Page 44 - the-trial

of the yard leading into a second yard. It irritated him that
he had not been given more precise directions to the room,
it meant they were either being especially neglectful with
him or especially indifferent, and he decided to make that
clear to them very loudly and very unambiguously. In the
end he decided to climb up the stairs, his thoughts playing
on something that he remembered the policeman, Willem,
saying to him; that the court is attracted by the guilt, from
which it followed that the courtroom must be on the stair-
way that K. selected by chance.
As he went up he disturbed a large group of children play-
ing on the stairs who looked at him as he stepped through
their rows. “Next time I come here,” he said to himself, “I
must either bring sweets with me make them like me or a
stick to hit them with.” Just before he reached the first land-
ing he even had to wait a little while until a ball had finished
its movement, two small lads with sly faces like grown-up
scoundrels held him by his trouser-legs until it had; if he
were to shake them off he would have to hurt them, and he
was afraid of what noise they would make by shouting.
On the first floor, his search began for real. He still felt
unable to ask for the investigating committee, and so he
invented a joiner called Lanz that name occurred to him be-
cause the captain, Mrs. Grubach’s nephew, was called Lanz
so that he could ask at every flat whether Lanz the joiner
lived there and thus obtain a chance to look into the rooms.
It turned out, though, that that was mostly possible with-
out further ado, as almost all the doors were left open and
the children ran in and out. Most of them were small, one-