A Very Special Year (9 page)

And then a handwritten letter arrived, which – in a script as spirited as it was meticulous – was not addressed to Aunt Charlotte, but to
The enchanting young lady c/o Ringelnatz & Co
., and which plunged
Valerie into emotional turmoil. It was a short letter and enclosed was a small book:

 

Dear Stranger
,

I came across this delightful epistolary novel in a small bookshop in Prague. I had to think of you (as I do almost every time I step into a bookshop) and hope I can remotely give you a little pleasure by sending it to you. Perhaps you don't remember me. No, you certainly won't remember me. But in your shop I found a book I'd been unsuccessfully trying to track down for ages, as only a few copies of it exist:
A Very Special Year.
Without knowing it, you have changed my life and I will always carry you around with me – you can guess where. If I were Cyrano, I'd dare do it…

With heartfelt greetings –

The signature was illegible as if he'd written it in a different alphabet.

Valerie sat in silence, staring at the writing, which oozed sophistication and intelligence. It was a while
before she opened the short book:
84 Charing Cross Road
by Helene Hanff. But she was unable to read. She couldn't get out of her head the picture of the young man who'd appeared in her shop as suddenly as he'd disappeared into the night. She picked up the envelope and turned it over. But there was no return address.

A soft sound from the back window wrenched her from her thoughts. A scraping, a scratching, barely audible. ‘Oh, Grisaille,' Valerie sighed, opening the window and gazing into the tiny, shining eyes of her old friend. She poured some milk into a saucer and placed it on the sill. The rat didn't have her old figure back yet, but she'd clearly had her children. ‘Congratulations,' Valerie said. ‘I bet you're happy.'

Of course the occasional customer came into the shop, and even bought books. Once an elderly lady in a flowery Laura Ashley dress browsed the shelves and took a large pile of children's books for her grandchildren (she was mindful to let Valerie advise her as thoroughly as possible, before making her own, arbitrary selection, which bore no relation to Valerie's recommendations). She requested the books be sent to her home, which gave Valerie the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a rather rundown but grand
villa near the Stadtpark, along with a harmless yet absolutely terrifying dog that protected the property and its distinguished owner.

To begin with, Valerie had harboured the suspicion that this customer might be another of those ladies who liked shopping but disliked paying. After all, her scrutiny of the cashbooks and list of unsettled bills showed that the shop was owed a whopping 28,000 euros, an incomprehensibly large sum, not even taking into account the interest and compound interest. For far too long Valerie had done nothing to address this. But on her way back from visiting the old lady she took a decision. Perhaps she was emboldened by the inevitability of transience, perhaps it was simply desperation. For too little money was going through the till and, even if costs were being kept down, a certain level of income was needed just to survive. Valerie's bank account had been in the red for two weeks. She was earning next to nothing and the gridlock in her financial affairs would soon spell serious trouble. Sure, she could have asked her father. But she didn't want to. Of all the solutions that occurred to her, this was the one that was out of the question. For her father would regard her as a poor economist, as he had Aunt Charlotte. The difference was that her aunt dismissed the criticism with a shrug of her shoulders and a
gentle smile, whereas it would hurt Valerie. No, there were other solutions.

Back in the shop she sat at the desk and took out the folder with the letters of thanks, as well as the one containing the outstanding bills. She didn't have to spend long looking, nor spend long thinking about it. On a sheet of the wonderfully old-fashioned Ringelnatz & Co. writing paper, and under the watchful eye of a young mother of six lovely little rats, she began her letter:

Dear Herr Noé…

ELEVEN

S
ummer is a difficult time for the book trade. Although people do read on holiday, they buy few books. Their summer reading is sorted out in springtime, and now they get down to it. From time to time the Gülestan greengrocer's daughter came by, a likeable teenager with fabulous locks of black hair that she only just kept under control beneath a rather fashionable headscarf. But she was more interested in chatting to Valerie than in books. In any case, very few of the things she wanted to read were available in Aunt Charlotte's shop. Although Valerie noted down the girl's orders – she answered to the beautiful name Siba – she wasn't sure about stocking those sorts of books permanently. Not because they were too
lowbrow (who, seriously, was in a position to make a judgement here?) but because she sensed it might upset the delicate structure by which the shop was arranged.

