The Taste of Apple Seeds (7 page)

Bertha loved Hinnerk. She loved his grim aura, his silences, and his biting sarcasm toward other people. But whenever he saw Anna his face would light up, he would smile politely and joke, and off the top of his head he would make up a sonnet about the bite Anna was about to take of her apple or a solemn ode to Bertha’s left pigtail, or walk on his hands in the yard, upsetting the chickens, which scuttled away clucking. The two girls laughed out loud, Bertha bashfully tugged at the ribbon on her left pigtail, and with feigned serenity and a hidden smile Anna threw the remains of her apple into the lilac, for once refraining from devouring the whole thing.

In the beginning, Hinnerk wanted Anna. He knew that she was the elder daughter of Carl Deelwater; if she hadn’t been he probably wouldn’t have wanted her, at least not quite as much. But it wasn’t her inheritance that attracted him, or not that alone. It was far more her status that he admired, her calm self-confidence, something he was totally lacking in. He could see her beauty, too, of course, her large breasts and hips and her supple back. He was charmed by the warmhearted indifference Anna showed him, but he always took care to pay the same amount of attention to both girls. Was this calculation or respect? A fondness for Bertha or sympathy for the younger daughter whose feelings he must have been aware of?

My grandmother knew that she was Hinnerk’s second choice. She had once said this to Rosmarie and me, without any bitterness, not even with regret, just very soberly, as if it had had to be thus. It was something we didn’t like to hear, we were almost angry at Bertha; love shouldn’t be like that, we thought. And without ever having agreed this between ourselves, we never told Mira.

Now that Inga was no longer Hinnerk’s daughter I could better understand Bertha’s lack of bitterness toward her husband, maybe her devotion to him, too. And with her it was always like the apples from the tree: they lay where they fell and, as she herself would say, they rarely fell far from the tree. After Bertha fell from the apple tree at the age of sixty-three, and then one memory after another came loose and fell, too, she gave in to this disintegration, forlornly and without a struggle. The wheels of destiny have always been set in motion—in our family as well—by a fall. And by an apple.

Herr Lexow spoke calmly, staring into his mug. It was now dark and we had switched on the wicker-shaded light that hung above the kitchen table. Sighing into his milk, Herr Lexow said that one night, after a hot and muggy day, he had gone for a walk, which had led him past the Deelwaters’ house, not totally by chance.

The house was in darkness. He stepped slowly onto the drive and stole along the side of the house and barn, straight to the orchard. Feeling a sudden embarrassment at creeping around like this, he decided just to walk over to the far side where he would climb over the fence into the neighboring pasture and cross this to get back on the lock path. But as he was passing beneath an apple tree he let out a yell. Something had hit him above his left eye. Not a stone, it wasn’t that hard, but it was wet, and when it bounced off his head it fell apart.

An apple.

Or, rather, the remains of an apple. The flesh at the blossom end was missing; the top half with its stalk lay in two pieces by his shoe. Lexow stood still, his breathing rapid and fitful. There was a rustling in the tree. He looked upward through the leaves, straining his eyes, but it was too dark. Carsten got the impression that something large and white was shimmering up above. There was another rustling and the boughs of the tree shook violently. When the girl jumped from the tree and landed with a thud, Carsten didn’t recognize her face, she was standing so close to him. The face came even closer and kissed Carsten on the lips. He closed his eyes; the lips were warm and tasted of apples. Of Boskoop. And bitter almonds. Before he could say anything the girl’s lips kissed Carsten’s once more and so he kissed them back, and the two of them fell into the grass beneath the apple tree, and breathlessly and clumsily removed the clothes from their bodies. Carsten’s tree nymph was wearing only a nightshirt, so it wasn’t that hard to free her from it, but when two people are trying to undress, undress each other, but also kiss and not leave each other’s arms for a second, it isn’t so easy, especially when, as in this case, neither of them is experienced in what they are doing. But they did it and much more besides, and the earth glowed around them so that the apple tree beneath which they were lying began to push out buds for the second time, even though it was June already.

