A Very Special Year Read Free

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.
    â€˜You ought to have a shave.’
    â€˜Hmm.’
    â€˜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 topatrol. 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.

THREE
    W hoever declared May to be the ‘merry month’ must have lived on Mauritius. Or Hawaii. There wasn’t much to be merry about in the climes of central Europe. Valerie’s nascent cold had turned overnight into a full-blown infection. Ever since the previous evening, the sky had been practising for Armageddon. With clammy fingers Valerie jiggled the key into the lock, cursed because the door was stuck, threw herself against it, almost clattered to the floor, and was very glad finally to be inside. She left the dripping umbrella in a corner and fled to the loo, where she stared at a worn-out stranger in the tiny mirror above the small basin. The samovar, she remembered, grateful that Aunt Charlotte had been such anold-fashioned woman. That would come to her assistance now. She quickly filled the boiler, chucked a handful of tea into the pot and unwrapped her scarf to dry it over the back of the chair.
    Ringelnatz & Co. had once been one of the most important, illustrious addresses in the neighbourhood. Established following those terribly dark years, from the outset the bookshop had been a beacon of culture, remaining so for many years as the young bookseller employed her wit and joie de vivre to seduce numerous young men into reading. Over time, however, circumstances had changed, the neighbourhood had changed. Of the two options – luxury redevelopment and gentrification, or decay and social decline – the neighbourhood that was home to Ringelnatz & Co. had been forced to take the latter. Accompanying this was the fact that the bookseller and her shop were both getting on in years. Sure, there was a phase in which she attracted sympathy merely on account of her presence, and even praise in the editorial sections of the free local papers. But this didn’t gain her any readers, at least not any new ones. The old ones, those customers from years and decades past, remembered the shop and popped in again. They’d talk about the good old times, complain about how young people had no interest in books, buy themselves a firstedition of a novel by Somerset Maugham (‘For my granddaughter; I loved him when I was her age’) and then disappear once more out of the elderly lady’s life.
    In spite of this, one had to concede that the bookshop – if one ignored a certain, albeit charming, shabbiness – was still a real gem, and not only on account of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made of huge, genuine walnut timbers, the splendid curtain or the excessively musical, but highly attractive floorboards, which – freshly waxed – recalled the polished planks of a luxury sailing boat. No, the chief appeal of the shop was, of course, its range of books, selected with as much intelligence and thoughtfulness as affection.
    Valerie’s intention had been to go home and make further notes to complete her to-do list, but she opted to read the rest of her Kafka novel and finally fell asleep on the sofa. When she woke up, she put the book on a stool, which the old lady must have used to reach books from higher shelves. She wouldn’t be able to put it back; now it looked second hand. But, hold on, hadn’t Valerie spotted a corner with antiquarian books on her inspection of the