The Taste of Apple Seeds E-Book

Katharina Hagena

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

For Iris, childhood memories are of long hot summers spent playing with her cousin Rosmarie in her grandmother's garden, a place where redcurrants turned to pale tears on the branches of trees and beautiful Aunt Inga shook sparks from the tips of her fingers. But now her grandmother is dead and, along with inheriting the property, Iris finds that she also inherits her family's darkest secrets. Reluctant to keep it, but reluctant to sell, Iris spends one more summer at the house. By day she swims at the local lake, where she rediscovers a childhood companion. Alone at night she roams through the familiar rooms, exploring the tall black shadows of the past. In the flicker between remembrance and forgetting, Iris recalls an enigmatic grandfather who went to war and came back a different man, the night her cousin Rosmarie fell through the conservatory roof and shattered her family's lives, and a moment of love that made the old tree in the orchard bloom overnight.

Leseprobe

The Taste of Apple Seeds

First published in Germany in 2008 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, GmbH & Co. KG.

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Katharina Hagena, 2008

Translator Copyright © Jamie Bulloch, 2013

The moral right of Katharina Hagena to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of Jamie Bulloch to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 0 85789 099 3

OME ISBN: 978 0 85789 107 5

Ebook ISBN: 978 1 78239 079 4

Set in 12⁄14.5pt Monotype Garamond

Designed by Nicky Barneby @ Barneby Ltd

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Christof

La mémoire ne nous servirait à rien si elle fût rigoureusement fidèle.

Memory would be of no use to us if it were strictly truthful.

PAUL VALÉRY

Contents

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter I

GREAT-AUNT ANNA DIED FROM PNEUMONIA when she was sixteen. They couldnt cure it because her heart was broken and penicillin hadnt yet been invented. It happened late one July afternoon. Annas younger sister, Bertha, ran howling into the garden and saw that with Annas rattling, dying breath all the redcurrants in the garden had turned white. It was a large garden; the scores of old currant bushes groaned under the heavy weight of the fruit. They should have been picked long before, but when Anna fell ill nobody gave a thought to the berries. My grandmother often told me this story, because it was she who had discovered the currants in mourning. Since that time there had only ever been blackcurrants and whitecurrants in my grandmothers garden, and every attempt to plant a red bush had failed only white berries would grow on the stems. But nobody minded: the white ones tasted almost as sweet as the red, when you juiced them they didnt ruin your apron, and the jelly they made had a mysteriously pale translucent shimmer. Preserved tears, my grandmother called it. The shelves in her cellar still housed jars of all sizes with the currant jelly from 1981, a summer particularly rich in tears, Rosmaries final one. Once when my mother was looking for some pickled cucumbers she came across a jar from 1945: the first post-war tears. She donated it to the windmill association, and when I asked her why on earth she was giving away Grannys wonderful jelly to a local museum she said that those tears were too bitter.

My grandmother Bertha Lnschen, ne Deelwater, died long after Great-Aunt Anna, but for many years she hadnt known who her sister was, what her own name was, or whether it was winter or summer. She had forgotten what shoes, wool or spoons were for. Over a decade she cast off her memories with the same fidgety ease with which she plucked at the short white locks of hair at the nape of her neck or swept invisible crumbs from the table. I had a clearer recollection of the noise the hard, dry skin of her hand made on the wooden kitchen table than of the features of her face. Also of the way her ringed fingers always closed tightly around the invisible crumbs, as if trying to catch the shadows of her spirit drifting by; but maybe Bertha just wanted to cover the floor with crumbs, or feed the sparrows that in early summer loved taking dust baths in the garden and were forever uprooting the radishes. The table she later had in the care home was plastic, and her hand fell silent.