That is not because of out-ward details; of course the formalities can be as strictly observed by night as by day, just as one likes. So that’s not it, but on the other hand official judgement suffers by night. One is instinctively inclined to judge things from a more private point of view then, the points advanced by members of the public seem to carry more weight than they should, consideration of the further situation of those members of the public, of their sufferings and sorrows, mingles with our assessment, where it does not belong. The requisite barrier between members of the public and officials, however flawlessly it may be present to outward appearance, is relaxed, and where usually only questions and answers are exchanged, which is just as it should be, a strange and entirely unsuitable exchange between the persons some-times seems to occur. So at least the secretaries say, and they are people whose profession means that they have the gift of an extraor-dinarily sensitive feeling for such things. But even they—and this is often discussed in our circles—even they notice little of those unfor-tunate influences during nocturnal hearings; on the contrary, they make great efforts from the first to counter them, and in the end they consider that they have done particularly good work. However, if you read the records later, you are often amazed by the weaknesses so clearly exposed.
And it is these errors, made to the only partly justified advantage of the members of the public, which cannot be dealt with summarily in the usual way, at least not according to our regulations. Of course they may be corrected by a supervisory office, but that will be useful only to the law and cannot affect the person concerned for the worse. Wouldn’t you say that in such circum-stances the complaints of the secretaries are highly justifiable?’ K. had already spent some time half asleep, and now his slumbers were disturbed again. Why all this, he asked himself, why all this? From beneath his lowered eyelids, he observed Bürgel not as an official who was discussing difficult questions with him, but simply as something that kept him from sleeping, and he couldn’t see any other point to him. Bürgel, however, given over entirely to his own train of thought, smiled as if he had just succeeded in leading K. slightly astray. However, he was ready to set him right again. ‘Nor’, he said, ‘can one call those complaints entirely justified either, just like that. Nocturnal hearings are not exactly stipulated anywhere, so no one is breaking any regulation in trying to avoid them, but the circumstances, the excessive amount of work, the way in which the officials in the castle work, the difficulty of getting hold of them, the regulation saying that hearings of members of the public may be held only after the rest of an investigation has been entirely concluded, but must then be held at once, all this and more has made the nocturnal hearings an un-avoidable necessity. However, if they have become a necessity—as I say—then that is also, or at least indirectly, as a result of the regula-tions, and finding fault with the nature of nocturnal hearings would then be almost—mind you, I am exaggerating slightly, so that as it is an exaggeration I may voice it—would then be almost to find fault with the regulations. On the other hand, it may be allowed that the secretaries seek to secure themselves as best they can, within the regulations, against the nocturnal hearings and their disadvantages, although those may be only apparent. And to a very great extent they do secure themselves; they admit only subjects of negotiation which allow as little as possible to be feared in that respect, they test them-selves closely before the negotiations and, if the result of the testing demands it even at the last minute, they withdraw any agreement, they reinforce their authority by frequently summoning a member of the public ten times before really considering his case, they like to be represented by colleagues who are unqualified to deal with the case concerned and can thus handle it more easily; they at least hold the negotiations at the beginning or end of the night and avoid the mid-dle hours—there are plenty of such measures.
They do not let any-one get the better of them easily, those secretaries, they are almost as tough as they are sensitive.’ K. was asleep. It was not real sleep; he could hear what Bürgel was saying perhaps better than during his early period of wakeful exhaustion, word after word came to his ear, but his troublesome consciousness was gone; he felt free, Bürgel no longer had a hold on him, he just sometimes made his way towards Bürgel, he was not yet deeply immersed in slumber but he had taken the plunge, and no one was going to rob him of that now. He felt as if he had won a great victory, as if a company had gathered to cele-brate it, and he or someone else was raising a glass of champagne in honour of that victory. And so that everyone would know what it was about, the struggle and the victory were repeated all over again, or perhaps not repeated, perhaps they were only now taking place but had been celebrated earlier, and because, luckily, the outcome was certain there was constant celebration. K. was fighting a naked secre-tary who greatly resembled the statue of a Greek god, and who was getting the worst of it. It was very comical, and K. smiled slightly in his sleep to see the secretary’s proud bearing upset again and again by K.’s advance, so that he had, for instance, to use his outstretched arm and clenched fist to cover his nakedness, but was always too slow about it. The combat did not last long; step after step, and they were long strides, K. pressed forward. Was it a combat at all? There was no serious obstacle, only a squeal from the secretary now and then. That Greek god squealed like a girl being tickled. And finally he was gone; K. was alone in a large space. He turned around in it, ready to fight, looking for his opponent, but there was no one there any more, the company had left.
Only the champagne glass lay on the ground, broken, and K. trod it to pieces. But the broken glass stung, and he woke again with a start, feeling unwell like a small child who has been woken suddenly. All the same, at the sight of Bürgel’s bared chest an idea came to him from his dream: ‘Here’s your Greek god! Get him out of bed!’ ‘However,’ said Bürgel, raising his face thoughtfully to the ceiling as if seeking in his memory for examples but failing to find any, ‘all the same, in spite of all the precautionary measures, there is an opportunity for members of the public to exploit this nocturnal weakness of the secretaries, always supposing that it is a weakness, for their own ends. To be sure it is a very rare opportunity, or more accurately I should say one that almost never comes. It consists in the arrival of the person concerned in the middle of the night, unan-nounced. You may be surprised that this happens so seldom, when it seems such an obvious thing to do. Well, you are not familiar with the way we go about things here. But you will have noticed the impenetrability of the official organization. However, that impene-trability in itself means that everyone who has any kind of request to make, or must be examined on some subject for other reasons, receives a summons at once, immediately, usually even before he has thought out his case, why, even before he knows about it. He will not be examined this time, usually he won’t be examined yet, generally the case has not reached that point, but he has the summons, which means that he can’t turn up announced and thus entirely by surprise.
At most, he can come at the wrong time, when the date and hour of his summons will be pointed out to him, and then, if he comes back at the right time, as a rule he will be sent away, and there is no more difficulty; the summons in the member of the public’s hand and the note in the files are weapons used by the secretaries, and if not always quite adequate they are still strong. That applies, however, only to the secretary responsible for the case; anyone would still be at liberty to take the other secretaries by surprise at night. But hardly anyone ever will; there’s almost no point in it. First, anyone who did so would arouse the ire of the secretary responsible for the case.
