A Very Special Year

by Thomas Montasser

  SIX

  It was some time before Valerie finally secured an appointment with the bank. Till then she’d just had a statement in the post for the end of the quarter. As was to be expected, she saw that there hadn’t been any payments in and only a few deductions – mainly from the bank. Account charges, debit interest, postage, transaction fees. Money for nothing. One ought to be a bank, Valerie thought, as she got on her bicycle and rode to the branch where Aunt Charlotte had her account. She’d packed all the lists that she’d made in the previous weeks: debit, credit, stock, outstanding receivables etc. Now she had to find out what dark spots were still lurking in the finances.

  The customer account manager greeted her with an engaging smile and a glance at her cleavage. As she followed him to one of the consultation booths that had been set up for discreet conversations to the rear of the service centre, she fastened another button on her blouse.

  ‘Right, we’re very pleased you’ve come to see us. How is your…’ – he looked at the letter she’d written him, which was now in a folder – ‘aunt?’

  ‘Thanks for asking,’ replied Valerie, who over the course of her studies had learned when it was better to keep some pieces of information to yourself. ‘She’s fine.’

  ‘I assume you have a letter giving you power of attorney?’

  ‘Of course.’

  From her documents Valerie took a sheet of paper on which she’d knocked out the following using Aunt Charlotte’s old typewriter: I hereby give my niece Valerie D. the power of attorney to look after my bank affairs. Yours faithfully, Charlotte K. She’d extravagantly covered the squiggle beneath this with the freshly inked Ringelnatz & Co. stamp. The banker took the scrap of paper without affording it more than a cursory glance and slipped it into his folder.

  ‘Now,’ he said, trying to sound businesslike as he noticed to his chagrin the fastened button, ‘what brings you here?’

  ‘We’re in the process of giving Ringelnatz & Co. a thorough overhaul to relaunch the company. Now that we’ve finished our assessment of stock and have checked and recorded all the bookkeeping matters, assets, liabilities etc., it’s time to address the company’s cashflow and financial resources. We’re also subjecting to scrutiny our lines of credit and the terms of our business transactions.’

  The account manager’s gaze had wandered upwards in slight disbelief and settled on her eyes. It took him a moment to switch from ‘petty nuisance’ to ‘business meeting’. Clearing his throat, he leafed briefly through what was a very thin folder and said, ‘Well, I’m afraid we can’t really talk of cashflow in relation to your… business.’ He scratched his neck. ‘For some time now it’s been more like a standstill.’

  ‘Obviously, the amount of cashflow we generate is directly linked to how the business is running – and to which bank account we’re using.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ the banker hurried to agree, but then paused. ‘Hold on, are you saying there are other banks?’

  ‘Of course,’ Valerie bluffed. ‘No healthy company would shackle itself to just one credit institution, would it?’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t look at it that way,’ the man contradicted her. She bet his hair had already started thinning at school and now, on the cusp of middle age, he was probably wondering what he was doing still sitting in this cubbyhole, haggling with the most minor businesses over the most minor conditions, while colleagues of his were playing at being financial jugglers in the skyscrapers of the bank’s headquarters and were allowed to gamble with billions. ‘I mean, a bank isn’t just responsible for transactions; it can be a long-term partner for your business. We see ourselves, at least, as a universal adviser for all financial questions. Look, with our financial products and services—’

  Valerie cut him off with a wave of her hand. ‘First I’d like to see what liabilities we have and what the interest rate is.’

  The adviser flicked through the file again. Then he rocked his head from side to side and said, ‘Your bookshop did have a business overdraft facility on its current account…’

  ‘Did have?’

  ‘Hmm, yes, well at some point it was converted into a private overdraft facility.’ He cleared his throat again.

  ‘At some point?’

  ‘Two years ago, to be precise.’

  ‘For what reason?’

  ‘Errm… I’m afraid I can’t see that from the documents in front of me,’ the man said. His uncertainty made it blatantly clear that the bank had taken her aunt for a ride.

  ‘Are there other documents, then?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know of any…’

  ‘Then I presume that the bank did it purely out of its own interests and without any prior consultation with my aunt.’

  ‘But we did write to her. Look…’ He pointed to a standard letter with the bank’s letterhead.

  ‘And did you get a reply?’

  ‘Hmm… no, clearly not.’

  ‘Well then, as you I’m sure know, your unilateral action is not legally binding. I’d like to object to the change, and demand a recession and recalculation based on the value from that date.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can do that without consulting my manager…’

  ‘Both of us know that not only can you do that, you must do it,’ Valerie asserted, bending over the table. ‘Let’s move onto the debts.’

  ‘Debts?’

  ‘How high are the liabilities that Ringelnatz & Co. currently have with your bank?’

  ‘Oh.’ The adviser essayed a smile but it looked forced. ‘Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that there aren’t any liabilities, apart from the negative balance on the last statement.’

