The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse Read Online Free PDF

now, even if he should see him again!) always talked about Friedrichstrasse, and later on that afternoon when they were alone, also about the Passage.
    The Passage—surely that was the large throughway he had been in on the first afternoon, right after his arrival, where the people had looked at him so oddly that he had become really frightened and had run away? So frightened that ever since he had always made a wide detour around it.
    Young guys had been standing around there, but they had not seemed to him good-looking, rather ugly and common. Were they gathered there looking for some kind of work?
    He did want to go there again and take a closer look at the situation—maybe ask somebody directly. No one could do more than chase him away or laugh at him.
    But suddenly hunger powerfully gripped him again and at the same time his heavy boots, which he had not taken off since yesterday, pained him so that he could go no farther. He had to sit down on the nearest bench under the linden trees and press his hands against his stomach. He was unable to think clearly any longer. In his burning head everything was all mixed up.
    A complete lethargy to everything seized him. It was all the same to him. If he fell down, someone would pick him up. Or let him lie.
    He had sat thus for almost an hour, dully staring straight ahead, his aching head in his hands, when he felt a coin pressed into his hand. He saw only an old, simply dressed woman, who walked away before he could thank her. She had probably been sitting on one of the other benches and observing him for a long time.
    He stared at the money. Ten pennies!
    Bread! he thought first. Then immediately: no—cigarettes!
    Ten pennies’ worth of bread could not fill him and he would have to go hungry anyway. Better to smoke once more.
    Across the way he bought four cigarettes for three pennies each from a peddler. He still had two pennies. He hurriedly chainsmoked them, lighting one from the other.
    He stood up feeling dull and knocked out. Avoiding the middle walkway of Unter den Linden, he walked beside the buildings on the north side. Then, crossing over, he looked for a seat on one of the densely occupied benches opposite the Passage.
    Gloomy and irresolute, he stared through the confusion of carriages at the entrance. Only the hunger that continued to make itself felt kept him awake. Otherwise he would have fallen asleep again here.
    It was the same bench, even the same corner of it, on which he had sat and looked across that first afternoon almost a week ago at this same hour, strange and shy, but oh!—with what other feelings.
    4
    The young man who had arrived in the capital at almost the same time as he spent his first day here in the most cheerless and tiring of all activities—the search for a room.
    Disgusted by almost all the lodgings, the triviality of their furniture, the impossible manner of their landladies, he had arrived, half dead and despairing, at a dead-end street. He was reluctant to enter at first, but then was drawn by its obvious peace and quiet. The street had houses on one side only, the other side being taken up by the high firewall of a large warehouse followed by another lower wall that apparently led into a neighboring courtyard or garden.
    Only the door of the last of the ten houses on the street showed the usual room-for-rent sign, which he had read probably a hundred times already today.
    The house, which did not have a doorkeeper, seemed quiet and clean.
    The rental room was supposed to be on the second floor to the left.
    He rang.
    A woman dressed entirely in black, with scrawny features and strikingly dark, sharp eyes, opened the door, scrutinized him in a glance, and let him enter.
    The door of the room was close beside the entrance. The room was large and faced the street with two windows. It was fitted out with old-fashioned, but large and comfortable furniture—a sofa with two armrests, an armchair with wings, a desk, and bookcase. A