The Taste of Apple Seeds (3 page)

The door to the barn was locked. The key was hanging beside it on the wall, attached to a block of wood. I let it hang there. Then I climbed the stairs to the rooms where we used to sleep and play. The third step up creaked more loudly than before, but maybe the house had just got quieter. And the two at the top? Yes, they still creaked, and the third one from the top had joined them, too. The banisters whimpered the moment I touched them.

Upstairs the air was thick, old, and warm like the woolen blankets packed in the chests. I opened the windows on the large landing, the doors to the four main rooms, both doors of the walk-through room that had been my mother’s, and finally the twelve windows in all five bedrooms. I didn’t touch the skylight over the staircase; it was covered in a thick layer of cobwebs. Hundreds of spiders had spun their webs here over the years and the gossamer threads suspended not only dried-out flies but perhaps the dead bodies of their onetime owners as well. Matted together, the webs formed a soft white material, a milky light filter, rectangular and wan. I thought of the soft web of wrinkles on Bertha’s cheeks; it was so wide meshed that daylight seemed to shimmer through her skin from behind. Bertha had become see-through with old age; her house was opaque.

“But both of them rather eccentric,” I said out loud to the skylight, and the cobwebs fluttered in my breath.

Up here were the mighty old wardrobes. This was where we had played, Rosmarie, Mira, and I. Mira was a girl who lived nearby, she was a little older than Rosmarie and two years older than me. Everyone said that Mira was very quiet, though we didn’t think so. She never said much but managed to breed disquiet wherever she went. I don’t think it was just because of the black clothes she always wore—that was fairly common back then. Far more disquieting were her brown oval eyes: a white stripe divided the lower lids from her irises, and the black kohl line she drew only on her lower lids made her eyes look as if they were wrongly positioned on her face. Her upper lid hung down heavily, almost as far as the pupil. This gave her a slightly furtive but also languidly sensuous expression, for Mira was very beautiful. With her small mouth painted dark red, her dyed-black bob, those eyes and the eyeliner, she looked like a morphine-addicted silent movie star. When I last saw her she had just turned sixteen. Rosmarie would have also turned sixteen a few days later. I was fourteen.

Mira didn’t just wear only black things, she ate only black things, too. In Bertha’s garden she would pick blackberries, black currants, and only the darkest cherries. When the three of us went on a picnic we would always have to pack some bitter chocolate or black bread with black pudding. What was more, Mira only read books that she had wrapped in black paper beforehand, listened to black music, and washed with black soap that an aunt in England used to send her. In art lessons she would refuse to paint with watercolors, drawing only with Scribtol ink or charcoal, but she was better than everyone else, and as the art teacher had a soft spot for her she got away with it.

“It’s bad enough that we have to paint on white paper, but bright colors, too!” she said scornfully, yet she liked drawing on white paper, you could see that.

“Do you also go to black masses?” Aunt Harriet had asked.

“They’re not for me,” Mira said casually, looking at my aunt from beneath those heavy eyelids. “I know everything’s black, but I find it all too gross and loud.” And she wasn’t a Christian Democrat, either, she added with a wry smile. Aunt Harriet laughed and offered her the box of After Eights; Mira nodded and picked out a paper bag with the tips of her fingers.

Mira did have one passion, however. One that wasn’t black. It was colorful and unpredictable and enigmatic—Rosmarie. Not even Aunt Harriet knew what became of Mira after Rosmarie died. All she knew was that she no longer lived in the village.

I kneeled on a dowry chest and leaned my arms on the windowsill. Outside, the leaves of the weeping willow were shimmering. The wind—I had almost forgotten it in the summer heat of Freiburg and behind the cool concrete walls of the university library. Wind was an enemy of books. In the special reading room for old and rare books it was forbidden to open the window. Ever. I tried to imagine what mischief the wind might get up to with the loose leaves of Jakob Böhme’s three-hundred-and-seventy-year-old manuscript,
De signatura rerum
, and almost ended up closing the window again. There were many books up here. Some in each room, while the large landing served as storage space for all the things that weren’t allowed into the cellar: anything made out of fabric, and books. I leaned farther out of the window and saw the climbing rose sprawling over the roof above the front door and tumbling from the railing past the little wall beside the steps.

