castle they have other ideas of a messenger’s job, ideas that can’t be reconciled with yours, even if Barnabas were to sacrifice himself entirely to his work, which I’m afraid he sometimes does seem inclined to do. We’d have to go along with that, we couldn’t object to it, but for the question of whether what he does really is a messenger’s work. To you, of course, he can’t express any doubt; as he sees it, if he did he would be undermining his own existence, offending severely against the laws which he thinks still govern him, and he doesn’t speak freely even to me. I have to cajole and kiss his doubts away, and even then he won’t admit that they are doubts. There is something of Amalia in him. And of course he doesn’t tell me any of this, even though I’m his only confidante. But we do sometimes talk about Klamm. I have never seen Klamm myself, you know, Frieda doesn’t much like me, and would never have given me a glimpse of him, but of course it’s well known in the village what he looks like, a few people have seen him, everyone has heard of him, and it seems as if a picture of Klamm has been built up out of rumours and certain ulterior motives which distort that picture, yet in outline it is probably correct. But only in outline. Otherwise it is apt to change, perhaps not even so apt to change as Klamm’s real appearance. It’s said that he looks different when he comes into the village and when he leaves it, different before and after he has drunk a beer, different awake and asleep, different on his own and in conversation, and it is quite understandable, with all this, that he looks almost entirely different up in the castle. Even within the village, quite wide differences are reported: differences of size, bearing, figure, of his beard, it’s only when the accounts come to his clothes that luckily they tally; he always wears the same thing, a black coat with long tails. Of course all these differences aren’t the result of some magic trick, but they are easy to understand, arising from the mood of the moment, the degree of excitement, the count-less nuances of hope or despair felt by those who are privileged to see Klamm, and then again, in general they catch only a brief glimpse of him.

I am telling you all this as Barnabas has often explained it to me, and someone who is not personally and directly affected can set his mind at rest with that thought. But we can’t, and whether he really speaks to Klamm is a matter of life and death to Barnabas.’ ‘It’s the same for me,’ said K., and they moved closer together on the bench by the stove. K. was indeed affected by all this disturbing informa-tion from Olga, but he felt it was a considerable compensation to find people here who, at least apparently, had much the same experience as he did, so that he could ally himself with them, striking up an understanding in many points, not just some, as with Frieda. He was in fact gradually abandoning any hope of success through a message brought by Barnabas, but the worse a time Barnabas had up there, the closer he was to him down here. K. would never have thought that any of the villagers themselves could be making such unhappy endeavours as Barnabas and his sister did. To be sure, that had not been fully enough explained yet, and could change to its opposite; he mustn’t let himself be led astray by Olga’s own nature, which was certainly innocent, into believing in Barnabas’s honesty too. ‘Barnabas knows the stories of Klamm’s appearance,’ Olga went on, ‘and he has collected and compared many of them, perhaps too many, he himself once even saw Klamm through a carriage window, or thought he saw him, so he was well enough prepared to know who he was, and yet—how would you explain this?—when he went into an office in the castle, and one official among several was pointed out to him, and he was told that was Klamm, he didn’t recognize him, and for a long time afterwards he couldn’t get used to the idea that the official had been Klamm.

But if you ask Barnabas in what way that man was different from the usual idea of Klamm, he can’t reply, or rather he does reply and describes the official at the castle, but that description tallies exactly with the description of Klamm that we know. “Well then, Barnabas,” I say to him, “why do you doubt it, why torment yourself ?” Whereupon, in obvious difficulty, he begins to enumerate distinctive features of the official at the castle, although he seems to be inventing rather than reporting them, and in addition they are so slight—a special way of nodding the head, for instance, or simply his unbuttoned waistcoat—that you can’t possibly take them seriously. What seems to me even more important is the way Klamm treats Barnabas. Usually Barnabas is taken into a large room which is an office, but it is not Klamm’s office, it is not any one person’s office. All down its length this room is divided into two parts by a desk at which people stand, one part of the room being narrow, where two people can only just avoid colliding, and that’s the officials’ area, and one part broad, the room for members of the public, the spectators, the servants, the messengers. Large books lie open on the desk side by side, with officials standing and reading most of them. But they don’t always stick to the same book, and they don’t exchange the books, they change places instead, and what surprises Barnabas most is the way they have to squeeze past each other in changing places, because the space is so cramped.

In front of the desk and close to it there are low tables at which clerks are seated, taking dictation when the officials want them to. It always surprises Barnabas to see how that is done. There is no express order from an official, and the dicta-tion is not loud, in fact you hardly notice that any dictation is going on. It is more as if the official is reading, as before, only he whispers as he does so, and the clerk is listening. Often the official dictates so quietly that the clerk, sitting down, can’t hear him. Then he has to keep jumping up to catch what is being dictated, sit down again quickly, write it down, jump up again quickly, and so on. How strange that is, how almost incomprehensible! Of course, Barnabas has plenty of time to observe all this, for he stands in the viewing area for hours, sometimes days, before Klamm’s glance falls on him. And even if Klamm has seen him, and Barnabas stands to attention, noth-ing is certain yet, for Klamm can turn back from him to the book, and forget him, which often happens. But what kind of a message service is so unimportant? My heart sinks when Barnabas tells me in the morning that he is going to the castle. The journey will probably be futile, the day will probably be wasted, the hope will probably be in vain. What’s the point of it? And down here the shoemaking work piles up, no one does it, and Brunswick is pressing for it to be done and delivered.’ ‘Very well,’ said K., ‘so Barnabas has to wait a long time before he is given something to do. That’s understandable, there seems to be an excessive number of employees there, not everyone can be given work to do every day. You shouldn’t complain, it could happen to anyone. After all, Barnabas is given work to do; he has already brought me two letters,’ ‘It’s possible’, said Olga, ‘that we are wrong to complain, particularly me, since I know all this only by hearsay, and as a girl I can’t understand it as well as Barnabas, who doesn’t tell me by any means everything. But now, let me tell you about the letters, for instance those letters that were brought to you. Barnabas doesn’t get them directly from Klamm, he gets them from the clerk. On a random day at a random hour—that’s one rea-son why, easy as it may seem, the work is so tiring, for Barnabas has to be on the alert all the time—the clerk remembers him and signals to him to come over.

It doesn’t seem to be Klamm’s doing; he is quietly reading his book, and sometimes he is cleaning his pince-nez when Barnabas arrives, though he does that often anyway, and then he may look at him, supposing he can see without the pince-nez on, which Barnabas doubts. Klamm’s eyes are closed, he seems to be asleep and cleaning his pince-nez in a dream. Meanwhile the clerk takes a letter for you out of the many files and papers under the table, but it isn’t a letter for you that has just been written, judging by the look of the envelope it is a very old letter that has been lying there for a long time. But if it is an old letter, why has Barnabas been kept waiting so long? And you as well, probably. And finally the letter too, because by now it is probably ancient. All this gives Barnabas the reputation of being a bad, slow messenger. However, the clerk shrugs it