The Solitaire Mystery

by Jostein Gaarder

  From the window I could see a large lake. I got dressed at once and went downstairs. I met a fat woman who was so friendly she tried to talk to me, even though she couldn’t speak a word of Norwegian.

  She said ‘Hans Thomas’ several times. Dad must have presented me to her when I’d been asleep and he’d carried me up to the room. I understood that much.

  I walked across the lawn in front of the lake and tried out a crazy Alpine swing. It was so high I could swing up above the rooftops. While I played on the swing I observed the little Alpine village. The higher I swung, the more of the landscape I could see.

  I began to look forward to Dad waking up – he was sure to go wild when he saw Dorf in full daylight. You see, Dorf was a typical doll’s village. Between high, snow-crested mountains there were a few shops lining a few narrow streets. When I swung high into the sky, it was like peeping down at one of the villages from Legoland. The guest-house was a three-storeyed white building with pink shutters and lots of tiny coloured-glass windows.

  Just as I was beginning to grow bored with the swing, Dad appeared and called me in for breakfast.

  We went into what must have been the world’s smallest dining room. There was only enough space for four tables, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, Dad and I were the only guests. There was a large restaurant beside the dining room, but it was closed.

  I guessed that Dad felt guilty for sleeping longer than I, so I asked for a fizzy drink for breakfast instead of Alpine milk. He gave in at once, and in return he ordered a ‘viertel’. It sounded mysterious, but when it was poured into his glass, it looked suspiciously like red wine. I understood we wouldn’t be driving on until the next day.

  Dad said that we were staying at a Gasthaus. It meant ‘guesthouse’, and apart from the windows it didn’t look very different from any other guest-house. It was called the Schöner Waldemar, and the lake was called the Waldemarsee. If I wasn’t mistaken, they were both named after the same Waldemar.

  ‘He fooled us,’ Dad said after drinking some of his viertel.

  I knew at once he meant the little man. No doubt he was the one called Waldemar.

  ‘Have we driven a roundabout way?’ I asked.

  ‘Did you say a roundabout way? It’s just as far from here to Venice as it was from the garage. In kilometres, that is. It means that all that driving we did after we asked for directions was a complete waste of time.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ I said. Having spent so much time with Dad, I’d started to pick up some of his sailor’s talk.

  ‘I only have two weeks of my holiday left,’ he went on, ‘and we can’t count on meeting Mama as soon as we roll into Athens.’

  ‘Why couldn’t we drive on today?’ I had to ask. I was just as eager to find Mama as he was.

  ‘And how did you know we wouldn’t be driving today?’

  I couldn’t be bothered to answer that, I just pointed at his viertel.

  He began to laugh. He laughed so loudly and raucously that the fat lady had to laugh, too, although she had no idea what we were talking about.

  ‘We didn’t get here until after one o’clock in the morning,’ he said, ‘so I think we deserve a day to recover.’

  I shrugged. I was the one who hadn’t liked the fact that we had to drive and drive without staying anywhere, so I felt I couldn’t protest. I just wondered whether he really had thought of ‘recovering’ or whether he’d planned to use the rest of the day to hit the bottle.

  Dad started to rummage around in the Fiat for some luggage. He hadn’t bothered to take out so much as a toothbrush when we’d arrived in the middle of the night.

  When the boss had finished putting the car in order, we agreed to go for a long walk. The lady in the guest-house showed us a mountain with a wonderful view, but with it already being late morning, she thought it was a bit too far for us to walk up and down.

  That was when Dad got one of his bright ideas. What do you do when you want to walk down a high mountain but you can’t be bothered to climb up? You ask if there is a road to the top of the mountain, of course. The lady told us that there was, but if we drove up and walked down, wouldn’t we have to walk up the mountain to fetch the car afterwards?

  ‘We’ll take a taxi up and walk down,’ said Dad. And that’s exactly what we did.

  The lady called for a taxi, and although the taxi driver thought we were completely crazy, Dad waved some Swiss francs about and the driver did as Dad said.

