Should we believe Pepi? Certainly her immediacy, her enthusiasm, even her eloquence tempt us to go along with her. But on the other hand there are certain conflicting, confusing elements to her story. Pepi concludes her torrential outpouring to K., after she has abandoned her post as barmaid, by describing her life with Henriette and Emilie — and by inviting K. to join them. By the end of her peroration, the maid’s room has emerged as a place of happiness, a caesura with respect to everything around it. But as we float in this mist, we might recall that Pepi has already spoken in a completely different way about that room — in the course of the same monologue. She has described it as a “tiny, dark room” where the girls work “as if in a mine,” convinced that they will spend “years, or even worse their whole lives, without being noticed by anyone,” often in the grip of terror, as when they hear something or someone creeping outside their room, which is continually ransacked by brutal “commissions” that rummage through their paltry things in search of lost or purloined records and subject them to “insults and threats.” And no peace: “Racket for half the night and racket starting at dawn.” How can they make room for K. in that slave’s life? How can Pepi make him see that room as a place of hidden delight? And how can they keep their secret?
Which of the two versions is true? This time we cannot evade the question with the usual contrivances (different point of view, different mood). The point of view is the same: Pepi’s. Her entire monologue has the same tonality — and the two opposing descriptions come a few minutes apart, one after the other.
Here we must look backward. As Kafka found his narrative substance in something that preceded even the division of gods and demons, indeed of the powers in general, so the narration itself seems to have gone back with him to the origin of the variants, to that most mysterious of points where every story begins to branch and proliferate, while still remaining the same story. Such branching is the lifeblood of every mythology. But Kafka had no rites or rhapsodists, which might have varied and recombined his gestures and meanings for him, at his disposal. He had to act with no help from the world. Alone before a sheet of paper — and using the latest form the times allowed stories to take, that of the novel — Kafka wove Pepi’s monologue. After having listened quietly to it, K. says to her: “What a wild imagination you have, Pepi.” And then: “These are nothing more than dreams born in your dark, narrow maid’s room down below, which is the proper place for them, but here in the middle of the barroom they sound very strange.” These stories, like Pepi’s clothes and her hairstyle, are “the offspring of that darkness and of those beds in your room.”
K.’s reaction to Pepi’s barroom monologue — he shakes his head — isn’t so different from the way the world would react to Kafka’s writings, which were also full of dreams born in a dark subterranean room. Kafka in fact once made this explicit: “We each have our own way of climbing back out of the subterranean world; I do it by writing.” That world that presented itself as a cellar is where Kafka saw himself:
It has already occurred to me many times that for me the best way to live would be to stay, with my writing materials and a lamp, in the innermost room of a vast, closed cellar. Food would be brought for me and would always be left far from my room, on the other side of the cellar’s outermost door. The journey to reach the food, in my dressing gown, beneath the cellar’s vaulted ceiling, would be my one stroll. Then I would return to my table, I would eat slowly and carefully, and I would immediately begin writing again.
Kafka wrote that way about his cellar to Felice, to frighten her. Pepi spoke that way to K. about her maid’s room, to attract him. The chambermaids’ tiny room, crowded with bows and petticoats, and the bare cellar with the table and the writing materials are analogous sites. Carved with difficulty into the solid surface of the world, they are nooks that host hidden life, imperceptible from without, life that can be both paradise and hell at once.
Pepi desperately loves K., loves him “as she has never loved anyone before,” loves him like a little girl who reads romances and dreams of a foreigner who will carry her off: “a hero, a rescuer of maidens.” Through her speaks a numberless female population: princesses and slaves, bourgeois ladies and peasant girls, office workers and waitresses. Whatever their social position, their words are the same, their devotion is the same — and their dreams are always “wild.”
Klamm is an official of a certain age, a man of habits, always dressed in a “black frock-coat with long tails.” He wanders about with an air somewhere between dreamy and sleepy, and sometimes “he’ll go for hours apparently without uttering a single word and then suddenly say something so vulgar it makes you shudder.” A flash of pure comedy. But do we think that with such details we’ve plumbed Klamm’s depths? In the words of Olga, who does know something of the subject: “What can we know about the thoughts of gentlemen!”
