“Like gods, those pines,” Christine Albrecht said with an intake of breath. “Druids—you’ve read about them, Rob, miraculous beings. In the isles, but maybe here in Hungary, too.”
“Darling.”
Miss Huk noted the wish to soothe. There was nothing wrong with her hearing, either.
She cleared her throat with an effort. “Pinaceae sylvestris,” she said. “Any tales you have heard of their transformative properties are only peasants’ fancies. Winters here are hard. Magpies do foretell the coming of newcomers, and there is a circlet of twigs that cures cramp. It’s called frázkarika. But the pines are merely trees.” She coughed. What a long speech.
All the guests were now in place. The kitchen maid served soup, and in a while she cleared the bowls; she brought the roast and the stewed fruit and a salad of lightly steamed ferns. She took those empty plates away when the time came. She brought cheese. The room was filled with the almost-silence of feasting. A conversation here, a hiss and a snapped remark there, false laughter from the Belgians, one brief cry. The kitchen maid brought tarts. Lars ate a single mouthful of soup, a single bite of meat, a single spoonful of fruit, a single fern. He left cheese and tart untasted. “At midnight,” said Robertson Albrecht to Miss Huk, “I would like to use your telephone, to call my brother in New York.”
“Of course. You are aware that we have no Internet access.”
“I have no computer.”
“No cell phone, no laptop, no wristwatch,” his wife said with a smile.
Lars raised his head. “Albrecht fraternis.” He returned to not eating dessert.
Andrei didn’t show up at dinner. He did come down to the parlor afterward, his big head like a burden on his skinny frame. Small red blemishes chased each other along his jaw—he must have been shaving with that straightedge. He nodded at the newcomers sitting side by side on the sofa but did not stop to introduce himself; instead he joined the topologist at the chess table.
Christine Albrecht accepted cognac from Miss Huk. Miss Huk then carried the tray of snifters to Andrei and the topologist, who each took one. S. and S., occupied with needlepoint, were tee-totallers. Miss Huk did not offer brandy to the three Belgians, still lingering in the dining room, interfering with cleaning up. They were hikers who had not intended to be here, they claimed; but the storm two days ago had kept them from reaching Sklar. And then one thing led to another, as their leader said to Miss Huk—ringleader, in her opinion; if these men were hikers she was the Queen of the Night. “There’s something about this place,” he went on to say, shaking his hyena’s head and smiling, an unconvincing routine. Some je ne sais quoi? But he didn’t say that; only the British used that phrase. She wondered what the threesome was up to. Perhaps an infusion of pine needles was now thought to cure schizophrenia and these thugs were planning to buy up the forests, or rent them from the feckless government, or steal them from the ogre under the bridge.
Lars sat on a footstool in the window embrasure, looking out at the pine gods. Miss Huk laid the tray on a table, picked up a snifter, and wandered to the window herself. She kept a decent distance from the boy.
“In Buenos Aires people eat live beetles,” she remarked. “A special kind of beetle. For their health.”
Silence.
“The health of the Argentineans,” she clarified.
Silence.
“Not of the beetles,” she said to his reflection.
Silence. Then, “Ulomoides dermestoides,” he said to hers.
II.
TWO DAYS LATER, when she was at the register, “Good morning,” Mr. Albrecht said. He had come soundlessly down the stairs.
“Good morning,” she echoed.
“Is your voice perhaps stronger in German?” he asked in German.
“No. In Hungarian only,” she said in English. “And not much stronger.”
He opened his hands to expose defeated palms.
“I don’t intend to sell the inn,” she said. “No, no,” she answered his raised eyebrows, “you have said nothing about buying it; and yes, yes, you came here because you heard of the unusual properties of the place and you wanted to experience them for yourself.” One of the Belgians walked by, not looking at the businessman. The businessman didn’t look at him, either. “But it is your nature to buy things,” she continued.
