Seven of Spades

… a mysterious planet …

M y eyes were sore after spelling my way, letter by letter, through this long section in the sticky-bun book. The letters were so tiny that I sometimes had to stop and wonder whether I was also making a little bit up myself.

I sat for a while staring at the high mountaintops we passed, thinking about Albert, who’d lost his mother and who’d had a father who liked his drink.

After a while, Dad said, ‘We’re getting close to the famous St Gotthard Tunnel. I think it cuts right through the huge mountain range you see ahead.’

He told me the St Gotthard Tunnel was the world’s longest road tunnel. It was more than 16 kilometres long, and had been open only a few years. But before that – for more than a hundred years – there had been a railway tunnel, and before that, monks and other travellers had taken the St Gotthard Pass on their way between Italy and Germany.

‘So there have been people here before us,’ he concluded. The next moment we were inside the long tunnel.

The trip through the tunnel took almost a quarter of an hour. On the other side we passed a little town called Airolo.

‘Oloria,’ I said. It was a kind of game I’d played in the car all the way from Denmark. I read all the names and road signs backwards to see if they hid a secret word or something. Sometimes I was luckier than others. ‘Roma,’ for example, became ‘amor,’ and I thought that was rather fitting.

‘Oloria’ wasn’t too bad either. It sounded like the name of a fairy-tale country. If I squinted my eyes a little, it was as though I were driving through this country now.

We drove down into a valley with small farms and stone walls. We soon crossed a river called Ticino, and when Dad saw it, his eyes began to water. That hadn’t happened since we strolled along the docks in Hamburg.

He braked sharply and pulled off the road. He jumped out of the car and stood pointing down at the river running through the steep-sided valley.

By the time I’d got out, he’d already managed to light a cigarette.

‘We’ve reached the sea at last, my boy. I can smell the tar and the seaweed.’

Dad was always coming out with remarks like this, but nevertheless, this time I was scared he’d finally flipped. What particularly worried me was that he said nothing else. It was as though he had nothing on his mind but to make it clear that we had reached the sea.

I knew we were still in Switzerland, which had no coastline, and even though I hadn’t a clue about geography, the high mountainsides were solid evidence that we were a long way from the sea.

‘Are you tired?’ I asked.

‘Nope,’ he said, pointing down to the river again. ‘But I’m afraid I haven’t told you much about the boat traffic in Central Europe, and I’m going to do that right away.’

I must have looked as though I’d fallen from the moon, because he added, ‘Relax, Hans Thomas. There aren’t any pirates here.’

He pointed at the mountains and continued: ‘We’ve just gone through the St Gotthard massif. Many of Europe’s longest rivers flow from here. The Rhine collects its first drops here, the source of the Rhône is also here – as is the Ticino’s, which joins the great Po further downstream before running out into the Adriatic Sea.’

It began to dawn on me why he’d suddenly started to talk about the sea, but to confuse me even more he said, ‘I said the source of the Rhône was here.’ He pointed to the mountains again. ‘That river flows through Geneva and down through France before it eventually spills into the Mediterranean a few miles west of Marseille. Then there’s the Rhine; it flows through Germany and Holland before it eventually empties into the North Sea. But there are many other rivers as well, you know, which drink their first gulps up here in the Alps.’

‘So do boats sail along these rivers?’ I asked. I thought I’d stay one step ahead of him.

‘You can be sure of that, my boy. But they don’t just sail along the rivers. They sail between them, too.’

He’d lit himself another cigarette, and once again I wondered whether he was totally out of his mind. Sometimes I worried that the alcohol was corroding his brain.

‘For example, if you sail along the Rhine,’ he said, ‘in a way you are sailing along the Rhône, the Seine, and the Loire. And along many other important rivers, for that matter. In this way you have access to all the large city ports of the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean.’

‘But aren’t there high mountains separating these rivers?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Dad continued. ‘And mountains are really perfectly all right as long as you can sail between them.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I said, interrupting him. Sometimes I got irritated when he started to talk in riddles.

‘Canals,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you know that you can sail from the Baltic to the Black Sea without being near either the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean?’

I just shook my head in despair.

‘You end up in the Caspian Sea: in other words, in the heart of Asia,’ he whispered excitedly.

‘Is that true?’

‘Yup! It’s as true as the St Gotthard Tunnel. It’s amazing.’

I stood looking down at the river, and now I thought I, too, could smell the faint tang of tar and seaweed.

‘What do you learn at school, Hans Thomas?’ Dad asked.

‘To sit still,’ I replied. ‘It’s so difficult that we spend years learning to do it.’

‘Okay … But do you think you’d have sat still if the teacher had told you about the sea routes in Europe?’

‘Probably,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m quite sure.’

And with that the cigarette stop was over. We drove on, following the Ticino River. The first place we passed was Bellinzona, a large town with three huge fortresses from the Middle Ages. After Dad had given a little lecture on the Crusades, he said, ‘You know I’m very interested in outer space, Hans Thomas. Well, I’m particularly interested in planets – most of all living planets.’

I didn’t say anything. Both he and I knew he was interested in that kind of thing.

‘Did you know,’ he continued, ‘that a mysterious planet has just been discovered where millions of intelligent beings are loafing around on two legs peering out over the planet through a pair of bright lenses?’

I had to admit this was completely new to me.

‘The little planet is held together by a complicated network of tracks where these clever guys constantly roll around in colourful wagons.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes it is! On this planet these mysterious creatures have also built enormous buildings which are more than a hundred storeys tall. And underneath these constructions they’ve dug long tunnels which they can flit around in, in electric things moving on rails.’

‘Are you quite sure?’ I asked.

‘Yes, quite sure.’

‘But … why have I never heard of this planet?’

‘Well,’ Dad said, ‘first of all, it was discovered only recently, and second, I fear that I am the only one who has discovered it.’

‘Where is it, then?’

At this point Dad stepped on the brake and pulled off the road.

‘Here,’ he said, and slapped his palm down on the dashboard. ‘This is the remarkable planet, Hans Thomas. And we are those intelligent guys rolling around in a red Fiat.’

I sat for a few seconds sulking because he’d fooled me. But then it occurred to me how incredible this planet is, so I forgave him.

‘People would have gone absolutely wild if the astronomers had discovered another living planet,’ Dad concluded. ‘They just don’t let themselves be amazed by their own.’

He sat for a long time without saying anything, so I took the opportunity to read more of the sticky-bun book.

It wasn’t easy to separate all the bakers in Dorf from each other. But I soon understood that Ludwig was the one who had written the sticky-bun book, and Albert was the one who had told him about the time he was a boy and went to visit Baker Hans.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28