The Taste of Apple Seeds (12 page)

She had first seen him at a friend’s party; he lived with this friend’s brother. He was standing alone, detached, watching the guests. Harriet found him arrogant and ugly. He was tall and thin with a long nose that curved like a beak. He was leaning against the wall as if his crane’s legs couldn’t quite support his body.

When Harriet left to go home he was standing outside the front door, smoking. Without saying a word he offered her a cigarette, which the inquisitive and flattered Harriet accepted. But when he gave her a light, stroking her cheek with his hand as he sheltered the match from the wind, not even pretending it was an accident, she went weak at the knees.

She took him home—that’s to say, as she walked he simply walked along beside her. It was clear to both of them that he wasn’t walking her home because he was a gentleman. It was Friday evening and Cornelia had gone back to her parents,” as she did every weekend. Friedrich Quast and Harriet spent two nights and two days in Harriet’s flat. As monosyllabic and aloof as Friedrich was when he was dressed, he became full of enthusiasm and imagination when he lay in bed naked next to Harriet. His beautiful hands stroked, held, scratched, and caressed her body with an assertiveness that overwhelmed her. He seemed to know her body far better than she did herself. Friedrich licked and sniffed and explored everything about her with an interest and curiosity that was not a little boy’s joy of discovery but the appreciative concentration of a gourmand.

Harriet remembered that weekend as the occasion on which she learned the most about herself. Her sexual liberation had less to do with the sixties than with these two nights and days. When she and Friedrich Quast weren’t in bed with each other, they ate rolls and apples, which Harriet always had in the house. Friedrich smoked. They didn’t talk much. Although he was a medic they didn’t speak about contraception, either. Harriet didn’t even think about it. On Sunday afternoon, Friedrich Quast got up and bent over Harriet, who gazed up at him in surprise. He looked into her eyes, said he had to go, gave her a fleeting but warm kiss, put a cigarette between his lips, and vanished. Harriet stayed in bed and was not much troubled. She heard Cornelia enter the stairwell. Heard her footstep pause for a second, a few murmured words, then she heard Friedrich hurry down the stairs, and only some time after this Cornelia’s measured tread as she made her way up. Christ, Harriet thought. Oh Christ. And sure enough, it wasn’t long before there was a knock at her door. Cornelia was horrified to find Harriet in bed in the middle of the day, hair tangled, cheeks flushed, lips red and sore looking. The smell of smoke and sex hit her like a slap, and she opened her mouth a few times to speak, looked at Harriet almost hatefully, and closed the door behind her. Harriet felt bad, but not as bad as she had expected.

However, she felt much worse than she had expected when Friedrich failed to call the next day, or the one after that. She spent the following weekend in bed, too, alone this time and so terribly unhappy that Cornelia started to worry and almost hoped that the man would show up again soon. Another week passed, during which Harriet had found out where he lived and sent him two letters. Then that Saturday evening her doorbell rang. When she saw who it was she vomited. Friedrich took her head in his hands, helped her back to bed, opened the window, smoked, and waited until the color had returned to her cheeks. Then he went over to her and placed his hand on her left breast. Harriet began breathing faster.

He stayed until Monday morning. Because of the pain she had suffered over the two weeks that he was away, everything was even more intense than the first time. Now she understood the meaning of the word “passion.” When he left, a very nervous Harriet asked whether he would come back. He gave a brief nod and disappeared. Again for two weeks.

Harriet tried to pull herself together, but it didn’t work; as the days passed she fell to pieces. And if she tried to hold on to one piece, another slipped off from elsewhere. And no sooner had she caught that one than the piece she had first been holding on to fell off. She got bad marks. Cornelia asked whether she might look for another flat. Her parents had a go at her because she had screwed up an exam. She lost weight and her hair dulled. When he turned up again a fortnight later, Cornelia stood at the door to Harriet’s room and shouted that she would be moving in with another friend the following week. As she was in the middle of her exams, she was spending the weekends in Göttingen as well, and needed more peace and quiet. Harriet was ashamed, but her relief at seeing Friedrich again was greater. She asked him whether he’d like to move in with her. Friedrich nodded. It was a scandal. When Hinnerk found out about it he was furious. He went straight out and changed his will: he cut Harriet out. She wasn’t to come home anymore. Not even at Christmas.

