K.

X. Scuffles and Escapes

Karl Rossmann is the little fairy-tale hero who gets thrown into the world. Serious, tenacious, ready for anything, curious, sturdy. He encounters ogres and ogresses, other boys and girls, policemen and vagabonds, to all and each he speaks as an adult, with gravity and propriety. The sentence that precedes him, which has driven him from his homeland and his family, doesn’t in his eyes compromise or cloud the world, which in America appears above all enlarged and multiplied. “How tall it is,” thinks Karl of the Statue of Liberty, as his ship passes slowly by. He’s not surprised when he sees the statue brandishing a sword instead of a torch. Karl observes, takes note. And this will be his approach throughout: to measure the world, its increasing quantities, its doors, its drawers, its compartments, its steps, its floors, its ever-growing number of vehicles. Nothing could be more natural for a boy who has always “been terribly interested in technology.” No doubt he would have become an engineer if they hadn’t sent him off to America. Karl immediately perceives whatever comes along as an element in a series. And this seriality of the perceived alters first and foremost the eye of the perceiver. He’ll come to see himself as substitutable, like one of the many dotlike figures that, seen from above, move through the streets and quickly vanish. Or else the same figures are simply reappearing again and again. The effect would be the same. Repetition of the identical looks the same as endless substitution.

An inexplicable, irrepressible cheerfulness runs through the pages of The Missing Person. The reason for it remains unclear. After his initial stroke of luck in meeting Edward Jakob, the proverbial “American uncle,” Karl Rossmann’s path becomes ever more harrowing. Every step entails some ordeal and seems to lead toward progressive degradation. But Karl has the gift of the great mystics he knows nothing about: he accepts everything that happens to him in the same spirit. He can tell when someone is hostile to him and can stand up for himself when threatened. But he never grows bitter. Karl focuses on one thing: whatever it is he must do, he wants to do it well. Even in the most discouraging situations he manages to tell himself: “It’s just a matter of understanding the mechanism.” He uses the dozens of compartments in the prodigious writing desk that his uncle procured for him with the same care and precision that he will employ in composing, from an array of half-eaten scraps, a presentable breakfast tray for the obese Brunelda.

Kafka in The Missing Person experimented with something that wasn’t congenial to his epoch: epic naïveté. And even for him it was an isolated attempt. His trick in approaching that naïveté was to take a character who wholly embodies it and put him in a place still capable of harboring it: America, as seen through the astonished eyes of a European adolescent at the beginning of the century. On the basis of having read only “The Stoker,” not knowing that it formed the first chapter of a novel, Musil got the point: “It is an intentional naïveté, but it lacks any of naïveté’s unpleasantness. Because it is genuine naïveté, which in literature (exactly like the false kind; that’s not where the difference lies!) is something indirect, complicated, and earned; a longing, an ideal.” Soon thereafter we find the loveliest words ever written about The Missing Person: the novel, Musil says, is sustained by “that feeling of children’s fervent prayers, and it has something of the restless care of well-done homework.”

The air that circulates through The Missing Person is pure adventure-novel air. It’s not that Karl Rossmann’s experiences are so astonishing but rather that the cast of his mind is such that the world appears to him with a strange sharpness of outline. People and objects both. It’s as if Karl were bringing as his gift to America that hyper-real vision that only the objective lens allows us. Stashed in his emigrant’s suitcase: the hallucination of cinema.

The passengers of a European ship are disembarking in New York. A young German realizes he has forgotten his umbrella and goes back to look for it, entrusting his suitcase to a casual acquaintance. Utterly banal, one of those scenes that a novelist — even Dickens, who is Kafka’s model here — devises in order to hasten toward some narrative juncture. But not this time. As soon as Karl turns around and goes back to look for his umbrella, the reader begins to experience an unusual phenomenon: that of sinking into detail. Every little thing suddenly takes on great importance. It stands out in relief, too much relief. Four lines later, when Karl Rossmann finds himself “forced to make his way through countless little spaces, continually curving passageways, short flights of stairs that followed one after the other, and an empty room with an abandoned desk,” we’re already obscurely aware that we’re no longer merely aboard a ship, but in a new land too, where everything is subject to heightened scrutiny and the observing eye feels obliged to fix on every gesture, every step, every feature of the characters. Everything expands; each fragment takes up the entire visual field. An unreasonable tension builds. For a while we wonder why, as if that tension is preparing us for some extraordinary event. But then we forget all that, satisfied by what is already happening. If a hulking German stoker, whose name we don’t even know, complains about injustices suffered at the hands of his boss, Schubal, who seems to prefer foreigners to Germans, and if Karl Rossmann, who has just met him, wants to help him make his case, this captures our interest, as if we were witnessing some divine judgment. And we’re not done sinking into detail yet. As the stoker and Karl Rossmann are presenting themselves to the captain, majestic ships, their flags blowing in the wind, cross paths beyond the room’s three windows — and jutting up behind them: New York. Is this perhaps the first time Karl sees the city? No, it is rather the first time Karl is seen: New York “stared at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers.” Thousands and thousands of eyes converge upon a single figure; they will accompany Karl through his ups and downs, never looking away. This gaze is one reason that every event he’s involved in is so tense and phantasmal, without Karl’s realizing it. A vast, anonymous audience is watching him. It’s the birth of the cinema. But the positions are reversed: this time the audience is up high, toward the sky, and fully lit.

