A Very Special Year

by Thomas Montasser

  But time passed and the departure drew irrevocably closer. Two tickets, Julia thought, there were two tickets in the woman’s envelope – they must be for two seats next to each other. Julia glanced at them again: seat 13 and – seat 13. Puzzled, she looked at the numbers above the seats. Two tickets for seat 13? Impossible. And yet there it was on the ticket in black and white: Carriage 12, Seat 13, both times. Until she realized what she’d completely failed to notice before: only the first ticket was for Paris. The second was from Paris to… At that moment she heard the guard’s whistle. And in a fraction of a second she made a decision: she would travel. To Paris, and then on to

  The text broke off in mid-sentence. Confused, Valerie turned the page. But on the next side and the one after that she found herself staring at blank paper. All the way to the final page the publication had turned into an empty book. The young woman put it down with a mixture of disappointment and fascination. How might the story continue? How would it end? The book was clearly a faulty copy. She picked up the card from Aunt Charlotte’s archive again. Under publisher was a name she’d never heard of before: Millefeuille. She knew this as a cake, but as a publishing house… Still, the name seemed somehow appropriate: a thousand leaves. The index of publishers must be somewhere; Valerie had seen it the day before. When she finally found it she looked for ‘Millefeuille’. But her intuition proved correct: ‘Millefeuille’ was not there. Now it might be the case, of course, that Millefeuille was just an imprint of a larger publishing house. But checking the publishing details at the front of the book didn’t help, because there weren’t any.

  Author? Nothing. ‘Who wrote this book, for goodness’ sake?’ Valerie wondered, opening the spine to check the blurb on the back cover, where she found the following meagre lines: The author lives and works in Paris, Florence and St Petersburg. After a major unhappy love affair with a woman, he fell deeply and happily in love with literature, thereby discovering a new life. This book is dedicated to the mother of his three daughters.

  Hmm, Valerie thought. A trifle overblown and yet so damn little information. She shut the book and stroked the surface with her fingers. It was beautifully bound with an embossed title and even a ribbon marker in hopeful green. The work of an unknown author from an unknown publishing house, maybe a completely misprinted edition; who could say whether an error-free one existed? Nobody would ask for it, nobody would buy it and in this state it couldn’t even be sold as a remainder at a bargain price. Valerie put it down, picked it up again and finally tossed it into a box already containing all sorts of pieces of paper that Valerie had no idea what to do with.

  The curse of undertaking a spring clean is that to begin with the chaos multiplies massively. It’s only when you get to the point of despair, when you’re on the verge of either giving up or jumping out of the window, that the fog suddenly starts to lift as if by magic. Almost imperceptibly to begin with, but then in an increasingly triumphant fashion, a certain order is re-established, a lucidity emerges, which after all the stress and agony feels even more refreshing. Jumping out of the window wouldn’t have got Valerie very far; the shop was on the ground floor, after all. Giving up wasn’t part of her plan either, and generally wasn’t an option amongst those with business degrees. But most importantly, she was far from the point of absolute chaos. Of course, Sven would have seen it differently. Which, indeed, he did when that day, or more precisely that evening after work – which for trainee management consultants means some time comfortably after nine o’clock – he knocked on the shop window and waited for Valerie to let him out of the biting cold and into the warmth.

  ‘Should I be worried?’ Sven asked, taking off his coat and throwing it into a corner. ‘You’re working longer hours than me.’

  ‘No idea. I mean, you should always look at things from the end point. But, to be honest, I can’t see an end,’ Valerie sighed, rubbing her eyes. Had she actually eaten anything today? She couldn’t remember. Probably not since breakfast, and that had been a white coffee and a bowl of muesli. No surprise, then, that she felt giddy.

  ‘Sit down, I shan’t be much longer.’

  ‘OK.’ Sven sank into the armchair and leaned his head back. He took out his smartphone to check emails and scroll through the news. ‘Shit,’ he cursed. ‘No juice. Have you…?’ But then he remembered that Valerie had a different phone and he couldn’t charge his with her adaptor. As for the elderly bookseller, it wasn’t even worth asking; she’d been way behind the times. He put his smartphone on the small table where a pile of books stood, and studied the spines of the diverse volumes.

