The Castle (23 page)

So it's a matter of indifference to you that I've lost my post at the Herrenhof and that I've had to leave the Bridge Inn as well, a matter of indifference that I have to endure the heavy work in the school. You have no tenderness to spare for me, you hardly even time for me, you leave me to the assistants, the idea of being jealous never comes into your mind, my only value for you is that I was old Klamm's sweetheart, in your ignorance you exert yourself to keep me from forgetting Klamm, so that when the decisive moment comes I should not make any resistance. Yet at the same time you carry on a feud with the landlady, the only one you think capable of separating me from you, and that's why you brought your quarrel with her to a crisis, so as to have to leave the Bridge Inn with me. But that, so far as I'm concerned, I belong to you whatever happens, you haven't the slightest doubt. You think of the interview with Klamm as a business deal, a matter of hard cash. You take every possibility into account.

Providing that you reach your end you're ready to do anything. Should Klamm want me you are prepared to give me to him, should he want you to suck to me you'll stick to me, should he want you to fling me out, you'll fling me out, but you're prepared to play a part too. If it's advantageous to you, you'll give out that you love me, you'll try to combat his indifference by emphasizing your own littleness, and then shame him by the fact that you're his successor, or you'll be ready to carry him the protestations of love for him which you know I've made, and beg him to take me on again, of course on your terms. And if nothing else answers, then you'll simply go and beg from him in the name of K. and wife.

But, the landlady said finally, when you see then that you have deceived yourself in everything, in your assumptions and in your hopes, in your ideas of Klamm and his relations with me, then my purgatory will begin, for then for the first time I'll be in reality the only possession you'll have to fall back on, but at the same time it will be a possession that has proved to be worthless, and you'll treat it accordingly, seeing that .you have no feeling for me but the feeling of ownership."

With his lips tightly compressed K. had listened intently, the wood he was sitting on had rolled asunder though he had not noticed it, he had almost slid on to the floor, and now at last he got up, sat down on the dais, took Frieda's hand, she feebly tried to pull away, and said: "In what you've haven't always been able to distinguish the landlady's thoughts from your own."

"They're the landlady's sentiment, purely," said Frieda, "I heard her out because I respected her but it was the first time in my life that I completely and wholly refused to accept her opinion. All that she said seemed to me so pitiful, so far from any understanding of how things stood between us. There seemed actually to be more truth to me at the direct opposite of what she said. I thought of that sad morning after our first night together. You kneeling beside me with a look as if everything were lost. And how it really seemed then that in spite of all I could do, I was not helping you but hindering you. It was through me that the landlady had become your enemy, a powerful enemy, whom even now you still undervalue. It was for my sake that you had to take thought, that you had to fight for your post, that you were at a disadvantage before the Superintendent, that you had to humble yourself before the teacher and were delivered over to the assistants, but worst of all for my sake you had perhaps lost your chance with Klamm.

That you still went on trying to reach Klamm was only a kind of feeble endeavour to propitiate him in some way. And I told myself that the landlady, who certainly knew far better than I, was only trying to shield me by her suggestions from bitter self-reproach.

A well-meant but superfluous attempt. My love for you had helped me through everything, and would certainly help you on too, in the long run, if not here in the village, then somewhere else. It had already given a proof of its power, it had rescued you from Barnabas's family."

"That was your opinion, then, at the time," said K., "and has it changed since?"

