A chance in a million
原文
Lesson 36
A chance in a million
What was the chance in a million?
We are less credulous than we used to be.
In the nineteenth century, a novelist would bring his story to a conclusion
by presenting his readers with a series of coincidences--most of them wildly improbable.
Readers happily accepted the fact that an obscure maidservant was really the hero's mother.
A long-lost brother, who was presumed dead, was really alive all the time
and wickedly plotting to bring about the hero's downfall. And so on.
Modern readers would find such naive solutions totally unacceptable.
Yet, in real life, circumstances do sometimes conspire to bring about coincidences which anyone but a nineteenth century novelist would find incredible.
When I was a boy, my grandfather told me how a German taxi driver, Franz Bussman,
found a brother who was thought to have been killed twenty years before.
While on a walking tour with his wife, he stopped to talk to a workman.
After they had gone on, Mrs. Bussman commented on the workman's close resemblance to her husband
and even suggested that he might be his brother.
Franz poured scorn on the idea,
pointing out that his brother had been killed in action during the war.
Though Mrs. Bussman was fully acquainted with this story,
she thought that there was a chance in a million that she might be right.
A few days later, she sent a boy to the workman to ask him if his name was Hans Bussman.
Needless to say, the man's name was Hans Bussman and he really was Franz's long-lost brother.
When the brothers were reunited,
Hans explained how it was that he was still alive.
After having been wounded towards the end of the war,
he had been sent to hospital and was separated from his unit.
The hospital had been bombed and Hans had made his way back into Western Germany on foot.
Meanwhile, his unit was lost and all records of him had been destroyed.
Hans returned to his family home, but the house had been bombed
and no one in the neighbourhood knew what had become of the inhabitants.
Assuming that his family had been killed during an air raid,
Hans settled down in a village fifty miles away where he had remained ever since.
译文
第36课
百万分之一的机会
那百万分之一的机会究竟是什么呢？
我们不再像过去那样容易轻信他人或事物了。
在十九世纪，小说家会通过一系列巧合来结束他的故事
——其中大多数都极不可能发生。
读者们欣然接受了这样一个事实：那位默默无闻的女仆其实就是这位英雄的母亲。
一个被认定已经去世的“失散多年的兄弟”，其实一直都活着。
并且一直在暗中策划要毁掉英雄，诸如此类。
现代读者会认为这种天真的解决方案完全不可接受。
然而，在现实生活中，情况确实有时会凑巧促成一些巧合，这些巧合除了十九世纪的小说家外，任何人都会觉得难以置信。
当我还是个孩子的时候，我的祖父给我讲过一个德国出租车司机弗朗茨·布斯曼的故事。
找到了一个被认为在二十年前就已经去世的兄弟。
在与妻子一起散步时，他停下来与一位工人交谈。
在他们离开后，巴斯曼夫人评论说那个工人和她丈夫长得非常像。
甚至暗示他可能是她丈夫的兄弟。
弗朗茨对这个想法嗤之以鼻。
他指出他的兄弟在战争中阵亡了。
尽管布斯曼夫人对这件事了如指掌，
她认为自己有百万分之一的可能性是对的。
几天后，她派了一个男孩去问那个工人，他的名字是不是汉斯·布斯曼（Hans Bussman）。
不用说，这个男人的名字是汉斯·布斯曼，他确实是弗朗茨失散已久的兄弟。
当兄弟俩重聚时，
汉斯解释了自己是如何活下来的。
在战争接近尾声时受伤之后，
他被送到了医院，也因此与他的部队分开了。
这家医院遭到了轰炸，汉斯只好徒步回到了西德。
与此同时，他的部队失踪了，关于他的所有记录也被毁掉了。
汉斯回到了他的家庭住宅，但房子已经被炸毁了。
而且邻居中没有人知道住户们后来怎么样了。
汉斯以为他的家人在一次空袭中丧生了，
汉斯在五十英里外的一个村庄安顿了下来，从那以后他就一直住在那里。