The Taste of Apple Seeds (14 page)

I picked up a pot of paint and the two rollers. Max stuck the brush in his back trouser pocket and took a pot in either hand and we traipsed around the side of the house. Past the kitchen garden where the smell of onions wafted up to our noses, then past the pine copse into which the evening sun cast bizarre shadows, until we finally got to the chicken shed. Back here the grass had not been mown for a very, very long time. Bertha used to keep the grass in front of the house short with her lawnmower, but behind the house Hinnerk would swing his scythe. As a child I loved the swishing sound as the grasses and buttercups fell. He would make his way slowly and calmly across the meadow. He didn’t wield his scythe in wild sweeps but rather with the rhythm and evenness of a baroque dance.

“Here it is.” We were by the wall with the red graffiti. “Max, do you know what? I think it’s true.”

“What’s true?”

“That he was one. A Nazi.”

“Was he in the party?”

“Yes. What about your granddad?”

“No, mine was a communist.”

“But my grandfather wasn’t just a party member; he always had to make decisions.”

“I see.”

“Harriet used to tell us things sometimes.”

“How did she know?”

“No idea. Maybe she asked him. Or my grandmother told her.”

Max shrugged and opened the first tin. He stirred the thick paint with a stick he had picked up in the pine copse. “Come on, let’s start painting. You get going there and I’ll start here.”

We dipped in the rollers and ran them over the dark gray render. The white dazzled. I pushed the roller slowly against the wall. The roof began just above my eye level. Thin trickles of white paint dripped. Painting was another form of forgetting. I didn’t want to attach too much importance to the writing in red. I mean, it wasn’t God who had sprayed it there but a bored teenager. Just a prank, someone painting the town red, so to speak.

The painting went quickly; the walls of the chicken shed weren’t particularly big. When we used to play there, Rosmarie, Mira, and I, the shed hadn’t seemed so small.

My grandmother’s hands brushed over every smooth surface—tables, cupboards, chests of drawers, chairs, televisions, stereos; she would run her hands everywhere, always on the hunt for crumbs, dust, or sand. She would sweep what she found into a pile with her right hand and then brush it into the cupped palm of her left. She would then carry around what she had swept up until someone took it off her and threw it into a bin, down the loo, or out the window. It’s a symptom of her illness, they all do that here, the sister in the home had told my mother. A ghost house. It was all apparently so practical and functional, but it was peopled with bodies whose spirits had forsaken them in different ways and to differing degrees. The good ones as well as the bad ones. They all brushed their hands along the smooth plastic furniture with rounded edges as if they were looking for something to hold on to. But this was a misconception: they weren’t feeling for something to hold on to. If Bertha spotted a stubborn mark, even if it was on the sole of her shoe, she would scratch at it fiercely and doggedly until it came away beneath her fingernails, disintegrating into specks or tiny balls and finally vanishing altogether. Tabula rasa. Nowhere could you find cleaner tables than in the House of Forgetting. There they forgot completely, their minds wiped clean.

When Christa came back from visiting Bertha she used to cry a lot. If people ever told her that there was some consolation in one’s parents becoming children again, she would get angry. Her shoulders would tense, her voice turned cold, and quietly she would say that it was the most stupid thing she had ever heard. Confused old people weren’t a bit like children, they were just demented geriatrics. There were no similarities. Comparing them to children was enough to make you laugh, if you didn’t cry first. An idea like that could occur only to someone who had never had children or a demented geriatric at home.

Those people, who had simply wanted to console Christa, would fall silent, shocked and often insulted. The comment about demented geriatrics was harsh and tasteless. Christa was being provocative and that astonished my father and me. We knew her only as a quiet, polite woman, determined, maybe, but never aggressive.

When I studied
Macbeth
at school I couldn’t help but think of Bootshaven. The whole play was about remembering and not wanting to remember, about getting rid of stains that weren’t there. And then there were the three sisters, the witches.

