ARGUMENTOS DE LOS TERCEROS

K. had been informed by telephone that a short hearing in his affair would take place the next Sunday. He was advised that these hear- ings would now proceed regularly, if not every week perhaps, then certainly at fairly frequent intervals. On the one hand, he was told, it was in everyone’s interest to bring the trial to a swift conclusion, on the other hand the hearings had to go into every aspect thoroughly but, because of the effort that entailed, should never last too long. The way out of the dilemma had been the choice of a rapid succes- sion of short hearings. Sunday had been set as the day for his hear- ings so as not to disrupt K.’s work at the bank. They were assuming he was happy with that; should he prefer a different time, they would try to oblige him as far as possible. For example, hearings could take place at night, but in that case K. would presumably not be fresh enough. As long as K. had no objections, therefore, they would leave it at the Sunday. It went without saying, the voice went on, that he had to turn up, presumably that didn’t have to be pointed out. He was given the number of the house where he was to present himself, it was in a street in an out-of-the-way, lower-class district where K. had never been before.

Once he had received the message, K. hung up without replying. He immediately resolved to go on Sunday. It was clearly necessary. The trial was getting under way, and he had to take a stand against that; this first hearing must also be the last. He was still standing by the telephone, lost in thought, when he heard the voice of the deputy manager behind him. He wanted to make a call, but K. was in his way. ‘Bad news?’ the deputy manager asked in an offhand manner, not because he wanted to know, but to get K. away from the tele- phone. ‘No, no,’ said K. stepping to one side, but not going away. The deputy manager picked up the receiver and said, while he was waiting to be connected, the receiver still clamped to his ear, ‘One thing, Herr K. Would you do me the pleasure of joining us on my yacht on Sunday morning? It will be a large party, including some of your acquaintances. Hasterer, the public prosecutor, for example. Will you come? Do come.’ K. tried to concentrate on what the dep- uty manager was saying. It was not without importance for K., for he

had never got on well with the deputy manager, and this invitation was clearly an olive branch and showed how important K. had become in the bank and how valuable his friendship, or at least his neutrality, was for the second-highest employee of the bank. This invitation was a humiliation for the deputy manager, even if he had issued it while waiting to be connected, the receiver clamped to his ear. And K. had to add a second humiliation. He said, ‘Thank you. Unfortunately I have no time on Sunday, I have a prior engagement.’ ‘Pity,’ said the deputy manager, turning to his telephone call that had just been put through. It was not a short call, but K. was so preoc- cupied, he stayed by the telephone all the time. Only when the dep- uty manager rang off did he come to with a start and said, in order to excuse himself just a little for standing there with no reason, ‘A per- son just rang to ask me to go somewhere, but forgot to tell me what time.’ ‘Ring back and ask,’ said the deputy manager. ‘It’s not that important,’ said K., even though that made his earlier excuse even more threadbare than it was already. As they left, the deputy man- ager talked of other things and K. forced himself to answer, though what he was mainly thinking was that it would be best to arrive at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, since that was the time all the courts started to work on weekdays.

Sunday was overcast. K. was very tired, because he had stayed up late into the night at the inn for a celebration with the regulars and had almost overslept. He dressed in a hurry, without having time to think and run through the various plans he had worked out during the week, and hastened off to the district indicated in the phone call without having had his breakfast. Oddly enough, even though he didn’t have much time for looking around, he saw the three bank clerks, Rabensteiner, Kullich, and Kaminer, who were involved in his affair. The first two were in a tram which crossed K.’s path, but Kaminer was sitting on the terrace of a café and leant over the balus- trade in curiosity just as K. passed. Presumably they all watched him go, surprised to see their superior hurrying along. It was a kind of defiance that had stopped K. taking a cab, he abhorred the idea of any, even the most minor assistance in this case of his, he didn’t want to call on anyone for help and have to take them into his confidence in any way at all, nor, when all was said and done, did he feel in the least like humbling himself before the commission of inquiry by excessive punctuality. However, he did start to run now, just so as to

The Trial 29 arrive by nine if possible, even though he had not been given an appointment for a particular time.

