by Knut Hamsun
I left, slamming the door behind me.
But when I got home to my room, into that miserable hole, soaked from the wet snow and my knees shaking from the day’s wanderings, I lost my cockiness instantly and collapsed afresh. I regretted my attack on the poor store clerk, wept, grabbed hold of my throat to punish myself for my dastardly trick and kicked up an awful row. He had naturally been in mortal fear on account of his job, hadn’t dared make a fuss about the five kroner the business had lost. And I had exploited his fear, had tortured him with my loud talk, transfixing him with every word I yelled out. The boss himself had perhaps been sitting in the next room, within an ace of feeling called upon to come out and see what was going on. Why, there was no limit anymore to the sort of vile things I was capable of.
All right. But why had I not been run in? Then it would be over with. After all, I had practically held out my hands for the irons. I wouldn’t have put up the least resistance, I would have helped them. Lord of heaven and earth, one day of my life for a happy moment once again! My whole life for a mess of pottage! Hear me just this once! . . .
I went to bed in my wet clothes. I had a vague idea that I might die during the night, and I used my last strength to fix up my bed a little so it would look fairly tidy around me in the morning. I folded my hands and chose my position.
All at once I remember Ylajali. That I could have forgotten her so completely all evening! A faint light penetrates my mind again, a tiny ray of sun, making me feel wonderfully warm. And the sunlight increases, a mild delicate silken light that brushes me in such a soothingly delicious way. The sun grows stronger and stronger, scorching my temples and seething white-hot and heavy in my emaciated brain. In the end a mad fire of sunbeams blazes before my eyes, a heaven and earth set on fire, humans and animals of fire, mountains of fire, devils of fire, an abyss, a desert, a whole world on fire, a raging Judgment Day.
And I saw and heard no more. . . .8
The next morning I awoke in a sweat, damp all over; the fever had been quite rough on me. At first I had no clear awareness of what had happened to me; I looked about me in surprise, felt my nature had been totally changed, and could no longer recognize myself. I passed my hands up along my arms and down my legs, wondered at the window being where it was and not on the wall directly opposite, and heard the stomping of the horses down in the yard as if it came from above. I also felt rather nauseous.
My hair lay damp and cold around my forehead. I got up on my elbow and looked down at the pillow: wet hair there too, left behind in small tufts. My feet had swollen inside my shoes during the night, but they weren’t painful, I just wasn’t able to move my toes very much.
As the afternoon wore on and it was beginning to grow dark, I got out of bed and started puttering about the room. I felt my way with short, careful steps, making sure I kept my balance and sparing my feet as much as possible. I didn’t feel much pain and I didn’t cry; I wasn’t at all sad, rather felt wonderfully contented. It didn’t enter my mind just then that anything could be different than it was.
Then I went out.
The only thing that still bothered me a little was my hunger, despite the fact that food made me nauseous. I was beginning to feel an outrageous appetite again, a ravenous inner craving for food that was constantly growing worse and worse. There was a merciless gnawing in my chest, a queer silent labor was going on in there. I pictured a score of nice teeny-weeny animals that cocked their heads to one side and gnawed a bit, then cocked their heads to the other side and gnawed a bit, lay perfectly still for a moment, then began anew and bored their way in without a sound and without haste, leaving empty stretches behind them wherever they went.
I wasn’t ill, just weak, and I broke into a sweat. I had meant to go over to Stortorvet Square to take a brief rest, but it was a long, difficult walk. Finally I was almost there, standing at the corner of the marketplace and Torv Street. The sweat trickled down into my eyes, fogging up my glasses and blinding me, and I had just stopped to wipe my face. I didn’t notice where I was standing, gave it no thought. The noise around me was terrible.
Suddenly a yell rings out, a cold, sharp warning. I hear this yell, hear it very well, and jump nervously to one side, stepping as quickly as my poor legs would allow. A monster of a baker’s van sweeps past me and the wheel grazes my coat; if I had been a bit quicker I would have gotten off scot-free. I could have been a bit quicker perhaps, a wee bit quicker, if I had exerted myself. But there it was: one foot hurt, a couple of toes were crushed—I could feel how they sort of curled up inside my shoe.
