The Mussel Feast (4 page)

We suddenly felt utterly helpless and awkward and didn’t know what to do. My mother stood up; we’re sitting here in the dark, she said, switching the light on. I can’t see those revolting things any more, she said, instead of her usual, I don’t care for them much; I can’t see those revolting things any more, and they did look disgusting, the mussels, they gleam when they’re freshly cooked, but now they’d dried up and were all wrinkly. They also seemed darker; yellow with green edging and the shells wide open offered an unpleasant sight. I’m feeling bilious, my mother said, and this made complete sense to me even though I didn’t know exactly what bilious meant; my mother knew, she was forever suffering from bilious complaints. And we glared at the mussels until my mother fetched from the fridge the wine meant for that evening’s celebration. It was a
Spätlese,
a special one; we always drank
Spätlese
on special occasions, and on really special occasions we drank sweet ice wine. The more a wine tastes of liqueur the better quality it is, and this
Spätlese
was bound to be very expensive and high quality, in fact we ought not to have been drinking it before my father arrived home, but we couldn’t spend the whole evening staring at the vile mussels, with my mother feeling bilious. She opened the wine and we felt terribly insubordinate. We sat around the dead mussels as if part of some conspiracy and drank father’s second-best wine without him, gradually realizing that the mood had been spoiled for all of us; my brother said, this sticky stuff, is this what he considers to be high quality. We couldn’t help laughing at my brother’s grim expression, and he and I drank as quickly as our mother, only she gets tipsy more quickly; our helplessness and anxiety faded away, and at that point we were fairly sure that he’d had a car accident because he still hadn’t come home. As we drank the
Spätlese
our mood became ever more peculiar; we normally drank tea and milk in the evenings, only my father drank beer and sometimes cognac. He always drank cognac while drawing his logical conclusions, a fact we discovered by chance that evening when my brother said, as he fetched the glasses, I loathe that wall unit in the living room, he always starts by pouring himself a cognac from the bar in the wall unit, and then he gets going. He behaved in exactly the same way with me; he’d always go to the bar – the name he gave to the collection of bottles in the middle of the wall unit – and pour himself a cognac before he started asking questions and drawing logical conclusions. My brother couldn’t have known that he did the same with me, and I couldn’t have known that he did the same with my brother, as he always locked the living-room door and put the key in his pocket; nor could my mother have known, for she was in the hall the whole time. Mum couldn’t stand the wall unit, either, in her case because it was new-old German style, and her taste was altogether different, not so solid or weighty, but my father didn’t allow them to buy cheap furniture any more. My mother also found the wall unit too dark, she would have preferred it to be a little lighter, a little more friendly-looking, she said, but of course she never mentioned this to my father. He was extremely assured in his taste; he didn’t like his taste being questioned. I couldn’t bear the wall unit, as I told them that evening, due to my head having been smashed against it on a number of occasions; the handles are positively lethal, I said. The drawer handles were made of turned oak, and protruded dangerously, my mother often banged her knee on them while cleaning; the keys in the doors were no better, brass; I said that the handles and keys on this new-old classical German wall unit were positively lethal, whether they were turned wood or brass. But the handles and keys are nothing, I added without a pause, compared to the panes of bullseye glass, because you spend the entire time trying to avoid going through the bullseye glass; what would have happened if one of us had gone through a pane of glass and broken it doesn’t bear thinking about. My brother agreed with me; he, too, found the bullseye glass far worse, more treacherous than the turned-oak handles and brass keys, and he also said that, quite apart from the fact that they’re lethal, wall units have no function; I then reminded him of the bar, which does have a function, and my mother reminded my brother and me of the stamp collection, and then, of course, he had to concede that wall units do have a function, ours was full of the stamps that my father had collected for my brother and me, as an investment for the future. There were a number of stamp albums, which on their own you wouldn’t have needed an entire wall unit for, but stamps used to arrive in the post roughly every month, always packed up in little packets; my father aimed for completeness, a stamp collection only makes sense and has any value if it’s complete, he said. The packets would arrive in the morning when nobody was at home, and had to be paid for on delivery; the invoice would sit in our postbox, indicating how much the stamps cost this time, the striving for completeness had its price, too, and in the afternoon one of us would have to go and collect them. This is ruining me again, your future, my mother said when she saw from the invoice the price she had to pay for our future, but her griping was in jest and she paid for the packet; and thus our stamp collection did become pretty much complete, and the packets started to