MARIELLE HARTMANN was an only child, although this didn’t become significant to her until 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.
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Behind them the Taunus
Mountains formed a barrier against the cold north wind, and below them the
And as a woman, it was the
ground upon which Tomas Marek first stepped into her life.
October 1975
THE CLANG OF Marielle Hartmann’s alarm clock ricocheted off the walls of the bedroom that had been hers as a 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 that it was still dark outside. 4:00 a.m. 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 was 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, 184
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’d 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’d 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 gold-stemmed glasses etched with her family’s name and crest. She’d 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’d 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 was only now gaining appreciation from 185
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’d 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 she’d absorbed
and found fascinating. In the afternoons, as she’d sat at the dining table
doing homework, Anita had shared the workspace with her, managing the difficult
decisions about staffing and equipment purchases and production, 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
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
With Max and Anita’s
blessing, she’d left home to pursue her studies and create a life for herself
in the business world after graduating with honors from
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It was while she was away that Max’s grasp of winemaking and of his world had been obliterated in an instant by a stroke. He was no longer able to walk or speak, and had made little progress with his rehabilitation. Although she’d 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. Give me your opinion.”
“It’s excellent, Mama. One of the best, I think.”
Anita nodded. “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’d 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 planned after she’d 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 gazed straightforwardly across the table at Marielle. Anita had never been one to tell Marielle fairy tales when she was a little girl. Storytelling had been Max’s role. Anita was 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 187
dinners; who knew which harvest crews were the best; who’d 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, while 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 wineglass 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
Anita sat erect, carrying her responsibilities with uncomplaining acceptance. It was what she’d 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, 188
wrapping up the loose ends
of her life in
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 were readying themselves for the day.
Marielle steered her
mother’s old Volkswagen bus off the B43 highway that ran along the Rhine where
it jogged westward a little north of
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 predawn morning.
Marielle tapped her foot impatiently and watched 190
her breath, wishing she’d 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’d led the harvest crew for her family’s vineyards for the past ten years. Behind him, stooping to clear the doorway, followed a lanky, dark-haired younger man.
As if Janosch had given a signal, the doors of the other campers opened and within five minutes six more men stood stomping in a muddy circle around him. He spoke a few words in Polish, gestured toward the Volkswagen and led the others toward Marielle.
She got out of the car as they approached and held out her hand to Janosch.
“Greetings! Welcome back.”
Janosch reached up to pull off his woolen cap and smiled expansively. Marielle’s impatience dissipated as 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’d 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 191
headed out of the campground
and up to the Hartmann vineyards on the hillside known as Johannisberg—
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 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’d 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’d 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 192
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 stood on the edge. 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 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 sport shoes, and they were already soaked
through from the wet grass. Marielle’s own feet were still snug in their sturdy
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 193
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 anxiety and curiosity. Watching Tomas, observing not only his skill but also his clearly practiced eye, relieved her concern that he’d be an impediment to the harvest. But she couldn’t shake her unease at the fact that he 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 194
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.
Marielle pulled off her gloves and helped her mother pass out steaming mugs of coffee and the hearty whole-grain bread their neighbor Ute Meyer sold every morning in her bakery. Marielle watched and listened as the crew took their mugs and murmured “thank you.” Tomas approached and clasped the thick pottery handle Marielle held out to him, taking it from her 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. He resented the circumstances that forced him to be here, and he was irritated by Marielle’s undisguised oversight and distrust of his work. Janosch joined him for a few minutes, leaving an animated discussion with the older men of the crew. He placed his hand on Tomas’s shoulder and invited him to join the conversation. But Tomas shrugged and shook his head in refusal.
Marielle heard a sharpness in Janosch’s voice but didn’t understand 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 here for 195
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’s doing. I can’t complain, although I find him perplexing.”
“If you have any concerns about him, speak to Janosch. Don’t let anything go unremarked. I’ve got to get back to Papa. I’ll send Ute’s son up around
1:30 p.m. 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 into 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’d been both a
long-distance runner and a rower on her university’s four-women boat. During
her childhood, Max had been a member of the Rheingau’s kayak club and he’d
taught her to manage a single kayak on the rapidly moving
her and her team well, and she’d led them to a German and then a European championship.
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 otherwise 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 campgrounds after a brief 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 in the rearview mirror and saw him in an unguarded moment—eyes closed, skin sallow, weariness and worry etched on his face.
She said 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, soaking in a hot tub, she felt she could enumerate each muscle in her back, her thighs and her calves. She stretched 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, 197
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, 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’d 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 everything that needs to be done when you were also raising me?”
“I wasn’t alone, Marielle.”
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’d spent every October of her life from
childhood in these hills. She’d missed the last two years while she was in
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 her 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 Wein-brand—the limited edition brandy Max had made every other year. She’d 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.
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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 rminded her that she needed to get more rest.
“I saw the light on in the courtyard office at midnight 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. Marielle, 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 up 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, underripeness. 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 she’d 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 201
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’s 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 every Sunday.”
Marielle quickly washed up,
ran a comb through her long hair and put on the navy-blue suit she’d worn on
the train from
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
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 up the aisle with Anita and knelt beside her as the priest approached the altar. Remembering the prayers, she followed along, echoing the responses out of respect for her mother, but she felt a great distance between herself and what was unfolding before her. During the sermon her mind and her glance wandered, as she observed the mostly older congregants listening intently to the priest’s droning.
Her gaze stopped abruptly, however, when she recognized a man off to the side by the Madonna’s altar. Tomas Marek wasn’t listening to the priest, but stood 202
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’ve 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 up 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 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’d 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 was away. That was the only answer she could imagine as she climbed the stairs. As she got closer, she realized that what she was 203
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 slipped quietly into the living 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 then exuberant. 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 minutes before retracing her steps 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 new role in the business and her right to be in the office, Marielle had not yet abandoned the feeling that she was an interloper—an imposter 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 riffling through the papers not for a management reason but a personal one.
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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
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.
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.”
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“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 she went on.
“Janosch has the same instincts as Papa. You’re not going to find what you’re looking for 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 didn’t 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.
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If Janosch thought she was incompetent, his opinion might spill over to the others and she’d 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 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’d 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 she knew she had to make over the next few weeks.
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.
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She slid ungraciously into her chair, 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 her 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’d picked that day.
Marielle knew that without looking at the label. Max had taught her that each of their patchwork of fields— both contiguous as well as scattered and each with its own name—produced distinctively flavored wines. All 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 was 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’d loved to accompany 209
him on the Feast of the Ascension, when he’d led a group of guests on a hike throughout their vineyards. At each field a trestle table had been set up with 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’d 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 she’d 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’d been at his side 210
you would know them, as well, instead of searching in the pages of a book.”
Marielle felt her face redden, her humiliation intensified by Tomas’s presence. Although she’d followed her father around as a little girl, she’d abandoned his side once her studies began. From the time she was fourteen she’d 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 event in order to study. Hadn’t that paid off for her? She’d won a place in economics at a prestigious university, graduated with honors, been hired immediately by Deutsche Bank, the only woman to secure such 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, poring over columns of numbers and pages of graphs, always prepared at meetings where she was the only woman at the table. She’d been relentless with herself in learning as much as she could and had earned respect for her diligence and intelligence. It hadn’t been easy, but it had been familiar territory, 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 211
at a table whose scratches and patina she knew intimately. Their drab and ill-fitting Eastern European clothing, their slumped and weary postures and unshaven faces were a sharp contrast to the bankers in their tailored suits. But Marielle was intimidated by these men, resistant to what Janosch was trying to teach her and frustrated that he couldn’t articulate what she needed in a way she could understand. It wasn’t 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 her notebook, finally giving in to everyone’s fatigue and the knowledge that the next day would be upon them far too soon. She offered to drive the men to the campground but Tomas told her 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 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 long she’d 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 didn’t realize how much help I needed.”
“It’s not the time that my uncle regretted as much as 212
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 light 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.”
“And what do you believe?”
“I’m somewhere in the
middle. I have great respect for my uncle and I understand his frustration with
the factory mentality of the Party’s approach to winemaking in
“So you disagree with your uncle?”
“To a certain extent. For example, I don’t think you’re 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 of winemaking that I think I can show you what you need to learn. 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?”
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“Because my uncle is a
friend of your father’s 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
Marielle stood with her arms folded across her chest listening and absorbing Tomas’s message. Her burdens were increasing, as if she carried 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?” she asked.
“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.