The driver reins in his horses with all his might; he turns around in the van and asks, terrified, how it went. Oh, well, it could have been much worse . . . no big deal really . . . I didn’t think any bones had been broken. . . . It’s quite all right. . . .
I walked over to a bench as fast as I could; all those people who stopped to stare at me had made me feel embarrassed. It wasn’t a deathblow after all, as far as accidents went it had turned out relatively well. The worst thing about it was that my shoe had been crushed to pieces, the sole torn loose at the tip. Lifting my foot, I could see blood in the gap. Oh well, it wasn’t done willfully by either party, it hadn’t been the man’s intention to make things even worse than they were for me; he looked very frightened. If I had asked him for a small loaf of bread from his van, maybe I would have gotten it. He would probably have been glad to give it to me. May God give him joy in return, wherever he is!
I was terribly hungry and didn’t know where to turn because of my shameless appetite. I twisted and turned on the bench and pressed my chest against my knees. When it got dark I trudged over to the jail—God knows how I got there—and sat down on the edge of the balustrade. I ripped a pocket out of my coat and started chewing on it, without any particular purpose, frowning angrily and staring into space with unseeing eyes. I heard some small children playing around me and sensed instinctively when a pedestrian went by. Otherwise I observed nothing.
Then I suddenly take it into my head to go down to one of the stalls in the arcade below me and lay hold of a piece of raw meat. I get up, cross the balustrade, step over to the far end of the arcade roof and walk down the stairs. When I was almost at the meat stand, I yelled up the empty stairway, shaking my fist as if talking to a dog up there, and turned brazenly to the first butcher I saw.
“Oh, please give me a bone for my dog!” I said. “A bone, nothing more; there doesn’t have to be anything on it. Just so he can have something to carry in his mouth.”
I got a bone, a gorgeous little bone with still a bit of meat left on it, and stuck it under my coat. I thanked the man so heartily that he looked at me in surprise.
“Forget it,” he said.
“Oh, don’t say that,” I mumbled, “it’s very sweet of you.”
I went back up. My heart was pounding.
I sneaked into the Smiths’ Passage, as far back as I could get, and stopped in front of a tumbledown gate in a rear court. There wasn’t a light to be seen anywhere, it was delightfully dark around me; I started gnawing my bone.
It had no taste at all; a sickening smell of dried blood rose from the bone and I had to vomit immediately. I tried again—if I could just keep it down, it would be sure to do some good, the important thing was to make it stay down. But I vomited again. I got angry, ground my teeth into the meat, ripped off a small piece and forced myself to swallow it. It was no use: as soon as the tiny bits of meat grew warm in my stomach, up they came again. Frantic, I clenched my fists, burst into tears from helplessness and gnawed like mad; I cried so hard that the bone got wet and dirty from my tears—I threw up, cursed and gnawed again, crying as if my heart would break, then threw up once more. I swore at the top of my voice, damning all the powers of this world to eternal torment.
Quiet. Not a soul around, no light, no noise. I find myself in a most violent frenzy, breathing heavily and loudly and sobbing bitterly each time I have to give up these bits of meat which migh
t alleviate my hunger. Since it avails me nothing however hard I try, I fling the bone at the gate, bursting with impotent hatred and carried away with rage, and shout fierce threats up at the heavens, screaming God’s name hoarsely and savagely and crooking my fingers like claws . . . : “I say to you, you holy Baal of heaven, you do not exist, but if you did exist I would curse you until your heaven trembled with the fires of hell. I say to you, I have offered you my service and you turned it down, you pushed me away, and now I turn my back on you forever, because you did not know the time of your visitation. I say to you, I know I shall die and yet I mock you, Our Heavenly Apis, with death before my eyes.9 You have used force against me, and you do not know10 that I never bend in adversity. Ought you not to know that? Did you frame my heart in your sleep?11 I say to you, my whole body and every drop of blood in me rejoice in mocking you and spitting on your grace.12 From this moment on I shall renounce all your works and all your ways, I shall curse my thoughts if they ever think of you again and tear off my lips if they speak your name. I say to you, if you exist, the last word in life and in death, I say goodbye.13 And now I shall be silent, turn my back on you and go my way. . . .”
