by Franz Kafka
He had thought he would recognize the building, even at a distance, by some sign he hadn’t visualized precisely, or by some unusual activity at the entrance. But Juliusstrasse, where it was supposedly located and at the top of which K. paused for a moment, was flanked on both sides by almost completely identical buildings, tall gray apartment houses inhabited by the poor. On this Sunday morning most of the windows were occupied; men in shirtsleeves leaned there smoking, or held small children with tender care at the windowsill. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman briefly appeared. People called across the street to each other; one such exchange directly over K.’s head aroused loud laughter. At regular intervals along the long street, small shops offering various foodstuffs lay below street level, reached by a few steps. Women went in and out of them, or stood on the steps chatting. A fruit vendor who was offering his wares to the windows above, paying as little attention as K., almost knocked him to the ground with his pushcart. Just then a gramophone that had served its time in better sections of the city began to murder a tune.
K. continued down the street, slowly, as if he had plenty of time now, or as if the examining magistrate had seen him from some window and knew he had arrived. It was shortly after nine. The building stretched some distance; it was almost unusually extensive, the entrance gate in particular was high and broad. It was evidently intended for heavy wagons belonging to the various warehouses, now locked shut, which lined the inner courtyard, with signs bearing the names of firms, some of which K. knew from the bank. Contrary to his normal habit, he was taking close note of all these surface details, and he paused a while at the entrance to the courtyard. On a crate nearby sat a barefoot man reading a newspaper. Two boys rocked back and forth on a handcart. A frail young girl in her night jacket stood at a pump and gazed at K. as the water poured into her jug. In one corner of the courtyard a line with wash to be dried already dangling from it was being stretched between two windows. A man stood below and directed the task with a few shouts.
K. turned to the stairs to find the room for the inquiry, but then paused as he saw three different staircases in the courtyard in addition to the first one; moreover, a small passage at the other end of the courtyard seemed to lead to a second courtyard. He was annoyed that they hadn’t described the location of the room more precisely; he was certainly being treated with strange carelessness or indifference, a point he intended to make loudly and clearly. Then he went up the first set of stairs after all, his mind playing with the memory of the remark the guard Willem had made that the court was attracted by guilt, from which it actually followed that the room for the inquiry would have to be located off whatever stairway K. chanced to choose.
On his way up he disturbed several children who were playing on the steps and who looked angrily at him as he passed through their midst. “The next time I’m to come,” he said to himself, “I’ll either have to bring candy to win them over or my cane to flog them.” Shortly before reaching the first floor he even had to pause for a moment until a marble had completed its journey, while two little boys with the pinched faces of grown tramps held him by the trouser legs; if he had wanted to shake them off he would have had to hurt them, and he feared their cries.
On the first floor the real search began. Since he couldn’t simply ask for the commission of inquiry he invented a carpenter named Lanz—the name occurred to him because Frau Grubach’s nephew, the captain, was called that—intending to ask at each apartment if a carpenter named Lanz lived there, hoping to get a chance to look into the rooms. That proved to be easy enough in general, however, since almost all the doors were standing open, with children running in and out. As a rule they were small, one-window rooms, where people cooked as well. A few women held babies in one arm as they worked at the stove with their free hand. Half-grown girls, apparently clad only in smocks, ran busily back and forth. In every room the beds were still in use, with someone sick or still asleep in them, or people stretched out in their clothes. K. knocked at the apartments with closed doors and asked if a carpenter named Lanz lived there. Generally a woman would open the door, listen to the question, and turn to someone in the room who rose up from the bed. “The gentleman wants to know if a carpenter named Lanz lives here.” “A carpenter named Lanz?” asked the one in bed. “Yes,” K. said, despite the fact that the commission of inquiry clearly wasn’t here and therefore his task was ended. Several people believed K. badly needed to find the carpenter Lanz, thought long and hard, recalled a carpenter, but not one named Lanz, remembered a name that bore some faint similarity to Lanz, asked their neighbors, or accompanied K. to some far distant door, where they fancied such a man might possibly be subletting an apartment, or where there was someone who could provide him with better information than they could. In the end K. scarcely needed even to ask, but was instead pulled along in this manner from floor to floor. He regretted his plan, which had at first seemed so practical. As he was approaching the fifth floor he decided to give up the search, took his leave from a friendly young worker who wanted to lead him further upward, and started back down. But then, annoyed once more by the futility of the whole enterprise, he returned and knocked at the first door on the fifth floor. The first thing he saw in the little room was a large wall clock that already showed ten o’clock. “Does a carpenter named Lanz live here?” he asked. “This way, please,” said a young woman with shining black eyes, who was washing diapers in a tub, and pointed with her wet hand toward the open door of the adjoining room.
K. thought he had walked into a meeting. A crowd of the most varied sort—no one paid any attention to the newcomer—filled a medium-size room with two windows, surrounded by an elevated gallery just below the ceiling that was likewise fully occupied, and where people were forced to crouch with their backs and heads pushing against the ceiling. K., who found the air too stuffy, stepped out again and said to the young woman, who had probably misunderstood him: “I was looking for a carpenter, a man named Lanz?” “Yes,” said the woman, “please go on in.” K. might not have obeyed if the woman hadn’t walked over to him, grasped the door handle and said: “I have to lock it after you, no one else is permitted in.” “Very sensible,” said K., “but it’s already too crowded.” But he went back in anyway.
