The Meowmorphosis Read online

  Franz licked his paw and then wiped his left ear thoroughly, which in that dancing language Josef K described seemed to communicate total uncaring for Gregor’s accusations or the idea that he might die. “And so what did you dream of, the night you transformed, Gregor S?”

  “I cannot recall—I cannot recall, and you cannot force me. But it was nothing like your mad dream, Franz, nothing at all, of that I am sure!” But his body gave lie to his words, and Gregor Samsa’s skinny legs twitched, his ears flicked, and before he knew it he was telling his dream in the same musical dance that the other cats knew well. “But yes, yes, I do think there was something, tickling at the back of my mind—I dreamed, I think, that a strange cat was standing before me; I did not feel hungry but rather filled with strength, and it seemed to me that my limbs were light and agile, though I made no attempt to prove this by getting to my feet. A beautiful but not at all extraordinary cat stood before me, I could see that, but that was all, and yet it seemed to me that I saw something more in her. There was blood under me, I soon realized, and at first I took it for food, but I then recognized it as blood that I had vomited. I turned my eyes to the strange cat: She was lean, long legged, brown, with a patch of white here and there, and she had a fine, strong, piercing glance. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You must leave!’

  “ ‘I can’t leave just now,’ I said, without trying to explain, for how could I explain anything to her when she was just a thing in my dream to begin with, and besides she seemed in a hurry. ‘Please go,’ she said impatiently, lifting her feet and setting them down again. ‘Let me be,’ I said, ‘leave me alone and don’t worry about me. No one else worries about me.’ ‘It’s for your own sake,’ the cat said. ‘You can ask for any sake you like,’ I replied, ‘I can’t go, even if I wanted to. This is my place.’ She set about yawning hugely. ‘You can go all right, if you choose. It’s because you seem to be feeble and a bit of a mess that I ask you now, for you can go now if you like. If you linger, you’ll have to run later on.’ ‘That’s my business,’ I replied. ‘It’s mine, too,’ she said, saddened by my stubbornness yet obviously resolved to let me be for the time being.

  “In the waking world, I would have happily submitted to the blandishments of such a beautiful creature, but at that moment—why, I could not tell—the thought of it filled me with terror. ‘Get out!’ I screamed, and all the louder, for I had no other means of protecting myself. ‘But don’t I please you?’ she asked. ‘You’ll please me by going away and leaving me in peace,’ I said, but I was no longer as sure of myself as I tried to make her think. My senses, sharpened by dreaming and, perhaps a little, by the first beginnings of catlike ways of knowing, suddenly seemed to see or hear something about her: I knew that this cat had the power to drive me, to move me, to destroy me or save me, though I could not at that moment even imagine getting to my own feet. And I gazed at her—she had merely shaken her furry head at my rough answer—with ever-mounting desire. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘I’m a hunter,’ she replied. ‘And why won’t you just let me lie here?’ I asked. ‘You disturbed me,’ she said. ‘I can’t hunt while you’re here.’ ‘Try,’ I said, ‘perhaps you’ll be able to after all. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, but you must go.’ ‘Don’t hunt for this one night! Give up hunting entirely! Devote yourself to some other life,’ I implored her. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I must hunt.’

  “ ‘You must hunt, I must go, nothing but musts,’ I said. ‘Can you explain to me why we must?’ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘but there’s nothing that needs to be explained; everything is natural and self-evident.’ ‘Not so self-evident as all that,’ I said. ‘You’re sorry that you must drive me out of my own dream, yet you do it.’ ‘That’s so,’ she replied. ‘That’s so,’ I echoed crassly. ‘That isn’t an answer. Which sacrifice would you rather make: to give up your hunting or to give up driving me away?’ ‘To give up my hunting,’ she said without hesitation. ‘There!’ said I. ‘Don’t you see you’re contradicting yourself?’ ‘How am I contradicting myself?’ she replied. ‘My dear little kitten’—and I noticed she called me a kitten but had no comprehension of its future meaning—‘can it be that you really do not understand that I must? Don’t you understand that most obvious fact?’ I made no answer, but I noticed—and new life ran through me such as terror brings—I noticed from almost invisible indications the very thing Josef K taught me to see in a cat’s body, but which then I understood only by instinct, that in the depths of her chest she was preparing to upraise a kind of song. ‘You’re going to sing,’ I said gravely. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I’m going to sing soon, but not yet.’ ‘You’re beginning already,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet. But be prepared.’ ‘I can hear it already!’ I said, trembling. She was silent, and then I thought I saw something such as no man or cat before me had ever seen, at least there is no slightest hint of it in our histories, and I hastily bowed my head in infinite fear and shame and love and desire in the pool of blood I was lying in. I thought I saw that the cat was already singing without knowing it; nay, more, that the melody, separated from her, floated on the air in accordance with its own law, and, as though she were finished with it and wanted no further part in it, it was moving toward me and me alone. Her song and the blood seeped into me, and I woke and could not remember the dream before now, but I am full of it as I speak to you, Franz, and I remember that great cat and how she spoke to me as though, if I did not depart my own dream, she might hunt me herself. And I wonder if she was not death and misery come home to catch me, and I refused it.”

