The Solitaire Mystery

by Jostein Gaarder

  How do I know you are the one to carry the story further? I will be able to tell when you come towards me, son. You will carry the sign.

  I am writing in Norwegian so you will understand, but also so that the people of Dorf cannot read the story of the dwarfs. If that were to happen, the secret of the magic island would be a sensation, but a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long. It captures attention for one day, then it is forgotten. But the story of the dwarfs must never drown in the temporary sparkle of the news. It is better for only one person to know the secret of the dwarfs, rather than for everybody to forget it.

  I was one of the many who sought a new place to live after the terrible war. Half of Europe was immediately transformed into a refugee camp. A large part of the world was under the shadow of an exodus. But we weren’t only political refugees; we were lost souls looking for ourselves.

  I, too, had to leave Germany to build a new life for myself, but there weren’t so many possibilities of escape for a noncommissioned officer of the Third Reich.

  I didn’t just find myself in a broken nation. I had brought home a broken heart from the land in the north. The whole world lay strewn about me in pieces.

  I knew I couldn’t live in Germany, but I couldn’t travel back to Norway either. In the end, I managed to get myself over the mountains to Switzerland.

  I roamed around for several weeks in a state of confusion, but in Dorf I soon met the old baker Albert Klages.

  I was on my way down from the mountains when, exhausted by hunger and many long days of wandering, I suddenly saw a small village. Hunger made me run like a hunted animal down through the dense woodland, and I soon collapsed in front of an old wooden cabin. There I heard the humming of bees and could smell the sweet aroma of milk and honey.

  The old baker must have managed to carry me inside the cabin. When I awoke on a bunk, I saw a man with white hair sitting in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe, and when he saw that I had opened my eyes, he came and sat next to me at once.

  ‘You’ve come home, dear son,’ he said comfortingly. ‘I knew that one day you’d come to my door. To collect the treasure, my boy.’

  I must have fallen asleep again. When I next awoke, I was alone in the cabin. I got up and went out onto the front steps. Here, I found the old man sitting bent over a stone table. On the heavy tabletop was a beautiful glass bowl. Inside the bowl swam a colourful goldfish.

  It immediately struck me how odd it was that a little fish from far away could swim around so happily here, high up in the mountains, in the middle of Europe. A piece of the living ocean had been lifted up to the Swiss Alps.

  ‘Grüss Gott!’ I greeted the old man.

  He turned round and looked up at me kindly.

  ‘My name is Ludwig.’

  ‘And I am Albert Klages,’ he replied.

  He went inside the cabin, but soon came out into the sunshine carrying some bread, cheese, milk, and honey.

  He pointed down to the village and told me that it was called Dorf, and that he owned a little bakery there.

  I lived with the old man a few weeks, and I soon began to join him in the bakery. Albert taught me to bake bread and sticky buns, pastries and all kinds of cakes. I’d always heard that the Swiss were great bakers.

  Albert was particularly happy to have some help stacking the heavy sacks of flour.

  I also wanted to meet other people from the village, and so I would sometimes visit the old pub called the Schöner Waldemar.

  I think the locals took a liking to me. Although they understood that I had been a German soldier, none of them asked me any questions about my past.

  One evening someone in the pub started to talk about Albert, who had been so kind to me.

  ‘He has a screw loose,’ said the farmer Fritz André.

  ‘But so did the previous baker,’ continued the old shopkeeper Heinrich Albrechts.

  When I joined in the conversation and asked them what they meant, they answered evasively at first. I had drunk a few carafes of wine, and I could feel my cheeks glowing.

  ‘If you can’t give me a direct answer, then you can at least take back your malicious gossip about the man who bakes the bread you eat!’ I spat out.

  Nothing more was said about Albert that evening, but a few weeks later Fritz piped up again. ‘Do you know where he gets all his gold fish from?’ he asked. I had noticed that the village locals showed particular interest in me because I lived with the old baker.

