K. confronts Frieda and Jeremias

K. sees Frieda in the distance at a turn in the corridor of the Castle Inn, carrying a tray of empty dishes. She acts as if she does not recognize him, looking blankly at him. He grasps her by the shoulders, asking trivial questions and searching her eyes, but her rigid bearing hardly changes. She absently rearranges the china on the tray and says, "What do you want from me? Go back to those—well, you know their names. You've just come from them, I can tell that you have." K. hastily changes the subject, not wanting to begin in the worst, least promising way possible for him.

The Breakup and Frieda's Accusations

Frieda tells K. that she has been taken back to work in the bar, saying, "There isn't going to be any wedding." When K. asks if she thinks he was unfaithful, she nods. K. argues that nothing has changed since their earlier conversations, when she always acknowledged his suspicions were unjust. He defends his visit to Barnabas's sisters, claiming the dark one, Amalia, is reserved and that he finds her company as awkward as Frieda does. Frieda bursts out, "You may think her reserved, you call that most shameless of all women reserved, and incredible as it may be you mean it; you are not pretending, I know that." She quotes the landlady of the Bridge Inn, who said of K.: "I can't stand the man, but I can't leave him to his fate either; when you see a small child who can't walk very well yet venturing too far you can't help yourself, you have to do something about it." K. smiles and suggests she take that advice. Frieda persists, asking why he calls Amalia reserved. K. says he is glad to describe her as reserved because it makes it easy to ignore her, and he has to go there on account of their joint future. He adds that he appreciates Olga's efficiency, circumspection, and lack of egotism, and no one can call her a temptress. Frieda retorts, "The servants think otherwise." K. replies, "In that and in much else. Are you going to conclude that I'm unfaithful because the servants give their lust free rein?" Frieda does not reply, and allows K. to take the tray from her, put it on the floor, link arms with her, and begin slowly walking up and down the small space. She says, "You don't know what it means to be faithful. The way you may behave with those girls isn't the main thing; your going to see that family at all and coming back with the smell of their living-room on your clothes shames me beyond bearing." She accuses him of leaving the school without a word, staying half the night with them, and slinking out by a secret way to spare the reputation of those girls. K. agrees not to talk about that subject and explains why he had to go there: to ask whether Barnabas was home at last with an important message. He says he didn't want to have Barnabas follow him back to the school to spare Frieda his presence, and that hours passed without Barnabas coming. He then mentions that someone else he hates came, and he left through the garden to avoid being spied on, carrying a flexible willow switch.

K.'s Counter-Accusations and the Role of the Assistants

K. compares Frieda's relationship with the assistants to his conduct towards Barnabas's family. He says he understands her dislike of the family and can share it, but he visits them only for the sake of their cause. He then asks, "But what about you and the assistants? You don't deny that they are pursuing you, and you've admitted that you are attracted to them." He says he was not angry with her for that, saw that there were forces beyond her control at work, and helped to defend her. He says that just because he neglected their defence for a couple of hours, trusting in her constancy, and that man Jeremias had the gall to go up to the window, he is to lose her and be greeted with the news that "there isn't going to be any wedding." He asks, "Shouldn't I be the one to feel I might reproach you? But I don't, no, I still don't reproach you." To take Frieda's mind off the subject, K. asks her to bring him something to eat, since he hasn't eaten anything since midday. Frieda nods and goes off, returning with a plate of sliced cold meats and a bottle of wine, which look like the remains of someone else's supper. K. sets about his meal with a hearty appetite. When he asks if she went to the kitchen, she says, "No, to my room. I have a room down here." K. suggests she might have taken him with her, but Frieda says she will bring him a chair. K. holds her back and says he won't go down there after all. Frieda, with an expression of defiance, her head bent and biting her lip, says, "Very well, yes, he's down there. What else did you expect? He's lying in my bed, he caught a chill outside, he's freezing, he could hardly eat a thing. Basically it's all your fault." She explains that if K. hadn't chased the assistants away and gone running after those people, they could be sitting peacefully in the schoolhouse. She says that as long as Jeremias was in K.'s service, he would never have dared to run off with her, but off duty he fears nothing. She says Jeremias came and took her away when K. had abandoned her, and that he broke the window and helped her out. They fled to the Castle Inn, where the landlord respects him, and they were taken in. She adds, "He isn't living with me, but we share the same room."

K.'s Analysis of Jeremias's Motives

K. says he is not sorry he drove the assistants away, and that their happiness wouldn't have been very great in a marriage where two beasts of prey who duck only under the lash were also present. He says he is grateful to Barnabas's family for unintentionally playing their part in separating them. He then says, "So everything would be all right, and we could part and go away, you to your new master Jeremias, who probably still has a chill from the school garden—considering that, perhaps you've left him alone too long—I to go back to the school on my own or, since I have no business there without you, somewhere else, anywhere they will take me in." He says he hesitates because he still has good reason to doubt what she has told him. He gives his own interpretation of Jeremias: that while in K.'s service, Jeremias was after Frieda, but now that he thinks his service is over, it's different. K. says, "Since you are not his master's fiancée any more, you are not such a temptation to him as you were before." He claims Jeremias's way of thinking strikes him as particularly cool, and that he was given a job by Galater to destroy their relationship. K. says Jeremias succeeded in his attempt, helped by some memory of Klamm clinging to him, and that now he harvests the fruits of his labours by helping Frieda out of the school window, but with that his work is over. K. says Jeremias told him openly that as Klamm's former lover, Frieda seems to him someone to be respected, and settling into her room and feeling like a little Klamm for once must be very nice, but that she herself means nothing to him. Frieda strikes her little fists together and says, "How you slander him!" K. replies that he doesn't mean to slander him, but that he may be doing him wrong, and that the only purpose of slander could be to counter her love for him. He says he doesn't have to slander Jeremias, because she doesn't love him, she only thinks she does.

K.'s Plea and Frieda's Final Rejection

K. argues that the whole situation was a malicious exploitation of the flaws in their relationship, which came together from two entirely different worlds. He says Frieda was torn away from Klamm, the ground shook beneath her feet, and she couldn't find her way. He says that in such interim periods, suitable people had only to be brought in front of her eyes and she was lost to them. He says the assistants were not sent by Klamm but by Galater, and that if they cast such a spell on her with that deception, she may have thought she saw traces of Klamm even in their dirt and dissolute ways. Frieda lays her head on K.'s shoulder, and they walk up and down in silence with their arms around one another. She says slowly, calmly, almost contentedly, "If only we had gone away at once, that very night, we could be somewhere safe now, still together, your hand always close enough for me to take it. How I need to have you close, how lost I have felt when I am without you ever since we met. Being close to you, believe me, is my dream, that and only that." Then someone calls out in the side corridor. It is Jeremias, standing on the bottom step in nothing but his shirt, with a shawl of Frieda's wrapped around him, looking like a patient escaped from the hospital. Frieda moves away from K. and is beside him in a minute, drawing the shawl more closely around him and trying to make him go straight back into the room. Jeremias says he is running a temperature and needs an infusion to make him sweat. He invites K. to come into their room with them, but Frieda forbids K. to go into it. She says, "I will never, never come back to you; I shudder at the mere thought of it. Go to those girls of yours; they sit on the bench with you beside their stove in nothing but their shifts, as I've been told, and if someone comes looking for you they spit and hiss at him." She says K. is free and has a fine life before him, and that his union with the girls is already blessed. She then leads Jeremias away, bending her head as she goes through a small door. Inside, there is still a little whispering to be heard, probably Frieda lovingly persuading Jeremias to go back to bed, and then the door is closed.