A Very Special Year (10 page)

‘These were the most beautiful.'

‘The most beautiful?'

‘Yes.' He unfastened his satchel, took out the English-language book by Foer and opened it up. ‘Look, the pages have holes you can read the individual words through. If you turn over the page you discover other words. Everything keeps changing, depending on how you look at it. That's cool! I've never seen a book like that before. And the other ones are beautiful too. This one here,' he said, pulling out the
Gilgamesh
a fraction, ‘has got two cords.'

‘Ribbon markers.'

‘Yes. A red one and a silver one. I like that. It's completely different from how it usually is.'

‘Usually?'

‘Usually things that aren't particularly special are
packaged really nicely to make them look good. With books it's the other way round. The packaging can never be as amazing as the stories. Well, sometimes the packaging
can
be beautiful too, and then you don't just enjoy reading the book but also holding it in your hand and gazing at it. But I've got to go!' And with that he was out the door and vanishing into the twilight.

Valerie just stood there, watching him run past the other shops where all they did was put ordinary things in extraordinary packages. She'd never looked at it like that. In a bookshop the beauty of the form could never compete with the diversity and uniqueness of what was packaged therein. What was extraordinary about a book was what was inside it.

The boy, who was called Timmi (‘with two “I”s like in Indonesia'), continued to pop in every day. He browsed, read, sat in the armchair and did actually bury himself in the DiCamillo until he'd finished the book. Sometimes he had a bit of money on him, which he'd use to pay off another part of his debt. He was, in fact, a quite ordinary boy, as well as being a quite extraordinary one. Time and again he'd baffle Valerie with his insights into literature, which were characterized by the fact that he saw things from
completely different perspectives, perspectives which would never have occurred to Valerie.

‘How many books do you actually have here?' he once asked.

‘Around eight thousand.'

‘Eight thousand different books…' Timmi repeated in acknowledgement.

‘Hold on a sec. I've got more than one copy of many books.'

Timmi nodded. ‘Either way it's still just a tiny proportion of all possible books.'

‘All possible books?'

‘Altogether there can be 26 to the power of 26 books.'

‘Twenty-six to the power of 26. Hmm. Because there are 26 letters, you mean?'

‘That's right. Of course there could be many, many more books if you include all the other languages with different alphabets. But if you combine every letter with every other letter…'

‘Then you get 26 to the power of 26 possibilities of writing a book. What about letters with umlauts – Ä, Ö and Ü?'

‘You're right, and the double S: ß. That makes it 30 to the power of thirty.'

‘Sounds about right,' Valerie said, shaking her head
with a smile. She'd never really thought of it like that before.

Timmi sighed. ‘Sounds wrong to me somehow. I expect you also have to multiply it with the number of pages and lines…'

‘Number of characters!' Valerie suggested.

‘Yes. Or you have to times it by the number of characters: 26 x
x
is the number of characters in the entire book. But I suppose you have to include spaces and punctuation marks in the calculation as well. Somehow.'

‘In any case it sounds rather complicated,' Valerie said.

‘Oh, maths is easy. Because everything always follows the rules. That's why I like books. There are always surprises!'

Valerie nodded. ‘And we've got thousands of them here,' she said, winking at him. ‘You won't find a range like this in any other kind of shop.'

‘Well,' Timmi said, ‘actually you only sell thirty different types of goods.'

Valerie laughed. ‘True. We've got everything here, but only from A to Z.'

As dubious as all their mathematical deliberations had been, this conclusion was indisputably correct.

TWELVE

O
ne fine autumn day, Valerie put her table and chair outside again and finally fetched a book by the man after whom her shop was named. That morning she'd been visited by two publishing reps and listened while they presented their forthcoming schedules. Time and again she was overwhelmed by the abundance of new books; it was a vast deluge through which she needed these pilots of the literature industry to steer her, but even so she never stopped fearing she would drown in the torrent. She could do with a little cheerful relaxation. Contrary to her expectations, however, Ringelnatz's poems and ideas were not only silly and humorous, they often had melancholy at their heart and an affectionate, but
essentially pessimistic sophistry. Life was no cakewalk. Not for him, nor for anybody else on this earth.

