TEN OF SPADES

… like distant islands I would
never reach under this boat’s sail …

A s I wandered home from Baker Hans’s that night, the taste of Rainbow Fizz lingered in my body. A sudden taste of cherry I would warm the outer rim of my ear, or a touch of lavender would brush across my elbow. But then a bitter rhubarb flavour might also sharply bite into one of my knees.

The moon had gone down, but above the mountains there was a sparkling shower of fiery stars – as though they were being shaken from a magic salt cellar.

I thought I was a little human being on earth. But now – with the Rainbow Fizz still inside me – it wasn’t something I just thought. I felt, through my entire body, as though this planet was my home.

Already I understood why Rainbow Fizz was a dangerous drink. It had awakened a thirst which could never be completely quenched. I already wanted more.

When I reached Waldemarstrasse, I saw Father. He came staggering out of the Schöner Waldemar. I went over to him and told him I’d been to visit the baker. He got so angry he boxed my ears.

When everything else was so good, this blow hurt me even more and I immediately began to cry. Then Father started to cry, too. He asked me if I could ever forgive him, but I didn’t reply, I just followed him home.

The last thing Father said before he fell asleep was that Mother was an angel and brandy was the devil’s curse. I think that was the last thing he said to me before the alcohol drowned him for good.

Early the next morning I stopped off at the bakery. Neither Baker Hans nor I said anything about the Rainbow Fizz. It didn’t really belong down here in the village – it belonged to another world completely. But we both knew that we now shared a deep secret.

If he had asked me again if I could keep the secret, I would have been deeply offended. But the old baker knew he needn’t ask.

Baker Hans went into the bakery behind the shop to make some pastry, so I sat on a stool and stared at the goldfish. I never got tired of looking at it. Not only did it have many beautiful colours, it swam back and forth inside the bowl and made small fidgety dives up and down in the water – driven by a peculiar inner desire. It had small living scales all over its body. It had black dots for eyes which never shut. Only its little mouth constantly opened and closed.

Every little animal is an individual, I thought to myself. This goldfish swimming round and round inside the glass bowl lives only this once, and one day when it comes to the end of its life, it will never return.

When I was about to go out into the street again – as I usually did after visiting Baker Hans in the morning – the old man turned to me and said, ‘Are you coming this evening, Albert?’

I nodded without saying anything.

‘I still haven’t told you about the island … and I don’t know how many days I have left to live,’ he added.

I turned and threw my arms round his neck.

‘You’re not allowed to die,’ I cried. ‘You’ll never be allowed to die!’

‘All old people must be allowed to die,’ he replied. He held on tightly to my skinny shoulder. ‘But it’s good to know there is someone to carry on from where the old leave off.’

When I walked up to Baker Hans’s cabin that night, he met me by the water pump.

‘Now it is back in its place,’ he said.

I knew he meant the Rainbow Fizz.

‘Will I ever taste it again?’ I had to ask.

The old man snorted and said, ‘No, never!’

He was strict and authoritative now. But I knew he was right. I had understood that I would never taste the mysterious drink again.

‘The bottle will now remain in the attic,’ he continued. ‘And it shan’t be taken down again before more than half a century has passed. A young man will knock on your door – and then it will be his turn to taste the golden brew. In this way, what is left in the bottle will flow through many generations. And some day – some day the remarkable stream will flow right into the land of tomorrow. Do you understand, son? Or am I talking too much like an adult?’

I said that I understood, and we went inside the cabin with all the wonderful things from all the corners of the world. We sat by the fire, as we had done the night before. There were two glasses on the table and Baker Hans poured blueberry juice from an old decanter.

I was born in Lübeck one cold winter’s night in January 1811 [he began]. It was in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Father was a baker like myself, but I decided at an early age to go to sea. The truth was, I had to. There were eight of us, and it wasn’t easy to support us all with Father’s little bakery. As soon as I turned sixteen – in 1827 – I signed on to a large sailing ship in Hamburg. It was a full-rigged ship from the Norwegian town of Arendal and it was called the Maria.

The Maria was my home and my life for more than fifteen years. But then – in the autumn of 1842 – we sailed from Rotterdam to New York with a general cargo. We had a skilled crew, but on this occasion both the compass and octant fooled us. I think we took too southerly a course when we left the English Channel. We must have sailed towards the Mexican Gulf. How this happened is still a mystery to me.

