by Franz Kafka
Pepi had finished. Breathing deeply, she wiped a few tears from her eyes and cheeks and looked at K., nodding her head as though she wanted to say that this had really nothing at all to do with her misfortune, she would bear it and did not need help or consolation from anybody, least of all from K., for she knew a great deal about life, despite her youth, and her misfortune only confirmed her knowledge, but it certainly had to do with K.; she had wanted to hold a mirror up to him, and even after all her hopes had been dashed she had thought it was still necessary to do so.
“What a wild imagination you have, Pepi,” said K. “It’s not at all true that you’ve only just discovered all this, those are only dreams from your dark narrow chambermaids’ room downstairs, which are not out of place there, but here in the public taproom they sound odd. You couldn’t make your mark here with ideas like that, well, that’s quite understandable. Even the dress and hairdo you boast about are nothing but the evil spawn of that darkness and of those beds in your room; they’re no doubt all very fine down there, but here everyone laughs at them, secretly or openly. And what else were you saying? That I was mistreated and deceived? No, dear Pepi, I was as little mistreated and deceived as you were. It’s true, for the moment Frieda has left me, or has, as you put it, taken to her heels with an assistant, you have certainly caught a glimmer of the truth, and it is also really quite unlikely that she will ever become my wife, but it is absolutely untrue that I would have grown tired of her, let alone that I would have driven her away the very next day or indeed that she would have deceived me, as otherwise a woman might deceive a man. You chambermaids are used to spying through a keyhole, and so from the tiny details that you actually see you often draw grand but false conclusions about the whole thing. The result is that for example in this case I know far less than you do. I certainly cannot give as detailed an explanation as you can of the reasons why Frieda left me. The most likely explanation, it seems to me, is the one you mentioned but didn’t use, namely my neglect of her. That’s unfortunately true, I did neglect her, but there were specific reasons for that, which are irrelevant here; I would be happy if she returned, but then I would immediately start neglecting her again. That’s how it is. When she was with me, I was always away on those wanderings that you ridicule; now that she’s gone, I have almost nothing to do, am tired, and I desire to have even less to do. Don’t you have any advice for me, Pepi?” “Oh, yes,” said Pepi, becoming animated all of a sudden and seizing K. by the shoulder, “both of us were deceived, let’s stay together, come on down with me to the girls.” “So long as you complain about being deceived,” said K., “I cannot reach an understanding with you. You’re constantly wishing to have been deceived, because it’s flattering and because it moves you. But the truth is that you aren’t suited for that position. How clear that unsuitability must be if even I, the most ignorant person in your opinion, can see it. You’re a good girl, Pepi, but it isn’t so easy to see that; I, for one, initially considered you cruel and arrogant, but you’re not, you’re simply confused by this position, which confuses you because you aren’t suited to it. I don’t want to say that the position is too lofty for you, it’s really not such an exceptional position, but looked at more closely, perhaps it is somewhat more honorable than your previous position; but on the whole there is no great difference, the two are really confusingly similar, one could almost claim that it would be preferable to be a chambermaid rather than serve in the taproom, for one is always surrounded by secretaries there, while here, though one may serve the superiors of the secretaries in the public rooms, one must waste one’s time with the lowest riffraff, like me, for instance; by rights I’m not allowed to spend my time anywhere except here in the taproom, so is it such an enormous honor to associate with me? Well, it seems so to you and you may have your reasons for that. But that’s why you are unsuitable. It’s a position like any other, but to you it is heaven, so you seize everything with exaggerated eagerness and pretty yourself just as, in your opinion, the angels pretty themselves—but in reality they’re different—you tremble for the position, feel you’re constantly being hounded, seek to win over through exaggerated friendliness everyone who could to your mind support you, but you only disturb and disgust them, for what they want at the inn is peace, and not the barmaids’ worries on top of their own worries. It is possible that after Frieda’s departure none of the high-ranking guests noticed what had happened, but today they know it and really long for Frieda, since Frieda must have managed everything quite differently. No matter how she is otherwise and no matter how high a regard she had for her position, on duty she was highly experienced, cool and restrained, you even stress that yourself, though you obviously haven’t learned anything from the example. Did you ever notice that look of hers? That surely was no longer the look of a barmaid, it was almost the look of a landlady. That look of hers swept over everything, but also took in each person, and the glance accorded to each one was still sufficiently strong to conquer him. Who cares that perhaps she was rather thin, rather old, that one could imagine more plentiful hair; those are trifles compared with what she really had in her possession, and anybody who found these shortcomings disturbing would simply have demonstrated his incapacity to appreciate higher things. One certainly cannot reproach Klamm for that; it’s only because of your mistaken point of view as an inexperienced young girl that you cannot believe in Klamm’s love for Frieda. To you, Klamm seems unattainable—and rightly so—you therefore think Frieda couldn’t have approached Klamm either. You are mistaken. On this question I would rely solely on Frieda’s word even if I didn’t have unmistakable proof. No matter how unbelievable this may seem to you, and no matter how difficult it may be for you to reconcile it with your notions of the world, of officialdom, of refinement, and of the effect of female beauty, it is true all the same that just as we sit here and I take your hand in mine they sat there side by side, Klamm and Frieda, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and he came down here of his own free will, even hurried down, nobody was lying in wait for him in the corridor and leaving other tasks undone, Klamm himself had to go to the trouble of coming down, and the defects in Frieda’s clothing that would