The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena Read Free Book Online

took the liberty—well, I simply wanted . . .”
    Now it was Herr Lexow who was stammering. I took a step backward to let him in, closed the front door, and took the cotton bag that he had been holding out to me while he spoke. Before I could think about which room to show him into, he asked permission to go ahead and walked along the hallway to the kitchen. There he gently took the bag back from me, fished out a large tupperware bowl, opened one of the lower cupboards without much deliberation, grabbed a saucepan and put it on the cooker. I moved a few steps closer. He didn’t say anything more, but moved around Bertha’s kitchen with calm familiarity. Now I no longer needed to ask Mira’s brother who had been looking after the house and garden in Bertha’s absence. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other indecisively. Although the kitchen was large I was getting in the way.
    “Would you mind fetching some parsley from the garden, my dear child?” Herr Lexow passed me some scissors.
    From the yard the path led between the two lime trees into Bertha’s kitchen garden. Italian honeysuckle rambled over the fence; the garden gate was ajar and it squeaked when I pushed it. There was parsley right at the front, overgrown with nasturtiums—“capers,” as Bertha and her daughters used to call them. In late summer my mother always kept in the fridge a small jar of the bright green fruits from these flowers, but I didn’t recall them ever being used in any cooking. What was this thin row of parsley doing growing here, anyway? Someone must have sown it. The same went for the unkempt pea and bean plants that were blossoming white and pink and orange. Here was a crooked row of leeks. On the ground, hairy cucumber vines were crawling between couch grass and camomile, trying to cast aside the weeds with their gray leaves, or at least infect them with blight.
    Lemon balm and mint had taken over the beds and were running riot between the white currants, the ailing gooseberry bushes, and the blackberry canes, which were escaping over the fence into the neighboring copse. Herr Lexow must have tried to maintain Bertha’s kitchen garden, but he didn’t have her talent for allotting every plant its rightful space and gently coercing the best out of it.
    I walked through the kitchen garden to take a look at Bertha’s old perennials, which either honored my grandmother’s memory or defied its disintegration—it amounted to the same thing. The billowing thicket of phlox had a delicate fragrance. Delphiniums thrust blue spikes into the evening sky. Lupins and marigolds shone above the soil, bellflowers nodded at me. The plump, heart-shaped hosta leaves barely left a patch of earth visible; behind these, hydrangeas, a whole hedge full, frothed bluish-pink and pinkish-blue from their foliage. Dark yellow and rosy parasols of yarrow swayed over the paths, and when I’d pushed them back my hands smelled of herbs and summer holidays.
    Between the currants and the brambles was the wilder part of the garden. But now it had hidden itself in its own shadows. Behind the garden the pine copse began. Here the ground was rust red and consisted entirely of fallen needles. With every step you sank before springing back up, softly and silently, and you walked through as if spellbound until reaching the large orchard on the other side. In the past, Rosmarie, Mira, and I had hung old net curtains between the trees and built fairy houses in which we acted out long, complicated romantic dramas. To begin with these were just tales of three princesses who had been abducted and sold by a disloyal chamberlain, managed to escape from their ghastly foster parents after years of servitude, and now were living in the forest where, by happy coincidence, they were reunited with their real parents. After that the princesses went back and punished all those who’d ever done them an injustice. Rosmarie performed the “escape,” I did the “reunion”