Alice Munros Best

this made her look as if she had actually lost flesh around her face and neck. The part of her under the hospital covers seemed as extensive and lumpy as ever.
    “But you must not think I am ungrateful,” she said. “Sit down. Bring that chair from over there – she doesn’t need it.”
    There were two other women in the room. One was just a thatch of yellow-gray hair on the pillow, and the other was tied into a chair, wriggling and grunting.
    “This is a terrible place,” said Charlotte. “But we must just try our best to put up with it. I am so glad to see you. That one over there yells all night long,” she said, nodding toward the window bed. “We must thank Christ she’s asleep now. I don’t get a wink of sleep, but I have been putting the time to very good use. What do you think I’ve been doing? I’ve been making up a story, for a movie! I have it all in my head and I want you to hear it. You will be able to judge if it will make a good movie. I think it will. I would like Jennifer Jones to act in it. I don’t know, though. She does not seem to have the same spirit anymore. She married that mogul.
    “Listen,” she said. “(Oh, could you haul that pillow up more, behind my head?) It takes place in Albania, in northern Albania, which is called Maltsia e madhe, in the nineteen-twenties, when things were very primitive. It is about a young woman travelling alone. Lottar is her name in the story.”
    I sat and listened. Charlotte would lean forward, even rock a little on her hard bed, stressing some point for me. Her puffy hands flew up and down, her blue eyes widened commandingly, and then from time to time she sank back onto the pillows, and she shut her eyes to get the story in focus again. Ah, yes, she said. Yes, yes. And she continued.
    “Yes, yes,” she said at last. “I know how it goes on, but that is enough for now. You will have to come back. Tomorrow. Will you come back?”
    I said, yes, tomorrow, and she appeared to have fallen asleep without hearing me.

    THE
KULA
WAS a great, rough stone house with a stable below and the living quarters above. A veranda ran all the way around, and there would always be an old woman sitting there, with a bobbin contraption that flew like a bird from one hand to the other and left a trail of shiny black braid, mile after mile of black braid, which was the adornment of all the men’s trousers. Other women worked at the looms or sewed together the leather sandals. Nobody sat there knitting, because nobody would think to sit down to knit. Knitting was what they did while they trotted back and forth to the spring with their water barrels strapped to their backs, or took the path to the fields or to the beech wood, where they collected the fallen branches. They knitted stockings – black and white, red and white, with zigzag patterns like lightning strokes. Women’s hands must never be idle. Before dawn they pounded the bread dough in its blackened wooden trough, shaped it into loaves on the backs of shovels, and baked it on the hearth. (It was corn bread, unleavened and eaten hot, which would swell up like a puffball in your stomach.) Then they had to sweep out the
kula
and dump the dirty ferns and pile up armloads of fresh ferns for the next night’s sleep. This was often one of Lottar’s jobs, since she was so unskilled at everything else. Little girls stirred the yogurt so that lumps would not form as it soured. Older girls might butcher a kid and sew up its stomach, which they had stuffed with wild garlic and sage and apples. Or they would go together, girls and women, all ages, to wash the men’s white head scarves in the cold little river nearby, whose waters were clear as glass. They tended the tobacco crop and hung the ripe leaves to dry in the darkened shed. They hoed the corn and cucumbers, milked the ewes.
    The women looked stern but they were not so, really. They were only preoccupied, and proud of themselves, and eager for competition. Who could carry the heaviest load of wood, knit the fastest, hoe the most rows of cornstalks? Tima, who had looked after Lottar when she was sick, was the most spectacular worker of all. She would run up the slope to the
kula
with a load of wood bound to her back that looked ten times as big as herself. She would leap from rock to rock in the river and pound thescarves as if they were the bodies of enemies. “Oh, Tima, Tima!” the other women cried out in ironic admiration, and “Oh, Lottar,