The Solitaire Mystery

by Jostein Gaarder

  On the rare occasion Dad stood deep in thought during a cigarette stop instead of overloading his defenceless son with his philosophical lectures, I would take out the magnifying glass from my jeans pocket and make biological investigations. I also used the magnifying glass when I sat in the back seat and read the sticky-bun book. I felt that nature and the sticky-bun book were equally rich in secrets.

  For many miles Dad remained deep in thought behind the steering wheel. I knew that at any moment he might come out with some important truth about the planet we lived on, or about Mama, who’d suddenly left us. But nothing was more important now than reading the sticky-bun book.

  I was relieved that I had managed to land on something more than just a meagre reef in the sea. But there was more: the island seemed to contain an unfathomable secret. It appeared to grow in size the further I moved into it – as though it unfolded in every direction with each step I took. It widened out on all sides as though something was pouring out from its inner depths.

  I followed the path further into the island, but it soon split in two and I had to choose which path to follow. I hurried along the path to the left; then that also divided in two. I went on, always heading left.

  The path slipped into a deep crevasse between two mountains, and here some enormous turtles crawled among the craters; the biggest turtles were over two metres long. I had heard about turtles this big, but I had never seen any myself. One of them stretched its head out from under its shell and peeped up at me as though it wanted to welcome me to the island.

  I continued my wandering all day. I saw new woods, valleys, and mountain plateaus, but never again did I see the sea. It was as though I’d entered a magical land, a reversed labyrinth where the paths never came to an end.

  Late in the afternoon I came to an open area with a large lake sparkling freshly in the afternoon sun. I immediately threw myself onto the bank of the lake and drank away my thirst. It was the first time for many weeks I had drunk anything other than ship’s water.

  It had been a long time since I’d washed myself, too. I tore off my tight sailor’s uniform and dived in. The water was refreshing after I’d walked about all day in the sweltering tropical heat, and only now did I realise how sunburnt my head was after I had sat unprotected in the lifeboat.

  I dived deeply a few times, and when I opened my eyes under the water, I saw a multitude of goldfish in all the colours of the rainbow. Some were as green as the plants by the edge of the lake, some were as blue as gemstones, others had a glorious shine of red, yellow, and orange. At the same time they each had a touch of every colour imaginable.

  I crawled onto land again and lay in the evening sun to dry. I felt a hunger chase through my body, and I noticed a thicket laden with clusters of yellow berries the size of strawberries. I had never seen any berries like them, but I guessed they were edible. They tasted like a cross between a nut and a banana. When I was full, I put on my clothes and finally fell asleep, exhausted, on the shore of the large lake.

  I woke with a start early the next morning, before the sun had come up. It was as though a solid ray of consciousness shot through my body.

  I’ve survived the shipwreck! I thought to myself. This really dawned on me only now, and I felt reborn.

  A rugged mountain landscape rose to the left of the lake. It was covered with yellow grass and some red, bell-shaped flowers which swayed gently in the cool morning breeze.

  Before the sun had appeared in the sky, I was on top of a mountain ridge. I couldn’t see the sea from here either … I gazed across a vast country, a continent. I had been in both North and South America before, but I couldn’t be on either of these continents now. There wasn’t a trace of human existence anywhere.

  I stood on the mountaintop until the sun began to rise in the east. Red as a tomato, but shimmering like a mirage, it rose over a plain in the distance. Because the horizon was so low, the sun was bigger and redder than I’d ever seen it before – yes, even at sea.

  Was it the same sun as the one shining on Mother and Father’s house at home in Lübeck?

  I continued to roam all morning from one landscape to the next. At around midday, when the sun stood high in the sky, I found myself in a valley filled with yellow rosebushes. Enormous butterflies flew among the bushes. The largest had wingspans the size of a crow’s, but they were infinitely more beautiful. They were all deep blue, but on their wings they had two large blood-red stars – I thought they looked like flowers in flight. It was as though some of the island’s flowers had suddenly broken free from the ground and learned to fly. However, the strangest thing was that these butterflies made a sound like birdsong. They whistled a gentle flute melody, only with a slightly different pitch. Soft haunting flute music floated through the valley – as though all the flautists in a large orchestra were tuning their instruments before a concert. Now and then they struck me with their soft wings; it was like being brushed with velvet. They gave off a scent which was heavy and sweet, like an expensive perfume.

  A torrential river ran through the valley. I decided to follow the river so as not to roam aimlessly around the big island. This way I was sure to reach the sea sooner or later, or so I thought. It wasn’t that simple, as I discovered later in the afternoon when the great wide valley came to an end. At first it narrowed like a funnel; finally it hit a massive rock face.

  I couldn’t understood it. How could a river turn and flow back on itself? When I got down into the gorge, I could see that the river continued through a mountain tunnel. I walked up to the entrance and peered inside. The water flattened out and created an underground canal.

  In front of the entrance to the mountain some large frogs were jumping around the water’s edge. They were the size of rabbits. When they all croaked at the same time, they made a terrible racket. That nature could produce such enormous frogs was totally new to me.

