Hans and Grete

Late in the summer Johannes and Margarete drove north out of the city, an hour before sunrise to avoid the worst of the traffic. The early morning was chill and damp, and they left the top up. Margarete drove, as always. Johannes sat back and scrolled through the music options on his phone, but after some time he sighed and put it away and they drove on in silence, every so often gossiping a little about friends and old lovers. He sipped coffee. She had chai. They kvetched about their co-workers. Her new assistant was competent but socially clueless and dressed a little slutty. The new associate in his firm was cute and fun, but lazy and too young, a disappointment. She had never heard him describe a potential partner as too young. Finally accepting middle age? she asked, smiling. Fuck you, he said, with a dramatic pout, then squeezed her shoulder. They drove out beyond the suburbs to where the country opened into farmland. As the sun rose over the hills the dew vanished from the fields and the air became balmy.

They stopped at a dingy clapboard service station. Johannes wrapped a blue paper towel around the grip of the pump nozzle and filled the tank, standing well back from the stinking hose, like a matador dodging the bull, Margarete thought. She touched up her makeup in the visor mirror and took a selfie of them in front of the grimy gas pump with its illiterate hand-written admonitory notes, and he posed with his smirk, the one she knew meant See what I have to tolerate? The sky was flawless. Margarete put the top down, put on her sunglasses, and tied her scarf over her hair and under her chin. A new Hermès Tyger Johannes hadn’t seen. He felt a moment of jealousy that she had gone shopping without him. He pushed a stray strand of her glossy black hair up under the scarf. He put a dab of sunscreen on her upturned palm and they did their faces.

They left the highway and drove up into the mountains and lakes. The maples and beeches gradually gave way to hemlock and pine. The valley narrowed, and each village was shabbier, smaller, and more remote than the last. The clean air brought them the smells of pine, then hay, then the barnyards of dairies. In the early afternoon they stopped by a pretty lake and, while Margarete vinyasa-ed through a few asanas on the narrow beach, Johannes spread out the car blanket on a soft patch of fallen pine needles and set out the lunch he had prepared. On his grandmother’s Reichenbach china he placed slices of frittata and a simple salad of late-summer greens, lightly dressed with vinaigrette. On a small wooden board he had found in an antique store he laid out, just so, a sliced rustic loaf and a bowl of burrata and bitter green olive oil. He poured them each a half-glass of chilled Sancerre. It’s a little too cold, love, he said. It’s delightful, she said, and smiled over her glass at him, and they sipped.

They checked the map. They had poor reception this far into the hills. Late in the afternoon they turned onto a narrower, rougher road over which the trees arched almost low enough to touch. The road dropped into a valley. Fallen stone walls quartered the second-growth forest. He asked, How old do you suppose these trees are? At least a hundred years, I should think, she said. They can’t have farmed this valley since the Civil War.

After a while, the road did not look familiar. He remembered it opening suddenly into broad pastures with a magnificent view across the lakes far below, but the road wound through the crowding trees far longer than he thought it would. He re-read the instructions. They were out of cell range. They stopped and debated. They put the top up and put on sweaters. They laughed when they saw each other’s new sweaters, both in the same shade of primrose yellow. They had seen the same photo-spread in a magazine. They had been best friends for years now. Over twenty years, as a matter of fact. They’d met when she was freshly separated from her then-husband, a partner in the firm Johannes used to work for. They were the same age, and enjoyed the same things: beautiful clothes, fitness, fine meals, posh hotels, weekends in the country. They even had similar taste in men, though they didn’t let their partners keep them apart. They passed as a couple.

It was dark well before sunset. The trees were like a tunnel. They drove on under barely a glimpse of sky. Right before sunset the trees opened and they felt a moment of elation, but it was not the pasture he remembered. Instead, they found themselves crossing a gorge. What at first they had thought was a field was, in fact, the tops of the dark spruces that rose out of the gorge to just the level of the road. As far as they could see to the west the trees rose in swells to the far horizon. On the far side of the gorge the road was so badly washed out that they barely managed to get the car through. God damn it, Johannes muttered. Under the dome light they huddled around the map, but they could not account for the length of their drive in the woods. Hansy, love, the road has got to go somewhere, she said. He just sulked and waved her onward. They drove on into the night. They couldn’t see anything beyond the white light of the headlights.

