dueling scars on his square face whose puffed lips came together so placidly when he spoke. His wife, a hard and friendly Nordic face, accentuated, beautiful walk,
accentuated freedom of her swaying hips. Woman from Lübeck with shining eyes. Three children, including Georg who, thoughtless as a butterfly, alighted beside
complete strangers. Then in childish talkativeness asked some meaningless question. For example, we were sitting and correcting the “Kampf.” Suddenly he appeared
and in a matter-of-fact, trustful, and loud voice asked where the other children had run off to.
The stiff old gentleman who was a demonstration of what the noble Nordic wise-heads look like in old age. Decayed and unrecognizable; yet beautiful young
wise-heads were also running around there.
29 July. The two friends, one of them blond, resembling Richard Strauss, smiling, reserved, clever; the other dark, correctly dressed, mild-mannered yet firm, too dainty,
lisped; both of them gourmets, kept drinking wine, coffee, beer, brandy, smoked incessantly, one poured for the other; their room across from mine full of French books;
wrote a great deal in the stuffy writing room when the weather was mild.
Joseph K., the son of a rich merchant, one evening after a violent quarrel with his father—his father had reproached him for his dissipated life and demanded that he put
an immediate stop to it—went, with no definite purpose but only because he was tired and completely at a loss, to the house of the corporation of merchants which stood
all by itself near the harbor. The doorkeeper made a deep bow, Joseph looked casually at him without a word of greeting. “These silent underlings do everything one
supposes them to be doing,” he thought. “If I imagine that he is looking at me insolently, then he really is.” And he once more turned to the doorkeeper, again without a
word of greeting; the latter turned towards the street and looked up at the overcast sky.
I was in great perplexity. Only a moment ago I had known what to do. With his arm held out before him the boss had pushed me to the door of the store. Behind the
two counters stood my fellow clerks, supposedly my friends, their gray faces lowered in the darkness to conceal their expressions.
“Get out!” the boss shouted. “Thief! Get out! Get out, I say!”
“It’s not true,” I shouted for the hundredth time; “I didn’t steal! It’s a mistake or a slander! Don’t you touch me! I’ll sue you! There are still courts here! I won’t go!
For five years I slaved for you like a son and now you treat me like a thief. I didn’t steal; for God’s sake, listen to me, I didn’t steal.”
“Not another word,” said the boss, “you’re fired!”
We were already at the glass door, an apprentice darted out in front of us and quickly opened it; the din coming in from what was indeed an out-of-the-way street
brought me back to reality; I halted in the doorway, arms akimbo, and, as calmly as I could despite my breathlessness, merely said, “I want my hat.”
“You’ll get it,” the boss said, walked back a few steps, took the hat from Grassmann, one of the clerks, who had jumped over the counter, tried to throw it to me but
missed his aim, and anyway threw it too hard, so that the hat flew past me into the street.
“You can keep the hat now,” I said, and went out into the street. And now I was in a quandary. I had stolen, had slipped a five-gulden bill out of the till to take Sophie
to the theater that evening. But she didn’t even want to go to the theater; payday was three days off, at that time I should have had my own money; besides, I had
committed the theft stupidly, in broad daylight, near the glass window of the office in which the boss sat looking at me. “Thief!” he shouted, and sprang out of the
office. “I didn’t steal,” was the first thing I said, but the five-gulden bill was in my hand and the till open.
Made jottings on the trip in another notebook. Began things that went wrong. But I will not give up in spite of insomnia, headaches, a general incapacity. I’ve