The Taste of Apple Seeds (4 page)

I couldn’t leave without taking a long and convoluted tour of the house, to bolt some doors from the inside, then going out through other doors that had to be locked from the outside, and so I finally ended up in the garden. For quite a long time Bertha had retained the ability to find her way around the house. At the point when she wasn’t able to go to the mill without getting lost she could still get straight from the laundry to the bathroom, even if one or another door on the way was locked on the other side. Over the decades she had so fused with the house that, had they performed an autopsy on her, I’m sure by looking at the twists and turns in her brain or the network of her veins they would have been able to produce a route map of the house. With the kitchen at its heart.

I had put the food from the petrol station into a basket that I found on top of a kitchen cupboard. The handle was broken, so I fastened it to the pannier rack and wheeled the bike out of the barn through the door that led into the garden. Everyone called this the kitchen door, even though it didn’t lead out of the kitchen but could only be seen from it. The willow branches brushed against my head and the handlebars. I pushed the bike past the steps, then to the right along the house, ankle-deep in forget-me-nots. On one of the hooks by the front door I had found a flat stainless-steel key, and because the only new door was the galvanized gate at the end of the drive, I tried it out. The key turned willingly and then I was standing on the pavement.

After passing the petrol station I veered left onto the pathway to the lock; on Hinnerk’s heavy bike I almost skidded on some sand in the bend, but recovered at the last moment and started pedaling more firmly. The springs beneath the leather saddle squeaked cheerfully as the asphalt gradually became riddled with potholes and soon turned into a gravel farm track. I knew this path, which went in a straight line through the cow pasture. I knew the birch trees, the telegraph poles, the fences—no, lots of them must be new, obviously. I also thought I recognized the black pied cows, but that was complete nonsense, of course. As I cycled, the wind buffeted my dress; although it was sleeveless, I still felt hot as the dark material absorbed the sun’s heat. For the first time since I had arrived I felt I could breathe again.

The path continued straight ahead, sometimes dipping a little, sometimes rising; I closed my eyes. They had all been down this path. Anna and Bertha riding in a carriage, wearing white muslin dresses. My mother, Aunt Inga, and Aunt Harriet on Rixe ladies’ bikes. And Rosmarie, Mira, and me on the same Rixe bikes, which rattled dreadfully and whose saddles were too high, which meant that most of the time we had to cycle in a standing position to avoid dislocating our hips. But we would not have lowered the saddles for anything: it was a matter of honor. We used to cycle in old dresses belonging to Anna, Bertha, Christa, Inga, and Harriet. The headwind would billow the light blue tulle and the black organza, and the sun reflected in the golden satin. We would fasten up our clothes with pegs so that they didn’t get caught up in the chains. And we would cycle barefoot to the river.

You were not supposed to ride for too long with your eyes closed, not even in a straight line. I almost scraped a cow fence; it wasn’t much farther now. In the distance I could already see the wooden bridge over the lock. On the bridge I stopped, holding on tightly to the railings without taking my feet off the pedals. No one there. Two sailing boats were moored to the jetty, metal clanking quietly against the masts. I got off, wheeled the bike from the bridge, unclipped the basket, left the bike on the grass, and walked down the slope. The ground didn’t fall away steeply to the water; instead it formed a gentle bank, overgrown with reeds. We used to spread out our towels where we could, but over the years it had become so overgrown that I now chose to sit on one of the wooden jetties.

My feet were dangling in blackish-brown water. Bog water. How white they looked, and unfamiliar. To distract myself from the sight of my feet I tried to read the names of the boats. One of them was called “Syne,” but that was just a part of it, a wreck of a name. I couldn’t make out the name of the second one; it was facing the other side of the river. Something with “-the” at the end. I lay on my back and left my unfamiliar feet where they were; the lock smelled of water, meadow, mustiness, and wood preservative.

How long had I slept? Ten minutes? Ten seconds? I was freezing. I took my feet out of the water and reached above my head for the basket. What my fingers touched wasn’t brittle wickerwork but a trainer. I wanted to scream, but all that came out was a groan. I rolled straight onto my stomach and pushed myself up. Silver dots were floating before my eyes and there was a whooshing in my head, as if the lock gate beside me had just opened. The sun glinted, the sky was white, white. Don’t faint now, I told myself; it was a narrow jetty, I would drown.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Please excuse me, please.”

