The Land Surveyor (Chapters 1–3)

K. arrived late in the evening. Deep snow lay over the village. Of the castle hill nothing could be seen; fog and darkness hid it, and not the faintest gleam of light showed where the great castle stood. For a long time K. stood on the wooden bridge that leads from the high road into the village, looking up into what seemed to be emptiness.

Then he went to look for a bed. At the inn by the bridge the landlord, surprised and uneasy, let him sleep on a straw sack in the taproom. He had hardly fallen asleep when he was woken. A young man, dressed like a townsman, with an actor's face, narrow eyes and heavy eyebrows, was standing over him with the landlord. He apologised for waking him; he was the son of the castle steward; and he explained that this village belonged to the castle, and whoever lived or spent the night here was, in a sense, living or spending the night in the castle. No one was allowed to do so without the Count's permission. Did K. have such a permit?

K. said he was the land surveyor whom the Count had sent for. His assistants were following tomorrow, with his instruments. The young man telephoned the castle. A voice answered: there was no record of any land surveyor. The young man turned on K. with contempt — a vagrant, a liar! But then the telephone rang again: a correction. Yes, a land surveyor had been appointed. K. listened. So the castle had made him its land surveyor. That was unfavourable for him, he thought, in one way, for it showed that the castle knew everything about him and had weighed up the forces, and accepted the struggle with a smile. And favourable in another way: for it showed that they underestimated him, and that he would have more freedom than he had dared to hope.

In the morning he saw the castle, sharply outlined in the clear air above the snow. It was no knight's fortress of the old kind, and no grand new palace either: just a wide straggle of buildings, mostly low, a few with a second storey, all pressed close together, so that a stranger who did not know might have taken it for a small town. It had a single tower, plain and round, its little windows flashing in the sunlight with a glint that seemed half mad, and along its top ran a crenellation drawn as shakily as a child would draw it against the sky. It reminded K. of the church tower of his own home town, which was surer of itself.

He set off to walk up to it. But the main street of the village did not lead to the castle hill; it led only near it, and then, as if on purpose, turned off, and though it did not lead away from the castle, it did not come any closer either. He grew tired in the snow. He stopped at a cottage, where a family was bathing in a great tub in clouds of steam, and a young woman sat in a corner with a baby, pale and tired, who said that she was from the castle. A carter, Gerstäcker, drove him back to the inn in a sledge. It was already growing dark, though it was hardly past noon.

On the way he met the village schoolmaster, a young, small, narrow-shouldered man, leading a crowd of children. The teacher asked whether he was looking at the castle, and whether he did not care for it; K., puzzled, wondered why he should not. When K. asked whether he knew the Count, the teacher said no, and turned away; and when K. pressed him, he answered in French, reminding him that innocent children were present. Between the peasants and the castle, he remarked later, there was little difference.

At the inn two young men were waiting for him: his assistants, they said, Arthur and Jeremias. They were so alike that K. could not tell them apart; he called them both Arthur. They knew nothing of surveying and had no instruments. They were cheerful, foolish, and always in the way. K. understood that they had been sent from the castle; and that they were not his old assistants at all.

K. wanted to know when he could go to the castle. He told the assistants to telephone and ask; then he took the receiver himself. Out of it came a murmur he had never heard on any telephone: something like a crowd of children's voices, or rather like singing from an immense distance, all running together into one high, insistent note that seemed to want to go right through him. He gave himself out as the assistant of the land surveyor, and asked when his master could come to the castle. "Never," was the answer. K. hung up.

Then came a messenger, Barnabas, a young man in a tight, silky white suit, with a face open and bright; he brought a letter from the castle: "Dear Sir, You have, as you are aware, been accepted into the service of the Count. Your immediate superior is the village mayor." It was signed by the head of Department Ten: Klamm. K. read it many times. It was contradictory; it gave him freedom and at the same time put him under the lowest official in the village; it addressed him as an employee and also as a free man.

K. went out with Barnabas into the dark, holding his arm, believing that he was going to the castle. He was led instead, after a long walk through the snow, to Barnabas's own home: a poor cottage, with two sisters, Olga and Amalia, and two old, broken parents. K. felt cheated. But he went with Olga to the Herrenhof, the Gentlemen's Inn, where the officials from the castle stayed when they came down to the village; Klamm was there that evening.

The barmaid at the Herrenhof was a small, plain, fair girl with sad eyes and a thin body: Frieda. She looked at K. with a look of extraordinary superiority. She was, she told him, Klamm's mistress. She let him look through a peephole in the door, and K. saw Klamm sitting in the room beyond: a fat, heavy man of medium height, with a black moustache, a pince-nez, a cigar, and a glass of beer before him; he did not move. K. could not take his eyes off him.

That night, when the taproom had been cleared of the peasants, Frieda hid K. under the bar; and there, on the floor among the puddles of beer and the rubbish, they lay in each other's arms. Hours passed in which they shared one breath and one heartbeat, and all that while K. felt that he was losing his way — that he had strayed into a foreign land, farther than anyone had ever strayed, a land so alien that even its air held nothing of the air of home. Then a voice called from Klamm's room, deep, commanding, indifferent: "Frieda." Frieda, lying beside K., knocked on the door with her fist and cried, "I'm with the land surveyor! I'm with the land surveyor!" And then it was quiet. She had given up Klamm for him. In the morning they went together to the Bridge Inn, and the two assistants, who had spent the night sitting on the bar watching, came after them.