The Trial by Franz Kafka

audience during his first interrogation. He might be mistaken, yet the Clerk of the Court

would have fitted excellently into the first row of the audience, the elderly gentlemen with

the brittle beards. Then a sound from the entrance hail as of breaking crockery made them all prick up

their ears. “I’ll go and see what has happened,” said K., and he went out, rather slowly, to

give the others a chance to call him back. Hardly had he reached the entrance hail and was

beginning to grope his way in the darkness, when a hand much smaller than his own

covered the hand with which he was still holding the door and gently drew the door shut. It

was the nurse, who had been waiting there. “Nothing has happened,” she whispered. “I

simply flung a plate against the wall to bring you out.” K. said in his embarrassment: “I

was thinking of you too.” “That’s all the better,” said the nurse. “Come this way.” A step or

two brought them to a door paneled with thick glass, which she opened. “In here,” she said.

It was evidently the lawyer’s office; as far as one could see in the moonlight, which

brilliantly lit up a small square section of the floor in front of each of the two large

windows, it was fitted out with solid antique furniture. “Here,” said the nurse, pointing to a

dark chest with a carved wooden back. After he had sat down K. still kept looking round

the room, it was a lofty, spacious room, the clients of this “poor man’s” lawyer must feel

lost in it. * K. pictured to himself the timid, short steps with which they would advance

to the huge table. But then he forgot all this and had eyes only for the nurse, who was

sitting very close to him, almost squeezing him against the arm of the bench. “I thought,”

she said, “you would come out of your own accord, without waiting till I had to call you

out. A queer way to behave. You couldn’t keep your eyes off me from the very moment

you came in, and yet you leave me to wait. And you’d better just call me Leni,” she added

quickly and abruptly, as if there were not a moment to waste. “I’ll be glad to,” said K. “But

as for my queer behavior, Leni, that’s easy to explain. in the first place I had to listen to

these old men jabbering. I couldn’t simply walk out and leave them without any excuse,

and in the second place I’m not in the least a bold young man, but rather shy, to tell the

truth, and you too, Leni, really didn’t look as if you were to be had for the asking.” “It isn’t

that,” said Leni, laying her arm along the back of the seat and looking at K. “But you didn’t

like me at first and you probably don’t like me even now.” “Liking is a feeble word,” said

K. evasively. “Oh!” she said, with a smile, and K.’s remark and that little exclamation gave

her a certain advantage over him. So K. said nothing more f or a while. As he had grown

used to the darkness in the room, lie could now distinguish certain details of the

furnishings. He was particularly struck by a large picture which hung to the right of the

door, and bent forward to see it more clearly. It represented a man in a Judge’s robe; he

was sitting an a high thronelike seat, and the gilding of the seat stood out strongly in the

picture. The strange thing was that the Judge did not seem to be sitting in dignified

composure, for his left arm was braced along the back and the side-arm of his throne,

while his right arm rested on nothing, except for the hand, which clutched the other arm of

the chair; it was as if in a moment he must spring up with a violent and probably wrathful

gesture to make some decisive observation or even to pronounce sentence. The accused

might be imagined as standing on the lowest step leading up to the chair of justice; the top