A Very Special Year (2 page)

The post-war era, when Aunt Charlotte had opened her bookshop, cannot have been a bad time to earn money from printed matter. After all, people had been starved culturally and intellectually, and were longing for good stories and clever ideas. In theory, the right business idea, Valerie thought – for back then. The problem was that the elderly lady had not moved with the times; on the contrary, in all those years essentially nothing had changed. Her trade had been overtaken by the professionalism of modern business ideas and the glamour of new media. I mean, who seriously still read books these days?

A clock hung above the entrance, and Valerie was truly astounded that it hadn't stopped, just as time had stopped here many years ago. A quarter to eleven.
And not a customer in sight. ‘Ringelnatz & Co.,' Valerie repeated with a sigh, heading to the small room at the back, which was reached via two steps and also separated from the shop by a gathered curtain – perhaps the rest of the large stage curtain framing the display window. The cash till seemed to have been pilfered from a film from the 1930s; large and black, it stood on the desk, yet it shone with promise. It was empty, of course. Or at least almost empty. The drawer contained a ten-euro note plus a few unsorted coins, which, added up, wouldn't come to much. On the right of the desk was a small cabinet that reminded Valerie of the catalogue in the old section of her university library; to the left lay a well-thumbed notebook, which at first glance revealed itself to be the cash account book. ‘Aha,' Valerie muttered. ‘So you kept some accounts at least.' A glimmer of hope, that things might not prove to be so dire, sparked inside her, just bright enough to last for a couple of minutes before dissipating as a lost illusion. ‘OK, that can't really be it,' Valerie concluded and decided to fortify herself with a coffee, amending her decision when she discovered that evidently there'd been no place for coffee in Aunt Charlotte's realm. With some difficulty she got the samovar going and waited.

A samovar consists of a large water boiler, on which a small pot sits that you fill with tea leaves and then pour in boiling water from the lower vessel. The pot is then returned to its place until the tea has brewed to such a strength that more or less homeopathic measures can be dribbled into a cup and mixed with more boiling water to reach the correct blend. This process takes the time you might expect, which is why Valerie spent longer waiting than she'd planned. So she plucked a book almost at random from the shelves and sat back down in Aunt Charlotte's chair to leaf through it.

‘Chapter One' began with an arrival, as do so many books, and as Valerie's story did, too, at least in relation to her elderly aunt's bookshop. But if we're being precise, it was much later in the day:

 

It was late evening when Josef K arrived. The village lay in deep snow. Nothing could be seen of the hill on which the castle stood; it was surrounded by fog and darkness. Not even a weak glimmer of light hinted at the presence of the large castle. K stood for a long while on the wooden bridge that led from the country road
to the village, gazing up into the apparent void…

A good samovar has a mechanism that automatically switches off the boiler if it heats the water for too long – although you ought to know that samovars are designed to simmer away for ages. Charlotte's samovar would also have possessed such a mechanism, but it came from post-Soviet Russia, a time when shoddy manufacturing no longer induced the wrath of the state apparatus, nor yet the wrath of the consumer. So the water kept boiling and boiling until on page 248 a card fell into Valerie's lap and she looked up in astonishment.

Dusk had set in outside. The balmy trace of spring had long given way to a perfidious draught which got the better of her nose before she realized it. As the day departed the sniffles appeared and the tea steeped in its pot, while for the first time ever Valerie read a Franz Kafka novel. It took her completely by surprise, for with each page she turned she kept expecting to get bored.

The aforementioned card turned out to be an order form on which Aunt Charlotte had meticulously noted how many copies of this book she had sold. A large number. An astonishingly large number.
Both the front and back of the form were filled with clusters of tally marks, and Valerie would have thought it a runaway bestseller if she hadn't noticed the date when the elderly bookseller first ordered the novel: 12/10/1959. ‘Seems to be a long-term seller, at any rate,' she observed, replacing the card inside the book before closing it and putting it down. A cup of hot tea would be most welcome now. Valerie locked the door, took one of the chipped mugs from the cupboard above the sink, both of which were in a niche in the office and invisible from the shop, poured herself a finger's width of tea and filled the mug with water from the boiler. Sitting back down at the desk, she found a piece of paper and started jotting down some notes.

