True Harvest Read online

  Marielle pulled off her gloves and helped her mother pass out steaming mugs of coffee and the hearty whole grain bread that their neighbor Ute Meyer sold every morning in her bakery. Marielle watched and listened as the gnarled and weathered hands of the crew took their mugs and murmured “thank you.” Tomas approached and clasped the thick pottery Marielle held out to him, taking it from her hand with a nod, but barely glancing at her before he turned away.

  While the others clustered in small groups, sipping their coffee and munching on their sandwiches with gusto, Tomas walked to the hillside and sat on an overturned bucket. Janosch joined him for a few minutes, leaving an animated discussion with a few of the older men of the crew. He placed his hand on Tomas’s shoulder and invited the younger man to join the conversation. But Tomas shrugged and shook his head in refusal.

  Marielle heard a sharpness in Janosch’s voice but did not understand his Polish. Janosch seemed frustrated with his nephew’s withdrawal but didn’t waste any more words with him and returned to the group.

  Anita had observed the scene, too.

  “Is that one going to be a problem?”

  “So far he’s been surprisingly efficient. Certainly not sociable, but you’ve always told me we’re not up here for a tea party. As long as he continues working the way he did this morning, he can drink his coffee in peace wherever he wants.”

  “I don’t recognize him—Janosch has never brought him before.”

  “He’s Janosch’s nephew. He must have worked other harvests before. He definitely knows what he is doing. I can’t complain, although I find him perplexing.”

  “If you have any concerns about him, speak to Janosch. Don’t let anything sit unremarked. It will be your undoing as the work gets harder and the crew tires. I’ve got to get back to Papa. I’ll send Ute’s son up around 1:30 pm with dinner. The weather’s supposed to hold for a few more days, so get as much out of them as you can now.”

  She put the empty mugs in a basin and climbed in the car, leaving Marielle to call the crew back to the vines for three more hours.

  For this round, she left Tomas Marek to his own labors and took up the task of collecting the contents of the buckets from each of the crew. She slipped the straps of a large open canvas knapsack over her shoulders and started at the top of the hillside, working her way down the path between rows of vines, stooping as each man dumped his bucket into her sack. Despite her bankerly life, Marielle had retained the athletic vigor of her student days, when she had been both a long-distance runner and a rower on her university’s four-woman boat. During her childhood, Max had been a member of the Rheingau’s kayak club and he had taught her to manage a single kayak on the rapidly moving Rhine. Marielle’s training and experience had served her and her team well, and she had led them to a German and then a European championship. Although she hadn’t rowed on a team since her student days, until Max’s stroke she had often strapped a pair of boats on top of the VW and driven off to a local whitewater river with her father on the weekends.

  Marielle felt the weight of the grapes on her back and straightened to her full height as she moved down the hill to the wagon with its wide plastic bin. She wanted to demonstrate to the men her ease and familiarity with the work, her strength and stamina. She was used to walking into a boardroom as the only woman and had learned how to be heard, how to be visible to those who would dismiss her. She was determined to be as much of a presence here in the vineyard.

  At the end of the day, Marielle reversed her trip of the morning, returning the crew to the campground after a brief side trip to the grocery store so they could pick up provisions for their evening meal. Again, Tomas Marek was silent and reclusive, not joining in the banter and the give-and-take of the other crew members. On the drive back, Marielle glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw him in an unguarded moment—eyes closed, skin sallow, weariness and worry etched into his face.

  She bid good night and arranged the pickup time for the next morning with Janosch. Tomas had already closed the door of the camper and lit a lantern as she pulled out of the clearing.

  That night, as she soaked in a hot tub, she felt she could enumerate each muscle in her back, her thighs and her calves. She stretched out her fingers in front of her and saw not the smooth, carefully manicured hands that only last week had been tapping away on a calculator. Instead, she saw chipped nails and scratches and felt as if she were coated in a sticky layer of grape juice.

