The Taste of Apple Seeds (11 page)

My mother lived far away. Inga was in town and very busy with her photography. Harriet just floated above it all; she was always going through different phases and with each new phase came a new man, which made Hinnerk more furious than anything else. So from time to time he would call my mother and grumble about Bertha without mentioning his growing fears. Inga was the first to realize that Bertha needed help. We didn’t realize that Hinnerk also needed help until it was too late. Meals on wheels were ordered. When Bertha had lunch she didn’t want any stains on the tablecloth. If they appeared she would jump up and hunt for a clean cloth, usually without coming back to the table. And if she did return then it wouldn’t be with a cloth but with a saucepan, a packet of rice pudding, or a pair of stockings. When she thought my sleeves were too long and was worried that they might trail in my food, she said, “You need to move away from there or you’ll get burned.” But we would roll up our sleeves, still able to understand what she meant. Later it became impossible, so she would get cross and stand up, or sink into her chair and cry without making a sound.

One of her social circle, Thede Gottfried, came three days a week to clean, tidy, shop, and go for a walk with her. At some point Bertha started running away. She might go out onto the road, get lost, and be unable to find her way back to the house she had grown up in. Hinnerk had to go looking for her every day; usually she was in fact somewhere in the house or garden, but both of these were large enough to make it a pretty big search. Almost everyone in the village knew her, which meant that sooner or later someone would take her home. Once she brought back a bicycle that didn’t belong to her. Another time she slipped out at night; the car was able to brake in time. She began to wet herself, wash her hands in the toilet bowl, and flush away an endless number of small items: envelopes, rubber bands, broken pushpins, weeds. She would search in her pockets a hundred times a day for a tissue, and if she couldn’t find one because a few minutes earlier she had fished it out and stuffed it in another pocket, she would become distressed. She had no idea what was happening to her, nobody talked to her about it, and at the same time she couldn’t help but know. When my aunts or my mother came to visit she would sometimes ask them in a whisper and with a look of fear on her face, “What’s going to happen?” or “Is it going to stay like this?” or “But it wasn’t like this before, I still had everything, now I’ve got nothing.” She was jumpy, wept several times a day, and her forehead was permanently bathed in a cold sweat; her frustration would suddenly erupt and she would spring from her chair and leave the room, only to wander restlessly through the large, empty house. My aunts tried to calm her, saying it was only old age and that basically she was fine. And although she was being treated by a doctor, the word “illness” was never uttered in Bertha’s presence.

Hinnerk was six years older than Bertha. He seemed too young for a heart attack at the age of seventy-five, because he appeared to be in perfect health. The doctors hinted that it might not have been the first attack. But who could have noticed this one or the others? He lay in the hospital for a fortnight and my mother traveled up to stay with him. She held his hand and he was afraid because he knew that this was the end. One afternoon all he said was my mother’s name, with that tenderness he was capable of but rarely showed, and then he died. My aunts stayed with Bertha when this happened. They were sad that they hadn’t been able to say good-bye, sad and angry that Hinnerk had had a favorite daughter, that they had had too little from him—especially too little love—that all that was left now was the wreck of my grandmother, and that my mother could run away back down south, where a loyal husband and daughter were waiting to give her comfort and support. This sadness and anger made them say terrible things to my mother. They accused her of shirking her responsibility for
her
mother. My grandmother stood by, weeping; she didn’t know what it was about but she could hear the bitterness and the disappointed love being off-loaded in the voices of her daughters. For the whole time that Bertha lived after that, and it was fourteen years in total, Christa had a very tense relationship with her sisters. After every telephone call and before every visit she was unable to sleep for nights on end. When, two years after Rosmarie’s death, my aunts decided to put Bertha into the care home, they first asked Christa with a sneer whether she would finally be prepared to take her mother in. Inga and Harriet said they had looked after her for long enough.

Of late, though, the three sisters had tentatively become closer again. They were three sisters, they were over fifty, they had buried many dreams, they had buried Rosmarie, and now . . . now they had buried their own mother.

