by Franz Kafka
XII.
THE ASSISTANTS
No sooner had they all left than K. said to the assistants: “Go away!” Baffled by this unexpected command, they complied, but when K. locked the door behind them, they immediately tried to come back in and began whimpering and knocking on the door. “You’re dismissed,” K. cried, “I will never employ you in my service again.” They weren’t willing to accept this, though, and hammered with their hands and feet on the door. “Let us come back to you, sir,” they cried, as if K. were the land and they were about to sink in the floods. But K. had no sympathy for them, he waited impatiently for the moment when the unbearable noise would force the teacher to intervene. This soon happened. “Let those damned assistants of yours in!” he shouted. “I’ve dismissed them!” K. shouted back; this had the undesired side-effect of showing the teacher what happened when one actually had the strength not only to give notice of dismissal but to enforce the dismissal. The teacher now attempted in an amicable way to soothe the assistants, they need only wait here calmly, for K. would finally have to let them back in again. Then he left. And the situation would have remained quiet if K. hadn’t begun shouting to them that they were dismissed and hadn’t the slightest hope of reinstatement. At that, they began to make as much noise as before. The teacher came back, but he would no longer negotiate with them and instead drove them, evidently with his greatly feared cane, from the school.
Before long they appeared at the windows of the gymnasium, knocking on the panes and shouting, but their words were no longer audible. Yet they didn’t stay there long either, in the deep snow they couldn’t jump about as much as their restlessness demanded. So they rushed to the fence of the school garden, jumped up on the stone base, where, though only from afar, they could get a better view of the room, there they ran up and down, holding on to the fence, then halted, and stretched their clasped hands beseechingly toward K. They kept this up a long time, despite the futility of their efforts; it was as if they were blind, and they probably didn’t even stop when K. lowered the curtains to get them out of his sight.
In the now dusky room K. went to the parallel bars to see about Frieda. At a glance from him she got up, tidied her hair, dried her face, and silently set about making coffee. Although she already knew about all this, K. nonetheless gave her formal notice of his dismissal of the assistants. She merely nodded. K. sat down on a school bench and observed her weary movements. It had always been her freshness and resolve that had lent her paltry body a certain beauty, but now that beauty was gone. It had taken only a few days of living with K. to bring this about. The work in the taproom hadn’t been easy, but it probably suited her better. Or was the distance from Klamm the real reason for her decline? Klamm’s proximity had made her so madly enticing, in that enticement K. had seized her, but now she was wilting in his arms.
“Frieda,” said K. She put the coffee mill down at once and came to K. on the bench. “You’re angry at me?” she asked. “No,” said K., “I think you cannot help it. You were quite content living at the Gentlemen’s Inn. I should have left you there.” “Yes,” said Frieda, gazing sadly into space, “you should have left me there. I’m not worthy enough to live with you. Freed of me, you could perhaps achieve everything you want. Out of concern for me you submit to that tyrannical teacher, take on this miserable post, and now you are making a painstaking application for an interview with Klamm. All for me, but I give you little in return.” “No,” said K., putting his arm around her consolingly, “those are merely trifles that don’t hurt me, and it isn’t just for you that I want to go to Klamm. And then there’s everything that you have done for me! Before getting to know you, I was very much adrift here. Nobody took me in and anybody I thrust myself upon soon made me leave. And even if I could have found peace with certain people, it could only have been with those I ought to have fled from, like Barnabas’s family—” “You fled from them? Isn’t that so? Darling!” Frieda broke in quite animatedly, and then, after a hesitant “Yes” from K., fell back into her weariness. By now, though, K. was no longer so determined to explain how everything had taken a turn for the better for him through the alliance with Frieda. Slowly he took his arm away, they sat a moment in silence, and then, as if K.’s hand had supplied her with a warmth that she now found indispensable, she said: “I cannot stand this life here. If you want to hold on to me, we must leave and go somewhere else, to southern France, or to Spain.” “I cannot go abroad,” said K., “I came here in order to stay here. I will stay here.” And in a contradiction he didn’t bother to explain, he added as if speaking to himself: “Now what could have attracted me to this desolate land other than the desire to stay?” Then he said: “But you too want to stay here, it is your country. All you miss is Klamm and that prompts such desperate thoughts.” “So I miss