by Franz Kafka
XVIII.
AMALIA’S PUNISHMENT
“But a little while after that we were inundated from all sides with questions about the letter affair; friends and enemies, acquaintances and strangers came, our best friends were quickest to leave, Lasemann, usually slow and dignified, came in looking as though he merely wanted to check the dimensions of the room, one look around and he was finished, it looked like some awful children’s game as Lasemann ran off and Father freed himself from several others and ran after him as far as the threshold of the house and then gave up, Brunswick came and gave Father notice, he wanted to set up his own shop, he said this quite honestly, a clever man, who knew how to seize the moment, the customers came and began to search through Father’s storeroom for the boots they had brought for repair, Father first tried to change the customers’ minds—all of us helped as best we could—then gave up and quietly helped people look, line after line in the order book was crossed out, the leather supplies that had been left with us were returned, debts were paid, all this was done without the slightest quarrel, people were happy to be able to break off the connection with us quickly, completely, even at some loss to themselves, that wasn’t an issue. And then, finally, as might have been expected, Seemann, chief of the fire company, came, I can still see the scene before my eyes, Seemann, tall and strong, but somewhat stooped and tubercular, always serious—he is quite incapable of laughter—stands before my father, whom he admired and to whom once in a cordial moment he held out the prospect of a post as a deputy chief, but now he’s supposed to inform Father of his dismissal by the association and request the return of his diploma. The customers in the house just then dropped what they were doing and gathered in a tight circle round the two men. Seemann cannot speak, keeps tapping Father on the shoulder as though determined to tap from him the words that he himself ought to say but cannot find. He laughs the whole time, probably trying to calm himself and everyone else somewhat, but since he cannot laugh and since nobody has ever heard him laugh, nobody realizes that it is actually laughter. But from this day on Father is too tired and despondent to be able to help Seemann, he even seems too tired to try to understand what’s happening. Indeed, we were all despondent, but since we were young we couldn’t imagine such a total collapse, we kept thinking that somewhere in the long line of visitors someone would finally come and get it all to stop, make everything go back to the way it was. In our foolishness we considered Seemann just the right person for this. We waited in suspense for a clear statement to emerge from the constant laughter. What was so funny anyhow, surely only the stupid injustice being inflicted on us. Chief, Chief, go and finally tell these people, we thought as we pressed around him, but this merely elicited the oddest gestures from him. Finally, responding not to our secret wishes but to encouraging or annoyed shouts from the customers, he did begin to speak. But we still had hope. He began with great praise for Father. Called him a jewel of the association, an unsurpassable model for the new recruits, an indispensable member whose departure would almost destroy the association. All this was quite fine, had he only ended there. But he went on. If the association had nevertheless resolved to ask Father for his resignation, though only provisionally, the seriousness of the reasons forcing this step on the association should be easily discernible. Perhaps things wouldn’t necessarily have gone so far had it not been for Father’s brilliant achievements at the previous day’s festival, and yet it was precisely those achievements that had attracted official attention, the association was in the spotlight and had to be even more concerned about its purity than before. And then when the messenger was insulted, the association could find no other way out, and he, Seemann, had undertaken the difficult task of reporting it. Father shouldn’t make this even more difficult for him. How glad Seemann was to have finally come out with this, indeed so satisfied that he was no longer exaggeratedly considerate and simply pointed to the diploma hanging on the wall, waving his finger. Father nodded and went to get it, but with his shaking fingers he couldn’t lift it off the hook, I climbed on a chair to help. And that was that, he did not even take the diploma from the frame but gave it to Seemann as it was. Then he sat down in a corner, not moving, no longer speaking to anyone, we ourselves had to deal with the customers as best we could.” “And where in all this do you see the influence of the Castle?” K. asked. “It doesn’t seem to have intervened yet. What you have told me up to now is nothing more than the mindless timidity of the people, their delight in someone else’s plight, their fickleness in