True Harvest Read online

  True Harvest

  A Novella

  Linda Cardillo

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Also by Linda Cardillo

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2021 Linda Cardillo

  ISBN: 978-1942209911

  TRUE HARVEST

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Bellastoria Press, P.O. Box 60341, Longmeadow, MA 01116.

  True Harvest is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Bellastoria Press

  P.O. Box 60341

  Longmeadow, MA 01116

  Cover design by Wicked Smart Designs

  Dedication

  To Stephan,

  with thanks especially for the years we spent in Germany

  “The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  Prologue

  Marielle Hartmann was an only child. This became significant to her only later in life. When she was a little girl, her father, a great bear of a man, would carry her on his shoulders up the dirt road that led to their vineyards. She clutched his hands, giant paws that held her securely as they climbed higher and higher. She could smell the musty, sweet aroma of fermenting grapes that clung to his thick curly hair and she could feel his heart beating steadily beneath her legs. When they reached the top of the hill, he spun her around in a whirling jig and she watched their acres and acres of vines spin with her, their gray-green leaves lifting in the breeze and their fruit pendulous and full of promise.

  “Taste this,” he said, as he thrust his hand through a tangle of broad leaves and emerged with a perfect cluster of grapes. He held them out to her in his palm, tiny pale globes of translucent green. She felt like a princess then, being offered a treasure of pearls as she surveyed her kingdom.

  Behind them the Taunus Mountains formed a barrier against the cold north wind, and below them the Rhine River was a slate blue ribbon warming the soil of their southern-facing slopes. This particular geography had made it possible for her family to grow grapes for over three centuries in a region of Germany that was as far north as Saskatchewan. She understood that only later. As a child, this land was her playground, not her livelihood. It was the earth upon which she learned her father’s love.

  And as a woman, it was the ground upon which Tomas Marek first stepped into her life.

  Chapter 1

  October 1975

  The clang of Marielle Hartmann’s alarm clock ricocheted off the walls of the bedroom that had been hers as a young girl. She reached out from under the down comforter her mother had retrieved from a trunk two days before and turned off the insistent bell. She could see through the slender cracks in the ancient shutters at her windows that it was still dark outside. 4:00 am. Not the banker’s hour she was used to waking up to in her high-rise apartment in Frankfurt. Marielle reminded herself that she was no longer in Frankfurt as she looked around the room she had not inhabited in nearly eight years.

  She stretched her arms over her head and threw her long legs over the side of the bed and onto the cold stone floor. She could hear her mother already in the kitchen so she grabbed her things and headed to the bathroom. Anita wouldn’t be pleased if Marielle were late for the first day of the wine harvest.

  Instead of the conservative navy suit she usually wore to her job as an economist at Deutsche Bank, Marielle pulled on a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt and a pair of thick wool socks before joining her mother downstairs.

  Anita handed her a mug of coffee and Marielle could see that she had already brewed a full urn to take out to the vineyards for the harvest crew.

  “How was Papa’s night?” Marielle asked as she sipped the steaming coffee, waiting for the jolt of caffeine she needed to start her day.

  Anita shook her head. Marielle could see the fatigue in her mother’s eyes, the stoop in her shoulders. She berated herself for not noticing sooner the toll her father’s stroke was taking on her mother when she had come to visit in July. Late in the evening during that visit - after her father, Max, had been settled in bed for the night - Marielle had sat with Anita and a bottle of their vineyard’s best wine.

  Anita had uncorked it with her usual expertise and poured a taste into one of the two golden-stemmed glasses etched with her family’s name and crest. She had set them out on the polished wood of a table in the winery’s tasting room. The winery had been in Anita’s family for over three hundred years. Anita herself, along with her parents and Max, had brought the vineyards back from the devastation of World War II. In the thirty years since the end of the war she had rescued fallow fields, planting new vines with her own hands, nurturing them through too much rain or not enough, protecting them from disease and finally, reaping the harvest of a unique Riesling that only now was gaining appreciation from wine connoisseurs. Until this spring, Max had been her partner in the enterprise—a man with a nose and a knack for viniculture and winemaking. It was Max who had come to understand and love the land and the grapes it produced.

  Marielle remembered trudging through the vineyards as a little girl, racing to keep up with her father as he inspected vines and scooped up handfuls of earth to test its acidity and moisture.

  Although Marielle had followed her father around in the vineyards, it was Anita’s example that Marielle had absorbed and found fascinating. In the evenings, as she had sat at the dining table doing homework, Anita had shared the workspace with her, managing the difficult decisions about staffing and equipment purchases, setting prices and courting customers. Marielle discovered her talent not only for math in those hours with Anita, but also for negotiating, sometimes helping her to calculate prices and often listening to her bargain with suppliers. When Marielle had scored highly on the Abitur, the qualifying exam for university, she was offered a place in economics at the University of Mannheim, one of the best in the country.

