Alice Munros Best

attached. The fancy balconies had been painted white, the whole place had the air of an ice-cream parlor. No doubt it had been renovated inside as well, andthe rents increased, so that people like Charlotte and Gjurdhi could have no hope of living there. I checked the names by the door, and of course theirs were gone. They must have moved out some time ago.
    The change in the apartment building seemed to have some message for me. It was about vanishing. I knew that Charlotte and Gjurdhi had not actually vanished – they were somewhere, living or dead. But for me they had vanished. And because of this fact – not really because of any loss of them – I was tipped into dismay more menacing than any of the little eddies of regret that had caught me in the past year. I had lost my bearings. I had to get back to the store so my clerk could go home, but I felt as if I could as easily walk another way, just any way at all. My connection was in danger – that was all. Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn’t we rather have a destiny to submit to, then, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
    I let myself slip, then, into imagining a life with Nelson. If I had done so accurately, this is how it would have gone.
    He comes to Victoria. But he does not like the idea of working in the store, serving the public. He gets a job teaching at a boys’ school, a posh place where his look of lower-class toughness, his bruising manners, soon make him a favorite.
    We move from the apartment at the Dardanelles to a roomy bungalow a few blocks from the sea. We marry.
    But this is the beginning of a period of estrangement. I become pregnant. Nelson falls in love with the mother of a student. I fall in love with an intern I meet in the hospital during labor.
    We get over all this – Nelson and I do. We have another child. We acquire friends, furniture, rituals. We go to too many parties at certain seasons of the year, and talk regularly about starting a new life, somewhere far away, where we don’t know anybody.
    We become distant, close – distant, close – over and over again.
    As I entered the store, I was aware of a man standing near the door, half looking in the window, half looking up the street, then looking at me. He was a short man dressed in a trenchcoat and a fedora. I had theimpression of someone disguised. Jokingly disguised. He moved toward me and bumped my shoulder, and I cried out as if I had received the shock of my life, and indeed it was true that I had. For this really was Nelson, come to claim me. Or at least to accost me, and see what would happen.
    We have been very happy.
I have often felt completely alone.
There is always in this life something to discover.
The days and the years have gone by in some sort of blur.
On the whole, I am satisfied.
    WHEN LOTTAR WAS leaving the Bishop’s courtyard, she was wrapped in a long cloak they had given her, perhaps to conceal her ragged clothing, or to contain her smell. The Consul’s servant spoke to her in English, telling her where they were going. She could understand him but could not reply. It was not quite dark. She could still see the pale shapes of roses and oranges in the Bishop’s garden.
    The Bishop’s man was holding the gate open.
    She had never seen the Bishop at all. And she had not seen the Franciscan since he had followed the Bishop’s man into the house. She called out for him now, as she was leaving. She had no name to call, so she called,
“Xoti! Xoti! Xoti
,” which means “leader” or “master” in the language of the Ghegs. But no answer came, and the Consul’s servant swung his lantern impatiently, showing her the way to go. Its light fell by accident on the Franciscan standing half concealed by a tree. It was a little orange tree he stood behind. His face, pale as the oranges were in that light, looked out of the branches, all its swarthiness drained away. It was a wan face hanging in the tree, its melancholy expression quite impersonal and undemanding, like the expression you might see on the face of a devout but proud apostle in a church window. Then it was gone, taking the breath out of her body, as she knew too late.
    SHE CALLED HIM and called him, and when the boat came into the harbor at Trieste he was waiting on the dock.

A WILDERNESS STATION
I
    MISS MARGARET CRESSWELL , Matron,