The Castle

Franz Kafka

• Publisher: Re-Image Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783961896264
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Clásicos

The Castle (German: Das Schloss German pronun­cia­tion: Das Schloß is a 1926 novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as K. arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle. Kafka died before finishing the work, but suggested it would end with K. dying in the village, the castle notifying him on his death bed that his "legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there". Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal.

XXV.

When K. woke up he thought at first that he had hardly slept at all; the room was just the same, warm and empty, all the walls in darkness, but with that one electric light above the beer-pulls, and night outside the windows. But when he stretched, the cushion fell to the floor, and the board and casks creaked, Pepi arrived at once, and now he discovered that it was evening and he had slept for over twelve hours. The landlady had asked after him several times during the day, and Gerstäcker, who had been sitting here over a beer in the dark when K. spoke to the landlady in the morning but hadn’t liked to disturb him, had also looked in once to see how he was. Finally, it appeared that Frieda too had come in, and stood beside K. for a little while, but she hadn’t really come on his account, only because she had several things to get ready here before returning to her old job that evening. ‘I suppose she doesn’t fancy you any more?’ asked Pepi, as she brought coffee and cakes. However, she asked not in her old malicious way but sadly, as if now she had come to know the malice of the world for herself, and beside it any personal malice pales and loses its point; she spoke to K. like a companion in misfortune, and when he tasted the coffee and she thought she saw that it wasn’t sweet enough for him, she went off and brought him the full sugar-bowl. It was true that her melancholy had not kept her from decking herself out today even more extravagantly, perhaps, than last time K. had seen her; she wore a profusion of bows and ribbons threaded through her hair, which she had carefully arranged with curling-tongs over her forehead and temples. Around her neck she wore a necklace hanging down into the low-cut neck of her blouse. When K., feeling glad to have had a long sleep and some good coffee, surreptitiously took hold of one of the bows and tried to undo it, Pepi said wearily: ‘Leave me alone,’ and sat down on a cask beside him. K. didn’t have to ask why she was unhappy, for she began telling him at once, her gaze fixed on K.’s coffee-pot as if she needed something to distract her mind as she told him about it, as if even when she thought about her suffering it was more than she could do to give herself up to it entirely. First K. discovered that he himself was to blame for Pepi’s unhappiness, but she didn’t bear him a grudge for that, she said. And she nodded eagerly as she told her tale, to keep K. from contradicting anything. First he had taken Frieda away from the bar and thus made it possible for Pepi to rise to the position of barmaid. She, Pepi, could think of nothing else that might have induced Frieda to give up her post; she sat there in the bar like a spider in its web, casting her threads far and wide as only she could; it would have been impossible to remove her against her will, only love for someone of low status, a love that was un fit for her position, could drive her from it. And what about Pepi? Had she ever aspired to such a post for herself ? She was a chambermaid, she had an insignificant job with few prospects, like every other girl she dreamed of a wonderful future, you can’t forbid anyone to dream, but she didn’t seriously expect to get very far, she had come to terms with what she had already attained. And then Frieda suddenly left the bar, so suddenly that the landlord didn’t have a suitable replacement to hand, he looked around and his eye fell on Pepi, who had certainly done her own part here by putting herself forward. At that time she loved K. as she had never loved anyone before, she had been living for months in her tiny, dark room down below, and expected to spend years there, her whole life if the worst came to the worst, with no one paying her any attention, and then along came K. all of a sudden, a hero, a deliverer of maidens, and he had opened the way for her to rise. Not that he knew anything about her, he hadn’t done it for her sake, but that didn’t make her any less grateful. On the night when she was appointed barmaid—the appointment wasn’t certain yet, but it was very probable—she spent hours talking to him, whispering her thanks into his ear. What he had done seemed even greater to her because the burden he had taken on his own shoulders was Frieda, there was something amazingly unselfish in the fact that to free Pepi from her predicament he was making Frieda his mistress, an unattractive thin girl not as young as she used to be, with short, sparse hair, a sly girl too, who always had secrets of some kind, just the thing you might expect from her appearance; although her face and body were undoubtedly a miserable sight, she must at least have had other secrets that no one could know about, perhaps to do with her alleged relationship with Klamm. At the time, Pepi even entertained ideas like this: was it possible that K. really loved Frieda, wasn’t he deceiving himself, or was he perhaps deceiving no one but Frieda, and would the only result of all this be just Pepi’s rise in the world? Would K. see his mistake then, or