Chapter 28
Matej
The curds won’t come.
That’s not quite right, they come, they always come, the chemistry doesn’t care about him.
But they’re wrong. He can feel it in his hands when he breaks them, the resistance that tells him the acidity is off, the culture didn’t develop as it should, something in the timing or the temperature or the milk itself has shifted by a fraction he can’t locate.
He has made this cheese for years. He knows what it should feel like.
He adjusts. He compensates. He works the curds longer than usual, coaxing them towards a texture that should have arrived on its own. They improve: not enough. He presses the wheel and marks the date and puts it in the cave and knows already that it will age wrong. Not inedible. Not right.
He does it again the next day. Same result.
On the fourth day he stands in the cheese room with his hands in the vat and tries to think of what has changed.
Temperature: same. Milk: Fanika’s, as always, the same cows, the same pasture and now the same barn.
Culture: the same starter he has maintained without interruption. His hands: the same hands.
He can’t find it.
He finishes the batch. Cleans the room until it is immaculate. Goes outside and stands in the yard in the cold and looks at the cave entrance and doesn’t go in.
The cold comes through the yard, straight and clean, and he stands in it without moving. He has stood in this yard alone a thousand times. It has never once felt like an absence.
He goes back inside. Makes coffee. Drinks it standing at the window, out of habit now, because it is the window he has stood at every morning for years and the road has always been empty and he has never minded.
He minds now.
He washes the cup and goes back to work.
Luca
He had planned to be in Milan through the week. He is done before that.
Not with the work. The work is fine. The editor meeting went well, the draft chapters went down without incident and came back with notes he can use.
The apartment is exactly as he left it: clean, ordered, the silence of a place that has been unoccupied for nearly three months.
Below the windows the city does what it always does, the low constant grind of it, brakes and horns and the tram on the next street, concrete holding all of it in and throwing it back.
The light comes in flat and grey and used, a city light, filtered through other buildings before it reaches him.
He had stopped noticing it years ago. He notices it now.
He tries to settle and can’t.
This is what bothers him, because settling has never been the problem.
He has used this apartment for years and never once at the desk.
The desk holds books and a lamp and a layer of mail.
He works in the armchair in the corner, wide and worn down to the shape of all of it, the left armrest darker where his elbow always goes, and when the armchair stops being interesting he works in the deep windowsill with his knees up, or perched on the arm of the chair rather than in it, or standing at the kitchen counter, or folded sideways across the chair with his feet over the side like a man who has never been shown how a chair is meant to function. He roosts. He has always roosted.
Tonight none of it takes. He tries the chair and the windowsill and the arm of the chair and the counter, and each one is wrong in the same way, and it takes him longer than it should to understand that the wrong thing is not the furniture.
The wrong thing is that the house is quiet, quiet like a house with no one in the next room.
No one moving. No one to not-talk to. He has lived alone here a long time and it has never once sounded like this.
The coffee, at least, is good. Actually good, the first proper espresso since September, and he stands at the counter and drinks it and is uncomplicatedly happy.
Then he packs the Bialetti. He packs the grinder.
He has two kilos of beans in the cupboard and on principle this should be enough, and he stands there and decides it is not enough, and on the way out of the city he stops at the place he has gone to for as long as he has lived here and leaves with two more.
He is aware of how this looks: a grown man fleeing a fire with the family silver.
He does it anyway, because the alternative is whatever Matej drinks, which is not coffee, which is a brown powder that constitutes, in his considered professional opinion, a crime.
There will be good roasting in Trieste. He will find it.
He will make it his mission. The sacrifice, he is prepared to admit, is mostly theatrical.
He takes one more thing.
The clock comes off the wall last, because he thinks about it the longest. It is his grandmother’s, a plain wall clock from Collio, the face gone soft with age, and it has travelled further than its size suggests: out of the hills, through a leaving nobody in the family describes the same way twice, across a border, into other rooms, and finally to him, by the slow arithmetic of who outlives whom.
It has hung in this apartment without his ever really seeing it.
He sees it now. He wraps it in a jumper and puts it in the box with the coffee, because it does not belong here, on a wall in the concrete, and he knows precisely the wall it belongs on, four hundred kilometres east, in a house that is not yet his and is becoming his anyway.
He does not look at that thought too closely. He tapes the box.
That afternoon, sorting papers, he remembers a thing he read somewhere, the kind of thing he picks up without meaning to.
He won’t write it down here and there’s no point repeating it now, because it is worthless until there is one person to tell it to, and that person is not in the apartment, is not in the city, is standing in a cold yard four hundred kilometres away not making cheese properly.
So he just hangs onto it. For later. For the table.
For the pleasure of watching Matej receive a piece of useless information as though it were a small unexpected gift.
He doesn’t fight it. He starts looking forward to it.
The evening before he leaves, some people he knows have dinner at a place in Navigli he has been to thirty or forty times: a couple of journalists, a photographer he has worked with for years, someone’s girlfriend who writes for a design magazine.