Klamm?” said Frieda, “there’s surely an abundance of Klamm here, too much Klamm; it’s so as to escape from him that I want to get away. It isn’t Klamm that I miss, but you. It’s for your sake that I want to leave; because I cannot get enough of you here, where everybody is constantly tearing at me. Better to have this pretty mask torn off, better to have this body made ugly, so that I can live with you in peace.” K. noted only one thing: “So Klamm is still in touch with you?” he asked at once, “he calls you?” “I know nothing about Klamm,” said Frieda, “I’m talking about others, for instance, the assistants.” “Oh, the assistants,” K. said in astonishment, “they follow you?” “Did you never notice it, then?” asked Frieda. “No,” said K., vainly trying to recall some details, “they surely are intrusive, lecherous young lads, but I never noticed their having the audacity to go near you.” “You never did?” said Frieda, “you never noticed how impossible it was to get them out of our room at the Bridge Inn, how jealously they observed our relations, how one of them lay in my place on the straw mattress, how they testified against you so as to drive you away, ruin you, and have me to themselves. You didn’t notice any of that?” K. looked at Frieda without answering. These charges against the assistants were surely true, but they could also be interpreted much more innocently as a reflection of the assistants’ ridiculous, childish, unstable, uncontrollable nature. And wasn’t it further proof against the accusation that they should have always endeavored to go with K. instead of staying behind with Frieda? K. mentioned something of the sort. “Hypocrisy,” said Frieda. “You didn’t see through it? Then why did you drive them away, if not for those reasons?” And she went to the window, pulled the curtain slightly to one side, looked out, and called to K. The assistants were still outside at the fence; visibly tired though they were, summoning all their energy, they extended their arms beseechingly every now and then toward the schoolhouse. One of them, in order to avoid having to keep holding on, impaled the back of his coat on the fence.
“Poor things! Poor things!” said Frieda. “You asked me why I drove them away?” K. asked. “You’re directly to blame for that.” “Me?” Frieda asked, without taking her eyes from the window. “You were all too friendly toward the assistants,” said K., “you tolerated their bad habits, laughed at them, stroked their hair, pitied them constantly, ‘poor things, poor things,’ you’ve just said so again, and then finally that last incident, since you believed I wasn’t too high a price to pay for getting the assistants out of a beating.” “That’s just it,” said Frieda, “that’s what I’m talking about, that’s exactly what makes me so unhappy, what keeps me from you, even though I know of no greater happiness than to be with you, constantly, without interruption, without end, but in the dreams I dream there’s no tranquil place on earth for our love in the village or anywhere else, so I picture a deep and narrow grave where we embrace each other as if with clamps, I hide my face in you, you hide yours in me, and nobody will ever see us again. But then—look at those assistants! It isn’t you they are thinking of when they clasp their hands like that, but me.” “And it’s not me who is watching them,” said K., “but you.” “Of course it’s me,” said Frieda almost
angrily, “but that’s what I have been telling you all along; why else would the assistants be pursuing me, even if they are the emissaries of Klamm—” “The emissaries of Klamm,” said K., for though the term immediately seemed quite natural to him, it still came as a big surprise. “Yes, of course, Klamm’s emissaries,” said Frieda, “but even if they are, they’re still clumsy youths whose education could profit from a beating. What ugly, swarthy youths, and how repulsive the contrast between their faces, which make one see them as adults, or almost as students, and their childish, silly behavior. Do you think I can’t see this? I am ashamed of them. But that’s exactly it, they don’t repel me, I’m ashamed of them. I can’t stop looking at them. When one ought to get annoyed at them, I can only laugh. When one ought to strike them, I can only stroke their hair. When I lie beside you at night, unable to sleep, I cannot help looking across you and observing one of them sleeping tightly rolled up in the blanket and the other kneeling by the open oven door stoking the fire and I must bend so far forward that I almost wake you. And it isn’t the cat that frightens me—oh, I know all about cats and I know all about those uneasy, constantly interrupted naps in the taproom—it’s not the cat that frightens me, but I who give myself a fright. And it doesn’t take that monster of a cat, for I jump at the least noise. One moment I’m afraid you’ll wake up and it’ll be all over and the next I’m jumping up to light the candle so you’ll wake up quickly and protect me.” “I had no idea about any of those things,” said K., “though in an inkling of it I drove them away, but now that they’re gone perhaps everything will be fine.” “Yes, they’re finally gone,” said Frieda, though her