The Taste of Apple Seeds (20 page)

We also played the game on the day before Rosmarie’s death. It had been raining nonstop for two days, but in the afternoon the sun broke through the clouds. Mira walked slowly down the drive toward the house; we hadn’t seen her for the past two days. She leaned her back against one of the lime trees. She yawned and turned her face to the sun. With her eyes closed she said, “We’re going to play Eat or Die.”

It was usually Rosmarie who determined what we played, but she just shrugged and pushed back her long red hair with the backs of her hands. “I’d rather go to the lock, but I don’t mind. Why not?”

I would rather have gone to the lock, too. We had been stuck inside for so long that I would have loved a race across the pasture. But I was more delighted by the fact that Rosmarie hadn’t decided what we were doing this time, so I said, “Yes, let’s play what Mira wants.”

Rosmarie shrugged her shoulders again, turned around, and went into the garden. She was wearing the golden dress and it glistened in the sun when she moved. I walked behind her. Mira followed us at a distance. The garden was steaming. Large rainwater lenses sat on the cucumber and pumpkin leaves through which you could see the veins and hairs magnified. Behind the currant bushes it smelled of earth and cat poo.

“Have you got the blindfold and the tape?”

Rosmarie had turned around and was staring at Mira and me with her pale eyes. Mira stared back; there was something challenging in her gaze that I didn’t understand. She had more mascara on than usual and her eyeliner was particularly bold. The dark makeup clung thickly and heavily to the curved lashes. When she moved her eyes it looked as if two black caterpillars were crawling across her face.

“No, we haven’t.” On that day Mira’s face was like ash, as was her voice. Only her eyes seemed to be alive, and the black caterpillars writhed silently.

“I’ll get them,” I said, running indoors, up the stairs, and fetching the tape. There wasn’t much left but it would be enough. I opened the large wardrobe, grabbed Hinnerk’s scarf, which was hanging over a tie rack on the inside of the door, hitched up my light blue skirt, clattered down the stairs again, and went back into the garden.

Mira and Rosmarie hadn’t moved from where they were; Rosmarie was talking to Mira, who was looking at the ground. But when they saw me coming they both turned away at the same time and walked off. I didn’t catch up until we got to the currant bushes.

“Here are the things.”

“Do you want to start, Iris?” Rosmarie asked.

“No, I’m going to start this time,” Mira said.

I shrugged and gave Mira the scarf; she tied it over her eyes and crossed her wrists behind her back. I stuck a length of brown tape around Mira’s wrists; when she saw I couldn’t tear it off, Rosmarie came over, bent down quickly, and bit through it. Mira said nothing.

We kneeled in the mud behind the bushes. “It doesn’t matter,” Rosmarie said. “We’ll wash our clothes before the Weird Sisters notice anything.”

We would often wash our clothes in secret.

Rosmarie and I got up again and went off to find something to eat. I tore off a sorrel leaf and showed it to Rosmarie. She nodded and held up a leaf of her own: soup greens. That was what our grandmother called it, at any rate; it smelled of soup and Maggi, and if you rubbed it between your hands you couldn’t get rid of the stench for days. I thought soup greens were a bit cruel for the first round, but I nodded and put some sorrel in my own mouth.

When we came back Mira was squatting on the ground, looking like a statue.

I said, “Okay, Mira, this is what you wanted. Eat or die. Mouth open. Are you going to give it to her, Rosmarie?”

Rosmarie crushed the leaf between her fingertips. Mira must have smelled it before it came close to her face. She opened her mouth, gave a loud groan, and vomited. The force of the eruption jerked her torso backward.

“Oh Christ! Mira!” I was so horrified that I didn’t even think of taking off the blindfold and tape.

“It’s fine. I feel better now. Rosmarie knows I don’t like lovage.”

I didn’t know that soup greens were the same as lovage and I assumed that Rosmarie didn’t, either. Rosmarie was silent. She kneeled behind Mira and put both arms around her. Her chin was resting on Mira’s shoulder. She closed her eyes. Mira’s eyes were still blindfolded. The air reeked of sick.

“Okay, come on, let’s go to the lock.”

I was sure that both of them would take up my suggestion. But Mira slowly shook her head.

“It’s still my turn,” she said. “That didn’t count. I mean, it didn’t even touch my tongue.”

