The Taste of Apple Seeds (19 page)

Little Christa was not at home. The housemaid, Agnes, had gone to see her mother, who had sprained her ankle. Agnes had to look after her, but had taken Christa with her so that her mother’s accident did not inconvenience Bertha. Hinnerk was at work, not at the office but with prisoners. Herr Lexow calmed down but left his head where it was. He took hold of Bertha’s legs and began stroking them from the ankles upward, under her skirt. He put his face into the apron and breathed in the fishy smell. Bertha was no longer thinking that he was like a little child. She became very still and held her breath. Snippets of sentences, words of love, agitated sobs drifted into her ears and she let him go on. She just sat there, silently, frowning and feeling her belly getting warmer and heavier. And although she loved Hinnerk rather than Herr Lexow, she hadn’t felt a sensation like this in five years of marriage. Carsten Lexow kneeled up and kissed her, and knew that it wasn’t the same mouth from that night. He was about to leave when he saw tears streaming down her cheeks. Not just one or two, but lots of them, a deluge. Her apron was already soaked across her breasts, but her shoulders weren’t moving, nor did she make any sound. Her neck was red and wet and salty when he kissed it.

She stood up abruptly, wiped her hands clean on the apron, and went into the bedroom opposite the kitchen. She drew the green curtains and untied her apron. She removed her shoes, her skirt and blouse, and got into bed. Carsten Lexow took off his trousers, shirt, and socks and placed everything neatly on the floor by the bed. He went to her and took her in his arms while thinking of that night in the garden. Back then, had he loved the wrong one and kissed the right one? Or loved the right one and kissed the wrong one? Was there not perhaps the hint of a taste of apples there among the fish and salt?

And yet, all the while that Carsten Lexow was in Bertha’s bed, tears streamed down her cheeks like two inlets.

That same night she made love with her husband, too, who had been given black bread topped with prawns and a fried egg for dinner. The muddy dahlia tubers still stood in the kitchen, shining yellow in the dim light. She said that Herr Lexow had popped over with the basket.

“He has a good life, that Herr Lexow. Holidays, flowers. In the middle of a war, too.” Hinnerk snorted his contempt, hacked off a piece of bread and forked it into his mouth. Bertha watched some of the delicate pink prawns fall back onto the plate.

Nine months later, Inga came into the world. On that night there was one of those rare, eerie winter storms where hailstones the size of cherries rain down and lightning flashes through the sky. Frau Koop, who was with Bertha during her labor, swore that lightning struck the house and shot into the earth via the lightning conductor.

“And if we’d put that baby girl in the bath she’d be dead now.”

She usually added, “But the littl ’un definitely got something from it, poor lass.”

If Rosmarie was there she would ask in a higher voice than usual, “Poor little worm, wasn’t it?”

Frau Koop would cast her a suspicious look, but wouldn’t know what to say, so she would fall into an eloquent silence.

Herr Lexow had stopped talking. He was looking at me expectantly. My daydream faded and I sat up somewhat dizzily.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I asked whether she’d ever spoken about me.”

“Who are we talking about now?”

“Bertha.”

“No, Herr Lexow, I’m sorry. Not to me. Not even later on. Well . . .”

“Well?”

“Once, twice maybe. But no, I don’t know. Once or twice she said, ‘The teacher’s here,’ if someone came in. But I can’t recall any more than that.”

Herr Lexow nodded. And looked at the floor.

I stood up. “Thank you, I really appreciate you having told me all of this.”

“Well, there wasn’t that much. But it was my pleasure. Please send my regards to your mother and aunts.”

“Oh please, don’t get up. I’m just going to wheel my bike out and I’ll close the gate behind me.”

“That’s Hinnerk Lünschen’s bicycle.”

“You’re right. It is his. It still rides excellently.”

Herr Lexow gave a nod to the bike and closed his eyes.

Chapter X

I CYCLED BACK TO THE HOUSE
. I had to get clear in my mind what was going to happen to my inheritance. Perhaps I ought to have paid closer attention to what Herr Lexow was saying rather than dozing in his garden. But who was to say that his story was any truer than my daydreams? After all, Aunt Inga had always been a woman full of mystery. Legends suited her.

