Hunger (6 page)

I wandered about debating this matter, unable to get it out of my mind; I discovered the weightiest objections to the Lord's arbitrariness in letting me suffer for everybody else's sake. Even after I had found a bench and sat down, this question continued to occupy me, hindering me from thinking about anything else. From that day in May when my adversities had begun I could clearly perceive a gradually increasing weakness, I seemed to have become too feeble to steer or guide myself where I wanted to go; a swarm of tiny vermin had forced its way inside me and hollowed me out. What if God simply intended to annihilate me? I stood up and paced back and forth in front of my bench.

My whole being was at this moment filled with the utmost anguish; even my arms ached, and I could barely endure carrying them in the usual way. I also felt a marked discomfort from my recent big meal. Glutted and irritated, I walked to and fro without looking up; the people who came and went around me glided by like flickering shadows. Finally my bench was taken by a couple of gentlemen who lighted their cigars and chatted loudly; I became angry and meant to speak to them, but turned around and went all the way to the other end of the park, where I found another bench for myself. I sat down.

The thought of God began to occupy me again. It seemed to me quite inexcusable for him to meddle every time I applied for a job and thus upset everything, since all I was asking for was my daily bread. I had noticed distinctly that every time I went hungry for quite a long time it was as though my brain trickled quietly out of my head, leaving me empty. My head grew light and absent, I could no longer feel its weight on my shoulders, and I had the impression that my eyes showed a too wide stare when I looked at somebody.

As I sat there on the bench pondering all this, I felt increasingly bitter toward God for his continual oppressions. If he meant to draw me closer to himself and make me better by torturing me and casting adversity my way, he was slightly mistaken, that I could vouch for. And nearly crying with defiance, I looked up toward heaven and told him so once and for all, inwardly.

Fragments of my childhood teachings came back to me, the cadences of the Bible rang in my ears, and I spoke softly to myself, cocking my head sarcastically. Wherefore did I take thought what I should eat, what I should drink, and wherewithal I should clothe this wretched bag of worms called my earthly body? Had not my heavenly Father provided for me as he had for the sparrows of the air, and had he not shown me the grace of pointing at his humble servant? God had stuck his finger down into the network of my nerves and gently, quite casually, brought a little confusion among the threads. And God had withdrawn his finger and behold!—there were fibers and delicate filaments on his finger from the threads of my nerves. And there was a gaping hole after his finger, which was God's finger, and wounds in my brain from the track of his finger. But where God had touched me with the finger of his hand he let me be and touched me no more, and allowed no evil to befall me. He let me go in peace, and he let me go with that gaping hole. And no evil shall befall me from God, who is the Lord through all eternity. . . .

Gusts of music are borne on the wind toward me from the Students' Promenade. So it must be past two. I got out my paper and things to try and write something, and as I did so my book of shaving coupons fell out of my pocket. I opened it and counted the pages—there were six coupons left. Thank God! I burst out; I could still get myself a shave for several weeks and look good! My spirits rose immediately because of this little possession that I still had left; I smoothed the coupons out carefully and put the book away in my pocket.

But write—no, I couldn't do it. After a few lines nothing more occurred to me; my thoughts were elsewhere and I couldn't pull myself together to make any definite effort. I was acted on and distracted by everything around me, all that I saw gave me new impressions. Flies and gnats stuck to the paper and disturbed me; I blew on them to make them go away, then blew harder and harder, but it was no use. The little pests lean back and make themselves heavy, putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend. They just cannot be made to budge. Having found something to latch on to, they brace their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper and stand stock-still until they find it convenient to go away.