Late, well after they would have finished supper, they came to a fork in the road. To the right the dirt road continued. To the left, a narrow lane dropped into the dark. The lane was little more than two ruts between which tall fireweed and thistles stood, as though no car had passed that way all summer. She followed the road to the right, until Johannes suddenly gripped her knee. As the headlights swung around the bend, they had illuminated a freshly-painted sign nailed to a tree. She stopped, almost skidding, and backed to the sign. Gingerbread Cottage, it read, in colorful, hand-painted, looping script, and an arrow pointed down the lane to the left. I am not driving down that, she said. Grete, dear, he said, we can’t just drive all night. We should just stop and ask for directions. Or maybe it’s a passable B and B. She sighed and rolled her eyes. But she turned down the lane.

The weeds scraped the bottom of the low car, but the ruts were smooth. Shortly, the trees quit, and the sky opened above them. They couldn’t see over the old stone walls, but they had the impression of driving between open pastures. Their hearts lightened. They passed massive old sugar maples every so often along the lane, but they saw no sign of a house. The lane went back into the trees and climbed steeply for a while, and the ruts became rocky and rough. Finally, off through the ancient trees, they saw a light, yellow and inviting. They came to a weathered gate in the stone fence. They could not see a driveway, so they parked the car and got out into the chill night. Insects whirred in the dark, but there was no other sound. Johannes looked in the glovebox for the flashlight Grete kept there, but it wasn’t there. They put on jackets and used their phones to light the way to the gate. They pushed through and found themselves on a narrow and deeply-worn path, banked with moss, that meandered off through the trees toward the light. They walked for some time, but the light did not come into clear view. They came to a huge log that had been hewn to form a narrow bridge above a deep little stream. They walked on into the trees. God damn it, Hans said. This is just ridiculous. How far from the road can a person live?

Shush, hun, she said. But then she said, I vote we turn back and sleep in the car. Grete, dear, he said, I’m so sorry. Shush, she said.

But just as they turned to go back to the car a wonderful aroma came to them through the forest. He discerned roasting lamb. She smelled caramelized sugar. Their senses became very alert. Apple wood, he said. She said, Cider vinegar. They turned toward the yellow light and continued on their way, now eager, stumbling now and then, in their fine shoes, on the mossy roots of trees, but heedless of the discomfort. He took her hand to step over a thick root. They stepped between closely-spaced trees onto a flat stone, like a mossy threshold. They smelled roses and lavender, goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace, dill and fennel. Ahead of them a pair of narrow sash windows glowed warmly in the night, faintly illuminating the tops of riotously-competing perennial flowers and herbs, through which the path led directly to the front door.

They looked at each other in the candle-glow of the windows and laughed out loud, delight broad on their smooth faces. Like a couple, they strode to the front door hand in hand.

As they approached the door they saw into the house. A long, low room spanned by massive timber beams, from which dozens of tarnished copper pots, of all shapes and sizes, hung from hooks. And, like an inverted winter garden, whole bushes of dried herbs hung above a long butcher-block island. A hulking masonry stove took up most of one wall. In it a hardwood fire raged on one side, and banked coals were raked to the other. A slate sink overflowed with dirty dishes and pots. At the far end of the room there was a long, black, roughly-hewn trestle table surrounded by maybe twenty mismatched chairs. One end of the table was draped with a snowy linen, on which three elaborate place-settings of bone china, polished silver, and crystal gleamed in the glow of a dozen tapers. Perhaps a hundred candles lit the room, from polished sconces and candlesticks of iron and silver, from hurricane lanterns and crystal vases, from a huge menorah and a long trough-like platter of maybe Asian design, and from where someone had simply stuck them in puddles of wax here and there, wherever there was space. On the stove several pots steamed. The complex smells of cooking reached them at the door, where the smoke from an immense chimney flowed down the steep slate roof and into the fecund garden.

Grete reached for the door. It swung inward before she touched the knocker. Warmth and rich aromas and golden light flowed out the door like a rug unfurled. In the sudden glow stood a tiny woman. Her great mane of curly grey hair fell below her waist. Her broad, creased face looked up at them, and she smiled deeply. She stood no taller than a child, a foot shorter than willowy Grete. Her body was compact and strong. Her muscular legs and body and her very large round breasts were clearly backlit through an unseasonal light linen dress. The woman smiled up at them for a moment, sighed with what must have been deep contentment, and stood aside, indication with a dramatic flourish of her thick, bare arm that they should enter.

