Apricot Kisses
Authors: Claudia Winter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Claudia Winter
Translation copyright © 2015 Maria Poglitsch Bauer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as
Aprikosenküsse
by the author via the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform in Germany in 2014. Translated from German by Maria Poglitsch Bauer. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503947542
ISBN-10: 1503947548
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant
All characters and events in this novel are the product of the author’s imagination, and your map search for the Tuscan village Montesimo will be in vain. The fictitious community serves as a substitute for all small Italian villages in which we hope to find what we long for. Any resemblances to real people, businesses, or events is purely coincidental.
Prologue
Fabrizio
Floor wax, apricots, a thick bean soup. Some aromas are as closely associated with my childhood as the scar on my wrist—a tiny white worm tattooed there by a bike accident when I was six. While memories of the pain and the rage I felt from making a fool of myself in front of my friends have faded, I clearly remember the smell and sticky smudge my grandmother’s lipstick kisses left behind.
I surreptitiously wipe my cheek, even though now I’m so tall that Nonna can barely reach my face. Still, I’m always on the lookout, because she grabs every opportunity to kiss me whenever I am anywhere near her red mouth. Unfortunately, Dr. Buhlfort’s waiting room has plenty of chairs, leaving no excuse for me to stand.
“Sit down, Fabrizio,” Nonna says and pushes me into a chair. Squinting, I wait for the inevitable: Nonna’s pinch—as if she planned to tear the skin from my cheek with her bony index and middle fingers—followed by the smacking of her lips.
When nothing happens, I sneak a glance in her direction. Nonna, leafing through a magazine, seems to have forgotten me. I suppress a grin—she’s studying the pages as if she understood every word. She is mumbling every now and then and moving her head from side to side as if it were attached to a pendulum.
“Verrrry interesting, this magazine,” she whispers when she notices me watching. She points to the magazine rack, which covers an entire wall of the waiting room. “This professor must be an excellent doctor. He reads quite a bit.”
I nod instead of pointing out what Nonna doesn’t want to hear anyway. She has been convinced that Buhlfort is the best heart specialist on the planet ever since I Googled him.
For generations, the Camini family has had an unexplained affinity for everything German. German cars, German soccer, German doctors. The last is why we’re wasting this afternoon in a crammed Berlin waiting room. Nonna Giuseppa Camini is perfectly healthy, but it’s always the same with her: whatever she sets her mind on eventually happens. I look at her out of the corner of my eye.
Nonna is sitting bolt upright in her chair (“Sit up straight, Fabrizio, otherwise you’ll turn into a hunchback”) with her knees touching and both feet on the floor. She’s wearing pumps, of course. (“Remember, a true Italian is buried in heels!”) Like all women in my family, she is slender, despite her age. When I once asked her why she always buys dresses two sizes too large, she advised me, with raised index finger, “You never know if you’ll put on weight as you age. Tell me, then what would I do with my good clothes?”
The cover of Nonna’s magazine,
Genusto Gourmet
, catches my eye. It shows a crate of apricots. The cursive German text is difficult to decipher, so I lean against Nonna’s shoulder to read. “Delicious recipes with sun-ripened apricots . . .” Nonna turns the page, and the image of apricots disappears.
“Fabrizio, there’s something about us!”
“About us?”
Since I don’t seem to get it, she pokes me in the ribs. I automatically straighten up, just like I do when she punches my back to correct my slouch over a plate of pasta. Nonna continues to rustle the pages.
“Fabrizio!”
“Nonna?” I like keeping her in suspense. She impatiently taps the magazine, which now rests on her knees, open to the page of the article. She’s right. The picture of a stone building on a cypress-covered hill looks familiar. Butterflies dance in my stomach: the Tre Camini house in a German gourmet magazine. I’ve never even dared to dream about such a thing.
“Are you deaf, kiddo? Somebody wrote about our
ristorante
.”
“I heard.” I want to tear the magazine out of her hands, but instead I just grin at her excitement. The elderly couple sitting across from us sizes us up disapprovingly—typical Germans. “Is everything all right?” I ask them in their language, with a smile. That keeps them quiet—also typically German. Nonna tugs on my sleeve. The V of wrinkles on her forehead has reached a dangerously steep angle. “Why don’t you give it to me, so I can read it to you,” I say.
Even though it’s been years since I’ve read anything long in German, my brain takes to the task and I translate fluently. But I understand what I’m reading only after the second paragraph, and then I hear a sound next to me that I cannot immediately classify.
Then I look up, and within a few seconds everything has changed.