The more time she spent here, the more strongly she became aware of the bookshop's highly individual character. Had it belonged to her, she wouldn't have hesitated to change this character. But she still clung to the hope that Aunt Charlotte would turn up again someday. So she took down Siba's orders and passed them onto the incredibly reliable and prompt warehouse of Charlotte's distributor. She drank a cup of the Turkish tea that the girl had brought along so she could chat to Valerie about whether Istanbul was a modern city, whether she ought to read Turkish books in Turkish or German (although she quite clearly had no interest in Turkish books, unlike Valerie who'd suddenly become engrossed in Orhan Pamuk's
My Name is Red
) and what school the boy might go to who'd recently started delivering for Pronto Pizza at weekends (and who she was probably keen on).

So the months passed and the year moved on imperceptibly, and Valerie's bookkeeping skills developed without her having paid much thought to the matter. She'd long abandoned the idea of liquidating the business; now the idea seemed absolutely absurd
to her. After all, Aunt Charlotte had not said ‘Close my shop down!'; she had merely requested that Valerie look after it. And that's what she was doing. Through the whole of spring and summer.

She first noticed him one Monday in September. As if he'd appeared out of thin air, there he was standing in front of the shop window, slightly to one side. She could barely see him behind the gathered curtain. His face was narrow, perhaps a little pale too. But his eyes twinkled with curiosity, examining the display in great detail, much more intensely than anyone else who'd stopped to look during the time that Valerie had been in charge. Peering more closely she could see his lips moving very faintly.

After that he turned up every day. Every school day, to be precise. Valerie guessed he must be in the fourth or fifth class; it was hard to say. Sometimes he'd pause briefly as he passed the door, then move on to study the window just as thoroughly from the other side, which amazed Valerie as the display hardly ever changed, nor were there any children's books there. ‘Why not, actually?' she thought, having watched the boy on another occasion, and so she decided to include books for younger readers in the display too, as well as rotating the items on show more frequently.
If she were now running the shop there was no reason to feature just the books her aunt had selected, for whatever good or trivial reason.

And so one day the boy allowed his keen and inquisitive gaze to wander along a new row of books in the window, evidently excited by the collection of unfamiliar reading matter suddenly before him. Finally his eyes stopped at an attractive little volume on the very end of the display, where Valerie had placed a copy of Kate DiCamillo's
The Tale of Despereaux
.

The boy would come past every day at lunchtime, obviously on his way home, so it was not hard to catch him. Behind the cover of the large curtain Valerie had an excellent vantage point from which to observe him. She couldn't help but smile and thought back to her own childhood and adolescence. Yes, there had been days when she'd absolutely devoured books, one after the other, and when she'd come to the end of her supplies she simply reread what was there and then again.

The following day something extraordinary happened. The boy came
in
to the shop. Not tentatively; he entered without a hint of timidity, put his satchel down by the door and looked around in the gloomy light. Valerie had been expecting the boy and watched
him, partially hidden behind a tall library ladder in the antiquarian section.

Closing his eyes, the boy breathed in deeply the air inside the shop. Then he nodded approvingly and turned to the nearest shelf. ‘Can I help you?' Valerie asked, stepping out from behind her ladder.

‘No thanks, that's not necessary,' the boy replied slightly precociously. ‘I'm just having a look around.'

‘Fine. If you need me I'll be in the office.' She pointed to the stairs then headed off in that direction to do a bit of bookkeeping.

Out of the corner of her eye she watched the boy inspect the titles on the book spines. ‘Children's books are at the front on the left, beside the door,' she called out.

