The Mussel Feast (5 page)

Spätlese
and all three of us were tiddly. A mere residue of anxiety prevented us from looking at the clock. And we didn’t look at the clock until later; before then we said, he must have been in an accident, but an accident can be any number of things, there are accidents and then there are accidents, we said; at this stage we’d ruled out the possibility of a breakdown, because he would have called, it was late after all. After an accident, you go to hospital at least, my brother said, and I said, at least. My mother changed the subject, saying, well, wouldn’t it be nice for once to have a Sunday without that Verdi racket, eh; in our house, you see, a Verdi record – at least one – was played every Sunday morning, and my father would whistle along to it; we had to be as quiet as church mice, as quiet as during the sports programme, and we had to stay in the living room and listen to my father whistling along to
Rigoletto
or
Aida
while Mum was cooking the roast, and this lasted until lunchtime; my mother couldn’t stand this endless Verdi, as she called it, this substitute for music, she said, this banal growling of the basses. She would close the kitchen door, refusing to come out again until Verdi was finished in the living room, then she’d open the window, albeit inconspicuously, to let out what remained of
Il Trovatore
; after all, my father always said with great satisfaction, Verdi’s the only music worth listening to, while my mother tried desperately to avoid the repulsive ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’. For many years the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ tormented my mother, Verdi in general tormented her, and the torment I suffered was especially cruel, because my father whistled along to it while the record was playing and we weren’t ever allowed to leave the living room. On rare occasions we struck lucky and my father would play Mozart, but only
The Magic Flute
, an opera he was able to whistle in its entirety from start to finish without stopping, which gave him a huge appetite for the Sunday roast. My mother couldn’t bear Verdi or Sunday roasts, as all week long she had to work and cook and clean and bring up her children; she didn’t enjoy spending her Sunday mornings in the kitchen, she said, but my father was never away on Sundays, his business trips lasted from Monday to Friday, so Mum was never once spared Verdi, that musical vermin plaguing our living room, as she put it several times that evening when already quite tiddly, that musical vermin plaguing our living room. And I said, at least you’re out of the room, you can hardly hear it, but she said, if that’s the choice – Verdi or roast veal – then no thank you, protesting for the very first time in her life. Besides, she pointed out, although Verdi may have been necessary to ensure a happy Sunday, he certainly wasn’t good enough; we thought about her bold statement for a while and among all the many requirements necessary to ensure a happy Sunday, we couldn’t find a single one which was good enough. We felt the difference between necessary and good enough was as fuzzy as the beauty question; none of us could remember a single Sunday which was even halfway good enough. On Sundays in particular my father loved to expound his notions about a proper family and he began his expounding at breakfast, saying, today we’re going to take a drive to here or there; sometimes my brother whined, not again, but then his Sunday would come to a very abrupt end; for my mother it sometimes came to an end at lunch, if she had let the roast dry out – once she even let it burn; on that occasion, however, my father put mercy before justice – but quite often the roast was dry, and then, my father said, his generosity dried up, too. Especially when it was the Christmas goose, then his generosity dried up completely; it was a Hungarian one, that Christmas goose, which my mother had bought cheaply, and because it was cheap it couldn’t have been anything other than dry. My father repeatedly tried to explain to my mother that, unlike the Hungarian ones, Polish Christmas geese wouldn’t be dry. That didn’t make sense to my mother: after all, the Poles were a poor people, so how come their geese wouldn’t be dry and tough. My mother didn’t really understand how currency exchange worked, she fancied a Polish goose would be leaner than a Hungarian one, because she didn’t think the Hungarians looked as hungry; but the cheaply bought Hungarian Christmas goose failed to oblige her by being a fat and meaty goose; on the contrary, it was pathetically dry, bony and tough; that’s where the generosity dried up, and with this Hungarian carcass my mother’s Christmas was over, just as her Sundays frequently came to an end at lunchtime when she served a dry roast. Occasionally we made it through the afternoon, but generally not much beyond, for one of my father’s notions about a proper family dictated that all of us should do something together; mostly we would take a drive somewhere in the car and then go for a walk together, because my father had spent the whole week in the office and was dying for some fresh air at the weekend; but we always had to drive far to find the right fresh air, and when we finally reached our destination, the car park was often full. And my father spent the journey whistling
