The Solitaire Mystery

by Jostein Gaarder

  ‘The baker’s son must find the way to the sea,’ he shouted as we ran.

  I told him that I had passed a wide plain with large bees and moluks before I had caught sight of the Two and Three of Clubs working in the field.

  ‘Then it is this way,’ said the Joker, pointing to a path leading off to the left.

  We soon emerged from the woods and stood on a cliff which looked out across the plain where I had met the first of the little men.

  Just as the Joker was about to climb down the crag, he tripped and tumbled down over the sharp stones. The sound of the bells on his costume echoed round the mountainside, and I was afraid he had hurt himself badly. He simply jumped up again, however, threw out his arms, and laughed heartily. The little fool hadn’t so much as a scratch on him.

  I thought I had better take it a little more carefully, though, and as soon as I was down, I felt the ground tremble beneath my feet.

  We crossed the plain; it seemed a lot smaller than I remembered. Soon we saw the bees. They were still much larger than the bees at home in Germany, but I thought they didn’t seem quite as big as before.

  ‘I think it’s that way,’ I said, pointing to a high mountain.

  ‘Does one have to climb it?’ the Joker asked in despair.

  I shook my head. ‘I came out through a narrow opening in the mountain.’

  ‘Then one must find that opening, sailor.’

  He pointed across the plain – all the dwarfs were charging toward us. Eight to ten moluks with their riders were leading the way, and the six-legged animals were churning up clouds of dust behind them.

  Once again I heard a curious sound – like distant thunder, but the sound wasn’t coming from the galloping moluks. At the same time, I thought the dwarfs had a shorter distance to cross than we had just had.

  When there were only a few metres between the moluks and us, I spotted the little opening in the mountain.

  ‘Here it is!’ I cried.

  I squeezed myself through the hole. Once I was inside the grotto the Joker tried to follow, but even though he was much smaller than I, I had to haul and drag him by the arms to pull him through. I was almost soaked through with sweat, but the Joker was as cold as the mountain.

  Now we could hear the moluks pull up in front of the grotto. The next moment a face appeared in the opening – it was the King of Spades. He just managed to peer in before the mountain closed completely. We watched him withdraw his arm at the last minute.

  ‘I think the island is shrinking,’ I whispered.

  ‘Or crumbling from the inside,’ replied the Joker. ‘We must try to get out of here before it goes completely.’

  We ran through the grotto. It was not long before we were outside in the deep valley. The frogs and lizards were still hopping and crawling around here, but they were no longer the size of rabbits.

  We ran up through the valley, and it was as though we leaped a hundred metres with each step we took; at any rate, it wasn’t long before we were among the yellow rosebushes and the humming butterflies. The butterflies were as numerous as before, but apart from the odd giant, they, too, were much smaller. I couldn’t hear them hum either, but that might have been because the Joker’s bells were ringing frantically as he ran.

  We soon reached the top of the mountain, where I had watched the sunrise the morning after the shipwreck. It felt as though we were floating over the landscape by simply lifting our feet. Down on the other side we could see the lake where I had swum with the rainbow-coloured goldfish. The lake seemed much smaller than I remembered, and now – now we could see the sea. Far, far away a white foam washed up over the island.

  The Joker started to hop and dance around like a child.

  ‘Is that the sea?’ he asked excitedly. ‘Do you see the sea, sailor?’

  But I couldn’t answer him, because again the hill thundered and crashed under our feet. There was a grinding sound, like somebody crunching rocks.

  ‘The mountain is eating itself!’ the Joker shouted.

  We ran down the mountain. Within moments we were by the lake where I had dived, but now it was no bigger than a little pool. The goldfish were still there, packed even more tightly than before. It looked as though a rainbow had fallen from the sky and was boiling in the little puddle.

  While the Joker looked around, I untied the white sack I was carrying on my back and carefully lifted out the glass bowl and filled it with goldfish. Just as I was about to pick up the glass bowl, it tipped over. I had hardly touched it – it fell over of its own accord – or the fish in the bowl let it happen. I noticed the bowl was chipped, but now the Joker turned round and said, ‘We must hurry, sailor.’

  He helped me refill the bowl with the goldfish. I tore off my shirt and wrapped it tightly round the bowl. I slung the sack over my shoulder and hugged the goldfish bowl close to my body.

  All at once we heard a sound so loud and horrific it was as if the whole island was about to break apart. We ran between the tall palm trees and soon came out by the lagoon where I had landed only two days before. The first thing I spotted was the little boat. It lay tucked neatly between two palm trees, just as I had left it. When I turned round, I saw that the island was nothing more than a little islet in the great ocean, and I thought I could spy the sea on the other side through a group of palm trees. Only one thing about the little lagoon was different from when I had arrived. The great ocean was as calm as before, but it had begun to froth by the water’s edge. I realised the island was sinking into the ocean.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw something yellow flutter under a palm tree. It was the Ace of Hearts. I put the sack and the goldfish bowl in the boat and went over to her while the Joker danced around the boat like a small child.

  ‘Ace of Hearts?’ I whispered.

  She turned round and looked at me with so much tenderness and longing that I thought she was going to throw herself on my neck.

