受教者

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The Educated（还未出中文版本，暂译《受教者》）是一本回忆录，作者塔拉·韦斯托弗（Tara Westover,1986— ）出生于美国爱达荷州的一个摩门教家庭。家中有七个孩子，她是最小的一个。父亲经营一个废品场，是个生存主义者，他不相信政府，抗拒现代医疗和学校教育，患有严重的躁郁症，对家庭拥有绝对的控制权。他带领家人深挖洞、广积粮，随时准备迎接世界末日的到来。母亲自制草药并替人接生，一切听从丈夫的旨意。二哥肖恩（Shawn）虐待和威胁塔拉和她的姐姐，多次把她的头按进马桶里，可是她们的父母以宗教和家庭团结为由，对此视而不见并试图修改她们的记忆。

17岁前的塔拉没有上过一天学，后来在三哥泰勒（Tyler）的影响下，她躲着父亲靠自学通过了ACT考试（American College Test），并进入犹他州的杨百翰大学（Brigham Young University）学习历史专业。大学教育令塔拉脱胎换骨，开始重新审视自己的家庭、人生和世界。她特殊的背景和经历、聪慧的天资和独特的视角，以及惊人的毅力和韧性使她获得了盖茨剑桥奖学金并拿到了硕士学位。2014年，塔拉又回到剑桥攻读博士学位，后来还成为哈佛大学的访问学者。然而无论她如何努力，却都无法改变自己的父母和暴戾的二哥。在绝望中她决定与她的原生家庭彻底决裂。

这一期选登的内容涉及塔拉的父亲跟祖母在观念和饮食上的冲突，父亲禁止全家喝牛奶，坚持要他们喝蜂蜜吃黄油；母亲为了孩子的未来准备给他们办理出生证明，却发现无法提供孩子们确切的出生日期；三儿子提出要去上大学，却遭到父亲的强烈反对。

A year after my father told us that story, we gathered one evening to hear him read aloud from Isaiah（《以赛亚书》，《圣经·旧约》中的一卷）, a prophecy（预言）about Immanuel（以马内利，耶稣基督的别称）. He sat on our mustardcolored（深黄色的）sofa, a large Bible open in his lap.Mother was next to him. The rest of us were strewn across the shaggy brown carpet（分散坐在粗糙的棕色地毯上）.

“Butter and honey shall we eat,” Dad droned（低沉地说）, low and monotone（单调的）, weary from a long day hauling scrap（搬运废品）. “That he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good.”

There was a heavy pause. We sat quietly.

《受教者》封面

My father was not a tall man but he was able to command a room. He had a presence about him, the solemnity of an oracle（传神谕者）. His hands were thick and leathery—the hands of a man who'd been hard at work all his life—and they grasped the Bible fi rmly.

He read the passage aloud a second time, then a third,then a fourth. With each repetition the pitch（音高）of his voice climbed higher. His eyes, which moments before had been swollen with fatigue, were now wide and alert. There was a divine doctrine here, he said. He would inquire of the Lord.

The next morning Dad purged（清除）our fridge of milk, yogurt and cheese, and that evening when he came home, his truck was loaded with fi fty gallons of honey.

“Isaiah doesn't say which is evil, butter or honey,” Dad said, grinning as my brothers lugged the white tubs to the basement. “But if you ask, the Lord will tell you!”

When Dad read the verse to his mother, she laughed in his face, “I got some pennies in my purse,” she said. “You better take them. They'll be all the sense you got.”

Grandma had a thin, angular face and an endless store of faux（假的）Indian jewelry, all silver and turquoise（青绿色的）, which hung in clumps from her spindly（细长的）neck and fi ngers. Because she lived down the hill from us, near the highway, we called her Grandma-down-the-hill. This was to distinguish her from our mother's mother, who we called Grandmaover-in-town because she lived fi fteen miles south,in the only town in the county, which had a single stoplight and a grocery store.

Dad and his mother got along like two cats with their tails tied together（两只争斗到底的猫）. They could talk for a week and not agree about anything,but they were tethered（拴系）by their devotion to the mountain. My father's family had been living at the base of Buck's Peak for half a century. Grandma's daughters had married and moved away, but my father stayed, building a shabby yellow house, which he would never quite fi nish, just up the hill from his mother's,at the base of the mountain, and plunking a junkyard（经营一个废品场）—one of several—next to her manicured（修剪过的）lawn.