  “I DREAMED, I THINK, THAT A STRANGE AND BEAUTIFUL CAT WAS STANDING BEFORE ME.”

  “Perhaps, then,” said Franz, “returning home with your conviction hanging on your neck would be like embracing the cat of your dream, the cat of your death, knowing how it all must come out and taking it up anyway; perhaps when we say your current state is a symbol, we mean only that you meant to kill yourself and this is your anxious dream, all of us and your trial and Josef K, and by going to your family you will complete it all and satisfy the novelist of my dream, who wants only neat and beautiful endings, where men become monsters and monsters become men.”

  Franz sauntered away, leaving the way open into the street, and the other cats drew back from Gregor, who wept bitterly and clawed the earth as he exited the court of the cats as if, even as he drew on, he wished to hold himself back for just a few moments more.

  V.

  So Gregor Samsa set off to return to the house he had known all his life, and as he saw the willow tree just outside his family’s window and caught sight therein of the parlor he had hoped to escape forever, he could feel the apartment looming before him like that same great cat—promising a hunt, and probably death. Why did he not run? He could glimpse his sister within the windows, moving in her morning duties, and he could not think but that he was tired, and nothing seemed sweet anymore, and though he did not know why they had convicted him, surely in his heart he did know he was worthy of conviction, and that his old apartment held his punishment.

  “Look at her,” Gregor thought to himself as he watched his sister within, “she is grown into a little woman now, quite slim, yet she is tightly laced as well. She is always in the same dress I see, having had to sell her others; look at it, how like fur it seems from this distance, it being made of dark grey stuff, something like the color of Josef K, and trimmed discreetly with tassels or buttonlike hangings of the same color. She never wears a hat any longer, her dull fair hair is smooth and not untidy, though, but worn very loose.” Gregor noted that although his sister was tightly laced, she was quick and light in her movements—actually rather overdoing the quickness, as if afraid to discover their mother or father changed in the fashion of Gregor, running about under her feet—putting her hands on her hips and abruptly turning the upper part of her body sideways with a surprising suddenness. The impression her hand had always made on Gregor could only be conveyed by saying that he had never seen a han
d so eager to stroke and to scratch, to imprison and impugn on his dignity. Yet it was not peculiar or ugly, but a normal and nearly lovely hand, one he had once been fond of.

