The Taste of Apple Seeds (8 page)

Christa blushed deeply and saw that the ice shavings on the toe picks of her skates had already melted and were falling from the bare metal like tears. No, she didn’t know that, and yes, it was astonishing. Then both of them fell silent. Eventually, after a very lengthy pause, Christa asked how he knew that. And he replied quickly and asked whether she would like to see the Institute of Physics sometime. It even had a machine that made dry ice. “I’d love to,” she said, without looking up, a strained smile on her red face. Dietrich nodded and said, “Good-bye,” and the two of them hurriedly went their own ways, both quite relieved.

The following day, the Lahn had completely broken up, the soft chunks of ice, now a brownish color, were drifting to the riverbank, and Dietrich didn’t know where to find the ice-skater again.

During the night the moonlight cast sharp shadows across my pillow; I had forgotten to draw the curtains. The bed with its three-part mattress was narrow and the blanket heavy.

My guilty conscience kept me wide awake. I should have called Jon some time ago; I might have thought about him at least. Now I was thinking about him. Jonathan—until recently my boyfriend, now my ex-boyfriend. He didn’t even know that I was here, but maybe that didn’t matter; after all, he hadn’t been in the place where I was before I came here, either. He lived in England and that was where he would stay. But not me. When he asked me two months ago whether we might move in together, I had the sudden feeling that it was time for me to go home. Even though I loved his country very much. Yes, it wasn’t my love for him but for his country that had kept me there so long, and that was why I knew I had to leave. And now I was here. Now I even had my own bit of countryside in this country. I refused to see this as a sign, but it helped confirm that I had made the right decision to come back.

When you lose your memory, time passes far too quickly to begin with, then it stops passing altogether. “Oh, but that was so long ago,” my grandmother used to say about things that were a week, thirty years, or ten seconds in the past. As she said it she would wave her hand dismissively and her voice would be edged with reproach. She was always on her guard. Was she being tested?

Her brain silted up like a riverbed. Then the riverbank began to crumble, until large chunks fell crashing into the water. The river lost its form and current, its natural character. In the end it didn’t flow anymore but just sloshed in all directions. White deposits in the brain prevented electrical charges from getting through, all nerve ends were isolated, as was the person in the end: isolation, island, England, gland, electrons and Aunt Inga’s amber bracelet, resin went hard in water, water went hard with a hard frost, glass was silicon and silicon was sand, and sand trickled down through the hourglass, and I should sleep now, it was late.

Of course, the two of them had seen each other again soon after ice-skating finished on the Lahn. In Marburg, avoiding someone is practically impossible. Especially when you’re looking for each other. The very next week they met at the Institute of Physics ball, to which my mother was accompanied by a fellow student, the son of my grandfather’s colleague. Both their fathers would have loved to see them start a relationship; this meant that Christa froze in his presence, while he turned into a zombie in hers. On this one occasion, however, the evening was a success. Christa was so busy looking around all over the place that she remained calm. For the first time the colleague’s son didn’t feel his companion’s iciness settle on his brain and tongue like hoar frost, and he even managed to tease the odd smile out of her with barbed comments about the first brave dancers. It was Christa who had mentioned the Institute of Physics ball to the colleague’s son. And although at the sight of her lips pressed together he could hear himself floundering as he spoke, he’d still had enough sense to invite her.

Christa saw Dietrich first, but then she had expected to find him there, whereas he had no idea she would show up. So some of her initial embarrassment had already passed when he spotted her shortly afterward. His gray eyes lit up, he raised his hand and then bowed his head in greeting. He advanced toward Christa with determination and a spring in his step, and immediately asked her to dance; then again; then he fetched her a glass of white wine and danced with her once more after that. Christa’s companion watched, perturbed, from the drinks table. While he was relieved that everything was going so smoothly this time and that he didn’t have to keep talking to her, he felt that it wasn’t quite right. He also saw with a combination of amazement, satisfaction, and jealousy that his companion was a much sought-after partner, and so decided to ask her if he could have the next dance. Which was the very opposite of what he had planned for that evening.