They argued daily, about the mess from the junkyard but more often about us kids. Grandma thought we should be in school and not, as she put it,“roaming the mountain like savages.” Dad said public school was a ploy（策略，手段）by the Government to lead children away from God. “I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself,” he said, “as send them down the road to that school.”

God told Dad to share the revelation（启示）with the people who lived and farmed in the shadow of Buck's Peak. On Sundays, nearly everyone gathered at the church, a hickory-colored（山核桃木颜色的）chapel just off the highway with the small, restrained steeple（尖塔）common to Mormon churches. Dad cornered（迫至一隅）fathers as they left their pews（教堂长椅）. He started with his cousin Jim, who listened good-naturedly while Dad waved his Bible and explained the sinfulness of milk. Jim grinned, then clapped Dad on the shoulder and said no righteous God would deprive a man of homemade strawberry ice cream on a hot summer afternoon. Jim's wife tugged on（拽拉）his arm. As he slid past us I caught a whiff（一股味道）of manure（肥料）. Then I remembered: the big dairy farm a mile north of Buck's Peak, that was Jim's.

After Dad took up preaching against milk, Grandma jammed her fridge full of it. She and Grandpa only drank skim（脱脂牛奶）but pretty soon it was all there—two percent, whole, even chocolate. She seemed to believe this was an important line to hold.

Breakfast became a test of loyalty. Every morning, my family sat around a large table of reworked red oak and ate either seven-grain（七种谷物的）cereal, with honey and molasses（糖浆）, or seven-grain pancakes, also with honey and molasses. Because there were nine of us, the pancakes were never cooked all the way through. I didn't mind the cereal if I could soak it in milk, letting the cream gather up the grist（磨碎的谷物）and seep into the pellets（小球，小团）, but since the revelation we'd been having it with water. It was like eating a bowl of mud.

Luke was fi fteen when he asked Mother if he could have a birth certif i cate. He wanted to enroll in Driver's Ed because Tony, our oldest brother, was making good money driving rigs（大卡车）hauling gravel（碎石）, which he could do because he had a license. Shawn and Tyler, the next oldest after Tony, had birth certif i cated; it was only the youngest four—Luke, Audrey, Richard and me—who didn't.

Mother began to fi le the paperwork. I don't know if she talked it over with Dad fi rst. If she did, I can't explain what changed his mind—why suddenly a ten-year policy of not registering with the Government ended without a struggle—but I think maybe it was that telephone. It was almost as if my father had come to accept that if he were really going to do battle with the Government, he would have to take certain risks. Mother's being a midwife（接生婆）would subvert（颠覆）the Medical Establishment, but in order to be a midwife she needs a phone. Perhaps the same logic was extended to Luke: Luke would need income to support a family, to buy supplies and prepare for the End of Days, so he needed a birth certif i cate. The other possibility is that Mother didn't ask Dad. Perhaps she just decided, on her own, and he accepted her decision. Perhaps even he—charismatic gale（有神赐能力的大风）of a man that he was—was temporarily swept aside by the force of her.

Once she had begun the paperwork for Luke, Mother decided she might as well get birth certif i cates for all of us. It was harder than she expected. She tore the house apart looking for documents to prove we were her children. She found nothing. In my case, no one was sure when I'd been born.Mother remembered one date, Dad another, and Grandmadown-the-hill, who went to town and swore an aff i davit（宣誓书）that I was her granddaughter, gave a third date.

Mother called the church headquarters in Salt Lake City. A clerk there found a certif i cate from my christening,when I was a baby, and another from my baptism, which, as with all Mormon children, had occurred when I was eight.Mother requested copies. They arrived in a mail a few days later. “For Pete's sake!” Mother said when she opened the envelope. Each document gave a different birth date, and neither matched the one Grandma had put on the aff i davit.

That week Mother was on the phone for hours every day. With the receiver wedged（楔入）against her shoulder,the cord stretched across the kitchen, she cooked, cleaned,and strained tinctures（过滤酊剂）of goldenseal（白毛茛）and blessed thistle（赐福蓟草）, while having the same conversation over and over.

“Obviously I should have registered her when she was born, but I didn't. So here we are.”

Voices murmured on the other end of the line.

“I've already told you—and your subordinate, and your subordinate's subordinate, and fi fty other people this week—she doesn't have school or medical records. She doesn't have them! They weren't lost. I can't ask for copies.They don't exist!”

