The letter arrived on a Tuesday, in an envelope too good for the neighbourhood. Halina read it twice, then put it under the till and sold three paperbacks and a map before she allowed herself to look at it again. The developer offered enough to close the shop, pay her debts, and live, as her nephew kept saying, comfortably. The building was one hundred and four years old and the roof leaked over the poetry section, which was, Halina thought, a kind of editorial judgement. She had run the shop for twenty-nine years. She had never once described it as comfortably.
信是星期二到的，信封的纸质好得不像这个街区该有的东西。哈莉娜读了两遍，然后把它压在收银机下面，先卖了三本平装书和一张地图，才允许自己再看一遍。开发商出的价钱足够她关掉书店、还清欠款，然后像她侄子一直说的那样，过得“舒服”。这栋楼一百零四岁了，屋顶在诗集那一区漏水，哈莉娜想，那也算是一种编辑意见。她经营这家店二十九年，从来没有用过“舒服”这个词来形容它。
Her nephew Marek came on Sunday with a folder of calculations. He was not unkind; he was thirty-one and had a mortgage and genuinely believed he was rescuing her. He spread the papers across the counter and spoke about liquidity and risk. Halina listened, and made tea, and at the end she said, “You have counted everything except the people.” Marek said that people did not pay invoices. She agreed. Then she asked him to stay for the reading group, which was that evening, and which he had never attended.
星期天，侄子马雷克带着一个装满计算的文件夹来了。他并不刻薄；他三十一岁，有房贷，真心相信自己是在救她。他把纸摊在柜台上，讲流动性和风险。哈莉娜听着，泡了茶，最后说：“你什么都算过了，就是没算人。”马雷克说，人不会替她付账单。她同意。然后她请他留下来参加晚上的读书会——他一次也没来过。
The insurance company required an inventory before it would discuss the roof, so Halina began, for the first time in decades, to count her stock. It was a strange occupation. In the back room she found forty-one books that had been lent and never returned, each with a borrower's name pencilled inside on a strip of card. Some of the names she knew. One was the doctor who had delivered her, one a boy who had moved to Norway, one a woman who had died in 1998 and whose daughter still came in every December to buy a calendar.
保险公司要先有一份清单才肯谈屋顶的事，于是几十年来第一次，哈莉娜开始清点库存。这是一种奇怪的工作。在后面的库房里，她找出四十一本借出去就再没还回来的书，每一本内侧都夹着一张小卡片，上面用铅笔写着借书人的名字。有些名字她认识。一个是当年为她接生的医生，一个是搬到挪威去的男孩，还有一个女人1998年就去世了，而她的女儿每年十二月仍会来买一本挂历。
She did not send any of the books away. Instead she wrote a letter to each borrower, or to their family, saying that the shop was making a record and would be glad to know what had become of the book. Nine people replied. Three returned the books with apologies and flowers. Two had lost them and sent money. One wrote four pages about how a novel had got her through a bad winter, and enclosed a photograph of the book on a shelf in Lisbon. Halina put the letters in the till, where the developer's offer had been, and found that she could no longer remember what it said.
她没有把任何一本书处理掉。她给每一位借书人，或者他们的家人，写了一封信，说书店正在做一份记录，很想知道那本书后来怎样了。九个人回了信。三个人把书还了回来，附上道歉和花。两个人说书丢了，寄来了钱。有一个人写了四页，讲一部长篇小说怎样陪她熬过一个难捱的冬天，还附了一张照片，拍的是那本书立在里斯本的一个书架上。哈莉娜把这些信放进收银机，就放在原来那份报价的位置，然后发现自己已经想不起那上面写的是什么了。
She did not sell. She did something less dramatic, which took eight months and three lawyers and a great deal of arithmetic. She sold the upper two floors to the developer, kept the ground floor, and signed a lease of ninety-nine years at a rent fixed in the contract, so that no future owner could raise it out of spite. The shop became smaller by one room. The poetry section moved into what had been the stockroom, and the leak, being above the new flats rather than above the Keats, became somebody else's problem.
她没有卖。她做了一件不那么戏剧性的事，花了八个月、三位律师和大量的算术。她把上面两层卖给了开发商，留下底层，又签了一份九十九年的租约，租金写死在合同里，这样以后的业主就没法出于怨气涨租。书店少了一个房间。诗集搬进了原来的库房，而漏水的地方现在位于新公寓的上方，而不是济慈的上方，于是成了别人的问题。
Marek called it a compromise, in the tone people use when they mean defeat. Halina preferred to call it a floor. On the first morning after the builders left, she opened at nine and found a queue of six people, most of them neighbours who had heard about the lease and wanted to see whether it was true. The doctor's daughter bought a calendar. A boy she did not recognise asked whether she had anything by an author whose name he could not remember, and she spent twenty minutes finding it, and did not once look at the clock.
马雷克把这叫做妥协，用的是人们其实想说“失败”时的那种语气。哈莉娜更愿意把它叫做“一层楼”。工人撤走的第一个早晨，她九点开门，发现门外排了六个人，大多是听说了租约的邻居，想来看看是不是真的。医生的女儿买了一本挂历。一个她不认识的男孩问她有没有某位作家的书——他说不出名字——她花了二十分钟替他找到，一次也没有看钟。