The wine is good. The food is good. He is good at this, has always been good at this, and he is present for all of it, contributing, landing his lines, laughing in the right places.
The photographer tells a story about a shoot in Marrakech that Luca has heard before and that improves, as it always does, with each telling.
Someone asks his opinion on a magazine that is folding.
He gives it. It is a good opinion. He has given it before.
Somewhere around the second bottle he understands that not one person at this table has asked him a single question whose answer he did not already know.
They ask the questions that confirm the Luca they have.
He answers as that Luca. It is frictionless and warm and it costs him nothing, and the costing-nothing is exactly the problem, and he sits in the noise of people he genuinely likes and feels, with great precision, the absence of one man asking why and then going quiet and actually waiting for the answer, as though the answer might be worth the wait.
He looks at his glass.
He pays his share of the bill at ten-thirty and tells them he has an early start. This is true. He has moved it up.
In the morning it takes him forty minutes to get clear of the city, stop and start, light after light, a queue at every junction, the whole apparatus of a place with two million people all trying to occupy the same road.
He sits in it without impatience, because he knows what is on the other side of it.
Out there the roads simply curve. You arrive at a roundabout and you go around it and you are gone, no light, no waiting, half the time no other car at all, the country threaded together by these small calm circles as though someone had decided that stopping was beneath everyone’s dignity.
The worst thing that happens on those roads is a tractor, and a tractor is not traffic.
A tractor is a reason to slow down and look at something.
He thinks about this with an intensity the subject does not deserve, and recognises it for what it is, which is a man inventing reasons to want to be somewhere he is going anyway.
He drives back on Christmas Eve. He has not told anyone he is coming.
The road north takes him out of the city, through the flatlands, and up onto the plateau. The light changes as he climbs. He thinks about his father — not as he usually does, not the months at the end. When he died he left one word: legacy.
Luca had thought he understood what that meant.
He drives through the Karst and thinks: he had it wrong.
His father didn’t leave him a thing he could hold.
He left one word. Luca had spent six months trying to understand it as a claim — something lost that could be found, property that could be traced, a history that could be recovered.
He had come here with that word like a question he’d been carrying since the funeral.
He knows now.
Legacy is what survived because someone chose to carry it. The recipe in two languages, folded into his notebook. The copper still in the dark of the hill. The cave that had nothing to do with property or inheritance — that had never been about what could be claimed.
His father sent him here to find what was lost. What he found was still here.
She throws only those who are already wavering. His grandmother, once, on the Bora.
He takes the turn without slowing down.
Matej
He doesn’t do anything special.
That’s always been the decision — not a sad one, just practical.
His parents are gone. Fanika would have him for dinner, he knows — she would put out another plate without making anything of it.
He doesn’t go. He has always preferred it this way.
Or he has always told himself he prefers it this way, which is not quite the same thing but has functioned adequately for years.
He makes a fire. He has good wine — a Vitovska he’s been saving, no occasion needed, tonight will do. He cuts bread and cheese and sits on the couch with the fire and the wine and the silence, which is the same silence as every other night except that tonight it has a name.
He remembers the conversation.
They were at the table, weeks ago — before everything, during the period he now thinks of as before, as he has always understood geological eras: as things that existed and then ended.
Luca had asked about Christmas and Matej had said: nothing, nobody, I don’t mind.
And Luca had been quiet and then said: me too.
And they had looked at each other across the table with the knowledge of two people who have learned to be alone and are not entirely sure anymore whether that’s a skill or a loss.
Matej drinks his wine.
The fire makes its sounds. Outside it is very still. December on the plateau.
He is not waiting for anything. He is sitting by his fire on Christmas Eve as he has done for years and he is fine and the cheese is good and the wine is better and he is absolutely not listening for a car on the road.
He hears the car on the road. His hand on the glass is not quite steady. His heart is doing something unreasonable.
The sound slows at the gate — that engine, slightly too refined for these roads, the hesitation he knows. The same hesitation as weeks ago when Luca came back the first time and stood in the yard with his hands in his pockets not moving towards the house.
Matej doesn’t move.
A door. Footsteps on stone. A knock — not uncertain, not aggressive. The knock of someone who has decided.
He gets up. Opens the door.
Luca is standing in the yard in the cold with no luggage, just his jacket, like he stopped the car and walked to the door before he could think about it too long. His hair is everywhere. He looks like he has been driving for a while.
He looks at Matej.
“I know what we said,” he says. “And then I was in Milan and I —” He stops. The cold sits between them. “I just wanted to be here.”
Matej looks at him and the thing he has been carrying for weeks, careful, contained, not looked at too directly, comes loose.
“I love you,” he says.
He says it plainly, without preparation, as if it is simply what is true and there is no reason not to say it. He has not planned this.
Luca goes still.
Then Luca’s face does the thing it does when something lands: open, unguarded, already knowing.
“I know,” he says. And then, quieter: “Me too.”
Matej steps back from the door.
Luca comes in.