The Taste of Apple Seeds (17 page)

And I realized that not only was forgetting a form of remembering, but remembering was a form of forgetting, too.

Chapter IX

OF COURSE I THOUGHT ABOUT MAX
. I thought about whether he was holding back because I was holding back and whether I was holding back because he was holding back or because I wanted to hold myself back for reasons I had to think about.

The following morning, it must have been Tuesday, I went barefoot to the large wardrobe and opened the doors. It smelled of wool, wood, and camphor, with a trace of my grandfather’s hair tonic. After a short deliberation I pulled out a white dress with light gray polka dots that had once been Inga’s ball gown. It was thin and light: perfect, for it seemed as if the heat wave was going to last. I sat on the steps by the front door with a cup of tea and breathed in the confident fragrance of summer. I saw the three empty paint pots at the bottom of the steps only when I was about to go back inside. I walked along the side of the house to the copse. And there it was: all four walls of the chicken shed were now painted white. It was what I had feared. It looked glorious, like a little summerhouse. How long had Max gone on painting yesterday? As I circled it, I could still see the word “Nazi” grinning through the white paint. The multiple “Irises” were no longer visible though. I went into the tiny house, but had to duck my head to stand up inside.

Whenever we were caught off guard by the rain, Rosmarie, Mira, and I would shelter in here. But I was often here on my own, too. Especially later on when I came to visit during the holidays. Sometimes Rosmarie would already be back at school in September, but not me. I would have the mornings to myself. I collected stones that looked completely different from the ones back home. We mainly had smooth, round pebbles, but here there were stones that looked, and almost broke, like glass. If you threw them against a patch of hard ground, pieces would splinter off, as sharp as knife blades. “Flint stones,” Mira called them. Most of them were light brown, gray brown, or black; only the odd one was white.

The Rhine pebbles that we had back home didn’t splinter. For a time I broke open lots of them in the hope of finding crystals inside. I had a good eye for these stones; the rougher and plainer they were on the outside, the more they sparkled inside. I would find them mostly on the old railway tracks that ran through the forest near our house. I could tell by their form whether there was anything inside worth finding. There was something in their roundness that seemed less arbitrary than that of normal stones. Sometimes the crystals would be visible on the surface, like glass windows you could look through. My father gave me a stonecutting saw and I would spend hours in our cellar sawing through stones. The blade made a horrible noise that hurt my ears. I would look eagerly into the glittering cavities. Although I felt triumph and pride when my assumptions were proved correct, I also knew that I was breaking into something forbidden, destroying secrets. And yet I was relieved that the brown stones weren’t just stones but crystal caves for fairies and tiny magical beings.

Later, I moved on to collecting words and mining the crystalline realms of hermetic poetry. But behind all this collecting was the same craving for magical, animated worlds in sleeping things. When I was a child I had a vocabulary book where I kept special words, in the same way that I would collect mussels and special stones. They were listed under the following categories: “beautiful words,” “ugly words,” “false words,” “contorted words,” and “secret words.” Under “beautiful words” I had written:
rosy, fragrant, pitter-patter, banana, mellifluous, foxglove, lullaby
. The “ugly words” were:
scrotum, gurnard, moist, crabby
. “False words” angered me because they pretended to be harmless but in fact they were nasty or dangerous, like “aftershock” and “growth.” Or they pretended to be magical, like “mangold” and “kingpin,” but were disappointingly normal. Or they described something that wasn’t clear to anybody: no two people would picture the same color if they heard the word “crimson.”

The “contorted words” were a sort of hobby of mine—or perhaps an illness. Maybe it amounted to the same thing. My favorite animals included the “hippotatomus,” the “rhinosheros” and the “woodspeckler.” I found it funny to “hoover over the abyss,” and loved the line from
Richard III
that went: “Now is the discount of our winter tents.” I knew what “antidisestablishmentarianism” was, but what was “pantyfishersentscaryrhythm”? I fancied it could be a menacing drumbeat to which one might retrieve one’s knickers from the lake.

The “secret words” were the hardest to find, but that was not surprising. They were words that behaved as if they were entirely normal but in fact harbored something quite different, something wonderful. So the opposite of the “false words.” I was comforted by the fact that the sports stadium at our school was home to a sweet-sounding holy man. His name was St. Adium and he was the patron saint of word games.

