The Castle

K. excused himself by referring to his weariness of the previous evening; it was quite possible, he admitted, that he had said something foolish yesterday, at any rate he couldn’t remember now. Whatever could he have had to say about madam’s clothes? That they were the finest he had ever seen? Certainly, he had never seen a landlady on duty dressed like that before. ‘That’s enough of your comments,’ the landlady interrupted. ‘I don’t want to hear another word from you about my clothes. My clothes are no concern of yours. I forbid you to mention them once and for all

as if we’d been too childish, too naïve, demanding something that could have been achieved easily and without attracting attention if we’d gone about it in Frieda’s calm and matter-of-fact way, instead of crying, scratching and tugging at it like a child pulling at a tablecloth who just drags the whole wonderful spread onto the floor and puts it out of its reach for ever.

Have you ever noticed the look in her eye? It was nothing like the look a barmaid gives you, it was more like the look of a landlady. She saw everything, but at the same time she saw every single person, and the look she reserved for each of them was enough to keep them in order. What did it matter that she was rather thin, that she was getting on a bit, that she could have had more hair, these things are trivial compared with what she actually had, and anyone who is worried by these defects is simply showing he has no feeling for better things

When you look at it, it may be a little more prestigious than your previous job, but on the whole there’s very little difference, they are so similar they’re almost indistinguishable, in fact you could almost say being a chambermaid is preferable to working in the bar, because down there you’re always among the secretaries, whereas here, although you’re allowed to wait on the secretaries’ superiors in the guest-rooms, you also have to associate with quite common people like me, for instance. I’m not allowed to go anywhere except here in the bar; is it such an extraordinary honour to be able to associate with me? Well, you think it is, and perhaps you have reason to believe it is. But that’s exactly what makes you unsuitable for the job. It’s just a job like any other job, but for you it’s heaven on earth, and so you throw yourself into it with excessive enthusiasm, you dress up the way you think the angels dress (in fact they’re quite different); you’re terrified of losing the job, you feel constantly persecuted, you try to win over everyone you think might be able to help you by being over-friendly to them, but that only annoys them and puts them off, because they come to the inn to have some peace and don’t want to hear about the barmaid’s worries on top of their own

Of course, what you see is that Frieda takes Klamm’s beer into his room and comes back out with the money, but what you don’t see you have to be told by Frieda, and you have to believe her. But she doesn’t tell you anything, she’s not going to spill secrets like that, oh no; the secrets spill out all round her by themselves, and once they’re out, then of course she’s not afraid of talking about them herself any more – but she does it modestly, without boasting, she just hints at what everybody knows already.

But you, on top of everything else, were torn away from Klamm; I can’t judge quite what that means, but I’ve gradually got some sense of it, the feeling of losing your balance and not being able to steady yourself, and even if I was always ready to support you, I wasn’t always there, and even when I was there, sometimes you were under the spell of your daydreams, or something more tangible like the landlady, for instance – in other words there were times when you looked away from me, when you were lost in some vague nostalgia, poor child, and at times like those it only needed the right people to be put in front of you for you to be taken in by them and fall for the illusion that what were really only fleeting impressions, ghosts, old memories, what was in fact a former life which was receding further and further into the past – that this was still your real existence.

Every relationship has its flaws, ours too; after all, we came together, each of us from quite different worlds, and since we met both our lives have taken a different direction, we still feel unsure because it’s all far too new.

As for your suggestion, I certainly have no reason to lie to you, but I have just as little reason to confide in you. You see, I’m not in the same position as you. As long as I was in your service, you were of course a very important person to me, not because of any qualities of your own but because of my conditions of employment, and I would have done anything you wanted me to, but now you mean nothing to me. Even though you broke the stick, it makes no difference; it only reminds me what a brutal master I had, it does nothing to gain my favour.’

But in spite of the thoughts with which he sought to reassure himself about Frieda, he was still uneasy. Just a short while ago he had praised Frieda to Olga, calling her his only support; well, that support was not very reliable – it didn’t take anyone very powerful to rob him of her, it had only needed this unsavoury assistant, this piece of flesh that sometimes gave the impression of not being fully alive

But I remember even during those laborious journeys – which were also very humiliating, for we frequently met carts from the harvest, and the workers fell silent at the sight of us and turned away – how even during those journeys Barnabas and I couldn’t stop talking about our troubles and our plans, and sometimes we stopped in the middle of our discussions and it needed a shout from our father to remind us of what we were doing. But all our discussions after the removal made no difference to our lives, except that we gradually became aware of our poverty