Rigoletto
and smoking, and that made me feel sick; I always asked him to stop the car, and sometimes he did stop so I could get out and throw up; but he couldn’t stop just anywhere, and I still had to be sick, which meant of course that my Sunday was over. It was also over when I said I felt sick because of the smoke and his fast driving; of course I didn’t say that
Rigoletto
made me feel sick, too, it was enough to have mentioned the smoke and his fast driving. I only pointed it out once and never again; in any case, by the time we started looking for a parking space Sunday was definitively over, because my mother said that there was also fresh air to be had behind our house, plenty of fresh air, and sometimes we said that behind our house the other children were playing Star Trek; we hardly ever played Star Trek with the other children, because we had to go together as a family to find fresh air in places with full car parks, while behind our house there was not only plenty of car-parking space, but also plenty of fresh air. My father became furious; we had no sense of spending time together as a family, and my mother swiftly demonstrated her good sense by admiring the scenery; behind our house the scenery wasn’t as beautiful, besides, we looked at our back garden every day, while my father had the brilliant idea of driving to this beautiful spot with plenty of fresh air. On Sundays my mother switched to wifey mode more than ever, and we found her intolerable, but we didn’t dare mention Star Trek again; in fact, on one Sunday afternoon, purely by chance we managed to slip outside and tried to play Star Trek with the other children, but the other children didn’t want to play Star Trek with us. We’d never played Star Trek with them before, and if you’ve never played Star Trek you can’t just come along and start playing it when the others are in the middle of their game; my father said that those weren’t proper families, they had no sense of family life, only indifference, and so their children play on the street. I wished at once that we had a little more indifference in our family, at least enough to allow us to go to our rooms while my father whistled
Rigoletto
; that was more togetherness than I found appropriate, and anyway when we went out in the afternoons to get some fresh air we generally strolled through the countryside separately, because Sunday was already over, and I thought we could just as easily have stayed at home. My father talked to my mother about his week at the office, whereas my mother didn’t talk to my father about her week at school, because the office was important and worth more than school; sometimes they planned our holidays and decided that we’d go to the sea next year, to Italy, Yugoslavia, Spain or Turkey; over time the distance from home increased. My mother loved the mountains, too, and said, Austria is closer and only half the price; she went on and on about the mountain lakes she’d heard about, and flower meadows appeared before her eyes; she pictured herself carrying armfuls of flowers into a wooden hut, for my mother often longed for village life; and the holiday resorts we always went to in the south looked very un-village-like, nor were there any flower meadows, but instead we had meals in huge dining halls. Although my mother was pleased that she didn’t have to cook on holiday, she pointed out that she’d rather cook on holiday than lie in bed sleeplessly above the discotheque again, because in Yugoslavia our bedroom was situated directly above the discotheque, but my father said, if we go to Austria it might rain the entire holiday, and immediately my mother agreed that we should go to the south again, because my father really needed the sun on his holidays. Once, when we were in Turkey, the sun shone only periodically rather than uninterruptedly in the first week, and then we counted ourselves lucky that it shone uninterruptedly in the second week. My mother can’t take the sun; she instantly turns red in the sun, whereas my father after being burned goes pretty dark. My mother doesn’t like sunburn, she always said, I can’t imagine it’s healthy to suffer like that, but my father said, you have to get through it, without the sunburn you don’t go brown; he drizzled lemon juice over all our sore spots and we were never able to decide whether sunburn was worse with lemon juice or without. My mother said, forget the martyrdom, this is absolute purgatory, but my father said, it helps, and he laughed at us when we fussed; stop making such a fuss, he’d say, and, pain is relative; that, in fact, was true, because my father had hardly any sensitivity to the sun; it’s all about strength of character, he said, and my mother seemed not to have much strength of character, indeed she seemed rather weak. Her sensitive skin instantly turned red in the sun, and she spent her