The Taste of Apple Seeds Read Free Page A

only when she put in my lap a large brass key—with the simple contour of its bit it looked like a stage prop for a fairy tale—that I finally grasped what was going on. It was all about the house: Bertha’s daughters here on the weathered steps, her dead sister who had been born in the house, and Rosmarie who had died in the house. And it was all about the young lawyer with the cigarette. I had almost failed to recognize him, but he had to be the younger brother of Mira Ohmstedt, our best friend. Rosmarie’s and my best friend.

Chapter II
    MY PARENTS, MY AUNTS, AND I stayed the night in the three guest rooms at the village inn.
    “We’re going back down to Baden,” my mother said the following morning. She said it a second time, as if needing to convince herself. Her sisters sighed; to them it sounded as if she were going back to happiness. And maybe that was the case. Aunt Inga would get a lift with them as far as Bremen. I gave her a quick hug and got an electric shock.
    “This early in the morning?” I asked in astonishment.
    “It’s going to be hot today,” Inga said apologetically. She crossed her arms over her chest and with a quick movement stroked from her shoulders down to her wrists. She then splayed her fingers and shook them. There was a slight crackle as sparks shot from her fingertips.
    Rosmarie had loved the way Aunt Inga sparked. “Oh, please can we have some more shooting stars?” she would say, especially when we were out in the garden at night. Then we would watch in awe as for a split second tiny points of light danced on Aunt Inga’s hands. “Doesn’t that hurt?” we would ask, and she would shake her head. But I never believed her; she used to wince whenever she leaned against a car, opened a cupboard door, turned on a light or the television. Sometimes she dropped things. I would come into the kitchen and Aunt Inga would be crouched down, sweeping up shards with the hand brush. When I asked her what had happened, she would say, “Oh, just a silly accident—I’m so clumsy.”
    On those occasions when Inga couldn’t avoid shaking hands with people she would apologize, as they often yelled in fright. Rosmarie called her “Sparky Fingers,” but we all knew that she really admired Aunt Inga. “Why can’t you do that, Mummy?” she asked Aunt Harriet once. “And why can’t I?” Aunt Harriet had looked at her and said that it was the only way Inga could release her tension, and that Rosmarie was so energetic that she would never be capable of such discharges; it was something she should be thankful for.
    Aunt Harriet had always been spiritual. She took a few inner journeys and wandered back again before she became Mohani and started wearing that wooden-bead necklace. As my mother saw it, when Harriet’s daughter died she sought a father and became a daughter again herself. She wanted something solid. Something that would stop her from falling but also help her forget. I was never satisfied with this explanation: Aunt Harriet loved drama, not melodrama. She might be crazy, but she was never vulgar. She probably felt a connection with Osho, the dead guru. It must have been a comfort to her that a dead person could be so alive, because she had never seemed particularly impressed by the living Bhagwan, and she used to laugh at the pictures of him with his fleet of huge cars.
    When my mother, father, and Aunt Inga had left, Aunt Harriet and I drank peppermint tea in the café. Our silence was wistful and relaxed.
    “Are you going to the house now?” Aunt Harriet asked finally. She stood and picked up her leather travel bag, which was next to our table. Osho was smiling in the wooden-framed pendant of her necklace. I looked him in the eye and nodded. He nodded back. I stood up, too. She hugged me so tightly that it hurt. I said nothing and peered over her shoulder at the empty café. The haze of coffee and sweat, which yesterday had cloaked the funeral-goers in its warmth, still hung