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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’s what you’re looking for.”
Marielle shook her head. She’d 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’d 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 as a refusal, shrugged and turned away.
“Fine, suit yourself.”
“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’d left off.
That evening, after driving
the rest of the crew back to the campground, Marielle prepared a platter of
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 about 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 that awaited them the next day.
“You should go, get some rest.”
“So should you. You can’t make good decisions if you’re sleep-deprived.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
As she gathered up the paperwork and turned off the lights, 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 didn’t sleep right away but studied her notes. She found no answers yet, but knew she’d 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.
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“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
“These lessons are supposed to be about winemaking, not 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 filled 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 217
dilettante vintner, acting the role but not truly embracing it. His accusation had stung so sharply because she felt adrift, unsuited for the title of “vintner.” If she wasn’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 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 a 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 into the neat rows of glasses she’d 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 218
normally presented herself, began to dissolve. At one point she exclaimed over the quality of a wine she’d 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’d worked the harvest.
“The weather was so warm that year—not 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 his colleagues asked what he’d done differently and he answered that winemaking was like jazz. Improvisational. Inspired by the moment, by the energy of those around him, by the emotions 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
“I’m sorry—for her, and for you that you never knew your father.”
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“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 raised his eyebrows to question how she knew that. Marielle felt her face redden.
“You were listening the night I played for your father?”
“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’d said anything, I would’ve 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’re here?”
“
“Don’t worry. Speaking as a daughter, I can assure you that she’ll forgive you.”
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The glasses were empty. The notebook was full. It was 1:00 a.m.
“I should help you wash up before I head back to the campground.” He rose and began to place glasses on the tray.
“I’m concerned about you cycling back at this late hour, and I’ve had too much wine to drive you. Why don’t you sleep here? I can make a bed for you on the couch in the office.”
“No, it’s too much trouble. I’ll be careful.”
“It’s no trouble at all. If you don’t stay, I’ll worry about your safety all night. Would you start the washing up while I get the bedding?”
Marielle left before he could protest again and tiptoed up to her room to retrieve pillows and a duvet from her trunk. By the time she’d made up a bed for him, he was placing the last glass on the drying rack.
She handed him a towel and a bar of soap and pointed out the bathroom.
“I’ll have a mug of coffee waiting for you in the kitchen at 5:00 a.m. Sleep well. And thank you.”
Tomas watched as she turned and walked up the stairs, notebook tucked under her arm. It had been a long time since he had revealed so much of himself. He wasn’t sure if it had been the wine or the vulnerable young woman whose memories had released his own.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Marielle experienced a far different form of Tomas’s help. A rainstorm rose quickly in the vineyard late in the afternoon, an isolated squall that came with little warning, black clouds looming over the mountains carrying a disastrous cargo of water and wind. Because their backs were turned from the mountains and the sky across the river to the south was still a luminous blue, the harvest crew didn’t sense the storm until it was upon them. Huge drops of rain fell first, splattering across head and hands, shaking the broad leaves, sending the birds on the hillside into scattered flight.
Normally, rain didn’t deter the pickers. Although uncomfortable, they continued on, sometimes at a slower pace as shears became slippery or visibility blurred. But Janosch, emptying a load of grapes into the wagon, saw the ominous blackness descending and yelled in warning to Marielle and the rest of the crew. A bolt of lightning arced down into the trees above them. He threw a canvas tarp over the wagon and secured it with rope just as the deluge began.
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Marielle called the others away from the vines and most of them withdrew to huddle under the long flaps of the canvas. Tadeusz, on the eastern side of the row, motioned that he’d finish his side, with only a few meters to go. Marielle nodded an okay.
She watched in dismay as the rain pelted the fragile fruit, unsure how much of it would withstand the downpour. The rain was so heavy that it had already cut into the aisles between the vines, forming streams of mud and stones that poured down the hillside.
Suddenly, a swath of churning water came rushing toward them from above, bringing with it the debris of the hillside to the north—broken vines, rocks the size of a man’s head, a pair of rusted and forgotten shears, a glove.
“The creek that runs across the field must have overrun its banks,” Janosch shouted to her over the din of the hammering rain.
Their location huddled around the wagon placed them just beyond the reach of the rising water that was gathering momentum as it raced down the hillside. Except for Tadeusz, who couldn’t hear their shouts and didn’t see the water until it was at his knees.
The others watched in horror as the water lifted him, carrying him away as if he were a leaf and not a 150pound man. He grabbed hold of a branch but the force of the water was so strong that it ripped the whole vine out of the earth with its root intact and swept them both farther down the hillside. Marielle saw the fear in Tadeusz’s eyes as the water turned him on his back and he disappeared over the next drop in the hill.
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Tomas and Matthias bolted from the shelter of the wagon, parallel to the destructive channel formed by the roiling water. They found Tadeusz unconscious, his body halted by an outcropping of rock. They managed to pull him away from the rising water to soggy but safer ground. Marielle, her fears for her grapes now replaced by concern for Tadeusz, ran to meet them.
Tomas was bent over Tadeusz’s limp body, breathing into his mouth, then beginning chest compressions. He worked silently and confidently, undeterred by the blood streaming for Tadeusz’s forehead where he’d been battered by the rocks.
Marielle stood back with Matthias, sheets of rain drenching her, as Tomas continued. When he saw her, he asked her to protect Tadeusz’s head from the rain. She stripped off her waterproof anorak and held it over him, keeping the water away from his face. Tomas worked tirelessly, his movements purposeful and focused, alternating between compressions and breathing.
Finally, Tadeusz coughed, his chest heaving, and Tomas rolled him onto his side as muddy water was expelled from his mouth. With Tadeusz breathing on his own, Tomas carefully checked him for bruises. It was then that he and Marielle saw the oddly twisted orientation of his left leg.
“The impact of being thrown against the rock must have broken it,” he said. He shouted to Matthias, “Can you find me something to use as a splint?”
Matthias returned with a discarded post that looked 224
long enough and strong enough for Tomas’s purpose. Marielle took the cotton scarf from around her neck and tore it into strips. At Tomas’s direction, she held Tadeusz’s head in her lap.
“Hold him down if you can. This is going to be excruciatingly painful for him.”
With deft, sure hands, Tomas aligned the broken leg and bound it to the splint.
“That should prevent further damage until we can get him off the hillside.”
The rain continued unabated. Marielle was reluctant to risk another life by sending someone down to lower ground to obtain help and decided to wait out the storm. From her vantage point, she could see that the village square had been flooded by the overflowing creek. Flashes from fire engines and rescue vehicles indicated that the danger and destruction had not been confined to the vineyards.
Marielle and Tomas were soaked to the skin. Tomas had removed his coat to cover Tadeusz to conserve his body temperature. He held Tadeusz’s hand, occasionally checking his pulse, and spoke to him in calming tones. Marielle stroked his head, which she still supported in her lap. Although the color had drained from his face and it was creased in pain, he was conscious and breathing.
Tomas looked across at Marielle and nodded.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thank you. You saved his life.”
As the rain finally subsided, Marielle saw headlights 225
climbing the hill and realized with relief that it was Anita in the station wagon. She brought with her the news that two people had drowned, trapped in a basement apartment. A pregnant woman and her little girl had been swept through the village in their Volkswagen, but had managed to escape when the car collided with a streetlight in the square.
After Anita’s arrival, they improvised a stretcher and carried Tadeusz to the car. Tomas rode with him to the hospital in Eltville, and Marielle turned to her rain-soaked, debris-strewn land. She sent the crew down with the wagon to the winery when she could see that the water below had receded, but stayed on the hillside by herself to assess how much she’d lost.
She trekked across the fields, counting up the damaged rows, holding back her fear. The destruction was limited to the single field where they’d been working that afternoon, a result of the path taken by the unleashed creek. Although the crew would need to spend a day or two at the end of the harvest in clean up, most of the grapes still on the vine had been spared. She was grateful for that, but more grateful for the life spared that afternoon and for Tomas’s presence on the hillside—and in her life.
AFTER THE STORM, Marielle’s confidence grew as she tackled the remaining days of the harvest. The yield promised to be higher than she’d anticipated. The weather held, and only the small acreage near the house was left when the first frost settled on the valley. The crew had the vines picked clean by the time the sun began to warm the earth—perfect conditions for ice wine. Although she still had much ahead of her before the success of the vintage would be apparent, Marielle no longer felt out of control or terrorized by what she didn’t know.