friendship, exactly the sort of thing one finds everywhere, and then in your father’s case—or so it seems to me—there is a certain pettiness, for, after all, what did the diploma amount to? Confirmation of his talents, but those he kept; if they made him indispensable, then so much the better, for the only way he could really have made things difficult for the chief would have been to throw the diploma at his feet before he could say another word. It seems significant to me that you haven’t mentioned Amalia; Amalia, the one to blame for all this, probably stood quietly in the background, observing the havoc.” “No, no,” said Olga, “nobody should be blamed for this, nobody could behave any differently, it was all due to the influence of the Castle.” “The influence of the Castle,” repeated Amalia, who had entered unobserved from the courtyard, their parents had long since gone to bed, “telling Castle stories? Still sitting here together? But you wanted to leave right away, K., and now it’s almost ten. Do you even care about such stories? There are people here who feed on such stories, they sit together as you sit here, regaling one another, but you do not strike me as one of them.” “Yes I am,” said K., “I am indeed one of them, whereas I am not greatly taken by those who do not concern themselves with such stories and simply make others concern themselves with them.” “Well, yes,” said Amalia, “but people are interested in different ways, I once heard of a young man whose mind was taken up day and night with thoughts of the Castle, he neglected everything else, people feared for his ordinary faculty of reason since all his faculties were always up at the Castle, but in the end it turned out that it wasn’t actually the Castle he was thinking of but only the daughter of a scullery maid at the offices, he got her, and then all was fine again.” “I would like that man, I think,” said K. “As for your liking that man,” said Amalia, “I’m not so sure about that, but you might like his wife. Now don’t let me disturb you, but I am going to bed and have to extinguish the lights because of our parents, they fall fast asleep right away, but in an hour their real sleep is over and then even the slightest glimmer will disturb them. Good night.” And indeed everything went dark right away, Amalia was most likely arranging a place to sleep on the floor by her parents’ bed. “Who is this young man she spoke of,” K. asked. “I don’t know,” said Olga, “perhaps Brunswick, though it doesn’t quite fit him, or perhaps someone else. It isn’t easy to understand exactly what she is saying, for one doesn’t know whether she is speaking ironically or seriously, it’s mostly serious, but sounds ironic.” “Stop interpreting everything!” said K. “How did you grow so heavily dependent on her, then? Was this already the case before the great misfortune? Or only afterwards? And don’t you ever wish you were independent of her? And are there any rational reasons for your dependence on her? She is the youngest, and as such she must obey. She is the one, whether guilty or innocent, who brought the misfortune on the family. Instead of begging each of you all over again for forgiveness every day, she carries her head higher than everybody else, doesn’t look after anything other than your parents—and then only barely, as an act of mercy—refuses to be initiated into anything, as she herself puts it, and when she finally does speak to you, she is ‘mostly serious, but sounds ironic.’ Or perhaps she rules through the beauty you sometimes mention. Well, you three greatly resemble one another, but the trait that distinguishes her from the two of you certainly isn’t to her advantage, and even on first seeing her I was scared off by the blank loveless look in her eyes. And though she is inde
ed the youngest, not a trace of it can be detected in her outward appearance, she has the ageless look of women who scarcely age, but who were scarcely ever young either. You see her every day, you don’t even notice the severity of her features. That’s why I too, if I think about it, cannot take Sortini’s affection seriously, perhaps he merely wanted to punish her with the letter rather than actually summon her.” “I don’t want to talk about Sortini,” said Olga, “anything is possible with those gentlemen from the Castle, no matter how beautiful or ugly the particular girl happens to be. But as for the rest, you’re completely mistaken about Amalia. Look, I have no particular reason for winning you over to Amalia’s side, and if I try to do so, it’s only for your sake. Amalia somehow was the cause of our misfortune, that is certain, but even Father, who was after all most seriously affected by the misfortune and could never keep his language under control, especially at home, even Father never spoke a word of reproach to Amalia, not even in the worst of times. And that wasn’t, say, because he approved of Amalia’s action; how could he, an admirer of Sortini’s, approve of it, let alone show the