TWO OF HEARTS

… She is probably standing on a wide
beach looking out over the sea …

I glanced up from the sticky-bun book. It was half-past three, and my ice cream had melted.

For the very first time I was struck by a monstrous thought: Frode had said the dwarfs on the magic island didn’t grow old like people. If this was so, then the Joker must still be running around the world today.

I remembered what Dad had said in the old square in Athens about the ravages of time, but time hadn’t had any power over the little people on the island. Although they had been as full of life as people and animals, they hadn’t been made of flesh and blood like us.

In several places in the sticky-bun book it was suggested that dwarfs could not be wounded. None of them cut themselves when the Joker smashed the bottles and decanters at the Joker Banquet. The Joker hadn’t been hurt when he had tumbled down the mountain crag, and his hands weren’t sore after all the rowing to escape the sinking island. And there was more – Baker Hans had also said that the dwarfs had cold hands …

An icy shiver ran up and down my spine.

The dwarf! I thought to myself. He’d also had cold hands!

Could it be possible that the strange little man we met at the garage was the very one who had jumped ashore and disappeared between some fishing huts in Marseille more than 150 years ago? Had the Joker himself given me the magnifying glass and indeed pointed the way to the sticky-bun book for me to read?

Had it been the Joker who had popped up at the fair in Como, on the bridge in Venice, on board the boat to Patras, and in Syntagma Square in Athens?

The thought was so terribly exciting that the melted ice cream on the table in front of me made me feel quite sick.

I looked around – I wouldn’t have been surprised if the little man suddenly popped up here in Piraeus, too. Just then Dad came bounding down from the street above the restaurant and tore me from my thoughts.

I could see right away that he hadn’t given up hope of finding Mama.

For some reason I remembered the Ace of Hearts looking out across the sea before she had been transformed into a playing card, and how she had said something about a shore which was both years and miles away from the shore she’d been standing on.

‘I’ll find out where she is this afternoon,’ Dad said.

I nodded solemnly. In a way we were nearing the end of the road.

‘She’s probably standing on a wide beach looking out over the sea,’ I said.

Dad sat down opposite me. ‘Something very like it, yes. But how could you know that?’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Dad told me that Mama was busy filming on a large point jutting out into the Aegean Sea. It was called Cape Sounion and lay on the southern peninsula of the Greek mainland, fifty miles south of Athens.

‘On the headland cliffs there are some huge ruins of a temple to Poseidon,’ he went on. ‘Poseidon was the Greek god of the sea. They’re going to snap a few pictures of Anita in front of the temple.’

‘Young man from land far away meets beautiful woman near the old temple,’ I said.

Dad sighed in despair.

‘What are you blabbering about?’

‘The Delphic Oracle,’ I said. ‘You were the one who was Pythia!’

‘Yeah, of course! But you know, I was really thinking of the Acropolis.’

‘ You were. But not Apollo, for goodness’ sake!’

He laughed excitedly. I wasn’t sure why.

‘Pythia was so woozy she can’t remember what she said,’ he finally admitted.

A lot of my experiences from the long journey have been difficult to recall, but I will never forget the trip out to Cape Sounion.

Once we had zoomed past all the resort towns which lay south of Athens, we had the chillingly blue Mediterranean Sea constantly on our right-hand side.

Although Dad and I thought of nothing but what it was going to be like to see Mama again, Dad kept the conversation on quite different topics. I think it was to stop me from getting my hopes up too much. At one point he insisted on asking me whether I thought we’d had a good holiday.

‘I really should have taken you to Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope,’ he said, ‘but at least you’re getting to see Cape Sounion.’

The trip was just long enough for Dad to need a cigarette stop. We stopped and stood on an exposed ledge in a moonlike landscape. The sea foamed at the bottom of a steep crag below, and a couple of water nymphs who looked like seals lay on the bare rocky slopes.

The water was so blue and clear my eyes almost started to water looking at it. I thought it must be twenty metres deep, but Dad claimed it was only about eight or ten metres.

Not a lot more was said after that. It was probably the quietest cigarette stop of the whole trip.

Long before we reached our destination we could see the Temple of Poseidon towering up from a point on our right.

‘What do you think?’ Dad asked.

‘Do you mean, do I think she’s there?’

‘At all,’ he said.

‘I know she’s there,’ I replied. ‘And I know she’ll come home to Norway with us.’

He laughed boisterously. ‘It’s not that easy, Hans Thomas. I’m sure you understand. You don’t leave your family for eight years just to be hauled back home again.’

‘She has no choice,’ I said.

I don’t think either of us said any more before we parked the car below the great temple fifteen minutes later.

We made our way between a couple of coaches and forty or fifty Italians. Then we had to pretend we were sightseeing and pay a couple of hundred drachmas to get into the temple site. On the way, Dad took out a comb and removed a silly sunhat he had bought in Delphi.

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Дата добавления: 2015-10-28