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lawyer, and he submitted various documents to the court
too …” “Various documents?” asked K. “Yes, that’s right,”
said the businessman. “That’s very important for me,” said
K., “in my case he’s still working on the first set of docu-
ments. He still hasn’t done anything. I see now that he’s
been neglecting me quite disgracefully.” “There can be lots
of good reasons why the first documents still aren’t ready,”
said the businessman, “and anyway, it turned out later on
that the ones he submitted for me were entirely worthless. I
even read one of them myself, one of the officials at the court
was very helpful. It was very learned, but it didn’t actually
say anything. Most of all, there was lots of Latin, which I
can’t understand, then pages and pages of general appeals
to the court, then lots of flattery for particular officials, they
weren’t named, these officials, but anyone familiar with the
court must have been able to guess who they were, then
there was self-praise by the lawyer where he humiliated
himself to the court in a way that was downright dog-like,
and then endless investigations of cases from the past which
were supposed to be similar to mine. Although, as far as I
was able to follow them, these investigations had been car-
ried out very carefully. Now, I don’t mean to criticise the
lawyer’s work with all of this, and the document I read was
only one of many, but even so, and this is something I will
say, at that time I couldn’t see any progress in my trial at
all.” “And what sort of progress had you been hoping for?”
asked K. “That’s a very sensible question,” said the business-
man with a smile, “it’s only very rare that you see any
progress in these proceedings at all. But I didn’t know that

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