Those little monsters continued to occupy me for quite a while, and I crossed my legs and took my time observing them. All at once a couple of loud, piercing clarinet notes reached me from the Students' Promenade, giving my thoughts a fresh impetus. Discouraged at not being able to prepare my article, I stuck the papers in my pocket again and leaned back on the bench. At this moment my head is so clear that I can think the most subtle thoughts without tiring. As I lie there in this position, letting my eyes wander down my breast and legs, I notice the twitching motion made by my foot at each beat of my pulse. I sit up halfway and look down at my feet, and at this moment I experience a fantastic, alien state I'd never felt before; a delicate, mysterious thrill spreads through my nerves, as though they were flooded by surges of light. When I looked at my shoes, it was as though I had met a good friend or got back a torn-off part of me: a feeling of recognition trembles through all my senses, tears spring to my eyes, and I perceive my shoes as a softly murmuring tune coming toward me. Weakness! I said harshly to myself, and I clenched my fists and said: Weakness. I mocked myself for these ridiculous feelings, made fun of myself quite consciously; I spoke very sternly and reasonably, and I fiercely squeezed my eyes shut to get rid of my tears. Then I begin, as though I'd never seen my shoes before, to study their appearance, their mimicry when I move my feet, their shape and the worn uppers, and I discover that their wrinkles and their white seams give them an expression, lend them a physiognomy. Something of my own nature had entered into these shoes—they affected me like a breath upon my being, a living, breathing part of me. . . .

I sat there indulging my fancy with these perceptions for quite a while, perhaps a whole hour. A little old man came up and occupied the other end of my bench; as he sat down he drew a heavy sigh after his walk and said, “Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay me!”

As soon as I heard his voice, it was as though a wind swept through my head. I let shoes remain shoes, and it now seemed to me that the confused state of mind I had just experienced belonged to a time long past, perhaps a year or two ago, and was slowly getting erased from my memory. I set about observing the old fellow.

What concern was he of mine, this little man? None, none at all! Except that he was holding a newspaper in his hand, an old issue with the ad page up front in which something seemed to be wrapped up. I became curious and couldn't take my eyes off that paper; I had the insane idea that it might be an unusual newspaper, in a class by itself; my curiosity increased and I began to move back and forth on the bench. It might contain documents, dangerous records stolen from some archive! The thought of some secret treaty, a plot, hovered before me.

The man sat still, thinking. Why didn't he carry his paper the way every other person did, with its name on the outside? What sort of tricks was he up to? It didn't look like he would ever let go of his parcel, not for anything in the world, he might even be afraid to entrust it to his own pocket. I could bet my life there was more in this matter of the parcel than met the eye.

I gazed straight ahead of me. The very fact that it was so impossible to penetrate this mysterious affair made me beside myself with curiosity. I searched my pockets for something I could give the man in order to start a conversation with him; I got hold of my shaving book but put it away again. Suddenly I took it into my head to be utterly shameless, patted my empty breast pocket and said, “May I offer you a cigarette?”

No thanks, the man didn't smoke, he'd had to quit to spare his eyes—he was nearly blind. “But many thanks anyway!”

Had his eyes been ailing for a long time? Then he couldn't even read maybe? Not even the papers?

Not even the papers, he was sorry to say.

The man looked at me. Those sick eyes were each covered with a film which gave them a glazed look; they appeared whitish and made a repellent impression.

“You're a stranger here?” he said.

“Yes.” Couldn't he even read the name of the paper he was holding in his hand?

“Hardly.” Anyway, he had heard right away that I was a stranger, something in my accent had told him. It took so little, his hearing was very good; at night when everybody was asleep he could hear the people in the next room breathing. . . . “What I wanted to ask was, where do you live?”

A lie appeared full-fledged in my head on the spur of the moment. I lied automatically, without meaning to and with no ulterior motive, and replied, “At 2 St. Olaf Place.”

“Really?” The man knew every stone in St. Olaf Place. There was a fountain, some street lamps, a couple of trees, he remembered it all. . . . “What number do you live at?”

Wanting to make an end of it, I got up, driven to extremities by my idea about the newspaper. The secret had to be cleared up, no matter the cost.

“If you can't read that paper, then why—”

“At number 2, did you say?” the man went on, without paying any attention to my restlessness. “At one time I used to know every person in number 2. What's the name of your landlord?”