slightest understanding, for he would surely have been glad to sacrifice himself and all his possessions for Sortini, though not in the way it had actually happened, namely, on account of Sortini’s likely anger. His likely anger, for we heard no more from Sortini; if until then he had been withdrawn, from now on it was as if he didn’t exist anymore. And you should have seen Amalia then! We all knew that there would be no express punishment. People simply withdrew. The people here as well as at the Castle. While we did of course notice the villagers’ withdrawal, there was no noticeable reaction from the Castle. We hadn’t noticed the Castle’s caring beforehand, so how could we now notice a complete change. The silence was the worst. And by no means the villagers’ withdrawal, which had not been undertaken out of any particular conviction, they probably had no serious reservations about us, their present contempt had not yet emerged, it was only out of fear that they had done so, and then they simply waited to see how matters would turn out. We still had no fear of hardship either, all the debtors had paid, the settlements had been favorable, relatives secretly supplied the food we lacked, that was easy, it was harvest time, but we had no fields and nobody would give us work anywhere, and so for the first time in our lives we were virtually condemned to idleness. And then we sat together behind closed windows in the July and August heat. Nothing happened. No summons, no news, no visitors, nothing.” “Well,” said K., “since nothing happened and no express punishment was to be expected, what did you fear? What sort of people are you at all!” “How should I explain this to you?” said Olga. “We weren’t afraid of anything to come, we were only suffering from present circumstances and were in the middle of being punished. The villagers even expected that we would come back, that Father would reopen his workshop, and that Amalia, who could sew extremely beautiful clothes, if only for the most genteel, would come to take new orders, and indeed all of the villagers regretted what they had done; when a respected family in the village is suddenly cut off completely, that is to everyone’s disadvantage in some way or other; they broke with us, they thought they were only doing their duty, and in their place we would have behaved no differently. And they didn’t really know what it was all about, all they knew was that the messenger had gone back to the Gentlemen’s Inn, his hand filled with scraps of paper, Frieda had seen him go out and come back, had exchanged a few words with him and immediately spread what she discovered, but she certainly didn’t do so out of hostility toward us but simply out of duty, a duty that under similar circumstances anyone else would have had to assume too. And of course, as I said, the villagers would have greatly favored a happy solution to the entire affair. If we had suddenly appeared with the news that all was now fine again, that the affair had, say, simply been a misunderstanding which had been completely cleared up, or that it was indeed an offense but had through its very commission been rectified, or that we had through our connections at the Castle succeeded in having the affair dismissed—even this would have been enough for the villagers—they would definitely have received us again with open arms, there would have been kissing, embracing, celebrations, I have sometimes seen that kind of thing with other people. But it wouldn’t even have been necessary to have such news; if we had only gone and presented ourselves of our own accord, taken up our old connections again without wasting a word about the letter affair, that would have been enough, everyone would have gladly stopped talking about the matter, for in addition to fear it was the painful embarrassment of the matter that had made them break with us, simply so that they would no longer have to hear anything about the matter or speak about it or think of it or be in any way touched by it. If Frieda had disclosed the matter, she had done so not because she took pleasure in it but in order to protect herself and everyone else from it, to notify the community that a certain incident had taken place in our house which one should be most careful to stay away from. The issue here was not us as a family but rather the actual affair, and we came into it only because of the affair in which we had become involved. So if we had simply come out again, let the past rest, shown through our behavior that we had overcome the matter, regardless of how, and if the public had been thus persuaded that whatever the entire matter might have been about, it would never be discussed again, even then everything would have been fine, and we would have encountered the same old helpfulness everywhere; even if we had only partly forgotten the matter, they would have understood this and helped us to forget it entirely. Instead we sat at home. I’m not sure what we were