The Judgement
by Franz Kafka
Finally he put the letter in his pocket and went out of his room, angling across a small passageway into his father’s room, which he had not been in for months. There was really no need to do that, since he was always dealing with his father at work and they took their noon meal at the same time in a restaurant. In the evenings, of course, they each did as they wished, but for the most part, unless George was with friends, as was most frequently the case, or was now visiting his fiancée, they still sat for a little while, each with his own newspaper, in the living room they shared.
George was surprised how dark his father’s room was, even on this sunny morning. So that was the kind of shadow cast by the high wall which rose on the other side of the narrow courtyard. His father was sitting by the window in a corner decorated with various reminders of his late lamented mother and was reading a newspaper, which he held in front of his eyes to one side, attempting in this way to compensate for some weakness in his eyes. On the table stood the remains of his breakfast, not much of which appeared to have been eaten.
“Ah, George,” said his father, coming up at once to meet him. His heavy night shirt opened up as he moved and the ends of it flapped around him. “My father is still a giant,” said George to himself.
Then he spoke up: “It’s unbearably dark in here.”
“Yes, it certainly is dark,” his father answered.
“And you’ve shut the window as well?”
“I prefer it that way.”
“Well, it is quite warm outside,” said George, as if continuing what he’d said earlier, and sat down.
His father cleared off the breakfast dishes and put them on a cupboard.
“I really only wanted to tell you,” continued George, who was following the movements of the old man quite absent mindedly, “that I’ve now sent a report of my engagement to St. Petersburg.” He pulled the letter a little way out of his pocket and let it drop back again.
“Why to St. Petersburg?” his father asked.
“To my friend,” said George, trying to look his father in the eye. “In business he’s completely different,” he thought. “How sturdily he sits here with his arms across his chest.”
“Ah yes, to your friend,” said his father, with emphasis.
“Well, father, you know at first I wanted to keep quiet to him about my engagement. Out of consideration, for no other reason. You yourself know he's a difficult person. I said to myself he could well learn about my engagement from some other quarter, even if his solitary way of life makes that hardly likely—I can’t prevent that—but he should never learn about it from me.”
“And now you’re thinking about it differently?” the father asked. He set the large newpaper on the window sill and on top the newspaper his glasses, which he covered with his hand.
“Yes, now I’ve been reconsidering it.