The Castle (36 page)

But you and the assistants!

You've never denied that they persecute you, and you've admitted that you're attracted by them. I wasn't angry with you for that, I recognized that powers were at work which you weren't equal to, I was glad enough to see that you put up a resistance at least, I helped to defend you, and just because I left off for a few hours, trusting in your constancy, trusting also, I must admit, in the hope that the house was securely locked and the assistants finally put to flight - I still underestimate them, I'm afraid - just because I left off for a few hours and this Jeremiah - who is, when you look at him closely, a rather unhealthy elderly creature had the impudence to go up to the window.

Just for this, Frieda, I must lose you and get for a greeting: "There will be no marriage."

Shouldn't I be the one to cast reproaches?

But I don't, I have never done so."

And once more it seemed advisable to K. to distract Frieda's mind a little, and he begged her to bring him something to eat, for he had had nothing since midday. Obviously relieved by the request, Frieda nodded and ran to fetch something, not farther along the passage, however, where K. conjectured the kitchen was, but down a few steps to the left.

In a little she brought a plate with slices of meat and a bottle of wine, but they were clearly only the remains of a meal, the scraps of meat had been hastily ranged out anew so as to hide the fact, yet whole sausage skins had been overlooked, and the bottle was three-quarters empty. However, K. said nothing and fell on the food with a good appetite.

"You were in the kitchen?" he asked.

"No, in my own room," she said. "I have a room down there."

"You might surely have taken me with you," said K. "Ìll go down now, so as to sit down for a little while I'm eating."

"Ìll bring you a chair," said Frieda already making to go.

"Thanks," replied K. holding her back, "Ìm neither going down there, nor do I need a chair any longer."

Frieda endured his hand on her arm defiantly, bowed her head and bit her lip.

"Well, then, he is down there," she said, "did you expect anything else? He's lying on my bed, he got a cold out there, he's shivering, he's hardly had any food. At bottom it's all your fault, if you hadn't driven the assistants away and run after those people, we might be sitting comfortably in the school now. You alone have destroyed our happiness.

Do you think that Jeremiah, so long as he was in service, would have dared to take me away? Then you entirely misunderstood the way things are ordered here. He wanted me, he tormented himself, he lay in watch for me, but that was only a game, like the play of a hungry dog who nevertheless wouldn't dare to leap up on the table. And just the same with me. I was drawn to him, he was a playmate of mine in my childhood - we played together on the slope of the Castle Hill, a lovely time, you've never asked me anything about my past

- but all that wasn't decisive as long as Jeremiah was held back by his service, for I knew my duty as your future wife.

But then you drove the assistants away and plumed yourself on it besides, as if you had done something for me by it. Well, in a certain sense it was true. Your plan has succeeded as far as Arthur is concerned, but only for the moment, he's delicate, he hasn't Jeremiah's passion that nothing can daunt, besides you almost shattered his health for him by the buffet you gave him that night - it was a blow at my happiness as well -

he fled to the Castle to complain, and even if he comes back soon, he's gone now all the same.

But Jeremiah stayed.

When he's in service he fears the slightest look of his master, but when he's not in service there's nothing he's afraid of. He came and took me. Forsaken by you, commanded by him, my old friend, I couldn't resist. I didn't unlock the school door. He smashed the window and lifted me out. We flew here, the landlord looks up to him, nothing could be more welcome to the guests, either, than to have such a waiter, so we were taken on, he isn't living with me, but we are staying in the same room."

"In spite of everything," said K., "I don't regret having driven the assistants from our service. If things stood as you say and your faithfulness was only determined by the assistants being in the position of servants, then it was a good thing that it came to an end. The happiness of a married life spent with two beasts of prey, who could only be kept under by the whip wouldn't have been very great. In that case I'm even thankful to this family who have unintentionally had some part in separating us."

They became silent and began to walk backwards and forwards again side by side, though neither this time could have told who had made the first move. Close beside him, Frieda seemed annoyed that K. did not take her arm again.

