A Very Special Year (8 page)

Valerie couldn't argue with that. Sven, for example, had a completely different reality from hers. And this flat had a completely different reality from Aunt Charlotte's bookshop.

Another letter was written in beautifully looped handwriting and in pale-blue ink:

 

Dear Bookseller
,

If you receive this letter I hope to be standing on the roof of the world. It is
to be the final stop on a long journey you have unknowingly sent me on. Although many a night I've wondered whether you had any idea what you were doing by entrusting this book to me – this magical, unbelievable, disorienting story, which quite unexpectedly became my story. I've been following it for almost a year now, chapter by chapter, stage by stage, and I'm discovering how my life could have been too. No! How it became. Thanks to you, my dear! You changed everything for me, for you gave me this book, which has made my dreams come true and continues to do so. Sometimes I read ahead, but I don't dare find out the ending. Sometimes I flick back and remember it all again. But now there's not much left and I know that soon I'll be returning to everyday life, where we'll hopefully meet again. But everyday life as I knew it from before will no longer exist. No, I know that I'll celebrate every day of my life until the end of
my days. If I were to have another ten years on this planet of ours, I'd wish to receive ten books like this and read each one differently. But I shall enjoy the uncertainty and launch myself with relish into every adventure.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
With warmest regards
,

Yours
,

 

Gertje Zurhoven

Valerie would have loved to know the unsurpassable book that her aunt had commended to Frau Zurhoven. But there was nothing about it in the letter. The customer seemed to have spent an entire year reading the novel. It was hard to imagine that a single book could take so long, unless it was the Bible. Interestingly, this was not the only letter that mentioned a year in relation to a book. Another missive, penned by a young hand, Valerie found oddly moving.

 

Dear Charlotte (thanks for allowing me to call you this),
When I entered the clinic a year ago I thought my life was over. I couldn't
imagine being in a wheelchair for ever. Tomorrow, on my fourteenth birthday, I'm going to be discharged. I'm still in a wheelchair and maybe I'll always have to be. But now I know that my life isn't over. I'm so grateful you gave my mum this book for me. I've read it again and again, throughout the entire year that I've had to stay in the clinic. To begin with your book was the only thing that kept me alive. My mum read it out to me. At the start I found it very difficult to concentrate. But then, at some point, I was right in the heart of the story, as if it was my own story. I've dreamed every dream in the book and from the window I've seen every person that's been written about. Soon I started reading myself and discovered so many good things in the book that I've come to love life. I love it far more than before my accident. I love it so much that I'm almost grateful it all happened to me. It might sound crazy, but that's how I feel. As I write this I can see a few
specks of dust dancing in the sunlight. There ought not to be any dust in the room at all. But this ballet's so wonderful that I'm glad a little ‘dirt' has been left. When I was still ‘healthy' I saw almost nothing at all, noticed nothing and didn't think about anything. I didn't even have dreams, not proper ones. Now I've got all of this. And I feel that only now do I understand how wonderful it is to be alive. I've got you to thank for this. You ought to know how much you've given me. Thanks
.

Yours
,

 

Nina F
.

Valerie made herself a cup of coffee in her old espresso pot. It rattled a bit and hissed, then an aroma unfolded that immediately reminded her of her mother, who always made coffee like this in the old days, when Valerie still lived in an ideal world, in childhood, at home, at a time when Papa wasn't the cynic he'd become, but every year would make himself look ridiculous as Father Christmas, every year would build snowmen with Valerie
and make children's punch at New Year, when on her birthday he'd climb to the top of the cathedral with her and each summer sit cursing in traffic so they could spend a carefree holiday together in the south. When every year the cherry tree in the garden would blossom and every year a photo was taken of Valerie with the girl next door. When every year at Easter the house smelled of raisin bread and Mama cooked up fruit in autumn. All the years had passed like this and nobody had noticed how wonderful they'd been. And Valerie had noticed least of all. She wished she knew what had become of the girl who'd written this letter. But there was no address on it, not even a complete name.

