Forbidden Fruit and Forgotten Nobles

Somewhere in the afterlife, a forgotten Baltic German nobleman is watching me stuff his apples into my bra, and I imagine he’s just as confused about this situation as I am. His only legacy – a crumbling manor house and an army of escaped apple trees – has turned me into a fruit-hoarding squirrel person, which I doubt was part of his grand seventeenth-century vision for the peninsula, presuming he existed at all.

I noticed the apple trees early in the season, growing on the road side and in the vacant lots and clinging to the mounds around the long-abandoned military installations. Estonia is a foraging nation, so I was deeply suspicious that the apples were still here, hanging from the boughs and glistening in the autumn sunshine. It was odd, I thought, that the people of Paldiski were not picking these apples as they ripened on the trees.

“The wild apples? They aren’t edible.” These were not real apple trees, but wild, grown from seed. But if I wanted apples, I should just say! Everyone had some to share.

Each day on my walk, I noticed more apple trees. They were scattered all over the peninsula, as if someone had spilled a bag of seed from up high.

When I was little, walking through forgotten villages with my grandfather, he would always reach up and grab an apple if we passed an apple tree. He would eat the whole fruit, core and all, scoffing at his granddaughter’s fear that an apple tree might sprout in his stomach and burst up through his throat.

I never saw him throw away an apple uneaten. I have never heard of a poisonous apple, with the obvious exception of the one that Snow White bit into before falling into a faint, and that is documented as not the apple’s fault.

Autumn swept across the peninsula, the golden trees broken up by the apples sporting red and green fruits tempting enough to belong in paradise. They were inedible, I reminded myself.

Then I saw an apple core lying in the road. My grandfather would not be impressed, I thought. Quickly followed by, at least one person is eating these apples.

The tree was full of fruit. I couldn’t see any sign of pests or even birds. I reached for a small green apple and it fell into my hand. Feeling a bit like Snow White myself, I bit into it. The flesh was crisp and tart. A drip of apple juice ran over my hand. I finished it, discarding the core (sorry Opa) and reached for another. I walked home with apples in both hands, ready for baking.

The next day I returned for more but was lured away by a nearby tree of red-cheeked apples. They were as sweet and crisp as the most expensive market apples. Another tree beckoned with golden apples: a little more tart, a little less crisp. I filled my pockets with all three types.

It became a challenge to collect the perfect blend of tart and sweet for an apple crumble.

On the other side of the peninsula stand the ruins of a 17th century manor house. I concluded that the scattered trees must be the remnants of the manor orchards. But the nobleman who had built and lived in the first manor house had disappeared from history, leaving no legacy other than the crumbling stone ruins and some apple trees. A lot of apple trees.

I started going out with a backpack.

Everywhere I looked, more trees beckoned, their boughs sagging under the weight of ripe apples that no one had picked yet. I reached to take one low-hanging apple–just to eat along the way–and three fell from the branch. My backpack and pockets were already full, so I stuffed them down the front of my jacket, held in place by my cleavage.

It is good to lean into your obsessions, I thought. It makes for good stories. Somehow, this justified me going out two or three times a week to collect apples. If I used all available space, I could carry five or six kilos per trip.

I made apple crumble, apple sauce, apple jelly and apple butter. I made spiced apple syrups by the gallon. I blew the dust from Cliff’s juicer and juiced apples until it overheated. I drank my fill and then added yeast and sugar to the rest in hopes of sparkling cider.

I proudly told my physiotherapist that I was walking almost every day. When I noted a small muscle in my back that had been bothering me, she looked surprised. “You haven’t been carrying anything heavy, have you? Like a backpack?”

Well, yes, I was taking a backpack with me on my walks.

She furrowed her brow. “But that’s not so heavy, is it?”

I opted not to explain.

The following day, I did the stretches she had recommended and then put the backpack on and head back across the peninsula.

I started categorizing the trees like a deranged wine critic. I fancied myself an apple connoisseur, choosing exactly the right mix of apples for each recipe, convinced that the variety of apples would somehow shine through all the sugar and simmering.

Apples are “extreme heterozygotes”, which means that the seedlings do not resemble their parents or even each other. Each apple tree grown from seed is genetically distinct; orchards of a specific type of apple are grafted, not planted. New apple varieties often come by chance from seedlings because you just never know what you are going to get.