have horrified you did not disturb him at all. You don’t want to believe her! And you don’t realize how you’re exposing yourself, and the lack of experience you are revealing in this way. Even someone who knew nothing of her relationship with Klamm would certainly have to recognize by observing her nature that it had been molded by someone who was more than you and me and all of the people in the village and that the conversations between them went beyond the jokes that go back and forth between guests and waitresses and that seem to be your goal in life. But I’m being unjust toward you. You yourself do recognize Frieda’s good qualities, only you’re interpreting everything incorrectly, you think she’s simply using all of this for her own purposes and to some evil end, or even as a weapon against you. No, Pepi, even if she had arrows like that, she could not shoot them at such close range. And selfish? One could rather say that by sacrificing the things she already owned and the things she might have expected to gain she gave the two of us the chance to prove ourselves in a higher position, but we have disappointed her, and we’re even forcing her to come back. I don’t know whether that is so, nor am I certain of my guilt, it’s only when I compare myself with you that such things come to mind; it is as if both of us had struggled too hard, too noisily, too childishly, too naively to obtain something that can be easily and imperceptibly gained through, say, Frieda’s tranquillity and Frieda’s reserve, and had done so by weeping, scratching, and tugging, just as a child tugs at the tablecloth but doesn’t gain anything and only tears down all that splendor and puts it out of his reach forever—I don’t know whether that is so, but I certainly do know that it’s more like that than as you say.” “Oh, well,” said Pepi, “you’re in love with Frieda because she ran away from you, it’s not hard to be in love with her when she’s gone. But even if everything is as you wou
ld have it, and even if all this, even your ridicule of me, is justified—what are you going to do now? Frieda has left you, neither my explanation nor yours gives you any hope that she’ll return, and even if she does, in the meantime you’ll have to stay somewhere, it’s cold and you don’t have work or a bed, so come to us, you’ll like my friends, we’ll make you comfortable, you’ll help us with our work, which is really too heavy for girls to do on their own, we girls won’t have to fend for ourselves anymore, and we will no longer be afraid at night. Come to us! My friends know Frieda too, we’ll tell you stories about her until you have grown tired of them. Do come! We have pictures of Frieda too and we’ll show them to you. In those days Frieda was even more unassuming than she is now, you’ll barely recognize her, at most by her eyes, which had a sly expression even then. So will you come?” “Is that permitted? Yesterday there was after all a big scandal because I was caught in your corridor.” “Because you were caught; but when you are with us, you won’t be caught. Nobody will know about you, except for the three of us. Ah, it’ll be fun. Life there now seems more bearable to me than it did only a moment ago. Perhaps I won’t even lose that much by having to go away from here. Listen, even with only the three of us we weren’t bored, one must sweeten the bitterness of life, it’s already been made bitter for us in our youth to ensure that our tongues don’t get spoiled, the three of us stick together, we live as pleasantly as possible there, you will like Henriette in particular, but Emilie too, I have already told them about you, there one listens to such stories with incredulity, as though nothing could ever happen outside that room, it’s warm and narrow, and we huddle all the more closely; no, even though we depend on each other, we haven’t become tired of each other; on the contrary, whenever I think of my friends I’m almost glad to be returning; why should I climb any higher than they; that’s precisely what kept us together, that for all three of us the future was blocked off in the same way, but then I broke through and was separated from them; I didn’t forget them of course and my first concern was how to help them; my own position was still uncertain—I had no idea just how uncertain—and it wasn’t long before I talked to the landlord and Henriette and Emilie. Concerning Henriette, the landlord wasn’t altogether intransigent, but for Emilie, who’s much older than the two of us, she’s about Frieda’s age, he held out no hope. But, believe it or not, they have no wish to leave, they know the life that they’re leading there is miserable but they’ve already reconciled themselves to it, the dear souls; I think their tears over my departure were mostly out of grief that I had to leave the room we share and go out into the cold—there, everything outside the room seems cold—and that I had to cope with strange tall people in strange tall rooms for the sole purpose of making a living, which after all I had been doing quite successfully in our common household. They probably won’t be at all astonished when I return and will weep for a while and bewail my fate only so as to let me have my way. But then they’ll see you and realize that it was actually a good thing that I went off. It’ll make them happy to see that we now have a man who will help us and protect us, and they’ll simply be delighted that all this must be kept secret and that through this secret we will be bound together even more closely than we were before. Come, oh please, come to us! There will be no obligation, you won’t be confined to our room all the time, as we are. Then, when spring comes and you find a refuge somewhere else and don’t like being with us anymore, you can of course leave, but even then you must keep this secret and not give us away, since that would be our last hour at the Gentlemen’s Inn; and in other ways, too, you must naturally be careful while you are with us and not go showing yourself anywhere unless we’ve said that there’s no danger there, and in general you must follow our advice; that’s the only thing that binds you and surely you’re just as keen about this as we are, but otherwise you’re completely free, the work we’ll assign you won’t be too difficult, you need have no fear of that. So will you come?” “How much longer is it till spring?” asked K. “Till spring?” repeated Pepi, “the winter here is long, a very long winter, and monotonous. But we don’t complain about that down there, we’re safe from the winter. Of course at some point spring does come and summer too, and they certainly have their day, but in one’s memory spring and summer seem so short, as if they didn’t last much longer than two days, and sometimes even on these days, throughout the most beautiful day, snow falls.”