The Solitaire Mystery

  In any case, Frode must have taught the diamonds the art of glassblowing. No doubt he’d also taught the clubs to till the land, the hearts to bake bread, and the spades to carpenter. But who were these extraordinary little people?

  I knew I would probably get the answer to that question if I only read more, but I wasn’t sure if I dared to read on when I was alone in the cabin.

  I pushed the curtains away from the window, and suddenly I was staring into a little face outside. It was the dwarf!. He was standing on the walkway outside, gaping at me.

  The whole thing lasted only a few seconds; then he ran away as soon as he realised he had been discovered.

  I was frozen with horror. My first reaction was to draw the curtains. After a while I threw myself onto my bed and started to cry.

  It never occurred to me that I could simply have walked out of the cabin and found Dad in the bar. I was so scared I didn’t dare do anything but hide my head under the pillow, and I hardly dared do that either.

  I don’t know how long I lay on the bed crying. Dad must have heard some wild howling out in the corridor, because the door swung open and he came charging in.

  ‘What is the matter with you, Hans Thomas?’

  He turned me over on the bed and tried to open my eyes.

  ‘The dwarf …’ I sobbed. ‘I saw the dwarf at the window … He was standing there … staring at me.’

  Dad probably thought something a lot worse had happened, because he suddenly let go of me and started to wander round the cabin.

  ‘That’s a load of nonsense, Hans Thomas. There’s no dwarf on board this boat.’

  ‘I saw him,’ I insisted.

  ‘All you saw was a little man,’ said Dad.

  In the end, Dad just about managed to convince me I’d made a mistake. At least he calmed me down. However, I set one condition for not talking about the matter any more. Dad had to promise he would ask the ship’s crew before we landed at Patras if there had been a dwarf on board.

  ‘Do you think we’re philosophising a bit too much?’ he asked, while I continued to give a little snuffle at regular intervals.

  I shook my head.

  ‘First we’ll find Mama in Athens,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll wait a bit before we solve life’s mysteries. Besides, there’s no big hurry. Nobody is going to come and steal our project in the meantime.’

  He looked down at me again.

  ‘Being interested in who people are and where the world comes from is such an enormously rare hobby, we are virtually the only ones doing it. Those of us who do this sort of thing live so far apart we’ve never even thought of forming our own society.’

  When I had stopped crying, Dad sloshed a little of his whisky into a glass. There was no more than a centimetre. He mixed it with water and handed me the glass.

  ‘Drink this, Hans Thomas. Then you’ll sleep well tonight.’

  I drank a couple of mouthfuls. I thought the stuff tasted so horrible I couldn’t understand why Dad went around quaffing it all the time.

  When Dad was ready for bed, I pulled out the joker I had bummed from the American lady.

  ‘This is for you,’ I said.

  He held it in his hand and studied it closely. I don’t think it was an unusual one, but it was the first time I had provided him with a joker.

  He thanked me for the gift by showing me a card trick. He placed the joker in a pack of cards which he’d had in his bag. Then he laid the pack on the bedside table. The next minute he plucked the same joker from thin air.

  I watched carefully and could have sworn he had put the joker into the pack. Maybe he had the card up his sleeve. But how did it get there?

  I couldn’t understand how something could just grow out of nothing.

  Dad kept his promise to ask the crew about the dwarf, but they maintained there had been no small people on board the boat. It must be as I feared: the dwarf was a stowaway.

  JACK OF CLUBS

  … if the world is

  a magic trick, then there must be

  a great magician, too …

  We agreed not to bother with breakfast on board the boat and to wait until we went ashore at Patras. We had set the alarm clock for seven, an hour before arrival, but I was already awake at six.

  The first thing I noticed was the magnifying glass and the sticky-bun book on the bedside table. I had completely forgotten to put them away when the cunning face had appeared at the window. It was pure luck Dad hadn’t seen them.

  The boss was still asleep, and from the moment I opened my eyes I wondered what Frode would say about the dwarfs on the island. I now read quite a bit further before Dad started to thrash around in bed, something he usually did just before he woke up.

  *

  ‘We would play cards a lot when we were at sea. I always had a pack of cards stuck in my breast pocket, and a pack of French cards was the only thing I had on me when I landed on the island after the shipwreck.

  ‘During the first years, I often played solitaire when I was lonely. The cards were the only pictures I had to look at. I didn’t just play the solitaire games I had learned in Germany and at sea. With fifty-two different cards – and moreover an ocean of time – I soon discovered there were no limits to how many games of solitaire and other tricks I could come up with.

  ‘After a while, I started to give the individual cards different characteristics. I began to look on them as individuals from four different families. The clubs had brown skin, a stocky build, and thick curly hair. The diamonds were thinner, more delicate and graceful. They had almost translucent complexions and straight, silvery hair. Then there were the hearts – they were simply heartier than the others. They were rounder in build, had rosy cheeks and thick blonde manes of hair. Finally there were the spades – oh me, oh my! They had firm, upright bodies, pale skin, a slightly strict and serious expression, piercingly dark eyes, and thin black hair.

