文字难度：★★☆
One spring day in 2002, a French woman whose name we may never know, stood on a cross-Channel ferry and threw a bundle of clothes into the sea. After it, went some lilies and a bottle in the shape of a teardrop. The clothes had belonged to her son, Maurice, who had died at the age of 13, and the bottle held her letter to the boy “that no wind…no storm…not even death could ever destroy”.
2002年的一个春日，一个我们也许永远不会知道其姓名的法国女人站在一艘横渡海峡的渡轮上，将一捆衣服扔进大海，接着投进一些百合花以及一个泪滴状的瓶子。那些衣服是她儿子莫里斯的，他在13岁时去世了，瓶子里装的是她的一封信，是给那个“无论狂风，还是暴雨……甚至死亡都无法摧毁”的小男孩的。
“Forgive me for being so angry at your disappearance,” the letter went. “Forgive me for not having known how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not having been able to find the words at that terrible moment when you slipped through my fingers…” The bottle vanished, the ship docked, the 1)mourner went home to get on with her life. She never dreamed the letter would reach shore, let alone that someone would read it.
“请原谅我因你的离去而如此生气，”信中写道，“请原谅我不懂得如何从死神手上挽救你。请原谅我在你从我指缝中溜走的那个恐怖时刻竟无法言语……”瓶子消失了，船只靠岸了，哀悼者回家了，继续着她的生活。她做梦都没有想过这封瓶中信会漂到岸上，更没想过会有人读到这封信。
Karen Liebreich, a London-based author, did just that a few weeks later. The bottle had washed up on a beach in 2)Kent, where it caught the eye of her friend Sioux Peto, who was walking her dogs. Inside, Peto found a thin 3)scroll tied with a ribbon and enclosing a 4)lock of hair. The handwriting was in French and, as Liebreich is fluent in the language, Peto sent her the letter for translation. This was tougher than it might have been, with the anonymous writer addressing now her son, now an imagined reader, and piling watery 5)image upon watery image. “You can't just skim it and understand it,” Liebreich says. As far as she could tell, the boy had died early one summer, probably by drowning. “For a long time,” his mother wrote, “he travelled between two waters, between two lights, trying tirelessly to use up the strength in his outstretched arms. He submitted to the silence, the terrors and the cold…” She had, of course, been devastated—“My life started when he was born, and I thought it was over when he left me…life is precious. I promise you to live it to the full, to savour each instant in richness and serenity. I know that we will find one another, when the time comes,” she wrote.
凯伦·里布瑞奇，一位住在伦敦的作家，在几周之后读到了这封信。瓶子被冲到了英国肯特郡的一个海滩上。里布瑞奇的朋友苏·皮托在那里遛狗时发现了这个瓶子。皮托发现瓶子里有一个用缎带绑着的薄纸卷，里面还有一缕头发。文字是用法语写的，因为里布瑞奇的法语很流利，所以皮托把信拿给她翻译。匿名的作者在信中一会儿用对她儿子讲话的语气写，一会儿以对虚无的第三者讲话的语气说，用了不少与水有关的意象，因而翻译工作比原来想的更困难。“你无法瞄一眼就能看得懂，”里布瑞奇说。她所能读懂的是，这个男孩早逝于某个夏天，很有可能是溺水而亡。“很长一段时间里，”他母亲写道，“他在两片海域间，在两盏灯之间挣扎，不屈不挠地想要用尽他那张开的双臂的力量。最终，他屈服于寂静、恐惧及寒冷……”当然，她因此而心力交瘁——“我的人生随着他的出生才开始，而当他离我而去时，我觉得我的人生也随之结束了……生命是珍贵的。我答应你要尽享生命，充分而平静地品味每一个瞬间。我知道，当最终一刻来临，我们将会重逢。”她写道。
As she translated, Liebreich found herself crying. “I'm not a 6)weepy person,” she says, “but the letter was very beautiful and very moving.” Liebreich couldn't sleep that night. In the days that followed, she found herself becoming more protective of her own children. “When your children are young, you can get lost in all the7)banality,” she says. “The house is full of toys and laundry and stuff from school, and in the boredom of the domestic routine you forget how precious they are. Something like this reminds you how important they are.”
里布瑞奇发现她自己一边翻译，一边哭泣着。“我并不是一个多愁善感的人，”她说，“但是这封信真的写得很美、很感人。”当天晚上，里布瑞奇无法入睡。接下来的那些天里，她发现自己更加注意保护自己的孩子了。“孩子们小的时候，你会迷失在那些繁琐的杂役当中，”她说道，“房子里满是玩具、衣服和学校的东西，在乏善足陈的日常生活中，你忘记了孩子们有多么珍贵。像这样的一封信提醒了你，孩子们是多么的重要。”