After seven or eight weeks in open water, by all accounts we should have been in port, but there was no land in sight. We may have been somewhere south of Bermuda. Then one morning a storm brewed. The wind grew stronger throughout the day, and soon there came a full-blown hurricane.

I don’t remember exactly what happened, but the ship must have capsized from one of the hurricane’s mighty blows. I have only a few broken memories from the shipwreck itself, everything happened so fast. I remember the ship turning over and taking in water, and I remember one of my mates being washed overboard and being lost in the sea. But that’s all. The next thing I recall is waking up in a lifeboat. And now – now the sea was completely calm.

I still don’t know how long I was unconscious. It could have been a few hours or many days. My reckoning of time begins again from when I woke up in the lifeboat. Since then I have found out that the ship went down without a trace of either the boat or the crew. I was the only one to survive.

The lifeboat had a small rig, and I found an old sailsheet under the floorboards at the front of the bow. I hoisted the sail and tried to navigate by the sun and the moon. I reckoned I must be somewhere on the east coast of America, and I tried to hold a westerly course.

I lay drifting about on the sea like this for more than a week, with nothing to eat but biscuits and water. I never saw so much as a ship’s mast.

I particularly remember the last night. The stars glittered above me like distant islands I would never reach under this boat’s sail. It was strange to think I was under the same sky as Mother and Father back home in Lübeck. Although we could see the same stars, we were so infinitely far apart from each other. Because stars don’t gossip, Albert. They don’t care how we live our lives on earth.

Mother and Father would soon hear the sad news that I had gone down with the Maria.

Early the next morning, as the sky above me cleared and the morning blushed forth across the horizon, I suddenly caught sight of a little dot in the distance. At first I thought the dot was a bit of dust in my eye, but although I rubbed my eye and cried, the dot stayed as immovable as before. I finally realised it must be an island.

I tried to steer the boat closer, but at the same time I felt it strain against a strong current pouring out from the little island I could hardly see. I loosened the sail, found a pair of solid oars, sat with my back to my destination, and put the oars into the rowlocks.

I rowed and rowed without stopping, but it seemed as though I didn’t move an inch. The endless ocean in front of me would be my grave if I didn’t reach the island. Almost a day had passed since I had drunk the last of the water ration. I struggled for hours, and the palms of my hands were soon bloody from the strokes of the oars, but the island was my last chance.

After I had rowed furiously for several laborious hours, I turned round and looked in the direction of the small dot. It had now grown into an island with clear contours, and I could see a lagoon with palm trees. But I still hadn’t reached my goal; I still had a tough job ahead of me.

At last I was rewarded for my pains. Well into the day, I rowed into the lagoon and felt the soft nudge of the boat hitting shore.

I climbed out of the boat and pushed it up on the beach. After all the long days at sea, it was like a fairy tale to feel solid ground under my feet.

I ate the last ration of biscuits before I pulled the boat up between the palm trees. The first thing I thought about was whether the island had water.

Although I had saved myself by landing on a tropical island, I wasn’t that optimistic. The island seemed so terribly small that I thought it must be uninhabited. From where I stood, I could see how it curved over. I could very nearly see over the top of it.

There weren’t many trees, but from the crown of a palm tree I suddenly heard a bird singing more beautifully than any bird I had ever heard before. It probably sounded so exceptionally beautiful because it was the very first sign that, despite everything, there was life on the island. Having spent many years at sea, I was sure this was not a seabird.

I left the boat and followed a narrow path to get closer to the bird in the tree. The island seemed to grow, the deeper I moved into it. I realised there were more trees here, and I heard more birds singing further inland. At the same time – I think I must have made a mental note of it just then – I realised that many of the flowers and bushes were different from any I had seen before.

From the beach I had seen only seven or eight palm trees, but I now saw that the little path I was following continued between some tall rosebushes – and then twisted on towards a small group of palm trees up ahead.

I hurried towards those trees – now I would find out just how big the island was. As soon as the palm-tree crowns were above my head, I could see they formed the gateway to some dense woodland. I turned round. There lay the lagoon I had sailed into. To my left and right the Atlantic Ocean glittered like gold in the bright daylight.

I stopped thinking. I just had to see where this forest ended, and so I ran in between the trees. When I emerged on the other side, steep hillsides rose around me. I could no longer see the sea.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28