Status Updates From Ο Πύργος

. . . she had taken the picture back, and now she looked at it, smoothed it out, and pushed it under the pillow again. Her movements were slower now, but not from weariness, they were slow under the burden of memory.

‘I’ve been at daggers drawn with him.

Only her little face showed now in the candlelight, its clear, stern features softened by the ravages of age.

I have to tell you the whole, if unwelcome, truth. You have been engaged, you say, as a land sur- veyor, but unfortunately we don’t need a land surveyor. There wouldn’t be any work for you here at all.

they deprived him of the chance of winning small, easy victories . . . and the well-justified confidence that he would then derive from them . . . Instead, the authorities allowed K. to go anywhere he liked, although only inside the village, thus indulging him but weakening his position, ruling out any possibility of a struggle, and leaving him living a non-official, unpredictable, troubled, and strange kind of life.

Mr Land Surveyor, I will give you a piece of information to take with you, for whatever you may say and what- ever insults you may offer me, poor old woman that I am, you are Frieda’s future husband. It’s only on that account that I tell you how shockingly ignorant you are of circumstances here, a person’s head fairly spins just listening to you, comparing what you say and think with the situation as it really is.

Bardzo ładny język, chyba rozumiem zamysł. Dawno nie musiałam tak dużo myslec przy czytaniu

She was in search of something and so was he, they tried to get at it almost angrily, ... their embraces and writhing bodies did not bring oblivion but reminded them of their duty to go on searching. Like dogs desperately scraping at the ground, they worked away at one another’s bodies, helplessly disappointed as they tried to retrieve the last of their bliss, sometimes licking each other’s faces with their tongues.