Authors: Katharina Hagena

The Taste of Apple Seeds (25 page)

BOOK: The Taste of Apple Seeds

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On the day I left, Max took me to the bus stop.

As the bus turned into the road I said, “Thanks for everything.”

He tried to smile, but it slipped. “Forget it.”

I got on and found an empty seat. When the bus moved off with a jolt, my body sank heavily into the backrest.

Epilogue

I’M SITTING AT HINNERK’S DESK
, looking out at the yard. The lime trees are bare. Now I know what the garden looks like in winter. I’ve made it winter-proof eleven times, laying branches of pine over the beds, coir matting around the tender plants, pruned back roses and shrubs. In February the meadow in front of the house is full of snowdrops.

On the desk are the notes of a Bremen architect and essayist who documented the events and phenomena of the Bremen art scene in the 1920s before emigrating to America. I’m editing his unpublished works.

Carsten Lexow died a year after Bertha. He simply keeled over. With pruning shears in his hand.

My son is skateboarding between the limes on the drive with his friends. I have to restrain myself from knocking on the window to tell him to pull his trousers up higher and do up his coat. But I won’t be able to hold out for long. It’s freezing.

Over the past few days I’ve been arranging the rooms upstairs for my parents. My father has decided to move away from southern Germany because my mother’s homesickness has got out of hand. She’s weeping a lot and eating little. She’s closing herself off.

She’s forgetting.

Sometimes she can’t remember whether she has cooked or not. Sometimes she even forgets how to cook. Maybe it will be easier for her here in the house, but I don’t think so. Nor do I believe that my father thinks so, either.

I’ve still not seen Mira yet, even though she’s part of the family now, but we call each other from time to time. Max has more contact. She’s still a partner in the law firm and for the past eleven years has been living with a female teacher in an old Berlin tenement flat. When I talk to her on the phone neither of us mentions Rosmarie. We focus so hard on not talking about her that we can hear her breath on the line. And the rustling of the night wind in the boughs of the willow tree.

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Birgit Schmitz and Katja Weller. I should also like to offer my warmest thanks to Anke Hagena and Otfried Hagena, Gerd Hagena, Erika Thies and Christiane Thies. Thanks and love go to Christof Siemes, Johann and Mathilda.

About the Author

KATHARINA HAGENA
, born in 1967, studied English and German literature in Marburg, London, and Freiburg, before lecturing at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Hamburg. Her first book,
What Are the Wild Waves Saying? Waterways Through Joyce’s Ulysses,
was published in 2006.
The Taste of Apple Seeds
is her first novel. Her second novel
On Sleep and Disappearing
came out in 2012. She currently lives in Hamburg.

www.katharinahagena.de

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Praise for
The Taste of Apple Seeds

“Beautifully phrased, artful, and sometimes ingenious. . . .
The Taste of Apple Seeds
is atmospheric and sensual. . . . Hagena ingrains the creaking old house—and the book—with melancholy; every word, every place is weighted with memories.”

—
The Independent

“Hagena’s sensitivity and attention to detail, and a narrator whose honesty and comical clumsiness keep the story light and engaging, have universal appeal.”

—
Sunderland Echo

“
The Taste of Apple Seeds
is a pure masterpiece.”

—
Le Nouvel Observateur

“[Hagena] immerses us in the destiny of three generations of women. . . . Between the lines, you smell the odor of apples and old stones . . . [the author] gives life to memories in a style whose graveness touches always right. You eat her apple entirely, even with the apple seeds.”

—
Elle

“The author constructs a narration of perfect unity . . . with these different lives that are all intimately connected to each other.”

—
Le Monde des Livres

“It is about heritage, about the weight of the past, a saga about three generations of women where happiness and tragedy, humor and gravity mix. . . . It is a book of high sensibility.”

—Martin Fabre, www.lechoixdeslibraires.com

Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover photograph © by Sean Malyon/Getty Images

Author photograph by Henrik Spohler

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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.

THE TASTE OF APPLE SEEDS
. Copyright © 2008 by Katharina Hagena. Translation copyright © 2013 by Jamie Bulloch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-229347-3

EPub Edition FEBRUARY 2014 ISBN 9780062293480

14 15 16 17 18
DIX
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RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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