THE FLOGGER

A few evenings later, as K. passed through the corridor that led from his office to the main staircase—he was almost the last to leave that night, only two assistants in shipping were still at work in the small circle of light from a single bulb—he heard the sound of groans behind a door that he had always assumed led to a mere junk room, though he had never seen it himself. He stopped in amazement and listened again to see if he might not be mistaken—it was quiet for a little while, but then the groans came again.—At first, feeling he might need a witness, he was about to call one of the assistants, but then he was seized by such uncontrollable curiosity that he practically tore the door open. It was, as he had suspected, a junk room. Old obsolete printed forms and overturned empty ceramic ink bottles lay beyond the threshold. In the little room itself, however, stood three men, stooping beneath the low ceiling. A candle stuck on a shelf provided light. “What’s going on here?” K. blurted out in his excitement, but not loudly. One man, who was apparently in charge of the others and drew K.’s attention first, was got up in some sort of dark leather garment that left his neck and upper chest, as well as his entire arms, bare. He didn’t reply. But the other two cried out: “Sir! We’re to be flogged because you complained about us to the examining magistrate.” And only then did K. recognize that it was indeed the guards Franz and Willem, and that the third man held a rod in his hand to flog them with. “Well now,” said K. staring at them, “I didn’t complain, I just told them what went on in my lodgings. And your behavior wasn’t exactly impeccable.” “Sir,” said Willem, while Franz apparently tried to seek safety behind him from the third man, “if you knew how poorly we’re paid, you’d judge us more kindly. I have a family to feed and Franz here wants to get married, you try to make money however you can, just working isn’t enough, no matter how hard you try, 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. If he makes it public, of course, then punishment must follow.” “I didn’t know any of that, and I certainly didn’t demand your punishment, it was a matter of principle.” “Franz,” Willem turned to the other guard, “didn’t I tell you the gentleman didn’t demand our punishment? Now, as you hear, he didn’t even realize we’d have to be punished.” “Don’t be swayed by that sort of talk,” the third man said to K., “their punishment is as just as it is inevitable.” “Don’t listen to him,” said Willem, interrupting himself only to lift a hand, across which he had received a blow of the rod, quickly to his mouth, “we’re only being punished because you reported us. Otherwise nothing would have happened, even if they had found out what we had done. Do you call that justice? Both of us have proved ourselves as guards over a long period of time, especially me—you have to admit we did a good job from the authorities’ point of view—we had prospects for advancement and would soon have been floggers ourselves, like him, who was simply fortunate enough never to be reported by anyone, for such reports are really quite rare. And now everything is lost, sir, our careers are finished, we’ll have to work at a much lower level than a guard, and undergo this terribly painful flogging as well.” “Can a rod cause that much pain?” K. asked, and examined the rod, which the flogger swung before him. “We have to strip completely,” said Willem. “Oh, I see,” said K., looking more closely at the flogger, who had a sailor’s tan and a savage, ruddy face. “Is there any possibility of sparing these two a flogging?” he asked him. “No,” said the flogger, and shook his head with a smile. “Strip,” he ordered the guards. And to K. he said: “You mustn’t believe everything they say. They’re already a bit weak in the head because they’re so afraid of the flogging. What this one was saying, for example”—he pointed at Willem—“about his prospective career is totally ridiculous. 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. Didn’t he eat yours as well? Well, what did I tell you? But a man with a belly like that can never become a flogger, it’s totally out of the question.” “There are floggers like me,” insisted Willem, who was just undoing his belt. “No!” said the flogger, stroking him across the neck with the rod in a way that made him twitch, “you shouldn’t be listening, you should be stripping.” “I’ll reward you well if you’ll let them go,” said K., taking out his wallet without looking at the flogger again, such matters being best conducted by both parties with lowered eyes. “Then you’ll probably report me too,” said the flogger, “and earn me a flogging as well. No thanks!” “Be reasonable,” said K., “if I’d wanted to have these two punished, I wouldn’t be trying to buy them off. I could simply shut the door, close my eyes and ears, and head home. But I’m not doing that, instead I’m serious about getting them off; if I’d suspected they’d be punished, or even known they faced possible punishment, I would never have mentioned their names. Because I don’t even consider them guilty; it’s the organization that’s guilty, it’s the high officials who are guilty.” “That’s right,” cried the guards, and immediately received a blow across their now bare backs. “If you had a high judge here beneath your rod,” said K., pressing down the rod, which was about to rise again as he spoke, “I really wouldn’t stop you from flailing away; on the contrary, I’d pay you extra, to strengthen you in your good work.” “I believe what you say,” said the flogger, “but I can’t be bribed. I’ve been hired to flog, and flog I will.” The guard Franz, who had kept somewhat in the background up to that point, perhaps in hope of a favorable outcome based on K.’s intervention, now stepped to the door dressed only in his trousers, fell to his knees, and clinging to K.’s arm whispered: “If you can’t manage to get us both off, please try to at least save me. Willem is older than me, less sensitive in every way, and he already received a minor flogging once a few years ago, but I’ve never been disgraced that way, and was only following the lead of Willem, who is my mentor in all things good and bad. My poor bride is waiting for me below in front of the bank; I’m so terribly ashamed.” He dried his tearstained face on K.’s jacket. “I’m not waiting any longer,” said the flogger, seized the rod with both hands, and laid into Franz, while Willem cowered in a corner and peeked over without daring to turn his head. The scream that Franz expelled rose steady and unchanging, scarcely human, as if it came from some tortured instrument; the whole corridor rang with it, the entire building would hear. “Don’t scream,” cried K., unable to stop himself, and as he looked intently in the direction from which the assistants would be coming, he pushed Franz, not hard, but hard enough that the witless man fell to the floor and clawed convulsively about with his hands; he didn’t escape the blows, however, the rod found him on the floor as well, as he writhed beneath it, its tip swung up and down steadily. And in the distance an assistant had already appeared, and a few steps behind him a second one. K. slammed the door quickly, stepped up to a nearby courtyard window, and opened it. The screams had ceased completely. To keep the assistants from coming nearer, he called out: “It’s me.” “Good evening, sir,” the call came back. “Has anything happened?” “No, no,” K. replied, “it’s just a dog howling in the courtyard.” When the assistants still didn’t stir, he added: “You can go on with your work.” And to avoid getting involved in a conversation with them, he leaned out the window. When he looked down the corridor again a while later, they were gone. But now K. remained at the window; he didn’t dare go into the junk room, and he didn’t want to go home either. The small, rectangular courtyard he looked down upon was lined with offices; all the windows were dark by now, only the highest ones catching a reflection of the moon. K. peered down intently, trying to penetrate the darkness of a corner of the courtyard where several pushcarts had been shoved together. It tormented him that he had been unable to prevent the flogging, but it wasn’t his fault; if Franz hadn’t screamed—of course it must have hurt terribly, but at critical moments you have to control yourself—if he hadn’t screamed, K. could very probably have still found some way to convince the flogger. If the entire lowest level of the bureaucracy was made up of riff-raff, why should the flogger, who had the most inhuman job of all, be an exception; K. had also taken close note of the way his eyes gleamed at the sight of the bank note; he had obviously taken the flogging so seriously solely to raise the amount of the bribe. And K. wouldn’t have been stingy, he really wanted to get the guards off; having already begun to fight corruption in the judicial system, it was only natural to take this approach as well. But the moment Franz started screaming, it was all over of course. K. couldn’t permit the assistants, and perhaps all sorts of other people, to arrive and catch him negotiating with this bunch in the junk room. No one could really demand such a sacrifice of him. If he had intended one, it would almost have been simpler for K. to strip and offer himself to the flogger in place of the guards. The flogger would hardly have accepted this substitution, however, since it would have been a grave dereliction of duty with nothing to gain, and no doubt a double dereliction, since surely no employee of the court had the right to harm him while his case was still in progress. Of course there might be special instructions in this respect as well. In any case, K. could not have done otherwise than slam the door, even though he had by no means escaped all danger by doing so even now. That he had shoved Franz at the end was unfortunate, and could only be excused by his state of agitation.

