‘Ringelnatz & Co.,’ she corrected him.
‘It’s a complicated name.’
‘Well, not really. It’s the name of a writer,’ Valerie explained, as she watched Timmi sit on the doorstep beside her. ‘And Co. means that it’s not just Ringelnatz’s books that are sold here, but those by other writers too.’
‘Then it was this writer who had the complicated name. Has it got anything to do with ringlets?’
‘I don’t know. But anyway, it’s a pseudonym. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, but lots of milk, please.’
‘Of course!’ She went inside, poured tea from the samovar pot – not too much, because Timmi was only ten – then filled it half-way up the cup with water, and then topped up with milk from the small fridge in the office. ‘You know what a pseudonym is, don’t you?’
Timmi nodded. ‘I’ve heard of it before. It’s not difficult to imagine what it is either. Even though it’s not Latin. More like Greek I think.’
‘Do you do Latin at school?’
‘Uh-huh. It’s my favourite subject. I can tell you that.’
Valerie had to smile to herself. She knew exactly what he meant. If he admitted it to his classmates he’d immediately be branded a swot and would lose all credibility. On the other hand, he came across as a loner anyway. Other boys his age didn’t hang around in bookshops all afternoon, admiring books for their aesthetic appeal.
‘It could mean: the one born with ringlets. Natz, I mean. From natus, born.’
‘Nice idea,’ Valerie said, realizing how much she’d come to like this boy. Whenever he didn’t pop in, she caught herself glancing at the door to see whether he might not turn up after all. Whenever she was sorting through books and discovered one that looked particularly unusual, she’d put it on the little table beside the armchair so that he’d find it on his next visit. Whenever it rained, she hoped he’d remembered to bring an umbrella. Timmi had become part of this strange state of affairs that had taken her through summer and into autumn, and now the question of how this whole business could possibly be brought to a successful conclusion was a matter of urgency.
When Valerie saw Timmi standing in the doorway the following day (it wasn’t raining, nor had there been any spectacular book discovery), she grabbed a cup and filled it with tea and milk without asking him. The boy took the cup with a smile and a nod, appearing completely at home, and looked at her inquisitively.
‘I’ve been doing a bit of research into Ringelnatz. You know…’ Valerie said.
‘The pseudonym.’
‘Yes. Well, Ringelnatz himself claimed that the name had no significance. He chose it because he liked the sound of it.’ She took a cup of tea too and sat in the armchair, while Timmi perched on the stool. ‘But there are clever people who have other theories. Some argue that the name comes from a ring snake.’
‘A snake?’
‘A very special snake. It’s equally at home on land as it is in water. I think that sounds quite plausible. At any rate, Ringelnatz did spend some time at sea.’
‘Was he a sailor?’
‘Yup.’
‘Cool.’ Timmi sniffed his tea then took a sip, as if he’d got lost in a Jane Austen novel and was now able to play the part of the Earl of Somewhere. ‘What about the other theory?’
‘Oh… well that’s linked to a sailor’s term: ringelnass.’
Timmi said nothing and drank his tea.
‘Ringelnass is a common sailors’ term for a seahorse.’
‘I like that theory. I don’t like the idea of a writer calling himself after a snake. But a seahorse, that suits.’ He put his cup smartly onto the table, said, ‘Thanks. I must be off.’ and disappeared without having so much as glanced at a single book.
Timmi still owed four euros when his visits to the little bookshop ceased. He simply stopped coming. Once Valerie thought she saw him running past on the opposite side of the street, but by the time she’d got to the door, the boy was nowhere to be seen. It was several weeks before the peculiar barrenness that his absence generated was overgrown again with the regularity of her daily routine and the irregularities of life. Perhaps he’d moved, perhaps he’d discovered another passion. Perhaps his pocket money had stopped and he was ashamed of his debts (although Valerie would have been very happy to waive the sum he still owed). But although Timmi would soon become a mere footnote in the history of Ringelnatz & Co., something of him remained: an enthusiasm for seeing things in a very different way from usual.
