A Very Special Year (7 page)

‘Does she say what book it is?'

‘Yes, wait a moment, it's somewhere in the letter.' He made that pointless and embarrassing dum-da-dum-da-dum-da-dum sound, which some people do when they're reading to signal to other people that they're doing what they're purporting to do: reading. It's a well-honed insecurity they like to round off with an ‘Ah'. ‘Ah, here,' Sven said. ‘
By Night Under the Stone Bridge
. By…'

‘Leo Perutz.'

‘Not bad. We ought to put you up for a quiz show.'

‘Wasn't too hard. I just had the book in my hand.'

‘If it's such a revelation, maybe you ought to read it,' Sven said off-handedly, without any attempt to sound serious about his suggestion. But even as he was reading out the title, Valerie took hold of the book again. It was an old edition, not an antiquarian one, but with a slightly faded spine and yellowed pages. She'd immediately taken to the title; it sounded mysterious and enticing.

‘Or this one here!' Sven called out. He was holding another letter: ‘
Once again you found something exactly to my taste. And yet the books you recommend me are all
so different that I'm at a loss as to how I end up liking them all so much. Thank you very much! Yours, Natalia de Bon-Leclerq
. Lovely writing paper – looks like it's from the nineteenth century. A marquise. Natalia Marquise de Bon-Leclerq du Tour. Unbelievable. How come the shop's in the red if your aunt had customers like that?'

‘That's something I'd love to know too,' Valerie replied, brushing a hair from her face. Yes, it did irritate her that Sven sat around either fiddling with his smartphone and cracking stupid jokes about the shop, but never made himself useful in any way. ‘You might also lend me a hand,' she said finally, as she realized that neither subtle hints nor body language can induce a man to remedy his social infirmity when it comes to being helpful.

On this occasion, even explicitly articulating one's wishes did no good. Sven seemed not to have heard. Maybe this was the case, maybe something else had absorbed every grain of his attention. Perhaps it was the missive he'd unfolded, written on paper from the elegant Zurich hotel Baur au Lac. A letter from the world-famous Viennese actor, Noé.

‘Noé? Does he still live in Vienna?'

‘Is he still alive in fact?'

It wasn't easy to find out whether Noé still lived in
Vienna, but it wasn't important either. Thanks to Sven's smartphone, however, they were able to establish after a few minutes that he was still alive. And evidently life was rosy for Noé. He had a new wife as well as numerous, doubtlessly well-paid jobs in television. He also seemed to be a permanent guest at prize ceremonies, and the more they honoured his life's work the more tortured his expression in the photographs became.

 

My Dearest Charlotte, How wonderful that package was which you sent to my little hideaway. I shall never, ever forget you for having included, besides the Thoreau and Gracián that I requested – and which I need for a part I'm playing at the Burgtheater in Vienna – the volume of Henry James stories and Mark Twain's
The Innocents Abroad.
Both writers, each in his own way, are godlike observers and windbags. ‘As a general thing, we have been shown through palaces by some plush-legged filigreed flunkey or other, who charged a franc for it.' – Twain. I cried with
laughter, dearest Charlotte! His experience was like that you get in a posh hotel where every few paces there's a boy who bows while holding out his hand. Polished buttons everywhere but no sense of discretion!

 

Appended to this letter you will find another short list of requests which I'd be terribly grateful if you would send me. These are books I've been meaning to read for ages or ones I've lost somewhere over the course of my wandering artist's life. Please be so kind as to send them again to my mountain retreat. There's no particular hurry; I'm on tour in France for the next three weeks. But if your package were to be there on my return, it would be a source of great comfort and relaxation after the strains that such travelling and nightly performances place on a sensitive artist's heart and my permanently somewhat frail physique. Please put the books on my account and I shall pay my debts
when I next visit your city. With my warmest regards and deep respect,

 

Yours
,

 

 

Noé

 

 

P.S. Please try to find the most beautiful editions available. A book is so much more than the sum of its words!

What couldn't be found was a list of the books. There was nothing else with the letter. But another thought had crept into Valerie's mind as Sven read out the letter: she'd seen the name of the famous actor on another list – several times in fact! On the list of unpaid bills…

At this point, dear reader, we can't help forcing our narrator to revise his pre-conceived ideas. Even the most witless business economist can, in certain circumstances, be placed in a position to steer his or her imagination in some other direction than towards currencies. This doesn't mean that such circumstances will always obtain. In Sven's case, we're looking at
someone whose imagination was clearly fired by monetary affairs, which is why – surrounded by countless fascinating stories – he quickly became bored in the small bookshop. ‘I can't understand,' he said sulkily one evening, ‘why you're wasting your time in here. It's all hopeless.'

‘Sven… it's what my aunt wanted. We don't even know where she is. How she is…'

‘Which means she abandoned all of this long ago, and it's high time you followed her example.' He blew some non-existent dust from a copy of
Man of Straw
and then stared morosely out into the street, where a crane was being delivered.

‘What? Vanish into thin air? Great plan.'

‘Don't be silly,' he carped. He wasn't in the mood for jokes. ‘I mean you should abandon this.'

‘Maybe she'll come back. Hopefully…'

‘Then she can do the job herself. This slump in turnover – was it your fault or hers?'

‘Instead of being so mean about Aunt Charlotte, why don't you help me?' Valerie replied, suppressing the lump that was trying to rise in her throat.

‘You want help? OK then!' He turned around, went up the two steps to the office, grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled down some bullet points. Then, perched with one buttock on the edge of the desk, he
pontificated, ‘The first thing you ought to do is a target group analysis. Who shops in this joint?'

‘OK… well, at the moment I'd say it's almost exclusively people who just pop in off the street. Far too few at any rate.'

