Hunger Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œIsn’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.”
    â€œA 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
    â€œHe’s supposed to be an able man, I’ve heard,” he said, feeling his way.
    â€œOh, 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—”
    â€œHee-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?
    â€œWhat, 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.
    â€œJust 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!
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œI 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