82-Year-Old Woman Dies during Routine Examination
On Wednesday, June 11, an 82-year-old Italian woman suffered a heart attack during a routine visit at Charité University Hospital in Berlin. Despite immediate resuscitation efforts, the woman died in the waiting room of cardiologist Professor Buhlfort’s office. An investigation found no fault with either the specialist or his clinic. The woman’s cardiac weakness had apparently not been previously diagnosed. The woman’s remains will be brought to Italy by a relative after her cremation.
Chapter One
Hanna
Berlin is probably the only German city that delivers what its tourism brochures promise. The city is huge, colorful, and confusing—you can get lost in it even if you grew up here. Long ago, I stopped trying to decide whether I love it or hate it, and I made up my mind to tolerate its otherness. But I know that, underneath its ugly asphalt skin, the city is more alive than all other German cities combined.
I notice a tuft of grass that has fought its way through a crack in the cobblestones and step to the side with a smile. A pit bull’s jaw has been spray-painted around it. Weeds always win out over pavement around here, especially in the areas where kids let loose with their graffiti. In avoiding the weed, I step into a puddle, and muddy brown water sloshes into my pumps—shoot!
It’s less than five minutes from the subway to the editorial offices of
Genusto
magazine on Zimmerstrasse, but when I finally arrive, I’m drenched, even with my umbrella. If time were measured in sheets of rain, the walk would be an eternity. I hurry through the revolving door, but before I can step onto the carpet of the foyer, something yellow rams into me at what feels like fifty miles an hour. Something else falls to the floor, and I hear a noise that sounds like an exploding water balloon. My ankle twists, and I stagger into the reception area, but my umbrella catches in the revolving door.
“What the—! Sorry!” The canary-yellow somebody, a woman in a raincoat, crouches down by a brownish puddle and gathers up Styrofoam cups and plastic lids. The enticing aroma of coffee fills the foyer. My eyelid twitches.
“Good morning, Sasha.” I inspect the woman’s crocheted beanie and the fine blonde hair that curls along the back of her childlike neck. Something about my intern has irritated me from the start, and it’s not just her questionable way of dressing. The girl’s a total nutcase—and clumsy on top of that. No day passes without her getting grease spots on important papers, spilling drinks, or breaking china. The revolving door grinds to a halt behind me.
“That’s the end of the umbrella for sure,” Sasha giggles. Rolling my eyes, I turn to the elevator while she fishes a soaked chocolate brownie out of the pool of coffee. She straightens up and looks at the sopping-wet paper bag in her hand. “Darn. Fifteen euros down the drain.”
The elevator display shows it’s stuck on the third floor—probably the janitor blocking the door with his cart again. I check my watch nervously. Colliding with Sasha has cost me five minutes of valuable working time and also left a coffee stain the size of a saucer on my light-gray suit. Shoot!
“Hanna?” Sasha, now at the reception counter, calls over to me. At least she’s organized a trash can and mop from the janitor’s office. “Do you have a moment? I need to talk with you about something important.”
Should I use the staircase? I can take only short steps in my tight pencil skirt. No way can I climb stairs. I bang on the elevator button. There’s a whirring sound, the second-floor indicator lights up, and then the first floor—finally!
“Wait, I’m almost done,” Sasha screeches. I hear clattering and rumbling but don’t look back. The elevator goes
pling
as the doors slide open, and I jump inside. In my mind, I’m already going over the phone calls I’ve planned for this morning. One of them will be with a colleague from the
Michelin Guide
who hates nothing more than people who are late. Unfortunately, just as the doors start to close, a spanking-green ankle boot pushes itself between them. Sasha squeezes past me and drops her handbag with a relieved sigh.
“You seem mad at me. Did you get hurt when I ran into you?” Sasha’s violet-blue eyes meet mine in the elevator’s mirror panels. Now I notice how she’s dressed for this middle-of-June day—pink tights that somehow harmonize with her rubber-ducky-yellow raincoat and green ankle boots.
“You’re late!” I answer with icicles in my voice. I push the fourth-floor button.
“I got here just two seconds after you.” Sasha grins.
I focus on the floor-number display above the door. “Did you want to discuss your working hours with me?”
My intern actually blushes. “No . . . of course not.” She bends down and rummages in her messenger bag. “Where is it? I swear it’s in here—this bag’s a freaking Bermuda Triangle—ah! Here it is.” With an air of importance, she hands me a tattered piece of paper. I anticipate trouble—and not just because of the curled corners.
