字：“我想你不会读这一本了。我还是把它留在这里。”
Priya spent a full week trying to trace the estate sale back to a name, a family, anyone who might explain who "Marta" had been. She wondered, too, who had written to her so faithfully for so long without ever once identifying himself. The trail went nowhere useful. Wills are not public record in any way a bookshop owner can easily search, and the auction house that had handled the sale had long since closed.
普丽娅花了整整一个星期，想顺着那场拍卖会找到一个名字、一户人家，随便什么能说明“玛尔塔”是谁的人。她还想知道，是谁那么忠实、那么长久地给她写信，却从来没有表明过身份。线索没有通向任何有用的地方。遗嘱并不是书店老板能轻易查到的公开记录，而经手那场拍卖的拍卖行早就关门了。
She still has the books, six of them now, kept together on a shelf behind the register that is not for sale. Customers sometimes ask about them, and she tells them the truth, which is that she doesn't know who the writers were, only that they had once, apparently, known each other very well.
那些书她还留着，现在是六本，放在收银台后面的一个书架上，不卖。顾客有时会问起，她就实话实说，说她不知道写字的人是谁，只知道他们似乎曾经彼此十分了解。
Not knowing, she has come to think, is not quite the same as the story being unfinished. Some conversations end because someone stops answering. This one, as best she can tell, ended because someone finally did.
她渐渐觉得，不知道，并不完全等于故事没有讲完。有些谈话结束，是因为有人不再回答。而这一场，据她所能判断，结束是因为终于有人回答了。
