The Taste of Apple Seeds (9 page)

I always felt secure when I swam. The ground beneath my feet couldn’t be taken away. It couldn’t crumble, sink, or shift, couldn’t gape open or swallow me up. I didn’t bump into things that I couldn’t see, didn’t accidentally tread on things, didn’t injure myself or others. You knew what water was going to be like, it always stayed the same. Okay, sometimes it was clear, sometimes black, sometimes cold, sometimes warm, sometimes calm, sometimes choppy, but its substance, if not its state of matter, always stayed the same: it was always water. And swimming was flying for cowards. Floating without the danger of falling. My stroke wasn’t particularly beautiful—my leg kicks were asymmetrical—but it was brisk and strong, and I could go on for hours if need be. I loved the moment when I left the earth, the change in elements, and I loved the moment when I trusted the water to carry me. And it did, unlike the earth and the air. Just so long as I swam.

I swam right across the black lake. Where my hands touched the glass-like surface it instantly became wavy and fluid. Herr Lexow’s story slid off me, all stories slid off me, and once more I became the person I was. And I started looking forward to the three days in the house. What if I kept it?

I didn’t get out at the other side of the lake. When my feet started brushing against the leaves of aquatic plants I turned around and swam back. I’ve always been frightened when something touches me from below in the water. I was afraid of the dead stretching out their soft white hands to me, huge pikes that might be swimming under me, places where the water suddenly turned very cold. As a child, in the middle of the quarry pond I once knocked right into one of the large rotting tree trunks that appear from time to time, floating just below the surface of the water. I screamed and screamed and screamed and could not move. My mother had to fish me out.

From afar I looked over at my bike and the small black pile of clothes on the white strip of sand. And I saw that now there was a second bike and another pile of clothes. Placed as far away as possible from mine, but that wasn’t very far, because mine were bang in the middle. And I wasn’t wearing a swimming costume. Hopefully it was a woman. Where was she?

I noticed the black shock of hair coming toward me in the water, the white arms rising and falling rhythmically. No. It couldn’t be—it wasn’t possible! Not again! Max Ohmstedt. Was he following me? Max got closer, at an incredible speed. He must have seen my bike when he went in, but had he recognized it? And the black dress?

Max didn’t look up once, just plowed serenely through the dark water. I could have swum past him, got dressed, and ridden home and he wouldn’t have noticed a thing. Later I wondered whether he hadn’t actually been trying to give me this very opportunity. Anyway, now I called out quietly, “Hi!”

Max didn’t hear me, so I had to shout louder. “Hi!”

And: “Max!”

He jerked his head up—we were now at the same point—pushed back the wet hair sticking to his forehead, and looked at me calmly.

“Hi!” he said, somewhat out of breath. He wasn’t smiling, but he didn’t look unfriendly, either. Eventually he raised his hand briefly out of the water and waved. A gesture that, in its indecisiveness, seemed to be part embarrassed greeting, part white flag.

I was moved by his seriousness and by his pushed-back hair that stuck straight up from his scalp. I couldn’t help laughing. “It’s only me.”

“Yes.”

We tried to act as if we were simply standing opposite each other, remaining as static as possible, but beneath the surface our legs were furiously treading water to prevent us from going under. We desperately tried to find a subject for a friendly but reserved chat. I was stark naked and he was my lawyer. All this was running through my head and it didn’t exactly add sparkle to my conversation. At the same time I was frantically thinking of a way to make a dignified exit. A small nod and smile, not overfriendly, a “see you” and then swim on—that seemed to me to be the best strategy. So I took a deep breath, raised my hand in farewell, and in the process scooped a huge volume of water into my mouth, which made me choke violently. I coughed, gasped for air, thrashed around in the water; tears welled in my eyes, and my face must have turned a strange color, because Max cocked his head to one side, screwed up his own eyes, and watched with interest my dramatic behavior in the black lake, which had previously been quite still. A coot flapped its wings; I coughed again, dived down, and resurfaced.

Max swam closer. “Everything okay?”

As I went to speak I started by spitting water into his face. “Yes, of course everything’s okay!” I spluttered. “What about you?”

Max nodded.

