At first you couldn’t help feeling indignant at its language and its cold-blooded tone, but then its harsh threats would probably have inspired fear in anyone but Amalia. Amalia, however, remained indignant; she doesn’t know the meaning of fear for herself or for other people. And as I crept back to bed, repeating to myself the unfinished closing sentence of the letter: “You had better come at once, or else—!” Amalia stayed where she was on the window-seat, looking out as if she expected further messengers, and was ready to treat every one of them as she had treated the first.’ ‘So that’s what the officials are like,’ said K., his voice faltering. ‘To think that there are such characters among them! What did your father do? I hope he complained of Sortini forcefully in the proper quarters, if he didn’t decide to go straight to the Castle Inn as the shortest and most certain way. The nastiest part of the story is not the insult to Amalia, which could easily be rectified; I don’t know why you make so much of it—how could Sortini really have disgraced Amalia for ever by writing her such a letter? From what you say, one might suppose he had, but that’s impossible: it would have been easy to get satisfaction for Amalia, and the incident would have been forgotten in a few days, so it wasn’t Amalia whom Sortini disgraced but himself.
It’s from Sortini that I recoil, from him and the idea that someone can so mis-use his power. Well, his abuse of power failed here, because his intentions were stated clearly, were entirely transparent, and he found a stronger opponent in Amalia, but in a thousand other cases where the circumstances were only slightly less favourable it could have succeeded and never been noticed at all, even by the victim of his abuse.’ ‘Hush,’ said Olga. ‘Amalia is looking at us.’ Amalia had finished feeding her parents, and was now busy undressing her mother; she had just undone her skirt, she placed her mother’s arms around her neck, raised them slightly, stripped off the skirt, and then sat quietly down again. Her father, still querulously protesting because she was attending to her mother first—obviously only because the old woman was even more helpless than he was—tried undressing him-self, perhaps to punish his daughter because he thought she was dawd-ling, but all the same he began with the least essential and easiest to remove of his garments, the loose, outsize slippers in which his feet flopped about. But there was no way he could take them off; he had to give up, breathing heavily, and leaned back stiffly in his chair.
‘You don’t understand what the crucial point was,’ said Olga. ‘You may be right in all you say, but the crucial point was that Amalia didn’t go to the Castle Inn. In itself, the way she treated the mes-senger might have been glossed over, that could have been hushed up. It was because she didn’t go that our family was doomed, and then her treatment of the messenger also became unpardonable, in fact much was made of it for public consumption.’ ‘What?’ cried K., but he immediately lowered his voice when Olga raised her hands pleadingly. ‘You, her own sister, are surely not saying that Amalia ought to have obeyed Sortini and gone to the Castle Inn?’ ‘No,’ said Olga, ‘heaven forbid, how can you think that? I know no one who is as firmly in the right as Amalia in everything she does. If she had gone to the Castle Inn I would have thought her conduct just as cor-rect; but her refusal to go was heroic. As for me, I’ll admit to you frankly, if I had received such a letter I would have gone. I couldn’t have borne the fear of the consequences if I hadn’t, only Amalia could face them. There were many ways out; another girl would have made her face up prettily, for instance, and made sure it took her some time, and then she would have gone to the Castle Inn to dis-cover that Sortini had already gone, perhaps that he’d left directly after sending the message, which in fact is very likely, for the gentle-men’s whims don’t last long. But Amalia didn’t do that or anything like it, she was too deeply insulted and she returned a forthright answer. If she had only somehow or other appeared to obey, if she had just crossed the threshold of the Castle Inn that day, disaster might have been averted.
We have some very clever lawyers here who know how to make anything you like out of almost nothing, but in this case even that helpful nothing wasn’t available; on the con-trary, we were left with the dishonouring of Sortini’s letter and the insult offered to his messenger.’ ‘But what disaster?’ said K. ‘And what kind of lawyers? Surely Amalia couldn’t be prosecuted or actu-ally punished for Sortini’s criminal behaviour?’ ‘Oh yes, she could,’ said Olga. ‘Not after a regular trial, of course, and she was not pun-ished directly, but in another way, she and our whole family, and now I suppose you are beginning to understand how harsh that pun-ishment is. It seems to you unjust and monstrous, but that is not the general opinion in the village; your view of the affair is kind to us, and ought to console us, and so it would if it didn’t obviously arise from misconceptions. I can easily prove that to you, and forgive me if I mention Frieda here, but apart from its final outcome the rela-tionship between Frieda and Klamm was very like the relationship between Amalia and Sortini. That may shock you at first, but you will find that I am right. And it is not a case of habit, feelings do not become blunted by dint of habit when it’s a simple matter of judge-ment; one just has to abandon one’s misconceptions.’ ‘No, Olga,’ said K. ‘I don’t know why you want to go dragging Frieda into this, it wasn’t like that at all with her, so please don’t confuse two such fun-damentally different cases. But go on with your story.’ ‘Please,’ said Olga, ‘don’t take offence if I stand by my comparison. You still have some misconceptions about Frieda too if you think you have to defend her against a comparison. She is not to be defended, merely praised.
If I compare the cases I don’t say they are the same, they are like black and white to each other, and Frieda is white. At the worst people may laugh at Frieda, as I was ill-mannered enough to do in the bar—I was very sorry for that later—but even those who laugh at her, whether out of malice or envy, well, they can still laugh. But Amalia can only be despised by those who aren’t her blood relations. That’s why they are, as you say, fundamentally different cases, but all the same they are similar.’ ‘They are not similar,’ said K., shaking his head indignantly. ‘Leave Frieda out of this. Frieda never received any charming letter such as the one sent to Amalia by Sortini, and Frieda really loved Klamm. Anyone who doubts that can ask her; she still loves him today.’ ‘Are those such great differences?’ asked Olga. ‘Do you think Klamm might not have written to Frieda in just the same terms? That’s how the gentlemen behave when they get up from their desks; they’re ill at ease, in their distraction they will say some very coarse things, not all of them, but many do. In Sortini’s mind his letter to Amalia may have been written in total disregard of what he actually set down on the paper. What do we know of the gentlemen’s minds? Didn’t you hear the tone in which Klamm spoke to Frieda for yourself, or haven’t you been told about it? Everyone knows that Klamm is very coarse; I’m told he will say nothing for hours on end, and then suddenly he comes out with something so coarse that it makes you shudder. We don’t know anything like that about Sortini, but then we aren’t acquainted with him anyway. All we really know of him is that his name is very like Sordini’s, and but for that similarity of their names we probably wouldn’t know any-thing at all about him. He probably also gets confused with Sordini as an expert on the fire brigade, because Sordini is the real expert, but he makes use of the similarity of their names to land
