K.

IV. The Way of Women

Frieda, Pepi, Olga, Leni: female, disyllabic, subordinate, erotic — they are the only interlocutors with whom K. and Josef K. speak as if they were speaking with themselves. The sexual intimacy is merely a consequence of a prior psychic intimacy, as if each of these beings has always inhabited some niche in the minds of K. and Josef K., caryatids over whom the eye passes without lingering, with just a nod — and now they breathe and move like living flesh. Not only that: they speak and offer themselves as advisors, even if it isn’t clear just where their advice might lead.

Like Talleyrand, K. thinks that in order to get results, one must “faire marcher les femmes.” But this isn’t merely one of K.’s proclivities. It’s also the only way that appears open to him. In the village, the men’s activities have an uncertain contour. We know there is a cobbler, a tanner, a coachman, a schoolteacher. But we don’t see them on the job, and their work is never discussed. The first men K. encounters live — we quickly learn — in a state of subjection to the women beside them: the landlord dominated by Gardena, Schwarzer crouched at the foot of Gisa’s desk, “content to live in the proximity, in the air, in the heat of Gisa.”

The women are presented quite differently. What we quickly come to know about them converges toward a single point: sex. Gardena lives in the memory of her three amorous encounters with Klamm. Frieda is first of all Klamm’s lover en titre and then becomes K.’s lover a few minutes after meeting him. Pepi flirts with the customers at the Gentlemen’s Inn. Olga regularly gives herself for money to the gentlemen’s servants. Amalia’s life is entirely the consequence of having refused the outrageous erotic propositions of one of the Castle gentlemen, tearing up the letter that contained them. To speak of these women is to speak of their sexual vicissitudes. And theirs are the stories that energize village life, which is otherwise amorphous and inert, and expose the exacerbated tension between the village and the Castle. K., then, must inevitably become intimate with these women if he wants to gain any degree of familiarity with those places. Sex for him is the only lingua franca.

The effectiveness of the way of women, K.’s chosen path, is confirmed when at last the Castle, in the person of secretary Erlanger, must ask a favor of K. And the favor in question regards Frieda. The Castle wants her to return to her post in the barroom, since even an insignificant alteration in Klamm’s routine might in some way disturb him. Or more precisely: the possibility that Klamm might be disturbed might itself disturb the other officials who “watch over Klamm’s well-being.” Erlanger likens the favor asked of K. to reversing the “slightest alteration of a desk, the removal of a stain that had been there forever”—in this comparison the “stain” corresponds to Frieda herself. And the more he insists on the favor’s smallness, even its irrelevance, the more suspect it seems, as if Erlanger wanted to conceal the fact that its importance is actually enormous, so enormous that “peace” among the officials, and therefore within the entire apparatus of the Castle, hangs in the balance. Erlanger lowers himself to the point of telling K.: “If you acquit yourself well in this little matter, it might turn out to be useful for you sometime down the road.” Here, for a moment, K. witnesses the humiliation of the Castle, which is normally the source of every humiliation. As in a dialogue between diplomats or merchants or criminals, Erlanger hints that K.’s friendly little gesture might be answered one day, in turn, by another friendly gesture, maybe even a more substantial one.

But K. has by now developed too fine an ear for Castle-speak not to detect Erlanger’s undertone of “derision.” In fact, even if K. wanted to prove himself eager to bring about Erlanger’s desired result, he couldn’t, simply because that result has already been achieved. Frieda has already reached an agreement with the landlord to resume her service behind the bar. They merely agreed to postpone her return by twenty-four hours so as not to inflict on Pepi “the shame of having to leave the barroom right away.” K. was informed of all this only after it was a done deal. And where is Frieda in that moment? A few steps away, in bed with the assistant Jeremias. How could Frieda have resisted her “childhood playmate”? And besides, she’s taking care of him, since he’s a bit of a wreck after the hardships of the preceding days.

Thus even the one instance when K. is called on to intervene confirms the rule of the place: that, whatever the Castle’s orders might be — and they could be “unfavorable or favorable, and even the favorable ones always had a final unfavorable core”—they always, for K., “passed over his head.” Why? Evidently, reflects K., because “his position was too lowly for him to be able to intervene or even to silence them so that his own voice would be heard.”

Is Erlanger, then, simply making fun of him, asking his help in resolving a matter that has already been resolved? One can’t be sure. Perhaps Erlanger, with the unerring perspicacity typical of Castle officials, is using Frieda’s return to the barroom as a simple pretext, when all he really wants is for K. to agree to behave in a certain way toward her: to declare his own willingness to make her return to her place in the village order. Leading her back to the barroom would be the same as handing her back over to Klamm.

It’s true that, minutes earlier, Frieda told K.: “I’ll never, ever come back to you, I shudder to think of such a thing.” But she was referring to a life with K. in the village. And just before that, Frieda had admitted that she still daydreamed about what would have happened had they “gone away at once that very night,” the first night. By now they would be “safe somewhere.” But “safe” from what? The threat that underlies each moment of life around the Castle is on the verge of surfacing. Is that, perhaps, what Erlanger feared? And perhaps he also feared the sentiment that Frieda now confesses to K.: “To be close to you is, believe me, the only dream I dream; there is no other.” If this is the case, then the favor Erlanger asked of K. is to smother his fiancée’s only dream. Such a deed would certainly redound to K.’s credit. It is the only deed for which the Castle seems willing to reward him.

When K. reaches the village beneath the Castle, he repeats with the women whom he encounters the gestures and reactions of Josef K. at the beginning of his trial. Josef K., like K., is made to feel like “the first foreigner to come along,” as soon as a woman lays eyes on him. In his case it’s the washerwoman, the wife of the court usher, and Josef K. immediately wonders whether she’s looking at him that way because she’s “had her fill of court officials.” It’s the same sort of disenchantment with a high-level official that K. attributes to Frieda. As for Josef K., he immediately begins to investigate the possible “relationships” between the washerwoman and the high-level officials, in order to use them to his advantage — just as K., according to Pepi, has become engaged to Frieda only because he’s attracted to her “connections that no one else knows about” with Castle officials.

Josef K. elicits the same kind of reactions from women that K. does. The washerwoman, Frieda, Pepi: these women who seem at times to be at the disposition of the officials, as in a garrison brothel, all dream immediately of being carried off by the ignorant stranger — Josef K. or K. They want to emigrate, run away forever. At the end of their first conversation, the washerwoman, already moving off toward another man, whispers to Josef K.: “If you take me with you, I’ll go wherever you like, you can do with me as you like, I’ll be happy just to be far away from here for as long as possible, even better forever.”

