Free The Taste of Apple Seeds by Katharina Hagena Page B

afterward. His gray eyes lit up, he raised his hand and then bowed his head in greeting. He advanced toward Christa with determination and a spring in his step, and immediately asked her to dance; then again; then he fetched her a glass of white wine and danced with her once more after that. Christa’s companion watched, perturbed, from the drinks table. While he was relieved that everything was going so smoothly this time and that he didn’t have to keep talking to her, he felt that it wasn’t quite right. He also saw with a combination of amazement, satisfaction, and jealousy that his companion was a much sought-after partner, and so decided to ask her if he could have the next dance. Which was the very opposite of what he had planned for that evening.
    Fortunately, he was a bad dancer and my father a good one. And my mother danced well with my father; she was freed from her stifling shyness because he had already seen her on the ice. That and the fact that my father was almost shyer than her. So they danced together at all the balls in Marburg that season: May Ball, Summer Celebration, Faculty Dance, University Bash. When dancing you didn’t have to talk if you didn’t want to, other people were there and you could go home any time you liked. Dancing was basically a sporting event, Christa thought, a kind of pair skating.
    Christa’s sisters guessed at once that she had a secret. During the holidays, which of course she spent in Bootshaven, she was—like all women with a secret—always the first one at the letterbox in the morning. But her sisters’ questions, which were sometimes penetrating and sometimes flattering, just made her blush and laugh, or blush and fall silent. When Aunt Inga started studying history of art in Marburg the following term, both sisters went to the first semester ball. Dietrich Berger, together with a whole group of young men from his student association, had already been introduced to Inga. Inga had taken a liking to a tall, handsome sport student and she assumed that it was him. But when she saw that Christa didn’t even glance at the high-heeled shoes that went so well with her brown silk dress, but went straight for the flat ballerina pumps, Inga knew exactly who it was: Dietrich Berger, just one meter seventy-six tall.
    They got engaged that same year, and when my mother, twenty-four years old, had finished her much hated teacher training at a secondary school in Marburg, they married and moved down to Baden, where my father got a job at the Physics Research Center. My mother had been homesick ever since.
    She couldn’t forget Bootshaven and clung with every last fiber to the house that was now mine. Although she had now lived far longer in Baden than she had in Bootshaven, she nonetheless believed that in the south she was just passing through. The first of those hot, humid, windless summers left her in despair. Unable to sleep at night because the temperature never fell below thirty, she would lie in bed, sweating, staring up at the frosted-glass lampshade on the ceiling, and she would bite her lower lip until it got light outside. Then she would get up and make breakfast for her husband. The summer gave way to a paltry autumn, and this eventually to a hard, cloudless winter. All bodies of water froze over, and stayed frozen for weeks on end. It was then that my mother knew she would stay. In November the following year I was born.
    I had never fully belonged in that place, down there in Baden. Definitely not in England, even though for a few years I had fancied I might. Not here either, in Bootshaven. I had grown up and gone to school in southern Germany, and that was where my best friends were, my parents’ house, my trees, my quarry ponds, and now my job. Here in the north, however, were the land, house, and heart of my mother. Here I had been a child and here I had stopped being one. Here was where my cousin Rosmarie lay in the cemetery. Here was where my grandfather lay,