A Very Special Year

by Thomas Montasser

  THREE

  Whoever 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.

  Or, to put it in Calvino’s words, If you really think about it, I’m sure you’d find it preferable to have something in front of you and not know exactly what it is.

  One must imagine Ringelnatz & Co. to be a totally uncompetitive business by today’s standards. Too little space. Only in exceptional cases could such a tiny shop be profitable – perhaps if it sold high-end goods such as jewellery and expensive watches, or exquisite cosmetics – and that’s assuming a steady clientele that ages prosperously. But a bookshop will find it difficult to defy the dictates of the market. And even if we were to consider ourselves amongst the greatest optimists (which of course we do), in the world of small bookshops, Ringelnatz & Co. was really one of the smallest. A ground-level shop floor, its longer side faced the street, promoted by its large display window, divided in the middle by a glass door. Inside, floor-to-ceiling shelves were on both sides and at the back on the left, all tightly packed with books; at the back on the right a small staircase with two steps led up to the galley kitchen and two narrow doors – one to the lavatory, the other to the backyard, where any sort of social interaction had ceased long ago. All of this in barely fifty square metres.

  In spite of the limited space, the old bookseller had managed to house an incredibly broad range of reading matter! Admittedly, there was no room for the books to show themselves off; customers were able to see the front covers of only a few. And yet, any passionate reader would find it hard to believe that they might fail to find the book of their choice in this treasury of literature. No lover of romantic tales, no reader of history books, no connoisseur of poetry… especially poetry! Valerie soon established that Aunt Charlotte must have had a weakness for poetry; it was very well represented among both the contemporary and antiquarian books. Whether it was the strictly rhyming and sometimes awkward verse of Andreas Gryphius or the nimble yet profound Lieder of Heinrich Heine, the elegiac sensuality of Rilke, the brutal honesty of Trakl or the far-sighted dedication of Neruda – nothing was missing. Modern, comic, earthy. But there was a notable accent on humour, something for which the elderly bookseller seemed to be p
articularly fond.

  After the Italo Calvino novel and two volumes of Robert Gernhardt, Valerie actually felt better! Literature as therapy? She’d never have subscribed to that. And yet, when two days later the young woman felt chirpy again and no longer found it a struggle to brace herself for the task in hand, she sensed that her small flights into realms of wit had helped her overcome her infection.

  FOUR

  This may come as a surprise, but every now and then what appears self-evident is the last thing you notice. Valerie had spent more than two whole days in the old bookshop when it finally dawned on her that there was a void, something missing there which was urgently required. All of a sudden it was so obvious that she almost let out a quiet scream when she discovered it. Or rather didn’t discover it. But then a number of things that had been veiled in a mild haze became crystal clear. With no computer there was no sensible system of stock control. And with no sensible system of stock control there was no sensible system at all – indeed, one would almost be forced to concede that there was no system whatsoever.

  Except that this was not completely true. For Aunt Charlotte had certainly had a system. Only it was going to take Valerie more than just two days to get her head around the system in its entirety. Until that point, she would find herself shunted back into a pre-digital era, which in her case – she did belong, after all, to the generation of so-called digital natives – could have also been called an antenatal era. At any rate, faced with this state of affairs she felt helpless.

  She turned around and looked down from the small office into the shop. And there they stood. Thousands of them, without a single folder or file that might have given them some order, that might have sorted, managed, tamed them. They stood there, gazing back, and Valerie fancied she could almost feel them making fun of her. Books. Mountains of books. How had the old lady known what she had in stock? Or what she needed to order? Or whether it had already been ordered? Or whether it was still available or out of print? ‘My God,’ Valerie whispered, as she went down the two steps into the shop to wander along the shelves again and look once more at all the volumes with quite different eyes. A farm, yes, that was somewhere which she could imagine might still function without a computer. Or perhaps a greengrocer’s, where they only sold a limited range of goods and it wasn’t hard to keep an overview of such perishable stock – what they bought in the morning was sold by the evening. But with books, of which there were thousands, no, millions of different ones and which often stood on the shelves for weeks and months, maybe even years before they were finally sold… No, there had to be a system. It might be antediluvian, but there had to be some kind of functioning system.

  Of course there was a system. It was bound up with index cards and catalogues as well as an array of binders that the elderly lady had put together over the years, and which her niece had until now simply failed to notice, just as you can look straight past an ancient and obsolete traffic sign by the roadside even though it’s under your nose.

  The index cards were in compartments in the two top drawers of the desk. Noted down in elegant yet painstaking handwriting were author, title, publisher, edition, price and order number, together with a variety of other rather opaque details. In tiny, but razor-sharp letters, the elderly lady had also made notes on the individual books. Points, as Valerie could see, with which she summarized the particular features of a book in a few words. Her curiosity aroused, she flicked through to the card for Calvino, Italo: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and read, ‘A bit frivolous, slightly whimsical, but wonderfully ironic – for those who don’t (or shouldn’t) take life so seriously.’

