The Man Without Charges
On the morning he turned thirty, Josef K. awoke to find two strangers in his room. They stood by his bed like furniture that had always been there. One of them straightened his cuffs and announced, with the weariness of a man delivering a routine order,“You are under arrest.”
“For what?” Josef asked.
The man smiled as if Josef had made a quaint joke. “That will become clear.”
No handcuffs were produced. No threats were made. They allowed him to dress, even suggested he go to work. But somewhere in the near future, they said, the matter would be addressed.
The “matter” proved elusive. Weeks later, he was summoned—not to a court in the sense he knew, but to a dusty attic filled with mismatched chairs and sweating clerks. A man in a black robe sat at the far end, leafing through papers that seemed to have no relation to Josef at all.
“You have been heard,” the judge declared after Josef tried to protest. The statement sounded less like a reassurance than a closing door.
In the months that followed, Josef wandered through a world that seemed to have tilted slightly off balance. At the bank, clients whispered his name as if it had entered the news. In cafés, strangers nodded to him with pity or knowing amusement. A painter told him that the court liked to keep cases alive “so the accused remain useful.”
Every path to clarity dissolved into more corridors—narrow staircases leading to rooms of typists, rooms of typists leading to doors marked “Do Not Disturb,” behind which low voices murmured.
When the end came, it was without warning. Two men appeared one evening, dressed exactly like the first pair he had met. They took him by the arms, neither gently nor cruelly, and walked him through streets that had never seemed so silent.
In an abandoned lot, they stopped. One man looked at the other as if for permission, then turned to Josef. “Do you have anything to say?”
Josef thought for a long time, but found only a hollow where words should have been.
They did what they had come to do.
And as he fell, it occurred to him—not that the trial had been unjust, but that it had never truly begun.