Chapter 24 #2
“The useful part being where.” She looks at him directly. “Your family’s?”
“My father’s side.”
She nods, once, as if this confirms something she had already decided. She does not ask further.
“I can’t tell you more than that,” she says. “I’ve told you what I know.”
They drink their coffee.
Outside, one of her cows moves in the small pasture — hooves on cold ground, unhurried. The starter on the counter sits in its bowl, doing its slow invisible work.
“The coppersmith,” Fanika says, after a while. “His grandfather was here before the war. Built things for several families.” She picks up her cup. “He might remember something. Or the grandson might.”
She drops it into the conversation as she drops everything — as if it is simply information, available to anyone who thinks to ask.
Matej is quiet. “We’ll go.”
They walk back across the field. The afternoon is cold and still.
Matej is quiet, the working kind, not the empty kind. Luca has learned to tell the difference.
“She knew more than she said,” Luca says.
“She always does.” Matej’s hands are in his jacket pockets. “That’s how she decides what a thing is worth.”
“Tomorrow,” Luca says. “The coppersmith.”
“Tomorrow.”
They fall back into step. At one point Matej’s shoulder touches his and neither of them adjusts.
Matej
The workshop smells as it always has: coal, hot metal, something mineral underneath that Matej has never been able to name. He has been coming here since he was a child, first with his father, then alone. The smell is one of those things that arrives before the memory does.
Kova? is in the front room when they enter, working on something small at the bench. He looks up, nods at Matej, looks at Luca with the brief assessment of a man who notices strangers but doesn’t make them feel noticed.
“Matej.”
“Kova?. This is Luca. He’s staying at the house.”
Kova? nods. This is sufficient introduction for him. He sets down his tool. “What do you need.”
Matej puts both keys on the workbench.
Kova? picks them up. Turns them over. He looks at both keys in silence, with the patience of someone who has learned that objects tell you what they are if you give them time.
He looks at the crest on Luca’s key.
“Where did you get this,” he says.
“My father’s estate,” Luca says. “It was in a box with documents.”
Kova? sets the key down. Picks it up again. “I’ve seen this mark before,” he says. Not to either of them — more to himself, working something out. “I have a piece somewhere. From my grandfather’s time.” He looks up. “Give me a few minutes.”
He goes through the door to the back.
The workshop settles into the quiet of a place used to its own sounds — the tick of cooling metal, something dripping somewhere.
Luca moves slowly along the wall of tools, not touching, just looking.
He does that — looks at things with the full attention that most people reserve for conversation.
Matej has watched him do it with the cave, with the cheese room, with the photograph in the back bedroom that Matej long ago stopped registering.
He is looking at a row of old copper molds now. His hands are in his pockets. The workshop light catches the side of his face.
Matej watches him.
Then he crosses the room.
Luca hears him coming, turns just slightly, not surprised. Matej puts both hands on the workbench, one on either side of him, and doesn’t move.
Luca looks up. The workshop light is behind Matej and his face is partly in shadow. Luca’s is not.
“He’ll be a while,” Matej says.
He is not, exactly, saying this about Kova?.
“I gathered,” Luca says.
He’s looking up at Matej — alert, decided. Knowing exactly what is happening and having made his peace with it some time ago.
Matej kisses him.
Luca makes a small sound against his mouth — not surprise, something more like confirmation — and his hand comes up to Matej’s jacket, not pulling, just holding.
The workbench is solid at his back. The workshop smells of coal and copper and Luca smells of none of those things, and Matej is aware of both at once.
From the back room, the sound of things being moved — a scrape of metal, something shifted, Kova? saying something under his breath that is probably not complimentary towards his own organizational system.
Luca pulls back just enough to speak. “He’s going to come back.”
“I know.”
“Any second.”
“I know.” Matej doesn’t move.
Luca laughs, quiet, into his shoulder. Matej feels it more than hears it. He straightens up, steps back, looks at the copper molds on the wall as if he has been looking at them this whole time.
Luca smooths his jacket. His expression is composed. His hair is slightly less composed. He does not fix it.
“Later,” he says, quietly.
Matej doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
Kova? comes back carrying something wrapped in an old cloth. He sets it on the workbench and unfolds it carefully. The thing is old and not entirely his.
