A Very Special Year

by Thomas Montasser

  THOMAS

  MONTASSER

  Translated by Jamie Bulloch

  A Oneworld book

  First published in North America, Great Britain and Australia by Oneworld Publications 2016

  This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications, 2016

  Originally published in German as Ein ganz besonderes Jahr by Thiele Verlag, 2014

  Copyright © Thiele & Brandstätter Verlag GmbH, 2014

  Translation copyright © Jamie Bulloch, 2016

  Published by special arrangement with Thiele Verlag and its duly appointed agent, 2 Seas Literary Agency

  The moral right of Thomas Montasser to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved

  Copyright under Berne Convention

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78074-866-5

  eBook ISBN 978-1-78074-867-2

  Excerpt from If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver. Copyright © 1979 by Giulio Einaudi Editore, s.p.a., English translation copyright © 1981 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

  From Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, published by Jonathan Cape. Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  For Mariam,

  the muse of my budding dreams

  Reality can’t compete

  with literature,

  you see.

  Valerie’s mother

  A book is so much more

  than the sum of its words!

  Noé

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  ONE

  If someone had peered through the window, that person would have glimpsed little more than the bent back of a carefully dressed elderly lady, whose snow-white, somewhat tousled bun was hovering above the till, bathed in the gentle light of a tired ceiling lamp. Maybe that person would have seen her emphatically draw a line below a list she’d written in an ancient notebook, then snap shut said notebook no less emphatically and snap open a handbag beside her, from which she took a purse, and from this she slipped out a rather low-value banknote and placed it in the till. That person would have seen her slender hand, dotted with age spots, but otherwise aristocratic and pale, close the till and touch it again – as you might comfort an old friend with a slap on the shoulder – before she finally stood up, conducted an inspection of the floor-to-ceiling shelves, whispered something to them, then turned off the light and left the small shop via the back door. Thus our observer would have been the witness of a specific event that can be summed up in two words: Charlotte’s disappearance.

  Now, you don’t need to be especially perceptive to realize that no such observer existed. On that – significant, as we shall see later – winter evening no one was passing by to glance through the window or, more accurately, at the window display. In other words, it was a perfectly normal evening, a typical evening rather than an unusual one. On no account could you blame this on a lack of people milling about; on the contrary, the old lady’s shop, although slightly set back from the street, was located in an area with a good level of footfall, as people put it so nicely. A bakery would have probably done a roaring trade, an off licence too, not to mention a fitness studio. In this respect, the elderly lady, whom our non-existent observer would have seen at the beginning, had a more difficult job. Much more difficult. For, as we know, passing trade is an odd species: wilful, stubborn, unpredictable, but most of all, never there when you need it. For the sake of accuracy, however, we must note that the business this elderly lady was in depends far more on regular customers than passing trade. For it doesn’t offer mass-produced goods for swift consumption or dubious, rapidly fading beauty, but something considerably more substantial, important even. We are talking here about being or not being, in more than one sense. Which is why Charlotte’s disappearance can quite rightly be regarded as a cultural event, albeit not a pleasant one. But more on that later.

  It would be a while before the door to the small shop was opened again. And under very different circumstances.

  TWO

  The paint was peeling in places and there was a crack in one corner of the glass pane in the door. Valerie shook her head. When she finally managed to open the antiquated lock – it had slightly rusted and the door was jammed at the top – she was hit by weeks-old stale air. Leaving the door open, she headed straight for the office at the back to open the window there too. Fortunately it was a warm, spring day.

  Valerie dropped her bag on the floor and tried not to fall immediately into despair. Where on earth to begin? This shop was like a dress that the elderly woman had tailored to fit her life. It may now have fitted her perfectly, but for Valerie’s youthful existence it was uncomfortable, shapeless and wholly impractical. She sat down hesitantly on the worn armchair, which Aunt Charlotte had positioned by the window for the light. ‘What have I let myself in for?’ she sighed.

  On the little side table lay a pile of business cards with the shop’s name in elegantly flowing letters. Valerie picked up one; it radiated a particularly magical aura. The surface felt as if it had been coated with velvet, the letters were embossed in a deep, dark red. Valerie was unable to suppress a smile. ‘Ringelnatz & Co.,’ she said softly, with a mixture of hilarity and embarrassment. Evidently Aunt Charlotte had been trying to emulate the Paris bookshop she so admired: Shakespeare & Co. Valerie couldn’t understand why she hadn’t at least called her shop something like Goethe & Co. But perhaps there was no need to understand. Perhaps it was simply because Aunt Charlotte was from another era.

  So, the bookshop. How long was it since she’d last been here? Years. Several. Since her mother died, she hadn’t seen much of her aunt; Papa and Charlotte had never really got on. As a professor of economics, his conversation would soon turn to business matters. Aunt Charlotte exasperated him. ‘Can’t you get it into your head that you’re no businesswoman?’ he’d exclaim, literally every time they spoke, and turn away shaking his head. The two of them had nothing in common.

  And now, of all people, it was up to Valerie to liquidate the old bookshop where she’d spent so many happy hours of her childhood, and whose outdatedness she later found so alien. Chance had decreed that she should be the elderly lady’s closest relative and that, with her recent degree in business administration, she should also have the necessary know-how for the job. It was just that she’d set herself other goals for this post-degree period. She had already enrolled on a master’s degree, without which she wouldn’t be able to set herself up for a career as a consultant specializing in S
candinavia and the emerging economies of the Baltic. As she sat here in Aunt Charlotte’s old bookshop, two dozen applications were on their way to top firms: business consultancies, accountancy firms, marketing agencies and think tanks. This is where she wanted to go, into the heart of things, where business was pulsing, where brainstorms thundered and the future was being invented. Instead, she was stranded here amid reams of old paper. Moreover, she fancied she had some idea of what awaited her in her aunt’s accounts. That’s to say, she had no idea; it was something she would only discover when she was right in the middle of this story. If not later.

  The situation was further complicated by the fact that although Aunt Charlotte had disappeared, she had not been registered as dead. She had merely not been found anywhere. There was as little evidence that she had willingly gone somewhere as there was that she had unwillingly arrived somewhere – even if this destination were the afterlife. But nobody, of course, was under any illusion, least of all Valerie. She’d always liked Aunt Charlotte and she was very saddened that the elderly lady – she would have been pushing eighty – had departed this life in such a mysterious way. There had been no sightings of her; she had quite simply taken leave of her existence, which was as cranky as it was convivial. And the note that had been found on her kitchen table was not even valid as an official will because it lacked a signature and it didn’t refer in so many words to anyone actually inheriting her estate, but maintaining it: ‘My niece Valerie is to look after everything.’ That was all.

  The shop probably hadn’t changed since its foundation in the late 1950s. True, different books adorned the shelves now and the samovar had only arrived in the nineties – by chance Valerie knew exactly when – after a trip her aunt had made to post-communist Russia, the land of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Pushkin. Russia had been Charlotte’s dream destination, at least until that visit, which had brought some sober reality (back then, Mama had said, ‘Reality can’t compete with literature, you see.’). But apart from this, there were floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves that could have done with a polish years ago, a worn parquet floor, three lamps with ancient green shades on wobbly side tables and a heavy, gathered curtain with gold embroidery at the edges, which separated the display window from the rest of the shop and which had once probably been a stage curtain, maybe even in the pre-war era.

  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.