13 january 2024

13 january 2024

John Bjarne Grover

It happened some years ago a sunday I stepped into tram #1 at the Ring, not far from the Parliament in Vienna, and found a folded black textile on a tramseat there. There were nobody else around there and I took it up and it was semi-transparent and humid, even if it was a dry and sunny day. Since somebody could have forgotten it there I gave it to the driver. One week later exactly the same happened - around the same time on the next sunday I stepped into the same #1 - and a black textile lay folded on probably the same seat, or close to it. A woman was sitting on the seat behind it and I asked if it were hers - it was not and I gave it once again to the driver. Even this time it was humid like the first one and the day was dry.

The Schönbrunn summer concert had always been thoroughly announced - one each summer - with outdoor posters around in the area where I lived. One summer, though, I saw on the front pages of the main newspapers of Vienna that Yuja Wang had given a concert in Schönbrunn the day before - but there had been no posters up around that year. I guess that this was after I found the textiles. Had the posters been up in the district as usual but somebody had been running before me and taken them down just before I came walking, wherever I came? I would not laugh at this theory.

I have speculated that when I gave the textiles to the driver, the lost-and-found office could have seen on surveillance if they had been formed ex nihilo just before I stepped into the trams, in which case they could have contacted me and told me that these belonged to me - and then Austria could have got their territories consolidated. This old story about the Schenkungs-Urkunde from AD 996 is not safe. But this did not happen, and it may be that Austria are nervous about the security of their territory. A pity that is. Did they feel that they had to prevent me from going to the concert in order to rescue their territory? The concert was attended by some 85.000 people - only I had not heard about it, it seems.