Chapter 2
Luca
The address is normal. A street name, a number, findable on any map — a place a postal van reaches twice a week, a track a tractor uses without thinking.
He had put it in the navigation and driven without incident to a point where the road ended at a gate and a gravel pull-off wide enough for two cars.
He parks. Gets out. Looks around.
The farm is not immediately visible from here, which he had not expected. A track continues beyond the gate into scrub oak and limestone. The afternoon light is already low. He has time.
There had also been a hand-drawn map in the email — a scan, slightly crooked, dotted lines for fieldstone walls, an X for the farm, a note in Slovenian that his translation app had rendered as turn at the big oak, you will know it. He had assumed this was an expression. He takes the scenic route.
The track is narrow, more path than road, pushing through low oak and open limestone. No forest to block the wind — it moves across him freely, across everything here, finding the gaps. He has his coat. He walks.
He has been walking for perhaps ten minutes when he realises he has gone wrong somewhere. The path has narrowed further and the farm is not appearing and the hand-drawn map, he now understands, has a scale problem. He stops. Looks back. Looks forward.
He keeps walking.
This is not a decision, exactly. It is more that stopping does not occur to him.
The wind has reached the point where he leans into it without choosing to, weight forward, and the lean is what does it: his grandmother had said — once, in the kitchen in Cormons with the smell of polenta and the afternoon light of the Collio — that the Bora was something you learned with your body, not your head.
That you leaned into it. That fighting it was the only way to lose.
He does not remember deciding to believe this.
He simply does, apparently, because he is doing it now, moving through the wind like you move through a current.
He has not thought about his grandmother in some time.
The path opens briefly onto a clearing and he stops because there is a man there.
The man is crouched beside a section of dry-stone wall, replacing a fallen stone without looking up — weight and angle decided by the hands.
Work jacket, no hat, hands bare. Not wearing enough for the cold, or rather wearing exactly as much as someone wears when the cold is simply the weather.
The stone goes in. He checks it with his palm. It holds.
He looks up.
Luca is aware, in the moment before either of them speaks, that he has been standing here for several seconds.
He is also aware — and not entirely sure how much of this is wishful thinking — that he has been looked at.
Not just noted. Looked at. The man’s eyes move over him once, unhurried, taking in something that turns out to be worth a second look.
Or that is what Luca reads into it. He files this under unconfirmed.
He thinks, briefly, of the jeans in his bag.
“I’m looking for the Kos farm,” Luca says. In English, which is a guess, but the emails were in English and the map was signed with a K.
The man straightens. Taller than he seemed from a distance, and broader, with the build of actual work rather than a gym’s idea of it. Wavy hair, brown going fair, a few days of stubble, none of it arranged. He looks at Luca with an expression that is not quite a smile and not quite not one.
“You came from the wrong direction,” he says.
His English is accented but easy. He picks up a second stone, weighs it in his hand, sets it aside.
“The track splits at the oak. You went left.”
“The map said left.”
“The map is wrong.”
Luca looks at the map. The man looks at the wall.
“You walked through the Bora,” the man says then, not quite a question.
“Yes.”
“Most people turn back.”
Luca considers this. He had not thought about turning back, which is perhaps the more interesting fact.
“I’m Luca,” he says.
The man nods once. “Matej.”
He says it the way it is meant to be said — the soft J, the weight on the first syllable — and Luca hears it and stores it and will use it correctly from this point forward without ever quite knowing why that feels important.
“The farm is back the way you came,” Matej says. “Ten minutes. I’ll be there in twenty.”
He turns back to the wall.
Luca goes the other way. The wind is at his back now, which is easier, and the oak is visible from here, and the track that goes right is clearly the correct one. He walks.
Behind him: the sound of stone on stone, steady, unhurried. A man putting a wall back together.