holiday in the shade, only because she was such a fusspot, whereas gritting our teeth in our attempts to impress our father, we went into the sun. It didn’t work because after the sunburn we turned nowhere near as brown as my father, but at least he couldn’t call us fusspots like my mother, who had holed up in the shade; it’s always so hot in the south, she moaned, so hot that you don’t feel like doing anything during the day. My mother would have loved a nap after lunch, that’s what they do here, she said, have a siesta, and get up again when it’s cooler; my father thought a nap a waste of holiday, they can enjoy the sun all year round, he said, we don’t come all this way south not to take advantage of the sun. And before booking the holidays, my father looked in the brochures and compared the average hours of sunshine per country and per year, and then worked out the probability of enjoying uninterrupted sunshine throughout our stay; that’s why he would never go to the mountains, where it can be overcast, and frankly a rainy holiday with my father would have been no fun, which is why on Sunday afternoons, when they were making holiday plans, they always decided to go south to the sea. And my mother secretly brought back a few twigs and grass stalks from our outings, sometimes daisies and bellflowers, too; when my father caught her he just shook his head at this ingrained nostalgia for the countryside, your incurable romanticism, he said; but the twigs and grasses and bunches of flowers rarely survived the journey home because of the traffic, and by the time we arrived home they’d dried out. We always got back in time for the sports programme, though, and it was usually better for my brother and me if our Sunday was already over, otherwise it would be over in dramatic fashion during the sports programme, for my brother and I were intractable in our failure to remember the rules of football or the names of the footballers; I could only remember Uwe Seeler, my brother wasn’t much better – he only knew Beckenbauer – and my father despaired; that borders on sabotage, he repeated again and again, and then usually one of us would stammer hopefully, Müller, and the other would stammer speculatively, Mayer; and if Müller or Mayer was not playing in that game then Sunday was definitively over. I remembered Uwe Seeler only because he was the one bald player and easy to spot; the others had hair and all looked the same on television, but my father was able to identify them accurately and he knew who was sitting on the subs bench, too, as well as having a detailed knowledge of the league table. Once, to oblige him, I asked, what’s a corner, when he shouted, corner, but he threw me out of the room; actually I was quite happy about this as I was in the middle of reading
Pole Poppenspäler
, and now I had some free time until supper; we didn’t play skat that day either, so I had even more time for
Pole Poppenspäler
. When my father was away on business I was allowed to read as much as I wanted, I was also allowed to practise the piano for longer than an hour, or less, even; I could practise the piano as and when I liked, which wasn’t the case with my father around, and this fact alone saddened me upon his return, and my mother was sad because my brother had to dash downstairs with the rubbish, including all the flowers and twigs and grasses, so that my father wouldn’t catch her wallowing in her ingrained nostalgia for the countryside. My brother had more secrets than ever, the entire basement where we kept the bikes was full of them, but when my father was away on business there were scarcely any secrets between us. Of course we didn’t do everything together as in a proper family, we only dealt with the shopping, washing, tidying and those sorts of things more or less together, the things my mother usually did on her own when my father was home, because he despised menial work, and my brother and I went to great pains to ensure that he didn’t despise us. Without my father around we often did the menial work together, it was quicker that way and we could talk to each other while doing the chores; for hours we told each other stories, either made up or not, or somewhere in between, which wasn’t usual in our family because there were important things and unimportant things, and my father said all the important things, while my mother blabbed to him about all the other important things, and the unimportant things were too unimportant to talk about and that’s why we seldom or never talked with my father at home. Now, too, we talked about this and that, as the three of us sat around the table and he didn’t come home; we also wondered why we put up with it, just as my father wondered; I’m not going to put up with that, he’d often say when his mood was spoiled, it’s sheer tyranny, if that’s what a proper family’s like then no thank you, all three of us now said, and we said it one right after the other, so that nobody could blab. Mum sometimes said, you’ve got to see the good sides, too, I mean there are so many good sides to him, and then she said, have a little