【有声英语文学名著】英国病人 04

At night he is never tired enough to sleep. She reads to him from whatever book she is able to find in the library downstairs. 

The candle flickers¹ over the page and over the young nurse’s talking face, barely revealing at this hour the trees and vista² that decorate the walls. He listens to her, swallowing her words like water. (If it is cold she moves carefully into the bed and lies beside him. She can place no weight upon him without giving him pain, not even her thin wrist. Sometimes at two a.m. he is not yet asleep, his eyes open in the darkness. He could smell the oasis³ before he saw it. The liquid in the air. The rustle⁴ of things. Palms and bridles⁵. The banging of tin cans whose deep pitch revealed they were full of water. They poured oil onto large pieces of soft cloth and placed them on him. He was anointed. He could sense the one silent man who always remained beside him, the flavour of his breath when he bent⁶ down to unwrap him every twenty-four hours at nightfall, to examine his skin in the dark. Unclothed he was once again the man naked beside the blazing aircraft. They spread the layers of grey felt over him. What 

great nation had found him, he wondered. What country invented such soft dates to be chewed by the man beside him and then passed from that mouth into his. During this time with these people, he could not remember where he was from. He could have 

been, for all he knew, the enemy he had been fighting from the air. Later, at the hospital in Pisa, he thought he saw beside him the face that had come each night and chewed and softened⁷ the dates and passed them down into his mouth. 

 

There was no colour during those nights. No speech or song. The Bedouin silenced themselves when he was awake. He was on an altar of hammock and he imagined in his vanity hundreds of them around him and there may have been just two who had found him, plucked the antlered hat of fire from his head. Those two he knew only by the taste of saliva⁸ that entered him along with the date or by the sound of their feet running. )

 

She would sit and read, the book under the waver of light. She would glance now and then down the hall of the villa⁹ that had been a war hospital, where she had lived with the other nurses before they had all transferred out gradually, the war moving north, the war almost over. (This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world. She sat at the night table, hunched¹⁰ over, reading of the young boy in India who learned to memorize diverse jewels and objects on a tray, 

tossed from teacher to teacher—those who taught him dialect those who taught him memory those who taught him to escape the hypnotic.)

 

The book lay on her lap. She realized that for more than five minutes she had been looking at the porousness¹¹ of the paper, the crease¹² at the corner of page 17 which someone had folded over as a mark.( She brushed her hand over its skin. A scurry¹³ in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling, a moth¹⁴ on the night window.) She looked down the hall, though there was no one else living there now, no one except the English patient and herself in the Villa San Girolamo. She had enough vegetables planted in the bombed-out orchard¹⁵ above the house for them to survive, a man coming now and then from the town with whom she would trade soap and sheets and whatever there was left in this war hospital for other essentials. Some beans, some meats. 

1 flickers   

电影制片业； （通常指灯光）闪烁，摇曳( flicker的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The fire flickers low. 炉火颤动欲灭。
• A strange idea flickers in my mind. 一种奇怪的思想又在我脑中燃烧了。

2 vista   

n.远景，深景，展望，回想

参考例句：

• From my bedroom window I looked out on a crowded vista of hills and rooftops.我从卧室窗口望去，远处尽是连绵的山峦和屋顶。
• These uprisings come from desperation and a vista of a future without hope.发生这些暴动是因为人们被逼上了绝路，未来看不到一点儿希望。

3 oasis   

n.（沙漠中的）绿洲，宜人的地方

参考例句：

• They stopped for the night at an oasis.他们在沙漠中的绿洲停下来过夜。
• The town was an oasis of prosperity in a desert of poverty.该镇是贫穷荒漠中的一块繁荣的“绿洲”。

4 rustle   

v.沙沙作响；偷盗(牛、马等)；n.沙沙声声

参考例句：

• She heard a rustle in the bushes.她听到灌木丛中一阵沙沙声。
• He heard a rustle of leaves in the breeze.他听到树叶在微风中发出的沙沙声。

5 bridles   

约束( bridle的名词复数 )； 限动器； 马笼头； 系带

参考例句：

• The horses were shod with silver and golden bridles. 这些马钉着金银做的鉄掌。

6 bent   

n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的

参考例句：

• He was fully bent upon the project.他一心扑在这项计划上。
• We bent over backward to help them.我们尽了最大努力帮助他们。

7 softened   

（使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰

参考例句：

• His smile softened slightly. 他的微笑稍柔和了些。
• The ice cream softened and began to melt. 冰淇淋开始变软并开始融化。

8 saliva   

n.唾液，口水

参考例句：

• He wiped a dribble of saliva from his chin.他擦掉了下巴上的几滴口水。
• Saliva dribbled from the baby's mouth.唾液从婴儿的嘴里流了出来。

9 villa   

n.别墅，城郊小屋

参考例句：

• We rented a villa in France for the summer holidays.我们在法国租了一幢别墅消夏。
• We are quartered in a beautiful villa.我们住在一栋漂亮的别墅里。

10 hunched   

（常指因寒冷、生病或愁苦）耸肩弓身的，伏首前倾的

参考例句：

• He sat with his shoulders hunched up. 他耸起双肩坐着。
• Stephen hunched down to light a cigarette. 斯蒂芬弓着身子点燃一支烟。

11 porousness   

多孔性

参考例句：

12 crease   

n.折缝，褶痕，皱褶；v.(使)起皱

参考例句：

• Does artificial silk crease more easily than natural silk?人造丝比天然丝更易起皱吗？
• Please don't crease the blouse when you pack it.包装时请不要将衬衫弄皱了。

13 scurry   

vi.急匆匆地走；使急赶；催促；n.快步急跑，疾走；仓皇奔跑声；骤雨，骤雪；短距离赛马

参考例句：

• I jumped on the sofa after I saw a mouse scurry by.看到一只老鼠匆匆路过,我从沙发上跳了起来。
• There was a great scurry for bargains.大家急忙着去抢购特价品。

14 moth   

n.蛾，蛀虫

参考例句：

• A moth was fluttering round the lamp.有一只蛾子扑打着翅膀绕着灯飞。
• The sweater is moth-eaten.毛衣让蛀虫咬坏了。

15 orchard   

n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场

参考例句：

• My orchard is bearing well this year.今年我的果园果实累累。
• Each bamboo house was surrounded by a thriving orchard.每座竹楼周围都是茂密的果园。