We’re so sorry to intrude, Hans began, but the woman interrupted. Please, please. Come in. Just throw your jackets and stuff on the chair there. Please, make yourselves at home.

Grete extended her hand. Margarete, she said. Pleased to meet you, said the little woman. Do you go by Grete? Startled, Grete replied, Yes, I do. My friends call me Grete. Then I will call you Grete, said the woman. If that’s ok. Certainly, Grete said, though she had not allowed this familiarity with any stranger since she was a child.

Hans did not like to shake hands. As he stood behind Grete and helped her out of her jacket, he nodded to the woman and said, Thank you so much for having us in. I’m Johannes. But Please. Call me Hans. The woman rocked up on her toes and back on here heels, a surprisingly childlike movement. She clasped her hands in front of her in delight. Come in the kitchen, she said. Supper is almost ready.

Wondering, Hans and Grete followed as the woman almost jogged into the kitchen, spinning on her bare heels to make sure they were following. She went to the stove and stirred an enormous soup pot, standing up on her toes to reach over the rim, which was well above her head. She stuck a finger into each of several saucepans and tasted each. Without looking, she reached up and plucked a leaf of a dried herb and rubbed it into a saucepan. She reached into the stove and, with her bare hands, grabbed a thick brand and moved it under the saucepan, and flames leapt up and shone through her dress, outlining her figure. In glimpses as she worked, Hans saw her face, smooth and youthful in the lights reflected off the copper pots. He seemed to have misjudged her age.

Hans opened his mouth to speak, but the woman spun toward them and produced, as though from nowhere, a plate of hand-formed crackers and preserved fruit and glistening fresh cheese. She pushed it to them across the scarred wood of the island, and when they raised their eyes from it she had placed before them slender glasses of effervescent wine. She held up one of her own, smiling at them. Her whole face furrowed when she smiled, and deep lines radiated like beams from her eyes. They picked up their flutes, and they reached over the island and the crystal rang. The ringing seemed to deepen and reverberate through the room, rising above the roar of the fire and the bubbling of the pots. A huge cat stretched out from under the island and put a paw on Hans’ shoe and looked up at him with yellow eyes. To friendship, the woman said, with laughter in her voice. Cheers, said Hans and Grete in unison, and they drank.

The wine filled the room with the rich smell of yeast, or of toasted bread, and with a memory of fall orchards, and with the musk of grapes and the warmth of wool. Hans and Grete found themselves sitting at the end of the table facing the woman as she worked in the kitchen. She moved very quickly, with a fluidity and certainty that reminded Hans of the great pianists, and Grete of ballet, which she hadn’t danced in so many years. The long room glowed, and each candle stood straight and did not waver, and the plumes of heat they produced climbed without agitation to the coffered ceiling. The heat of the room grew and enveloped them, but did not become oppressive. The cat climbed onto Hans’ lap. You don’t like cats! Grete said, and the three of them laughed.

Hans gazed at Grete as he never had except when he thought she didn’t know he was looking. He admired the shape of her, her slender shoulders and upright bearing, the tautness of the skin across her forehead and around her eyes, the stylish cut of her shining black hair. She looked tired but radiant. She looked well-tended, he thought. Well-preserved, youthful and fit and polished. He knew how much work and attention it took her to look so fresh.

Hans fell into a reverie, and he thought of the long day driving, and he tried for a moment to reconstruct in his mind the route they had driven, but as he drank a warm convexity of good will rose in him, and the worry and irritation of the day stopped clamoring and grew faint. He looked up and studied the sturdy shape of the woman in her thin dress. He saw that the pots and dishes that had been piled in the sink were now in the drainboard, shining in the candle-light. He had not noticed her washing. He stood and said, I’m just sitting here enjoying this marvelous champagne and not lifting a finger. The woman spoke over her shoulder, Please. Sit. Everything is taken care of. A fragrance reached his nose, earthen, herbal, grassy. He looked down to find a small bowl of creamy soup in front of him, and a plate of toast, still smoking from the stove. A thick, lumpen bottle stood before them, and their white-wine glasses were filled with an almost amber wine. They raised their glasses to each other, and the woman was suddenly there. To our hostess, Hans said, and Grete spoke a heartfelt Amen. Hans could not remember such warmth in his best friend’s voice.