Kafka wanted to portray an “ultra-modern New York.” Great was his disappointment when the first copy of “The Stoker” arrived. On Werfel’s advice, Kurt Wolff had, for the cover image, used an etching of New York Harbor in 1840. A steamer with a tall smokestack, a few sails in the distance, the vague outline of a city in the background. A charming genre scene — but how remote from what the author had intended. No trace, in that strip of low, distant houses, of the watching eyes. Kafka hid his disappointment among expressions of gratitude. He concluded, in mandarin style, by telling Wolff that it was just as well that he hadn’t been shown the cover in advance, since he would have refused it — and in so doing would have “lost that lovely image.”

From the first pages of The Missing Person, the words fall into their rows, always with the same weight, as evenly spaced as lines in a school notebook. This evenness remains characteristic of The Trial and The Castle, even as they advance into murkier, more abstract territories. Everything is related in the manner of Karl Rossmann’s journey through the ship in search of his umbrella. The surface is unfailingly compact, the density constant. Each word demands attention. The precise description of a gesture, a remark about the weather, and a digression on the law are placed on the same level and lead smoothly one into the other. Nothing is glaringly important, nothing is insignificant. Perhaps no other novelist has given readers this calm certainty, such as runners have when they feel the clay track, always uniformly firm and yielding, beneath their feet.

When Kafka was writing The Missing Person, the pervasive, sooty air of the big city, already encountered in Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoevsky, hadn’t yet penetrated the German novel. Now, as soon as Kafka begins to describe New York, the scene stands out with the clarity of the first time—and of the panels of Little Nemo, still wet with Winsor McCay’s colors, which Kafka had never seen.

The Missing Person is extraordinarily visual. In The Trial and The Castle, everything unfolds first of all within an individual’s psyche, and images interpose themselves from time to time, beating their bat wings against the flow of thought. But here they cover, from one corner to the other, a vast external surface, over which Karl Rossmann must travel with his gaze. And so he does, like a good schoolboy. So when certain figures — his uncle, the head cook, Klara Pollunder, or Brunelda — suddenly acquire names and stories of their own, it’s as if they have come to life and taken temporary leave from their stations on that surface. But their mute, cutout shapes remain. And someday they’ll return to lie back down in them, as if into the still-warm depression of a bed.

New York light? It’s “powerful,” “tangible,” always scattering and regathering — to such an extent that it seems as if “a sheet of glass that covers everything were being continually and violently smashed.”

A New York peril: going out onto your own balcony, on first arriving in your room, and staring at the traffic for hours on end, like a “lost sheep.”

The American spell: in his Uncle Jakob’s house, a spacious freight elevator carries Karl’s piano to the sixth floor. And Karl ascends beside it in the elevator for people, remaining always at the same level as the piano. All the while, he gazes through a wall of glass at “the beautiful instrument he now possessed.”

The “first American poem” that Karl learns by heart is a “description of a fire.” He recites the lines to his uncle, who beats the time, as they stand by a window in Karl’s room and watch the darkened sky.

In the middle of New York, on the sixth floor of an iron-frame building, with the windows open wide to the roar of traffic that rises up, together with eddies of odor and dust, from the street, Karl sits at his piano and plays “an old soldier song from his homeland, which the soldiers, from the windows of their barracks in the evenings, sing to each other, from window to window, as they look out into the darkness of the square.” This is Mahler in words. And Karl didn’t rule out, as he lay dreaming in his bed before going to sleep, the possibility that his style of play might exert “a direct influence on the American scene.”