Fortunately, he was a bad dancer and my father a good one. And my mother danced well with my father; she was freed from her stifling shyness because he had already seen her on the ice. That and the fact that my father was almost shyer than her. So they danced together at all the balls in Marburg that season: May Ball, Summer Celebration, Faculty Dance, University Bash. When dancing you didn’t have to talk if you didn’t want to, other people were there and you could go home any time you liked. Dancing was basically a sporting event, Christa thought, a kind of pair skating.

Christa’s sisters guessed at once that she had a secret. During the holidays, which of course she spent in Bootshaven, she was—like all women with a secret—always the first one at the letterbox in the morning. But her sisters’ questions, which were sometimes penetrating and sometimes flattering, just made her blush and laugh, or blush and fall silent. When Aunt Inga started studying history of art in Marburg the following term, both sisters went to the first semester ball. Dietrich Berger, together with a whole group of young men from his student association, had already been introduced to Inga. Inga had taken a liking to a tall, handsome sport student and she assumed that it was him. But when she saw that Christa didn’t even glance at the high-heeled shoes that went so well with her brown silk dress, but went straight for the flat ballerina pumps, Inga knew exactly who it was: Dietrich Berger, just one meter seventy-six tall.

They got engaged that same year, and when my mother, twenty-four years old, had finished her much hated teacher training at a secondary school in Marburg, they married and moved down to Baden, where my father got a job at the Physics Research Center. My mother had been homesick ever since.

She couldn’t forget Bootshaven and clung with every last fiber to the house that was now mine. Although she had now lived far longer in Baden than she had in Bootshaven, she nonetheless believed that in the south she was just passing through. The first of those hot, humid, windless summers left her in despair. Unable to sleep at night because the temperature never fell below thirty, she would lie in bed, sweating, staring up at the frosted-glass lampshade on the ceiling, and she would bite her lower lip until it got light outside. Then she would get up and make breakfast for her husband. The summer gave way to a paltry autumn, and this eventually to a hard, cloudless winter. All bodies of water froze over, and stayed frozen for weeks on end. It was then that my mother knew she would stay. In November the following year I was born.

I had never fully belonged in that place, down there in Baden. Definitely not in England, even though for a few years I had fancied I might. Not here either, in Bootshaven. I had grown up and gone to school in southern Germany, and that was where my best friends were, my parents’ house, my trees, my quarry ponds, and now my job. Here in the north, however, were the land, house, and heart of my mother. Here I had been a child and here I had stopped being one. Here was where my cousin Rosmarie lay in the cemetery. Here was where my grandfather lay, and now Bertha, too.

I didn’t know why Bertha hadn’t left the house to my mother or one of her sisters. Maybe it had been some comfort to my grandmother that my existence meant there was another generation of Deelwaters. But no one loved the house as much as my mother did: it would have been natural to leave it to her. Then it would have been passed on to me at some point. What was she going to do with the cow pastures? I had to talk to Mira’s brother about it again sometime. I was unsettled by the idea of discussing family matters with Max Ohmstedt. I would have to ask after Mira as well, find out how she was.

It was still early when I got up. Sunday mornings felt different, you noticed this straightaway. The air had a different texture: it was heavier and slowed everything down. Even familiar noises sounded different. More muffled and yet more emphatic. This must have been down to the lack of car noise, maybe the lack of carbon monoxide in the air, too. Perhaps it was also due to the fact that on Sundays you paid attention to breezes and sounds that you wouldn’t waste a second on during the week. But actually I didn’t believe that, because Sundays felt like this even during the holidays.

