Olga’s Plans

noticing me may perhaps arrive at a more favourable opinion of me than the others, that he may recognise that I’m fighting for my family and carrying on my father’s efforts, no matter in how poor a way. If he should see it like that, perhaps he’ll forgive me too for accepting money from the servants and using it for our family. And I’ve achieved something more yet, which even you, I’m afraid, will blame me for. I learned a great deal from the servants about the ways in which one can get into the Castle service without going through the difficult preliminaries of official appointment lasting sometimes for years; in that case, it’s true, one doesn’t become an actual official employee, but only a private and semiofficial one, one has neither rights nor duties⁠—and the worst is not to have any duties⁠—but one advantage one does have, that one is on the spot, one can watch for favourable opportunities and take advantage of them, one may not be an employee, but by good luck some work may come one’s way, perhaps no real employee is handy, there’s a call, one flies to answer it, and one has become the very thing that one wasn’t a minute before, an employee. Only, when is one likely to get a chance like that? Sometimes at once, one has hardly arrived, one has hardly had time to look round before the chance is there, and many a one hasn’t even the presence of mind, being quite new to the job, to seize the opportunity; but in another case one may have to wait for even more years than the official employees, and after being a semiofficial servant for so long one can never be lawfully taken on afterwards as an official employee. So there’s enough here to make one pause, but it sinks to nothing when one takes into account that the test for the official appointments is very stringent and that a member of any doubtful family is turned down in advance; let us say someone like that goes in for the examination, for years he waits in fear and trembling for the result, from the very first day everybody asks him in amazement how he could have dared to do anything so wild, but he still goes on hoping⁠—how else could he keep alive?⁠—then after years and years, perhaps as an old man, he learns that he has been rejected, learns that everything is lost and that