“I had a cool idea last night,” she says, “and wrote it all down.”
“Hm.” I keep studying the floor numbers. Second floor. This thing is as slow as if we were hauling ourselves up with a pulley. What if I pretend not to understand what she wants? Maybe she’ll lose her nerve and give up. But I know that’s wishful thinking. Sasha has already imagined a movie—starring herself—about her winning a Pulitzer Prize.
“So I obviously got up right away,” Sasha goes on. “Writers like us have to put our ideas on paper immediately, or—poof—they’re gone in the morning.” She pats me on the shoulder as if we played in the same league. I step away.
“Sasha, you do realize that you’re not employed to write articles.”
“Urban vegetable gardening!” she shrieks, making me jump. “I bet it’s a hot topic!” She’s beaming as if she’d just invented the light bulb.
“Vegetable gardening?”
She nods. “In pots on balconies—carrots, for example. Grow your own herbs without chemicals and stuff like that.”
“You want our readers to grow vegetables on their balconies? That’s . . . interesting.” Third floor. Can this thing not move any faster?
“Will you read my article? I worked on it half of last night, and maybe—well, only if you like it . . .”
“Of course. Put it into my yellow box, and I’ll look at it later.”
Sasha exhales. “You mean the tray where my other articles are gathering dust? The one you haven’t checked for the past two months?”
Fourth floor. I try not to appear stressed. The doors glide open. Sasha, looking like a chastised little dog, doesn’t move. Now I really feel like a bad person, so I sigh and take the paper out of her limp hand.
“I’ll look at it. Promise,” I say. “But first, do what you’re supposed to do: make coffee, dust the shelves, and file papers. Keep your eyes and ears open and learn—just like any other intern. Next week I’ll recommend you for the mail room. There you’ll realize what order and accuracy really mean.”
Sasha’s eyes open wide. “Hannaaa.”
“I have your best interests in mind, sweetie.”
Sasha pouts. Now she looks like a Berlin street waif, with a few damp strands of hair plastered to her forehead, the soaked Coffee Fellows bag in one hand, and the other hand clenched into a fist. I head toward our open-plan office and focus on the etched “Food and Lifestyle” on the glass door.
“Order is completely overrated,” I hear her say from behind, but I’m already pushing down the door handle.
Fabrizio
Nonna had insisted that her hotel room face east, toward the sunrise. She didn’t care that the red-brick facade of Coffee Fellows fills the view out the window, so you have to tilt your neck to see just a little bit of sky. Forget about seeing the sunrise. All you get is street noise and exhaust fumes, and not even a balcony.
I turn my attention to the task waiting for me in the middle of the room: four suitcases, not counting mine, and bags from practically every boutique in Berlin’s city center. I sit down on the edge of the bed. The blanket is neatly folded and the pillow fluffed up, as if nobody ever slept here. The room seemed small to me before. Now it’s tiny. Can rooms shrink?
“How the hell am I going to carry all that stuff to the airport, Nonna? Do I really have to transport a dead woman’s clothes all over the place, clothes nobody’ll wear anymore?”
I imagine her reply,
“Of course you have to, Fabrizio. Such good quality.”
The porcelain urn could be mistaken for a vase. The undertakers had been friendly and professional. Very German. They hadn’t flinched a bit when I selected the ugly red-and-blue-striped one. It was the only damn vessel with a little bit of color. Nonna loves—used to love—colorful things.
I cautiously fish something blue out of a shopping bag—on closer look, a square-cut dress. The next dress is red, the same style, with a narrow belt and a scarf, the fluttering kind. More dresses in the next bag—some with flowers, others with stripes, a yellow one, a red one. They all look the same to me.
“Who will ever understand women?” I sheepishly mumble in Nonna’s direction. She replies promptly in my head,
“You don’t know what you are talking about.”
I have no idea who could use the stuff. Lucia is heavier than Nonna, Alba is too young, and let’s not even talk about Rosa-Maria’s dimensions. Giving away Nonna’s things to strangers is out of the question. So I’m back at square one. The dresses fall to the floor in a pile of yellow, blue, and red. I avoid the shopping bag of underwear. Even the dead have a right to some privacy.
You really thought of everything, didn’t you, Nonna? You disappear and make your grandson the butt of jokes for the entire town with all this luggage.
After hesitating for a moment, I reach for her well-worn leather handbag. Ever since I was little, I’ve been dying to find out what Nonna lugs—lugged—around in it. Exploring its magic depths just got me whacks from her beringed fingers. Marco and I would goof off by asking Nonna for the craziest things imaginable, and she would oblige by fishing scissors, pastry scrapers, sweets, or toothpicks out of this leather monstrosity. Once she even pulled out a real pistol—but that’s another story.
