The flood was two thousand kilometres away, and it arrived in Sorel as a photograph on the evening news and a cardboard box in the school gymnasium. Ilya was sixteen and had volunteered to sort donations because it was better than revising. On the first afternoon he counted blankets, tinned fish, baby formula and, at the bottom of a crate, forty packets of a medicine whose label had faded to the colour of weak tea. Someone had written a date on the side in marker. The date had passed two years earlier.
洪水在两千公里之外，而它来到索雷尔镇的方式，是晚间新闻里的一张照片，和学校体育馆里的一只纸箱。伊利亚十六岁，报名分拣捐赠物资，因为总比复习功课好。第一个下午，他数了毛毯、罐头鱼、婴儿奶粉，然后在一只板条箱底部，发现了四十包药，标签已经褪成淡茶的颜色。有人在侧面用记号笔写了一个日期。那个日期两年前就过去了。
He told the teacher in charge, who told the coordinator, who said that everything would be checked at the other end. Ilya asked whether the other end had the facilities to check it. The coordinator, who had been awake for thirty hours, said that this was not the moment for perfectionism, and Ilya, who was sixteen, did not know how to explain that he was not asking for perfection. He looked at the box, and at the faded date, and at the photograph on the wall of a street he had never seen, where a woman was standing in water holding a child and a plastic bag.
他告诉了负责的老师，老师告诉了协调人，协调人说所有东西到了那边都会检查。伊利亚问，那边有没有检查的条件。已经三十个小时没睡的协调人说，现在不是讲完美主义的时候；而伊利亚十六岁，不知道该怎么解释，他要的不是完美。他看着那只箱子，看着那个褪色的日期，又看着墙上那张照片——一条他从未见过的街，一个女人站在水里，抱着一个孩子和一只塑料袋。
Three days later the same photograph appeared again, this time with a caption naming the town. Ilya looked at it for a long time before he understood what was bothering him. Behind the woman, stacked against a wall, were crates identical to the ones in the gymnasium: same blue stencil, same chipped corner, same battered edge where the forklift had caught it. He could not prove it was the same crate. He knew, in the way you know things at sixteen, that it was.
三天后，同一张照片又出现了，这次说明文字标出了那座小镇的名字。伊利亚看了很久，才明白是什么让他不安。那个女人身后，靠墙堆着一些箱子，和体育馆里的一模一样：同样的蓝色喷字，同样磕掉的一角，同样被叉车撞出的破损边缘。他无法证明那就是同一只箱子。但以一种十六岁的人知道事情的方式，他知道就是。
He wrote an email to the regional depot and received an automated reply. He wrote again, copying the school, the council and a journalist whose address he found on the newspaper's website. This time a woman called him back and asked, very calmly, how he had noticed. Ilya said that he had spent four afternoons looking at boxes. She asked him to send photographs of the labels, and then asked him whether he would be willing to explain the sorting system to a meeting on Friday, and he said yes before he had time to be frightened.
他给地区仓库写了一封邮件，收到的是一封自动回复。他又写了一封，抄送学校、村委会，还有一位他从报纸网站上找到地址的记者。这次有一位女士给他回了电话，非常平静地问他，是怎么注意到的。伊利亚说，他花了四个下午看箱子。她请他拍下标签的照片发过去，然后问他愿不愿意在星期五的会上讲一讲分拣流程。他还没来得及害怕，就说了愿意。
The meeting was not dramatic. Nobody was accused of anything. A man from logistics explained that the expired medicine had come from a well-meaning pharmacy drive, that it should have been screened, and that the screening had been skipped because the warehouse was full and the lorry was leaving. The journalist wrote four hundred words about it. The system changed in one small respect: every crate now had to be opened and dated before it was sealed, and the sealing was done by two people instead of one.
会议并不戏剧化。没有人被指控什么。一位物流部门的男士解释说，那些过期药来自一次好意的药店募捐，本来应该经过筛查，而筛查被跳过了，因为仓库满了，卡车又要出发。记者就此写了四百字。制度在一个很小的方面改变了：现在每一只箱子在封箱之前都必须打开并标上日期，而且封箱要由两个人完成，而不是一个人。
Ilya's school raised less money that year than the year before. He knew this because he kept the ledger, and because he had learned that a number going down is not the same as a thing going wrong. The photograph on the gymnasium wall was replaced with a new one, sent by the town, showing a woman in a dry street holding a child and a blue crate, and on the crate, in marker, someone had written a date that had not yet passed, and the words: checked twice.
那一年，伊利亚的学校筹到的钱比前一年少。他知道这一点，因为他管着账本，也因为他已经懂得，一个数字下降，并不等于有事情出了错。体育馆墙上的照片换成了新的一张，是那座小镇寄来的：一个女人站在干了的街道上，抱着一个孩子和一只蓝色箱子；箱子上有人用记号笔写了一个还没有过去的日期，还有几个字：检查过两次。