The Taste of Apple Seeds (2 page)

“Let’s go into the study,” Aunt Inga said, leading the way.

I was intoxicated by the aroma in the entrance hall: it still smelled of apples and old stone, and my great-grandmother Käthe’s carved dower chest still stood by the wall. On either side of it were the oak chairs adorned with the family coat of arms: a heart divided by a saw. My mother’s and Aunt Inga’s heels clacked against the floor, sand crunched beneath leather soles; Aunt Harriet alone followed slowly and noiselessly in her Reeboks.

Granddad’s study had been tidied up. My parents and one of the lawyers, the young one with the cigarette, pushed four chairs together: three on one side and one opposite. The young lawyer then joined his colleague against the wall to the right. Unmoved by the commotion, Hinnerk’s hefty desk remained by the wall between the two windows, which looked out onto the drive and the limes. The leaves refracted the sunlight, dappling the room; dust danced in the air. It was chilly in here. My mother and aunts sat on the three dark chairs, while the third lawyer took Hinnerk’s desk chair. My father and I stood behind the three sisters. The legs and backs of the chairs were so tall and straight that the bodies sitting in them instantly snapped into right angles: feet and shins, thighs and back, upper arms and forearms, neck and shoulders, chin and neck. The sisters looked like Egyptian statues in a burial chamber. And although the flecked light dazzled us, it did not warm up the room.

The lawyer sitting on Hinnerk’s desk chair fiddled with the locks on his briefcase; seeming to take this as a sign, the other two cleared their throats and looked seriously at him, obviously their boss. He introduced himself as the partner of the former partner of Heinrich Lünschen, my grandfather.

Bertha’s will was read and explained, my father appointed executor. A ripple passed through the bodies of the sisters when they heard that the house had been left to me. I dropped down onto a stool and looked at the partner of the partner. I could see the lawyer with the cigarette staring at me, so I lowered my eyes and fixed them on the hymn sheet from the funeral service, which was still rolled up in my hand. The notes of “O Head Full of Blood and Wounds” had become imprinted on the heel of my palm. Inkjet printer. In my mind I saw heads full of blood and wounds, hair like jets of red ink, holes in heads, the gaps in Bertha’s memory, sand from the egg timer. You could make glass from sand if it was hot enough. With my fingers I felt my scar: no, no sand was trickling out yet, only dust swirling from my skirt when I took my hand from my forehead and crossed my legs. I stared at a thin ladder that started at my knee then vanished beneath the black velvet of my skirt. I could sense Harriet’s gaze, and looked up. Her eyes were full of pity; she hated the house. Rosemary, for remembrance. Who had said that? Forgotten.

The looser the mesh of Bertha’s mind, the larger the chunks of memory that slipped through. As she became more confused, the woolen things she knitted became ever crazier: because she was constantly dropping stitches, knitting different patterns together, or starting new stitches at the seams, they grew and shrank in all directions, gaped and felted, and could be unpicked at any point. My mother had gathered together the pieces of knitting in Bootshaven and taken them back home. She had kept them in a box in her wardrobe. Once, by chance, I’d stumbled upon them; with a mixture of horror and amusement, I had laid out on my parents’ bed one woolen sculpture after another. At that stage I wasn’t living with my parents anymore and Bertha was already in the care home. My mother came in, and for a while both of us gazed at the woolen creatures.

“I suppose that each of us has to preserve our tears somewhere,” my mother had said, as if defending herself, and then she packed everything away in the wardrobe. We never spoke about Bertha’s knitting again.

We all walked out of the study in single file, back along the hallway and out the front door; the bell clanged tinnily. The lawyers offered us their hands then left, and we sat outside on the steps. Almost all the smooth yellow-white stones had cracks. Flat chunks of stone had come loose and you could lift them up like lids. In the past there hadn’t been that many loose ones, only six or seven; we had used them as secret compartments, hiding feathers, flowers, and letters inside.

Back then I still wrote letters, I still believed in written, printed, and read matter. These days I no longer did. I had a job at the library at Freiburg University: I worked with books, I bought books, I even borrowed the odd one. But read them? No. I used to—oh yes, I used to read all the time, in bed, while eating, on my bike. But it stopped. Reading was the same as collecting, and collecting was the same as keeping, and keeping was the same as remembering, and remembering was the same as not knowing exactly, and not knowing exactly was the same as having forgotten, and having forgotten was the same as falling, and at some point you had to stop falling.

