FIVE OF SPADES

… I heard the old
man walking around in the attic …

D ear Son,

I must be allowed to call you that. I am sitting here writing my life story, knowing that one day you’ll come to the village. Maybe you’ll wander by the bakery in Waldemarstrasse and stand in front of the goldfish bowl. You won’t even know why you’ve come, but I know you’ll come to Dorf to carry on the story of the Rainbow Fizz and the magic island.

I am writing this in January 1946, and I am still a young man. When you meet me in thirty or forty years time, I will be old, with white hair. So I am also writing for a day to come.

The paper I am writing on is like a life raft, my unknown son. A life raft can drift with the wind and rain before sailing towards the ocean in the distance. But some rafts sail a totally different course. They sail towards the land of tomorrow. From there, there is no return.

How do I know you are the one to carry the story further? I will be able to tell when you come towards me, son. You will carry the sign.

I am writing in Norwegian so you will understand, but also so that the people of Dorf cannot read the story of the dwarfs. If that were to happen, the secret of the magic island would be a sensation, but a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long. It captures attention for one day, then it is forgotten. But the story of the dwarfs must never drown in the temporary sparkle of the news. It is better for only one person to know the secret of the dwarfs, rather than for everybody to forget it.

I was one of the many who sought a new place to live after the terrible war. Half of Europe was immediately transformed into a refugee camp. A large part of the world was under the shadow of an exodus. But we weren’t only political refugees; we were lost souls looking for ourselves.

I, too, had to leave Germany to build a new life for myself, but there weren’t so many possibilities of escape for a noncommissioned officer of the Third Reich.

I didn’t just find myself in a broken nation. I had brought home a broken heart from the land in the north. The whole world lay strewn about me in pieces.

I knew I couldn’t live in Germany, but I couldn’t travel back to Norway either. In the end, I managed to get myself over the mountains to Switzerland.

I roamed around for several weeks in a state of confusion, but in Dorf I soon met the old baker Albert Klages.

I was on my way down from the mountains when, exhausted by hunger and many long days of wandering, I suddenly saw a small village. Hunger made me run like a hunted animal down through the dense woodland, and I soon collapsed in front of an old wooden cabin. There I heard the humming of bees and could smell the sweet aroma of milk and honey.

The old baker must have managed to carry me inside the cabin. When I awoke on a bunk, I saw a man with white hair sitting in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe, and when he saw that I had opened my eyes, he came and sat next to me at once.

‘You’ve come home, dear son,’ he said comfortingly. ‘I knew that one day you’d come to my door. To collect the treasure, my boy.’

I must have fallen asleep again. When I next awoke, I was alone in the cabin. I got up and went out onto the front steps. Here, I found the old man sitting bent over a stone table. On the heavy tabletop was a beautiful glass bowl. Inside the bowl swam a colourful goldfish.

It immediately struck me how odd it was that a little fish from far away could swim around so happily here, high up in the mountains, in the middle of Europe. A piece of the living ocean had been lifted up to the Swiss Alps.

‘ Grüss Gott!’ I greeted the old man.

He turned round and looked up at me kindly.

‘My name is Ludwig.’

‘And I am Albert Klages,’ he replied.

He went inside the cabin, but soon came out into the sunshine carrying some bread, cheese, milk, and honey.

He pointed down to the village and told me that it was called Dorf, and that he owned a little bakery there.

I lived with the old man a few weeks, and I soon began to join him in the bakery. Albert taught me to bake bread and sticky buns, pastries and all kinds of cakes. I’d always heard that the Swiss were great bakers.

Albert was particularly happy to have some help stacking the heavy sacks of flour.

I also wanted to meet other people from the village, and so I would sometimes visit the old pub called the Schöner Waldemar.

I think the locals took a liking to me. Although they understood that I had been a German soldier, none of them asked me any questions about my past.

One evening someone in the pub started to talk about Albert, who had been so kind to me.

‘He has a screw loose,’ said the farmer Fritz André.

‘But so did the previous baker,’ continued the old shopkeeper Heinrich Albrechts.

When I joined in the conversation and asked them what they meant, they answered evasively at first. I had drunk a few carafes of wine, and I could feel my cheeks glowing.

‘If you can’t give me a direct answer, then you can at least take back your malicious gossip about the man who bakes the bread you eat!’ I spat out.

Nothing more was said about Albert that evening, but a few weeks later Fritz piped up again. ‘Do you know where he gets all his gold fish from?’ he asked. I had noticed that the village locals showed particular interest in me because I lived with the old baker.

‘I didn’t know there was more than one,’ I replied truthfully. ‘And he probably bought that from a pet shop, in Zürich perhaps.’

The farmer and the shopkeeper both started to laugh.

‘He has lots more,’ said the farmer. ‘Once my father was out hunting, and on his way home he came across Albert airing his goldfish. He had them out in the sunshine all together, and there were more than just a few of them, mark my words, baker boy.’

‘He’s never been outside Dorf either,’ added the shopkeeper. ‘We are exactly the same age, and as far as I know, he’s never left Dorf.’

‘Some people say he’s a wizard,’ whispered the farmer. ‘They claim he doesn’t only bake bread and cakes, but he makes these fish himself. One thing is sure: he didn’t catch them in Waldemarsee.’

I also began to wonder whether Albert was really hiding a big secret. A couple of sentences constantly rang in my ears: ‘You’ve come home, dear son. I knew that one day you’d come to my door. To collect the treasure, my boy.’

I didn’t want to hurt the old baker’s feelings by repeating any of the villagers’ gossip. If he was hiding a secret, I was sure he would tell me when the time was right.

For a long time I thought the reason there was so much gossip about the old baker was simply that he lived on his own high above the village itself. But there was also something about the old house which got me thinking.

As soon as you stepped into the house, you were in a large living room with a fireplace and a kitchen corner. There were two doors leading from the living room, one to Albert’s bedroom and the other to a little bedroom I’d been given the use of when I had arrived in Dorf. The rooms didn’t have particularly high ceilings, but when I observed the house from the outside, it was obvious that there must be a large attic. Moreover, from the crest of the hill behind the house, I could see a little window in the slate roof.

It was strange that Albert had never said anything about this attic, and he was never up there either. This is probably why I thought of the attic whenever my friends mentioned Albert.

Then one evening I happened to come home late from Dorf, and I heard the old man walking around in the attic. I was so surprised – and possibly a little scared, too – that I immediately ran outside to fetch some water from the pump. I took my time, and when I went back inside, Albert was sitting in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe.

‘You’re late,’ he said, but I felt as though he was thinking about something completely different.

‘Were you up in the attic?’ I asked. I didn’t know how I dared ask, but it just slipped out.

He seemed to sink into his chair, but then he looked up with the same kind face he had when he had taken care of me that day many months ago, when I had collapsed with exhaustion outside the old house.

‘Are you tired, Ludwig?’ he asked.

I shook my head. It was a Saturday evening. The next day we could sleep until the sun woke us.

He got up and threw some logs onto the fire.

‘Then we’ll sit together tonight,’ he said.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28