  ‘The Kamasutra?’ he said finally with a mixture of amusement and approval. ‘Don’t tell me your aunt sold erotic literature here too.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a Kamasutra here between Schiller and Schnitzler.’

  ‘Oh yes, right.’ Valerie looked up from her list. ‘She had a system and I’m in the process of sifting out the most important books from it. That’s my first result.’

  But Sven wasn’t really listening. He’d slid out the book and started studying it. Perhaps Valerie had carried on talking, but if so he wasn’t aware of it. The truth is that literature can grab hold of us and capture our entire attention. It can transport us to other worlds, free us from our everyday cares. We can lose ourselves in literature. Even terribly prosaic individuals are receptive to this, providing it’s the right book. Which was clearly the case with Sven and the Kamasutra. Valerie had just switched off the desk lamp and packed up her bag when her boyfriend laughed out loud. ‘You’ve got to see this!’ he giggled.

  Now it was Valerie’s turn to lean her head back. ‘What?’

  ‘They were quite weird, those ancient Indians.’

  ‘There are ancient Egyptians and ancient Romans. I’ve also heard of ancient Persians, but ancient Indians? I think they’re still the same people…’

  ‘So what, look at this!’ he said, resting the book on his lap. The colour in his face indicated that he was nowhere near as exhausted as Valerie. She stood next to him and bent over.

  ‘So?’

  ‘That’s impossible in real life,’ Sven laughed. ‘Just a completely weird sex fantasy.’

  ‘Well, as far as I know this is a scientific book of sorts. I presume that everything in there is possible.’ She took a closer look. ‘Having said that…’

  Perhaps it was the slight dizziness that had taken hold of her, perhaps the vague awareness that Sven was breathing more rapidly. Perhaps it was the dim glow from this one reading lamp that bathed the entire shop in a very modest light. Anyway, Valerie perched on the soft arm of the chair, leaned back on her Sven, grabbed the book, leafed through a couple of pages, muttered, ‘We really ought to try that out sometime,’ felt her breathing getting faster too, turned off the light, put the book down and her hand back to where it had just been resting. Sven took a deep breath, turned the light back on and got up.

  ‘Great curtain,’ he said in a slightly hoarse voice, undoing the cord that tied back the large stage curtain behind the shop window. ‘And a great chair.’

  ‘Reading chair,’ Valerie specified.

  ‘Let’s do some studying then.’

  What a marvellous invention stage curtains are. Devised to hide the banal and whet our appetite for the extraordinary. They create the space for our imagination by eliminating the external perspective. Stage curtains embed our attention in the necessary mixture of mystery and anticipation. In a sense one could argue that there is a performance on either side of the stage curtain in Ringelnatz & Co. The main characters introduce themselves in the proscenium – selected titles which, thanks to their topicality, their particularly charming features or because the elderly bookseller held them in great esteem, are like lighthouses attracting the curiosity of passers-by. To the rear of the stage, the entire mass of players, utterly inconceivable in their diversity, so overwhelming that each one of them can become for the spectator the lead protagonist. Each book an e
vent, turned into a theatrical production solely thanks to this heavy, deep-red curtain with its golden tassled edging, as old-fashioned as it is voluptuous, which was not pulled back again until the following morning to free up the view to an interested observer: Valerie, who until now hadn’t given it a glance. She stood inside the small bookshop, somewhat dishevelled from a largely sleep-deprived night full of various Kamasutra-related studies, but pleasantly exhausted, and she realized to her astonishment that this most important PR tool for Ringelnatz & Co. had till now completely escaped her attention.

  Well, over the course of the day she would subject the books to careful scrutiny. To start with she pulled out a handful and, obeying a spontaneous hunch, put the Kamasutra in one of the spaces that had become free. Then she left the shop with her boyfriend to get something to eat finally.

  FIVE

  A cabinet of fantasies, a source of knowledge, a collection of lore from past and present, a place to dream… A bookshop can be so many things. Of course, on a very banal level it is also a store of printed matter to be sold to customers. But anyone who engages with the diversity a bookshop offers can experience epiphanies of a quite different and exceptionally sensual nature!

