Epilogue
Keeping.
A cave holds whatever you give it for as long as you tend it. Stop tending, and the same dark that ripened the wheel will take it back.
Matej
The cable came in March.
Two men from the telecoms company, a Tuesday, four hours of work through the yard and up the wall and into the room that used to be the guest room and is now, without anyone having made a formal decision about this, Luca’s office.
They ran the line through the window frame with the efficiency of people who have done this a thousand times in a thousand farmhouses across the plateau.
When they left, Luca sat down at his desk and opened the laptop and the page loaded in the time it was supposed to take.
He looked at it.
Then he said: “I’m going to need a minute.”
Matej went back downstairs and started on the curds.
It is November now. Just past Martinovanje — the second one, which is different from the first in ways that are difficult to articulate but easy to feel. The light is the same. The cold is the same.
What is different: two cups on the counter instead of one.
A second pair of boots by the door, Italian, better quality than necessary for the terrain, mud-caked now in a way that took approximately four days.
A desk upstairs with papers on it that are not Matej’s.
A shelf in the cave with a row of test bottles — dark glass, wax seals, no labels yet — that are not wine.
Small differences. The kind that accumulate without announcement and then one day are simply the shape of things.
The first distillation ran in September.
Not perfectly. Luca had found someone in Gorizia who still knew the old process — a retired man, seventies, who had heard of the Ferai the way you hear of things in border regions: sideways, through someone else’s memory.
He came for two days, looked at the copper, read the recipe, asked three questions that neither of them could answer, and then said: try it and see.
They tried it. The yield was lower than the recipe indicated. The nose was not quite right, and neither of them could have said why. They tasted it. Looked at each other.
“Not yet,” Luca said.
“No,” Matej agreed. “But close.”
The recipe is Luca’s great-uncle’s. The copper is a hundred and forty years old. The grapes are from the same ridge his grandfather worked.
They put it up to age anyway. A single small cask, the test batch, set in the back of the cave next to the cheese that is also not quite ready for anyone but them.
Two projects in parallel, both patient, both moving at the speed the cave allows.
This is, Matej has come to understand, the only speed that works here.
The cheese is closer.
Three wheels going to a restaurant in Ljubljana next week — the first external sale, small, a chef Luca knows who asked without being asked.
Matej said yes before he thought about it, which is how he knows it was the right answer.
The wheels are ready. He has tasted them.
They are what he has been working towards for four years, and they are ready, and he said yes.
Luca did not say I told you. He said: “Which three?” and let Matej choose.
This is one of the things. There are many things, gathered over a year, that Matej has not made a list of because making a list is not something he does. But he is aware of them. The weight of them. The unremarkable, daily texture of a life that has another person in it.
The post van comes on Tuesdays and Fridays.
Helena — who has delivered to this address for eleven years and knows the rhythm of the house better than most people Matej has spoken to — has developed an expression for Fridays.
He has seen it many times now. It is the face of a woman who has noted something, formed an opinion, and is keeping the opinion to herself out of professional courtesy, though not, evidently, without effort.
Last Friday: a box, dimensions approximately forty by thirty, discreet packaging, return address somewhere in Berlin.
Helena handed it over with the expression.
Matej signed for it with the expression he uses for belt tensioners and invoices.
Inside: Luca’s standard order from Berlin. The lube — enough for six weeks, which has turned out to be the correct interval, a logistical calculation neither of them has discussed out loud but both have clearly made — and something else, smaller, in a second layer of packaging.
Luca opened the second layer with the focused attention he gives to interesting problems.
“Well,” he said.
“What is it,” Matej said. Not quite a question.
Luca held it up. Matej looked at it.
“No,” he said.
“You said that about the last one.”
“That was different.”
“Was it.”
Matej picked up his coffee. “How long does the other thing last.”
“Six weeks. Maybe five, at this rate.”
Matej said nothing. He finished his coffee and went out to the cave. Behind him, from the kitchen: the sound of Luca not quite laughing.
The thing from the second layer of packaging was, he noted three days later, not as objectionable as he had indicated.
He did not mention this.
Luca did not ask.
The book came out in October.
Under the Stone: Wine, Knowledge, and the Long Memory of the Karst. Published by a small press in London, Luca’s third book, his first that he has described — once, to Matej, not to anyone else — as the one that was actually his.
His father had wanted him to write it. He had not known that until after.
The cheesemaker is in chapter seven. No name.
The cheesemaker I met in the Karst — six pages, the cave, the process, the philosophy.
The sentence about conversation rather than revival.
Matej read it once, the week the advance copy arrived, sitting at the kitchen table while Luca was somewhere in the region and the house was quiet.
He read it twice.
Then he put it on the shelf, between the christening photograph and the clock, and went out to check on the wheels.
He passed the barn on the way back. He had passed it more times than he could count. Today he stopped. In the corner, under its canvas: his road bicycle, carbon frame, race geometry, the machine he had been built for. He pulled the canvas off. Set it aside. Then he went to the cave.
Tonight: the fire, the board, a bottle of someone else’s Teran because their own vines are still three years from producing anything worth drinking.
Luca is on the couch with his feet up, reading something on his phone, occasionally saying things about it that don’t require a response.
Matej is not reading. He is looking at the fire and thinking about the second distillation — February, he thinks, when the grapes have had time, when the cold has done what cold does.
“Helena,” Luca says, without looking up from his phone. “Do you think she knows?”
“Yes,” Matej says.
“Does she mind?”
Matej considers this. Helena has delivered to this address for eleven years. She brought the cable crew coffee on the Tuesday in March without being asked. She has not said one word about any of it.
“No,” he says.
Luca makes a sound of satisfaction and goes back to his phone.
Outside the Bora moves through the dark, indifferent and constant, showing them exactly who they are.
Inside: the fire, the wine, the smell of aged milk and old copper and whatever came in the second layer of packaging from Berlin. The shelf with the book. Twelve bottles in the cave that are not yet right but will be.
The second Martinovanje.
It is enough. It is, in fact, more than enough — though Matej would not say this, because there is no one to say it to and no reason to say it and because the fire is warm and Luca is here and some things do not need to be said to be true.