With the business concluded, they moved on to dinner, ate at the pace of the overworked working class they all belonged to, and finished with dessert and conversation. Of this, she was to take no part in, but rather to return her borrowed space and leave the table. Still, she remained seated, looking at them all, listening intently to Dutch words she didn’t recognise, and often observing the pianist’s hands, how they moved to pour coffee or to prepare a filter cigarette. When it became clear she sought some company, they switched to English.

      “Sorry. It’s just a habit,” said the pianist’s girlfriend.

      “It’s fine. I can’t speak it but I understand most of it,” she lied with conviction.

      She was new enough to them that they couldn’t be sure if she did indeed know some Dutch. In fact, they had previously seen her work her way through some Spanish and French. She intended to lighten the mood with an obvious joke but their reactions were so serious, scared even, that without understanding one word, she knew who the target of the cahoots had been.

      “I’m joking,” she said.

      They emitted a nervous, forced laugh and returned to their now less-mysterious conversation. She stayed for a while longer, watching them, as characters on stage; how they interacted with the props in front of them and the set around them: the mismatched cups and saucers from flea markets and street piles; a finger trailing the rim of a wine glass; the hand using old, unopened letters as a fan. Her entire two-month stay was no more than a long, feverish play. It felt scripted that she was to live enchanted but unwelcome. How she missed cod and olive oil and parsley and decent bread; and being known.

       “I’m heading up, guys,” she finally relented. “Thanks for dinner.”

       They acknowledged her with smiles and carried on what must have been a different topic by then. She took the overt, albeit hidden, judgement emanating from them as curiosity. People are naturally wary of those different than them, especially when they are in groups and have reason to suspect. The pianist looked at her in the instant before her face disappeared up the stairs and nodded upward. She headed to the living-room veranda on the third floor, where the pianist’s chess set rested on a table mid-game, and waited.

       Not for long.

      “You really don’t speak any Dutch?” he asked, as he sat his tall frame on a flimsy bamboo chair.

      “Didn’t need to, did I?”

      “Where were we?” he asked the air, facing at the board.

      “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Are you practicing for something?” She pointed to the piano sitting inside. His eyes were the bluest against the backdrop of a painted summer sky the previous occupants of the house had left behind on the brick wall. “I’ll come back in ten years and you’ll be a famous concert pianist.”

      He smiled at his pieces. “No. I do it because it calms me down.” He peered at her for a second before turning away.

      It often came in late afternoons, right before everyone was about to arrive home from work and on Sunday mornings. He practiced the same songs, each time in the same order, with his back straight up and his head tilted down to face the keys. Around him, there were bright, tall plants—hers; colorful furniture, which appeared too put together to be used – hers; and a bookcase with shelves bent in the middle, holding thousands of classics from around the world—his. He had even read books that had put his chess partner to sleep in high school classes, interminable verse about 15th-century colonialist conquests. The most recently published book he owned had been bought because it featured a topless woman on the cover.

       “I open my door just a bit when I hear you playing,” she risked, instead of the full truth.

      He raised his face from the game to meet hers. “It calms me, too. Piano music has always done that for me,” she explained. The pianist nodded and moved his piece.

      “I still have a lot of practice to do to be decent at it.” He wouldn’t have put himself down, if there were other people around them.

      “It sounds wonderful to me,” she offered.

      The door to the living room, where the piano rested, was never closed again after that night.

      “It’s strange,” she said, pretending to plan her next move.

      “What is?” the pianist asked.

      “You play Chopin and Debussy on the piano, but the records you listen to are very Hyde.”

      “I need the contrast.” He stopped, focusing on the museum beyond the house’s back patio. It was a three-story building with imposing arches and columns made in a different century. “I’m not sure why.” He continued speaking, explaining, but she didn’t pay attention to most of it, fixated as she was on his side profile as it moved to pour out words.

      “Distortion?” She looked at him from the top of her glasses. “You mean the screaming guitars that are being tortured to death?” she said, and laughed, still focused on him. How is it so easy to look at him, when everyone else’s eyes are full of threats?

      “It’s your turn,” the pianist reminded her, shaking her glance off of himself. “I see you’re still going through your Asian Literature phase,” he said, nodding at the book that she had brought up.

      “I’m not sure it’s a phase, anymore,” she said, still not making her move.

      “Why do you like them so much?”

      She made a poorly-thought-out play and leaned back to think about it.           “They’re not grand,” she said. “They understand humanity a lot better than us in the west. It feels like they are writing from the future.” She paused before concluding. “It’s intimate.”

      “Give me your hand,” the pianist said.