Then Rosmarie kissed Mira on the lips. The kiss unnerved me. I had never seen them kiss before, and what’s more I thought of how Mira had just projectile vomited.

“You’re crazy,” I said. I felt uncomfortable there in the garden, although I didn’t know whether it was because of the game or because of the kiss.

Rosmarie took Mira a few meters away and helped her sit down again. Then she went looking, but not very far. She bent down abruptly and when she stood up again I could see that she had picked a zucchini, not one of the clubs but a small one. A piece of zucchini was all right, I thought, particularly if it was small and fresh. But Rosmarie didn’t break a piece off. Instead she muttered, “Eat it or forget it, sweetie.”

Mira smiled and opened her mouth. Rosmarie crouched down right in front of her. She pinched off the flower and put the end, still wet from the rain, in Mira’s mouth. And then she hissed, “This is your lover’s cock.”

Mira recoiled briefly. Then she became very calm, bit firmly on the end of the zucchini to break it off, and spat it blindly in Rosmarie’s face. It hit Rosmarie on the upper lip. Then Mira said, “You lost, Rosmarie.”

Mira tugged at the sticky tape, and it ripped open. She stood up, pulled the white scarf off her head, and threw it on the compost heap. Then she left. Rosmarie and I stared after her.

“Look, what’s going on?” I asked.

Rosmarie turned to me, her face screwed up. She screamed, “Just leave me alone, you stupid, stupid idiot!”

“Fine!” I answered. “Anyway, I don’t play with bad losers.”

I only said that because I had seen how Mira’s words had upset Rosmarie. I hadn’t understood them. Rosmarie came over to me in two long strides and slapped me.

“I hate you,” I said to her.

“Worms can’t hate.”

I ran into the house.

Rosmarie didn’t eat with the family that evening. And she didn’t come up to our room until I was practically in bed. She acted as if nothing had happened. I was still angry with her. But I sat down beside her on the window seat and she explained the thing with Mira. And then night fell.

When I was there in the summer Rosmarie and I always slept together in the old marital bed. It was funny and creepy, and we would tell each other our dreams, chat, and giggle. Rosmarie talked about school, Mira, and boys she was in love with. She often talked about her father, a red-haired hulk from the north. A polar researcher, a pirate on the Arctic Ocean, maybe dead already, frozen, a silver-gray sky reflecting in sightless eyes, and other stories in that vein. She never spoke about her father with Harriet, and Harriet never mentioned him.

In bed Rosmarie and I would make up languages, secret languages, nighttime languages. For a while we said everything backward. To begin with it was a very slow process, but after a few days we were well practiced and could bounce a few short sentences back and forth. We turned around the names of everyone we knew. I was Siri, she was Eiramsor, and of course there was Arim. Then Rosmarie decided that the opposite of something would be the word for the thing itself, but with the letters reversed. So our word for eat, especially the way I did it on my own at home with my books, was “timov.” Indeed this was the very opposite of “eat,” only backward.

Once, when Rosmarie, Mira, and I were perched on the broad window seat in our bedroom, peering out at the rain, Rosmarie said, “Did you two know that I’ve absorbed Mira?”

Mira looked at her beneath her heavy lids. Languidly she opened her small, dark red mouth. “Oh really?”

“Yes. Mira is contained in Rosmarie. And you, Iris, only got away by a whisker, more precisely by a single ‘i.’ ”

Mira and I were silent, trying to work it out in our heads. Rosmarie. After a while I said, “You know, there are a lot of things contained in you.”

“I know.” Rosmarie giggled gleefully.

“Sore,” Mira said. After a pause she added, “Sore and arse.”

“Mars,” I said. After a pause I added, “I’m hungry.”

We laughed.

In fact, there were multitudes contained inside Rosmarie. Sore and arse, rose and Mars, emir and sari, rear and rim.

There was nothing in me. Nothing at all. I was just myself. Iris. Flower and eye.

Enough. I had been staring long enough at the wounds that came with the house. From outside I went into the barn, then through the former utility room into the fireplace room. The glass sliding door squeaked as I pushed it open as hard as I could. The stone flags kept the whole room cool. In spite of the large glass doors it was dark in here, as the weeping willow stood too close to the terrace and only let light in through a green filter. I carried one of the wicker chairs outside. It was right here where the roof of the conservatory had been. Bertha’s father had designed it himself. The local farmers had mockingly called the glass construction “The Palm House,” because the Deelwaters’ conservatory was very tall, not just some sort of minor extension with crown glass windows. Since then, however, the branches of the weeping willow had screened off the area from the street. Even inquisitive eyes couldn’t see in anymore.