During school holidays I loved to stay in bed the morning after my first night in the house, listening to sounds from below. The creaking of the staircase, heels on the kitchen floor. The door from the kitchen to the barn jammed; it always grated as it was shoved open and banged as it was slammed shut. And the iron bolt, which in the morning was hung on a hook, would rattle as it dangled beside the door frame. By contrast, the door from the hallway into the kitchen was loose, and whenever the barn door was pushed open the kitchen door would jump out of its catch and clatter open in the draft. The brass bell by the front door clanged when my grandfather left the house to fetch his bicycle from the barn and ride to the office. He would wheel his bike outside, stand it in the garden, go back in, lock the barn from the inside, and then go through the kitchen, along the hall, and back out through the front door. Why didn’t he go straight out through the barn? Probably because he wanted to bolt the barn from the inside rather than locking it with the key from the outside. It seemed to me as if he just wanted to rest his hand on the shining brass handle of the large front door and linger at the top of the outside steps for a few seconds as master of the house; then he would grab the newspaper from the letterbox, put it in his briefcase, walk down the steps, leap onto his bike, and ride off into the young morning with a ring of his bell and a brief, jaunty wave to the kitchen window. In any case, if he had slipped out to work unnoticed through the back entrance, it would not have fitted the picture that he and everybody else had of the notary. Not even when he was no longer in charge at work. Even then, until his dying day none of the partners dared take over his office, although it was the largest and nicest.

When he had gone you could hear the noisy clattering of crockery from the kitchen, women’s voices, women’s laughter, brisk footsteps, the banging of doors; but the echo in the high-ceilinged kitchen distorted voices so you could never hear what was being said. What you could quite clearly hear, on the other hand, were the emotions buzzing around the kitchen. If the voices were muted and deep, the words monosyllabic and punctuated by long pauses, there was worry in the air. If much was being said, and rapidly, in the same, generally loud tone, this was day-to-day gossip. If there was giggling and whispering or suppressed squeals it was advisable to get dressed in a flash and creep downstairs, because in that household secrets were seldom disclosed. Later, when Bertha had lost her memory, she no longer spoke loudly and the pauses between her words were of variable length. If they threatened to get too long, they would be sharply ended by other voices. Mostly by several other voices at once, which would rapidly swell to a clamor, and ebb away again just as rapidly.

This morning, obviously, there was nothing to be heard. I was alone in the house, after all. The silence reminded me of that other morning thirteen years before when there was nothing to be heard, either. Just the occasional rattling of a door or a cup. It was the sort of silence that comes only in the wake of a tragic shock. Like deafness after a gunshot. A silence like a wound. Rosmarie had bled only a little from her nose, but on her pale skin the slight, sharply defined trickle looked as if it were mocking us.

I washed my face and brushed my teeth in Aunt Inga’s bedroom, put on my crumpled black dress, and went downstairs to make myself some tea. I found an array of boxes of tea bags, even a packet of cornflakes that had a slight taste of kitchen cupboard but at least hadn’t gone soft. Probably from Aunt Inga’s brief stay at the house. I still had some milk in the fridge from Herr Lexow.

I went out for a ride. As I passed the telephone box at the petrol station I remembered I ought to call Freiburg. It was Sunday, of course, but I knew that the answerphone in the university library would click in. I said I had to take three more days off to sort out matters here relating to my inheritance. Then I rode on to the lake.

It must have still been very early because the few people I met on the way, all of them dog owners, greeted me with the discreet, conspiratorial smile that real early risers—those who do it on Sunday, too—share with one another. It was easy to find the path to the lake. Like almost all the paths here, it went straight across pastures and through copses. At some point I turned right and rode on a cobbled street through a village consisting of three farms with barns, silos, and tractors, then the path continued around two hills, through pasture again, and right once more into the next copse. Then there it was. A pane of black glass.

I would look in the wardrobes for old swimming costumes later: I didn’t want to become a public nuisance. But it would be all right this time, there was nobody here. Unfortunately I had no towel, either, though there were two or three huge chests full of them in the house. I whipped off my dress and shoes and headed into the lake. The shoreline was overgrown; there was only one place where it was flat and sandy. A tiny patch of sand, just enough for one person. I went in slowly. A fish darted past me and I shuddered. The water was not as cold as I had imagined. The soft ground squidged between my toes. I plunged in quickly and started to swim.