索尔．贝娄的洪堡园

我每次去纽约，不是住在华尔街就是布鲁克林，都离water street 很近。Water Street上有个Russian bathhouse，非常不起眼的小门脸。我每次经过那里，就想起了索尔．贝娄在《洪堡的礼物》〈Humboldt’s Gift）里写的芝加哥Humboldt Park的俄国浴室。

贝娄9岁的时候就随父母从加拿大移民到芝加哥。他们家在西边的洪堡园。我一直在想他的《洪堡的礼物》是否出自于此。那个时候，洪堡园大都是东欧移民，而现在，这里的居民大却是黑人和墨西哥人。

在他晩年的时候，他是这样回忆洪堡园的：

“on the back porch, your neighbors on their back porches all down the line, the graceless cottonwoods reaching toward you and you listened to the accordions and player pianos and harmonicas below, across the way, down the street, playing mazurkas ... One of the children was sent to the corner to bring home a pitcherful of soda pop (the druggist called it a phosphate). Over every drugstore in Chicago there swung a large mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs and every summer the sandflies with green light transparent wings covered the windows.”

而他在《洪堡的礼物》里，是这样描写那个俄国浴室里的景象：

“The patrons of the Russian Bath are cast in an antique form. They have swelling buttocks and fatty breasts as yellow as buttermilk. They stand on thick pillar legs affected with a sort of creeping verdigris or blue-cheese mottling of the ankles. After steaming, these old fellows eat enormous snacks of bread and salt herring or large ovals of salami and dripping skirt-steak and they drink schnapps. They could knock down walls with their hard stout old-fashioned bellies. Things are very elementary here. You feel that these people are almost conscious of obsolescence, of a line of evolution abandoned by nature and culture. So down in the super-heated subcellars all these Slavonic cavemen and wood demons with hanging laps of fat and legs of stone and lichen boil themselves and splash ice water on their heads by the bucket. Upstairs, on the television screen in the locker room, little dudes and grinning broads make smart talk or leap up and down. They are unheeded ... There may be no village in the Carpathians where such practices still prevail.”

现在这里己翻修一新，改名为＂红场＂day spa，还附带一个酒吧和餐馆，比起纽约水街上的那个要高级多了，可水街上的那个却更接近巜洪堡的礼物》里面的。