But K. has by now developed too fine an ear for Castle-speak not to detect Erlanger’s undertone of “derision.” In fact, even if K. wanted to prove himself eager to bring about Erlanger’s desired result, he couldn’t, simply because that result has already been achieved. Frieda has already reached an agreement with the landlord to resume her service behind the bar. They merely agreed to postpone her return by twenty-four hours so as not to inflict on Pepi “the shame of having to leave the barroom right away.” K. was informed of all this only after it was a done deal. And where is Frieda in that moment? A few steps away, in bed with the assistant Jeremias. How could Frieda have resisted her “childhood playmate”? And besides, she’s taking care of him, since he’s a bit of a wreck after the hardships of the preceding days.
Thus even the one instance when K. is called on to intervene confirms the rule of the place: that, whatever the Castle’s orders might be — and they could be “unfavorable or favorable, and even the favorable ones always had a final unfavorable core”—they always, for K., “passed over his head.” Why? Evidently, reflects K., because “his position was too lowly for him to be able to intervene or even to silence them so that his own voice would be heard.”
Is Erlanger, then, simply making fun of him, asking his help in resolving a matter that has already been resolved? One can’t be sure. Perhaps Erlanger, with the unerring perspicacity typical of Castle officials, is using Frieda’s return to the barroom as a simple pretext, when all he really wants is for K. to agree to behave in a certain way toward her: to declare his own willingness to make her return to her place in the village order. Leading her back to the barroom would be the same as handing her back over to Klamm.
It’s true that, minutes earlier, Frieda told K.: “I’ll never, ever come back to you, I shudder to think of such a thing.” But she was referring to a life with K. in the village. And just before that, Frieda had admitted that she still daydreamed about what would have happened had they “gone away at once that very night,” the first night. By now they would be “safe somewhere.” But “safe” from what? The threat that underlies each moment of life around the Castle is on the verge of surfacing. Is that, perhaps, what Erlanger feared? And perhaps he also feared the sentiment that Frieda now confesses to K.: “To be close to you is, believe me, the only dream I dream; there is no other.” If this is the case, then the favor Erlanger asked of K. is to smother his fiancée’s only dream. Such a deed would certainly redound to K.’s credit. It is the only deed for which the Castle seems willing to reward him.
When K. reaches the village beneath the Castle, he repeats with the women whom he encounters the gestures and reactions of Josef K. at the beginning of his trial. Josef K., like K., is made to feel like “the first foreigner to come along,” as soon as a woman lays eyes on him. In his case it’s the washerwoman, the wife of the court usher, and Josef K. immediately wonders whether she’s looking at him that way because she’s “had her fill of court officials.” It’s the same sort of disenchantment with a high-level official that K. attributes to Frieda. As for Josef K., he immediately begins to investigate the possible “relationships” between the washerwoman and the high-level officials, in order to use them to his advantage — just as K., according to Pepi, has become engaged to Frieda only because he’s attracted to her “connections that no one else knows about” with Castle officials.
Josef K. elicits the same kind of reactions from women that K. does. The washerwoman, Frieda, Pepi: these women who seem at times to be at the disposition of the officials, as in a garrison brothel, all dream immediately of being carried off by the ignorant stranger — Josef K. or K. They want to emigrate, run away forever. At the end of their first conversation, the washerwoman, already moving off toward another man, whispers to Josef K.: “If you take me with you, I’ll go wherever you like, you can do with me as you like, I’ll be happy just to be far away from here for as long as possible, even better forever.”
Of course, there’s a big difference between Frieda’s lover and the washerwoman’s. Klamm is a high-level official, whose name suffices to inspire reverence in servants and gentlemen alike. Many doubt that K. will ever succeed in speaking a single word to him. But Bertold is merely a student: small, bowlegged, with a short, reddish beard. He summons the washerwoman, his erotic slave, “with just a finger.” The washerwoman considers him “a repellent person” and in his presence calls him a “little monster.” It’s said of him, however, that he “would in all likelihood one day attain a high-level official position.” This looming future is what enables him to exert his “tyranny” over the washerwoman. As soon as he sees her, he touches her, kisses her, strips her, and throws her to the ground, regardless of who might be present, whether it’s the entire crowd gathered in the hearing room or Josef K. alone. Her body, to Josef K., looks “luxuriant, supple, and warm in her dark dress of coarse, heavy material,” and the student presses against it wherever he can: up against a wall or window, on the floor. The washerwoman seems to detest the student, but Josef K. suspects she loves him, and he is therefore jealous of him — as he is of the examining magistrate who merely saw the washerwoman asleep and told her that “he’d never forget that vision.” Later he sent her, “via the student, whom he trusts a great deal and with whom he collaborates,” a pair of silk stockings that the washerwoman finds “beautiful but really too nice and not suitable” for her.
The world of The Trial is more brutal and crude than that of The Castle. The transitions are more vexing and jarring, more jagged. But the erotic mechanisms are identical — and they repeat themselves precisely.
Women are attracted to Josef K. the way “the court is attracted to guilt.” From the moment of his arrest, he is enveloped, wherever he goes, in an erotic halo. His every relation with the court and its representatives, official or not, is counterpointed by sex. During his first deposition, he becomes aware of a certain commotion in the back of the room. Through a “dazzling whitish” light, he is able to make out a woman who is being pressed against the wall by an unknown man. It’s the washerwoman, who shortly before had opened the door to the hearing room for him, the guardian of the threshold of the court. In fact, as we will learn, she’s the wife of the court usher, and these places are their apartment. Every time there’s a hearing, they have to clear their things out of the adjacent room. Josef K. sensed at once, without any reason and “from the moment she first appeared,” that this woman would cause “a serious disturbance.” Now even amid the throng, breaking off his deposition, he finds a way to fix his gaze on “her unbuttoned blouse,” which “hung down around her waist” as the unknown man forced himself on her (crossed out passage).