The Castle (6 page)

"The Land Surveyor mustn't go anywhere but into the bar."

"Certainly," said Olga, who took K.'s part at once, "he's only escorting me."

But K. ungratefully let go her arm and drew the landlord aside. Olga meanwhile waited patiently at the end of the hall. "I should like to spend the night here," said K.

"I'm afraid that's impossible," said the landlord. "You don't seem to be aware that this house is reserved exclusively for gentlemen from the Castle."

"Well, that may be the rule," said K., "but it's surely possible to let me sleep in a corner somewhere."

"I should be only too glad to oblige you," said the landlord, "but besides the strictness with which the rule is enforced - and you speak about it as only a stranger could - it's quite out of the question for another reason; the Castle gentlemen are so sensitive that I'm convinced they couldn't bear the sight of a stranger, at least unless they were prepared for it; and if I were to let you sleep here, and by some chance or other - and chances are always on the side of the gentlemen - you were discovered, not only would it mean my ruin but yours too. That sounds ridiculous, but it's true."

This tall and closely-buttoned man who stood with his legs crossed, one hand braced against the wall and the other on his hip, bending down a little towards K. and speaking confidentially to him, seemed to have hardly anything in common with the village, even although his dark clothes looked like a peasant's finery.

"I believe you absolutely," said K., "and I didn't mean to belittle the rule, although I expressed myself badly. Only there's something I'd like to point out, I have some influence in the Castle, and shall have still more, and that secures you against any danger arising out of my stay here overnight, and is a guarantee that I am able fully to recompense any small favour you may do me."

"Oh, I know," said the landlord, and repeated again, "I know all that."

Now was the time for K. to state his wishes more clearly, but this reply of the landlord's disconcerted him, and so he merely asked: "Are there many of the Castle gentlemen staying in the house to-night?"

"As far as that goes, to-night is favourable," returned the landlord, as if in encouragement, "there's only one gentleman."

Still K. felt incapable of urging the matter, but being in hopes that he was as good as accepted, he contented himself by asking the name of the gentleman.

"Klamm," said the landlord casually, turning meanwhile to his wife who came rustling towards them in a remarkably shabby, old-fashioned gown overloaded with pleats and frills, but of a fine city cut. She came to summon the landlord, for the Chief wanted something or other. Before the landlord complied, however, he turned once more to K., as if it lay with K. to make the decision about staying all night. But K. could not utter a word, overwhelmed as he was by the discovery that it was his patron who was in the house.

Without being able to explain it completely to himself he did not feel the same freedom of action in relation to Klamm as he did to the rest of the Castle, and the idea of being caught in the inn by Klamm, although it did not terrify him as it did the landlord, gave him a twinge of uneasiness, much as if he were thoughtlessly to hurt the feelings of someone to whom he was bound by gratitude; at the same time, however, it vexed him to recognize already in these qualms the obvious effects of that degradation to an inferior status which he had feared, and to realize that although they were so obvious he was not even in a position to counteract them. So he stood there biting his lips and said nothing. Once more the landlord looked back at him before disappearing through a doorway, and K. returned the look without moving from the spot, until Olga came up and drew him away.

"What did you want with the landlord?" she asked.

"I wanted a bed for the night," said K.

"But you're staying with us!" said Olga in surprise.

"Of course," said K., leaving her to make what she liked of it.

In the bar, which was a large room with a vacant space in the middle, there were several peasants sitting by the wall on the tops of some casks, but they looked different from those in K.'s inn. They were more neatly and uniformly dressed in coarse yellowish-grey cloth, with loose jackets and tightly-fitting trousers. They were smallish men with at first sight a strong mutual resemblance, having flat bony faces, but rounded cheeks. They were all quiet, and sat with hardly a movement, except that they followed the newcomers with their eyes, but they did even that slowly and indifferently. Yet because of their numbers and their quietness they had a certain effect on K. He took Olga's arm again as if to explain his presence there. A man rose up from one corner, an acquaintance of Olga's, and made towards her, but K. wheeled her round by the arm in another direction. His action was perceptible to nobody but Olga, and she tolerated it with a smiling side-glance.