      “What?” she said, restraining herself from doing so.

      “Come on.”

      She did. “You have a red spot here,” the pianist said, brushing over it with his thumb. “I’ve noticed it before.”

      She fought the instinct to take it right back. “It’s been there forever. My doctor says it’s harmless. I have them all over my body.”

      The pianist played his next move with his left hand.

      When the girlfriend joined them on the veranda, they were only conversing and laughing, discussing films she had never seen while she watered her plants. The plants covered the whole house. From the corners of shared spaces to every step of the staircase, they spilled onto the back patio, forming a small jungle over the old, gray cobblestones. From the third floor hung lilac little flowers, falling over the veranda’s railing like wedding confetti ready to be thrown at the bride and groom. There was no green leaf around them that didn’t belong to her. The huge dining table, as shared territory, was the only place where they were absent.

      “Prove it. Who invented time travel in Endgame?” she provoked, knowing he was lying. He enjoyed other sorts of movies.

      “Bruce.”

      “No. Are you serious?”

      “He did. He had the machine in the van,” the pianist protested.

      “You’ve seen it four times, you said?” she teased him.

      “Can you pass me that sweater?” the pianist asked of his chess opponent, pointing to the turquoise handmade sweater that had been resting on the back of her chair the whole time. She hadn’t even noticed it. Maybe he had put it there when he arrived. Had he been wearing it? She passed it to him.

      “Do you like it? It’s new,” he said.

      “Sure,” she answered.

      He put it on and passed a hand over his torso, which she followed. “I’m still getting used to it. It’s not my usual style.” He made an undecipherable glance at his girlfriend.

      The girlfriend left in a swift movement, the pianist followed, and the poorly muffled shouting started soon after.

      “You are trying to make me jealous,” the girlfriend asserted.

      “I’m just being nice,” he said, sheepishly. “She’ll be around the house for the next two months.”

      She remained on the veranda for some time, leisurely collecting the chess pieces and storing them on their tea box. She put the ash from all the different ash trays in the trash, and piled the used coffee cups, before taking them to the kitchen and leaving them on the sink.

      That night, she heard the girlfriend’s steps coming down and stopping by her door. The girlfriend knocked and waited for her to open, but had nothing to say once she did.

      What dramatics.

      Surely a camera was pointing at them from above, filming for a teenage soap opera, perhaps. The girlfriend continued down the staircase and walked through the corridor into the patio. From her bedroom window, she could hear the girlfriend crying.

      She shut it and went to sleep.

      The girlfriend came back. “He does this but he doesn’t mean it.”

      She said nothing, so the girlfriend continued. “The other night when we were all at the garden and most of us left early, he went to the club beneath the bar and made out with some girl.” She hadn’t known about this.

“He told me about it as soon as he got home,” the girlfriend said, and grabbed her hand. “I have these red dots, as well. They’re blood spots. They go away with time.”

§

      It was her last day. She came down with a book and a snack, making for the front door, as the pianist was coming in, carrying a box of decorations from their old apartment.

      “Heading out?” he said, as soon as he saw her.

      “I’m going to the garden behind the museum,” she said, raising her book.         “My flight leaves at the end of the day.”

      The pianist leaned back against the corridor wall. The blue in his eyes dazzled in the morning sunlight coming through the door’s top window. Ordinary words came out of his mouth slowly, as if they had a sweet taste that he was savoring.

      “Still with the Asian lit,” he said, his eyes smiling. “What’s this one about?”

      She wished to remain there, motionless but breathing, looking at him, relaxed like a leaf fallen by the roots of a tree. The feeling that she had been transported inside fiction had set in from the moment she had met them, and only intensified with each day living inside those walls. This moment was perfect, until, “Misogyny and how it’s ever present, in this case in South Korea.”

      The pianist stiffened. “You’re going to the garden now?”

She nodded.

      “Okay, let me get my stuff and I’ll join you.” He walked upstairs, three steps at a time, and out of sight.

      It was a Thursday morning. Everyone apart from them worked from the office. The pianist should have been working from home but, as was his custom, he would get the day’s work done after dinner. She wouldn’t be there, but she knew the pianist would be sitting on the brick-red couch facing his piano and bookcase, focused on his computer until his eyelids caved, only to be up at dawn the following day, drinking his coffee at the back patio.