And so Valerie, who'd wanted to blink in the sun and be cheered up by a few light verses, soon found herself in the gloominess of her own mood, watching the construction workers across the street and ruminating on the futility and transience of all human activity. Until Timmi turned the corner, discovered the book on the table, looked up at the sign above the shop, rocked his head comically from side to side like an Indian street trader and declared, ‘I think it's interesting that your shop's called “Ringelnatz and so”.'

‘Ringelnatz & Co.,' she corrected him.

‘It's a complicated name.'

‘Well, not really. It's the name of a writer,' Valerie explained, as she watched Timmi sit on the doorstep beside her. ‘And Co. means that it's not just Ringelnatz's books that are sold here, but those by other writers too.'

‘Then it was this writer who had the complicated name. Has it got anything to do with ringlets?'

‘I don't know. But anyway, it's a pseudonym. Would you like a cup of tea?'

‘Yes, but lots of milk, please.'

‘Of course!' She went inside, poured tea from the samovar pot – not too much, because Timmi was only
ten – then filled it half-way up the cup with water, and then topped up with milk from the small fridge in the office. ‘You know what a pseudonym is, don't you?'

Timmi nodded. ‘I've heard of it before. It's not difficult to imagine what it is either. Even though it's not Latin. More like Greek I think.'

‘Do you do Latin at school?'

‘Uh-huh. It's my favourite subject. I can tell
you
that.'

Valerie had to smile to herself. She knew exactly what he meant. If he admitted it to his classmates he'd immediately be branded a swot and would lose all credibility. On the other hand, he came across as a loner anyway. Other boys his age didn't hang around in bookshops all afternoon, admiring books for their aesthetic appeal.

‘It could mean: the one born with ringlets.
Natz
, I mean. From
natus
, born.'

‘Nice idea,' Valerie said, realizing how much she'd come to like this boy. Whenever he didn't pop in, she caught herself glancing at the door to see whether he might not turn up after all. Whenever she was sorting through books and discovered one that looked particularly unusual, she'd put it on the little table beside the armchair so that he'd find it on his next visit.
Whenever it rained, she hoped he'd remembered to bring an umbrella. Timmi had become part of this strange state of affairs that had taken her through summer and into autumn, and now the question of how this whole business could possibly be brought to a successful conclusion was a matter of urgency.

When Valerie saw Timmi standing in the doorway the following day (it wasn't raining, nor had there been any spectacular book discovery), she grabbed a cup and filled it with tea and milk without asking him. The boy took the cup with a smile and a nod, appearing completely at home, and looked at her inquisitively.

‘I've been doing a bit of research into Ringelnatz. You know…' Valerie said.

‘The pseudonym.'

‘Yes. Well, Ringelnatz himself claimed that the name had no significance. He chose it because he liked the sound of it.' She took a cup of tea too and sat in the armchair, while Timmi perched on the stool. ‘But there are clever people who have other theories. Some argue that the name comes from a ring snake.'

‘A snake?'

‘A very special snake. It's equally at home on land as it is in water. I think that sounds quite plausible. At
any rate, Ringelnatz did spend some time at sea.'

‘Was he a sailor?'

‘Yup.'

‘Cool.' Timmi sniffed his tea then took a sip, as if he'd got lost in a Jane Austen novel and was now able to play the part of the Earl of Somewhere. ‘What about the other theory?'

‘Oh… well that's linked to a sailor's term: ringelnass.'

Timmi said nothing and drank his tea.

‘Ringelnass is a common sailors' term for a seahorse.'

‘I like that theory. I don't like the idea of a writer calling himself after a snake. But a seahorse, that suits.' He put his cup smartly onto the table, said, ‘Thanks. I must be off.' and disappeared without having so much as glanced at a single book.

