The reduction to prime elements doesn’t by any means imply a reduction in the complexity of relations. On the contrary: Frieda is observed by many eyes when she works in the barroom, when the rumors of her relationship with Klamm begin to spread, and finally when everyone is certain about that relationship. Her every gesture gets carefully weighed, interpreted, connected to some other scene that isn’t visible. She’s like Madame de Maintenon, who methodically gains the affections of Louis XIV even as she is being scrutinized by all of Versailles — including Saint-Simon.
There is a physical intimacy between the gentlemen and the barmaids who serve them. Pepi speaks of her service as if it were a question of good manners, organizational efficiency, care in dressing. But it turns out that “a word, a look, a shrug of the shoulders” isn’t enough. There is also physical contact. Every day Pepi’s curly locks are fingered, many times, by the gentlemen: “So avidly did all those hands run through Pepi’s curls that she had to redo her hair ten times a day.” And Pepi adds: “No one can resist the allure of those curls and bows, not even K., who is always so distracted.” The barroom is a simulacrum of a brothel, where certain gestures that are appropriate to both places are repeated with one customer after another. For this reason, a little later, in his reply to Pepi, K. feels the need to observe: “The true barmaid should be a barmaid, not every customer’s lover” (this in a crossed-out passage of the manuscript).
Pepi descends from the charming, sly servant girls of the opera buffa. Like them, she has a sharp perception of the world and of men. When she sees K. abandoned by Frieda but still in love with her precisely because she has run off (“it isn’t hard to be in love with her now that she’s no longer around”), she makes him a proposition: “You have neither a job nor a bed, come stay with us. You’ll like my friends, we’ll make you comfortable, you can help us with our work, which is really too burdensome for girls to do alone. We wouldn’t have to rely only on ourselves, and we’d no longer be afraid at night.”
But how do Pepi and the other girls live? In a “warm, narrow” room. The other two girls are Henriette and Emilie, whose delicious French names, utterly anomalous in the village, lead us straight to the soft, abstract world of the music hall. Living in that closet-room is like living in a little dressing room backstage, where the air is stale and the light artificial. But “everything outside the room seems cold.” In the end it’s more entertaining to stay in the tiny room and tell one another stories about the world outside than it is to take part in that world: “In there one listens to such stories with disbelief, as if nothing could actually happen outside that room.”
Pepi’s invitation is chummy, almost as if K. were another girl who could be added to the group. There are no erotic overtones. But everything Pepi says is erotic, if only because, as K. observed, Pepi treats all her customers like lovers — and K. is the customer par excellence, the stranger. Let’s examine the details: Where would K. stay? In one of the girls’ beds. Perhaps he would take turns. In her magnanimity, Pepi even suggests to K. which of her two friends he might like better: Henriette. And her magnanimity goes further stilclass="underline" the three girls will also talk to K. about his absent lover, Frieda. They’ll recount for his benefit complicated stories about her, which they know well. And they’ll take out “portraits of Frieda” and show him those too. Three charming girls, actual or potential lovers of a young man, sitting together on the edge of a bed, all contemplating these portraits of another woman, also his lover — that life could last all winter. K. listens and asks himself two questions: Would such a thing be allowed? And then, more subtly: How much longer will winter last? Pepi is a great expert on timing. She knows how essential one day more or one day less might be. And her answer goes beyond meteorology: village life is, above all, winter—“long, terribly long, monotonous.” After spring and summer have come and gone, they occupy in one’s memory a period “so brief, it’s as if they lasted no more than two days.” The ominous sentence that follows is exemplary of Kafka’s lyrical laconicism: “Even on those days, even on the most beautiful day, sometimes snow still falls.”
The confraternity of girls, as Pepi tells it, is drastically opposed to everything that takes place outside. Founded on complete promiscuity and interchangeability, it is ready to receive K. as if he were a new girl, there to give a hand with the work, though exactly how is never clear. At the same time, K. would retain the ancient attributes of the male. Because of him, the three girls “would no longer be afraid at night.” They would be “happy” to have “a man to help and protect them.” And each — Pepi lets this be understood without saying it, since she always retains a certain shyness when speaking of sex — would offer herself in turn as his lover. But with K. it is enough that she, like a wise courtesan, drops the hint: “You’ll like Emilie too, but you’ll especially like Henriette.” In that tiny room, charm and pleasure reign. The girls may know that theirs is a “miserable life,” but they don’t by any means want out. As Pepi says, “We make our life there as charming as possible,” so that “even with just three of us we never get bored.” And she sighs, thinking of K.’s arrivaclass="underline" “Oh, it will be fun.”
The girls’ complicity has a solid foundation: “That’s precisely what kept us together, knowing that all three of us were equally denied a future.” The maid’s room must be enough in itself, because there will never be anything outside of it. Occasions for rancor or resentment don’t ever arise. And even when Pepi gets promoted to barmaid and for four days leaves the room, the other girls do not feel betrayed. In fact they help her get her new clothes ready. One selflessly offers Pepi “some expensive fabric, her treasure,” which so many times she had let the others admire and which so many times she had dreamed of someday wearing. Yet now, “since Pepi needed it, she offered it up.” Then, sitting in their beds, one above the other, they begin to sew, while singing. At the same time, when Pepi returns, “they probably won’t be astonished and, just to please her, they’ll cry a little and lament her fate.” So K. has nothing to worry about either: “You’re not obligated in any way, you won’t be tied forever to our room, as we are.” Words of profound psychological insight. The maid’s room is the only paradise where K. can come and go without incurring obligations or violating prohibitions. As long as he keeps their secret.
With the tone of a country girl who knows a thing or two about life and speaks plainly, Pepi at each turn suggests to K. the most radical and extreme solutions. A little earlier, she insinuated that the act that would make him her “chosen” would be the burning down of the Gentlemen’s Inn, “so that not a trace is left.” Now she lets him glimpse another possibility: a tiny erotic paradise, stashed covertly within that same Gentlemen’s Inn, and founded — in the way of the ancient Mysteries — on a secret. Like so many other hierodules of forbidden cults, the three girls are “enchanted by the fact that all this must remain a secret.” As a result, they will be “bound together even more closely than before.” K. need do nothing else but join them. And here Pepi’s appeal to K. resounds in all its pathos: “Come, oh please, come stay with us!”