Of course, there’s a big difference between Frieda’s lover and the washerwoman’s. Klamm is a high-level official, whose name suffices to inspire reverence in servants and gentlemen alike. Many doubt that K. will ever succeed in speaking a single word to him. But Bertold is merely a student: small, bowlegged, with a short, reddish beard. He summons the washerwoman, his erotic slave, “with just a finger.” The washerwoman considers him “a repellent person” and in his presence calls him a “little monster.” It’s said of him, however, that he “would in all likelihood one day attain a high-level official position.” This looming future is what enables him to exert his “tyranny” over the washerwoman. As soon as he sees her, he touches her, kisses her, strips her, and throws her to the ground, regardless of who might be present, whether it’s the entire crowd gathered in the hearing room or Josef K. alone. Her body, to Josef K., looks “luxuriant, supple, and warm in her dark dress of coarse, heavy material,” and the student presses against it wherever he can: up against a wall or window, on the floor. The washerwoman seems to detest the student, but Josef K. suspects she loves him, and he is therefore jealous of him — as he is of the examining magistrate who merely saw the washerwoman asleep and told her that “he’d never forget that vision.” Later he sent her, “via the student, whom he trusts a great deal and with whom he collaborates,” a pair of silk stockings that the washerwoman finds “beautiful but really too nice and not suitable” for her.

The world of The Trial is more brutal and crude than that of The Castle. The transitions are more vexing and jarring, more jagged. But the erotic mechanisms are identical — and they repeat themselves precisely.

Women are attracted to Josef K. the way “the court is attracted to guilt.” From the moment of his arrest, he is enveloped, wherever he goes, in an erotic halo. His every relation with the court and its representatives, official or not, is counterpointed by sex. During his first deposition, he becomes aware of a certain commotion in the back of the room. Through a “dazzling whitish” light, he is able to make out a woman who is being pressed against the wall by an unknown man. It’s the washerwoman, who shortly before had opened the door to the hearing room for him, the guardian of the threshold of the court. In fact, as we will learn, she’s the wife of the court usher, and these places are their apartment. Every time there’s a hearing, they have to clear their things out of the adjacent room. Josef K. sensed at once, without any reason and “from the moment she first appeared,” that this woman would cause “a serious disturbance.” Now even amid the throng, breaking off his deposition, he finds a way to fix his gaze on “her unbuttoned blouse,” which “hung down around her waist” as the unknown man forced himself on her (crossed out passage).

We will soon come to know this: the washerwoman entered the room because she was attracted to Josef K., particularly to his “beautiful dark eyes.” She has never before risked such a thing, because the hearing room is for her “more or less off limits.” Perhaps that’s why Josef K., like an old sailor who sees a woman striding across the deck of his boat, immediately recognized her presence as a sign of a “serious disturbance.”

The woman enters the room while the defendant is being deposed. Josef K.’s words are vehement — they cannot be taken as anything less than an accusation against the court itself. Just then the woman gets pushed up against the wall by a student who has pursued her for some time. Then the two of them fall to the floor together. When the woman sees Josef K. again, a week later, she regrets that she had to miss part of his speech, which she otherwise “liked very much,” because “during the last part she was lying on the floor with the student.”

Hard to imagine a more unspeakable and unseemly commingling than that between the life of the court and the private lives of those who are linked to it. In the spaces used for offices one often finds “laundry hung out to dry,” which renders even more “unbreathable” the air of those attic rooms, already overheated by the sun and overcrowded by the “heavy traffic of the parties.” On Sunday morning, when court is not officially in session, the usher is sent off to deliver a “message that’s useless anyway” simply in order to get him away from home for a few minutes, so that the student Bertold, who collaborates with the examining magistrate in the offices one floor up, can carry off the usher’s wife, maybe on his back. And maybe he won’t subject her to his lust — but will offer her to the examining magistrate instead.

The usher knows perfectly well that his errand is a pretext, and so he sprints off hoping to return in time to catch the student. But the student is always too quick, because he needs only to “come down the stairs from the attic.” It’s like a scene out of Feydeau, with a single difference: here the seducer hides not behind a screen but behind the door to a court office. Meanwhile the usher’s futile rage grows. He has already imagined the student squashed into the wall, with his bandy legs and his blood spattered around him. “But up to now it’s only been a dream,” he confesses to Josef K., shortly after shaking his hand for the first time. If no one dares lift a finger against the student, it’s because “everyone fears his power.” No one can do anything — no one except, paradoxically, someone like Josef K., a defendant. The usher is one subordinate among many; his life is squeezed, almost crushed, between the hearing room, adjacent to his apartment, and the court offices, a few steps above. He isn’t eloquent, but one gets the feeling he knows what he’s talking about. Like Pepi, the servant girl who goads K. “to set fire” to the Gentlemen’s Inn, the usher too makes it clear to Josef K. that he would be happy to see him intervene violently, even if he isn’t counting on it. And he adds: “People are always rebelling.” Nobody else, not even K., will say anything as abrupt and radical as this.

The erotic nature of the women in The Trial and The Castle generates some unruly psychic turmoil in Benjamin and Adorno. It’s as if these characters forced them to reveal their own closeted sexual fantasies. For Benjamin, Kafka’s women emerge from the “world of dust, fluff, and mustiness, as if from some primeval landscape.” Their psychopomp is Bachofen, inventor and singer of a hetaeric swamp stage at the threshold of which we’ll find Leni with her webbed fingers. But in other passages, Benjamin is less dreamy and more angry, speaking of “whorish women” who correspond to the “shamelessness of the swamp world,” with their luteae voluptates—and who can’t therefore attain “beauty,” as if because of some moral shortcoming. And as for Adorno, he’s the only exegete who seems to have been deeply affected by Gisa, the schoolmistress, a minor figure who appears in a single scene of The Castle, retaking possession of the classroom where K. and Frieda have camped out with the assistants. Kafka describes her as “a tall, blonde, beautiful, rather stiff girl.” Nothing more. This is how Adorno describes her: “Gisa, the blonde schoolmistress, cruel and fond of animals — perhaps the only beautiful girl he [Kafka] depicts as unscathed, as though her hardness scorned the Kafka maelstrom — belongs to the pre-Adamite race of Hitler Jungfrauen, who hated Jews long before there were any.”

Implications of that sentence: doesn’t Gisa, the blond schoolmistress, with her “full, luxuriant body,” her wide hips — doesn’t she represent, as a member of a “pre-Adamite race,” those Hyperborean ur-Indo-Europeans evoked by Herman Wirth? The ones who seem ready to hate the Jews who don’t exist yet, because they are too modern? Perhaps they are impatiently awaiting the creation of the first Jew so they can hurl themselves on him. His name will be Adam.

