by Franz Kafka
K. watched her go; now that he had definitely decided to dismiss the lawyer, it was probably just as well that he hadn’t managed to discuss the matter further with Leni beforehand; she hardly had a sufficient grasp of the whole, and would certainly have advised against it; she might even have actually prevented K. from announcing the dismissal at this point; he would have remained upset and unsure, and yet in the end, after a period of time, he would still have carried out his decision, for the decision itself was all too compelling. The sooner it was carried out, however, the more damage it would prevent. Perhaps the merchant might have something to say about it.
K. turned around; the moment the merchant noticed, he began to rise. “Don’t get up,” said K., and drew a chair up beside him. “You’re an old client of the lawyer?” asked K. “Yes,” said the merchant, “a very old client.” “How many years has he been representing you then?” asked K. “I don’t know in what sense you mean that,” said the merchant, “he’s been representing me in my business affairs—I’m a grain dealer—ever since I took over the firm, for about twenty years now, and in my own trial, to which you’re no doubt alluding, he’s represented me right from the start as well, for more than five years now.” “Yes, much longer than five years,” he went on to add, and pulled out an old wallet, “I’ve written it all down here; if you wish I can give you the exact dates. It’s hard to keep track of it all. No doubt my trial has been going on much longer than that; it began shortly after the death of my wife and that was more than five and a half years ago.” K. drew nearer to him. “So the lawyer handles ordinary legal affairs as well?” he asked. This alliance of the court with jurisprudence seemed to K. unusually comforting. “Of course,” said the merchant, and then whispered to K.: “They say he’s even better in legal affairs than he is in the others.” But then he seemed to regret his words; he placed a hand on K.’s shoulder and said: “Please don’t betray me.” K. patted him comfortingly on the thigh and said: “No, I’m no traitor.” “He’s vindictive, you see,” said the merchant. “Surely he wouldn’t do anything to such a faithful client,” said K. “Oh, yes he would,” said the merchant, “when he’s upset he draws no distinctions, and what’s more I’m not really faithful to him.” “What do you mean?” K. asked. “Should I confide in you?” the merchant asked doubtfully. “I believe you may,” said K. “Well,” said the merchant, “I’ll confide it in part, but you have to tell me a secret too, so that we both have something to hold over the other with regard to the lawyer.” “You’re certainly cautious,” said K., “but I’ll tell you a secret that will put you entirely at ease. So, in what way are you unfaithful to the lawyer?” “Well,” said the merchant hesitantly, in a tone as if he were confessing something dishonorable, “I have other lawyers besides him.” “That’s really nothing very bad,” said K., a little disappointed. “Yes it is, here,” said the merchant, still breathing heavily after his confession, but gaining confidence from K.’s remark. “It’s not allowed. And the last thing you’re allowed to do is take on shysters in addition to one designated as a lawyer. And that’s just what I’ve done; in addition to him I have five shysters.” “Five!” K. exclaimed, astonished above all by the number; “five lawyers besides him?” The merchant nodded: “I’m negotiating with a sixth right now.” “But why do you need so many lawyers,” asked K. “I need them all,” said the merchant. “Won’t you tell me why?” asked K. “Gladly,” said the merchant. “First of all I don’t want to lose my trial, that goes without saying. So I mustn’t overlook anything that might be of use; even if there’s only a slight hope in a given instance that it might be of use, I still don’t dare discard it. So I’ve spent everything I have on my trial. For example, I’ve withdrawn all my capital from the business; my firm’s offices used to almost fill an entire floor; now one small room in the back suffices, where I work with an apprentice. Of course this decline resulted not only from a withdrawal of funds, but even more from the withdrawal of my energy. If you’re trying to work on your trial, you have little time for anything else.” “So you deal directly with the court yourself?” asked K. “I’d like to know more about that.” “There’s not much to tell,” said the merchant, “I tried it at first, but soon gave it up. It’s too exhausting, with too few results. At any rate I found I just couldn’t work there and deal with them myself. Just sitting and waiting is a major strain. You know yourself how stuffy it is in the offices.” “How do you know I was there?” asked K. “I was in the waiting room when you passed through.” “What a coincidence!” cried K., carried away and completely forgetting how ridiculous the merchant had once seemed. “So you saw me! You were in the waiting room when I passed through. Yes, I did pass through there once.” “It’s not that great a coincidence,” said the merchant, “I’m there practically every day.” “I’ll probably have to go there fairly often now,” said K., “but I doubt I’ll be received as respectfully as I was back then. Everyone stood