Lovers of Sophia
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underneath which showed a strip of light – “he has turned on his
light and is amusing himself at our expense.” “I’m just coming,”
K. said, rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips,
then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily
at a spring of long-sought fresh water. Final y he kissed her on
the neck, right on the throat, and kept his lips there for a long
time. A slight noise from the Captain’s room made him look up.
“I’m going now,” he said; he wanted to call Fraulein Burstner by
her first name, but he did not know what it was. She nodded
wearily, resigned her hand for him to kiss, half turning away as
if she were unaware of what she did, and went into her room
with down-bent head. Shortly afterwards K. was in his bed. He
fell asleep almost at once, but before doing so he thought for a
little about his behavior, he was pleased with it, yet surprised that
he was not still more pleased; he was seriously concerned for
Fraulein Burstner because of the Captain.119
119 Ibid., 29-30.
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One might expect Fraulein Burstner to have slapped Joseph K.,
or perhaps even cried out for help, upon being assaulted in such a
manner by a virtual stranger. Yet, she does not do so, and it is far
from an assault. Her weary nod and offer of her hand to be kissed
evoke the image of secret lovers hesitantly departing before the light of dawn can reveal their liaison. That she acts “as if she were unaware of what she did”, means that she is acting out of her subconscious
mind, beyond constraints of conceptual judgment. In fact, her
profoundly non-judgmental character may have driven Joseph K. to
make the move to culminate, in such an insane manner, the intimate
exchange that began in her room.
Just as he is about to leave he asks her if she is angry with him (for keeping her up at such a late hour with his reenactment of the Court
proceedings in her room), to which she responds: “No, no, I’m never
angry with anybody.”120 Such a spiritual liberation from the impulse
to erect artificial barriers of judgment and be constrained by them,
is perhaps why K. devours her as an animal would “a spring of long-
sought fresh water.” The reference to an “animal” is to the aspect of
Joseph K. that seeks to escape from his own judgmental advantage-
seeking mentality – a mentality that animals are incapable of by
nature of their inability to engage in conceptual thought. The
archetype of Artemis-Hecate, goddess of wild animals and their
wilderness, is at work here.
There are verbal suggestions and innuendoes of sexual
intercourse in this passage, both in the actual exchange, and in the
exhausted satisfaction of Joseph K. as he returns to his room. He
intended to visit Elsa, the prostitute, after his meeting with Fraulein Burstner, yet the latter takes Elsa’s place and K. goes straight to bed.
However, what is significant is that no such intercourse actual y
takes place. The encounter is one wherein the ever-virgin goddess
of the wild retains her virginity, while manifesting her unbridled
wildness. The eroticism here is total y unpredictable, unusual, even
inhuman. The deepest kiss is on the throat, like that of a vampire
imbibing a person’s life essence by night. Hecate was a “nightwalker”, 120 Ibid., 29.
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a maiden who was nonetheless a “lover and companion of the night,”
who stalked graveyards wandering among corpses like a succubus
thirsting for blood, and striking fear into the heart of mortals with
her Gorgonic aspect.121 She is also connected to the vampire folklore
of the Middle Ages through her association with the herb wolfsbane.122
Medea, who would pray to Hecate while she mixed her poisons, was
said to be “naked, shrieking, and wild-eyed” when she cut roots for
herbal magic.123
Only one thing mars Joseph’s perfect enjoyment of Fraulein
Burstner. He is concerned that the Captain might have heard their
exchange and that, believing her to be an ‘easy’ woman, he might
take advantage of her. It is not unreasonable to assume that this is in fact what motivates his letters of apology and explanation to Fraulein Burstner, and final y his unannounced entry into her room before
the eyes of the Captain. This may be the real reason why she gives
him a cold shoulder, and informs K., via her new roommate, that
an interview of the kind that he wanted would accomplish nothing.
She does not want him to explain away his actions, and she does not
want to be controlled by him. Consequently, he forfeits her legal aid.
In respect to this potential ‘legal advisement’, we should remember
that she has been seen by Frau Grubach in disreputable “outlying”
areas of town with different gentlemen. This could be a suggestion
by Kafka that the Law Offices that she is going to work for are the
very same ones that are to be found in the attics of impoverished
outlying suburbs, where K. travels to be prosecuted.
The dialectic between the desire to possess and an attraction to
free-spiritedness, reemerges in Joseph’s interactions with two even
more promiscuous women who have already been initiated into
the service of the Law: the Usher’s wife and Leni. K. real y meets
the Usher’s wife when he shows up to Court a week from the first
interrogation. He recognizes her as the washerwoman in the
entryway who, he believes, was ‘raped’ in the courtroom while he
121 D’Este,
Hekate, 64.
