by Alice Munro
But in the light of the railway depot, whatever was promising, or mysterious, was immediately removed. There were people lined up at the window, and he stood behind them, waiting his turn, and bought her ticket. They walked out onto the platform, where passengers were waiting.
“If you will write your full name and address on a piece of paper,” she said, “I’ll send you the money right away.”
Now it will happen, she thought. And it was nothing. Now nothing will happen. Good-bye. Thank you. I’ll send the money. No hurry. Thank you. It was no trouble. Thank you just the same. Good-bye.
“Let’s walk along here,” he said, and they walked along the platform away from the light.
“Better not to worry about the money. It is so little and it might not get here anyway, because I am going away so soon. Sometimes the mail is slow.”
“Oh, but I must pay you back.”
“I’ll tell you how to pay me back, then. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“I will be here next summer in the same place. The same shop. I will be there by June at the latest. Next summer. So you will choose your play and come here on the train and come to the shop.”
“I will pay you back then?”
“Oh yes. And I will make dinner and we’ll drink wine and I will tell you all about what has happened in the year and you will tell me. And I want one other thing.”
“What?”
“You will wear the same dress. Your green dress. And your hair the same.”
She laughed. “So you’ll know me.”
“Yes.”
They were at the end of the platform, and he said, “Watch here,” then, “All right?” as they stepped down on the gravel.
“All right,” said Robin with a lurch in her voice, either because of the uncertain surface of the gravel or because by now he had taken hold of her at the shoulders, then was moving his hands down her bare arms.
“It is important that we have met,” he said. “I think so. Do you think so?”
She said, “Yes.”
“Yes. Yes.”
He slid his hands under her arms to hold her closer, around the waist, and they kissed again and again.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming. When they stopped they 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 sort of fate. Those were words she used to herself. Fate. Lover. Not boyfriend. Lover. Sometimes she thought of the casual, reluctant way he had spoken about getting in and out of that country, and she was afraid for him, imagining him involved in dark schemes, cinematic plots and dangers. It was probably a good thing that he had decided there should be no letters. Her life would have been drained entirely into composing them and waiting for them. Writing and waiting, waiting and writing. And of course worrying, if they didn’t arrive.
She had something now to carry around with her all the time. She was aware of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings. It made her walk differently and smile for no reason and treat the patients with uncommon tenderness. It was her pleasure to dwell on one thing at a time and she could do that while she went about her duties, while she ate supper with Joanne. The bare wall of the room, with the rectangles of streaked light reflected on it through the slatted blinds. The rough paper of the magazines, with their old-fashioned sketched illustrations, instead of photographs. The thick crockery bowl, with a yellow band around it, in which he served the Stroganoff. The chocolate color of Juno’s muzzle, and her lean strong legs. Then the cooling air in the streets, and the fragrance from the municipal flower beds and the streetlamps by the river, around which a whole civilization of tiny bugs darted and
circled.
The sinking in her chest, then the closing down, when he came back with her ticket. But after that the walk, the measured steps, the descent from the platform to the gravel. Through the thin soles of her shoes she had felt pain from the sharp pebbles.
Nothing faded for her, however repetitive this program might be. Her memories, and the embroidery on her memories, just kept wearing a deeper groove.
It is important that we have met.
Yes. Yes.
Yet when June came, she delayed. She had not yet decided on which play, or sent away for her ticket. Finally she thought it best to choose the anniversary day, the same day as last year. The play on that day was As You Like It. It struck her that she could just go on to Downie Street, and not bother with the play, because she would be too preoccupied or excited to notice much of it. She was superstitious, however, about altering the day’s pattern. She got her ticket. And she took her green dress to the cleaners. She had not worn it since that day, but she wanted it to be perfectly fresh, crisp as new.
The woman who did the pressing, at the cleaners, had missed some days that week. Her child was sick. But it was promised that she would be back, the dress would be ready on Saturday morning.
“I’ll die,” said Robin. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready for tomorrow.”
She looked at Joanne and Willard, playing rummy at the table. She had seen them in this pose so often, and now it was possible she might never see them again. How far they were from the tension and defiance, the risk of her life.
The dress was not ready. The child was still sick. Robin considered taking the dress home and ironing it herself, but she thought she would be too nervous to make a good job of it. Especially with Joanne looking on. She went immediately downtown, to the only possible dress shop, and was lucky enough, she thought, to find another green dress, just as good a fit but made along straight lines, and sleeveless. The color was not avocado, but lime, green. The woman in the store said that was the color this year, and that full skirts and pinched waists had gone out.
Through the train window she saw rain starting. She did not even have an umbrella. And in the seat across from her was a passenger she knew, a woman who had had her gallbladder out just a few months ago, at the hospital. This woman had a married daughter in Stratford. She was a person who thought that two people known to each other, meeting on the train and headed for the same place, should keep up a conversation.
“My daughter’s meeting me,” she said. “We can take you where you’re going. Especially when it’s raining.”
It was not raining when they got to Stratford, the sun was out and it was very hot. Nevertheless Robin saw nothing for it but to accept the ride. She sat in the back seat with two children who were eating Popsicles. It seemed a miracle that she did not get some orange or strawberry liquid dripped onto her dress.
She was not able to wait for the play to be over. She was shivering in the air-conditioned theater because this dress was made of such light material and had no sleeves. Or it might have been from nervousness. She made her apologetic way to the end of the row, and climbed up the aisle with its irregular steps and went out into the daylight of the lobby. Raining again, very hard. Alone in the Ladies Room, the same one where she had lost her purse, she worked at her hair. The damp was destroying her pouf, the hair she had rolled to be smooth was falling into wispy curly black strands around her face. She should have brought hairspray. She did as good a job as she could, backcombing.