Of all the gentlemen, only Klamm inspires exaltation and sacred awe. Not only in the landlady of the Bridge Inn and in Frieda, who are in charge of his cult, but also in Pepi, the incendiary servant. That Klamm doesn’t make an appearance during the days when Pepi lends her services to the bar is the greatest blow to her. She waits, expecting him “at any moment, even at night.” Her disappointment exhausts her. She even dares wait for him in a recess of the forbidden corridor, thinking: “Ah, if only Klamm would come now, if only I could take the gentleman from his room and carry him in my arms down to the public room. I wouldn’t collapse beneath that weight, no matter how great it was.” Klamm, this gentleman similar in appearance to other gentlemen who are “elderly and attached to their habits,” appears here helpless as a baby, lovingly transported in the firm arms of the servant Pepi, protected by that flighty, fervent Magdalene. After all, for Klamm even this will merely be another of his many metamorphoses.
During her vain wait for Klamm, Pepi becomes aware of the quality of the silence that reigns in the gentlemen’s corridor. This silence is such “that you can’t stand it there for long”—it’s a silence that “drives you away.” Nevertheless Pepi doesn’t give up. “Ten times she was driven away, ten times she went back up.” Why? Pepi, who has a gift for direct expression, knows how to explain it: “It didn’t make sense, but if [Klamm] didn’t come, then almost everything was senseless.” To wait for Klamm makes no sense. But it is Klamm alone who imbues “almost everything” with sense. And so to wait for Klamm is practically the only thing that does make sense. This is Pepi’s paradox, which merits inclusion in logical treatises. One of its applications is The Castle.
III. “There’s No Traffic Here”
It’s only the morning after his arrival when K. gives up the idea of presenting himself at the Castle. A sudden weariness descends upon him, such as he never felt during his long journey (“How he kept forging ahead for days, calmly, step after step!”). He starts out thinking that if he can “push himself to walk at least as far as the Castle entrance, he will have done more than enough.” But he quickly realizes that he doesn’t know which street leads to the Castle entrance. The village’s main street, flanked with low, snow-covered houses, their doors all closed, a long street, an endless street, merely gives the illusion of leading to the Castle. Then it suddenly veers away — maintaining, from that point on, a constant distance from the Castle.
In these initial steps, in these initial observations, the whole of K.’s story is already prefigured. His movements seem to him casual, even capricious, like those of a traveler taking a look around in an unknown place. But that’s not how it is. Every detail, every remark addressed to him, circles around him, cages him. To linger over some of these phrases is enough to become alarmed. K. always takes them as ordinary phrases, tossed off by people to whom he clearly attaches no importance: the landlord, the schoolteacher he meets on the street, the tanner whose house he enters. And yet their words are quite clear. “I don’t think you have any power,” the landlord says. “Strangers never like the Castle,” says the schoolteacher, and then: “There is no difference between the peasants and the Castle.” Finally: “Hospitality is not our custom here,” says the tanner; “we have no need for guests.” Frightening words. In the dark, smoky hovel where two bearded men soak in a huge washtub, where a young woman with “tired blue eyes” languishes on a “tall armchair,” holding an infant to her breast, “inert,” staring upward “toward some indefinite place” like a Madonna of melancholy, while from the one tiny window on the back wall a pale snow-light casts a “silky sheen” on her dress — in this archaic, torpid penumbra where the only recognized law might well be the law of hospitality, we encounter these brutal, resolute words: “Hospitality is not our custom here.” And further: “We have no need for guests.” These last words are the harshest K. will hear, but he quickly passes over them: “Of course not; why would you ever need guests?” His reply actually attempts to establish complicity, allowing K. to raise the point that he holds dearest: that he is the exception, the chosen one. He continues: “But every so often, you must have need of someone, of myself for instance, a land surveyor.” And so K. rushes headlong past an opportunity to understand. A mist still surrounds him, protects him, mocks him.