The morning of November 11
dawned crisp and clear. It was Martinstag, the feast of
Schmid’s white stallion,
whose bridle was decorated as lavishly as Joseph himself, and horse and rider
arrived in the square in front of the church. A hundred children from the
kindergarten and the elementary school waited impatiently with their parents,
lanterns hanging from long sticks swinging restlessly in their small hands. As
soon as Joseph took his place at the head of the line, the firemen’s band
brought their horns to their lips and began to play. Parents lit the lanterns
and the procession moved forward, the horse prancing and the children singing
about the unselfish
All along the route of the procession, townspeople watched, some joining in the singing and walking with the children. By darkness they’d come to an open field at the edge of the village, where the fire brigade had built a towering pile of scrap wood and roped it off. The children formed a circle around the wood. Joseph dismounted, removed his red cloak and draped it over Gregor Sperling, who’d played the beggar with great gusto every year since he’d graduated from high school. Then Joseph took a torch from a waiting colleague and lit the wood.
To the excitement of the children, the fire rose quickly through the towering pile. Ute Meyer began moving around the outer circle, distributing her large, doughy pretzels encrusted with salt crystals.
Marielle had not attended
the
had walked down to the field with the procession when it passed by the winery and she stood now, pulling apart one of Ute’s pretzels as the flames crackled and shot into the air.
Tomas had been leaving
Gruber’s Appliance Store where he’d spent some of his harvest earnings on a
toaster and a Bosch coffeemaker for his mother. He saw the bobbing lanterns of
the children turn the corner at the end of the square and felt a pang for
When he got to the bonfire he saw Marielle across the clearing and watched her face in the firelight. He saw both exhaustion and tenacity reflected in her expression. Her hair fell in loose waves around her shoulders instead of in the severe braid she’d worn throughout the harvest. He had considered her attractive before, but in a conventional way. Tonight, however, watching her in an unguarded moment, singing with the children, he was touched by her vulnerability and openness. She looked beautiful to him. An unexpected wave of tenderness washed over him as he stood on the periphery of the circle. Her circle. Her life. Not his, he reminded himself, and turned away with his shopping bags.
The next morning, their campers stowed with Miele washing machines and other West German goods pur229
chased with some of the Deutschmarks they’d earned, the Polish crew got ready to depart from the campground. As Tomas and Janosch made final preparations, Marielle pulled into the clearing and jumped out of the car. She had two packages in her arms and breathlessly approached the two men.
“I was worried that you’d already left,” she murmured. “I had these for you last night, but you didn’t come by.” She tried not to sound plaintive, but her voice was tinged with disappointment and internally she winced at her own neediness.
“I wanted to say thank you, to both of you.”
She handed Janosch the larger bundle. “My mother told me of your fondness for hazelnuts. I hope you enjoy this.”
To Tomas she held out a flat package about the size of a book.
“On Sundays I did some painting. I’ve noticed how you look out over the valley during breaks and I thought you might like this small memento.”
Tomas unwrapped the package and held up a watercolor of the scene that had surrounded him for the last six weeks.
“Thank you.” He took Marielle’s hand and shook it. “Goodbye. My best wishes to your parents.”
Marielle stood in the middle of the campground as the crew formed a caravan and headed out onto the highway. She stared after the gray ribbon of ancient vehicles until it was out of sight.
ON JANUARY 5 Max died in his sleep. He had enjoyed the Christmas holidays with Anita and Marielle and watched the fireworks on New Year’s Eve from the upstairs parlor windows that looked out over the river. It had been too cold to take him to the top of the hillside where he and Marielle had always watched when she was a girl.
Anita came to wake Marielle. She was still in her robe and slippers and Marielle knew immediately that something had happened. It was unlike Anita not to be dressed for the day well before Marielle ventured from her bed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked her mother as Anita gently called her name.
“Papa is gone.” And she took Marielle in her arms.
After the funeral Marielle helped Anita sort and answer the condolences that had flooded into the winery as news of Max’s death had spread. In the stack of envelopes that had not yet been opened she found one with a Polish stamp addressed to her. She reacted 231
with a sharp physical pain in her chest, as if she’d been startled by a loud noise in the middle of the night. She put the envelope aside to open later in the privacy of her room.
The paper was a thin, cheaply made sheet the color of dirty dishwater and the words had been formed with a ballpoint pen that skipped occasionally. But as she read the words she saw Tomas’s long fingers moving across the page and heard his voice as if they were sitting in the winery late at night. His letter was tender and thoughtful, remembering how much Marielle had loved Max and calling to mind the images she’d described the night she drank too much.
“You hold much of your father within yourself. Don’t forget that as you mourn him, because he lives on in you. He was a fortunate man to have a daughter like you, Marielle, and I know he loved you.”
For the first time since the morning of Max’s death, Marielle cried, trying not to spill her tears on the fragile paper for fear it would disintegrate. That Tomas understood her loss and the special nature of her connection to her father touched her deeply. His empathy spoke to what Marielle believed must be his relationship to his own daughter. But it took her breath away that he understood the guilt she felt in not being the natural vintner Max had been. Throughout the fall she’d berated herself for not paying more attention when she was younger, for not being present for so much of her adult life. When she’d left home for university and the wider world, she wondered if Max had ever regretted her 232
going or felt that she’d turned her back on him. She wondered if Max had even been aware that she’d taken on his responsibilities in those last months.
As these thoughts
overwhelmed her, her body was engulfed in sobs—both for her father and for the
man in
The next morning she woke at dawn to Tomas’s letter on her night table and sat at her desk, still wearing her nightgown, to answer him. She expressed her gratitude for his understanding and for the kindness he’d shown Max during the harvest. She reminded him of the joy she’d seen on Max’s face the night Tomas played the piano for him. She didn’t trust herself to write about the depth of her own feelings when she’d read Tomas’s note. She didn’t reveal how deeply he’d touched her and how much he’d seen into her soul.
Later that morning she added her letter to the stack of acknowledgments she’d written for Anita and took them to the post office. And then she waited, not conscious that she was keeping track of the days it would take for the post to reach Warsaw, be delivered and read by Tomas, allow him to respond and then for the response to travel back to her. That she was waiting for a reply seemed foolish to her—ridiculous to want something so unattainable. He’d probably written merely out of courtesy and by accident had found the words that spoke so directly to her. He had no intention, she was sure, of continuing the correspondence. When two weeks had passed without a reply, she acknowledged that her expectations had indeed been unrealistic, and 233
she was relieved that she’d been restrained in her reply
to him.
She tried to put him out of her mind.
She threw herself into the winter rhythm of the winery—preparations for the bottling of the harvest, calls to customers confirming their orders, plans to schedule the concerts and performances that took place every summer in the courtyard, equipment maintenance that needed to be done. She was in the office on the morning of February 14 when she heard the doorbell. Anita had gone to do the marketing so Marielle answered the door. Maria Marangoudakis, a Greek immigrant who ran the florist shop in the railroad station, stood on the stoop with an elaborately wrapped bouquet.
“It’s for you, Marielle—not
a late funeral arrangement. The request came by wire from
She handed over the flowers with a twinkle in her eye and climbed back onto her bicycle. The attached cart was filled with more flowers destined for others in the village who would soon be smiling as broadly as Marielle.
Marielle took the bouquet into the winery kitchen to find a vase large enough for the dozen long-stemmed roses that she discovered under the layers of cellophane and yards of ribbon. The roses were a deep burgundy with petals like velvet. Tucked deep inside the center of the bouquet was an envelope with her name on it, scrawled in Maria’s hand. But inside the envelope was the printed copy of the wire itself, with the order for the roses and the text of the message. Her hand trembled as she unfolded the yellow sheet of paper and read what it held.
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Dear Marielle,
Happy Valentine’s Day! Although such frivolities are discouraged, I thought that a gift of flowers for you alone (and not simply in memory of your dear father) would be a way to brighten what has been a dark winter for you. Your note reminded me of the many hours I spent at your side during the harvest and how much I miss your curiosity and drive and tenacity. I have framed the painting you gave me and it hangs in my office at the clinic—a constant reminder of the woman who painted it and what she sees every day. It links me to you. Forgive me if the roses are inap-propriate—a gift that should come from a lover rather than a friend. I thought of making up some excuse about florists only having roses today, but the truth is, I asked for roses.