‘Look, if you know who you're sitting here for and which sort of people you're expecting,' Sven continued impassively, ‘you're on the way to sharpening your profile. Otherwise you're missing out on at least half your ideal customers. Don't waste any time on the minnows. If you've got three sorts of customers, concentrate on the two lucrative groups and let the third go.'

‘Three sorts of customers would be great, Sven. The way things look at the moment I don't even have…'

‘Process optimization and profit maximization,' the young man blurted out with a faint tremolo – his forehead was quivering. ‘These are measures you need to undertake. A business doesn't work because you've tried to understand how others have got it wrong; it runs smoothly because you find out how you can make it work yourself.'

Although at that moment Valerie hated Sven for his perspective on things and found his pathological diagnosis ridiculous, his insight was perhaps not
altogether wide of the mark. And yet, everything he'd said before that sounded so inane, and she marvelled she had ever taken all the nonsense from her course so seriously. ‘Or…' she said, getting up. ‘Or the secret of a bookshop is something quite different.' She shoved Sven off the desk and herded him to the back door.

‘Right,' Sven said laconically. ‘I can see that.'

‘Listen, I know myself that the shop wasn't working. But believe me, if it were as simple as you say and that all you had to do to get the cash rolling in was a target group analysis, process optimization and tralala, then any moron with a bookshop would soon be minted.'

‘Thanks for calling me a moron,' Sven grumbled, half-heartedly resisting being shoved out of the door. ‘Hey, what are you doing?'

‘Go home, Sven. I could be here a while yet. I need more time to work my alchemy. You'll get out via the backyard.'

‘Alchemy?' Sven spluttered, aghast. ‘Are you mixing with poets now or…?'

Valerie was very pleased when the door closed and shut out the noises coming from outside. Thrusting his hands into his coat pockets, Sven trudged off. And Valerie could have sworn that behind her an armada
of books were chuckling softly.

But she wasn't happy. Somehow her relationship with Sven was not going in the right direction. Ringelnatz & Co. was to blame, quite clearly. Last year, in February, they'd considered renting a flat together instead of living separately in overpriced apartments. But no more had been said on the matter since Charlotte vanished. And while she watched Sven turn the corner and disappear from view, the image of that mysterious young man came into her head again. How differently he had left the shop. In fact, as Valerie had to admit to herself, he'd never really left it – all too often she thought she could feel his presence, all too often she could hear his voice: ‘I could spend my life here.'

The lump had returned to her throat and the only way she could be rid of it was to wash it back down with a flood of tears. Valerie looked reproachfully at the books, which maintained an embarrassed silence. Finally she blew her nose, packed one of the folders with letters into the large bag she always carried around with her these days, so she could take a few books to and from home, and left the shop too. As she walked out she glimpsed Grisaille's nose poking out from behind a ledge on the wall.

‘Oh, it's you,' she said, stopping. ‘I didn't give you
anything today… I'm very sorry.' The rat gave her a curious look. ‘Wait.' Valerie quickly opened the shop, took a saucer from the cupboard, poured a little milk and placed it on the window sill before locking up again and standing a short distance from the window. Grisaille was not at all afraid of her; the young woman had long been a familiar face and the two of them occasionally talked to each other. Valerie noticed that the creature had become a little rounder. Was that the milk? But surely the rat's belly was growing a bit too quickly for that.

‘You're pregnant!' Valerie exclaimed quietly, observing her little friend with fascination. ‘Of course, it all happens rather quickly with you lot. That's why you've got so round.'

This sparked a thought in her. She picked a little red book from her bag, a collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's poems. ‘Do you know this one?' she asked Grisaille. ‘It's called
From a Railway Carriage
. Listen!

 

Faster than fairies, faster than witches
,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle
,

All through the meadows the horses and cattle:

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye
,

Painted stations whistle by
.

 

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles
,

All by himself and gathering brambles;

Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

And there is the green for stringing the daisies!

Here is a cart run away in the road

Lumping along with man and load;

And here is a mill and there is a river:

Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

For some reason Valerie had to cry again the moment she stopped, perhaps because she feared she would soon lose Grisaille when the rat had to care for her babies.

She put the book down. ‘I can only hope that your man has a different mentality than mine. See you tomorrow.' Ill at ease, she left the yard to go home. As lovely as the bookshop was and as attached as she had become to all those books, at times it was comforting to free herself from the burden of responsibility and nestle into the sofa at home or share a glass of wine with friends.

NINE

R
ecently she'd only been home to shower and sleep. To read in peace and have the odd coffee. But the computer in her work corner had barely been touched and her fridge had suffered from chronic emptiness – Valerie just didn't get around to shopping any more. Running a shop meant being there during business hours. But whenever she came back to her small flat – actually, a tiny flat – she was astonished at how mundane these four walls were. No samovar. No eighteen varieties of tea. No little rodent you could chat to. No faux antique reading chair. And hardly any books, or at least none apart from textbooks and a few comics that Sven had dumped at some point.

It had only taken a few days for Valerie to feel as if
she were coming home whenever she entered the bookshop. Now, in this apartment, she sometimes felt like a stranger, as if it were part of someone else's life altogether, whereas Ringelnatz & Co. was part of
hers
.

Some of the letters she'd brought back were very touching. A teacher thanked Aunt Charlotte: with the book (sadly the letter didn't specify which) that the elderly lady had recommended as a class read, she'd
finally reconnected with my pupils, even though I'd never have been able to get the management to approve this novel. But maybe that was one of the reasons why – I made a pact with the class; for the time it took us to read the book we were a secret community. You know, many years ago this is exactly how I'd imagined what being a teacher would be like, before reality got in the way. But now, thanks to you, I know that there are other realities!