It was still a mystery to him how Frieda could be so patient with the assistants. They had been supposed to be cleaning his clothes down in the yard, but after a long search she had found them sitting happily downstairs at their midday meal, the clothes bundled together on their laps. She had had to clean them all herself, and yet, although she was used to giving orders to menials, she did not scold them, but told him, and in their presence too, of their shocking negligence as if it were a little joke, and even tapped one of them lightly, almost flatteringly, on the cheek. K. would reprove her for that in the near future, he thought, but now it was high time to leave. ‘The assistants can stay here and help you with moving our things,’ said K. to Frieda. But they were not happy with that; cheer-ful and well fed as they were, they liked the idea of a little exercise. Only when Frieda said: ‘That’s right, you stay here,’ did they agree. ‘Do you know where I’m going now?’ asked K. ‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘And you’re not trying to stop me any more?’ asked K. ‘You’ll find so many obstacles in your way,’ said she, ‘what would anything I say mean?’ She kissed K. goodbye, gave him a package of bread and sausage that she had brought up for him, since he had had no lunch, reminded him that he was to go to the school later and not come back here, and with her hand on his shoulder went down to the front door with him.
8
Waiting for Klamm
At first K. was glad to have escaped the warm room, crowded as it was with the maids and the assistants. It was freezing a little outside, the snow was firmer and walking easier. However, it was beginning to grow dark, so he quickened his pace.
The castle, its outline already beginning to blur, lay as still as always. K. had never seen the slightest sign of life there. Perhaps it wasn’t possible to make anything out from this distance, yet his eyes kept trying and wouldn’t accept that it could lie so still. When K. looked at the castle he sometimes thought he saw someone sitting quietly there, looking into space, not lost in thought and thus cut off from everything else, but free and at ease, as if he were alone and no one was observing him. He must notice that he himself was under observation, but that didn’t disturb him in the slightest, and indeed—it was hard to tell whether this was cause or effect—the observer’s eyes could find nothing to fasten on, and slipped away from the figure. This impression was reinforced today by the early coming of darkness. The longer he looked, the less he could make out, and the further everything receded into the twilight.
Just as K. reached the Castle Inn, which still had no lights on, a window on the first floor opened, a stout, clean-shaven young gentle-man in a fur coat leaned out and stayed where he was at the window, appearing not to respond to K., who hailed him, with even the slight-est nod of his head. K. met no one in either the entrance hall or the bar, where the smell of stale beer was even stronger than before. That sort of thing didn’t happen at the Bridge Inn. K. immediately went to the door through which he had seen Klamm last time he was here and carefully pressed the handle down, but the door was locked. Then he tried feeling about for the peephole, but presumably the catch over it was so well fitted that he couldn’t find it by touch, and so he struck a match. Then he was alarmed by a cry. A young girl was sitting huddled by the stove in the corner between the door and the sideboard, staring at him as the match flared up and struggling to open her drowsy eyes properly. This was obviously Frieda’s successor.
She soon pulled herself together and turned on the electric light, the expression on her face still unfriendly, but then she recognized K. ‘Ah, it’s you, Mr Land Surveyor,’ she said with a smile, and offered him her hand, introducing herself: ‘My name is Pepi.’* She was small, red-cheeked, and healthy in appearance, her profuse sandy hair was plaited into a big braid, and curls had escaped it to surround her face. She wore a dress that didn’t suit her at all, made of some shiny grey fabric, falling straight but drawn together at the hem with childish clumsiness by a silk ribbon tied in a bow, which kept her from moving freely. She asked how Frieda was, and whether she wasn’t going to come back here soon. There was almost a touch of malice in her question. ‘I was sent for in a hurry as soon as Frieda had left,’ she added, ‘because they can’t have just any girl working here. I’ve been a chambermaid until now, and I can’t say I’ve done well out of my change of job. There’s a lot of work here in the even-ings and at night, which is very tiring, I’ll hardly be able to stand it, and I don’t wonder that Frieda gave it up.’ ‘Frieda was very well satisfied with the job here,’ said K., to make Pepi aware of the differ-ence between her and Frieda, which she seemed to ignore. ‘Don’t you believe her,’ said Pepi. ‘Frieda can control herself better than most people. What she doesn’t want to admit she won’t admit, so that you don’t even notice she has something to admit. I’ve been working here with her for several years, we always shared a bed, but I can’t say I was close friends with her, and I’m sure she doesn’t give me a thought any more. Her one woman friend, maybe, is the old landlady of the Bridge Inn, which is typical of her.’ ‘Frieda is my fiancée,’ said K., looking for the peephole in the door as he spoke. ‘I know,’ said Pepi, ‘that’s why I’m telling you. If she wasn’t your fiancée, then it wouldn’t be of any importance to you.’ ‘I under-stand,’ said K. ‘You mean I can be proud of having won myself such a reserved girl.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, and laughed, sounding pleased, as if she had induced K. to come to some secret understanding with her about Frieda.
But it wasn’t really anything she said that occupied K.’s mind and distracted him a little from what he was looking for; it was her appearance and her presence here. To be sure, she was much younger than Frieda, almost a child still, and her clothes were ridiculous; she had obviously dressed in line with her own ideas of a barmaid’s importance. And in her way she was right, since the position, for which she wasn’t yet in the least suited, had presumably come to her unexpectedly, undeserved, and only on a trial basis. Even the little leather bag that Frieda always used to carry at her belt had not been entrusted to her. As for her alleged dissatisfaction with the job, she was simply showing off. Yet in spite of her childlike foolishness, she too probably had connections with the castle. If she wasn’t lying, she had been a chambermaid, she slept away the days here without knowing the value of what she had, and if he embraced her small, plump, rather round-shouldered body he couldn’t deprive her of that, but proximity to it might encourage him for the difficult task ahead. Then perhaps she was not so very different from Frieda after all? Oh yes, she was. He had only to think of Frieda’s glance to be sure of that. No, K. would never have touched Pepi. Yet he had to cover his eyes for a while, he was looking at her so avidly.
‘We don’t need the light on,’ said Pepi, turning it off again. ‘I only turned it on because you gave me such a fright. What do you want here, anyway? Has Frieda left something behind?’ ‘Yes,’ said K., pointing to the door. ‘Here, in the next room, a tablecloth, a white crochet-work cloth.’ ‘Oh yes, that’s right, her tablecloth,’ said Pepi. ‘I remember, a fine piece of work, I helped her with it, but it’s not in that room.’ ‘Frieda thinks it is. Who’s staying in there?’ asked K. ‘No one,’ said Pepi, ‘it’s the gentlemen’s dining-room, it’s where they eat and drink, or rather it’s meant for that, but most of the gentlemen stay up in their own rooms.’ ‘If I could be sure’, said K., ‘that there was no one in the room next door just now, I’d really like to go in and look for that tablecloth. But I can’t be sure, can I? Klamm for one often sits in that room.’ ‘Klamm certainly isn’t there now,’ said Pepi. ‘He’s just going out. The sleigh is waiting for him in the yard.’
K. left the bar immediately, without a word of explanation, and in the entrance hall turned not to the way out but to the interior of the house. A few more steps brought him to the yard. How quiet and
