The Greenhouse

Nineteen

Just when I think I have completely lost my bearings, an inn appears at the end of the side road. As expected, there are white lace curtains in the windows. There’s one car in the driveway. I walk past the front side of the house until I reach the kitchen. The skinned furs of forest animals adorn the walls in a row: hares, rabbits, and wild boar. The owner comes out the door to greet me and ushers me into a small dining room with a few tables. There are more furs on the walls and stuffed stag heads, along with a collection of guns. I’m clearly the only guest. The place gives off a pleasant odor of cleanliness and food. There are white tablecloths on the table and linen napkins, three glasses per plate, and three sets of knives and forks of different sizes.

I’m none the wiser after reading the menu, which the man tries to talk me through over my shoulder, but I can’t follow the thread.

— One moment, he says, to prevent me from immediately turning around, and he fetches a woman from the kitchen in a lily-white apron whom I imagine he must have lived with for several decades because he doesn’t even need to explain the problem to her. The woman presents me with my options:

— Would you like this or would you prefer this? asks the woman.

I just nod. The woman suddenly bursts out laughing.

— Which do you want? she asks.

This is the worst question she could have asked me, and it throws me into a panic. I don’t know what I want; there’s still so much I’ve yet to try and understand.

— That’s the problem, I say to the woman, I don’t know what I want.

I imagine you can’t really sink much lower than this on the estimation scale of a restaurant in a forest, not even to know what you want to eat. The woman nods, full of understanding.

— I’ll just take what you recommend, I say to settle the matter. The woman seems pleased; this isn’t the first time I’ve asked a woman to make decisions for me.

— Trust me, she says in a manner that is both mysterious and trustworthy, you won’t be disappointed.

A short while later, as I sit alone in the room under the reindeer’s head, the woman returns with a dish and bottle of wine. It turns out to be the first of many dishes. She pours the wine into one of the glasses.

— I took the liberty of choosing the wine as well, she says, enjoy your meal. She recoils slightly and observes my reactions.

— How do you like it? she asks.

— Very good, I say, tasting a lukewarm pâté in a wild mushroom sauce.

— I thought as much.

She brings over a photograph of a porcupine to show me the source of the pâté. The porcupine pâté is followed by at least another three starters, pâté upon pâté, wild boar pâté, duck pâté, and goose pâté; then after that, three of the forest restaurant’s specialties: breast of fallow deer, moose fillets, shoulder of venison, one meat dish after another. According to the collection of photographs that the woman presents with each dish, everything that’s brought to me, literally everything comes from the forest. These are the creatures that I’ve been scared of running over all day, now cooked. There isn’t much along the lines of vegetables; instead there are sauces and bread. The woman insists on me drinking a glass of wine with each dish. The couple are very soft spoken and ask me a number of questions that I try to answer as much as my knowledge of the language will allow. Every time a new dish is carried in I think, that’s it, the meal’s over. The man asks where I’m headed and I tell him. At various intervals a girl around my age wanders into the room. She comes and goes and seems to acknowledge me; I notice she’s wearing a dotted skirt. I get the feeling that the whole family is observing me, that there’s some purpose behind all this.

But I can’t deny that the food is excellent and the bill ludicrously low. Since I’ve knocked back too many glasses to be able to carry on with my journey, I ask the woman about accommodation in the forest. It seems to be on the couple’s top floor, so I fetch my backpack and then my plants from the car. As the family watches me from the stairs, the man asks me if I’m a gardener, and I say you could say that. The woman tells me I can pay for the dinner tomorrow, and after drinking a cranberry liqueur on the house, I water the plants one last time, brush my teeth, undress, and dive under the lily-white sheets.