Roberto Calasso: K.

Josef K. and K. fundamentally await , the one a verdict, the other an appointment. Whatever they do, their lives wear them down. They both belong to that vast crowd of those “who wait,” who throng outside , in the world, in a “limitless mass that stretches into the darkness.” Inside , in the tower or in the edifice of the “invisible tribunal,” sit those whose job it is to respond. And perhaps they would like to respond. But something prevents their response from being direct. If the key to the balcony door reappeared, would anything be resolved? No, in fact the hidden intent of those who live inside would then reveal itself: to never show themselves at all and not to allow what’s outside to be shown to them. Closed in a room that resembles a cell, elbows propped on the desk, the unknown character holds his head in his hands. That desk is the only indispensable object, the only contact he’s permitted. He thinks: “I don’t want to see anyone, I don’t want to let any sight confuse me — my desk, that is my place.” Like Calderón’s Segismundo, he fantasizes about various figures and characters. Beyond the windows, the air teems with the tribes of the invisible.

At the Gentlemen’s Inn, the chambermaids stay shut in their room, which “is nothing more than a big closet with three shelves.” The claustrophobia is heightened by the rule that bars them, for many hours of the day and night, from going out into the halls, where they would run the risk of disturbing the gentlemen, or even of simply seeing them. “In fact we don’t know the gentlemen, we’ve hardly glimpsed them,” Pepi remarks.

Every now and then the chambermaids hear someone knocking at their door and giving orders. But the terror begins when “no order comes at all” and the chambermaids hear someone (or something) creeping just outside the door. The girls “press their ears to the door, they kneel down, they hold one another in anguish.” Then the terrifying sentence is sprung, which by now resembles Lautréamont: “And one constantly hears the creeper ( den Schleicher ) outside the door.” In Lautréamont, so prone to sneering and mockery, the corresponding sentence would be: “But a shapeless mass pursues him relentlessly, on his trail, amid the dust.” Kafka, as always, takes a more sober road. With a minimal expenditure of words he achieves maximum effect. Even the word Schleicher is both commonplace and alarming. Schleicher is the person (or entity) that creeps, but it has the additional meaning of “hypocrite,” or someone who acts deceptively, furtively. Here, however, the word is returned to its most literal meaning — and the effect is all the more violent. We can understand that then, shut in their room, “the girls faint from fear and, when it’s finally quiet again outside their door, they lean against the wall without the strength to climb back into their beds.” This somber, rending scene, like something out of an Elizabethan play, is not, however, the climax of some crisis in a deadly adventure. It’s merely the description of a day like any other day in the life of a chambermaid at the Gentlemen’s Inn. And it is understood as such by the reader. It is plain daily life, recounted by Pepi to the stranger she’s in love with.

Why are the chambermaids so worried? What is the danger that threatens them? That they might let themselves go. And why shouldn’t they? They are prisoners. No one sees them — unless, fleetingly, the kitchen staff. Accordingly, to enter the gentlemen’s rooms immaculately dressed is both “frivolous and a waste.” Since the chambermaids are forced to work amid such filth, they might as well live in it all the time. Artificial light, stale air, excessive heat (the heat is always on). And tremendous, constant fatigue. The oppression of the chambermaids is vicious and subtle. Seen from the outside, however, their life is utterly common. They have a duty, they carry it out. They spend their free time waiting to return to duty. When they have the afternoon off, once a week, their favorite way to spend it is “sleeping soundly and fearlessly in some nook of the kitchen.”

The barroom, where Frieda and Pepi roam and where the foreigner K. sometimes sits for a while, is a force field as lively and delicate and complex as any palace of government or strategic headquarters or imperial court. What goes on there is no easier to unravel or understand. In relations of power, the tension is not proportionate to the size of the elements in question. A room can be as charged as a continent. But in the room, the power relations will manifest themselves with maximum linearity, because potential distractions are minimal. Minimal, precious, and revelatory, like Pepi’s bows or Frieda’s rustling petticoat.

The reduction to prime elements doesn’t by any means imply a reduction in the complexity of relations. On the contrary: Frieda is observed by many eyes when she works in the barroom, when the rumors of her relationship with Klamm begin to spread, and finally when everyone is certain about that relationship. Her every gesture gets carefully weighed, interpreted, connected to some other scene that isn’t visible. She’s like Madame de Maintenon, who methodically gains the affections of Louis XIV even as she is being scrutinized by all of Versailles — including Saint-Simon.

There is a physical intimacy between the gentlemen and the barmaids who serve them. Pepi speaks of her service as if it were a question of good manners, organizational efficiency, care in dressing. But it turns out that “a word, a look, a shrug of the shoulders” isn’t enough. There is also physical contact. Every day Pepi’s curly locks are fingered, many times, by the gentlemen: “So avidly did all those hands run through Pepi’s curls that she had to redo her hair ten times a day.” And Pepi adds: “No one can resist the allure of those curls and bows, not even K., who is always so distracted.” The barroom is a simulacrum of a brothel, where certain gestures that are appropriate to both places are repeated with one customer after another. For this reason, a little later, in his reply to Pepi, K. feels the need to observe: “The true barmaid should be a barmaid, not every customer’s lover” (this in a crossed-out passage of the manuscript).

Pepi descends from the charming, sly servant girls of the opera buffa . Like them, she has a sharp perception of the world and of men. When she sees K. abandoned by Frieda but still in love with her precisely because she has run off (“it isn’t hard to be in love with her now that she’s no longer around”), she makes him a proposition: “You have neither a job nor a bed, come stay with us. You’ll like my friends, we’ll make you comfortable, you can help us with our work, which is really too burdensome for girls to do alone. We wouldn’t have to rely only on ourselves, and we’d no longer be afraid at night.”

But how do Pepi and the other girls live? In a “warm, narrow” room. The other two girls are Henriette and Emilie, whose delicious French names, utterly anomalous in the village, lead us straight to the soft, abstract world of the music hall. Living in that closet-room is like living in a little dressing room backstage, where the air is stale and the light artificial. But “everything outside the room seems cold.” In the end it’s more entertaining to stay in the tiny room and tell one another stories about the world outside than it is to take part in that world: “In there one listens to such stories with disbelief, as if nothing could actually happen outside that room.”

Pepi’s invitation is chummy, almost as if K. were another girl who could be added to the group. There are no erotic overtones. But everything Pepi says is erotic, if only because, as K. observed, Pepi treats all her customers like lovers — and K. is the customer par excellence, the stranger. Let’s examine the details: Where would K. stay? In one of the girls’ beds. Perhaps he would take turns. In her magnanimity, Pepi even suggests to K. which of her two friends he might like better: Henriette. And her magnanimity goes further still: the three girls will also talk to K. about his absent lover, Frieda. They’ll recount for his benefit complicated stories about her, which they know well. And they’ll take out “portraits of Frieda” and show him those too. Three charming girls, actual or potential lovers of a young man, sitting together on the edge of a bed, all contemplating these portraits of another woman, also his lover — that life could last all winter. K. listens and asks himself two questions: Would such a thing be allowed? And then, more subtly: How much longer will winter last? Pepi is a great expert on timing. She knows how essential one day more or one day less might be. And her answer goes beyond meteorology: village life is, above all, winter—“long, terribly long, monotonous.” After spring and summer have come and gone, they occupy in one’s memory a period “so brief, it’s as if they lasted no more than two days.” The ominous sentence that follows is exemplary of Kafka’s lyrical laconicism: “Even on those days, even on the most beautiful day, sometimes snow still falls.”