NINE OF SPADES

… he saw peculiar things
that everyone else was blind to …

D ad had kept trying to talk to me while I read about Rainbow Fizz, but that drink was so good I couldn’t put the sticky-bun book down. Now and then, to be polite, I glanced out of the window when Dad commented on the view.

‘Wow!’ I’d say. Or: ‘Beautiful!’

One of the things Dad pointed out while I continued to sneak around Baker Hans’s attic was that all the signs and names were written in Italian. We were driving through the Italian part of Switzerland, and the names were not the only things that were different. Even while I was reading about Rainbow Fizz, I had noticed the valley we drove through had flowers and trees which really belonged to countries from the Mediterranean regions.

Dad – who’d been all over the world – started to comment on the vegetation.

‘Mimosa,’ he said. ‘Magnolia! Rhododendron! Azalea! Japanese cherry tree!’

We saw a number of palm trees, too – long before we’d crossed the Italian border.

‘We’re not far from Lugano,’ Dad said, as I put the book down.

I suggested we spend the night there, but Dad shook his head. ‘The agreement was, we would cross the Italian border first. It’s not that far now, and it’s still early afternoon.’

As a consolation, we had a long stop in Lugano. First of all we nosed around the streets and in the various gardens and parks the town was full of. I took the magnifying glass with me and made a few botanical investigations, while Dad bought an English newspaper and smoked a cigarette.

I found two very distinct trees. One had large red flowers, while the other had rather small yellow ones. The flowers had totally different forms as well; nevertheless, these two trees must have been of the same family, because when I studied the leaves from the two trees closely under the magnifying glass, I discovered the veins and fibres of the leaves were almost identical.

We suddenly heard a nightingale. It chirped, whistled, twittered, and peeped for so long and so beautifully I almost started to cry. Dad was equally impressed, but only laughed.

It was so hot that I got two ice creams without having to coax Dad into philosophising. I tried to get a big cockroach to walk along the ice-cream stick, so I could put it under the magnifying glass, but this particular cockroach had a hopeless fear of the doctor.

‘They jump out as soon as the thermometer teeters over thirty degrees,’ Dad said.

‘And they jump away again as soon as they see an ice-cream stick,’ I replied.

Before getting back in the car, Dad bought a pack of cards. He did this as often as other people might buy a magazine. He wasn’t particularly interested in playing cards, and he didn’t play solitaire either – I was the only one who did that. So I’d better explain about these packs of cards.

Dad worked as a mechanic in a large garage in Arendal. Apart from going back and forth to work, he’d always been utterly absorbed by the eternal questions. The bookshelves in his room were overflowing with books about different philosophical subjects. But he also had a pretty normal hobby. Well – exactly how normal it was, is, of course, open to discussion.

Lots of people collect different things like stones, coins, stamps, and butterflies. Dad also had a passion for collecting. He collected jokers. This was something he’d done long before I’d known him; I think it began when he was at sea. He had a drawerful of different jokers.

He mainly went about it by asking for the joker from people playing cards. He would walk over to complete strangers sitting at a café, or by the dockside, playing cards and say that he was a passionate collector of jokers and could he have the joker if they didn’t need it in the game. Most of them plucked out the joker and gave it to him right away, but a lot of them looked at him as though they were about to say ‘it takes all kinds.’ Some politely said no to the request, others refused in a bolder fashion. I sometimes felt like a Gypsy child who’d been involuntarily drawn into some kind of begging operation.

Of course, I wondered how this unique hobby had begun. In this way, Dad had managed to collect a card from all the packs of cards he came across. Therefore, his hobby seemed related to collecting a postcard from all the corners of the world. It was also clear that the joker was the only card he could collect. For example, he couldn’t collect the nine of spades or the king of clubs, because interrupting a high-spirited bridge party and asking for the king of clubs or the nine of spades just wasn’t done.

The whole point was that there are usually two jokers in a pack of cards. We had found up to three and four, but generally there were two. Moreover, there aren’t many games requiring the joker, and on the rare occasions it is used, you can get by with just one. But Dad was interested in jokers for a deeper reason.

The fact was, Dad considered himself a joker. He rarely said it straight out, but I had known for a long time that he saw himself as a joker in a pack of cards.

A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He’s not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He’s not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn’t belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.

I think Dad felt like a joker when he grew up as the illegitimate child of a German soldier in Arendal. But there was even more: Dad was also a joker in being a philosopher. He always felt he saw peculiar things that everyone else was blind to.

So when Dad bought this pack of cards in Lugano, it wasn’t for the pack itself. Something made him particularly curious to see what the joker of this pack of cards looked like. He was so excited he opened the package right away and pulled out one of the jokers.

‘Just as I thought,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen this one before.’

He put the joker in his shirt pocket, and now it was my turn.

‘Do I get the pack of cards?’

Dad handed the rest of the pack to me. This was an unwritten law: when Dad bought a pack of cards, he kept the joker – never more than one – and gave the rest of the cards to me if I asked for them before he’d disposed of them elsewhere. In this way, I’d collected nearly a hundred packs of cards. Because I was an only child – and didn’t have a mother at home – I really liked playing solitaire, but I wasn’t an avid collector, so I began to feel I had enough packs of cards. Sometimes Dad would simply buy a pack of cards, snatch the joker, and throw the rest away. It was almost like peeling a banana and throwing away the skin.

‘Garbage!’ he might say as he took the good from the bad and tossed the remains in the bin.

He generally got rid of the garbage, however, in a more compassionate way. If I didn’t want the cards, he’d find some other children and give the pack of cards to them without saying a word. In this way, he paid mankind back for all the jokers he had gone around bumming off casual cardplayers. I thought mankind got a good deal.

When we started the car again, Dad confided in me that the scenery was so beautiful here he wanted to make a little detour. Instead of following the highway from Lugano to Como, we drove along Lake Lugano. We crossed the Italian border after having driven halfway along the lake.

I soon understood why Dad had chosen this route. Just after we’d left Lake Lugano, we came to a much larger lake with a lot of boat traffic. It was Lake Como. From here we drove through a little town called Menaggio. Oigganem, I said. We drove along the large lake for several miles before we arrived in Como later that evening.

While we drove, Dad continued to name all the trees we saw.

‘Stone pine,’ he said. ‘Cypress, olive, fig.’

I didn’t know where he got all the names from. I had heard a couple of them before, but all the others he could have just made up, for all I knew.

In between all the impressions from the landscape around us, I read more from the sticky-bun book. I was eager to find out where Baker Hans had got the delicious Rainbow Fizz. And all the goldfish, for that matter.

Before I started to read, I made sure to start a game of solitaire, so I had a kind of explanation as to why I was so quiet. I had promised the nice baker in Dorf to keep the sticky-bun book a secret between the two of us.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28