The rain had stopped when she came out, and again the sun was shining, glaring on the wet pavement. Now she set out. Her legs felt weak, as on those occasions when she had to go to the blackboard, at school, to demonstrate a math problem, or had to stand in front of the class to recite memory work. Too soon, she was at the corner of Downie Street. Within a few minutes now, her life would be changed. She was not ready, but she could not stand any delay.
In the second block she could see ahead of her that odd little house, held in place by the conventional shop buildings on either side.
Closer she came, closer. The door stood open, as was the case with most shops along the street—not many of them had put in air-conditioning. There was just a screen door in place to keep out the flies.
Up the two steps, then she stood outside the door. But did not push it open for a moment, so that she could get her eyes used to the half-dark interior, and not stumble when she went in.
He was there, in the work space beyond the counter, busy under a single bulb. He was bent forward, seen in profile, engrossed in the work he was doing on a clock. She had feared a change. She had feared in fact that she was not remembering him accurately. Or that Montenegro might have altered something—given him a new haircut, a beard. But no—he was the same. The work light shining on his head showed the same bristle of hair, glinting as before, silver with its red-brown tarnish. A thick shoulder, slightly hunched, sleeve rolled up to bare the muscled forearm. An expression on his face of concentration, keenness, perfect appreciation of whatever he was doing, of the mechanism he was working with. The same look that had been in her mind, though she had never seen him working on his clocks before. She had been imagining that look bent on herself.
No. She didn’t want to walk in. She wanted him to get up, come towards her, open the door. So she called to him. Daniel. Being shy at the last moment of calling him Danilo, for fear she might pronounce the foreign syllables in a clumsy way.
He had not heard—or probably, because of what he was doing, he delayed looking up. Then he did look up, but not at her—he appeared to be searching for something he needed at the moment. But in raising his eyes he caught sight of her. He carefully moved something out of his way, pushed back from the worktable, stood up, came reluctantly towards her.
He shook his head at her slightly.
Her hand was ready to push the door open, but she did not do it. She waited for him to speak, but he did not. He shook his head again. He was perturbed. He stood still. He looked away from her, looked around the shop—looked at the array of clocks, as if they might give him some information or some support. When he looked again at her face, he shivered, and involuntarily—but perhaps not—he bared his front teeth. As if the sight of her gave him a positive fright, an apprehension of danger.
And she stood there, frozen, as if there was a possibility still that this might be a joke, a game.
Now he came towards her again, as if he had made up his mind what to do. Not looking at her anymore, but acting with determination and—so it seemed to her—revulsion, he put a hand against the wooden door, the shop door which stood open, and pushed it shut in her face.
This was a shortcut. With horror she understood what he was doing. He was putting on this act because it was an easier way to get rid of her than making an explanation, dealing with her astonishment and female carrying-on, her wounded feelings and possible collapse and tears.
Shame, terrible shame, was what she felt. A more confident, a more experienced, woman would have felt anger and walked away in a fine fury. Piss on him. Robin had heard a woman at work talk about a man who had abandoned her. You can’t trust anything in trousers. That woman had acted as if she was not surprised. And deep down, Robin now was not surprised, either, but the blame was for herself. She should have understood those words of last summer, the promise and farewell at the station, as a piece of folly, unnecessary kindness to a lonely female who had lost her purse and came to plays by herself. He would have regretted that before he got home, and prayed that she wouldn’t take him seriously.
It was quite possible that he had brought back a wife from Montenegro, a wife upstairs—that would explain the alarm in his face, the shudder of dismay. If he had thought of Robin it would be in fear of her doing just what she had been doing—dreaming her dreary virginal dreams, fabricating her silly plans. Women had probably made fools of themselves over him before now, and he would have found ways to get rid of them. This was a way. Better cruel than
kind. No apologies, no explanations, no hope. Pretend you don’t recognize her, and if that doesn’t work, slam a door in her face. The sooner you can get her to hate you, the better.
Though with some of them it’s uphill work.
Exactly. And here she was, weeping. She had managed to hold it back along the street, but on the path by the river, she was weeping. The same black swan swimming alone, the same families of ducklings and their quacking parents, the sun on the water. It was better not to try to escape, better not to ignore this blow. If you did that for a moment, you had to put up with its hitting you again, a great crippling whack in the chest.
“Better timing this year,” Joanne said. “How was your play?”
“I didn’t see all of it. Just when I was going into the theater some bug flew into my eye. I blinked and blinked but I couldn’t get rid of it and I had to get up and go to the Ladies and try to wash it out. And then I must’ve got part of it on the towel and rubbed it into the other eye too.”
“You look as if you’d been bawling your eyes out. When you came in I thought that must’ve been a whale of a sad play. You better wash your face in salt water.”
“I was going to.”
There were other things she was going to do, or not do. Never go to Stratford, never walk on those streets, never see another play. Never wear the green dresses, neither the lime nor the avocado. Avoid hearing any news of Montenegro, which should not be too difficult.
II
Now the real winter has set in and the lake is frozen over almost all the way to the breakwater. The ice is rough, in some places it looks as if big waves had been frozen in place. Workmen are out taking down the Christmas lights. Flu is reported. People’s eyes water from walking against the wind. Most women are into their winter uniform of sweatpants and ski jackets.
But not Robin. When she steps off the elevator to visit the third and top floor of the hospital, she is wearing a long black coat, gray wool skirt, and a lilac-gray silk blouse. Her thick, straight, charcoal-gray hair is cut shoulder-length, and she has tiny diamonds in her ears. (It is still noted, just as it used to be, that some of the best-looking, best-turned-out women in town are those who did not marry.) She does not have to dress like a nurse now, because she works part-time and only on this floor.