K.

II. From Pepi’s Dreams

At the Gentlemen’s Inn, the chambermaids stay shut in their room, which “is nothing more than a big closet with three shelves.” The claustrophobia is heightened by the rule that bars them, for many hours of the day and night, from going out into the halls, where they would run the risk of disturbing the gentlemen, or even of simply seeing them. “In fact we don’t know the gentlemen, we’ve hardly glimpsed them,” Pepi remarks.

Every now and then the chambermaids hear someone knocking at their door and giving orders. But the terror begins when “no order comes at all” and the chambermaids hear someone (or something) creeping just outside the door. The girls “press their ears to the door, they kneel down, they hold one another in anguish.” Then the terrifying sentence is sprung, which by now resembles Lautréamont: “And one constantly hears the creeper (den Schleicher) outside the door.” In Lautréamont, so prone to sneering and mockery, the corresponding sentence would be: “But a shapeless mass pursues him relentlessly, on his trail, amid the dust.” Kafka, as always, takes a more sober road. With a minimal expenditure of words he achieves maximum effect. Even the word Schleicher is both commonplace and alarming. Schleicher is the person (or entity) that creeps, but it has the additional meaning of “hypocrite,” or someone who acts deceptively, furtively. Here, however, the word is returned to its most literal meaning — and the effect is all the more violent. We can understand that then, shut in their room, “the girls faint from fear and, when it’s finally quiet again outside their door, they lean against the wall without the strength to climb back into their beds.” This somber, rending scene, like something out of an Elizabethan play, is not, however, the climax of some crisis in a deadly adventure. It’s merely the description of a day like any other day in the life of a chambermaid at the Gentlemen’s Inn. And it is understood as such by the reader. It is plain daily life, recounted by Pepi to the stranger she’s in love with.

Why are the chambermaids so worried? What is the danger that threatens them? That they might let themselves go. And why shouldn’t they? They are prisoners. No one sees them — unless, fleetingly, the kitchen staff. Accordingly, to enter the gentlemen’s rooms immaculately dressed is both “frivolous and a waste.” Since the chambermaids are forced to work amid such filth, they might as well live in it all the time. Artificial light, stale air, excessive heat (the heat is always on). And tremendous, constant fatigue. The oppression of the chambermaids is vicious and subtle. Seen from the outside, however, their life is utterly common. They have a duty, they carry it out. They spend their free time waiting to return to duty. When they have the afternoon off, once a week, their favorite way to spend it is “sleeping soundly and fearlessly in some nook of the kitchen.”

The barroom, where Frieda and Pepi roam and where the foreigner K. sometimes sits for a while, is a force field as lively and delicate and complex as any palace of government or strategic headquarters or imperial court. What goes on there is no easier to unravel or understand. In relations of power, the tension is not proportionate to the size of the elements in question. A room can be as charged as a continent. But in the room, the power relations will manifest themselves with maximum linearity, because potential distractions are minimal. Minimal, precious, and revelatory, like Pepi’s bows or Frieda’s rustling petticoat.

The reduction to prime elements doesn’t by any means imply a reduction in the complexity of relations. On the contrary: Frieda is observed by many eyes when she works in the barroom, when the rumors of her relationship with Klamm begin to spread, and finally when everyone is certain about that relationship. Her every gesture gets carefully weighed, interpreted, connected to some other scene that isn’t visible. She’s like Madame de Maintenon, who methodically gains the affections of Louis XIV even as she is being scrutinized by all of Versailles — including Saint-Simon.

There is a physical intimacy between the gentlemen and the barmaids who serve them. Pepi speaks of her service as if it were a question of good manners, organizational efficiency, care in dressing. But it turns out that “a word, a look, a shrug of the shoulders” isn’t enough. There is also physical contact. Every day Pepi’s curly locks are fingered, many times, by the gentlemen: “So avidly did all those hands run through Pepi’s curls that she had to redo her hair ten times a day.” And Pepi adds: “No one can resist the allure of those curls and bows, not even K., who is always so distracted.” The barroom is a simulacrum of a brothel, where certain gestures that are appropriate to both places are repeated with one customer after another. For this reason, a little later, in his reply to Pepi, K. feels the need to observe: “The true barmaid should be a barmaid, not every customer’s lover” (this in a crossed-out passage of the manuscript).

Pepi descends from the charming, sly servant girls of the opera buffa. Like them, she has a sharp perception of the world and of men. When she sees K. abandoned by Frieda but still in love with her precisely because she has run off (“it isn’t hard to be in love with her now that she’s no longer around”), she makes him a proposition: “You have neither a job nor a bed, come stay with us. You’ll like my friends, we’ll make you comfortable, you can help us with our work, which is really too burdensome for girls to do alone. We wouldn’t have to rely only on ourselves, and we’d no longer be afraid at night.”

