The Whipping

One evening, a few days after his first cross-examination, Josef K. was walking along a corridor near the main stairway of the bank where he worked when he heard a sigh from behind a door he had never opened, a door he had always assumed led to a junk room. He stood in amazement, listening again to establish whether he might not be mistaken. For a while there was silence, but then came more sighs. His first thought was to fetch one of the servitors, it might well have been worth having a witness present, but then he was taken by an uncontrollable curiosity that made him simply yank the door open. It was, as he had thought, a junk room. Old, unusable forms and empty stone ink-bottles lay scattered behind the entrance. But in the cupboard-like room itself stood three men, crouching under the low ceiling. A candle fixed on a shelf gave them light.

Discovery and the Accused Policemen

K. asked what they were doing there, quietly but crossly and without thinking. One of the men was clearly in charge, and attracted attention by being dressed in a kind of dark leather costume which left his neck, chest, and arms exposed. He did not answer. But the other two called out, "Mr. K.! We're to be beaten because you made a complaint about us to the examining judge." K. then realized that it was actually the two policemen, Franz and Willem, and that the third man held a cane in his hand with which to beat them. K. stated that he had not made any complaint, only said what took place in his home, and that their behaviour was not entirely unobjectionable. Willem, who had a family to feed, explained that they were sorely tempted by K.'s fine clothes, and that while it was not right, it was tradition that the clothes go to the officers. He insisted that if K. had not spoken openly about it, the punishment would not have followed. K. replied that he had made no sort of request that they be punished, he was simply acting on principle. The whip-man, however, declared that the punishment was both just and unavoidable.

K.'s Attempt to Intervene

K. tested the cane the whip-man swung in front of him and asked if there was no possibility of sparing the two men their beating. The whip-man shook his head with a laugh and ordered the policemen to get undressed. He mocked Willem, pointing out that his fat belly, built from eating the breakfasts of those he arrested, meant the first strokes of the cane would just get lost in all that fat, and that a man with a belly like that could never be made into a whip-man. K. then offered to make it well worth the whip-man's while if he would let them go, pulling out his wallet without looking at the whip-man again. The whip-man refused, saying that K. would then try and put in a complaint against him and get him flogged. K. argued that if he had wanted to get the two punished he would not now be trying to buy their freedom, and that it was the organisation and the high officials who were to blame, not the policemen. The whip-man remained unmoved, stating that it was his job to flog people, so he flogged them. Franz, who had been fairly quiet, now stepped forward wearing just his trousers, kneeled down hanging on to K.'s arm, and whispered a plea for mercy, claiming that his bride was waiting for him at the entrance to the bank and that he was so ashamed of himself. The whip-man then took hold of the cane in both hands and laid into Franz, while Willem cowered back in a corner.

The Scream and K.'s Flight

The sudden scream that shot out from Franz was long and irrevocable, it seemed to come not from a human being but from an instrument that was being tortured, the whole corridor rang with it, it must have been heard by everyone in the building. K. called out for Franz not to shout like that, and, as he looked anxiously in the direction from which the servitor would come, he gave Franz a shove, not hard, but hard enough for him to fall down unconscious, clawing at the ground with his hands by reflex; he still did not avoid being hit; the rod still found him on the floor; the tip of the rod swung regularly up and down while he rolled to and fro under its blows. One of the servitors appeared in the distance, with another a few steps behind him. K. quickly threw the door shut, went over to one of the windows overlooking the yard and opened it. When the servitor called out, K. answered that it was only a dog yelping in the yard. He did not dare go back into the junk room, and he did not want to go home either. He felt anguish at not having been able to prevent the flogging, but he reasoned that if Franz had not screamed like that, it was at least highly probable that K. would have been able to dissuade the whip-man. He thought the whip-man's eyes had lit up when he saw the banknotes, and that he had only seemed serious about the flogging to raise the level of the bribe a little. But it became impossible for K. to do anything as soon as Franz started screaming, as he could not possibly have let the junior bank staff, and perhaps even all sorts of other people, come along and catch him by surprise as he haggled with those people in the junk room. He promised himself that he would raise the matter again with somebody and see that those who really were guilty, the high officials whom nobody had so far dared point out to him, received their due punishment. As he went down the main stairway, he looked carefully round at everyone who was passing, but there was no girl to be seen who might have been waiting for somebody, showing that Franz's claim about his bride was a lie, albeit one that was forgivable and intended only to elicit more sympathy.

The Recurrence and Aftermath

The policemen were still on K.'s mind all through the following day; he was unable to concentrate on his work and had to stay in his office a little longer than the previous day so that he could finish it. On the way home, as he passed by the junk room again, he opened its door as if that had been his habit. Instead of the darkness he expected, he saw everything unchanged from the previous evening: the forms and bottles of ink just inside the doorway, the whip-man with his cane, the two policemen, still undressed, the candle on the shelf. The two policemen began to wail and call out "Mr. K.!" K. slammed the door immediately shut, and even thumped on it with his fists as if that would shut it all the firmer. Almost in tears, he ran to the servitors working quietly at the copying machine and shouted at them to go and get that junk room cleared out, that it should have been done long ago. He sat down briefly in order to keep them near him for a little longer, looked through a few of the copies to give the impression that he was checking them, and then, as he saw that they would not dare to leave at the same time as himself, went home tired and with his mind numb. The scene's recurrence confirms that the court's punishments are not isolated events but a permanent, inescapable condition, and that K.'s attempts to intervene or forget are futile.