  It was a well-thumbed little book, wrapped in grey-black paper, one of those works so easy to overlook in a superficial review of the stock. Most of the gold embossing on the spine had disappeared due to a tear in the binding. Valerie didn’t examine it closely; she just pulled out the book to note down the author and title. Both were set between two small stars, also embossed in gold, on a very beautiful oxblood vignette on the front cover: Gustav Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman. And while she wondered why this name hadn’t been written with an ‘e’ – Gustave Flaubert – she opened the book and discovered that inside, that’s to say on the title page, it had been printed in two colours: red and black on white. In the bottom right-hand corner on this first page (something seemed to be missing; maybe the book had once had a frontispiece) was an illegible name and a year: ‘39’. As a note on the very last page said, this edition had appeared in 1922. The book smelled faintly of printer’s ink and pipe smoke. How many hands might this have passed through before ending up amongst the antiquarian books in the shop? And who had brought it here?

  The text was sharply printed and – as Valerie noted when she ran her fingers across the pages – slightly debossed. On those pages with only a few lines of text, the imprint of the type on the reverse side was clearly visible. At the bottom of page 17 there was a tiny annotation, set apart from the main text: ‘2 Flaubert’. She found a similar annotation on page 33: ‘3 Flaubert’. The book came to an end shortly after ‘7 Flaubert’; it only had 99 pages in total. But, as Valerie worked out, each annotation marked a so-called printed sheet, which consisted of sixteen pages. In vain she tried to picture the specific technique by which one of these sheets would have to be folded, printed and cut to end up with a meaningful sequence of text, or rather the only correct sequence, the desired sequence, the tale of a young Flaubert or another of the countless stories that had made it into book form over the past five hundred years.

  The Flaubert book was neither one of the most beautiful nor best smelling on the shelves. Not even the works of Ringelnatz, all of them fairly conventional-looking tomes (scarcely daring to emphasize the originality of the ideas they harboured), belonged in this category. But there were myriad books whose aesthetic charm was irresistible, so long as you gave it the opportunity to work its magic. The editions of Heinrich Heine, for example, which in just two volumes of delicate lightweight paper managed to reproduce all the fragility of Heine’s divine and wicked poetical art. You handled each page with the greatest respect, allowing the airy, shimmering ideas to take effect. There was the cloth-bound Balzac, whose dignified understatement was the very opposite of the pompous man himself – a commercial writer of the highest calibre – but it did lend the work a more universal validity. Although the volume was almost odourless, it had a flawlessly stitched binding that shimmered impishly. The ostentatious Dostoevsky, bound entirely in cognac-coloured leather that smelled slightly like an old, long-distance train compartment, in which a delegation of well-off gentlemen discuss prices on the wood market. On the front cover, embossed deeply in gold, was the author’s signature with its bold loops that rose as high as they sunk low, but completely illegible; it could have easily been the signature of any old vet. A perfidious edition of Christian Morgenstern’s Gallows Songs, which may have lain for goodness knows how long on the bedside table of a fashionable young lady – no, more likely under her pillow. The scent of her perfume had penetrated deeply into the rather brittle and yellowed paper, which was of the plainest quality and had already torn in places. The book’s appearance stood in sharp contrast to its olfactory charms, which made it interesting. Valerie was so curious that she sat down to investigate further. After spending a while getting used to the author’s bizarrely crafted ideas, she came across a poem entitled The Daynight Lamp. And as she was reading it, something switched on in her mind:

  Korf invents a daynight lamp

  that turns the brightest day

  into darkest night

  the moment you flick the switch.

  When in Congress, by the ramp

  he demonstrates his light.

  All who know their stuff, they

  must face up to the fact, which –

  (Darkness replaces the light of day,

  applause in the House reaches fever

  pitch)

  (They cry to the butler, Herr Hamp:

  ‘Turn on the lights’) – must face up

  to the fact, which

  is that this very lamp

  does indeed turn the brightest day

  into darkest night

  when you flick the switch.

  Valerie stood up, put the book down, turned out the lights and inhaled deeply the discoveries in this wonderful cabinet of dreams, the scents of all the new and old books, the aroma of their experiences and promises, their curses and prophesies, of the hands in which they had rested, the care with which the paper manufacturer, printer and binder had worked on them, the ink with which they were printed, the glue, the cloth, the leather, the covers and dust-jackets, the stitching, the ribbons and tissue paper. No perfumery could produce as perfect a blend from the interplay of countless aromas as a bookshop, in which old and new works were arranged with love. As The Daynight Lamp proved, if for a moment you can stop regarding a book as purely a means of conveying ideas, it is an utterly sensual experience – a work of total art.

