The Taste of Apple Seeds (24 page)

And then it happened: Mira recoiled. Rosmarie had given her an electric shock. She lost her friend’s hand. Crashing and cracking. A dull thud and an ear-piercing clatter that seemed as if it would never end. One pane of glass after another came away from its fixing and fell to the ground. Glass shattered on stone. Glass. The night air, bathed in moonlight, sparkled with slivers and shards. I screamed and ran indoors to get my mother and Harriet. When I reached the hallway all three sisters were already racing toward me. Inga wasn’t wearing pajamas. We ran into the garden together. Mira had climbed down from the willow and was kneeling beside Rosmarie, screaming.

Rosmarie was lying on her back on the bright stones. The night wind toyed with the sleeves of her dress. Shards of glass lay all around her like crystals. A small trail of blood ran from her nose.

Harriet threw herself onto her daughter and tried to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. My mother and Aunt Inga ran indoors and called an ambulance. It came and took Rosmarie; Mira and Harriet went with her.

When they had gone a dark pool of blood was left behind.

Rosmarie died of a brain injury. She had hardly lost any blood.

The pool of blood was Mira’s.

That was how we found out about the abortion that Mira had undergone the day before.

Bertha had vanished. We began to look for her. Christa, Inga, and I were relieved to have something to do. We searched the garden together. She was standing beside the currant bushes.

“Anna, brock at me.” She gave me an uncertain smile. “You’re not Anna?”

I shook my head.

“Where is Anna? Tell me. I don’t mersom what these balls are glicking.” She pointed to the berries. “Where are we supposed to speen that? I mean, it won’t be any better. Or what do you think? Go on, tell me. It bunts a shud. If we want to. Poor little me. Poor little me.”

Bertha became even more agitated. She kept bending over to pick up fallen currants from the ground. “And the dancing just goes on and on. Here it’s all smunge. We can’t. Not as it was. The post’s come. Tra-la-la. And that’s it.” She was crying.

She had also soiled her pajama bottoms. I wished I could cry, too. But I couldn’t. I took Bertha’s hand, but she got cross and snatched it back. I turned and walked away. Christa and Inga could sort this out. I couldn’t. Bertha came behind me. When she saw Christa and Inga she waved to them and flung her arms around their necks. “Here are my mothers! What a joy! These lovely women.”

Christa and Inga linked arms with Bertha and I followed on slowly behind. It was hard to make out who was actually supporting whom.

Since that night I’ve refused, every single night that’s followed, to ask myself the following questions: What did Rosmarie want to tell me? Why did she want to wake me? Did she want to talk to me? Did she want me to talk to Mira? Did she want me to come with her? If so, where had she originally planned to go? To the lock, perhaps, or to the lake for a swim? Maybe just to the apple tree behind the house? Or maybe to see Aunt Harriet? Did she see Bertha and me standing there in the dark? Why didn’t I call out to her? Why didn’t she call out to me? Did she know about Mira’s abortion? If not, then did Mira tell her that evening and was that why Rosmarie jumped—a life for a life? If so, did she perhaps want to tell me? If so, was she relieved? If so, had she got scared? And why had she climbed up there? Did she jump? Did she fall? Was it just a whim? Had she planned it? Did Mira let go of her by accident? Deliberately? Did she make Mira let go of her? What was that electric good-night gesture all about? Was it Inga trying to get her revenge? Did Rosmarie want to say good-bye to me? Did she want to tell me a secret? Did she want to make up with me? Did she want me to beg forgiveness? What would have happened if I had blinked? What would have happened if I hadn’t acted all offended? What would have happened if I had crept down behind her? What would have happened if I had called to her outside? What did Rosmarie want to tell me that night? Why had she tried to wake me up? Was she always planning to go outside or did she go outside only because I refused to wake up? What did Rosmarie want to tell me? What was it, what? What did Rosmarie want to tell me? Why had I pretended to be asleep? What would have happened if I had giggled? What would have happened if I had blinked? What would have happened if I had listened to what she wanted to tell me? What did she want to tell me? What?

Chapter XII

MAX DIDN’T GO HOME
. That night we made love under the apple tree.

When the sun came up we rode off together and swam in the lake. The water was still and cold, and where it wasn’t silver it was black. I accompanied him back to his house, and he asked whether he could come over after work. I said yes.