Friedrich lived at Harriet’s flat, but would it really be right to say he had moved in with her? He slept there and left a couple of changes of clothes in Cornelia’s old wardrobe. But his things, his books, pictures, pens, blankets, pillows—all the stuff a grown man might own—none of this was ever brought to the flat. Harriet was distraught. Friedrich, on the other hand, said he didn’t need anything else. Harriet even went once in secret to see Friedrich’s former flatmate, her friend’s brother, but he no longer lived in the flat, either. He had finished his studies and returned to the Sauerland to start working for his father’s firm. Nobody in the building knew anything about Friedrich Quast. When Harriet once asked him where the rest of his things were, he replied that his books were in a small room in the Faculty of Medicine where he was running a course for first-year students. And the other stuff? In storage. At the house of one of his mother’s friends. Harriet became jealous. She had the suspicion that she wasn’t the only woman he was seeing. Although Friedrich was indeed at her place more often, and although they always slept together whenever he was there, Harriet became more and more convinced that he must be seeing other women. Sometimes it was an unfamiliar smell, sometimes a letter opened too casually or a hasty departure after a furtive glance at his watch. Harriet closed her eyes. And flew away.

At some point she opened her eyes again and realized that she had been abandoned in midflight. Abandoned with a baby in her belly. Friedrich had noticed it before she did. Yes, her gums had bled quite often recently and once they had even been inflamed. Yes, she had also noticed she was tired, but that was down to the nights she spent having sex with Friedrich instead of sleeping. And the flying. She failed to notice her breasts getting bigger; she had perhaps felt something but didn’t think any more of it. Friedrich didn’t say much, he just looked at her and asked about her cycle. Half asleep, Harriet shrugged and closed her eyes. That night he woke her up, lay on her back, took her gently but energetically from behind, and left her flat soon afterward. At first Harriet wasn’t concerned. It was a bit upsetting when he left but nothing unusual. Then she looked into his wardrobe, saw that even the few items of clothing had gone, and she couldn’t help vomiting. And afterward the sickness didn’t stop. She vomited in the morning, the afternoon, the evening and at night. As she kneeled over the toilet bowl in the bathroom she suddenly remembered his last question. Harriet screwed up her eyes as tightly as she could, but she didn’t fly anymore. She hoped it would come back but didn’t really believe it would. And her gut feeling—Harriet called it intuition—didn’t deceive her.

Two decades later—Rosmarie had been dead for five years—Inga was passing a doctor’s surgery in Bremen. She read the sign more out of habit than interest. And when she reached the next crossroads the name that had been on the sign suddenly hit her. She went back. And there it was: Dr. Friedrich Quast. Cardiology. Of course. A heart specialist, Inga thought with a contemptuous snort. She was about to go in, but then she reconsidered and rang her sister Harriet instead.

The pregnant Harriet wasn’t devastated when she realized she would have to bring up an illegitimate child on her own. Eventually the vomiting stopped. She took her exams and performed well. The glances and whispers of her fellow students didn’t bother her as much as she had feared; in fact, there weren’t that many whispers at all. It was only when Cornelia, whom she bumped into by chance in town, walked past her and shook her head at seeing the swollen belly that Harriet went into a café and cried. After much deliberation she wrote to her parents, and wasn’t expecting the answer she got. Bertha wrote back to her daughter telling her that she would love Harriet to come home. She had discussed it with Hinnerk and he wasn’t happy about the whole affair. But—and it was the only time that Bertha used this argument against her husband—the house wasn’t just Hinnerk’s; it was Bertha’s parental home, and big enough for her daughter and grandchild as well.

Harriet went back to Bootshaven. When Hinnerk saw her, he turned on his heel and spent the rest of the day in his study. But he said nothing. Bertha had got her way. Nobody ever found out how high the price was that she had to pay for it.