122 Ibid., 95.
123 Ibid., 100-101.
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was giving his speech. At first, K. is most disturbed that she does
not view the act as a grave violation, even though she is married.
She replies that she is justified in the eyes of all who know her. She claims that even her husband has been forced to accept the situation,
since the young man that she was on the floor with during the end
of Joseph’s speech was a law student training to become a Judge. She
predicts that he will become an official of great power. However, K.
starts to be attracted to her when she expresses interest in his desire to reform the court and offers to run away with him. She only asks
K. to be patient while she momentarily addresses the student, who
has returned and is watching them:
The woman bent over K. and whispered: “Don’t be angry with
me, please don’t think badly of me, I must go to him now, and
he’s a dreadful-looking creature, just see what bandy legs he has.
But I’ll come back in a minute and then I’ll go with you if you’ll
take me with you, I’ll go with you wherever you like, you can do
with me what you please, I’ll be glad if I can only get out of here
for a long time, and I wish it could be forever.” She gave K.’s hand
a last caress, jumped up, and ran to the window. Despite himself
K.’s hand reached out after hers in the empty air. The woman
real y attracted him, and after mature reflection he could find
no valid reason why he should not yield to that
attraction. He
dismissed without difficulty the fleeting suspicion that she might
be trying to lay a trap for him on the instructions of the Court.124
K. does not think of taking the woman away from the student in
order to restore her to the Usher. He wants to possess her for
himself. She has told him that now, not only the student, but also the Examining Magistrate has taken an interest in her. K. daydreams that
“some night the Examining Magistrate…might come to the woman’s
bed and find it empty…because she had gone off with K…belonged
to K. and to K. alone.” He does not mind that she commits adultery,
so long as it is with him, and him alone. He cannot be patient and he begins to storm up and down the room. This elicits the reaction
124 Ibid., 56.
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of the student: “If you’re so impatient, you can go away…” To which
K. responds that it is the student who should go away and leave him
and the Usher’s wife alone. The exchange ultimately ends with K.
attempting to seize the woman’s hand and the student in response
carrying her off after he says to K. “no, no, you don’t get her.” K. is angry that she does not protest more violently, but simply shrugs
her shoulders. Against her explicit request “Don’t be angry with me,
please don’t think badly of me…I’ll come back in a minute…” K.
yel s at her “as for you, I never want to see you again.” He is even
more jealous and enraged at being taken in, when he finds out from
her husband that she was no victim in the affair, rather “she simply
flung herself” at the student. Significantly, the student is not carrying her off for his own pleasure this time, but for that of the Examining
Magistrate.
This is Kafka’s way of suggesting that because K. could not
patiently await her return, and above al , because he wants to possess the woman for himself alone, he loses the chance to be with her.
His interview with her, interrupted by the timed intervention of
the student, is indeed a kind of test set for him by the Court. Had
he been patient and willing to share the woman, the student would
have in all likelihood gone away and allowed the two of them to be
together. Yet once K. betrays his jealousy and possessiveness, the
Usher’s wife does not appear to be carried away against her wil . Her
shrug of the shoulders does not show much protest in it, and she has
a rather bemused expression.
We should note that the man carrying her off is referred to as a
“miserable creature,” the same words that Leni later uses to describe
the tradesman Block. This would suggest that the Usher’s wife is
not only in a dominant position over her husband, but even over
the student who carries her away. She certainly does not want to
be “rescued” or “set free”, as if she were a helpless dame looking to
the arrival of some knight in shining armor. She has metaphorical y
castrated her seethingly jealous husband, and K. is rendered equal y
impotent. Even the student carries her off not for himself, but for
the Examining Magistrate’s pleasure, and by the looks of it, her
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own delight as wel . The emasculation and castration of men is
a major theme in the cult of Artemis. Some have interpreted the
many pendulous ‘breasts’ of the statue of Artemis from the temple
of Ephesus as the testicles of castrated bul s or even of castrated
men.125 In her conflation with the Mother Goddess Cybele or Rhea, who was worshipped at Ephesus before her, barefaced male devotees
did indeed have themselves castrated in honor of her and as a way
to emasculate themselves so as to become fit receptacles of the
overpowering force of the divine feminine; they also grew their hair
long.126 This can be traced back to the practices of archaic shamans,
who wore women’s clothing as part of an effort to attain ‘female’
spiritual abilities.127
In the case of Leni we see a more prominent manifestation
of the emasculation of men who threaten possession. The first
encounter between Joseph K. and Leni mirrors the encounter with
Fraulein Burstner in the darkened entryway of the boardinghouse.