Yours,
Tomas
Marielle read the note over and over, her eyes leaping from one phrase to the next. Were these the words of a friend, or of a man who wished to be more than a friend? Why had he chosen Valentine’s Day to send the flowers if he only intended a gesture of friendship? Why was she feeling such turmoil? She wanted with all her heart to simply enjoy the lush and lavish burst of color and not agonize over its meaning. She was shocked by how quickly her perception of Tomas had changed when he’d written her after Max’s death and understood her 235
so clearly. Had she been denying her own feelings toward him? Had those feelings only been allowed to blossom after he’d left and was no longer a man she employed—a man who was a thousand kilometers away? Marielle didn’t know what to do with her feelings.
She brought the vase into the office and placed it on her desk, where its emphatic presence filled her sight and she could inhale its rich scent.
When Anita returned she stopped in the office and saw the bouquet.
“Who are these from?”
“Tomas Marek.”
Anita looked at Marielle with curiosity.
Marielle shrugged. She wasn’t ready to admit her wonder at what was happening between her and Tomas.
“A belated condolence,” she explained. “I’ll send him a thank-you note.”
That evening, Marielle
struggled with her response. She was surprised by her longing for Tomas, a
longing that had been muffled through the winter by the strain of Max’s
deteriorating condition and death. She’d been so preoccupied with the impending
loss of her father that she hadn’t recognized her sense of loss after Tomas’s
departure. She’d been lonely during the winter, but she’d thought it was
because she’d left friends and colleagues behind in
Rheingau, it had become increasingly rare for her friends to visit. Evenings spent laughing over a glass of wine as a release from the pressures of business were no longer a part of her life. But she realized she didn’t miss those evenings at all. She realized that what she missed were Tomas Marek’s hands—gesturing in the dim light of the fermentation room as he explained a concept, or cradling a cluster of grapes in the autumn sunshine, or brushing against hers as he gathered up the papers strewn across her desk.
She tried to imagine him in
That longing was impossible to fulfill. It stilled her own hands, and she found she couldn’t write to him at all.
The next morning she sent a brief wire assuring him the flowers had arrived, that they were beautiful and that she was deeply moved by his words and his gift. She didn’t want to appear ungrateful for what had been an extraordinary expense for him. She was overwhelmed, in fact, by the extravagance of what he’d done and said. But she held in check her hope that the longing she felt was shared by him.
She spent the day impatient and irritable, thrusting 237
crates of empty bottles out of her way, when two days before she’d stacked them in the courtyard exactly where she’d wanted them. She broke the pen she was using to fill out some order forms when she pressed too hard, splattering ink across the page and onto her shirt. In the kitchen at midday she slammed cupboard doors and tore open a package of noodles, spilling most of them on the floor.
Anita, as if dealing with an unruly toddler, said nothing and retrieved her dustpan and whiskbroom from the closet and began sweeping up.
“I’m sorry, Mama. Let me clean up the mess.”
“It’s nothing, almost done. Why don’t you put the water on to boil and I’ll finish.”
“I can’t seem to do anything right today. Everything, even the slightest inconvenience, is annoying me.”
“When you were younger, you used to act like this when you had to make a choice about something and were afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of taking a risk. When you were learning to walk, you couldn’t quite bring yourself to let go and take a step. But it made you so angry that you’d throw your toys. You wanted so much to go, but a part of you always held back. Cautious. Tentative. Your frustration was so palpable. Like it is now.”
Marielle looked at her mother.
“What’s holding you back? Are you afraid he doesn’t love you as much as you love him? We never truly know another’s feelings. It’s like the leap of faith 238
you had to take this fall with the vintage. Trust your instincts, even when you don’t have all the data. And believe me, any other woman who received a bouquet like you did yesterday would consider that all the data she needed.”
“How did you know?”
“I knew before he left here in November. You may not have recognized it in yourselves, but when the two of you were together you radiated. I saw him watching you when you weren’t aware of it. He couldn’t take his eyes off you.”
“It’s hopeless, of course.
That’s why I’m so paralyzed. He’s in
“If you ask me, the Pandora’s Box has already been opened, and if you try to stuff your feelings back in, you’ll just face more days like today filled with anger and frustration.
“Your father and I were separated for years during the war. Months went by with no word from him. But our love survived. You’ll find a way.”
“What should I do?”
“I can’t tell you that, Marielle. But you’ll know. Be still and listen—to yourself and to him.”
The next day, her answer came in the form of another wire from Tomas.
“Come to
And she did.
April 1976
HER BAGS WERE FILLED with gifts. A doll and picture books for Magdalena; stockings and well-made gloves for Tomas’s mother, Halina; handkerchiefs and a merino wool shawl for Nyanya, the nurse who had cared for Tomas as a child and now looked after Magdalena; and food for the Easter meal—ham and oranges and cheese and fresh peas. She also brought some of Anita’s plum preserves and cookies that she’d baked herself the night before she left and packed between layers of waxed paper in a tin.
The train ride was long and
complicated, across
240
Exhausted, she arrived in
At the end of the platform
she put down her bags and waited. There was a grayness to the building and to
the faces surrounding her. Soldiers with Kalishnikov rifles slung over their
shoulders patrolled the main concourse. In contrast to the hectic pace of the
She was startled when she felt a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he murmured as she turned toward him.
She took in his gaze, his dark eyes ringed by circles of fatigue, his skin no longer showing the effects of six weeks in the open autumn air but reflecting the same gray-tinged pallor she’d seen on others in the station. She reached up to touch the face she’d been imagining 241
for weeks as his hands encircled her shoulders and he bent to kiss her.
At first, he offered her the platonic continental greeting of a kiss on each cheek. But the proximity of their bodies, the sensation of his cheek against her skin and the memory of his scent as he leaned in toward her caused her to move closer into the circle of his arms. The tension of the long journey began to loosen and her body softened, molding itself to the contours of Tomas’s angular frame.
He was thinner than she remembered as he pulled her even closer, wrapping his arms tightly around her. His lips moved from her cheek to her mouth and she felt as if he was breathing life into her, not only reviving her after the exhausting journey, but also filling her up after the emptiness and loss of the winter.
He didn’t stop kissing her. After her mouth, he kissed her eyes, her neck, her fingertips. A smile lit her face and he laughed out loud.
“I can’t believe you’re here and in my arms.”
“I can’t believe it, either. I don’t recognize myself right now. I feel like a madwoman or an addict.”
He lifted her. She felt the strength in his arms and placed herself in his care, allowing him to carry not only her body but her spirit.
“My mother and
He gathered her suitcases and led her to the street and the trolley.
242
She sat by the window and at his urging looked out at the city instead of at him. He held her hand, his long fingers entwined with hers, gently stroking as if to convince them both that their presence together was real, confirmed by the evidence of touch, skin, pulse.
They changed trolleys twice before arriving at his apartment block on the outskirts of the city. There was no elevator and he carried her bags up the narrow staircase to the sixth floor. Vestiges of cabbage and onion permeated the stairwell. They passed others descending the stairs and Marielle was aware of the blatant glances sweeping over her from her head to her shoes. Everything about her looks and her clothing screamed “Western economy.” She had noted as she watched from the tram that even the young women were dressed drably in shapeless clothing. She’d never considered herself overly concerned with style, but her well-made skirt and sweater and especially her shoes had drawn excessive interest.
She wondered if she would be causing Tomas difficulty as so obviously a Western woman.
When they got to the landing, she stopped worrying about the impact of her clothing. She could hear the chatter of a young girl, querulous and insistent, behind one of the doors, and a much older voice answering her.
Tomas placed his key in the lock.
“Papa!”
Marielle stepped back as
whirled around with
She rose and stretched out her hand to Marielle.
“I am Halina Marek, mother of Tomas, sister of Janosch, who tells me many things of your family and your vineyards,” she said in German. “My sympathy at the loss of your father. Janosch had great respect and love for him.”
Marielle took her hand and returned the firm grasp, knowing that Halina, while gracious, was measuring her. Marielle had no doubt that Halina, like her own mother, had recognized the depth of Tomas’s feelings.
244
She was acutely conscious of her position as an intruder in this house full of women—all of whom had their own special connection to Tomas. She wondered if he was equally aware, or oblivious to the impact of her presence here.
She glanced around the cramped space and wondered if she and Tomas would find the privacy to explore the physical closeness they’d tasted at the Central Station. Perhaps she should’ve insisted on booking a hotel when he’d first suggested she come. She hadn’t wanted to impose on their hospitality; now she felt even more the disruption that her visit was causing.
