The Taste of Apple Seeds Read Online Free PDF Page A

The floor was made up of millions of tiny black and white square stones. I hadn’t learned the word “terrazzo” until much later. As a child I could stare for hours at this stone pattern. At some point, when it started to swim before my eyes, secret symbols would suddenly appear on the kitchen floor. But they always vanished before I could decipher them.
    There were three doors in the kitchen. I had entered from the hallway; another, bolted door led down to the cellar. The third door went out into the barn.
    The barn was neither inside nor outside. Once a cowshed, it had a tamped-earth floor bordered by wide gutters. Three steps led down to it from the kitchen and at the bottom were the bins and a woodpile stacked up against the roughcast walls. If you went straight through the barn you came to another door, a green wooden door, and this really did lead outside, into the orchard. But if you turned right immediately, as I did now, you came to the utility rooms. The first door I opened was the one to the laundry, which had once housed a privy; now there were just two huge freezers. Both stood empty, their doors open, the plugs on the floor beside them.
    From here a narrow staircase led up to the attic, from which my grandfather used to try to scare us. Behind the laundry was a room with an open fireplace. It used to be the anteroom to the conservatory, full of planters and jardinieres, watering cans and folding chairs. It had a light-colored stone floor and fairly new floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors that led out onto the terrace. This had the same flagstones as inside. The branches of the weeping willow brushed against the flags and obscured the view to the exterior steps and the front door.
    I sat on the sofa beside the black fireplace and gazed out. There was no longer any sign of the conservatory; it had been an elegant construction that must have clashed with the solid brick house. Just glass and a steel frame. Aunt Harriet had had it dismantled thirteen years earlier. After Rosmarie’s accident. The flagstones, which were actually too delicate for the outside, reminded me of the glass structure.
    I suddenly realized that I didn’t want it, this house. It had stopped being a house a long time ago; it was now only a memory, just like the conservatory that didn’t exist anymore. When I got up to push open the sliding doors I felt how clammy my hands were. Outside it smelled of moss and shadows. I pushed the doors closed again. The burned-out fireplace radiated the cold. I would tell Mira’s brother that I didn’t want my inheritance. But right now I had to get out of here, get out and go to the lock by the river. I dashed back into the barn and searched through the clutter for a bicycle that might work. All the newer ones were in bad shape, but Granddad’s very old, gearless black bike just needed the tires pumping up.
    I couldn’t leave without taking a long and convoluted tour of the house, to bolt some doors from the inside, then going out through other doors that had to be locked from the outside, and so I finally ended up in the garden. For quite a long time Bertha had retained the ability to find her way around the house. At the point when she wasn’t able to go to the mill without getting lost she could still get straight from the laundry to the bathroom, even if one or another door on the way was locked on the other side. Over the decades she had so fused with the house that, had they performed an autopsy on her, I’m sure by looking at the twists and turns in her brain or the network of her veins they would have been able to produce a route map of the house. With the kitchen at its heart.
    I had put the food from the petrol station into a basket that I found on top of a kitchen cupboard. The handle was broken, so I fastened it to the pannier rack and wheeled the bike out of the barn through the door that led into the garden. Everyone called this the kitchen door, even though it didn’t lead out of