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

smaller room joined it, which served as a bedroom and got its light from the front room.
    Altogether it made a somewhat cold but very clean impression.
    Bath and toilet were opposite; the landlady’s own rooms were at the dark end of the hall. Therefore, completely independent of her! the young man thought with satisfaction.
    The lodgings were all together not bad.
    But the wall? Was it possible to stand the sight of that bare wall across the way for long without going crazy?
    Then he considered that he would mainly be in only evenings, when it was beginning to be dark or was already dark, that he would see it and have to endure it at most on Sundays. The quiet and peacefulness of the street decided the matter. Carriages would almost never come by, and seldom pedestrians.
    A few more questions, concisely asked and briefly answered, and he made his decision.
    The price was no problem. It was the usual and he immediately paid a month in advance.
    With a clear, firm handwriting he signed his name, “Hermann Graff,” on a registration card, and a couple of hours later he had already moved into his new quarters.
    *
    The following day, after a long sleep, he started his new job in the large publishing house.
    He was assigned his place in the multi-office concern—a wheel, one small wheel more in a machine—by a window that faced a courtyard where there was constant life and activity. He read manuscripts and proof sheets, he copied letters and bills. He began to familiarize himself with the work and was among complete strangers: smart and stupid; aspiring and indifferent; friendly and grumbling; old, grown gray in service, and young, still to grow gray. And among books, books, books.
    He had to be at his place by nine o’clock in the morning and remain until five (with an hour break at noon). Then his eight-hour workday ended.
    During the first days of working, he was so tired at day’s end that he only went out in the evenings to eat. Only toward the end of the week did his thoughts return from his new, unaccustomed work to his life.
    What form would it take for him?
    He knew rather well.
    He was a very serious person, very solitary and introverted, who experienced difficulty joining others.
    He had never felt a mother’s love, since he lost her quite early. He had had one friend of his own age, but lost him too when he told him how it was with him (and he suffered a long time under the bitterness of this separation). He had once been in love, long and hopelessly, and he whom he loved had never known that he was loved and in what way. He was unable to lose the love of his father because he never had it. When his father died several months ago, he was firmly decided to come to Berlin. He applied for a position and received it. Now he was here.
    He felt that he could not and must not continue to live as he had done until then—that he had to win and have a human being that he loved. He also knew that this person could only be a boy, such as had been the one he had loved; and he knew finally that he could not seek him out, but rather must find him as one finds good luck.
    He had read much. What’s more: he had thought about it for himself—about the others and about himself. He was sure of the direction of his love, to whom alone it could be directed, must be directed by virtue of the law of his nature.
    Just as his emotions were always directed only toward few people, whereas he was indifferent to the great mass of them (by far the majority of individuals were foreign to him, often distasteful); just as there were only a few books that he could read over and over, only a few picture that he could not view enough—so too he knew that among the many boys there were only a very few individuals whom he would be able to love. Perhaps only one. How could he hope to meet him?
    And yet he did hope.
    Because every life without hope is meaningless.
    *
    Perhaps he had already met him, here and already on the first day?!
    When his