The narrator of this story doesn’t try to hide her unreliability from the reader. She is indignant at her daughter’s accusations that she is responsible for the tragic fate of a refugee who came to live with the family. She says coolly that she doesn’t mind her husband’s infidelities. She protests too much.
The narrator knows that her husband “lied sometimes, but so do all divinities. Divinities invented convenient fables and they appeared in strange disguises, but they were never mistaken”. The family’s private dramas are played out against the background of postwar Germany, where the past often gets distorted in interpretation.
When Mavis Gallant moved to Europe from Canada in 1950, it was to understand what really happened in the preceding decade. This short story convincingly demonstrates both the futility of such attempts and their absolute necessity.
Originally published in The New Yorker, 1972. Collected in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004
A Personal Anthology 