I don’t have to be afraid of a slap on my wrist anymore, but my heart nevertheless races when I zip open Nonna’s bag and spill the contents onto the bed.
I am disappointed. The items could be from almost any woman’s handbag: handkerchiefs, a tube of lipstick, creams, a powder compact, a nail file, a wallet, boutique ads, a shoe-store coupon, tape, a pen, and Nonna’s day planner. I leaf through it—more because I don’t know what else to do than because I’m curious—and swallow when I see her familiar, proper handwriting. Daily entries, some marked with stars. Birthdays. I open it to the twenty-fourth calendar week. My left temple throbs, announcing a migraine, as I stare at the date and what Nonna wrote. It says:
twelve o’clock, Dr. Buhlfort’s office
.
I suddenly hear my father’s voice in my head:
“You can go on bawling as long as you want, son. It won’t bring back your mamma. Now wipe your nose and take care of your little brother.”
Defiantly, I wipe my face with the back of my hand. I almost missed the penciled entry below it:
four o’clock, Isabella Colei!
It’s underlined and ends with an exclamation mark. Who the hell is Isabella Colei?
Nonna’s address book gives me a preliminary answer: the entry for Signora Colei lists a Berlin phone number. I could just close the booklet and forget about the entry, but something makes me pick up the phone. Nonna always stressed the importance of keeping appointments. And maybe I do it out of more than a sense of duty—I haven’t talked with anyone in two days, other than the lawyer who’s going to investigate that article. I don’t like the guy, but he seems to know what he’s doing. I decide to let the phone ring three times—just three times—and if nobody answers, I’ll hang up.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, hurried but friendly.
“Please excuse my calling so early. Is this Signora Colei?” I speak so fast that the sentences blur into one word.
“Yes. Speaking.”
“My name is Fabrizio Camini and I . . .” Breathe, Fabrizio. Breathe! “Hello? Are you still there?”
The woman on the other end immediately switches to Italian. “What can I do for you, Signor Camini?” But her voice is suddenly ten degrees colder.
“I think you had an appointment with my grandmother, Giuseppa Camini, four days ago. I’m sorry that I’m calling so late, but I need to inform you . . .” What am I doing, telling a stranger that Nonna is dead? “My grandmother asked me to tell you that she’s unfortunately unable to meet with you right now.”
Silence.
“Signora, are you still there?”
“I’ve never heard of your grandmother. I am sorry.”
“But she listed an appointment with you in her daily planner—for Wednesday, the eleventh.”
“Probably a mistake.”
“But . . .”
“Have a good day, Signor Camini.”
The woman hangs up. I’m still staring at the receiver when someone knocks on the door. “Not now,” I mumble.
“Housekeeping,” I hear faintly.
“No, thank you,” I say, louder, but someone is already opening the door.
Che merda!
“I said no, thank you!” I scream at the shocked maid, and a sharp pain cuts across my forehead. She turns as white as her apron and stumbles a few steps back. She points to the sign on the door handle that says “Please Make Up the Room,” but I can’t apologize. Instead I wave her away impatiently, and she shuts the door. I swear that Nonna’s room has shrunk even more, and I feel like I’m suffocating.
My stomach rumbles. My last meal was a sandwich at noon yesterday that tasted like a mixture of cardboard and Styrofoam. No wonder I’m behaving like a jerk. I hang up the receiver to stop its beeping and stare at the urn. Oh, Nonna, I’m sure you imagined a different trip home.
Determined, I get up from the bed. Unpleasant things don’t get better by being postponed. I’ll grab some food at the airport. I leave twenty euros and all the coins from Nonna’s purse on the pillow for the maid. It doesn’t make me feel any better.
Hanna
Claire looks at me, aghast, and leans on my desk. “You’re not serious! Sasha in the mail room?
Mon dieu
, that won’t end well. You know how fussy they are down there.”
“Whatever.” Unmoved, I open my mail folder. It’s almost bursting: letters from readers, comments about my most recent article, and inquiries from restaurants wanting to be reviewed. I can’t believe what has stacked up during my two-week absence. In the future, I should forget about vacations and all the sentimental reasons why I flew to Italy, of all places. I look up, since my forehead is starting to tingle. My colleague is gnawing on one stem of her eyeglasses and scrutinizing me. Claire Durant is one of the few people who can manage to criticize you without saying a word.