Alice Munros Best

Southern Europe.
    “You will have to go to the Antiquarian Bookstore,” I said. “The one on Fort Street. It isn’t far to take them.”
    He made a sound of disgust, maybe indicating that he knew well enough where it was, or that he had already made an unsuccessful trip there, or that most of these books had come from there, one way or another, in the first place.
    “How is Charlotte?” I said warmly. I had not seen her for a while, although she used to visit the store quite often. She would bring me little presents – coffee beans coated with chocolate to give me energy; a bar of pure glycerine soap to counteract the drying effects, on the skin, of having to handle so much paper. A paperweight embedded with samples of rocks found in British Columbia, a pencil that lit up in the dark (so that I could see to write up bills if the lights should go out). She drank coffee with me, talked, and strolled about the store, discreetly occupied, when I was busy. Through the dark, blustery days of fall she wore the velvet cloak that I had first seen her in, and kept the rain off with an oversized, ancient black umbrella. She called it her tent. If she saw that I had become too involved with a customer, she would tap me on the shoulder and say, “I’ll just silently steal away with my tent now. We’ll talk another day.”
    Once, a customer said to me bluntly, “Who is that woman? I’ve seen her around town with her husband. I guess he’s her husband. I thought they were peddlers.”
    Could Charlotte have heard that, I wondered. Could she have detected a coolness in the attitude of my new clerk? (Charlotte was certainly cool to her.) There might have been just too many times when I was busy. I did not actually think that the visits had stopped. I preferred to think that an interval had grown longer, for a reason that might have nothing to do with me. I was busy and tired, anyway, as Christmas loomed. The number of books I was selling was a pleasant surprise.
    “I don’t want to be any kind of character assassin,” the clerk had said to me. “But I think you should know that that woman and her husband have been banned from a lot of stores in town. They’re suspected of lifting things. I don’t know. He wears that rubber coat with the big sleeves and she’s got her cloak. I do know for sure that they used to go around at Christmastime and snip off holly that was growing in people’s gardens. Then they took it round and tried to sell it in apartment buildings.”
    On that cold morning, after I had refused all the books in his wagon, I asked Gjurdhi again how Charlotte was. He said that she was sick. He spoke sullenly, as if it were none of my business.
    “Take her a book,” I said. I picked out a Penguin light verse. “Take her this – tell her I hope she enjoys it. Tell her I hope she’ll be better very soon. Perhaps I can get around to see her.”
    He put the book into his bundle in the wagon. I thought that he would probably try to sell it immediately.
    “Not at home,” he said. “In the hospital.”
    I had noticed, each time he bent over the wagon, a large, wooden crucifix that swung down outside his coat and had to be tucked back inside. Now this happened again, and I said, thoughtlessly, in my confusion and contrition, “Isn’t that beautiful! What beautiful dark wood! It looks medieval.”
    He pulled it over his head, saying, “Very old. Very beautiful. Oak wood. Yes.”
    He pushed it into my hand, and as soon as I realized what was happening I pushed it back.
    “
Wonderful
wood,” I said. As he put it away I felt rescued, though full of irritable remorse.
    “Oh, I hope Charlotte is not very sick!” I said.
    He smiled disdainfully, tapping himself on the chest – perhaps to show me the source of Charlotte’s trouble, perhaps only to feel for himself the skin that was newly bared there.
    Then he took himself, the crucifix, the books, and the wagon out of my store. I felt that insults had been offered, humiliations suffered, on both sides.

    UP PAST THE tobacco field was a beech wood, where Lottar had often gone to get sticks for the fire. Beyond that was a grassy slope – a high meadow – and at the top of the meadow, about half an hour’s climb from the
kula
, was a small stone shelter, a primitive place with no window, a low doorway and no door, a corner hearth without a chimney. Sheep took cover there; the floor was littered with their droppings.
    That was where she went to live after