“Habit, not nature,” he murmured. “I don’t want the inn, it is your empire.” He carried his own empire in his head, and in his brother’s head. She had read about it; it reached everywhere. “But I have observed you at work,” he went on. “If you ever want a job …”
“Thank you,” she said, meaning no. When she lay on her pallet awaiting death she wanted to remember a life that except for a few years in Budapest was contained here, her steps crossing and recrossing each other on this patch of mountain.
The telephone rang. The voice was hoarse, the language French, she recognized one of a pair of brothers. Bird-watchers. Sunday. “Yes,” Miss Huk said into the volume enhancer.
LONG AGO, AFTER THE WAR, when the inn had been the property of her uncle and aunt, when she had been a little girl and then a bigger girl, reading stories to guests’ young children in her already soft voice … Long ago, the guests had been proper burghers, spending with caution the money they had managed to hoard. There was no Andrei then. On Saturday nights fiddlers came up from Sklar to play old tunes, get paid, get drunk, stumble home across the bridge.
Her kind aunt and uncle sent her to university in Budapest. She studied science. But she could barely breathe in the city; she missed the holy forest air. Amid ordinary citizens she felt misplaced, even stolen. Her voice retreated into her larynx. She recognized solitaries like herself—the man who repaired her shoes, a woman in the park with a wondering look, a mathematics professor. But solitaries don’t gather; someone must collect them.
She managed to stay long enough to earn her degree. Then she went home.
“I will live here,” she told them.
“Oh, dearest, stay in the city, teach, marry. Why did we work except to spare you drudgery.”
“This is my place.”
“So much to do,” they said, and sighed. “A lonely business, you have seen that,” they said. “It is necessary to keep distant from guests, from staff …”
“Yes,” she breathed.
She began as housemaid, at her own request. She scoured the stone floor of the kitchen; she learned the rudiments of the electrician’s trade, the plumber’s, the accountant’s. Her uncle and aunt died, one after the other in the same month. She cried for the old man and she cried for the old lady. But her tears were without salt.
Gradually the inn’s patronage changed. Unimaginative guests gave way to guests with secrets. Families yielded to isolates. Some people brought their own quilts; one old woman who came every summer carried a set of saucepans. Exhausted men drove up and deposited some relative for an unspecified amount of time. Word had gotten around as it always did, carried from village to village like legends brought by midwives—that place near the bridge: odd people could be themselves there.
The staff changed, too. One day the ancient handyman, often drunk anyway, dropped foaming to the ground. Two days later the new one arrived, thighs flapping against each other. Sitting with Miss Huk in the book room, his eyes blue lanterns, he offered the information that he had been accused of unhealthy practices.
“Peeping,” she guessed.
“Yes. Because I like to sit alone in parks, within arcades, on river-banks. I have no worse habits, no tendency. But the children … they tease me. Then they report me.”
She hired him. She pensioned off the old cook. The new cook appeared, her face presented like a hatchet or the result of a hatcheting. The drifty-eyed kitchen maid appeared.
There was so much to do, so blessed much. Food, wine, towels; the register; windowpanes. Now she opened the ledger. Robertson Albrecht had withdrawn to a chair with a book, leaving her to her empire. There were bills to pay. The
re were new guests to get ready for—the bird-watchers, and a fat English couple with three kids. They came every year. The kids were foster children they had managed to adopt, the mother confided … confided to anybody who’d listen, in tones of urgent secrecy. “Only here do we feel like a family.”
THREE O’CLOCK WAS A LOW TIME for everyone at the inn. Andrei stopped practicing and got into bed. The cook smoked outside. The handyman went somewhere. Guests retreated to their rooms or to the baths.
Often at three Miss Huk went into the kitchen. The kitchen maid was usually sitting beside the discolored samovar. She produced her shy smile. Miss Huk drew a chair up to the table, its top a thick slab for chopping. A cleaver hung from a loop strapped to its side.
Three drifted to three fifteen, to three thirty, to three forty-five. Things began to stir again. Andrei’s afternoon sadness lessened, and he got out of bed. Sometimes the Sklar taxi brought a guest or retrieved one, and the driver came into the kitchen for a drop. The handyman reappeared, lugging a barrel. His form was not ungainly or unsatisfactory, Miss Huk thought: just another way for a man to be. Some nights, tuxedoed behind the bar, his beardless face slightly moist, his lips slightly red, he looked like a beautiful woman in drag.
