At the beginning, Leni is “two large black eyes” looking through a peephole in a door. The door doesn’t open. A little while later the two eyes reappear, and “now they might almost have seemed sad.” Finally Leni shows herself; she’s wearing a long white apron, well suited to her role as nurse, and she holds in her hand a candle that casts a weak light through the apartment of Huld, the lawyer. From the first moment, Leni stares at Josef K. — and he stares back, examining her doll face, its every part round or rounded, even her hairline and her hair, which is “thick, dark, tightly gathered.” When Leni speaks, a hint of mockery enters her voice, as if she can’t help it. In order to lure Josef K. out of the lawyer’s bedroom, she breaks a plate against the wall. When he opens the door to see what has happened, she quickly scolds him for having made her wait. Meanwhile her little hand is already resting on his, even before he has let go of the doorknob. Leni wants to become his lover as soon as possible. She asks him questions about his so-called lover, Elsa, disregards his defense of her, then examines a snapshot of her dancing and immediately zeroes in on her physical defects. Moments later she kisses him, bites his neck and hair — and gloats: “You see, now you’ve already traded for me!” Meaning: Josef K. has already traded Elsa for me, and now I’ve taken the place of Elsa, who is “clumsy and rough,” as well as a bit fat. And who, above all, wouldn’t be able, according to Leni, to sacrifice herself for Josef K. It all gets wildly jumbled, as inevitably happens when Josef K. meets a woman: instant sexual intimacy, discussions of his trial. All in stark contrast to the “chatter of the old gentlemen” in the next room. Leni is sober, blunt, precise — we can’t rule out the possibility that she alone knows how to “escape” the court. She hints at a decisive intervention, at mysterious undercurrents, between bouts of frivolity and flirtation that include the game in which she reveals her “physical defect”: the webbing between the middle and ring fingers of her right hand. “What a pretty claw,” Josef K. says, quickly placing a gallant kiss on that “prank of nature.” It’s the first kiss between them, and in that moment a pact is sealed between Josef K. and a nature that hasn’t yet entirely emerged from the waters. It’s then that Leni takes his head in her hands and kisses and bites his neck and “even his hair.” Meanwhile “hurriedly, mouth open, she climb[s] with her knees onto his belly,” giving off as she does an “exciting, bitter, peppery odor.” Then the two tangled bodies slide down onto the carpet, a primordial swamp glazed with moonlight. “Here are my keys, come whenever you like” are Leni’s last words, punctuated by a “stray kiss.” For pure erotic intensity, libertine literature offers little to rival this scene, steeped in that “peppery odor.”
When K. meets Pepi for the first time, in the Gentlemen’s Inn, a descriptive machine seems to come suddenly to life, meticulously recording, like a police report, the details of her physical appearance and her wardrobe: “small, rosy, healthy.” It observes her “head of luxuriant reddish-blond hair, knotted into a thick braid.” Neither her “almost childlike” air nor her carnality escapes notice. And we also learn that she’s dressed in a misguided, inappropriate way, “corresponding to her exaggerated notion of a barmaid’s importance.” All this in a few seconds, while Pepi speaks to K. in that tone of instant intimacy that all the village women seem to adopt with him, while for his part he seems to know her well enough already to say what inconsistent notions she has about her job.
It’s clear during all this what’s on K.’s mind: everything that happened with Frieda could also happen with Pepi, “if only he had reason to feel that Pepi had some kind of relationship with the Castle.” This according to a few lines crossed out of the manuscript, lines that even add a violent stroke: “He would have tried to wrench her secret from her with the same embraces he’d had to use with Frieda.” The final version, on the other hand, says only that K. rejects this thought and tells himself: “Oh yes, it was different with Frieda.”
K.‘s sexual rapacity is now pushed to one side with a denial, which in the end only highlights the evidence of it: “K. would never have touched Pepi. Still, he now had to cover his eyes for a moment, so greedy was his gaze.” The crossed-out passage is what the reader glimpses between the lines, or rather, sees. But the reader alone must come to that blunt, drastic realization. Must see that wire. The writer must obscure it, with rags, dirt, leaves, twigs — or whatever else happens to be at hand.
