Chapter 22
Luca
He doesn’t wait to be asked again.
That’s what he decides, standing outside in the cold with his rucksack and his key left behind on the table. Matej didn’t ask him to leave a second time. He won’t need to.
Luca knows how this works. You go before the door closes in your face, because at least that way it was your choice.
He gets in the car.
He doesn’t start it immediately. He sits in the dark with his hands on the wheel and looks at the house, the light in the window, the shape of it against the Karst sky, the solidity of old stone that has stood through worse than this. Matej is at the window. Matej is not looking at him.
He looks down at his hands on the wheel.
The ring is on his right hand. His father’s ring, the family crest worn smooth at the edges, on his finger since the hospital and never once taken off. He turns it now with his thumb, as he hasn’t in months.
He thinks: I should have told him. At the start, before any of this became what it became.
He has known since the first morning, the hook, the key, the shape of the land.
He told himself he was waiting for the right moment.
He was waiting because he was afraid that the right moment would end everything.
Last night Matej opened every door he keeps closed. And Luca sat there with a key in his bag and said nothing.
That was not Matej’s fault. That was his.
He starts the car.
The headlights come on: the stone wall, the gate, the dark mouth of the barn. Then he turns onto the road and the house disappears behind him.
He drives.
Not away. Not that. He drives towards something, which is different. There is a thing he can do, and he is going to do it, and then he is coming back. Whether that will be enough is not something he can know yet. But he is not leaving. He is not leaving.
The border crossing is quiet at this hour.
The road through Collio opens up in the grey morning light, the vines stripped bare, the hills the colour of old iron.
He knows this road. He grew up not far from here, on the other side of this fold of land, in a house that is now someone else’s problem. He does not look at it as he passes.
He knows the bend it comes up on. He has known it his whole life, the way you know the spot on a road where the view opens, and for his whole life the move has been the same: eyes forward, foot steady, past it before it can ask him anything.
A house at the edge of sight. He has gotten very good at the not-looking, so good that the not-looking has its own muscle now, older than he is, inherited like everything else on this road.
And here is what he notices, foot steady, the house already behind him: he is driving through all of it for once instead of away from it.
Not fleeing the fold of land he came from.
Crossing it. On his way to a cold yard on the other side where a man is standing at a window not looking at a road, and Luca is bringing him a letter and a name and the truth he should have told weeks ago, before he knows whether any of it will be enough.
His mother’s cousin, who still holds the Collio property, barely, the kind of holding-on that is mostly stubbornness and debt. He called ahead from the road. They were not surprised to hear from him. They are never surprised, which is its own kind of communication.
The documents are in a box in a back room that smells of old paper and sulphur from the winery below. His mother’s cousin, Gianni, sixty-something, the kind of man who stores everything and labels nothing, pulls it out without comment and leaves Luca to it.
He finds what he is looking for in twenty minutes.
A letter. Enrico Ferrante, Trieste, 1943.
Written to his brother Roberto, Luca’s side of the family, the Collio side.
The tone is careful, the kind of careful that is also afraid.
He talks about the estate at ?tanjel. He talks about things being put away before the situation becomes impossible.
He uses the phrase per quando torneremo, for when we return. They did not return.
Beneath the letter, an inventory. Items, rooms, a cellar. No location beyond the estate. No key mentioned. The key, Luca thinks, would have been taken for granted. You do not write down the key when you are writing to your brother.
He photographs everything. Folds the letter back carefully. Returns the box.
Gianni is in the kitchen when he passes through. “Trovato quello che cercavi?” Found what you were looking for?
“Abbastanza,” Luca says. Enough.
He gets back in the car.
He is back in Slovenia as the light is going.
The snow started somewhere near the border, light at first, then settling in properly, sticking to the Karst stone and staying. By the time he turns onto the road towards the farm the landscape has changed: white on grey, the Bora carrying it sideways, the sky the same colour as the ground.
He slows at the gate.
The yard is quiet. Matej’s car is there but the lights in the house are off — no, one light, upstairs, but the ground floor dark. Luca stops at the gate.
