‘Sally!’
It took a while for her finally to surface from her sleep. She didn’t know how often Liss had repeated her name.
‘What? What’s the time?’
‘Half past two.’ Liss was speaking very quietly, as if there were someone else in the room she didn’t want to wake. ‘It’s time you were getting up. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.’
Sally rubbed her face with her hands.
‘I’m awake. I’m awake.’
Liss made a slight noise; in the darkness it sounded as though there was a smile there too.
‘There’s hot coffee downstairs. And wrap up warm. It’s cold.’
She walked out of the room, leaving the door open. The landing light was on. Sally sat up. She’d had colourful, vivid dreams, but now she couldn’t remember exactly what they’d been. It was as though the images were waiting just around the street corner, ready to return once she’d fallen back to sleep. She was hovering between wakefulness and sleep, and felt like she was sinking. OK. She straightened up. Don’t fall asleep. But it was still an effort to open her eyes.
The crush starts the day after tomorrow, Liss had said. It’ll be a full moon and a clear night. The crush? Sally hadn’t known what she’d meant. Picking the grapes, Liss had said. Harvesting. Sally found ‘crush’ a funny word used like that. It made her think of crowded stations, or fancying someone.
‘The crush,’ Sally whispered into the darkness, as she stood up. Harvesting sounded nicer, she thought.
She shivered as she dressed hastily. The warmth of the bed had dissipated immediately.
The kitchen was empty when she walked in, the patio door ajar. The tractor was already standing in the yard, engine running. Sally drank the coffee in great gulps. It was hot and bitter. On the kitchen table was a cloth bag of sandwiches. A metal Thermos flask. Hopefully there was tea in it. She took the bag, turned off the light and went into the yard to help Liss. It was like going on a journey. When you got up in the middle of the night. Excitement at experiencing something for the very first time. The goosebumps from cold mingled with tension because your body was tired but your mind was wide awake.
The moon hung bright and almost round, high up in the blackness. Stars over the rooftops. It was nice that the streetlamps weren’t on all night here in the village. There was a warm smell of diesel, but her breath steamed in the air, and she couldn’t quite imagine that she’d soon be cutting grapes without gloves. She climbed onto the tractor. They’d loaded the trailer yesterday. Liss hurried across the yard. She was carrying a heavy iron reel around which a steel cable was wrapped. Sally jumped down to help her.
‘Forgot the winch.’
Liss was breathing fast. Sally had no idea what they needed the cable for, but she lent a hand. Together, they heaved it onto the trailer. Then they both climbed up and drove out of the yard.
She’d never been on an open vehicle at night before, unless you counted her bicycle. They drove a little way down the deserted country lane. The empty fields on either side had been harrowed and, in the moonlight, they looked freshly groomed and relaxed.
Midway through autumn. Midway through autumn, it felt like something new was beginning. Maybe it was. They were still harvesting here. The seed was already in the ground. Even when everything looked empty and picked and finished.
Liss steered the tractor into the vineyards. A lot had already been harvested.
‘Why are we only picking now?’
She called out over the noise of the diesel and the equipment clashing, clanking and jolting together in the trailer. Still. They were kind of peaceful sounds. Like work. Almost a chord.
‘Riesling,’ Liss called back. ‘Riesling is the last grape. It’s always risky round here if you don’t get enough sun in the autumn. But it’s the best of all.’
Now they were driving through fruit trees that some wine-grower must have planted at the edge of his vineyard decades back. They were unkempt and had also already been harvested, but when she saw a single, forgotten pear in the branches, she stood up from her seat, kept her balance, stretched and broke it off as they passed. Liss glanced over to her as she bit into it. The pear was ice-cold, tasted fiercely bitter and sweet all at once. A fitting breakfast.
By the time they reached Liss’s vineyard, there was already a small group of people standing there in thick jackets and woolly hats. As if it were winter. She nudged Liss, who saw her surprise.
‘Did you think we could do this alone? It’s a huge amount of work. Really huge. You always need helpers.’
She left the engine running as she jumped down from the driver’s seat.
‘Will you help pass the things down from the trailer?’
The grape pickers were all from the Czech Republic or Poland or somewhere. There was nobody from the village. They were quick and knew what to do. Three women, two men. Sally handed them the baskets and tubs, and heaved the huge sledge over the side of the trailer – not that she had any idea what it was for. Everyone was cheerful, and one of the women put out a hand to help her as she climbed out of the trailer. Someone else pressed a pair of grape shears and a bucket into her hand.
‘I show you,’ he said, introducing himself by pointing to his chest. ‘Jan.’
Sally looked around for Liss, but she was busy at the front of the tractor, unwinding steel cable, which she hooked onto the sledge.
