Eight of Hearts

… such a fantastic miracle that it’s hard
to know whether to laugh or cry …

I stood up and went outside the cabin. It was hard to walk straight, because different tastes fought for attention throughout my whole body. As the most delicious strawberry cream slid through my left shoulder, a bitter mixture of redcurrants and lemon stabbed my right knee. The tastes chased through my body so quickly and so frequently that I couldn’t name them all.

There are people sitting all over the world eating different things right at this moment, I thought to myself. That meant many thousands of different tastes, and it was as if I were present at all those meals – as if I were tasting everything people all over the world were eating.

I started to wander up into the woods above the cabin. As the firework display of tastes slowly began to subside, I felt something I have never lost since.

I turned round and looked down at the village, and for the first time I realised how fantastic the world is. How is it possible that there are people on this planet, I thought to myself. I felt I was experiencing something completely new, but at the same time it was something which had been out in the open ever since I was a small child. I had been asleep; my life on earth had been one long hibernation.

I am alive! I thought to myself. I am a person bursting with energy. For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be a person, and at the same time I understood that if I had continued to drink the strange drink, then this feeling would gradually slip away until at last it disappeared completely. I would have tasted the whole world so often that I would become one with it. I would no longer have any feeling of existing. I would become a tomato – or a plum tree.

I sat down on a tree stump, and a roe deer appeared between the trees. It wasn’t that unusual really; wild animals were always roaming around in the woods above Dorf. However, I couldn’t remember that I had ever seen how much of a miracle a living creature is. Of course, I had seen roe deer, I saw roe deer almost every day, but I had never understood how unfathomably mysterious every single roe deer is. Now I understood why this was so – I had never taken the time to experience these wild animals because I had seen them so often.

It was the same with everything – with the whole world, I thought to myself. As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us – but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensual experience.

I now understood exactly what had happened to the dwarfs on the magic island. They had been unable to experience life’s deepest secrets. Perhaps that was because they had never been children. When they started to catch up on what they had missed, by drinking the powerful drink every single day, it wasn’t surprising that they finally became one with everything around them. Now I appreciated how much of a victory it must have been for Frode and the Joker to have given up the Rainbow Fizz.

The roe deer stood watching me for a second or two before it bounded away. For a moment there was an incomprehensible silence, then a nightingale started to sing its heavenly tune. That such a little body could produce so much sound, breath, and music was a marvel.

This world, I thought to myself, is such a fantastic miracle that it’s hard to know whether one ought to laugh or cry. Perhaps one should do both, but it isn’t easy to do both at the same time.

My thoughts wandered to one of the farmers’ wives down in the village. She was only nineteen, but one day she had come into the bakery with a little baby girl who was two or three weeks old. I had never been all that interested in babies, but when I peeped into the basket I thought I saw a look of wonder in the little baby’s eyes. I hadn’t thought any more about it, but now as I sat on the tree stump in the woods and listened to the nightingale’s song and a carpet of sunshine unfolded over the fields on the other side of the valley – yes, then it struck me that if the little baby had been able to talk, she would have said something about how wonderful the world was. I had had enough sense to congratulate the young mother on the birth of her child, but really it was the child I should have congratulated. One should bend over every single new citizen of the world and say, ‘Welcome to the world, little friend! You are tremendously lucky to be here.’

I sat thinking how terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living. One day we suddenly take the fact that we exist for granted – and then, yes, then we don’t think about it any more until we are about to leave the world again.

I now felt an. intense strawberry taste surge through my upper body. Of course it tasted good, but it was also so strong and rich that I almost felt sick. No, I needed no persuasion not to drink Rainbow Fizz again. I knew that I had more than I needed with the blueberries in the woods and a little visit from a roe deer or a nightingale now and again.

As I sat there, I suddenly heard a rustling of branches beside me. When I looked up, I saw a little man peering out from between the trees.

I felt my heart somersault as I realised it was the Joker.