up. They probably thought I was a judge.” “No,” said the merchant, “we were greeting the court usher. We knew you were a defendant. News like that travels fast.” “So you already knew that,” said K., “then my behavior may have struck you as arrogant. Didn’t anyone mention it?” “No,” said the merchant, “on the contrary. But that’s all nonsense.” “What sort of nonsense?” asked K. “Why do you ask?” the merchant said irritably, “You don’t seem to know the people there and might take it wrong. You have to realize that a great number of things are discussed in these proceedings that the mind just can’t deal with, people are simply too tired and distracted, and by way of compensation they resort to superstition. I’m talking about the others, but I’m no better. One such superstition, for example, is that many people believe they can predict the outcome of the trial from the face of the defendant, and in particular from the lines of his lips. Now these people claimed that according to your lips, you were certain to be convicted soon. I repeat, it’s a ridiculous superstition, and completely disproved in a majority of cases, but when you live in such company, it’s difficult to avoid these beliefs. Just think how strong the effect of such a superstition can be. You spoke to someone there, didn’t you? But he could hardly answer you. Of course there are all sorts of reasons for getting confused there, but one was the sight of your lips. He told us later he thought he’d seen the sign of his own conviction on your lips as well.” “My lips?” asked K., taking out a pocket mirror and regarding his face. “I can’t see anything unusual about my lips. Can you?” “Neither can I,” said the merchant, “absolutely nothing at all.” “These people are so superstitious!” K. exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell you so?” asked the merchant. “Do they spend so much time together then, exchanging opinions?” said K. “I’ve avoided them totally up to now.” “They generally don’t spend much time together,” said the merchant, “they couldn’t, there are too many of them. And they don’t have many interests in common. When a group occasionally begin to believe they share some common interest, it soon proves a delusion. Group action is entirely ineffective against the court. Each case is investigated on its own merits; the court is, after all, extremely meticulous. So group action is entirely ineffective, it’s only individuals who sometimes manage something in secret; only when it’s been achieved do others learn of it; no one knows how it happened. So there’s no sense of community; people meet now and then in the waiting room, but there’s not much conversation there. These superstitions have been around for ages, and multiply totally on their own.” “I saw the gentlemen there in the waiting room,” said K., “their waiting seemed to me so pointless.” “Waiting isn’t pointless,” said the merchant, “the only thing that’s pointless is independent action. As I mentioned, I have five lawyers besides this one. One would think—and I thought so myself at first—that I could now turn the case over to them completely. But that’s totally mistaken. I’m even less able to turn it over to them than if I had only one. You probably don’t understand why?” “No,” said K., placing his hand soothingly on that
of the merchant to slow down his all too rapid speech, “I just wonder if you could speak a little more slowly; all of these things are very important to me, and I can’t really follow you.” “I’m glad you reminded me,” said the merchant, “you’re a newcomer, after all, a mere youth. Your trial is six months old, right? Yes, I’ve heard about it. Such a young trial! I, on the other hand, have thought these things through innumerable times; to me they’re the most self-evident matters in the world.” “You’re no doubt happy your trial’s so far along?” K. inquired; he didn’t want to ask straight out how the merchant’s case was coming. But he didn’t receive a straightforward answer either. “Yes, I’ve been pushing my trial along for five years,” said the merchant, bowing his head, “that’s no small accomplishment.” Then he fell silent for a moment. K. listened to hear if Leni was returning yet. On the one hand he didn’t want her to come, for he still had many questions to ask and didn’t want Leni to discover him in intimate conversation with the merchant; on the other hand, he was annoyed that in spite of his presence, she was remaining so long with the lawyer, much longer than necessary to hand him his soup. “I still remember clearly,” the merchant continued, and K. was immediately all ears, “when my trial was about as old as yours is now. Back then I had only this one lawyer, but I wasn’t particularly satisfied with him.” “I’m finding out everything here,” thought K., and nodded vigorously as if to encourage the merchant to tell him everything worth knowing. “My trial,” the merchant went on, “was getting nowhere; inquiries were taking place all right, and I attended every one of them, gathered material, and turned all my business records over to the court, which I discovered later wasn’t even necessary; I kept running to my lawyer, and he was submitting various petitions as well—” “Various petitions?” asked K. “Yes, of