He had assumed he would recognize the building from a distance by some sign or other, though he did not have a precise idea of what that would be, or by some particular movement outside the entrance. He stood for a moment at the beginning of Juliusstrasse,* where it was supposed to be, but the street was lined on both sides with almost identical houses, tall, grey tenements where poor people lived. Now, on this Sunday morning there were people at most of the win- dows, men in their shirt - sleeves smoking or carefully and tenderly holding children on the window-ledges. Other windows had eider- downs piled up in them, above which the tousled head of a woman would appear for a moment. People called to each other across the street, one such call provoking a gale of laughter right above K. At regular intervals in the long street were little shops selling various kinds of groceries; they were below street level, with a few steps lead- ing down to them. Women were going in and out, or standing on the steps, chatting. A fruit-seller, who was hawking his wares to the people at the windows and paying no more attention than K., almost knocked him over with his barrow. At that moment a gramophone, that had seen better days in better districts of the city, started up its excruciating noise.

K. went farther down the street, slowly, as if he were in plenty of time, or as if the examining magistrate could see him from one of the windows and so would know that K. had turned up. It was shortly after nine. It was quite a long way to the house, which was quite unusually extensive. The gateway especially was high and wide, obvi- ously intended for goods being delivered to the various warehouses which, closed at the moment, surrounded the large courtyard and bore the names of firms, several of which were familiar to K. from the bank. He stood at the entrance to the courtyard for a while, taking in, contrary to his usual habit, all these superficial details. Close by him a man with bare feet was sitting on a crate, reading a newspaper. Two boys were in a handcart, rocking to and fro. At a pump a frail young girl in a bedjacket was looking across at K. as the water poured into her jug. In one corner of the yard a line was being fixed between two windows. The washing which was being hung out to dry was already on it, and a man was directing the operation with a few calls from the yard below.

K. turned towards the stairs to go to the room where the hearing would be held, but then he stopped again, for apart from these stairs there were three other flights of stairs in the courtyard; as well as that, a little passageway at the end of the yard seemed to lead to a second courtyard. He was annoyed that he hadn’t been told precisely where the room was, the manner in which he was being treated was strangely negligent or offhand, a point he intended to make loudly and clearly. Finally he went up the first staircase after all, with the memory of something the guard Willem had said going through his mind, namely that the court was attracted by guilt, so that logically the hearing should be held in a room on the staircase K. happened to choose.

As he went up, he got in the way of a lot of children who were playing on the stairs and gave him angry looks as he passed through their line. ‘If I have to come here again,’ he said to himself, ‘I’ll either have to bring some sweets, to win them over, or my stick to beat them.’ Just before the first floor he even had to wait a while for a marble to come to a halt; two small boys with the twisted faces of grown-up miscreants* held on to his trousers until it stopped. If he had tried to shake them off he would have hurt them, and he feared the fuss they would kick up.

The actual search began on the first floor. Since he couldn’t really ask for the commission of inquiry, he invented a carpenter called Lanz* — the name occurred to him because that was what the cap- tain, Frau Grubach’s nephew, was called — and decided to ask in all theflats if a carpenter called Lanz lived there so that he would get the opportunity to look into the rooms. As it turned out, however, in most cases that was unnecessary, since almost all the doors were open and the children were running in and out. In general they were small rooms with a single window, in which the cooking was also done. Some women had babies in their arm and were working at the stove with their free hand. The busiest at running to and fro were adoles- cent girls, who appeared to be wearing nothing but pinafores. In all the rooms the beds were still being used, occupied by people who were sick, or sleeping, or lying on them fully clothed. K. knocked at doors that were closed and asked if a carpenter called Lanz lived there. Usually a woman opened the door, listened to his question, and turned to a man just discernible in a bed in the room. ‘There’s a gentleman asking if there’s a carpenter called Lanz lives here.’

The Trial 31 ‘A carpenter called Lanz?’ the man asked from the bed. ‘Yes,’ said K., even though it was obvious the commission wasn’t there, so that he had found out what he needed to know. Many of them assumed it was very important for K. to find the carpenter called Lanz and spent a long time racking their brains, before mentioning a carpenter, who, however, was not called Lanz, or a name that bore a fairly remote similarity to Lanz, or they asked the neighbours, or took K. to the door of a flat some distance away where they thought such a man might be a subtenant or where there was someone who would be better informed than they themselves. Eventually K. hardly needed to ask his question any more, since he was dragged from storey to storey in this way. He regretted the plan he had made, which at first had seemed so practical. Before he was taken up to the fifth floor he decided to abandon the search, said goodbye to a friendly young worker who wanted to take him farther, and went back down. Then, however, annoyed at the pointlessness of the whole business, he went back and knocked at the first door on the fifth floor. The first thing he saw in the room was a large clock on the wall showing that it was already ten o’clock. ‘Does a carpenter called Lanz live here?’ he asked. ‘Through there,’ said a young woman with lustrous black eyes who was washing nappies in a tub, and gestured with her wet hand at the open door to the neighbouring room.

