All was quiet. In the large bedroom upstairs and the small one connecting to it the handyman would place suitcases on folding racks, pull open the curtains, and push the windows outward. In the kitchen the cook, half of whose face was purple, was roasting a pig. The walleyed kitchen maid was stewing fruit. The rest of the small staff was busy, too, and the other guests were occupying themselves in their different manners; and Miss Huk sat at the register; and Mr. Albrecht stood beside Mrs. Albrecht, only the upper arms of their jackets touching, as if accidentally.
The boy was still on his knees. The foot wearing the sock and sneaker moved out of sight. The head appeared on the other side of the chair. Slowly he got to his feet.
Miss Huk turned her eyes on him. As she expected, he avoided her spectacled gaze. His own eyes were large and silvery. His hair was pale, too. His cheeks were gaunt and his chin pointed. He looked toward but not at his parents — toward Mr. Albrecht’s rubbery features coated in dark skin, toward Mrs. Albrecht’s beautiful face and unremarkable clothing. They both spoke excellent French, Miss Huk had noted. The boy walked forward with a mechanical grace. He stopped eighteen inches away from his mother and father. He was inserting a magnifying glass into its holder; he was dropping the device into the pocket of his khaki short pants: short pants worn, Miss Huk guessed, not in defiance of the snow outside but because he was attached to the garment. Maybe the color, maybe the pockets. “Anthrenus scrophulariae,” Lars now said to the non-space between his parents, the line where their tweed arms just touched.
“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.