I swam briskly to the shore. I had to stop once or twice to cough. But when I glanced back before getting out, Max was swimming behind me; he had followed and he wasn’t doing the front crawl anymore. My God! Did I now actually have to dash out of the water, naked and in the middle of a coughing fit? I pictured myself trying to pull the black dress over my head and shoulders in a hurry and—because I was still wet—getting stuck with my arms in the air. Blind and bound, as the dress was made of stiff cotton, I would fall over my bicycle, and when I tried to recover, the arm of the dress would catch on the pedal. And as I hastily hobbled away, still tightly bound, dragging a man’s bicycle behind me, my plaintive, animallike cries would be audible across the lake and beyond. If anybody were unlucky enough to hear them their heart would freeze and they would never—

“Iris.”

I turned around. At least I didn’t have to tread water this time; my feet could touch the bottom.

“Iris, I . . . Well, I’m really happy to see you. Honest. And Mira loved this lake, too. It was—well, you know how she was.”

“Because it’s like a black mirror. I know.” A black mirror? Had I just said that? Max must have thought I was seriously daft. I tried to look as if I had just said something very clever, and then asked, “How is Mira?”

“Oh, you know, fine. She moved away years ago. She’s a lawyer, too. In Berlin.” Max was on solid ground now as well. We were standing about two body lengths from each other.

“Berlin. That fits. I bet she’s in some cool office, wearing black suits and black boots.”

Max shook his head. He seemed to want to say something in reply, thought about it for a while, then said, “I haven’t seen her for ages. After the death . . . After your cousin died she stopped wearing black. She doesn’t come here anymore. We speak on the phone from time to time.”

I don’t know why I was so shocked. Mira wearing color? I stared at Max. He looked a bit like Mira; he had more freckles, which I’m sure Mira had bleached back then. His eyes were multicolored. There was brown in there, and something brighter, green, maybe, or yellow. The same heavy lids. I remembered them now. I had known his eyes since we were children, but his body was unfamiliar. It was now a whole head taller than mine and leaned slightly forward, white, smooth, not especially broad, but in good shape. I steeled myself.

“Max.”

“What?”

“I don’t have a towel.”

He gave me a slightly puzzled look, pointed with his chin to his pile of clothes, and opened his mouth. But before he could offer me his towel I said smartly, “And I haven’t got a swimming costume, either. I mean, not on.”

Max let his gaze wander across my shoulders and I sank a bit deeper into the water. He nodded. Did I perhaps notice the hint of a smirk?

“It’s fine. I wanted to swim more anyway. Take whatever you need.” He nodded again and swam off.

What a nice, earnest young man, and so polite, I murmured as I stepped out of the water, and wondered why that sounded so cutting. I didn’t want to use his towel at first, but then I took it and dried myself until it was wet all over. I put on my dress. And when I sat on the bike to ride back, I looked across the lake and saw Max standing on the other side. I waved briefly, he raised his arm in response, and then I set off.

Chapter VI

BY THE TIME I GOT
back to the house, the air above the asphalt was so hot that it was shimmering and the road seemed to change into a river. I wheeled the bike into the barn where, as ever, a damp semidarkness rose from the tamped-earth floor and a chill radiated from the whitewashed walls. Max’s pale shoulders in the black water. Eyes like bogs and marshes.

Should I look through the papers? Check the inheritance documents? Had I in fact kept any of them? Go on a hunt for mementos? Continue to roam through the rooms? Go outside? Grab a deck chair and read? Visit Herr Lexow?

I took an enamel bowl from one of the cupboards and went out to the currant bushes in the garden. I was familiar with the feeling of the warm berries, which you had to cup gently in your palm, as if they were blackbirds’ eggs, and then, where the bunch hung by a stem, pinch it free with the fingernails of that same hand while the other steadied the branch. Quickly and quietly, my hands picked a bowlful. I sat on the trunk of a pine tree lying on its side and teased the milky golden berries from the green stalks with my teeth. They were both sweet and sour, the pips bitter and the juice warm.

