A Very Special Year Read Online Free Page B
Author: Thomas Montasser
Maybe sheâd arrived just before the train left. Julia checked the tickets to see whether a specific seat had been reserved for her. Seat 13. She was standing right next to it! Perfect, she could wait for the woman here. Sitting down, she gazed out of the window at the platform. From here sheâd be able to see the stranger coming from far off
.
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But time passed and the departure drew irrevocably closer. Two tickets, Julia thought, there were two tickets in the womanâs envelope â they must be for two seats next to each other. Julia glanced at them again: seat 13and â seat 13. Puzzled, she looked at the numbers above the seats. Two tickets for seat 13? Impossible. And yet there it was on the ticket in black and white: Carriage 12, Seat 13, both times. Until she realized what sheâd completely failed to notice before: only the first ticket was for Paris. The second was from Paris to⦠At that moment she heard the guardâs whistle. And in a fraction of a second she made a decision: she would travel. To Paris, and then on to
The text broke off in mid-sentence. Confused, Valerie turned the page. But on the next side and the one after that she found herself staring at blank paper. All the way to the final page the publication had turned into an empty book. The young woman put it down with a mixture of disappointment and fascination. How might the story continue? How would it end? The book was clearly a faulty copy. She picked up the card from Aunt Charlotteâs archive again. Under publisher was a name sheâd never heard of before: Millefeuille. She knew this as a cake, but as a publishing house⦠Still, the name seemed somehowappropriate: a thousand leaves. The index of publishers must be somewhere; Valerie had seen it the day before. When she finally found it she looked for âMillefeuilleâ. But her intuition proved correct: âMillefeuilleâ was not there. Now it might be the case, of course, that Millefeuille was just an imprint of a larger publishing house. But checking the publishing details at the front of the book didnât help, because there werenât any.
Author? Nothing. âWho wrote this book, for goodnessâ sake?â Valerie wondered, opening the spine to check the blurb on the back cover, where she found the following meagre lines:
The author lives and works in Paris, Florence and St Petersburg. After a major unhappy love affair with a woman, he fell deeply and happily in love with literature, thereby discovering a new life. This book is dedicated to the mother of his three daughters
.
Hmm, Valerie thought. A trifle overblown and yet so damn little information. She shut the book and stroked the surface with her fingers. It was beautifully bound with an embossed title and even a ribbon marker in hopeful green. The work of an unknown author from an unknown publishing house, maybe a completely misprinted edition; who could say whether an error-free one existed? Nobody would ask for it, nobody would buy it and in this state it couldnât even be sold as a remainder at a bargain price. Valerie put itdown, picked it up again and finally tossed it into a box already containing all sorts of pieces of paper that Valerie had no idea what to do with.
The curse of undertaking a spring clean is that to begin with the chaos multiplies massively. Itâs only when you get to the point of despair, when youâre on the verge of either giving up or jumping out of the window, that the fog suddenly starts to lift as if by magic. Almost imperceptibly to begin with, but then in an increasingly triumphant fashion, a certain order is re-established, a lucidity emerges, which after all the stress and agony feels even more refreshing. Jumping out of the window wouldnât have got Valerie very far; the shop was on the ground floor, after all. Giving up wasnât part of her plan either, and generally wasnât an option amongst those with business
.
Â
But time passed and the departure drew irrevocably closer. Two tickets, Julia thought, there were two tickets in the womanâs envelope â they must be for two seats next to each other. Julia glanced at them again: seat 13and â seat 13. Puzzled, she looked at the numbers above the seats. Two tickets for seat 13? Impossible. And yet there it was on the ticket in black and white: Carriage 12, Seat 13, both times. Until she realized what sheâd completely failed to notice before: only the first ticket was for Paris. The second was from Paris to⦠At that moment she heard the guardâs whistle. And in a fraction of a second she made a decision: she would travel. To Paris, and then on to
The text broke off in mid-sentence. Confused, Valerie turned the page. But on the next side and the one after that she found herself staring at blank paper. All the way to the final page the publication had turned into an empty book. The young woman put it down with a mixture of disappointment and fascination. How might the story continue? How would it end? The book was clearly a faulty copy. She picked up the card from Aunt Charlotteâs archive again. Under publisher was a name sheâd never heard of before: Millefeuille. She knew this as a cake, but as a publishing house⦠Still, the name seemed somehowappropriate: a thousand leaves. The index of publishers must be somewhere; Valerie had seen it the day before. When she finally found it she looked for âMillefeuilleâ. But her intuition proved correct: âMillefeuilleâ was not there. Now it might be the case, of course, that Millefeuille was just an imprint of a larger publishing house. But checking the publishing details at the front of the book didnât help, because there werenât any.
Author? Nothing. âWho wrote this book, for goodnessâ sake?â Valerie wondered, opening the spine to check the blurb on the back cover, where she found the following meagre lines:
The author lives and works in Paris, Florence and St Petersburg. After a major unhappy love affair with a woman, he fell deeply and happily in love with literature, thereby discovering a new life. This book is dedicated to the mother of his three daughters
.
Hmm, Valerie thought. A trifle overblown and yet so damn little information. She shut the book and stroked the surface with her fingers. It was beautifully bound with an embossed title and even a ribbon marker in hopeful green. The work of an unknown author from an unknown publishing house, maybe a completely misprinted edition; who could say whether an error-free one existed? Nobody would ask for it, nobody would buy it and in this state it couldnât even be sold as a remainder at a bargain price. Valerie put itdown, picked it up again and finally tossed it into a box already containing all sorts of pieces of paper that Valerie had no idea what to do with.
The curse of undertaking a spring clean is that to begin with the chaos multiplies massively. Itâs only when you get to the point of despair, when youâre on the verge of either giving up or jumping out of the window, that the fog suddenly starts to lift as if by magic. Almost imperceptibly to begin with, but then in an increasingly triumphant fashion, a certain order is re-established, a lucidity emerges, which after all the stress and agony feels even more refreshing. Jumping out of the window wouldnât have got Valerie very far; the shop was on the ground floor, after all. Giving up wasnât part of her plan either, and generally wasnât an option amongst those with business
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