But how do Pepi and the other girls live? In a “warm, narrow” room. The other two girls are Henriette and Emilie, whose delicious French names, utterly anomalous in the village, lead us straight to the soft, abstract world of the music hall. Living in that closet-room is like living in a little dressing room backstage, where the air is stale and the light artificial. But “everything outside the room seems cold.” In the end it’s more entertaining to stay in the tiny room and tell one another stories about the world outside than it is to take part in that world: “In there one listens to such stories with disbelief, as if nothing could actually happen outside that room.”

Pepi’s invitation is chummy, almost as if K. were another girl who could be added to the group. There are no erotic overtones. But everything Pepi says is erotic, if only because, as K. observed, Pepi treats all her customers like lovers — and K. is the customer par excellence, the stranger. Let’s examine the details: Where would K. stay? In one of the girls’ beds. Perhaps he would take turns. In her magnanimity, Pepi even suggests to K. which of her two friends he might like better: Henriette. And her magnanimity goes further still: the three girls will also talk to K. about his absent lover, Frieda. They’ll recount for his benefit complicated stories about her, which they know well. And they’ll take out “portraits of Frieda” and show him those too. Three charming girls, actual or potential lovers of a young man, sitting together on the edge of a bed, all contemplating these portraits of another woman, also his lover — that life could last all winter. K. listens and asks himself two questions: Would such a thing be allowed? And then, more subtly: How much longer will winter last? Pepi is a great expert on timing. She knows how essential one day more or one day less might be. And her answer goes beyond meteorology: village life is, above all, winter—“long, terribly long, monotonous.” After spring and summer have come and gone, they occupy in one’s memory a period “so brief, it’s as if they lasted no more than two days.” The ominous sentence that follows is exemplary of Kafka’s lyrical laconicism: “Even on those days, even on the most beautiful day, sometimes snow still falls.”

The confraternity of girls, as Pepi tells it, is drastically opposed to everything that takes place outside. Founded on complete promiscuity and interchangeability, it is ready to receive K. as if he were a new girl, there to give a hand with the work, though exactly how is never clear. At the same time, K. would retain the ancient attributes of the male. Because of him, the three girls “would no longer be afraid at night.” They would be “happy” to have “a man to help and protect them.” And each — Pepi lets this be understood without saying it, since she always retains a certain shyness when speaking of sex — would offer herself in turn as his lover. But with K. it is enough that she, like a wise courtesan, drops the hint: “You’ll like Emilie too, but you’ll especially like Henriette.” In that tiny room, charm and pleasure reign. The girls may know that theirs is a “miserable life,” but they don’t by any means want out. As Pepi says, “We make our life there as charming as possible,” so that “even with just three of us we never get bored.” And she sighs, thinking of K.’s arrival: “Oh, it will be fun.”

The girls’ complicity has a solid foundation: “That’s precisely what kept us together, knowing that all three of us were equally denied a future.” The maid’s room must be enough in itself, because there will never be anything outside of it. Occasions for rancor or resentment don’t ever arise. And even when Pepi gets promoted to barmaid and for four days leaves the room, the other girls do not feel betrayed. In fact they help her get her new clothes ready. One selflessly offers Pepi “some expensive fabric, her treasure,” which so many times she had let the others admire and which so many times she had dreamed of someday wearing. Yet now, “since Pepi needed it, she offered it up.” Then, sitting in their beds, one above the other, they begin to sew, while singing. At the same time, when Pepi returns, “they probably won’t be astonished and, just to please her, they’ll cry a little and lament her fate.” So K. has nothing to worry about either: “You’re not obligated in any way, you won’t be tied forever to our room, as we are.” Words of profound psychological insight. The maid’s room is the only paradise where K. can come and go without incurring obligations or violating prohibitions. As long as he keeps their secret.

With the tone of a country girl who knows a thing or two about life and speaks plainly, Pepi at each turn suggests to K. the most radical and extreme solutions. A little earlier, she insinuated that the act that would make him her “chosen” would be the burning down of the Gentlemen’s Inn, “so that not a trace is left.” Now she lets him glimpse another possibility: a tiny erotic paradise, stashed covertly within that same Gentlemen’s Inn, and founded — in the way of the ancient Mysteries — on a secret. Like so many other hierodules of forbidden cults, the three girls are “enchanted by the fact that all this must remain a secret.” As a result, they will be “bound together even more closely than before.” K. need do nothing else but join them. And here Pepi’s appeal to K. resounds in all its pathos: “Come, oh please, come stay with us!”

Should we believe Pepi? Certainly her immediacy, her enthusiasm, even her eloquence tempt us to go along with her. But on the other hand there are certain conflicting, confusing elements to her story. Pepi concludes her torrential outpouring to K., after she has abandoned her post as barmaid, by describing her life with Henriette and Emilie — and by inviting K. to join them. By the end of her peroration, the maid’s room has emerged as a place of happiness, a caesura with respect to everything around it. But as we float in this mist, we might recall that Pepi has already spoken in a completely different way about that room — in the course of the same monologue. She has described it as a “tiny, dark room” where the girls work “as if in a mine,” convinced that they will spend “years, or even worse their whole lives, without being noticed by anyone,” often in the grip of terror, as when they hear something or someone creeping outside their room, which is continually ransacked by brutal “commissions” that rummage through their paltry things in search of lost or purloined records and subject them to “insults and threats.” And no peace: “Racket for half the night and racket starting at dawn.” How can they make room for K. in that slave’s life? How can Pepi make him see that room as a place of hidden delight? And how can they keep their secret?