  ‘I have finally found my way out of the labyrinth,’ she said. ‘I know now that I belong to a different shore … Can you hear the waves beat against the shore – which is years and miles away from this one?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied.

  ‘A little boy is thinking of me,’ she continued. ‘I can’t find him here … but maybe he can find me. I am so far away from him, you see. I have crossed oceans and moods, I have struggled over mountains and difficult thoughts, but someone has shuffled the cards …’

  They’re coming!’ the Joker screeched suddenly.

  I turned around and saw the whole swarm of dwarfs running towards us through the palm trees. Four moluks were ahead of the pack, and now the Kings were riding.

  ‘Get them!’ cried the King of Spades. ‘Get them back in the pack!’

  A loud boom sounded from inside the island – and in an instant something happened which made me stumble in fright. As though by magic the moluks and the dwarfs disappeared like dew before the sun. I turned back to face the Ace of Hearts – but now she had vanished, too. I ran to the palm tree which she had been leaning against, and there – exactly where the Ace of Hearts had stood – I found a playing card lying face down. When I turned the card over, I saw that it was the Ace of Hearts.

  I could feel tears begin to well in my eyes, and at the same time a strange fury forced its way through my despair. I dashed over to where the moluks and the dwarfs had come storming through the palm trees, and just as I reached the spot a burst of wind sent a whole swarm of playing cards whirling up into the air. I already had the Ace of Hearts in my hand and now I counted the other fifty-one cards. They were all terribly worn and tattered around the edges, and I could only just make out the different pictures. I put the fifty-two cards in my pocket.

  When I looked at the ground again, I saw four white beetles; each of them had six legs. I tried to catch them with my fingers, but they crawled under a stone and were gone.

  Another massive boom sounded from within the tiny island, and at the same moment
some powerful waves washed up over my legs. I saw that the Joker was sitting in the boat and had already started to row away from the island. I hurriedly waded after him. The water was up to my waist before I reached the boat and could climb aboard.

  ‘So the baker’s son wanted to come along after all,’ said the Joker. ‘Otherwise I had thought to leave here alone.’

  He gave me an oar, and while we rowed as hard as our palms could bear, we watched the island sink into the sea. The water bubbled and swirled around the palm trees, and as the last one disappeared beneath the waves I saw a little bird take off from the treetop.

  We had to row for our lives so as not to be pulled under by the backwash as the island disappeared into the depths. My hands were torn and bloody by the time it was safe to rest the oars inside the boat. The Joker had also rowed fiercely, but his hands were as clean and white as they had been when we had shaken hands outside Frode’s cabin the day before.

  The sun soon sank below the horizon, and we drifted with the wind and the elements all night long and all the next day. I made several attempts to talk to my companion, but I didn’t get much out of him. Most of the time he sat silently, with a big grin on his face.

  Later the next day we were picked up by a schooner from Arendal. We told them we had been on board the Maria, which had capsized a few days before, and that we were probably the only survivors from the shipwreck.

  The schooner was en route to Marseille, and throughout the long journey to Europe the Joker was as quiet as he had been in the lifeboat. The ship’s crew probably thought he was an odd creature, but nobody said anything.

  As soon as we moored in Marseille, the little jester ran between some boat sheds and was gone. He ran off without saying a word of goodbye.

  Later that year I arrived here in Dorf. Everything I had experienced had been so bizarre, I felt I needed the rest of my life to think about it. In which case Dorf was the perfect place to be. Coincidentally, I came here fifty-two years ago.

  When I discovered that they didn’t have a baker, I settled down and opened a little bakery. After all, I had been a baker’s apprentice back home in Lübeck before I went to sea. This has been my home ever since.

  I have never told anybody about what I experienced; nobody would believe me anyway.

  Of course, there have been times when I have doubted the story of the magic island myself, but when I stepped ashore in Marseille I was carrying the white sack over my shoulder. I have guarded the sack and its contents all these years.

  TWO OF HEARTS

  … She is probably standing on a wide

  beach looking out over the sea …

  I glanced up from the sticky-bun book. It was half-past three, and my ice cream had melted.

  For the very first time I was struck by a monstrous thought: Frode had said the dwarfs on the magic island didn’t grow old like people. If this was so, then the Joker must still be running around the world today.

  I remembered what Dad had said in the old square in Athens about the ravages of time, but time hadn’t had any power over the little people on the island. Although they had been as full of life as people and animals, they hadn’t been made of flesh and blood like us.

  In several places in the sticky-bun book it was suggested that dwarfs could not be wounded. None of them cut themselves when the Joker smashed the bottles and decanters at the Joker Banquet. The Joker hadn’t been hurt when he had tumbled down the mountain crag, and his hands weren’t sore after all the rowing to escape the sinking island. And there was more – Baker Hans had also said that the dwarfs had cold hands …

  An icy shiver ran up and down my spine.

  The dwarf! I thought to myself. He’d also had cold hands!

  Could it be possible that the strange little man we met at the garage was the very one who had jumped ashore and disappeared between some fishing huts in Marseille more than 150 years ago? Had the Joker himself given me the magnifying glass and indeed pointed the way to the sticky-bun book for me to read?