The beer was drawn off by a young girl called Frieda. An unobtrusive little girl with fair hair, sad eyes, and hollow cheeks, with a striking look of conscious superiority. As soon as her eye met K's it seemed to him that her look decided something concerning himself, something which he had not known to exist, but which her look assured him did exist. He kept on studying her from the side, even while she was speaking to Olga. Olga and Frieda were apparently not intimate, they exchanged only a few cold words. K. wanted to hear more, and so interposed with a question on his own account:

"Do you know Herr Klamm?"

Olga laughed out loud.

"What are you laughing at?" asked K. irritably.

"Ìm not laughing," she protested, but went on laughing.

"Olga is a childish creature," said K. bending far over the counter in order to attract Frieda's gaze again. But she kept her eyes lowered and laughed shyly.

"Would you like to see Herr Klamm?"

K. begged for a sight of him. She pointed to a door just on her left.

"There's a little peephole there, you can look through."

"What about the others?" asked K.

She curled her underlip and pulled K.. to the door with a hand that was unusually soft.

The little hole had obviously been bored for spying through, and commanded almost the whole of the neighbouring room. At a desk in the middle of the room in a comfortable arm-chair sat Herr Klamm, his face brilliantly lit up by an incandescent lamp which hung low before him. A middle-sized, plump, and ponderous man. His face was still smooth, but his cheeks were already somewhat flabby with age. His black moustache had long points, his eyes were hidden behind glittering pince-nez that sat awry. If he had been planted squarely before his desk K. would only have seen his profile, but since he was turned directly towards K. his whole face was visible. His left elbow lay on the desk, his right hand, in which was a Virginia cigar, rested on his knee. A beer-glass was standing on the desk, but there was a rim round the desk which prevented K. from seeing whether any papers were lying on it; he had the idea, however, that there were none. To make it certain he asked Frieda to look through the hole and tell him if there were any. But since she had been in that room a short time ago, she was able to inform him without further ado that the desk was empty. K. asked Frieda if his time was up, but she told him to go on looking as long as he liked. K. was now alone with Frieda. Olga, as a hasty glance assured him, had found her way to her acquaintance, and was sitting high on a cask swinging her legs.

"Frieda," said K. in a whisper, "do you know Herr Klamm well?"

"Oh, yes," she said, "very well."

She leaned over to K. and he became aware that she was coquettishly fingering the lowcut cream-coloured blouse which sat oddly on her poor thin body. Then she said:

"Didn't you notice how Olga laughed?"

"Yes, the rude creature," said K.

"Well," she said extenuatingly, "there was a reason for laughing. You asked if I knew Klamm, and you see I" - here she involuntarily lifted her chin a little, and again her triumphant glance, which had no connexion whatever with what she was saying, swept over K. - "I am his mistress."

"Klamm's mistress," said K.

She nodded.

"Then," said K. smiling, to prevent the atmosphere from being too charged with seriousness, "you are for me a highly respectable person."

"Not only for you," said Frieda amiably, but without returning his smile.

K. had a weapon for bringing down her pride, and he tried it: "Have you ever been in the Castle?"

But it missed the mark, for she answered: "No, but isn't it enough for me to be here in the bar?"

Her vanity was obviously boundless, and she was trying, it seemed, to get K. in particular to minister to it.

"Of course," said K., "here in the bar you're taking the landlord's place."

"That's so," she assented, "and I began as a barmaid at the inn by the bridge."

"With those delicate hands," said K. halfquestioningly, without knowing himself whether he was only flattering her or was compelled by something in her. Her hands were certainly small and delicate, but they could quite as well have been called weak and characterless.

"Nobody bothered about them then," she said, "and even now ..."

K. looked at her inquiringly. She shook her head and would say no more.

"You have your secrets, naturally," said K., "and you're not likely to give them away to somebody you've known for only half an hour, and who hasn't had the chance yet to tell you anything about himself."

