Runaway

them both, and again he apologized for her.
    “She thinks it’s her job to check that there’s nobody in here who shouldn’t be, and not anything different from when she went out.”
    The place was full of clocks. Dark wood and light wood, painted figures and gilded domes. They sat on shelves and on the floor and even on the counter across which business could be transacted. Beyond that, some sat on benches with their insides exposed. Juno slipped between them neatly, and could be heard thumping up a stairs.
    “Are you interested in clocks?”
    Robin said “No,” before she thought of being polite.
    “All right, then I do not have to go into my spiel,” he said, and led her along the path Juno had taken, past the door of what was probably a toilet, and up the steep stairway. Then they were in a kitchen where all was clean and bright and tidy, and Juno was waiting beside a red dish on the floor, flopping her tail.
    “You just wait,” he said. “Yes. Wait. Don’t you see we have a guest?”
    He stood aside for Robin to enter the big front room, which had no rug on the wide painted floorboards and no curtains, only shades, on the windows. There was a hi-fi system taking up a good deal of space along one wall, and a sofa along the wall opposite, of the sort that would pull out to make a bed. A couple of canvas chairs, and a bookcase with books on one shelf and magazines on the others, tidily stacked. No pictures or cushions or ornaments in sight. A bachelor’s room, with everything deliberate and necessary and proclaiming a certain austere satisfaction. Very different from the only other bachelor premises Robin was familiar with—Willard Greig’s, which seemed more like a forlorn encampment established casually in the middle of his dead parents’ furniture.
    “Where would you like to sit?” he said. “The sofa? It is more comfortable than the chairs. I will make you a cup of coffee and you sit here and drink it while I make some supper. What do you do other times, between when the play is over and the train is going home?”
    Foreigners talked differently, leaving a bit of space around the words, the way actors do.
    “Walk,” Robin said. “And I get something to eat.”
    “The same today, then. Are you bored when you eat alone?”
    “No. I think about the play.”
    The coffee was very strong, but she got used to it. She did not feel that she should offer to help him in the kitchen, as she would have done with a woman. She got up and crossed the room almost on tiptoe and helped herself to a magazine. And even as she picked it up she knew this would be useless—the magazines were all printed on cheap brown paper in a language she could neither read nor identify.
    In fact she realized, once she had it open on her lap, that she could not even identify all the letters.
    He came in with more coffee.
    “Ah,” he said. “So do you read my language?”
    That sounded sarcastic, but his eyes avoided her. It was almost as if, inside his own place, he had turned shy.
    “I don’t even know what language it is,” she answered.
    “It is Serbian. Some people say Serbo-Croatian.”
    “Is that where you come from?”
    “I am from Montenegro.”
    Now she was stumped. She did not know where Montenegro was. Beside Greece? No—that was Macedonia.
    “Montenegro is in Yugoslavia,” he said. “Or that is what they tell us. But we don’t think so.”
    “I didn’t think you could get out of those countries,” she said. “Those Communist countries. I didn’t think you could just leave like ordinary people and get out into the West.”
    “Oh, you can.” He spoke as if this did not interest him very much, or as if he had forgotten about it. “You can get out if you really want to. I left nearly five years ago. And now it is easier. Very soon I am going back there and then I expect I will be leaving again. Now I must cook your dinner. Or you will go away hungry.”
    “Just one thing,” said Robin. “Why can’t I read these letters? I mean, what letters are they? Is this the alphabet where you come from?”
    “The Cyrillic alphabet. Like Greek. Now I’m cooking.”
    She sat with the strangely printed pages open in her lap and thought that she had entered a foreign world. A small piece of a foreign world on Downie Street in Stratford. Montenegro. Cyrillic alphabet. It was rude, she supposed, to keep asking him things. To make him feel like a specimen. She would have to control herself, though now she