Hunger by Knut Hamsun

over my forehead as though I had forgotten something and slink away. When I found myself on the sidewalk again, I felt veritably saved, as if I had just escaped a great danger. And I hurried off.
    Cold and hungry and more and more distressed, I wandered up Karl Johan Street. I began cursing quite loudly and didn’t care if someone could hear me. At the Storting, near the first lion, I suddenly remember, through a fresh association of ideas, a painter I knew, a young person I had once saved from getting slapped in the amusement park and had later visited. I snap my fingers and head for Tordenskjold Street, find a door with the name C. Zacharias Bartel on a card and knock.
    He came to the door himself; he reeked something awful of beer and tobacco.
    â€œGood evening,” I said.
    â€œGood evening. Oh, it’s you. Why the hell have you come so late? It doesn’t really look good by lamplight. I’ve added a haystack since the last time you saw it and made a few alterations. You have to see it in the daytime, it’s no use trying now.”
    â€œLet me see it anyway,” I said. Actually, I didn’t remember which picture he was talking about.
    â€œAbsolutely impossible!” he replied. “It would all look yellow. And then there’s something else”—he came toward me, whispering—”I have a little girl with me tonight, so it just can’t be done.”
    â€œWell, in that case it’s out of the question, of course.”
    I stepped back, said good night and left.
    Apparently there was no alternative but to go out into the woods somewhere. If only the ground hadn’t been so damp! I patted my blanket and felt more and more reconciled to the idea of sleeping under the open sky. I had taken such pains, for such a long time, to find a lodging in town that I was sick and tired of the whole thing. It gave me a sweet sense of pleasure to take it easy, resign myself and drift along the street without a thought in my head. I dropped by the University clock and could see it was after ten, and from there I headed uptown. Someplace in the Hægdehaugen area I stopped outside a grocery store where some food was displayed in the window. A cat lay asleep beside a round loaf of white bread, and just behind it was a bowl of lard and several jars of grits. I stood eyeing these eatables awhile, but since I didn’t have anything to buy with I turned away from them and continued my tramp. I walked very slowly, passed Majorstuen, continued onward, always onward, walked for hours, and finally got out to the Bogstad Woods.
    Here I stepped off the road and sat down to rest. Then I busied myself looking for a likely place, began to scrape together some heather and juniper twigs and made a bed on a small slope where it was fairly dry, opened my parcel and took out the blanket. I was tired and fagged out from the long walk and went to bed at once. I tossed and turned many times before I finally got settled; my ear hurt—it was a bit swollen from the blow of the fellow on the hay load and I couldn’t lie on it. I took off my shoes and placed them under my head, with the big wrapping paper on top of them.
    A brooding darkness was all around me. Everything was still, everything. But up aloft soughed the eternal song of wind and weather, that remote, tuneless hum which is never silent. I listened so long to this endless, faint soughing that it began to confuse me; it could only be the symphonies coming from the whirling worlds above me, the stars intoning a hymn. . . .
    â€œThe hell it is!” I said, laughing aloud to buoy myself up. “It is the night owls of Canaan hooting!”
    I got up, lay down again, put on my shoes and wandered about in the dark, lay down afresh, fought and battled fear and anger until the early morning hours, when I finally fell asleep.
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    It was broad daylight when I opened my eyes, and I had a hunch it was almost noon. I pulled on my shoes,