  ‘I didn’t know there was more than one,’ I replied truthfully. ‘And he probably bought that from a pet shop, in Zürich perhaps.’

  The farmer and the shopkeeper both started to laugh.

  ‘He has lots more,’ said the farmer. ‘Once my father was out hunting, and on his way home he came across Albert airing his goldfish. He had them out in the sunshine all together, and there were more than just a few of them, mark my words, baker boy.’

  ‘He’s never been outside Dorf either,’ added the shopkeeper. ‘We are exactly the same age, and as far as I know, he’s never left Dorf.’

  ‘Some people say he’s a wizard,’ whispered the farmer. ‘They claim he doesn’t only bake bread and cakes, but he makes these fish himself. One thing is sure: he didn’t catch them in Waldemarsee.’

  I also began to wonder whether Albert was really hiding a big secret. A couple of sentences constantly rang in my ears: ‘You’ve come home, dear son. I knew that one day you’d come to my door. To collect the treasure, my boy.’

  I didn’t want to hurt the old baker’s feelings by repeating any of the villagers’ gossip. If he was hiding a secret, I was sure he would tell me when the time was right.

  For a long time I thought the reason there was so much gossip about the old baker was simply that he lived on his own high above the village itself. But there was also something about the old house which got me thinking.

  As soon as you stepped into the house, you were in a large living room with a fireplace and a kitchen corner. There were two doors leading from the living room, one to Albert’s bedroom and the other to a little bedroom I’d been given the use of when I had arrived in Dorf. The rooms didn’t have particularly high ceilings, but when I observed the house from the outside, it was obvious that there must be a large attic. Moreover, from the crest of the hill behind the house, I could see a little window in the slate roof.

  It was strange that Albert had never said anything about this attic, and he was never up there either. This is probably why I thought of the attic whenever my friends mentioned Albert.

  Then one evening I happened to come home late from Dorf, and I heard the old man walking around in the attic. I was so surprised – and possibly a little scared, too – that I immediately ran outside to fetch some water from the pump. I took my time, and when I went back inside, Albert was sitting in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said, but I felt as though he was thinking about something completely different.

  ‘Were you up in the attic?’ I asked. I didn’t know how I dared ask, but it just slipped out.

  He seemed to sink into his chair, but then he looked up with the same kind face he had when he had taken care of me that day many months ago, when I had collapsed with exhaustion outside the old house.

  ‘Are you tired, Ludwig?’ he asked.

  I shook my head. It was a Saturday evening. The next day we could sleep until the sun woke us.

  He got up and threw some logs onto the fire.

  ‘Then we’ll sit together tonight,’ he said.

  SIX OF SPADES

  … a drink which is more

  than a thousand times better …

  I was just about to fall asleep over the magnifying glass and the sticky-bun book. I realised I had read the beginning of a great fairy tale, but it didn’t occur to me that this fairy tale had anything to do with me. I tore a piece from the paper bag that the buns had been in and used it as a bookmark.r />
  I had once seen something similar in Danielsen’s bookstore in the market square in Arendal. It was a tiny book of fairy tales inside a box. The difference was that that book’s writing was so big there wasn’t room for more than fifteen or twenty words on each page. Of course, this being so, there was no chance of it being a great fairy tale either.

  It was past one in the morning. I put the magnifying glass in one of my jeans pockets and the sticky-bun book in the other and dived into bed.

  Dad woke me up early the next morning. We had to hurry and get back on the road, he said, otherwise we would never make it to Athens in time. He was slightly irritated because I’d dropped so many sticky bun crumbs on the floor.

  Crumbs! I thought. So the sticky-bun book hadn’t been just a dream. I pulled on my jeans and could feel something hard in both pockets. I told Dad that I’d been so hungry in the middle of the night I’d eaten the last sticky bun. I hadn’t wanted to turn on any lights, that’s why there were so many crumbs on the floor.