THIRTEEN
Life sometimes proves to be an accumulation of events following on thick and fast from each other, sometimes appears as a wild vortex of barely manageable demands, often as chaos, but the elements of life always follow a very particular order: they take place consecutively. Every moment is followed by another and another and yet another until your time’s up – and even after that it goes on and on, in a neat sequence.
The book has developed an incomparable form for turning this natural sequence of events into a natural concurrence. If you read a book from the first line to the last, it adheres to the conventional pattern of all existence. But sometimes we might open a book in the middle, fix on a sentence and then read from there, as a guest in the future, so to speak. Some books even ask to be opened at random. Then they throw out an idea such as:
He who ordained, when first the world
began,
Time, that was not before creation’s
hour,
Divided it, and gave the sun’s high
power
To rule the one, the moon the other
span.
Valerie was struck by how Michelangelo’s words had been translated and made anew for a different time by John Addington Symonds.
Valerie became increasingly accustomed to opening books wherever she fancied. She’d get curious and would investigate what was happening at the same time at a completely different point in the story. She could have warned Anna Karenina (another of those books that the elderly bookseller had made no comments on). She could have helped Nicholas Nickleby or Harry Potter. She would have fallen hopelessly in love with Mr Darcy and she would have cheered on Hal Jam from Kotzwinkle’s cryptic parable, The Bear Went over the Mountain.
Occasionally she’d put the book she was reading down on the little table outside the shop, close her eyes for a moment, listen to life going on around her, think of her old aunt or Sven (although rarely of Sven these days), before picking up the book again and reading on from where the wind had blown it. Sometimes this would allow her to rediscover a part she’d already read, but more importantly discover it in a new way; sometimes she found herself in a completely different scene, leaping straight into it as if it were a life that till then had been completely alien to her. Discovering a book meant freely rising above the demands of everyday life and uprooting your own existence from the here and now in order to plant it elsewhere.
It was the day on which the letter from the university arrived. She had failed to re-register at the beginning of the semester. Now she was informed very prosaically that she’d been ex-matriculated. Valerie ought to have been expecting this. But she simply hadn’t thought about it. To tell the truth, thoughts of the university hadn’t crossed her mind at all. A mistake. For now reality was striking back with merciless bureaucracy.
The note lay on the desk like a tax bill or like a love letter from the most stupid boy in the class. It made her feel aggressive. What had she done wrong to make them chuck her out just like that? OK, she’d missed a few tests, but she could retake them next semester or the one after that. She’d skipped a few seminars – in fact, all of them – but there was no consistent rule about obligatory attendance. If in the end she knew everything reasonably well she could get her credits and take the exam, maybe even obtain a better grade than if she’d hung around the campus the whole time slurping cappuccinos from the vending machine. In any case, what she was doing here was nothing other than applied b
usiness management – the practical application of what she could only learn in theory at university. In other words, it was far more important, it was learning by doing, it was real! ‘Damn it!’ she exclaimed, scrunching up the letter before propelling it with all her strength beyond the waste-paper basket. ‘What am I now? Student? Business economist? Bachelorette?’ She stood up, took a deep breath, suppressed the tears she could feel welling up, and sighed. Was that six semesters squandered? All her studies a waste of time? And for what? Without the opportunity to turn her bachelor’s degree in to a master’s, she could forget all her dreams of a great career in consultancy.
She turned around and fired an accusatory look at the books, which still stood stoically on their shelves, as if none of this had anything to do with them. They were all facing in a different direction. None seemed to give two figs about how human beings really felt. How she felt! Just a moment ago she’d still been a student. And now?
‘And now?’