My knees were hurting, so I slid down from the chest back into the room. Limping, I brushed along the bookshelves. Legal commentaries, their paper swollen and warped, were almost crushing the fragile
Nesthäkchen and the World War
;
Nesthäkchen
’s cracked spine had old German writing on it. I remembered that my grandmother’s name was inside the book, in a child’s Sütterlin script. The collected works of Wilhelm Busch propped itself peacefully up against Arthur Schnitzler’s autobiography. Here was
The Odyssey
, there
Faust
. Kant snuggled up next to Chamisso, the collected letters of Frederick the Great stood back to back with
Pucki as a Young Housewife
. I tried to work out whether the books had been slotted into the shelves at random or ordered according to a particular system. Perhaps there was a code I had to recognize and decipher. They certainly hadn’t been arranged by size. I could also rule out alphabetical or chronological order, as well as publisher, author’s country of origin, or topic. Thus it had to be a random system. I didn’t believe the books were put there randomly, but that there was a system that made it seem that way. And if there was a system to the randomness then it couldn’t technically be random, which means a pattern could be figured out. Either that or it was all coincidental. The message of the books’ spines was still hidden to me, but I resolved to keep it in the back of my mind. Over time something would click, I was sure of it.

How late was it? I never wore a watch; I relied on clocks at pharmacies, petrol stations, and jewelers’ shops, station clocks and my relatives’ alarm clocks. In the house there were a number of splendid clocks, but none of them worked. I was unsettled by the thought of being in this place without knowing the time. How long had I been staring at the books? Was it past lunchtime? The thicket of cobwebs in the skylight may have become even denser during the time that I had spent up here. I looked up at the shimmering rectangle and tried to compose myself by thinking in big units of time. Night hadn’t passed yet, the funeral was yesterday, today was Saturday, tomorrow would be Sunday, I had taken off the day after that, then I would be going back down to Baden. But it didn’t work. I cast a final glance at the bookshelves, closed all the windows, and went down the stairs, which continued to creak for a while even after I had reached the bottom.

Grabbing my rucksack, I lingered in the hallway. After being away for so long and now being alone in the house for the first time, I felt as if I was taking stock. What was still there, what wasn’t, and what had I forgotten? What really had been different and what now felt different? Through the glass panes of the front door I could see the roses, the sun in the meadows and pasture. Where should I base myself? Upstairs was preferable; the rooms downstairs still belonged to my grandmother, even if she hadn’t set foot in them over the past five years. She had been in the care home for almost thirteen years, but my aunts would often bring her back to the house for an afternoon. At some point, however, she didn’t want to get into a car anymore, and later wasn’t able to, couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk.

I opened the door to Bertha’s bedroom. It was next to the study and its windows also looked out onto the drive with the limes. The venetian blinds were closed. Bertha’s dressing table stood between the two windows. I sat on the stool, gazing into the large folding mirror, which looked like an open book. My hands reached for the two side panels and angled them slightly inward so that they were reflecting each other. As in the past, I could now see hundreds of images of my face. My scar shone white. I saw myself reflected so many times that I became disoriented. It was only when I folded one side panel flat again that I could work out where I was.

I went back upstairs and pushed the windows wide open once more. Up here were the old wardrobes with the once-beautiful garments made of soft, tired materials. As a child I had tried them all on. Over there were the old chests packed with ironed linen, nightshirts, and tablecloths bearing the monograms of my great-grandmother, Great-Aunt Anna, and Bertha, the pillows and sheets, woolen blankets, eiderdowns, crocheted covers, doilies, broderie anglaise, and substantial lengths of white curtains. The ceiling beams were bare, the doors gaped. And all of a sudden I felt a wrench, and then I couldn’t help crying because everything was so terrible and so lovely at the same time.

I cried many other times, too.

