lads were see-sawing on a hand-barrow. A sickly young girl was standing at a pump in her
dressing-jacket and gazing at K. while the water poured into her bucket. In one corner of
the courtyard a line was stretched between two windows, where washing was already
being hung up to dry. A man stood below superintending the work with an occasional
shout.
K. turned toward the stairs to make his way up to the Court of Inquiry, but then came
to a standstill again, for in addition to this staircase lie could see in the courtyard three
other separate flights of stairs and besides these a little passage at the other end which
seemed to lead into a second courtyard. He was annoyed that he had not been given more
definite information about the room, these people showed a strange negligence or
indifference in their treatment of him, he intended to tell them so very positively and
clearly. Finally, however, he climbed the first stairs and his mind played in retrospect with
the saying of the warder Willem that an attraction existed between the Law and guilt, from
which it should really follow that the Court of Inquiry must abut on the particular flight of
stairs which K. happened to choose.
On his way up he disturbed many children who were playing on the stairs and looked
at him angrily as he strode through their ranks. “If I ever come here again, he told himself,
“I must either bring sweets to cajole them with or else a stick to beat them.” Just before he
reached the first floor he had actually to wait for a moment until a marble came to rest, two
children with the lined, pinched faces of adult rogues holding him meanwhile by his
trousers; if he had shaken them off he must have hurt them, and he feared their outcries.
His real search began on the first floor. As he could not inquire for the Court of
Inquiry he invented a joiner called Lanz the name came into his mind because Frau
Grubach’s nephew, the Captain, was called Lanz and so he began to inquire at all the doors
if a joiner called Lanz lived there, so as to get a chance to look into the rooms. It turned
out, however, that that was quite possible without further ado, for almost all the doors
stood open, with children running out and in. Most of the flats, too, consisted of one small
single-windowed room in which cooking was going on. Many of the women were holding
babies in one arm and working over the stove with the arm that was left free. Half-grown
girls who seemed to be dressed in nothing but an apron kept busily rushing about. In all the
rooms the beds were still occupied, sick people were lying in them, or men who had not
wakened yet, or others who were resting there in their clothes. At the doors which were shut K. knocked and asked if a joiner called Lanz lived there. Generally a woman opened,
listened to his question, and then turned to someone in the room, who thereupon rose from
the bed. “The gentleman’s asking if a joiner called Lanz lives here.” “A joiner called
Lanz?” asked the man from the bed. “Yes,” said K., though it was beyond question that the
Court of Inquiry did not sit here and his inquiry was therefore superfluous. Many seemed
convinced that it was highly important for K. to find the joiner Lanz, they took a long time
to think it over, suggested some joiner who, however, was not called Lanz, or a name
which had some quite distant resemblance to Lanz, or inquired of their neighbors, or
escorted K. to a door some considerable distance away, where they fancied such a man
might be living as a lodger, or where there was someone who could give better information
than they could. In the end K. scarcely needed to ask at all, for in this way he was
conducted over the whole floor. He now regretted his plan, which at first had seemed so
practical. As he was approaching the fifth floor he decided to give up the search, said goodby