Page 152 - the-trial

It would of course not be enough, if that was to be done, for
K. to sit in the corridor with his hat under the bench like
the others. Day after day, he himself, or one of the women
or somebody else on his behalf, would have to run after the
officials and force them to sit at their desks and study K.’s
documents instead of looking out on the corridor through
the grating. There could be no let-up in these efforts, every-
thing would need to be organised and supervised, it was
about time that the court came up against a defendant who
knew how to defend and make use of his rights.
But when K. had the confidence to try and do all this the
difficulty of composing the documents was too much for
him. Earlier, just a week or so before, he could only have felt
shame at the thought of being made to write out such docu-
ments himself; it had never entered his head that the task
could also be difficult. He remembered one morning when,
already piled up with work, he suddenly shoved everything
to one side and took a pad of paper on which he sketched
out some of his thoughts on how documents of this sort
should proceed. Perhaps he would offer them to that slow-
witted lawyer, but just then the door of the manager’s office
opened and the deputy-director entered the room with a
loud laugh. K. was very embarrassed, although the depu-
ty-director, of course, was not laughing at K.’s documents,
which he knew nothing about, but at a joke he had just heard
about the stock-exchange, a joke which needed an illustra-
tion if it was to be understood, and now the deputydirector
leant over K.’s desk, took his pencil from his hand, and drew
the illustration on the writing pad that K. had intended for

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