The Castle

in this passage, even Erlanger himself, although he was one of the highest among them. The servant put out his lantern, for here it was brilliant with electric light. Everything was on a small scale, but elegantly finished. The space was utilised to the best advantage. The passage was just high enough for one to walk without bending one’s head. Along both sides the doors almost touched each other. The walls did not quite reach to the ceiling, probably for reasons of ventilation, for here in the low cellar-like passage the tiny rooms could hardly have windows. The disadvantage of those incomplete walls was that the passage, and necessarily the rooms as well, were noisy. Many of the rooms seemed to be occupied, in most the people were still awake, one could hear voices, hammering, the clink of glasses. But the impression was not one of particular gaiety. The voices were muffled, only a word here and there could be indistinctly made out, it did not seem to be conversation either, probably someone was only dictating something or reading something aloud; and precisely from the rooms where there was a clinking of glasses and plates no word was to be heard, and the hammering reminded K. that he had been told sometime or other that certain of the officials occupied themselves occasionally with carpentry, model engines and so forth, to recuperate from the continual strain of mental work. The passage itself was empty except for a pallid, tall, thin gentleman in a fur coat, under which his night clothes could be seen, who was sitting before one of the doors. Probably it had become too stuffy for him in the room, so he had sat down outside and was reading a newspaper, but not very carefully; often he yawned and left off reading, then bent forward and glanced along the passage, perhaps he was waiting for a client whom he had invited and who had omitted to come. When they had passed him the servant said to Gerstäcker: “That’s Pinzgauer.” Gerstäcker nodded: “He hasn’t been down here for a long time now,” he said. “Not for a long time now,” the servant agreed.

At last they stopped before a door which was not in any way different from the others, and yet behind which, so the servant informed them, was Erlanger. The servant got K. to lift him on to his shoulders and had a look into the room through the open slit. “He’s lying down,” said the servant climbing down, “on the bed, in his clothes it’s true, but I fancy all the same that he’s asleep. Often he’s overcome with weariness like that, here in the village, what with the change in his habits. We’ll have to wait. When he wakes up he’ll ring. Besides, it has happened before this for him to sleep away all his stay in the village, and then when he woke to have to leave again immediately for the Castle. It’s voluntary, of course, the work he does here.” “Then it would be better if he just slept on,” said Gerstäcker, “for when he has a little time left for his work after he wakes, he’s very vexed at having fallen asleep, and tries to get everything settled in a hurry, so that one can hardly get a word in.” “You’ve come on account of the contract for the carting for the new building?” asked the servant. Gerstäcker nodded, drew the servant aside and talked to him in a low voice, but the servant hardly listened, gazed away over Gerstäcker, whom he overtopped by more than a head, and stroked his hair slowly and seriously.

XVIII

Then, as he was looking round aimlessly, K. saw Frieda far away at a turn of the passage; she behaved as if she did not recognise him and only stared at him expressionlessly; she was carrying a tray with some empty dishes in her hand. He said to the servant, who however paid no attention whatever to him⁠—the more one talked to the servant the more absentminded he seemed to become⁠—that he would be back in a moment, and ran off to Frieda. Reaching her he took her by the shoulders as if he were seizing his own property again, and asked her a few unimportant questions with his eyes holding hers. But her rigid bearing hardly as much as softened, to hide her confusion she tried to rearrange the dishes on the tray and said: “What do you want from me? Go back to the others⁠—oh, you know whom I mean, you’ve just come from them, I can see it.” K. changed his tactics immediately; the explanation mustn’t come so suddenly, and mustn’t begin with the worst point, the point most unfavourable to himself. “I thought you were in the taproom,” he said. Frieda looked at him in amazement and then softly passed her free hand over his brow and cheeks. It was as if she had forgotten what he looked like and were trying to recall it to mind again, even her eyes had the veiled look of one who was painfully trying to remember. “I’ve been taken on in the taproom again,” she said slowly at last, as if it did not matter what she said, but as if beneath her words she were carrying on another conversation with K. which was more important⁠—“this work here is not for me, anybody at all could do it; anybody who can make beds and look good-natured and doesn’t mind the advances of the boarders, but actually likes them; anybody who can do that can be a chambermaid. But in the taproom, that’s quite different. I’ve been taken on straight away for the taproom again, in spite of the fact that I didn’t leave it with any great distinction, but, of course, I had a word put in for me. But the landlord was delighted that I had a