course,” said the merchant. “That’s very important to me,” said K., “in my case he’s still preparing the first petition. He hasn’t done anything yet. I see now that he’s neglecting me shamefully.” “There may be various valid reasons why the petition isn’t finished yet,” said the merchant. “And my petitions, by the way, later proved to be entirely worthless. I even read one of them myself through the good graces of a court clerk. It was scholarly all right, but in fact contained nothing of substance. A lot of Latin for the most part, which I don’t understand, then several pages of general appeals to the court, then flattery of certain individual officials, who weren’t in fact named but could have been deduced by anyone familiar with the court, then self-praise on the lawyer’s part, combined with an almost canine servility before the court, and finally analyses of legal cases from ancient times that were supposedly similar to mine. Of course these analyses, so far as I could tell, were very carefully done. I don’t mean to judge the lawyer’s work in saying all this, and the petition I read was only one of many; nevertheless, and this is what I want to get to, I couldn’t see that my trial was making any progress.” “What sort of progress did you expect to see?” asked K. “That’s a very sensible question,” said the merchant with a smile, “you seldom see any sort of progress at all in such proceedings. But I didn’t know that then. I’m a merchant, and was much more of one then than I am today; I wanted to see tangible results; I expected the whole matter to be moving toward a conclusion, or at least to advance at a steady pace. Instead there were nothing but hearings, most of which went over the same old material; I already had the answers prepared like a litany; several times a week, court messengers would come to my firm or to my lodgings, or wherever they could find me; that was disturbing of course (things are much better these days, at least in that respect; a telephone call causes far less disruption), and rumors about my trial were starting to spread, among my colleagues in particular, but among my relatives as well, so that damage was being done on all sides, without the least indication that even the first session of the trial would take place anytime soon. So I went to my lawyer and complained. He offered long explanations of course, but steadfastly refused to take the action I desired; no one could influence the setting of a firm date for the trial, to make such a demand in a petition—as I was asking—was simply unheard of and would ruin both him and me. I thought to myself: what this lawyer either can’t or won’t do, some other lawyer can and will. So I looked around for other lawyers. Let me say right away: not one of them asked for or succeeded in getting a firm date set for the main hearing; it turns out that, with one reservation, which I’ll come to, it’s truly impossible to do so; on this point the lawyer had not deceived me; for the rest however I had no regrets about having turned to other lawyers. You’ve probably already heard something about shysters from Dr. Huld; no doubt he portrayed them as contemptible, and in fact they are. Of course whenever he talks about them, and compares himself and his colleagues with them, a small error always creeps in, which I wish simply to point out to you in passing. He always refers to his own circle of lawyers, by way of contrast, as the ‘great’ lawyers. That’s inaccurate; anyone can call himself ‘great’ if he wants to, of course, but in this case court usage is decisive. According to that there are, in addition to the shysters, both petty lawyers and great lawyers. This lawyer and his colleagues are only petty lawyers, however; the great lawyers, whom I’ve merely heard of but never seen, stand incomparably higher in rank above the petty lawyers than those do over the despised shysters.” “The great lawyers?” asked K. “Who are they then? How can they be contacted?” “So you’ve never heard of them,” said the merchant. “There’s scarcely a single defendant who doesn’t dream of them for a time after learning about them. Don’t fall prey to that temptation. I don’t know who the great lawyers are, and it’s probably impossible to contact them. I don’t know of a single case in which they can be said with certainty to have intervened. They do defend some people, but it’s not possible to arrange that on one’s own, they only defend those they wish to defend. The cases they take on, however, have no doubt already advanced beyond the lower court. On the whole it’s best not to think about them, otherwise consultations with other lawyers, their advice and assistance, all seem so disgusting and useless that, as I myself know from experience, what you would like most to do would be to pitch the whole affair, go home to bed, and hear nothing more of it. But of course that would be equally stupid; nor would you be left at peace in bed for long.” “So you didn’t think about the great lawyers back then?” asked K. “Not for long,” said the merchant, and smiled again, “you can never quite forget them, unfortunately, nights are particularly conducive to such thoughts. But back then I wanted immediate results, so I went to the shysters.”