Alice Munros Best

this could not be so. They had come much too far.
    “I am taking you to the Bishop’s house,” said the Franciscan. “He will know what to do with you.”
    “Why not to your house?” said Lottar. “I could be a servant in your house.”
    “It isn’t allowed – to have a woman servant in my house. Or in any priest’s house. This Bishop now will not allow even an old woman. And he is right, trouble comes from having a woman in the house.”
    After the moon rose they went on. They walked and rested, walked and rested, but never fell asleep, or even looked for a comfortable place to lie down. Their feet were tough and their sandals well worn, and they did not get blisters. Both of them were used to walking long distances – the Franciscan in his far-flung parish and Lottar when she was following the sheep.
    The Franciscan became less stern – perhaps less worried – after a while and talked to her almost as he had done in the first days of their acquaintance. He spoke Italian, though she was now fairly proficient in the language of the Ghegs.
    “I was born in Italy,” he said. “My parents were Ghegs, but I lived in Italy when I was young, and that was where I became a priest. Once I went back for a visit, years ago, and I shaved off my mustache, I do not know why. Oh, yes, I do know – it was because they laughed at me in the village. Then when I got back I did not dare show my face in the
madhe.
A hairless man there is a disgrace. I sat in a room in Skodra until it grew again.”
    “It is Skodra we are going to?” said Lottar.
    “Yes, that is where the Bishop is. He will send a message that it was right to take you away, even if it is an act of stealing. They are barbarians, in the
madhe.
They will come up and pull on your sleeve in the middle of Mass and ask you to write a letter for them. Have you seen what they put up on the graves? The crosses? They make the cross into a very thin man with a rifle across his arms. Haven’t you seen that?” He laughed and shook his head and said, “I don’t know what to do with them. But they are good people all the same – they will never betray you.”
    “But you thought they might sell me in spite of my oath.”
    “Oh, yes. But to sell a woman is a way to get some money. And they are so poor.”
    Lottar now realized that in Skodra she would be in an unfamiliar position – she would not be powerless. When they got there, she could run away from him. She could find someone who spoke English, she could find the British Consulate. Or, if not that, the French.
    The grass was soaking wet before dawn and the night got very cold. But when the sun came up Lottar stopped shivering and within an hour she was hot. They walked on all day. They ate the rest of the bread and drank from any stream they found that had water in it. They had left the dry river and the mountains far behind. Lottar looked back and saw a wall of jagged rocks with a little green clinging around their bases. That green was the woods and meadows which she had thought so high. They followed paths through the hot fields and were never out of the sound of barking dogs. They met people on the paths.
    At first the Franciscan said, “Do not speak to anybody – they will wonder who you are.” But he had to answer when greetings were spoken.
    “Is this the way to Skodra? We are going to Skodra to the Bishop’s house. This is my servant with me, who has come from the mountains.
    “It is all right, you look like a servant in these clothes,” he said to Lottar. “But do not speak – they will wonder, if you speak.”
    I HAD PAINTED THE walls of my bookstore a clear, light yellow. Yellow stands for intellectual curiosity. Somebody must have told me that. I opened the store in March of 1964. This was in Victoria, in British Columbia.
    I sat there at the desk, with my offerings spread out behind me. The publishers’ representatives had advised me to stock books about dogs and horses, sailing and gardening, bird books and flower books – they said that was all anybody in Victoria would buy. I flew against their advice and brought in novels and poetry and books that explained about Sufism and relativity and Linear B. And I had set out these books, when they came, so that Political Science could shade into Philosophy and Philosophy into Religion without a harsh break, so that compatible poetscould nestle together, the arrangement of the shelves of books – I believed – reflecting a more or less