In the distance he heard the steps of the assistants; in order not to attract their attention, he closed the window and walked toward the main staircase. He stopped for a moment at the door of the junk room and listened. Silence reigned. The man might have beaten the guards to death; after all, they were completely in his power. K. reached toward the door handle, but then pulled back his hand. He couldn’t help anyone now, and the assistants would be coming at any moment; he vowed to bring the subject up again, however, and insofar as it was within his power, to punish appropriately those who were truly guilty, the high officials, not one of whom had yet dared to show himself to him. As he descended the front steps of the bank, he took careful note of all the passersby, but there was no young woman in sight, even in the distance, who might have been waiting for someone. Franz’s claim that his bride was waiting for him thus proved to be a lie, understandable of course, intended solely to awaken greater pity.

The next day K. still couldn’t get the guards off his mind; he had difficulty concentrating on his work, and in order to finish up he had to stay at the office slightly longer than he had the day before. As he passed by the junk room again on his way home, he opened the door as if by habit. What he saw, in place of the expected darkness, bewildered him completely. Everything was unchanged, just as he had found it the previous evening when he opened the door. The printed forms and ink bottles just beyond the threshold, the flogger with the rod, the guards, still completely clothed, the candle on the shelf, and the guards began to wail, crying out: “Sir!” K. slammed the door shut at once and pounded his fists against it, as if to close it more tightly. Almost in tears, he ran to the assistants, who were working quietly at the copying press and paused in their work with astonishment. “Clear out that junk room once and for all,” he cried. “We’re drowning in filth.” The assistants said they would be happy to do it the next day, and K. nodded; he couldn’t force them to do it this late in the evening, as he had at first intended. He sat down for a moment to keep the assistants around a while longer, shuffled through a few copies, trying to give the impression that he was checking them over, and then, since he realized the assistants wouldn’t dare leave with him, he headed for home, tired and with his mind a blank.