So I wasn’t imagining things: every tree’s apples really did taste different, completely distinct from any other unless someone had grafted their tree off of one of mine. The Pakri peninsula is around forty square kilometres squared and I was claiming every apple tree for myself.

I had my favourites, of course: sweet red apples with skins so dark that they dyed the flesh inside, blushing peach apples with a perfect blend of sweet and tart, hard green apples that made the mouth pucker, softer yellow apples that held the most juice. Still, each time my bag was full, I would find another tree and be convinced that these apples were absolutely perfect and exactly the apple I needed to add to my mix.

I tried to sketch a map of my favourite trees but then I had to go out again, visiting every tree to verify locations and taste each of their apples one more time.

Sometimes a local resident would stop and watch me with surprise or concern in their eyes but I reassured myself that it was always someone different. No one knew how many apples I was taking home to chop up and cook in the dark evenings.

I found myself explaining to an Estonian friend, with the fevered intensity of a prepper, why I needed to collect all of the different types of apples, while she stared at me with the kind of concern usually reserved for people who claim that aliens are sending them messages through the television.

“You need apples? I can give you apples.”

“No,” I told her. “I need to find the right apples.”

She shook her head. “Whatever, if you need apples, we have plenty.”

Fruit flies roamed my kitchen, threatening a coup. My terrace steps were covered in apples and still I got more.

The trees started to shed their leaves. To get to the remaining apples, I would need a ladder. Then a muddy grass trail led me to six new trees, all thick with green, red and yellow fruit. Again I filled every available space, eager to collect them all.

I blamed the Baltic German noble for my descent into apple-hoarding madness, though I was beginning to suspect that I made him up. The manor house and its nobles definitely existed but the current ruins probably date from a 19th-century reconstruction. Worse, I could find no evidence of the now-famous-in-my-mind sprawling orchards, other than a passing reference to an orchard (and greenhouse growing grapes) leased along the manor in 1919, after Estonia declared independence for the first time.

Garden trees became popular in the late 18th century, with sweeter and larger fruit completely displacing the wild apples that had grown all over mainland Estonia. Apple farming peaked after independence and by 1939, Estonian boasted over two million apple trees.

During the second world war and the Soviet occupation, the manor grounds became the Leetse II Missile Base and Paldiski was sealed off by the military to protect the secret nuclear submarine training center. The farmlands covering the peninsula became overgrown. The manor house caught fire, leaving only the foundation walls.

My orchard escapees were much more likely the remnants of the garden trees planted after the first world war, feral refugees from ordinary farmers’ gardens. This didn’t make them any less delicious, or me any less obsessed. If anything, it made them even more desireable: these weren’t noble apples at all, but survivors, carrying on without anyone’s permission or attention until they seduced an immigrant into filling her bra with their fruit.

The receptionist at my building tapped at her phone as I slunk in, weighted down by another batch of apples. She was the only one who might have noticed that I had collected a hundred kilos of apples over the last weeks of summer, but she rarely did more than glance up to confirm that I did not want anything for her.

Late autumn storms blew across the peninsula. The trees lost their leaves. The scrabby grass at their feet was covered with mouldering apples. I sped up my efforts, spending every clear day searching for trees protected from the Baltic winds. In the forest, I found piles of rotting apples, dumped just out of sight of the roads. I was the only one still longing for more.

My shelf of apple products filled up, became two shelves, expanded to a cupboard. I live alone and am not even that fond of apples. I had enough apple preserves to survive the zombie apocalypse and a growing suspicion that I was acting unhinged.

What if I ran out of apples before I perfected my Chicken Normandy? How could I get through the winter with only one bottle of my latest creation, Apple Lemon Syrup with Star Anise?

By late October, it was clear that my scrumping days were over; it was a minor miracle that the apples had lasted this long. The night temperatures dropped to below freezing.

The wind blew harder and the bare trees creaked and swayed. Still, I stamped through the damp grass and hiked through a maze of brambles to get to a tree with a few red fruit still dangling. I tried one: very sweet with a slight tinge of bitterness, perfect for chili jelly. As I surveyed the dozen apples left on this tree, I heard a whirring sound. A vee of large white birds flew low overhead, close enough that I could hear their wing beats.

I stood in the cold sunshine for a moment, thinking how is this my life?

And then I went back to filling my backpack.