Hjalmar Söderberg translated by Charles Wharton Stork
One day in April many years ago, in the time when I still wondered about the meaning of life, I went into a little cigar booth on a back street to buy a cigar. I selected a dark and angular El Zelo, stuffed it into my case, paid for it, and made ready to go. But at that moment it occurred to me to show the young girl who stood in the booth, and of whom I used often to buy my cigars, a little sketch in India ink, which I happened to have lying in a portfolio. I had got it from a young artist, and to my thinking it was very fine. “Look here,” said I, handing it to her. “What do you think of that?” She took it in her hand with interested curiosity and looked at it very long and closely. She turned it in various directions, and her face took on an expression of strained mental activity. “Well, what does it mean?” she asked finally with an inquisitive glance. I was a little surprised. “It doesn’t mean anything in particular,” I answered. “It’s just a landscape. That’s the{59} ground and that’s the sky and that there is a road—an ordinary road——” “Yes, I can see that,” she interrupted in a somewhat unfriendly tone; “but I want to know what it means.” I stood there embarrassed and irresolute; I had never happened to think that it ought to mean anything. But her idea was not to be removed; she had now got it into her head that the picture must be some sort of “Where is the cat?” affair. Why otherwise should I have shown it to her? At last she set it up against the window-pane so as to make it transparent. Presumably someone had once shown her a peculiar kind of playing card, which in an ordinary light represents a nine of diamonds or a knave of spades, but which, when one holds it up against the light, displays something indecent. But her investigation brought no result. She gave back the sketch, and I prepared to leave. Then all at once the poor girl grew very red in the face and burst out, with a sob in her throat: “Shame on you! it’s real mean of you to make a fool of me like that. I know very well I’m a poor girl, and haven’t been able to get myself a better education, but still you don’t need to make a fool of me. Can’t you tell me what your picture means?” What was I to answer? I should have given{60} much to be able to tell her what it meant; but I could not, for it meant precisely nothing.
Ah, well, that was many years ago. I now smoke other cigars, which I buy in another shop, and I no longer wonder about the meaning of life—but that is not because I think I have found it.