  We hurriedly packed our things and loaded them into the car before we dashed into the dining room for breakfast. I glanced into the empty restaurant where Ludwig had once sat drinking wine with his friends.

  After breakfast we said goodbye to the Schöner Waldemar. As we drove past the shops in Waldemarstrasse, Dad pointed to the bakery and asked if that was where I’d got the buns. I didn’t have to answer his question, though, because at that moment the white-haired baker appeared on the steps and waved. He waved at Dad, too, and Dad waved back.

  We were soon back on the highway. I sneaked out the magnifying glass and the sticky-bun book from my jeans pockets and started to read. Dad asked me a couple of times what I was doing. First I said I was checking to see whether there were any fleas or lice in the back seat, but the second time he asked, I said I was thinking of Mama.

  Albert sat back down in his rocking chair, found some tobacco in an old chest, filled his pipe, and lit it.

  ‘I was born here in Dorf in 1881,’ he began. ‘I was the youngest of five children. That was probably why I was the one most attached to Mother. It was usual in Dorf for boys to stay at home with their mother until they were seven or eight years old, but as soon as they turned eight, they joined their fathers at work in the fields and woods.

  ‘I remember all those long, happy days I walked around the kitchen hanging on to her skirts. The whole family gathered together only on Sundays. That’s when we would go for long walks, spend more time eating dinner, and play dice games in the evening.

  ‘Then misfortune fell on our family. When I was four years old, Mother was struck down by tuberculosis. We lived with the sickness in our house for many years.

  ‘Of course, as a little boy I didn’t understand everything, but I remember that Mother was always having to sit down to take a rest, and gradually she was confined to her bed for long periods of time. Sometimes I would sit by her bed and tell her stories I made up myself.

  ‘I once found her bent over the kitchen bench having a terrible coughing attack. When I saw that she had coughed up blood, I went into a terrible rage and started to break everything I found in the kitchen. Cups and saucers and glasses, everything I came across. That must have been the first time I realised she was going to die.

  ‘I also remember Father coming in to me early one Sunday morning, before the rest of the house had woken up.

  ‘“Albert,” he said, “it is time we talked, because Mother doesn’t have long to live.”

  ‘“She’s not going to die,” I cried in fury. “You’re lying!”

  ‘But he wasn’t. We had a few more months together. Even though I was only a young boy, I grew used to living with the thought of death, long before it arrived. I saw how Mother grew paler and thinner, and how she had a constant fever.

  ‘I remember the funeral most of all. My two brothers and I had to borrow mourning clothes from friends in the village. I was the only one who didn’t cry; I was so angry with Mother for leaving us that I didn’t shed a single tear. Since then I’ve always thought the best medicine for sorrow is anger …’

  The old man looked up at me – as though he knew I was also carrying a great sorrow.

  ‘In this way, Father had to support five children,’ he went on. ‘In the beginning we managed pretty well. In addition to working on the little farm, Father was the village postmaster. There weren’t more than two or three hundred people living in Dorf at that time. My oldest sister, who was only thirteen years old when Mother died, looked after the house. The others helped on the farm, while I – being too small to be useful – went around by myself most of the time. It wasn’t uncommon for me to sit by my mother’s grave and cry, but I hadn’t forgiven her for dying.

  ‘However, it wasn’t long before Father started to drink. At first it was only at the weekends, but it soon became every single day. The postmaster job was the first to go; then the farm started to fall apart. Both my brothers left for Zürich before they were fully grown men. I continued to wander about on my own.

  ‘As I grew older, I was often teased because my father was “on the grape”, as they called it. If he was found stone drunk in the village, he was sure to be put to bed. I was the one to be punished. I felt I was the one who constantly had to pay for Mother’s death.

  ‘In the end I found a good friend, Baker Hans. He was a white-haired old man who had run the village bakery for a whole generation, but because he had not grown up in Dorf he was always regarded as a stranger. In addition, he was a quiet man, so no one in the village felt they knew him.

