Chapter 17
Matej
November has settled in the way it does here — not an event, just a fact. Dark stone in the morning, the plateau at its winter register, the light gone by four.
This is the shape of things now.
Luca works at the table, sitting up properly in the chair this time, which he mostly doesn’t.
Matej works somewhere else in the house, or in the barn, or in the cave — and at some point they end up in the same room without having planned it, and this is no longer something either of them notices.
The notebooks are filling up. The cheese is aging. The evenings have their own logic.
Matej has stopped cataloguing what has changed. There is too much of it and none of it is surprising anymore, which is its own kind of thing to notice and then leave alone.
What he does notice, this morning: Luca at the kitchen table with the laptop open, still in yesterday’s shirt, an untouched cup at his elbow.
There is a mark on the side of his neck that was not there last week.
Matej made it, which Luca knows, and Luca has done nothing about it — no collar turned up, no comment — which Matej also knows.
He puts the kettle on. Luca doesn’t look up.
This too is the shape of things now.
Thursday: he comes in from the barn and crosses the kitchen and Luca, without looking up from whatever he is reading, says:
“I’m going to buy you a robot vacuum.”
“No.”
“You left a trail from the door to the cheese room to the sink. It looks like a crime scene.”
“I cleaned the sink.”
“With what.”
Matej looks at the cloth he used. Luca is still not looking up.
“Not the fun kind,” Luca says. “The actual cleaning kind. I’ll order it from Ljubljana.”
“You will not.”
“I already looked them up. There are good ones.”
“This is my house.”
“I live here.”
He says it without emphasis, not making it a thing, already turning a page.
Matej stands in the kitchen doorway with the cloth in his hand and says nothing because there is nothing to say.
It is not a challenge. It is just the fact of it, stated plainly — the jacket on the hook and the trail across the kitchen and the weeks becoming something neither of them named.
He does not order the vacuum. Neither does Luca.
The trail continues.
The days take on a texture. Luca in the yard with the winegrower from the next property over, recorder in hand, asking the careful questions he asks when he actually wants to know, laughing at the ‘22 vintage with the real laugh, the one underneath. In the evenings at the table with three open books and a glass of Vitovska he has poured himself, which is a change: the first three weeks it was always Teran, until it wasn’t.
Matej sits across from him to sort the invoices and says nothing about the wine.
Some people need time to find out where their limit is with the iron.
They sit an hour without speaking. Luca reads a line out loud about ponca soil and the minerality it leaves, and Matej says yes, that’s right without looking up, and Luca makes a note.
On his way to the stove he puts a hand on the back of Luca’s neck, not stopping, and Luca tips his head back, his own hand coming up to cover it before letting go.
The nights have their own weight. They don’t talk about this either — the warmth of it, waking in the dark with someone’s arm across your chest and not moving because moving would end it.
The play they’ve found between them, the ease of it, the way desire has settled into something that doesn’t need occasion anymore.
It is simply there, between them, available, chosen repeatedly without being named.
The house sounds different with two people in it. He has stopped noticing the silence because there isn’t one anymore.
Friday, the eleventh.
They walk into the village because Luca wants to see the Martinovanje procession — has heard about it from the winegrower, has been asking Matej about it for three days, like a man building a chapter.
They go in the late afternoon, when the light has gone flat and gold and the first torches are being lit at the edge of the square.
The village is small enough that everyone knows Matej is back, has known for years, has made its peace with his silence in the way small places make peace with the choices of the people they grew up with.
A few nods. One handshake — old Novak, who knew his father, who says nothing about the years Matej was gone. Matej nods back.
Luca moves through it like he has been here before. Not performing comfort — actually comfortable. He talks to the woman selling the young wine, listens to her explain the saint, watches the torches with the expression he gets when something is going into the book whether he writes it down or not.
Matej watches him watch.
They walk — through the upper part of the village, the part tourists don’t find, where the walls are older and the gates are closed and the smell of must from the harvest is still faint in the stone. Luca has his hands in his jacket pockets. Matej walks beside him.
At some point Luca says: “Is it not the eleventh today?”
“Yes.”
“Then take me to your secret wine estate.” He doesn’t look at Matej. Just walks. “The one that’s not on any list. Where we can try the new vintage properly.”
Matej is quiet.