  He adjusted his glasses, looked at the statement as if it were an imperial proclamation and said, ‘Five euros eighteen.’ He cleared his throat again. ‘I should point out, however, that your aunt’s private wealth is almost all gone. She won’t be able to inject capital for much longer. I mean, as she’s done over the past few years.’

  Valerie shrugged, seemingly casually, but inwardly at a loss. ‘She won’t have to inject any more capital,’ she curtly informed the dumbfounded banker. Giving him a nod, she stood up.

  To Valerie’s astonishment she found out over the coming days that, although there were pretty much zero cash reserves in the small business that was Ringelnatz & Co., Aunt Charlotte had nonetheless carefully avoided accruing anything like debts. Whenever a financial hole had appeared, she’d plugged it with her own money – during all those years she’d run the shop she gradually returned to the business the little money she’d been able to save. There weren’t any other banks of course, nor any other assets – but there weren’t other liabilities elsewhere either.

  Basically, the appointment with the accounts manager had been totally unnecessary. His involvement extended to little more than passing on a statement of net income (although it had been years since one could talk of net income) and an invoice for his work.

  The only real items in Aunt Charlotte’s business accounts were the quarterly direct debits for gas, electricity and water, as well as the incidental costs for the premises. What Valerie hunted for unsuccessfully was a regular rent payment, until finally she discovered that the elderly bookseller actually owned the shop! The business itself might not have been thriving, but Aunt Charlotte had had money in bricks and mortar! Or she still did. For in spite of all the conclusive proof Valerie was faced with, she didn’t want to exclude the possibility that the old lady might still be alive. Hopefully she was. Valerie wished it to be true. But of course she was enough of a realist to know how low the probability was.

  ‘The appointment was a roaring success, by the way!’ she later told her new friend, who was now showing up on a daily basis, over a saucer of milk. ‘Bankers are as predictable as an atomic clock.’ Valerie sipped her tea and watched Grisaille’s pretty pink tongue lap away at the white liquid. If you set aside your prejudices and look at a rat close up, you can’t help finding it beautiful. Rats have
coats that shine like silk, clever, alert eyes, while their claws are tiny masterpieces of evolution. What’s more, Grisaille always had one ear open for Valerie’s reflections. And now Valerie even dared leave the window open when the rat emerged from its obscure corner.

  In spite of this proximity to literature, however, Grisaille was more interested in her own tail than the tales housed in the bookshop. When Valerie once tried to read her a few lines of Susanna Clarke’s The Ladies of Grace Adieu, the beast fled – which can’t have had anything to do with Clarke. At least this cleared up what species of rat Grisaille belonged to. Valerie thought that it couldn’t be Rattus norvegicus, the common sewer rat, or Rattus rattus, the established house rat, but Rattus alliterarius and thus a welcome distraction from the insularity that usually envelops the written word and its reader. With this, Valerie added a sixty-seventh species of rat to the sixty-six already recognized by zoology.

  ‘Do you think Aunt Charlotte is still alive?’

  Grisaille looked at her with her pitch-black, reflective eyes. Was she smiling?

  ‘Thanks,’ Valerie said after a while. ‘I bet you’re right. She’s travelling somewhere in the history of the world. Maybe she hijacked an underground train and absconded to South America with it. Or right now she’s inviting a few Eskimos to share an excellent bottle of Tunisian vodka.’

  Grisaille smirked, then lapped up a little more milk. When Valerie poured herself some more tea the rat vanished. But then the bell by the door rang and the postwoman came in.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she said by way of a greeting, handing Valerie the usual bundle of bills, flyers and a trade journal that Valerie had never even glanced at. But right at the top was a postcard. An idyllic scene with a sea view that invited envy. At the top was written ‘Porto’.

  Curious, Valerie turned over the card and read:

  Dear Valerie,

  I hope all’s well with you. Please

  don’t be worried about me! Bye bye!

  Charlotte

  It seemed to Valerie as if she were looking straight through these barren lines at Grisaille’s mysterious little rat smile.

  The card from Portugal remained the only sign of life from the old woman. Days, weeks and months passed, but the postwoman never arrived again with anything similar. Instead Valerie felt herself being dragged more deeply into an existence that was quite alien to her. She wasn’t a bookseller, she wasn’t the old lady from Ringelnatz & Co. She wasn’t even a big reader, not at all. And yet these days she kept catching herself, as if by coincidence, with books in her hands, immersed in stories and poems. She sorted, analysed, did the accounts, she drank the elderly bookseller’s tea, sat in her armchair, pored over her business documents. And she chatted to rats. While Aunt Charlotte was drifting heaven knew where, Valerie was gradually taking her place. And she was alarmed to note that she felt increasingly comfortable doing so.