Brush, brushing, Bertha’s hands moving over everything that was flat: the body’s affirmation that it still existed, that it could still offer resistance. Checking whether there continued to be a difference between itself and the lifeless objects in the room. But all that—the sweeping, clearing, emptying—came later. Prior to that, these tables and sideboards and chairs and chests of drawers were full of or piled high with notes. Endless notes. Small square pieces of paper, cleanly detached from notebooks, pieces cut out from the edge of a newspaper, large A
₄
pages torn from a pad, the blank sides of receipts. Shopping lists, memos, lists of birthdays, lists of addresses, notes with directions, notes with commands printed in capitals:
TUESDAYS FETCH EGGS!
or
KEY FRAU MAHLSTEDT
. Then Bertha started asking Harriet to help decode the notes.

“What does ‘Key Frau Mahlstedt’ mean?” she asked in exasperation. “Did Frau Mahlstedt give me a key? Where is it then? Does she want to give it to me? Did I mean to give one to her? Which one? Why?”

The notes kept on multiplying. They would float all over the place. Because there was always a draft somewhere, they would drift slowly through the kitchen like the large lime leaves through the yard in autumn. The messages on the notes became increasingly illegible and incomprehensible. Whereas the first notes were things like the step-by-step instructions for the new washing machine, over time they got shorter and shorter. “Right before left” one simply said; this was still understandable. But sometimes my grandmother wrote notes that she then couldn’t read, and sometimes she tried to read notes that had nothing legible on them at all. The messages got stranger: “Swimming costume in Ford”—even though they didn’t have a Ford anymore—and then “Bertha Lünschen, Geestestrasse 10, Bootshaven,” over and over again. At some point this became just “Bertha Deelwater,” but by then there were fewer notes. Bertha. Bertha. As if she had to make sure that she still existed. The name no longer looked like a signature, but like something copied out carefully in neat script. A short piece of handwriting full of places where the pen had stopped, paused, and then started again, a mass of tiny scars. Time swept past and the flow of paper dried up completely. Whenever Bertha came across an old note she would stare at it blankly, scrunch it up, and put it in her apron, sleeve, or shoe.

My grandfather grumbled about the chaos in the house. Harriet did her best, but she had to work on her translations, and Rosmarie didn’t exactly help keep everything looking orderly and tidy. Hinnerk started locking his study to stop his wife from making a mess of it. A baffled Bertha would rattle the door to his room, saying she had to come in. It was a sight none of us found easy to bear. It was her house after all.

In fact, I knew Bootshaven only in the summer when I was here on holiday. Sometimes I came with both my parents, but usually it was just with Christa. Once or twice I came alone. For Hinnerk’s funeral we made the trip in November. But all it did was rain. I didn’t really see much except for the cemetery.

What was the garden like in winter? I asked my mother the ice-skater, whose name sounded like the scraping of blades on ice.

In winter the garden was beautiful, of course, she said with a shrug. When she realized that this wasn’t enough for me, she added that on one occasion everything had frozen. It had started by raining all day long, but then in the evening the temperature dropped and everything glazed over. Each leaf, each stalk had its own transparent layer of ice, and when the wind blew through the pine copse, the needles had jangled against one another. It was like the music of the stars. Each stone in the yard looked as if it were made from glass. Nobody had been allowed outside. They had opened the window in Inga’s room and looked out. The next day it had got warmer again and the rain washed everything away.

What was the garden at Bertha’s house like in winter? I asked my father, who must also have seen it outside the summer holidays. He nodded thoughtfully and said, “Well, similar to how it is in summer, just brown and dull.” He was only a natural scientist, so nature was probably lost on him.

When I was there in the summer I asked Rosmarie and Mira. We sat on the steps, hiding short letters under the loose bits of stone. The garden in winter? Rosmarie didn’t think about it for long. “Boring,” she said.

“Deathly boring,” Mira said, laughing.

When Rosmarie, Mira, and I were playing one of our dressing-up games, my grandfather came past to offer us some sweets from the Quality Street tin. He liked us. He liked me better than Rosmarie because I was Christa’s child, because I was younger, because I didn’t live in the house with him, and because he didn’t see me so often. But he loved flirting with the two older girls and they would readily flirt back. This pleased him and he became quite charming, so I also asked him what the garden looked like in winter. Hinnerk winked at us, looked out the window, then, after a dramatic sigh, turned to us and spoke in a deep voice:

Winter sees the gray man come,

The frost, my child, and ice,

And if you fail to dress up warm

You’ll get a chill in a trice.