That was one explanation.

But I liked being a librarian. For the same reasons that I didn’t read anymore.

I had started out studying German, but working on my essays I found that everything I did after compiling the bibliography seemed inconsequential. Catalogs, subject registers, reference books, indexes all had their own delicate beauty, which, if you gave them only a cursory reading, was as inaccessible as a hermetic poem. Whenever, starting with a general reference volume, its pages softened by the fingers of myriad readers, I gradually arrived via several other books at a highly specialized monograph whose cover nobody save for a librarian had touched before me, I felt a sense of satisfaction I could never gain from my own writing. And in any case, the things you wrote down were the things you didn’t have to remember, that is to say the things you could safely forget because you knew where to find them, and thus what held true for reading applied to writing as well.

What I particularly loved about my job was rooting out forgotten books, books that had been sitting in the same spot for hundreds of years, probably never read, covered with a thick layer of dust, and yet which had outlived the millions of people who hadn’t read them. I had already unearthed seven or eight of these books and would visit them occasionally, but I would never touch them. Sometimes I might breathe in their smell. Like most library books they had a stale odor, the very opposite of fresh. The book that smelled the worst was the one on ancient Egyptian friezes; it was terribly blackened and ragged.

I had visited my grandmother only once in the care home. She was sitting in her room, clearly frightened of me, and she wet herself. A nurse came and changed her nappy. I gave Bertha a good-bye kiss on the cheek; she was cold, and my lips felt the web of wrinkles that softly traversed her skin.

While I was waiting on the steps, tracing the cracks in the stone with my finger, my mother sat two steps higher, talking to me. She spoke quietly without finishing her sentences; her words seemed to hang in midair. Irritated, I wondered why she had started doing this of late. It was only when she put in my lap a large brass key—with the simple contour of its bit it looked like a stage prop for a fairy tale—that I finally grasped what was going on. It was all about the house: Bertha’s daughters here on the weathered steps, her dead sister who had been born in the house, and Rosmarie who had died in the house. And it was all about the young lawyer with the cigarette. I had almost failed to recognize him, but he had to be the younger brother of Mira Ohmstedt, our best friend. Rosmarie’s and my best friend.

Chapter II

MY PARENTS, MY AUNTS, AND I
stayed the night in the three guest rooms at the village inn.

“We’re going back down to Baden,” my mother said the following morning. She said it a second time, as if needing to convince herself. Her sisters sighed; to them it sounded as if she were going back to happiness. And maybe that was the case. Aunt Inga would get a lift with them as far as Bremen. I gave her a quick hug and got an electric shock.

“This early in the morning?” I asked in astonishment.

“It’s going to be hot today,” Inga said apologetically. She crossed her arms over her chest and with a quick movement stroked from her shoulders down to her wrists. She then splayed her fingers and shook them. There was a slight crackle as sparks shot from her fingertips.

Rosmarie had loved the way Aunt Inga sparked. “Oh, please can we have some more shooting stars?” she would say, especially when we were out in the garden at night. Then we would watch in awe as for a split second tiny points of light danced on Aunt Inga’s hands. “Doesn’t that hurt?” we would ask, and she would shake her head. But I never believed her; she used to wince whenever she leaned against a car, opened a cupboard door, turned on a light or the television. Sometimes she dropped things. I would come into the kitchen and Aunt Inga would be crouched down, sweeping up shards with the hand brush. When I asked her what had happened, she would say, “Oh, just a silly accident—I’m so clumsy.”

On those occasions when Inga couldn’t avoid shaking hands with people she would apologize, as they often yelled in fright. Rosmarie called her “Sparky Fingers,” but we all knew that she really admired Aunt Inga. “Why can’t you do that, Mummy?” she asked Aunt Harriet once. “And why can’t I?” Aunt Harriet had looked at her and said that it was the only way Inga could release her tension, and that Rosmarie was so energetic that she would never be capable of such discharges; it was something she should be thankful for.