  With Max and Anita’s blessing, Marielle had left home to pursue her studies and create a life for herself in the business world after graduating with honors from Mannheim. Marielle had flourished. At twenty-seven, she was one of only a few female vice presidents at Deutsche Bank. She had spent two years in Hong Kong and had returned only three months ago.

  It was while she had been away that Max’s grasp of his winemaking and of his world had been obliterated in an instant by a stroke. He was no longer able to walk or to speak, and had made little progress with his rehabilitation. Although she had been shocked by the change in her father and his utter dependence upon Anita, Marielle had been both unable and unwilling to acknowledge what Max’s condition meant for all of them—until that evening in July when
Anita had poured her the wine.

  “Taste it, Schatz. Tell me what you think of it.”

  “It’s excellent, Mama. One of the best, I think.”

  Anita nodded. “Good. At least you can recognize a good vintage. It’s a start.” She rubbed her forehead, creased with new lines.

  “A start of what?”

  “You becoming a vintner.”

  Marielle sat very still. She had known deep in her heart that her parents—especially her mother—would want her to inherit the winery. But that was decades away. Her second career. Something she had planned after she had made a name for herself in finance.

  “Aren’t you rushing things a little? You and Papa still have half a lifetime to spend running the business.”

  “No, Marielle, we don’t.” Anita’s eyes gazed straightforwardly across the table at Marielle. Anita had never been one to tell Marielle fairy tales when she had been a little girl. Storytelling had been Max’s role. Anita had been the realist, the practical housekeeper who knew exactly how much food she needed to buy when they opened the winery courtyard in summer for wine tasting dinners; who knew which harvest crews were the best; who had calculated to the penny the cost of producing every bottle of wine.

  “We have no time left at all. Papa can’t take part in the business. In fact, he can’t be left alone anymore. In May, when I was up in the vineyards supervising the pruning, he fell out of bed. I won’t put him in a home. But I cannot care for him and manage the business.”

  Marielle stared at her mother, trying to absorb the enormity of what she was saying, trying to deny what she knew her mother was about to ask her.

  “I need you now, Marielle. Not in twenty or even ten years. I need you to come home. To carry on for me, for us.”

  Marielle could not answer at first. Her hand gripped the fragile stem of the wine glass with such intensity that it would have shattered if Anita hadn’t gently loosened her fingers.

  “I know this isn’t what you expected for your life right now, to come back to this little village and a life dictated by the seasons after you’ve been racing across Southeast Asia making deals. But it’s not what I expected for mine, either.”

  Anita sat erect, carrying her responsibilities with uncomplaining acceptance. It was what she had always done. And it was what Marielle knew was expected of her, as well.

  And so, in the weeks that followed, Marielle submitted her resignation at the bank and sublet her apartment, wrapping up the loose ends of her life in Frankfurt in time to be here with her mother on this first morning of the harvest.

  Chapter 2

  Thin wisps of smoke curled from the rusted chimney pipes of the circled campers at the river’s edge camping ground. The shadows of bodies stretching and pulling on shirts and sweaters indicated that the men inside the campers were readying themselves for the day.

  Marielle steered her mother’s ancient Volkswagen bus off the B43 highway that ran along the Rhine where it jogged westward a little north of Mainz. She pulled into the campground and turned off the engine. She considered knocking at the door of Janosch Kosakowski’s camper to let the crew chief know she had arrived, but she had no idea which of the ancient metal boxes was his. She decided to wait for the men to emerge and tucked her hands inside her pockets to warm them.

  The fog was still thick, hovering just above the water and seeping across the campground, the highway, and then up into the village and the vineyard-covered hillsides above it. The yellow lantern lights within the campers were the only warmth in this gray pre-dawn morning.

  Marielle tapped her foot impatiently and watched her breath, wishing she had thought to take a thermos of coffee with her. She pulled her woolen hat down over her ears and blew on her rapidly chilling fingers. She was about to start banging on every camper when the door to the middle one opened and two men stepped out. The first Marielle recognized as Janosch, the Pole who had led the harvest crew for her family’s vineyards for the last ten years. Behind him, stooping to clear the doorway, followed a lanky, dark-haired younger man whom Marielle had never seen before.

  As if Janosch had given a signal, the doors of the other campers opened and within a few minutes six more men stood stomping in a muddy circle around him. He spoke a few words in Polish, gestured toward the bus and led the others toward Marielle.

  She got out of the car as they approached and reached out her hand to Janosch.