All those girls who will introduce themselves one after the other, under the names of Leni, Pepi, Frieda, and Olga, are prefigured by Fini, who emerges from the charred rubble of the Hotel Kingston in Istanbul, in an enchanting story left suspended by Kafka. The man she is supposed to lead astray and drag into a “dubious affair” is named Liman. He has just arrived in Istanbul on a business trip and has been driven to his usual hotel. The coachman is careful not to tell him that in Istanbul’s last fire the Hotel Kingston was destroyed, and so Liman finds himself faced with a heap of ruins. These turn out, however, to be inhabited by some of the hotel staff, now jobless. By this point we’re already in a state of happy anticipation, as with any of those films from the 1930s that are set in Macao — or even in Istanbul. But the hallmark that confirms we’ve entered an authentic Kafka situation is the appearance of a gentleman “in a frock-coat and a bright red necktie,” who begins recounting in great detail the story of the fire while twisting “the tip of his long, thin beard around his finger.” We already know by this point that Liman will soon be embroiled in a story that will lead him off in some direction he would never choose. But for now he’s just a traveler who has had some bad luck and would like to get settled in a hotel as soon as possible. “Hotel Royal,” Liman tells the coachman. In vain. The man with the frock coat has already offered to lodge him in a private residence, in rooms arranged for by the hotel management, which doesn’t want to abandon its old guests. On top of that, the man in the frock coat has called for Fini’s assistance — which is enough to send a shiver through the rubble. “Everyone was looking for Fini,” like some new Figaro. And she appears: laughing, holding her hands over her brand-new hairdo, running toward the coach. She introduces herself at once: “I’m Fini,” she tells Liman “in a low voice,” as “she runs her hands over his shoulders, caressing them.” Then one of those comic scuffles erupts that Kafka never tires of describing in all their variations, as in The Missing Person. Fini wants to force her way into the coach; Liman wants to block her entry — a sign of unpleasant complications to come. With the help of the man in the frock coat, who pushes her from behind, Fini prevails and secures a seat in the coach, adjusting immediately and “hastily her blouse, and then, more carefully, her hair.” Liman falls back into his seat, facing Fini. “This is unheard of,” we hear him exclaim — as if those were his last words before sinking into a soft, ambiguous fog, where only the hand of Ernst Lubitsch could guide him. And here the story breaks off, trailing a wake of Turkish perfume.

At the beginning, Leni is “two large black eyes” looking through a peephole in a door. The door doesn’t open. A little while later the two eyes reappear, and “now they might almost have seemed sad.” Finally Leni shows herself; she’s wearing a long white apron, well suited to her role as nurse, and she holds in her hand a candle that casts a weak light through the apartment of Huld, the lawyer. From the first moment, Leni stares at Josef K. — and he stares back, examining her doll face, its every part round or rounded, even her hairline and her hair, which is “thick, dark, tightly gathered.” When Leni speaks, a hint of mockery enters her voice, as if she can’t help it. In order to lure Josef K. out of the lawyer’s bedroom, she breaks a plate against the wall. When he opens the door to see what has happened, she quickly scolds him for having made her wait. Meanwhile her little hand is already resting on his, even before he has let go of the doorknob. Leni wants to become his lover as soon as possible. She asks him questions about his so-called lover, Elsa, disregards his defense of her, then examines a snapshot of her dancing and immediately zeroes in on her physical defects. Moments later she kisses him, bites his neck and hair — and gloats: “You see, now you’ve already traded for me!” Meaning: Josef K. has already traded Elsa for me, and now I’ve taken the place of Elsa, who is “clumsy and rough,” as well as a bit fat. And who, above all, wouldn’t be able, according to Leni, to sacrifice herself for Josef K. It all gets wildly jumbled, as inevitably happens when Josef K. meets a woman: instant sexual intimacy, discussions of his trial. All in stark contrast to the “chatter of the old gentlemen” in the next room. Leni is sober, blunt, precise — we can’t rule out the possibility that she alone knows how to “escape” the court. She hints at a decisive intervention, at mysterious undercurrents, between bouts of frivolity and flirtation that include the game in which she reveals her “physical defect”: the webbing between the middle and ring fingers of her right hand. “What a pretty claw,” Josef K. says, quickly placing a gallant kiss on that “prank of nature.” It’s the first kiss between them, and in that moment a pact is sealed between Josef K. and a nature that hasn’t yet entirely emerged from the waters. It’s then that Leni takes his head in her hands and kisses and bites his neck and “even his hair.” Meanwhile “hurriedly, mouth open, she climb[s] with her knees onto his belly,” giving off as she does an “exciting, bitter, peppery odor.” Then the two tangled bodies slide down onto the carpet, a primordial swamp glazed with moonlight. “Here are my keys, come whenever you like” are Leni’s last words, punctuated by a “stray kiss.” For pure erotic intensity, libertine literature offers little to rival this scene, steeped in that “peppery odor.”

When K. meets Pepi for the first time, in the Gentlemen’s Inn, a descriptive machine seems to come suddenly to life, meticulously recording, like a police report, the details of her physical appearance and her wardrobe: “small, rosy, healthy.” It observes her “head of luxuriant reddish-blond hair, knotted into a thick braid.” Neither her “almost childlike” air nor her carnality escapes notice. And we also learn that she’s dressed in a misguided, inappropriate way, “corresponding to her exaggerated notion of a barmaid’s importance.” All this in a few seconds, while Pepi speaks to K. in that tone of instant intimacy that all the village women seem to adopt with him, while for his part he seems to know her well enough already to say what inconsistent notions she has about her job.

It’s clear during all this what’s on K.’s mind: everything that happened with Frieda could also happen with Pepi, “if only he had reason to feel that Pepi had some kind of relationship with the Castle.” This according to a few lines crossed out of the manuscript, lines that even add a violent stroke: “He would have tried to wrench her secret from her with the same embraces he’d had to use with Frieda.” The final version, on the other hand, says only that K. rejects this thought and tells himself: “Oh yes, it was different with Frieda.”

K.‘s sexual rapacity is now pushed to one side with a denial, which in the end only highlights the evidence of it: “K. would never have touched Pepi. Still, he now had to cover his eyes for a moment, so greedy was his gaze.” The crossed-out passage is what the reader glimpses between the lines, or rather, sees. But the reader alone must come to that blunt, drastic realization. Must see that wire. The writer must obscure it, with rags, dirt, leaves, twigs — or whatever else happens to be at hand.

