The mention of the two hearings, particularly the one with Erlanger, and the respect with which K. spoke of the two gentlemen, made the landlord more inclined to tolerate him. He seemed about to agree to K.’s request to let him put a plank on the casks and sleep there at least until daylight came, but the landlady was clearly against it, and kept tugging uselessly here and there at her dress, the disorder of which she seemed to have noticed only now, and shaking her head again and again. What was obviously a long-standing argument about the cleanliness of the house seemed about to break out again. To K., weary as he was, the conversation between husband and wife took on enormous importance. To be driven away from here seemed a mis-fortune greater than any he had yet known. It must not happen, even if the landlord and landlady were to unite against him. Slumped on the cask, he watched the two of them warily. Until the landlady, in her own unusual sensitivity, which K. had noticed long ago, suddenly stepped aside and cried out—she had probably just been talking to the landlord about something else—‘See how he’s looking at me! Send him away, do!’ But K., seizing his opportunity, and now feeling sure, almost to the point of indifference, that he would be staying, said: ‘I’m not looking at you, I’m only looking at your dress.’ ‘Why my dress?’ asked the agitated landlady. K. just shrugged. ‘Come along,’ the landlady told the landlord. ‘He’s drunk, the lout. Leave him here to sleep it off.’ And she told Pepi, who at her call emerged from the darkness looking tired and tousled, with a broom held list-lessly in her hand, to throw K. a cushion or so.
25
When K. woke up he thought at first that he had hardly slept at all; the room was just the same, warm and empty, all the walls in dark-ness, but with that one electric light above the beer-pulls, and night outside the windows. But when he stretched, the cushion fell to the floor, and the board and casks creaked, Pepi arrived at once, and now he discovered that it was evening and he had slept for over twelve hours. The landlady had asked after him several times during the day, and Gerstäcker, who had been sitting here over a beer in the dark when K. spoke to the landlady in the morning but hadn’t liked to disturb him, had also looked in once to see how he was. Finally, it appeared that Frieda too had come in, and stood beside K. for a little while, but she hadn’t really come on his account, only because she had several things to get ready here before returning to her old job that evening. ‘I suppose she doesn’t fancy you any more?’ asked Pepi, as she brought coffee and cakes. However, she asked not in her old malicious way but sadly, as if now she had come to know the malice of the world for herself, and beside it any personal malice pales and loses its point; she spoke to K. like a companion in misfortune, and when he tasted the coffee and she thought she saw that it wasn’t sweet enough for him, she went off and brought him the full sugar-bowl. It was true that her melancholy had not kept her from decking herself out today even more extravagantly, perhaps, than last time K. had seen her; she wore a profusion of bows and ribbons threaded through her hair, which she had carefully arranged with curling-tongs over her forehead and temples. Around her neck she wore a necklace hanging down into the low-cut neck of her blouse. When K., feeling glad to have had a long sleep and some good coffee, sur-reptitiously took hold of one of the bows and tried to undo it, Pepi said wearily: ‘Leave me alone,’ and sat down on a cask beside him. K. didn’t have to ask why she was unhappy, for she began telling him at once, her gaze fixed on K.’s coffee-pot as if she needed something to distract her mind as she told him about it, as if even when she thought about her suffering it was more than she could do to give herself up to it entirely.
First K. discovered that he himself was to blame for Pepi’s unhappiness, but she didn’t bear him a grudge for that, she said. And she nodded eagerly as she told her tale, to keep K. from contradicting anything. First he had taken Frieda away from the bar and thus made it possible for Pepi to rise to the position of barmaid. She, Pepi, could think of nothing else that might have induced Frieda to give up her post; she sat there in the bar like a spider in its web, casting her threads far and wide as only she could; it would have been impossible to remove her against her will, only love for someone of low status, a love that was unfit for her position, could drive her from it. And what about Pepi? Had she ever aspired to such a post for herself ? She was a chambermaid, she had an insig-nificant job with few prospects, like every other girl she dreamed of a wonderful future, you can’t forbid anyone to dream, but she didn’t seriously expect to get very far, she had come to terms with what she had already attained. And then Frieda suddenly left the bar, so sud-denly that the landlord didn’t have a suitable replacement to hand, he looked around and his eye fell on Pepi, who had certainly done her own part here by putting herself forward. At that time she loved K. as she had never loved anyone before, she had been living for months in her tiny, dark room down below, and expected to spend years there, her whole life if the worst came to the worst, with no one pay-ing her any attention, and then along came K. all of a sudden, a hero, a deliverer of maidens, and he had opened the way for her to rise. Not that he knew anything about her, he hadn’t done it for her sake, but that didn’t make her any less grateful. On the night when she was appointed barmaid—the appointment wasn’t certain yet, but it was very probable—she spent hours talking to him, whispering her thanks into his ear. What he had done seemed even greater to her because the burden he had taken on his own shoulders was Frieda, there was something amazingly unselfish in the fact that to free Pepi from her predicament he was making Frieda his mistress, an unat-tractive thin girl not as young as she used to be, with short, sparse hair, a sly girl too, who always had secrets of some kind, just the thing you might expect from her appearance; although her face and body were undoubtedly a miserable sight, she must at least have had other secrets that no one could know about, perhaps to do with her alleged relationship with Klamm.
At the time, Pepi even entertained ideas like this: was it possible that K. really loved Frieda, wasn’t he deceiving himself, or was he perhaps deceiving no one but Frieda, and would the only result of all this be just Pepi’s rise in the world? Would K. see his mistake then, or stop trying to hide it, and take notice of Pepi instead of Frieda? That wasn’t such a wild idea of Pepi’s, for as one girl against another she could hold her own against Frieda very well, no one would deny that, and it had been primarily Frieda’s position as barmaid and the lustre with which Frieda had managed to endow it that had dazzled K. at the moment when he met her. And then Pepi had dreamed that when she had the position herself K. would come to plead with her, and she would have the choice of either listening to K. and losing the job, or turning him down and rising higher. She had worked it out that she would give up everything and lower herself to his level, and teach him the true love that he could never know with Frieda, the love that is independ-ent of all the grand positions in the world. But then it all turned out differently. And what was to blame for that? K. first and foremost, and then of course Frieda’s crafty, sly nature. K. first, said Pepi, because just what did he want, what strange kind of person was he? What was he after, what important matters occupied his mind to make him forget all that was closest to him,