  Some fat anole lizards crept through the wet grass, and some even bigger geckos. Although I had never seen them quite so big, I was used to seeing these kinds of creatures, having been in so many ports all over the world. But I had never seen so many different colours. The reptiles on this island were red, yellow, and blue.

  I discovered it was possible to walk along the edge of the canal inside the tunnel. All I had to do was creep inside and see how far I could get.

  There was a soft blue-green light inside the mountain. The water hardly moved. I saw some scores of goldfish twitching in the crystalclear water here, too.

  After a while, I heard a faint rumbling sound further along the tunnel. As I moved forward, the sound gradually grew louder and louder, like the thunder of kettledrums. I was nearing an underground waterfall. I’m going to have to turn round after all, I thought to myself. But before I reached the edge of the waterfall, a bright light filled the place.

  I looked up and saw a tiny opening in the rock wall. I scrambled up to it. The view was so blindingly beautiful that my eyes began to water.

  I only just managed to wriggle out through the hole. I stood up, and before me lay a valley so green and fertile that I no longer missed the sea.

  As I made my way down the hillside, I came across all kinds of different fruit trees. Some of them bore apples and oranges and other familiar fruits. But there were also fruits and berries in this valley that I had never seen before. The biggest trees bore long, plumlike fruits. Some of the slightly smaller trees bore green fruits the size of tomatoes.

  The ground was carpeted with different flowers, each kind more fantastic than the previous one. There were bellflowers, cowslips, and crown flowers. Small rosebushes grew all over the place, with tight garlands of purple-coloured dwarf roses. Bees buzzed around these bushes. They were almost as big as the sparrows in Germany. Their wings shone like glass in the bright afternoon sun, and I could smell the strong aroma of honey.

  I continued a little way down the valley. That’s when I saw the moluks …

  Both the bees and the butterflies had made me look twic
e, but although they were much larger and more beautiful than their relations back home in Germany, they were bees and butterflies. It was the same with the frogs and reptiles. But now – now I saw some large white animals which were so different from anything I’d seen or heard about, I had to rub my eyes.

  There was a flock of about twelve to fifteen of them. They were the size of horses and cows, but their heads were much smaller and more pointed, they had thick white hides which resembled pigskin – and they all had six legs. Now and then they stretched their heads towards the sky and said ‘Brash, brash!’

  I wasn’t scared. The six-legged animals looked as dopey and kind as the cows in Germany. But their presence made it clear that I wasn’t in a country drawn on any map. It was as spooky as meeting a person without a face.

  Naturally, it took much longer to read the tiny letters in the sticky-bun book than to read normal letters. Every little letter had to be singled out from the multitude and combined with the others. By the time I’d read about the six-legged animals on the magic island, it was already late in the afternoon, and now Dad turned off the wide autostrada.

  ‘We’ll have a meal in Verona,’ he said.

  ‘Anorev,’ I replied. I had read the sign.

  As we drove towards the town, Dad told me the terribly sad story of Romeo and Juliet, who couldn’t be together because their two families were always at war with each other. The young couple – who had to pay with their lives for their forbidden love – had lived in Verona many hundreds of years ago.

  ‘It sounds a bit like Grandma and Grandpa,’ I said, and Dad laughed heartily. He’d never thought of that before.

  We ate antipasto and pizza at a big outdoor restaurant. Before driving on, we walked around the streets, and Dad bought a pack of cards with fifty-two half-naked women on them from a souvenir shop. Needless to say, he picked out the joker pretty quickly, but this time he kept the whole pack of cards.

  I think he was a little embarrassed, because the ladies in the pack were even more flimsily dressed than he’d imagined. At any rate, he quickly put the cards in his breast pocket.

  ‘It is really quite amazing that there are so many women,’ he said, more to himself than to me. Since he had to say something.

  Of course, it was a dumb comment, seeing as half the world’s population are women. What he probably meant was that there were a lot of naked women, since they’re not quite as common.

  If that was what he meant, I totally agreed. I thought it was a bit much to group fifty-two models in one pack of cards. Whatever the reason, it was a bad idea, because you can’t play cards with a pack made up only of women. True enough, the king of spades, the four of clubs, and so on were printed in the upper lefthand corner, but if you were going to play with cards like these, you’d probably sit staring at the ladies rather than concentrating on the game.

  The only man in the pack was the joker. On this occasion, it was a Greek or Roman statue with a billygoat’s horn. He was naked as well, but then so are all old statues.

  When we were back inside the Fiat, I kept thinking about the strange cards.

  ‘Have you ever thought that you could find yourself a new wife, instead of spending half your life trying to find the one who hasn’t found herself?’ I asked.

  At first he laughed out loud, but then he replied, ‘I agree that it is a bit of a mystery. There are five billion people living on this planet. But you fall in love with one particular person, and you won’t swap her for any other.’

  No more was said about that pack of cards. Although there were fifty-two different women doing everything they could to look their best, I realised that Dad thought the pack was missing one important card. It was that card we were going to find in Athens.

