Free The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena Page A

that. And he replied quickly and asked whether she would like to see the Institute of Physics sometime. It even had a machine that made dry ice. “I’d love to,” she said, without looking up, a strained smile on her red face. Dietrich nodded and said, “Good-bye,” and the two of them hurriedly went their own ways, both quite relieved.
    The following day, the Lahn had completely broken up, the soft chunks of ice, now a brownish color, were drifting to the riverbank, and Dietrich didn’t know where to find the ice-skater again.
    During the night the moonlight cast sharp shadows across my pillow; I had forgotten to draw the curtains. The bed with its three-part mattress was narrow and the blanket heavy.
    My guilty conscience kept me wide awake. I should have called Jon some time ago; I might have thought about him at least. Now I was thinking about him. Jonathan—until recently my boyfriend, now my ex-boyfriend. He didn’t even know that I was here, but maybe that didn’t matter; after all, he hadn’t been in the place where I was before I came here, either. He lived in England and that was where he would stay. But not me. When he asked me two months ago whether we might move in together, I had the sudden feeling that it was time for me to go home. Even though I loved his country very much. Yes, it wasn’t my love for him but for his country that had kept me there so long, and that was why I knew I had to leave. And now I was here. Now I even had my own bit of countryside in this country. I refused to see this as a sign, but it helped confirm that I had made the right decision to come back.
    When you lose your memory, time passes far too quickly to begin with, then it stops passing altogether. “Oh, but that was so long ago,” my grandmother used to say about things that were a week, thirty years, or ten seconds in the past. As she said it she would wave her hand dismissively and her voice would be edged with reproach. She was always on her guard. Was she being tested?
    Her brain silted up like a riverbed. Then the riverbank began to crumble, until large chunks fell crashing into the water. The river lost its form and current, its natural character. In the end it didn’t flow anymore but just sloshed in all directions. White deposits in the brain prevented electrical charges from getting through, all nerve ends were isolated, as was the person in the end: isolation, island, England, gland, electrons and Aunt Inga’s amber bracelet, resin went hard in water, water went hard with a hard frost, glass was silicon and silicon was sand, and sand trickled down through the hourglass, and I should sleep now, it was late.
    Of course, the two of them had seen each other again soon after ice-skating finished on the Lahn. In Marburg, avoiding someone is practically impossible. Especially when you’re looking for each other. The very next week they met at the Institute of Physics ball, to which my mother was accompanied by a fellow student, the son of my grandfather’s colleague. Both their fathers would have loved to see them start a relationship; this meant that Christa froze in his presence, while he turned into a zombie in hers. On this one occasion, however, the evening was a success. Christa was so busy looking around all over the place that she remained calm. For the first time the colleague’s son didn’t feel his companion’s iciness settle on his brain and tongue like hoar frost, and he even managed to tease the odd smile out of her with barbed comments about the first brave dancers. It was Christa who had mentioned the Institute of Physics ball to the colleague’s son. And although at the sight of her lips pressed together he could hear himself floundering as he spoke, he’d still had enough sense to invite her.
    Christa saw Dietrich first, but then she had expected to find him there, whereas he had no idea she would show up. So some of her initial embarrassment had already passed when he spotted her shortly