I put my bag in my mother’s old room, the walk-through room. I fished out my purse from a side pocket and raced down the stairs. If you ran they only squealed briefly. I took the key, which I’d hung on its hook, opened the front door—the bell clanged—and then I locked up behind me. Down the steps, a breath of roses in my lungs, a glance at the terrace—this was where the conservatory used to be—quickly, quickly through the rose arch and the garden gate, and I was out. There had to be a few things to eat at the petrol station just around the corner. I didn’t fancy the Edeka shop and the teenagers’ wobbling heads, nor being stared at out of curiosity—there were bound to be more people around now.

It was all happening at the petrol station. Here, the Saturday car wash was a ritual. Inside the shop, two boys were standing in front of the chocolate bars, their foreheads deeply furrowed. They didn’t even look up when I squeezed past them. I bought some milk, black bread, cheese, a bottle of apple juice, and a large carton of multivitamin buttermilk, as well as a newspaper, a packet of crisps, and a bar of nut chocolate for an emergency. Well, two bars, just in case. I could always come back and get more if necessary. A dash to the till. As I left I saw the two boys in the same place, still deep in thought.

On Bertha’s kitchen table my shopping looked out of place and rather silly: the bread in a plastic bag, the shrink-wrapped cheese, and the luridly colorful buttermilk carton. Maybe I should have gone to the Edeka shop after all. I picked up the cheese: six identical yellow squares. They were strange, these long-life things; perhaps the windmill association might even exhibit the cheese in their local museum someday. In the library I had once come across a book called
Eat Art
, which contained photos of food exhibited as artwork. The food itself was going bad but the photos had put a halt to the decay; the book was more than thirty years old. The food would have long since vanished, devoured by hungry bacteria, but on those yellowed glossy pages it was stranded in a sort of cultural limbo. There was something merciless about preserving; maybe the process of forgetting was in fact a dignified way of letting things go, rather than cruelly conserving them. All this thinking about food: I must be hungry. Maybe I ought to go back down to the cellar and look for the currant jelly. It tasted wonderful on black bread. I had forgotten to buy butter.

The kitchen was large and cold. The floor was made up of millions of tiny black and white square stones. I hadn’t learned the word “terrazzo” until much later. As a child I could stare for hours at this stone pattern. At some point, when it started to swim before my eyes, secret symbols would suddenly appear on the kitchen floor. But they always vanished before I could decipher them.

There were three doors in the kitchen. I had entered from the hallway; another, bolted door led down to the cellar. The third door went out into the barn.

The barn was neither inside nor outside. Once a cowshed, it had a tamped-earth floor bordered by wide gutters. Three steps led down to it from the kitchen and at the bottom were the bins and a woodpile stacked up against the roughcast walls. If you went straight through the barn you came to another door, a green wooden door, and this really did lead outside, into the orchard. But if you turned right immediately, as I did now, you came to the utility rooms. The first door I opened was the one to the laundry, which had once housed a privy; now there were just two huge freezers. Both stood empty, their doors open, the plugs on the floor beside them.

From here a narrow staircase led up to the attic, from which my grandfather used to try to scare us. Behind the laundry was a room with an open fireplace. It used to be the anteroom to the conservatory, full of planters and jardinieres, watering cans and folding chairs. It had a light-colored stone floor and fairly new floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors that led out onto the terrace. This had the same flagstones as inside. The branches of the weeping willow brushed against the flags and obscured the view to the exterior steps and the front door.

I sat on the sofa beside the black fireplace and gazed out. There was no longer any sign of the conservatory; it had been an elegant construction that must have clashed with the solid brick house. Just glass and a steel frame. Aunt Harriet had had it dismantled thirteen years earlier. After Rosmarie’s accident. The flagstones, which were actually too delicate for the outside, reminded me of the glass structure.

I suddenly realized that I didn’t want it, this house. It had stopped being a house a long time ago; it was now only a memory, just like the conservatory that didn’t exist anymore. When I got up to push open the sliding doors I felt how clammy my hands were. Outside it smelled of moss and shadows. I pushed the doors closed again. The burned-out fireplace radiated the cold. I would tell Mira’s brother that I didn’t want my inheritance. But right now I had to get out of here, get out and go to the lock by the river. I dashed back into the barn and searched through the clutter for a bicycle that might work. All the newer ones were in bad shape, but Granddad’s very old, gearless black bike just needed the tires pumping up.