The peasants of the Gentleman's Inn are described as looking different from those at the Bridge Inn. These are the Gentleman's servants and as it turns out for that day, Klamm's servants. Immediately, as soon as they enter the tap room, K. steers Olga away from one of these peasants who approaches her. Later we will see that these servants do what they want with Olga, Barnabas's sister, who is powerless to stop them.

Frieda is introduced serving beer in the tap room: “Frieda. A nondescript little blonde with sad features, thin cheeks, and a surprising gaze, a gaze of exceptional superiority.” We must always note these descriptions, as I said, because they are few and far between and are not always consistent with each other.

“When this gaze descended on K., it seemed to him to be a gaze that had already decided matters concerning him.” From the beginning, there is something sinister about Frieda and we are led to suspect that she is in collusion with the assistants and that she is possibly a spy sent by Klamm or the castle.

Frieda is described as having “uncommonly soft hands.” She says to K that she “worked her way up” (as K later puts it) from being a stable girl to a barmaid at the Gentleman's Inn. A stable girl would have very rough hands, of course. The fact that her hands are “uncommonly” soft makes us wonder if she might be lying about having been a stable maid even two years before.

1

A comical scene follows when Frieda asks K if he wants to see Klamm. He says yes, of course, and she then directs him to a peephole through which he can look, literally, at Klamm in his office. K looks through the peephole and “sees” Klamm. This is the only time we get any description of Klamm: “At a desk in the center on a comfortable arm-chair sat Mr. Klamm, harshly illuminated by a lightbulb hanging in front of him. A medium-sized, fat, ponderous gentleman. His face was still smooth, but his cheeks had begun to sag a little under the weight of the years. His black mustache stuck out on the sides. A precariously balanced pince-nez, which reflected the light, concealed his eyes. Had Mr. Klamm been sitting directly facing the desk, K. would have seen only his profile, but since Klamm was turned straight toward him, he had a full view of his face. Klamm had put his left elbow on the desk and his right hand, which held a Virginia cigar, was resting on his knee. On the desk was a beer glass; since the desk had a high rim, K. could not see clearly whether there were any documents lying there, but to him the desk seemed empty.”

K doesn't notice that Klamm is sleeping, but later we find out that Klamm was in fact sleeping when K "saw" (looked at) him through the peephole. This adds to the comical effect, later. Frieda informs K that she is Klamm's mistress.

“Then I consider you a very respectable person."
"You're not alone in that," Frieda said affably, though without returning his smile.”

K asks her, “Have you ever been at the Castle?" But this didn't work, for she responded: "No, but isn't it sufficient that I'm here in the taproom?”

K remarks, with another reversal, after Frieda says that she began as a stable maid at the Bridge Inn, “Her hands were indeed small and delicate, but they could also he called weak and expressionless.”

2

K. says to Frieda to encourage her to reveal more about herself: "you have your secrets and aren't about to tell them to someone you've only known for half an hour, someone who still hasn't even had a chance to tell you about his situation."

But we are then told “This remark proved inopportune, it was as if he had awakened Frieda from a slumber favorable to him, she took from the leather bag hanging from her belt a small wooden stick, stopped the peephole with it, and said to K., clearly checking herself so that he wouldn't notice the change in her attitude, "As for you, I know all about you, you're the surveyor.”

It appears that Frieda allows herself and others to “see” Klamm by showing the peephole and then stopping it with a stick when she doesn't want them to see Klamm. In that way, she functions as a kind of comical doorman.

Again, it seems as if everyone already knows that K is “the surveyor.” It is as if the entire village is already set up to defend itself and the Castle against K.

Now comes the extraordinary seduction scene:

“Miss Frieda, your eyes speak not so much of the past struggle as of that to come. But the world puts up great resistance, the higher the goals, the greater the resistance, and it's no disgrace to secure help, even that of a little man without influence who is struggling just as much. Perhaps we could get together sometime for a quiet talk, without all these eyes staring at us."

"I don't know what you want," she said, and her voice now seemed to echo not the victories of her life but its infinite disappointments, "perhaps you want to take me from Klamm. Good heavens!" she said, clapping her hands. "You've seen through me,"

K. said, as if wearied by such great mistrust, "that precisely was my most secret goal. You were supposed to leave Klamm and become my mistress.”

Again we have the feeling that K has planned his attack on the Castle and that taking Frieda from Klamm is one of the moves in the chess game which is his attack on the Castle and that Frieda and the Castle have anticipated this move and have prepared a defense against it. In fact, we feel the distinct possibility that Frieda is simply a pawn in the chess game that the Castle and K are playing with each other, and that Frieda knows it.

K continues, “now of course I can go. Olga!" cried K., "we're going home." Obediently Olga slid from the barrel, but she couldn't immediately free herself from the friends encircling her.”

