First Encounter with Ylajali

The First Encounter with Ylajali occurs on an autumn morning in Christiania, shortly after the narrator has pawned his waistcoat for a shilling and eaten a large meal of bread and cheese. The food, taken on a completely empty stomach, has disordered his senses, leaving him in a tantalizing mood, annoyed with himself over a forgotten pencil, and highly disturbed. As he descends Castle Hill, he overtakes two ladies, accidentally brushing one on the arm. She blushes, her high, full bosom heaves violently, and she closes her hand tightly above the handle of her parasol. The narrator, seized with an odd desire to make this lady afraid, to follow her and annoy her in some way, turns back, meets her face-to-face, and on the spur of the moment invents a name he has never heard before—a name with a gliding, nervous sound—Ylajali. He draws himself up and says impressively, "You are losing your book, madam!"

The Pursuit and the Fascination

The narrator's devilment waxes apace; he is fully conscious that he is playing a mad prank but cannot stop himself. His disordered condition runs away with him, and he follows the ladies, making idiotic grimaces behind the lady's back and coughing frantically as he passes her. When they reach Pascha's bookshop, he steps forward and repeats his strange address: "You are losing your book, madam!" The lady, affrighted, cannot grasp his short, passionate address; she has no book with her, yet she fumbles in her pockets, looks down repeatedly at her hands, and exerts her sensitive little brain to the utmost. Her companion declares the narrator drunk. The narrator, strange to himself and absolutely a prey to peculiar invisible inner influences, observes everything around him with gleaming distinctness: a large brown dog with a narrow collar of German silver, a servant-maid cleaning window panes, the blue bird's wings in the ladies' hats, and the plaid silk ribbons round their necks. He concludes they are sisters. The ladies turn, stop at Cisler's music-shop, then return the way they came, passing the narrator again and turning the corner of University Street up towards St. Olav's Place. The narrator is all the time as close at their heels as he dares to be. They turn once and send him a half-fearful, half-questioning look, with no trace of a frown.

The Window and the Name

This forbearance shames the narrator thoroughly; out of sheer gratitude he resolves to follow them with his gaze until they enter some place safely. Outside No. 2, a large four-storeyed house, they turn again before going in. The narrator leans against a lamp-post near the fountain and listens for their footsteps on the stairs; they die away on the second floor. He advances from the lamp-post and looks up at the house. Then something odd happens: the curtains above are stirred, a window opens, a head pops out, and two singular-looking eyes dwell on him. The narrator mutters "Ylajali!" half-aloud and feels he grows red. They stand and look into one another's eyes without moving for a full minute; thoughts dart between the window and the street, and not a word is spoken. She turns round, and the narrator feels a wrench, a delicate shock through his senses—a shoulder that turns, a back that disappears across the floor. That reluctant turning from the window, the accentuation in that movement of the shoulders, feels like a nod to him. His blood is sensible of all the delicate, dainty greeting, and he feels all at once rarely glad. He wheels round and goes down the street, daring not to look back, and escapes down a side street, feeling the pursuing eyes on his neck.

Consequences and Thematic Significance

This first encounter establishes Ylajali as a figure of obsession and fantasy for the narrator, a projection of his desperate need for connection and beauty in a life of grinding poverty and isolation. The invented name 'Ylajali'—with its gliding, nervous sound—becomes a private talisman, a word that will recur in his feverish dreams and hallucinations throughout the novel. The event also demonstrates the narrator's volatile psychological state: his hunger and nervous exhaustion make him susceptible to sudden, irrational impulses, and his acute sensitivity to every detail of his surroundings—the dog's collar, the servant's sleeves, the ribbons on the ladies' hats—reveals a mind stretched to a painful, almost hallucinatory clarity. The encounter is not a conventional romantic meeting but a strange, wordless exchange of glances that leaves the narrator both exhilarated and ashamed, setting the stage for the complex, ambivalent relationship that will unfold in later parts of the book.