face was tormented rather than joyful, “but we don’t know who they are. Klamm’s emissaries, that’s what I call them in my thoughts, just playfully, but perhaps that is what they really are. Their eyes, those naive but sparkling eyes, somehow remind me of Klamm’s eyes, yes, that’s it, Klamm’s glance sometimes leaps from their eyes and goes straight through me. And so it was wrong of me to have said that I’m ashamed of them. I only wish that were so! Though I realize that in other places and with other people this same conduct would be stupid and offensive, with them it isn’t, I watch their silly antics with admiration and respect. But if they are Klamm’s emissaries, who will free us from them, and would it even be good to be freed from them? Wouldn’t you have to bring them back in at once and be happy if they actually came?” “You want me to let them back in?” K. asked. “No, no,” said Frieda, “nothing could be further from my wishes. The sight of them if they were to burst in now, their delight in seeing me again, their hopping about like children and their stretching out their arms like men, I might not be able to bear that. But then when I think that if you keep treating them this harshly you may be denying Klamm access to you, I want to save you from the repercussions of that. Then I want you to let them in. So quickly let them in. Don’t worry about me, what difference do I make. I will defend myself for as long as I can, but if I lose, well then I lose, but with the awareness that this, too, was for your sake.” “You’re only reinforcing my opinion about the assistants,” said K., “they will never come in here again with my permission. The fact that I got them out shows that under certain circumstances it is indeed possible to curb them and that they have no significant business with Klamm. Only yesterday evening I got a letter from Klamm from which it emerges that Klamm has been completely misinformed about the assistants, and the only conclusion this permits is that he is utterly indifferent to them, for if this weren’t so he could certainly have obtained precise information about them. The fact that you see Klamm in the assistants proves nothing, for unfortunately you’re still influenced by the landlady and see Klamm everywhere. You’re still Klamm’s mistress and not my wife yet by any means. This sometimes makes me feel quite dismal, then it’s as if I had lost everything, then I have the feeling I have just arrived in the village, not full of hope, as I truly was then, but aware that nothing but disappointments lie ahead and that I will have to drink each one down to the dregs. But still that’s only sometimes,” K. added, smiling, when he saw Frieda sag under his words, “besides, it does underline something positive, namely, what you mean to me. And if you call upon me to choose between you and the assistants, then the assistants have already lost. What an idea, to choose between you and the assistants. Now I want to get rid of them, once and for all. Who knows, perhaps the weakness that came over the two of us simply comes from our not having had breakfast yet.” “Possibly,” said Frieda, smiling wearily, and she set to work. K., too, picked up his broom again.
XIII.
HANS
A little while later there was a light knock. “Barnabas!” K. shouted, threw down the broom, and in a few bounds was at the door. Frieda, startled more by the name than by anything else, looked at him. With his unsteady hands K. couldn’t immediately open the old lock. “I’m opening up,” he kept repeating, instead of asking who was knocking. And then he had to watch entering through the now wide-open front door, not Barnabas but the small boy who had once wanted to speak to K. But K. had no desire to remember him. “Well, what are you doing here?” he said, “classes are next door.” “I came from there,” said the boy, looking up at K. with large brown eyes, erect, his arms close to his body. “So what do you want? Quick!” said K., bending down a little, for the boy spoke softly. “Can I help you?” asked the boy. “He wants to help us,” K. said to Frieda, and then to the boy: “So what’s your name?” “Hans Brunswick,” said the boy, “fourth grade, son of Otto Brunswick, master shoemaker, Madeleine Street.” “Well then, your name is Brunswick,” said K., who now became friendlier. It turned out that Hans had become so upset over the bloody welts the schoolmistress had raised on K.’s hand that he had then decided to help him. Without asking, he had at the risk of severe punishment crept from the other classroom like a deserter. He was no doubt largely driven by such boyish notions. They were matched by the earnestness evident in everything he did. Only initially hampered by shyness, he soon got used to K. and Frieda, and on being given good hot coffee to drink he grew lively and confiding and his questions eager and insistent, as if he wanted to ascertain the essential as quickly as possible in order to be able to make decisions for K. and Frieda on his own. There was also a certain imperiousness in his nature, but mixed with childish innocence so that you were glad to submit to him, half sincerely, half jokingly. In any case he monopolized