waiting for, probably for Amalia’s decision, she had that morning seized the leadership of the family and kept a tight grip on it. Without recourse to special actions, orders, or pleas, almost solely by means of silence. The rest of us, though, had much to discuss, there was ceaseless whispering from morning until evening, and sometimes Father in a sudden attack of fright called me and I spent half the night by his bedside. Or sometimes we sat together, myself and Barnabas, who at first showed little understanding of the entire matter and ardently demanded explanations, always the same ones, he must have known that the untroubled years expected by others of his age no longer existed for him, we sat together, K., like the two of us now, and forgot that night had come and morning again. Mother was the weakest of us, no doubt because she had endured not only our shared sorrows but each individual sorrow, and so with horror we observed in her changes which, we suspected, awaited our entire family. Her favorite spot was the corner of a settee, we no longer have it, it’s in Brunswick’s large parlor, she sat there, either—one couldn’t tell which it was—dozing or, as her moving lips seemed to suggest, conducting lengthy conversations with herself. So it was only natural that we should have gone on discussing the letter affair from all angles, in all its certain details and uncertain possibilities, constantly outdoing ourselves in an effort to devise ways to achieve a favorable solution, this was all quite natural and unavoidable, but not good, and indeed we kept getting more and more mired in the very thing we wanted to escape from. And however excellent these ideas, what use were they, none could be carried out without Amalia, they were only preliminary deliberations, meaningless because the results never even reached Amalia, and if they had, they would have met with nothing but silence. Well, fortunately I understand Amalia better now than I did then. She bore more than the rest of us, it’s incomprehensible that she bore it and is still living among us today. Mother did perhaps bear all our sufferings, but she bore them because they had befallen her and didn’t bear them for long; one cannot say that she still somehow bears these sorrows today, and even then her mind was confused. But Amalia not only bore the sorrow, she also had the sense to see through it, we saw only the consequences, she saw the cause, we hoped for some little remedy or other, she knew everything had already been decided, we had to whisper, she merely had to keep silent, she stood face to face with the truth and lived and endured this life then as now. How much better things were for u
s in all our misery than for her. Still, we had to leave our house, Brunswick moved in, they allotted us this cottage, and in several trips we brought our property here in a handcart, Barnabas and myself pulling, Father and Amalia helping out behind, Mother, whom we had brought here first, always greeted us, sitting on a crate, with low wails. But I remember that even during those strenuous journeys—which were humiliating since we often met harvest wagons whose occupants fell silent on seeing us and looked away—we, Barnabas and I, couldn’t refrain from discussing our worries and our plans, sometimes we came to a stop as we spoke and it took Father’s ‘Hey’ to remind us of our duty. But even after the move all those discussions did not change our life except that we now gradually began to feel the poverty. The subsidies from our relatives ceased, our means were almost exhausted, and just then the contempt, as you know it, began to develop. People noticed that we hadn’t the strength to extricate ourselves from the letter affair and held this very much against us, it wasn’t that they underestimated the grave nature of our fate, although they did not know exactly what it was; if we had overcome this they would certainly have honored us accordingly, but since we hadn’t succeeded they made definitive what they had done only temporarily till then, they banished us from all circles, knowing that they themselves probably wouldn’t have withstood the test any better, but that this made it all the more necessary to make a complete break with us. Then they no longer spoke of us as people, our family name never came up again; if they had to talk about us they called us after Barnabas, the most innocent among us; even our cottage fell into disrepute, and if you examine yourself you’ll have to admit that on first arriving here you too thought that you noticed the justification for this contempt; later when people began coming to see us again, they turned up their noses at the most trivial things, for instance that the little oil lamp was hanging over the table. Where else should it hang if not over the table, but to them that was intolerable. Yet if we hung the lamp elsewhere, that still didn’t lessen their aversion. Everything that we were and possessed met with the same contempt.”