The Taste of Apple Seeds (6 page)

Widow Lexow continued to run the haberdashery on her own; Carsten sometimes helped out with the books. He had no siblings, but his mother’s younger brother, a high-ranking official with the postal service and a bachelor, offered to lend his sister and nephew a hand. As Carsten showed no particular inclination to sell sewing thread and hat elastic, the widow agreed to send her son to Bremen for teacher training. Carsten spent two years there before he got the post in Bootshaven without even having applied for the job.

The old teacher had died of a heart attack, right in the middle of a lesson, but as he had a habit of nodding off in class none of the children had paid any attention to the hunched figure. As they always did when he fell asleep, the fourteen children left the room quietly giggling when the afternoon bell rang. Also as usual, they forgot the teacher until they saw him still asleep at his desk in exactly the same position the following morning. Nobody was surprised that the school and the classroom were unlocked; the old teacher had always been absentminded. But finally the eldest pupil, Nikolaus Koop, plucked up his courage and spoke to the small pale man, whose head had slumped so far onto his chest that only the crown was visible. When he didn’t answer, Nikolaus took a step closer and had a good look at his teacher.

Like almost all the people in the village, the Koops were farmers. Nikolaus had often helped out with the slaughtering and had once seen a cow die while giving birth. He blinked a few times, turned to the other children, and said calmly, with long pauses between the words, that there wouldn’t be any school today, they should all go home. Although Nikolaus was a shy boy who was often the first one out when they played dodgeball, and although he wasn’t the class leader in spite of being the eldest, all the pupils left obediently. Anna Deelwater and her younger sister, Bertha, left the schoolhouse with the other children. Their farmhouse was next to Nikolaus’s and the three of them always walked to and from school together. On this day, however, the sisters went home without him, silently, their heads bowed.

Nikolaus Koop rang the bell of the parsonage, which was next to the school, and told the pastor what had happened. The pastor had been sitting at his desk, leafing through the paper. That same day the pastor wrote to his friend the pastor of Geeste, and three days later Carsten Lexow came to Bootshaven as the village teacher, just in time for the funeral of his predecessor. It was a blessing for everyone. The villagers were delighted to get a close look at the new teacher so soon. And Carsten Lexow counted himself lucky that he was wearing the black suit that he had had made for his father’s funeral. It was also a good opportunity to introduce himself to everybody before they started making up stories about him. Of course they made up stories anyway, for Carsten Lexow was tall and slim with dark hair that he had difficulty keeping to one side, only managing it with a severe parting. His eyes were blue, but one day in class Anna Deelwater discovered, as he looked up from her exercise book, which he had been marking, that his pupils were hemmed with golden rings, and from that moment to the end of her life, which was not a long time, she remained chained to these rings.

There was only a single photograph of Anna Deelwater, the eldest daughter of Käthe, actually Katharina, and Carl Deelwater, but many copies of it. My mother had one, there was one hanging in Aunt Inga’s house, and Rosmarie had stuck one in her wardrobe with tape. Aunt Anna—that was what my aunts and my mother called her when they spoke about her—Aunt Anna was dark-haired like her mother. In the photo it looked as if she had dark eyes, too, but Aunt Inga maintained that this was because of the poor lighting. What could be said with certainty was that she had drawn-out gray eyes and broad eyebrows that formed crescents rather than a straight line. Anna’s eyebrows dominated her face, giving it something secretive and wild at the same time. She was shorter than her sister, but not as thin. Although Bertha, long-legged, fair, and cheerful, seemed to be the very opposite of her sister in appearance and character, both girls in fact were reserved, almost shy, and absolutely inseparable. They would whisper and giggle just as much as other girls of their age, but only ever together. Some people thought they were haughty, because Carl Deelwater owned the most pastureland and the biggest farmhouse in Bootshaven. He had also bought a pew for himself and his family in the front row of the church, engraved with his surname. Not that he was particularly religious. He seldom went to church, but when he did, on the high festivals such as Easter, Christmas, and Harvest Festival, he sat at the front in his own pew with his wife and daughters, and was gawked at by the other members of the small parish. On the many Sundays in the year when he didn’t go to church, the pew remained empty and was gawked at all the same. Anna and Bertha were proud of their beautiful farmhouse and their wonderful father who, although he worried about who would succeed him at the farm, never held it against his daughters or his wife but sought to spoil his “three lasses” as much as possible.