  She leaned back in the tub to soak her long hair and then slid momentarily under the warm water, obliterating briefly the images and anxieties of the day.

  When she emerged from the bath, muffled in an old sweatshirt and pants she had found in the bottom of her dresser, Anita was waiting with a cup of hot cocoa and a stack of papers.

  “How did it go?” She looked straight into Marielle’s exhausted eyes.

  Marielle nodded. “I got through the day with a decent volume. But I should go down to the tanks and check that Dieter got it all loaded…”

  She set down the mug and started for the stairs.

  “It’s fine. Papa was already asleep, so I went down while you were in the tub.”

  Marielle smiled gratefully at her mother.

  “How did you manage to do all that needs to be done when you were also raising me?”

  “I wasn’t alone, Schatz.”

  Chapter 3

  Over the next week, the days repeated themselves in a pattern that was as familiar to her as the ancient, meter-thick walls of the winery’s courtyard. The too-early alarm clock; the mug of coffee waiting in her mother’s outstretched hand; the dense fog hiding the contours of the landscape in the early morning; the groggy and increasingly weary crew stamping their feet in the damp clearing of the campground waiting for their ride. The morning harvest, halting and somber as fingers stiff from the previous day and cold from the near-freezing temperatures clutched at equally cold grapes. The sun eventually burning through the grayness and giving both definition and warmth to the afternoon. The loaded wagon at sunset trundling the harvest down the hill to the tanks. And throughout it all, Tomas Marek’s silence.

  The rhythm of the days was familiar to Marielle because she had spent every October of her childhood on these hills. She had missed the last two years while she was in Hong Kong, but she hadn’t forgotten or lost the knack of progressing along a row of vines, cradling, clipping and dropping grapes into a bucket in one swift, uninterrupted movement. The days were not a challenge to her, especially as the crew got comfortable with her expectations. They treated her with respect, thanks to Janosch.

  It was the nights that filled her with anxiety. After returning the crew to the campground every evening and then grabbing some bread and cheese at her mother’s insistence, she no longer soaked away the chill and aches of the day in the tub.

  She headed instead to the fermentation tanks and her notebooks. She listened to the weather reports, calculated how much was in, how much was still on the vine, and worried about how much time she still had and how high the sugar content of the grapes was from each field.

  She stayed late in the tiny office adjacent to the tanks, protecting herself from the cold seeping up from the concrete floor through her feet, up her cramped legs and into her spine by wrapping herself in one of Max’s old coats and nursing a fiery glass of Weinbrand—the limited-edition brandy Max had made every other year. She had driven to the wine school in Geisenheim the week before the harvest began and bought a couple of textbooks on viticulture. It was during these evenings alone that she delved into the books, making notations, trying to absorb what she needed in the only way she knew how—through book learning. Marielle had always been a good student, and she tackled the harvest as if she were preparing for an exam.

  But the answers eluded her, as she observed her own grapes not reacting in textbook ways.

  One morning as she handed Marielle her coffee, Anita reminded her that she needed to get more res
t.

  “I saw the light on in the courtyard office at midnight again last night. You’re still as stubborn as you were as a child when you couldn’t fall asleep until you’d gotten the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle to fit. Schatz, winemaking isn’t a puzzle, or even an equation. Sometimes you simply aren’t going to be able to solve it.”

  On the first Sunday of the harvest, Marielle hiked alone to the eastern fields early in the morning to make an assessment of how much was left on the vine. The weather service was predicting an early frost later in the month. Although Max had always reserved a small vineyard close to the house for ice wine—made from grapes picked early in the day, frozen from the first frost—Marielle knew there was still too much hanging to risk harvesting it all as ice wine. She walked up and down the rows, inspecting clusters for mold or, on the contrary, under ripeness. It would do no good to rush the harvest of grapes that weren’t ready.

