The Trial

by Franz Kafka

But it was equally possible he hadn’t been listening at all, for he had pressed his hand firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers.

I’ve arranged for three of your colleagues here to be placed at your disposal.” “What?” K. cried out, and stared at the three in amazement. These so uncharacteristically anemic young men, whom he recalled only as a group by the photographs, were indeed clerks from his bank, not colleagues, that would be an overstatement, and indicated a gap in the inspector’s omniscience, but they were certainly lower-level clerks from the bank.

this is hilariojs

But now you must give me your hand; an agreement like this has to be confirmed by shaking hands.”

Everything that happens is so bizarre

“Don’t take it so hard, Herr K.,” she said with tears in her voice, forgetting of course to shake his hand. “I didn’t think I was taking it hard,” K. said, suddenly weary, and realizing how worthless this woman’s assent was.

????

“I’m coming,” said K., rushed out, seized her, kissed her on the mouth, then all over her face, like a thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring it has found at last. Then he kissed her on the neck, right at her throat, and left his lips there for a long time.

Whagt the fjck

He had taken the additional step of bringing to the young lady’s room three minor employees from my bank, who spent their time fingering photographs, the property of the lady, and mixing them all up.

“I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact,” said the examining magistrate, “that you have today deprived yourself—although you can’t yet have realized it—of the advantage that an interrogation offers to the arrested man in each case.”

“Oh, I see,” said K. and nodded, “they’re probably law books, and it’s in the nature of this judicial system that one is condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.”

“It wasn’t to your disadvantage to have your speech interrupted. You were judged quite unfavorably afterwards.”

Of course I heard only part of it, since I missed the beginning and at the end I was on the floor with the student.”

K. opened the book on top, and an indecent picture was revealed.

K. didn’t leaf through any further, but simply opened to the frontispiece of the second book, a novel entitled The Torments Grete Suffered at the Hands of Her Husband Hans.

im laughing

“she’s offering herself to me; she’s depraved,

I wojld offer mhsemf to you k. On your thirtieth birthday

I have to go to him now, to this horrible man, just look at his bandy legs.

The student carried her off to the examining magistrate.” “You see,” said the court usher, “they’re always taking her away from me. Today is Sunday, and I have no official duties, but just to get me out of the way, they send me off with a message that’s meaningless anyway.

“And now it’s getting worse: up to this point he’s just carried her off for himself, but now, as I’ve been expecting for some time of course, he’s carrying her to the examining magistrate as well.”

“there’s nothing unusual about that here, almost everyone has an attack like this the first time. You are here for the first time? Well, you see then, it’s nothing at all unusual.

“You see,” he said to the young woman, “I hit the nail on the head. It’s only here that the gentleman feels unwell, not in general.”

“So it does,” the man said with an annoyed air, “but I don’t understand, Fräulein, why you’re telling this gentleman all our intimate secrets, or more accurately, forcing them upon him, since he has no interest in knowing them. Just look at him sitting there, obviously immersed in his own affairs.”

tread without matching it, for he was practically carried

“Sir! We’re to be flogged because you complained about us to the examining magistrate.”

I was tempted by your fine undergarments, guards are forbidden to act that way of course, it was wrong, but it’s a tradition that the undergarments belong to the guards, it’s always been that way, believe me; and you can see why, what difference do such things make to a person unlucky enough to be arrested.

Lmaoaoaoaooxxxao

Look how overweight he is—the first blows of the rod will be lost in fat.—Do you know how he got so fat? He’s in the habit of eating the breakfast of anyone who’s arrested.