everybody’s attention, all work had ceased, breakfast was dragging on. Although he was seated on a bench, K. above at the teacher’s table, and Frieda on a nearby chair, it looked as if Hans were the teacher, as if he were examining them and judging their answers, a faint smile around his soft mouth seemed to suggest he knew very well that this was merely a game, but this only made him concentrate all the more intently, perhaps it wasn’t so much a smile as the happiness of childhood that played about his lips. It took him a remarkably long time to admit that he knew K. from the time he had come by Lasemann’s. This pleased K. “You were playing at the woman’s feet?” K. asked. “Yes,” said Hans, “that was my mother.” And now he had to speak about his mother, but he did so only hesitantly; after repeated requests, however, it became clear that he was indeed a young boy, from whom, especially when he was asking questions, there seemed to issue a voice, perhaps in a premonition of the future, but perhaps this was merely a sensory illusion on the part of the uneasy tense listener, the voice of an almost energetic, clever man with foresight, but then without transition he was once again a schoolboy who was incapable of understanding certain questions and misinterpreted others and spoke too softly, with a childish inconsiderateness, even though this failing was repeatedly pointed out to him, and then, faced with some especially penetrating questions, he fell quite silent, as though out of stubbornness, and also without the slightest embarrassment, in a way no adult could have done. Indeed it seemed as if he thought that he alone was permitted to ask questions and that questions from the others would only break some rule and waste time. He c
ould sit there quietly for a long time, body erect, head lowered, lower lip pouting. This so pleased Frieda that she often asked him questions in the hope that they would silence him in this way. Sometimes she even succeeded, but this annoyed K. On the whole one didn’t learn much, Hans’s mother was rather sickly, but the exact nature of the illness was still unclear, the child that Frau Brunswick had been holding on her lap was Hans’s sister and was called Frieda (Hans wasn’t pleased to discover that the woman questioning him had the same name), they all lived in the village, though not at Lasemann’s, they had only gone there for a bath since Lasemann had the large tub in which the small children—Hans no longer counted as such—loved to bathe and frolic; Hans spoke of his father with reverence or fear, but only when there was no mention of his mother; when set against his mother, his father evidently counted for little; incidentally, no matter how you questioned him about his family life, he never responded, all you learned about his father’s trade was that he was the largest shoemaker in the village, nobody else came near, as Hans repeated often enough in response to entirely unrelated questions; the father even gave out work to other shoemakers, such as Barnabas’s father, but in that particular case Brunswick must have done so as a special favor, as indicated by the proud way Hans tossed his head, which made Frieda jump down and kiss him. Asked whether he had ever been at the Castle, he answered only after repeated questioning, and what’s more with a “No”; when asked the same question concerning his mother he simply did not answer. K. finally wearied of this, the questioning seemed useless even to him, for in that respect he agreed with the boy, there was also something rather shameful about this effort to probe family secrets in a roundabout way through an innocent child, and indeed doubly so if you couldn’t even come up with anything. And finally, when K. asked the boy how he proposed to help, he was no longer surprised to learn that Hans merely wanted to help them with their tasks so as to ensure that the teacher and schoolmistress ceased scolding K. K. explained to Hans that no such help was needed, it was probably in the teacher’s nature to be a scold, and one could scarcely escape this even through the most meticulous work, the work itself wasn’t that difficult and only because of certain chance events had he fallen behind today, and in any case this scolding didn’t affect K. as it would a pupil, he simply shook it off, it meant almost nothing to him, and he hoped to escape soon from the teacher. Since this merely concerned help against the teacher, K. thanked him very much and said he could go back now, he hoped he wouldn’t be punished. Although K. never emphasized this and only intimated it involuntarily, it was only the help against the teacher that he didn’t need, whereas he wasn’t ruling out the possibility of another sort of help, Hans clearly took note of this and asked whether K. needed help of some other kind, he would be very glad to help him, and if he couldn’t, he would ask his mother to do so, and then success would be assured. Besides, when Father had worries he also asked Mother for help. And Mother had once even asked about K., she hardly ever left the house, her presence that day at Lasemann’s was exceptional, but he, Hans, often went there to play