Aunt Harriet had always been spiritual. She took a few inner journeys and wandered back again before she became Mohani and started wearing that wooden-bead necklace. As my mother saw it, when Harriet’s daughter died she sought a father and became a daughter again herself. She wanted something solid. Something that would stop her from falling but also help her forget. I was never satisfied with this explanation: Aunt Harriet loved drama, not melodrama. She might be crazy, but she was never vulgar. She probably felt a connection with Osho, the dead guru. It must have been a comfort to her that a dead person could be so alive, because she had never seemed particularly impressed by the living Bhagwan, and she used to laugh at the pictures of him with his fleet of huge cars.

When my mother, father, and Aunt Inga had left, Aunt Harriet and I drank peppermint tea in the café. Our silence was wistful and relaxed.

“Are you going to the house now?” Aunt Harriet asked finally. She stood and picked up her leather travel bag, which was next to our table. Osho was smiling in the wooden-framed pendant of her necklace. I looked him in the eye and nodded. He nodded back. I stood up, too. She hugged me so tightly that it hurt. I said nothing and peered over her shoulder at the empty café. The haze of coffee and sweat, which yesterday had cloaked the funeral-goers in its warmth, still hung beneath the low white ceiling. Aunt Harriet kissed my forehead and left. Her Reeboks squeaked on the waxed floorboards.

On the street she turned and waved. I raised my hand. She turned back and stood at the bus stop. Her shoulders were hunched and her short red hair slipped beneath the collar of her black blouse. I was shocked. It was only from behind that I could see how unhappy she was. I looked away and sat back down at the breakfast table. I didn’t want her to feel embarrassed. When the bus groaned as it left, rattling the windowpanes, I looked up and caught one last glimpse of Aunt Harriet; she was sitting, casting a frozen stare at the seat in front of her.

I walked back to the house. My bag wasn’t heavy—there wasn’t much in it besides the black velvet skirt—and I was wearing a short black sleeveless dress and black sandals with thick wedge heels: good for long distances on pavement or lugging books from shelves without twisting your ankle. There was little going on on that Saturday morning. A few teenagers were sitting on their mopeds outside the Edeka shop, eating ice cream. The girls were endlessly tossing their newly washed hair. It looked strange, as if their necks were too weak to support their heads, and I was afraid that at any moment their heads might snap backward or to the side. I must have been staring, because they all fell silent and returned my gaze. Although this was uncomfortable, I was relieved that the girls’ heads had stopped wobbling and now sat upright on their necks rather than listing at strange angles on their shoulders or chests.

The main road curved sharply to the left; straight ahead a gravel road led past the BP petrol station and a couple of houses to the pastures. Later I wanted to pump up the tires on one of the bikes and cycle along this road to the lock. Or even to the lake. Aunt Inga had said it would get warm today.

I walked on the right-hand side of the road. To my left I could already see the large mill beyond the poplars. It had been freshly painted and I felt sorry for it, degraded by such color. After all, nobody would think of forcing the women of my grandmother’s social circle to flounce around in glitzy leggings. Bertha’s farmhouse, which was now to be my house, was opposite the mill. I stood at the bottom of the drive; the galvanized gate was locked but lower than I remembered, exactly at waist height, so I quickly straddled it and climbed over.

In the morning light the house was a dark, tatty box with a broad, ugly driveway. The lime trees were in the shade. On the way to the steps I saw that the entire front garden was overgrown with forget-me-nots. The blue flowers were just beginning to wither; some were fading, others were turning brown. A thicket of dying forget-me-nots. I bent down and pulled off a flower; it wasn’t blue at all, it was gray and violet and white and pink and black. Who
had
been looking after the garden when Bertha was in the home? And what about the house? I planned to ask Mira’s brother.

As I entered I was greeted once more by the aroma of apples and cold stone. I put my bag on the dowry chest and walked the length of the hallway. Yesterday we had only made it as far as the study. Today I didn’t peek into any of the rooms but opened the door at the very end of the hall. To the right a steep staircase led upstairs, straight ahead there were two steps down, then the bathroom on the right, where my grandfather had come crashing through the ceiling one evening as my mother was washing me. Intent on giving us a fright, he had crept up to the attic above. The floorboards must have been rotten and my grandfather was a large, heavy man. He broke his arm and we weren’t allowed to tell anybody what happened.