You’ll cough and sniffle and you’ll sneeze

And speak right through your nose,

Now red and running as you freeze—

The winter brings such woes.

Alone there sitting on your bed

Wiping your nose sore,

That wretched cold inside your head

Keeps all friends from the door.

Alone in the garden, too,

Your heart so heavy and sad,

No friend will dare come near you,

They fear your cold’s too bad.

Hinnerk roared with laughter and took a bow. Bravo, we cried, more out of politeness than genuine appreciation, and clapped our gloved hands. Rosmarie and I wore white gloves that buttoned at the wrist. Mira’s gloves were made of black satin and came to her elbows. Hinnerk went back down again, still laughing; the stairs creaked under his feet. Mira wanted to know whether he had made up the poem on the spot. I would have liked to know that, too, but Rosmarie just shrugged. Maybe, she said. He’s always making up poems. He’s got a book full of them.

By now Max and I had reached the graffiti on the wall. I rolled over the “i,” he over the “N.” Slowly we crossed each other’s path.

“I’ll finish along here,” I said, “and you start with another wall. It looks funny with just one wall painted white, so we’ll do them all. Won’t take long.”

Max took another tin of paint, opened the lid, gave it a stir, then took it around the corner to paint the side facing the copse.

“Max?” I was talking to my wall.

Max’s voice came from the right. “Hmm?”

“Haven’t you anything better to do this evening than to paint this shed?”

“Are you complaining?”

“No, of course not. I’m delighted, I really am. But you’ve got a life, haven’t you? I mean, I’m sure . . . well, you understand?”

“No, I don’t understand. I’d be grateful if you’d finish what you were saying, Iris. I’m not going to help you out here.”

“Okay, fine. It’s my own fault. I was just trying to be polite. I just get the impression that you’re throwing yourself at me and my business as if there were nothing else in your life—is that the case?”

Max peered around the corner and looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Maybe, yes, maybe that is the case. And so now you’re inferring with that pitiful little woman’s brain of yours that I’m only hanging around here because I’m lonely and bored.” Max sighed, shook his head, and disappeared again behind the chicken shed.

I took a deep breath. “So? Are you?”

“Lonely and bored?”

“Well?”

“Okay, I admit it. A bit, sometimes. But it doesn’t mean I generally go looking for the company of strange women and start doing DIY jobs on their houses and chicken sheds.”

“Hmm. So I should be taking this personally, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“What
do
you do when you’re not painting chicken sheds or working?”

“Oh dear, I knew that was coming. Not much, Iris. Look, I play tennis twice a week with a colleague. In the evenings I go running, even though I find it boring as hell. I go swimming when it’s hot, I watch telly, read two papers every day, and occasionally leaf through
Der Spiegel
. Sometimes I go to the cinema after work.”

“Where’s your wife? By the age of twenty-five you lot in the country have usually already got two or three children with a woman you’ve known since you were both sixteen.” I was glad that I couldn’t see him.

“That’s true. And I almost did have one. My last girlfriend—who by the way I met when I was twenty-two, and who I lived with for four years—moved away last year. She was a nurse.”

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

“She changed hospitals, even farther away from town than here. And before we could consider whether we should move midway between her hospital and my office, she had an affair with her boss.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Max.”

“Me too. But what I was most sorry about was that somehow I didn’t really care. The only thing that infuriated me was the doctor-nurse cliché. My heart wasn’t broken. Not even sprained. I probably don’t have a heart anymore; it’s sunk into this boggy landscape.”

“You had one when you were little.”

“Really? How touching.”

“When you pulled Mira out of the water. At the lock.”

“But did that have anything to do with my heart? I think it was more a case of doing my duty. And I didn’t enjoy doing it.”

“No, but you showed heart when you never said hello to us anymore after that.”