Of course, Herr Lexow didn’t go into the details of what went on beneath the apple tree, and I was glad of this, but his soft yet keenly spoken words—his eyes still fixed on his mug—evoked images in my mind that seemed familiar, as if they had been described to me before, as if I had heard them as a child, maybe from an adult conversation that I had listened in to secretly from a hiding place, and that I hadn’t understood until now. Thus Carsten Lexow’s story became part of my own story and part of my story about the story of my grandmother and part of my story about the story of my grandmother’s story of Great-Aunt Anna.

Whether Carsten Lexow had cried out Bertha’s name at any point and then pushed away the girl in his arms and run, whether during their lovemaking he had realized his mistake by her large breasts and taken his hands off her, whether the two of them went on right to the end as if they didn’t know what the other knew, only afterward going their separate ways in silence, never to find each other again, I didn’t know and probably would never find out. But what everyone in the village had talked about and what Rosmarie, Mira, and I often heard was the story of the old Boskoop tree in the Deelwaters’ orchard, which started to blossom one warm summer’s night and the following morning was covered in white as if there had been a frost. But the wonderful blossoms were fragile and that same morning they had fallen to the ground silently, in thick flakes. The entire farmstead stood around the tree, awestruck, suspicious, delighted, or simply astonished. Only Anna Deelwater didn’t see it; she had caught a cold, felt a slight burning in her throat, and had to stay in bed. The burning intensified and scorched the delicate cilia in her bronchial tubes, then spread until her lungs became inflamed and finally grew weak. Carsten Lexow never saw her again, and four weeks after the apple tree had blossomed she was dead. A tragic case of pneumonia.

Herr Lexow glanced at his watch and asked whether he should go. I didn’t know what time it was but nor did I know what had happened next; we hadn’t got any further in his story of Bertha. But maybe he should go. He saw my hesitation and stood up immediately.

“Please, Herr Lexow, we haven’t finished yet.”

“No, we haven’t. But perhaps we are done for tonight?”

“Maybe. For tonight. Will you come again tomorrow evening?”

“No, there’s a council meeting I can’t miss.”

“Tomorrow afternoon for a cup of coffee?”

“I’d love to.”

“Thanks for the soup. And the milk. And for the house, the garden . . .”

“Not at all. Please, Iris, you know that it’s me who needs to thank you and to apologize.”

“You’ve absolutely no need to apologize to me. What for? For having loved my grandmother till the day she died, or for the death of my great-aunt Anna? Honestly.”

“No, I don’t have to apologize to you for that,” he said, giving me a warm smile. I could see exactly why my great-aunt Anna had fallen for him. “I only need to apologize because no one in your family knew that I had a spare key, not even your aunt Inga. She thought all I did was stroll around outside the house from time to time, taking a quick look.” He felt in his trouser pocket and for the second time a huge brass front-door key was put in my hand. It seemed as if Herr Lexow had a spare key to many things, I thought as I placed the warmed metal on the kitchen table.

I saw the old teacher and my grandmother’s lover to the door. “Coffee tomorrow, then?”

He waved briefly and went down the front steps somewhat awkwardly, disappearing behind the roses as he turned to the right, toward his bicycle, which he had left on the drive. I could hear the kickstand of his bike dragging across the flagstones and shortly afterward the soft humming of his dynamo as he cycled out onto the pavement and past the hedge. Then I pulled off my grandfather’s socks, took the key from the hook, and went outside to close the gate.

In the dark I walked over to the garden, where Bertha’s ghost appeared in certain corners. Her garden was like those grotesque woolen figures my mother had kept in her wardrobe: gaping holes, rampant undergrowth, and somewhere the hint of a pattern.

Anna loved Boskoop, Bertha Cox’s Orange.

What did Bertha want to tell my mother back then? What did she remember and what things did she allow to become forgotten? What’s forgotten never vanishes without trace; it always, secretly, draws attention to itself and its hiding place. The girl’s kiss tasted of Boskoop, Herr Lexow said.

When, a month after the miracle of the summertime apple blossom, Bertha ran weeping through the garden, she saw that the red currants had turned white. The black ones had remained black. All the other currants now had the greenish gray-white of ash. That year there were many tears and particularly good currant jelly.

