True Harvest Read online

  At the end of the day Anita had arranged for a neighbor to drive the crew back to the campground so Janosch could stay to advise Marielle. In the small public dining room that the winery used for tastings and light meals over the winter Anita had left a supper of bread, cold cuts and cheese, and a bottle of the previous year’s vintage.

  Marielle went to the outer office to get her notebooks before joining Janosch in the dining room. When she returned she was surprised to see Tomas with his uncle. Her already tenuous hold on authority was disintegrating before her eyes if both Janosch and Tomas were aware of her ignorance.

  She slid ungraciously into the booth, barely greeting the two men.

  Janosch gestured to his nephew and spoke in halting German. “To translate, I ask him to come.”

  Marielle was impatient to begin and be done, desperate for the help but angry that she needed it.

  The men shifted on their feet, awaiting some signal from Marielle. It finally dawned on her that they were as tired and hungry as she was and she pointed to the food.

  “Please sit and eat, then we can work.”

  Marielle could barely swallow and took only small bites of bread and goat cheese while Tomas and Janosch filled their plates and savored each mouthful of the simple meal. Marielle remembered her role as host and uncorked the wine, pouring three glasses. The bottle was from the Steinmorgen acreage, the same fields they had picked that day.

  Marielle knew that without looking at the label. Max had taught her as a girl that each of their patchwork of fields—both contiguous as well as scattered, and each with its own name—produced distinctively flavored wines. All of their grapes were Riesling, but the composition and acidity of the soil, the drainage, the angle of the sun all affected the quality and taste of the different wines. She remembered what a discovery it had been to her, to the child she had been then, and how Max had made a game of it, masking the labels and having her guess with her nose whether she was tasting a Marcobrunn or a Steinmorgen or a Johannisberg. She had loved to accompany him on the Feast of the Ascension, when he had led a group of guests on a hike throughout their vineyards. At each field a trestle table had been set up with tasting glasses and wine made from the grapes grown in that soil the previous year. At the end of the hike, at the top of the northernmost field, Anita was waiting with vintner’s stew and cucumber salad and crusty bread to soak up the sauce. Often there had been forty or fifty guests, sunburned, sated, enjoying the view of the valley as they sat at the outdoor feast.

  Marielle said a silent prayer to the memory of those days and hoped that she would have the wines to serve next spring when she would lead the hike herself for the first time.

  Reminded of why she was sitting here with Janosch, she opened her notebook as he wiped the crumbs from his lips.

  “Shall we begin?” she said, reining in her anxiety.

  For the next two hours, Janosch spoke to her through Tomas, trying to convey in words what he sensed through his fingertips and his nose. He tried to articulate what for him was as instinctive as breathing. Marielle kept seeking specifics—measurements, temperature, chemical analysis. But Janosch had no notebooks, no records like a chemist in a lab. He tapped his head and his heart.

  “It’s all in here. I watched and learned from my father. He taught me how to recognize when the grapes are ready to be picked, when the fermentation has reached its optimum.

  “Max knew these things. If you had been at his side you would know them as well, instead of searching through the pages of a book.”

  Marielle felt her face redden; her humiliation intensified by Tomas’s presence. Although she had followed her father around as a little girl, she had abandoned his side once her studies began. From the time she was fourteen she had propelled herself through school, preparing for the university qualifying exam—the Abitur—long before her classmates had begun to apply themselves to learning. When Desiree Schultz, the daughter of a neighboring vintner, had been elected queen of the wine festival the year she and Marielle were eighteen, Marielle had ignored the entire festival in order to study. Hadn’t that paid off for her? She had won a place in economics at a prestigious university, graduated with honors, been hired immediately by Deutsche Bank, the only woman to secure a position.

  To prove herself in that environment, Marielle had continued to do what she knew best. She worked long hours at her desk, running regression analyses, pouring over columns of numbers and pages of graphs, always prepared at meetings where she was the only person in a skirt at the table. She had been relentless with herself in learning as much as she could and had earned respect for her diligence and intelligence. It had not been easy, but it had been familiar territory for her, concepts she knew she could grasp. The challenge of proving herself to a phalanx of skeptical men in suits had not been fraught with terror, as the task before her now was.

  She looked at the two men sitting across from her at a table whose scratches and patina she knew intimately. Their drab and ill-fitting Eastern European clothing, their slumped and weary postures and their unshaven faces were a sharp contrast to the bankers in their tailored suits, Italian shoes and Swiss watches who had wanted data and projections and ample bottom lines from her only a few weeks ago. But Marielle was intimidated by these men, resistant to what Janosch was trying to teach her and frustrated that he could not articulate to her what she needed in a way she could understand. It was not merely the gulf between his Polish and her German, but the distance between a man of the earth and a woman of the mind.

  At ten in the evening, the second bottle of wine emptied, Marielle closed the notebook, finally giving in to everyone’s fatigue and the knowledge that the next day’s dawn would be upon them far too soon. She offered to drive them to the campground but Tomas told her that Anita had offered them two old bikes that had been sitting unused in the shed. They would pedal back.

