Runaway

were both trembling, and it was with an effort that he got his voice under control, tried to speak matter-of-factly.
    “We will not write letters, letters are not a good idea. We will just remember each other and next summer we will meet. You don’t have to let me know, just come. If you still feel the same, you will just come.”
    They could hear the train. He helped her up to the platform, then did not touch her anymore, but walked briskly beside her, feeling for something in his pocket.
    Just before he left her, he handed her a folded piece of paper. “I wrote on it before we left the shop,” he said.
    On the train she read his name.
Danilo Adzic.
And the words
Bjelojevici. My village.
    She walked from the station, under the dark full trees. Joanne had not gone to bed. She was playing solitaire.
    “I’m sorry I missed the early train,” Robin said. “I’ve had my supper. I had Stroganoff.”
    “So that’s what I’m smelling.”
    “And I had a glass of wine.”
    “I can smell that too.”
    “I think I’ll go right up to bed.”
    “I think you’d better.”
    Trailing clouds of glory, thought Robin on her way upstairs. From God, who is our home.
    How silly that was, and even sacrilegious, if you could believe in sacrilege. Being kissed on a railway platform and told to report in a year’s time. If Joanne knew about it, what would she say? A foreigner. Foreigners pick up girls that nobody else will have.
    For a couple of weeks the two sisters hardly spoke. Then, seeing that there were no phone calls or letters, and that Robin went out in the evenings only to go to the library, Joanne relaxed. She knew that something had changed, but she didn’t think it was serious. She began to make jokes to Willard.
    In front of Robin she said, “You know that our girl here has started having mysterious adventures in Stratford? Oh yes. I tell you. Came home smelling of drink and goulash. You know what that smells like? Vomit.”
    What she probably thought was that Robin had gone to some weird restaurant, with some European dishes on the menu, and ordered a glass of wine with her meal, thinking herself to be sophisticated.
    Robin was going to the library to read about Montenegro.
    “For more than two centuries,” she read, “the Montenegrins maintained the struggle against the Turks and the Albanians, which for them was almost the whole duty of man. (Hence the Montenegrins’ reputation for dignity, bellicosity, and aversion to work, which last is a standing Yugoslav joke.)”
    Which two centuries these were, she could not discover. She read about kings, bishops, wars, assassinations, and the greatest of all Serbian poems, called “The Mountain Garland,” written by a Montenegrin king. She hardly retained a word of what she read. Except the name, the real name of Montenegro, which she did not know how to pronounce.
Crna Gora.
    She looked at maps, where it was hard enough to find the country itself, but possible finally, with a magnifying glass, to become familiar with the names of various towns (none of them Bjelojevici) and with the rivers Moraca and Tara, and the shaded mountain ranges, which seemed to be everywhere but in the Zeta Valley.
    Her need to follow this investigation was hard to explain, and she did not try to explain it (though of course her presence in the library was noted, and her absorption). What she must have been trying to do—and what she at least half succeeded in doing—was to settle Danilo into some real place and a real past, to think that these names she was learning must have been known to him, this history must have been what he learned in school, some of these places must have been visited by him as a child or as a young man. And were being visited, perhaps, by him now. When she touched a printed name with her finger, she might have touched the very place he was in.
    She tried also to learn from books, from diagrams, about clock making, but there she was not successful.
    He remained with her. The thought of him was there when she woke up, and in lulls at work. The Christmas celebrations brought her thoughts round to ceremonies in the Orthodox Church, which she had read about, bearded priests in gold vestments, candles and incense and deep mournful chanting in a foreign tongue. The cold weather and the ice far out into the lake made her think of winter in the mountains. She felt as if she had been chosen to be connected to that strange part of the world, chosen for a different