  The landlady obviously knew the terrain much better than the little man from the garage. Neither Dad nor I had ever seen such a fantastic mountain or view, even though we came from Norway.

  Far down below, we spied a little pond beside a microscopic cluster of tiny dots. It was Dorf and the Waldemarsee. Although it was the middle of summer, the wind blew straight through our clothes on the top of the mountain. Dad said we were much higher above sea level than we could be on any mountain at home in Norway. I thought that was pretty impressive, but Dad was disappointed. He confessed he’d planned this trip to the top of the mountain purely because he’d hoped we’d be able to see the Mediterranean Sea. I think he’d imagined that he might be able to see what Mama was doing down there in Greece.

  ‘When I was at sea, I was used to the complete opposite,’ he said. ‘I could stand on deck for hours and days without catching a glimpse of land.’

  I tried to imagine what that would be like.

  ‘It was much better,’ Dad added, as though he’d read my thoughts. ‘I’ve always felt cooped up when I can’t see the sea.’

  We started to walk down the mountain. We followed a path between some tall leafy trees and I could smell honey here, too.

  At one point we rested in a field and I took out the magnifying glass while Dad lit a cigarette. I found an ant creeping along a little twig, but it wouldn’t stay still, so it was impossible to study. Then I shook the ant off and studied the twig instead. It looked pretty impressive when it was enlarged, but I didn’t learn any more about it.

  All at once we heard the rustle of leaves. Dad jumped up as though he was afraid some dangerous bandits would be roaming around up here; but it was only an innocent roe deer. The deer stood still for a few seconds staring straight at us before it sprang off into the woods again. I looked across at Dad and realised that he and the deer had been equally scared by each other. Since then, I’ve always thought of Dad as a roe deer, but it’s something I’ve never dared to say aloud.

  Even though Dad had drunk a viertel at breakfast, he was in good shape this morning. We ran down the mountainside and didn’t stop until we suddenly came across a whole battery of white stones lined up in their own little field between the trees. There were several hundred; they were all smooth and round, and none of them was bigger than a lump of sugar.

  Dad stood scratching his head.

  ‘Do you think they grow here?’ I asked.

  He shook his head and said, ‘I smell the blood of a Christian man, Hans Thomas.’

  ‘But isn’t it a little strange to decorate the forest floor so far away from people?’

  He didn’t answer right away, but I knew he agreed with me.

  If there was one thing Dad couldn’t stand, it was to be unable to explain something he experienced. In situations like this, he reminded me a bit of Sherlock Holmes.

  ‘It reminds me of a graveyard. Each little stone has its allotted space of a few square centimetres …’

  I thought he was going to say something about the people of Dorf burying some tiny Lego people here, but that would be going a bit far, even for Dad.

  ‘It’s probably just some children who bury beetles here.’ This was clearly for the lack of a better explanation.

  ‘Possibly,’ I said, crouching over a stone with the magnifying glass in my hand. ‘But the beetles would hardly have laid the white pebbles.’

  Dad laughed nervously. He put his arm around my shoulder, and we continued down the mountain at a slightly slower tempo.
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  We soon came to a log cabin.

  ‘Do you think somebody lives here?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  He pointed to the chimney, and I saw a thin trail of smoke rising from it.

  Just down from the cabin we drank some water from a pipe which stuck out from a little stream. Dad called it a water pump.

  FOUR OF SPADES

  … what I held in

  my hands was a little book …

  By the time we got back down to Dorf, it was already late afternoon.

  ‘It’d be good to have a meal now,’ said Dad.

  The large restaurant was open, so we didn’t have to creep into the little dining room. A number of locals sat around one of the tables with tankards of beer.

  We ate sausages and Swiss sauerkraut, and for dessert we had a kind of apple pie with whipped cream.

  After we’d finished eating, Dad stayed at the table ‘to taste the Alpine brandy’, as he put it. I thought this was so boring to watch that I took a fizzy drink and went up to our room. Here I read for the last time the same Norwegian comic books I had read ten or twenty times before. Then I began to play solitaire. I started a seven-card game twice, but both times I got stuck almost as soon as I’d dealt out the cards, so I went back down to the restaurant.