‘Down there!’ she called briefly to her. ‘You two start down there. Take the sledge.’
‘Sally,’ she said to her companion, and then they descended through the vines towards the valley. Jan was pulling the sledge with two of the huge, empty plastic barrels, the ones she and Liss had loaded up yesterday. Now she also understood why there were oval-shaped holes in the top of the sledge. They held the barrels, which then stayed upright on the steep hillside.
As they descended, she kept slipping on the woodchips scattered between the rows of vines, until Jan nudged her and pointed at the wires around which they twined.
‘Hold on.’
She was starting to feel warm. In the other rows, the helpers were already at the bottom. When they got to the foot of the hill, Jan took the small buckets from the sledge and handed her one. Then he turned away without a word and cut a bunch of grapes to show her. The dew glittered in the moonlight on the grey berries. Jan pointed the tip of the shears at some that had brown-black spots on them; others were dark, still others almost black.
‘Yes,’ he said of the grapes he was showing her, ‘yes. Yes. No. Yes.’
Sally had to grin. That had surely been the shortest lesson in the history of the crush.
‘OK.’
And then they started. At first it took her a while to figure out the best place to hold onto the bunch and how to go with the motion as you cut. Where to position the bucket – in front of you or behind? Where to look so as not to miss any grapes. Now and then, Jan, who was already several metres ahead of her, swapped to her side to show her a technique, or to stop her throwing away a bunch where she saw rotten grapes. He took it from her, picked off a berry and popped it into her mouth before she could fend him off. He threw the bunch into her bucket. She sucked on the cold grape and all at once her mouth was filled with an over whelming, aromatic sweetness that didn’t taste in the least like a wine grape; it was much more like muscat, and somehow also like honey and apples in the grass. Jan showed her again what that kind of berry looked like, but she didn’t understand how he could distinguish them from the properly rotten ones just by the light of the moon. Fortunately, it didn’t often arise. When she felt an ache in her back, she found herself thinking about the potatoes. How long ago that had been. At the thought, she gradually found her way into a rhythm. It was so quiet in the vineyard. Barely anyone spoke. You could hear the rustle of the vine leaves, the grapes falling into the bucket, footsteps, other people breathing. An almost magical atmosphere. The sky above her was black, the moon above her looked as though someone had punched a hole in the blackness. Every contour was sharply defined. She could even see her own shadow on the ground. It was like she was moving in a black-and-white film.
What I’m doing here is old. People have been doing this for thousands of years. Standing in a vineyard and cutting grapes. And now me.
Without Liss, she’d never have experienced this.
Grapes in her left hand. Cold, sweet weight. Cut. Inspect the grapes. Grapes in the bucket. Move on a metre. Push aside the leaves with a rustle. Frozen dew. Grapes in her left hand. Cut. Throw.
This is where we met.
She hadn’t even seen the vineyard then. It had just been countryside. Meaningless. It hadn’t been the same vineyard she was standing in now. This vineyard was real. It had become real over time. Maybe it had been all the points of contact with the earth. When had she ever had her hands in the soil before? Bees on her skin? When had she stood in a tree? Yes. Maybe that was it. That and Liss, who didn’t even know how amazing she was. For a moment, she had to stand still. Because she couldn’t catch her breath when she thought about the ossuary. As if it were only now that she understood what it would really have meant if Liss had killed herself there.
I want her to know what she’s truly like. I want her to live. I want her to be able to feel the same happiness at being here. In this ice-cold morning in a vineyard.
‘Look.’
Jan had pulled her sleeve to make her turn around. He pointed to the left. The sky was turning pink. Black and sharp, the silhouette of the town down by the river stood out against the delicate lightness in the east.
‘Wow,’ she whispered. ‘Wow!’
When the earliest hint of brightness was in the sky, Jan called up for the first time. She had hooked up the second trailer and swept both out again, and then lined them with the tarpaulins. Now she started up the tractor and engaged the winch. The cable tensed. Drops of dew scattered off the whirring wire. Liss blew on her hands. It was cold. Until now, she’d done everything because she’d always done it that way. As if something were moving her from outside. As if she were hanging on wires like the vines, and without them, she’d collapse in on herself. And never be able to get up again. But when she saw the sledge running up the hill through the dawn with Sally standing on it, keeping both barrels balanced, Jan walking alongside, Sally pushing off strongly on the right or left, again and again, to keep the sledge on the track between the vines, laughing with excitement and the pleasure of riding a sledge uphill with no snow, Jan beside her catching the joy from her and smiling, correcting the course if Sally pushed too hard; when she saw that, it wasn’t just pins and needles inside her anymore. It was as though things were no longer just bouncing off her skin. For the first time in a long time, an image found its way in. This picture of a laughing Sally on the sledge, travelling up the hill with two barrels full of grapes as the sun rose. All at once it was as though it hurt to breathe – with the sudden small joy of being able to feel something again.