I hit upon a name in a hurry to get rid of him, a name made up on the spot, and spat it out to stop my tormentor.

“Happolati,” I said.

“Happolati, yes,” the man nodded, without losing a syllable of this difficult name.

I looked at him with amazement; he appeared very serious, with a thoughtful air. No sooner had I uttered this stupid name that had popped into my head than the man was comfortable with it and pretended to have heard it before. Meanwhile he put his parcel away on the bench, and I felt my nerves tingling with curiosity. I noticed that there were a couple of grease spots on the paper.

“Isn't he a sailor, your landlord?” the man asked, without a trace of irony in his voice. “I seem to remember that he was a sailor.”

“A sailor? Pardon me, it must be his brother that you know; this, you see, is J. A. Happolati, the agent.”

I thought that would finish him off, but the man acquiesced in everything.
¹

“He's supposed to be an able man, I've heard,” he said, feeling his way.

“Oh, a shrewd man,” I replied, “a real business capacity, agent for all sorts of things, lingonberries to China, feathers and down from Russia, hides, wood pulp, writing-ink—”

“Hee-hee, I'll be damned!” the old man broke in, extremely animated.

This was beginning to get interesting. The situation was running away with me, and one lie after another sprang up in my head. I sat down again, forgot about the paper and the remarkable documents, became excited and interrupted him when he spoke. The little dwarf 's gullibility made me reckless, I felt like stuffing him full of lies come what may, driving him from the field in grand style.

Had he heard about the electric hymn book that Happolati had invented?

“What, an elec—?”

With electric letters that shone in the dark? A quite magnificent enterprise, millions of kroner involved, foundries and printing shops in operation, hosts of salaried mechanics employed, as many as seven hundred men, I'd heard.

“Just as I have always said,” the man remarked, softly. That was all he said; he believed every word I had told him and still wasn't bowled over. This disappointed me a little, I had expected to see him utterly bewildered by my inventions.

I came up with a couple of other desperate lies, taking a mad gamble by hinting that Happolati had been a cabinet minister in Persia for nine years. “You may not have any idea what it means to be a cabinet minister in Persia,” I said. It was more than being king here, about the same as a sultan, if he knew what that was. But Happolati had managed it all and was never at a loss. And I told him about Ylajali, his daughter, a fairy princess who owned three hundred women slaves and slept on a bed of yellow roses; she was the loveliest creature I had ever seen, I hadn't seen anything in all my life that matched her loveliness, God strike me dead if I had!

“She was that pretty, was she?” the old man remarked with an absent air, looking down at the ground.

Pretty? She was gorgeous, she was ravishingly sweet! Eyes like raw silk, arms of amber! A single glance from her was as seductive as a kiss, and when she called me her voice went straight to my heart, like a jet of wine. And why shouldn't she be that beautiful? Did he think she was a bill collector or something or other in the Fire Department? She was simply divine, he could take it from me, a fairy tale.

“I see,” the man said, somewhat confused.

His composure bored me; I had gotten excited by the sound of my own voice and spoke in dead earnest. The stolen archival papers, the treaty with some foreign power or other, these no longer occupied my thoughts; the little flat parcel lay there on the bench between us, but I no longer had the least desire to examine it and see what was in it. I was completely taken up with my own tales, wonderful visions hovered before my eyes, the blood rushed to my head and I lied like a trooper.

At this moment the man seemed to want to leave. Raising his body slightly, he asked, so as not to break off the conversation too abruptly, “This Mr. Happolati is supposed to own vast properties, isn't he?”

How did that disgusting, blind old duffer dare play around with the foreign name I had invented, as if it was just an ordinary name, one you could see on any huckster's sign in town! He never stumbled over a single letter and never forgot a syllable; this name had taken firm hold of his brain and struck root instantly. I felt chagrined, and indignation began to stir in my heart against this person whom nothing could baffle and nothing make suspicious.