  Had it been the Joker who had popped up at the fair in Como, on the bridge in Venice, on board the boat to Patras, and in Syntagma Square in Athens?

  The thought was so terribly exciting that the melted ice cream on the table in front of me made me feel quite sick.

  I looked around – I wouldn’t have been surprised if the little man suddenly popped up here in Piraeus, too. Just then Dad came bounding down from the street above the restaurant and tore me from my thoughts.

  I could see right away that he hadn’t given up hope of finding Mama.

  For some reason I remembered the Ace of Hearts looking out across the sea before she had been transformed into a playing card, and how she had said something about a shore which was both years and miles away from the shore she’d been standing on.

  ‘I’ll find out where she is this afternoon,’ Dad said.

  I nodded solemnly. In a way we were nearing the end of the road.

  ‘She’s probably standing on a wide beach looking out over the sea,’ I said.

  Dad sat down opposite me. ‘Something very like it, yes. But how could you know that?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  Dad told me that Mama was busy filming on a large point jutting out into the Aegean Sea. It was called Cape Sounion and lay on the southern peninsula of the Greek mainland, fifty miles south of Athens.

  ‘On the headland cliffs there are some huge ruins of a temple to Poseidon,’ he went on. ‘Poseidon was the Greek god of the sea. They’re going to snap a few pictures of Anita in front of the temple.’

  ‘Young man from land far away meets beautiful woman near the old temple,’ I said.

  Dad sighed in despair.

  ‘What are you blabbering about?’

  ‘The Delphic Oracle,’ I said. ‘You were the one who was Pythia!’

  ‘Yeah, of course! But you know, I was really thinking of the Acropolis.’

  ‘You were. But not Apollo, for goodness’ sake!’

  He laughed excitedly. I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Pythia was so woozy she can’t remember what she said,’ he finally admitted.

  A lot of my experiences from the long journey have been difficult to recall, but I will never forget the trip out to Cape Sounion.

  Once we had zoomed past all the resort towns which lay south of Athens, we had the chillingly blue Mediterranean Sea constantly on our right-hand side.

  Although Dad and I thought of nothing but what it was going to be like to see Mama again, Dad kept the conversation on quite different topics. I think it was to stop me from getting my hopes up too much. At one point he insisted on asking me whether I thought we’d had a good holiday.

  ‘I really should have taken you to Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope,’ he said, ‘but at least you’re getting to see Cape Sounion.’

  The trip was just long enough for Dad to need a cigarette stop. We stopped and stood on an exposed ledge in a moonlike landscape. The sea foamed at the bottom of a steep crag below, and a couple of water nymphs who looked like seals lay on the bare rocky slopes.

  The water was so blue and clear my eyes almost started to water looking at it. I thought it must be twenty metres deep, but Dad claimed it was only about eight or ten metres.

  Not a lot more was said after that. It was probably the quietest cigarette stop of the whole trip.

  Long before we reached our destination we could see the Temple of Poseidon towering up from a point on our right.

  ‘What do you think?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Do you mean, do I think she’s there?’

  ‘At all,’ he said.

  ‘I know she’s there,’ I replied. ‘And I know she’ll come home to Norway with us.’

  He laughed boisterously. ‘It’s not that easy, Hans Thomas. I’m sure you understand. You don’t leave your family for eight years just to be hauled back home again.’

  ‘She has no choice,’ I said.

  I don’t think either of us said any more
before we parked the car below the great temple fifteen minutes later.

  We made our way between a couple of coaches and forty or fifty Italians. Then we had to pretend we were sightseeing and pay a couple of hundred drachmas to get into the temple site. On the way, Dad took out a comb and removed a silly sunhat he had bought in Delphi.

  THREE OF HEARTS

  … a woman who was all dressed up

  and wearing a wide-brimmed hat …

  From then on, everything happened so fast I now have problems reshuffling my memories.

  Dad saw a couple of photographers and a little group of people who obviously were not ordinary tourists at the far end of the promontory. As we moved closer, we noticed a woman who was all dressed up and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a pair of dark sunglasses, and a long bright yellow dress. She was clearly the centre of all the attention.

  ‘There she is,’ Dad said.

  He froze like a statue, but I just walked straight over to her.

  ‘You can take a break from this snapping now,’ I announced so loudly that the two Greek photographers spun round, even though they hadn’t understood a word I had said.

  I remember I was pretty angry. I thought this was going too far. All these people feasting on Mama by taking photos of her from all angles, when we hadn’t had a glimpse of her for over eight years.

  Now it was Mama’s turn to freeze like a statue. She removed her sunglasses and looked down at me from a distance of ten to fifteen metres. She glanced at Dad – and then down at me again.

  She was so bowled over, I had time for a great many thoughts to pass through my head before anything else happened.

  First I thought of how I didn’t know her. Yet I was also certain that she was my own Mama. That’s something a child always knows. I also thought she was incredibly beautiful.

  The rest was like a slow-motion movie. Although Dad was the one Mama had recognised, I was the one she ran to. For a few seconds I felt sorry for Dad, because it might have looked as though Mama cared more about me.