So if I were to let you spend the night here, and by some chance—and chance is always on the gentlemen’s side—you were discovered, not only would I be finished but so would you. It may sound ridiculous, but it’s the truth.’ This tall man, his coat tightly buttoned up, one hand leaning on the wall, the other on his hip, his legs crossed, bending down to K. slightly and speaking to him in a familiar tone, hardly seemed to be one of the villagers, even if his dark clothes looked no better than a local farmer’s Sunday best. ‘I believe every word you say,’ said K., ‘and I don’t underestimate the importance of the rules, even if I may have expressed myself clumsily. Let me just point out one thing: I have valuable connections in the castle, and shall have some that are even more valuable, and they will secure you against any risk you might incur by my staying here, and guarantee that I’m in a position to render all due thanks for a small favour.’ ‘I know that,’ said the landlord, and he repeated it. ‘Yes, I know that.’ At this point K. might have put his request more forcefully, but the landlord’s answer took his mind off it, so he asked only: ‘Are there many gentlemen from the castle staying here tonight?’ ‘As far as that goes, this is our lucky day,’ said the landlord, almost as if tempting him. ‘We have just the one gentleman staying here.’ K. still felt he couldn’t press the landlord, but he hoped he was almost accepted, so he asked the gentleman’s name. ‘Klamm,’ said the landlord casually, as he turned to look for his wife, who came hurrying up in curiously shabby, old-fashioned, but fine city clothes, laden with pleats and frills. She had come to fetch the landlord, saying the chief executive wanted some-thing. But before the landlord left he turned to K. again, as if not he himself but K. must now decide whether he should spend the night here. However, K. could say nothing; in particular, he was surprised to discover that his own superior was staying here, and without being able to explain it entirely to himself, he didn’t feel he could be as free with Klamm as with the castle as a whole. Being found here by Klamm would not have deterred K. in the way that the landlord meant, but it would have been an embarrassing impropriety, rather as if he were thoughtlessly planning to upset someone to whom he owed gratitude. He was sorry, however, to see that such thoughts obviously showed how he feared the consequences of being regarded as an inferior, a common workman, and how he couldn’t dismiss his fears even here, where they showed so clearly. So he stood where he was, biting his lip and saying nothing. Once, before the landlord disappeared through a doorway, he looked back at K., and K. looked at him, and did not move from the spot until Olga came and led him away. ‘What did you want to ask the landlord?’ asked Olga. ‘I wanted to spend the night here,’ said K. ‘But you are spending the night with us,’ said Olga in surprise. ‘Yes, of course,’ said K., leaving her to take that whatever way she liked.
3
Frieda
In the bar, a large room entirely empty in the middle, several men were sitting around the walls, near and on casks, but they looked different from the local rustics in K.’s inn. They were more neatly dressed, all of them wearing clothes of the same coarse, greyish-yellow fabric, their jackets flared out, their trousers fitted closely. They were small men, very like each other at first sight, with flat, bony, and yet round-cheeked faces. They were all quiet and hardly moved, only their eyes followed the new arrivals in the room, but slowly and with an expression of indifference. All the same, they made a certain impression on K., perhaps because there were so many of them and it was so quiet. He took Olga’s arm again, by way of explaining his presence here to these people. A man in one corner, evidently an acquaintance of Olga’s, rose to his feet and was going to approach them, but K., who was arm in arm with her, turned her away in a different direction. No one but Olga herself could have noticed, and she allowed it with a smiling sideways glance at him.
The beer was poured by a young woman called Frieda.* She was a small blonde, rather insignificant, with a sad face and thin cheeks, but with a surprising expression of conscious superiority in her eyes. When they fell on K. it seemed to him that they had already discov-ered things about him of which he knew nothing, although that gaze convinced him that they existed. K. kept on looking sideways at Frieda, and still did so as she spoke to Olga. Olga and Frieda did not seem to be great friends; they exchanged only a few cool words. K. decided to help the conversation along, so he asked suddenly: ‘Do you know Mr Klamm?’ Olga laughed out loud. ‘Why do you laugh?’ asked K., rather annoyed. ‘I’m not laughing,’ she said, but she still laughed all the same. ‘Olga is a very childish girl,’ said K., leaning over the bar counter to make Frieda look at him again. But she kept her eyes lowered, and said quietly: ‘Would you like to see Mr Klamm?’ K. said he would, and she pointed to a door on her left. ‘There’s a little peephole there; you can look through that.’ ‘And what about these people?’ asked K. She pouted, thrusting out her lower lip, and led K. over to the door with a hand that was very soft. Through the small hole, which had obviously been made in it for purposes of obser-vation, he could see almost the whole of the next room. Mr Klamm was sitting at a desk in the middle of the room, in a comfortable round armchair, brightly illuminated by an electric light-bulb hang-ing in front of him. He was a stout, ponderous man of middle height. His face was still smooth, but his cheeks drooped slightly with the weight of advancing age. He had a long, black moustache, and a pair of pince-nez, set on his nose at a crooked angle and reflecting the light, covered his eyes.
If Mr Klamm had been sitting upright at the desk K. would have seen only his profile, but as he was turning away from it K. saw him full-face. Klamm was resting his left elbow on the desk, and his right hand, holding a Virginia cigarette, lay on his knee. A beer glass stood on the desktop; as the desk had a raised rim K. couldn’t see if there were papers of any kind on it, but he rather thought it was empty. To make sure, he asked Frieda to look through the hole and tell him. However, she had been in that room herself only a little while ago, so she could assure K. without more ado that there were no papers there. K. asked Frieda if he had to leave the peephole now, but she said he could look through it as long as he liked. Now K. was alone with Frieda, for Olga, as he soon saw, had made her way over to her acquaintance and was perched on a cask, swinging her feet in the air. ‘Frieda,’ said K. in a whisper, ‘do you know Mr Klamm very well?’ ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Very well.’ She leaned close to K., and playfully adjusted her cream-coloured blouse, which, as K. only now saw, was cut rather low at the neck; it was a neckline which didn’t quite suit her meagre body. Then she said: ‘Don’t you remember how Olga laughed?’ ‘Yes, she’s ill-mannered,’ said K. ‘Well,’ she said soothingly, ‘there really was something to laugh about. You were asking if I knew Klamm, and as it happens I am’—here she instinctively stood a little straighter, and K. once again felt the force of her triumphant expression, which did not seem to connect at all with what she was saying—‘as it happens I am his lover.’ ‘Klamm’s lover,’ said K. She nodded. ‘Then,’ said K., smiling, so as to keep their talk from getting too serious, ‘as far as I am concerned you are someone worthy of respect.’ ‘And not just as far as you’re concerned,’ said Frieda in friendly tones, but without responding to his smile.
However, K. had a weapon to use against her pride, and he brought it to bear by saying: ‘And have you ever been in the castle?’ But that did not have the desired effect, for she replied: ‘No, but isn’t it enough that I’m here in the bar?’ She obviously had a raging thirst for praise, and she seemed to want to slake it on K. ‘To be sure,’ said K., ‘here in the bar you’re doing the landlord’s work for him.’ ‘So I am,’ she said, ‘and I began as a dairymaid at the Bridge Inn.’ ‘With those soft hands,’ said K., half questioning, and