Between two men who were conversing near the door—one of them was going through the motions of counting out money with outstretched hands, the other was looking him sharply in the eye—a hand reached out for K. It was a little red-cheeked boy. “Come on, come on,” he said. K. let him lead the way; it turned out that there was indeed a narrow path free through the swirling crowd, one that possibly divided two parties; this possibility was further supported by the fact that K. saw scarcely a face turned toward him in the closest rows on his left and right, but merely the backs of people addressing their words and gestures solely to those in their own party. Most were dressed in black, in old, long, loosely hanging formal coats. This was the only thing K. found confusing; otherwise he would have taken it all for a local precinct meeting.
K. was led to the other end of the hall, where a small table had been placed at an angle on a low and equally overcrowded platform, and behind the table, near the platform’s edge, sat a fat little man, wheezing and chatting with someone standing behind him—the latter was leaning with his elbow on the back of the chair and had crossed his legs—laughing heartily all the while. Now and then he would fling his arms in the air, as if he were caricaturing someone. The boy who was leading K. found it difficult to deliver his message. Twice already he’d tried to say something, standing on tiptoe, without being noticed by the man above. It was only when one of the people up on the platform drew attention to the boy that the man turned and bent down to listen to his faint report. Then he pulled out his watch and glanced over at K. “You should have appeared here an hour and five minutes ago,” he said. K. was about to reply, but he didn’t have time, for the man had scarcely spoken when a general muttering aro
se from the right half of the hall. “You should have been here an hour and five minutes ago,” the man repeated more loudly, and glanced down into the hall as well. The muttering immediately grew louder still and, since the man said nothing more, died out only gradually. It was now much quieter in the hall than it had been when K. entered. Only the people in the gallery continued making comments. They seemed, as far as one could tell in the semidarkness, haze, and dust overhead, to be dressed more shabbily than those below. Some of them had brought along cushions that they placed between their heads and the roof of the hall so as not to rub themselves raw.
K. had decided to observe more than speak, and therefore waived any defense of his supposedly late arrival, merely saying: “I may have arrived late, but I’m here now.” A burst of applause followed, once again from the right half of the hall. “These people are easily won over,” thought K. and was only disturbed by the silence in the left half of the hall, which lay immediately behind him and from which only thinly scattered applause had arisen. He considered what he might say to win all of them over at once, or if that was not possible, at least to win the others for the time being.
“Yes,” said the man, “but now I’m no longer required to examine you”—again the muttering, but this time mistakenly, for the man waved the people off and continued—“however, I’ll make an exception for today. But such tardiness must not be repeated. And now step forward!” Someone jumped down from the platform to free a space for K., and he stepped up into it. He was standing right up against the table; the pressure of the crowd behind him was so great that he had to actively resist if he didn’t want to push the examining magistrate’s table, and perhaps even the magistrate himself, right off the platform.
The examining magistrate wasn’t worried about that, however, but sat comfortably enough in his chair and, after a closing remark to the man behind him, reached for a little notebook, the only object on his table. It resembled a school exercise book, old and totally misshapen from constant thumbing. “So,” said the examining magistrate, leafing through the notebook and turning to K. as if simply establishing a fact: “You’re a house painter?” “No,” said K., “I’m the chief financial officer of a large bank.” This reply was followed by such hearty laughter from the right-hand party below that K. had to join in. The people propped their hands on their knees, shaken as if by fits of coughing. There were even a few laughing up in the gallery. The examining magistrate, who had become quite angry and was probably powerless to do anything about the people below, tried to compensate for this by jumping up and threatening the gallery, while his ordinarily inconspicuous eyebrows contracted bushy black and large above his eyes.
The left half of the hall, however, was still silent, the people standing there in rows, their faces turned toward the platform, listening to the words exchanged above as quietly as to the clamor of the other party, now and then even allowing a few members within their own ranks to go along with the other side. The people in the party on the left, who were in fact less numerous, may have been no more important than those in the party on the right, but their calm demeanor made them appear more so. As K. now started to speak, he was convinced that he was expressing their thoughts.
“Your question, Your Honor, about my being a house painter—and you weren’t really asking at all, you were telling me outright—is characteristic of the way these entire proceedings against me are being conducted. You may object that these aren’t proceedings at all, and you’re certainly right there, they are only proceedings if I recognize them as such. But I do recognize them, for the moment, out of compassion, so to speak. One can only view them compassionately, if one chooses to pay any attention to them at all. I’m not saying these proceedings are sloppy, but I would like to propose that description for your own self-knowledge.”
