A Very Special Year

by Thomas Montasser

  The signature was illegible as if he’d written it in a different alphabet.

  Valerie sat in silence, staring at the writing, which oozed sophistication and intelligence. It was a while before she opened the short book: 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. But she was unable to read. She couldn’t get out of her head the picture of the young man who’d appeared in her shop as suddenly as he’d disappeared into the night. She picked up the envelope and turned it over. But there was no return address.

  A soft sound from the back window wrenched her from her thoughts. A scraping, a scratching, barely audible. ‘Oh, Grisaille,’ Valerie sighed, opening the window and gazing into the tiny, shining eyes of her old friend. She poured some milk into a saucer and placed it on the sill. The rat didn’t have her old figure back yet, but she’d clearly had her children. ‘Congratulations,’ Valerie said. ‘I bet you’re happy.’

  Of course the occasional customer came into the shop, and even bought books. Once an elderly lady in a flowery Laura Ashley dress browsed the shelves and took a large pile of children’s books for her grandchildren (she was mindful to let Valerie advise her as thoroughly as possible, before making her own, arbitrary selection, which bore no relation to Valerie’s recommendations). She requested the books be sent to her home, which gave Valerie the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a rather rundown but grand villa near the Stadtpark, along with a harmless yet absolutely terrifying dog that protected the property and its distinguished owner.

  To begin with, Valerie had harboured the suspicion that this customer might be another of those ladies who liked shopping but disliked paying. After all, her scrutiny of the cashbooks and list of unsettled bills showed that the shop was owed a whopping 28,000 euros, an incomprehensibly large sum, not even taking into account the interest and compound interest. For far too long Valerie had done nothing to address this. But on her way back from visiting the old lady she took a decision. Perhaps she was emboldened by the inevitability of transience, perhaps it was simply desperation. For too little money was going through the till and, even if costs were being kept down, a certain level of income was needed just to survive. Valerie’s bank account had been in the red for two weeks. She was earning next to nothing and the gridlock in her financial affairs would soon spell serious trouble. Sure, she could have asked her father. But she didn’t want to. Of all the solutions that occurred to her, this was the one that was out of the question. For her father would regard her as a poor economist, as he had Aunt Charlotte. The difference was that her aunt dismissed the criticism with a shrug of her shoulders and a gentle smile, whereas it would hurt Valerie. No, there were other solutions.

  Back in the shop she sat at the desk and took out the folder with the letters of thanks, as well as the one containing the outstanding bills. She didn’t have to spend long looking, nor spend long thinking about it. On a sheet of the wonderfully old-fashioned Ringelnatz & Co. writing paper, and under the watchful eye of a young mother of six lovely little rats, she began her letter:

  Dear Herr Noé…

  ELEVEN

  Summer is a difficult time for the book trade. Although people do read on holiday, they buy few books. Their summer reading is sorted out in springtime, and now they get down to it. From time to time the Gülestan greengrocer’s daughter came by, a likeable teenager with fabulous locks of black hair that she only just kept under control beneath a rather fashionable headscarf. But she was more interested in chatting to Valerie than in books. In any case, very few of the things she wanted to read were available in Aunt Charlotte’s shop. Although Valerie noted down the girl’s orders – she answered to the beautiful name Siba – she wasn’t sure about stocking those sorts of books permanently. Not because they were too lowbrow (who, seriously, was in a position to make a judgement here?) but because she sensed it might upset the delicate structure by which the shop was arranged.

  The more time she spent here, the more strongly she became aware of the bookshop’s highly individual character. Had it belonged to her, she wouldn’t have hesitated to change this character. But she still clung to the hope that Aunt Charlotte would turn up again someday. So she took down Siba’s orders and passed them onto the incredibly reliable and prompt warehouse of Charlotte’s distributor. She drank a cup of the Turkish tea that the girl had brought along so she could chat to Valerie about whether Istanbul was a modern city, whether she ought to read Turkish books in Turkish or German (although she quite clearly had no interest in Turkish books, unlike Valerie who’d suddenly become engrossed in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red) and what school the boy might go to who’d recently started delivering for Pronto Pizza at weekends (and who she was probably keen on).

  So the months passed and the year moved on imperceptibly, and Valerie’s bookkeeping skills developed without her having paid much thought to the matter. She’d long abandoned the idea of liquidating the business; now the idea seemed absolutely absurd to her. After all, Aunt Charlotte had not said ‘Close my shop down!’; she had merely requested that Valerie look after it. And that’s what she was doing. Through the whole of spring and summer.

  She first noticed him one Monday in September. As if he’d appeared out of thin air, there he was standing in front of the shop window, slightly to one side. She could barely see him behind the gathered curtain. His face was narrow, perhaps a little pale too. But his eyes twinkled with curiosity, examining the display in great detail, much more intensely than anyone else who’d stopped to look during the time that Valerie had been in charge. Peering more closely she could see his lips moving very faintly.

  After that he turned up every day. Every school day, to be precise. Valerie guessed he must be in the fourth or fifth class; it was hard to say. Sometimes he’d pause briefly as he passed the door, then move on to study the window just as thoroughly from the other side, which amazed Valerie as the display hardly ever changed, nor were there any children’s books there. ‘Why not, actually?’ she thought, having watched the boy on another occasion, and so she decided to include books for younger readers in the display too, as well as rotating the items on show more frequently. If she were now running the shop there was no reason to feature just the books her aunt had selected, for whatever good or trivial reason.