How true were the stories people told me, and how true were those that I stitched together myself from memories, guesswork, fantasies, and eavesdropping? Sometimes fabricated stories became true in hindsight, and some stories fabricated the truth. Truth is closely related to forgetting; I knew this because I still read dictionaries, encyclopedias, catalogs, and other reference books. In the Greek word for truth,
aletheia
, the underworld river Lethe flows covertly. Whoever drank from this river discarded their memories as they already had their mortal coil, in preparation for the realm of shadows. And so the truth was what was not forgotten. But did it make sense to look for the truth where there was no forgetting? Didn’t truth prefer to hide in the cracks and holes of memory? I couldn’t get any further with words.

Bertha could put a name to all plants. When I thought of my grandmother I pictured her in the garden, a tall figure with spindly legs and broad hips. Her slender feet would usually be wearing smart shoes. Not because she was desperately vain, but because when she came back from the village, from town, or from a friend’s, she always went into the garden first rather than into the house. She wore aprons that had to be tied at the back, only seldom those that buttoned up at the front. She had a wide mouth with narrow, faintly curved lips. Her long, pointed nose was a little red and her slightly prominent eyes were often wet with tears. She had blue eyes. Forget-me-not blue.

Bertha would walk between the beds with a slight stoop, her gaze focused on the plants. Sometimes she would bend down to pick out a weed, but generally she was accompanied by her garden hoe as if it were a shepherd’s crook. A sort of iron stirrup was fixed to the end of the handle. She would dig it into the earth and shake the handle forcefully with both hands. It looked as if it was the hoe waggling her rather than the other way around. As if she had cut into an electric cable by mistake. But the only things buzzing were the metallic blue dragonflies in the shimmering air.

The center of the garden was where it was hottest; nothing cast its shadow there. Bertha barely seemed to notice this. Only very rarely would she stop what she was doing and, with an unconscious, graceful movement of her hand, stroke her damp hair from the nape of her neck back up into her bun.

The more that was cut from her memory, the more they cut off her hair. But until her death, Bertha’s hands still moved like those of a woman with long hair.

One day my grandmother began wandering through the garden at night. That was when she started forgetting time. She could still make out what time it was from the clock, but time meant nothing to her anymore. In summer she would put on three vests, one over the other, and woolly socks, and then she would be outraged because she was sweating profusely. She was still putting socks on her feet then. At around the same time she lost the distinction between day and night. She would get up in the night and wander around. When Hinnerk was still alive she would wander around the house at night. She did it back then because she couldn’t sleep. Later, however, she roamed around outside because it would never have occurred to her that she should have been sleeping.

Harriet usually noticed when Bertha went off at night, but not always. As soon as she got wind of it she would get up with a groan, throw on her dressing gown, slip on her clogs, which were standing ready by the bed, and go outside. On those nights, Harriet thought she wouldn’t be able to go on like this for long. She had a career. She had an adolescent child. By following the trail of open doors Harriet could work out which route Bertha had taken. Mostly she went out the back way, through the barn door, onto the drive and into the garden. Sometimes Harriet found her mother watering the flower beds, usually with the old tin mug in which she used to keep dried marigold seeds. Sometimes Bertha kneeled between the beds, weeding, but most of all she loved to pick flowers. She didn’t pick the flower at the stem, but only the flower itself. With big umbels she would rip off the petals, which she would hold in her hand until it was too full to close. When Harriet went over to her mother, Bertha would stretch out her hand with the squashed flowers and petals and ask where she could put them. Over four cold, early-spring nights, Bertha managed to tear off the flowers from an entire bed of blue-and-white pansies. The palms of her large hands hand were stained violet for weeks afterward. As a young girl she had deadheaded the faded rose blooms with her sister, Anna, so that they flowered again rather than forming rosehips. Bertha no longer knew how old she was. She was as old as she felt, and that could mean eight, as when she called Harriet Anna, or thirty, when she talked about her husband and asked us whether he had left the office yet. People who forget time stop aging. Forgetting defeats time, the enemy of memory. For, after all, time can only heal all wounds by allying itself with forgetting.

I stood at the garden fence and fingered the scar on my forehead. I needed to think of other wounds. For years I had refused to do it. The wounds came with the house; they were part of my inheritance. And I had to take at least one look at them before I could stick the plaster of time back over them.