3

Olga is clearly of a lower rank than Frieda and she can't keep Klamm's servants away from her and, by implication, from doing what they want with her.

At that, Frieda said softly, with a menacing glance at K.: "When can I speak with you?"

Frieda's glance is menacing, presumably because she knows that it is her task, given by the Castle, to become K's mistress and that Olga might stand in the way.

K. asks Frieda, "Can I spend the night here?"

For reasons that we can't understand K does not want to stay with the Barnabas family and holds them in great contempt. Frieda shares this contempt, apparently.

"Yes," said Frieda.

"Can I stay here now?"

"Go with Olga, so I can get rid of these people here. And then after a while you can come back."

"Fine," said K., and he waited impatiently for Olga. But the peasants wouldn't let her go, they had made up a dance with Olga in the middle, and during this round dance one of them, always at a cry from the whole group, went up to Olga, grasped her firmly by the hips, and whirled her about several times, the round went ever faster, their hungrily rattling shouts gradually merged into a single sound, Olga, who had tried earlier to break out of the circle with a smile, was now simply reeling about from one to the other, with her hair undone.”

Olga is depicted as a kind of prostitute of necessity, not being able to protect herself from the Gentlemen's servants and by implication from the gentlemen either. It is another indication of the power of the Castle. We can assume that Frieda is also enthralled by its power.

Later, we learn that Olga's sister Amalia has refused the sexual advances of a gentleman named Sordini and this refusal has had grave consequences for her family, the Barnabas family. The power of the Castle overshadows everything and certainly sexual love and the choice of sexual partners.

4

"That's the sort of people they send me," said Frieda, biting her thin lips in anger.

"Who are they?" asked K.

"Klamm's servants," said Frieda, "he always brings these people with him, their presence shatters me.”

Frieda is also oppressed and even “shattered” by the power of Klamm, and by extension, by the power of the Castle and she communicates this to K, seemingly without guile.

“they're the most despicable and repulsive creatures I know, and yet it's their beer glasses I have to fill. How often have I asked Klamm to leave them at home; even if I have to put up with the other gentlemen's servants, he, at least, could show some consideration, but it's useless asking, an hour before he comes they always burst in, like cows into a shed.”

Later, the landlady says, inexplicably, that the Gentleman's Inn is very near the bottom in the ranking of village inns, however, “not the lowest.” She also informs us that Klamm has never uttered a word to Frieda except to give Frieda commands and that Klamm has never even indicated that he even notices Frieda's presence or has listened to anything she says.

Frieda paints her disgust with the servants in the most lurid terms along with her intension to do something about them:

“But now they're really going to be put in the shed, where they belong. If you weren't here, I would tear open this door and Klamm would have to drive them out himself."

By telling K. that Klamm does not want to be in the same room with K. it seems, by extension, that she is telling K. that Klamm does not want to meet with him either. But later we are told that the gentlemen can't stand the presence of people who are not from the Castle so it could simply be that Klamm doesn't want to be in the same room with K. because K. has not yet been approved by the Castle.

In the next chapter we are told by the landlady that Klamm and Frieda never have conversations and that Klamm only calls her name occasionally but Frieda has just told K. “How often have I asked Klamm to leave [the servants] at home.” In the next chapter we are told that Klamm never speaks to Frieda but only calls her name, “and Frieda's decision to rush over was naturally her own business and the fact that she was admitted without difficulty is simply due to the goodness of Klamm, but nobody can claim that he actually called her.” We seem to be in the presence of a theocratic ruler like John Winthrop who presided over New England in the early 1600's. Winthrop's subjects had absolutely no influence over his behavior which was dictated by divine, inscrutable principles. Klamm and the Castle officials seem to follow the same theocratic model which was also the model for European kings and was known under the designation, Divine Right of Kings.

5

Comedy intervenes again:

"Well, can't he hear them?" asked K.

"No," said Frieda, "he's asleep." "What!" cried K., "he's asleep? But when I looked into the room, he was still awake, sitting at his desk."

"And he's still sitting there like that," said Frieda, "even when you saw him, he was asleep—if not, do you think I would have let you look in there?—that was his sleeping position, the gentlemen sleep a great deal, it's hardly possible to understand this. Besides, if he didn't sleep so much, how could he stand these people. But now I'll have to drive them out myself."

Frieda does not question Klamm's great distance from and disdain for his servants. In fact, she seems to approve of it: “if he didn't sleep so much, how could he stand these people?”

It appears that Klamm can only be “seen” when he is asleep and that he can't stand to to “see” ordinary people either. This theme recurs in a later chapter where gentlemen interview people at night because they don't have to see them as clearly as they would if they interviewed them during the day.

Chaplinesque images, tinged with a hint of the sinister, intervene:

“Taking a whip from the corner, Frieda leaped toward the dancers in one high but not entirely secure leap, the way, say, a little lamb leaps.”