Today, through the window, she saw him at the woodpile with his ax. A figure moved toward him. Robertson Albrecht. A polite exchange—she could imagine it. I need the exercise; may I? Certainly, sir. The American raised the ax, his muscles alive under their layer of unimportant fat, and he struck, and the wood split as if it were in his thrall.
At four the bell rang in the kitchen. The little kitchen maid carried tea and cake to the parlor. A few minutes later: “A royal banquet,” Andrei exclaimed to Miss Huk, who had slipped into her place behind the register. He said the same thing almost every day. The Norwegian S. smiled at Andrei, exposing long gray teeth. “Oh, join us, Miss Huk,” said the Scottish S.
“I’ve had tea, thank you.” She had in fact had no tea, had communed with the kitchen maid without benefit of nourishment or words; but it would soon be time for a real drink. The little group warmed itself at the hearth. The handyman, now in his monkey suit, opened the bar. A Belgian came down the stairs. The topologist came down. Another Belgian came down. Lars crawled in from the book room—were there woodworms there? oh Lord. The third Belgian appeared. Everyone was assembled except the senior Albrechts—but, no, they were there, standing by the window, so solid, how could she not have seen them come in.
III.
ON FRIDAY, at that low hour of three, Miss Huk climbed to the handyman’s room to deliver his linens. She laid the pile of sheets and towels on his cot … soft stuff, so that his sensitive skin would not pucker.
The turret had four windows, one on each side. Three of them looked out on glistening green boughs. From the fourth you could see Sklar in the distance. If you looked directly downward, you saw the kitchen garden and the little parking area. Only the inn’s pickup truck stood there now. The Albrechts’ rented sedan was gone, she saw.
And she saw the stranger: thin black hair combed over a shining pate. She leaned forward for a better look and smacked her forehead on the handyman’s window. She backed away and lifted his binoculars from the dresser.
Flat ears. A tan scarf. A bony face. A pointed black beard.
A scientist, you’d think.
He waited, this seeming scientist, his hands loose at his thighs, beside a birch tree. When Lars crawled into the parking lot the man pursed his thin lips. Lars did not raise his head at the whistle. But he got to his feet. He approached the stranger. He stopped at the usual distance of a foot and a half.
The man’s lips moved in speech. Lars listened. They both squatted, and the man produced his own magnifying glass. More talk, more listening. When the man stood and walked toward the road, Lars followed.
Man walking, boy trailing; and both disappeared from Miss Huk’s view.
She inhaled sharply, producing only a light whistle. She did nothing else. The inn allowed guests to do as they pleased. Children were the responsibility of their parents.
So she stood there, thinking of the stories she had read aloud. The merchant who traded his gold for a pair of wings. She had found that old book a few days ago. The brothers who mistakenly killed each other in darkness. She had offered to read to Lars. The peasants’ sons who went out to seek their fortunes and had succeeded or failed. Lars had given her a hard look and scuttled away. The starling whose song shattered the mirror that was the world, and so the world had to begin again.
She was still at the window.
But the little figure: how brief his stay.
“You move like lightning,” Uncle Huk had marveled.
She could still do that. In a minute she was on the second floor, then the first. The cook was not in the kitchen. The handyman was elsewhere. S. and S. sat in the parlor with their embroidery. The topologist amiably manned the registration desk. “The telephone rang,” he said. “I took a reservation.” Miss Huk, on her way upstairs again, bowed her gratitude. She knocked on Andrei’s door. Oh, he’d hate this. But: “Yes,” he called. She flew in, and there he was, and the kitchen maid was with him, her round face registering Miss Huk’s entry without alarm.
“A man has taken Lars,” Miss Huk rasped.
Buckling his trousers, Andrei sped out of the room. The kitchen maid grabbed his razor and scampered after him. Miss Huk brought up the rear.
