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Before the Law
BEFORE THE LAW STANDS A DOOR-keeper. A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and asks to be admitted to the Law. But the doorkeeper informs him that he cannot grant him admittance at this time. The man ponders this and then asks whether he will be admitted at some point in the future. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at present.” Because the gate stands open—as always—and the doorkeeper steps aside, the man stoops down to look through the gateway to the interior. On seeing this, the doorkeeper laughs and remarks: “If it’s so enticing, then just try going in despite my interdiction. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the lowliest doorkeeper. In hall after hall stand other doorkeepers, each more powerful than the last. The mere sight of the third doorkeeper is more than even I can endure.” The man from the country never anticipated such difficulties. The Law, he thinks, should be accessible at all times and to everyone, but when he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his large, pointed nose and his long, skinny, black Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait for permission to enter after all. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and allows him to set it to one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted and exhausts the doorkeeper with his pleas. The doorkeeper often conducts little interviews with him, asking him about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, much as high-ranking officials would put them, and he always concludes by repeating that he cannot yet admit him. The man, who came well equipped for his journey, uses everything he has, however valuable, for the purpose of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything but says as he does so: “I’m only accepting this so you won’t think there’s something you haven’t tried.” Throughout the many years he observes the doorkeeper fixedly with almost no interruption. He forgets the other doorkeepers and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle between himself and the Law. He curses his miserable fate, loudly and recklessly in the early years, but later, as he grows old, he just grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since he has come to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper’s fur collar during the long years of studying him, he begs the fleas to help him and to help win the doorkeeper over to his side. Eventually his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether his eyes deceive him or whether it is really growing darker around him. But through the gloom he can now definitely make out a radiance that pours unendingly from the doorway of the Law. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death, all the experiences of these long years come together in his head to form one question that he has not yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons to him because he can no longer raise his cramped and stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend down to him, since the difference in their heights has changed drastically, much to the man’s disadvantage. “So, what is it that you still want to know?” asks the doorkeeper. “You are insatiable.” “Surely everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man, “so how is it that no one but me has ever begged for admittance?” The doorkeeper recognizes that the man is near the end and, in order to penetrate his failing senses, shouts: “No one else could ever be granted admission here, as this gate was just for you. Now I am going to close it.”
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Josephine the Singer, Or The Mouse People
OUR SINGER’S NAME IS JOSEPHINE. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is not one among us who is not swept away by her singing, and this is indeed high praise—higher still as we are not generally a music-loving people. Peace and quiet is the music most clear to us; we have a hard life and even on the occasions when we have tried to shake free from the cares of our daily life we still cannot raise ourselves up to something so lofty and remote from our routine lives as music. But we don’t much mourn this, we never even get that far; we consider a certain pragmatic cunning, of which we are sorely in need, to be our greatest asset, and with a smile born of this cunning we are wont to console ourselves for all our woes even if—but it never happens—we were once to yearn for the kind of happiness such as music might provide. Josephine is the sole exception, she loves music and also knows how to give voice to it; she is the only one, and with her demise music will disappear—for who knows how long—from our lives.