The Stone Bride

The Legend

传说

When it rained, she wept. That was the first thing anyone learned about the Stone Bride of Key Lane, and for most visitors the last as well, since no more would fit into a photo. Above the door of house number seven, in the keystone of the doorway, sat the head of a young woman in grey sandstone, hardly bigger than a loaf of bread, her hair tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. As soon as it rained, two dark tracks ran from the corners of her eyes over her cheeks down to her chin, and the corners of her mouth, worn soft by the weather, drew downwards as well, as if she had seen it coming.

一下雨，她就哭。关于钥匙巷的石新娘，人们最先知道的就是这一点，而对大多数游客来说，这也是最后知道的一点，因为再多的东西就装不进一张照片了。七号房子的门上方，门洞的拱心石里，嵌着一个年轻女子的头像，灰色砂岩雕成，不比一个面包大，头发在颈后挽成一个髻。只要下雨，两道深色的水痕就从她的眼角流过脸颊，一直淌到下巴，被风雨磨得柔和的嘴角也随之向下撇，仿佛她早就料到会这样。

On this Tuesday in October Tereza Nováková stood beneath her for what was, at a cautious estimate, the three-thousandth time. She held up the yellow umbrella by which her groups recognised her, waited until the last of them had come up the lane, and lowered her voice, as she always did, at exactly this spot.

这个十月的星期二，特蕾扎·诺瓦科娃站在她的下方，保守估计，是第三千次。她高举着团队用来认出她的那把黄伞，等最后一个人也走上巷子，然后放低声音，一如既往，就在这个位置。

“In the spring of 1848,” she said, “Anežka, the daughter of the master of the house, was engaged to a raftsman. He brought timber from the Bohemian Forest down the Vltava, and on the day before the wedding the raft arrived without him. Anežka waited at this door every evening, for forty years. When she died, the stonemason immortalised her face up here. And ever since, whenever it rains …” She pointed upwards, and twenty-three phones rose with her finger.

“1848年春天，”她说，“房东的女儿阿内什卡和一个放筏人订了婚。他从波西米亚森林沿着伏尔塔瓦河运木材下来，婚礼前一天，木筏到了，人却没有回来。阿内什卡每天傍晚都在这扇门前等，等了四十年。她去世后，石匠把她的面容永远留在了这上面。从那以后，每逢下雨……”她指向上方，二十三部手机随着她的手指举了起来。

It was not raining. It had not rained for eleven days, and the bride, to be honest, looked only slightly put out, like someone who has waited too long for a bus. Tereza knew the disappointment in their faces and had a sentence for it: anyone who wanted to see her weep would simply have to come back. Most of them did not come back, but they wrote it in their reviews, and the reviews brought the next ones.

没有下雨。已经十一天没下雨了，说实话，新娘看上去只是有点不高兴，像一个等公交车等得太久的人。特蕾扎熟悉游客脸上的失望，也为此备好了一句话：想看她哭的人，只好再来一趟。大多数人没有再来，却把这写进了评论，而评论又带来了下一批游客。

That Anežka had never existed was known in Prague to one single person, and she was at that moment holding the yellow umbrella. Tereza had invented her six years ago, on a wet afternoon, back when she still offered art-history tours that nobody booked, and a group from Ohio had asked her, in front of this very door, why the woman up there was crying. She had not known the truth and had not felt like admitting it. So she had let a raftsman drown. It had been, as would turn out, the most successful quarter of an hour of her working life.

阿内什卡从来不存在，这件事在布拉格只有一个人知道，而那个人此刻正举着黄伞。六年前，一个潮湿的下午，特蕾扎编出了她。那时她还在推出艺术史导览，却没有人预订，一个来自俄亥俄的团恰好在这扇门前问她，上面那个女人为什么哭。她不知道真相，也不愿承认不知道。于是她让一个放筏人淹死了。事后证明，那是她职业生涯里最成功的一刻钟。

By now the Stone Bride was in three guidebooks, in two of them with the wrong year. Other guides retold her, some with a second lover, one even with poison. Wedding couples from Seoul and Milan had themselves photographed beneath the doorway, and across the lane Radek Bureš, with whom Tereza had once almost moved in, had turned his former pawnshop into the Café of the Weeping Bride , in whose window lay a cake of the same name: poppy seed, with an icing that ran in the warmth.

如今，石新娘出现在三本旅游指南里，其中两本把年份写错了。别的导游也转述这个故事，有的还加上第二个情人，有一个甚至加上了毒药。来自首尔和米兰的新婚夫妇在门洞下拍照，对面，特蕾扎差一点就同居过的拉德克·布雷什，把他从前的当铺改成了 “哭泣的新娘”咖啡馆 ，橱窗里摆着一款同名的蛋糕：罂粟籽蛋糕，淋着一层遇热就会流淌的糖霜。