When I went back downstairs the living room was dark, but I made it to the windows and got the curtains over them before turning on the lights. In the kitchen I found Wolfe concentrated on cuisine, with his shirt sleeves rolled up, under a bright light from a ceiling fixture, and the window bare. I had to mount a chair to arrange the curtain so there were no cracks, after making a suitable remark.
We ate at a little table in the kitchen. Of course there was no milk, and Wolfe said he wouldn’t recommend the water from the faucet, but I took a chance on it. He stuck to wine. There was just one item on the menu, dished by him out of a pot. After three mouthfuls I asked him what it was. A pasta called tagliarini, he said, with anchovies, tomato, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper from the cupboard, sweet basil and parsley from the garden, and Romano cheese from a hole in the ground. I wanted to know how he had found a hole in the ground, and he said — offhand, as if it were nothing — by his memory of local custom. Actually he was boiling with pride, and by the time I got up to dish my third helping I was willing to grant him all rights to it.
While I washed up and put away, Wolfe went upstairs with his bag. When he came down again to the living room he stood and looked around to see if someone had brought a chair his size during his absence, discovered none, went to the couch and sat, and drew in air clear down to the tagliarini he had swallowed.
“Have we made up our mind?” I inquired.
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Which of the three did we pick?”
“None. I’m going to Montenegro, but not as myself. My name is Toné Stara, and I’m from Galichnik. You have never heard of Galichnik.”
“Right.”
“It is a village hanging to a mountain near the top, just over the border from Albania in Serbia, which is a part of Yugoslavia. It is forty miles southeast of Cetinje and the Black Mountain, and it is famous. For eleven months of each year only women live there — no men but a few in their dotage — and young boys. It has been that way for centuries. When the Turks seized Serbia more than five hundred years ago, groups of artisans in the lowlands fled to the mountains with their families, thinking the Turks would soon be driven out. But the Turks stayed, and as the years passed, the refugees, who had established a village on a crag and named it Galichnik, realized the hopelessness of wresting a living from the barren rocks. Some of the men, skilled craftsmen, started the practice of going to other lands, working for most of a year, and returning each July to spend a month at home with their women and children. The practice became universal with the men of Galichnik, and they have followed it for five centuries. Masons and stonecutters from Galichnik worked on the Escorial in Spain and the palaces at Versailles. They have worked on the Mormon Temple in Utah, the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, the Empire State Building in New York, the Dnieperstroi in Russia.”
He joined his fingertips. “So I am Toné Stara of Galichnik. I am one of the few who one July did not return — many years ago. I have been many places, including the United States. Finally I became homesick and curious. What was happening to my birthplace, Glichnik, perched on the border between Tito’s Yugoslavia and Russia’s puppet Albania? I was eaten by a desire to see and to know, and I returned. The answer was not in Galichnik. There were no men there, and the women suspected me and feared me and wouldn’t even tell me where the men were. I wanted to learn and to judge, as between Tito and the Russians, and between them both and certain persons of whom I had vaguely heard, persons who were calling themselves champions of freedom. So I made my way north through the mountains, a hard rocky way, and here I am in Montenegro, determined to find out where the truth is and who deserves my hand. I assert my right to ask questions so I may choose my side.”