Inside: a small copper plate. Rectangular, the size of a book. On it, worked into the metal with the kind of skill that takes decades: a crest.
The same crest as on Luca’s key.
Beside him, Luca has stopped breathing, or close to it. Matej looks at the plate and says nothing.
“My grandfather made this,” Kova? says. “I don’t know exactly what it was part of — something larger, he always said.
A commission for a family in the region.
Ferrante, the name was.” He touches the edge of the plate, not the crest itself.
“He mentioned once that whatever he built for them was taken apart afterward. Put somewhere safe, before things got complicated.”
“Put where,” Matej says.
Kova? shakes his head. “He didn’t know. Or if he knew, he didn’t say.” He looks at both of them. “I always assumed it was just a story. The kind that gets told when people lose things and need somewhere to put the loss.”
Luca picks up the copper plate. Holds it in both hands, level, as he holds things he is thinking about seriously. He looks at the crest. Then he sets it down and looks at the two keys beside it — his, and Matej’s — all three bearing the same mark.
He doesn’t say anything.
Neither does Matej.
“Can we keep this for a few days,” Matej asks Kova?.
Kova? considers. “It’s been here a long time. A few more days won’t hurt.”
They walk back in the early dark. Matej reaches over and takes Luca’s hand. They walk like that for a while, without talking, the silence full rather than empty, both of them turning something over.
Matej is thinking about his father’s distillery — the single small still in the cellar, built by Kova?’s father, the seams never quite right.
It made something, in good years. His father called it brandy.
Matej has understood for years that it was never the equipment.
That there was something the hands knew that the tools couldn’t reach.
He is thinking about the key on the hook at home. Always there, always between the Majolka and the clock and the christening photograph. He has looked at it ten thousand times and never wondered.
They have dinner. Luca reads after, on the back of the couch. Matej washes the dishes.
The window above the sink looks out towards the dark ridge of the Karst. He watches it without seeing it, hands in the water, and he is thinking about the copper plate and the crest and the key and —
He goes still.
Deep in the cave. Years ago, the first winter he was working in there, before he understood what he had.
A mark on the wall — he had thought it was a natural formation in the limestone, as the rock sometimes makes shapes that look deliberate.
He had noted it and moved on and not thought about it since.
He tries to remember exactly where.
“Matej.”
Luca is in the doorway. He has been watching him stand motionless at the sink for long enough to come and check.
“There’s something in the cave,” Matej says. “On the wall. Deep in, past the second chamber. I always thought it was the stone.” He pauses. “I don’t think it’s the stone.”
Luca looks at him.
“You’re not sure,” he says.
“No.”
“But you want to go look.”
“Yes.”
“Now?” Luca says.
Matej is already drying his hands.
Luca
Matej hands him a headlamp at the cave entrance without explanation. Luca has been in the cave before — once, in the first two chambers where the work is. Tonight Matej walks past both without stopping.
“How far,” Luca says.
“Further than I usually go.”
The cave narrows after the second chamber and then opens again, not dramatically, just enough that the ceiling lifts and the air changes.
Cooler here. Drier. The smell is different too: less of the washed rind, less of the active biological work of the aging rooms. Something older. Stone and time and nothing else.
Matej’s headlamp moves ahead of him. Luca follows the light.
They walk for longer than Luca expects. The cave does not go straight — it bends, drops slightly, bends again.
Matej puts a hand back without looking and Luca takes it, steps over something on the floor that his lamp catches a second too late to have been useful. Matej lets go when the passage widens.
He is thinking about the keys in his jacket pocket. Two keys, one crest, one hundred years of no one asking the right question. He is thinking about the copper plate on Kova?’s workbench and how Matej went still at the sink and said the cave like something had finally lined up.
He is thinking about his father’s voice telling the same story so many times it became geography — this is where we were, this is what was taken, this is who we were before. The story with no useful part.
He wonders what the useful part is.
Matej stops.
His headlamp is on the wall, a section of limestone that looks, at first, like every other section of limestone in this cave. Same pale grey, same irregular surface, same accumulated darkness in the hollows.
Then Luca sees it.