FOUR OF SPADES

… what I held in
my hands was a little book …

B y the time we got back down to Dorf, it was already late afternoon.

‘It’d be good to have a meal now,’ said Dad.

The large restaurant was open, so we didn’t have to creep into the little dining room. A number of locals sat around one of the tables with tankards of beer.

We ate sausages and Swiss sauerkraut, and for dessert we had a kind of apple pie with whipped cream.

After we’d finished eating, Dad stayed at the table ‘to taste the Alpine brandy’, as he put it. I thought this was so boring to watch that I took a fizzy drink and went up to our room. Here I read for the last time the same Norwegian comic books I had read ten or twenty times before. Then I began to play solitaire. I started a seven-card game twice, but both times I got stuck almost as soon as I’d dealt out the cards, so I went back down to the restaurant.

I thought I’d try to get Dad up to the room before he got too drunk to tell stories from the seven seas, but he clearly hadn’t finished tasting the Alpine brandy. Moreover, he’d started to speak German with some of the locals.

‘You can go for a walk and look round the town,’ he told me.

I thought it was mean of him not to come with me. But today – today I’m glad I did as he said. I think I was born under a luckier star than Dad.

To ‘look round the town’ took exactly five minutes, it was so small. It consisted of one main street, called Waldemarstrasse. The people of Dorf weren’t very inventive.

I was pretty angry with Dad for sitting around drinking Alpine brandy with the locals. ‘Alpine brandy!’ Somehow it sounded better than alcohol. Once Dad had said it wasn’t good for his health to stop drinking. I went around repeating this sentence to myself many times before I understood it. Normally people say the opposite, but Dad can be thought of as a rare exception. He wasn’t the illegitimate child of a German soldier for nothing.

All the shops in the village were closed, but a red van drove up to a grocery shop to make a delivery. A Swiss girl played ball against a brick wall, and an old man sat on a bench under a large tree smoking his pipe. But that was it! Although there were a lot of fine fairy-tale houses here, I thought the little Alpine village was incredibly boring. I couldn’t understand why I needed a magnifying glass either.

The only thing that kept me in a good mood was knowing we would be driving on the next morning. Some time in the afternoon or evening we would reach Italy. From there we would drive through Yugoslavia to Greece … and in Greece we might find Mama. Thinking about it gave me butterflies in my stomach.

I walked across the street to a little bakery. It was the only shop window I hadn’t looked in. Next to a tray of old cakes was a glass bowl with one lonely goldfish inside. There was a big chip in the upper edge of the bowl, about the same size as the magnifying glass I’d got from the mysterious little man at the garage. I pulled the magnifying glass out of my pocket, removed its cover, and examined it closely. It was just a bit smaller than the chip in the bowl.

The tiny orange goldfish was swimming round and round inside the glass bowl. It probably lived on cake crumbs. I thought that maybe a roe deer had tried to eat the goldfish, but it had taken a bite from the bowl instead.

All of a sudden the evening sun shone through the little window and lit up the glass bowl. Then I saw the fish wasn’t just orange, it was red, yellow, and green. Both the glass and the water in the bowl were tinted by the fish now, all the colours from a paintbox at once. The more I stared at the fish, the glass, and the water, the more I forgot where I was. For a few seconds I thought I was the fish swimming around inside the bowl and the fish was outside gazing at me.

As I stared at the fish in the glass bowl, I suddenly noticed an old man with white hair standing behind the counter inside the bakery. He looked down at me and waved for me to come inside.

I thought it was a little odd that this bakery should be open in the evening. First I glanced back at the Schöner Waldemar to see if Dad had finished drinking his Alpine brandy, but when I didn’t see him I opened the door to the bakery and stepped inside.

‘ Grüss Gott!’ I said politely. It was the only thing I’d learned to say in Swiss-German, and it meant ‘praise be to God,’ or something like that.

I could tell at once that the baker was a kind man.

‘Norwegian!’ I said, beating my chest so he’d understand I didn’t speak his language.

The old man leaned over a wide marble counter and stared into my eyes.

‘Reallich?’ he said. ‘I have also lived in Norway. Many, many years ago. Now I have almost all my Norwegian forgotten.’

He turned round and opened an old refrigerator. He took out a bottle, opened it, and put it on the counter.

‘Und you like fizzy drinks,’ he said. ‘ Nicht wahr? There you go, my junger friend. It is a sehr good fizzy drink.’

I placed the bottle to my lips and took a few gulps. It tasted even better than the drink I’d had at the Schöner Waldemar. I think it had a pear flavour.

The white-haired old man bent over the marble counter again and whispered, ‘It tastes good, yes?’

‘Delicious,’ I replied.

‘ Jawohl,’ he whispered again. ‘It is a sehr good drink. And there is anozer fizzy drink to be found here in Dorf. It is even besser. But that soda isn’t sold over counter. Verstehst you?’

I nodded. He whispered so strangely I was almost scared. But then I looked up into his blue eyes, and they were truly kind.

‘I come from Arendal,’ I said. ‘Dad and I are on our way to Greece to find Mama. Unfortunately, she’s got lost in the fashion world.’

He looked at me sharply. ‘ Sagst you Arendal, my friend? And got lost? There are perhaps others who have the same done. I have auch some years in that grimme Stadt lived. But they have probably me there forgotten.’

I looked up at him. Had he really lived in Grimstad? That was our neighbouring town. Dad and I used to go there by boat during the summer.

‘That’s not … that far from Arendal,’ I stuttered.

‘No, no. And I knew that a junger jack one day here to Dorf would come. To collect the treasure, my friend. Now it is no longer just mine.’

Suddenly I heard Dad calling me. I could tell by his voice he’d had plenty of Alpine brandy.

‘Thank you very much for the drink,’ I said. ‘But I have to go now, Dad’s calling.’

‘ Vater ja. Aber natürlich, my friend. Wait doch a little. While you were here at the fish looking, a tray of buns in the oven I put. I saw you had the magnifying glass. Then I knew that you the right jack were. You will verstehen, my sohn, you will verstehen …’

The old baker disappeared into a back room. A minute later he returned with four freshly baked sticky buns, which he put into a paper bag.

He gave me the bag and said sternly, ‘ Nur an important ding you must promise me. You will hide the biggest sticky bun till last and eat it when you are completely alone. You must never say anything to anyone else. Verstehst you?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And thank you very much.’

The next moment I was back out on the street. Everything happened so fast I don’t remember anything before I met Dad between the little bakery and the Schöner Waldemar.

I told him I’d got a fizzy drink and four sticky buns from an old baker who’d emigrated from Grimstad. Dad probably thought I was just making it up, but he ate one of the sticky buns on the way back to the guest-house. I ate two. I hid the biggest sticky bun in the bag.

Dad fell asleep as soon as he lay down on the bed. I lay awake thinking about the old baker and the goldfish. In the end, I was so hungry I got out of bed and fetched the bag with the last sticky bun. I sat on a chair in the dark and bit into the bun.

Suddenly my teeth hit something hard. I tore away the bits of bun and discovered an object the size of a matchbox. Dad lay snoring on his bed. I turned on a light by the chair.

What I held in my hands was a little book. On the cover was written: The Rainbow Fizz and the Magic Island.

I began to leaf through the book. Although it was extremely small, it had over a hundred pages of minuscule writing. I turned to the first page and tried to read the tiny letters, but it was absolutely impossible. Then I remembered the magnifying glass I’d got from the little man at the garage. I fetched my jeans, found the magnifying glass in the green cover in one of the pockets, and put it over the letters on the first page. They were still very small, but as soon as I leaned over the magnifying glass, they were just big enough for me to read.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28