But her concerns were postponed by the noisy bustling of Nyanya, who marched into the room with a steaming soup tureen.
“Zupa!” she declared, depositing the bowl on the table and gesturing for everyone to sit.
After the meal, Marielle
distributed her gifts.
Marielle volunteered to help her, an offer that was noted but refused by the old woman. She did allow Marielle to carry the packages into the kitchen and Marielle then understood that it was Nyanya’s domain. The narrow room had barely enough space for one 245
person to work. In one corner was a bed that had been the old woman’s since she’d arrived from the countryside thirty years before to care for the infant Tomas. Under the bed were all her worldly possessions, stored in salvaged cardboard boxes and fastened with saved string.
Tomas and Marielle spent the
afternoon in the park with
Marielle bit her lip and forced back the tears that were too close to the surface. She would not mar the three days she had on her visa by wallowing in what 246
was denied to her. She got up from the bench and found a piece of chalk by the edge of the playground’s asphalt surface. Kneeling, she sketched out the boxes for hopscotch, then searched the bare ground for a flat stone.
Curious,
“Nie!” He shook his head and pointed to Marielle. “It’s Marielle’s turn!”
Marielle held her breath, half expecting the girl to throw the stone on the ground and stalk away. But something in her father’s tone clearly warned her that was not acceptable. She reluctantly held the stone out to Marielle, and Marielle smiled at her.
“Dziekuje˛.”
The girl turned to her father. “She speaks Polish?”
“She’s trying. Maybe you can teach her.”
They finished the game, with
On the walk back to the
apartment they counted in singsong,
After supper that evening,
Tomas explained the sleeping arrangements. Marielle was to have the single
bedroom, normally occupied by Halina and
247
They would sleep on the sofa
beds in the living room and Tomas planned to sleep at a neighbor’s on the floor
below. Marielle, dismayed at the disruption, insisted on sleeping on the sofa
and allowing Halina and
“It’s not Riesling, but it’s our national drink,” she said, as they toasted the friendship between the two families.
Around midnight Janosch took his leave and Halina said good-night. Nyanya had long before closed the kitchen door, muttered her prayers and turned out the light.
Tomas smiled at Marielle.
“You’ve survived your first day.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No. I expected you to charm all of them. And though you may not believe it or realize it, you have.”
He took a step toward her and pulled her to him. She felt the warmth of his breath on her neck, the security of his arms around her, his lean body against her own. He kissed her slowly, so many times that she lost count, and once again found herself melting into him, rigidity giving way to a softness and a willingness that was new to her. She had never known herself to be so pliant. She felt him slip his arm under her and carry her to the 248
bed. For an instant he left her there and she was bereft, but he had moved away only to turn off the light. The immediate darkness was total. No streetlights burned outside the apartment to cast even a hazy illumination through the window and there was no moon. She felt him before he was close enough to see the outline of his face. He stretched his body the length of hers and pulled the duvet over them. Despite the April date, temperatures still dropped at night and they’d shut off the heater hours before to conserve fuel. Warmth spread through her from his closeness and her own surging blood. He began to kiss her again in silence, and then moved his hands down her body.
Marielle wasn’t without
experience with men. She had had a steady boyfriend in university and had
stumbled through the awkward couplings that had come at the end of long hours
of studying or Saturday-evening gatherings where too much alcohol had been
consumed. After graduation they’d drifted apart, especially when Marielle had
gotten the prestigious offer from Deutsche Bank. For a while she’d dated
another expatriate while she was living in
she now heard nothing but Tomas’s steady breathing and his heart, beating beneath her hand.
They made love in silence, with only the gentle escape of a sigh as, freed from the layers of clothing and restraint they’d carried all day, their skin first made contact—belly to belly, legs wrapped around each other, arms taking each other in. In the past, Marielle had often felt as if she were outside her body when she’d had sex, watching herself go through the motions, responding to touch, following the lead of her partner, but never fully engaged. For the first time in her life, Marielle was no longer an observer, but lost in the midst of a deep pleasure that seemed to obliterate the distance she’d always kept between herself and others. She was surprised by how emboldened she was, how hungry for Tomas and his body. She pulled him into her, wrapping herself tightly around him, aware of her power as she felt him respond to her with a hunger as aching and desperate as her own.
She didn’t know herself as she felt the boundaries between her body and his dissolve, ignoring the geographic and political boundaries that had dominated her thoughts in the weeks leading up to this night. Their lovemaking allowed her to forget, if only for these few hours, what separated them. Surrounded by the dark nothingness that disguised the limits of Tomas’s life, she let those limits slip away—the bleak apartment block; the cramped flat crowded not just with furniture and belongings but also with the unfulfilled needs of the three people who loved Tomas so intently; the constant 250
sense of struggle to meet even the most basic necessities of life. For a blissful few hours the darkness and the silence gave Marielle and Tomas only each other, because that was all they could perceive. Heartbeat, breath, lips, hands were their only reality.
They fell asleep briefly, their bodies slick with sweat beneath the comforter despite the chill in the room. At
3:00 a.m. they woke and made love again, but with a more bittersweet mood. He murmured that Nyanya would be awake soon and he’d have to at least make the pretense of having slept on his neighbor’s sofa. He drew away, kissing her lips and then her forehead and then her now-tangled hair as he rose from the bed. He pulled on his pants and sweater and eased himself out the door of the apartment.
Marielle rolled over to where Tomas had lain, breathed in his familiar scent and hugged herself as she tried to close her eyes to the approaching dawn and the encroachments of Tomas’s life.
Morning began early in the
Marek household. It was Easter Sunday. Nyanya was up at five to begin preparations
for the meal. By six,
251
She threw back the comforter
and forced herself up, taking the bathrobe she hadn’t used the night before out
of her suitcase and slipping it on just as Magdalena opened the bedroom door.
Marielle, toothbrush in hand, was on her way to the bathroom as
“Where’s my papa?” she asked Marielle in Polish.
Although she understood the question, Marielle’s grasp of the language wasn’t enough to answer.
From the bedroom, Halina answered her granddaughter.
“He spent the night with
“Not yet, Grandma. Breakfast, first,” and she ran to the kitchen.
Marielle washed up quickly
in the bathroom, cautious of the limited water supply, and dressed in the
living room while
She made the bed and stored the pillows and linens in the storage compartment under the mattress. Smoothing down the skirt of her suit, she went into the kitchen.
It was warm with steam rising from the boiling potatoes. Cucumbers, peeled and sliced paper thin, were 252
draining in a colander over the sink. A bowl of pastry dough covered with a kitchen towel was rising at the back of the stove. Nyanya gestured to the pot of coffee on the burner and got up to cut her a slice of bread. She held out an egg, as well, but Marielle replied with a “No, thank you.”
The little girl asked her something, but Marielle didn’t understand.
“Nie rozumiem.” I don’t understand.
“Who?”
Marielle pointed to herself. “I did.”
When Nyanya realized what was going on, she shooed them out of the kitchen.
“No hair in here!” she scolded.
Marielle took her coffee and
moved into the living room with
contact with a child. With
no siblings, she hadn’t had the opportunity to be “Auntie” to anyone, and she
had grown distant from the women she’d gone to high school with who now had
children. It was comforting to have
When she finished, she dug a
compact out of her purse, opened it and put the mirror in
At that moment Tomas entered
the apartment. He was brought to a standstill by the sight of Marielle and
Magdalena side by side with the same hairstyle— Marielle’s a deep chestnut and
“Good morning, my ladies,” he said, his eyes lingering on Marielle as the color rose in her cheeks. She wasn’t sure how she’d get through the day when she felt a sense memory sweep over her body as Tomas took her in with his eyes.
“Papa, look at my hair! Just like Janina and Kasia.”
She twirled around.
“You look like a very grown-up young lady. Grandma must be very happy that you sat still long enough for her to braid it.”
“Grandma didn’t do it! She did.”
“Marielle? Did you thank her for such a beautiful job?” Halina had come into the room and touched Mag-dalena’s braids. She held a circle of brightly colored artificial flowers decorated with blue ribbons.
254
“Dziekuje˛,” murmured
“Would you like to wear the
flowers to church?” Halina set the flowers on her head and
“Now you look like a proper young Polish lady.”
Together, the whole family,
including Nyanya in her black dress, walked to church,
After church, Marielle
helped Halina set the table while Nyanya finished the meal and Tomas and
“He has so little time with her, he must make the most of the weekends,” Halina confided. “It’s never enough for her. She’s afraid of losing him the way she lost her mother.”