She reached for her coat, took the key from the desk and only a few seconds later was out the door, where a soft mist was weaving golden arcs around the lantern. ‘And now? What am I now?’ she whispered. The street was empty. The shop windows gave off a lonely glow. Mr Pronto Pizza. Nailzz. GoFit! Gülestan Market. Ringelnatz & Co. She could have laughed. Yes, it really was a joke. A bookshop in this location in this era, full of the best and most beautiful volumes, all the knowledge and imagination which the cultures of the world had produced over centuries and millennia. It was so laughable that she could do nothing but laugh as she stared at the old sign above the shop, whose gold leaf looked like a greeting from distant epochs. But then it struck her: this bookshop could only exist here and now. It was needed precisely here and now. Here and now she’d look after it, breathe new life into this old business. For here and now she realized what she had become: ‘I’m a bookseller.’
There’s a huge difference between tackling something with the intention of bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion and deciding to give it a new beginning. Till now Valerie had seen herself as the person who’d been given the thankless task of winding up Aunt Charlotte’s affairs. But when, that previous evening, she’d stood outside in the twilight and surveyed the bleakness of the area, she suddenly realized that the carcass was still breathing. Weren’t the corners of the mouth still twitching, as if the corpse was secretly making fun of the young woman?
Several things may have stifled Ringelnatz & Co.’s business: the changes in the area, the large bookshop one underground station away, internet shopping, e-books. All of these were developments that made it difficult for a business run in such an old-fashioned way to survive. But why, Valerie wondered, shouldn’t I try to give this wonderful bookshop the kiss of life and wake it from its deep slumber?
And she began to see the shop through different eyes: the eyes of passers-by who might just glimpse Ringelnatz & Co. from the corner of their eyes, or who merely looked at the shop window on the way to work as they might glance up at the clock on the church tower, even though they knew precisely that they’d left home at 7.50, so it must now be 7.53, as it was every day of the year that they went into the office. But what, Valerie speculated, would happen if one day the clock on the church tower said 9.20? Or if it suddenly had three hands? What if the things they expected to see weren’t there, but something surprising caught their eye and thus their attention?
The first thing that Valerie did was take everything out of the display window and close the curtain.
Valerie worked from the inside out. To start with she changed the lighting to make it brighter, yet more romantic. She did this by covering the ceiling lights, which were permanently off because they were ghastly fluorescent tubes, with a red and an orange cloth. Switched on, they now made the shop appear friendly and inviting, as if it were Christmas every day. Then she repositioned the stool, covering it with a tablecloth and adorning it with individual books that she considered good reads as well as beautiful. She arranged more seating opportunities and revamped the shop window, creating a mysterious display by cutting large keyholes in book-size pieces of black cardboard and placing them on top of the books displayed so that only a section of the cover – the most attractive – was visible. Above these she hung colourful pieces of paper with letters that spelled out:
I-f y-o-u w-a-n-t t-o f-i-n-d o-u-t
m-o-r-e…
And she repainted the sign above the entrance. Like an Irish pub, the golden letters now shone on a deep green background: Ringelnatz & Co.
And indeed over the coming days a few passers-by were caught in the web that Valerie had woven. Some of these even became customers, including a teacher (at Timmi’s school?) who appeared delighted that in times like these such a young woman would dare take on a bookshop and fly the sacred banner of culture (she didn’t use these exact words, of course, and Valerie omitted to reveal how she’d embarked on this adventure). On the second day the teacher returned and asked whether Valerie fancied helping her organize a reading night for her pupils, a night that the children would spend in the bookshop with the teacher (and the bookseller, of course) and where they’d be allowed to take turns reading. A wonderful idea that was unfortunately quashed by an objection from the school management (‘insurance-related reservations’).
And yet Valerie summoned up hope, working her way through the area, forging contacts with the other local shops, inviting people to tea, visiting the church, the nearby old-people’s home, moving heaven and earth to get her little shop noticed. Meanwhile she kept writing letters. Letters to customers who owed money, to readers who’d ordered or picked up books but hadn’t paid. Some, indeed many of these unpaid bills went back years, a number of them even decades. But, undeterred, Valerie typed reminders on Aunt Charlotte’s old typewriter. Occasionally she received replies, sometimes even money. A few mortified old customers transferred the money, others included cash with their letters. And after a few weeks the debt level had been reduced from 28,000 euros to just under 27,000.