  Could anybody else have put it better? Of course, this was exactly the point of that curious little volume. What about Kafka’s The Castle? To Valerie’s disappointment her aunt hadn’t made any notes on it. A quick glance at the other cards revealed that this was a rare exception. Why? Maybe there were books which were such must-reads that they didn’t need any selling points. And perhaps The Castle was one of those.

  As she gradually battled her way through the elderly lady’s archive, Valerie realized there were a number of books that had been sorted without any keywords, such as Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks or Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. Quite a few children’s books fell into this category too. Beside The Happy Leeward Isles Aunt Charlotte had just put an exclamation mark. When Valerie went to get the book she discovered an extraordinarily long and jolly title: The Journey of Captain Davorin Midrankovic and His Passengers to the Isle of Honey, the Isle of Peace, the Isle of Towers, the Isle Where the Fiddles Grow, the Isle of Brushes, the Isle of Gugelhupfs and the Isle of Beautiful Truth, Narrated by Himself and Written down by James Krüss for All Those Who Are Happy or Should Like to Be.

  Of course, before she could continue working it was essential for Valerie to read some lengthy passages from this enchanting book and actually feel a little happier. It was already early evening by the time she had got as far as a volume that bore the auspicious title: A Very Special Year, by… Intrigued, Valerie went to fetch this book from the shelves too (it stood between a Dorothy Parker biography and Ferdinand Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet) and sat down with it in the armchair, which had by now taken on the scent of her perfume (and of eucalyptus balm). The cover showed a ticket for passage on a ship, old-fashioned and appealing. And the moment she flipped open the book she was thrust straight into the middle of a story; it felt as if the text had whisked her away instantaneously.

  There had been no forewarning of the sudden change in weather. To begin with it was barely more than a gentle breeze. The elegant silhouette of a woman of indeterminate age was reflected in the shop window. Her headscarf flew up in the wind. Julia turned around and was astonished to see that the wind, which had whipped up from nowhere, looked as if it might carry the woman off. She scuttled out into the street, vanishing for a moment in a group of people who crowded around her as quickly as they dispersed. Just enough time for the stranger to undergo a wonderful transformation. The headscarf had disappeared, giving way to long, blonde hair that fluttered in the wind, while her dress was hidden beneath a light raincoat. As soon as the rain started, the woman opened a dark-blue umbrella that was so ordinary looking it almost rendered her invisible.

  Julia had followed the stranger with her gaze without knowing why. And now, just as instinctively, she walked behind her, impervious to the wind and rain. The woman emanated a mysterious aura that held Julia spellbound. Totally oblivious to her surroundings, she guided her steps in the same direction the woman was heading. In spite of the sudden torrent, the stranger moved with a lightness as if she were not of this world. Fascinated, Julia came closer. They approached a small bridge, on the other side of which steps led up to the old town. As Julia walked onto the bridge a violent gust wrenched the woman’s umbrella. Struggling to keep hold of it, the woman dropped her handbag. Then, in a single, fluid movement, she abandoned the umbrella that was spinning in the wind, picked up her bag and continued swiftly on her way. Julia watched the umbrella rise up into the sky then flap down into the river. Like a drowned butterfly, she thought. When she looked back the woman was gone.

  Confused and slightly embarrassed, Julia stood on the bridge. How on earth did I end up here? she asked herself. What am I doing following this woman? By now she was drenched and starting to freeze. She would go back home and make a hot chocolate – yes, and quickly too, before she caught a cold. She had gone no more than a metre or two when, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed something glinting brightly: an envelope. She stopped to pick it up. It must have fallen out of the stranger’s handbag. She looked over to the far side of the bridge and the steps, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. Julia stuffed the envelope in her pocket and scampered to a nearby porch, where she took it back out and examined it in the pale light of a gloomy, stormy afternoon. It bore no address or inscription. Only now did Julia realize that the envelope was not sealed. Opening the flap, she removed the c
ontents: two train tickets that had remained passably dry. First class, she noted. They were for today. Two tickets to Paris.

  Had the stranger been on her way to the station? Julia looked at her watch: just past six o’clock. The train left at half past seven. The route – over the bridge, up the steps and through the old town – was the right direction. But the elegant-looking stranger hadn’t been carrying any luggage, had she? Would she have had to? No, she could have left it in a station locker to pick up prior to departure. In any event, she would need the tickets. Maybe everything would have turned out differently if the rain hadn’t abated at that moment, to be superseded by the slanting, late-afternoon sun. But Julia took a decision that would change everything, not least – in fact this most of all – her whole life.

  She hurried across the bridge, up the steps and through the old town. Half an hour later, she was at the station, where the train to Paris was already waiting. The first-class carriage was at the end of the platform. But there was still enough time. Julia got on and made for the front of the train, carefully checking in every compartment to see whether the mysterious stranger was there. But she would be in the front carriage, obviously. Or should have been. For as it turned out the woman wasn’t there either. She was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she’d arrived just before the train left. Julia checked the tickets to see whether a specific seat had been reserved for her. Seat 13. She was standing right next to it! Perfect, she could wait for the woman here. Sitting down, she gazed out of the window at the platform. From here she’d be able to see the stranger coming from far off.