Read Online A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser - Free Book Online Page B

and gathering brambles;
    Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
    And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
    Here is a cart run away in the road
    Lumping along with man and load;
    And here is a mill and there is a river:
    Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
    For some reason Valerie had to cry again the moment she stopped, perhaps because she feared she would soon lose Grisaille when the rat had to care for her babies.
    She put the book down. ‘I can only hope that your man has a different mentality than mine. See you tomorrow.’ Ill at ease, she left the yard to go home. As lovely as the bookshop was and as attached as she had become to all those books, at times it was comforting to free herself from the burden of responsibility and nestle into the sofa at home or share a glass of wine with friends.

NINE
    R ecently she’d only been home to shower and sleep. To read in peace and have the odd coffee. But the computer in her work corner had barely been touched and her fridge had suffered from chronic emptiness – Valerie just didn’t get around to shopping any more. Running a shop meant being there during business hours. But whenever she came back to her small flat – actually, a tiny flat – she was astonished at how mundane these four walls were. No samovar. No eighteen varieties of tea. No little rodent you could chat to. No faux antique reading chair. And hardly any books, or at least none apart from textbooks and a few comics that Sven had dumped at some point.
    It had only taken a few days for Valerie to feel as ifshe were coming home whenever she entered the bookshop. Now, in this apartment, she sometimes felt like a stranger, as if it were part of someone else’s life altogether, whereas Ringelnatz & Co. was part of
hers
.
    Some of the letters she’d brought back were very touching. A teacher thanked Aunt Charlotte: with the book (sadly the letter didn’t specify which) that the elderly lady had recommended as a class read, she’d
finally reconnected with my pupils, even though I’d never have been able to get the management to approve this novel. But maybe that was one of the reasons why – I made a pact with the class; for the time it took us to read the book we were a secret community. You know, many years ago this is exactly how I’d imagined what being a teacher would be like, before reality got in the way. But now, thanks to you, I know that there are other realities!
    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:
    Â 
    Dear Bookseller
,
    If you receive this letter I hope to be standing on the roof of the world. It isto 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 ofmy 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