  “Greetings! Welcome back.”

  Janosch reached up to pull off his woolen cap and smiled expansively. Marielle’s impatience dissipated and she recognized familiar faces. Janosch introduced each member of the crew and they nodded silently or smiled and saluted as he rattled off their names. The last was the tall, man who had shared Janosch’s camper. He barely acknowledged Marielle as Janosch announced his name. “Tomas Marek,” he said. “Son of my sister.”

  Marielle opened the VW doors and waved the eight men in, breathing in the aromas of cheap Eastern European cigarettes and fried onions that had saturated the fabric of their jackets. She backed up the bus and headed out of the campground and up to the Hartmann vineyards on the hillside known as Johannisberg—St. John’s Mountain. According to legend, it was Charlemagne who had first recognized the potential of this fragment of the Holy Roman Empire and had ordered the first vines planted.

  The thing Marielle immediately noticed about Tomas Marek was his hands—pale, slender fingers in a pair of black wool gloves with the tips cut off. They were the hands of a musician—a violinist perhaps—or an artist used to handling delicate brushes. They were hands unmarked by weather or rough work; hands that had not lifted heavy crates of wine bottles; hands that hadn’t tilled or planted or pruned. For Marielle, Tomas Marek’s hands were both beautiful and useless.

  Right now they were hands that he had shoved into his pockets as he stood on the periphery of the harvest crew while Marielle demonstrated in a mixture of German, limited Polish and gestures what she expected of the crew on this first morning.

  She had listened to Anita give these directions for years—to her as a schoolgirl released from the classroom to work the harvest, and later whenever she could spare time from the bank to help her parents bring in the crop. But before she had always been the listener, not the one giving directions. Marielle struggled within herself to set the tone of authority that Anita projected.

  “Let them know from the beginning what you expect,” Anita had advised. “Hard work, consistent effort, a steady pace, no rotten clusters to augment their baskets. For the most part, they’ll work hard. Janosch knows how to put together a good crew—but watch out for newcomers who are either too inexperienced or too lazy to do the job well.”

  Marielle scanned the somber faces in the misty chill, the men’s feet damp and shifting as she spoke. Who among them could she trust to follow instructions, work quickly and competently? Who among them might fail her? They were generally a sturdy group, with knowledge of the task. But her eyes and her doubts kept returning to Tomas Marek, who continued to stand on the edge of the group. He had lit a cigarette and barely listened to her, staring off at nothing since the fog hadn’t yet lifted in the valley.

  Rather than walk the row as the crew started to pick, Marielle decided to work alongside Tomas for a few hours so that she could gauge his skill. She watched him finish his cigarette and crush it under the sole of his shoe. Like the rest of the crew, he wore a shoddy Eastern European imitation of Adidas sports shoes, and they were already soaked through from the wet grass. Marielle’s own feet were still snug in their sturdy Wellingtons, and she remembered hiking Mt. Kenya a few years earlier and being struck by the meager footwear of her guide. He had worn thin-soled leather street shoes yet picked his way nimbly over the soggy, porous lower elevations and later the rocky trail as they approached the summit.

  Like the Kenyan guide, Tomas seemed oblivious to the incongruity or discomfort of his shoes. He settled into a crouch and began snipping clusters of Riesling
grapes from the lower branches of the vines, reaching behind the curtain of dripping leaves to interior clusters that a less experienced or lazy picker would have ignored. His long fingers deftly cradled a bunch in his left hand and he snapped his shears swiftly and cleanly over the stem. He withdrew his arm from the vine, gently placed the bunch of grapes in the canvas basket at his side, then moved back in for the next cluster. He worked with a steady, graceful rhythm, from the bottom to the top of the stalk, breaking the flow of his movements only to discard a rotten or desiccated bunch.

  Marielle had her own rhythm, but she was distracted from it by her own anxiety and curiosity. Watching Tomas, observing not only his skill but also his clearly practiced eye, relieved her concern that he would be an impediment to the harvest. But she could not shake her unease that was here at all.

  The other members of the crew had begun a low, guttural song that rumbled up and down the row. Occasionally Janosch, transporting a full bucket of grapes, would bark an order or point out a missed cluster. Tomas continued silently, filling his basket systematically and only gesturing with his hand when he was ready for it to be emptied. He talked to no one; he did not pick up the song; and he ignored Marielle’s gaze, burying himself in the task with an intensity that hovered between concentration and anger.

  By ten o’clock the morning sun had finally burned through the fog and Anita arrived with an urn of hot coffee and ham sandwiches. The crew got to their feet and stretched. A few shrugged off jackets and sweaters as the combination of vigorous labor and the heat from the sun began to warm them.