But many months, if not years, had passed since those first documents were drawn up for Department A, which is understandable, for when, as generally happens, a file is sent in the proper way it reaches the right department within a day at the latest, and is dealt with that same day. However, if it gets lost—and considering the excellence of the organ-ization it really has to try very hard to get lost or it will never succeed in doing so—then it can indeed take a very long time. So when we received Sordini’s note we had only the vaguest memory of the affair; there were only the two of us doing the work at the time, Mizzi and me, they hadn’t given me the teacher to assist me yet. We kept copies only of the most important documents—in short, all we could reply, very uncertainly, was that we didn’t know anything about any such appointment, and there was no need for a land surveyor here.
‘However,’ said the mayor, interrupting himself as if, in his eager-ness to tell the tale, he had gone too far, or as if it were at least possible that he had gone too far, ‘I do hope this story isn’t boring you?’
‘Not at all,’ said K. ‘It’s entertaining me.’
‘I’m not telling it to entertain you,’ said the mayor.
‘The only reason why it entertains me,’ said K., ‘is the insight it gives me into the ridiculous confusion which, in some circumstances, can determine the course of a man’s life.’
‘You haven’t been given any such insight yet,’ said the mayor gravely, ‘and I can go on with the story. Naturally a man of Sordini’s calibre wasn’t going to be satisfied with our reply. I admire him, even though he’s a thorn in my flesh. The fact is, he distrusts everyone, even when, say, he has come to recognize a person on countless occa-sions as the most trustworthy man alive—he distrusts him on the next occasion as if he didn’t know him at all, or more correctly, as if he knew him to be a rogue. I think that’s quite right, that’s the way an official ought to proceed, but unfortunately I can’t seem to follow that basic principle. It’s on account of my own nature. You see how frankly I am telling you, a stranger, all this, I just can’t help it.
Sordini, on the other hand, distrusted our answer at once. And then a long correspondence ensued. Sordini asked why it had suddenly occurred to me that no land surveyor ought to be appointed, and I replied, with the help of Mizzi’s excellent memory, that the first idea had come from the authorities themselves (of course we had long ago forgotten that it came from a different department of the castle authorities). Sordini then asked why I mentioned the official letter only now, to which I said that it was because I had only just remembered it. That, said Sordini, was very remarkable. To which I replied that it wasn’t at all remarkable in an affair that had dragged on so long. Sordini said no, it was remarkable, because the letter I had remembered did not exist. Of course it didn’t exist, I said, since the whole file had been lost. Here Sordini said that there must, surely, have been a preliminary note regarding that first letter, the one that didn’t exist. Here I hesitated, for I didn’t like to claim that a mistake had been made, or say I believed that it had been made, in Sordini’s department. In your mind, Mr Land Surveyor, perhaps you are blaming Sordini and thinking that reflection on my claim should at least have caused him to enquire about the case in other departments. But that wouldn’t have been right; I don’t want any blame imputed to the man even in your mind. It is a working principle of the author-ities that they do not even consider the possibility of mistakes being made. The excellent organization of the whole thing justifies that principle, which is necessary if tasks are to be performed with the utmost celerity. Sordini therefore could not enquire in other depart-ments; moreover, those departments would not have responded to his enquiries, because they would have noticed at once that they were being asked to look into the possibility of some mistake.’
‘Mr Mayor, may I interrupt you with a question?’ said K. ‘Didn’t you mention a supervisory authority checking everything? From what you say, the organization is of such a kind that one feels quite ill at the mere idea of these supervisory checks failing.’
‘You are very severe,’ said the mayor, ‘but if you multiplied your severity a thousand times, it would still be as nothing compared to the severity of the authorities’ attitude to themselves. Only a complete stranger would ask your question. Are there supervisory authorities? There are only supervising authorities. To be sure, they’re not intended to detect mistakes in the vulgar sense of the word, since there are no mistakes, and even if there is a mistake, as in your own case, who’s to say that it’s really a mistake in the long run?’
‘That strikes me as an entirely new idea,’ cried K. ‘It’s a very old one to me,’ said the mayor. ‘I am no less convinced than you that there has been a mistake, and as a result of his despair Sordini has fallen very ill, and the first supervisory authorities to check the case, those to which we owe the discovery of the source of the mistake, also acknowledge its existence.
But who can claim that the second set of supervisory authorities will come to the same con-clusion, and then the third set, and so on with all the others?’
‘Maybe,’ said K., ‘but I’d rather not indulge in such reflections, and anyway this is the first time I’ve heard of these supervisory authorities, so of course I can’t understand them yet. Only, I do think that we have to distinguish between two things here: first, what goes on within the authorities, and what is then official or can be taken as official; and second, my own person, outside the orbit of all these official authorities as I am, and threatened by them with such point-less restrictions that I still can’t believe the danger is serious. As for the first point, what you, Mr Mayor, describe with such astonishing and extraordinary command of the subject is probably true. Only I wouldn’t mind hearing a word about myself as well.’
‘I’m coming to that,’ said the mayor, ‘but you couldn’t understand it without a little more preamble. I even mentioned the supervisory authorities too soon. So I’ll go back to my argument with Sordini. As I said, my defences gradually came down. But if Sordini can gain even the slightest advantage over someone else, he has already won the day, because then his close attention, energy, and presence of mind are all the greater, and to the man he is attacking he is a fearsome sight, although a welcome one to that man’s enemies. It’s because I’ve had this experience in other cases that I can speak of him as I do. By the way, I’ve never yet managed to set eyes on him myself, he can’t come down here, he is so overworked. As his office has been described to me, all the walls are hidden behind towers of huge bundles of files stacked one above another, and these are only the files on which Sordini is working at present. Since files are always being taken out of the bundles or put back into them, and it’s all done in a great hurry, the towers are always collapsing, and the sound of them constantly crashing to the floor has become typical of Sordini’s office. Well, Sordini is a real worker, and he devotes the same attention to both the smallest cases and the largest.’
‘Mr Mayor,’ said K., ‘you keep calling my case one of the smallest, yet a great many officials have put their minds to it, and while it may have been very small at first, the zeal of officials like Mr Sordini has made it into a major one. That is unfortunate, and not at all what I want, since I have no ambition to see towers of files about me rise in the air and come crashing down, I just want to work at a little drawing-board in peace as a humble land surveyor.’
‘No,’ said the mayor, ‘it’s not a major case, you have no grounds for complaint there. It is one of the smallest of small cases. The status of the case is not determined by the amount of work done on it, and if that’s what you think you are still very far from understanding the authorities. But even if it did depend on the amount of work, your case would be one of the slightest. There are far more normal cases, I mean cases where no so-called mistakes creep in, and indeed much more rewarding work is done on them. Anyway, you know nothing at all about the real work your case has entailed, and I will now tell you about it. At first Sordini left me right out of it, but then his officials arrived, and there were daily hearings of highly regarded members of this parish at the Castle Inn, all taken down for the records. Most of the villagers backed me, and only a few expressed distrust, saying
