The evening memoir class meets on Wednesdays in a room above the library that smells of radiator dust and instant coffee. There are nine students, most of them retired, and a tutor who believes that everyone has at least one story that is truly theirs. Roisin joined in March because her daughter suggested it, and because the house had begun to feel like a very quiet waiting room. She writes about her father's shed, her first job in a factory, a dog she once lost on a beach. Each week at eight o'clock the tutor asks for a volunteer to read aloud, and each week, with a small sigh like a door settling, Roisin raises her hand.
晚间的回忆录班每周三在图书馆楼上的一间屋子里上课，屋里有一股暖气片的灰尘味和速溶咖啡的味道。班上有九名学员，大多已经退休，还有一位导师，她相信每个人至少有一个真正属于自己的故事。罗伊辛是三月加入的，因为女儿建议她来，也因为家里已经开始像一间非常安静的候诊室。她写父亲的工具棚，写自己在工厂的第一份工作，写她曾在海滩上弄丢的一条狗。每个星期八点，导师都会请一位志愿者朗读，每个星期，罗伊辛都会轻轻叹一口气，像一扇门合上，然后举起手。
Imre sits two chairs along from her, a detail she would never have remarked on if he did not read so slowly. He is a tall man with a careful voice, and he moves through his pages as if crossing a floor he does not trust. His subjects are modest too: a bus conductor's whistle, a cousin's wedding, one winter spent working in a bakery by a river. Nobody in the class thinks of him as a writer. Neither, it seems, does he.
伊姆雷坐在她隔两把椅子的地方，这个细节，要不是他读得那么慢，她是绝不会留意的。他是个高个子男人，嗓音谨慎，念自己的稿子，像是走过一块他不信任的地板。他写的题材也很朴素：一个公交售票员的哨子，一位表亲的婚礼，在河边面包房干活的一个冬天。班上没有人把他当作写作的人。看起来，他自己也不这么看。
It begins, as far as she can tell, in the fifth week. Roisin reads a page about a dance hall with a green floor, where the power failed one January night and a hundred people stood in the dark, laughing, until someone found candles. When it is his turn, Imre reads about the bakery. Only in the last paragraph does he mention that on his night off he went to a dance, and that the lights went out in the middle of a song. He does not say what he did in the dark. He says that he lost a glove.
据她判断，事情是从第五周开始的。罗伊辛读了一页，写的是一间有绿色地板的舞厅，一月的一个夜晚停了电，一百个人站在黑暗里笑着，直到有人找来了蜡烛。轮到他时，伊姆雷读的是面包房。直到最后一段，他才提到，在他休息的那个晚上，他去参加了一场舞会，歌唱到一半，灯灭了。他没有说他在黑暗里做了什么。他说，他丢了一只手套。
She does not remark on it. Nobody does. The following week she writes about a boy who trod on her feet in the dark and apologised, very politely, to her shoes. Imre studies his own shoes throughout the reading. Seven days later he reads about a girl in a green scarf who laughed at him and told him, kindly, that he was leading with the wrong foot. The class enjoys that one. The tutor says there is a lovely sense of period.
她没有提起这件事。谁也没有。接下来那个星期，她写了一个男孩，在黑暗里踩了她的脚，还非常有礼貌地向她的鞋子道了歉。整个朗读过程中，伊姆雷都在研究自己的鞋。七天后，他读到一个围绿围巾的女孩，她笑话他，还好心地告诉他，他起步的脚不对。班上的人很喜欢这一段。导师说，有一种可爱的年代感。
Roisin, who has kept a single glove in a drawer for longer than she would care to calculate, writes the next piece about nothing at all, a walk to the post office. It is the dullest thing she has produced in months, and she reads it in a steady voice, looking at no one.
罗伊辛把一只手套在抽屉里留了很久，久到她不愿去算，下一篇，她写了一件什么也算不上的事，走路去邮局。这是她几个月来写得最乏味的东西，她用平稳的声音读完，不看任何人。
Having noticed the pattern, neither of them acknowledges it. It would be easy to ask, and it would also, she suspects, be the end of something. If she were twenty, she would have asked on the first night; at seventy-one, she knows that a question like that can ruin a perfectly good story. What interests her now is how the next page will answer this one, and whether he is thinking the same.
他们都注意到了这个规律，却谁也没有承认。要问很容易，她也怀疑，那样一问，就是某种东西的终结。要是她二十岁，第一个晚上就会问了；到了七十一岁，她知道，这样的问题能毁掉一个原本很好的故事。现在让她感兴趣的是，下一页会怎样回答这一页，还有，他是不是也这么想。
Tonight, as the class stacks the chairs, Imre stops beside her with his coat over his arm.
今晚，大家在叠椅子的时候，伊姆雷拿着外套搭在臂弯里，停在她身边。
"You gave the dance hall a green floor," he says.
“你给那间舞厅配了绿色的地板。”他说。
"It was green."
“它就是绿的。”
"Was it? I remember it brown."
“是吗？我记得是棕色的。”
"Then one of us has remembered it wrong."
“那就是我们中有一个人记错了。”
"Or we were at different dances," Imre says.
“或者我们去的是不同的舞会。”伊姆雷说。
Neither of them moves. The caretaker turns off the lights bank by bank, until only the sign above the exit is left.
两个人都没有动。看管员一排一排地关着灯，直到只剩下出口上方的指示牌亮着。