K. interrupted himself and looked down into the hall. What he had said was harsh, harsher than he had intended, but nonetheless accurate. It should have earned applause here and there, but all was still; they were evidently waiting tensely for what was to come; perhaps in that silence an outburst was building that would put an end to everything. It was disturbing that the door at the end of the hall now opened, and the young washerwoman, who had probably finished her work, entered, drawing a few glances in spite of her painstaking caution. Only the examining magistrate gave K. direct cause for joy, for he appeared to have been struck at once by his words. Up to that point he had been standing as he listened, for K.’s speech had caught him by surprise as he rose to admonish the gallery. As K. now paused, he slowly lowered himself back into his chair, as if hoping to keep anyone from noticing. In an attempt to regain his composure, no doubt, he took out his little notebook again.
“It’s no use, Your Honor,” K. continued, “even your little notebook confirms what I’m saying.” Pleased that his own calm words alone were to be heard in that strange assembly, K. even dared to snatch the notebook from the magistrate’s hands and lift it in his fingertips by a single center page, as if he were repelled by it, so that the foxed and spotted leaves filled with closely spaced script hung down on both sides. “These are the records of the examining magistrate,” he said, letting the notebook drop to the table. “Just keep reading through them, Your Honor, I really have nothing to fear from this account book, although it’s closed to me, since I can barely stand to touch it with the tips of two fingers.” It could only be a sign of deep humiliation, or at least so it seemed, that the examining magistrate took the notebook from where it had fallen on the table, tried to put it to rights somewhat, and lifted it to read again.
The faces of the people in the front row were turned toward K. so intently that he gazed down at them for a short time. They were all older men, a few with white beards. Perhaps they were the decisive ones, capable of influencing the whole assembly, men whom even the examining magistrate’s humiliation could not stir from the quiescent state they’d fallen into since K.’s speech.
“What has happened to me,” K. continued, somewhat more quietly than before, and constantly searching the faces of those in the front row, which made his speech seem slightly disjointed, “what has happened to me is merely a single case and as such of no particular consequence, since I don’t take it very seriously, but it is typical of the proceedings being brought against many people. I speak for them, not for myself.”
He had instinctively raised his voice. Someone clapped somewhere with raised hands and cried out: “Bravo! Why not? Bravo! And encore bravo!” Those in the front row pulled at their beards now and then; no one turned around at the cry. Nor did K. grant it any importance, yet it cheered him; he no longer considered it necessary for everyone to applaud, it was enough that the audience in general was beginning to think the matter over and that someone was occasionally won over by his words.
“I don’t seek success as an orator,” K. said with this in mind, “nor could I necessarily achieve it. The examining magistrate is no doubt a much better speaker; after all, it goes with his profession. What I seek is simply a public discussion of a public disgrace. Listen: Around ten days ago I was arrested; the arrest itself makes me laugh, but that’s another matter. I was assaulted in the morning in bed; perhaps they’d been ordered to arrest some house painter—that can’t be ruled out after what the examining magistrate has said—someone as innocent as I am, but they chose me. The room next door had been taken over by two coarse guards. If I had been a dangerous thief, they couldn’t have taken better precautions. These guards were corrupt ruffians as well; they talked my ear off, they wanted bribes, they tried to talk me out of my undergarments and clothes under false pretenses, they wanted money, supposedly to bring me breakfast, after they’d shamelessly eaten my own breakfast before my very eyes. And that wasn’t all. I was led into a third room to see the inspector. It was the room of a young woman for whom I have the highest respect, yet I was forced to look on while this room was defiled, so to speak, by the presence of the guards and the inspector, on my account, but through
no fault of my own. It wasn’t easy to stay calm. However, I managed to, and I asked the inspector quite calmly—if he were here he’d have to confirm that—why I had been arrested. And what was the reply of this inspector, whom I still see before me, sitting on the chair of the young woman I mentioned, the very image of mindless arrogance? Gentlemen, he really had no reply at all, perhaps he actually knew nothing, he had arrested me and that was enough for him. He had taken the additional step of bringing to the young lady’s room three minor employees from my bank, who spent their time fingering photographs, the property of the lady, and mixing them all up. The presence of these employees served another purpose, of course: they were meant, like my landlady and her maid, to spread the news of my arrest, damage my public reputation, and in particular to undermine my position at the bank. Well, none of this met with the slightest success; even my landlady, a very simple person—I pronounce her name in all honor, she’s called Frau Grubach—even Frau Grubach was sensible enough to realize that an arrest like that means as little as a mugging on the street by teenage hoodlums. I repeat, the whole affair has merely caused me some unpleasantness and temporary annoyance, but might it not have had more serious consequences as well?”
As K. interrupted himself at this point and glanced at the silent magistrate, he thought he noticed him looking at someone in the crowd and giving him a signal. K. smiled and said: “The examining magistrate here beside me has just given one of you a secret signal. So there are those among you who are being directed from up here. I don’t know if the signal is meant to elicit hisses or applause, and I deliberately waive my opportunity to learn what the signal means by having revealed the matter prematurely. It’s a matter of complete indifference to me, and I publicly authorize His Honor the examining magistrate to command his paid employees below out loud, rather than by secret signals, and to say something like: ‘Now hiss’ and the next time: ‘Now clap.’ ”