Frieda, Pepi, Olga, Amalia, Hans’s mother, Gardena, Leni, the washerwoman: everything feminine is preyed on by the court magistrates and the Castle officials. After all, the women belong to the court and to the Castle. No one would dare assert that they might not be at the disposition of any official or magistrate at any time. And yet it would be misguided to lump them with the sort of prostitute whose clients are all members of the same club. They should be seen, rather, as hierodules, no less knowledgeable than priests when it comes to the cult’s secrets — but more willing to expose and explore them. Gardena exemplifies the older hierodule, who has already trained a younger one to take her place: Frieda. The little girls on Titorelli’s stairs, the newest pupils, are still playing games before assuming their role. With the exception of Gardena, who is the strict custodian of the cult and defends the Castle as strenuously as the prison chaplain defends the court, one sentiment unites them alclass="underline" they dream of a lover, foreign to their world and already for this reason guilty. Just as K. is attracted to Frieda and Josef K. to the washerwoman because they imagine that those girls, whom they already plan to use to their own ends, have “relationships” or “connections” with the Castle or the court, so for Frieda and the washerwoman K. and Josef K. exude first and foremost the lure of the foreigner, of one who has come from a place where the air is less dense and suffocating than their own. This doesn’t imply, however, that they seriously oppose the Castle or the court. The only radical opponent — mute and rejected — is Amalia. The others have mixed, complex feelings. Frieda in the end chooses her old erotic games with the assistants over K. and reclaims her post at the Gentlemen’s Inn, as if she had left it only so that she might be acutely missed. And it’s hard to tell to what degree the washerwoman is tormented and to what degree she’s complicit with her sexual pursuers. It’s true that, as the student was carrying her off like a sack, the washerwoman waved at Josef K., “shrugging her shoulders” in an effort “to show him that the abduction wasn’t her fault.” But it’s also true that “her gesture didn’t express a great deal of regret,” as if Josef K. were witnessing not an instance of coercion but the repetition of a rite, mechanical and ineluctable, one that prompted him to shout: “And you don’t want to be freed.”
That’s a sentence that strikes deep. One might suspect that all of them — Josef K., K., the women — want above all else to enter ever more deeply into the Castle and the court, despite sometimes yearning to destroy them. Meanwhile, however, they act in such a way as to bring about their own destruction.
The “Barnabas women”: that’s what the villagers, with-sneering sarcasm, call the two sisters of Barnabas. One, Amalia (the “extraordinarily reserved,” the “accursed Barnabas woman”), is the local untouchable. No one speaks a word to her, nor would they get a reply. Olga is the family breadwinner, by virtue of her official status as prostitute — it is her duty to satisfy the stable hands. Just as the assistants, even the sounds of their names, are “repugnant” to K., so are the Barnabas women to the rest of the village. They are the pet targets of perfidy, especially for other women. And above all for Frieda. In her last exchange with K. — the breakup conversation — Frieda makes it clear that the truly irremediable difference between them, which reveals that they come from “completely different worlds,” is represented by the tension between the assistants and the Barnabas women. You can choose one side or the other but never both. They are hopelessly incompatible. When this subject comes up, alarms go off. There is no longer any room to argue or “refute,” activities to which Frieda and K. are fervently dedicated. The only valid response on this subject is an instant, physical repulsion. Just after saying that being near K. is her “only dream,” Frieda mocks K.’s peroration in defense of his relations with the Barnabas women and retires to her room with the assistant Jeremias, to take care of him. She attends to him as one would a sick child or an old lover. Jeremias has won — and K. begins to suspect that in “any other struggle” Jeremias would triumph as well. Not long after having come to the village determined to be the “attacker,” K. now reaches the conclusion that, in any conflict, he would be defeated even by the Castle’s lowliest creature. At last he is coming close to removing what has up until now been his most serious obstacle. At last he understands that Klamm’s omnipotence is reflected even in the two assistants. Which explains why Jeremias, occupying Klamm’s place in Frieda’s bed, can claim that he feels like “a little Klamm.” And why Frieda herself might find in the assistants, even “in their filth and in their lechery, traces of Klamm.”