Birgit Vanderbeke: The Mussel Feast

It was neither a sign nor a coincidence that we were going to have mussels that evening. Yes, it was slightly unusual, and afterwards we sometimes spoke of the mussels as a sign, but they definitely weren’t; we also said they were a bad omen – that’s nonsense too. Nor were the mussels a coincidence. This evening of all evenings, we’d say, we decided to eat mussels. But it really wasn't like that; you couldn’t call it a coincidence. after the event, of course, we tried to interpret our decision as a sign or coincidence, because what came in the wake of our abortive feast was so monumental that none of us have got over it yet...


Everything in our lives revolved around us having to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a family to be because he hadn't had one himself and so didn't know what a proper family was, although he'd developed the most detailed notions of what one was like...they may have been incredibly precise, but were impossible to fathom as none of us understood the logic behind them...

Ever since their escape to the West my mother's violin had lain in their bedroom wardrobe, and only occasionally, when she was sad, would she sit at the piano, playing and singing Schubert songs, the whole of the Wintereisse, back and forth, crying all the while...

I didn't get to know modern music at these concerts, in short bursts, but from listening to it secretly on the radio, and from the radio I gained the impression that music and mathematics were not so dissimilar, but closely related, they went hand in hand, I told my mother. My mother didn't like twelve tone music, she said; she preferred harmonious music, but not when it went dum-dee-dum-dee-dum like Verdi, who she didn't rate as a serious composer.