Business administration can be described as a science as useful as it is imprecise. It undoubtedly gives a grounding to a flighty young woman, as well as the necessary confidence – if this is naturally lacking – to regard even the most undoable tasks as doable, for example the management, rescue or even liquidation of a small bookshop whose owner has gone AWOL, to say nothing of the customers. And so it should come as no surprise that, at the end of a long evening, a to-do list with no fewer than eighty-four tasks lay
beside the till, with the memorable heading, ‘First Steps – Short-Term Measures', beneath which sat such important bullet points as: Cash Audit, Bank Appointment, Inventory, Materials Management, Check Deliveries and Payments, Overview of Cash Flow, Receivables, Accountant?, Overdraft Facility?, Account Balances, Results?

At this point in our story it is time to put the record straight about a widespread prejudice. Women in their mid-twenties, especially educated women and particularly those with glasses (although we should note here that Valerie was wearing contact lenses, at least on that day), are not necessarily interested in romance. On the contrary, they often tend to be marked by a pronounced sobriety, whose origin and aim are so uncertain that one must assume it has no particular significance. And anybody who had seen the young man knocking at the door around nine o'clock could not avoid coming to the same conclusion. Valerie opened the door and offered her cheek to Sven, while glancing up at the sky and wondering how much longer it would be before it began raining.

For his part, Sven, who had recently started as a trainee in a business consultancy, glanced into the shop, rolled his eyes and said by way of a greeting, ‘I
don't want to know what sort of money you've got to write off for the stock here.'

‘Good point,' Valerie replied, hurrying back to the desk so she could jot down ‘Inventory Valuation'. In truth, all manner of dead wood lurked on the shelves. It suddenly occurred to her that booksellers were apparently entitled to send books they'd ordered back to the publishers – ‘remittances', as they were called. So she also added ‘Remittances? Refunds/Offsetting?' to her list.

‘Are you finished?' Sven asked, as he stepped beside her and examined the desk.

Valerie looked up at him and noted that he was again trying to grow one of those ridiculous three-day beards. On day one his roundish face had a dirty tinge. It was scratchy, too, as she'd felt when they kissed each other. Tomorrow it would be really unpleasant, and the day after it would look awfully shabby.

‘You ought to have a shave.'

‘Hmm.'

‘I'm almost done. Just let me do another security check.'

The inspection took precisely thirty seconds. The shop, barely more than forty square metres, the galley kitchen that doubled up as the office, perhaps ten, probably more like eight square metres: little space to
patrol. Valerie picked up her bag, thrust the Kafka novel in it, shoved Sven out of the shop and locked up behind her, without noticing the shadow that scurried past her feet.

THREE

W
hoever declared May to be the ‘merry month' must have lived on Mauritius. Or Hawaii. There wasn't much to be merry about in the climes of central Europe. Valerie's nascent cold had turned overnight into a full-blown infection. Ever since the previous evening, the sky had been practising for Armageddon. With clammy fingers Valerie jiggled the key into the lock, cursed because the door was stuck, threw herself against it, almost clattered to the floor, and was very glad finally to be inside. She left the dripping umbrella in a corner and fled to the loo, where she stared at a worn-out stranger in the tiny mirror above the small basin. The samovar, she remembered, grateful that Aunt Charlotte had been such an
old-fashioned woman. That would come to her assistance now. She quickly filled the boiler, chucked a handful of tea into the pot and unwrapped her scarf to dry it over the back of the chair.