      The walk to the garden was short and delightful, passing through a stone tunnel that ran on the side of the house and led to the entrance of the museum. A little side gate opened up to an improvised bar in the premises of what used to be a gatekeeper’s lodge. Inside, the tables and chairs were set too close together; framed pictures covered the thick, stone walls; and, of course, the stairs that led to the subterranean level branched into the toilets and the bar; but outside there was space, a small, albeit sizeable, garden with a fountain at its center. They held concerts there in July and August, which were too cold this far north to be called summer. She sat on her usual spot after ordering a tea, and opened her book, but when she peeked at the gate, the pianist was already approaching.

      “You’re having tea? I ordered a beer,” he said.

      “I’m never in the mood for beer,” she lied. “I’m too old.”

      The pianist sat down and observed her as she read her book in a whisper.       She could feel his eyes on her but didn’t give in. 

      “You always read aloud then?”

      She looked up with mockery in her face as a yes.

      “It’s adorable.”

      “Yes, I am known to be adorable.”

      She went back to her book and the pianist pulled out his filter-cigarette parts to construct a few for the day. “Did you ever get to that film I told you about?” he asked.

       “Yes, I did.”

      “Disturbing, right?”

      “Yes, but in a cathartic way,” she said, which surprised him.

      “Seeing him not give up and the staff being on his side,” she explained. “The fact that it was so undeniable,” she said, letting out a sigh with satisfaction hanging from her mouth, “that it wasn’t that everyone believed it, but rather that they couldn’t pretend they didn’t anymore.”

      The pianist chose to be silent, frowning initially, but the corners of his mouth began twisting up.

      “He won, within the parameters that their lives allow it. The father was still there but he had no power in the family.”

      “But isn’t it weird that the father stays?”

      “Of course, but it’s realistic.” She set her book upside down on the table.        “These situations are never resolved neatly. That’s a thing of fiction.”

      “Is it?”

      “Has anything in your life ever resolved perfectly?”

      “I’m hoping this will,” he said, scrunching his nose to hide the taste of embarrassment these things inevitably left on his tongue.

      “We’ll see.”

      That established a comfortable silence between them, like a slow current river where they can float for hours regarding the wind in the water and the trees above them. The seats around them filled one by one as the sun rose in the sky and the shade they sat under shifted. The background noise of cups, conversation, and music grew louder, taking away the façade of privacy they had enjoyed upon arrival. His voice snapped her out of the book and back into the living-in-fiction sensation of that place.

      He stretched his whole body like a little kid waking up from a nap.                 “Lunch?” he offered.

      “Lunch,” she agreed.

      “The burgers are decent at the bar in the basement.”

      “I have food in the fridge.”

      Back at the house, they ate on the right side of the table, which was kept somewhat clean these days, for the resident with the theater crew did the most charming thing every night. He prepared a three-course dinner, at least, and ate it by candle light. Coming into the room at that time meant being transported to another century, until the dishwasher came into view.

      “I have these oranges and I’m not taking them,” she said. “I think they’re still good.”

      “Let me see.” The pianist picked both up with his hands. “Perfect for orange juice,” he said, and got two champagne glasses from the cabinet. He cut the oranges in two and squeezed each half in the cups with his hands.

      “A pianist and a barbarian.”

      He laughed. “You wouldn’t survive a day in the real world.”

      “You didn’t even wash your hands.”

      As they drank their juice, some early afternoon sunlight came in through the floor to ceiling kitchen window that led to the patio. It stopped on the floor just behind the pianist, leaving the two of them in the shadow.

      “Do you hear that?” The pianist said, turning to his left.

      “No.”

      “The fridge is making a weird noise.” He got up, walked to it and crouched to put his ear to the door. “Come.”

      She did the same, amused. “I don’t hear it.”

      “Shhh! Get closer.”

      She could have, but she stepped away from the fridge. “We’re like the two friends from Platonic when they get high and go to the roof to search for aliens,” she said and sat down.

      The pianist followed and downed the rest of his juice. “Is that what we are?” He asked, a hand on some unopened letter, the other on his glass, his eyes on her.

      “Does it matter?”

      The pianist looked down and all around them; stretched and got up. “I’ll get the chess set.”

      She drank the remainder of her orange juice. They played some more chess, mostly in silence, and when the time came to depart for the airport, they embraced behind the entrance door and the pianist let her walk alone to the train station.

      Back at the kitchen, he put the unwashed cups in a box and saved it under the bed he shared with his girlfriend. He then went to her old room and took back the plants he had borrowed her to bring some life into the bare quarters. The book she had been reading that day in the garden sat on the desk with the bookmark still inside, placed a few pages into the last chapter. Before he headed out, he stepped on the windowsill and collected the small camera he had put up there, atop the window frame. He then collected the one above the bricked up fireplace across from her bed and went upstairs to upload the footage. This time, he might keep it just for himself.