The Taste of Apple Seeds (16 page)

According to Harriet, Hinnerk had written the poems after the war, when he was no longer allowed to work as a lawyer. He was sent to southern Germany for denazification. My grandfather hadn’t just been an ordinary party member. I knew from Harriet that Granddad had been a district judge. He was lucky that he didn’t have to put his signature to any bad judgments. My mother, who often came to his defense, had said that he had acquitted Herr Reimann, the farrier and a known communist. As a schoolboy he had often sat in Herr Reimann’s workshop; the sight of the glowing metal had both frightened and thrilled him. He loved the hissing and steaming of the water. And yet the finished horseshoes that came out of the water looked to him like waste products. They were hard, dulled, brown, and lifeless, whereas before they had been red, they had glowed magically as if they had a life of their own.

To begin with, Hinnerk had to learn High German at school. Christa said the teacher had asked the new children what the following sentence meant: “Never torture animals as a game, for like you they feel pain.” Hinnerk put up his hand and said, in broad dialect, “I know how they feel.” Hinnerk was fortunate because his parents had finally given in to the pastor’s insistence and sent him to grammar school. The war broke out straight afterward, Hinnerk’s father was called up, but Hinnerk stayed on at school. So, my mother used to say, if the First World War had broken out six months earlier, Hinnerk would never have gone to school, would never have studied, would never have married Bertha, would never have had her, Christa; and I, Iris, would never have existed, either. I realized at an early age that school was important. Vitally so.

When the Second World War broke out, Hinnerk was already a husband and father, not a victory-hungry hothead. He didn’t want to be a soldier, and he wasn’t called up but was put in charge of a prison camp, which meant he would come home for dinner in the evening as usual. Hinnerk Lünschen was proud of himself. Nothing had been gifted to him, handed to him on a plate. He had got somewhere and it was all down to his strength of will, his intelligence, and his self-discipline. He was athletic, he liked wearing a uniform and he looked dashing in it. And he thought that most of the Nazis’ ideas were tailored precisely for men like him. It was just all that stuff about
Untermenschen
he could do without. For him, being an
Übermensch
was quite enough. He detested people who had to make other people small just so that they could feel big themselves. He, Dr. Hinnerk Lünschen, the notary, didn’t need to do that. Of course he sorted out the necessary papers so that his old classmate Johannes Weill could leave the country to go to his relatives in England. It was a point of honor. He had never spoken about it, but Johannes Weill had written us a letter when, via a roundabout route, Hinnerk’s death notice had reached him in Birmingham. It was half a year after Granddad died. Inga photocopied it and sent it to her sister Christa. The letter was polite and aloof; this man didn’t have any warm feelings for my grandfather. I would rather not know how patronizingly Hinnerk may have behaved toward him at the time. Nor do I know if my grandfather was an anti-Semite; in any event there was barely anybody in his life whom he didn’t fall out with at some stage. But the letter stated quite categorically that Hinnerk had helped his school friend. It was a huge relief for the whole family.

He had his quarrels with the Nazis, too, of course. He hated stupidity, and many Nazis were far more stupid than him. He also found it stupid to continue fighting a war they clearly had no chance of winning anymore. Indeed, he came out with this one evening when he had popped into Tietjens’ for a beer. A woman was sitting in the pub. Was she the wife of a man Hinnerk had sentenced or brought an action against? Had Hinnerk ever humiliated her? He was smart enough to gauge weaknesses quickly, and sharp enough to be able to come up with cutting descriptions of people, but he wasn’t wise enough to resist the temptation to do it in public.

Frau Koop had once said that Hinnerk had had a lover in town, a beautiful dark-haired woman. She had seen a photo of her, one she had found in Hinnerk’s desk. Rosmarie and I were more surprised by the fact that Frau Koop had peeked inside Hinnerk’s desk than by the photo of the mysterious dark-haired woman. Inga claimed she knew the photo. It was a print from the photographs that were taken of Bertha’s sister, Anna. In any case, Hinnerk said he hadn’t recognized the woman at Tietjens.” But she must have known him or at least asked about him, because she denounced him. And so, to the horror of the entire family, Dr. Hinnerk Lünschen became a soldier at the age of almost forty, just before the war ended.

