5 june 2024

5 june 2024

John Bjarne Grover

A short story

First, the pope apologized for what the news called 'gay slur'.

Thereafter, a military jet crashed at Albuquerque, New Mexico. It cost 135 million dollars, told the news.

On the day of the Nord Stream sabotage, which (according to an article on TASS) was triggered by 'the norwegians', I had gone from Urban Loritz Platz up Märzstrasse and when I came to the intersection to 'Löhrgasse', a car stopped and the driver jumped out and started walking in front of me up the street (as if it should have been about genetics related to my sexual maturation?) while another man hopped out on the righthand side and went around the car to take the driver's seat. I think the news of the Nord Stream sabotage occurred later in the day and I had to associate with this event. 'Röhrgasse' = gas from a pipe, 'Lørdag' = norwegian for 'saturday'.

Thereafter I was to a cultural event and a man passed in the narrow row and gave me a tap, a faint slap, a 'querque', so to speak, on the elbow in the narrow passing. Was it the Albuquerque story? News later told that Hamas hostages called Alexander Trufanov, Andrey Kozlov and Alexander Lobanov could hope to be released.

In this file, under 'A particularly strong and vivid memory' - there is the story of the 'rathunt' from Odda 1960 or so:

I and my friend Allal (his real name was Harald) decided to go for a rathunt behind the house. I grabbed a broom in the entrance room and we went behind the house where there was the creek or river and the field of stinging nettles and the foundations of the house made of stones. Between some of these, a rat suddenly peeped out with a friendly look. It was rather big. I swung the broom and hit the rat on one of its paws resting on the brim of the stone - it looked at the bleeding paw and then on me with a sad look in its eyes: Why did you do this to me? Then it disappeared under the house again. We went back up with the broom and a terrible conscience attacked me on the way (like flames of shame rising from the shoulders). I put the broom back in the entrance room.

I was punished with a terrible shame thereafter - like flames shooting up from my young shoulders. I notice the volcano that erupted in Iceland approximately in the moment when I peeled one of these 'Senorita' oranges - now apparently renamed into 'Götterfrucht', if that is not simply a competing brand. Is it this childhood memory that was converted into the story with the man who called himself 'John Grøver' and who carried a 'box on his ear', on his shoulder, when passing from the washing room to the stairway? It is probable that my childhood memory is only a memorial or narrative format for its opposite - since I could not take the chance on keeping anything secret. It is well possible that the 'rathunt' memory really could have been from a meeting of mine with Paul Celan.