We will soon come to know this: the washerwoman entered the room because she was attracted to Josef K., particularly to his “beautiful dark eyes.” She has never before risked such a thing, because the hearing room is for her “more or less off limits.” Perhaps that’s why Josef K., like an old sailor who sees a woman striding across the deck of his boat, immediately recognized her presence as a sign of a “serious disturbance.”
The woman enters the room while the defendant is being deposed. Josef K.’s words are vehement — they cannot be taken as anything less than an accusation against the court itself. Just then the woman gets pushed up against the wall by a student who has pursued her for some time. Then the two of them fall to the floor together. When the woman sees Josef K. again, a week later, she regrets that she had to miss part of his speech, which she otherwise “liked very much,” because “during the last part she was lying on the floor with the student.”
Hard to imagine a more unspeakable and unseemly commingling than that between the life of the court and the private lives of those who are linked to it. In the spaces used for offices one often finds “laundry hung out to dry,” which renders even more “unbreathable” the air of those attic rooms, already overheated by the sun and overcrowded by the “heavy traffic of the parties.” On Sunday morning, when court is not officially in session, the usher is sent off to deliver a “message that’s useless anyway” simply in order to get him away from home for a few minutes, so that the student Bertold, who collaborates with the examining magistrate in the offices one floor up, can carry off the usher’s wife, maybe on his back. And maybe he won’t subject her to his lust — but will offer her to the examining magistrate instead.
The usher knows perfectly well that his errand is a pretext, and so he sprints off hoping to return in time to catch the student. But the student is always too quick, because he needs only to “come down the stairs from the attic.” It’s like a scene out of Feydeau, with a single difference: here the seducer hides not behind a screen but behind the door to a court office. Meanwhile the usher’s futile rage grows. He has already imagined the student squashed into the wall, with his bandy legs and his blood spattered around him. “But up to now it’s only been a dream,” he confesses to Josef K., shortly after shaking his hand for the first time. If no one dares lift a finger against the student, it’s because “everyone fears his power.” No one can do anything — no one except, paradoxically, someone like Josef K., a defendant. The usher is one subordinate among many; his life is squeezed, almost crushed, between the hearing room, adjacent to his apartment, and the court offices, a few steps above. He isn’t eloquent, but one gets the feeling he knows what he’s talking about. Like Pepi, the servant girl who goads K. “to set fire” to the Gentlemen’s Inn, the usher too makes it clear to Josef K. that he would be happy to see him intervene violently, even if he isn’t counting on it. And he adds: “People are always rebelling.” Nobody else, not even K., will say anything as abrupt and radical as this.
The erotic nature of the women in The Trial and The Castle generates some unruly psychic turmoil in Benjamin and Adorno. It’s as if these characters forced them to reveal their own closeted sexual fantasies. For Benjamin, Kafka’s women emerge from the “world of dust, fluff, and mustiness, as if from some primeval landscape.” Their psychopomp is Bachofen, inventor and singer of a hetaeric swamp stage at the threshold of which we’ll find Leni with her webbed fingers. But in other passages, Benjamin is less dreamy and more angry, speaking of “whorish women” who correspond to the “shamelessness of the swamp world,” with their luteae voluptates—and who can’t therefore attain “beauty,” as if because of some moral shortcoming. And as for Adorno, he’s the only exegete who seems to have been deeply affected by Gisa, the schoolmistress, a minor figure who appears in a single scene of The Castle, retaking possession of the classroom where K. and Frieda have camped out with the assistants. Kafka describes her as “a tall, blonde, beautiful, rather stiff girl.” Nothing more. This is how Adorno describes her: “Gisa, the blonde schoolmistress, cruel and fond of animals — perhaps the only beautiful girl he [Kafka] depicts as unscathed, as though her hardness scorned the Kafka maelstrom — belongs to the pre-Adamite race of Hitler Jungfrauen, who hated Jews long before there were any.”
Implications of that sentence: doesn’t Gisa, the blond schoolmistress, with her “full, luxuriant body,” her wide hips — doesn’t she represent, as a member of a “pre-Adamite race,” those Hyperborean ur-Indo-Europeans evoked by Herman Wirth? The ones who seem ready to hate the Jews who don’t exist yet, because they are too modern? Perhaps they are impatiently awaiting the creation of the first Jew so they can hurl themselves on him. His name will be Adam.
All those girls who will introduce themselves one after the other, under the names of Leni, Pepi, Frieda, and Olga, are prefigured by Fini, who emerges from the charred rubble of the Hotel Kingston in Istanbul, in an enchanting story left suspended by Kafka. The man she is supposed to lead astray and drag into a “dubious affair” is named Liman. He has just arrived in Istanbul on a business trip and has been driven to his usual hotel. The coachman is careful not to tell him that in Istanbul’s last fire the Hotel Kingston was destroyed, and so Liman finds himself faced with a heap of ruins. These turn out, however, to be inhabited by some of the hotel staff, now jobless. By this point we’re already in a state of happy anticipation, as with any of those films from the 1930s that are set in Macao — or even in Istanbul. But the hallmark that confirms we’ve entered an authentic Kafka situation is the appearance of a gentleman “in a frock-coat and a bright red necktie,” who begins recounting in great detail the story of the fire while twisting “the tip of his long, thin beard around his finger.” We already know by this point that Liman will soon be embroiled in a story that will lead him off in some direction he would never choose. But for now he’s just a traveler who has had some bad luck and would like to get settled in a hotel as soon as possible. “Hotel Royal,” Liman tells the coachman. In vain. The man with the frock coat has already offered to lodge him in a private residence, in rooms arranged for by the hotel management, which doesn’t want to abandon its old guests. On top of that, the man in the frock coat has called for Fini’s assistance — which is enough to send a shiver through the rubble. “Everyone was looking for Fini,” like some new Figaro. And she appears: laughing, holding her hands over her brand-new hairdo, running toward the coach. She introduces herself at once: “I’m Fini,” she tells Liman “in a low voice,” as “she runs her hands over his shoulders, caressing them.” Then one of those comic scuffles erupts that Kafka never tires of describing in all their variations, as in The Missing Person. Fini wants to force her way into the coach; Liman wants to block her entry — a sign of unpleasant complications to come. With the help of the man in the frock coat, who pushes her from behind, Fini prevails and secures a seat in the coach, adjusting immediately and “hastily her blouse, and then, more carefully, her hair.” Liman falls back into his seat, facing Fini. “This is unheard of,” we hear him exclaim — as if those were his last words before sinking into a soft, ambiguous fog, where only the hand of Ernst Lubitsch could guide him. And here the story breaks off, trailing a wake of Turkish perfume.