  When they left, Marielle cleared the plates and washed up in the winery’s café kitchen; the sound of the running water hid her tears.

  The next morning in the vineyard Tomas approached her during the break. She was startled to have him initiate a conversation with her. She saw the dark circles under his eyes and regretted how late she had kept him the night before.

  “I’m sorry for the late hour yesterday evening. I’m sure when Janosch said yes to my mother he wasn’t anticipating how much help I needed.”

  “It’s not the time that my uncle regretted as much as his inability to teach you. Or rather, in his words, your inability to learn.”

  The briefest smile skimmed across Tomas’s face; the first time Marielle had seen any emotion at all. She was stung by Janosch’s criticism but felt that Tomas was attempting to make like of it.

  “He’s an old man, set in his ways, who has little use for the science of winemaking. He believes that too much science will destroy the unique character of each wine—create a dull uniformity that relies on duplicating a formula over and over instead of experimenting and trusting one’s instincts with the chance of developing a wine with true brilliance.”

  “And what do you believe?”

  “I’m somewhere in the middle. I have great respect for my uncle and know his frustration with the factory mentality of the Party’s approach to winemaking in Poland. But I am a scientist. In the same way that I rely upon both my training and my instincts when I encounter a problem during surgery, I know that one needs both to produce a successful vintage.”

  “So, you disagree with your uncle?”

  “To a certain extent. For example, I don’t think that you are unteachable.” Again, the flicker of a smile.

  “It sounds as if Janosch has given up on me.”

  “But I haven’t. I have an offer to make you. I know enough about the science and the art that I think I can show you what you need to learn, in a way you will understand. Will you allow me to help on my own? Not as a translator of Polish, but as a translator of the intangible?”

 
“Why would you?”

  “Because my uncle is a friend of your father and does not want to disappoint him. And because my uncle’s reputation is his livelihood, so a failed harvest will reflect badly on him. There are many families in Poland who are dependent upon Janosch’s ability to bring the crew to this vineyard year after year. What we are able to earn here in one season we cannot make in a whole year in Poland. Not even I, as a physician. I know you have wondered about what would bring someone like me to work the harvest. You have no idea, here in the West, how little our economy can support. I’m not the only one on the crew who is an educated professional. Thadeusz is a civil engineer. Matthias is a teacher of mathematics. But they cannot feed their families—I cannot feed mine—without the work here in your vineyards. If you fail, many people will suffer.”

  Marielle stood with her arms folded across her chest listening and absorbing Tomas’s message. Her burdens were increasing as if she were carrying a heavily laden basket of grapes on her shoulders. She shifted her weight and straightened her back, not willing to be daunted by the magnitude of the responsibility.

  “What are you proposing?”

  “I’ll stay behind in the evenings as we did last night and work with you. I can’t promise you success, but I can give you the tools you’ll need to make success possible. The rest is up to you, the weather, the market.”

  Marielle felt herself stiffen as her terror surfaced again—in broad daylight on the hillside instead of in the darkness and solitude of night.

  Tomas saw the expression on her face and felt a brief stab of compassion for her struggle to fill her father’s shoes.

  “There will always be risk. Always elements you can’t control. I can’t give you predictability and certainty, if that is what you’re looking for.”

  Marielle shook her head. She had learned with Max’s stroke that life was not predictable and certain. She understood intellectually that, even with as much science as she could get her hands on, she would still face obstacles. But in the past, she had always been able to rely on herself, find the resources within to solve her problems. She hated having to trust someone else.

  Tomas, taking her silence and stiffness as a refusal, shrugged and turned away with bitterness.

  “Fine, suit yourself. Find your own answers.”

  “Wait.”

  Marielle unclasped her tightly entwined arms and reached out to touch him on the shoulder. He stopped, but didn’t turn around.

  “I accept your offer. Please stay this evening.”

  He nodded brusquely. “Bring the harvest records for the last ten years. Perhaps we can identify some patterns.”

  And he walked away, pulling his gloves out of his pockets as he took up a position on the row where he had left off.

  That evening, after driving the rest of the crew back to the campground, Marielle prepared a platter of Parma ham, cheese and pickles and carried it out to the fermentation room where Tomas was making notations. They ate quickly and silently before spreading the records of the last decade across a worktable. Heads bent, they studied the numbers, pointing out exceptions or oddities, marginal notes of weather aberrations, anything that could give them clues to the success or failure of a vintage.

  They worked till nine. Marielle would have persisted, pushed herself to stay longer, but she felt guilty about keeping Tomas late the night before and knew she had to balance her need for him now with the work she knew awaited them the next day in the vineyard.

  “You should go, get some rest.”

  “So should you. You can’t make good decisions if you are sleep-deprived.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  She gathered up the paperwork and turned off the lights as Tomas pulled his bicycle from the shed. Although he was still an enigma to her, Marielle felt a sense of reassurance as she watched him pedal away toward the river. She shut the gate to the courtyard and closed the latch. Wrapping her sweater around her, she climbed the stairs to her room. Despite her agreement to get some rest, she did not sleep right away but studied her notes. She found no answers yet, but knew she had made a beginning.