The grass between the apple trees was much taller than here behind the house. I really did have to see Herr Lexow again. He wasn’t going to get away that easily. I drank my tea, ate my sandwich, briefly thought of Max and shook my head. What had actually gone on there?

The sun’s rays became harsher. I took my tray and was about to go back into the house, ceremoniously—it was the only way to do it with my golden dress on—when through the trees I caught sight of the old chicken shed, the Hock as they used to call it here. Something red had been sprayed onto the gray render. I walked past the fruit trees to the shed, where my mother and her sisters had once played with dolls. Rosmarie, Mira, and I had used it as somewhere to go when it was raining. From a distance I could see only a red scrawl, but as I approached I could make out a word: “Nazi.” Horrified, I turned around as if expecting to see someone with a spray can dash behind the elder bushes.

I tried to scratch away the writing with a stone, but it didn’t work. When I bent over to pick up the stone I stepped on the hem of my dress, and as I stood up again the worn material tore. It sounded like a scream.

I went back into the barn and tried to get my bearings—my eyes took a while to get used to the dim light. Earlier, when I had passed the alcove where the ladders were stored, I had seen some large pots of paint. I opened the first one, but the white paint it contained was rock hard and cracked. None of the other pots looked much newer. I would have to sort it out later. Who had sprayed it? Someone from the village? Someone from the far right or far left? A moron or someone who was being serious? Forgetting was a family trait. Maybe someone wanted to jog our memory.

To take my mind off it, I went to my grandfather’s study. I wanted to investigate his desk. There used to be sweets in the bottom right drawer. After Eights, Toblerone, and always several tins of colorfully wrapped Quality Street. I loved those tins, the lady in the gorgeous purple dress and the horse-drawn carriage. I found the man rather unsettling, with his smile and tall hat, but I would go into raptures over the lady’s delicate parasol and the horses’ dainty legs. And wasn’t there a black puppy somewhere as well? The only thing that disturbed me about the woman was her narrow waist. Her beaming smile couldn’t hide the fact that she might snap in half at any moment. It was impossible to look at her for long. The sweets would make our teeth stick together, and if you were unlucky all that was left were those with the cold, soft white filling. My favorites were the rectangular red ones, Rosmarie liked the ones that looked like golden coins, whereas Mira stuck to the After Eights. But from time to time, when my grandfather passed around the tin himself, she would take one of the dark purple caramel and nut ones.

The key was still in the desk cupboard. Hinnerk had never bothered to lock anything away. At any rate, no one dared root around in his study. His fierce temper didn’t differentiate between colleagues and subordinates, granddaughters and their friends, wife and cleaning lady. And he wouldn’t hold himself back with his daughters, either, whether their husbands and children were present or not. Hinnerk was a man of the law, which also meant he was the law. So Hinnerk thought. But Harriet did not.

I opened the desk and was met by the familiar odor of wood polish, paper, and peppermint. I sat on the floor, breathed in the smell, and peered into the desk. Indeed there was an empty tin of Quality Street inside, as well as a narrow gray book. I took it out, opened it, and saw that Hinnerk had written his name in the front in ink. A diary? No, not a diary, a book of poems.

Chapter VII

AUNT HARRIET HAD TOLD US
once about Hinnerk’s poems. Although she lived in the same house as her father, she never talked much to him and even less about him, so we found the poetry even stranger.

Harriet’s way of dealing with her father was to avoid him. As a child she didn’t freeze in his presence like Christa and Inga. And she didn’t cry like Bertha. She fled. When he yelled at her or even locked her in her bedroom, she would close her eyes and go to sleep. Yes, she went to sleep. It wasn’t a trance or loss of consciousness, but sleep. Harriet called it flying and said that every time she dreamed that she was hovering in the orchard and then slowly rose above the apple trees into the sky. There she would float once around the pastures, landing only when her father stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Although Hinnerk had been beaten regularly by his own father, he never raised his hand to a single person, however livid he became. He would threaten beatings and “corporal punishment,” as he called it, he would spit and froth at the mouth, his voice would crack and get so loud that it hurt your ears, he would sulk and go quiet, he could whisper the most terrible things, but he never hit anybody and was never tempted to, either. Harriet exploited this; she fell asleep and flew away.