  I thought I’d try to get Dad up to the room before he got too drunk to tell stories from the seven seas, but he clearly hadn’t finished tasting the Alpine brandy. Moreover, he’d started to speak German with some of the locals.

  ‘You can go for a walk and look round the town,’ he told me.

  I thought it was mean of him not to come with me. But today – today I’m glad I did as he said. I think I was born under a luckier star than Dad.

  To ‘look round the town’ took exactly five minutes, it was so small. It consisted of one main street, called Waldemarstrasse. The people of Dorf weren’t very inventive.

  I was pretty angry with Dad for sitting around drinking Alpine brandy with the locals. ‘Alpine brandy!’ Somehow it sounded better than alcohol. Once Dad had said it wasn’t good for his health to stop drinking. I went around repeating this sentence to myself many times before I understood it. Normally people say the opposite, but Dad can be thought of as a rare exception. He wasn’t the illegitimate child of a German soldier for nothing.

  All the shops in the village were closed, but a red van drove up to a grocery shop to make a delivery. A Swiss girl played ball against a brick wall, and an old man sat on a bench under a large tree smoking his pipe. But that was it! Although there were a lot of fine fairy-tale houses here, I thought the little Alpine village was incredibly boring. I couldn’t understand why I needed a magnifying glass either.

  The only thing that kept me in a good mood was knowing we would be driving on the next morning. Some time in the afternoon or evening we would reach Italy. From there we would drive through Yugoslavia to Greece … and in Greece we might find Mama. Thinking about it gave me butterflies in my stomach.

  I walked across the street to a little bakery. It was the only shop window I hadn’t looked in. Next to a tray of old cakes was a glass bowl with one lonely goldfish inside. There was a big chip in the upper edge of the bowl, about the same size as the magnifying glass I’d got from the mysterious little man at the garage. I pulled the magnifying glass out of my pocket, removed its cover, and examined it closely. It was just a bit smaller than the chip in the bowl.

  The tiny orange goldfish was swimming round and round inside the glass bowl. It probably lived on cake crumbs. I thought that maybe a roe deer had tried to eat the goldfish, but it had taken a bite from the bowl instead.

  All of a sudden the evening sun shone through the little window and lit up the glass bowl. Then I saw the fish wasn’t just orange, it was red, yellow, and green. Both the glass and the water in the bowl were tinted by the fish now, all the colours from a paintbox at once. The more I stared at the fish, the glass, and the water, the more I forgot where I was. For a few seconds I thought I was the fish swimming around inside the bowl and the fish was outside gazing at me.

  As I stared at the fish in the glass bowl, I suddenly noticed an old man with white hair standing behind the counter inside the bakery. He looked down at me and waved for me to come inside.

  I thought it was a little odd that this bakery should be open in the evening. First I glanced back at the Schöner Waldemar to see if Dad had finished drinking his Alpine brandy, but when I didn’t see him I opened the door to the bakery and stepped inside.

  ‘Grüss Gott!’ I said politely. It was the only thing I’d learned to say in Swiss-German, and it meant ‘praise be to God,’ or something like that.

  I could tell at once that the baker was a kind man.

  ‘Norwegian!’ I said, beating my chest so he’d understand I didn’t speak his language.

  The old man leaned over a wide marble counter and stared into my eyes.

  ‘Reallich?’ he said. ‘I have also lived in Norway. Many, many years ago. Now I have almost all my Norwegian forgotten.’

  He turned round and opened an old refrigerator. He took out a bottle, opened it, and put it on the counter.

  ‘Und you like fizzy drinks,’ he said. ‘Nicht wahr? There you go, my junger friend. It is a sehr good fizzy drink.’

  I placed the bottle to my lips and took a few gulps. It tasted even better than the drink I’d had at the Schöner Waldemar. I think it had a pear flavour.