Frieda, Pepi, Olga, Amalia, Hans’s mother, Gardena, Leni, the washerwoman: everything feminine is preyed on by the court magistrates and the Castle officials. After all, the women belong to the court and to the Castle. No one would dare assert that they might not be at the disposition of any official or magistrate at any time. And yet it would be misguided to lump them with the sort of prostitute whose clients are all members of the same club. They should be seen, rather, as hierodules, no less knowledgeable than priests when it comes to the cult’s secrets — but more willing to expose and explore them. Gardena exemplifies the older hierodule, who has already trained a younger one to take her place: Frieda. The little girls on Titorelli’s stairs, the newest pupils, are still playing games before assuming their role. With the exception of Gardena, who is the strict custodian of the cult and defends the Castle as strenuously as the prison chaplain defends the court, one sentiment unites them all: they dream of a lover, foreign to their world and already for this reason guilty. Just as K. is attracted to Frieda and Josef K. to the washerwoman because they imagine that those girls, whom they already plan to use to their own ends, have “relationships” or “connections” with the Castle or the court, so for Frieda and the washerwoman K. and Josef K. exude first and foremost the lure of the foreigner, of one who has come from a place where the air is less dense and suffocating than their own. This doesn’t imply, however, that they seriously oppose the Castle or the court. The only radical opponent — mute and rejected — is Amalia. The others have mixed, complex feelings. Frieda in the end chooses her old erotic games with the assistants over K. and reclaims her post at the Gentlemen’s Inn, as if she had left it only so that she might be acutely missed. And it’s hard to tell to what degree the washerwoman is tormented and to what degree she’s complicit with her sexual pursuers. It’s true that, as the student was carrying her off like a sack, the washerwoman waved at Josef K., “shrugging her shoulders” in an effort “to show him that the abduction wasn’t her fault.” But it’s also true that “her gesture didn’t express a great deal of regret,” as if Josef K. were witnessing not an instance of coercion but the repetition of a rite, mechanical and ineluctable, one that prompted him to shout: “And you don’t want to be freed.”

That’s a sentence that strikes deep. One might suspect that all of them — Josef K., K., the women — want above all else to enter ever more deeply into the Castle and the court, despite sometimes yearning to destroy them. Meanwhile, however, they act in such a way as to bring about their own destruction.

The “Barnabas women”: that’s what the villagers, with-sneering sarcasm, call the two sisters of Barnabas. One, Amalia (the “extraordinarily reserved,” the “accursed Barnabas woman”), is the local untouchable. No one speaks a word to her, nor would they get a reply. Olga is the family breadwinner, by virtue of her official status as prostitute — it is her duty to satisfy the stable hands. Just as the assistants, even the sounds of their names, are “repugnant” to K., so are the Barnabas women to the rest of the village. They are the pet targets of perfidy, especially for other women. And above all for Frieda. In her last exchange with K. — the breakup conversation — Frieda makes it clear that the truly irremediable difference between them, which reveals that they come from “completely different worlds,” is represented by the tension between the assistants and the Barnabas women. You can choose one side or the other but never both. They are hopelessly incompatible. When this subject comes up, alarms go off. There is no longer any room to argue or “refute,” activities to which Frieda and K. are fervently dedicated. The only valid response on this subject is an instant, physical repulsion. Just after saying that being near K. is her “only dream,” Frieda mocks K.’s peroration in defense of his relations with the Barnabas women and retires to her room with the assistant Jeremias, to take care of him. She attends to him as one would a sick child or an old lover. Jeremias has won — and K. begins to suspect that in “any other struggle” Jeremias would triumph as well. Not long after having come to the village determined to be the “attacker,” K. now reaches the conclusion that, in any conflict, he would be defeated even by the Castle’s lowliest creature. At last he is coming close to removing what has up until now been his most serious obstacle. At last he understands that Klamm’s omnipotence is reflected even in the two assistants. Which explains why Jeremias, occupying Klamm’s place in Frieda’s bed, can claim that he feels like “a little Klamm.” And why Frieda herself might find in the assistants, even “in their filth and in their lechery, traces of Klamm.”

Only when together do the assistants go around with a loose, “electrified,” nimble gait. If we happen to encounter them on their own, as we do Jeremias, they appear “older, wearier, more wrinkled.” Jeremias even “limps a little” and seems “elegantly infirm.” K. has trouble recognizing him. Why? “Because I’m alone,” says Jeremias, perfectly aware of the change. He knows that, by himself, he’s no longer animated by the disturbing force of the double.

Other writers, a German Romantic for instance, would have presented K.’s assistants as demonic offspring, creatures “as alike as snakes,” with a primordial nature not easily reconciled with civilized order. Not Kafka. Artur and Jeremias are fake youths, with their “reddened cheeks that seemed made of slack flesh.” They are “seemingly good-natured, childish, funny, irresponsible,” and they would be merely irritating but for a few details that give rise to graver suspicions. When the village superintendent smiles, K. discovers that his smile is “indistinguishable” from those of the assistants. As children, the assistants played with Frieda in the shadow of the Castle. Erotic games, no doubt, which they are now ready to resume, in order to wrest her away from K. To the villagers, Artur and Jeremias are “old acquaintances”—the landlord even respects them — and everyone’s familiarity with them confirms for K. his own irredeemable foreignness. If there is any radical change in K.‘s understanding of the Castle, it can be seen in his attitude toward the assistants. In the beginning, he treats them like gadflies that have been assigned to him in a “thoughtless” manner and need to be squashed. But the superintendent, patient and calm, explains: “Nothing here happens in a thoughtless manner.” In the end, K. realizes with frustration that he has always neglected the importance of the assistants. “I keep underestimating them, I’m afraid,” he whispers to Frieda, whom he has now lost. An unforeseen conclusion suggests itself: “Perhaps it would have been even shrewder to have kept them as his assistants, letting them torment him, rather than have them wandering about so recklessly, freely plotting their intrigues, for which they seemed to have a special knack.” To be tormented by some official or by Artur and Jeremias ultimately amounts to the same thing. Even those two mocking creatures have been “inspired from above, from the Castle.”

The story of Barnabas’s family takes up six of the twenty-five chapters, 115 pages of the German edition — a novel within the novel. In The Trial, no episode focusing on secondary characters expands to such an extent. Furthermore, direct connections between the story of Barnabas’s family and K.’s vicissitudes (connections that include the message Barnabas delivers and Frieda’s rancor toward the Barnabas women) are scarce. Taken together, it’s a story that stands alone — and on a slightly different level than the rest of the village stories.