At first, [Klamm's servants] turned to face [Frieda] as if a new dancer had come, and indeed for a moment it seemed as if Frieda was about to drop the whip”

We are led to imagine that Frieda herself might once have been a “prostitute” like Olga appears to be now. This would contradict her story of rising to the level of barmaid from that of stable girl by hard work alone. It appears that she might have attained her rank as barmaid by becoming Klamm's “mistress.”

This surrealistic scene is given theocratic undertones when Frieda invokes Klamm's name as if he were a King asserting his Divine Right or, like John Winthrop, the interpreter of God's Divine Will:

"In the name of Klamm, into the shed, all of you into the shed," they saw now that this was serious, and in a fear that K. found incomprehensible began rushing toward the back, where under the pressure of the first arrivals a door opened, night air streamed in, all of them disappeared with Frieda, who was evidently driving them across the courtyard into the shed.”

The commotion attracts the landlord and K ducks behind the serving counter to hide.

The landlord asks, "And where is the surveyor?"

Now a description of the landlord is provided: He was in any case a courteous man, who had acquired his cultivation through constant and relatively open dealings with people far outranking him.

6

"I forgot all about the surveyor," said Frieda, putting her small foot on K.'s chest. "He must have left long ago."

"I didn't see him, though," said the landlord, "and I was in the corridor almost the entire time."

"But he's not here," said Frieda coolly.

"Perhaps he hid somewhere," said the landlord, "if my own impression is any indication, one oughtn't to put anything past him."

"He could hardly be that impudent," said Frieda, pressing her foot down more firmly on K. In her being there was something gay and free, which K. hadn't noticed before, and it got out of hand, quite unexpectedly, when she laughingly said: "Perhaps he's hiding down here," bent down to K., kissed him lightly, jumped back up, and said sadly: "No, he isn't here."

An extraordinary love scene follows.

The landlord could scarcely have left the room when Frieda switched off the electric light and joined K. under the counter.

"My darling! My sweet darling!" she said in a whisper, but without touching K. ... Then she started, for K. was still silent, lost in thought, and like a child she began to tug at him: "Come, it's stifling down here"

K is abstracted, still, and lost in thought. Like Chaplin's tramp, K. is bewildered by what is happening to him but, like the tramp, he begins, slowly, to respond to Frieda's advances:

They embraced each other, her small body was burning in K.'s hands; they rolled a few paces in an unconscious state from which K. repeatedly but vainly tried to rescue himself, bumped dully against Klamm's door, and then lay in the small puddles of beer and other rubbish with which the floor was covered.

K. tries, vainly to escape from the “unconscious state which he has fallen into.”

Hours passed there, hours breathing together with a single heartbeat, hours in which K. constantly felt he was lost or had wandered farther into foreign lands than any human being before him, so foreign that even the air hadn't a single component of the air in his homeland and where one would inevitably suffocate from the foreignness but where the meaningless enticements were such that one had no alternative but to go on and get even more lost.

His encounter with Frieda is portrayed with the same symbols and images as his assault on the Castle: He is entering strange lands and unknown territory, the air is foreign and the enticements “meaningless,” etc.

7

It is also significant, of course, that K. calls himself a land surveyor. These foreign “lands” need to be charted and “surveyed” just as any foreign and wild country needs to be surveyed for the future purpose drawing of maps and official boundaries.

And so, initially at least, it came not as a shock but as a consoling glimmer when from Klamm's room a deep, commanding, yet also indifferent voice called out for Frieda.

K.'s feeling that he is entering the deeply foreign “territory of Frieda,” causes him to hear Klamm's request for Frieda as a “consoling glimmer” of hope that he might be rescued from this great challenge that Frieda represents. It is as if he hopes that Klamm himself might be calling a truce. K. clearly thinks of Frieda and the Castle as coterminous in some mysterious way.

"Frieda," said K. in Frieda's ear, relaying the cry. With almost innate obedience Frieda was about to jump to her feet, but then, realizing where she was, she stretched, laughed softly, and said: "I will not go, I will never go to him again." K. wanted to object, he wanted to urge her to go to Klamm, and began to gather what was left of her blouse, but he couldn't speak, for he was all too happy having Frieda in his arms, all too anxiously happy, since it seemed to him that if Frieda abandoned him all he possessed would abandon him too.

His mission and purpose, whatever they are, reassert themselves in his anxious happiness. With his sexual embrace of Frieda, he has embraced a destiny which is to struggle against the Castle.

And as though Frieda had been fortified by K.'s consent, she clenched her fist, knocked on the door, and cried: "I'm with the surveyor. I'm with the surveyor."