Grete had not eaten rich food in years, but she felt something like lust when she smelled the soup. She ate it quickly, for once unconcerned with delicacy or manners. The wine was tart and acidic, the soup was thick and creamy, and the two complemented each other in strange and subtle ways, so that Hans and Grete both leaned forward and greedily spooned the soup into their mouths with their right hands and sipped, and then gulped, the wine with their left hands. Soon, they scraped their bowls clean with scraps of toast and finished the wine.

As they looked up, the woman pulled out the third chair and sat to Hans’ right, across from Grete. She poured a ruby wine into their Burgundy glasses. In front of each of them was a plate of sliced roasted meat arrayed on a fragrant purée blanche. The woman passed a saucier and ladle. They raised their glasses to the candles. Spectacular, said Grete. Lovely, said Hans. A pleasure, said the woman, and they drank, at first sipping, and then in gulps between mouthfuls of meat. The sauce informs the wine, if it’s not foolish to say it that way, said Grete. Indeed, said Hans. A perfect pairing. The meat was pink in the middle, the same hue as the wine. The outer edges of the meat were almost as dark as the cat that purred on Hans’ lap. As they ate in reverent silence, the purée released the steam of potatoes and onions, celery root and parsnip, white pepper and the sweetest butter. When Hans set down his fork, his plate clean, the woman reached out and took his hand and squeezed it. He realized that he was holding Grete’s hand, too.

Grete noticed with a start that she had not been thinking. She imagined herself in an embrace. The warmth of the room extended deep into her and released her from her obligation to sit straight. She looked around the room. Everything glowed in the candlelight. For the first time she saw shelf upon shelf of dark-bound books ranked along the wall behind the table. She was a great lover of books; how could she have missed these hand-bound volumes, perhaps a thousand of them, their embossed titles reflecting richly the light of the hundred candles? She felt a tear move down her cheek. She became aware of the dry warmth of Hans’ hand enveloping hers. She looked at him, so handsome and perfectly groomed, so burnished and well-muscled. Their eyes met, and Hans looked at her, or into her, with a soulfulness she had never seen before in all the years they had been best friends.

The warmth of the room grew. As one, they pushed their chairs back from the table and pulled their sweaters over their heads. Hans took them into the front room. When he turned back he saw that several cats were curled on the other chairs. Their tails hung and twitched. He looked at Grete, who always had such perfect posture. She was leaning back in her chair, and had one cashmere-stockinged foot under her. When he looked to the other end of the room, to the kitchen, he saw that the woman was standing in front of the stove, with a hip rocked out and her hand on her hip holding a long spoon, like a girl posing as a housewife. She was looking at him, directly in his eyes, smiling. He could not hold her gaze, but blew her a drunken kiss of gratitude and returned to the table, dimly aware that he was staggering.

The woman opened another misshapen, unmarked bottle. The cork looked like a ragged hank of oak-bark dipped in beeswax. This wine was very dark, almost black. Malbec? he asked. Oh, no, the woman said, almost laughing. Nothing so exotic. I don’t know what they call these grapes. Just the black ones that grow well here. You made this wine? Hans asked. Yes, she said. Years and years ago.

They sat without food for some time, sated, in silence. The wine was pungent, dark and earthy. It seemed to all three of them that their earliest childhoods unspooled from the wine. As it opened in the air, the wine revealed deeper and deeper complexities, layer upon layer of encoded memory. Hans thought of his mother, alone now in the city. He thought of her much younger, cleaning his face with a washcloth, the smell of her close around him. For a moment he thought he saw the face of his father, whom he could not remember. Grete thought of the summer place on the Cape, when she was a girl. A long-dormant image arose in her of a local boy, shirtless, tilling the family vegetable garden on the first warm day of spring. She closed her eyes and felt next to her the warm presence of her horse Ezra, the tall warmblood given to her by her father for her sixteenth birthday. She smelled the leather of the tack and the musk of the arena. The little woman’s thoughts drifted deep into the forest, into the glade of elephantine beeches, where she had been most content as a girl, daydreaming alone on the moldering leaves.