The sledge was up, and she and Jan reached for the first barrel. They hoisted it over the side and emptied the grapes into the trailer.
‘You’re quick,’ she said to Sally and Jan. Sally had turned in surprise and watched her for a moment. Liss knew why. She’d noticed it herself – her voice had sounded different. That touch lighter that you could really only feel yourself. Like when you’d cut your own hair. Nobody could sense that from outside. Only you could. But Sally had noticed all the same.
They emptied the second barrel into the trailer, set both back into the sledge. Sally grabbed it and was already on her way back down. Jan looked at Liss with a small, almost mocking smile, jerked his head in Sally’s direction and gave her a wordless thumbs up before descending again himself. She watched him go, and then looked east, where the horizon was now starting to burn red while the last stars could still be seen above her. For a moment, she remembered the hot day when she’d first met the girl. Here, in the vineyard. How totally differently Sally had come up here just now. How had that happened? Perhaps it was like the harvest. You might do this and that in the vineyard, you cut and scattered and directed – but growth happened by itself. Still, after all these years, it was like a miracle that the vines blossomed, that the tiny flowers developed into berries and finally ripened into grapes. You couldn’t do a thing about it. It just happened. It depended solely on the soil and the sun. Perhaps Sally had just been growing in the wrong place before.
From one moment to the next, the sun appeared on the horizon, and everything took on colour. The vine leaves shone red and yellow. Hanging over the river and the long-mown meadows was a fine fog. The brief shouts of the pickers rang out downhill. Liss could hear Sally laughing. Then – as suddenly as the sunrise – she was filled with her first real emotion in a very long time. It was a shattering yearning to have grown up in the right soil herself, and she couldn’t stop the tears suddenly running down her face. But then the cable twitched again and Jan called up that the sledge was full.
It was about eight o’clock when they took the first break. Sally sat with Jan on the sledge. Liss had a big basket with sandwiches, fruit, flasks of coffee and tea, sausage, cheese, pretzels and croissants. When had she done all that? Had she even gone to bed?
Sally pressed her palms together. They were so sticky with grape juice that she could hardly pull them apart again. Liss saw.
‘It’ll be a good wine,’ she remarked. ‘If the juice is that sticky, the grapes are sweet. Good winemakers can tell the Oechsle rating just from how sticky the juice is.’
‘What’s that?’ Sally asked, eating a pretzel. The air was still cold, but she’d got so warm that she’d taken her jacket off ages ago. The early sunlight made the fine hairs on her forearms shimmer gold.
‘The must weight,’ answered Liss, handing around the Thermos flasks. ‘How sweet the must is. That determines what the wine’ll be like.’
Everything smelt of grapes, mingled with a dry and slightly spicy, tart bitterness from the dried vine leaves. From under the sledge, a very fine mist rose where the sun was shining on the churned-up soil. That was the best smell. She knew it from the potato field, but here it was completely different. It was the dark scent of the earth in October, and Sally suddenly knew that she would always associate it with this radiant autumn day in the vineyard.
The others seemed to go way back. They were swapping jokes and chatting briefly, sometimes in Czech, sometimes in German, but she never had the feeling that anything was going over her head. She was just a grape picker like the rest. Jan hardly spoke at all, but he’d helped her all morning if she’d wanted to know something. Jan handed her the bag of pastries and poured tea into the cup they were all drinking from. Funny that you could feel so good among strangers.
‘Why did we have to get up so early? It’s going to be a gorgeous day.’
Liss was already packing the bags back into the basket.
‘Because the grapes have to be cold.’
She reached into the trailer, pulled out a bunch of grapes and held it to Sally’s cheek. It was almost as though it radiated cold.
‘They mustn’t ferment too quickly. Before sunrise, they’re almost at freezing point, and later when we press them, the must will be cool enough. That’s why we have to carry on again now. We’ll eat properly later.’
Sally stood up, and she and Jan headed for a row further downhill. It was now properly foggy down in the valley, but even on the bottom edge of Liss’s vineyard they were high above the fog. The sun lit it up like a lake. Only the church tower in the small town below emerged from it like a lighthouse.
She took the grape shears from her back pocket and started to cut. This was so different from anything else she’d ever done. Different from school. She sometimes got a good feeling, a sense of achievement, there too. But nothing was like this. Working and seeing something happen. The bucket filled. Then the barrel. Then the trailer. Sure, it was all very simple. But it still felt right. Right and good.
