Victoria (Penguin Classics) by Knut Hamsun

Author:Knut Hamsun [Hamsun, Knut]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2005-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

V

Fall came. Victoria had gone home, and the small, out-of-the-way street lay there as before, with its houses and its silence. In Johannes’ room the lamp burned through the night. It was lighted in the evening when the stars came out and was put out at the crack of dawn. He was working tirelessly, writing his big book.

Weeks and months passed; he was alone and called on nobody, he never went to the Seiers’ anymore. Often his imagination played crazy tricks on him, messing up his book with irrelevant fancies that later had to be erased and trashed. This set him back a great deal. A sudden noise in the nocturnal silence, the rumble of a carriage in the street, would give his thinking a jolt and throw it off course.

Make way for this carriage in the street, watch out!

Why? Why should one watch out for this carriage? It rolled past, by now it may be at the corner. Perhaps a man is in the way; coatless and hatless, he stands there bent forward, meeting the carriage head-on—he’ll be run over, irreparably injured, killed. The man wants to die, that’s his affair. He no longer buttons his shirt, has stopped lacing his shoes in the morning, and goes about with everything open, his chest bare and emaciated; he is to die. . . . A man lying at death’s door wrote a letter to his friend, a note, a small request. The man died, leaving this letter. It had a date and a signature, it was written with capital and small letters, though he who wrote it was to die within the hour. It was so strange. He had even made the usual flourish under his name. And an hour later he was dead. . . . There was another man. He lies alone in a small room, painted blue and with wood paneling. So what? Oh, nothing. In the whole wide world, he’s the one who is going to die. Preoccupied by this, he thinks about it to the point of exhaustion. He can see it is evening, that the clock on the wall says eight, and he can’t figure out why it doesn’t strike. The clock doesn’t strike. Actually, it’s a few minutes past eight and it keeps on ticking, but it doesn’t strike. Poor man, his brain is already going to sleep, the clock has struck and he didn’t notice. He pricks a hole in his mother’s picture on the wall—what does he want with this picture now, and why should it remain whole when he’s gone? His weary eyes fall on the flowerpot on the table and, stretching out his hand, he slowly and deliberately pulls the large flowerpot to the floor, where it goes to pieces. Why should it stand there, whole? Then he throws his amber cigarette holder out the window. What does he need that for anymore? It seems quite obvious that it doesn’t have to be left behind. And in a week the man was dead.

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