by Knut Hamsun
I talked at length about these burns which my soul had suffered. But the longer I talked, the more anxious she became; finally she said “Oh, my God!” in despair a couple of times, wringing her hands. I could see quite well that I was torturing her, and I didn’t want to torture her but did so anyway. At last I thought I had managed to tell her the broad essentials of what I had to say. I was moved by her despairing look and cried:
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving! Can’t you see I have my hand on the latch already? Goodbye! Goodbye, do you hear? You could at least answer when I say goodbye twice, all ready to leave. I don’t even ask to see you again, because it would cause you pain. But tell me, Why didn’t you leave me alone? What have I ever done to you? I didn’t get in your way, did I? Why do you suddenly turn away from me, as if you don’t know me any longer? You have plucked me thoroughly clean, made me more wretched than I’ve ever been. But, good God, I’m not insane. You know very well if you stop and think that there’s nothing wrong with me now. So, come here and give me your hand! Or let me come to you. Will you? I won’t do you any harm, I’ll just kneel before you a moment, kneel on the floor right there, in front of you, for just a moment; may I? No, no, then I won’t do it, I can see you’re scared, I won’t, I won’t do it, do you hear? Good God, why are you getting so frightened? I’m standing still after all, I’m not budging. I would’ve kneeled down on the carpet for a minute, right there, on that red spot near your feet. But you got scared, I could tell by your eyes right away that you got scared, and so I stood still. I didn’t move one step while I was asking you to let me, did I? I stood just as motionless as I do now, showing you the place where I would’ve kneeled before you, over there on that red rose in the carpet. I’m not even pointing with my finger, I’m not pointing at all, I’m holding off not to alarm you; I’m just nodding and looking over there, like this! You understand very well which rose I mean, but you won’t allow me to kneel there; you’re afraid of me and don’t dare come near me. I don’t understand how you could have the heart to call me crazy. You don’t believe that any longer, do you? There was a time last summer, long ago, when I was crazy; I was working too hard and forgot to go to dinner on time when I had a lot to think about. It happened day after day; I ought to have remembered but constantly forgot about it. I swear to God, it’s true! May God never let me out of this place alive if I’m lying! So, you see, you’re doing me an injustice. It wasn’t out of need that I did it; I have credit, lots of credit, at Ingebret’s and Gravesen’s. Also, I often had plenty of money in my pocket, and yet I didn’t buy any food because I forgot to. Do you hear? You don’t say a word, you don’t answer me, you don’t budge from the fireplace, you just stand there waiting for me to go. . . .”
She came quickly over to me and held out her hand. I looked at her full of distrust. Was she doing this freely, with a light heart? Or was she doing it just to get rid of me? She put her arm around my neck, tears in her eyes. I just stood and looked at her. She offered me her mouth but I couldn’t believe her, it was bound to be a sacrifice on her part, a means of getting it over with.
She said something, it sounded to me like, “I love you anyway!” She said it very softly and indistinctly, I may not have heard it correctly, perhaps she didn’t say exactly those words. But she threw herself passionately on my neck, held both arms around my neck a little while, even raised herself on tiptoe to reach well up, and stood thus.
Afraid that she was forcing herself to show me this tenderness, I merely said, “How beautiful you are now!”
That was all I said.28 I stepped back, bumped against the door and walked out backwards. She was left standing inside.
PART FOUR
WINTER HAD COME, a raw and wet winter with hardly any snow, a dark and foggy everlasting night without a single fresh gust of wind all week long. The street lamps were lighted almost all day, and yet people kept running into one another in the fog. All sounds, the peal of the church bells, the harness bells on the cab horses, peoples’s voices, the hoofbeats—everything came through so muffled in the heavy air, as though it was buried. Week after week went by and the weather remained the same.
I was still staying down in the Vaterland section.
I became more and more attached to this tavern, this rooming house for travelers, where I had been allowed to stay despite being so down-and-out. My money had been used up long ago, but I continued to come and go in the house, as if I were entitled to it and belonged there. The landlady hadn’t said a word yet, but it worried me nonetheless that I couldn’t pay her. Three weeks went by in this way.
I had resumed my writing several days ago, but I was no longer able to come up with anything I was satisfied with; I had no luck at all anymore, though I worked very hard and kept trying at all times. It was no use whatever I tried, my luck was gone.
I was sitting in a room on the second floor, the best guest room, when I made these attempts. I had been left undisturbed up there since that first evening, when I had money and could pay up. I kept hoping all along I might finally put together an article about something or other, so I could pay for my room and whatever else I owed; that was why I was working so hard. In particular, I had started a piece for which I had high expectations, an allegory about a fire in a bookstore, a profound idea that I would take the utmost pains to work out and bring to the “Commander” as an installment on my debt. Then the “Commander” would realize he had helped a real talent this time; I had no doubt he would realize that, I just had to wait for the inspiration to come. And why shouldn’t the inspiration come, even very soon? There was nothing the matter with me anymore; I got a little food from my landlady every day, a few sandwiches morning and evening, and my nervousness was all but gone. I no longer had rags around my hands when I wrote, and I could look down into the street from my second-floor windows without getting dizzy. I was doing much better in every way, and I was actually beginning to wonder why I hadn’t yet finished my allegory. I couldn’t understand what the explanation was.