Hans and Grete sat back from the table, drifting in and out of formless thoughts. The sounds from the woman’s work in the kitchen barely reached them, as though they were under deep, warm water. Time passed unmarked. They revived to the smell of hot butter and burned sugar as the woman placed before them a smoking tarte Tatin. She cut it with a knife of black steel, and the caramelized sugar cracked, and the brown syrup of pears spread across their plates. She spooned sweet cream over their portions. They found small glasses of a honey-hued wine in front of them. It was sweet and acidic and right.

In the morning Grete awoke to the crowing of roosters and the clanging of steel pails outside the window. The sun came in low and pink. She was in a low, plain room of timber and plaster. The wall she could see from where she lay on her side was covered with books, from the floor to the ceiling, many hundreds of them. She stretched and felt her naked skin against flannel. Her exposed arm was cold in the air from the open window. She pulled it under the sheet and brushed against warmth. She turned over and, after a moment of incomprehension, was horrified to find Hans in bed next to her, his evenly-tanned and muscular shoulder bare, his broad back to her. She looked around for her clothes. She found them within reach, neatly folded on a Morris chair by her side of the bed. As quickly as she could without waking Hans, she dressed under the covers. She glimpsed him there naked beside her. She slipped out of bed and out into a hall. She opened doors looking for a bathroom, but found only pantries, several of them, full to the beams with food. Ranked jars of brightly-colored vegetables and fruits, sacks of flour, bins and barrels, hams and sausages hanging, mesh bags of dried mushrooms, many hundreds of bottles of wine, great carboys of cider, bins of apples and pears, piles of root vegetables.

With trepidation and shame, she stepped into the kitchen. The woman, her cheeks bright and red from the chill morning, wearing the same dress and tall muddy boots, smiled up at her and handed her a mug of coffee. Grete hadn’t had coffee in years, but the smell of it comforted her immediately. She accepted it gratefully and drank it standing by the window looking out over mist-shrouded pastures, small barns, fenced yards where goats chewed and horses stood alert and chickens scratched. The forest stood all around this idyll like a black wall.

Some time later Hans came out, looking more disheveled than Grete had ever seen him. He smiled at her. How did you sleep? he asked. She felt herself blush. What’s wrong? he asked. She stammered something he couldn’t hear. He looked concerned. I don’t even remember going to bed, he said, and laughed abruptly. Quite a night. She set down her coffee and covered her face with her hands and turned away from him. Grete, love. What’s wrong? I am so embarrassed, she said. Why? Because of all the drinking? You didn’t do anything silly, he said. No, not the drinking. Not the drinking per se. Just waking up like that. Like what? What happened? he asked. The woman bustled back in, bringing the chill with her, hauling a pail of eggs in one hand, and a pail of frothy milk in the other. She set them down and poured Hans a mug of coffee.

As she strode out the mudroom door, the woman spoke over her shoulder, rather brusquely, Let’s get this day rolling, my friends. She grabbed a stack of baskets and headed out to the garden. They finished their coffee standing, then followed her out. She was bent at the waist picking greenbeans. Her hands moved very quickly. We’d better change out of these travelling clothes, Hans said, as lightly as he could. She waved them off, frankly irritated. Hans went across the garden, between the twinned great beech trees, and jogged up the path. It twisted more than he remembered. It forked here and there, so that twice he had to backtrack. After some minutes he arrived at the car. He got their overnight bags and went back to the cottage as quickly as he could. They looked again for a bathroom, but found only the pantries and the one bedroom. Where the hell is she keeping the bathroom? Grete asked. Well, where did you go this morning? He asked. I didn’t find one. And where did you sleep? There’s only this one bedroom, where I slept, he said. Hans? she said. What, ma chère? I slept with you, she said. What? I slept with you, in the one bedroom. Here.

