“Thank you,” said K., “that’s frank and I believe you absolutely. So my position is as uncertain as that, is it, and Frieda’s position, too?”
“No!” interrupted the landlady furiously, “Frieda’s position in this respect has nothing at all to do with yours. Frieda belongs to my house, and nobody is entitled to call her position here uncertain.”
“All right, all right,” said K., “I’ll grant you that too, especially since Frieda for some reason I’m not able to fathom seems to be too afraid of you to interrupt. Stick to me then for the present. My position is quite uncertain, you don’t deny that, indeed you rather go out of your way to emphasise it. Like everything else you say, that has a fair proportion of truth in it, but it isn’t absolutely true. For instance, I know where I could get a very good bed if I wanted it.”
“Where? Where?” cried Frieda and the landlady simultaneously and so eagerly that they might have had the same motive for asking.
“At Barnabas’s,” said K.
“That scum!” cried the landlady. “That rascally scum! At Barnabas’s! Do you hear—” and she turned towards the corner, but the assistants had long quitted it and were now standing arm in arm behind her. And so now, as if she needed support, she seized one of them by the hand, “do you hear where the man goes hobnobbing, with the family of Barnabas? Oh, certainly he’d get a bed there; I only wish he’d stay’d there overnight instead of in the Herrenhof. But where were you two?”
“Madam,” said K. before the assistants had time to answer, “these are my assistants. But you’re treating them as if they were your assistants and my keepers. In every other respect I’m willing at least to argue the point with you courteously, but not where my assistants are concerned, that’s too obvious a matter. I request you therefore not to speak to my assistants, and if my request proves ineffective I shall forbid my assistants to answer you.”
“So I’m not allowed to speak to you,” said the landlady, and they laughed all three, the landlady scornfully, but with less anger than K. had expected, and the assistants in their usual manner, which meant both much and little and disclaimed all responsibility.
“Don’t get angry,” said Frieda, “you must try to understand why we’re upset. I can put it in this way, it’s all owing to Barnabas that we belong to each other now. When I saw you for the first time in the bar—when you came in arm in arm with Olga—well, I knew something about you, but I was quite indifferent to you. I was indifferent not only to you, but to nearly everything, yes, nearly everything. For at that time I was discontented about lots of things, and often annoyed, but it was a queer discontent and a queer annoyance. For instance, if one of the customers in the bar insulted me, and they were always after me—you saw what kind of creatures they were, but there were many worse than that, Klamm’s servants weren’t the worst—well, if one of them insulted me, what did that matter to me? I regarded it as if it had happened years before, or as if it had happened to someone else, or as if I had only heard tell of it, or as if I had already forgotten about it. But I can’t describe it, I can hardly imagine it now, so different has everything become since losing Klamm.”
And Frieda broke off short, letting her head drop sadly, folding her hands on her bosom.
“You see,” cried the landlady, and she spoke not as if in her own person but as if she had merely lent Frieda her voice; she moved nearer too, and sat close beside Frieda, “you see, sir, the results of your actions, and your assistants too, whom I am not allowed to speak to, can profit by looking on at them. You’ve snatched Frieda from the happiest state she had ever known, and you managed to do that largely because in her childish susceptibility she could not bear to see you arm in arm with Olga, and so apparently delivered hand and foot to the Barnabas family. She rescued you from that and sacrificed herself in doing so. And now that it’s done, and Frieda has given up all she had for the pleasure of sitting on your knee, you come out with this fine trump card that once you had the chance of getting a bed from Barnabas. That’s by way of showing me that you’re independent of me. I assure you, if you had slept in that house you would be so independent of me that in the twinkling of an eye you would be put out of this one.”
“I don’t know what sins the family of Barnabas have committed,” said K., carefully raising Frieda—who drooped as if lifeless—setting her slowly down on the bed and standing up himself, “you may be right about them, but I know that I was right in asking you to leave Frieda and me to settle our own affairs. You talked then about your care and affection, yet I haven’t seen much of that, but a great deal of hatred and scorn and forbidding me your house. If it was your intention to separate Frieda from me or me from Frieda it was quite a good move, but all the same I think it won’t succeed, and if it does succeed—it’s my turn now to issue vague threats—you’ll repent it. As for the lodging you favour me with—you can only mean this abominable hole—it’s not at all certain that you do it of your own free will, it’s much more likely that the authorities insist