One day I was at last to get an inkling of how weak I had really become, how sluggishly and ineptly my brain was working. That day my landlady came upstairs with a bill which she asked me to look at. There must be something wrong with the bill, she said, it didn’t tally with her own books; but she hadn’t been able to find the mistake.
I set about adding it up; my landlady sat directly opposite, watching me. I added up the twenty items first once down, and found the total to be correct, then once up and came again to the same result. I looked at the woman sitting right in front of me, waiting for my word; I noticed immediately that she was pregnant, it didn’t escape my attention though I looked anything but closely at her.
“The sum is correct,” I said.
“Check every item, will you,” she answered. “It can’t be that much, I’m sure it can’t.”
I began to review every item: two loaves of bread at 25 each; one lamp glass, 18; soap, 20; butter, 32. . . . No clever head was needed to go through these rows of numbers, this piddling huckster’s bill which wasn’t the least bit complicated, and I tried honestly to find the mistake the woman was talking about, but couldn’t. After grappling with these figures for a few minutes, I felt, unhappily, that everything started spinning in my head; I no longer distinguished between debit and credit but mixed it all up. Finally, I froze in my tracks all of a sudden at the following item: 1pounds of cheese at 32 a pound. My brain was completely stumped, I stared stupidly down at that cheese and couldn’t get anywhere.
“I’m damned if I ever saw such a screwed-up way of putting things!” I said desperately. “Here it says flatly, God help me, ten-sixteenths of cheese. Ha-ha, who ever heard of anything like that! Here, see for yourself!”
“Yes,” the matron answered, “that’s the way it’s usually written. It’s the clove cheese. Oh yes, that’s correct! Ten-sixteenths, that’s ten ounces—”
“That much I understand!” I broke in, though in fact I didn’t understand a thing anymo
re.
I tried again to tackle this little sum, which I could have added up in a minute a few months ago. Perspiring heavily, I applied myself to those enigmatic figures with all my might, blinking my eyes thoughtfully as if I were studying the matter real hard; but I had to give up. Those ten ounces of cheese finished me completely; it was as though something had snapped in my head.
However, to give the impression that I was still working on my computations, I moved my lips and spoke some number aloud every now and then, all the while sliding further and further down the bill as if I were making steady progress and getting close to the finish. The matron was waiting. Finally I said, “Well, now I have gone through it from beginning to end, and there is really no mistake, as far as I can see.”
“There isn’t?” the woman replied. “What, there isn’t?” But it was quite apparent that she didn’t believe me. And suddenly her speech seemed to take on a touch of contempt, a slightly indifferent tone which I hadn’t heard in her voice before. She said that maybe I wasn’t used to figuring with sixteenths; she also said she would have to turn to someone who was up on things to get the bill properly checked. She didn’t say all this in any hurtful manner, to put me to shame, but thoughtfully and seriously. When she stood at the door about to leave, she said, without looking at me, “Excuse me for taking up your time!”
She left.
Shortly afterward the door opened again and my landlady came in once more; she could hardly have gone further than the hallway before turning around.
“By the way,” she said, “you mustn’t be offended, but you do owe me some money by now, don’t you? It was three weeks ago yesterday since you came, wasn’t it? I figured it was, anyway. It’s not easy to manage with such a big family, so I’m afraid I can’t let anyone stay here on credit—”
I stopped her.
“I’m working on an article, as I mentioned to you before,” I said, “and as soon as it’s finished you’ll get your money. There’s no need to worry.”
“But you won’t ever finish that article, will you?”
“You think so? I may feel inspired to write tomorrow, or maybe even tonight; it’s not at all impossible that the inspiration will come sometime tonight, and then my article will be finished in a quarter of an hour, at the most. You see, it’s not the same with my work as with other people’s; I can’t just sit down and get so much done every day, I have to wait for the right moment. And nobody can tell the day or the hour when the spirit will come upon him. It must take its course.”
My landlady left. But her confidence in me seemed greatly shaken.
As soon as I was alone, I sprang up and started tearing my hair in despair. No, there wasn’t the least hope for me, no hope at all! My brain was bankrupt! Had I turned into an utter idiot, since I couldn’t even figure out the price of a piece of clove cheese anymore? But then, could I have lost my wits as long as I was asking myself questions like that? On top of it all, hadn’t I made the crystal-clear observation in the midst of my efforts with the bill that my landlady was pregnant? I had no basis for knowing that, nobody had told me anything about it, nor did it occur to me haphazardly—I saw it with my own eyes and I understood it immediately, in a moment of desperation at that, when I was figuring with sixteenths! How was I to explain that?
I walked to the window and looked out; my window faced Vognmand Street. Some children were playing on the pavement below, poorly dressed children in the middle of a poverty-stricken street. They were tossing an empty bottle back and forth amid loud yells. A moving van rolled slowly by; it must have been an evicted family, since they were moving at such an unusual time of year. This thought came to me immediately. The van was loaded with bedding and furniture, worm-eaten beds and chests of drawers, red-painted chairs with three legs, mats, scrap iron, tin articles. A little girl, a mere child, a downright ugly brat with a runny nose, was sitting on top of the load, holding on with her poor blue hands to keep from falling off. She sat on a bunch of ghastly, wet mattresses that had been slept on by children, and looked down at the small fry tossing the empty bottle among themselves.