sympathy for him; but that evening our sympathy vanished and stayed away and never came back. We said, still all three of us, and who’ll show us some sympathy; we sounded childish and angry, and we were angry at our mother, too, because our mother always said, just have a little sympathy for him; we did what we could, but that evening, as I said, our sympathy vanished; my brother said, I could do with the odd ounce of sympathy, too, but in our family sympathy didn’t come your way for nothing, you had to earn it first. Our father would have given us short shrift if we’d gone and asked him for some cheap sympathy, sympathy for nothing. He’d had to battle his way through life, he didn’t get by on the cheap; he’d never once been guilty of the shirking he ascribed to us, not for a single moment, he said, only when you had to battle through life did you see who had real character; endless sympathy is no good, you need to achieve to make an impression. But apparently we weren’t cut out for achievement and making an impression; remember all those years ago when you didn’t fancy doing that dive, my father said, that would have been one minor achievement at least. We liked going swimming, but we didn’t like diving, we liked swimming and going underwater; we liked going to the pool because my father’s colleagues and sometimes his boss went too, with their families, and then my father wasn’t able to shout at us and could only say, we’ll have words later, which is what he said that day, too, when my brother and I were supposed to dive. My brother was slightly braver than me, I used to be a real chicken when it came to diving; even the idea of diving head first from the starting block struck fear and terror in me, though I wasn’t so cowardly in other ways; I climbed the highest trees and was always known as the monkey in our family. I was brave when it came to climbing trees – I certainly wasn’t a coward – but my father would often tell the story of the father who says to his son standing on a wall, jump, come on, jump, I’ll catch you, and the son becomes scared and says, I’m not going to jump, but the father says, don’t be scared, I’ll catch you, and finally the son does jump, the father steps aside, the son falls and hits the ground, hurting himself badly, and sobs, why didn’t you catch me; the father laughs and says, trust no one, remember that, not even your own father. I was never able to laugh at this joke as my father wanted me to, it was a cruel joke, the laughter stuck in my throat, and unfortunately I couldn’t help thinking of this very joke whenever I was about to jump into the water. And I was never able to bring myself to jump into the water, especially not head first, even when my father was already in the water and said, but I’m here, that didn’t help, the fact that he was there; he couldn’t have caught me in the water, and I was certain I would drown. I’ve only dived head first once in my entire life, once and never again, but my father couldn’t cope with the humiliation of having cowardly children, who failed the courage test miserably, and so he said, if you dive from the three-metre board I’ll give you five marks. My brother climbed up to the three-metre board in a flash, but once there his courage deserted him, and he climbed back down again. My father turned ashen-faced from sheer disappointment – that was a bad sign – my brother started howling and my father said he’d even dived from the five-metre board, so my brother climbed back up, jumped finally and received the five marks after all; so, was it really that bad in the end, my father asked him; my brother was so proud that he replied, absolutely not, and I felt ashamed at being a coward so I climbed up, too, and dived in head first. It was terrible. My head and back just hurt, the pressure in my ears ached badly, too, because my ears are so useless and hurt even if I go under just two metres, and when I did that dive I must have gone three or four metres under; I thought I’d never get back to the surface. I was so overcome by earache – even as a child I had regular ear infections – I thought my ears were going to burst, and I could no longer tell what was above and what below, with the pain in my ears I completely lost my orientation underwater, and then all the air went out of me; I’m going to die, I thought, because I’m never going to get back up again. After an age I finally made it back to the surface. I was sick at the side of the pool due to the pain, and because the dive had been so terrible, and my father asked me the same question: was that really so bad; horrible, I said, really horrible, and my father said, do it again, you need to jump again straight away. But I didn’t, even though he said I had no strength of character. I didn’t want the five marks if it meant I had to dive again; my father didn’t want to pay me the five marks for the dive itself, rather – as I thought at the time – he wanted to pay me for having enjoyed it, or for me saying that I’d enjoyed it; I said I’d rather have no strength of character than jump again and say I enjoyed it, when in fact it’s horrible.