“Her birthday? Let's say the twenty-seventh.”“No, I'm not sure.”

“No, I don't have documentation.”

“Yes, I'll hold.”

The voices always put Mother on hold（让母亲不要挂电话）when she admitted that she didn't know my birthday, passing her up the line to their superiors, as if not knowing what day I was born delegitimized（取消合法资格）the entire notion of my having an identity. You can't be a person without a birthday, they seemed to say.I didn't understand why not. Until Mother decided to get my birth certif i cate, not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I'd been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn't fall on a Sunday because it's no fun spending your birthday in church. Sometimes I wished Mother would give me the phone so I could explain. “I have a birthday, same as you,”I wanted to tell the voices. “It just changes. Don't you wish you could change your birthday?”

Eventually, Mother persuaded Grandma-down-thehill to swear a new aff i davit claiming I'd been born on the twenty-seventh, even though Grandma still believed it was the twenty-ninth, and the state of Idaho issued a Delayed Certif i cate of Birth. I remember the day it came in the mail. It felt oddly dispossessing（剥夺的）,being handed this fi rst legal proof of my personhood:until that moment, it had never occurred to me that proof was required.

In the end, I got my birth certif i cate along before Luke got his. When Mother had told the voices on the phone that she thought I'd been born sometime in the last week of September, they'd been silent. But when she told them she wasn't exactly sure whether Luke had been born in May or June, that set the voices positively buzzing.

“I'm g-g-going to c-college,” Tyler said, his face rigid. A vein in his neck bulged as he forced the words out, appearing and disappearing every few seconds, a great, struggling snake.

Everyone looked at Dad. His expression was folded, impassive（冷漠的）. The silence was worse than shouting.

Tyler would be the third of my brothers to leave home. My oldest brother, Tony, drove rigs, hauling gravel or scrap, trying to scrape together enough money to marry the girl down the road. Shawn, the next oldest,had quarreled with Dad a few months before and taken off. I hadn't seen him since, though Mother got a hurried call every few weeks telling her he was fi ne,that he was welding（焊接）or driving rigs. If Tyler left too, Dad wouldn't have a crew, and without a crew he couldn't build barns or hay sheds. He would have to fall back on scrapping（拆捡废品）.

“What's college?” I said.

“College is extra school for people too dumb to learn the fi rst time around,” Dad said. Tyler stared at the fl oor, his face tense. Then his shoulders dropped, his face relaxed and he looked up; it seemed to me that he'd stepped out of himself. His eyes were soft, pleasant. I couldn't see him in there at all.

He listened to Dad, who settled into a lecture.“There's two kinds of them college professors,” Dad said. “Those who know they're lying, and those who think they're telling the truth.” Dad grinned. “Don't know which is worse, come to think of it, a bona fi de（真诚的）agent of the Illuminati（先觉者，睿智的人）,who at least knows he's on the devil's payroll（为魔鬼工作的人）, or a high-minded（傲慢的）professor who thinks his wisdom is greater than God's.” He was still grinning. The situation wasn't serious; he just needed to talk some sense into his son.

Mother said Dad was wasting his time, that nobody could talk Tyler out of anything once his mind was made up. “You may as well take a broom and start sweeping dirt off the mountain,” she said. Then she stood, took a few moments to steady herself, and trudged downstairs.

An hour later Dad was no longer grinning. Tyler had not repeated his wish to go to college, but he had not promised to stay, either. He was just sitting there, behind that vacant expression, riding it out（经受住）. “A man can't make a living out of books and scraps of paper,”Dad said. “You're going to be the head of a family. How can you support a wife and children with books?”

Tyler tilted his head, showed he was listening, and said nothing.

作者塔拉·韦斯托弗

“A son of mine, standing in line to get brainwashed by socialists and Illuminati spies—”

“The s-s-school's run by the ch-ch-church,” Tyler interrupted. “How b-bad can it b-be?”

Dad's mouth fl ew open and a gust of air rushed out. “You don't think the Illuminati have inf i ltrated（潜入）the church?” His voice was booming; every word reverberated with a powerful energy. “You don't think the fi rst place they'd go is that school, where they can raise up a whole generation of socialist Mormons? I raised you better than that!”

I will always remember my father in this moment, the potency（力量）of him, and the desperation. He leans forward, jaw set, eyes narrow,searching his son's face for some sign of agreement,some crease of shared conviction（共同信念的某些迹象）. He doesn't fi nd it.