They took their turns brushing their teeth and washing their faces in the kitchen sink, and trying to straighten their hair without a mirror. They changed into walking clothes and went out to help in the garden. They picked beans and tomatoes and dug carrots and other roots neither of them could name. When they delivered the heaping baskets to the kitchen, the woman had bread and fresh cheese and fruits and a salad on the table. They ate in silence. As soon as they were done, the woman showed them to the berry patch, and for an hour they picked raspberries. Their hands were raw and their forearms were scratched. In the kitchen, they washed the berries and the woman cooked them in a copper kettle, adding sugar by the handful. They helped ineptly. When they were slow setting up the Mason jars and pressure cooker, the woman was visibly peeved, but they focused on the work and did it as quickly as they could. In the middle of the afternoon, out in the orchard picking up fallen green apples for the pigs, Hans said, I think we’ve paid for the meal by now, don’t you? Grete said, Let’s make a polite departure. Let’s find her something in the trunk for a thank-you present, and ask how to get ourselves un-lost, and get out of here well before dark.

But when they found her by the chicken coop, the woman handed Grete a digging fork and asked her, or told her, to turn the compost pile. She beckoned Hans to follow her and led him inside. He looked back over his shoulder apologetically, and Grete shook her head in disbelief. Once inside, the woman handed Hans a bottle of cider and told him to sit. He sat in a big padded chair and the woman said, You can rest now. Grete and I will finish up and then start supper. He felt guilty and confused, but he sat in the chair and drank the cider. Soon, he fell asleep and dozed the rest of the afternoon, nodding in the chair.

Blisters formed on Grete’s hands, and her back ached. Years of Yoga and Pilates had not prepared her for this hard work, but, once she found a sustainable rhythm, she fell into a kind of trance. She stood up on the fork to push it into the redolent, raw kitchen scraps and manure, then stood down and pulled the handle of the fork back to her, then twisted the handle to turn over the clod. She found the exertion pleasant, and watched the sun move up the wall of trees until the woman appeared by her, nodded approvingly, and said, Time to make supper. They went into the house.

While Hans napped on the chair, Grete cleaned a big pile of mushrooms the woman had apparently just brought in from the forest. She worked quickly, sitting on a stool at the butcher-block island. The smell of earth and leaf-mold filled the kitchen. The woman sorted the growing pile of clean mushrooms. Fat gray ones in one pile; big, graceful yellow ones in another; small, very delicate bluish ones and pink ones with furled edges. When Grete finished cleaning the mushrooms, the woman handed her a hand-blown glass of brown liquor. She smelled it. Calvados? Jack, the woman said. Pear jack. It was smooth and intense and pleasantly hot. The late afternoon took on a kind of golden unreality. She lost track of how many glasses of jack she sipped. She moved fluently, almost automatically, as though she had some deep program in her guiding her movements. She chopped squash and eggplants, blanched peas, butterflied a chicken, and cored tomatoes as though she had done it many times, though she had always avoided cooking. She had been eating out for many years. 

The sun went down. They drank a bottle of red wine. Hans started awake from his long nap just as the woman finished assembling a salad of frisée, fresh goat cheese, rabbit sausages, candied walnuts, and currants. The woman guided her to the table with her hand on the small of her back. They drank a sharp, mineral white wine, nearly colorless, with the salad. They drank a heavier golden wine with the roast chicken and mushrooms. After sitting in the warm light of the candles for a while, the woman moved a plate of cheeses in front of them. It had been there all along, but they hadn’t seen it. They drank the same ink-black wine they’d had the night before.

In the morning, Grete awoke to the crowing of roosters and the clanging of the steel pails. She opened her eyes to the simple room, with its shelves of books. She quieted her breathing and focused her senses on the presence behind her. She could feel his heat radiating across the space between them under the blankets. His breathing was soft and even. She felt the flannel sheets against her naked skin. She felt three days’ stubble on her legs snag the sheets as she moved cautiously and dressed herself in the half-dark. She searched her memory for folding her clothes, but the night was foggy. She could remember the hours of work in the kitchen and each course of the meal, but the later hours of the long evening were out of focus, remote, muddled, no doubt, by the alcohol. She could retrieve no memory at all of getting up from the table, getting ready for bed, getting in bed, or of Hans doing any of these things either. Certainly, she thought, No matter how drunk I was, I would never undress with Hansy in the room, and I can’t imagine that he would undress with me around.