Hinnerk hated violence. He had scorned and loathed his violent father, and now he was supposed to go off and shoot people, or, worse, be shot himself. He stopped sleeping and would sit all night long at his study window, peering into the darkness. The lime trees in the yard were tall even then. It was autumn, and the drive was covered in yellow, heart-shaped leaves. On the day before his departure, Hinnerk left the Nazi Party. And he got pneumonia.

In the train he had a high temperature and was very weak. He couldn’t be shipped to Russia in such a state, so he stayed in a military hospital. Although he wasn’t given penicillin he recovered. In January 1945, he was sent to the front in Denmark. There he wound up in a prisoner-of-war camp, and after the war was transferred to an internment camp in southern Germany. I learned that from Christa, who was typing up Bertha’s letters to Hinnerk and had read them out to my father and me. Bertha wrote about the pig she had bought and taken to the farm owned by Hinnerk’s sister, Emma. And of all the pigs that her sister-in-law had, it was only Bertha’s pig that died. What bad luck. Not that she could have recognized her pig among all the others, no, but she had to believe Emma. What else could she do? She wrote all this to Hinnerk. And about how she had cycled in the snow to a man who owed Bertha’s father a favor. She borrowed an ax from this man because hers was broken. Bertha labored and managed to keep her family alive. They still had Ursel, the cow. Strangers came into the home, refugees from East Prussia who were housed there. That was hard, Bertha wrote, having to share the kitchen. After the war, British soldiers were billeted at the house, too. They made fires in the kitchen, just like that, in the middle of the floor. They were awfully loud, but friendly to the children. Bertha wrote of the stream of refugees that flowed down the main road. The girls stood at the fence, watching hundreds of people with horses and bags and handcarts and baskets pass by the house every day. They found it very exciting. For weeks on end they loaded everything they could find in the house into two-year-old Harriet’s pram, put on whatever they could find in the wardrobes, and hobbled in single file across the yard. “We’re playing refugees,” they explained to their mother, and out of necessity they had to stay in the chicken shed. Bertha wrote about this to her husband. She traveled the length of Germany to visit him. Without the children.

And then he came back. He didn’t seem to be distressed, angry, or ill. He seemed no different from before: no moodier, no milder. Hinnerk was simply happy to be home. He wanted everything to be as it had been before, and so he pulled himself back together. The only difference was that from now on he called his youngest daughter, Harriet, who had still been a baby when he left, Fjodor. Nobody knew why. Who was Fjodor? Christa and Inga imagined that Fjodor must have been a small Russian boy with slanting bright blue eyes and shaggy dark hair. He had saved my grandfather’s life by hiding him in his tree house and giving him crusts of bread. But Hinnerk had never got as far as Russia, of course.

After Hinnerk’s return, Bertha went back without a murmur to playing the dutiful wife. She showed him the household accounts, which he checked. She let him decide whether to keep or sell Ursel. He wanted to keep her even though she was barely producing milk anymore. There were still strangers living on the upstairs floor of the house. Hinnerk didn’t like this. He railed against the elderly couple even when they were in earshot. All of a sudden it was too much of a squeeze, and Bertha, who up till then had shared the kitchen perfectly well with this couple, had to draw up new schedules of who could be where when. She was ashamed, but she did it nonetheless.

Although Hinnerk had left the party he had been a district judge. He had accepted an important post in the Nazi regime and thus lost his license to work as a lawyer. The Americans soon sent him to a denazification camp. My mother told me that every few months she and her sisters had had to put on their best clothes. Then they would take the train to Darmstadt to visit their father. When Inga, eight at the time, asked him what he got up to all day long, he just looked at her and said nothing.

On the way back from these visits, Bertha would tell her daughters that the British and Americans were examining their father there, so that he could work again soon. My mother admitted to me that for years she had imagined a legal exam, only in English.

Then he came home, got his lawyer’s license back, and never mentioned another word about those eighteen months. Nor about the years before that.

Inga said that in his will, Hinnerk had stated that his diary should be burned after his death. So they burned it.

“Didn’t you take a look at it beforehand?” a doubting Rosmarie asked.

“No,” Inga said, looking Rosmarie in the eye.