  Her head ached from lack of sleep and too many glasses of Weinbrand. With a start, she realized that she had promised her mother that she would accompany her to church that morning. She hadn’t been to Mass in years, and Anita herself had not been one to spend much time in the church. But since Max’s illness she seemed to have found some peace in the old rituals.

  Marielle jogged down the hill, slipped off her boots in the anteroom and ran upstairs to change as her mother emerged from the bedroom.

  “You’re coming after all?”

  “I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Who’s staying with Papa?”

  “Bruno is downstairs in the yard fixing the axle on the wagon. He’ll check on Papa for me while we’re in church. He does that for me every Sunday.”

  Marielle quickly washed up, ran a comb through her long hair and put on the navy-blue suit she had worn on the train from Frankfurt when she’d arrived the week before. It already felt stiff and unfamiliar.

  Her mother was waiting in the vestibule, handbag over her wrist. They walked arm in arm down the main street of the village to St. Margarete’s, two blocks away, as the bell tolled to announce the next Mass.

  Marielle’s eyes adjusted to the dimness inside the thick-walled medieval building that had been reconstructed since the bombing of World War II. She hurried with Anita up the aisle and knelt beside her as the priest approached the altar. Remembering the prayers, she followed along, echoing the responses out of respect to her mother, but she felt a great distance between herself and what was unfolding before her. During the homily her mind and her glance wandered, observing the mostly older congregants listening intently to the priest’s droning.

  Her gaze stopped abruptly, however, when she saw a familiar figure off to the side by the Madonna’s altar. Tomas Marek was not listening to the priest, but stood in the shadows, arms folded across his chest, his face illuminated by the flickering light of the candles.

  Before Mass was over, Marielle saw him light a candle and then slip out of the church through the side door. He was the last member of the Polish crew she would have expected to see in church, and, in fact, she saw three or four others in the back as she and Anita left. She nodded in greeting to them and they tipped their caps. Later in the afternoon, Marielle went back to the vineyard—not to worry over the crop but to spend an hour sketching. It was her form of escape, to capture with a few strokes of oil pastels the broad sweep of the valley or the detail of a columbine blossom.

  That evening, after checking on the tanks and the weather report, Marielle left the winery before eight, intending to finally get some rest before the week began again and the push to finish the harvest intensified.

  As she entered the house, she thought she heard a sound that had been an indelible part of her childhood. Max at the piano. He was—had been—an accomplished musician, and had given up a professional career to marry Anita and save the winery after the war. But he had never given up the piano, at least not until his stroke, and had entertained guests throughout the season when the courtyard was open every weekend for wine tastings and festivals.

  Marielle was stunned and perplexed by the music drifting down the stairs from her parents’ living quarters above the public rooms of the winery. Perhaps Max had made a recording when Marielle had been away. That was the only answer she could imagine as she climbed the stairs. As she got closer, she realized that what she was hearing was the piano itself, not a recording, and for an instant she felt like a child again, wishing that the music she heard meant her father had been restored to her.

  When she reached the landing, she quietly slipped into the living room at the end of the room opposite the piano. What she saw was more surprising than if it had been the fulfillment of her wish. Max was indeed sitting in the room in his wheelchair, near but not at the piano. His eyes were closed and his hands lay still in his lap. At the piano, his back to Marielle, was Tomas Marek. His long frame was folded over the keyboard, his head bent into the music.

  He improvised as spontaneously as Marielle remembered Max doing on summer evenings, at times plaintive and questioning, and then exuberant and exalting. Max, whose hearing was still acute although he could no longer speak, nodded his head, a smile of childlike joy on his face.

  Rather than interrupt, Marielle hung back and retreated to the hallway, listening for a few more minutes before retracing her steps back down the stairs. Reaching into her pocket, she retrieved the ring that held all the keys for the winery and opened the heavy door that led to the business office where Anita kept the files.

