With his head leaning on his arm and his arm stretched toward the post of Bürgel’s large bed (the only object in the room apart from the night table and lamp), K. listens to the most lucid, most precise words that he’s yet heard about the Castle. They are also the only words spoken about the Castle from within. Cautious words, they make explicit the doubts and the sense of impotence about resolving them that the Castle produces among its own officials, who feel they lack “the proper distance” for answering certain questions. But who, then, would have the “proper distance”? The landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn? Or Count Westwest? Or perhaps K. himself?
Nonetheless, drunk with weariness, K. finds Bürgel “amateurish” and so must strive not to “underestimate him,” as he is instinctively inclined to do — much as Josef K. instinctively mistrusts Titorelli. Meanwhile, Bürgel’s words tumble toward the secret. They reveal to K. things that no one has told him before, things on which everything depends. Why, for example, are the secretaries required “to conduct most village interrogations at night”?
The great danger of the “nighttime interrogations” arises because, on such occasions, the barriers between parties and officials tend to come down. Previously inadmissible considerations begin to filter in, such as the parties’ “troubles and fears,” and resistances weaken, until in the end there may be “an absolutely inappropriate trading of places between the persons involved”—parties becoming officials and vice versa. In the middle of the night, the parties would find themselves, as if after a dance step, in the places previously occupied by the secretaries they had been besieging daily. An unheard-of reversal would take place, wounding the great order: that which is perennially external to it would infiltrate its most delicate mechanisms. The pure chance nature of the individual party would take on the voice of necessity. There can be no greater risk.
The nighttime interrogations are not necessarily harmful — Bürgel himself speaks of their “perhaps only apparent disadvantages”—but they are certainly frightening. They are the perpetual shadow of the regulations. The officials, then, take “measures” to fortify themselves against the interrogations. And because they occupy the lowest ranks of the hierarchy — those closest to the parties — the secretaries in particular develop an “extraordinary sensibility in such matters,” constantly inventing tricks to reduce their risk. They are “as resistant as they are vulnerable.” In their border outposts, they understand that every order — no matter how ubiquitous and flexible — contains a vulnerable point, which is exposed in those rare moments when a party becomes able to “achieve more through a word, through a glance, through a show of trust, than through a lifetime of arduous effort.” Of course, Bürgel adds, those opportunities “are never taken advantage of”—a fact that surely plays a part in the general scheme of things. But to the heightened sensibility of a secretary, it’s enough that such “opportunities” exist. They have something in common with K., “a surveyor without surveying work,” who nevertheless exists and has the potential to disturb. His situation is considered “surprising” and perhaps unsettling, since — as Bürgel makes clear—“our circumstances here are certainly not such that we can let technical ability go to waste.”
What is the relationship between the regulations and the nighttime interrogations? It’s true that nighttime interrogations are not prescribed by any regulation, but it’s also true that the very nature of things—“the over-abundance of work, the manner in which the officials are employed at the Castle, their lack of accessibility, the requirement that the interrogations of the parties happen only after the usual investigations have been completed, but then immediately”—makes nighttime interrogations an “unavoidable necessity.” Bürgel even dares to make a claim that some of his colleagues might consider impious: “But if they have now become a necessity — as I say — that is still, albeit indirectly, a result of the regulations.”
As soon as necessity is named, we enter the realm of the regulations. Thus “finding fault with the nature of the nighttime interrogations,” Bürgel adds, as if shocked at his own audacity, would be like “finding fault with the regulations.” The nighttime interrogations, these abnormal, pernicious entities, are therefore themselves the offspring of the regulations. They are members of the same family. For this reason alone we can see as baseless the claim that the regulations reach into every corner, that nothing exists beyond the regulations and their “iron-clad observance and execution,” as Bürgel puts it. Alongside them, the nighttime interrogations will always manage to persist. And K. has, without knowing it, sought out that dark, amorphous, elusive zone, which is the only place that could welcome him, despite his less than limpid past and his burden of “troubles and fears.” Only “during the night” would it be possible “to judge things from a private point of view,” thus doing justice to the peculiarity of the person and of his difficult circumstances — a peculiarity that the person could then, at last, describe in all its strangeness. In just that moment, however, overcome by exhaustion, K. finds that he can no longer even recognize the voice of the man who is revealing all this; he doesn’t even see him as a person now but rather as “a something that prevented him from sleeping and whose deeper significance he couldn’t fathom.”
Bürgel is the psychopomp who introduces K. to the secret of nighttime interrogations. But every secret looks different depending on the point of view. Seen from the highly significant viewpoint of the landlady of the Gentlemen’s Inn, hence from the viewpoint of officialdom, the nighttime interrogations have a completely different nature and purpose. According to the landlady, they have “the sole purpose of allowing those parties whom the gentlemen couldn’t bear to see by day to be quickly interrogated by artificial light at night, so that the gentlemen had the chance immediately after the interrogation to forget all the ugliness in sleep.”
Mysteries are always a little shady. That’s why the early Christian Fathers used Eleusis as a principal argument for defaming pagans. But the landlady’s view, as always the view of the orthodoxy, isn’t merely reductive. It’s true that the “gentlemen’s boundless delicacy” is sorely tested by the nighttime interrogations. And it’s quite possible that they feel a certain disgust when faced with that shapeless mass of singularity, as party after party scurries past them, each one potentially capable of upsetting them, making it “difficult or downright impossible to maintain fully the official character of the hearings.” And K., according to the landlady, is one of the worst examples of that sort of thing. Not only does he make a “mockery of all the security measures.” Not only does he hang around like a ghost where he doesn’t belong, but — unlike ghosts — he refuses to vanish in the morning, indeed he “remained there, hands in his pockets,” as if everything else — the gentlemen and their rooms — was just some apparition and he himself the only reality. And that’s not alclass="underline" in the end he even witnessed the distribution of records, a ceremony that must be conducted behind “nearly closed doors,” such an “important, fundamental” task that not even “the landlord and landlady had ever been allowed to watch, though it took place in their own house.” K., that disrespectful, inconsiderate, sneaky foreigner, had thus managed, as if accidentally but really through perverse insistence, to witness the true mystery: the distribution of records, of fates — a scene that once upon a time was spoken of only in legends, and that no one had dared to watch. The last one to speak of it was Er the Pamphylian, and Plato has left us his story.