fill our wall unit completely, which meant it did have a function. In our living room, packed up in little packets, were all the stamps which had been issued in West Germany and the GDR since 1965. Later my father signed up for another deal that went back to the war; our fortune was piled up in the wall unit in the form of a stamp collection which was nearing completion, an all-German and very valuable investment for the future, according to my father. Once my mother called it a rather expensive pleasure, this investment for the future, and my father was stunned by her lack of understanding and proceeded to explain to her the increase in value. She didn’t want to know; she said, you may well be right, but they’re already quite dear today, these all-German stamps, and then he said, that’s what investment means and it will pay back; scrimping on investments makes no sense at all, it’s obvious you come from a village where the future is stuffed into a stocking, you’ll never be rid of your penny-pinching for as long as you live; my father thought that scrimping on investments was the height of provincialism, and sometimes my mother would reply that her grandmother used to put her money in washing baskets under the bed during the currency crisis and inflation. Then she asked, do you actually know how much they cost, but my father wasn’t interested in what they cost because he was at the office when the packets arrived and had to be redeemed at the post office; he laughed, saying, only a fraction of what they’ll bring and be worth later on, surely you don’t want to scrimp on your children’s future, and of course she didn’t want that; besides, the stamps gave our wall unit a function. My father also ordered all the accessories for the stamps, the tweezers and magnifying glasses and all those instruments needed to sort out stamps; they sat in his desk, and he tried to teach us how to organize stamps in stamp albums, the system and technique; he also ordered the catalogue each year, and we were meant to sort the stamps according to the catalogue, but we were so stupid with the very first stamp, so utterly gormless, that he had to conclude, you’ve got no sense of the value of a stamp collection, anybody who’s so gormless with the first stamp cannot be helped, clumsiness and sloppiness are the enemies of stamp collecting; and he showed us again, but we weren’t able to make any sense of either the vast quantities of packets or the catalogue. Then I drove my father up the wall by saying that all stamps look pretty much the same, don’t you think, because there were so many of them and there’s a big difference between sorting ten stamps or several years’ worth; he was, he said, a passionate stamp collector, and his dream had always been to have an all-German stamp collection, it pained him to see us sabotage this dream with our gormlessness, and to see our lack of thoroughness and patience in helping him achieve his dream of all-German completeness, which after all was an investment for our future. My father couldn’t spend his evenings and weekends organizing all-German stamps into these albums for our future; this was our task, a task which from the outset we’d approached, not with thoroughness and patience, but with clumsiness and sloppiness, and that’s why he couldn’t trust us with such an expensive and valuable stamp collection, even though it was meant for us. My father left it until a later date when we’d be able to behave responsibly with our stamp collection and future; the sole result of this was that our wall unit became full of tiny pay-on-delivery packets which my grumbling mother or one of us had to redeem at the post office every month, only to stuff them into one of the drawers afterwards. The shelves of our wall unit were full, too, because my father, who had a keen enthusiasm for completeness, possessed every single issue of
Der Spiegel,
storing them on the shelves of the wall unit, every edition since the currency reform. And to celebrate its anniversary,
Der Spiegel
offered its entire back catalogue for sale, so my father bought every edition, because
Der Spiegel
has been German history since 1948. In the same vein, his first task after our flight to the West was to buy the entire Ziegler, a twenty-volume encyclopaedia of history, on credit. After we arrived in the West a new view of history seemed due and sorely needed; my father received his view of history in twenty volumes and on credit from Herr Ziegler; there was a lot we knew nothing about over there, he said, filling the gaps seamlessly with Ziegler. When my father embarked on something it would be as good as finished, and so the wall unit became full, the unit we hated not just because the complete history threatened us from its lofty shelves; if there was something we didn’t know and we asked about and wanted an explanation for, my father would leap up, grab the Ziegler and leaf through it. He’d read the article to himself first, look up references in other volumes – sometimes there’d be three or four volumes open by the end – and my father would painstakingly research whatever we wanted to know in the Ziegler while we became restless. We didn’t know what to do in the living room, and our homework never got done by staring at my father as he researched our questions. Then he’d give us a detailed historical explanation because we weren’t very well educated historically in our schools, my father said, we were taught a false and superficial view of history, an express education, not thorough and complete, starting at the very beginning, as they