Alice Munros Best

past the hotel, beyond the streetlights, down the dark side roads. Somewhere out in the country they would lose the sound of each other’s bells.

THE ALBANIAN VIRGIN
    IN THE MOUNTAINS , in Maltsia e madhe, she must have tried to tell them her name, and “Lottar” was what they made of it. She had a wound in her leg, from a fall on sharp rocks when her guide was shot. She had a fever. How long it took them to carry her through the mountains, bound up in a rug and strapped to a horse’s back, she had no idea. They gave her water to drink now and then, and sometimes
raki
, which was a kind of brandy, very strong. She could smell pines. At one time they were on a boat and she woke up and saw the stars, brightening and fading and changing places – unstable clusters that made her sick. Later she understood that they must have been on the lake. Lake Scutari, or Sckhoder, or Skodra. They pulled up among the reeds. The rug was full of vermin, which got under the rag tied around her leg.
    At the end of her journey, though she did not know it was the end, she was lying in a small stone hut that was an outbuilding of the big house, called the
kula.
It was the hut of the sick and dying. Not of giving birth, which these women did in the cornfields, or beside the path when they were carrying a load to market.
    She was lying, perhaps for weeks, on a heaped-up bed of ferns. It was comfortable, and had the advantage of being easily changed when fouled or bloodied. The old woman named Tima looked after her. She plugged up the wound with a paste made of beeswax and olive oil and pine resin. Several times a day the dressing was removed, the wound washed out with
raki
. Lottar could see black lace curtains hanging from the rafters, and she thought she was in her room at home, with her mother (who was dead) looking after her. “Why have you hung up those curtains?” she said. “They look horrible.”
    She was really seeing cobwebs, all thick and furry with smoke – ancient cobwebs, never disturbed from year to year.
    Also, in her delirium, she had the sensation of some wide board being pushed against her face – something like a coffin plank. But when she came to her senses she learned that it was nothing but a crucifix, a wooden crucifix that a man was trying to get her to kiss. The man was a priest, a Franciscan. He was a tall, fierce-looking man with black eyebrows and mustache and a rank smell, and he carried, besides the crucifix, a gun that she learned later was a Browning revolver. He knew by the look of her that she was a giaour – not a Muslim – but he did not understand that she might be a heretic. He knew a little English but pronounced it in a way that she could not make out. And she did not then know any of the language of the Ghegs. But after her fever subsided, when he tried a few words of Italian on her, they were able to talk, because she had learned Italian at school and had been travelling for six months in Italy. He understood so much more than anyone else around her that she expected him, at first, to understand everything. What is the nearest city? she asked him, and he said, Skodra. So go there, please, she said – go and find the British Consulate, if there is one. I belong to the British Empire. Tell them I am here. Or if there is no British Consul, go to the police.
    She did not understand that under no circumstances would anybody go to the police. She didn’t know that she belonged now to this tribe, this
kula
, even though taking her prisoner had not been their intention and was an embarrassing mistake.
    It is shameful beyond belief to attack a woman. When they had shot and killed her guide, they had thought that she would turn her horse around and fly back down the mountain road, back to Bar. But her horse took fright at the shot and stumbled among the boulders and she fell, and her leg was injured. Then they had no choice but to carry her with them, back across the border between the Crna Gora (which means Black Rock, or Montenegro) and Maltsia e madhe.
    “But why rob the guide and not me?” she said, naturally thinking robbery to be the motive. She thought of how starved they looked, the man and his horse, and of the fluttering white rags of his headdress.
    “Oh, they are not robbers!” said the Franciscan, shocked. “They are honest men. They shot him because they were in blood with him. With his house. It is their law.”
    He told her that the man who had been shot, her guide, had