The Taste of Apple Seeds (15 page)

“I found you creepy.”

“Oh, come off it. You thought we were great.”

“Terrifying.”

“You were crazy about us.”

“You were just totally crazy.”

“You thought we were gorgeous.”

Max fell silent.

“You thought we were gorgeous.”

“Okay, so maybe I did. And?”

We went on painting.

A few minutes later I heard Max’s muffled voice again. “This graffiti on the wall—it’s been sprayed either by someone who hasn’t got a clue what he’s writing, or by someone who knew Hinnerk Lünschen well. Because there isn’t a far-right scene here in Bootshaven. There isn’t any scene here at all, in fact. Unless you count the car-washing scene or the geraniums-in-concrete-window-boxes scene. There’s so little going on here that sometimes I sit in the cemetery and knock back red wine just to make something happen. I’m a boring man and just intelligent enough to realize it. Typical!”

I didn’t say a word. I didn’t fancy trying to comfort him, nor did I feel that he was asking to be comforted. And anyway, what he said was sort of right. What did I see in this glib lawyer? The past, maybe. In some way it must be important to me that he still had this picture of me as I was back then: a chubby blond girl trying desperately to catch the attention of two older girls. He knew me as Bertha’s granddaughter, Rosmarie’s cousin, Hinnerk’s “little lass.” And even though Max, like all little brothers between the ages of eight and thirteen, vanished off our radar, he had seen us all the same. Sometimes Mira had to bring him over to our place; we wouldn’t give him the time of day, or he us either, but I did notice how he watched us. I could sense that, like me, beneath the feigned indifference was a streak of desperation.

These days, I didn’t know anybody who knew us as we were back then—besides my parents and aunts, of course. But they didn’t count as they never stopped seeing us as children. Max, however, was seeing me now. What luck that he was so nice. I supposed that had to be the case, really; Mira had bagged all the other attributes. She was wild, he was calm. She caught people’s eye, he made himself invisible. She left, he stayed. Mira craved drama, Max peace and quiet. And because he was so nice we had never noticed him. Sophisticated girls never notice the nice boys.

But now I had noticed him and I wondered why. Death and eroticism have always gone hand in hand, of course, but apart from that? Because neither of us had anyone at the moment? I had left Jon because I wanted to “go home.” Everyone knows you have to be careful what you wish for because it might just come true. Max came with the house. The house. A shared process of forgetting was as strong a tie as a shared process of remembering. Perhaps even stronger.

And this solved the mystery of the man with the bottle at the cemetery. Not much could remain a secret in the village, not even from me. No doubt everyone already knew that Max was standing here painting Bertha Deelwater’s chicken shed.

And what had Max noticed back then? That day at the lock was one of the first days of summer. I recall dodging huge swarms of green flies as we cycled through the cow pastures to the canal. Rosmarie was wearing a slim-fitting violet dress; the headwind billowed the thin, sheer material of her puffed sleeves. Her arms shone white through the purple voile and it looked as if two sea serpents were growing from her shoulders. She had hitched the dress up to her thighs so she could ride her bike, and the clothes pegs were blown flat in the airstream. I must have been riding behind her, because I can still picture the freckles on the backs of her knees. But that may have been on another bike ride.

I am positive I was wearing Aunt Inga’s green dress on that occasion, too. I remember feeling like a river nymph on the way there, and like a bloated, drowned corpse on the way back.

Mira wore black.

We dropped our bikes at the riverbank, took our swimming gear from the pannier racks, and ran down to one of the fishing jetties. I put a huge towel around my shoulders and tried to get undressed beneath it. There was no one there apart from us. Mira and Rosmarie laughed when they saw me. “What on earth are you doing that for? What have you got to hide?”

But I was ashamed of my body precisely because I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. Rosmarie had small, firm breasts with rebellious pink nipples; Mira had an extraordinarily large chest, which you would never have expected what with her baggy black jumpers and her narrow shoulders. I had nothing. Nothing to speak of. I wasn’t quite as flat as a year earlier, when I had gone swimming uninhibitedly in a pair of bikini bottoms. There was something there, but it was strange and embarrassing and it felt fake. I didn’t understand why in swimming pools the girls always had to get changed in a communal area, whereas the women had their own individual cabins. It would have made more sense the other way around. It’s the things that aren’t finished that need covering up. This is as true of works of art as it is of potato beetles. It was perfectly clear to me which group I belonged to.

