know quite well that in these matters opinions differ so much that the confusion is
impenetrable. This Judge, for instance, assumes that the proceedings begin at one point,
and I assume that they begin at another point. A difference of opinion, nothing more. At a
certain stage of the proceedings there is an old tradition that a bell must be rung.
According to the Judge, that marks the beginning of the case, I can’t tell you now all the
arguments against him, you wouldn’t understand them, let it be sufficient for you that there
are many arguments against his view.” In embarrassment Block sat plucking at the hair of
the skin rug lying before the bed; his terror of the Judge’s utterance was so great that it
ousted for a while his subjection to the lawyer and he was thinking only of himself, turning
the Judge’s words round and surveying them from all sides. “Block,” said Leni in a tone of
warning, catching him by the collar and jerking him upward a little. “Leave the rug alone
and listen to the lawyer.”
This chapter was never completed. Chapter 9
In the Cathedral
AN ITALIAN colleague, who was on his first visit to the town and was one of the Bank’s
most influential clients, was to be taken in charge by K. and shown some of the town’s art
treasures and monuments. It was a commission that K. would once have felt to be an
honor, but at the present juncture, now that all his energies were needed even to retain his
prestige in the Bank, he accepted it reluctantly. Every hour that he spent away from the
Bank was a trial to him; true, he was by no means able to make the best use of his office
hours as once he had done, he wasted much time in the merest pretense of doing real work,
but that only made made him worry the more when he was not at his desk. In his mind he
saw the Assistant Manager, who had always spied upon him, prowling every now and then
into his office, sitting down at his desk, running through his papers, receiving clients who
had become almost old friends of K.’s in the course of many years, and luring them away
from him, perhaps even discovering mistakes that he had made, for K. now saw himself
continually threatened by mistakes intruding into his work from all sides which he was no
longer able to circumvent. Consequently if he were charged with a mission, however
honorable, which involved his leaving the office on business or even taking a short journey
— and missions of that kind by some chance had recently come his way fairly often — then
he could not help suspecting that there was a plot to get him out of the way while his work
was investigated, or at least that he was considered far from indispensable in the office.
Most of these missions he could easily have refused. Yet he did not dare do so, since, if
there were even the smallest ground for his suspicions, a refusal to go would only have
been taken as an admission of fear. For that reason he accepted every one of them with
apparent equanimity, and on one occasion when he was expected to take an exhausting two
days’ journey he even said nothing about a severe chill he had, to avoid the risk of having
the prevailing wet autumnal weather advanced as an excuse for his not going. When he
came back from this journey with a racking headache, he discovered that he had been
selected to act as escort next day for the Italian visitor. The temptation to refuse, for this
once, was very great, especially since the charge laid upon him was not strictly a matter of
business; still, it was a social duty toward a colleague and doubtless important enough,
only it was of no importance to himself, knowing, as he did, that nothing could save him
except work well done, in default of which it would not be of the slightest use to him in the
unlikely event that the Italian were to find him the most enchanting companion; he shrank