The Mussel Feast Read Online Free PDF

The fact that my brother was good at volleyball didn’t help one jot – all the training, he made a real effort – the disappointment was simply too great for my father. He couldn’t stand wimpishness, the wimpishness of my brother and mother, flowery souls, he called them. My father was sporty and harboured sporting ideals, competitive ones; he would have counted competitiveness among his sporting ideals. And luckily I was sporty and my father assumed that I harboured sporting ideals and was competitive, too, which wasn’t true, but he didn’t realize this at first, so at least I didn’t ruin his life by being unsporty. Instead I ruined it with my bandy legs. I inherited them from him; they’re not bad on a man or a footballer, but on a girl they look absolutely dreadful; besides, I had spots. I was, however, always good at school; you inherited your ambition from me, my father said, you’ll be successful one day, please do me a favour and make something of yourself; in fact I was very ambitious and always received Ones for my homework and in my school reports. I didn’t want to be like my brother, who utterly ruined my father’s life with his Fours; my father simply couldn’t tolerate being disgraced by his own flesh and blood. My brother never managed to lie; I could, even though I never got any Fours; I did, however, earn extra cash on the sly by tutoring younger children – we had very little pocket money – and with my extra cash I went to the cinema on the sly and spent entire days in cafés; I was good at school so I could hide the fact that I was earning cash and spending it in cafés, not to mention cinemas. My father himself loved going to the cinema when he was young; he really loved going to the cinema because at home we children just screamed all day long, me more than my brother, and then when he studied in Berlin, he loved going too. He utterly detested the small provincial town where we first lived, it wasn’t cosmopolitan enough for him and the cinema offered the only escape. I liked going to the cinema, too, but I preferred not to say it out loud, instead I said that we had games in period thirteen, which was a lie. There was no period thirteen, school was long finished for the day when I came back late, but nobody noticed. I spent days tutoring younger children, sitting in cinemas and cafés, smoking cigarettes and reading books, and didn’t go home until after period thirteen, which didn’t exist. At any rate, it was easier for me to lie than my brother; our test results at school had to be signed by a parent, and my mother always said that our father should sign them; in the evening she would tell my father, and my brother couldn’t escape. Mum felt bad afterwards when my brother ran from the living room, sobbing and with a bloody nose, and she sobbed the whole time as she heard my father yelling in the living room. Basically she felt bad about having to disappoint my father and about my brother’s bloody nose, which was a consequence of this disappointment. My father reproached her, too; after all, he couldn’t keep an eye on everything; of course a mother is to blame if her son is so bone idle that he only manages Fours; his lack of intelligence can’t be down to me, my father said, you see my father’s an intelligent man, so the failure couldn’t be down to him. But perhaps, my father said, the reason he’s stupid and idle may have something to do with the fact that my mother was not regarded as particularly intelligent in the family; maybe this was the reason I, at least, was regarded as intelligent, but that was cold comfort to him, because a man wants to be proud of his son, doesn’t he. In a proper family, which my father longed for us to be, the father is proud of his son, and my brother ought to have made more of an effort, but he didn’t; I can do what I like, it won’t work, my brother always said. Anyhow, it wasn’t easy to impress our father, because he was very