  For the remainder of the harvest she met with Tomas nearly every night, listening, absorbing, struggling to assimilate what he had to impart. One evening he asked her to characterize each of the last ten years’ vintages—to describe them not with data but with words, images.

  “I don’t even remember some of them. I wasn’t here during many of those years.”

  “How can you be a vintner if you don’t know your own history? It’s one of my frustrations with the Party in Poland—they’re trying to create a new society without memory. You can’t abandon responsibility for what came before simply because you were sitting at a desk in Frankfurt. That’s not who you are anymore.”

  “These lessons are supposed to be about winemaking, not about who I am or am not.” Marielle spoke to him as she would have to a subordinate, not a colleague.

  “Very well. If you can’t remember then I suggest we retrieve bottles from each of the vintages and start tasting.”

  They trudged down to the wine cellar and began filling a crate with the long-necked brown bottles that were standard for the region. When the crate was full Marielle insisted on carrying it to the dumbwaiter and hoisting the rope that sent the load to the upper level.

  In silence she set out a basket of crackers and a tray full of tasting glasses etched with her mother’s seal. Then she began uncorking bottles.

  Her fury at being lectured by Tomas masked the fear she felt at having no definable identity. He was right that she was no longer a banker. But she had nothing to replace that role, nothing that was hers. To Janosch and the crew she was merely the daughter of the chief, not the chief herself. She assumed that Tomas also saw her as unformed, amorphous, filling the shape of whatever vessel was presented to her: the hardy field worker, shouldering as much weight as the men; or the dilettante vintner, acting the role but not truly embracing it. His accusation had stung so sharply because she felt so adrift, so unsuited for the title “vintner.” If she weren’t a banker anymore—and she wasn’t—or a vintner, who was she?

  When she finished uncorking all the bottles she started with the oldest and poured them a taste of 0.1 liter from every year and every vineyard. She picked up the first glass, looked Tomas in the eye and raised it slightly in a mock toast.

  “To your experiment.”

  With each glass she made notations, searching for words to describe each of the wines. Tomas drank with her. At first, Marielle was deliberately sullen, recording her impressions only in writing and not sharing them with Tomas. To her surprise, he didn’t object.

  “This isn’t an exam, you know. I’m not the teacher waiting for you to recite back my lectures. You’re your own teacher here.” And he raised his glass containing the 1969 Marcobrunn Spätlese.

  Tomas’s remark released some of the pressure she always felt to perform well at every task. As she proceeded deeper into the neat rows of glasses she had arrayed on the table, she began to make discoveries—subtle differences, echoes, textures. Max had taught her to appreciate and enjoy wine, but this evening with Tomas began to reveal a complexity and beauty that ten years’ worth of data had not. It also made her drunk. Even though they took only a sip from each glass, there were nevertheless many of them. Her reserve, the way she normally presented herself, began to dissolve. At one point she exclaimed over the quality of a wine she had just sipped and launched into a verbal description that reopened the conversation with Tomas. As she tasted and noted the year on the bottle, she pulled out of her memory anecdotes of particular experiences when she had worked the harvest.

  “The weather was so warm that year—not at all like now. I remember wearing a yellow t-shirt and shorts and the sweat dripping down my back.”

  “That was the year the Auslese won a gold medal. I came home for the dinner to congratulate my father. I was sitting next to him when one of hi
s colleagues asked what he had done differently that year and he answered that winemaking was like jazz. Improvisational. Inspired by the moment, by the energy of those around him, by the emotions churning within. By the willingness to shift tempo or key and head off in a new direction.”

  As she spoke the memories became less about the wine and more about her relationship with Max.

  “You’re very close to your father, aren’t you?” Tomas asked.

  “Yes. Are your parents still alive? Healthy?”

  “My mother is. She lives with us in Warsaw, works as a bookkeeper. My father died before I was born. My older sister, although she was only four, remembers the day when my mother, pregnant with me, learned of his death.”

  “I’m sorry—for her, and for you that you never knew your father.”

  “Janosch has been a father to me. My mother turned to him, her brother, and he stepped in. It’s because of him that I went to university and studied medicine. I was an angry boy in my teens. I wanted to be a musician.”

  “But you are a musician!”

  He lifted his eyebrows to question how she knew that. Marielle felt her face redden.

  “You were listening the other night?”

  “Sound travels in the house. I couldn’t help overhearing you. You were good. And you made my father happy, for which I’m most grateful.”

  “So you were watching, as well.”

  “I didn’t want to intrude. My father’s face was so blissful. If I had said anything, I would have broken your spell.”

  “I hope my daughter grows to love me as much as you love Max.”

  “Your daughter? How old is she? Is she with your wife while you are here?”

  “Magdalena is seven. My wife is gone and Magdalena lives with me and my mother and our old nanny who cared for my sister and me while my mother worked. Now she cares for Magdalena. I miss her. She doesn’t understand when I am away for so long. I worry that when I go back, she will turn away from me for abandoning her.”