Cultural City Bergen 2000, Bergen Public Library

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Bibliography

Novels and
other prose

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World
premières

Articles
by Gunnar Staalesen

Excerpts

Like a bee
to honey

The witch ring

1900 Sunrise

Fallen Angels

Amalie Jensen Blues:
the story of the one who
(almost) became my first
girlfriend

Translations

of Gunnar Staalesen

by Gunnar Staalesen

Miscellaneous

About Gunnar Staalesen

Amalie Jensen Blues:
the story of the one who (almost)
became my first girlfriend
Fulltext version

She sat on the steps leading up to the green house, her long fair hair was braided and tied back with a hair band and her eyes were of the same blue as the Hansa bottle tops from those seltzer water bottles - the ones with white letters sloping across a blue background, spelling out Seltzers - and not the worst thing to go home with after playing our springtime rounds of 'Hansa-dice'.
One of her hands held a delicious piece of sugar candy, the other was picking her nose. I adored her. The year was 1953 and I was six years old. She was a mature woman of six and a half.
Her name was, no, that's of little importance now. And the steps she sat upon are equally unimportant because they, and the house itself, have since been razed to the ground. But on that early October day in 1953 she (almost) became my first girlfriend.
It wasn't difficult to make friends, not in 1953. I remember when we moved into the street, and the first thing I did was to take a pile of Donald Duck mags, and sit myself down on the steps in front of the house. In 1953 if you owned Donald Duck mags, you could make friends with anyone you wished, even Eisenhower. So, long before the rain had set in - and you didn't have to wait long for that in 1953 - I had a street full of friends.
Finding a girlfriend was another story. She - and I mean SHE - collected scrapbook pictures. She was said to own the best collection in our street. She even had some from America. They were the ones with the small Red Indian children petting fallow deer out in the forest. I had a few scrapbook pictures too, including some Phantom pix that I'd won when the Blue Cross had held a raffle in the gymnasium at Nesttun. They made up an original Phantom series of eight pictures, there was this bunch of guys robbing a bank, and the Phantom goes after them, and one of the pictures is Phantom parachuting down onto the train the bank robbers are using for their escape, the next picture shows him landing on the roof of the train, and finally he's inside the train and "Up with your hands!" the entire gang are caught. It was the most brilliant series of scrapbook pix I've ever seen, and one of my most treasured possessions.
But I worshipped her. So that day, as she sat there on the steps in front of the green house with the sugar candy in her hand, and those Seltzers eyes of hers and all that, I went over and showed her my Phantom pix and said: "You can have them all... if you'll be my girlfriend." She looked at me. And she looked at the pix. I just stood there with the pix in my hand. Then she reached out her hand. The hand in which she'd been holding the sugar candy. It was a sticky hand, a tanned and sticky hand, and I realised how the sugar candy goo would ruin the pix, and I immediately understood how much the pictures meant to me...
I withdrew my hand, pix and all. Then I ran home and glued the entire Phantom series into my scrapbook along with the angels and cherubs and Jesus' draped in glitter, and there they have remained to this day.
So she didn't become my first girlfriend. It wasn't easy to get a girlfriend, not in 1953. The house and the steps have long since been demolished. But I still occasionally see Amalie around town. She wears furs, is stuck up and sports a different hair-colour now. And she never acknowledges me. Either because she doesn't recognise me, or she doesn't want to - and to think she (almost) became my first girlfriend, in 1953.

Translated by Kevin Reeder