TRUE HARVEST

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

Prologue

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

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

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

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

Chapter 1

October 1975

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

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

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

Anita handed her a mug of coffee and Marielle could see that she had already brewed a full urn to take out to the vineyards for the harvest crew.
“How was Papa’s night?” Marielle asked as she sipped the steaming coffee, waiting for the jolt of caffeine she needed to start her day.

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

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

Although Marielle had followed her father around in the vineyards, it was Anita’s example that Marielle had absorbed and found fascinating. In the evenings, as she had sat at the dining table doing homework, Anita had shared the workspace with her, managing the difficult decisions about staffing and equipment purchases, setting prices and courting customers. Marielle discovered her talent not only for math in those hours with Anita, but also for negotiating, sometimes helping her to calculate prices and often listening to her bargain with suppliers.

When Marielle had scored highly on the Abitur, the qualifying exam for university, she was offered a place in economics at the University of Mannheim, one of the best in the country. With Max and Anita’s blessing, Marielle had left home to pursue her studies and create a life for herself in the business world after graduating with honors from Mannheim.

Marielle had flourished. At twenty-seven, she was one of only a few female vice presidents at Deutsche Bank. She had spent two years in Hong Kong and had returned only three months ago.

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

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

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

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

“A start of what?”

“You becoming a vintner.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anita sat erect, carrying her responsibilities with uncomplaining acceptance. It was what she had always done. And it was what Marielle knew was expected of her, as well.
And so, in the weeks that followed, Marielle submitted her resignation at the bank and sublet her apartment, wrapping up the loose ends of her life in Frankfurt in time to be here with her mother on this first morning of the harvest.