A strange, meaningless life E-Book

Johannes Hroner

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 128

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Peter is the son of a craftsman, but he has no manual skills himself. He also fails at school and has difficulty making friends. His parents don't understand any of this, but are disappointed in him and leave him alone with his problems. Every day he struggles with his many fears, but he doesn't give up because he believes that he can find happiness, even if the road to it is often rocky.

Leseprobe

Foreword

I wrote this book primarily for my aunt, who is now over 90 years old and is my only relative who loves and has always loved me.

I am also writing this book for people who have known, know and recognize me, and maybe I can entertain a lot more people with it and bring a smile or a tear to their eyes.

I just need a lot more plus points with the good Lord and have to reduce my minus points and somehow I imagine that if I arouse emotions in people, it helps.

I am now in the last stage of my life, and publishing this book is as much a part of my life as my little finger.

I don't want to hurt or accuse anyone with this book. The content corresponds to my subjective perception of the world.

Chapter 1

The birth and first days

Why am I here now? The light is getting brighter.

The safe time is over.

Now all I hear is this screaming.

That's me,

so small and loud.

It's still far too early! Six weeks too early, I hear him say,

a man with a white coat and a white collar.

1961, which was still dangerous.

Medicine was not yet ready.

I am healthy, no thalidomide.

My mother, despite her many aches and pains,

took another tablet

I had a bald head with a few blond hairs,

as I found out later.

Then I see them, so far I've often only heard screaming,

their crying and also their laughter,

I also felt her anger.

Long black hair,

cheeks flushed, all sweaty.

August brought extremely hot days.

I was weighed,

connected to a terrible device.

I shed tears for three days,

away from the woman with the black hair.

I went home. My cradle was ready,

But what am I supposed to do? Man, that's boring.

I'm screaming, hungry, thirsty and alone.

Where are the fucking pigs?

who are to blame that I have to be here,

instead of continuing to float on the cloud

I am full of annoyance.

So this is how my life will be.

I die in solitude

and no one is ready for me.

Then a slim, thin man came by

with sparkling blue-turquoise eyes.

That's outrageous, it's hard to believe,

I wanted them to be brown-green.

I was supposed to inherit them from my mother.

The man was my father. He was 22 years old at the time.

He was warm and took care of me,

but little spoken

and often hides in his snail shell

crawled away.

He had great black hair,

was a fan of Bill Hayley,

a super rock'n'roll dancer,

welcome with the women

and also a truant.

Why he found my mother of all people,

is a mystery to me, I am not familiar with it.

My father was a bricklayer, later a plasterer.

He couldn't write, had never really learned.

But he certainly wasn't stupid.

He was a country kid who grew up on a farm,

and he was also a child of war.

You have the seven to fourteen-year-olds

put into a class. Those who came along were lucky

and those who didn't come along were out of luck.

He often told me stories about the war,

how the children should jump into the specially prepared prepared holes on the way to school to protect themselves from bombers, or how his father,my grandfather, was a prisoner of war in Russia and came home much earlier thanks to his singing talent.

My father also liked to sing and knew the song by Weiß Ferdl "Ein Wagen von der Linie 8" by heart, for example. He always sang it to me when we bathed together in the small bathtub.

He was also often sad and quiet,

and he always said to me, don't talk so much.

He also got very, very loud,

if you didn't listen or didn't dare,

to say anything against him. To speak back,

could then end very badly.

A loud roar could then be heard

and he was not allowed to be disturbed for a while.

Our first apartment was so small that

There will only be three of us.

My mother was 19 years old when I was born.

She wanted to break out of her home.

She wasn't comfortable with my grandmother's second husband.

A heavy man, a monster to them?

But of course, with a man like that from the age of fourteen

Spending time without shower and bath and with washing at the sink in an old Munich city apartment

with one shared toilet per floor is not exactly wonderful either. exactly wonderful.

She went to business school in Munich, spoke good English, knew a few words of French and had a good job at an insurance company.

And then I came!

This strange person who can still put himself in the shoes of a two-year-old. Well, I don't want to exaggerate now, as a three-year-old.

Who sits here today and writes such things, who was often a loner perhaps not really a loner, but a loner in his head, and there will be many more examples in this text, novel and poem to prove it.

Chapter 2

Little child

Oh, I'm a pretty child! Oh, I am lovely!

Blonde hair, his father had it too when he was a boy.

The aunts are so enthusiastic.

The rich farmer is infatuated.

I got everything.

The drawers were

always filled with sweets.

This problem is still with me today.

I was able to speak quite early and walk rather late.

Now life was really good.

But one day, when I was about three, the peace was over.

I had bad and strange dreams.

My mother cried so much.

My father was even calmer than usual,

except when they were arguing loudly.

You matzo, you stupid dog, were still harmless words.

Once my father had several knives against the front door

thrown. I had no idea what it was. Everything was wonderful for me.

It wasn't until many years later that I found out what had happened during that time.

My grandmother organized everything.

My mother went to Vienna and aborted my unborn brother.

A year later, my sister was born.

Long black hair, she already looked like a witch at birth.

When she had to go to bed, I had to go with her.

For years I could only fall asleep when I was singing something, I was often terribly anxious.

I dreamed of Christmas children whose bottoms I danced on and of the devil coming to get me. Once it was so bad that I went to bed with my sister and was feverish all night. Sometimes I liked to spin in circles and see ghosts that were always in the doorway. I often had the dream that I climbed up a high mountain and fell down, opening my eyes just before I hit the ground and was glad to be alive.

I was also dreaming, almost dreaming, that I could climb out of the window and fly through the air from house to house. That gave me a good feeling.