Ringelnatz & Co. had once been one of the most important, illustrious addresses in the neighbourhood. Established following those terribly dark years, from the outset the bookshop had been a beacon of culture, remaining so for many years as the young bookseller employed her wit and joie de vivre to seduce numerous young men into reading. Over time, however, circumstances had changed, the neighbourhood had changed. Of the two options – luxury redevelopment and gentrification, or decay and social decline – the neighbourhood that was home to Ringelnatz & Co. had been forced to take the latter. Accompanying this was the fact that the bookseller and her shop were both getting on in years. Sure, there was a phase in which she attracted sympathy merely on account of her presence, and even praise in the editorial sections of the free local papers. But this didn't gain her any readers, at least not any new ones. The old ones, those customers from years and decades past, remembered the shop and popped in again. They'd talk about the good old times, complain about how young people had no interest in books, buy themselves a first
edition of a novel by Somerset Maugham (‘For my granddaughter; I loved him when I was her age') and then disappear once more out of the elderly lady's life.

In spite of this, one had to concede that the bookshop – if one ignored a certain, albeit charming, shabbiness – was still a real gem, and not only on account of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made of huge, genuine walnut timbers, the splendid curtain or the excessively musical, but highly attractive floorboards, which – freshly waxed – recalled the polished planks of a luxury sailing boat. No, the chief appeal of the shop was, of course, its range of books, selected with as much intelligence and thoughtfulness as affection.

Valerie's intention had been to go home and make further notes to complete her to-do list, but she opted to read the rest of her Kafka novel and finally fell asleep on the sofa. When she woke up, she put the book on a stool, which the old lady must have used to reach books from higher shelves. She wouldn't be able to put it back; now it looked second hand. But, hold on, hadn't Valerie spotted a corner with antiquarian books on her inspection of the shop yesterday? Yes, she had. Taking a closer look, she noticed that a section of the shop, in fact the section furthest from the door (which didn't mean very much in such a
small shop) was stocked with second-hand books. To be more accurate, many of them must have been third or fourth hand. Here were many tomes bound in leather with gold-embossed spines, some faded from years in the light, many well-thumbed. But all the volumes that Aunt Charlotte had collected in these two bookcases had quite clearly been handled with great care. Valerie picked out a book, which looked as if it must have been rebound at some point, and opened it – it looked like a collection of poems, but was in fact a novel:

 

You're about to read Italo Calvino's latest novel
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller.
Relax. Compose yourself
.
Put every other thought aside. Let your surroundings blur into an indistinct haze. Better close the door; the television's always on in there. Tell the others right away, ‘No, I don't want to watch telly!' Raise your voice or they won't hear you say, ‘I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!' Maybe they haven't heard you, what with all that noise. Better say it even louder, shout out, ‘I'm about to start
Italo Calvino's new novel!' Or don't say it if you don't want to. Hopefully they'll leave you in peace
.

Valerie couldn't help smiling. She'd never come across an opening to a book like this.

 

Find the most comfortable position: sitting, stretched out, huddled or lying down. On your back, on your side, on your tummy. In an armchair, on the sofa, on the rocking chair…

Admittedly, it did all seem like a load of nonsense – a highly dubious exercise in silliness – but it was fun to read the ever-surprising and confusing twists and turns in the stories, from which a quite unusual novel emerged, navigating Valerie through eras and lands like a runaway literary carrousel, shunning convention and conspiring cheekily with the reader on every page.

And so our protagonist found herself in the elderly bookseller's armchair once more, after hours of enjoyable reading, while the samovar boiled incessantly beside her, at the very least giving off a pleasant warmth. She hadn't drunk anything – she hadn't even
poured a cup – but she didn't care. On the contrary, she discovered how good it felt to read a story purely for its own sake. And to her complete amazement she realized she enjoyed following this peculiar author through the amusing labyrinth of his finely crafted tales. It was something she hadn't done since her schooldays, when she'd regarded reading as a particularly laborious form of mental torture. Now at a distance, she recalled all the bizarre things she'd had to learn: chiasmus and tropes, pleonasm, metaphor, ellipsis and all manner of other conceptual fog, behind which access to the written word was supposedly hidden. But this was certainly not the case with these stories. No, the more she thought in the writer's playful language, and the more intricately she became entangled in Italo Calvino's fascinating plot twists, the more fun she had, the more her curiosity grew.