Page 12 - the-trial

from the policemen’s point of view, that they had made him
go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten
different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though,
he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point
of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those
two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his
breakfast, perhaps? It would have been so pointless to kill
himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness
would have made him unable. Maybe, if the policemen had
not been so obviously limited in their mental abilities, it
could have been supposed that they had come to the same
conclusion and saw no danger in leaving him alone because
of it. They could watch now, if they wanted, and see how he
went over to the cupboard in the wall where he kept a bottle
of good schnapps, how he first emptied a glass of it in place
of his breakfast and how he then took a second glassful in
order to give himself courage, the last one just as a precau-
tion for the unlikely chance it would be needed.
Then he was so startled by a shout to him from the other
room that he struck his teeth against the glass. “The super-
visor wants to see you!” a voice said. It was only the shout
that startled him, this curt, abrupt, military shout, that he
would not have expected from the policeman called Franz.
In itself, he found the order very welcome. “At last!” he
called back, locked the cupboard and, without delay, hur-
ried into the next room. The two policemen were standing
there and chased him back into his bedroom as if that were
a matter of course. “What d’you think you’re doing?” they
cried. “Think you’re going to see the supervisor dressed in

11