A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser Page B

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?
    â€˜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 hereand 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 wayto 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 booksdisplayed so that only a section of the cover – the most attractive – was visible. Above these she hung