"And so everything seems in order," K. went on, "and we might as well say good-bye, and you go to your Jeremiah, who must have had this chill, it seems, ever since I chased him through the garden, and whom you've already left by himself too long in that case, and I to the empty school, or, seeing that there's no place for me there without you, anywhere else where they'll take me in. If I hesitate still in spite of this, it's because I have still a litde doubt about what you've told me, and with good reason. I have a different impression of Jeremiah. So long as he was in service, he was always at your heels and I don't believe that his position would have held him back permanently from making a serious attempt on you.

But now that he considers that he's absolved from service, it's a different case.

Forgive me if I have to explain myself in this way. Since you're no longer his master's fiancee, you're by no means such a temptation for him as you used to be. You may be the friend of his childhood, but - I only got to know him really from a short talk to-night -

in my opinion he doesn't lay much weight on such sentimental considerations. I don't know why he should seem a passionate person in your eyes. His mind seems to me on the contrary to be particularly cold. He received from Galater certain instructions relating to me, instructions probably not very much in my favour, he exerted himself to carry them out, with a certain passion for service, I'll admit - it's not so uncommon here - one of them was - he should wreck our relationship. Probably he tried to do it by several means, one of them was to tempt you by his evil languishing glances, another - here the landlady supported him - was to invent fables about my unfaithfulness.

His attempt succeeded, some memory or other of Klamm that clung to him may have helped, he has lost his position, it is true, but probably just at the moment when he no longer needed it, then he reaped the fruit of his labours and lifted you out through the school window, with that his task was finished, and his passion for jervice having left him now, he'll feel bored, he would rather be in Arthur's shoes, who isn't really complaining up there at all, but earning praise and new commissions, but someone had to stay behind to follow the further developments of the affair.

It's rather a burdensome task to him to have to look after you. Of love for you he hasn't a trace, he frankly admitted it to me. As one of Klamm's sweethearts he of course respects you, and to insinuate himself into your bedroom and feel himself for once a little Klamm certainly gives him pleasure, but that is all, you yourself mean nothing to him now, his finding a place for you here is only a supplementary part of his main job.

So as not to disquieten you he has remained here himself too, but only for the time being, as long as he doesn't get further news from the Castle and his cooling feelings towards you aren't quite cured."

"How you slander him," said Frieda, striking her little fists together.

"Slander?" said K., "no, I don't wish to slander him. But I may quite well perhaps be doing him an injustice, that is certainly possible. What I've said about him doesn't lie on the surface for anybody to see, and it may be looked at differently too. But slander?

Slander could only have one object, to combat your love for him. If that were necessary and if slander were the most fitting means, I wouldn't hesitate to slander him. Nobody could condemn me for it, his position puts him at such an advantage as compared with me that, thrown back solely on my own resources, I could even allow myself a little slander.

It would be a comparatively innocent, but in the last resort a powerless, means of defence. So put down your fists."

And K. took Frieda's hand in his.

Frieda tried to draw it away, but smilingly and not with any great earnestness.

"But I don't need slander," said K., "for you don't love him, you only think you do, and you'll be thankful to me for ridding you of your illusion. For think, if anybody wanted to take you away from me without violence, but with the most careful calculation, he could only do it through the two assistants. In appearance, for childish, merry, irresponsible youths, fallen from the sky, from the Castle, a dash of childhood's memories with them too.