‘Not much,’ Valerie mumbled with a frown, examining the address list she’d drawn up. There were only a few of these customers owing money whose addresses she knew or had been able to find out from their correspondence. Taking away all of those with whom she had no idea how to get in contact, and assuming that all those she’d written to and still could write to would duly pay, ‘then we’re looking at a total of three thousand euros. Just.’
With a sigh she put her head in her hands and her elbows on the typewriter. And while with a ‘clack’ she kept typing an ‘Ä’ on the letter she’d just begun, the bell rang and the door opened.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m here,’ Valerie called out, straightening herself, taking a deep breath and practising a professional composure. ‘Won’t be a sec.’
She ripped out the piece of paper she’d inserted into the typewriter, tossed it into the waste-paper basket (by now she could have joined a district league basketball team at least), stood up and turned to face the visitor.
‘You?’
‘Have we met?’ the visitor asked, letting his gaze roam the shop. ‘Where is the owner?’
‘I’m… Well, erm, I’m standing in for her.’ Valerie cleared her throat. ‘During her absence.’
‘Oh, what a shame. I’d hoped to find her here.’ The man scrutinized her inquisitively. A few biscuit crumbs were caught in his beard, his eyebrows arched theatrically above black flashing eyes, with which he virtually skewered Valerie, but not in an unfriendly way. ‘So you must be the woman who wrote me this letter?’
It struck Valerie that she ought to take a deep breath to forestall a medical incident. ‘Erm, yes, that was…me.’
He nodded and stared at her again. Then his face twisted into an ironic and mischievous smile, and he held out his hand. ‘Delighted to meet you. I’m…’
‘But of course,’ Valerie said. ‘I know who you are. It’s an honour that you’ve come to pay Ringelnatz & Co. a visit.’
/> ‘And you are?’
‘Valerie. Call me Valerie.’
‘With pleasure.’ He took another look around. ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he stated. ‘Everything is how I remember. Perhaps even a touch more beautiful. But in those days I didn’t have eyes for the shop. Is Charlotte well?’
‘Thanks, erm…’ Valerie stuttered. ‘I hope so. We haven’t heard from her in a long time. She’s…she’s been away for quite a while.’
Another smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s Charlotte all right. She always had a mind of her own.’
He felt in his pocket and took out a rather tatty envelope. ‘First I’m going to give you this to finally settle my debts. I hope it’s enough. I’m sure those books you listed weren’t all the ones I, well, bought without paying for them. Money is unimportant to me, you know. If one has enough of it, one sometimes forgets just how important it is for other people.’
Valerie took the envelope from his hand. ‘I’m sure it’s enough,’ she said. ‘May I offer you a cup of tea?’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to take a seat…’ She pointed to the comfortable armchair by the window.
‘Thanks very much. How marvellous that this old furniture still exists.’
Then the great Noé from Vienna sat down and absentmindedly watched Valerie fill the teapot, looking so unbelievably like her old aunt – a miracle of memory.
The famous actor’s visit turned out to be the best PR coup imaginable. It was probably pure coincidence that while he was there a middle-aged woman looked in the window and then a bit further into the shop! That she recognized the elderly thespian and her heart missed a beat in sheer ecstasy, before setting into a wild gallop. That she had a mobile on her and phoned her friend without delay, upon which two happy new customers of Ringelnatz & Co. turned up, who surpassed each other in cultural matters (which to Valerie’s delight manifested itself in book purchases). That the friend in question clearly telephoned another friend or several friends and told them. And thus it wasn’t long before a group of Viennese female fans had surrounded Noé and were hanging breathlessly on his every word – a mixture of anecdotes from the life of a global star and book recommendations. Not everything was in stock (if we’re being honest, Valerie knew neither Thoreau, the author, nor Walden, his most important work). But as several copies were urgently needed of almost all the books commended to the gathering of women, the young bookseller started taking orders as if she were offering gold at the price of silver in her shop.
A Very Special Year Page 8
