The Trial

The Trial

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. The cook of Frau Grubach, his landlady, who brought him his breakfast every day at about eight o’clock in the morning, did not come this time. That had never happened before. K. waited a little while, looked from his pillow at the old woman who lived opposite him and who was watching him with a curiosity quite unusual in her, but then, at once puzzled and hungry, he rang. Immediately there was a knock, and a man whom he had never seen before in this apartment entered. He was slender and yet firmly built; he wore a close-fitting black garment, which, like travel suits, was provided with various folds, pockets, buckles, buttons, and a belt, and consequently, without one’s being clear what purpose it was meant to serve, appeared especially practical. “Who are you?” asked K., and at once sat half upright in bed. The man, however, passed over the question, as if his appearance had simply to be accepted, and merely said in turn: “You rang?” “Anna is to bring me my breakfast,” said K., and at first tried silently, through attention and reflection, to determine who the man actually was. But the man did not expose himself to his gaze for very long; instead, he turned to the door, which he opened a little in order to say to someone who was evidently standing just behind it: “He wants Anna to bring him his breakfast.” A little laughter followed in the adjoining room; from the sound it was not certain whether several people were not involved in it. Although the strange man could not thereby have learned anything he had not already known, he now nevertheless said to K. in the tone of a report: “It is impossible.” “That would be something new,” said K., jumped out of bed, and quickly put on his trousers. “I want to see what sort of people are in the next room and how Frau Grubach will answer to me for this disturbance.” It occurred to him at once, to be sure, that he need not have said that aloud and that by doing so he was, in a sense, acknowledging a right of supervision on the stranger’s part, but that did not seem important to him now. The stranger nevertheless took it that way, for he said: “Wouldn’t you rather stay here?” “I neither want to stay here nor to be addressed by you, so long as you do not introduce yourself to me.” “It was meant kindly,” said the stranger, and now opened the door of his own accord. In the adjoining room, into which K. entered more slowly than he wanted, it looked at first glance almost exactly as it had the evening before. It was Frau Grubach’s living room; perhaps there was a little more space than usual today in this room crowded with furniture, blankets, porcelain, and photographs, but that was not immediately apparent, all the less so since the principal change consisted in the presence of a man who sat by the open window with a book, from which he now looked up. “You should have stayed in your room! Didn’t Franz tell you so?” “Yes, what is it you want?” said K., and looked from the new acquaintance to the one named Franz, who had remained standing in the doorway, and then back again. Through the open window one could again see the old woman, who with truly senile curiosity had stepped to the window opposite, in order to go on seeing everything. “I want to speak to Frau Grubach—” said K., made a movement as though he were tearing himself away from the two men, who, however, were standing far from him, and wanted to go on. “No,” said the man by the window, threw the book onto a little table, and stood up. “You may not leave; you are under arrest.” “So it seems,” said K. “And why?” he then asked. “We are not appointed to tell you that. Go into your room and wait. The proceedings have now been set in motion, and you will learn everything at the proper time. I am going beyond my orders when I speak to you so amicably. But I hope no one hears it except Franz, and he himself is being friendly to you against all regulations. If you continue to have as much luck as you had in the appointment of your warders, then you may be confident.” K. wanted to sit down, but now he saw that in the whole room there was no seat except the chair by the window. “You will yet see how true all this is,” said Franz, and together with the other man he walked toward him. The latter in particular towered over K. considerably and often patted him on the shoulder. Both examined K.’s nightshirt and said that he would now have to put on a much worse shirt, but that they would keep this shirt, as well as the rest of his linen, and, if his case turned out favorably, return it to him. “It is better for you to give the things to us than to the depot,” they said, “for in the depot embezzlements often occur, and besides, all things there are sold after a certain time, without regard to whether the proceeding in question is over or not. And how long such trials last, especially in recent times! You would eventually, of course, receive the proceeds from the depot, but those proceeds are, first, already small in themselves, because in the sale it is not the size of the offer that decides but the size of the bribe; and second, experience shows that such proceeds diminish when they are passed from hand to hand and from year to year.” K. paid hardly any attention to these speeches; the right of disposing over his things, which perhaps he still possessed, he did not value highly. Much more important to him was to gain clarity about his situation; in the presence of these people, however, he could not even think. Again and again the belly of the second warder—they could only be warders—bumped against him in an almost friendly way; but when he looked up, he saw, utterly unsuited to this fat body, a dry, bony face with a strong nose turned sideways, which was communicating across him with the other warder. What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? To what authority did they belong? K. lived, after all, in a state governed by law; peace prevailed everywhere, all laws were in force—who dared attack him in his own apartment? He was always inclined to take everything as lightly as possible, to believe the worst only when the worst arrived, to make no provisions for the future even when everything threatened. Here, however, that did not seem right to him. One could, to be sure, regard the whole thing as a joke, as a crude joke that his colleagues at the bank had arranged for unknown reasons, perhaps because today was his thirtieth birthday; it was, of course, possible. Perhaps all he needed to do was somehow laugh in the warders’ faces and they would laugh too; perhaps they were porters from the street corner, they did not look unlike them—nevertheless, this time, virtually from the first sight of the warder Franz, he had been determined not to give up the slightest advantage that he might perhaps possess over these people. K. saw only a very slight danger in the possibility that later people would say he had not understood a joke; but he did recall—though otherwise it had not been his habit to learn from experience—a few intrinsically insignificant cases in which, unlike his friends, he had deliberately, without the slightest feeling for the possible consequences, behaved imprudently and had been punished by the result. That was not to happen again, at least not this time; if it was a comedy, he would play along.

Conversation with Frau Grubach