Perhaps you aren’t impudent at all, perhaps you’re just like a child who knows some silly joke and can’t be brought to keep it quiet. So out with it. What’s so special about those dresses?’ ‘You’ll be angry if I tell you.’ ‘No, I shall laugh, because it will be just childish nonsense. So what are my dresses like?’ ‘Well, you did ask. They are made of good fabric, expensive dress material, but they are old-fashioned, over-trimmed, often too elaborately made, they are wearing out, and they suit neither your years nor your figure nor your position. I noticed them as soon as I first set eyes on you, about a week ago in the front hall here.’ ‘So now we have it. They are old-fashioned, over-trimmed, and what else was it? And how do you think you know all that?’ ‘I can see it. One doesn’t need any training to know such a thing.’ ‘You can see it, just like that. You don’t have to go and ask anywhere, you know at once what fashion demands. You’re going to be invaluable to me, because I do have a weakness for beautiful dresses. And what will you say when I tell you that this wardrobe is full of them?’ She pushed the sliding doors aside, and dress upon dress was to be seen hanging close together the whole breadth and depth of the wardrobe, most of them dark, grey, brown, black dresses, all carefully hung up with their skirts spread. ‘Those are my dresses, all of them old-fashioned and over-trimmed in your opinion. But these are only the dresses I don’t have room for in my bedroom. I have two more wardrobes full of them upstairs, two wardrobes, each almost the size of this one. Are you amazed?’ ‘No, I expected something of the kind. As I said, you’re more than just a landlady, you are aiming for something else.’ ‘I’m aiming only to dress well, and you are either a fool or a child or a very bad, danger-ous man. So go away, hurry up, go away!’ K. was out in the hall, and Gerstäcker was holding his sleeve again, as the landlady called after him: ‘I’m having a new dress delivered tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll let you go and fetch it.’
Gerstäcker, angrily waving his hand as if to silence the landlady from a distance, because she bothered him, asked K. to go with him. At first he wouldn’t explain why, and he didn’t take much notice of K.’s objection that he ought to go to the school now. Only when K. resisted being dragged off by him did Gerstäcker tell him not to worry, he would have everything he needed at his own place, he could give up the post of school janitor, and would he please now come? He’d been waiting for him all day, Gerstäcker told him, his mother didn’t know where he was. Slowly yielding to his demands, K. asked how he planned to provide board and lodging for him. Gerstäcker just answered briefly, saying he needed K. to help with the horses, he himself had other business now, and he wished K. didn’t have to be dragged along like this, making unnecessary diffi-culties for him. If K. wanted payment then he, Gerstäcker, would give him payment. But for all his tugging K. stopped dead now. He didn’t know anything about horses, he said. That didn’t matter, said Gerstäcker impatiently, and in his irate state of mind he actually clasped his hands pleadingly to persuade K. to go with him. ‘I don’t know why you want me to come with you,’ K. said at last. It was all one to Gerstäcker what K. knew. ‘Is it because you think that I can bring influence to bear on Erlanger for you?’ ‘That’s right,’ said Gerstäcker. ‘Why else would I be interested in you?’ K. laughed, took Gerstäcker’s arm, and let the man lead him away through the darkness.
The living-room in Gerstäcker’s house was only dimly lit by the fire on the hearth and a candle-end. By the light of the latter someone could be seen stooped in a niche under the sloping rafters that stuck out there, reading a book. It was Gerstäcker’s mother. She gave K. her trembling hand and made him sit down beside her. She spoke with difficulty, it was hard to understand her, but what she said
EXPLANATORY NOTES
5 Westwest’s: this name has provoked much inconclusive conjecture, usually associating ‘west’ with ‘decline’.
6 land surveyor: Erich Heller maintains that the German word Landvermesser ‘alludes to Vermessenheit, hubris’ (The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1951), 169), though nothing is made of this association in the text. E. T. Beck notes that the Hebrew word for ‘land surveyor’, mashoah, is almost identical with that for ‘messiah’, mashiah (Kafka and the Yiddish Theater (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 195); the possible implications of this are followed out in Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 228 – 35.
8 to the land surveyor now?: here a deleted passage in Kafka’s manuscript has K. seizing his stick and terrifying the peasants.
9 wife and child: not otherwise mentioned.
14 silk: many figures associated with the castle have clothes that resemble silk: cf. Barnabas (p. 23), the Castle Inn landlady’s ‘dress that rustled like silk’ (p. 249), and Pepi’s dress of ‘shiny grey fabric’ secured with a ‘silk ribbon’ (p. 89). This person is mentioned later (p. 127), and is said to be ill from the air in the village (p. 129), but she plays no part in the action.
16 Lasemann: suggests Czech lázen, ‘bath’.
17 Gerstäcker: the name of a nineteenth-century author of adventure stories; in Richard Sheppard’s view it ‘inevitably calls to mind the German word for graveyard, “Gottesacker” ’ (On Kafka’s Castle:A Study (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 105).
22 That eternal land surveyor: perhaps alluding to the expression ‘der ewige Jude’ (the Wandering Jew; literally, the eternal Jew).
23 Barnabas: though explained in Acts 4: 36 as ‘son of consolation’, this name more likely means ‘son of the prophet’.
I am a messenger: in the original, Barnabas inverts subject and object (‘Barnabas am I called; a messenger am I’) in a strange and solemn way. Kafka knew that in Hebrew malakh means ‘messenger’ and also ‘angel’.
27 Klamm: suggests the Czech word klam, ‘illusion’.
31 didn’t entice him: at this point Kafka originally had a long and stormy conversation between K. and Olga, during which K., annoyed by Amalia’s stare, seized her knitting and threw it on the table.
35 Frieda: a very common name, suggesting German Friede, ‘peace’.
38 whip: Frieda uses the whip to drive away the bestial servants: not to pro-voke lust, but to tame it.
40 song of some kind: at this point in the manuscript Kafka deleted an over-explicit formulation of K.’s motives: ‘K. was thinking more about Klamm than about her. The conquest of Frieda required him to change his plans, here he was getting a powerful instrument which might make it unneces-sary for him to spend any time working in the village.’
rubbish: on the juxtaposition of love and filth, cf. Kafka’s letter to Milena of 8 – 9 August 1920, in which he says that his sexual urge ‘had something of the eternal Jew — senselessly being drawn along, senselessly wandering through a senselessly obscene world’, yet that in sex ‘there’s something of the air breathed in Paradise before the Fall’ (Letters to Milena (New York: Schocken, 1990), 148).
42 fourth day: that is, if one counts the evening of his arrival as the first day.
50 those villains!: the hostility shown by the villagers, here and later, to Barnabas and his family, is inconsistent with Barnabas’s friendly recep-tion earlier in the saloon bar (p. 23). Kafka must have changed his plans for the family, without amending his earlier text accordingly.
52 eagle: Klamm is associated with an eagle also in a cancelled passage where K. says that Klamm’s sleigh has a golden eagle at the front, but is told by Pepi that it is an ordinary black sleigh like any other.
59 Sordini: possibly suggested by Italian sordo, ‘deaf ’.
70 Gardena: an unusual name, possibly suggesting ‘guard’ with a suffix common in Czech female names (e.g. Milena, Ruzena).
78 on your own account: the original phrase, ‘auf eigene Faust’, which recurs at p. 82 (‘of your own accord’), may allude to Goethe’s Faust, whose ambitious behaviour resembles K.’s (see Introduction).
89 Pepi: short for Josefine, an extremely common name in Catholic German-speaking countries.
98 Momus: the Greek god of laughter. That everyone promptly becomes serious is a little joke by Kafka.
104 fire and brimstone: cf.