Free The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch

of the window. I didn’t really understand what there was to disapprove of; I wanted my grandmother to teach me how to stare out of the window for hours, and I liked going to her place; when I was at my grandmother’s we did nothing at all. In our house doing nothing didn’t exist; it was absolutely imperative that everybody was doing something, all the time; when I went to cafés later on, I merely carried on in secret with what I’d picked up from my other grandmother : doing nothing. I never thought my grandmother was a simple woman; I thought she was an extraordinary woman, because she was capable of doing nothing, whereas everybody else was always doing something; your mother is an extraordinary woman, I’d often say to my father; he felt flattered, and then said, look at me, nothing comes from nothing. Clearly, he didn’t understand what I meant. In any case, he resented her for her menial life and for the fact that she couldn’t keep her hands still as a consequence of those years when she’d had to graft so that her son could reach the top. He was very attached to her, however, and was so distraught when she died that my mother thought he’d gone crazy with pain; he mourned his mother and tore his hair out; he holed up in the bedroom, locking himself in, and refused to come out for days. When he did come out he swore that his mother would have the loveliest grave in the whole village; he made all the arrangements for this lovely grave, which wasn’t easy because we were in the West and the village in the East. But he managed to arrange for the most splendid grave in the whole village; he invited the entire village to the funeral, everybody who was anybody, and reserved the restaurant in the town hall for a meal that nobody was going to forget in a hurry. He made a precise note of who came to the funeral and who didn’t, and thank God almost everybody came; there were more than a hundred people at his mother’s funeral, more than had ever known or greeted her, and the grave lies in a lovely spot, not too close to the perimeter, under trees, not in the part of the cemetery for poor people; it’s the only grave with a gold-leaf inscription – my father ordered gold leaf specially from the West because there was no gold leaf over there. He could not rest until his mother’s grave was the only one with gold leaf, and only then did he find peace – apart from with me. I didn’t come to the funeral; he never forgave me for not coming, you of all people, he reproached me, you of all people, and he reproached me for being stubborn and cold-hearted, he had no sympathy; in our family I was always known as the stubborn and cold-hearted one, and my stubbornness and cold-heartedness, which developed from my unappealing nature, were in evidence yet again when I refused to go to my grandmother’s funeral, to a place I’d always enjoyed going and where I felt happy. My father never forgave me for this act of spite and irreverence, as he called it. But he couldn’t force me, because I’d come of age; my grandmother died at the very moment when I came of age, just a few days afterwards; and when I came of age my stubbornness and cold-heartedness really showed, my father said, but unlike in the past, before I’d come of age, now there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t beat the stuffing out of me; I’ll beat the stuffing out of you, he’d have said in the past, I’ll give you what for, and I really would have been given what for if he’d beaten the stuffing out of me. My mother would have stood with my brother in the hall by the living-room door, while my father locked the door behind him and fetched a cognac from the bar in the wall unit, the key to the living-room door in his trouser pocket as ever, and my father would have tried to identify the reasons for my stubbornness; could you explain it to me, he’d have asked, and I wouldn’t have been able to, because I wasn’t able to explain anything if my