If K. senses right away that there was “something special” about this family, that it is composed of “people for whom, at least on the surface, things were going much as they were going for himself, so that he could ally himself with them, and could agree with them about many things,” if K. notices a family resemblance in that family, it’s because their implicit hopes and relentless fears are much the same as those of Hermann Kafka’s family. The primary difference lay in the father figure, who in Barnabas’s family has lost every trace of imperiousness, becoming utterly pathetic and helpless. Aside from that, whether the head of the household manufactures excellent boots or sells wholesale fancy goods, the profile of the two little family groups, above all in their manners, their feelings, their fears, and their hopes, is extraordinarily similar. And K. is never so cruel, never so deeply involved, as in his relationships with Barnabas’s family. He is torn between a certain repugnance, which he feels most strongly toward the corner of the table where the parents sit moaning and incapable of moving, and an irresistible inclination to feel at home, like one who finds himself among his own. The idea of spending the night at their house thus seems to K. both “distressing” and “the most natural thing in the whole village.”

Even before anyone tells him that Barnabas’s family is condemned and execrated by the village community, K. seems to know it. As soon as he enters their house, he gets an “unpleasant impression.” And this only because he’s seen Amalia’s gaze, which “wasn’t unpleasant in itself, but rather proud.” If K. were to go a step further, he would realize that the house seems unpleasant to him because there’s something too familiar about it. With everyone else, he makes an effort to present himself in the best light, because he anticipates that any of them might turn out to be useful to him, and yet “with these people he didn’t bother at all.” Indeed, “where they were concerned he felt, as it were, no shame.” To Amalia, whom he barely knows, he has no qualms about saying: “You’re always so sad, Amalia. Is something tormenting you? Can’t you say what it is?” Yes, the torment exists — and no, she can’t name it.

In Olga’s house, K. senses and recognizes that feeling of familiarity that the assimilated Jew feels in the home of other assimilated Jews. Indeed the intimacy is greater still: like K. himself, this entire family is among those who are simultaneously assimilated and cast out. And they aren’t foreigners, but locals. The excessive ease and directness of his relationships with them, that disagreeable instant understanding that he feels in Olga’s house, repels him — as if he has been plunged into an element that is too familiar, that holds him back and draws him in, instead of giving him the support and energy to move forward. Whereas that is precisely what he expects women to provide.

Psychology is sharpened, honed to an exaggerated fineness — sometimes so painful as to seem unpresentable — when the Jewish family leaves the shtetl or some other remote place in central Europe and takes up residence in a bourgeois apartment in the big city. The transition spans roughly two generations, Freud’s to Joseph Roth’s: extreme, reckless perceptiveness, never again regained.

Kafka, with ill-concealed impatience, was drenched in it — to the point of loathing it. When he wrote: “For the last time psychology!” perhaps he meant that one had to go through psychology before it could be left behind. He could have made his way through its marshy wastes with an animal-like dexterity and expertise. Comparable perhaps only to that shown, in the same years, by another assimilated Jew: Marcel Proust.

K. isn’t merely brazen and defiant. At times he can be honey-tongued and eager to ingratiate himself with his interlocutor however he can. We see this twice in one night. First with Frieda, who rebukes him for the hours spent with the Barnabas women. Then with the landlord and landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who are disgusted by his inexcusable nighttime wanderings through the hallways onto which the officials’ rooms open.

With Frieda, K. wants to show that he fundamentally shares her loathing of the Barnabas women, the two outcasts with whom he feels rather too at home—a feeling otherwise unknown to him in that village. As for Amalia, K. doesn’t have the courage even to speak her name. Regarding Olga, he’s quick to state that she isn’t “seductive,” in an attempt to deflect Frieda’s jealousy. Thus he sets her up for this retort: “The stable hands think differently,” seeing that they have spent the night with her “at least twice a week for more than two years.” But above all K. wants to make clear that he too, like the village as a whole, condemns the family: “I understand your aversion to that family and I can share it.” If he has had anything to do with them, it has been only to protect his interests, since he has been expecting news from Barnabas and is counting on using the messenger to his advantage. He’s like a man who says that sure, he’s had dealings with Jews, but only out of professional necessity.

With the landlord and landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, K. defends himself in no less dubious a fashion. He attributes his errors to weariness and to the fact of “not yet being used to the strain of the interrogations.” He neglects to mention that he barely said a word to either Bürgel or Erlanger. He merely listened — or slept. It is then, at best, an exaggeration to say that he “had to face two interrogations in a row.” As for the distribution of records, K. denies having “been in a position to see anything.” In this case, the opposite is true. His excuses may seem simpleminded, but they touch pressure points. And they succeed above all because of his obsequious tone. In fact, “the respect with which he spoke of the gentlemen left the landlord favorably disposed toward him.” As for the landlady’s reaction, nothing is said. She is much harder to fool.

The Firemen’s Festival is celebrated on the third of July — Kafka’s birthday. Just as the day of the comices agricoles sealed Emma Bovary’s fate, so will this day seal Amalia’s. Festivities sniff out disgrace. They unite communion and wound, marriage and immolation. They are the heirs of sacrifice.

Amalia is decked out like a bride and accompanied by her father’s unlucky words: “Today, mark my words, Amalia will find a husband.” Wearing the necklace of Bohemian garnets that Gardena (in those days a family friend) once loaned Olga, who in turn has offered it to her, and wearing also her white, lace-covered blouse, Amalia advances toward the festival. Her gaze always has something “gloomy” about it, but more than anything else it is regal: people “nearly bowed down, without meaning to, before her.” Even then, in the midst of the crowd, “her gaze was cold, clear, fixed as ever; it wasn’t aimed directly at what she was observing, but rather — and this was disturbing — slightly to one side, in a way that was barely noticeable but undeniable.” This slant is due not to any shyness or “embarrassment,” but rather to a calling that she felt even before becoming the village outcast, a “desire for solitude that overpowered every other feeling,” as though she were trying to rid herself of all attachment to the world. Amalia is the only person who simply doesn’t want to accept the rules of the village and therefore of the Castle. K., on the other hand, wants first to understand them — and then to use them to clear his way.

Perhaps it is precisely this aloofness that strikes Sortini, the “tiny, weak, brooding” official, as he leans against the fire truck. And he knits his brow in his usual manner, so that “all his wrinkles etched a fan-like pattern into his forehead, converging toward the bridge of his nose.”

Amalia isn’t spectacularly beautiful. She has “the ageless look of women who don’t grow old but were never truly young.” What is unique about her is that gaze, which an official like Sortini can’t fail to notice as soon as he lifts (since “she was much taller than he was”) his eyes toward her. It isn’t merely attraction that grips him but also a certain sense of danger, as if he has for the first time brushed up against something utterly foreign. This may perhaps help us understand why an official as reserved as Sortini would resort to such brutish manners when inviting Amalia to meet him. He acts both as suitor and as guardian of the Castle rules. His message to her is a challenge that will force her to expose herself.