Because of how he said it — your secret, like he knew there was one. Like he had been thinking about this for longer than today.
He helped with the harvest. He knows what the September looked like, what the grapes carried, what that slope gives in a cold year. He knows things about this village that take years to know.
Luca is here for six weeks.
“How do you know about that,” Matej says.
Luca glances at him. A look crosses his face. “You helped with the harvest.”
“Who told you.”
“Novak. Last Tuesday. He was very proud of you.”
Matej says nothing. Looks at the road ahead.
“Also,” Luca says, mildly, “you smelled like must sometimes. In October. I noticed.”
Neither of them speaks. The torches behind them. The cold coming properly now, the Bora finding the gap between the walls.
Matej turns left at the old gate.
“Come,” he says.
The cellar is low and warm and smells of new wine and old stone. Branko — sixty-something, who has been making Teran on this slope for thirty years without telling anyone how — pours without ceremony, two glasses, sets the bottle on the barrel between them.
Luca takes the glass. Turns it. Smells it properly, as he smells things when he is actually paying attention.
He tastes.
“This is extraordinary,” he says. Quietly. Just the fact of it.
Branko looks at Matej. Matej says nothing.
They stay for an hour. Luca asks Branko good questions, ones that make Branko talk about things he doesn’t usually talk about. Matej sits beside them and drinks his wine and watches Luca work and thinks about none of the things he has been thinking about for weeks.
Outside, the torches are still burning. The new wine is in the glass. The eleventh has done what the eleventh always does here — reminded everyone that the year has turned, that what was new is aging, that this is how it works and always has.
Matej finishes his glass.
Luca is still listening to Branko. His notebook is out now, pen moving. He doesn’t look up, but his shoulder is warm against Matej’s in the low space of the cellar, and he has not moved away, and neither has Matej.
Walking back, Luca is quiet as he is quiet when something is working on him from the inside.
He knows things about Matej that Matej hasn’t told him. Not secrets — not quite. A name in a forum post. A photograph, sidebar of an article about someone else, two years old. The caption had said former and left it there.
He has not said anything. He has told himself this is because it isn’t his to bring up. That Matej will say it when he wants to say it. That the timing isn’t right. These are all true and none of them is the whole truth.
The whole truth is that he doesn’t want to be the person who walked in knowing.
He doesn’t want Matej to look at him and understand that the first week, the second week — the slow accumulation of all of it — happened with that knowledge already in his pocket.
It would change the shape of everything backwards.
He doesn’t know how to say I knew and I stayed without it landing as a confession that requires an answer.
So he doesn’t say it.
Matej walks beside him, hands in his jacket, looking at the road.
The torches behind them are going out one by one.
Two days later he comes around the side of the barn and stops.
Matej is in the yard, moving a barrel — relocated from one wall to another, both hands required.
At some point in the last ten minutes he has started playing music loudly enough to carry across the yard.
Luca can’t make sense of it immediately: something guttural and resonant, layered and low, like it’s coming from inside the stone rather than out of a phone.
It takes him a moment to find the word for it.
It is possibly the least expected sound to come out of a Karst farmyard on a November afternoon. It is absolutely working.
Matej is not dancing. He is moving through the work in a way that is adjacent to dancing — the weight of the barrel, the turn, the set-down, the step back. The music doing something to how he carries himself. He hasn’t seen Luca.
Luca leans against the wall and watches for longer than he means to.
He thinks: this man spent this morning telling me about Mongol cavalry tactics.
He is now moving barrels to throat singing in a November farmyard.
He is completely serious about both of these things.
There is no version of this that is not entirely deranged and Luca cannot look away.
The song ends. Matej straightens up, pulls out his phone. Sees Luca.
He does not look embarrassed. He does not look anything except slightly out of breath.
“Throat singing,” Luca says.
“Yes.”
“That’s —” He gestures at the yard, the barrel, the phone, the general situation. “All of this.”
“Yes.” Matej holds up the phone. A YouTube link, already open.
Luca crosses the yard and takes it.
“You can thank me later,” Matej says, and goes back inside.
Luca stands in the yard with the phone. He watches the first thirty seconds. Then he watches the rest of it.
He pockets the phone and goes inside to make coffee. Matej is already back at whatever he was doing, AirPod in, as if a man moving barrels to throat singing on a November afternoon were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Which, here, it apparently is.