A long piece of sticky tape kept our hands tied behind our backs when we played the game that Rosmarie had invented and that we called Eat or Die. We played it in the garden, in the far corner where we couldn’t be seen from the house, between the white currant bushes and the bramble thicket. That was also where the large compost heap was; in fact there were two of them, one a mound of earth, the other of peelings, yellowed cabbage leaves, and brown grass cuttings. The hairy leaves and fleshy stalks of pumpkins, cucumbers, and zucchini snaked their way across the ground. Bertha had planted zucchini in the garden because she loved trying out new plants, and she was delighted by the speed at which they grew. She was unsure, however, about what to do with the gigantic gourds. When she cooked them they quickly disintegrated and they didn’t taste at all nice raw. So they grew and grew, and by summer the back of the garden looked like an abandoned battlefield from an earlier age, when powerful tree giants had fought each other and then left their chunky green clubs lying around.

Mint and lemon balm grew rampant here, and when our bare legs brushed against them they gave off their fresh aroma, as if they were trying to mask the foul smells from this part of the garden. Camomile grew here, too, but so did stinging nettles, ground elder, thistles, and tetterwort, which ruined our clothes with its thick yellow blood if we sat on it.

One of the three of us would be bound and blindfolded. Mostly we used Hinnerk’s white silk scarf, which had a small burn mark at one end and so had been banished to the large wardrobe. We always took turns. I was usually first as I was the youngest. I would kneel down, blindfolded, my hands tied together loosely. I couldn’t see a thing, but the pungent smell of the ground elder squashed beneath me mingled with the damp, warm haze of the compost heap. In early afternoon it was quiet in the garden. Flies hummed. Not the dozy black ones from the kitchen but the blue-and-green ones that always sat around cows’ eyes where they drank themselves into a stupor. I could hear Rosmarie and Mira whispering; they had moved a fair distance from me. The rustling of their dresses came closer. They stood before me and one of the two girls said, “Eat or die!” Then I had to open my mouth and whoever had spoken put something on my tongue. Something they’d just found in the garden. Quickly, before I could taste anything, I would position it between my teeth, which also meant I could now determine how big it was, whether it was hard or soft, sandy or clean, and usually I could already work out what it was: a berry, a radish, a bunch of curly parsley. Only then would I put it back on my tongue, bite it, and swallow. As soon as I showed the others my empty mouth they would rip the sticky tape from my wrists. I would take the scarf from my eyes and we would laugh. Then it was the next person’s turn; she would have her hands tied and eyes blindfolded.

It was astonishing just how unsettling it was if you didn’t know what you were eating, or if you were expecting something different from what you got. Currants, for example, were easy to recognize. But on one occasion I thought I was holding a currant between my teeth only to find myself chewing on a fresh pea. I was distraught and disgusted. I liked peas and I liked currants, but in my mind that pea was a currant, and as a currant it was an abomination. I gagged, but I swallowed. Because if you spat it out you had to go again. And doing it again was a punishment. Whoever spat a second time was out of the game. To loud jeering she would be banished from the garden and banned from playing with the others for the rest of the day, and usually for the next day, too. Rosmarie almost never spat anything out, while Mira and I did it roughly as often as each other. Mira maybe even spat slightly more often than me, but later on I suspected that the two of them had gone somewhat easy on me. They were probably worried that I might snitch on them to my mother or Aunt Harriet.

The game would begin harmlessly and then escalate from round to round. There were afternoons when we would finish by eating earthworms, ant eggs, and rotten onions. Once I was convinced that the tiny, hairy gooseberry between my teeth—a punishment for a slippery piece of leek that I had dropped from my mouth—had to be a spider. When it burst and the juice ran over my tongue, I spat it out and it dribbled down my chin. I was out, obviously.

Another time Rosmarie was chewing a wood louse without grimacing. After she had swallowed it and her hands were free again, she carefully removed the blindfold. We held our breath. She looked at Mira and me with a glint in her eye and asked, thoughtfully, “So how many calories
are
there in a wood louse?” Then she threw her head back and laughed. We assured her that the game was over and she had won, because we were afraid of what she might do as payback.