Olga, confident and severe in her telling of the story, depicts Sortini as an arrogant abuser of power. But aside from her portrayal, all we know about him is his reputation as a thoughtful and retiring official. To this is added Amalia’s violent reaction to a message that no one but she and her sister see. And thus a doubt creeps in, not about Amalia but about Sortini. Perhaps their relationship isn’t as simple and crude as it seems. Perhaps Sortini is above all an official distinguished by his great, almost pathological acumen, which allows him to recognize in Amalia, with commendable foresight, and perhaps only because of the singularity of her gaze, traces of a wicked, wholesale rejection of the Castle. And perhaps Amalia too realizes that she has been unmasked. Her despair may stem from that unmasking more than from a sexual insult, which would be in stark contrast to Sortini’s manners and nature. After all, we don’t know for sure what his message said. Maybe it told Amalia just this: “You’re caught.” Maybe it was a blackmail note or even a proposed pact of silence. Or maybe it was simply a notice informing her that someone has seen through her little game. Now that’s something Amalia could never reveal, for such a notice would in itself be tantamount to expulsion from the village community — it would expose her apostasy, and thus her guilt, leading to the ruin of her entire family.

Amalia is an Antigone who doesn’t appeal to natural law but rather simply refuses to “let herself be initiated” into that unnameable amalgam of community and cult that is the Castle. Her rejection of the rules is much more radical than is implied by her gesture of shredding an official’s abrupt, coarse, and threatening invitation. The message couldn’t, after all, have been an unheard-of outrage, since, as her sister explains to K., relations between village women and officials have a singular characteristic: “We know that women can’t help but love the officials if the officials ever approach them, indeed they love them even beforehand, no matter how much they try to deny it.” Olga, a shrewd, lucid woman, in whom K. has “complete trust,” never speaks imprecisely. And here she uses the word love twice. She doesn’t say that sometimes, out of self-interest, the women of the village yield to the powerful officials who approach them. Rather she asserts that all the village women love the officials, even before they are approached by them. Amalia’s gesture is therefore something that profoundly unhinges the order of things, something that denies the very foundation of village life: the irresistible attraction to anything that emanates from the Castle — and above all to its officials.

Before Amalia’s gesture, her family was among the most prominent in the village. Her father had plenty of customers who ordered their boots from him. Amalia herself sewed “very beautiful clothes” for the most distinguished villagers. They had kind, influential friends, like Gardena. The father had hopes of an imminent promotion in the Firemen’s Association. They lived in a bourgeois house. That fateful third of July, the Firemen’s Festival was to have marked the culmination of a slow but sure social ascent. The festival’s success might have persuaded the authorities to select Amalia’s father as instructor to the Castle firemen. Amid all this, with “the wildest sounds” of the festival trumpets still echoing in their ears, Amalia performs her gesture — and destroys everything. There’s no punishment. It’s enough that the world withdraws from the family, little by little. All sap ceases to flow. Soon they will find themselves “sitting together with the windows closed in the heat of July and August. Nothing was happening. No summons, no news, no visitors, nothing.”

No image of humiliation is more piercing than that of Amalia’s father pestering the Castle copyists to let him know his crime so that he might then attempt to obtain a pardon. But no one answers him, because the cobbler has committed no crime — and then he imagines that “they are concealing his crime from him because he isn’t paying enough.” He has no idea that Castle officials “accept bribes, but only for simplicity’s sake, in order to avoid pointless conversations, and in any case you can’t get anywhere that way.”

To bribe someone for the favor of being accused. Only Block, in The Trial, reaches such heights of humiliation. In his case, however, he must complement it with physical degradation dispensed by Leni, his erotic jailer. Amalia’s father punishes himself on his own, with his silent, tortured brooding.

Between Amalia’s gesture of shredding Sortini’s letter and her father’s grueling attempts to make his petitions heard sprawls the gamut of situations that accompanied the persecution of central Europe’s Jews. What happened later, in the Hitler years, was first and foremost a literalization of this process, as Karl Kraus warned when he wrote that “to pour salt in open wounds” had ceased to be a metaphor, for the metaphor had been “reabsorbed by its reality.” Now the word was etched directly into the flesh, as with the machine in “In the Penal Colony.”

The story of Barnabas’s family shows what can happen when individuals take themselves out of the game of customs and unspoken precepts. The punishment is archaic and ferocious; it strikes not only the ones who have acted, but all their relatives as well. The Castle doesn’t require specific acts of devotion. But it presupposes unquestioning assent to its order. And it avenges itself like nature when one of its equations is questioned.

In addition to her gaze, Amalia has another peculiarity, which K. observes immediately — and it alarms him: she is so “imperious that not only did she appropriate everything said in her presence, but it was all spontaneously conceded to her.” It’s as if Amalia knows how to take possession of other people’s words and turn them inside out until she reaches an ulterior meaning, the only one that matters. Whoever spoke the words meant them in just that way but doesn’t dare admit it, even to himself. Thus to converse with Amalia implies offering up one’s own hidden thoughts.

In her brief exchanges with K., this happens twice. First, K. says to her, giving his words their most common meaning: “Perhaps you are not initiated into Barnabas’s affairs, in which case all’s well and I’ll drop the matter, but perhaps you are initiated — and this, rather, is my impression — and in that case it’s an ugly business, because it would mean your brother is deceiving me.” K. seems to focus only on his captious and insinuating distinctions. But for Amalia, it’s as if K. has said one word only: “initiated.” She responds: “Calm down, I’m not initiated, nothing could induce me to allow myself to be initiated, nothing, not even my regard for you, though I would do many things for you, since we are, as you said, good-natured.” With these words, Amalia allows K. to glimpse her secret: she doesn’t want to be initiated, at any cost. She’s the only person in the village who doesn’t want to know what even K. longs to know. One might think that’s because she already knows it — and refuses to accept it. There’s something stony in her, something impervious to the emanations of the Castle, to its power to ensnare. Perhaps Amalia is mistaken in what she thinks she knows, and yet she’s the only person, among all those K. encounters, who is capable of remaining “face to face with the truth.” There’s no doubt that she clearly understands the causes of the horrible events that, because of her, have befallen her family. And it’s easy to imagine her standing “quietly in the background, observing the devastation.”

The second instance is less obvious. K. begins: “‘You are’—K. was searching for the right word, didn’t immediately find it, and made do with a vaguer one—‘perhaps the most good-natured (gutmütig) people I’ve met so far in the village.’” In his clumsy attempt to maintain distances, K. chooses the most inappropriate word. Especially as regards Amalia. As Olga informs him a few moments later, “Amalia was many things, but ‘good-natured’ wasn’t one of them.” Amalia herself is very careful not to say this. Instead she immediately subjects K.’s word to her process of appropriation, pretending to accept it (“since we are, as you said, good-natured”). Here we are witnessing a superior and severe marivaudage. First of all, Amalia uses the inappropriate word, which K. has chosen, as a pretext for telling him that she will do “many things” for him. For someone like Amalia, who doesn’t waste words, this is like a fiery confession of love. At the same time, with her perennial irony, Amalia makes it clear to K. that his discordant “good-natured” ought to be replaced by another adjective. Perhaps good, a term not apparently in common use in the village.