stop trying to hide it, and take notice of Pepi instead of Frieda? That wasn’t such a wild idea of Pepi’s, for as one girl against another she could hold her own against Frieda very well, no one would deny that, and it had been primarily Frieda’s position as barmaid and the lustre with which Frieda had managed to endow it that had dazzled K. at the moment when he met her. And then Pepi had dreamed that when she had the position herself K. would come to plead with her, and she would have the choice of either listening to K. and losing the job, or turning him down and rising higher. She had worked it out that she would give up everything and lower herself to his level, and teach him the true love that he could never know with Frieda, the love that is independent of all the grand positions in the world. But then it all turned out differently. And what was to blame for that? K. first and foremost, and then of course Frieda’s crafty, sly nature. K. first, said Pepi, because just what did he want, what strange kind of person was he? What was he after, what important matters occupied his mind to make him forget all that was closest to him, all that was best and most beautiful? Pepi was the victim in all this, everything was stupid, all was lost, and if there was a man with the strength of mind to set fire to the whole Castle Inn and burn it to the ground, leaving no trace, like a piece of paper in the stove, he would be the man of Pepi’s dreams today. Well, so Pepi came to work in the bar, she went on, four days ago just before lunchtime. It’s not easy work here, she said, in fact it’s murder, but you could do a lot for yourself. Pepi never used to live in the moment, and although in her wildest dreams she wouldn’t have thought of rising to occupy the post of barmaid her-self, she’d kept her eyes open, she knew what the job was like, she hadn’t been unprepared when she took it on. You can’t take a post on unprepared, or you’d lose it in the first few hours. Particularly if you behaved the way the chambermaids here did. When you’re a chambermaid you feel forgotten and forlorn, it’s like working down the mine, or at least it is in the corridor where the secretaries stay, you don’t see a soul for days on end except for a few members of the public flitting back and forth, never venturing to look up, no one but the two or three other chambermaids who feel just as bitter about their lot. You can’t leave your room in the morning, the secretaries want to be on their own, the servants bring their food from the kitchen, the chambermaids don’t usually have anything to do with that, and you can’t show yourself in the corridor at mealtimes either. It’s only while the gentlemen are working that the chambermaids are allowed to tidy up, not of course in the rooms that are occupied but in those that happen to be empty, and the housework has to be done very quietly so as not to disturb the gentlemen at their work. But how can anyone clean and tidy quietly if the gentlemen stay in their rooms day after day, and then there are the servants going around, dirty riff raff that they are, and when a room is finally free for the chamber-maid to go in, it’s in such a state that not even a deluge could wash it clean? It’s true that the gentlemen who come here are very fine, but you have a hard time of it mastering your disgust so that you can clean up after them. The chambermaids don’t have too much work, but what there is of it is tough going. And never a word of praise, only blame, particularly the frequent and vexatious accusation that files have been lost while you were clearing up. In fact nothing is ever lost, every tiny piece of paper is handed in to the landlord; well, files do get lost, yes, but it’s not the maids’ fault. And then commissions of inquiry come along and the maids have to leave their room and the commission of inquiry takes their beds apart; the maids don’t have any possessions, their few things fit into a pannier you can carry on your back, but the commission of inquiry spends hours searching all the same. Of course it never finds anything; how would files get into the maids’ rooms? What would the maids do with files? But once again the result is angry scolding and threats on the part of the disappointed commission of inquiry, conveyed only through the landlord. And never any peace—not by day or by night. Noise half the night, noise from first thing in the morning. If only the chambermaids at least didn’t have to live there, but they must, because it’s their business to bring small things ordered from the kitchen in between times, particularly at night. Again and again you hear that sudden banging of a fist on the chambermaids’ door, the order is dictated, you run down to the kitchen, you shake the sleeping kitchen-boys awake, you leave the tray of whatever has been ordered outside the chambermaids’ door, from which the gentlemen’s servants fetch it—how dreary it all is. But that’s not the worst. The worst is when there are no orders and in the middle of the night, when everyone ought to be asleep, and most people really do get to sleep in the end, you sometimes hear someone slinking around outside the chambermaids’ door. Then the maids get out of bed—the beds are above each other, there’s very little space anywhere there; the whole room where the maids sleep is really no more than a big cupboard with three compartments—they listen at the door, they kneel down, they clutch one another in fear. And you keep hearing that person slinking about outside the door. Everyone would be glad if he finally did come in, but nothing happens, no one comes in. You have to remind yourself that there isn’t necessarily

