Free A Very Special Year by Thomas Montasser Page A

home in my beloved mountains the day before Christmas Eve. How thrilled I was to find your package of books there, far moretreasured than all the Christmas presents I’d already been sent. But what on earth are you trying to say to me with this sentimental
Letter from an Unknown Woman
by Stefan Zweig (whom I otherwise hold in high esteem)!? Do you not know that I’m one of the most melancholy individuals under the sun? I found more appealing the laconic humour of the Alan Bennett book you included. But nothing comes close to his
Uncommon Reader,
not even this magnificent, sad yet funny
Clothes
farce
    The famous actor proceeded to discuss his illnesses and unhappy (that’s to say: unsuccessful) love affairs (that’s to say: conquests). Although the letter was brimming with compliments and flattery, it was utterly narcissistic too. If he expressed his thanks, it was a pretext to show off his knowledge; if he asked for forgiveness, he was fishing for sympathy; if he sounded contrite, it was an exercise in vanity. Valerie was just about to consign the vulgar missive to the waste-paper basket when she caught sight of the unduly long postscript:
    Â 
    How fondly I think back to those sweet evenings in the séparée you created in your delightful little shop
,
    the wine and the tenderness between us. Oh, if only we were twenty years younger, if only it were thirty years ago! But after all these long years I no longer dare pay court to you and disclose my infatuation. No, in your mind’s eye you should see me as you once gazed at me with your black diamonds. And with every bar of Shostakovich I listen out for your heartbeat as I once did behind your shamelessly red curtain in those fair hours of our first life. Do you still have the gramophone? Oh, I’m sure it’s gone now, like so much else. Gone and lost for all time. I send you my love with tears in my eyes
.
    Yours
,
    Â 
    Noé
    What a bombshell! Aunt Charlotte as the decadentlover of a great actor and notorious philanderer? Aunt Charlotte? ‘I don’t believe it!’ Valerie stammered more than once as she paced up and down the flat, the letter in her hand. ‘Aunt Charlotte – Noé’s sweetheart?
The
Noé?’ All of a sudden she saw the shop through quite different eyes. The curtain, yes, she’d drawn it too, when Sven… The armchair in which they’d… Did her aunt… Surely that wasn’t possible. Was it? After all, elderly ladies haven’t always been elderly ladies. And if thirty years ago, several years before Valerie was born… Well, Aunt Charlotte would have been around fifty at the time, so in all probability still a woman with undeniable charms.
    â€˜Auntie, Auntie,’ Valerie muttered, sinking onto her sofa bed. ‘Who would have thought it?’

TEN
    M anagement consultancies like their employees to spend some time abroad. It improves their skill with modern languages, sharpens their sensibility for the globalized market and imbues future executives with a certain cosmopolitanism. Most of all, of course, it prevents young employees from putting down firm roots. For anyone who gets attached early, let alone brings offspring into the world, will become unwieldy for business use and start articulating ever greater demands vis-à-vis employment rights, which are generally an obstacle to commercial demands.
    Now, there are some strong personalities who avoid being completely swallowed up by their firm, and who follow their heart rather than their career. Andthere are those who we’ll later applaud as heroes of industry, extolling their courage, application, entrepreneurial genius and consistent self-sacrifice.
    Regrettably, it is impossible to deny that Sven fell into the latter category. If till now no meeting had been too late, no business dinner too unnecessary and no work trip too long, the offer to go to Doha ‘for a few months and, if you do well, maybe even