The telephone terror 1986-88

The telephone terror 1986-88

John Bjarne Grover

It was around the time of the assassination of Olof Palme on 28 February 1986 that I was thrown out from my home on Tårnåsen outside Oslo and had to find a new place in a hurry. But I was just in the process of writing out the parts to some orchestral or opera work for which there was a short time schedule and therefore I could not both find a new place, move to it and continue the job. So I moved down to Labråten 58 in Fredrikstad for completing the job there before I found a new place. Today I would of course never have done anything like it but in those days it seemed to be the only choice. (I don't know whether this situation could have been a part of the story with the throw-out - the owner did not ask me to move but made it so difficult that I had no choice). I was working downstairs and the telephone was plugged in the wall downstairs so that I could use it if needed. It was left on the TV set close to the door in the lower living-room and could be moved through the door and be placed on the floor of the corridor just inside the door if needed. I worked in a room in the end of that corridor.

I suppose there must have been a second phone plugged into the same line upstairs. When somebody called from the upper phone, there were short beeping sounds in the lower phone when the wheel was turning as somebody dialled a number. I cannot remember that the lower phone was an 'extra' but I think there must have been two phones on the same line since I remember the beeps.

One late night (3-4 o'clock) when I was sitting up writing those parts I heard somebody walk upstairs and then the lower phone in the end of the corridor gave off those beeping sounds. Somebody was apparently dialling a number upstairs. (Is it possible to hear footsteps through the ceiling/floor? I can't remember if such footsteps naturally sound through the concrete).

Another time the lower phone was left on the TV set when Ragna Grøver was at her office downtown. The phone rang and Grøver/'Mengele' lifted the receiver but it was silent and he put it back. I do not recall the order of these two events - which of them was first.

When my job was finished I went for a trip to Budapest, and when I came back I moved to another address in Fredrikstad while waiting for a chance to move in to Oslo again. The new place turned out to be difficult and so I moved on to a third location in Fredrikstad. It was there that the telephone terror in the form of silent phones started after I had sent a letter to Pernille Lønne Christiansen (later Mørkhagen) after the news of the death of her husband/mate. I had to believe that it was she who called to tell me that she could not call me but had to tell it to me in that way. It was only that this telling lasted for a couple of years. At the end of the two years, closer to the end of 1988 (with the Lockerbie bombing on 21 December), I had understood from correlations with my contacts with the family that it was not she but rather somebody with knowledge of the family contact. When I finally could predict the last telephone on the minute, it was because I knew that it was when Grøver/'Mengele' sat down to watch the TV news ('Dagsrevyen' - its postwar chief was Eivind Hjelle who seems to have been the name under Oslo Report #6 - later chiefs were Bjartmar Gjerde and Einar Förde) at 19:30 in the evening that Ragna Grøver would walk up the stairs and dial the number for listening to the voice in the other end of the line while Grøver/'Mengele' was watching the TV news downstairs. The last phone came after I had predicted it for that day, and it came as I had guessed at 19:37-38 in the evening. (It was in fact my neighbour in the student town who took the phone - I had said that he should inform me if there were such silent phones but I had not told him the time point I had computed, and I saw him lifting the receiver and putting it back when it was silent - and he told me that it was that kind of phone I had talked about). So it had to be Ragna Grøver who had called, I concluded. She had 'guessed' the letter I had sent to PLC by the emotions of the inner smoke, just like it happened with the first cigarette I smoked, which was at age 16: I was sitting up late at night writing and got the impulse of trying a cigarette and had gone upstairs to find one (it was called 'Craven A') and smoked with surprising ease and felt more comfortable than ever with deep inhaling when suddenly Ragna Grøver appeared in morning gown in the middle of the cigarette. She had 'felt' the smoke as an inner sensation and came to interrupt my new attachment, perhaps since it could threaten the somewhat sick symbiosis which tied me to the place. That at least is how I felt it - that it was an act of attempted liberation which was beaten efficiently down in the very beginning.

With the discovery of Ragna Grøver as the silent caller, I could conclude that it was not PLC who had called but the story was equivalent to the first smoke. The first smoking. (I started smoking in late 1973 and got a 'smoking' = 'tuxedo' from Trygve Madsen a year or two or three later - didn't he even smoke 'Craven A'? I am not sure about this).

If this is a story about sick symbiosis by abnormal attachment, one could speculate if it would be a late reflex of early infancy morphine abuse in a period of cork expansion. 'The Royal Oak'. The Oslo Report! This morphine would be the one imitated in Grøver/'Mengele's hospital career in Norway and hence an integral part of an 'administrative' project on me.

The version I could construct today would be that it was 'secret service' who called for the purpose of a longterm administrative project on me - in extension from the school dentistry and all that. They could have recorded the letter to PLC and that is why they started in 1986. But it could have been prepared with the silent phone on the TV set in Labråten 58 in the spring or summer 1986. And it ended with the discovery that it was connected with just this TV set and the news at 19:30 and the phone upstairs.

The beeping telephone in the corridor at the door could also be affiliated with the idea of 'the calling' = 'Kolingen', the apparent theme of the graphic artwork which Gisele Celan-Lestrange had sent to Sachs via Lenke Rothmann but which seems to have been replaced with a parasol sort of picture in the photo which Sachs sent to the Celans in Paris.

For a longterm project, one can recognize the affiliation of this 'tele-phone' terror with the 'tele-vision' set as relevant to the 'Visthouse camera' at Hoerbiger 2006.

If Grøver/'Mengele' (or somebody else) had asked his wife to dial (or rather 'button') a certain number on the telephone, for example that night when I heard the beeping, it could be called 'ba-u-taste-in' ('bauta-stein' = 'memorial stone') the code number.

The throwout in 1986 was followed by Gro Harlem Brundtland's government which lasted for about a decade (with a short interruption). Petter Andre Syversen (PAS) - who was then the husband or at least 'mate' of PLC, cp.also 'Syversens vei' out to Isegran and 'Syenitt-veien' on 'Falchåsen' - got a stipend for going to Botswana and allegedly lost his life in a car accident (his car was pressed inbetween 2-3 lorries, as far as I understood). This gives the following scheme:

2-3 Dec 1984 Bhopal - GAS = cyanide
7 Aug 1986 Botswana - PAS = Petter Andre Syversen
16 Mar 1988 Halabjah - GAS = cyanide

22 Mar 1988 Oslo? - death of Gudmund Harlem (as far as I know)
21 Dec 1988 Lockerbie - bombing of PAN AM 103

Bhopal had been prepared with my co-student Sindre Bostad ('cyan drep bostad', while 'bostad' = 'bopael') when I studied Latin in the autumn 1984 (we were 4 students on the course and we probably had exam around the days of the disaster), and the throwout as 'palme ut' in 1986 is a case of the same. If we now - by a ligature 'locking-two' graphic units together - compute 23 December instead of 2-3 December, cp. also the 2-3 lorries - and if we compute the death of Harlem as 9 months before Lockerbie, there are 5 days from Halabjah. Then 2-3 December could mean 'John Grøver' (cp. 30666) and 5 days (his wife?) is the interval between the deaths of Jozsef Antall and Johan Jørgen Holst (cp. the story of Judges 4 with the tent peg).