  The white-haired old man bent over the marble counter again and whispered, ‘It tastes good, yes?’

  ‘Delicious,’ I replied.

  ‘Jawohl,’ he whispered again. ‘It is a sehr good drink. And there is anozer fizzy drink to be found here in Dorf. It is even besser. But that soda isn’t sold over counter. Verstehst you?’

  I nodded. He whispered so strangely I was almost scared. But then I looked up into his blue eyes, and they were truly kind.

  ‘I come from Arendal,’ I said. ‘Dad and I are on our way to Greece to find Mama. Unfortunately, she’s got lost in the fashion world.’

  He looked at me sharply. ‘Sagst you Arendal, my friend? And got lost? There are perhaps others who have the same done. I have auch some years in that grimme Stadt lived. But they have probably me there forgotten.’

  I looked up at him. Had he really lived in Grimstad? That was our neighbouring town. Dad and I used to go there by boat during the summer.

  ‘That’s not … that far from Arendal,’ I stuttered.

  ‘No, no. And I knew that a junger jack one day here to Dorf would come. To collect the treasure, my friend. Now it is no longer just mine.’

  Suddenly I heard Dad calling me. I could tell by his voice he’d had plenty of Alpine brandy.

  ‘Thank you very much for the drink,’ I said. ‘But I have to go now, Dad’s calling.’

  ‘Vater ja. Aber natürlich, my friend. Wait doch a little. While you were here at the fish looking, a tray of buns in the oven I put. I saw you had the magnifying glass. Then I knew that you the right jack were. You will verstehen, my sohn, you will verstehen …’

  The old baker disappeared into a back room. A minute later he returned with four freshly baked sticky buns, which he put into a paper bag.

  He gave me the bag and said sternly, ‘Nur an important ding you must promise me. You will hide the biggest sticky bun till last and eat it when you are completely alone. You must never say anything to anyone else. Verstehst you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And thank you very much.’

  The next moment I was back out on the street. Everything happened so fast I don’t remember anything before I met Dad between the little bakery and the Schöner Waldemar.

  I told him I’d got a fizzy drink and four sticky buns from an old baker who’d emigrated from Grimstad. Dad probably thought I was just making it up, but he ate one of the sticky buns on the way back to the guest-house. I ate two. I hid the biggest sticky bun in the bag.


  Dad fell asleep as soon as he lay down on the bed. I lay awake thinking about the old baker and the goldfish. In the end, I was so hungry I got out of bed and fetched the bag with the last sticky bun. I sat on a chair in the dark and bit into the bun.

  Suddenly my teeth hit something hard. I tore away the bits of bun and discovered an object the size of a matchbox. Dad lay snoring on his bed. I turned on a light by the chair.

  What I held in my hands was a little book. On the cover was written: The Rainbow Fizz and the Magic Island.

  I began to leaf through the book. Although it was extremely small, it had over a hundred pages of minuscule writing. I turned to the first page and tried to read the tiny letters, but it was absolutely impossible. Then I remembered the magnifying glass I’d got from the little man at the garage. I fetched my jeans, found the magnifying glass in the green cover in one of the pockets, and put it over the letters on the first page. They were still very small, but as soon as I leaned over the magnifying glass, they were just big enough for me to read.

  FIVE OF SPADES

  … I heard the old

  man walking around in the attic …

  Dear Son,

  I must be allowed to call you that. I am sitting here writing my life story, knowing that one day you’ll come to the village. Maybe you’ll wander by the bakery in Waldemarstrasse and stand in front of the goldfish bowl. You won’t even know why you’ve come, but I know you’ll come to Dorf to carry on the story of the Rainbow Fizz and the magic island.

  I am writing this in January 1946, and I am still a young man. When you meet me in thirty or forty years time, I will be old, with white hair. So I am also writing for a day to come.

  The paper I am writing on is like a life raft, my unknown son. A life raft can drift with the wind and rain before sailing towards the ocean in the distance. But some rafts sail a totally different course. They sail towards the land of tomorrow. From there, there is no return.