I was watching all this and hadn’t the least difficulty understanding what was going on. While I stood there at the window observing it, I could also hear my landlady’s maid singing in the kitchen, right beside my room; I knew the tune she was singing and was listening on purpose to hear if she would make a mistake. I said to myself that no idiot could have done all this; I was, thank God, as much in my senses as anyone.
Suddenly I saw two of the children in the street leaping up and starting to wrangle, two small boys; I knew one of them, my landlady’s son. I open the window to hear what they are saying to each other, and instantly a flock of children crowd together under my window and look up wish-fully. What were they waiting for? Something to be thrown down? Dried-up flowers, bones, cigar stubs, something or other they could chew on or amuse themselves with? They looked up at my window with infinitely wistful eyes, their faces blue with cold. In the meantime the two small enemies continue to bawl each other out. Words swarm out of their childish mouths like big clammy monsters, horrible nicknames, gutter language, and sailors’ cuss words they may have picked up at the docks. They’re both so engrossed in this that they don’t notice my landlady, who comes rushing out to learn what’s up.
“Why,” her son explains, “he grabbed me by the wea sand, it took me a long time to get my wind back.” Then, turning toward the little malefactor, who is laughing maliciously at him, he flies into a rage and yells, “Go and fry in hell, you Chaldean beast! That a lousy bastard like you should dare grab people by the throat! By golly, I’ll—”
And the mother, this pregnant woman who dominates the whole length of the narrow street with her belly, answers the ten-year-old, seizing him by the arm to pull him along, “Ssh! Shut your trap! So you swear too, do you! You’re shooting your mouth off like someone who’s spent years in a whorehouse! Now, get yourself inside!”
“No, I won’t!”
“Oh yes, you will!”
“No, I won’t!”
I stand at the window and see the mother’s anger rising. This ghastly scene upsets me terribly, I cannot take it any longer and call down to the boy to come up to me a moment. I call twice just to distract them, trying to break it up; my last call is very loud and the mother turns around bewildered and looks up at me. But she regains her composure on the spot, looks at me brazenly, downright arrogantly, and then marches off with a reproachful remark to her son. Talking loudly for my benefit, she says to him, “Pfoo! You should be ashamed of yourself, letting people see how bad you are!”
In all that I observed in this way there was nothing, not even a tiny incidental circumstance, that escaped me. My attention was most alert, every little thing was sensitively picked up, and I had my own ideas about these matters as they occurred. So there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with my sanity. As things were, how could there possibly be anything the matter with it?
Now, look here, I said all of a sudden, you have been bothering yourself about your sanity long enough, making yourself anxious on that score; now let’s put a stop to these tomfooleries! Is it a sign of insanity to perceive and understand all things as accurately as you do? On my word, you almost make me laugh at yourself; it does have its humorous side, you know. In short, everyone gets stuck once in a while, and precisely in the simplest things. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s pure chance. As I’ve said, I’m only a hairs-breadth away from having a good laugh at you. As far as that grocery bill is concerned, those piddling ten-sixteenths of a poor man’s cheese, I might call it—hee-hee, a cheese with cloves and pepper in it—as far as this ridiculous cheese is concerned, the very best among us might have been stupefied by that. The very smell of that cheese could finish a man. . . . And I held all clove cheese up to the most vicious ridicule. . . . No, give me something edible! I said. Give me, if you please, ten-sixteenths of good creamery butter! That’s something else!
I la
ughed frantically at my own cracks, finding them terribly funny. There was really nothing wrong with me anymore, I was in my right mind.1
My gaiety kept rising as I paced the floor talking to myself; I laughed aloud and felt mighty glad. It really looked as though all I needed was this brief happy hour, this moment of truly carefree delight without a worry on the horizon, to get my head in working order. I sat down at the table and started busying myself with my allegory. It went very well, better than it had in a long while. It didn’t go fast, but I thought the little I accomplished was altogether first-rate. Also, I worked for about an hour without getting tired.
I am right now at a very important point in my allegory about a fire in a bookstore. It seemed to me so important that everything else I had written counted for nothing as compared to this point. I was about to express, in a truly profound way, the idea that it wasn’t books that were burning, it was brains, human brains, and I wanted to make a veritable Bartholomew’s Night out of those burning brains. Suddenly my door was opened in great haste and my landlady came barging in. She strode to the middle of the room, without even stopping on the threshold.
I gave a little hoarse cry; indeed, I felt as though I had received a blow.
“What?” she said. “I thought you said something. We’ve got a new arrival and need this room for him. You can sleep downstairs with us tonight, you’ll have your own bed there too.” And before I had managed to answer her, she began quite casually to gather up my papers on the table, messing them all up.
My happy mood was blown away, I was angry and disheartened and got up at once. I let her clear the table without opening my mouth; I didn’t utter a word. She handed me all the papers.