any danger, perhaps it’s just someone pacing up and down, wondering whether to order something and unable to make up his mind. Well, perhaps that’s all it is, but perhaps it’s something quite different. The chambermaids don’t really know the gentlemen at all, they’ve hardly set eyes on them. Anyway, the maids inside the room are half dead with fear, and when at last it’s quiet again outside they lean against the wall without even enough strength to get back into bed. And that was the life waiting for Pepi; this very evening, she said, she was to move back to her old place in the maids’ room. And why? Because of K. and Frieda. Back to the life she’d barely escaped, escaped with K.’s help, to be sure, but also by dint of her own diligent efforts. Because the maids on duty down there, even the most fastidious, do tend to neglect themselves. Who would they be prettifying themselves for? No one sees them, at most the kitchen staff , well, maybe a maid who’s satisfied with that will prettify herself. But otherwise they are in their little room, or in the gentlemen’s rooms, and again it would be silly and a waste of time to enter those rooms in neat, clean clothes. And you’re always in artificial light and stuff y air—the heating is always on—and always dead tired. The best way to spend your one free afternoon a week is to find some quiet place near the kitchen where you can sleep undisturbed and without fear. So why make yourself pretty? You hardly bother even to dress. And then—then Pepi was suddenly moved to the bar where the very opposite was necessary if you wanted to hold your ground, where you were always before other people’s eyes, those people including some very finicky and observant gentlemen, and where you must always look as fine and pleasant as possible. Well, that was a great change! And Pepi might boast that she left nothing undone. How things turned out later didn’t worry Pepi. She knew she had the abilities necessary for the job, she was sure of it, she is still convinced of it now and no one can take that conviction away from her, even today, the day of her defeat. The only difficult bit was knowing how to prove herself at first, because she was a poor chambermaid without nice clothes and jewellery, and the gentlemen don’t have the patience to hang about and see how you grow into the job, they want a proper barmaid at once, without any in-between period, or they’ll go some-where else. You might think their demands weren’t very great if Frieda could satisfy them. But that wasn’t so. Pepi had often thought about it, she said, had often been in Frieda’s company, even shared a bed with her for a while. It wasn’t easy to make Frieda out, and anyone who didn’t study her very closely—and what gentleman is going to study a barmaid very closely?—would easily be led astray. No one knows better than Frieda herself how pathetic she looks; for instance, when you first see her let her hair down you clasp your hands in pity; a girl like that ought not really to be even a chamber-maid; she knows it too, and she has cried her eyes out over it many a night, pressing close to Pepi and winding Pepi’s hair around her own head. But when she was serving in the bar all her doubts were gone, she considered herself a beauty and knew how to make everyone think so too. She knows what people are like, that’s her real art. And she is a quick liar, and deceptive, so that people don’t have time to look at her more closely. Of course that won’t work forever, people do have eyes, and after all their eyes would tell them the truth. But when Frieda realized there was a danger of that she had something else up her sleeve, most recently, for instance, her relationship with Klamm. Her relationship with Klamm! If you don’t believe me, you can go to Klamm and ask him, said Pepi. How clever, how cunning. And if you daren’t go to see Klamm on that kind of subject, maybe you wouldn’t be let in to see him on far more important business, if Klamm is entirely inaccessible—though only to you and your like, because Frieda, for instance, can pop in and see him whenever she wants—well, if that’s the case, you still can find out, you’d think you only had to wait. Klamm wouldn’t allow such a false rumour to circulate for long, he really likes to know what’s said about him in the bar and the guest-rooms, all that is very important to him, and if it’s false he’ll soon put it right. But he hasn’t put it right, so people think there’s nothing to put right and it is the truth. What you see is only Frieda taking the beer to Klamm’s room and coming out again with the payment, but Frieda tells you what you haven’t seen, and you have to believe her. Although in fact she doesn’t tell you, she wouldn’t reveal such mysteries, no, the secrets spread of their own accord around her, and once they’ve spread she doesn’t shrink from speaking of them herself, but in a modest way, without claiming anything, just referring to what’s common knowledge. Not to everything, for instance not that Klamm drank less beer than before since she was serving in the bar, not much less, but distinctly less, she doesn’t talk about that, and there could be various reasons; it could be that a time came when Klamm didn’t like beer so much, or that Frieda made him forget about drinking beer. Anyway, surprising as it may be, let’s say Frieda was Klamm’s mistress. But if someone is good enough for Klamm, why wouldn’t others admire her too? So Frieda became a great beauty, just like that, the kind of girl that’s needed in the bar, almost too beautiful, too powerful, soon the bar would hardly be enough for her. And sure enough, it seemed strange to people that she was still in the bar; it’s a great thing to be a bar-maid, and from that point of view her connection with Klamm seemed very credible, but if the barmaid is Klamm’s mistress, why did he leave her in the bar for so long? Why didn’t he promote her to better things? You can tell people a thousand times that there was nothing contradictory about this, that Klamm had his reasons for acting in such a way, or that some time, perhaps very soon, Frieda’s promotion would come. None of that had much effect; people get certain ideas and in the long term they won’t be persuaded otherwise, not by any arts. No one doubted that Frieda was Klamm’s lover, even those who obviously knew better were too tired to doubt it. ‘For heaven’s sake, call yourself Klamm’s lover then,’ they thought, ‘but if you really are we’ll notice by your rise in the world.’ However, no one noticed anything, and Frieda stayed in the bar as before, and was secretly very glad to stay there. But she lost face with other people, she couldn’t help noticing that, of course, she does notice things, usually even before they’ve happened. A really beautiful, attractive girl, once she’s become used to working in the bar, doesn’t have to employ any arts; as long as she’s beautiful she will be a barmaid, unless something especially unfortunate happens. A girl like Frieda, however, must always be anxious about her job; of course she doesn’t show it in any obvious way, she’s more likely to complain and curse the job. But in secret she keeps observing the atmosphere, so she saw how people were getting indifferent t...