Block, the grain dealer, is also represented by Josef K.’s lawyer, in his “business cases” as well as in a trial of the kind Josef K. is undergoing. This fact is of immediate interest to Josef.K., who asks: “So the lawyer takes on ordinary cases too?” At Block’s affirmative reply, Josef K. appears relieved: “That connection between the court and jurisprudence seemed extremely reassuring to K.” Until this moment, a corrosive suspicion has been building in him: that the court has nothing to do with the law and the legal codes. Perhaps the court is simply a powerful, impenetrable apparatus superimposed upon juridical praxis and terminology, but in the end completely separate, resting on other premises. Block’s answer is at first blush “reassuring,” because it makes the court’s very existence seem less foreign and opaque. Ultimately it might be one of many courts, one that simply by chance hasn’t come to Josef K.’s attention sooner. But in the very next moment, these thoughts open the door to an even more disturbing suspicion: the court might indeed be part of that “jurisprudence,” and the process of passing into its ambit from that of the ordinary cases might even be easy, one habit among many for certain men of the law, just as it is possible to sit calmly down in a café without realizing that one is surrounded only by costumed extras. And another suspicion arises: what if all the courts that deal with “ordinary cases” are only a cumbersome, misleading front for the one true court, that which judges Josef K. and prefers to camouflage itself among the normal courts?
Block is the assimilated Jew whose arrival is “always ill-timed,” even when he has been “summoned.” Whatever he does is the wrong thing, and yet it corresponds precisely to what is asked of him. Only he would think to boast of having “studied closely what decency, duty, and judicial custom demand.” Who else but Block would decide to “study” what “decency” demands? That itself is an indecent admission.
Though as defendants they share a common condition, Josef K. subjects the merchant to those violent oscillations between attraction and aversion that assimilated Jews endured in the period between the first emancipations and Hitler. Josef K. listens to Block’s stories with the greatest attention, leaning toward him. He has the impression that Block has “very important things” to say and knows how to say them. And yet, moments later, “K. suddenly couldn’t bear the sight of the merchant.” There’s something shameless in the way Block reveals his suffering. Josef K. watches him and thinks that the merchant is certainly experienced, “but those experiences had cost him dearly.” Block is a magnet for humiliation. It’s as if his body is the repository for that supplement of uncertainty, fatigue, and anxiety from which the Jew in the big city cannot escape.
In a letter to Milena, it happened that Kafka spoke of Jews directly and at length. He was writing in response to a question of Milena’s that had taken him aback and that must have seemed improbable (“You ask me if I’m Jewish, perhaps this is only a joke”). It was the perfect opportunity. He wrote:
The insecure position of Jews, insecure within themselves, insecure among people, should explain better than anything else why they might think they own only what they hold in their hands or between their teeth, that furthermore only tangible possessions give them a right to live and that once they have lost something they will never again regain it, rather it will drift blissfully away from them forever. Jews are threatened with dangers from the most unlikely quarters or, to be more precise, forget dangers and let’s say “they are threatened by threats.”
With Block one has the impression that he holds his trial documents “between his teeth.” In any case, they are never out of his sight. In the unlit room where Block sleeps, there is “a niche in the wall, by the head of his bed, in which he had carefully arranged a candle, an inkpot and pen, and also a bundle of papers, probably trial documents.”
Block’s voluntary humiliation at the bedside of his lawyer, Huld, and in the presence of Leni and Josef K., is an impious parody of monotheistic devotion, with respect to which every anti-Semitic caricature seems timid. That’s why the scene “nearly degraded the onlooker”—and the reader.
Even when first entering the bedroom, Block is unable to look at the lawyer, “as if the sight of his interlocutor were too dazzling to bear.” From this point on, each gesture takes on an additional resonance: biblical, devotional, ritual. Block begins to tremble, as the lawyer, his back turned, addresses him. His face would be an unbearable sight. Block stoops as if to kneel on the fur rug beside the bed. The lawyer and the merchant exchange these words: “‘Who is your lawyer?’ ‘You are,’ said Block. ‘And other than me?’ asked the lawyer. ‘None but you,’ said Block. ‘Then do not follow any other,’ said the lawyer.” It’s a profession of faith. Its model is Moses before Yahweh. A little later Block kneels on the bedside rug: “‘I’m on my knees, my lawyer,’ he said.” Then, encouraged by Leni, he kisses the lawyer’s hand, twice. Leni stretches her supple body and leans over to whisper something in Huld’s ear. Perhaps she is interceding on Block’s behalf, so that the lawyer will speak to him. Now the lawyer begins to speak and Block listens “with his head lowered, as if listening transgressed some rule (Gebot).” But Gebot is also “commandment.” At this point, Josef K. has a strong, decisive sensation: the scene isn’t taking shape before his eyes but is the repetition of something “that had repeated itself many times before and would repeat itself many times again, and only for Block could it retain its newness.” This is a definition of ritual. Indeed, it’s a definition of ritual that makes plain its affinity with obsessional neurosis, as defined by Freud.
The lawyer and Leni, those two harmonious accomplices, are ready to lead Block to his final abjection, which is the performance of ritual gestures for some alien purpose. This is the most subtle of profanations, and Block is compliant. They treat him like a caged and rather repulsive animal. The lawyer has already dubbed him “that wretched worm.” Now he asks Leni: “How has he behaved today?” In the manner of a John Willie governess with a leather bodice and a riding crop, Leni replies, “He’s been quiet and diligent.” Huld aims to transform his client into a “lawyer’s dog,” and Block is presented to Josef K. as model and prefiguration of what he himself could become. “If [the lawyer] had ordered him to crawl under the bed as into a kennel and to start barking, he would have done so gladly.” In order that his abjection be crystal clear, his devotional gestures must be fused with the repertoire of animal gestures.
Leni proceeds in her description of Block’s day, as she observed it through the peephole in his cell. “He was kneeling on his bed the whole time, he had the documents you loaned him open on the windowsill and was reading them there.” Thin, small, with a bushy beard, kneeling before a text, Block now appears to us as a Hasid immersed in the Torah. According to Leni, his devotion is a sign of obedience to the lawyer: “That made a good impression; the window in fact opens only onto an air shaft and gives barely any light. That Block was nevertheless reading showed me how obedient he is.” At this point Huld breaks in like the perfect straight man who knows how to take things further, even when they seem extreme already: “But does he at least understand what he reads?” And Leni, without missing a beat, retorts: “At any rate I could tell he was reading closely.” If there’s one image that has over the centuries characterized Jews, it’s reading closely. A Jew reading, as in Rembrandt, seems to reach the highest summits of intensity and concentration. That this is the image implied by Leni is confirmed at once: “He read the same page all day, and as he was reading he followed the lines with his finger.” Leni has in mind the little silver hand used to keep one’s place in the Torah. Block doesn’t possess one, he doesn’t possess anything anymore, but he revives the gesture. His life, Leni assures us, consists now only of study, “almost without interruption.” If he does pause, it’s only to ask for a glass of water — and he did that “just once.” So, she adds, “I gave him a glass through the peephole.” We know that Leni can also be “affectionate” with Block. She doesn’t deny him a glass of water. After all, the beauty of defendants shines even on him.