On the first floor Andrei plunged into the kitchen, returned with the cleaver; and the three raced down the wooden steps of the inn and through the scrub to the road. They turned downhill. Patches of snow from the last storm still clung to the mud.
Miss Huk ran, and her thoughts ran, too. Perhaps the Americans had arranged to dispose of their child. They could not transform him. They could not cosset him forever. Her heart thudded. Lars would not love. He would not marry. He would not wonder, even; he would recognize and classify. He would learn more Latin names and remember each one. It was a kind of happiness—she could tell them that.
The three reached the shallow steps of Junius Bridge. Andrei raised the cleaver. The kitchen maid waved the razor. Miss Huk slowed to a walk.
The chief Belgian stepped into their path, both arms aloft. “The boy is safe,” he said.
Lars was standing at the railing, near but not next to his father. The phony scientist was also standing on the bridge, his arms tied behind his back. The second Belgian was there, carrying a coil of rope. Beyond them, in the middle of the bridge, stood the Albrecht car, Mrs. Albrecht at the wheel, and next to it a strange green car, the third Belgian at its wheel. The cars would block traffic. When was there any traffic?
The Belgian with the rope marched the bound man forward and pushed him into the backseat of the green car and got in front beside his compatriot. Hikers indeed. The car backed off the bridge, turned, and headed toward Sklar.
Lars was examining something on the railing. She knew what it was. A speckled moth deposited her eggs here. The larva spun a cocoon around itself. The whole process was a biological curiosity—the moth should have chosen wood, not iron—but some ancestress had made the mistake long ago, when the Junius was reconstructed, and the error was replicated generation after insect generation; new moths kept emerging from the bridge.
Andrei and the kitchen maid, their weapons lowered, turned and began to walk up the road. The chief Belgian followed them. Christine Albrecht started her car and drove a few yards and picked up her husband. They sat side by side for a moment, not looking at each other, his hand covering hers on the wheel. Then they drove on toward the inn. Lars, after a final inspection of the cocoon, followed his parents’ car.
When everyone was out of sight Miss Huk lowered herself down the bank. Her boots squelched on the mud. She peered under the bridge.
Blue eyes in a fat face stared at her.
“You know I would never …,” he began. “I sit here of an afternoon, I like the design of the iron …,” he began again.
“I do know,” she reassured him. “Come home now.”
She climbed the bank again. She was catching up with Lars … no, he had lagged behind. “The cocoon on the bridge,” she said.
He turned his head toward her, though his gaze strayed elsewhere.
She kept him waiting. At last he looked at her.
“Hepialus lemberti,” she rewarded him. His eyes locked themselves to hers for a moment, pupils penetrating pupils, like sex she supposed.
IV.
ANDREI DREW RIBBONS of sound from the painted instrument.
Lars sat like a stone on one of the carved benches. In a row of folded chairs sat the other guests and Miss Huk, all listening. The handyman, elbows on the bar, listened. The splotched cook, shoulder against the doorjamb, listened. Somewhere the kitchen maid listened, too.
Christine Albrecht seemed to be only half listening. She looked weary beyond repair. After the applause she slipped away. Robertson Albrecht watched her climb upward; Miss Huk, nearby, watched him. “May we go into the book room?” he said, his eyes still on his wife.
They sat side by side. “I am sorry about this afternoon,” he said, with his tensile gravity. “We are used to kidnapping attempts, we are prepared for them. But I would have spared you.”
She nodded.
“We will leave tomorrow, along with our offensive bodyguards.” Silence lay between them like an animal. “Thank you for the comfort of your inn,” he said. “Lars,” he said, then paused. “Lars is not particularly precocious, doesn’t read anything except entomology, doesn’t even read very well.”
She favored him with her expressionless gaze.
“My brother in New York, my partner, he too is … narrow.” She spoke at last, as loudly as she could. “It is possible that in a century or two the interpersonal will cease to be of value.”
“Practiced by a few eccentric devotees,” he agreed. “Like swordplay.”
Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories Page 33
