The Solitaire Mystery Read online

‘He got up and fetched a little glass; then he poured a couple of drops into it. They lay on the bottom of the glass and glittered like snow crystals.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  “Don’t I get any more?” I asked, surprised.

  ‘The old man shook his head. “A little taste is more than enough. The taste of just one drop of Rainbow Fizz will last for many hours.”

  “So maybe I can drink a drop now, and another drop early tomorrow morning,” I suggested.

  ‘Baker Hans shook his head in despair. “No, no. One drop now – and no more drops ever again. You will find this drop so good you will want to steal the rest. That’s why I have to lock it up in the attic again as soon as you leave. When I’ve told you about Frode’s playing cards, you’ll think yourself lucky I didn’t give you the whole bottle.”

  “Have you tasted it yourself?”

  “Yes, once. But that was more than fifty years ago.”

  ‘Baker Hans got up from his chair by the fire, took the bottle with the liquid diamonds, and put it in the little bedroom.

  ‘When he returned, he placed one hand on my shoulder and said, “Drink now. This is the greatest moment of your life, my boy. You will always remember it, but this moment will never ever return.”

  ‘I raised the little glass to my mouth and drank the glittering drops that lay in the bottom. As soon as the first drop tickled the tip of my tongue, a wave of desire washed through my body. At first I tasted all the best flavours I had tasted previously in my young life; then a thousand other flavours surged through my body.

  ‘Baker Hans had been right about the taste starting from the tip of my tongue. But I could also taste strawberry, raspberry, apple, and banana in my arms and my legs. In the tip of my little finger I could taste honey, in one of my toes I tasted preserved pears, and in the small of my back confectioner’s custard. I could smell the scent of my mother all over my body. It was a smell I had forgotten, though I had missed it ever since she’d died.

  ‘When the first storm of flavour eased, it was as though the whole world was in my body; yes, as if I was the whole world. I suddenly felt that all the woods and lakes, mountains and fields were part of my body. Although my mother was dead, it was as though she were out there somewhere …

  ‘When I looked at the green Buddha figure, it seemed to laugh. I glanced at the two swords hanging crossed on the wall, and now they appeared to fence. The ship in the bottle which I had spotted as soon as I had entered Hans’s cabin was on top of a large cupboard. I now felt as though I were standing on board the old sailing ship, rushing towards a lush island in the distance.

  “Was it good?” I heard a voice say. It was Baker Hans. He leaned over and ruffled my hair.

  “Mmm …” was all I could reply. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘And so it is today. I can’t say what Rainbow Fizz tasted like; it tasted like everything. I just know I still get tears in my eyes when I think of how good it was.’

  NINE OF SPADES

  … he saw peculiar things

  that everyone else was blind to …

  Dad 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 f
rom 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.

  TEN OF SPADES

  … like distant islands I would

  never reach under this boat’s sail …

  As 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 t
own 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.