This remark proved to be ill-chosen, for it seemed to arouse Frieda as from a trance that was favourable to him. Out of ihe leather bag hanging at her girdle she took a small piece of wood, stopped up the peephole with it, and said to K. with an obvious attempt to conceal the change in her attitude: "Oh, I know all about you, you're the Land Surveyor,"

and then adding: "but now I must go back to my work," she returned to her place behind the bar counter, while a man here and there came up to get his empty glass refilled. K.

wanted to speak to her again, so he took an empty glass from a stand and went up to her, saying:

"One thing more, Fraulein Frieda, it's an extraordinary feat and a sign of great strength of mind to have worked your way up from byre-maid to this position in the bar, but can it be the end of all ambition for a person like you? An absurd idea. Your eyes -

don't laugh at me, Fraulein Frieda - speak to me far more of conquests still to come than of conquests past. But the opposition one meets in the world is great, and becomes greater the higher one aims, and it's no disgrace to accept the help of a man who's fighting his way up too, even though he's a small and uninfluential man. Perhaps we could have a quiet talk together sometime, without so many onlookers?"

"I don't know what you're after," she said, and in her tone this time there seemed to be, against her will, an echo rather of countless disappointments than of past triumphs.

"Do you want to take me away from Klamm perhaps? O heavens!" and she clapped her hands.

"You've seen through me," said K., as if wearied by so much mistrust, "that's exactly my real secret intention. You ought to leave Klamm and become my sweetheart. And now I can go. Olga!" he cried, "we're going home."

Obediently Olga slid down from her cask but did not succeed immediately in breaking through her ring of friends. Then Frieda said in a low voice with a hectoring look at K.:

"When can I talk to you?"

"Can I spend the night here?" asked K.

"Yes," said Frieda.

"Can I stay now?"

"Go out first with Olga, so that I can clear out all the others. Then you can come back in a little."

"Right," said K., and he waited impatiently for Olga.

But the peasants would not let her go; they made up a dance in which she was the central figure, they circled round her yelling all together and every now and then one of them left the ring, seized Olga firmly round the waist and whirled her round and round; the pace grew faster and faster, the yells more hungry, more raucous, until they were insensibly blended into one continuous howl. Olga, who had begun laughingly by trying to break out of the ring, was now merely reeling with flying hair from one man to the other.

"That's the kind of people I'm saddled with," said Frieda, biting her thin lips in scorn.

"Who are they?" asked K.

"Klamm's servants," said Frieda, "he keeps on bringing those people with him, and they upset me. I can hardly tell what I've been saying to you, but please forgive me if I've offended you, it's these people who are to blame, they're the most contemptible and objectionable creatures I know, and I have to fill their glasses up with beer for them.

How often I've implored Klamm to leave them behind him, for though I have to put up with the other gentlemen's servants, he could surely have some consideration for me; but it's all no use, an hour before his arrival they always come bursting in like cattle into their stalls. But now they've really got to get into the stalls, where they belong. If you weren't here I'd fling open this door and Klamm would be forced to drive them out himself."

"Can't he hear them, then?" asked K.

"No," said Frieda, "he's asleep."

"Asleep?" cried K. "But when I peeped in he was awake and sitting at the desk."

"He always sits like that," said Frieda, "he was sleeping when you saw him. Would I have let you look in if he hadn't been asleep? That's how he sleeps, the gentlemen do sleep a great deal, it's hard to understand. Anyhow, if he didn't sleep so much, he wouldn't be able to put up with his servants. But now I'll have to turn them out myself."

She took a whip from a corner and sprang among the dancers with a single bound, a little uncertainly, as a young lamb might spring. At first they faced her as if she were merely a new partner, and actually for a moment Frieda seemed inclined to let the whip fall, but she soon raised it again, crying:

"In the name of Klamm into the stall with you, into the stall, all of you!"

When they saw that she was in earnest they began to press towards the back wall in a kind of panic incomprehensible to K.., and under the impact of the first few a door shot open, letting in a current of night air through which they all vanished with Frieda behind them openly driving them across the courtyard into the stalls. In the sudden silence which ensued K. heard steps in the vestibule. With some idea of securing his position he dodged behind the bar counter, which afforded the only possible cover in the room. He had an admitted right to be in the bar, but since he meant to spend the night there he had to avoid being seen. So when the door was actually opened he slid under the counter. To be discovered there of course would have its dangers too, yet he could explain plausibly enough that he had only taken refuge from the wild licence of the peasants. It was the landlord who came in.