  ‘I could soon picture the figures when I played solitaire. With every card I laid down, it was as though I let a spirit out of a magic bottle. A spirit, yes – because it wasn’t only the appearance of the figures that varied from family to family. They also had their own distinct temperaments. The clubs were slightly more sluggish and stiffer in personality than the vague and sensitive diamonds. The hearts were kinder and cheerier than the fierce and hotheaded spades. But there were also great differences within each family. All the diamonds were easily hurt, but the Three of Diamonds cried most frequently. All the spades tended to be a bit quick-tempered, most of all the Ten of Spades.

  ‘So through the course of time I created fifty-two invisible individuals who sort of lived with me on the island. In the end there were fifty-three, because the joker also came to play an important part.’

  ‘But how …’

  ‘I don’t know if you can imagine how lonely I felt. The stillness was never-ending here. I was always coming across different animals, and owls or moluks were always waking me at night, but I never had anyone to talk to. After a few days I started talking to myself. After a few months I’d started talking to the cards as well. I would lay them in a big circle around me and pretend they were real people made of flesh and blood like myself. Sometimes I would pick up a single card – and hold a long conversation with it.

  ‘Gradually the whole pack became so worn the cards started to disintegrate. The sun had bleached the colours, and I could hardly make out the pictures on the cards. I put the remains in a little wooden box which I have looked after to this very day, but the figures lived on in my mind. I could now play solitaire in my head. I didn’t need the physical cards any more. It was like when you can suddenly calculate numbers without using an abacus. Six plus seven is thirteen even if you don’t use counters to show it.

  ‘I continued to talk to my invisible friends, and then they seemed to answer me – even though it was only in my head. They were most vivid when I slept, because the figures from the pack of cards nearly always appeared in my dreams. We were like a
little society. In my dreams the figures could say and do things quite by themselves. In this way the nights were always a little less lonely than the long days. The cards took on their own personalities. They ran around in my subconscious like proper kings and queens and people made of flesh and blood.

  ‘I had a more intimate relationship with some of the figures than others. In the early days, I was forever having long conversations with the Jack of Clubs. I could joke around for hours with the Ten of Spades – when he managed to control his temper.

  ‘I was secretly in love with the Ace of Hearts for a while. I was so lonely I was able to be in love with my own brainchild. I felt as though I saw her in front of me. She had a yellow dress, long blonde hair, and green eyes. I missed a woman so badly on the island. At home in Germany I’d been engaged to a girl called Stine. Alas, her sweetheart was lost at sea.’

  The old man stroked his beard; then he sat for a long time without saying anything.

  ‘It’s late, my boy,’ he said eventually. ‘And you must be exhausted after the shipwreck. Perhaps you’d like me to continue tomorrow?’

  ‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘I want to hear everything.’

  ‘Yes, of course. You have to know everything before we go to the Joker Banquet.’

  ‘The Joker Banquet?’

  ‘Yes, the Joker Banquet!’

  He got up and walked across the floor. ‘But you must be hungry,’ he said.

  I couldn’t deny that. The old man went into a little pantry and brought out some food which he put on beautiful glass plates. He set the food on the table between us.

  I had imagined the food on the island to be rather simple and modest. However, Frode first put a dish with loaves of bread and rolls on the table; then he returned with different cheeses and pâtés. He also brought a jug of lovely white milk that I realised was moluk’s milk. Dessert arrived last. It was a large bowl of ten or fifteen different fruits. I recognised the apples, oranges, and bananas. The others were specialities of the island.

  We ate for a while before Frode continued with his story. The bread and cheese tasted a little different from what I was used to. So did the milk; it was much sweeter than cow’s milk. The greatest taste shock, however, came with the fruit bowl. Some of the fruits tasted so different from any other fruit I knew that now and again I would exclaim in astonishment.

  ‘I have never had to go wanting for food,’ the old man said.

  He cut a slice from a round fruit the size of a pumpkin. The fruit was soft and yellow inside, like a banana.

  ‘Then one morning it happened,’ he continued. ‘I had been dreaming extra vividly that night. When I left the cabin early in the morning, the dew was still lying on the grass and the sun was rising over the mountains. Suddenly two silhouettes came walking towards me from a ridge of hills in the east. I thought I finally had some visitors on the island and started to walk towards them. My heart turned somersaults in my chest when I got closer and recognised them. It was the Jack of Clubs and the King of Hearts.

  ‘At first I thought I must still be lying in the cabin asleep and the meeting was just another dream. Yet I was absolutely positive that I was wide awake. But this had happened to me many times when I had been asleep, so I wasn’t completely sure.

  ‘The two of them greeted me as though we were old friends. Which we were in a way!

  ‘“It’s a lovely morning, Frode,” said the King of Hearts.

  ‘They were the very first words which were spoken on the island by someone other than myself.

  “Today we’re going to do something useful,” continued the Jack.

  ‘“I order that we build a new cabin,” said the King.

  ‘And that was exactly what we did. They slept in the cabin with me here for the first two nights. Then after a couple of days they were able to move into a brand-new cabin just below mine.

