Roberto Calasso - K.

It’s dawn. All is still quiet in the Hotel Occidental — except in the head waiter’s room, where a trial is under way. The defendant is Karl, the elevator boy. Backed by the head porter, the head waiter accuses Karl of having abandoned his post for several minutes. This scene, squeezed into the smallest of spaces, invisible to the outside world, and as near to insignificance as possible, is the originary cell of every trial, every interrogation, every sentence. Every beginning has something inconsistent and disproportionate about it, from which escape seems easy. But then it leads the defendant (or individual) toward impotence and helplessness: “It’s impossible to defend oneself in the absence of good will,” thinks Karl, with a lucidity that Josef K. will never manage to achieve. The point is that the world does not extend goodwill toward those who pass through it — who are always potential defendants. Something happens in the room of the head waiter of the Hotel Occidental that will spread through all the attics on the outskirts of the big city and will continue to make itself felt as far as the cathedral, or the junk room in a bank. Then too it will happen that someone will shake his head at the accused, as now the head cook does at Karl, and say: “Just causes have a just air about them, and your story, I must confess, does not.” Because no story has “a just air.” These words sentence him. They are spoken by the woman who up until that moment has been Karl’s high protector.

While he’s writing up the report of what has just happened in the barroom, the secretary Momus crumbles a pretzel with caraway seeds. The head waiter of the Hotel Occidental is studying a list and shaking the sugar from a piece of cake. K. and Karl observe them, attentive, tense. It’s as if writing and reading — always mysterious acts — must be accompanied by the scattering of fine particles, by the dissolution of something friable.

When the end is in sight, someone always asks whether we aren’t glad that “everything turned out so well.” And occasionally there’s even someone who, like Karl Rossmann, says: “But of course”—even as he’s wondering “why he ought to be glad to be chased away like a thief.” The simultaneity of his affirmative answer and the silent formulation of the question in his head is decisive.

It’s a mystery how The Missing Person manages to radiate such a sense of happiness and, at the same time, of acute despair. So disconcerting a union would be hard to find anywhere else. Karl passes from servitude to servitude, from humiliation to humiliation, from getting more and more lost to going missing in the world, all the while retaining, as if in his emigrant’s suitcase along with the Verona salami, an unscathed capacity for perceiving what happens to him with a decal-like clarity that in itself prefigures happiness.

Like K.’s assistants, the two vagabonds Delamarche and Robinson are characters from whom there can be no hope of escape. “Rossmann, what would become of you without Delamarche!” says Robinson at one point — and his words sound mocking. But that’s not to say he doesn’t have a point. For Karl, the two vagabonds signify nothing less than a hopeless and increasingly suffocating ensnarement in life.

Dressed in red and holding a red parasol, the obese Brunelda looks out from a balcony on the eighth floor of a “huge tenement block” in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Brunelda is “a fantastic singer,” according to the vagabond Robinson, who is Rossmann’s “living guilt.” She spends her days in semidarkness, lying on a sofa that she fills entirely. She stirs herself from immobility only to swat at the occasional fly. The room is overflowing, mainly with various fabrics. Curtains, clothes, and carpets are piled high. The air is stagnant and dusty. Sitting on the sofa, legs apart, Brunelda needs help taking off her thick white stockings. In her fat little hands, she holds open a tiny fan. Brunelda snorts in her sleep, and even “at times” when she speaks. The singer is quite sensitive. She can’t stand a racket. She suffers frequently from headaches and gout. She moans in her sleep, tormented by “oppressive dreams.” For certain men, including Robinson and Delamarche, Brunelda’s body is irresistible. “She was utterly lickable. She was utterly drinkable”: that’s how Robinson felt the first time he saw her, in a white dress with that red parasol.

Brunelda has become a fugitive for love. She abandoned a rich cocoa manufacturer to follow the vagabond Delamarche. Robinson recounts her deeds as if she were a romantic heroine: “Because of Delamarche, Brunelda sold everything she had and moved here with all her riches, to this apartment on the edge of town, so she could devote herself entirely to him and no one would disturb them, which was what Delamarche wanted too.” Like certain great lovers of the past, Brunelda and Delamarche need solitude and servants who will attend to them in silence. Robinson and Karl are made to serve that purpose in their overstuffed, airless room. The composition of place , in the sense of Saint Ignatius’s exercises, is so perfect that it requires no commentary, merely contemplation.

A particularly violent scuffle between Karl and Delamarche. In the end, Karl’s head gets slammed against a cupboard, and he loses consciousness. When he comes to, an old piece of Brunelda’s lace, still wet, is wrapped like a turban around his head. Pushing aside the curtain, Karl creeps back into the room of his masters and jailers. “The combined breathing of the three sleepers greeted him.” Brunelda, Delamarche, and Robinson form a single body, simultaneously soft and knobby, which Karl bumps against repeatedly in the semidarkness. At one point he feels Robinson’s boot, at another Brunelda’s overflowing flesh. The appendages of a many-headed creature, from which there can be no escape. Even the unyielding student Josef Mendel, that little Talmudist hunched in the night, studying on his balcony, advises Karl “absolutely” to remain in that room. And that word seems a decree intoned by some other voice, “deeper than that of the student,” who might be one of fate’s ventriloquists.

Brunelda, a fat Melusine, enjoys recalling the days when she swam in the Colorado, “the most agile of all her friends.” Now, as Delamarche subjects her to endless ablutions behind chests of drawers and screens, her insidious call sounds again. She invites her servant Robinson to look at her nude body, but as soon as he pops his head in, she and Delamarche seize him and dunk him in the tub. It’s a punishment that Brunelda would like to inflict on Karl too. She’s already lying in wait — and she calls him “our little fellow.”

And then the panicked search for Brunelda’s perfume, among “matted, stuck-together stuff” and through drawers that overflow with powder boxes, hairbrushes, sheet music, letters, English novels. Drawers that, once opened, can’t be closed again. But Karl doesn’t lose heart, because he never loses heart, and he says: “What work can be done now?” Whether it’s learning English, playing the piano, accompanying guests on the elevator, or preparing Brunelda’s breakfast tray, Karl is always ready to apply himself — his good disposition is unassailable. And just as, in the beginning, he came forward to address the ship’s captain on the stoker’s behalf, so now he offers to stand up for the maltreated Robinson, heedless of where he is and of who might be listening with a smirk.

The deeper Karl goes into the vast spaces of America, the more stuck he gets. Not only because someone is always violently detaining him, but also because he is surrounded by boggy terrain. The central source: Brunelda’s room. Robinson explains that the singer “isn’t transportable”—not because she’s sick but because she’s too heavy. To be with her is to sink. A little later we see Karl in a hallway trying, with care and skill, to compose an acceptable breakfast from the remains of the breakfasts of many strangers. He cleans knives and spoons, trims partially eaten rolls, collects leftover milk, scrapes away dribbles of butter, all in order to “remove the evidence of use.” This is the most desperate moment of his adventures. But it is Karl’s gift to be unaware of that. He is focused on his task, even though Robinson assures him that it’s pointless, since “breakfast had often looked much worse.” And, with Brunelda already wolfing it down, reaching out with her “soft, fat hand that could flatten anything,” Karl reflects, like a technician judging his own work, and tells himself: “The first time I didn’t know how it should all be done; I’ll do better next time.”