  SEVEN

  Anybody who imagines there are no surprises to be had in a bookshop is quite mistaken. It is true that bookselling might be regarded as predictable and even a little boring from an entrepreneurial perspective. But not everything is foreseeable. No, however rare it is, the unexpected inevitably comes into play: the customer.

  When the bell rang, which had hung over the door from the time the shop was founded, Valerie’s initial reaction was to look at her mobile. Not that her ringtone sounded remotely similar. But if anything happened these days, it usually happened via a digital link to the outside world. She’d just been staring at a list which her aunt had entitled, surprisingly, ‘Outstanding Items’, but which contained nothing of the sort that a business graduate might consider to be ‘outstanding items’ – much more a sort of incoherent to-do list, which also included a few details of books still in storage, though Valerie hadn’t looked at it that closely yet.

  The young man stood quite unexpectedly in the doorway, favourably lit by the mild glow of an early summer evening. ‘Are you still open?’ he asked diffidently.

  ‘Are we still open?’ Valerie repeated, slightly confused. In fact she’d arranged to meet a couple of friends at the cinema and ought to have left long ago. ‘Actually we’re not,’ she said hesitantly. The film was starting in half an hour, and these friends had already been teasing her for never being around any more.

  ‘Oh, I’m very sorry to have disturbed you then,’ the young man mumbled, turning to go.

  On the other hand, the shop’s sums were not so great that she could afford not to give them a boost using every means at her disposal.

  ‘But we’ll happily make an exception for you,’ exclaimed Valerie, who really couldn’t justify losing a potential sale. She rushed around the desk and down the steps to the shop floor. Why do I keep saying ‘we’, she wondered? Is there anybody else here responsible for this shop? Thousands of books stared at her and Valerie looked at the floor, inwardly ashamed. Outwardly, she smiled at the customer, who was wearing an elegant, if somewhat old-fashioned between-seasons coat, from the pocket of which the headlines of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung poked out nosily; a rather creased shirt, with spectacles in the breast pocket; and Italian shoes, which may no longer have been brand new, but were well looked after. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Do you mind if I have a quick look around?’

  Valerie was not sure, but she thought she heard a faint accent in his voice, a tone which sounded foreign and charming. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Please feel at home.’

  ‘That’s an invitation I don’t have to be offered twice in a bookshop, especially not in one arranged so marvellously as this!’ The young man had the eye of a connoisseur, which ploughed along the rows of shelves, glinting each time it stopped at a particular volume. From time to time his gaze slipped and brushed the young bookseller as if by chance. Valerie pretended unsuccessfully to look as if she had urgent things to do behind his back. There was something about him, something you rarely saw – he radiated a distinguished sophistication. Sven could have taken a leaf out of his book.

  Where are you from? Valerie wondered, with a furtive smile at the strange contradiction of his completely untamed hair and carefully picked elegant wardrobe. His shoes gleamed, his snow-white cuffs protruded exactly a finger’s width from his sleeves, as if he were applying to be a concierge at a grand hotel or accepted in an English club, and yet with his shock of hair, beard and melancholy eyes he looked like a communist revolutionary. Valerie couldn’t help finding him exceedingly interesting. Maybe even more than interesting… To still be standing after the looks she’d been firing at him he must be made of wood or stone.

  It had been the elderly lady’s great talent, which she’d honed and perfected over all the years she’d spent as a bookseller, that she’d possessed an almost magical sense for finding and stocking the right books. The ‘right books’ always meant those that the customers entering her shop really wanted to read. Although it wasn’t always the case that these customers knew this beforehand. On the contrary, they’d often come in just ‘to have a look around’. But then they’d go away with one or several books that would often change their lives.

  Anybody entering Ringelnatz & Co. was subjected to a rigorous examination by the elderly bookseller’s dependable eye. Sometimes a short conversation helped, sometimes watching how potential customers went along the shelves showed her what would be suited to them. Often a customer would pick the wrong book, upon which the elderly lady would find ways and words to dissuade them, for nothing is more dangerous for people’s reading pleasure and thus for booksellers than the wrong book at the wrong time. With a sure hand she would take out another tome, open it as if at random, appear to read a short passage or two, then look up in astonishment and say, ‘You really ought to see this.’ Or she would assume her legendary mischievous smile and raise a finger, as if urgently needing to disclose a secret, before saying, ‘An excellent choice. But I’m sure you don’t know this book yet!’ And as if by magic she’d whip out
a volume tailor-made for the customer, and which would bring them inspiration, insight or simply a great deal of pleasure.

  Valerie, of course, possessed no such bookselling magic. She wouldn’t have known what advice to give – negative or positive – if a customer had asked her. But the young man didn’t ask. Rather he kept browsing the stock in a knowledgeable yet modest way, regularly plucking a book from the shelves, opening it, stroking the pages with his slender fingers (instinctively Valerie checked to see whether he wore a ring, which he didn’t), while a delicate smile appeared on his lips. At one point Valerie glimpsed a critical frown on his brow.