As I tramped through the dewy grass to the orchard, I didn’t notice anything at first. It wasn’t until I stretched out on our makeshift camp and looked up into the tree that I saw it: the apples had ripened overnight. Heavy Boskoop apples with coarse green and red and brown skin were hanging from the branches. It was June. I got up, picked one, took a bite; it tasted sweet and sour, and the skin was slightly bitter.

I then went off to fetch a bucket and some baskets. On the way to the barn a thought crossed my mind and I took a detour to the currant bushes. But here everything was as usual. Only white and black ones.

I picked apples all day long.

It turned hot, the tree was big and it had lots of apples. I had leaned an aluminum ladder against the trunk. With the bucket and baskets and tubs I had found, there were also S-shaped metal hooks, one end of which you could hang over a branch. On the other you hooked the handle of the bucket. I went up and down the ladder many times with this bucket. It was hard work picking apples, but the tree made it easy for me. Its branches were strong and wide; I could stand and climb on them and so reach the fruit without too much difficulty.

Was this the apple tree that Bertha had fallen from before she got up, transformed into an old woman? I didn’t know and it wasn’t important, either. After Rosmarie’s fall, Harriet fell apart. Inga looked for a place in a care home for Bertha. But it was almost two years before Harriet moved out of the house and found herself a flat in Hamburg. During that time Inga looked after her mother, bringing her home regularly in the afternoons so she could keep an eye on Harriet, too. My mother began traveling up to Bootshaven outside of my holidays. That was a relief, as I didn’t want to go anymore. I paid a few brief visits during university vacations or I went to see Inga in Bremen. When she visited Bertha I didn’t go with her, apart from the one occasion. I realized that this disappointed my mother and my aunts, but I couldn’t help it.

Harriet didn’t last long in Hamburg and she traveled to India for several months, where she took part in seminars at an ashram. It seemed to help her. The seminars were expensive; she moved into an even smaller flat and took on more work. At some point she started wearing the wooden-bead necklace with the Bhagwan’s face hanging from it, and she began signing her letters with the name Mohani. But apart from that we couldn’t see any major changes in her. There was none of the brainwashing that my mother and Inga had been worried about. She sometimes said things about spirituality and karma, but she had spoken about these sorts of things before. When Rosmarie was still alive. Christa said that whatever did Harriet good was good. For anybody who was incurable was also invulnerable.

Around this time, Inga walked past the practice of Friedrich Quast, purely by chance. She called her sister. A few days later, Harriet took the train to Bremen. She sat in the full waiting room. As she didn’t have an appointment or a card, she had to wait until there was no one else left. She sat patiently. She wasn’t waiting for much. And expecting nothing. Finally Dr. Quast himself beckoned her into his consulting room.

He must have seen a middle-aged woman with slightly shaggy henna-red hair. A flat, round face without any makeup. Wrinkles around the eyes and two deep indentations on either side of the bridge of her nose. He saw her clothes, the saffron, cinnamon, and turmeric colors she liked to wear, besides those of other spices. And her trainers. And he would have pigeonholed her instantly—old hippie, a touch esoteric, frustrated, probably divorced.

Without any curiosity he asked what had brought her here.

She said her heart caused her pain. Day and night.

He nodded and raised his eyebrows, inviting her to say more.

Harriet smiled at him. “I had a daughter. She’s dead now. Do you have a daughter? A son?”

Friedrich Quast glanced at her. He shook his head.

Harriet went on speaking softly, staring at him all the while. “I had a daughter. She had red hair like you and freckled hands like you.”

Friedrich Quast placed his hands on the table. They had been in the pockets of his white coat the whole time. He said nothing, but his right eyelid began twitching ever so slightly when he met Harriet’s gaze.

He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. How old was your daughter?”

“Fifteen. Almost sixteen. Not a child, not a woman. She’d be just twenty-one now.”

Friedrich Quast gulped. Nodded.

Harriet kept on smiling. “I was young and in love with a red-haired student. I’m very sad that he never had a daughter. And she didn’t want to know where he was, even though I’d have given her every support if she’d wanted to find out. These things aren’t always so difficult, you know. But it breaks my heart, because he’ll never have this daughter. And it would break his, too, if he knew.”