The verbal exchanges between Amalia and K. are scanty; they get straight to the bottom of things — and then stop there. Olga, on the other hand, speaks continuously. At times one gets the feeling she could go on forever. But Amalia suddenly enters and interrupts her: “Telling Castle stories? Still sitting here together? And you, K., who wanted to take your leave at once — and now it’s nearly ten. So these stories worry you, do they? There are people here who feed on such stories, they sit around together, like you two, and take turns tormenting each other, but you don’t strike me as one of those people.” Amalia’s every word is charged with meaning, but — as Olga will explain later—“it’s not easy to understand exactly what she means, since often you can’t tell if she’s speaking ironically or seriously, mostly she’s serious, but sounds ironic.” That’s the case here with K.: irony is attending her last, profoundly serious, almost desperate attempt to wrest K. away from what Amalia calls “the Castle’s influence.” But K. doesn’t follow her, and instead goes on the offensive with hard words directed at Amalia herself: “I am indeed one of those people, whereas those who don’t concern themselves with these stories, leaving them for others to worry about, do not greatly impress me.” Words spoken to wound, and well aimed. But Amalia is quick on her feet and replies with a fable in which, if only he wanted to, K. might recognize his own story, held up to the light and sketched with cruel, wise, sarcastic strokes. Amalia says: “I once heard of a young man who devoted his days and nights to contemplating the Castle, neglecting everything else. People feared he might lose his mind because he always kept it up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that he hadn’t really been eyeing the Castle at all, just the daughter of a woman who washed floors in the offices. When he managed to get her, everything went back to normal.” Those words are coded. Only K. can know how close they are to the mark — and how full of scorn.

The last completed scene from the incomplete Castle features K. and the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn in the office next to the barroom. The landlady is annoyed by K.s impertinence — a few hours earlier he dared to comment on her clothes. She reminds him of that, and he pretends not to remember. But his remark was undeniably cheeky: “I’m not looking at you, I’m looking at your dress.” Their conversation becomes heated, with K. on the defensive and the landlady on the attack. But what do the landlady’s dresses have to do with the complex, ramifying adventure of a land surveyor who has now been reduced to the rank of janitor? We don’t know and we aren’t told. But we hear in this conversation, as in other episodes, the flutter of something that might be vitally important — and that continues to elude us. The reader’s uncertainty here is shared by K., who is sure of only one thing, which he dares to assert: “You’re not merely a landlady, as you claim.” And a little later he affirms again: “You’re not merely a landlady, you have other goals.” But what disguised power might the landlady represent? And why the disguise? And to what heights might that power reach?

But all this would remain pointless and abstract, were it not for the landlady’s dresses. Put on the spot like a child caught in the act, K. defines them thus: “Made of good material, expensive, but outmoded, overdone, often mended, and threadbare.” Furthermore, he tells the landlady, “they’re not suitable for a woman of your age, figure, or position.” Insolent janitor. But, once again, perceptive.

When the landlord and landlady, the night before, rushed in to reproach K. for having remained in the hallway during the distribution of records, K. noticed at once that the landlady was strangely attired, in a “dark dress, with a full skirt that rustled like silk, poorly buttoned and laced.” And he wondered: “Where could she have possibly found it in the rush?” Now the landlady shows him. Right there in the office, next to the iron strongbox, she slides open the doors of a vast, deep wardrobe. Like a satrap, she unveils her treasure: numberless dresses, these too in a range of dark shades, pressed one against the other. And then she adds: “Upstairs I have two more wardrobes full of dresses, two wardrobes, each nearly as large as this one.” After this revelation, the dialogue becomes clenched. K. has the nerve to say: “I expected something like this, it’s as I said, you’re not merely a landlady, you have other goals.” And the landlady replies: “My only goal is to dress well.” Here the expression “to dress well” seems to belong to the figurative language of the arcana imperii. One can imagine Plato and the tyrant Dionysius, in Syracuse, exchanging similar words. Each remark could be said by either of them. And maybe Plato was told at some point what the landlady now tells K.: “You’re either a fool or a child, or else a very malicious and dangerous man. Get out of here, now!”

The role of landlady — whether played by Gardena, who oversees the more modest Bridge Inn, or by the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn — presupposes a hidden relationship with the Castle. And K. immediately feels its pull. Thus the astute Pepi can hint that K. is less interested in Frieda than in Gardena, since “when one speaks of Frieda one is really speaking of the landlady, whose creature Frieda is.”

Gardena is the chief hierodule of Klamm’s cult. Frieda is in line to succeed her, but she is ready to abjure. The dresses that the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn keeps shut away in her vast wardrobe are the temple vestments. Just as lo’s brief visits from Zeus gave way to a long life of wandering, remembrance, and despair, so Gardena survives by contemplating the little mementos she was able to pilfer from Klamm. And her devotion has grown in the absence of her beloved. She’s now the guardian of the inviolable space that surrounds him wherever he goes. That explains why Gardena has become K.’s most tenacious, most “powerful enemy.” She spotted him immediately, just as the high-level agents of the Ochrana could spot a young terrorist in a shapeless mass of students.

Massive and solemn, the only bearer of gravitas in the dense air of the inn she rules over, Gardena is heir to countless generations who, even before being devoted to the brahman or to Yahweh, were devoted to certain sharp-eyed Brahmins or sons of Aaron who concerned themselves above all with keeping the locus and liturgy of authority as separate as possible from that surging, shapeless, impure expanse that was the rest of the world. For Gardena, K. is the grain of sand in the gears. She is his great, unrelenting adversary; she clashes with him more than anyone else — and understands him better than anyone else. Or understands, at least, how dangerous he can be.

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn is profoundly akin to Gardena, but on a level of higher formality: she is a devotee of an office, which by its nature she doesn’t consider to be in the service of anything else. Indeed, the office is the goal toward which all else converges. The true officials are those who protect the officials. Such is the landlady.

K.’s stay in the village rests upon two pillars: his conversations with the two landladies. Both instruct him, rebuke him, and restrain him. Gardena, the landlady of the Bridge Inn, is lower in rank and more exposed to contact with ordinary villagers. Also more vulnerable and pathetic. The other, the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, is occupied exclusively with the worship and service of the officials. She is harsher and crueler than Gardena. But they share the same knowledge. What K. at one point thinks about Gardena could be said about either: “An intriguing nature, which seems to operate like the wind, senselessly, following strange remote orders that could never be fathomed.”