It was the first mention of Tomas’s wife. Marielle was 255
torn between wanting to know and wanting to deny her existence. In the end, she decided that she needed to know.
“How?” she asked.
“She left for work one day
and didn’t come back.
“Did he find her?” Marielle realized she wanted the answer to be yes, wanted Tomas to have that emptiness behind him, wanted him to be free to love her.
“He did. She was destroying
herself with drugs. She’d been a nurse and so had easy access to painkillers,
which she’d started to take to kill the pain in her spirit. In the end, they
killed her, as well. Tomas brought her home, got her help, but she
overdosed—about a year ago now. Thank God, not here, not in front of her child.
They found her under a bridge on the outskirts of
Marielle was very still. The suffering of this family and their ability to put one foot in front of the other and continue was incredible.
“I’m so sorry, Halina. Thank you for telling me. It explains so much.”
“I wouldn’t have told you, wouldn’t have betrayed my son’s privacy, if I hadn’t witnessed what has passed between you in this short time. Tomas does not know 256
how to protect himself in love. He suffered greatly with the loss of Krystyna. I can’t bear to have him suffer again. I want you to understand that before you go any deeper into this relationship. He will not abandon his child.”
“I know that, Halina. I will never ask that of him.”
“Unless you abandon your mother and your vineyards, I don’t understand what you two are doing to each other.”
“I don’t understand, either. But I’ve never loved anyone the way I love Tomas.”
“Then God help you both.”
AT TWO IN THE AFTERNOON, Janosch arrived with his wife, their
daughter and her husband and their two little girls, Janina and Kasia, whose
hairstyle
to feed them, even when shortages and soaring prices had put the most basic necessities out of reach. Her pride at this Easter meal was palpable, and the family was rewarding her with the highest praise—their vociferous enjoyment of everything she put on the table. Pierogi stuffed with potatoes and cheese, wild mushroom soup, ham, potatoes baked with eggs and sour cream, stuffed cabbage, and for dessert, pastry twists and cheesecake.
It was past eleven when the
last of the pastries had been eaten, the vodka bottle was empty and the three
little girls had fallen asleep on the sofa. Janosch and his son-in-law each
carried one of the cousins down to the car. Halina carefully slipped
By midnight Nyanya had turned off the light in the kitchen and closed the door. Halina bid them good-night, but with a penetrating glance at Marielle that Tomas didn’t miss.
“What was that look for?”
“She’s a mother who loves her son and doesn’t want to see him hurt.”
“Does she think you’re going to hurt me?”
“She thinks we’re hurting each other—that it’s madness to continue this relationship when we can’t be together.”
“Is that what you believe?”
“I did in the beginning. No, wait. I still think it’s madness. But I can’t stop loving you. It’s too late.”
259
“It’s too late for me, as well.”
He took her in his arms. Their lovemaking that night had an elegiac quality to it, a consciousness that this touch, that kiss, would be the last for many months. Marielle wanted to commit to memory the sound of his voice whispering her name, the hollows of his body into which her curves fit, the scents of both of them mingled on his skin. She clung to him afterward, unable to sleep or to let him go until it was nearly dawn.
In the morning, Marielle said goodbye to the three women. Nyanya blessed her and put a small packet of herbs in her hand.
“For the zupa,” she directed.
With Tomas, she reversed her trip of Saturday morning, traveling by trolley to the city center and the train station. Tomas had arranged with the clinic to have the morning off so he could spend these last few hours with her. They sat in silence in the stuffy trolley, a light rain spattering the windows. He held her hand.
“Thank you for coming. It was a lot to ask.”
“Thank you for asking. There was nowhere else I wanted to be.” She hesitated, then asked the question that was hovering between them.
“Will you come for the harvest?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. They rode in silence again until the transfer point, where they changed lines.
260
“Is this what our lives will be from now on? A few days of bliss each year punctuating a lonely existence?”
“I won’t ask you to do that. I’ve been lonely for a long time, even before my wife’s death. I’m used to it. My time with you is a gift. But you—you have a world of opportunity before you. The vineyards, your friends. Your life is full of possibilities. Don’t close yourself off to those possibilities because of me.”
She turned to him.
“There is no possibility for me except you.”
A look of both pain and hope skimmed across Tomas’s face as she spoke.
“It’s too much to ask of you,” he protested.
“It’s too much to ask me to let you go. I don’t know what else to do except wait for the harvest and store up from our time together what will sustain us for the rest of the year.”
She kissed him as the trolley pulled into the station—a firm, determined, decisive kiss. There was no more to say. No other solution.
They parted on the platform
as the final boarding call for the train to
Once on the train she took a window seat and watched for as long as he was visible. He remained on the platform until the last car had made the bend beyond the station. Then he turned and walked back into his life.
1976-1982
TOMAS AND JANOSCH and the crew returned in the fall for the next harvest. Marielle had renovated an unused wing of the winery in the ell over the tank room, turning it into an apartment for herself. It was there that she intended to live with Tomas for the six weeks of the harvest. She anticipated Anita’s objection. The village was small; opinions of the Polish workers among the older members of the community were often negative. Even though the entrance to the apartment was within the enclosed courtyard and not on the street, Marielle knew it wouldn’t be long before the gossips began chattering over loaves of bread at Ute’s bakery.
She braced herself for the conversation with her mother as they painted the new rooms in late August.
“Mama, I want you to know my intentions when Tomas arrives in October. I’m going to invite him to stay here instead of at the campground.”
“That’s gracious of you to wait to move in until after 262
the harvest. Why not ask Janosch, too? I’m sure he’d appreciate not having to live in that cramped tin box.”
“Mama, this is difficult to explain. I mean to invite Tomas to stay with me in the apartment.”
Anita put down the paintbrush and looked at her daughter.
“Do you realize what you’re exposing yourself to? Not only the criticism of the village, but a weakening of your position with the crew! You’re the chief, they’re the workers. To be so blatant about your relationship with Tomas is damaging to your authority. It’s suicidal.”
“Mama, this whole relationship is suicidal. I can’t live with him. I can’t live without him. At least for these few short weeks, I intend to give us the life we can never have!”
“It’s a pretense. A fairy
tale. You shouldn’t flaunt it. I’m not telling you to stop loving him. Believe
me, I understand. But don’t live with him while he’s here. This isn’t the
anonymity of
Reluctantly, Marielle acquiesced to Anita’s advice. She asked Tomas and Janosch to stay in the apartment and gave up her fantasy of a few weeks of domestic life. But the apartment connected via an internal door to the main part of the house, and both Anita and Janosch ignored Tomas’s nightly visit to Marielle’s bedroom.
They deepened their intimacy during those nights— sometimes simply falling asleep in each other’s arms, physically exhausted by the day’s labor. Sometimes they 263
continued conversations that
had begun earlier in the evening, about the vineyards, about
Tomas continued to struggle with his belief that he was cutting Marielle off from the chance to live a full live—with a husband and a family.
“I’m not sure I ever saw that as the direction my life would take, especially when I set out on my career at Deutsche Bank. Now that I’m responsible for the winery, my life is full. The vineyards are my children. I’m not missing anything in my life because of you. On the contrary, you’re filling an emptiness that had been there for a long time.
“Tomas, I’m not going to deny that there’s nothing I want more than to be your wife. But that isn’t within my reach. Perhaps we can’t make this work. But I’m as committed to you as if I wore your ring.”
Tomas left that year, as he
had in the past, on the morning after
Tomas returned for two more
harvests without another visit by Marielle to
always, on Valentine’s Day, a huge bouquet of roses, delivered first thing in the morning by Maria.
When Karol Wojtyla, the
archbishop of Kraków, was elected as Pope John Paul II in 1978, a new energy
and sense of identity surged in
With thousands of other people, but conscious only of the man by her side, Marielle experienced one of the pope’s outdoor Masses and began to grasp what she’d observed at the church on Easter Sunday a few years before. For Poles, the Church was more than devotion and prayer. It was the constant that defined them despite a turbulent history of shifting borders and foreign oppression. With this second visit, Marielle fit another piece into the puzzle of understanding Tomas.