She sat back down with her coffee on the sofa bed, which she hadn't made back into a sofa for weeks, only changing the sheets occasionally, and placed the folder with the letters on her lap again. As she went through the papers she noticed to her astonishment that the famous actor, whose letter Sven had read out in the shop, hadn't just written one letter to her aunt.

 

My Dear Charlotte
,

 

I arrived back home in my beloved mountains the day before Christmas Eve. How thrilled I was to find your package of books there, far more
treasured than all the Christmas presents I'd already been sent. But what on earth are you trying to say to me with this sentimental
Letter from an Unknown Woman
by Stefan Zweig (whom I otherwise hold in high esteem)!? Do you not know that I'm one of the most melancholy individuals under the sun? I found more appealing the laconic humour of the Alan Bennett book you included. But nothing comes close to his
Uncommon Reader,
not even this magnificent, sad yet funny
Clothes
farce

The famous actor proceeded to discuss his illnesses and unhappy (that's to say: unsuccessful) love affairs (that's to say: conquests). Although the letter was brimming with compliments and flattery, it was utterly narcissistic too. If he expressed his thanks, it was a pretext to show off his knowledge; if he asked for forgiveness, he was fishing for sympathy; if he sounded contrite, it was an exercise in vanity. Valerie was just about to consign the vulgar missive to the waste-paper basket when she caught sight of the unduly long postscript:

 

How fondly I think back to those sweet evenings in the séparée you created in your delightful little shop
,

the wine and the tenderness between us. Oh, if only we were twenty years younger, if only it were thirty years ago! But after all these long years I no longer dare pay court to you and disclose my infatuation. No, in your mind's eye you should see me as you once gazed at me with your black diamonds. And with every bar of Shostakovich I listen out for your heartbeat as I once did behind your shamelessly red curtain in those fair hours of our first life. Do you still have the gramophone? Oh, I'm sure it's gone now, like so much else. Gone and lost for all time. I send you my love with tears in my eyes
.

Yours
,

 

Noé

What a bombshell! Aunt Charlotte as the decadent
lover of a great actor and notorious philanderer? Aunt Charlotte? ‘I don't believe it!' Valerie stammered more than once as she paced up and down the flat, the letter in her hand. ‘Aunt Charlotte – Noé's sweetheart?
The
Noé?' All of a sudden she saw the shop through quite different eyes. The curtain, yes, she'd drawn it too, when Sven… The armchair in which they'd… Did her aunt… Surely that wasn't possible. Was it? After all, elderly ladies haven't always been elderly ladies. And if thirty years ago, several years before Valerie was born… Well, Aunt Charlotte would have been around fifty at the time, so in all probability still a woman with undeniable charms.

‘Auntie, Auntie,' Valerie muttered, sinking onto her sofa bed. ‘Who would have thought it?'

TEN

M
anagement consultancies like their employees to spend some time abroad. It improves their skill with modern languages, sharpens their sensibility for the globalized market and imbues future executives with a certain cosmopolitanism. Most of all, of course, it prevents young employees from putting down firm roots. For anyone who gets attached early, let alone brings offspring into the world, will become unwieldy for business use and start articulating ever greater demands vis-à-vis employment rights, which are generally an obstacle to commercial demands.

Now, there are some strong personalities who avoid being completely swallowed up by their firm, and who follow their heart rather than their career. And
there are those who we'll later applaud as heroes of industry, extolling their courage, application, entrepreneurial genius and consistent self-sacrifice.

Regrettably, it is impossible to deny that Sven fell into the latter category. If till now no meeting had been too late, no business dinner too unnecessary and no work trip too long, the offer to go to Doha ‘for a few months and, if you do well, maybe even for longer' was utterly irresistible. Doha, the capital of Qatar on the Persian Gulf. It didn't only sound exotic and unrelated to virtually anything he'd heard of before, most of all it sounded like a hefty salary rise and an extension to his contract by a year at least.

And so one July evening – it was beautifully warm, she'd put a chair outside the shop, a bottle of wine beside it (and a glass, of course) and had just opened a wonderful little book – Valerie received a text on her mobile: ‘Doha's happening! Yeah!'

