and groaning, for he was beginning to be exhausted. The woman waved her hand to K. as
he stood below, and shrugged her shoulders to suggest that she was not to blame for this
abduction, but very little regret could be read into that dumb show. K. looked at her
expressionlessly, as if she were a stranger, he was resolved not to betray to her either that
he was disappointed or even that he could easily get over any disappointment he felt.
The two had already vanished, yet K. still stood in the doorway. He was forced to the
conclusion that the woman not only had betrayed him, but also had lied in saying that she
was being carried to the Examining Magistrate. The Examining Magistrate surely could
not be sitting waiting in a garret. The little wooden stairway did not reveal anything, no
matter how long one regarded it. But K. noticed a small card pinned up beside it, and
crossing over he read in childish, unpracticed handwriting: “Law Court Offices upstairs.”
So the Law Court offices were up in the attics of this tenement? That was not an
arrangement likely to inspire much respect, and for an accused man it was reassuring to
reckon how little money this Court could have at its disposal when it housed its offices in a
part of the building where the tenants, who themselves belonged to the poorest of the poor,
flung their useless lumber. Though, of course, the possibility was not to be ignored that the
money was abundant enough, but that the officials pocketed it before it could be used for
the purposes of justice. To judge from K.’s experience hitherto, that was indeed extremely
probable, yet if it were so, such disreputable practices, while certainly humiliating to an accused man, suggested more hope for him than a merely pauperized condition of the Law
Courts. Now K. could understand too why in the beginning they had been ashamed to
summon him into their attics and had chosen instead to molest him in his lodgings. And
how well-off K. was compared with the Magistrate, who had to sit in a garret, while K. had
a large room in the Bank with a waiting-room attached to it and could watch the busy life
of the city through his enormous plate-glass window. True, he drew no secondary income
from bribes or peculation and could not order his attendant to pick up a woman and carry
her to his room. But K. was perfectly willing to renounce these advantages, at least in this
life.
K. was still standing beside the card when a man came up from below, looked into the
room through the open door, from which he could also see the courtroom, and then asked
K. if he had seen a woman about anywhere. “You are the usher, aren’t you?” asked K.
“Yes,” said the man. “Oh, you’re the defendant K., now I recognize you, you’re welcome.”
And he held out his hand to K., who had not expected that. “But no sitting was announced
for today,” the usher went on, as K. remained silent. “I know,” said K., gazing at the man’s
civilian clothes, which displayed on the jacket, as the sole emblem of his office, two gilt
buttons in addition to the ordinary ones, gilt buttons that looked as if they had been
stripped from an old army coat. “I was speaking to your wife a moment ago. She’s not here
now. The student has carried her up to the Examining Magistrate.” “There you are,” said
the usher, “they’re always carrying her away from me. Today is Sunday too, I’m not
supposed to do any work, but simply to get me away from the place they sent me out on a
useless errand. And they took care not to send me too far away, so that I had some hopes
of being able to get back in time if I hurried. And there was I running as fast as I could,
shouting the message through the half-open door of the office I was sent to, nearly
breathless so that they could hardly make me out, and back again at top speed, and yet the