Chapter 7 4 of spades ..... what I hold in my hand is - a small book .....

It was evening when we returned to the village of Durf. "Now, it's time for us to have a good dinner!" Dad said. The big restaurants are open so we don't have to go into the little dining rooms.Several locals sat around a chair with several mugs of beer on the table. We ate sausage and sauerkraut.Dessert was an apple pie topped with whipped cream. After dinner, Dad stayed in the restaurant, "tasting the brandy of the Alps" - as he put it.Watching him drink was boring, so I ordered a soda and went upstairs to my room.I took out those Norwegian comic books that I had read a dozen or twenty times, and read them one last time.Then I started playing solitaire.I was playing seven cards, and I had a bad deal twice, so I went downstairs and back to the restaurant.

I would have taken Papa upstairs to rest before he was drunk--when he was drunk he would start telling stories about his days at sea--but he hadn't had enough Alpine brandy, apparently.At the moment, he is speaking German and chatting with the local customers in the restaurant. "Go for a walk by yourself, look around town," Dad said to me. When I heard that he didn't accompany me for a walk, I was naturally angry.However, in retrospect today, I am glad that I went out alone that night.I think my life is much better than my father's. It only takes five minutes to "walk around town" because the town is so small.It has only one street, the name is Waldemarasse).The inhabitants of Dulph are not really creative.

Dad just wants to hang out with the locals, drink Alpine brandy in big gulps, and ignore me completely, how can I not be angry? "Alpine brandy is better than strong alcohol. Dad once said that quitting alcohol would be harmful. His health. I repeated his words over and over and thought for a long time before I understood what he meant. Most people say that drinking alcohol is harmful to health. But my father was different. After all, he was the illegitimate child of a German soldier. All the shops in the village were closed.A red van drove to a grocery store and unloaded the goods.A Swiss girl was playing ball by herself facing a brick wall; an old man was sitting alone on a bench under a big tree, smoking a pipe.This is the view on the street! Although there are many houses in the village that are as beautiful as fairy tales, in my opinion, this small Alpine village is so dull that it makes people uncomfortable.I don't see what a magnifying glass can do in a place like this.

Fortunately, tomorrow morning we will drive on the road and continue our itinerary.In the afternoon or evening, we will arrive in Italy.From there, we could drive all the way through Yugoslavia to Greece, and we might be able to find Mom.When I think of this, I can't help but lift up my spirits. I walked across the street to a small bakery.Only the shop window of this shop I haven't browsed yet.Next to a plate of cakes stood a glass aquarium with a solitary goldfish in it.There is a gap in the upper end of the glass jar, about the size of the magnifying glass that the little man gave me.I took out the magnifying glass from my pocket, took off the cover, compared it carefully, and found that it was only slightly smaller than the gap in the glass cylinder.

The little orange goldfish kept swimming around in the glass tank.He presumably lives on cake crumbs.I guess a roe deer tried to eat this goldfish before, but took a bite out of the glass tank and swallowed the pieces. The evening sun suddenly shone through the small window, and the glass tank suddenly lit up.In an instant, the orange goldfish was dyed red, yellow and green.Under the swimming of the goldfish, the water in the glass tank also becomes magnificent and colorful, as if the paint in the palette was poured into the tank in one go.I just stared at the goldfish, the glass, and the water, forgetting where I was.In a trance, I felt that I had become a goldfish in the tank, while the real goldfish was watching me from outside the tank.

I was gazing at the goldfish in the aquarium when I suddenly noticed an old man with white hair standing behind the counter in the bakery.He looked at me, waved to me, and beckoned me to enter the store. It was late, and the bakery was still open, so I wondered.I looked back at the Waldermart Inn to see if Papa had finished his drink, but there was no sign of Papa, so I broke my heart and pushed open the front door of the bakery and went in. "Praise God!" I said in German.This is the only sentence in Swiss German I can speak. I could tell at a glance that the baker was a kind man.

"Norwegian!" I patted my chest, indicating that I don't speak his language. The old man leaned over from behind the wide marble counter and stared me straight in the eye. "Really?" he said. "I lived in Norway, many, many years ago. I've almost forgotten all my Norwegian now." He turned around, opened the old refrigerator, took out a bottle of drink, uncapped it, and put the bottle on the counter. "You like soda, don't you?" said the old man. "Go ahead, kid. That's a nice bottle of soda." I picked up the bottle, put it to my mouth, and Gulu took a few gulps.Sure enough, it tastes better than the soda in the Huadema Inn, and it has a pear flavor.

The white-haired old man leaned over from behind the marble counter again, and asked softly, "Is it good, huh?" "tastes good." "Okay!" he said in a low voice again, "this bottle of soda is very good, but there are better soda drinks here in Dulph, which are not sold to the public. Do you understand?" I nod.The old man kept talking in a low voice, and I couldn't help but feel hairy in my heart.But when I looked up into his kind blue eyes, I knew he wasn't a bad guy. "I'm from Arendall," I said. "Dad drove me to Greece to find my mum. Poor mum, she's lost in fashion."

The old man glanced at me; "Son, you said you were from Arendall? Is your mother lost? Maybe other people have the same experience. I also lived in Grimm Town for a few years. People there have given me forget." I looked up at the old man.Did he really live in Grimm? It's a town near our house.Every summer, my father always takes me there on a boat for vacation. "It's not far...from Ellendale," I stammered. "Not far, not far. I know that a young fellow there will come to Dulf's village one day and claim his treasure. This treasure is not mine alone now."

Suddenly I heard my father calling me.I could tell from his voice that he had downed several glasses of Alpine brandy. "Thanks for the soda," I said. "I have to go! My dad is calling me." "Oh, your father is calling you, of course. Wait a minute, I was just putting a plate of buns into the oven while you were here looking at the goldfish. I saw you had a magnifying glass in your hand, so I knew you It's the young man. Boy, you'll understand, you'll understand..." The old man went into a dark room at the back of the shop.After about a minute, he came out with a paper bag containing four freshly baked buns.He handed me the paper bag and said with a straight face, "You have to promise me one thing, it's very important. You have to hide the biggest bun and eat it at the end.

Remember, you can only eat it when no one else is around! You can't tell anyone about this, you know?" "Yes," I said, "thanks." I hurried out of the bakery.It happened so suddenly that I was at a loss, until I met my father halfway from the bakery to the Huadema Inn, and I gradually regained my senses. I told Baba that an old man who immigrated from Greenham and owned a bakery bought me a bottle of soda and gave me four buns.Dad obviously didn't believe me, but he ate a bun on the way back to the inn.I ate two and the largest one I stashed in a paper bag. As soon as Dad lay on the bed, he fell asleep.I couldn't sleep, and all I could think about was the old man at the bakery and the goldfish.Thinking about it, I felt hungry, so I climbed out of bed and took out the last bun in the paper bag.In a dark room, I sat on a chair, biting into a bun. , Suddenly, I bit a hard thing.I tore open the bun to find something the size of a matchbox hidden inside.Dad lay in bed, snoring and snoring.I turned on a lamp by the chair. What I hold in my hand is a small book.The cover reads "The Rainbow Soda and the Magic Island". I flipped through this book casually.It has more than a hundred pages, densely packed with extremely fine print.I opened the first page, tried to read the tiny letters, but couldn't make out a single word.Suddenly, I remembered the magnifying glass that the little man gave me, and I quickly took it out of my jeans pocket and put it on the first page of letters.The font is still small, but when I lean forward to read through the magnifying glass, I find that the font size is just right for my eyesight.