‘Great!' she texted back. ‘I'm delighted for you.' Then she deleted the second sentence. She turned ‘Great!' into ‘Great', and ‘Great' into ‘Wow!', then ‘Wow' and finally…

She poured herself another glass of wine, swirled it around and held it up to her nose. As the bouquet of blackberries, lavender, fir, oak and vanilla roamed her senses, she watched a family walking down the street
some distance away. The wife was wearing a headscarf, the man had a beard, the boy an enormous stick of candy floss, so large that his entire head disappeared behind it. She looked up at the lit window opposite, through which she could see the silhouette of a woman moving back and forth. Maybe she was mixing something in a bowl, maybe she was playing guitar or piano, maybe she was sitting on her boyfriend. Whatever she was doing, it looked as if she was doing it with commitment. The family soon vanished. The glass soon emptied. The light in the window switched off. Valerie turned off her mobile. ‘Have a good flight,' she muttered, opening her book in the weak light of dusk, which coalesced with the weak light of the streetlamp. And as a soft summer wind took all thoughts of Sven away, so these words took her to another place at another time:

 

Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,– the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen…

She has more than a thousand pages before her. Her first really thick book. It's not one of those must-reads her aunt had catalogued without any notes. No, on this one she commented simply, ‘The most beautiful first line in all literature. The entire book one long poem.'

It may well turn out to be a book that's impossible to explain, one like James Joyce's
Ulysses
that is as compelling as it is unreadable, so mysterious and puzzling that after reading it what lingers is the uncertain feeling of having gained a glimpse of an unheard-of world rather than the certainty of having understood its life and workings.

Aunt Charlotte had also made a note on Joyce's masterpiece: ‘Liebig's Extract of Meat. You can't eat it. But it'll make many soups (Tucholsky).'

There were a few similarly gargantuan tomes, which Valerie had put in a separate pile to turn to in moments of hubris. Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain
was there, as were Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, Robert Musil's
The Man without Qualities
, Jonathan Franzen's
The Corrections
, David Foster Wallace's
Infinite Jest
and Susanna Clarke's
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell
(Aunt Charlotte's comment: ‘As if from another time. A great storyteller!') Each one a heavyweight and out of the ordinary.
Literary bulk. Valerie was terrified of these works. But as the old truism goes, fear always shows the way. And so, whenever she'd had enough of the monotony of management, she followed the path of fear and leaped into the adventures of these mighty literary tomes.

And that was what she did that evening, when she'd had enough of managing her relationship with Sven, in which there were no more surprises (had there ever been any?), in which passion had long given way to sex (had there ever been any passion?), in which almost every conversation revolved around benchmarks, liquidity management or entrepreneurship (had these been conversations?). She could have granted herself a short period of mourning, to allow the grass to grow over their separation. Instead she seized Thomas Pynchon's
Mason & Dixon
and let stories as finely knit and flighty as just-hatched butterflies swarm over the matter. And while she plunged deep into the obscure tale of two land surveyors, above her, on the surface, a young man drifted away. But we can dispense with him for the rest of our story.

Summer bestowed bright, sunny days and mild evenings on the city. The neighbourhood came pleasantly alive. People from all corners of the world sat in small and sometimes larger groups outside the shops,
chatting away, often late into the night. All of a sudden Valerie was no longer an outsider with her table and tea in front of the house. Occasionally someone might come past and offer her an exotic sweet (which was always far too sweet) or invite her to sit with the others. For example the owners of the Gülestan Market, which exuded its oriental aromas a few doors down, in the shade of a huge awning. Nice people, hard to understand with their funny accents, the men reserved in a friendly way; the women far more open. But all of them displayed a warmth that Valerie had never come across before, not even in her own family. And so they got along well, joking, laughing, drinking tea (on the second visit Valerie brought a mixture from Aunt Charlotte's collection) and gratefully lauding the wonderful summer, which reminded each of them of a different place – for one it would be their home in Izmir, another his childhood by the sea. For Valerie, however, it reminded her of
Emil of Lönneberga
, a story that her mother read to her as a young girl, when summer was always sunny and carefree.