The Taste of Apple Seeds Read Free

pieces of knitting in Bootshaven and taken them back home. She had kept them in a box in her wardrobe. Once, by chance, I’d stumbled upon them; with a mixture of horror and amusement, I had laid out on my parents’ bed one woolen sculpture after another. At that stage I wasn’t living with my parents anymore and Bertha was already in the care home. My mother came in, and for a while both of us gazed at the woolen creatures.
    “I suppose that each of us has to preserve our tears somewhere,” my mother had said, as if defending herself, and then she packed everything away in the wardrobe. We never spoke about Bertha’s knitting again.
    We all walked out of the study in single file, back along the hallway and out the front door; the bell clanged tinnily. The lawyers offered us their hands then left, and we sat outside on the steps. Almost all the smooth yellow-white stones had cracks. Flat chunks of stone had come loose and you could lift them up like lids. In the past there hadn’t been that many loose ones, only six or seven; we had used them as secret compartments, hiding feathers, flowers, and letters inside.
    Back then I still wrote letters, I still believed in written, printed, and read matter. These days I no longer did. I had a job at the library at Freiburg University: I worked with books, I bought books, I even borrowed the odd one. But read them? No. I used to—oh yes, I used to read all the time, in bed, while eating, on my bike. But it stopped. Reading was the same as collecting, and collecting was the same as keeping, and keeping was the same as remembering, and remembering was the same as not knowing exactly, and not knowing exactly was the same as having forgotten, and having forgotten was the same as falling, and at some point you had to stop falling.
    That was one explanation.
    But I liked being a librarian. For the same reasons that I didn’t read anymore.
    I had started out studying German, but working on my essays I found that everything I did after compiling the bibliography seemed inconsequential. Catalogs, subject registers, reference books, indexes all had their own delicate beauty, which, if you gave them only a cursory reading, was as inaccessible as a hermetic poem. Whenever, starting with a general reference volume, its pages softened by the fingers of myriad readers, I gradually arrived via several other books at a highly specialized monograph whose cover nobody save for a librarian had touched before me, I felt a sense of satisfaction I could never gain from my own writing. And in any case, the things you wrote down were the things you didn’t have to remember, that is to say the things you could safely forget because you knew where to find them, and thus what held true for reading applied to writing as well.
    What I particularly loved about my job was rooting out forgotten books, books that had been sitting in the same spot for hundreds of years, probably never read, covered with a thick layer of dust, and yet which had outlived the millions of people who hadn’t read them. I had already unearthed seven or eight of these books and would visit them occasionally, but I would never touch them. Sometimes I might breathe in their smell. Like most library books they had a stale odor, the very opposite of fresh. The book that smelled the worst was the one on ancient Egyptian friezes; it was terribly blackened and ragged.
    I had visited my grandmother only once in the care home. She was sitting in her room, clearly frightened of me, and she wet herself. A nurse came and changed her nappy. I gave Bertha a good-bye kiss on the cheek; she was cold, and my lips felt the web of wrinkles that softly traversed her skin.
    While I was waiting on the steps, tracing the cracks in the stone with my finger, my mother sat two steps higher, talking to me. She spoke quietly without finishing her sentences; her words seemed to hang in midair. Irritated, I wondered why she had started doing this of late. It was