  ‘They were my equals – with one important difference. They never realised they hadn’t lived on the island for as long as I had. There was something inside them which didn’t allow them to see that in reality they were my own brainchildren. Of course, it’s the same with all our thoughts. Nothing of what we create in our minds is aware of itself. But these particular brainchildren were not exactly like other conceptions. They had followed the inexplicable path from the creative space in my own brain to the created space outside beneath the heavens.’

  ‘That … that is impossible!’ I gasped.

  But Frode just continued his story.

  ‘Other figures gradually appeared. The oddest thing was that the old ones never made a scene when the new ones arrived. It was like when two people suddenly meet each other in the garden – neither of them makes a fuss.

  ‘The dwarfs talked as though they had known each other for a long time, which in a way was true, too. They had been together on the island for many long years, because I had dreamed and day-dreamed about them holding conversations.

  ‘One afternoon I was chopping wood in the forest just down the hill when I met the Ace of Hearts for the first time. I think she lay somewhere in the middle of the pack. I mean, she was neither the first nor the last to be dealt out.

  ‘She didn’t see me at first. She was walking around by herself humming a beautiful tune. I stopped what I was doing, and I had tears in my eyes. It was because I was thinking of Stine.

  ‘I gathered my courage and called to her. “Ace of Hearts,” I whispered.

  ‘She looked up and walked towards me. She threw herself round my neck and said, “Thank you for finding me, Frode. What would I have done without you ?”

  ‘That was a justifiable question. Without me she wouldn’t have done anything. But she didn’t know this, and she must never find out either.

  ‘Her mouth was so soft and red, I wanted to kiss her, but there was something which stopped me.

  ‘As the newcomers gradually populated the island, we built new houses for them. A whole village grew up around me. I no longer felt lonely. We soon created a society where everyone had his own special job to take care of.

  ‘The solitaire was complete as early as thirty or forty years ago – with fifty-two figures. There was only one exception. Joker was an addition who first showed up on the island sixteen or seventeen years ago. He was a troublemaker who interrupted the idyll just when we had all grown used to our new existence. But this can wait until later. There is another day tomorrow, Hans. If there is one thing life on the island has taught me, it is that there are always new days ahead.’

  What Frode told me was so incredible I remember every word to this day.

  How could fifty-three dream pictures manage to jump out into reality as living people made of flesh and blood?

  ‘It’s … it’s impossible,’ I said again.

  Frode nodded and said, ‘During the course of a few years all the playing cards had managed to creep out of my mind onto the island, where I was living. Or had I gone the other way? That is a possibility I have constantly had to think about.

  ‘Although I have lived with these friends around me for many, many years, although we have built the village together, worked the land together, prepared and eaten food together, I have never stopped asking myself whether the figures around me are real.

  ‘Had I entered an eternal world of fantasy? Was I lost – not only on the great island but in my own imagination? And if that was the case, would I ever find my way back to reality?

  ‘Only when the Jack of Diamonds brought you along to the water pump could I be sure the life I was living was real. Because you’re not a new Joker in the pack of cards, are you, Hans? I haven’t dreamed you up as well?’

  The old man looked up at me imploringly.

  ‘No,’ I replied quickly. ‘You haven’t dreamed me. But you’ll have to excuse me if I turn the question around: if you’re not the one sleeping, then it could be me. Then I am the one dreaming this fantasy which you are telling.’

  Dad suddenly turned over in bed. I jumped out onto the floor,
pulled on my jeans, and shoved the sticky-bun book safely into one of the pockets.

  He didn’t wake up properly right away. I went to the window and stood behind the curtains. I could now see that land was in sight, but I didn’t dwell on that very much. My thoughts were elsewhere entirely – and in an entirely different time, too.

  If what Frode had told Baker Hans was really true, I had read about the world’s greatest card trick ever. To conjure up a whole pack of cards would be pretty impressive in itself, but to turn all fifty-two playing cards into real people bursting with life was magic on a totally different level. It had taken many years to do.

  I have been sceptical about everything in the sticky-bun book many times since then. At the same time, from that day on I have regarded the whole world – and all the people who live in it – as one great big magic trick.

  But if the world is a magic trick, then there must be a great magician, too. I hope one day I’ll be able to expose him or her, but it isn’t easy to reveal a trick when the magician never shows up on stage.

  Dad went into a complete spin when he popped his head under the curtains and saw the strip of land we were nearing.

  ‘We’ll soon be in the homeland of the philosophers,’ he declared.

  QUEEN OF CLUBS

  … could at least have

  signed the masterpiece before He

  took off …

  The first thing Dad did when we drove on land in the Peloponnese was buy an issue of the woman’s magazine his aunt had bought in Crete.

  We sat down at an outdoor restaurant in the busy port and ordered breakfast. While we waited for the coffee and juice and the dry bread with a dab of watered-down jam, Dad started to flick through the magazine.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ he suddenly exclaimed.

  He turned the magazine towards me and showed me a whole page spread of Mama. She was not quite as skimpily dressed as the ladies in the pack of cards Dad had bought in Verona, but she wasn’t far from it. Her flimsy attire could at least be excused here – it was obvious she was advertising swimwear.