  It’s not particularly difficult to run a bookshop successfully, Valerie thought. You need the most basic principles of management, a sensible business plan, a little negotiating skill, a few contacts and a large helping of magic. Of course, not everyone who sails through time and space with a bookshop can master the last of these. Nor could Valerie. She didn’t even come close, she would soon realize. For you could check, correct, predict all the figures; you could count, order and make an inventory of all the books. You could work from early in the morning to late in the evening and even at night. But if you couldn’t perform magic then all this was in vain. It felt as if there must be a million books available. Perhaps there were many more than this. Different titles! And several editions of many of these. Who could ever know what from all this material would really interest the reader? Who could even begin to make a selection from this inconceivable mass of books that had accumulated over hundreds of years? Didn’t managing a product range mean that you had to know everything to be able to sift out what you could recommend to your readers? But perhaps the bookshop itself was a work, too: an anthology of other works that comprised its soul. Wasn’t every shop inevitably the expression of its owner’s individuality? Nobody could know a million books.

  Limits were essential, therefore. Every bookseller selected from what they knew and liked. This gave the bookshop its own personality. Then there were orders from customers who asked for c
ertain books they couldn’t find among the stock. If this happened frequently, the bookseller would buy copies of the title to have it in stock for when the next customer came asking for it. And that’s how a bookshop evolved, like a child that grows up, severing the umbilical cord from its parents and developing its own character, its distinct personality: unpredictable, idiosyncratic and full of surprises. But the more strongly this character is developed, the more strength and empathy it needs to master it and show off its best. It’s like a hot-blooded horse that needs a first-rate rider.

  Valerie, however, was not a particularly good rider. To tell the truth, she wasn’t a rider at all. In actual fact, she had the feeling, even after just a few weeks, that she was the one being ridden here. If she trotted in one direction (for example by drawing up a new price list) the strange world of bookselling would mercilessly rein her in (because prices are fixed by the publisher long before the product is in the shops). If she galloped in the opposite direction (let’s say by means of bold discounting to gain greater support from publishing partners) the law would force her to make a U-turn (in this case because discounts in Germany are only allowed up to a certain level; anything beyond this is termed ‘unfair competition’). The combination of stipulations, conventions, customs, regulations, and therefore opportunities, appeared such a complex amalgam that big leaps seemed out of bounds from the beginning. It was only with content that there were no limits and this lack of limits was so absolute that, in addition to the aforementioned qualities needed for the felicitous management of a successful bookshop, Valerie soon stumbled upon the final, equally indispensable, requirement: unqualified madness.

  Experienced readers of novels that deal with booksellers may at this juncture argue that another fixed element is essential for everything to run smoothly: a mysterious female cat that was either a pharaoh or temple dancer in a previous life, or alternatively an unscrupulously gallant tom with differently coloured eyes and a missing claw. In fact Ringelnatz & Co. had the necessary technical provision for this: a window onto the backyard, tall and narrow (both the window and the yard). When Valerie opened it for some oxygen to combat the tiredness that had overcome her, she thought she glimpsed a modest grey tabby darting away beneath the sill. The yard looked like the set for a Mafia film. In one corner raindrops tussled with brown leaves, while the wind cut so bitterly through the ramshackle walls that Valerie decided it would be better to tilt the window open from the top to stop it from slamming shut in her face. Beforehand, though, she placed a saucer of milk on the sill. Then she lay in wait, wondering what name she’d give the cat. ‘Ruby’ came to mind, but that didn’t suit grey. ‘Grisella’! But wasn’t that the name of a little donkey from a children’s story she vaguely remembered? ‘Grisaille’, perhaps? Valerie didn’t know that this was a painting technique for oil designs. So Grisaille it stayed. She thought it sounded like a friendly old lady, such as Aunt Charlotte. She kept thinking about this until the cat popped onto the window sill and turned out not to be a cat after all. Not even a tom cat. Grisaille was another beast altogether and, yes, Valerie got quite a shock when there it was staring straight at her just a few inches away, albeit separated by the windowpane. For Grisaille was almost the opposite of a cat: she was a rat.