Both daughters had to pitch in at home; they lent a hand to their mother in the house and helped Agnes, the maid, in the kitchen. Agnes came every day and was not a maid at all but a grown woman with three adult sons. With Agnes they made juice and plucked chickens. But what they enjoyed most of all, and spent most time doing, was working outside in the garden.

From the end of August they were rarely out of the apple trees. The light bell-shaped apples were ready first; they tasted of lemon, and from the moment you took your first bite it was impossible to finish them before the flesh started turning brown. These were never cooked to a pulp; their aroma vanished like the August wind they had ripened in. Then, slowly, came the apples on the Cox’s Orange trees; the big one first of all, which grew very close to the house and basked in the heat given off by the red clinker bricks that had stored up the sun throughout the day. This meant that its fruit was always larger and sweeter than that of the other apple trees.

By October, all the trees had fruited. Anna and Bertha moved almost as nimbly in the trees as on the ground. Some years before, a gardener had nailed a few boards to the branches of a particularly heavily laden Boskoop tree so that they could sit their baskets on them. But the girls preferred sitting there themselves. They would read books to each other, drink juice, and eat apples and sometimes buttercake, which Agnes always brought out to them when one of her sons had stopped by. At least this meant she could say, if anyone ever asked why only one of the two tins of buttercake was left, that Bertha and Anna had eaten some, too. But nobody ever did ask.

Of course, Herr Lexow didn’t tell me about Agnes’s buttercake. I don’t think he even knew that Agnes existed. I was sitting at the kitchen table in Bertha’s house, seeing my grandmother and great-aunt as children, although in my mind Anna never looked any different from how she did in the photograph. Sipping a mug of lukewarm UHT milk I recalled things Bertha had told my mother and my mother had told me, or that Aunt Harriet had told Rosmarie and Rosmarie had told Mira and me, and things we had made up or at least imagined. On occasion Frau Koop had told us how when he was a boy her husband had found his teacher dead in the classroom. Nikolaus Koop had become a good-natured, hardworking farmer who had a cataract and was terrified of his wife. He only needed to hear her voice and his eyes would start to blink nervously behind a pair of thick lenses. His eyelids fluttered like the wings of the linnet that had once flown by mistake through the open sitting-room window of the Deelwaters’ house and couldn’t find its way out again. Aunt Harriet had sprung up and instructed us to open all the windows so it didn’t break its neck on a pane of glass. The bird flew away, leaving behind two red feathers on the windowsill.

Nikolaus Koop blinked often in this way, and we had also noticed that each time he saw his wife he pushed his glasses up onto his forehead. Mira thought he was trying to evade his wife through self-imposed blindness, a sort of escape route, just like an open window. But Rosmarie insisted that, unlike the bird, it was not his own neck he was afraid of breaking but Frau Koop’s. What we couldn’t know at the time was that it was Rosmarie whose neck would be broken, and by flying through a pane of glass.

I worked out for myself some of what Herr Lexow was trying to tell me as I looked into his blue eyes and discovered the rings around his pupils, which were no longer golden but ocher. The white around them had now turned a little yellowy. He had to be way over eighty. And who was he now, anyway? My great-uncle? No, as my aunt’s father he was my grandfather. But he couldn’t be, that was Hinnerk Lünschen. He was quite simply a “friend of the family,” a witness.

A few years ago, at a time when my grandmother no longer knew that I existed, my mother went to stay with her for a fortnight. It was one of her last visits before Bertha went into the home. On a warm afternoon the two of them were sitting behind the house, in the orchard. All of a sudden Bertha gave Christa a look that was exceptionally alert and insistent, and told her firmly that Anna had loved Boskoop, and she Cox’s Orange. As if this were the final secret she had to divulge.