This seems to K. to be a great betrayal of him, K., by Frieda. Presumably, it would have been far better for K. if Frieda had been silent about her affair with “the surveyor.” It seems to mean to K. that there is a possible collusion between the two ("now that all was betrayed.")

Klamm now fell silent. Yet K. rose, knelt beside Frieda, and looked about in the dull early-morning light. What had happened? Where were his hopes? What could he expect from Frieda, now that all was betrayed.

He is now remorseful at his animalistic sexual behavior with Frieda: “he had rolled about all night in the beer puddles, which now gave off an overpowering smell.”

Instead of advancing with utmost caution in a manner befitting the size of the enemy and the goal, he had rolled about all night in the beer puddles, which now gave off an overpowering smell.

8

Klamm is clearly described as “the enemy” and K.'s sexual relationship with Frieda is clearly a logistic one.

"What have you done?" he said to himself. "We are lost, the two of us."

"No," said Frieda, "only I am lost, but I have won you. And hush now. But look at the way those two are laughing."

"Who?" asked K., turning around. Sitting on the counter were his two assistants, they were somewhat tired from lack of sleep, but cheerful, it was the kind of cheerfulness that comes from the faithful fulfillment of duty.

The assistants are always portrayed as extensions of the Castle, and among other things, presumably spies who are obviously out to impede his progress in some way. K. does not respond to Frieda's assurances but instead turns around and shouts at the assistants:

"What do you want here?" K. shouted as though they were to blame for everything, he looked about for the whip that Frieda had in the evening.

"We had to come looking for you," said the assistants, "you never came back down to the taproom, so we looked for you at Barnabas's and finally found you here. We've been sitting here all night. This isn't easy work, that's for sure."

Clearly, the assistants have watched Frieda and K. rolling in beer puddles all night long and they are laughing and even allow themselves to express their disgust at such behavior: “this isn't easy work, that's for sure.”

"I need you by day, not at night," said K., "go away!"

"Well, it is day now," they said, without moving.

It was indeed day, the gate to the courtyard opened, the peasants poured in, also Olga, whom K. had completely forgotten; Olga was as lively as last evening despite the disheveled state of her clothes and hair; from the doorway her eyes sought K. "Why didn't you go home with me," she said, almost in tears.

It is made clear again that Olga is a prostitute and that she cannot fend off Klamm's servants, here called the peasants.

"For the sake of a woman like that," [Olga] said, and then repeated the remark several times. Frieda, who had gone away for a moment, came back with a small bundle of clothes.

For the first time, Olga, in spite of the fact that she is a prostitute, asserts her moral superiority to Frieda, “a woman like that,” and we are given another reason not to trust Frieda.

Sadly, Olga moved aside. "Now we can go," said Frieda, obviously meaning that they should go to the inn by the bridge.

We begin to suspect that Olga, who is Barnabas's sister, is someone who sincerely wants to help K. but that K. feels a deep, ambivalent need to follow Frieda instead, abandoning Olga to the peasants. K. seems to be abandoning love for power when he chooses Frieda over Olga: Frieda is a logistic move in his chess game with the Castle and Olga and the Barnabas family represent bad moves.

9

At the inn K. went straight to his room and lay down on the bed, Frieda arranged a place to sleep for herself on the floor beside it, the assistants had pushed their way into the room and were driven out, but they came back in through the window. K. was too tired to drive them out again.

We need have no doubt now, if we ever had, that the so-called “assistants” are really part of the Castle and are only there to do K harm in some unspecified way or at the very least, to impede his progress to the Castle and by extension prevent any meeting with Klamm or the Castle.

Frieda now portrayed not as a lover but as a servant: When she arranges a place for herself on the floor beside K's bed, she is seems to be taking on the role of servant to K. and not the role of lover.

The landlady is introduced here:

The landlady came up for the sole purpose of greeting Frieda, who called her "little mother"; the greetings that followed were incomprehensibly effusive, with kisses and long embraces.

Clearly these two women have a relationship of some kind that K. and the reader do not understand. Frieda calls the landlady “little mother,” a description which is never clarified in the rest of the novel.

In the next chapter the landlady is described in dreamlike images as being larger than life and while standing next to her, Frieda is said to come up only to her shoulder, even though the landlady is sitting in a chair. But she still describes herself as a mother for Frieda (but not literally as Frieda's mother.)

The defensive, hostile concern of the landlady for Frieda is in stark contrast to the sincere and innocent concern of the Barnabas family for K. We can only see the landlady as another proponent of the insular, theocratic power of the Castle as against the power of reason, experience and love that K and the Barnabas family represent.

10

It is stated explicitly in chapter 3 that K. has no power. We should make note of this and use it as further evidence that K. has almost certainly not been called by the Castle to be a land surveyor.

In fact K. is without any official position at all and is, like his beloved Charlie Chaplin, a “tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.”