  And so one day the boy allowed his keen and inquisitive gaze to wander along a new row of books in the window, evidently excited by the collection of unfamiliar reading matter suddenly before him. Finally his eyes stopped at an attractive little volume on the very end of the display, where Valerie had placed a copy of Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux.

  The boy would come past every day at lunchtime, obviously on his way home, so it was not hard to catch him. Behind the cover of the large curtain Valerie had an excellent vantage point from which to observe him. She couldn’t help but smile and thought back to her own childhood and adolescence. Yes, there had been days when she’d absolutely devoured books, one after the other, and when she’d come to the end of her supplies she simply reread what was there and then again.

  The following day something extraordinary happened. The boy came in to the shop. Not tentatively; he entered without a hint of timidity, put his satchel down by the door and looked around in the gloomy light. Valerie had been expecting the boy and watched him, partially hidden behind a tall library ladder in the antiquarian section.

  Closing his eyes, the boy breathed in deeply the air inside the shop. Then he nodded approvingly and turned to the nearest shelf. ‘Can I help you?’ Valerie asked, stepping out from behind her ladder.

  ‘No thanks, that’s not necessary,’ the boy replied slightly precociously. ‘I’m just having a look around.’

  ‘Fine. If you need me I’ll be in the office.’ She pointed to the stairs then headed off in that direction to do a bit of bookkeeping.

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched the boy inspect the titles on the book spines. ‘Children’s books are at the front on the left, beside the door,’ she called out.


  ‘OK,’ was all he said, ignoring her as he took out an E.T.A. Hoffmann work and leafed through it, followed by some Hemingway short stories and then Camus’s The Outsider… He inspected each volume with the greatest of care, opening it, stroking the paper with his fingertips, turning it over, taking off the dust jacket and caressing the ribbon marker if the book had one… He delved into Kant for a long while, came across Eichendorff (who he took a close look at) beside the armchair and then was engrossed for ages in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, a book so weird and complicated that it had completely bewildered Valerie when she’d browsed through it. After spending a long time with this obscure marvel of modern American literature, he shut it and put it down beside his satchel.

  Valerie cleared her throat. ‘Would you mind putting it back on the shelf, please?’

  But the boy just casually raised his hand and, over his shoulder, aimed an ‘I’m taking it’ in Valerie’s direction. The Foer was joined by a collection of Daniil Kharms’ writing, Maupassant’s Bel Ami and the Gilgamesh epic.

  It was almost evening by the time the boy stood next to her with his bundle of books and said drily, ‘I’d like these.’

  Valerie tried to fathom from his expression whether he was being serious. If he was joking, this young customer had the poker face of the century.

  ‘Have you got that much money?’

  ‘Seventy-four euros, thirty-nine cents? Sure.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Valerie took the books from him and put them on the desk. She entered the prices into the ancient till and tapped with the back of her hand the enter key, which for some inexplicable reason had ‘CASH’ written on it vertically. When she’d rung up all the prices she pressed ‘CASH’ again and stared at the display, a small, unglazed window behind which black cogs with engraved white numbers rotated. It told her: ‘Seventy-four euros, thirty-nine cents.’

  The boy felt in his trouser pocket and pulled out a twenty-euro note. ‘That’s what I can pay,’ he told her, handing over the banknote.

  ‘I see. I’m afraid I can’t put it on account.’

  ‘On account?’

  ‘Lend you the money.’

  ‘You don’t have to lend me any money,’ the boy said, unfazed. ‘Basically you’re just lending me the books. Until I’ve paid them off in full. Then they’ll belong to me.’

  ‘Erm… sure,’ Valerie replied, ambushed by the logic of his reasoning.

  And before she could lay down any further clear rules on the subject of payment by instalment, the boy nodded and said, ‘So we’re agreed. I pass by here every day anyway. If I’ve got any money I’ll just give you some.’

  Suddenly it dawned on Valerie what had happened. Only now did she realize. ‘You’re making fun of me!’ She laughed, still slightly uncertain, but she laughed. ‘This is a joke, right? You’d never ever be interested in these books. How old are you, anyway?’

  ‘Ten. And you?’

  ‘Twenty-… OK – erm – young man, leading me up the garden path like that is all very cute, but I’d like to shut the shop now and go home.’

  ‘Oh blimey!’ the boy replied. ‘Home. I’d completely forgotten! Mum’s going to be worried. Then she’ll have a go at me because she loves me so much.’ He picked up the books to put them in his bag.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ Valerie called out. ‘That’s enough now, OK? Please leave the books where they are; I’ll put them back myself. Here’s your twenty euros back…’ She held out the banknote, but he merely looked at it, vaguely disconcerted.

  ‘But I bought the books.’

  ‘Yes, but you weren’t being serious…’

  ‘I was.’ And with that the books vanished into his schoolbag, which he threw over his shoulder.

  ‘Now look here…’ With a determined stride she overtook him and blocked his way to the door. ‘What do you want with Kharms? And Maupassant? You’re ten years old! Kids your age read children’s books, not old French novelists. Nor contemporary experimental American literature.’

  ‘Experimental?’ She couldn’t fail to notice the gleam in his eyes.

  What’s going through his head now? Valerie wondered, but somehow she was struck by an unbelievable sympathy for the boy who’d come into her shop with such confidence, trawled through the collection of books, handed over all his money and was now standing here in front of her like a gentlemanly philosopher thrust back into childhood. His eyes were so full of curiosity and disarming attentiveness that Valerie suddenly felt ashamed. She cleared her throat, pointed to his satchel and asked, ‘Why these books? Why not Desperaux? Or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?’

  ‘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 th
e 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

  One 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”.’