He walked forward a couple of paces, and from a distance of ten or fifteen metres he said, ‘Yum, yum!’

He licked his tiny lips. ‘You have refreshed yourself with the delicious drink? Yum, yum! says the Joker.’

I still had the long story of the magic island in my head, so I wasn’t frightened. The initial surprise of seeing him soon disappeared as well. I felt as though we belonged together – I was a joker in the pack of cards, too.

I got up from the tree stump and walked over to him. He was no longer wearing the jester’s purple costume with bells; instead, he had on a brown suit with black stripes.

I stretched out my hand and said, ‘I know who you are.’

As he shook my hand, I heard a faint jingle of bells, and I realised he had simply put a suit on over his jester’s costume. His hand was as cold as the morning dew.

‘I have the pleasure of shaking the hand of the soldier from the land in the north,’ he said.

He smiled strangely when he said this, and his tiny teeth shone like mother-of-pearl. Then he added: ‘Now it is this Jack’s turn to live. Happy birthday, brother!’

‘It’s … it’s not my birthday,’ I stammered.

‘Sssh, says the Joker. It’s not enough to be born only once. Last night the baker’s friend was born again, because the Joker knows, and therefore the Joker wishes him a happy birthday.’

He had a squeaky doll’s voice. I let go of his icy hand and said, ‘I … I have heard everything … about you and Frode and all the others …’

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘because today is Joker Day, my boy, and tomorrow is the beginning of a whole new round. Fifty-two years will pass until the next time. By then the boy from the land in the north is a grown man, but before that he visits Dorf. Luckily, he has been given a magnifying glass on his journey. Fancy magnifying glass, says Joker. Made from the finest diamond glass, he says. Because one can put things in one’s pocket when an old goldfish bowl is smashed. Joker clever boy, but it is this Jack who gets the most difficult task.’

I didn’t understand what the dwarf meant, but then he moved closer and whispered, ‘You must remember to write about Frode’s playing cards in a little book. Then you will bake the book in a sticky bun because the goldfish does not give away the secret of the island but the sticky bun does, Joker says. Enough!’

‘But… the story of Frode’s playing cards will hardly fit in a sticky bun,’ I protested.

He laughed heartily at this. ‘It depends on how big the sticky bun is, my boy. Or how small the book is.’

‘The story of the magic island … and everything else… is so long it will have to be a.very large book,’ I protested again. ‘And so it’ll have to be a giant sticky bun, too.’

He looked at me cunningly. ‘One mustn’t be so cocksure, Joker says. Bad habit, he repeats. The sticky bun needn’t be so big if all the letters in the book are tiny.’

‘I don’t think anybody can write that small,’ I insisted. ‘And even if it was possible, hardly anyone would be able to read it.’

‘Joker says just write the book. You might as well begin right away. Then you can make it small when the time comes. And he who has the magnifying glass will see.’

I looked across the valley. The golden carpet had already drawn in over the village.

When I turned back to face the Joker, he was gone. I looked round, but the little jester had darted away between the trees as artfully as a roe deer.

I felt quite exhausted as I made my way back down to the cabin. At one stage I almost lost my balance when a powerful spurt of cherry shot through my left leg just as I was about to step on a rock.

I thought about my friends in the village. If only they knew. Soon they would be gathering in the Schöner Waldemar again. They had to have something to talk about, and there was nothing more natural to gossip about than an old man living alone in a wooden hut away from everyone else. They probably thought he was a bit strange, and for safety’s sake they declared him crazy. However, they were part of the biggest mystery themselves – it was all around them, they just didn’t see it. Perhaps it was true that Albert had a big secret, but the biggest secret of all was the world itself.

I knew that I would never drink wine in the Schöner Waldemar again. And I also knew that one day it would be me they would gossip about down there. In a few years I would be the only joker in the village.

Eventually I dived into bed and slept until late afternoon.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-28