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By Root 949 0

But now I’ll assume that you have nerves of steel, that you don’t even know what it is to be nervous. Let’s go on! You still walk the streets, you meet hundreds of people and pass them by indifferently. But suddenly—as you come down to the docks and stop outside a poor little one-story house without curtains, but with white flowers in the window—a man comes toward you who somehow impresses you immediately. There is nothing unusual about him other than the fact that he’s poorly dressed and walks with a slight stoop; it’s the first time you’ve ever come across him, and you have a bizarre intuition that the man’s name is Johannes. Johannes, just so. Why, exactly, do you feel that his name is Johannes? That you cannot explain to yourself, but you can read it in his eyes, tell by his gestures, hear it in the sound of his footsteps; and it’s not because you have ever met someone else who looked like him and whose name was Johannes, no, it’s not because of that. For you never met anyone the man reminds you of. But there you are with your wonderment and your mysterious feeling, unable to explain any of it.”

“Have you met such a person here in town?”

“No, no,” he hastened to reply, “I just presuppose it—the town, the one-story house and the man, I presuppose them all. But it’s queer, isn’t it? ... And there are other mysterious things happening: You come to a strange town and enter a strange house, let’s say a hotel, one you’ve never been to before. All at once you have the distinct feeling that at one time, many years ago maybe, there was a pharmacy in this house. What gives you that idea? There are no indications of it, no one ever told you, there’s no smell of medicine, none, no marks on the walls from shelves and no track on the floor left by a counter. And yet you know in your heart that so and so many years ago there was a pharmacy in that house! You’re not mistaken, you are momentarily filled with a mysterious intimate knowledge that reveals hidden things to you. Perhaps it has never happened to you?”

“I haven’t thought about this before. But now that you mention it, I believe it has happened to me, too. At any rate, I’m often afraid of the dark, frightened for no reason. But maybe that’s something else.”

“God only knows what is one thing and what something else! There are so many things between heaven and earth, mysterious, delightful, unparalleled things, truly unexplainable presentiments, dumb terrors that make you tremble with uneasiness. Imagine that you hear someone prowling along the walls on a dark night. You’re wide awake, sitting at the table smoking a pipe, but your senses are off guard. Your head is full of plans you’re grappling with, and you are extremely anxious to master these plans to the last detail. Then you suddenly hear, quite distinctly, someone prowling along the walls outside, following the paneling, or even in your room, over by the stove, where you can see a shadow on the fire wall. You remove the lampshade to have more light and walk up to the stove. As you stand before the shadow, you see a person unknown to you, a man of average height with a black-and-white woolen scarf around his neck and with completely blue lips. He looks like the jack of clubs in a Norwegian deck of cards. I shall assume that you are more curious than scared, so you press the fellow hard, hoping to sweep him away with a glance; but he doesn’t budge, though you are so close to him you can see him blink, making you realize he’s just as alive as yourself. Then you try a humorous approach, and you say, though you’ve never seen him before, ‘Your name wouldn’t by any chance be Homan, would it, Bernt Homan?’ you say. And when he doesn’t answer, you decide to call him Homan and say, ‘Why the hell shouldn’t you be a Bernt Homan?’ And then you sneer at him. But he still doesn’t budge, and you are at your wits’ end what to do with him. Then you back away a step, jab at him with your pipe stem and say, ‘Bah!’ But he doesn’t crack a smile. Well, that does it! Annoyed, you give the man a regular poke. But although he appears to be someplace