Even today I can close my eyes and imagine the blue sky with a ray of light or a lake or a green forest or a wooded hill and then fall asleep. I have no idea if this is normal, but it is.

I wasn't interested in toys that you had to tinker with.

But I still played on the floor with buttons and sticks and toy cars until I was at least thirteen, forming soccer or ice hockey teams and sliding them around to determine a winner.

I think if I saw those buttons today, I could still tell which players they were.

My parents didn't have the slightest idea what I was doing.

I liked my parents very much. But for some reason I never cuddled with my mother and unfortunately I have a very bad first memory of my father. He took me to the extended family's own pub on Sundays and I shat my pants. He shouted at me and never took me there again.

I often heard my parents say that he took after the grandfathers. My father's father, who could sing well and was a baker, also liked to go to the horse races, was probably a hard-workingman, but certainly also a little dreamer. When I was about 4, he drowned in the lake and his bike was found in it. They thought it was an accident. My father had to identify him. My mother's father supposedly never worked, only sold paintings. His experiences during the Second World War made him mentally ill and that's why my grandmother separated from my mother's mother. I saw my mother's father maybe twice as a child.

I hardly had any friends, and when my sister and I were supposed to go to kindergarten for a few days because my mother wanted to get her driver's license, we screamed so much that another solution had to be found. When I was about five, I locked myself in the pantry of my parents' second home and played suicide. When I was about six, I fought with the neighbor's daughter, who was two years older than me, until she recognized me as the boss of the gang of kids.

No other children were allowed to come to our apartment at that time.

I was the prettiest little boy in the whole street, was the best pupil in first grade, also considered myself clever, defended my little sister and yet even as a small child, if you can say that at that age, I was always a bit unhappy and it took a bit longer than others to get house-trained. I was often afraid and didn't know what to be afraid of.

I did quite well at school up to the fourth grade and got good grades. I disposed of the transfer certificate for grammar school after year 4. By the time my parents even found out about it, it was a done deal. After the fifth grade, however, I had to transfer to grammar school. I still had the best grades without having to study.

I already knew what was coming and I didn't have a good feeling.

And nobody knew who I really was. I had already been a scared dreamer and weirdo at the age of 6.

Chapter 3

Childhood and puberty

We moved into a big house when I was seven.

I got the big nursery and my sister got the smaller one.

I was put into second grade and sat next to Charlie, a shy little boy who was the absolute loner of the class. Nobody liked him. He grew up at home with his father.

His mother and brother suffered from a serious lung disease and were in hospital for a very long time.

I only got straight A's at elementary school, at least I felt that way.

Sometimes I had to draw something. My mother did that for me. I just couldn't do it and cried until she did it for me.

Because I was or am completely untalented at anything that is done with my hands except, strangely enough, playing tennis and table tennis. Unfortunately, this also applied to playing musical instruments.

I joined the soccer club when I was about eight. There was a large playground with a soccer pitch and goal behind our house.

In some years, however, the whole playground was flooded and we could float boats or wade through the waist-high water.

Children from all walks of life met there and played and showed each other naked. There were also children from the social block. They were quite nice once they had accepted you. But for those who didn't belong to them, it could end badly. There were a few behind the ears, sometimes more.

I always played the soccer, which was an advantage. Later, there was a girl who was maybe 13 years old and mentally disabled. They liked to try her out, with her consent of course. I stayed out of it, thank God.

There were also one or two who had to serve time later in life.

I learned to swim in the river. The little ones used to watch the big ones jump in, float downstream, then hold on to a rock and climb out. Anyone who didn't do that was a loser. I became a fighter in the playground. There was always a hierarchy among the children. There was a lot of wrestling and I was usually in fourth place, which meant I couldn't move up any further, but I was so high up in the hierarchy that none of the lower ranks dared to attack me. Only wrestling was allowed and anyone who didn't comply was excluded. We often ran upstream with truck tires and then floated downstream, what fun. I didn't help much in the garden at home. I had no talent for working with my hands. Once, when I was 11, I accidentally hit my father in the instep with a pickaxe.

That was on the day the Olympic village in Munich was attacked in 1972.

I never had to work on vegetable patches again. Later, he could only really use me to haul cement and build scaffolding when building the garage.

I mowed the lawn in the garden in circles until I didn't have to do it anymore.

My mother often gave me slaps because I liked to contradict her and didn't always do what she wanted.

I was also a good soccer player until the age of 15 and made it to the Upper Bavarian team, but unfortunately only for one game. My father didn't have much time for me. He always had to work at the weekends to bring in money and couldn't drive me to the next meeting.

I think he only watched two games during my entire soccer career.

My father almost single-handedly built two semi-detached houses, one for our family and one for my grandmother. The monster, my step-grandfather, who my mother was so afraid of as a child, died unexpectedly at the age of 50 from a heart attack in his car and caused an accident in the process.

His father died six months later. He had been the local shoemaker.

I'll never forget the sweet smell in the air when we picked up my grandma from home after the monster's sudden death.

I then had a few friends at the soccer club, in the neighborhood and at school, but I was still who I was, a scared dreamer and weirdo, an outsider, someone who couldn't think, talk or feel normally. When I reached puberty, I also became ugly and developed a skin disease called psoriasis. I only had it on my scalp, but for a child at the start of puberty, it was still a major impairment.

My legs got thicker, it became much harder to play soccer and I could also see my belly starting to grow. At school, the girls sitting behind me laughed at me when my back was all white with dandruff. There was some medication that helped a little, but not in the long term.

I was generally very sickly and often injured through my own fault.

All the childhood illnesses haunted me.

A serious case of pneumonia after visiting a small lake in winter because I really wanted to go for a walk on the ice.