On the Calculation of Volume II

This is the second volume of Solvej Balle's seven-part novel, continuing the story of Tara Selter, an antiquarian bookseller trapped in a time loop that forces her to relive the eighteenth of November every day. In Volume I, Tara discovered the fault in time, told friends Philip Maurel, a coin dealer, and his wife Marie about her predicament, and traveled to Paris, where they gave her a Roman sestertius, an ancient coin, as a parting gift. Volume II opens on Day #368, as Tara sits in Room 16 of the Hôtel du Lison in Paris, confronting the failure of her hope that completing a full year of repetitions would restore normal time.

Tara had imagined that the 366th day might function as a portal back into chronological time. Instead, it proved identical to every other. She accepted that the repetition is now chronic: a time without years, seasons, weeks, or months. She carries the sestertius in her coat pocket and walks her familiar Parisian streets, passing antiquarian bookshops she no longer enters. She is no longer T. & T. Selter, the bookselling business she built with her husband Thomas. A growing emptiness pervades her walks, not a literal change in the streets but a feeling that she no longer belongs, that she is superfluous. When the hotel fire alarm sounds, she simply assumes it is false, recognizing that she no longer believes in variation.

To combat her isolation, Tara throws herself into the currents of other people's movements, boarding buses and metro trains, letting the crowd carry her along. The immersion briefly gives her momentum, but each time the stream disperses she stalls. Her circles grow larger until she finds herself on a train to Lille, having followed the morning rush without buying a ticket.

She buys a green cloth-bound notebook in Lille and begins traveling by train through France, Belgium, and Germany, listening to other people's conversations: a man orchestrating a sailing club's annual meeting, a woman arranging a chicken dinner with her son, a dog owner confessing that his pets had only tolerated him to be near each other. On a train to Bremen, she shares a compartment with a forlorn young woman whose boyfriend has just left her. Tara guards the space and listens as the young woman phones her mother about lost plans for children and Christmas presents. At Bremen station, Tara watches the young woman's mother embrace her and sees them into a car before moving on.

Having counted the days and determined it should be Christmas Eve, Tara travels to Brussels, her childhood home, carrying two bags of wrapped presents. Her mother, a teacher at an international school, greets her in the garden beside the family's quince bush. Tara calls her sister Lisa, a chemistry student, and tells her the full story of the time fault; Lisa takes the day off. The next morning, Tara tells her parents everything. The family prepares a dinner blending their English and Belgian customs: turkey, roast potatoes, Brussels sprouts, Bûche de Noël, and Christmas pudding. That night, Tara packs the leftovers into a cooler bag and bursts into half-laughing, half-sobbing giggles at the absurdity. The next morning her parents remember nothing and she must explain everything again. Lisa offers to join Tara's travels, but Tara is uncertain. That evening, her mother tucks her in, sings all five verses of "In the Bleak Midwinter," and shares her belief that all change starts with children. Tara promises to find a way out by listening carefully, though she privately doubts this. She slips away before dawn.

Tara heads north in pursuit of winter, determined to construct a parallel year with seasons layered onto her eternal November day. In Odense, Denmark, she sits in a café where she and Thomas once waited during a snowstorm in their early bookselling days. She hesitates to begin writing in her green notebook, knowing that doing so would mean accepting that her days will continue indefinitely. She sprains her ankle at the station and makes her way to Copenhagen. At the emergency room, she meets a meteorologist whose young son hurt his hand in a bike accident. The meteorologist, intrigued by Tara's cover story about scouting film locations across all four seasons, researches snowfall patterns and provides the data on a memory stick. Tara copies everything into her notebook before the digital data vanishes overnight.

She travels to Lund, Sweden, wakes to snow on the roofs, writes "January 1st" in her notebook, and celebrates with champagne. Her "seasons machine" is in motion. She pushes deeper into winter through Stockholm, Finland, and Norway, recording hotel addresses, recipes, and winter vocabulary. In rural Norway, her taxi nearly collides head-on with a truck on an icy road; only the car's automatic emergency braking saves them. The near-death experience forces Tara to confront the danger she poses to others simply because she wants winter. She hitches a ride south and begins searching for spring.

From Bergen she sails to London, then cycles through the English countryside on a bicycle she finds in a shed. In Cornwall, she discovers newborn lambs at a farm called Spring Farm. The meteorologist had noted that autumn lambing could produce spring-like scenes, and the lambs confirm this, yet Tara senses something missing: no birdsong, no scent of growth. She continues to southern France and Spain for summer, settling in an empty yellow house near a beach. She dances at night, collects sea glass, and misses Thomas. Her constructed seasons grow transparent, like Roman glass, revealing November underneath.

In Düsseldorf, a man on a rattling bicycle snatches her bag while she walks along the Rhine. She finds it the next day propped against a flower planter at a riverside restaurant. Her purse and passport are intact, but her cash, her keys, and her green seasons notebook are all missing. She accepts that seasons cannot be built from fragments of November.

Tara reaches Day #733, two full years in the loop. She rents an apartment on Wiesenweg in Düsseldorf, a former architect's studio with a medlar tree in the backyard, and reconceives her time not as a circle or line but as a container: a vessel, a room, a pool. She establishes a precise daily routine at Café Möller, in her backyard, and at a Greek restaurant. She buys household items from secondhand shops and "trains" them to persist through the nightly reset by keeping them in her bag for several nights.

While clearing out her bag, she rediscovers the Roman sestertius, which triggers an urgent need to know. She buys a laptop and begins obsessive research into the Roman Empire: supply lines, aqueducts, legions, and bread. She discovers that everything in the Roman world is a container, from houses built around courtyards to the empire enclosed within walls, and recognizes this as a mirror of her own situation. She visits Roman sites, attends university lectures, and gradually shifts from consuming history to cautious engagement with the living world. She begins typing her handwritten notes into the laptop and printing them each evening, afraid of losing her story to the nightly reset.

On Day #1141, she marks another New Year alone in her backyard, producing only a soft chuckle. Three days later, on Day #1144, she sits at her window table in Café Möller with an appointment at nine o'clock. She reveals that she has met a man named Henry Dale who is also trapped in the eighteenth of November. She is not alone. Through the window, she sees him approaching. The door opens, the bell jangles, and he walks in. The volume ends on this cliffhanger.