Free The Sons by Franz Kafka

my nephew did to merit that punishment, yet his transgression was of a kind that merely needs to be mentioned to find indulgence.”
    “That’s not too bad,” thought Karl, “but I hope he won’t tell the whole story. Anyhow, he can’t know much about it. Who would tell him?”
    “For he was,” Uncle Jacob went on, bracing himself with the bamboo cane and making little bouncing motions that helped to make the situation a good deal less solemn than it would otherwise have been, “for he was seduced by a servant, Johanna Brummer, a person of about thirty-five. It is far from my wish to offend my nephew by using the word ‘seduced,’ but it is difficult to find another equally suitable word.”
    Karl, who had moved quite close to his uncle, turned around to read in the gentlemen’s faces the impression the story had made. None of them laughed, all were listening patiently and seriously. After all, one doesn’t laugh at the nephew of a Senator at the first opportunity. It was rather the stoker who now smiled at Karl, though very faintly, but that was, in the first place, a pleasure to see, as a sign of his reviving spirits, and excusable in the second place, since in the stoker’s bunk Karl had tried to make an impenetrable mystery of the very story that was now being made so public.
    “Now this Brummer woman,” Uncle Jacob went on, “had a child by my nephew, a healthy boy who was baptizedJacob, evidently in honor of my unworthy self, since my nephew’s doubtless quite casual references to me must nevertheless have made a deep impression on the woman. Fortunately, let me add. For the boy’s parents, to avoid paying alimony or being personally involved in any further scandal—I must point out that I know nothing about the laws of their state nor anything about their personal circumstances—to avoid the scandal, then, and the payment of alimony, they packed off their son, my dear nephew, to America, shamefully unprovided-for, as you can see, and the poor lad, despite the signs and wonders which still happen in America if nowhere else, would have come to a wretched end in some back alley of New York, being thrown entirely on his own resources, if this servant girl hadn’t written a letter to me, which after long delays reached me the day before yesterday, giving me the whole story, along with a description of my nephew and, very wisely, the name of the ship as well. If I were setting out to entertain you, gentlemen, I could read a few passages to you from this letter”—he pulled out and flourished before them two huge, closely written sheets of letter paper. “You would certainly be impressed, for the letter is written with somewhat simple but well-intended cunning and with much loving concern for the father of the child. But I have no intention either of entertaining you for longer than my explanation needs, or of wounding at the very start the perhaps still sensitive feelings of my nephew, who, if he likes, can read the letter for his own instruction in the seclusion of the room already waiting for him.”
    But Karl had no feelings for that girl. Hemmed in by an ever-receding past, she sat in her kitchen beside the counter, resting her elbows on top of it. She looked at him whenever he came to the kitchen to get a glass of water for his father or do some errand for his mother. Sometimes, awkwardly sitting sideways at the counter, she would write a letter,drawing her inspiration from Karl’s face. Sometimes she would sit with one hand over her eyes, impervious to anything that was said to her. Sometimes she would kneel in her tiny room next to the kitchen and pray to a wooden crucifix; then Karl would feel shy if he passed by and caught a glimpse of her through the crack of the slightly open door. Sometimes she would race around the kitchen and jump back, laughing like a witch, if Karl got in her way. Sometimes she would shut the kitchen door after Karl entered and hold it shut until he had to beg to be