The Cheese Cellar – Part 1: Turning the Wheels

The cellar was cut into the mountainside, cool and dark, and lined with ten thousand wheels of cheese on spruce shelves.

"You turn them," said Fabian. "Every day. Gently."

Lena looked at the wheel in her hands: heavy as a small child, golden-rinded, smelling of hay and cellar. She was twenty-nine, a former accountant from Zurich who had quit her job in a fit of madness. Fabian was thirty-four, quiet, with big hands and a tidy brown beard, and a way of looking at cheese the way other people looked at art.

"It's alive," he added.

"It's cheese."

"It is cheese that is alive. It breathes." He ran a thumb across the rind. "If you hurry it, it sulks."

She laughed. He glanced at her, surprised, and a slow smile touched his mouth.

For a month she turned wheels and learned. Brush the rind with salt brine. Tap and listen for the hollow. Smell. He did not praise her; he simply handed her the next job. But he began leaving a flask of hot tea at her station, and once a slice of the best wheel on a scrap of paper.

"Can I ask you something?" said Lena, one evening.

"Yes."

"Why cheese?"

"Because it teaches patience." He turned a wheel. "And because nobody argues with it."

"I argued with a spreadsheet for eleven years."

"And?"

"It didn't listen either."

He laughed, a short, startled laugh. "Then you are in the right place."

"Green?" she said, on an impulse.

"Green," said Fabian, going faintly red. "Very green. Try this one."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Ripe.