During the months of separation between harvests, Marielle accumulated more puzzle pieces in the form of Tomas’s letters. They were a journal, recounting the minutiae of his life in a way that allowed Marielle to imagine his daily existence. As she moved through her own life, pruning, planting, rushing to the hillside after a particularly devastating storm to survey the damage to the vines, she would sometimes pause and see him— treating patients at the clinic, seated at the dining table 265
with Halina and Magdalena in
the evening, attending a recital when
As the date of the harvest
approached, however, she would develop a heightened emotional state. Despite
the letters, she always felt a stab of uncertainty. Each year was as if they
were beginning anew, with an initial reserve that marked the first day of his
arrival. Tomas and Janosch always came to dinner the first night, a meal
Marielle prepared with great care. She drove into
In some ways, the elaborate preparations for the meal and the ritual of the meal itself eased the transition from life without Tomas to Tomas as a daily presence. She poured her energy into chopping and peeling and stirring to still the voices in her head, the questions about how Tomas would react to her when he walked through the door.
Each time he arrived, he greeted Anita first—in the early years with a simple handshake and later with a kiss on each cheek that she warmly returned. Then he took Marielle in his arms and bent to kiss her, holding 266
her with his eyes closed for a moment as they both relished the reunion.
Their first night together always began tentatively, an exploration of achingly familiar territory. But as their bodies grew comfortable with each other again, their hesitancy gave way to a recklessness and abandon and outpouring of all that had been pent up during their months of separation.
For seven years these
reunions repeated themselves, sustaining their love. Marielle’s wines were
gaining attention as she grew in confidence and knowledge in her winemaking.
Magdalena turned thirteen during Soli-darity’s revolutionary impact on
1983-1988
IN THE SPRING OF 1983, Marielle came face-to-face with the
consequences of the choice she’d made to lead this divided and often incomplete
life. The Rheingau Vintners’ Association arranged a trip for the group to
travel to the
She realized how narrow her
world had become in the years since she hadtaken over the winery. She had
devoted herself to the business and only making time for Tomas, writing to him
every week. Her friends from
hiked through glorious countryside and sat over lingering meals with a different wine for each course.
She also met a man. Klaus Eckhardt ran a winery in Kiedrich, about twenty kilometers north of her village. He was about forty, an outgoing and energetic man who reminded her in many ways of her father. There was an earthiness and frankness to him—a man without pretense who considered himself first and foremost a farmer. He sat next to her on the bus and entertained her with hilarious stories of his education as a vintner. His stories put her own anxieties in perspective. When the trip was over, Klaus invited her to a concert at Kloster Eberbach, an ancient monastery with extraordinary acoustics.
Again, Marielle had a wonderful time in his company, forgetting her loneliness and the stress of business. He had a large extended family full of nieces and nephews, the children of his six brothers and sisters. Marielle felt herself absorbed with ease into Klaus’s noisy and comfortable family. One summer evening she sat on his brother’s veranda, watching the sunset as the adults enjoyed a bottle of Klaus’s Spätburgunder and the children played on the lawn.
It was a scene she hadn’t expected to be part of, and she was disturbed by prickles of dissatisfaction. She hadn’t thought she wanted something as prosaic as this—a traditional vision of family life. It surprised her to be feeling this lack, and she went home that evening wondering if she would ever regret not marrying and having children.
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She felt no physical attraction to Klaus, but she appreciated his humor and warmth. He became a friend, willing to coax her out of her driven focus on work. She even told him about Tomas.
All summer she questioned what might be missing from her life. She noticed women pushing strollers. When it was her turn to host the tasting stand at the village park she watched families walking, children on bikes, grandmothers doting on grandchildren. Was this a buried need she’d put aside? Would it haunt her? She didn’t know.
When Tomas came in October,
he was thinner and more worn than she’d ever seen him. Martial law had been
imposed in the wake of strikes; civil liberties had been suspended and many
union leaders imprisoned. His hospital had received many of the injured when
government troops had attacked striking laborers. Once again,
After a few weeks of work in the open air and Anita’s hearty meals, he’d lost his gauntness. In his arms, Marielle felt his strength once again.
“Are you happy?” he asked her late one night after lovemaking.
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“Yes,” she said. “Being here with you is what makes my life meaningful.”
“But is it enough? I look at you, how hard you work. And I see very little else, except waiting for these few weeks. You should be living, not waiting.”
“When you’re here, I forget the waiting.”
“But when I’m not here…”
He always seemed to be attuned to what she was thinking, despite her efforts to protect him from her doubts.
“Marielle, you’re still a young woman, young enough to start a family. You’re living half a life.”
“I didn’t think I needed the other half until…”
“Until what? Until someone?”
“Not someone in the way you mean. I’m not in love with anyone else. But I was introduced to a family this year, with children and grandparents and uncles and aunts, and I didn’t know until I was in the midst of it that it represented a hole in my life.”
“You could come to
She knew he wished he could give her a whole life.
She still didn’t know how to define that life.
They didn’t resolve their
dilemma that night. It hovered over them throughout the harvest and imbued
their lovemaking with a desperation and hunger that drove them to a level of
intensity that echoed their first time in
They exhausted themselves physically and emotion271
ally. They talked in each other’s arms, over the dinner table, during long walks on Sunday mornings along the river’s edge.
As the Feast of St. Martin approached, Tomas came to a decision. He’d seen the look on Marielle’s face on Sundays when they passed families on the river path, a look she struggled to mask. But he knew her too well.
Like the centurion giving up his red cloak to the shivering beggar, Tomas gave up his claim to Marielle’s heart.
“I need to set you free, Marielle. This is no life for you. Find what you need. Don’t wake up twenty years from now full of regret and bitter that I couldn’t let you go.”
He left, as he always did, early the next morning. He kissed her for the last time and closed the gate to the courtyard behind him.
The rhythm of her life for the last eight years an
the way she defined herself were disrupted, torn. For weeks, she went through the motions of running the winery and did nothing else. Klaus called to invite her to the Kiedricher Advent concert. He’d been busy with his own harvest, but had also kept his distance when Tomas was there. She accepted the invitation and was swept back into Klaus’s exuberant family. For a few months she entertained the idea of considering Klaus romantically, but when she couldn’t imagine herself making love to him, she gently dissuaded him from his hopes that they could ever be a couple.
Gradually she opened herself up to meeting other men. Matchmaking friends of Anita’s began to set up 272
blind dates. She dutifully attempted to make conversation over dinners up and down the Rheingau. Now and then she went on a second date. For a while she was serious with a young research scientist who shared her interest in rowing. She felt a “normalcy” to her social life.
But she missed Tomas even more than she’d expected. His empathy, his intensity, his tenderness, his understanding of who she was beneath the facade of smart, driven businesswoman.
In the fall, Tomas continued to return for the harvest, but he didn’t work with Marielle. Instead he joined a crew working another vineyard, the one where he’d labored as a teenager. His path and Marielle’s did not cross.
For four years, Marielle thought her desire for a family would override the reservations she had about one man or another. But she found that she couldn’t will herself to love. Whenever she got close enough, she saw only what the men couldn’t give her. In the winter of 1987 she received a proposal of marriage and turned it down. She spent the following spring and summer alone, deliberately withdrawing from the dating scene. She was in retreat from partnership and coupling.
During that time she reread the hundreds of letters Tomas had written her over the years of their relationship. She sat up in bed at night, remembering and reliving.
She remembered, as well, his final conversation with her. “Don’t look back with regret twenty years from now.”
In October, after Janosch and the crew arrived, she 273
drove to the campground the first Sunday morning and knocked on the door of the camper. Tomas answered.
His hair was beginning to gray and the lines around his eyes had deepened. His hands, hanging at his sides, were still beautiful.
“I have no regrets,” she said. “I want you in my life however and whenever you can be there.”
She held her breath. She had
no idea what had filled Tomas’s life in the four years they’d been apart. Had
he found a woman who could be wife and mother in
He reached out his hand and stroked the side of her face, then gathered her into his arms, burying a moan in the hollow of her neck. She sobbed, her tears spilling onto his shoulder.
November 1989
IN 1989 WHEN TOMAS came back for the harvest, he once again moved into Marielle’s apartment. In the evenings, instead of struggling to learn her craft as she had so many years before, Marielle painted. That fall, rather than her usual landscape, she painted Tomas’s portrait.
She finished it in the
beginning of November and brought it to a shop in
The news was on, and the announcer’s voice was heightened, incredulous, jubilant. Marielle stopped her car and pulled over.
“Die Mauer ist weg!” The Berlin Wall had fallen.
Marielle was numb, disbelieving. She switched radio stations, thinking she’d misheard or the reporter had made a mistake. But every station was reporting the same thing.