  Despite her role now in the business and her right to be in the office, Marielle had not yet abandoned the feeling that she was an interloper—an impostor pretending to be Anita, who would soon be revealed as a fake.

  She tried to convince herself that her concern was legitimate, but she knew she was rifling through the papers not for a management reason but for a personal one.

  She wanted to know who Tomas Marek was and why he was here.

  In a folder in the middle drawer of the desk she found what she was looking for—copies of the visa applications that Anita had had to file with the government in order to bring the crew to the West. Marielle flipped through the alphabetically arranged pages and found “Marek, Tomas.” Amid the stamps and signatures she sought the lines requiring his background. What she read stunned her. Tomas was a surgeon, educated at Jagiellonian University Medical College in Krakow, on leave from the Centralny Szpital Kliniczny (Central Clinical Hospital).

  Marielle replaced the papers and returned the folder to the drawer. The music above her had stopped and she heard voices—Anita’s in thanks, Tomas’s mumbled response, Janosch’s more voluble and emphatic conversation.

  When she heard their footsteps on the stairs, she remained in the office. She could not explain her discomfort and chose to attribute her reluctance to greet them to her fatigue. Once the outer door closed behind them and Anita had coaxed Max to bed, Marielle left the office, locked the door behind her and went to bed herself.

  Chapter 4

  The next morning, still driven by the curiosity that had sent her to Anita’s files, Marielle took up a position opposite Tomas on the steep Steinmorgen vineyard. Like all the mornings before this one, a damp chill pervaded the hillside and only the rustle of leaves being parted and the snap of metal clippers separating stems from vines penetrated the stillness. That morning, not even Janosch was humming.

  “Your skill is exceptional.” she told him. “I haven’t often seen anyone except my father handle the grapes as well as you do.”

  Tomas nodded through the tangle of the leaves to acknowledge that she had spoken to him.

  “How did you learn? Have you been at the harvest before?”

  “I came as a teenager with my uncle a few times. But we worked for von Hausen then. Later, when Janosch began working for your father, I didn’t come anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was studying.”

  “At medical school?”

  Again Tomas nodded, but didn
’t offer more.

  Marielle could see that she was falling behind in filling her bucket and resumed her silence, despite wanting to know what had brought Tomas back to the harvest. She doubted, even if she asked outright, that he would tell her.

  Later, when Anita brought a cauldron of lentil soup with ham for the midday meal, she spoke briefly with Marielle.

  “Last night when Janosch visited with Papa, I asked him for a favor—to work with you this evening on some of the questions I know you need answered. He’s agreed to help.”

  Marielle started to protest, but Anita went on.

  “Janosch has the same Fingerspitzengefühl, the same instincts, as Papa, Schatz. You’re not going to find everything you need in textbooks. I’ve seen you night after night, hunched over the desk in the outer office, filling your notebook with numbers. That’s only part of what you need to learn. Let Janosch help you. Don’t be stubborn. You don’t have that luxury. We don’t have that luxury.”

  Marielle acquiesced, but only because she did not have any other solution to the knot that had been tightening in her stomach with each passing day. Her fears for the success of the year’s vintage grew more intense, especially after all the frustrating nights of trying to grasp what she needed and having the answers elude her. She was reluctant to admit her weakness to the one individual—Janosch—whose respect was vital to the completion of the harvest.

  If Janosch thought she was incompetent, his opinion might spill over to the others and she would lose control. Considering Anita’s advice about establishing herself as the leader, Marielle questioned why her mother would expose her vulnerability.

  She helped Anita repack the station wagon with the remains of the meal in silence and turned back to the grapes for the rest of the afternoon without speaking to Janosch, whose eyes she avoided as she vigorously attacked a row. She worked for an hour before hoisting a collection bag on her shoulders and taking the measure of each crew member’s performance as she gathered what they had harvested since the meal. At least she could manage and even master the physical part of the harvest, she thought to herself, if not the critical decisions that she knew she had to make over the next few weeks.