The Pollunders welcome Karl and shower him with kindnesses. But his evening at their country house has a darkly violent undercurrent — mainly because of Green, the sinister messenger whose gestures are precise and sometimes repellent, who gives Karl the impression that their relationship “will eventually be determined by the triumph or annihilation of one or the other of them.” Karl has no idea, at this point, that the moment of annihilation is nigh; it comes when Green, two hours later, reads Karl the letter with which his uncle dismisses him.

His Uncle Jakob, Pollunder, Mack, Klara, Green: these are meticulously detailed and studied figures, created by a master of his craft who specializes in rubber puppets.

Pollunder and Green sit facing each other after dinner. Each has smoked a big cigar, and now, drinks in hand, they’re talking business. But what business? “Someone who didn’t know Mr. Pollunder might very well have thought they were discussing criminal matters rather than business.” But who really knows Mr. Pollunder?

Lyricism in The Missing Person: it’s all the more intense because the prose doesn’t make a show of it. At the Pollunders’ country house, Karl enters the bedroom that has been assigned to him. He sits on the windowsill and observes the night: “A skittish bird seemed to be moving through the leafy branches of the old tree. The whistle of a New York suburban train sounded somewhere out in the countryside. The rest was silence.” Nor does this lyricism need nature in order to resonate. When Karl is working as an elevator boy at the Hotel Occidental, it emerges once again in the dead of night: “He leaned heavily against the railing beside his elevator, slowly eating his apple, which from the first bite had given off a strong perfume, and he looked down, into a light well that was surrounded by the large windows of the storerooms, behind which hung masses of bananas, gleaming dimly in the dark.”

Twice Karl gets cast out into the darkness. First by his parents, then by his American uncle. And each time he’s pushed farther west: from Germany to New York, then from New York to California. In both cases, the preamble to his expulsion is a scuffle with a woman. A bed, a sofa. The robust Karl is smothered, flattened. The first time by a poor cook, amid eiderdowns, quilts, and pillows. The second by an “American girl,” an heiress with red lips and a tight skirt, skilled in jujitsu.

Again and again Karl Rossmann is restrained, his arms or legs immobilized by the use of force and cunning. The original scuffle is the one that blurs into coitus with the maid Johanna, thereby determining Karl’s fate, since Johanna gets pregnant. But other scuffles follow. First Klara, the heiress, then the head porter at the Hotel Occidental, then Robinson, then Delamarche, and finally Brunelda: they all want to block Karl’s escape from some claustrophobic place. A considerable number of the novel’s episodes revolve around these scenes of struggle. Meticulous, prolonged, exasperating descriptions. Observed from a certain distance, Karl’s defining gesture becomes that of wriggling free — the constantly renewed effort to escape a hold or an onslaught, to regain his status as an outcast, a “missing person,” a wandering foreigner. Then one day Karl finds, in the Theater of Oklahama, the ecumenical place where everyone and everything is welcome, is registered and listed on a scoreboard. In his case, under a fictitious name: Negro — a name that evokes a race more than an individual. And it was Karl himself who wanted it that way. Perhaps he can avoid the abuse he suffers as a lone individual only by camouflaging himself in a set, even an abused one.

There’s always something a little diabolical about the scuffles involving Karl Rossmann. They are evil’s stratagems. Evil knows that “the challenge to fight” is one of its “most effective means of seduction.” It knows that every fight is “like the struggle with women, which ends in bed.” That’s just how Karl’s fate has been decided. Now he is wandering through America, waiting for a brutal hand to grab him by his jacket collar and fling him in some new direction, far away: “And he was looking nervously at the policeman’s hand, which might at any moment rise to seize him.”

Together with the vagabonds Robinson and Delamarche, Karl treks against a current of five unbroken lanes of traffic that are rushing toward New York. Everything that teems produces in the end a sense of stasis and quiet. Just as New York, seen from a height, will later strike him as “empty and useless,” surrounded by “a smooth, lifeless ribbon of water,” so now “it was the general calm that surprised Karl the most. Had it not been for the cries of animals obliviously bound for the slaughterhouse, perhaps nothing would have been heard but the clatter of hooves and the hissing of tires.” These are the acoustics of the new world, as if isolated in a lab. But that’s not what Karl Rossmann, still clinging to his suitcase, is thinking.

