K. isn’t merely brazen and defiant. At times he can be honey-tongued and eager to ingratiate himself with his interlocutor however he can. We see this twice in one night. First with Frieda, who rebukes him for the hours spent with the Barnabas women. Then with the landlord and landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, who are disgusted by his inexcusable nighttime wanderings through the hallways onto which the officials’ rooms open.
With Frieda, K. wants to show that he fundamentally shares her loathing of the Barnabas women, the two outcasts with whom he feels rather too at home—a feeling otherwise unknown to him in that village. As for Amalia, K. doesn’t have the courage even to speak her name. Regarding Olga, he’s quick to state that she isn’t “seductive,” in an attempt to deflect Frieda’s jealousy. Thus he sets her up for this retort: “The stable hands think differently,” seeing that they have spent the night with her “at least twice a week for more than two years.” But above all K. wants to make clear that he too, like the village as a whole, condemns the family: “I understand your aversion to that family and I can share it.” If he has had anything to do with them, it has been only to protect his interests, since he has been expecting news from Barnabas and is counting on using the messenger to his advantage. He’s like a man who says that sure, he’s had dealings with Jews, but only out of professional necessity.
With the landlord and landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, K. defends himself in no less dubious a fashion. He attributes his errors to weariness and to the fact of “not yet being used to the strain of the interrogations.” He neglects to mention that he barely said a word to either Bürgel or Erlanger. He merely listened — or slept. It is then, at best, an exaggeration to say that he “had to face two interrogations in a row.” As for the distribution of records, K. denies having “been in a position to see anything.” In this case, the opposite is true. His excuses may seem simpleminded, but they touch pressure points. And they succeed above all because of his obsequious tone. In fact, “the respect with which he spoke of the gentlemen left the landlord favorably disposed toward him.” As for the landlady’s reaction, nothing is said. She is much harder to fool.
The Firemen’s Festival is celebrated on the third of July — Kafka’s birthday. Just as the day of the comices agricoles sealed Emma Bovary’s fate, so will this day seal Amalia’s. Festivities sniff out disgrace. They unite communion and wound, marriage and immolation. They are the heirs of sacrifice.
Amalia is decked out like a bride and accompanied by her father’s unlucky words: “Today, mark my words, Amalia will find a husband.” Wearing the necklace of Bohemian garnets that Gardena (in those days a family friend) once loaned Olga, who in turn has offered it to her, and wearing also her white, lace-covered blouse, Amalia advances toward the festival. Her gaze always has something “gloomy” about it, but more than anything else it is regaclass="underline" people “nearly bowed down, without meaning to, before her.” Even then, in the midst of the crowd, “her gaze was cold, clear, fixed as ever; it wasn’t aimed directly at what she was observing, but rather — and this was disturbing — slightly to one side, in a way that was barely noticeable but undeniable.” This slant is due not to any shyness or “embarrassment,” but rather to a calling that she felt even before becoming the village outcast, a “desire for solitude that overpowered every other feeling,” as though she were trying to rid herself of all attachment to the world. Amalia is the only person who simply doesn’t want to accept the rules of the village and therefore of the Castle. K., on the other hand, wants first to understand them — and then to use them to clear his way.
Perhaps it is precisely this aloofness that strikes Sortini, the “tiny, weak, brooding” official, as he leans against the fire truck. And he knits his brow in his usual manner, so that “all his wrinkles etched a fan-like pattern into his forehead, converging toward the bridge of his nose.”
Amalia isn’t spectacularly beautiful. She has “the ageless look of women who don’t grow old but were never truly young.” What is unique about her is that gaze, which an official like Sortini can’t fail to notice as soon as he lifts (since “she was much taller than he was”) his eyes toward her. It isn’t merely attraction that grips him but also a certain sense of danger, as if he has for the first time brushed up against something utterly foreign. This may perhaps help us understand why an official as reserved as Sortini would resort to such brutish manners when inviting Amalia to meet him. He acts both as suitor and as guardian of the Castle rules. His message to her is a challenge that will force her to expose herself.
Olga, confident and severe in her telling of the story, depicts Sortini as an arrogant abuser of power. But aside from her portrayal, all we know about him is his reputation as a thoughtful and retiring official. To this is added Amalia’s violent reaction to a message that no one but she and her sister see. And thus a doubt creeps in, not about Amalia but about Sortini. Perhaps their relationship isn’t as simple and crude as it seems. Perhaps Sortini is above all an official distinguished by his great, almost pathological acumen, which allows him to recognize in Amalia, with commendable foresight, and perhaps only because of the singularity of her gaze, traces of a wicked, wholesale rejection of the Castle. And perhaps Amalia too realizes that she has been unmasked. Her despair may stem from that unmasking more than from a sexual insult, which would be in stark contrast to Sortini’s manners and nature. After all, we don’t know for sure what his message said. Maybe it told Amalia just this: “You’re caught.” Maybe it was a blackmail note or even a proposed pact of silence. Or maybe it was simply a notice informing her that someone has seen through her little game. Now that’s something Amalia could never reveal, for such a notice would in itself be tantamount to expulsion from the village community — it would expose her apostasy, and thus her guilt, leading to the ruin of her entire family.
Amalia is an Antigone who doesn’t appeal to natural law but rather simply refuses to “let herself be initiated” into that unnameable amalgam of community and cult that is the Castle. Her rejection of the rules is much more radical than is implied by her gesture of shredding an official’s abrupt, coarse, and threatening invitation. The message couldn’t, after all, have been an unheard-of outrage, since, as her sister explains to K., relations between village women and officials have a singular characteristic: “We know that women can’t help but love the officials if the officials ever approach them, indeed they love them even beforehand, no matter how much they try to deny it.” Olga, a shrewd, lucid woman, in whom K. has “complete trust,” never speaks imprecisely. And here she uses the word love twice. She doesn’t say that sometimes, out of self-interest, the women of the village yield to the powerful officials who approach them. Rather she asserts that all the village women love the officials, even before they are approached by them. Amalia’s gesture is therefore something that profoundly unhinges the order of things, something that denies the very foundation of village life: the irresistible attraction to anything that emanates from the Castle — and above all to its officials.
Before Amalia’s gesture, her family was among the most prominent in the village. Her father had plenty of customers who ordered their boots from him. Amalia herself sewed “very beautiful clothes” for the most distinguished villagers. They had kind, influential friends, like Gardena. The father had hopes of an imminent promotion in the Firemen’s Association. They lived in a bourgeois house. That fateful third of July, the Firemen’s Festival was to have marked the culmination of a slow but sure social ascent. The festival’s success might have persuaded the authorities to select Amalia’s father as instructor to the Castle firemen. Amid all this, with “the wildest sounds” of the festival trumpets still echoing in their ears, Amalia performs her gesture — and destroys everything. There’s no punishment. It’s enough that the world withdraws from the family, little by little. All sap ceases to flow. Soon they will find themselves “sitting together with the windows closed in the heat of July and August. Nothing was happening. No summons, no news, no visitors, nothing.”