Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Well, that’s not surprising,” Mr. Albrecht said to his son. Mrs. Albrecht said nothing.

Miss Huk also said nothing. Those damned carpet beetles , was what she thought.

WHEN YOU RUN an inn in the foothills of the Mátra Mountains, an inn that boasts nothing in particular — a thermal spring of course, excellent food and wine of course, forest trails — you’ve got to attract people who have reason to be content with bathing, walking, eating, drinking, reading the books they’ve brought or the ones in the book room behind the stairs. If the inn is more than inn, or less, you are wise to offer something to offset that less or more. Miss Huk did offer something: Andrei.

“He’s not our resident musician, not at all,” she said a few hours later to the bathed, hydrated Albrechts. “He is a guest here like anybody else, semipermanent like many. He brought the harpsichord — it is his.”

“By car?” Mrs. Albrecht asked, idly.

Miss Huk said yes, it is easy to enclose keyboard and strings in padding and of course the legs had been removed. Legs can be stowed in a sack. When Andrei plays for us, she informed the lovely, sorrowful face, he and the handyman carry the thing downstairs. And the kitchen maid carries the legs …

“In a sack,” Mrs. Albrecht supplied, her eyes seeking the drawing of the bridge and its ogre.

Her husband said nothing. He was so still — like pudding.

“Yes, a sack. And then, in this room, near the windows there, the men and the girl reassemble the instrument, whirling the legs into place. They have all three become expert at the maneuver.”

The kitchenmaid came in and suggested dinner. The gong sounded at the same time. Miss Huk rose, the Albrechts rose, Lars came out from behind his chair and moved slowly forward. “Will you join me at my table?” Miss Huk asked these newest guests. “It is the custom on the first night.”

Lars paused. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. Reluctance rippled across his features, but he followed his parents into the dining room. Lit only by candles, the room held six tables. Four were quickly occupied. The Belgians took one. The topologist, beaming in his vacuous way, took another. S. and S. took the third table. S. and S. were women who preferred to be addressed by last initials only; too bad they bore the same initial, but the staff managed to oblige. One S. was Scottish, the other Norwegian. Miss Huk and the Albrechts seated themselves at Miss Huk’s table, which stood on a low platform near the window. Beyond the window was the forest: dense, then denser.

“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.