My New Novel!

Kaj Bernh. Genell was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1944, as the second son of a Sea Captain and his wife, a housewife. After an adventurous youth, he became interested in philosophy and, in 1983, published a book exclusively on Irony - “Ironi och existens.” Soon hereafter, Genell, who had a great interest in one of the giants of Modernism, Franz Kafka, wrote a series of papers at the University of Gothenburg related to Kafka. This would later result in “Kafka och det Kafkaeska” (2018), an essay in Swedish on the Literary Technique of Kafka, later also published in English as “Kafka” (2021). As a fiction writer Genell started out with several books in the Swedish language, such as “Pistolen”, “Tavelstölden”, “Tegelkrona och skönheten”, ”Höstdrama” and “Skjuta sig fri”. Under the pseudo “Bill Clactoe,” his first novel in English appeared in 2021,” Fell´s Point,” a small crime story set in Baltimore, USA. With “The Lion´s Disease,” Genell has created a psychological and philosophical comment on pandemics by describing an odyssey to Indonesia on a Bulk Cargo Carrier.

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 CHAPTER ONE

 

LONDON  HARBOUR

 

 

“Et si le soleil ne revenait par

demain … N´est-ce pas, ajoute-t-il,

 le plus veille angoisse du Monde ? »

    G. Simenon, Le Roman de l´homme, p.27.

 

 

A

ll this took place only years after the horrendous pandemic, the Covid19, had paralyzed the world. Economy had been slowing down, and the tricky disease made a lot of people face death, sorrow, hunger, as well as homelessness.

 

In November of this year, Rattner & Rattner, the renowned and prosperous London Shipping Agency, had hired me as an officer onboard the Punjab, a Handysize Geared Bulk Carrier. Minutes after being appointed an officer at a visit to the Staff Employment Office, I set out to find my ship from Emmet Street, where the office building was situated. I was on foot, in light rain and some wind in the dusky remains of the Tuesday afternoon, out for the vessel, which was an immense one, lying at anchor outside the Northwest Pier of London Outer Harbor. I had been hired in an extreme hurry due to a mishap on a red London bus on the morning of the ship´s departure; the ordinary 3rd Mate – a man whose name I forgot - unprovoked got busted up by a drunkard, and, because of a broken arm, was brought to the hospital for surgery. The Company was in dire need of a replacement, and with a terse notice, I, who was then 1st Mate on another Carrier - the Swanee - of the same size, but an oil carrier, decided to jump in.

It was a commotion to try to reach the area. My beloved Swanee lay by an anchor in a whole different part of the port. I went by subway and by bus and on my way happened to end up on a small bridge, about a hundred yards tall, in one of the harbor areas, viewing a large portion of the London port from a distance. The harbor rested with thousands and thousands of ships, cranes, sheds, and piers in front of me. Stairs and viaducts, trains and carriages were seen everywhere, and miles of rails in grey and blue nuances, covered by smoky fog, were spotted in all directions. How strange are the cities, man built out in the plane and by the outpour of rivers! But they were part of work, of human endeavor.

Work, this rather primitive agreement between people, is often not entirely rational or logical, but still, the only meaningful agreement, precisely because it since primordial times stays based on reciprocity. This small mutual agreement is quite fundamental. There was since the earliest epochs no other decency to be found in the world of humans anywhere in the world than in the simple agreement of work. Some say that slavery was born the day after work was invented. I realize that. Maybe so… But that does not affect the nobility of Work itself.

The city, this immense organism, the actual big city, skyscraper City, was the predicament, the condition, and the very place of this decency and agreement, and in this decency, quite simply, marked by smoke, fog, and thousand smells, … marvelous. So this was the city of British decency, of the decency of civilization, I thought, as I folded my collar against the wind, which came in, gust after gust on this evening, from the West.

 

   “Of all the airts the wind can blow,

   I dearly like the West,

   `Cause there my lovely dearie lives,

   The girl that I loe´ best.”

 

I silently hummed. I always loved Robert Burns. My father was from Edenborough. But as for myself, I have mostly been living in New York.

Cooperation is beautiful. Capitalism is not. Collaboration is healthy and decent. Decency is beautiful. The most beautiful thing in life, next to love, is decency.