"I don't know," replied Frieda, glancing down at K.'s hand which still held hers,

"perhaps nothing has changed. When you're so close to me and question me so calmly, then I think that nothing has changed. But in reality -" she drew her hand away from K., sat erect opposite him and wept without hiding her face. She held her tear-covered face up to him as if she were weeping not for herself and so had nothing to hide, but as if she were weeping over K.'s treachery and so the pain of seeing her tears was hidden. "But in reality everything has changed since I've listened to you talking with that boy. How innocently you began asking about the family, about this and that! To me you looked just due you did that night when you came into the taproom, impetuous and frank, trying to catch my attention with such a childlike eagerness. You were just the same as then, and all I wished was that the landlady had been here and could have listened to you, and then we should have seen whether she could soil stick to her opinion. But then quite suddenly

- I don't know how it happened - I noticed that you were talking to him with a hidden intention. You won his trust - and it wasn't easy to win - by sympathetic words, simply so that you might with greater ease reach your end, which I began to recognize more and more clearly. Your end was that woman. In your apparently solkitous inquiries about her I could see quite nakedly your simple preoccupation with your own affairs. You were betraying that woman even before you had won her. In your words I recognized not only my past, but my future as well, it was as if the landlady were sitting beside me and explaining everything, and with all my strength I tried to push her away, but I saw clearly the hopelessness of my attempt, and yet it was not really myself who was going to be betrayed, it was not I who was really being betrayed, but that unknown woman. And then when I collected myself and asked Hans what he wanted to be and he said he wanted to be like you, and I saw that he had fallen under your influence so completely already, well what great difference was there between him, being exploited here by you, the poor boy, and myself that time in the taproom?"

"Everything," said K., who had regained his composure in listening. "Everything that you say is in a certain sense justifiable, it is not untrue, it is only partisan. These arc the landlady's ideas, my enemy's ideas, even if you imagine that they're your own.

And that comforts me. But they're instructive, one can learn a great deal from the landlady. She didn't express them to me personally, although she did not spare my feelings other ways. Evidently she put this weapon in your hands in the hope that you would employ it at a particularly bad or decisive point for me. If I am abusing you, then she is abusing you in the same way.

But, Frieda, just consider. Even if every, thing were just as the landlady says, it would only be shameful on one supposition, that is, that you did not love me. Then only then, would it really seem that I had won you through calculation and trickery, so as to profiteer by possessing you. In that case it might even have been part of my plan to appear before you arm-in-arm with Olga so as to evoke your pity, and the landlady has simply forgotten to mention that too in her list of my offences. But if it wasn't as bad as all that, if it wasn't a sly beast of prey that seized you that night, but you came to meet me, just as I went to meet you, and we found one another without a thought for ourselves, in that case, Frieda, tell me, how would things look? If that were really so, in acting for myself I was acting for you too, there is no distinction here, and only an enemy could draw it. And that holds in everything, even in the case of Hans.

Besides, in your condemnation of my talk with Hans your sensitiveness makes you exaggerate things morbidly, for if Hans's intentions and my own don't quite coincide, still that doesn't by any means amount to an actual antagonism between them, moreover our discrepancies were not lost on Hans, if you believe that you do grave injustice to the cautious little man, and even if they should have been all lost on him, still nobody will be any the worse for it, I hope."

"It's so difficult to see one's way, K.," said Frieda with a sigh. "I certainly had no doubts about you, and if I have acquired something of the kind from the landlady, I'll be only too glad to throw it off and beg you for forgiveness on my knees, as I do, believe me, all the time, even when I'm saying such horrible things. But the truth remains that you keep many things from me. You come and go, I don't know where or from where. Just now when Hans knocked you cried out Barnabas's name. I only wish you had once called out my name as lovingly as for some incomprehensible reason you called that hateful name. If you have no trust in me, how can I keep mistrust from rising? It delivers me completely to the landlady, whom you justify in appearance by your behaviour. Not in everything, I won't say that you justify her in everything, for was it not on my account alone that you sent the assistants packing? Oh, if you but knew ith what passion I try to find a grain of comfort for myself in all that you do and say, even when it gives me pain."

"Once and for all, Frieda," said K., "I conceal not the slightest thing from you. See how the landlady hates me, and how she does her best to get you away from me, and what despicable means she uses, and how you give in to her, Frieda, how you give in to her!

Tell me, now, in what way do I hide anything from you?

