the assistant further along it, pacing up and down outside Barnabas’s house. Sometimes he stopped and tried shining his lantern into the living-room through the curtained window. K. called out to him, and without visibly taking alarm he stopped spying on the house and came towards K. ‘Who are you looking for?’ asked K., testing the flexibility of the willow switch against his thigh. ‘You,’ said the assistant, coming closer. ‘But who are you?’ asked K. suddenly, for it didn’t seem to be the assistant after all. He seemed older, wearier, his face fuller but more lined, and the way he walked was quite different from the jaunty bearing of the assistants, who looked as if their joints were galvanized. He walked slowly, limping slightly, with a pernickety and sickly air. ‘Don’t you know me?’ asked the man. ‘Why, I’m Jeremias, your former assistant.’ ‘You are?’ said K., showing a small length of the willow switch that he had been hiding behind his back. ‘But you look quite different.’ ‘That’s because I’m alone,’ said Jeremias. ‘When I’m on my own my cheerful youthfulness is all gone.’ ‘Where’s Artur, then?’ asked K. ‘Artur?’ said Jeremias. ‘Your little favourite? He’s left your service. You were rather too harsh with us, and he couldn’t put up with it, poor sensitive soul. He’s gone back to the castle to com-plain of you.’ ‘And what about you?’ asked K. ‘It was fine for me to stay,’ said Jeremias. ‘Artur is complaining on my behalf too.’ ‘What are the pair of you complaining about?’ asked K. ‘We’re complaining,’ said Jeremias, ‘that you can’t take a joke. And what have we done? Cracked a few jokes, laughed a bit, teased your fiancée a little. And all of it, by the way, done to order. When Galater sent us to you—’ ‘Galater?’ asked K. ‘Yes, Galater,’ said Jeremias. ‘He was deputizing for Klamm at the time. When he sent us to you he said—I took par-ticular note of it, because that’s what we refer to in our complaint—you two are going to be the land surveyor’s assistants, he said. What, we said, us? We don’t know the first thing about that kind of work.

To which he said: that’s not the point; if necessary he’ll teach you. But the main thing is that I want you to cheer him up a little. I hear he takes everything very hard. He’s come to the village, and to him this is a great event, whereas in fact it’s nothing at all, and you’re going to show him that.’ ‘Well,’ said K., ‘Galater was right there—and did you carry out your task?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Jeremias. ‘It wasn’t possible in such a short time. All I know is that you were very rough with us, and that’s what we’re complaining of. I really don’t under-stand how you, only an employee here, and not even employed by the castle, can’t see that service of that kind is very hard work, and it’s extremely unfair to make a man’s work hard for him in such a wilful, almost childish way as you did. Your callous attitude in leav-ing us freezing outside by the fence, the way you almost struck Artur dead—and he’s a sensitive soul who feels pain for days after so much as a cross word—when you brought your fist down on the mattress where he lay like that, the way you hunted me all over the place in the snow in the afternoon—why, I needed an hour to recover! I’m not as young as I was!’ ‘My dear Jeremias,’ said K., ‘you’re perfectly right, only you should be saying all this to Galater. It was his own idea to send you to me, I never asked him to do it. And as I never asked for you, I was justified in sending you back again, and I would rather have done it peaceably than by force, but you obviously wouldn’t have that. Why didn’t you come to me at once and speak about it as openly as you do now?’ ‘Because I was on duty, of course,’ said Jeremias. ‘That goes without saying.’ ‘And you’re not on duty now?’ asked K. ‘Not any more,’ said Jeremias. ‘Artur has given in our notice at the castle, or at least the procedure that will finally take us off the job is in progress.’ ‘But you still come in search of me as if you were on duty,’ said K. ‘No,’ said Jeremias, ‘I came in search of you only to set Frieda’s mind at rest. When you left her for those girls, Barnabas’s sisters, she was very unhappy, not so much because of her loss as because of your betrayal, but then again she’d seen it coming long ago, and it had made her suffer severely. I went back to the school window to see if by any chance you’d come back to your senses. But you weren’t there, I saw only Frieda sitting on a school bench crying. So I went in to see her and we came to an agreement. I’m going to be room-service waiter at the Castle Inn, at least until my business at the castle is cleared up, and Frieda will be back behind the bar. That’s better for her. There was no sense in marry-ing you, not for Frieda. What’s more, you didn’t appreciate the sac-rifice she was making for you. And now, good soul, she is still wondering sometimes whether she hasn’t done you wrong, whether perhaps you weren’t with Barnabas’s sisters after all. But of course there could be no doubt where you were, I went to find out once and for all, because after all that agitation Frieda deserves a good night’s rest, and so do I. So I went, and not only did I find you, I could see that those girls were doing just as you wanted like puppets on a string. Especially the brunette*—oh, she’s a real wild-cat, the way she spoke up for you. Well, each to his own taste. Anyway, you didn’t have to go taking the long way round through the garden next door, because I know it myself.’

21

So what could have been foreseen but not prevented had happened. Frieda had left him. That needn’t necessarily be final; it wasn’t as bad as all that, Frieda could be won back. She was easily influenced by strangers and definitely by those assistants, who thought that Frieda was in the same situation as they were, and that now they had given in their notice Frieda must do the same. But K. had only to appear in person, remind her of all the points in his favour, and she would be remorseful and go back to him, particularly if he could justify his visit to the girls by showing her that he had succeeded in something, and owed it to them. However, although he tried to reassure himself with these reflections when he thought of Frieda, he was not in fact reassured. Only a little while ago he had praised Frieda to Olga, saying that she was his only prop and stay, but she was not a very steady prop and stay; it did not take some powerful man to intervene and rob him of Frieda, only that not very appetizing assistant, a specimen of humanity who sometimes gave the impression of not being properly alive.
Jeremias had already begun moving away, and K. called him back. ‘Jeremias,’ he said, ‘I will be perfectly open with you, so please answer one question honestly yourself. We aren’t master and servant any more, and you are not the only one to be glad of it, so am I, which means we have no reason to deceive each other. Here before your eyes I break the switch I had intended for you; I took the way through the garden not for fear of you but to take you by surprise and give you a taste of the switch. Well, don’t bear me a grudge, that’s all over now. If the authorities hadn’t forced you to be my servant, if you’d only been an acquaintance of mine, I am sure we would have got on very well, even if your appearance does bother me a little at times. And now we can make up for our omissions in that respect.’ ‘Do you think so?’ said the assistant, rubbing his tired eyes and yawning. ‘I could explain the whole thing to you in more detail, but I don’t have the time, I must go to Frieda, the child’s waiting for me. She hasn’t gone back to work yet—she wanted to immerse herself in work at once, probably to forget you, but I persuaded the landlord to give her a little time to recover, and we will at least spend that time together.

As for your idea, I certainly have no reason to lie to you, but I have no reason to confide in you either. I’m not the same as you, you see. As long as I was your servant of course you were a very important person to me, not on account of your own qualities but because of my job as a servant, and I would have done anything you wanted, but now you are a matter of indifference to me. I’m not touched by your breaking that switch either; it only reminds me what a rough master I had, so it’s no use trying to win me over that way.’ ‘You speak to me like that,’ said K., ‘as if you were perfectly cer-tain you’d