Quiet.
Quivering with rage and exhaustion, I keep on standing in the same place, still whispering oaths and insults, catching my breath after my fit of crying, broken and limp after my insane explosion of anger. Alas, it was nothing but rhetoric and literature, which I tried to get right even in the midst of my misery—it turned into a speech.14 I stood there maybe for half an hour, gasping and whispering while holding on to the gate. Then I hear voices, a conversation between two men who are coming toward me down the Smiths’ Passage. I stagger away from the gate, drag myself along the walls of the buildings and come out onto the bright streets again. As I shuffle down Youngsbakken Lane, my brain suddenly begins to act in an extremely strange manner. It occurs to me that those wretched hovels at the edge of the marketplace, the storage shacks and the old stalls with second-hand clothing, were a real disgrace to the place. They spoiled the entire appearance of the marketplace and were a blot on the city —ugh, away with the junk! As I walked along, I turned over in my mind what it would cost to move the Geodetic Survey down there, that handsome building which had always appealed to me so much each time I passed it. It might not be possible to undertake a move of that kind for less than seventy to seventy-two thousand kroner—a tidy sum, one had to admit, quite a neat piece of change, heh-heh, to start with anyway. And I nodded my empty head and admitted that it was quite a nice bit of change to start with. My whole body was still shaking, and I gave deep gasps every now and then after my bout of tears.
I had a feeling there wasn’t much life left in me, that I was in fact nearing my journey’s end. It mattered very little to me one way or another, I didn’t trouble my head about it in the least. Rather, I bent my steps downtown, toward the docks, farther and farther away from my room. For that matter, I could just as well have lain right down in the street to die. My sufferings were making me more and more insensitive: my sore foot was throbbing badly, indeed I had the impression that the pain was spreading up the entire leg, but even that didn’t hurt very much. I had endured worse sensations.
I reached the Jærnbane Pier. There was no traffic, no noise, only a lone soul to be seen here and there, a stevedore or a sailor loafing about with his hands in his pockets. I noticed a lame man who squinted hard at me as we passed each other. I stopped him instinctively, touched my hat and asked if he knew whether The Nun had sailed yet. Afterward I couldn’t help snapping my fingers right to his face and saying, “Yes, damn it, The Nun!” The Nun, which I had completely forgotten! The thought of it must have slumbered unconsciously within me anyhow, I had borne it with me unbeknownst to myself.
Lord, yes, The Nun had sailed.
He couldn’t tell me where it had sailed to, could he?
The man thinks a moment, standing on his longer leg and holding the shorter one in the air; the shorter one swings a little.
“No,” he says. “You wouldn’t know what cargo it’s been taking in?”
“No,” I reply.
But by now I had already forgotten The Nun, and I asked the man how far it might be to Holmestrand, in terms of good old geographic miles.
“To Holmestrand? I would guess—”
“Or to Veblungsnæs?”
“What I meant to say, I guess that to Holmestrand—”
“Hey, come to think of it,” I interrupted him again, “you wouldn’t be so kind as to give me a quid of tobacco, would you, just a tiny wee bit?”
I got the tobacco, thanked the man very warmly and walked off. I didn’t make any use of the tobacco, I just stuck it in my pocket right away. The man was still keeping an eye on me, maybe I had somehow aroused his suspicion; standing or walking, I felt his suspicious glance following me, and I didn’t like being persecuted by this individual. I turn around and drag myself over to him again, look at him and say, “Welter.”
Only this one word: Welter. No more. I looked very hard at him as I said it, I felt I was glaring at him; it was as though I were looking at him from another world. I stood there for a moment after uttering this word. Then I shuffled up to Jærnbanetorvet Square again. The man didn’t let out a sound, he just kept an eye on me.