That I want to reach Klamm you know, that you can't help me to do it and that accordingly I must do it by my own efforts you know too. That I have not succeeded up till now you see for yourself. Am I to humiliate myself doubly, perhaps, by telling you of all the bootless attempts which have already humiliated me sufficiently? Am I to plume myself on having waited and shivered in vain all an afternoon at the door of Klamm's sledge? Only too glad not to have to think of such things any more, I hurry back to you, and I am greeted again with all those reproaches from you. And Barnabas? It's true I'm waiting for him. He's Klamm's messenger, it isn't I who made him that."

"Barnabas again!" cried Frieda. "I can't believe that he's a good messenger."

"Perhaps you're right," said K., "but he's the only messenger that's sent to me."

"All the worse for you," said Frieda, "all the more reason why you should beware of him."

"Unfortunately he has given me no cause for that till now," said K. smiling. "He comes very seldom, and what messages he brings are of no importance. Only the fact that they come from Klamm gives them any value."

"But listen to me," said Frieda, "for it is not even Klamm that's your goal now, perhaps that disturbs me most of all. That you always longed for Klamm while you had me was bad enough, but that you seem to have stopped trying to reach Klamm now is much worse, that's something which not even the landlady foresaw. According to the landlady your happiness, a questionable and yet very real happiness, would end on the day when you finally recognized that the hopes you founded on Klamm were in vain. But now you don't wait any longer even for that day, a young lad suddenly comes in and you begin to fight with him for his mother, as if you were fighting for your very life."

"You've understood my talk with Hans quite correctly," said K., "it was really so. But is your whole former life so completely from your mind - all except the landlady, of course, who allow herself to be wiped out - that you can't remember longer how one must fight to get to the top, especially when one begins at the bottom? How one must take advantage of every, thing that offers any hope whatever? And this woman comes from the Castle, she told me herself on my first day here, when I happened to stray into Lasemann's. What's more natural than to ask her for advice or even for help. If the landlady only knows the obstacles which keep one from reaching Klamm, then this woman probably knows the way to him, for she has come here by that way herself."

"The way to Klamm?" asked Frieda.

"To Klamm, certainly, where else?" said K.

Then he jumped up: "But now it's high time I was going for the lunch."

Frieda implored him to stay, urgently, with an eagerness quite disproportionate to the occasion, as if only his staying with her would confirm all the comforting things he had told her. But K. was thinking of the teacher, he pointed towards the door, which any moment might fly open with a thunderous crash, and promised to return at once, she was not even to light the fire, he himself would see about it. Finally Frieda gave in in silence.

As K. was stamping through the snow outside - the path should have been shovelled free long ago, strange how slowly the work was getting forward I - he saw one of the assistants, now dead tired, still holding to the railings. Only one, where was the other?

Had K. broken the endurance of one of them, then, at least? The remaining one was certainly still zealous enough, one could see that when, animated by the sight of K., he began more feverishly than ever to stretch out his arms and roll his eyes.

"His obstinacy is really wonderful," K. told himself, but had to add, "he'll freeze to the railings if he keeps it up." Outwardly, however, K. had nothing for the assistant but a threatening gesture with his fist, which prevented any nearer approach. Indeed the assistant actually retreated for an appreciable distance.

Just then Frieda opened one of the windows so as to air the room before putting on the fire, as she had promised K., immediately the assistant turned his attention from K., and crept as if irresistibly attracted to the window. Her face torn between a glance for the assistant and a beseeching helpless glance which she threw at K. Frieda put her hand out hesitatingly from the window, it was not clear whether it was a greeting or a cormmand to go away, nor did the assistant let it deflect him from resolve to come nearer. Then Frieda closed the outer window hastily, but remained standing behind it, her hand on the sash, with her head bent sideways, her eyes wide, and a fixed smile a her face. Did she know that standing like that she was more likely to attract the assistant than repel him?