By the early afternoon, they’d finished. Every part of her ached, but that was OK. They’d loaded up the trailer one last time. Liss wanted to leave two rows. Ice wine, she’d said. Nothing more. Sally would ask for an explanation later. Now she was just glad the picking was over. They’d started at three a.m. Now it was three again. Twelve hours on the hill. And she was hot. It was now one of those beautiful afternoons she loved so much. The sky in that high, bright blue you only get in autumn. The air cool and clear, but full of light. The river, the town, the few leaves on the trees – everything was colour. At around noon, a light breeze had got up, and all at once she remembered a poem she’d learnt at school: the landscape was like … ‘like a verse in the Psalter’.
‘Let’s go,’ cried Liss.
They had loaded the sledge, the barrels and buckets back onto the second trailer, and Sally climbed up to join Jan. Liss had already taken three or four trips back to the farm with the others. Sally couldn’t wait to see what it looked like in the wine-pressing room now, what it was like to unload the grapes down the wooden chute, through the window into the cellar, what it was like to make wine. The tractor and trailer jerked. Jan offered her a cigarette; she shook her head. The smoke smelt wonderful in the blue air as they drove through the afternoon sun back into the village.
The evening had soon come. When Liss climbed up from the wine cellar, the pickers were long gone. She was so exhausted that she could hardly stay on her feet. She wondered how she’d managed it last year without help. Sally had helped with the gleaning, destemming, pressing and finally the cleaning. That was always the worst part, because the work was actually done, and the cleaning was like an extra task that you longed to put off till the next day. But they’d done it. Hosed out the trailer, washed the barrels, spread out the tarpaulins … The day was done. A week ago, she hadn’t believed she’d ever harvest again.
In the kitchen, Sally sat with her legs pulled up on the bench. The radio was playing. Something from her youth. Sally had laid two little chopping boards on the table and the remains of the pastries in a basket. There was butter and cheese amid autumn leaves that she must have brought with her, and a few bunches of grapes gleaming darkly on the old wood. She’d opened a bottle of last year’s wine too.
‘I’ve never tried your wine,’ she said, pouring her a glass.
Liss had no idea when someone had last laid a table for her.
‘Thank you.’
‘No,’ said Sally, putting the bottle down carefully and raising her glass. ‘Thank you.’
Liss picked up her glass too, found herself responding to the toast. It felt funny. As if Sally were celebrating something, yet Liss didn’t know what it was.
‘Is this a belated birthday party or something?’
Sally took a sip of wine.
‘Perhaps.’
Suddenly she laughed quietly.
‘Sure. But not for me.’
Another song started. It took Liss a while to remember. ‘Cantaloupe Island’. She’d once heard it in a bar in the south of France. All alone. With a book and a pastis under Perpignan’s incredibly hot midday sun.
Sally stood up abruptly and turned up the radio.
‘That’s cool.’
‘It’s old,’ said Liss, stretching out her legs.
Sally looked at Liss and grinned.
‘You’re old, but you’re still cool.’
She started to move to the music. Liss looked at her. How could the girl still dance after a day like that. The slow, driving piano chords filled the kitchen and felt strange in the autumnal darkness; strange and yet so alluring. The trumpets struck up; so serene. She’d always wanted to be that serene, that floating…
Suddenly Sally was standing in front of her, reaching for her hand, pulling her up.
‘No!’ said Liss. ‘I … I can’t.’
Sally didn’t let go of her hand.
‘Everyone can dance.’
As if the rhythm had been sleeping somewhere inside her and was now slowly waking, she allowed herself to sway, only very gently. When the song was over, she wanted to sit down again, but another was starting up, much quicker; one she didn’t know. Sally had let go of her hand and was moving lightly and wildly. It was so absurd. The sleepless night and the long day of hard work behind her. The music in her kitchen. Sally, whom she was seeing dancing for the first time. OK, she thought, OK. She let the beat move her legs. She used to like dancing.
‘Hey!’ laughed Sally.
Liss danced. The song finished, they drank some wine and danced some more. The kitchen lamp reflected itself and their silhouettes in the dark windowpane. Every new song seemed to fit. Slow. Fast. Hard. Suddenly, Sally ran out of the kitchen.
‘Wait!’ she called. Liss kept moving. It was so long since she’d moved to music. A new song, something about dragonflies in the sun … about feeling good.
Slow but full of power. She shut her eyes and let herself drift around the room with the words, like she’d done back then by the sea … She heard Sally come back, but didn’t open her eyes. Suddenly she felt something trickle down onto her head, opened her eyes and was shrouded in a cloud of white powder, could taste sweetness.
‘What are you doing?’
Sally had the packet of icing sugar in her hand.
‘Icing sugar. Because of the mites of the past. Dance. Move!’
It took her a moment to understand. Then it was as though she had to laugh, she felt so liberated; she took the packet from Sally and dusted her with sugar too.
The radio played and played and played.