Karl Rossmann and Jakob von Gunten are kindred characters. To be a pupil in the Benjamenta Institute or an elevator boy at the Hotel Occidental is to aspire to be a zero. “Of course elevator boys mean nothing,” says Karl; for his part, Jakob sees his best friend, Kraus, as “an authentic divine creation, a nothing, a servant” and himself as “a charming, utterly round zero in later life.” Like Jakob, Karl knows that he might from one moment to the next be swept away, by the anger of a head waiter or a head porter, without anyone caring except perhaps Therese and the head cook, and even the cook will approve his sentence in the end. And like Jakob, Karl too could say: “Some day I’ll suffer a stroke, a truly devastating stroke, and then everything, all these confusions, this longing, this ignorance, all of it… this thinking one knows and this never knowing, will end. And yet I want to live, I don’t care how.”

During the course of Karl’s adventures, pride and raw humiliation are at times conjoined, as if this amalgam were the hallmark of his experience. Never is that mark so sharply felt as when Karl tries on his elevator-boy uniform at the Hotel Occidental. “On the outside,” it looks “splendid, with gold buttons and braids.” But when he puts it on, he shudders, “because especially under the arms the jacket was cold, stiff, and at the same time irredeemably damp with the sweat of elevator boys who had worn it before him.”

It’s dawn. All is still quiet in the Hotel Occidental — except in the head waiter’s room, where a trial is under way. The defendant is Karl, the elevator boy. Backed by the head porter, the head waiter accuses Karl of having abandoned his post for several minutes. This scene, squeezed into the smallest of spaces, invisible to the outside world, and as near to insignificance as possible, is the originary cell of every trial, every interrogation, every sentence. Every beginning has something inconsistent and disproportionate about it, from which escape seems easy. But then it leads the defendant (or individual) toward impotence and helplessness: “It’s impossible to defend oneself in the absence of good will,” thinks Karl, with a lucidity that Josef K. will never manage to achieve. The point is that the world does not extend goodwill toward those who pass through it — who are always potential defendants. Something happens in the room of the head waiter of the Hotel Occidental that will spread through all the attics on the outskirts of the big city and will continue to make itself felt as far as the cathedral, or the junk room in a bank. Then too it will happen that someone will shake his head at the accused, as now the head cook does at Karl, and say: “Just causes have a just air about them, and your story, I must confess, does not.” Because no story has “a just air.” These words sentence him. They are spoken by the woman who up until that moment has been Karl’s high protector.

While he’s writing up the report of what has just happened in the barroom, the secretary Momus crumbles a pretzel with caraway seeds. The head waiter of the Hotel Occidental is studying a list and shaking the sugar from a piece of cake. K. and Karl observe them, attentive, tense. It’s as if writing and reading — always mysterious acts — must be accompanied by the scattering of fine particles, by the dissolution of something friable.

When the end is in sight, someone always asks whether we aren’t glad that “everything turned out so well.” And occasionally there’s even someone who, like Karl Rossmann, says: “But of course”—even as he’s wondering “why he ought to be glad to be chased away like a thief.” The simultaneity of his affirmative answer and the silent formulation of the question in his head is decisive.

It’s a mystery how The Missing Person manages to radiate such a sense of happiness and, at the same time, of acute despair. So disconcerting a union would be hard to find anywhere else. Karl passes from servitude to servitude, from humiliation to humiliation, from getting more and more lost to going missing in the world, all the while retaining, as if in his emigrant’s suitcase along with the Verona salami, an unscathed capacity for perceiving what happens to him with a decal-like clarity that in itself prefigures happiness.

Like K.’s assistants, the two vagabonds Delamarche and Robinson are characters from whom there can be no hope of escape. “Rossmann, what would become of you without Delamarche!” says Robinson at one point — and his words sound mocking. But that’s not to say he doesn’t have a point. For Karl, the two vagabonds signify nothing less than a hopeless and increasingly suffocating ensnarement in life.

Dressed in red and holding a red parasol, the obese Brunelda looks out from a balcony on the eighth floor of a “huge tenement block” in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Brunelda is “a fantastic singer,” according to the vagabond Robinson, who is Rossmann’s “living guilt.” She spends her days in semidarkness, lying on a sofa that she fills entirely. She stirs herself from immobility only to swat at the occasional fly. The room is overflowing, mainly with various fabrics. Curtains, clothes, and carpets are piled high. The air is stagnant and dusty. Sitting on the sofa, legs apart, Brunelda needs help taking off her thick white stockings. In her fat little hands, she holds open a tiny fan. Brunelda snorts in her sleep, and even “at times” when she speaks. The singer is quite sensitive. She can’t stand a racket. She suffers frequently from headaches and gout. She moans in her sleep, tormented by “oppressive dreams.” For certain men, including Robinson and Delamarche, Brunelda’s body is irresistible. “She was utterly lickable. She was utterly drinkable”: that’s how Robinson felt the first time he saw her, in a white dress with that red parasol.

