Free The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke, Jamie Bulloch Page B

him, whereas I rarely apologize straight away; sometimes I didn’t apologize at all, but sometimes I apologized when my mother said, go on, apologize, can’t you see how this pains me. Although I could see how my behaviour pained her, I spent months reading books in my room in the evenings and doing nothing. Sometimes I’d wonder what I’d done, and when I remembered I’d wonder what was so bad about it, but when I missed the funeral, I realized straight away what was bad about
that
. Even then I didn’t go, however much that meant betraying my family. In the past, on the other hand, I seldom knew what I’d done wrong. Sometimes I asked. I soon realized this question wasn’t a good idea, this question drove my father into a blinding rage, and then he certainly gave me what for; afterwards, when I was in my room, he used to come in and say, now you’ve got time to think about it. My father could always spot and condemn my wickedness, even when I was totally unaware of it; he showed me how wicked I was, making it very clear, just as he showed my brother what a wimp he was, making that perfectly clear, too. My brother also wondered what he might break if he jumped from the first-floor balcony, he said that evening; when I’m in a closed room, he said, I’m always drawn to the window, I can’t help but be drawn to windows in closed rooms, I always want to jump out of the window, I’m obsessed by this urge. My mother fetched another bottle of
Spätlese
and we carried on drinking. At this point she said, I’m to blame for it all; she always said that, she always took the blame completely, adding, I did it all wrong, and we had to comfort her and say, absolutely not, you didn’t do anything wrong, but she said, I’m a wreck; caught between you two and your father I’ve been ground down to exhaustion. And we were worried that she might sit down at the piano and play Schubert songs, which she was particularly wont to do when she thought she was to blame for everything, or after a domestic scene when my father would slam the door behind him and leave; then she was to blame because my father couldn’t bear her pedantry any longer, her stinginess. He’d drive off and not come back until the middle of the night, always after they’d tried to complete their tax return; Mum couldn’t do the tax return on her own because she needed bills and receipts, which my father didn’t keep because he was generous rather than a nit-picker; and my mother would calculate that we couldn’t afford this or that, but my father calculated that he couldn’t afford her nit-picking any more; my father didn’t scrimp on his generosity on business trips, not with himself, nor with others he met while away and who he’d automatically pay for; out of generosity he’d always pay the bill, and my mother would say, these bills are huge; my father always chucked away the receipts for these bills and never calculated his expenses; he refused to calculate expenses, he would have felt ashamed to do so with the firm. They were both irritated by these discarded expenses; my father would say to my mother, you’re so pernickety, and we’d hear them argue, which was rare in our house, because my mother loved harmony and hated arguing; usually she’d give in, so we’d only hear our parents arguing loudly when they filled in the tax return, and also when my father bought Japanese shares. The Japanese firms had a tendency to file for bankruptcy the instant my father put all his money into the shares; my mother took against Japanese shares, she was prejudiced against them since the first bankruptcy; but as soon as another financial adviser visited us and started talking up Japanese shares, my father would offer him
Spätlese
, and after a few bottles of
Spätlese
he’d put all our money into Japanese shares once more. On several occasions all our money was lost from one day to the next and practically overnight, although this didn’t stop my father,