Timmi still owed four euros when his visits to the little bookshop ceased. He simply stopped coming. Once Valerie thought she saw him running past on the opposite side of the street, but by the time she'd got to the door, the boy was nowhere to be seen. It was several weeks before the peculiar barrenness that his absence generated was overgrown again with the regularity of her daily routine and the irregularities
of life. Perhaps he'd moved, perhaps he'd discovered another passion. Perhaps his pocket money had stopped and he was ashamed of his debts (although Valerie would have been very happy to waive the sum he still owed). But although Timmi would soon become a mere footnote in the history of Ringelnatz & Co., something of him remained: an enthusiasm for seeing things in a very different way from usual.

THIRTEEN

L
ife sometimes proves to be an accumulation of events following on thick and fast from each other, sometimes appears as a wild vortex of barely manageable demands, often as chaos, but the elements of life always follow a very particular order: they take place consecutively. Every moment is followed by another and another and yet another until your time's up – and even after that it goes on and on, in a neat sequence.

The book has developed an incomparable form for turning this natural sequence of events into a natural concurrence. If you read a book from the first line to the last, it adheres to the conventional pattern of all existence. But sometimes we might open a book in
the middle, fix on a sentence and then read from there, as a guest in the future, so to speak. Some books even ask to be opened at random. Then they throw out an idea such as:

He who ordained, when first the world

began
,

Time, that was not before creation's

hour
,

Divided it, and gave the sun's high

power

To rule the one, the moon the other

span
.

Valerie was struck by how Michelangelo's words had been translated and made anew for a different time by John Addington Symonds.

Valerie became increasingly accustomed to opening books wherever she fancied. She'd get curious and would investigate what was happening at the same time at a completely different point in the story. She could have warned Anna Karenina (another of those books that the elderly bookseller had made no comments on). She could have helped Nicholas Nickleby or Harry Potter. She would have fallen hopelessly in love with Mr Darcy and she would have cheered on Hal Jam from Kotzwinkle's cryptic parable,
The Bear Went over the Mountain
.

Occasionally she'd put the book she was reading down on the little table outside the shop, close her eyes for a moment, listen to life going on around her, think of her old aunt or Sven (although rarely of Sven these days), before picking up the book again and reading on from where the wind had blown it. Sometimes this would allow her to rediscover a part she'd already read, but more importantly discover it in a new way; sometimes she found herself in a completely different scene, leaping straight into it as if it were a life that till then had been completely alien to her. Discovering a book meant freely rising above the demands of everyday life and uprooting your own existence from the here and now in order to plant it elsewhere.

It was the day on which the letter from the university arrived. She had failed to re-register at the beginning of the semester. Now she was informed very prosaically that she'd been ex-matriculated. Valerie ought to have been expecting this. But she simply hadn't thought about it. To tell the truth, thoughts of the university hadn't crossed her mind at all. A mistake. For now reality was striking back with merciless bureaucracy.

The note lay on the desk like a tax bill or like a love letter from the most stupid boy in the class. It
made her feel aggressive. What had she done wrong to make them chuck her out just like that? OK, she'd missed a few tests, but she could retake them next semester or the one after that. She'd skipped a few seminars – in fact, all of them – but there was no consistent rule about obligatory attendance. If in the end she knew everything reasonably well she could get her credits and take the exam, maybe even obtain a better grade than if she'd hung around the campus the whole time slurping cappuccinos from the vending machine. In any case, what she was doing here was nothing other than applied business management – the practical application of what she could only learn in theory at university. In other words, it was far more important, it was learning by doing, it was real! ‘Damn it!' she exclaimed, scrunching up the letter before propelling it with all her strength beyond the waste-paper basket. ‘What am I now? Student? Business economist? Bachelorette?' She stood up, took a deep breath, suppressed the tears she could feel welling up, and sighed. Was that six semesters squandered? All her studies a waste of time? And for what? Without the opportunity to turn her bachelor's degree in to a master's, she could forget all her dreams of a great career in consultancy.