K. had the impression he was entering a meeting. The medium- sized room with two windows was filled by a jostling throng of all sorts of people, who ignored him when he went in. Just below the ceiling was a gallery running round the room which was also crammed full with people, who had to stand bent over, their heads and backs touch- ing the ceiling. K., finding it too muggy in there, went out again and said to the young woman, ‘I was asking about a carpenter, a man called Lanz?’ ‘Yes,’ said the woman, ‘please go in.’ K. would perhaps not have complied had she not gone up to him and, taking hold of the door-handle, said, ‘I have to close the door after you, no one else is allowed in.’ ‘Very sensible,’ said K., ‘but it’s too full already.’ However, he still went back in.

Two men were standing right next to the door talking — one had his hands extended in the gesture of counting out money, while the other looked him sharply in the eye. A hand appeared between them and clutched at K. It was a little, red-cheeked boy. ‘Come on, come on,’ he said. K. let the boy lead him, and it turned out that there was

a narrow way free through the teeming throng, possibly separating two parties. That was also suggested by the fact that in the front rows on either side there was scarcely a face turned towards K.; he could only see the backs of people who were talking and gesturing to those of their own party alone. Most were dressed in black, in old, long Sunday coats* that hung down loosely. K. found their dress puzzling, otherwise he would have assumed it was a district political meeting.

K. was led to the far end of the room, where a little table had been set up across a very low and equally overfilled platform. Sitting at the table, close to the edge of the platform, was a small, fat, wheezing man who, with a great deal of laughter, was chatting with one of those standing behind him — the latter was leaning his elbows on the back of the chair and had his legs crossed. Sometimes he threw an arm up into the air, as if he were caricaturing someone. The boy who was leading K. had difficulty attracting their attention. Standing on tiptoe, he twice tried to get his message across without being noticed by the man. Only when one of those on the platform pointed out the boy did the man turn to him, lean down, and listen to what he had to say in his quiet voice. Then he took out his watch and gave K. a quick glance. ‘You should have been here an hour and five minutes ago,’ he said. K. was going to reply, but he had no time, since hardly had the manfinished speaking than a general muttering arose from the right- hand side of the hall. ‘You should have been here an hour and five minutes ago,’ the man repeated in a louder voice, and with a quick glance down into the body of the hall. Immediately the muttering grew louder, then gradually died away when the man said nothing more. It was much quieter in the hall now than when K. had first come in. Only the people in the gallery continued to make their remarks. They seemed to be more poorly dressed than those below, as far as one could make anything out in the gloom, smoke, and dust up there. Some had brought cushions, which they placed on their heads so as not to hurt them as they pressed them against the ceiling.

K. had resolved to observe more than to speak, so refrained from defending himself for his late arrival but merely said, ‘Perhaps I have arrived late, but now I’m here.’ This was followed by a round of applause, again from the right-hand side of the hall. ‘They’re easily won over,’ K. thought; the only thing that bothered him was the silence from the left-hand side, which was immediately behind him and from which only isolated applause had come. He wondered what

The Trial 33 he could say to win them all over at once or, if that should prove impossible, to get the others on his side at least some of the time.

‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘but I am no longer obliged to question you.’ Again the muttering, but ambiguous this time, for the man waved it aside and went on, ‘Exceptionally, however, I will do so today. But such a late arrival must not occur again. And now step forward.’ Someone jumped down from the platform, making room for K., who climbed up. He was squashed up against the table, the crush behind him was so great he had to brace himself against it to stop himself pushing the examining magistrate’s table, and possibly the magistrate himself, off the platform.

The examining magistrate did not bother about that, however, but settled comfortably enough in his chair and, after he had said a final word to the man behind him, picked up a little notebook, the only object on the table. It was like a school exercise book, old and falling to pieces from having been consulted so often. ‘Right then,’ said the magistrate, leafing through the notebook, and addressing K. as if stat- ing a fact: ‘You are a painter and decorator?’ ‘No,’ said K., ‘I am senior accountant with a large bank.’ This answer was followed by laughter from the right-hand group, that was so hearty K. had to join in. People put their hands on their knees and shook as if they had a violent fit of coughing. Even the odd person in the gallery laughed. Now very angry, the examining magistrate, who was probably powerless against the people below, tried to take it out on the gallery. He jumped up and shook his finger at the gallery, his normally unremarkable eye- brows* gathering in a huge bushy blackness over his eyes.