I knew that voice. The whooshing got quieter. In front of me stood the young lawyer in his tennis gear; I was so angry I could have been sick. Mira’s dim-witted younger brother, what was it they used to call him?

“Oh, it’s the Wimp!” I tried to sound calm.

“I know, I frightened you and I’m really sorry.” His voice became steadier and I could hear a spark of irritation in it. That was fine. I looked at him and said nothing. “I didn’t follow you or anything like that—I always come here to swim. First I play tennis, you see, and then I go for a swim; my partner never comes, but I’m always here on the jetty; I didn’t see you until I got down here and then I saw you were sleeping and was about to go again, but you grabbed my trainer—of course you didn’t know it was my trainer, but even if you had I wouldn’t have held it against you because, after all, it was me who frightened you, and now . . .”

“My God, do you always go on like that? Even in the courtroom? Have you really got a permanent job with that law firm?”

Mira’s brother laughed. “Iris Berger. I was only ever the Wimp to you lot, and it doesn’t look as if that’s ever going to change.”

“I suppose not.”

I bent down and reached for my basket. Even though Mira’s brother had a nice laugh I was still furious. I was also hungry, and I wanted to be alone and not have to talk. And no doubt he wanted to talk about the will, what I was planning to do with the house, and tell me that I should have it insured and about everything in store for me when the will came through. But I didn’t want to talk about it now, didn’t even want to think about it.

When I stood up again, basket in hand and mentally composed to give my great speech, I was surprised to see that Mira’s brother had already trudged halfway up the embankment. He trod heavily up the slope. I smiled.

There were patches of red sand on the right shoulder of his white T-shirt.

After the picnic I tidied everything away into the basket, took a final glance at the river, the lock, the boats; the second one had moved a little, but I still couldn’t make out the whole name—something ending in “-ethe,” Margarethe maybe, that was a good name for a boat. I climbed onto Hinnerk’s bike and rode back to the house. To
my
house. How did that sound? Weird, and fake somehow. The wind blew snatches of a chiming bell across the pasture but I couldn’t hear how late it was. It felt like early afternoon, one or two o’clock, maybe later. The sun, food, anger and fright, and now the head-on wind made me tired. After the petrol station I turned onto the pavement, then dismounted on the drive. I hadn’t locked the gate, and I waded through the forget-me-nots and leaned the bike by the kitchen door. I let myself in with the large key. A brass clanking, another brass clanking, and then I was in the cool hallway. The stairs groaned, the banisters moaned, it was hot and sticky below the roof. I threw myself onto my mother’s bed; why had it been freshly made? A purple pillow twinkled beneath the broderie anglaise. The holes were flowers. Holes in the pillow. The point of broderie anglaise was what wasn’t there. That was the art of it. If there were too many holes, there would be nothing left. Holes in the pillow, holes in the head.

When I woke up, my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth. I staggered through the left-hand door into Aunt Inga’s room, which had a washbasin; brackish brown water spluttered petulantly into the white sink. In the mirror I looked at the pattern the pillow cover had made on my cheek: red rings. Gradually the water flowed more evenly, slowly getting clearer. I splashed water onto my face, took off my sweaty clothes—dress, bra, knickers, everything—and enjoyed standing there naked in Aunt Inga’s room, the gray-green lino cold beneath my toes. Aunt Inga had been the only one not to have carpet in her room; my mother, Great-Grandma Käthe, and Aunt Harriet, who were at the back of the house, had a hard, rust-colored sisal carpet that scratched the soles of your feet if you walked across it barefoot. On the large landing there were raffia mats on the wood. It was only the girls’ room, which had long been a storage room, that had bare floorboards, but these were coated in a thick brown varnish. They no longer made a sound.

I went onto the landing, opened the walnut wardrobe, and found that all the dresses were still hanging there; a little less vibrant but there, unmistakably, was the tulle dream from Aunt Harriet’s end-of-dancing-course ball, the golden dress my mother had worn to her engagement party, and that black spangly-sparkly number, a tea gown from the thirties. It was one of Bertha’s. I rummaged further until I came across an ankle-length green silk dress, the top half of which was embroidered with sequins. It belonged to Aunt Inga. I put it on; it smelled of dust and lavender, the hem was torn and there were some sequins missing, but it was cool against my body and felt a thousand times better than my black one that I had slept in. I had never before spent so long in the house without swapping my outfit for one from the old wardrobes; in my own clothes I felt as if I had been in disguise all day long.