She drank her coffee standing. She went out to the barn to explain that they had to leave, but somehow found herself sitting and learning how to milk the cow, and then the goats. The woman disappeared, and presently Grete heard the sound of wood being chopped and stacked, and the woman returned and the chopping continued. It was after noon before she saw Hans. They ate in near silence. Grete drank coffee. The woman handed Hans a bottle of cider. He sat and drank it and soon fell asleep.

Hours again that afternoon and into the evening Grete and the woman worked in the kitchen, and for hours the three ate and drank until the golden light and the warmth of the stove and the ecstatic glow of the wine drew a scrim over their thoughts and they slept.

Once, passing each other at the twinned beeches, they planned to leave. They went down the path, figured out the forking way to the car, closed the gate behind them, and found that a large tree had fallen across the road. Hans spent hours chopping it with an axe, but made little progress. He had no aptitude for labor. His hands were blistered and bruised. In the afternoon he quit, had a bottle of cider, and napped til supper.

One morning Hans woke before Grete. He turned and found her there by him. He studied her in the half-light. She looked old. The skin of her neck had loosened since her facelift. Her hair was coming in white at the part, and looked dry and, frankly, unfashionable. He felt his face, now covered in a thick beard. He looked at his hands. He had always had weekly manicures, and he moisturized twice a day, but his nails were torn and bitten, he had yellow calluses, his knuckles were barked and raw, and his skin was dry and coarse. He held up his arms. The backs of his hands were dark brown, but from the wrist up he was pale. He lifted the cover and looked down at himself. He had never liked to sleep naked. He looked white and shrunken and old. A new, thick layer of fat surrounded his waist, and he could feel it thickening around his back. His chest and back were covered with the beginning of a thick mat of grey hair. He had gotten waxed right before the trip  ̶  you never know when you’re going to meet someone, he had said to Grete over lunch salads  ̶   but the hair had come back like a shameful memory.

He got out of bed silently and dressed. The woman met him in the kitchen. This time, instead of handing him a mug of coffee as she had every morning since they’d arrived, she stood in front of the stove and looked at him. The early light came through the window, and he could see, plainly, the shape of her in the thin dress. He knew that shape by now. She stepped to him and looked up. She looked very old for a moment. Then the light changed and she looked young, but weathered or tired. Her hair may have been grey or silver or just very light blond, he was never certain. She took both of his hands and looked into his eyes, first one eye, then the other. She put one hand on the front of his pants, but he was unmoved. She unbuttoned her dress and dropped it. Her body was strong, very muscular and very womanly, like an ancient Venus, he thought. Not a body for chic clothes or boardrooms or photographs. A body for work and sex and children. She put her hand back on him, but of course he did not respond as she expected. She put his hand on her and held it there while she searched his face. Then she looked away, picked up her dress, rebuttoned it, and went back to the stove. She wiped her eyes with the inside of her wrist and stirred the pot of milk.

Hans got the axe, and he worked on the fallen tree for hours. Blisters formed, then bled, but he kept at it. Gradually, he learned to alternate the angle of his axe-strokes, so that each swing produced a fat chip of the green wood and the bit didn’t get stuck as it so frustratingly had at first. He chopped a length out of the trunk just wide enough to get the car through. He turned the car in the narrow road and inched through the gap he’d cut. He went back to the house for Grete. He found her shucking corn. Her hands were chapped and cracked, and her nails were short and showed yellow through the little polish that remained. Purplish bags sagged under her eyes, and the white roots that had grown into her dyed-black hair reminded him of a skunk. The skin of her cheeks and neck, without makeup, was blotchy, slack, and papery.

She looked at him. His hair had come in gray and gray hair was matted on his nape, throat, and face. Gray hair sprouted from his ears. His clothes were dirty and untidy. He was visibly fat around the middle. He carried himself slightly stooped, and capillaries had burst in his nose and under his bloodshot eyes.

They left the woman standing there tending the wood in the stove. She didn’t even look at them when they said thank you. They walked out to the car and drove back to the city in silence. She looked to the road ahead, and he watched the country scroll by outside his window. First the long tunnel of the forest, then the broadening valley, then the farms and villages, each more prosperous than the last. Then the freeway, then the suburbs, then the looming of the city, its welcome bustle and distractions, then the familiar front door of his building. She looked back to see that he had his bags, then merged into traffic, anonymous and alone.