  KING OF SPADES

  … close encounter of the

  fourth kind …

  When we eventually arrived in Venice, towards evening, we had to leave the car in a large carpark before we were allowed to enter the town itself, because Venice doesn’t have a single proper street. On the other hand, it has 180 canals, more than 450 bridges, and thousands of motorboats and gondolas.

  From the carpark we took the waterbus to the hotel, which was beside the Grand Canal, the biggest canal in Venice. Dad had booked a room from the hotel in Como.

  We dumped our luggage in the smallest and ugliest hotel room we’d stayed in during the whole trip, and went out and strolled along the canals and over some of the numerous bridges.

  We were to stay in this city of canals for two nights before continuing our journey, and I knew that there was a strong chance Dad would revel in the city’s selection of alcoholic drinks.

  After eating dinner in Piazza San Marco, I persuaded Dad to pay for a little trip in a gondola. Dad pointed to where he wanted to go on a map, and the gondolier splashed off. The only thing that wasn’t as I expected was that he didn’t sing a note. It didn’t bother me, though, because I’d always thought singing gondoliers sounded like cats meowing.

  Something happened as we splashed along which Dad and I have never agreed on. Just as we were about to go under a bridge, a familiar face peeped over the top of the railing above us. I was positive it was the little man from the garage, and this time I disliked the surprise meeting. I realised we were actually being followed.

  ‘The dwarf!’ I exclaimed, jumping up in the boat and pointing at him.

  Today I can understand why Dad got angry, because the whole gondola very nearly capsized.

  ‘Sit down!’ Dad ordered. But when we had passed under the bridge, he turned around and looked, too. Only now the dwarf was long gone – just like at the fair in Como.

  ‘It was him, I saw him,’ I said, and then I started to cry. I’d had a scare when the gondola almost tipped over. Moreover, I was sure Dad didn’t believe me.

  ‘You’re just imagining it, Hans Thomas,’ he said.

  ‘But it was a dwarf!’

  ‘It could well have been, but it wasn’t the same one,’ he protested, even though he hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him.

  ‘So you think all Europe is full of dwarfs?’

  That question must have hit the nail on the head, because Dad now sat in the gondola smiling smugly.

  ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘We’re all strange dwarfs, really. We are mysterious small people who suddenly jump out from bridges in Venice.’

  The gondolier, whose expression hadn’t changed, dropped us off at a place where there were lots of little restaurants. Dad bought me an ice cream and a fizzy drink, and ordered a coffee and something called Vecchia Romagna for himself. When the coffee arrived, I wasn’t surprised to discover that it was served with a brown drink in an elegant glass that looked like a goldfish bowl.

  After two or three of these glasses, Dad looked me straight in the eyes, as though he’d decided to tell me his darkest secret.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten our garden at home on Hisøy Island?’ he began.

  I couldn’t be bothered to answer such a dumb question, and he didn’t expect an answer either.

  ‘Okay,’ he continued, ‘now listen very carefully, Hans Thomas. Let us imagine you’re out in the garden one morning – and you discover a little Martian between the apple trees. We’ll say he’s a little shorter than you, but whether he’s yellow and green I’ll leave to your imagination.’

  I nodded dutifully. There was no point in protesting about the choice of topic.

  ‘The stranger stands and stares at you – as you do at people from another planet,’ Dad went on. ‘The question is, how would you react?’

  I was about to say I would invite him for an earth breakfast, but then I replied truthfully that I would probably be so terrified I’d scream.

  Dad nodded; he was clearly pleased with my answer. At the same time I could see he had more on his mind.

  ‘Don’t you think you’d also wonder who the little chap was and where he came from?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  He tossed his
head and appeared to assess all the people in the square.

  ‘Has it never struck you that you are a Martian yourself?’ he asked.

  I’d expected to hear something along these lines, but all the same I had to grab hold of the table to stop myself from falling off the chair I was sitting on.

  ‘Or earth-dweller, if you like,’ he continued. ‘It doesn’t matter at all what we call the planet we live on. The point is that you are also a two-legged human being crawling around on a planet in the universe.’

  ‘Just like that Martian,’ I added.

  Dad nodded. ‘Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you’ll probably also scream a little. And that’ll be perfectly all right, because it’s not every day you realise you’re a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.’

  I understood what he meant, but it wasn’t easy to add anything to the conversation. The last thing he said about Martians was ‘Do you remember we saw a film called Close Encounters?’

  I nodded. It was a crazy film about some people who discovered a flying saucer from another planet.

  ‘To see a spaceship from another planet is called a close encounter of the first kind. If you also see the two-legged beings come out of the spaceship, that’s called a close encounter of the second kind. But one year after we saw Close Encounters, we saw another film …’

  ‘And that was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. That was because they touched those strange humanoids from another solar system. It is this direct contact with the unknown which is called close encounters of the third kind. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He sat for a while, looking across the square with all the cafés.

  ‘But you know, Hans Thomas, you’ve experienced a close encounter of the fourth kind.’

  I must have looked like a living question mark.

  ‘Because you are one of those space beings yourself,’ Dad said emphatically. He put his coffee cup down on the table with such a loud clatter we were both amazed it didn’t break. ‘You are this mysterious creation, and feel it inside.’