The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena Page B

‘but’?”
    “For God’s sake, no. But if you keep on asking, well . . .”
    “There you go, there was a ‘but.’ ”
    “Yes, you’re right.”
    “I knew it,” Max said with a sigh, sounding satisfied. Then he jumped up and said, “Right. Let’s go and see what we can find in the kitchen.”
    We found plenty in the kitchen. I laughed a lot that evening, maybe inappropriately for someone who was here for a funeral. But Max and his polite audacity made me feel good. He had so much bread, olives, and dips in the fridge that I asked him if he had been or was still expecting someone. He paused for a second, pulled a rather odd face, and nodded. Then he gave in and admitted that he had planned to invite me over because he was a sensitive man and he had frightened me to death at the lock and because he couldn’t have guessed that I would suddenly turn up at his place. He smiled crookedly and spread leek puree onto some bread. I said nothing.
    When I got up to go it was dark. Max walked me to my bike. And when I took hold of the handlebars, he placed his hand on mine and grazed the corner of my mouth with his lips. His kiss shot through me with a force that stunned me. Both of us took a step backward, me knocking over a flowerpot in the process. I hastily picked it up again and said, “I’m sorry. I always do that when I feel relaxed somewhere.”
    Max replied that he had also felt relaxed that evening. And we both fell silent, standing out there in the dark. Before Max could do anything, or not do anything, I took my bike and rode back to the house.
    I didn’t sleep well that night, either. I had to think things through.
    Once again I woke up very early. The sun’s rays were still feeling their way uncertainly along the bedroom wall. I got up, threw on my mother’s golden ball gown, cycled to the lake, swam across and back; on the way home I bumped into the same dog owners as on the previous day, but not Max. Back at the farmhouse I made tea, laid some cheese between two slices of black bread, and put everything on a tray. I carried it through the barn and then out to the orchard behind the house. A few pieces of weather-beaten garden furniture stood there. I moved two white wooden folding chairs into the sun, putting the tray on one of them and sitting on the other. My bare feet were wet from the dew, as was the hem of my dress. The grass was starting to straggle, but it couldn’t have been mown more than four or five weeks ago. I drank my tea with a dash of Herr Lexow’s milk, gazed at the old apple trees, and thought of my grandmother Bertha.
    After she had fallen from a tree while picking apples one autumn day nothing was the same again. Of course, nobody realized this at first, Bertha herself least of all. But from then on she often felt a dull ache in her hips and started forgetting whether she had taken her painkillers. She would be forever asking Hinnerk whether she had taken her tablets. Hinnerk would get impatient and give her a tetchy reply. Bertha got confused by this harshness because she really didn’t know, and could have sworn she hadn’t asked him before. As Hinnerk always rolled his eyes when she asked, she stopped asking but became uncertain about many things. She could no longer find her glasses or her handbag or the house key. She got muddled about appointments and all of a sudden couldn’t remember the name of Hinnerk’s secretary who had worked in the office for more than thirty years. All this made her uneasy to start with, then worried. In the end, when she noticed it getting worse and worse, and there was no one there to help her or talk to about it, when whole chunks of her life, not just the present, simply sank into nothingness, she became frightened. This fear meant that she often cried, lay in bed in the mornings, her heart pounding, not wanting to get up.
    Hinnerk was now ashamed of his wife and started cursing her under his breath. The path from the kitchen to the dining