That of course must have seemed very nice, especially when I was the antithesis of it all, and was always running after affairs moreover which were scarcely comprehensible, which were exasperating to you, and which threw me together with people whom you considered deserving of your hate - something of which you carried over to me too, in spite of all my innocence. The whole thing was simply a wicked but very clever exploitation of the failings in our relationship. Everybody's relations have their blemishes, even ours, we came together from two very different worlds, and since we have known each other the life of each of us has had to be quite different, we still feel insecure, it's all too new. I don't speak of myself, I don't matter so much, in reality I've been enriched from the very first moment that you looked on me, and to accustom oneself to one's riches isn't very difficult. But - not to speak of anything else - you were torn away from Klamm, I can't calculate how much that must have meant, but a vague idea of it I've managed to arrive at gradually, you stumbled, you couldn't find yourself, and even if I was always ready to help you, still I wasn't always there, and when I was there you were held captive by your dreams or by something more palpable, the landlady, say - in short there were times when you turned away from me, longed, poor child, for vague inexpressible things, and at those periods any passable man had only to come within your range of vision and you lost yourself to him, succumbing to the illusion that mere fancies of the moment, ghosts, old memories, things of the past and things receding ever more into the past, life that had once been lived that all this was your actual present-day life.

A mistake, Frieda, nothing more than the last and, properly regarded, contemptible difficulties attendant on our final reconciliation. Come to yourself, gather yourself together. Even if you thought that the assistants were sent by Klamm - it's quite untrue, they come from the plater - and even if they did manage by the help of this illusion to charm you so completely that even in their disreputable nicks and their lewdness you thought you found traces of them, just as one fancies one catches a glimpse of some precious stone that one has lost in a dung heap, while in reality one couldn't be able to find it even if it were there - all the same they're only hobbledehoys like the servants in the stall, except that they're not healthy like them, and a little fresh air makes them ill and compels them to take to their beds, which I must say that they know how to snuffle out with a servant's true cunning."

Frieda had let her head fall on K.'s shoulder.

Their arms round each other, they walked silently up and down.

"If we had only," said Frieda after a while, slowly, quietly, almost serenely, as if she knew that only a quite short respite of peace on K.'s shoulder were reserved for her, and she wanted to enjoy it to the utmost, "if we had only gone away somewhere at once that night, we might be in peace now, always together, your hand always near enough for mine to grasp.

Oh, how much I need your companionship, how lost I have felt without it ever since I've known you, to have your company, believe me, is the only dream that I've had, that and nothing else."

Then someone called from the side passage, it was Jeremiah, he was standing there on the lowest step, he was in his shirt, but had thrown a wrap of Frieda's round him. As he stood there, his hair rumpled, his thin beard lank as if dripping with wet, his eyes painfully beseeching and wide with reproach, his sallow cheeks flushed, but yet flaccid, his naked legs trembling so violently with cold that the long fringes of the wrap quivered as well, he was like a patient who had escaped from hospital, and whose appearance could only suggest one thought, that of getting him back in bed again. This in fact was the effect that he had on Frieda, she disengaged herself from K., and was down beside Jeremiah in a second. Her nearness, the solicitude with which she drew the wrap closer round him, the haste with which she tried to force him back into the room, seemed to give him new strength, it was as if he only recognized K. now.

"Ah, the Land Surveyor!" he said, stroking Frieda's cheek to propitiate her, for she did not want to let him talk any "forgive the interruption. But I'm not at all well, that must be my excuse. I think I'm feverish, I must drink some tea and get a sweat. Those damned railings in the school garden, they'll give me something to think about yet, and then, already chilling to the bone, I had to run about all night afterwards. One sacrifices one's health for things not really worth it, without noticing it at the time.

But you, Land Surveyor, mustn't let yourself be disturbed by me, come into the room here with us, pay me a sick visit, and at the same time tell Frieda whatever you have still to say to her. When two who are accustomed to one another say good-bye, naturally they have a great deal to say to each other at the last minute which a third party, even if he's lying in bed waiting for his tea to come, can't possibly understand. But do come in, I'll be perfectly quiet."

"That's enough, enough!" said Frieda pulling at his arm. "He's feverish and doesn't know what he's saying. But you, K., don't you come in here, I beg you not to. It's my room and Jeremiah's, or rather it's my room and mine alone, I forbid you to come in with us. You always persecute me. Oh, K., why do you always persecute me? Never, never will I go back to you, I shudder when I think of the very possibility. Go back to your girls.