He gets out of the car. Goes to the door. Knocks.
Nothing.
He tries the door. It opens, Matej does not lock it, has never locked it, which Luca has always understood as a fact about him and now understands differently. He goes inside.
The key is on the table. Luca’s key, the one that fell, the one Matej set down before he said get out. It is still there, in the same place.
Luca takes off his jacket. Sits down at the table. The house is cold: no fire, no coffee on, the ash in the grate hours old.
He does not know where Matej is. He does not have a number for Fanika. He does not know anyone else he could call.
He waits.
The photograph of the Enrico letter goes on the table beside the key. Letter and key, set out where Matej will see them first. A letter and a name and the truth he should have told weeks ago. It is what he drove across a border to bring, and it is all he has to put down.
He might be starting to understand.
Outside the snow comes down. The yard fills with it, white on grey on white, the storm settling in. It is quiet in a way the Karst rarely is.
He waits.
Matej
Fanika doesn’t ask.
She never asks. It is one of the things he has always trusted about her. She puts coffee in front of him and gets on with the starter and the silence between them has room in it.
He has walked here through the first snow of the year without noticing until he arrived and found himself standing in her kitchen with wet shoulders and no clear memory of the last kilometer. She did not comment on this.
She lifts the cloth from the starter, checks it, replaces it. Moves to the window. Looks out towards the barn where the cows stand in the failing light, the new calf among them, still finding its range.
“The young one is doing well,” she says.
“Good,” Matej says.
Fanika sets down her cup. Picks it up again.
“The Italian,” Fanika says. Not looking at him. Her voice the same as always, flat, unhurried. Something she has been turning over for a while. “I think he might be a Ferrante.”
Matej goes still.
She says nothing more. She is watching the barn, her hands around her cup, her face turned away from him. She has said what she had to say. The rest is his.
“Why,” he says. His voice comes out strange.
“He wears a ring,” she says. “The crest.”
She doesn’t explain further. Matej thinks about Luca’s hands — he had not looked at them in the kitchen this morning, he had been looking at the key.
“He didn’t say anything,” Matej says.
Fanika is quiet. “No,” she says. “He wouldn’t.”
She goes back to her starter. She puts bread on the table without asking. His cheese, Kamen, from the wheel she took home last month — she cuts a piece and sets it in front of him and says nothing about it, which is its own kind of cruelty. He eats it without tasting it.
He sits there for a while. The snow comes down outside, heavier now.
I threw him out before he could explain.
And: he should have told me sooner.
Both things are true. They sit side by side and don’t resolve.
And underneath both of them, the thing he is not letting himself think directly: that Luca is gone. That he got in the car and drove away and there is no reason — no real reason — to come back. That Matej had one door open, one person sitting next to him in the dark, and he closed it himself.
No number. Luca has always just been there: at the table, in the cheese room, in the yard, the left AirPod on the counter, the jacket on the hook.
Gone now to somewhere Matej cannot reach.
He will not know until he goes home, and even then he might walk into an empty house and find nothing but a key on a table.
He sits with this. Does not get up.
Fuck.
The shape of it, somewhere behind his sternum.
The kind of stupid he has been. He had one person in six years who stayed past the point of convenience, who learned the cheese room and the silence and the way this house works in winter, who came back every evening without being asked.
He had that, and he threw it at a wall because he could not stand the idea of being the last to know something.
He is, it turns out, still very good at standing in his own way.
Outside the snow thickens. Fanika moves around the kitchen behind him, unhurried, saying nothing. Once she refills his cup without asking.
Six weeks. The way Luca learned to be quiet in the cheese room. How he sat with things he didn’t understand and waited instead of asking. Came back, again and again, when he could have left any of a hundred times.
Not someone who takes and leaves. Matej knows this. Has known it for a while, longer than he has admitted to himself.
Come back, he thinks. Just — come back.
He puts on his jacket. Says goodbye to Fanika’s back. Walks out into the snow.
He walks back across Fanika’s field and onto his own. The snow is already settling into the tracks behind him.