Hinnerk loved fire. He spent entire days building fires in the garden; he would stand there and poke at the blaze with a pitchfork. Whenever Rosmarie, Mira, and I joined him, he would say, “There are three things, you know, that you can never tire of looking at. The first is water, the second is fire. And the third is other people’s misfortunes.”

You could still see the scorch marks on the kitchen floor where the British soldiers had made their fire. But the red graffiti on the chicken shed had now vanished beneath the white paint. Well, almost. If you knew it was there you could see it. But I reckoned we had done enough. I went around the corner to see Max. He had put the large roller to one side and was now painting with the brush.

“How far have you got, then?”

Max didn’t look up; he kept painting with great concentration.

“Hey, Max! It’s me. Are you okay? Have you got compulsive painting disorder? Cramp? Should I help you?”

Max brushed around wildly in the center of the wall. “No, I’m fine.”

I came closer, but he stood in my way and said, “Oh, have you finished your wall already? Let me have a look. Can you still make out the N-word?”

He jostled me back around to my side of the shed, took a look at it, and said, “It’s come out well.”

“You can still see it.”

“Yes, but only if you really want to.”

I stared at the white wall. “Crikey! Is this chicken shed now symbolic somehow?”

But Max wasn’t listening. He had disappeared behind the shed again. It was getting dark. The painted wall was shining white. Why was he behaving so oddly? I went around and stood next to him, but still he didn’t look at me. I could see that he wasn’t painting the wall evenly from one side to the other but had started in the middle. No, he was painting over something. For a second I thought there must have been a second scrawl of red graffiti that I hadn’t seen and that he was trying to hide from me. To protect me, maybe. But then I saw that he was painting over something he’d written himself. My name. About a dozen times.

“Iris, I . . .”

“I like the wall.”

The two of us stood and looked at it for a while.

“Come on, Max, let’s stop. It’s too dark to paint now.”

“You go on in. I’m just going to finish this.”

“Don’t be daft.”

“No, really, I’m enjoying it. Anyway, it was my idea to start painting tonight.”

As you wish, I thought. I turned around and started clearing up my painting things.

“Leave all that. I’ll do it. I will.”

I shrugged and wandered slowly through the garden to the front door. When I passed the roses I noticed how their scent was more powerful in the evening than during the day.

I drank a large mug of hot milk and took Hinnerk’s book of poetry with me to bed. It was written in old-fashioned German script, but then again I was a librarian. All the same, I had to get used to his handwriting. The first poem was an eight-line verse about fat and thin women. Then there was a long one about farmers who exposed crafty lawyers while pretending to play dumb. There was a rhyming formula for preventing the plague, which began:

Lungwort, butterbur, speedwell too,

Angelica and sea cole,

Juniper, gentian white not blue,

Birthwort swallowed whole . . .

I read poems about will-o’-the-wisps on the fen, an old harbor on the Geeste that had silted up long ago and where an empty barque would anchor at full moon in September—and whenever it anchored, a child from the village would be missing the following day. Hinnerk wrote about the rich sound made by four men swinging their flails, threshing in the fields. There was a poem about emigrants to America. One was entitled “August 24th,” and described the day the storks depart. Another told of an ice harvest at the pond outside the village. I read a slightly crude verse about the parish copper who injured a cow, which then had to be slaughtered. Yet another was about the dance in the barn at Tietjens.” And at the end there were two odd poems, one of which was called “The Twelve.” It was about the six final nights of the old year and the six first ones of the new. Anybody who hung their washing out at this time would soon be wrapped in a burial shroud. Anybody who turned a wheel, even a spinning wheel, would soon be driven in a hearse. Because in this period the great deer hunter charges through the air. The final poem in the gray book was about the massive fire in Bootshaven the year before Hinnerk was born. In it the people scream like cattle and the cattle scream like people as half the village is consumed by fire.

I switched off the lamp on the bedside table and stared into the blackness of the room. After my eyes had become used to it I could make out shadows and outlines. There wasn’t a single poem in Hinnerk’s gray book about the war. Nor were there any that suggested they had been written in a camp. In a camp whose purpose was to make the inmates recall gruesome deeds from recent years: their own and those of others. I thought of the poems that dealt with Hinnerk’s village and were imbued with love for the places of his childhood. His childhood that he had hated so much.