with Lasemann’s children, and Mother had once asked him whether the surveyor had ever come back. Well, one shouldn’t ask Mother needless questions, for she was weak and ill, and so he had simply told her that he hadn’t seen the surveyor there, and nothing more was said; on finding K. here in the school, though, he had to speak to him so that he could inform his mother. For Mother liked it best if you carried out her wishes without explicit orders. At that, after a moment’s reflection, K. said he didn’t need help, he had everything he needed, but it was very kind of Hans to want to help him and he thanked him for his good intentions, it was certainly possible he might need something later, then he would turn to him, he did have his address. But this time maybe he, K., could be of some help, he was sorry that Hans’s mother was ailing and that nobody here evidently understood her illness; in a case as badly neglected as this, even illnesses that are quite minor in and of themselves can become quite serious. Well, he, K., not only had some medical knowledge but also, and this was even more valuable, experience treating patients. There were cases where doctors had failed and he had succeeded. At home, on account of his healing powers, they always called him “the bitter herb.” Anyhow, he would like to take a look at Hans’s mother and talk to her. Perhaps he could give some good advice, he would gladly do so, even if only for Hans’s sake. At first Hans’s eyes lit up at this offer, tempting K. to become even more insistent, though the result was unsatisfactory, for in answer to repeated questions and without even expressing regret Hans said that no strangers were allowed to visit Mother since she needed constant care; though K. had barely spoken to her that one time, she had had to spend a few days in bed afterwards, but this was a frequent occurrence. Father had become very angry at K. and would certainly never allow K. to come and visit Mother, indeed he had actually wanted to go and see K. in order to punish him for his behavior, except Mother had dissuaded him. But above all Mother herself generally didn’t want to speak to anyone and her question about K. was no exception to that rule, on the contrary, in mentioning him she could have said that she wished to see him, but she had not done so, and had thus made her intentions plain. She only wanted to hear about K. and didn’t want to speak to him. By the way it wasn’t actually an illness she suffered from, she was fully aware of the cause of her condition and sometimes hinted as much, it was probably the air here that didn’t agree with her, but then again because of Father and the children she didn’t want to leave the village, and also her condition was much better than it had been. And this is all K. learned; Hans’s powers of reasoning had noticeably improved now that he had to shield his mother from K., the very person whom he supposedly wanted to help; indeed, in the good cause of keeping K. from his mother, he even contradicted some of his own previous statements, those, for instance, concerning her illness. Nonetheless, K. could now see too that Hans still viewed him favorably, only he forgot everything else because of his mother; anybody one happened to mention in the same breath as his mother immediately got put in the wrong, just now it was K., but it could just as easily be someone like, say, his father. K. wanted to test that last notion and said that it was certainly very sensible of Hans’s father to shield his mother from all disturbances and if he, K., had had even the slightest inkling of that he certainly wouldn’t have risked speaking to his mother and so he was asking Hans to convey his belated apologies to the family. Still, he couldn’t quite understand why, if the causes of the illness were so clearly established, his father was preventing his mother from recovering in the air someplace else; one had to say that his father was preventing her since it was only for his sake and the children’s that she didn’t go away, but she could take the children with her, she certainly needn’t go away for long, nor very far either; for up on the Castle hill the air was entirely different. His father needn’t fear the cost of such an excursion, he was after all the largest shoemaker in the village, and he or his mother surely had relatives or acquaintances at the Castle who would gladly take her in. Why wouldn’t he let her go? He shouldn’t underestimate an ailment of that sort, K. had caught only a glimpse of his mother, but it was her striking paleness and infirmity that had prompted him to speak to her, and even then he had been surprised that Hans’s father had left that sick woman in the bad air of a room used for communal bathing and washing and hadn’t tempered his own loud voice either. His father probably didn’t know what was at stake, it could be that the ailment had improved of late, that sort of ailment is fickle, but in the end if you don’t fight it, it gathers force and comes back, and nothing more can be done. Well, if K. couldn’t speak to Hans’s mother, it would perhaps be a good idea to speak with his father and make him aware of all this.