“Superintendent,” said K., “you interpret the letter so well that nothing remains of it but a signature on a blank sheet of paper. Don’t you see that in doing this you depreciate Klamm’s name, which you pretend to respect?”
“You’ve misunderstood me,” said the Superintendent, “I don’t misconstrue the meaning of the letter, my reading of it doesn’t disparage it, on the contrary. A private letter from Klamm has naturally far more significance than an official letter, but it hasn’t precisely the kind of significance that you attach to it.”
“Do you know Schwarzer?” asked K.
“No,” replied the Superintendent. “Perhaps you know him, Mizzi? You don’t know him either? No, we don’t know him.”
“That’s strange,” said K., “he’s a son of one of the under-castellans.”
“My dear Land Surveyor,” replied the Superintendent, “how on earth should I know all the sons of all the under-castellans?”
“Right,” said K., “then you’ll just have to take my word that he is one. I had a sharp encounter with this Schwarzer on the very day of my arrival. Afterwards he made a telephone enquiry of an under-castellan called Fritz and received the information that I was engaged as Land Surveyor. How do you explain that, Superintendent?”
“Very simply,” replied the Superintendent. “You haven’t once up till now come into real contact with our authorities. All those contacts of yours have been illusory, but owing to your ignorance of the circumstances you take them to be real. And as for the telephone: As you see, in my place, though I’ve certainly enough to do with the authorities, there’s no telephone. In inns and suchlike places it may be of real use, as much use say as a penny in the slot musical instrument, but it’s nothing more than that. Have you ever telephoned here? Yes? Well, then perhaps you’ll understand what I say. In the Castle the telephone works beautifully of course, I’ve been told it’s going there all the time, that naturally speeds up the work a great deal. We can hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it too. Now this humming and singing transmitted by our telephones is the only real and reliable thing you’ll hear, everything else is deceptive. There’s no fixed connection with the Castle, no central exchange which transmits our calls further. When anybody calls up the Castle from here the instruments in all the subordinate departments ring, or rather they would all ring if practically all the departments—I know it for a certainty—didn’t leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a little distraction, especially in the evenings and at night, and may hang the receiver on. Then we get an answer, but an answer of course that’s merely a practical joke. And that’s very understandable too. For who would take the responsibility of interrupting, in the middle of the night, the extremely important work up there that goes on furiously the whole time, with a message about his own little private troubles? I can’t comprehend how even a stranger can imagine that when he calls up Sordini, for example, it’s really Sordini that answers. Far more probably it’s a little copying clerk from an entirely different department. On the other hand, it may certainly happen once in a blue moon that when one calls up the little copying clerk Sordini will answer himself. Then finally the best thing is to fly from the telephone before the first sound comes through.”
“I didn’t know it was like that, certainly,” said K. “I couldn’t know of all these peculiarities, but I didn’t put much confidence in those telephone conversations and I was always aware that the only things of real importance were those that happened in the Castle itself.”
“No,” said the Superintendent, holding firmly on to the word, “these telephone replies certainly have a meaning, why shouldn’t they? How could a message given by an official from the Castle be unimportant? As I remarked before apropos Klamm’s letter. All these utterances have no official significance; when you attach official significance to them you go astray. On the other hand, their private significance in a friendly or hostile sense is very great, generally greater than an official communication could ever have.”
“Good,” said K. “Granted that all this is so, I should have lots of good friends in the Castle: looked at rightly the sudden inspiration of that department all these years ago—saying that a Land Surveyor should be asked to come—was an act of friendship towards myself; but then in the sequel one act was followed by another, until at last, on an evil day, I was enticed here and then threatened with being thrown out again.”
“There’s a certain amount of truth in your view of the case,” said the Superintendent; “you’re right in thinking that the pronouncements of the Castle are not to be taken literally. But caution is always necessary, not only here, and always the more necessary the more important the pronouncement in question happens to be. But when you went on to talk about being enticed, I ceased to fathom you. If you had followed my explanation more carefully, then you must have seen that the question of