‘OK,' was all he said, ignoring her as he took out an E.T.A. Hoffmann work and leafed through it, followed by some Hemingway short stories and then Camus's
The Outsider
… He inspected each volume with the greatest of care, opening it, stroking the paper with his fingertips, turning it over, taking off the dust jacket and caressing the ribbon marker if the book had one… He delved into Kant for a long while, came across Eichendorff (who he took a close look at) beside the armchair and then was engrossed for ages in Jonathan Safran Foer's
Tree of Codes
, a book so
weird and complicated that it had completely bewildered Valerie when she'd browsed through it. After spending a long time with this obscure marvel of modern American literature, he shut it and put it down beside his satchel.

Valerie cleared her throat. ‘Would you mind putting it back on the shelf, please?'

But the boy just casually raised his hand and, over his shoulder, aimed an ‘I'm taking it' in Valerie's direction. The Foer was joined by a collection of Daniil Kharms' writing, Maupassant's
Bel Ami
and the
Gilgamesh
epic.

It was almost evening by the time the boy stood next to her with his bundle of books and said drily, ‘I'd like these.'

Valerie tried to fathom from his expression whether he was being serious. If he was joking, this young customer had the poker face of the century.

‘Have you got that much money?'

‘Seventy-four euros, thirty-nine cents? Sure.'

‘Hmm.' Valerie took the books from him and put them on the desk. She entered the prices into the ancient till and tapped with the back of her hand the enter key, which for some inexplicable reason had ‘CASH' written on it vertically. When she'd rung up all the prices she pressed ‘CASH' again and stared at
the display, a small, unglazed window behind which black cogs with engraved white numbers rotated. It told her: ‘Seventy-four euros, thirty-nine cents.'

The boy felt in his trouser pocket and pulled out a twenty-euro note. ‘That's what I can pay,' he told her, handing over the banknote.

‘I see. I'm afraid I can't put it on account.'

‘On account?'

‘Lend you the money.'

‘You don't have to lend me any money,' the boy said, unfazed. ‘Basically you're just lending me the books. Until I've paid them off in full. Then they'll belong to me.'

‘Erm… sure,' Valerie replied, ambushed by the logic of his reasoning.

And before she could lay down any further clear rules on the subject of payment by instalment, the boy nodded and said, ‘So we're agreed. I pass by here every day anyway. If I've got any money I'll just give you some.'

Suddenly it dawned on Valerie what had happened. Only now did she realize. ‘You're making fun of me!' She laughed, still slightly uncertain, but she laughed. ‘This is a joke, right? You'd never ever be interested in these books. How old are you, anyway?'

‘Ten. And you?'

‘Twenty-… OK – erm – young man, leading me up the garden path like that is all very cute, but I'd like to shut the shop now and go home.'

‘Oh blimey!' the boy replied. ‘Home. I'd completely forgotten! Mum's going to be worried. Then she'll have a go at me because she loves me so much.' He picked up the books to put them in his bag.

‘Wait a moment,' Valerie called out. ‘That's enough now, OK? Please leave the books where they are; I'll put them back myself. Here's your twenty euros back…' She held out the banknote, but he merely looked at it, vaguely disconcerted.

‘But I bought the books.'

‘Yes, but you weren't being serious…'

‘I
was
.' And with that the books vanished into his schoolbag, which he threw over his shoulder.

‘Now look here…' With a determined stride she overtook him and blocked his way to the door. ‘What do you want with Kharms? And Maupassant? You're ten years old! Kids your age read children's books,
not
old French novelists. Nor contemporary experimental American literature.'

‘Experimental?' She couldn't fail to notice the gleam in his eyes.

What's going through his head now? Valerie wondered, but somehow she was struck by an unbelievable
sympathy for the boy who'd come into her shop with such confidence, trawled through the collection of books, handed over all his money and was now standing here in front of her like a gentlemanly philosopher thrust back into childhood. His eyes were so full of curiosity and disarming attentiveness that Valerie suddenly felt ashamed. She cleared her throat, pointed to his satchel and asked, ‘Why these books? Why not
Desperaux
? Or
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
?'