Harriet stood up, tears streaming down her cheeks. Friedrich Quast was ashen-faced. He just gaped at her, breathing fitfully. Harriet didn’t seem to realize she was crying; as she left she said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Quast, I know you can’t help me. You can’t, but do you know what? I can’t help you, either.” Harriet went to the door.

“No. Don’t. Don’t go. What was her name? What was her name?”

Harriet looked at him. Her red eyes were expressionless. She would never tell him Rosmarie’s name. He would never get even a piece of her.

She said, “I’ve got to go.”

Harriet opened the door and closed it gently behind her. The receptionist eyed her mistrustfully as Harriet walked past her with hunched shoulders and a distracted nod.

The next time Inga was walking down that street, a few weeks later, she looked for his plaque, but it wasn’t there. Another doctor had set up practice. Inga went in and asked after Dr. Quast at the counter. He doesn’t practice here anymore, they said. You won’t find him in this town any longer.

Inga stayed in Bremen. From time to time she had lovers—all of them good-looking, most of them a bit younger than her—but nothing serious. People kept her at arm’s length, but she captured moments forever. In 1997 she won the German Portrait Award for the photographic series of her mother. She was also making electrostatics work for her. At Bertha’s funeral she told me how a sudden temperature change had charged some film with static, and flashes had appeared on the images. This mistake had opened up a whole new world of possibilities and perspectives.

I had filled two washing baskets and a plastic tub with apples. I brought them into the house and left them in the kitchen. Should they be stored in the cellar or the barn? Where was it cooler and drier? For now, though, I’d leave them where they were, standing on the floor of the kitchen.

I leaned over a basket of apples and gazed at the black and white square stones. Maybe I would finally manage to do it today. But just as the first symbols began to emerge I heard footsteps behind me. Max came into the kitchen and stopped in his tracks when he saw me bent over the floor.

“Are you not feeling well?”

I looked up, bemused. “Yes, of course I am.” I composed myself quickly and asked, “Do you know how to make apple puree?”

“I’ve never done it. But it can’t be that difficult, can it?”

“Okay, so you don’t. Do you know how to peel apples?”

“Yes I do, more’s the pity.”

“Excellent. Here’s the knife.”

“Where did these apples come from?”

“From the tree we slept under.”

“I didn’t sleep.”

“I know.”

“Apples? But it’s . . .”

“. . . June. I know.”

“Seeing as you know everything, might you now explain it to me?”

I shrugged.

“Have you got the Tree of Knowledge growing in your garden? That’ll push up the sale price of your house. So long as you don’t reject your inheritance.”

I hadn’t thought about selling yet. I looked at Max; his mouth had narrowed. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking that you’ll be off again soon. That you might sell the house and never come back here again, or only in one hundred years in a wheelchair pushed by your great-grandson. He’ll wheel you over to the cemetery and you’ll throw an apple on my grave and mutter, ‘Who was that again? What did he look like? Oh yes, I remember, he was the man who was forever ambushing me when I was naked!’ And then a dry cackle will escape from your throat, still with its majestic poise. And your great-grandson will be terrified and let go of you at the very moment that he was about to push you up the steep bank behind the lock. And you’ll roll backward and crash into the water, but at that very instant the lock gate will be opened and—”

“Max.”

“Sorry, I always talk too much when I’m nervous. Right, come here and kiss me.”

We peeled apples and cooked up twenty-three jars of puree. I couldn’t find any more preserving jars. We had muscle cramps and calluses from turning the Mouli grater. Luckily there were two Moulis in the house, a big one and a small one, so we could both crank at the same time. We added some cinnamon and nutmeg to the puree, as well as three apple pips that I had peeled and chopped. The warm, sweet, earthy aroma of cooked apples filled every corner of the house. Even the beds smelled of it. It was a wonderful apple puree.

I spent the days that followed in the garden. I ripped out mountains of ground elder and tetterwort, and carefully freed the stems of phlox and marguerites from the bindweed that was choking them. I dug up the columbines that had seeded themselves on the paths and replanted them in the beds. I pruned branches of lilac and mock orange so that the gooseberry bushes could get the sun again. I gently detached the small, delicate sweet-pea shoots from unreliable grass stems and guided them to the fence or tied them to a cane. The forget-me-nots had almost dried out by now, with only the odd twinkle of blue here and there. With thumb and forefinger I plucked them out by their thin stalks to scatter the seeds. I put my hand up into the wind and let the tiny gray grains fly away.