I returned to the house through the hot garden. A large blue-green dragonfly darted over the bushes like a memory, stopped for a second in the air, and then vanished. There was the smell of ripe berries and earth and something foul: excrement perhaps, a dead animal or rotten fruit. I got the sudden urge to uproot the ground elder, which had spread unchecked. I felt compelled to kneel down and provide some firmer support for the young sweet peas—Herr Lexow must have sown these, too—which had twined themselves blindly around fence posts, flower stems, and grasses. But instead I picked a few of the tall bellflowers, closed the low gate behind me, walked past the outside steps and kitchen windows, and opened the door to the barn. After the blazing morning light of the garden I couldn’t see a thing at first in the gloom, and the earthy cold that prowled under my black dress felt intense. I fumbled blindly for the bicycle and wheeled it outside. Then I cycled up the main road again toward the church. But instead of turning left I went right, past the small paddock to the cemetery.

I stood the bike in the forecourt, next to another man’s bicycle, picked a few corn poppies to go with my bellflowers, and went to the family graves.

I saw Herr Lexow from a distance. His white hair shone out against the foliage of the evergreen hedges. He was sitting on a bench a few meters from Bertha’s grave. It touched me to see him there, but also unsettled me. I wanted some time here on my own. When he heard my footsteps on the gravel he stood up with difficulty and came over to me.

“I was just about to go,” he said. “I’m sure you’d like some time here on your own.”

I was ashamed, because he had read my thoughts word for word, and so I gave a vigorous shake of my head. “No, of course not. Anyway, I wanted to ask you whether you’d like to come over afterward and tell me the end of the story.”

Herr Lexow looked around anxiously. “Oh, I don’t think there’s any more to add.”

“Yes, but what happened then? Bertha married Hinnerk—what about you? How could you get . . . I mean how could you get my . . .” Embarrassed, I broke off. After all, I could hardly say “get my grandmother pregnant.”

Herr Lexow spoke quietly but emphatically. “I don’t believe I know what you’re talking about. Your grandmother Bertha was a good friend of mine and I never showed her anything but respect. Thank you very much for the kind invitation, but I’m an old man who goes to bed early.”

He nodded at me; a hint of coldness had crept into his voice. Then he nodded at the wreaths on Bertha’s grave, which had already wilted, and made slowly for the exit. So he went to bed early. Nothing but respect. I looked for Hinnerk’s headstone and for Rosmarie’s patch of earth with the rosemary bush on it. Had Herr Lexow forgotten yesterday evening already? Was it only those people who had something to forget who became forgetful? Was forgetfulness simply the inability to remember something, or was it that old people never forgot anything at all, they just refused to remember things? Everyone must reach a certain point where they have too many memories. So forgetting was just another sort of remembering. If you couldn’t forget anything, you couldn’t remember anything, either. Forgetting was an ocean that enclosed islands of memory. It had currents, eddies, and depths. Sandbanks would sometimes appear and join up the islands, sometimes the islands would disappear. The brain has tides. In Bertha’s case the incoming tide had come and swallowed the islands whole. Was her life lying somewhere on the ocean bed and Herr Lexow didn’t want anyone snorkeling around down there? Or was he using her death to tell his own story, a story in which he played a role?

Granddad had often told Rosmarie and me the story about the sunken neighboring village. Fischdorf, according to Hinnerk, had once been a rich parish, richer than Bootshaven, but one day its inhabitants played a trick on the pastor. They called him to someone’s deathbed in which they had stuffed a live pig. Brimming with compassion, the shortsighted pastor gave this pig its last rites. When it leaped squealing from the bed, the pastor was so distressed that he fled the village. Just before he got to the parish boundary with Bootshaven he realized that he had left his Bible back in Fischdorf. He turned back, but the village was no longer there. Where it had once stood was now a large lake. Bobbing in the shallow water by the shore was his Bible.

My grandfather always used this story as an excuse to mock the stupidity and alcoholism of clergymen. Not being able to distinguish between people and pigs, always leaving their stuff lying around and losing their way. All so typical, Hinnerk thought, and he sided squarely with the Fischdorfers. He didn’t particularly like it when people were punished for their success.

Maybe Herr Lexow wasn’t Inga’s father after all. Maybe he just wanted to claim the best of what Bertha had to offer. Something that belonged to nobody else, either. In any case, Bertha had only ever loved Hinnerk. I had to ask Inga. But what else could she tell me apart from another person’s story?