did over there, the only problem being that what they taught over there was false, unfortunately, which was one of the reasons for getting out. My father didn’t read to us only from the Ziegler, but that’s what he mainly consulted to expand our poor historical knowledge; he’d read us several pages until he came to our question, sometimes not even getting that far as he had to read a lot of pages, while we were unable to understand or remember everything because there was no breadth or depth to what we learned at school, it was only bullet points and surface knowledge, i.e. superficial knowledge; all we learned was how to take short cuts and regurgitate. My father realized this as soon as he saw the way we were looking at him as he was reading us the Ziegler; our school system and our mother taught us to take short cuts and regurgitate, so instead of listening with interest to what he was reading out in response to our question, we looked at him impatiently, understanding nothing; all we wanted was a date or a short explanation for our homework, something we could learn by heart and use, not the complete history from the very beginning. We never acquired this thorough Ziegler knowledge, nor were we curious or eager about what the encyclopaedia revealed as we’d been systematically brought up to take short cuts, rather than systematically learning how to think, and that’s what my father wanted to teach us when he looked up our questions in the Ziegler. He was determined to fill our gaps, but obviously we didn’t want them filled, all we wanted was a short answer. But there aren’t and cannot be short answers, and if I could get by at school with my bullet-point, surface knowledge, this was because nowadays, my father said, they gave Ones to us pupils who took the easy route and regurgitated, rather than Fours, which we would have received in the past, when high marks depended on other factors. My father said, in my day your One would have been a Four at most, maybe not even that, and deep down my father thought that even my Ones weren’t good enough. What we had to do to get a Three, he said, that would be off the scale these days; my father was an exceptionally good pupil, and my brother often didn’t dare come home with his school reports, and to me my father said, well, it looks all right, but these grades are worthless nowadays, and then he’d fetch his reports from the desk and compare them, and if mine was better than his he’d be especially quick to notice the drop in standards, identifying all the things he knew and could do at my age. I could do practically none of those or only very few, because I played piano and read books, and these were of very little value compared to logarithms. Playing piano and reading books won’t get an engine started, my father pointed out; he also said, it’s useless if you don’t understand the difference between necessary and good enough. Unfortunately he was right there. I didn’t understand the difference, even though it was very important in our family, as important as it was in logic, for a One was necessary in order to avoid spoiling my father’s mood, but it wasn’t good enough, and so I generally achieved the standard which was necessary, but not one which was good enough; my brother, on the other hand, failed even to achieve what was necessary. Although it was necessary to come home with Ones, in reality these Ones were worthless – they were phoney Ones – since they’d been given to bullet-point and surface knowledge, and this angered my father, who refused to put up with the lack of education, the express education, in his family, thus the necessary standard was never good enough. In fact I don’t ever remember a standard being good enough; it was in the nature of all necessary standards that they weren’t good enough, so I played the piano and read books, wasting my intelligence, much to my father’s chagrin. Back then, you see, it was assumed that I’d follow in his footsteps and study science; I wouldn’t have been able to study piano, as I’d dearly wanted to for years. My father didn’t like me playing the piano; stop that tinkling this minute, he’d often say when he came home tired and found me still at the piano, even though he was adamant that my brother and I should play at least one instrument and practise this instrument for an hour a day, and while my brother didn’t do an hour’s practice, I’d occasionally play for more than an hour and was caught practising by my father in the evening. Such excessive practising aroused his anger and spoiled his mood; in my defence I argued that you couldn’t become a pianist with just an hour’s practice a day, but my father had an allergic reaction to my playing, it turned his stomach; in a flash I had to jump off the stool, gather my music and shut the piano lid – my father even became allergic to the traces of my practising – and eventually I stopped, after which I spent all day and all night reading. I often fell asleep in front of the TV and had to be carried to bed, where I’d wake again and start reading the moment the door was closed. I was permanently pale from staying up all night. The child doesn’t look healthy, my father said; that comes from reading. I secretly borrowed books from our municipal library and hid them, always scared that my father might find them; in a proper family, my father said, there’s no need for secrets, and each one of us was terrified of being caught committing a secret crime. Only now were we able to cast off our fears and worries, because it was getting later and later, and we had drunk a bottle of