Brunelda has become a fugitive for love. She abandoned a rich cocoa manufacturer to follow the vagabond Delamarche. Robinson recounts her deeds as if she were a romantic heroine: “Because of Delamarche, Brunelda sold everything she had and moved here with all her riches, to this apartment on the edge of town, so she could devote herself entirely to him and no one would disturb them, which was what Delamarche wanted too.” Like certain great lovers of the past, Brunelda and Delamarche need solitude and servants who will attend to them in silence. Robinson and Karl are made to serve that purpose in their overstuffed, airless room. The composition of place, in the sense of Saint Ignatius’s exercises, is so perfect that it requires no commentary, merely contemplation.

A particularly violent scuffle between Karl and Delamarche. In the end, Karl’s head gets slammed against a cupboard, and he loses consciousness. When he comes to, an old piece of Brunelda’s lace, still wet, is wrapped like a turban around his head. Pushing aside the curtain, Karl creeps back into the room of his masters and jailers. “The combined breathing of the three sleepers greeted him.” Brunelda, Delamarche, and Robinson form a single body, simultaneously soft and knobby, which Karl bumps against repeatedly in the semidarkness. At one point he feels Robinson’s boot, at another Brunelda’s overflowing flesh. The appendages of a many-headed creature, from which there can be no escape. Even the unyielding student Josef Mendel, that little Talmudist hunched in the night, studying on his balcony, advises Karl “absolutely” to remain in that room. And that word seems a decree intoned by some other voice, “deeper than that of the student,” who might be one of fate’s ventriloquists.

Brunelda, a fat Melusine, enjoys recalling the days when she swam in the Colorado, “the most agile of all her friends.” Now, as Delamarche subjects her to endless ablutions behind chests of drawers and screens, her insidious call sounds again. She invites her servant Robinson to look at her nude body, but as soon as he pops his head in, she and Delamarche seize him and dunk him in the tub. It’s a punishment that Brunelda would like to inflict on Karl too. She’s already lying in wait — and she calls him “our little fellow.”

And then the panicked search for Brunelda’s perfume, among “matted, stuck-together stuff” and through drawers that overflow with powder boxes, hairbrushes, sheet music, letters, English novels. Drawers that, once opened, can’t be closed again. But Karl doesn’t lose heart, because he never loses heart, and he says: “What work can be done now?” Whether it’s learning English, playing the piano, accompanying guests on the elevator, or preparing Brunelda’s breakfast tray, Karl is always ready to apply himself — his good disposition is unassailable. And just as, in the beginning, he came forward to address the ship’s captain on the stoker’s behalf, so now he offers to stand up for the maltreated Robinson, heedless of where he is and of who might be listening with a smirk.

The deeper Karl goes into the vast spaces of America, the more stuck he gets. Not only because someone is always violently detaining him, but also because he is surrounded by boggy terrain. The central source: Brunelda’s room. Robinson explains that the singer “isn’t transportable”—not because she’s sick but because she’s too heavy. To be with her is to sink. A little later we see Karl in a hallway trying, with care and skill, to compose an acceptable breakfast from the remains of the breakfasts of many strangers. He cleans knives and spoons, trims partially eaten rolls, collects leftover milk, scrapes away dribbles of butter, all in order to “remove the evidence of use.” This is the most desperate moment of his adventures. But it is Karl’s gift to be unaware of that. He is focused on his task, even though Robinson assures him that it’s pointless, since “breakfast had often looked much worse.” And, with Brunelda already wolfing it down, reaching out with her “soft, fat hand that could flatten anything,” Karl reflects, like a technician judging his own work, and tells himself: “The first time I didn’t know how it should all be done; I’ll do better next time.”