Chapter V

I WOKE IN THE NIGHT, FREEZING
. I had left both windows and doors in Christa’s room open, and now the nighttime breeze had chilled the air. I pulled the blanket over my head and thought of my mother. She loved the cold. In Baden the summers were so hot that not only did she have every reason to own an air-conditioning unit, but she turned it up full, took all her drinks with ice, and every few hours went to the chest freezer in the cellar to fetch herself a small glass bowl of vanilla ice cream.

But when it was winter the gravel pits, quarry ponds, canals, and channels of the old Rhine froze more quickly there than the lakes up here in the rain-soaked north German lowlands.

And then she went ice-skating.

She ice-skated like no one else; she wasn’t particularly graceful, she didn’t dance, no, she flew, she ran, she burned up the ice. My grandfather had bought her a pair of white skates when she was young. He was proud of his own skating skills, which were limited to a brisk forward movement and one that weaved backward. He could also make big circles by crossing his outer leg over his inner one. But he hadn’t taught his daughter Christa all the things she did on the ice. She cut broad figures of eight by putting her hands on her hips and leaning into the curves. She would take a run-up and leap wildly into the air five or seven times with her knees up. With each jump she would make a half-turn and sweep forward or backward across the shining surface. Or she would spin around on one leg, her gloved hands thrust up to the winter sky, sprinkling her pigtails with ice. In the beginning, Hinnerk wondered whether he could actually tolerate this kind of ice-skating. People would stare, for it was certainly eye-catching. But then he thought he could detect envy in people’s whispers, and so he decided to enjoy his daughter and her strange behavior on the ice. Especially as otherwise she was very polite, gentle, and motherly, always keen to make life pleasant for Hinnerk, her beloved father.

She met my father on the frozen Lahn. Both were studying in Marburg: Christa sport and history, my father physics. Of course, there was no way my father could fail to notice my mother on the ice. Small groups of people gathered to watch from the bridges above the river, people who couldn’t fail to notice her either. They looked down at the tall figure, which wasn’t immediately identifiable as male or female. The legs in the narrow brown trousers were a boy’s, as were the shoulders and the large hands in felted mittens, and the short brown hair swept under a bobble hat—Christa had cut off her pigtails before the first lecture. Only the hips were perhaps a touch too broad for a man, the red cheeks too smooth, and the outline of her face, from her earlobe to her lower jaw and then down her neck, ran in such a delicate arc that my father wondered whether it described a parabolic or sine curve. To his great surprise he realized he was curious to find out how and where this curve might continue beneath the thick, bright blue woolen scarf.

My father, Dietrich Berger, didn’t speak to the young ice skater at first. He just went to the Lahn every afternoon and took a look around. The youngest of four children, he was still living at home with his mother. As his elder brother had already moved out and his mother was a widow, the burden of being the man of the house fell on his shoulders. He bore it stoically, however, and didn’t find it too heavy, maybe because it never occurred to him to think about it. Although his two sisters mocked and insulted him, and laughed when he told them what time they had to come home at night, they were pleased that he had taken on the responsibility for the family.

I barely knew my father’s mother. She died when I was small, and all I recall is her stiff woolen skirt over a taffeta petticoat that made a singing sound when it rubbed against her nylon tights. Aunt Inga said she was a saint. But my mother said something different: yes, her mother-in-law had always helped other families out, but she had never kept her own household in order, seldom cooked, and she might have spent a little more time looking after her children. My father was terribly pedantic: he loved systematic orderliness, methodical tidying, and efficient cleaning. Chaos caused him physical pain and so most evenings he would clear up after his mother. The four children didn’t develop any sense of mischief and wit from their pious and sober mother. My father learned how to amuse himself—if not others—only later, from my mother, long after he had actually dared to talk to her at the end of the Marburg skating season.

When the ice finally began to lose its luster and puddles were starting to collect under the bridges, my father plucked up courage, and after a fortnight of their circling around each other every day he introduced himself, saying, “On average, the kinetic friction coefficient of skates on ice is 0.01. No matter how heavy the person is. Isn’t that astonishing?”