Or road signs warning of a “Hidden Dip.” These were actually saying that if you looked hard enough on the roadside you might come across a delicious tub of taramasalata, hummus, or tzatziki. Every time we passed such a sign I would imagine taramasalata spread thickly on toasted white bread with a squeeze of lemon juice and freshly ground black pepper. Or that very rare but delicious fish, the perchance, dusted in seasoned flour then fried. Absolute heaven.

My recollections had made me hungry so I went inside. There was practically nothing left to eat in the kitchen; I munched on some black bread and nut chocolate, and decided to go shopping later.

I ran upstairs and fetched a towel from the small washing basket in Inga’s room. It had a flowery pattern but was as stiff as a board. I fastened it to the pannier rack and rode to the lake. It was a normal working day; I had a guilty conscience because I wasn’t in the library, nor was I sorting out my inheritance. I wasn’t even shattered by grief. Well, I reminded myself, I had taken some time off, even if only via an answerphone. I hadn’t left an address or telephone number, but so what? I would have to try to get hold of my boss again later.

My work, of course, was nothing more than me continuing to collect secrets. And just as I had stopped sawing into stones I suspected might contain crystals, I had also stopped reading books that interested me and started getting interested in books that nobody read anymore.

When we were younger, Rosmarie always made fun of the fact that I took it personally if the nuts we cracked open were empty. I couldn’t stop wondering how the nut had escaped from its closed shell. Her favorite trick was to spoon out a soft-boiled egg and hand it over to me at breakfast with the hole hidden in an egg cup. I would howl each time I cracked open the shell and put my spoon into the void. And now this house had been handed over to me. If I declined, I would dream about it forever.

An early-morning mist hung over the lake. I laid my bike on the grassy slope and undressed. My dress floated down to the dew like a cloud. I spread out my towel and put my things on it to stop them from getting drenched. When I waded into the water tiny fish scattered from around my ankles, darting into the safety of the dark. It was cold. Once more I wondered about all the things that were swimming around in here. I had never been taken by the idea of scuba diving; angry seas, sad gravel pits, and dark bog lakes suited me, because in the end I didn’t want to know exactly.

I swam across the lake with long strokes. Small air bubbles tickled my stomach. Swimming naked was wonderful; I could feel resistance and turbulence over the entire surface of my body. Let’s face it, you don’t exactly become more streamlined without a swimming costume on. But at least these days I had a body that I regarded as my own. It had taken long enough. Devouring books and bread had made my mind light and my body sluggish. Because I never liked looking at myself back then, I would reflect myself in stories. Eat, read, read, eat. When, later on, I stopped reading, I also stopped bingeing. I remembered my body again. I had one now. A bit neglected, maybe, but it was there and I was surprised by its diversity of forms, lines, and surfaces. The communal changing room at the swimming pool would no longer be my downfall; I knew it was time for the individual ladies’ cabins.

Downfall, windfall, fallacies, falling, Rosmarie for remembrance. Her body fell to ruin before it was even all there. All young girls are obsessed by their bodies because they don’t have bodies yet. They are like nymphs that live underwater for years, eating and eating. Every so often they acquire a new skin and they keep on eating. Then the nymphs climb out of the water on a long stalk, shed their skin a final time, and fly off as dragonflies. She might have managed it. When Harriet was Rosmarie’s age she was already able to fly.

A few meters before reaching the far bank I turned around and swam back. By now the mist had almost disappeared; there was only a thin layer above the surface of the water. I was just able to touch the ground with my feet when I saw Max. After laying his bike beside mine he didn’t look over at me, just ripped off his shirt and shorts and ran into the water with a splash. He dived in and began swimming the crawl straightaway. But as he was about to pass me, he stopped, turned to me, and raised his hand.

“Hi, Iris!”

“Good morning.”

He came closer. I didn’t know what to say. Clearly he didn’t, either. We stood facing each other but averted our eyes. I used the water like a blanket, pulling it up to my chin; I glanced at his shoulder and watched the drops running off it. Although I couldn’t see where he was looking, so close to me, I could feel it. Quickly, I crossed my arms over my breasts. Then, finally, his eyes met mine.