At first light, the streets empty, Karl pushes a cart that wobbles beneath a shapeless burden, covered by a gray cloth. Sacks of potatoes, one man thinks. Sacks of apples, Karl tells another. But it is Brunelda. Robinson and Delamarche will not be heard from again. Karl, having taken yet another step on the road to the irreparable, is now alone with his burden, which will be hard to shed. Finally they come to the “dark narrow alleyway where Enterprise No. 25 was located.” There, Karl and the singer meet a man who is waiting impatiently. But what is Enterprise No. 25? An office? A factory? A brothel? A freak show? A circus? We’ll never know, though the brief description we’re left with, before the manuscript breaks off for good, suggests a brothel. The paint on the walls is reasonably fresh, and the artificial palm trees are “only slightly dusty,” but Karl is struck most by a particular quality of the place: a dirtiness that “wasn’t tangible.” This is a metaphysical obstacle; it goes beyond the physical facts. Here “everything was greasy and repulsive, as though everything had been put to some ill use and by now no amount of cleaning could have remedied it.” Here even Karl, the most upbeat, open-minded, and willing of all the heroes, finds himself for the first time at a loss as he confronts the irredeemable: “Karl, when he first came to a place, loved to think about what might be improved there and what a pleasure it would be to get to work at once, heedless of the potentially endless work involved. But this time he didn’t know what could be done.” On the road to abjection — a thoroughly unintentional abjection, shaped by circumstance — Karl has reached the dead end. For the first time, Kafka writes, he didn’t know what could be done.

The Theater of Oklahama is certainly the “biggest theater in the world”—some say it’s “nearly limitless.” But the few who pause outside the racetrack are a bit suspicious, as if its banners conceal some catch. Karl may have guessed why: “It’s possible that the enticements used in the recruitment campaign are failing precisely because of their grandiosity.” There is an inescapable disproportion between this spectacle that is almost coextensive with the world and the inhabitants of the world itself. The spectacle is too vast, too boundless. It exists apart, in a sort of cosmic autism. At best, one might be able to get a walk-on role, as Fanny does with her trumpet — as Karl himself does when, on that same trumpet, he plays a few bars of a song he heard once in some pub.

Exegetes of various stripes agree that the Theater of Oklahama inspires both dismay and euphoria. For some it’s the only apparition of happiness in Kafka’s work. For Adorno, it is also the only plausible image of that utopia that pervaded his thought. It’s as if the call of the poster inviting people to the Clayton racetrack were addressed to each person individually. But the world is full of posters — and “no one believed in posters anymore.” This one, however, sounds like an eschatological announcement (the model, after all, for posters): “The great Theater of Oklahama is calling you! It’s calling only today, only once!” The appeal is directed at the individual reading it. And the individual learns that he is everyone: “All are welcome!” But this total openness is paired with the cruel temporal arbitrariness: “Everything closes at midnight, never to reopen!” To which is appended the merciless codicil of every eschatology: “Cursed be those who don’t believe us!”

If there was one place in the twentieth century that came to represent mathematical, irresponsible happiness, it was the set of the Hollywood musical. But when Kafka was writing The Missing Person, the musical didn’t exist yet. Neither did the sound track, which burst into meta-history, accompanying and anticipating history, with the messy chorus of trumpets that greets Karl in front of the Clayton racetrack. The vision that unfurls there before his eyes is the original scene of the musical: a variation that finally upsets the symmetry of the angel formations in Dante’s paradise. The direction is at once simple and grandiose. Every detail stands out, but especially this one: hundreds of women standing together.

In front of the entrance to the racetrack a long, low platform had been built, on which hundreds of women dressed as angels, with white robes and great wings on their backs, played long gleaming golden trumpets. They weren’t standing directly on the platform, rather each stood on a pedestal, which however was hidden from sight by the long flowing robes of the angel costume. But since the pedestals were quite tall, some indeed as tall as two meters, the figures of the women appeared gigantic; it was only their little heads that to some degree disturbed the impression of great size, and their loose hair too seemed strangely short and faintly ridiculous in the way it fell between and around their great wings. In order to avoid any uniformity, they had used pedestals of varying heights, and there were very low women who appeared only slightly taller than their actual size beside others who soared to such heights that the slightest breeze seemed to threaten them. And now these women were playing in unison.

These words suffice to convey an almost unbearable sense of happiness — and this time an unmotivated happiness, free from any worry of election or exclusion. It’s a pure visual and auditory fact. Nothing more is required. The perfect life would need no other introduction.

In 1914, between August and October, Kafka found himself writing a new novel, The Trial, and at the same time trying to finish an interrupted novel, The Missing Person. A year later he made this observation: “Rossmann and K., the innocent and the guilty, in the end both alike killed in punishment, the innocent with a lighter hand, more pushed aside than taken down.” Such words could resolve many of the exegetes’ doubts. Finally we learn, from an authoritative source, that Josef K. is guilty, without further ado, and that Karl Rossmann is innocent, without further ado. But none of that matters to a higher power that wants only to kill them. By execution, in K.’s case. As for Karl Rossmann, he simply needs to be pushed off the edge of the road, like an animal hit by a car.