Anna loved Boskoop, Bertha Cox’s Orange. In autumn the sisters’ hair carried the scent of apples, as did their clothes and hands. They would cook apple puree, apple cider, and apple jelly with cinnamon, and more often than not they would have apples in their apron pockets and apples with bites taken out of them in their hands. Bertha would start by quickly eating a fat ring around the middle, nibble carefully around the blossom end at the bottom, around the stalk at the top, and then she would throw away the core in a high arc. Anna ate her apples slowly, relishing them from top to bottom—the entire thing. She would spend hours chewing on the seeds. When Bertha scolded her for this, saying that the seeds were poisonous, Anna replied that they tasted like marzipan. She only ever spat out the stalk. That was what Bertha told me when she noticed once that I ate apples like her, Bertha. That was how most people ate apples.

In summer, Carsten Lexow gave his pupils a day off because of the heat, a “fruit-picking day,” as he called it. Bertha laughed and said it was the pick of her lessons. Carsten Lexow noticed his pupil’s small white teeth and the fidgety ease with which her large hands tried to push the loose hair at the nape of her neck back into her pigtails. As her teacher was still looking at her, and because she felt she might have annoyed him with her cheeky comment, she blushed, turned, and slunk away. His heart pounding, Herr Lexow stared at Bertha and said nothing. Anna saw everything, she recognized the look with which Herr Lexow followed her sister, recognized it just as you would recognize your own reflection in the mirror, and hurried off to find Bertha, her cheeks a deep red and her head bowed.

Anna loved Lexow, Lexow loved Bertha, and Bertha? She actually loved Heinrich Lünschen, or Hinnerk as everyone called him. He was the son of the landlord at the village pub, a nobody with little land. All the family had were two small pastures right at the edge of the village, and these were leased to an even poorer old devil. Hinnerk hated his parents’ pub. Hated the smell of the kitchen and of stale beer in the bar in the morning. Hated the passionate and loud rows his parents had, hated their equally passionate and loud reconciliations. One night when Hinnerk and one of his younger brothers—Hinnerk was the eldest—were forced to listen to a particularly ferocious argument in the dark kitchen, his brother said that they would probably have another brother soon. Hinnerk got angry; he hated all his mother’s pregnancies.

“How do you know that?”

“Well, whenever they’ve had a row we get another brother soon afterward.”

Hinnerk gave a cruel laugh. He had to get out of there. He hated it.

He had come to the attention of Herr Deelwater because the pastor and the old teacher had praised his intellect to the skies. Hinnerk was cleverer than anybody else in the village, he was very well aware of this, and a few others who were not stupid themselves had noticed it, too. Hinnerk was often at the Deelwaters’ house. He helped on the farm at harvest time, earning himself a little money. He was given even more money by the pastor; however, this only made the proud Hinnerk hate this man, too. He quit the church at the first available opportunity, which was provided by his mother’s funeral. They could save on costs for the homily, he said, anyone else could do it just as well, all those speeches sounded the same anyway, all priests did was insert the relevant name, but some of them found even that difficult enough. The pastor, who had put a lot of money into Hinnerk’s education, and whose—admittedly not very extensive—library had always been at Hinnerk’s disposal, was deeply offended, not just because of Hinnerk’s lack of respect and gratitude, but also because Hinnerk had come all too close to the truth. But the legal exams were passed with flying colors and the young lawyer, by then freshly engaged to the Deelwater daughter, was no longer financially dependent on the pastor. The pastor knew this and also knew that Hinnerk knew he knew, and this was what irritated him most of all.

I remembered Hinnerk Lünschen as a loving grandfather who could fall asleep wherever he laid his head; he made full use of this ability. Sure, his moods were unpredictable. But he was no longer full of hatred; he was a proud notary, proud owner of a law firm, proud husband of a beautiful wife who made him a proud owner of a proud property, proud father of three beautiful daughters and proud grandfather of two even more beautiful granddaughters, as he always assured Rosmarie and me while shoveling proud portions of Fürst-Pückler ice cream into the cut-glass bowls. Everything had turned upside down: now he, Hinnerk, was hated by many, but he didn’t hate himself anymore; after all, he had achieved everything he wanted. He was still the smartest man in the village and now everybody knew it.

He had even had a family crest designed in order to obscure his lowly origins, which was pointless of course: everybody came to him because he spoke the regional dialect, not because of his impressive family tree. So the framed picture of the family crest always stayed in the storage room, what had been the maid’s room, where it still hung now. But I also remembered that whenever he looked at the crest the hint of a smile would play on his well-defined lips: satisfaction or self-mockery? I expect he was not sure himself.