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

chair and drew my feet onto the seat under me. Shortly afterward, milk was steaming in the mugs. Herr Lexow sat back down and told me, in a few words, what had happened.

Chapter IV
    CARSTEN LEXOW ARRIVED IN BOOTSHAVEN as a young teacher. He was only twenty and came from Geeste, a village near Bremen. The school in Bootshaven had one large classroom in which all children of school age were lumped together. A single teacher taught everything and to everyone at the same time. Just once a year, a week after the end of the summer holidays, the pastor turned up and greeted the new confirmands.
    Carsten’s father had been a haberdasher and had died of a war injury four years before his son moved to Bootshaven. A French rifle bullet had roamed around his body for almost eight years before one day finally ending its wanderings in his lung and thus also ending the life of the haberdasher Carsten Lexow Senior. Carsten’s father was a taciturn man who spent so much time in his shop that he forever remained a stranger to the family. Carsten’s mother blamed this on the roaming bullet, which had stopped him from ever really coming home, but maybe it was just his manner. Much about him was short, not only the needles and pins he sold, but also his legs, his nose, and his hair, as well as his sentences and his temper. The only thing that was long was the path that the rifle bullet had traveled in his squat body, but when it finally reached its goal his death—just like his life—was short.
    Widow Lexow continued to run the haberdashery on her own; Carsten sometimes helped out with the books. He had no siblings, but his mother’s younger brother, a high-ranking official with the postal service and a bachelor, offered to lend his sister and nephew a hand. As Carsten showed no particular inclination to sell sewing thread and hat elastic, the widow agreed to send her son to Bremen for teacher training. Carsten spent two years there before he got the post in Bootshaven without even having applied for the job.
    The old teacher had died of a heart attack, right in the middle of a lesson, but as he had a habit of nodding off in class none of the children had paid any attention to the hunched figure. As they always did when he fell asleep, the fourteen children left the room quietly giggling when the afternoon bell rang. Also as usual, they forgot the teacher until they saw him still asleep at his desk in exactly the same position the following morning. Nobody was surprised that the school and the classroom were unlocked; the old teacher had always been absentminded. But finally the eldest pupil, Nikolaus Koop, plucked up his courage and spoke to the small pale man, whose head had slumped so far onto his chest that only the crown was visible. When he didn’t answer, Nikolaus took a step closer and had a good look at his teacher.
    Like almost all the people in the village, the Koops were farmers. Nikolaus had often helped out with the slaughtering and had once seen a cow die while giving birth. He blinked a few times, turned to the other children, and said calmly, with long pauses between the words, that there wouldn’t be any school today, they should all go home. Although Nikolaus was a shy boy who was often the first one out when they played dodgeball, and although he wasn’t the class leader in spite of being the eldest, all the pupils left obediently. Anna Deelwater and her younger sister, Bertha, left the schoolhouse with the other children. Their farmhouse was next to Nikolaus’s and the three of them always walked to and from school together. On this day, however, the sisters went home without him, silently, their heads bowed.
    Nikolaus Koop rang the bell of the parsonage, which was next to the school, and told the pastor what had happened. The pastor had been sitting at his desk, leafing through the paper. That same day the pastor wrote to his friend the pastor of Geeste, and three days later Carsten Lexow came to Bootshaven as the