He slowly took his hand out of the water and traced the line of my shoulder with his forefinger. His hand disappeared back into the water. He was standing quite close; I pressed my arms more tightly to my body. He leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. He felt warm and soft and good. I must have made a grab for his shoulders. I was light-headed. Max pulled me toward him. When my breasts touched his chest I could feel his body tighten. What I did after that I can’t say with any certainty, nor how long I did it for. But soon afterward we ended up on the narrow patch of sand at the shore. I could feel the coolness of the water on his body beneath me, his penis inside his wet trunks, his lips on my neck. As I was helping him take off his trunks he suddenly held me firmly in his arms.

“I don’t have sex outdoors with clients.”

“Really? Haven’t you noticed that this is precisely what you’re doing now?”

“Oh God! I don’t have sex with clients full stop. Not outdoors or anywhere else.”

“Are you sure?”

“No. Yes! No. Iris, what are you doing to me?”

“Sex outdoors?”

“Iris. You’re driving me crazy. Your smell, your walk, your lips and the way you speak.”

“My what?”

I rolled off him and onto the sand. Max was probably right. It was a stupid idea: he was Mira’s little brother. Not only that, he was my lawyer and my aunts’ lawyer; we still had to discuss what was going to happen to the house if I didn’t take it. What we were doing right now would only complicate matters unnecessarily. My relationship with his sister and Rosmarie had also been complicated. He had no idea just how complicated. I covered my eyes with my hands. Beneath my forefinger I could feel the scar on the bridge of my nose.

Then I felt his fingers on my hands.

“Come here, Iris. What’s wrong? Hey!” Max’s voice was soft and warm, just like his mouth. “Iris, you can’t begin to imagine how much I’d love to sleep with you. I don’t even dare tell you that I’d even like to sleep with you in the chicken shed, in your bed, in my bathroom, in the DIY store, and, God forgive me, in the cemetery.”

I couldn’t help smiling beneath my hands. “Oh really?”

“Yes!”

“In the DIY store?”

“Yes!”

“So, with white paint running down between my breasts?”

“No. That’s the chicken-shed fantasy. In the DIY store I saw all these screws and nuts and drills and rawlplugs and . . .”

I sat up and saw that Max was trying to stop himself from laughing. The very effort of it was making him wince. When he saw me looking at him he burst out laughing. I punched him in the chest; he fell onto his back, laughing all the while. He had grabbed hold of my arms and pulled me down with him so that my naked torso was lying on his once more. It was like a power surge. Now he wasn’t laughing anymore.

I could have had sex with him there and then. Instead he pushed me away, somewhat roughly, shook his head, and dived back into the lake. Without looking around he swam off. I stood up, pulled on my dress, and rode away.

I stood the bicycle by the front door, went inside, and changed into my black funeral clothes—a smart move, I thought, after my experience with the golden dress at the DIY store. I picked up my bag and rode to the Edeka shop. I bought bread, milk, butter, almonds, two types of cheese, carrots, tomatoes, more nut chocolate, and, because I felt so hot, some watermelon. Back home I put everything in the fridge, rang Freiburg, and spoke to my boss. Again she offered her condolences and said she appreciated that I still had to sort out my inheritance.

“Do it as quickly as you can,” she said with a sigh. “The sooner these things are resolved, the better. My brother and I still haven’t come to an agreement even though our parents have been dead for years. Yes, it’s very busy here. The vacation is almost upon us but don’t worry, we’ve got enough staff. Frau Gerhard is back from her break. So stay as long as is necessary. You don’t sound terribly well, Frau Berger. I see. So I shouldn’t expect you here this week? Yes. That’s fine. I understand. Good-bye, good-bye, ciao, Frau Berger.”

I hung up. I didn’t sound terribly well? Obviously not. I was upset, confused, and hurt by Max’s rejection. But how did I react? I withdrew coyly. I realized with disdain that I hadn’t come much further than the women of the previous generation, with regard to being in control of one’s life. But that was no surprise. I mean, I was the product of the most uptight of the three Lünschen sisters.