Welter? All at once I stopped in my tracks. Sure. Wasn’t it just what I had sensed from the very beginning: I had met this cripple before. Up in Grænsen Street one bright morning; I had pawned my vest. It seemed like an eternity since that day.
As I am thinking about this—I’m leaning against a building at the corner of the marketplace and Havn Street—I give a sudden start and try to scramble off. Failing in this, I stare in dismay straight ahead and swallow my shame, it couldn’t be helped—I stand face to face with the “Com mander.”
With casual audacity, I even move a step away from the wall to make him aware of me. I don’t do it to awaken his compassion but to mock myself, make myself an object of derision. I could have thrown myself in the gutter and asked the “Commander” to walk over me, to trample on my face. I don’t even say good evening to him.
The “Commander” may have sensed there was something wrong with me; he slowed down a little, and to make him stop I said, “I should have brought you something, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.”
“Yes?” he answers, inquiringly. “So you haven’t finished it?”
“No, I haven’t managed to finish it.”
But now, with the “Commander’s” friendliness, my eyes are suddenly watering, and I hawk and cough furiously to toughen myself. The “Commander” gives a snort; he stands looking at me.
“And do you have anything to live on in the meantime?” he says.
“No,” I answer, “I guess I don’t. I haven’t had anything to eat yet today, but—”
“God help us, man, that won’t do; you just can’t let yourself starve to death!” And he reaches for his pocket right away.
At this, my sense of shame awakens, I stagger up to the wall again and hold on to it. I watch the “Commander” rummaging in his purse but don’t say anything. He hands me a ten-krone bill. He doesn’t make a big fuss about it, he simply gives me ten kroner. At the same time he repeats that it wouldn’t do for me to starve to death.
I stammered an objection and didn’t accept the bill right away: I ought to feel ashamed . . . besides, it was far too much. . . .
“Hurry up,” he says, looking at his watch. “I’ve been waiting for the train and now I hear it coming.”
I took the money. Paralyzed with joy, I didn’t say another word, even forgetting to thank him.
“There’s no need to feel embarrassed about it,” the “Commander” says at last. “You can always write for it, you know.”
Then he left.
When he had gone a few steps I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t thanked the “Commander” for his help. I tried to overtake him but couldn’t move fast enough, my legs gave way and I was c
onstantly on the point of falling on my face. He got farther and farther away. Giving up the attempt, I thought of shouting after him but didn’t dare, and when I finally took heart all the same and called once or twice, he was already too far away—my voice had grown too weak.
I stood there on the sidewalk and followed him with my eyes, crying quietly. Did you ever see anything like it! I said to myself; he gave me ten kroner! I walked back and placed myself where he had stood and imitated all his movements. Then I held the bill up to my moist eyes, inspected it on both sides and began to swear, hurling a wild oath into the blue inane: there was no mistake about it, I was holding a ten-krone bill in my hand.
A while afterward—perhaps a very long while, for it had grown fairly quiet everywhere by this time—I stood, strangely enough, in front of 11 Tomte Street. It was here I had swindled a coachman who had driven me once, and it was here I had walked straight through the house without being seen by anybody.15 After collecting myself for a moment and wondering, I went through the door for the second time, straight into “Refreshments and Lodging for Travelers.” Here I asked to be put up for the night and was given a bed right away.16
Tuesday.
Sunshine and calm weather, a wonderfully clear day. The snow was gone; gaiety and good cheer everywhere, happy faces, smiles and laughter. The jets of water rising from the fountains formed arcs that turned golden from the sun, bluish from the blue sky.
Around noon I left my lodging on Tomte Street, where I was still staying and doing fine on the “Commander’s” ten-krone bill, and went out. I was in exuberant spirits and loafed about all afternoon in the most crowded streets, observing the people. It wasn’t yet seven o’clock when I took a stroll to St. Olaf Place and peeped on the sly up at the windows of number two. In an hour I would see her! I was caught up in a mild, delicious fear the whole time. What would happen? What should I say when she came down the stairs? Good evening, miss? Or just smile? I decided to settle for the smile. Of course I would make a deep bow to her.