We sat on the wooden jetty and compared the color of our bodies. We were terribly pasty, and although my hair was the fairest I had the darkest skin of us all: a yellowish hue. Mira was alabaster, Rosmarie blue-veined with freckles. Then we compared our bodies. Rosmarie talked about breasts and how periods made them change size. I didn’t understand what she was talking about; in what periods did they get bigger and smaller? And was there a period in which mine might not stay as stunted as this forever? Rosmarie and Mira laughed loudly. I blushed and felt hot all over. All I knew was that there was something I didn’t know that I ought to know; my eyes were burning and I bit the inside of my cheeks to stop myself from bursting into tears.

It was Mira who collected herself first and asked whether my mother had told me that once a month women lose blood down below. I was horrified. Blood. No one had ever told me anything about that. I dimly recalled something that my mother had called “the time of the month,” but that had something to do with not being able to play sports. I was furious at my mother. And furious at Mira and Rosmarie. I could have thumped them. Bang in the middle of their wobbly, jellylike breasts.

“Hey, Mira, she really didn’t know!” Rosmarie crowed in utter delight.

“You’re right. How sweet!”

“Of course I knew, I just didn’t know you called it a ‘period.’ At home we call it ‘the time of the month.’ ”

“All right, so you must also know what you use to stop the blood from trickling out.”

“ ’Course I do.”

“What then?”

I went quiet and bit the inside of my cheeks once more. It hurt and distracted me. I tongued the marks my teeth had made. I didn’t want to let on how little I knew, but I didn’t want to change the subject, either, because I absolutely had to find out more.

Rosmarie looked at me—she was lying down in the middle of the three of us—and her eyes flashed as silver as the scales of the slender fish in the canal. She seemed to know what was going through my mind.

“I’ll tell you: tampons and sanitary towels. Mira, tell her how a tampon works.”

I was unsettled by what Mira said next: hard, thick cylinders of cotton wool that you pushed inside yourself down below. Bits of string that hung out of you, and blood, blood, and more blood. I felt sick. I got up and jumped into the water. Behind me I could hear Mira and Rosmarie laughing. When I climbed back out the two of them were discussing their weight.

“. . . and little Iris here has got a lovely big bottom, too.” Rosmarie gave me a provocative look.

Mira snorted. “That comes from all the chocolate your granddad gives you.”

It was true, I wasn’t thin. I wasn’t even slim. I had a fat bottom and big legs, no breasts but a round tummy. I was the ugliest of us three. Rosmarie was the mysterious one, Mira the disreputable one, and I was the fat one. And it was also true that I ate too much. I loved eating while reading. One sandwich after another, one biscuit after another, continually alternating between sweet and salty. It was wonderful: romances with gouda, adventure novels with nut chocolate, family tragedies with muesli, fairy tales with toffees, knights in shining armor with Prinzen Rolle biscuits. In many books the characters ate at the happiest point in the story: meatballs and compote and cinnamon rolls and a ring of the very best bologna sausage. Sometimes when I was roaming our kitchen looking for food my mother would bite her bottom lip, nod in a particular way, and say that I should pack it in as supper would be in an hour, or that I should pay a little more attention to my figure. Why did she always tell me to pack it in when she was trying to get me to do the exact opposite? She knew how much her words humiliated me, that I would storm up to my room and wouldn’t come down for supper, and later I would steal the almonds and cooking chocolate and take them up to bed. I would read and eat, and I would be an unhappy, mute mermaid or a little lord, I would be stranded on an island, run over a moor with wild hair, or kill dragons. With the almonds I would chew up my anger and self-disgust, and then swallow it all down with cooking chocolate. So long as I read and ate, it was fine. I would be anybody at all apart from myself. I just had to make sure I didn’t stop reading.

I didn’t read that day at the lock. I stood dripping on the jetty and froze beneath the gaze of the two girls. I looked down at my feet; viewed from above they jutted out white and wide from beneath my belly, and my goose bumps were bigger than my nipples.

Rosmarie leaped up. “C’mon, let’s jump from the bridge.”