Hinnerk refused to say a single word to Harriet during her pregnancy. Bertha pretended not to notice and spoke to both of them, but she got tired early in the evening, her blond hair detached itself from her beehive and she looked worn out. Her youngest daughter didn’t see this, however; by then she had become totally inward looking. In the mornings she would sit in her old bedroom, translating. Thanks to the friendly assistance of a professor who held her work in high regard—or maybe he just felt sorry for her—she was working for a publishing house specializing in biographies. The genre suited Harriet and she found the translation easy. Thus she would type away on a gray Olympia up in her mansard, surrounded by encyclopedias and dictionaries, making one foreign life after another appear in a new language.

She would come downstairs for lunch. Mother and daughter ate together in the kitchen. Ever since Harriet had come back home, Hinnerk stayed in his study during lunch. Harriet washed up and Bertha would have a short lie-down on the sofa. Then Harriet would get back to work again, but only until midafternoon. She would stop around four, put a soft gray plastic cover over the typewriter, and push her chair in. By then her movements were labored and she would trudge slowly down the stairs. When she heard her daughter’s footsteps, Bertha would push the beans she was chopping to one side, drop the heavy washing basket she was about to carry through the barn, or put down the pen with which she was doing the household accounts. She would listen in silence, clutching her neck. A dry sob would sometimes break loose from her throat.

Harriet noticed none of this. She would slowly make her way into the garden, take a hoe and weed the flower beds, for it was late summer. Bending over had become difficult. Unless she opened her legs wide to make room between them for her belly, all the breath was squeezed out of her, which was painful. Harriet got rid of the weeds nonetheless. Day by day. Bed by bed. And when she had finished she started all over again. Even when it was raining she would go over to the cow pasture where the washing would normally be hanging from the line and wade through the tall grass to the large bramble bushes to pick blackberries. The raindrops made the berries look even bigger, turning them heavy and soft. Juice and water ran down Harriet’s sleeves. And each time she picked a berry the bush shook like a wet dog.

After an hour or two in the garden she would sit on an old folding chair or a bench, lean her head against the wall under the veranda or a tree trunk, and fall asleep. Dragonflies darted above her, bumblebees got tangled up in her red hair, but Harriet felt none of this. She wasn’t flying, wasn’t dreaming, just slept like a log.

But this meant she slept worse at night. It was hot beneath the roof, hot beneath the heavy blanket; her breasts sweltered against her swollen belly. She couldn’t go to sleep on her front. If she lay on her back she felt dizzy. On her side, the ankle, knee, hip, and shoulder she was lying on started to hurt after a while. And then she didn’t know what to do with her forearm: it would generally fall asleep before she did and that was uncomfortable. Every night Harriet got up and dragged herself down the stairs to go to the loo. But when she started getting up twice at night she began using the chamber pot she had used as a child, back when the way downstairs had been too long, too steep, and too cold to negotiate every night. Harriet didn’t go straight back to bed after using the pot. The windows were open, but the cool air didn’t get very far into upstairs rooms. Harriet stood by the window and the draft billowed out her nightdress like a large sail.

Rosmarie said Harriet had told her that people walking along the road below had seen a white ghost floating around the attic of the house. That must have been Harriet. She never left the property and so some people in the village never knew that she had come back. Most of them of course knew about her pregnancy, and gossip was rife.

It must have been around this time that the books on the upstairs shelves started being moved around. It happened every few months. Time and again all the books would suddenly be in a different place from before, and it always felt as if this rearrangement had not occurred at random, but according to a particular pattern. Once we had the impression that it was the shape of the books that determined the order, another time the texture of the covers; on one occasion we thought that the authors sitting side by side would have had a lot to say to each other, while on another it was those writers who would have despised each other who were close together.

But Harriet never admitted to it. “Why would I do something like that?” she asked her daughter and me, smiling at us in astonishment.

“Who else could have done it?” we asked in return.

“After all, you do fly when you’re asleep,” Rosmarie added defiantly.

Harriet laughed out loud. “Who’s been telling you all this again?” She laughed once more, shook her head, and left the room.

I still wondered who had changed the books around upstairs. Had it been Bertha the whole time, even continuing it when she visited from the home? But now I was kneeling down here by my dead grandfather’s desk with a bad conscience because I had found a secret book of poetry that he had written more than four decades ago. I put it back. I wanted to keep it for another time. And now I had to deal with the chicken shed.