The higher circle, to which K. would like to gain access, where indeed he would like to take up residence, since he has “come here to stay,” is certainly not the home of good, as benevolent interpreters say, nor is it the home of evil, as malevolent interpreters say; rather it is the site where good and evil arrange themselves into shapes that can’t be recognized or distinguished by those who have encountered them only in other circles. The ancient Chinese would not be surprised by this; they would say that they are the two elements united in the Holy Place. But who nowadays is able to reason like the ancient Chinese? The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn is the only one capable of adoring and venerating the Holy Place as such, without requiring any further explanations. Everyone else — not just the foreigner K., but the villagers too — seems divided between memories of blessings enjoyed and curses suffered. They agree on one point only: they would rather remain silent, like the survivors of a patrol that has escaped an ambush. They don’t feel like talking and absentmindedly run their fingers over their scars.

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn is the true guardian of the orthodoxy. For her the distances separating the parties — that is, everyone — and the Castle are never large enough. Her argument is first of all an aesthetic one, and derives from her “pathological striving for refinement.” Simply put, it wasn’t pretty when the parties thronged the same spaces frequented by officials. “If it’s really necessary and they actually must come,” she would say, “at least, for heaven’s sake, let them come single file.” For the landlady the parties, whoever they are and whatever they want to discuss, are merely varieties of postulants, and scarcely more dignified. Essentially, they are all weak-natured, incapable of getting by on their own — hindrances, some worse than others, to the running of the Castle. That’s why the landlady, little by little, drove the parties out: first into a hallway, then onto the stairs, then onto the landing, then into the barroom — and finally out into the street. “But even that wasn’t enough for her. She found it unbearable to be constantly ‘under siege,’ that’s how she put it, in her own house.” How pretty it would all be, if only it weren’t for the traffic of parties. Ultimately, she can’t see what the point of it is. “To get the front steps dirty,” an official once told her, in an angry tone. But the landlady was careful not to ask herself whether his sarcasm might have been directed at the question she had asked. Indeed, “she took pleasure in quoting that phrase.” Her latest idea is to have a building constructed, facing the Gentlemen’s Inn, expressly for the waiting parties. She speaks of it often. But even that project would be nothing but a stopgap. The ideal solution would be to prohibit the parties from ever setting foot in the Gentlemen’s Inn. Unfortunately, the officials themselves are against that.

The Castle gentlemen — at least those officials who occasionally make appearances in the village — often behave more like artists or eccentrics than employees of a vast administration. They always regard themselves as just passing through. Something impels them, makes them appear to be thinking about something other than what’s in front of them. Even at the lowest level, that of the secretaries, they are easily irritated, because they lead “an uneasy life, not fit for everyone.” But even if it’s true that “the job is hard on the nerves,” they won’t give it up for anything, for they can “no longer do without this kind of work.” Any other job “would seem insipid” to them. Like all artists, they don’t know the “difference between ordinary time and work time.” Even when sleeping, they keep a notebook under the covers. They deal with business-related matters seated in the barroom or in bed, letting it be understood that these are the best, most fitting moments for doing so. At times, they take those matters up just before falling asleep, as if they can’t disengage from them and want to carry them even into slumber. Some — like Bürgel — admit that they slip directly from office conversations into sleep, and vice versa. They are loath to move “with all their papers” to another location, as if a swirling wake of words adheres to them, has by now become part of their bodies. Some obscure, unending toil seems to be taking place within them. And it must be exhaustion that sometimes leads them — in order to distract themselves, redirect their energies, exercise their limbs, and above all “recover from the constant intellectual exertion”—to take up “carpentry, fine mechanics, and the like.” In this they are much like Kafka, who at various times sought refuge from the obsessive nature of his thoughts in carpentry and gardening. Certainly the Castle characters are more persistent, since even at night hammering can be heard coming from their windowless rooms in the Gentlemen’s Inn.

The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who knows the Castle officials well, bows to their will, and is able to appreciate the reasons behind it, when they let her know that they won’t be accepting her proposal to transfer the interviews and interrogations of the parties to a new building, separated by only a few meters from the Gentlemen’s Inn and conceived expressly in order to prevent the parties from setting foot in the Gentlemen’s Inn. Every deviation is bothersome, every change a rupture in the delicate sequence of their acts.

Like the two heads of opposed secret-service agencies, K. and the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn are each capable of anything except believing the other. The game is encoded by both parties. To the landlady, K. isn’t a land surveyor or even an aspiring land surveyor (not that she knows anything about that trade; it “made her yawn”). To K., the landlady isn’t “merely a landlady.” Her clothes alone prove it: ill suited to her position, embellished “with frills and pleats,” as overdone as a Byzantine dignitary’s. If the two principal adversaries are not what they claim — and at the same time can’t say what else they are (“What are you really?” the landlady asks K.) — then doubt hangs over everything. Even the village might be an improvisation, like a Potemkin village. Even the Castle.

Of course, one might be tempted to consider K.’s vicissitudes as the frantic and fruitless attempts of an aspiring land surveyor, on finding himself in the position of school janitor, to assert himself. That is, in short, as a fairly inconsequential series of events. But the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who knows how the world works, thinks differently. She has “had to deal with unruly people of various sorts” and considers K. the worst case she has encountered. With his irresponsible and disrespectful behavior, which leaves her “trembling with indignation,” K. has succeeded in making happen “that which had never happened before.” If the danger that K. poses is so frightening, if the gentlemen are reduced to wanting to be “finally free of K.,” that implies that what has happened around him up to then — the pathetic skirmishes, the mocking equivocations, the long, meandering conversations — must have touched in some obscure way the nerve centers of the Castle’s admirable organization, as “gap-free” as Hilbert had wanted the axiomatization of mathematics to be. The landlady and landlord, like true police, are quick to point out that K. will “certainly have to answer” for all this. And his punishment might be as simple as the protraction of his torturous life in that village. But the fact remains, and it is as troubling as ever, that by retracing step by step K.’s course of action, others too might find a way to discover the Castle’s various delicate, arcane points. And perhaps to make happen again “that which had never happened before.”

Some part of what is, a sizable part, must not be accessible as knowledge. It isn’t clear whether that’s the case because the knowledge would lead to breakdowns or simply because it would, at a certain point, become inconvenient. In any case, knowledge is the first enemy. This is the premise of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn. This is the sanctuary she wants to protect. To her, K. is the interloper, he who — out of thoughtlessness, curiosity, self-interest, arrogance, defiance — wants access to everything. And so must be excluded from everything. In the clash between the landlady and K., every word has a double resonance. From the start, with the complicity of monomaniacs, they address one question only — as they well know. But they address it by speaking incessantly of other things. Even clothes.