Birgit Vanderbeke - The Mussel Feast

We forfeited all our father’s sympathy, we said that evening, also saying that any sympathy we might have felt for our father had vanished; we even said that the sole reason our sympathy had vanished was because any sympathy he’d had for us had also vanished long ago; the fact that we were always there, ruining his life, had drained all sympathy from him, as he sometimes said; I wish you weren’t born, he once remarked, adding that he deeply regretted having fathered first me — by accident — and then my brother, who had been planned, but who he regarded as a mistake, a disastrous one when he looked at the result: his son a complete and utter failure, which he blamed on my mother and the school system which had relentlessly mollycoddled him in the most irresponsible way; while from the outset he’d hated my obduracy, my unappealing side; that evening my mother said that from the outset my father hadn’t shown the slightest sympathy for my unattractiveness. The first time he saw me, apparently, he cried out in horror, it’s a monkey, tearing his hair out because there was no way that ugly thing could be his daughter, let alone the son he was meant to have had. I was very ugly when I was born, my mother said, but that didn’t bother her; I didn’t notice, she said; she didn’t realize until the midwife consoled her by saying, don’t worry, it can all change; Mum found me exceptionally pretty all the same and loved me straight away, even though she could see what the midwife had meant when she said, don’t worry, it can all change. I was covered in hair from top to bottom, there was black hair over my entire body — apparently even my face was hairy like a monkey’s — my entire body right down to my toes; I was so plug-ugly when I was born that my father was disgusted by the sight of me; my mother always said she found me exceptionally lovely straight away, only later did she notice that I looked like a black monkey. The hair fell out after a few days, and from then on I looked like all other babies, but it was too late for my father, who had already formed a negative impression of me, there was no way of salvaging this impression; my father is a good-looking man, you see, and he felt aggrieved that he of all people should have fathered a little black monkey. My father’s hair grows quickly, he needs to shave twice a day to avoid a shadow on his chin, and he was especially proud of his hair, because other men went bald, but my father had such thick black hair that he didn’t have to worry about going bald; he thought bald men plain silly, apart from Uwe Seeler, who he didn’t find quite so silly. Whenever someone said to him after I was born, she’s just like her father, he’d go mad; apparently he went straight from the clinic to get drunk, unable as he was to cope with his daughter’s ugliness while sober; my mother didn’t notice any ugliness, she said, but he showed not the slightest sympathy from the outset. Apparently my father said how ashamed he felt to have such a monkey for a daughter, and was inconsolable that a handsome person like him could be cursed with such an ugly child; in fact my unappealing side, as he often said, became more pronounced as time went on. Whereas other children were cute and clean, I was forever filthy; they dressed me in clean clothes, but the moment they tried to take me out in a clean coat, I spoiled it; I incessantly puked up the fresh and delicious food they fed me, and while other parents wheeled their rosy, cute-looking children in pushchairs through the village and castle gardens, my mother had to turn back in a hurry, because I’d puked up my entire lunch; they used to say, no matter what you give this child, she pukes it up again immediately, but the truth was — terribly unappealing, I know — I waited until the very moment my mother sat me in the pushchair and was about to go to the castle gardens before puking up, not a second earlier, which meant that everyone could see me puking up my entire lunch. I’d bring up my entire lunch in public, whereas other children would do their burps at home behind closed doors, and right after being fed. I never burped to order after being fed, and I didn’t just do one burp, either, but many burps, and not until I’d been put in a clean coat; I never puked up twice on the same coat, my mother said, besides I howled from morning to night, and Mum could have fed me from morning to night; I must have been such a glutton, no sooner had I downed a bottle of formula than I’d start howling again for more, even though I hadn’t puked up the first bottle yet. I was only quiet, my mother said, when I had the bottle of formula in my mouth, and hence I became a very chubby baby. There are photos of how chubby I was, so chubby I couldn’t move, all the same I continued to howl the second my bottle was empty; my father, thank God, was studying at the time, he was renting a room in Berlin and only came home at the weekends, but he couldn’t bear those weekends, because I didn’t just howl from morning to night, but from night to morning, too: all night, every night. My parents put my cot in the room furthest away from theirs and closed the doors, but still neither of them could sleep a wink, my howling must have been so ghastly; my mother told me that my father said, she’s not a monkey, she’s the devil incarnate, so my mother spent her weekends comforting and placating my irate father; he was not to be comforted or placated, however, particularly not at night, as he couldn’t sleep through my howling; his devilish child, this spawn of Satan, enraged him so much that once he picked me up and threw me against the wall. My father later said that this was the first time I was quiet, and I asked, what happened then, but my parents couldn’t remember what happened then. I even limped like the devil himself, forever dragging one leg behind me, from the moment I could walk, because there was a problem with the way my hip bone had developed, which of course nobody could anticipate and detect in a small child before they could walk. My mother was pleased that my father wasn’t at home the whole time, for my howling was unreasonable; my grandmother, too, thought that this child wasn’t appealing and cute like the other children who were all pretty and clean, and who didn’t howl, certainly not all night long, especially not the girls; puking and howling are unseemly; boys might do those things from time to time, although my brother was one of those cute babies, he never brought up his food and never howled, nor was my brother such a glutton. He was gentle. My father pitied his gentleness and his permanent cuteness enraged him, while he found it lacking in me. And my parents assumed their unappealing daughter would never find a husband, whereas my brother’s girly nature — he even wanted to wear dresses when he was little — made my father suspicious from the outset, my mother said. My brother was blond and rosy and always smiling, a child with a permanent smile, apparently; from the outset my father found my brother’s smile peculiar, and my father always said, that’s meant to be my son; I was supposed to have been his son, and my father showed no sympathy for the fact that I wasn’t his son; I was too ugly and unappealing to be his daughter, I was my father’s monkey, whereas my brother was my mother’s golden boy; she saw nothing peculiar about his smile, just as she’d seen nothing monkey-like about me and my initial hirsuteness. Only later did she realize that her daughter was a little devil; she worried a lot about both her children, but showed sympathy, too; my mother always showed sympathy for everybody. And that evening, even though she was being insubordinate for the first time in her life, she tried to persuade us to show some sympathy for our father, which we absolutely refused to do because our sympathy had vanished, it never having been aroused in my father, as my mother said, but forfeited from the outset.