Mira got up slowly and stretched. She looked like a black-and-white cat in her bikini. “Do we have to?” She yawned.

“Yes, we do, my dear. You come too, Iris.”

Mira bristled: “Go and play elsewhere, children. Just give the grown-up a little bit of peace, okay?”

Rosmarie looked at me, her watercolor eyes shining. She gave me her hand. I took it gratefully and we ran to the bridge together. Mira followed slowly.

The wooden bridge was higher than we had thought, but not so high that you wouldn’t dare do it. In midsummer the older boys jumped from here, but today it was deserted.

“Look, Mira, that’s your little brother sitting down there. Hey! Wimp!”

Rosmarie was right. Below us Max was sitting on a towel with a friend. They were eating shortbread and hadn’t seen us yet. When Rosmarie shouted out they both looked up.

“Okay, who’s first?” Rosmarie asked.

“Me.” I wasn’t scared of jumping: I was a good swimmer. And even if I was ugly, at least I was brave.

“No, Mira’s jumping first.”

“Why? Let Iris do it if she wants.”

“But I want you to jump, Mira.”

“But I don’t want to jump.”

“Come on. Sit on the rail.”

“I don’t mind doing that, but that’s enough.”

“Fine.” Rosmarie looked at me again and there was a glint in her eye. I knew at once what she was up to. She and Mira had been ganging up on me and now my cousin was switching sides. I was still annoyed about earlier and yet I felt flattered. I nodded at Rosmarie. She nodded back. Mira sat on the rail, her feet dangling over the water.

“Are you ticklish, Mira?”

“You know I am.”

“Are you ticklish here?” Rosmarie caressed her back lightly.

“No, stop it!”

Rosmarie gave her shoulders a halfhearted tickle.

“Go away, Rosmarie!”

I moved up next to Mira and said, “Or here?” And I pinched her sharply on the side.

She flinched and screamed and fell from the bridge. Rosmarie and I didn’t look at each other. We bent over the rail to see what Mira would do when she resurfaced.

We waited.

Nothing happened.

She didn’t come up again.

Just before I jumped I caught sight of Max running into the water with a splash. When I came up again he was already dragging his sister toward the bank. She was coughing but swimming.

She staggered onto the embankment and lay down in the tall grass. Max sat beside her. They weren’t talking. When I got out of the water and Rosmarie ran down from the bridge, he looked at all three of us in turn, spat into the water, got up, and left. He jumped onto his bike in his wet trunks and rode off.

Rosmarie and I sat beside Mira, who still had her eyes closed and was breathing hard.

“You’re mental.” She panted the words.

“I’m sorry, Mira, I . . .” I started crying.

Rosmarie didn’t say anything, she just looked at Mira. When Mira finally opened her eyes to look at Rosmarie, Rosmarie threw her head back and laughed. Mira puckered her small red mouth—was it pain or hatred, or would she cry, too? Her lips parted, she gasped for air loudly, and then she began to laugh, quietly at first, then noisily, helplessly, piercingly. Rosmarie didn’t take her eyes off her. I sat beside her, howling.

“Max?”

“Hmm?”

“That time at the lock . . .”

“Hmm?”

“I felt so bad. I wonder . . .”

“Hmm?”

“I wonder whether it had anything to do with Rosmarie’s death?”

“No idea. But I don’t think so—it wasn’t even the same summer. That was years before. What makes you think of that now?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“You know what? Maybe everything had something to do with it. So maybe that had something to do with it, that and the weather, and what was sprayed on this shed, and a thousand other things besides. Do you follow me?”

“Hmm.”

I brushed the hair from my forehead. We kept on working. It was still warm. The paint job wasn’t very effective; you could still easily make out the red letters. Nazi. Hinnerk had often used the word “leftie” himself. You would have had to be deaf not to know that he didn’t like lefties. He railed against those on the right, those on the left, all parties and all politicians alike. He despised the whole corrupt pack of them, something he never tired of telling those who wanted to hear it, but especially those who didn’t. My father, for example, was one of those who didn’t want to hear it; he was a member of the local council and at home he would passionately put to us the case for bicycle ramps on curbs, roundabouts at junctions, and the switching off of traffic lights at night on empty streets.