  ‘Baker Hans had been a sailor, but after many years at sea he had settled down in the village as a baker. On the rare occasions when he walked round the bakery in just his undershirt, he exposed four enormous tattoos on his arms. We thought this alone made Baker Hans a bit mysterious, as no other man in Dorf had a tattoo.

  ‘I particularly remember the tattoo of a woman sitting on a big anchor, under which was written MARIA. There were many stories about this Maria. Some people said she had been his sweetheart, but she’d died of tuberculosis before she was twenty years old. Others said Baker Hans had killed a German woman called Maria and that’s why he’d settled down in Switzerland …’

  Albert seemed to look at me as if he knew that I, too, had run away from a woman. He doesn’t think I’ve killed her, does he? I thought to myself.

  But then he added: ‘There were also some who said Maria was the name of a ship he had sailed on, which had been wrecked somewhere in the great Atlantic Ocean.’

  With that Albert got up and fetched a big piece of cheese and some bread. He brought out two glasses and a bottle of wine.

  ‘Am I boring you, Ludwig?’ he asked.

  I shook my head vigorously, and the old baker continued.

  ‘Being the “orphan” I was, I sometimes stood in front of the bakery on Waldemarstrasse. I was often hungry and thought it helped my hunger just to look at all the bread and cakes. Then one day Baker Hans waved me into the bakery and gave me a big slice of currant cake. From that day on I had a friend, and this is where my story begins, Ludwig.

  ‘From then on I was always visiting Baker Hans. I think he quickly noticed how lonely I was, and how I had to take care of myself. If I was hungry, he would give me a piece of freshly baked bread or some cake, and sometimes he opened a fizzy drink. In return, I started to run small errands for him, and before I turned thirteen years old, I was a baker’s apprentice. But that was after many long years, by which time everything else had come to light and I had become his son.

  ‘Father died the same year: he really did drink himself to death. Until the very end, he talked about how he wanted to meet Mother again in heaven. Both my sisters had married far away from Dorf, and I’ve never heard from my brothers since then …’

  At this point Albert poured the wine. He walked across to the fireplace and knocked the ash out of his pipe, refilled it with tobacco, and lit it. He blew large, heavy clouds of smoke into the room.


  ‘Baker Hans and I were companions for each other, and once he was my protector, too. Four or five boys started to bully me right outside the bakery. They threw me to the ground and punched me: at least, that’s how I remember it now. I had learned long before why this kind of thing happened. It was punishment because Mother was dead and Father a drunkard. But that day Baker Hans came charging out onto the street, and I will never forget that sight, Ludwig. He fought to free me and beat every single one of them; not one escaped without a scratch. He may have been more aggressive than he needed to be, but since that day none of the people of Dorf have dared to bother me.

  ‘Well now, this fight was a turning point in my life in more ways than one. Baker Hans dragged me into the shop, brushed off his white coat, and opened a bottle, which he placed on the marble counter in front of me.

  ‘“Drink!” he ordered.

  ‘I did as he said, and I already felt my score had been settled.

  ‘“Does it taste good?” he asked, almost before I’d had the chance to swallow the first mouthful of the sweet drink.

  ‘“Yes, thank you.”

  ‘“But if that tastes good,” he continued, almost trembling, “then I promise you that one day I will offer you a drink which is more than a thousand times better.”

  ‘Of course, I thought he was only joking, but I never forgot his promise. There was something about the way he said it, and something about the situation. His cheeks were still red from what had happened out on the street. Moreover, Baker Hans was no joker …’

  Albert Klages started to cough and splutter now. I thought he’d got some smoke caught in his throat, but he was just a bit overexcited. He looked across the table at me with a pair of heavy brown eyes.

  ‘Are you tired, my boy? Should we continue another evening?’

  I took another sip of wine and shook my head.