Which of the two versions is true? This time we cannot evade the question with the usual contrivances (different point of view, different mood). The point of view is the same: Pepi’s. Her entire monologue has the same tonality — and the two opposing descriptions come a few minutes apart, one after the other.

Here we must look backward. As Kafka found his narrative substance in something that preceded even the division of gods and demons, indeed of the powers in general, so the narration itself seems to have gone back with him to the origin of the variants, to that most mysterious of points where every story begins to branch and proliferate, while still remaining the same story. Such branching is the lifeblood of every mythology. But Kafka had no rites or rhapsodists, which might have varied and recombined his gestures and meanings for him, at his disposal. He had to act with no help from the world. Alone before a sheet of paper — and using the latest form the times allowed stories to take, that of the novel — Kafka wove Pepi’s monologue. After having listened quietly to it, K. says to her: “What a wild imagination you have, Pepi.” And then: “These are nothing more than dreams born in your dark, narrow maid’s room down below, which is the proper place for them, but here in the middle of the barroom they sound very strange.” These stories, like Pepi’s clothes and her hairstyle, are “the offspring of that darkness and of those beds in your room.”

K.’s reaction to Pepi’s barroom monologue — he shakes his head — isn’t so different from the way the world would react to Kafka’s writings, which were also full of dreams born in a dark subterranean room. Kafka in fact once made this explicit: “We each have our own way of climbing back out of the subterranean world; I do it by writing.” That world that presented itself as a cellar is where Kafka saw himself:

It has already occurred to me many times that for me the best way to live would be to stay, with my writing materials and a lamp, in the innermost room of a vast, closed cellar. Food would be brought for me and would always be left far from my room, on the other side of the cellar’s outermost door. The journey to reach the food, in my dressing gown, beneath the cellar’s vaulted ceiling, would be my one stroll. Then I would return to my table, I would eat slowly and carefully, and I would immediately begin writing again.

Kafka wrote that way about his cellar to Felice, to frighten her. Pepi spoke that way to K. about her maid’s room, to attract him. The chambermaids’ tiny room, crowded with bows and petticoats, and the bare cellar with the table and the writing materials are analogous sites. Carved with difficulty into the solid surface of the world, they are nooks that host hidden life, imperceptible from without, life that can be both paradise and hell at once.

Pepi desperately loves K., loves him “as she has never loved anyone before,” loves him like a little girl who reads romances and dreams of a foreigner who will carry her off: “a hero, a rescuer of maidens.” Through her speaks a numberless female population: princesses and slaves, bourgeois ladies and peasant girls, office workers and waitresses. Whatever their social position, their words are the same, their devotion is the same — and their dreams are always “wild.”

Klamm is an official of a certain age, a man of habits, always dressed in a “black frock-coat with long tails.” He wanders about with an air somewhere between dreamy and sleepy, and sometimes “he’ll go for hours apparently without uttering a single word and then suddenly say something so vulgar it makes you shudder.” A flash of pure comedy. But do we think that with such details we’ve plumbed Klamm’s depths? In the words of Olga, who does know something of the subject: “What can we know about the thoughts of gentlemen!”

Of all the gentlemen, only Klamm inspires exaltation and sacred awe. Not only in the landlady of the Bridge Inn and in Frieda, who are in charge of his cult, but also in Pepi, the incendiary servant. That Klamm doesn’t make an appearance during the days when Pepi lends her services to the bar is the greatest blow to her. She waits, expecting him “at any moment, even at night.” Her disappointment exhausts her. She even dares wait for him in a recess of the forbidden corridor, thinking: “Ah, if only Klamm would come now, if only I could take the gentleman from his room and carry him in my arms down to the public room. I wouldn’t collapse beneath that weight, no matter how great it was.” Klamm, this gentleman similar in appearance to other gentlemen who are “elderly and attached to their habits,” appears here helpless as a baby, lovingly transported in the firm arms of the servant Pepi, protected by that flighty, fervent Magdalene. After all, for Klamm even this will merely be another of his many metamorphoses.

During her vain wait for Klamm, Pepi becomes aware of the quality of the silence that reigns in the gentlemen’s corridor. This silence is such “that you can’t stand it there for long”—it’s a silence that “drives you away.” Nevertheless Pepi doesn’t give up. “Ten times she was driven away, ten times she went back up.” Why? Pepi, who has a gift for direct expression, knows how to explain it: “It didn’t make sense, but if [Klamm] didn’t come, then almost everything was senseless.” To wait for Klamm makes no sense. But it is Klamm alone who imbues “almost everything” with sense. And so to wait for Klamm is practically the only thing that does make sense. This is Pepi’s paradox, which merits inclusion in logical treatises. One of its applications is The Castle.