Wearing Inga’s silk dress I went back into her room and sat on the wicker chair. The afternoon sun that flickered through the treetops bathed the room in a lime-green light. The streaks in the lino seemed to move like water, a breeze came in through the open window, and it felt as if I were sitting in the tranquil current of a green river.

Chapter III

AUNT INGA WORE AMBER
. Long chains of polished beads in which you could see tiny insects. We were convinced that they would shake their wings and fly away the second their resinous shells broke. Around Inga’s wrist was a chunky milky-yellow bracelet. She didn’t wear this jewelry from the sea because of her deep-sea bedroom and mermaid dress, but, as she said, for health reasons. Even as a baby she gave everyone who held her an electric shock, barely noticeable, but the spark was there; and at nighttime when Bertha put her on her breast she got a sharp shock from her child, almost like a bite, before Inga started suckling. Bertha didn’t talk to anybody about it, not even to Christa, my mother, who was two at the time and who used to flinch whenever she touched her sister.

The older Inga got, the stronger her electrical charge became. Soon other people noticed it, too, but then every child has something that marks them out from others and that people either tease them for or admire. In Inga’s case it was these electric shocks. Hinnerk, my grandfather, got angry when Inga was close to the radio and upset the reception. There would be static, and through the hissing and crackling Inga would sometimes hear voices talking softly to one another or calling her name. As a result, when Hinnerk was listening to the radio she wasn’t allowed into the living room. Mind you, he always listened to the radio when he was in the living room. When he wasn’t in the living room he sat in the study, where no one was allowed to disturb him anyway. This meant that during the colder months of the year Hinnerk and Inga saw each other only at mealtimes. In summer everyone was outside, and in the evenings Hinnerk would sit on the terrace or ride his bike through the pasture. Inga avoided riding a bike: too much metal, too much friction. It was more Christa’s thing, and so on summer evenings and Sundays Christa and Hinnerk would ride to the lock, the lake, and to cousins in the neighboring villages. Inga stayed close to home; she rarely left the property and thus knew it better than the rest of us.

Frau Koop, Bertha’s neighbor, used to tell us girls that Inga was born during a violent storm; lightning had been raging overhead, and at the very instant that a bolt had flashed through the house from top to bottom, Inga was born. Inga hadn’t made a sound; the first cry came from her mouth when the thunder boomed, and from then on she was electric. “The littl ’un,” Frau Koop would tell anyone willing to listen, “hadn’t been earthed yet,” but was still “half hanging in the other world, the poor little worm.” Admittedly, Rosmarie had come up with “the poor little worm” afterward. But if Frau Koop hadn’t actually said that, it was definitely what she meant. In any case, we would never tell each other this story without adding the “poor little worm” at the end; we thought it sounded so much better like that.

Christa, my mother, had inherited the height and the long, rather pointy nose of the Deelwaters. From the Lünschens she had her thick brown hair, but her lips were sharply defined, her eyebrows strong, and her gray eyes narrow. Too severe to be considered a beauty in the fifties. I looked like my mother, only everything about me, my head, my hands, my body, even my knees, was rounder than Christa. Too round to be considered a beauty in the nineties. So that was another thing we had in common. Harriet, the youngest, wasn’t exactly pretty, but looked lovely—always a little disheveled, with red cheeks, chestnut-brown hair, and healthy teeth that were slightly crooked. Her loping stride and large hands were reminiscent of a puppy. But Inga, she was beautiful. As tall as Bertha, if not taller, with a grace in the way she moved and a sweetness in her features that somehow refused to fit into the barren landscape here. Her hair was dark, darker than Hinnerk’s, her eyes were blue like her mother’s but larger and framed by curled dark eyelashes. Her red lips curved mockingly. She spoke in a soft, clear voice, though her vowels resonated deeply, which filled even the most empty words with promise. All men fell in love with Inga. But my aunt always kept them at arm’s length; this wasn’t so much coyness on her part as fear of the physical repercussions if she kissed them, let alone made love to them. So she withdrew, stayed at home listening to music on a bulky record player that a smart admirer who was good with his hands had made for her out of spare parts, and danced alone on the matte lino floor of her bedroom.