Leni breaks a plate against the wall so that she can call K. out of
the meeting between his Uncle, the Lawyer, and the Chief Clerk of
the Court. She is waiting for him in the darkened hal way, takes his
hand and shuts the door to the room where the meeting is taking
place. Thus this third meeting with the third woman associated
with K., takes place in an entryway or doorway, just as the first two.
K. encountered Fraulein Burstner in the entryway of the boarding
house, and the Usher’s wife as the gatekeeper before the doorway to
the Courtroom. As Propylaia, Hecate was the one before the gate, with statues of her not only at the entrances to cities, temples, and
sanctuaries to other deities, but also outside the front door to many
homes, in a protective porch-like shrine known as a hekataion.128 The first thing we learn about Leni is that she is the Lawyer’s “nurse.” At first, K. simply refers to her as “the nurse.” Artemis was the “child’s 125 Wilde,
The Amazons in Myth and History, 86.
126 Ibid., 97-98.
127 Ibid., 98.
128 D’Este,
Hekate, 21.
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nurse” ( Kourotrophos) and the “nurse of children” ( Paidotrophos).129
Hecate was also the nursemaid goddess who presided over
childbirth.130
At this point, the ‘nurse’ should be even more of a stranger to K.
than Fraulein Burstner was when the two of them had their bizarrely
passionate encounter. Stranger as she might be, there is a similar
whispering in the dark of a secret mutual recognition, as in the case
of Fraulein Burstner:
“Nothing has happened,” she whispered. “I simply flung a plate
against the wall to bring you out.” K. said in his embarrassment:
“I was thinking of you too.” “That’s all the better,” said the nurse.
“Come this way.”131
The ‘nurse’ of the Lawyer guides K. down the dark passageway to
the Lawyer’s moonlit office. Again, we see Kafka employing the
symbolism of Hecate. Her guiding role here cal s to mind Hecate
as Propolos, or “torch bearer”, in the Eleusinian mysteries – with her priestesses bearing twin torches as they lead the initiate
through labyrinthine underground passageways symbolizing the
Underworld.132 Regarding the office being bathed in moonlight, the
hunting bow of Artemis resembles the new moon; she sometimes
wore a lunar crescent as her crown (which, put through her hair,
made her appear to have horns); and she was referred to as
shooting arrows from her “silver bow.”133 In this connection, she was
identified with the Greek moon goddess Selene from the second
century BC onwards,134 and the Roman lunar goddess Diana was in
turn identified with her. In his second century work Philopseudes, Lucian claims that certain witches and sorcerers were able to “draw
129 D’Este,
Artemis, 66.
130 D’Este,
/> Hekate, 169.
131 Kafka,
The Trial, 106.
132 D’Este,
Hekate, 56.
133 D’Este,
Artemis, 97.
134 Ibid., 114.
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down the Moon, and show you Hecate herself, as large as life.”135
When “the Moon was brought down,” it “went through a variety
of transformations.”136 Like Artemis, Hecate was syncretised with
the lunar goddess Selene.137 Hecate could break open the surface of
the Earth, opening passageways to the Underworld – including the
Elysian Fields.138
The office in which K. and Leni have their first encounter, is
bathed and il umined by moonlight alone. Here, Leni tel s K. that
she is annoyed at him for not having come out of the room on his
own accord. She tel s him that given the way he had been gazing at
her since his arrival, she was surprised to have been made to wait so
long for him to come and be with her. K. takes this to mean that she
is offering herself to him, for sex, and says: “I couldn’t simply walk out and leave them without any excuse, and in the second place I’m
not in the least a bold young man, but rather shy, to tell the truth,
and you too, Leni, real y didn’t look as if you were to be had for the asking.”139 Leni’s response begins to draw another key parallel to the exchange with Fraulein Burstner: “It isn’t that,” said Leni, laying her arm along the back of the seat and looking at K. “But you didn’t like
me at first and you probably don’t like me even now.”140 At the end
of Leni’s explanation of the Examining Magistrate’s portrait, Kafka
adds:
“But I’m a vain person, too, and very much upset that you don’t
like me in the least.” To this last statement K. replied merely by
putting his arm around her and drawing her to him; she leaned
her head against his shoulder in silence…seizing the hand with
which K. held her [she began] to play with his fingers.141
135 D’Este,
Hekate, 147.
136 Ibid., 148.
137 Ibid., 175.
138 Ibid., 151.
139 Kafka,
The Trial, 107.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid., 108.
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Whether Joseph K. realizes it or not, what Leni is saying, especial y
in the first comment beginning with “It isn’t that…” is that she was