Harriet was one of those girls who could never simply like something or find it adequate; she had to rave about it. She would go crazy over children and small animals. After leaving school she decided to study to become a vet even though she had no aptitude for the natural sciences. Even worse than her below-average grasp of logic was the fact that she would burst into tears when she saw a sick animal. Already in the second week of her course, Harriet’s professor had to tell her that she wasn’t there to love animals but to make them better. My mother told me about Harriet’s first practical seminar, examining the corpse of a black-and-white rabbit, after which she had chucked her lab coat at the feet of the lecturer; with her lab coat, she had chucked in her studies, too. After she stormed out of the laboratory her rather stunned lecturer stared at the door, but she never came back. My mother always told this story in Harriet’s presence, and my aunt would giggle her approval. I don’t know if it was Harriet who had told it to her or a fellow student. Rosmarie liked this story, too, and my mother would always vary it a little. Sometimes it was a cat being dissected, sometimes a puppy, and once it was even a tiny piglet.

Harriet studied languages after that, English and French, and didn’t become a teacher as her father had envisaged, but a translator. It was something she was gifted at. She had the ability to put herself completely into other people’s thoughts and feelings—a born intermediary between two worlds unable to communicate with each other. She mediated between her sisters. Between her mother and the seamstress who came twice a year to the house. Between her father and her teachers. Because she understood everything and everybody, she found it hard to take a firm stand on anything. Anyway, Harriet wasn’t made for standing: she used to hover instead. Hover above things, always with the danger of course that she might fall and crash to the ground. Curiously, however, these falls were seldom hard; she would usually come spinning gently back to earth. Although she looked a little disheveled and tired when she was back on the ground, she was always in one piece.

Harriet was the only one of the three girls to have something like a history with boys. Christa was too shy. Inga had her admirers, who were allowed to look but not touch—maybe they had no inclination to, either. Harriet wasn’t an especially artful or passionate lover, but she only had to be looked at in a particular way and she would get butterflies in her stomach. She let herself be carried along without any resistance and she was capable of experiencing such intense pleasure that it simply took boys’ breath away. She might not have been good in bed, whatever that is supposed to mean, but she made men feel that
they
were. And that was almost better. What was more, as the youngest of the sisters, she also got caught up in that time when flowers, sex, and peace suddenly became very important. Not in Bootshaven and certainly not in the house in Geestestrasse. Unlike Christa and Inga, Harriet studied in Göttingen, kept a few Indian blouses in her wardrobe, and loved wearing flared trousers made out of nothing but large, rectangular patches of leather, all the same size. And she began to color her chestnut-brown hair with henna. Harriet was probably a hippie, but there was no radical change, no shift in her personality. She became what she already was.

Although there were only three years between Inga and Harriet, and five between Christa and Harriet, this gap seemed like an entire generation. And yet, because Harriet came from the family she came from, she lived her hippie existence in moderation. She didn’t take hard drugs; at most she would drink some hash tea, but she didn’t particularly like it and it made her feel hungry more than anything. Her doped-up mind didn’t have the time to spread its wings and glide over the horizon, as Harriet permanently needed to fill her belly with food. She lived with another girl, Cornelia. She was older than Harriet, serious and very shy. There was no question of having men over. There were few men anyway.

But one day this medical student arrived: Friedrich Quast. Aunt Inga had told me about him only a few years back, on the same evening she had shown me the portraits of Bertha. I suspect it was because of Aunt Inga’s bewitching voice and the way she filled her tales with suspense that I couldn’t help but paint Harriet’s love story in rich colors.

Friedrich Quast had red hair and white skin that shimmered blue in places. He was tight-lipped and withdrawn. It was only his powerful, freckled hands that seemed lively and confident and knew exactly where they wanted to go and, most of all, what they had to do when they got there. Harriet was smitten; this was something entirely different from the hasty and clumsy, albeit tender, caresses of her previous admirers.