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Trembling, she drove home, pulling the car into the courtyard and racing up the stairs to the apartment.
“Have you heard?” She burst
into the apartment. Tomas, sitting in front of the television, nodded. He stood
up and she ran to him, still trembling—because of what this meant for East and
THE MONTHS THAT followed were marked by hope, upheaval and a
disruption of old ways and limited expectations. As welcome as the
extraordinary change was in their lives and their definition of home, country,
The patterns they’d established, the rituals and boundaries that protected all of them, not just Tomas and Marielle, but those they loved—Magdalena, Halina, Nyanya, Anita—it all began to shift. Like a handful of loose rocks, skittering down the hillside, barely noticeable as they tumbled over closely cropped grass and carefully tended rows of vines. But the changes gathered momentum over the winter, like the muddy landslide set off by the heavy, unrelenting rains so long ago.
Marielle and Anita went to
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At dinner on Wigilia, Christmas Eve, the Oplatek— the blessed bread—was passed from hand to hand, each of them taking a fragment as the first star appeared in the night sky.
“I have an announcement.”
Maggi held her vodka glass high, as if she was about to make a toast. “I’ve
been accepted to an exchange program at Juilliard in
Everyone’s glass went up in
congratulations. Nyanya wiped her eyes with her napkin, her expression a
mixture of pride in
How had that fact escaped him? For so long he’d been consumed with sheltering her, surrounding her with love to cushion her from the loss of her mother. That his love and protection could have formed her into a bird with such strong wings and an even stronger desire to fly was a revelation to him that night.
It was the moment he realized that she’d surpassed him, that she no longer needed him. And he was free.
On Christmas, a day of brilliant sunshine and biting cold, Tomas and Marielle walked home from church, their arms linked and their heads wrapped in wool scarves.
“I want to talk with you apart from the others,” he said. “Let’s stop in the park for a few minutes.”
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They sat facing each other on a wooden bench that was free of snow.
“
Marielle stroked the side of his cheek with her gloved hand and smiled.
“It also made me see that
there’s nothing to hold me back now, and it frightens me a little. I feel like
an old woman who’s become so used to limitations that I cannot imagine any
other kind of life. Until my daughter opened the door for me in a way the hole
in the
He placed his hand over Marielle’s.
“Marry me, Marielle. Let me give you the complete man. On your soil.”
At dinner that afternoon they made their own announcement to the family and invited them all to the winery on Valentine’s Day for the wedding.
In February, Maggi drove
Halina and Nyanya across the boundaries that for so many years had been ominous
barriers. Tomas had gone ahead, to begin looking for work and to start the
paperwork to be licensed as a physician in
Marielle asked Maggi to be
her maid of honor and took her shopping in
thing she’d want to take to
Maggi’s final choice was a
black jersey wrap dress that was a striking counterpoint to her blondness and
pale skin. Neither Halina nor Nyanya approved of its color or style—they
would’ve preferred to see her as
The villages of the Rheingau were preparing for Fasching, the German celebration of Carneval in the weeks leading up to Lent. Parades wound their way through the streets with floats full of costumed revelers tossing candy to children. Streamers of multicolored confetti flew through the air. It was a time of abandon in those first months of 1990, and Marielle and Tomas found themselves swept up in the music and the gaiety.
The morning of the wedding,
Maria arrived with her usual delivery of Valentine roses, but instead of the
dozen Tomas had always ordered in the past, he’d requested ten times as many.
Maria had combed the wholesale flower market in
The winery’s public rooms were ablaze with color, with bowls of roses on every table, set for the guests who would celebrate with them later in the day. Vases also rested on the windowsills formed by the meter-thick walls.
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Rather than wear white, Marielle chose a dress the color of the roses, its velvet fabric echoing their texture. Her bouquet, in contrast, was white, with a single red rose at its center. She pinned another single rose to Tomas’s lapel before they walked to the church.
During the wedding ceremony, Maggi played her violin for them, a vibrant and inventive rendition of “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Marielle felt the world coming to life for her and Tomas in those intense moments of music.
When they left the church on foot, followed by their guests, Maggi again put the violin to her chin and played as they strolled through the village to the winery. Along the way, friends opened windows and threw confetti and streamers. By the time they arrived at the gate to the courtyard, Marielle’s hair was entwined with the multicolored paper strands and Tomas’s shoulders were covered with a dusting of confetti. At the reception they toasted each other and their guests with the 1988 Marcobruun, an extraordinary vintage that was to launch an incredible streak lasting eight years of great wines from the Rheingau.
Later that evening, as they lay in one another’s arms for the first time as husband and wife, Tomas raised himself on one elbow and with his other hand traced circles on Marielle’s belly.
“I’ve watched you in the
last few days, taking on the role of
“Thank you.” She kissed him.
“So I took that another step. What if we have a child 280
now? You and I. You’re only forty-one. I know you gave that up for me but, like everything else we thought we’d forsaken—a life together, a future—we have a second chance. Why not?”
Marielle was still. A list of objections began to form in her mind, conditioned for so long not to want or imagine what she couldn’t have.
But she knew that she’d never completely abandoned her desire to have a child. For Tomas, with his daughter grown, to offer her this gift overwhelmed her.
She burst into tears.
“Yes,” she gulped, between sobs.
1991–2007
VALENTIN MAREK was born a year later, on Valentine’s Day, doubly blessing the day for them.
During the harvest of 1991, Valentin slept in a backpack borne alternately by his mother and father, the rhythm of their movements lulling him in the crisp air.
By the harvest of 1995, he followed his great-uncle Janosch around, dumping buckets of grapes into Janosch’s carrier as the old man stooped to Valentin’s height. By the harvest of 1998, Valentin had his own shears and worked the lower layers of the vines, only occasionally popping a handful of grapes into his mouth.
Maggi, when she finished her studies at Juilliard, won a seat with the Berlin Philharmonic. When her concert schedule allowed, she came back for the harvest, and she always made time in the summers to perform with Tomas in the courtyard concerts that had become signature events for the winery. In 2000 she 282
made her first solo recording and Tomas and Marielle hosted a launch party for her at the winery.
By the time he was thirteen in 2004, Valentin was as tall as his father, with the same long fingers. He had inherited his mother’s eyes and chestnut hair, which he wore in dreadlocks, much to Anita’s dismay. He’d also inherited Marielle’s intensity, and was the winery’s mechanic, fascinated by its equipment. He was less fascinated with school, and was chafing at the prospect of spending six more years preparing for the Abitur and then university, as his parents and his sister had before him.
On his sixteenth birthday he listened to the toasts of his parents and two grandmothers, made with wine from the case that had been set aside in his birth year. Each major event in his life—his baptism, his first day of school, his first communion—had been celebrated with the opening of a bottle from that case. On the occasion of his sixteenth birthday Marielle poured a small glass for him, as well. After the toasts, Valentin stood, brushing back the hair from his eyes.
“I have a birthday wish,” he said solemnly. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I don’t want to go to university.”
He waited for the predictable objections, and his grandmothers did not disappoint. But Marielle and Tomas knew their son well enough to understand that something else was coming. They exchanged glances.
“I want to study winemaking instead. Maggi certainly isn’t going to come back and take on the work, so who else but me?”
Marielle wanted to tell him it wasn’t an expectation, 283
that he was free to make his own way in life, even if that took him away from the land. But Tomas squeezed her hand and she let Valentin go on.
“If you’ll agree, I can transfer to the wine institute in the fall. I’m not interested in spending years in a classroom like you two did. I’m much happier working with my hands—repairing the tractor, rigging the bottler, pruning and grafting the vines.
“I’m not like you, Papa. I don’t have the patience to study for years and years. And, Mama, I’ll probably have to hire somebody to do the books when you’ve had enough of them. But I think I can make our hills flourish. What do you say?”
Marielle rose from the table and hugged him. Anita wiped her eyes. Even Halina was mollified.
Later that night, Tomas and Marielle took a walk. The moon was full, and sharing their anniversary with their son’s birthday had led them to take time for themselves at the end of the day. The night was cold but clear and they headed up the vineyard path to the top of the hill.
Tomas kissed her, taking her face in his hands. “You’ve raised quite a young man, Mrs. Marek.”
“So have you, Dr. Marek.”
“No disappointments?”
“None. He’s much more sure of himself than I was at his age.”
Tomas nodded. “And much happier than I was.”
“Are you happy now, Tomas?”
“Happier than I’ve ever been.”