But before I thought any further about the conservatory I wanted to remember Peter Klaasen. My mother had told me some of the story, some of it I had found out myself, and Rosmarie regularly eavesdropped on Aunt Harriet’s conversations with Aunt Inga, which were then relayed to me. Although Peter Klaasen was still quite young back then, maybe twenty-four, his hair had turned silver. He worked at the BP petrol station on the road out of the village. By then Inga was coming to the house more often. After Hinnerk died, Bertha’s memory had started to deteriorate ever more rapidly. Although Harriet and Rosmarie lived there, Inga couldn’t let Bertha be their responsibility alone. Christa lived too far away. She traveled up for the holidays with me, but that was only several times a year, so Inga tried to relieve Harriet of the burden on the weekends at least. Every Sunday evening she would get into her white VW Beetle and fill up at the BP petrol station before driving home to Bremen. Every Sunday evening she was still deep in thought even hours after her visit, caught up in a tangle of anxiety and sadness, but also relief at being able to return to her own life. And of guilt toward the one sister who wasn’t able to do just that, and hatred for the other who simply carried on with her own life because she was married. Inga was forty at the time and unmarried, she had no children and didn’t want any, either, but in her opinion Christa was making life incredibly easy for herself. Dietrich was a nice man on a good salary. She had a child and taught eight hours of sport per week at the secondary school in the neighboring village. Not because she needed to, but because she had been asked to, and she liked doing it. Inga knew, of course, that Christa would have helped out more if she had lived closer to Bootshaven, but she didn’t and that wasn’t fair. But on Sunday evenings, when everyone else was sad that the weekend was over, Inga would sit in her small noisy car and sing.

Petrol stations gave Inga the creeps. She preferred to be served. And every Sunday evening she was served by the same man with gray hair on top of a smooth, boyish face. Every Sunday he wished her a good week. She would thank him with an absentminded smile from her beautifully curved mouth. When after three months the young man called her by name, she looked at him properly for the first time.

“I’m sorry. Do you know my name?”

“I do. You come every Sunday and fill up at my garage. One should know one’s regulars by name.”

“I see, regulars. But how do you know who I am?” Inga was baffled. She didn’t know how old the man was. He looked very young, but his hair made her unsure. Inga didn’t know whether she should react with maternal condescension or cool detachment. When the pump attendant winked at her and laughed, Inga caught herself smiling back. The young man was only trying to be friendly and she was behaving like a prima donna. As she drove off she could see the young man with the gray hair in her rearview mirror, watching her while another customer was attempting to talk to him.

The next Sunday the young man was there again and greeted her politely, but without saying her name.

“Oh, come on! I’m a regular.”

He gave her a candid smile. “Yes, Frau Lünschen, indeed you are, but I don’t wish to be pushy.”

“You’re not. Not at all. I’m just a moody old bag.”

The man said nothing. He looked her up and down. A look that lasted a little too long for Inga’s liking.

“No, you’re not. And you know it.”

Inga laughed. “I believe that was a compliment. Many thanks.”

I’m flirting with him, she thought in astonishment as she left the petrol station. I’m flirting with this strange pump attendant. She shook her head but couldn’t help smiling.

On the Sundays that followed she would often talk with him, just briefly but enough to find herself smiling on the drive back. She found that she would only think about Bertha until she came to the edge of the village. And then, as time went on, she found herself starting to think about filling up with petrol while she was still having supper with Bertha, Harriet, and Rosmarie. She had discovered that, like her, he was there only on weekends. He was a mechanical engineer who had just finished his studies and had taken a temporary job at the petrol station. It belonged to one of his father’s friends. He had found out Inga’s name from the owner of the garage, who knew Inga’s father from when he used to come and fill up his old black Mercedes. He was nice, not particularly eloquent, but confident. He looked handsome, was slightly vain, but most of all he was much too young, younger than Inga had first thought, and she would not allow herself to get to know him better. It was obvious that he was attracted to her, but Inga was used to this. It was why she never needed to develop an immediate interest in a man. But Peter Klaasen—by then she knew his name, too—was persistent without being overbearing.