  “This little woman,” Gregor thought then, “is very ill-pleased with me, even if she doesn’t know at all where I have been, and even before my situation she always found something to object to—I was always doing the wrong thing, home too often or away too long—a true daughter of our mother and father, and now I annoy her with every step. If a life could be cut into the smallest of small pieces and every scrap of it could be separately assessed, every scrap of my current life would now be objectionable to her, save that scrap of me that was once her brother and her bill payer. And yet if I had only been a better cat, I could have endured her attentions when she wished to give them to me; but now she will want nothing of them, having had a space without me, time to feel relief and wonder at how she ever tolerated my antics. Like a wife whose husband has strayed, she will find only fault in my person from here on out because I have scorned her petting and, worse, run away. But I wonder now how I can be such an offense to her; it cannot be that anything about me enrages her sense of beauty—I am a fine enough cat, I have pleasant fur when I do not need brushing, my nose is quite pink, and I have a tail the equal of anyone’s. But perhaps I enrage her feeling for justice, her habits, her traditions, her hopes for the future, and our now completely incompatible natures—or at least my nature is incompatible with her hopes and her taste in collars. And perhaps it is because I have now grown much larger than a usual cat, just as Josef K and Franz and Willem did—there is something within our former natures as men that wishes to swell the feline form to our own original proportions. But, really, all she has to do is regard me as an utter stranger, a pet she discovered in a shop or an alley; indeed, I should welcome this situation, and she and the rest need only forget my existence, save for food in the mornings and evenings and all their—and my!—torments would be at an end. I am not even thinking of myself, I am quite leaving out of the account the fact that I find it all very trying, leaving it out because I recognize my discomfort is small compared to the suffering she endures. All the same, I am well aware that hers will no longer be an affectionate suffering—she has left off, I can see, seeking any improvement for me, building a little door for me into the kitchen or tidying up my sand-box, for she does not care about my development, only for her own personal interest in the matter, which I admit is large, and perhaps she will be keen to visit on me revenge for the torments I have given her. I have already tried once to effect the best way of putting a stop to all this perpetual misery, which is to say I absented myself, but my very attempts brought me down to such a nadir of misery that I shall not repeat it. No, I am convicted, that is all.”

  He felt, too, a certain responsibility laid upon him, if you like to put it that way, for the strangers they were now to each other, his sister and himself, and however true it was that one day soon the sole connection between them would be the vexation he caused her, or rather the vexation she let him cause her, and Gregor reminded himself that he ought not to feel indifferent to the visible physical suffering that this induced in her. Every morning, before he escaped and, he presumed, today as well, she rose a bit paler, more unslept; their mother was frequently worrying about her, wondering what could have caused her condition, if not Gregor’s unhappy shape, and no other answer was to be found: Grete’s vexation, soon to be daily renewed, lay with her brother. “True,” Gregor thought, “I am not so worried about her as the rest of my family, for she is hardy and tough; anyone who is capable of such strong feeling is likely also to be capable of surviving its effects. I have even a suspicion that her sufferings—or some of them, at least—are only a pretense to bring me willingly into her arms. She is too kind to admit openly what a torment my very existence is to her; to discuss in public this unclean affliction of hers would be too shameful. But to keep utterly silent about something that so persistently rankles will soon also be too much for her. So with feminine guile she steers a middle course; she keeps silent but betrays all the outward signs of a secret sorrow in order to draw gentle attention to the matter. Perhaps she even hopes that public attention will be paid to me, that the press should be alerted and doctors, too, and a general public rancor against me might rise up and use all its great powers to condemn me definitively to dissection, much more effectively and quickly than her relatively feeble private rancor could do; she would then retire into the background, draw a breath of relief, and turn her back on me. Well, if that is what she hopes, she is deluding herself. The cats have already decided I am guilty of, well, being guilty, and public opinion would never find me as infinitely objectionable as my own family can, even under its most powerful magnifying glass. I am not so altogether useless a creature as she thinks; I don’t want to boast, and especially not in this connection; but if I am not conspicuous for specially useful qualities such as earning income, I am certainly not conspicuous for the lack of others such as mousing; only to her, only to her these days almost bleached eyes, do I appear so. So in this respect I can feel quite reassured, can I? She will accept me and love me once more? No, not at all; for if it becomes generally known that my situation is making her positively ill, the world should put questions to me that I could not answer except for my helpless meowing: Why am I tormenting the poor little woman with my incorrigible refusal to return to my previous human station, and do I mean to drive her to her death, and my mother, too, and when am I going to show some sense and have enough decent human feeling to stop such goings-on, do away with myself for the decency of my family? If the world were to ask me that, it would be difficult to find an answer. Should I admit frankly that I don’t much believe in anything anymore and thus produce the unfavorable impression of being a man who has divested himself of connections, and in such an ungallant manner? And how could I say that she would be better off without me entirely, which is to say with me being dead; I should not feel the slightest sympathy for her subsequent grief, since she made herself a complete nuisance to me and any connection between us is summed up by the ridiculous belled collar she fitted me with? I don’t say that people wouldn’t believe me; they would be interested enough in the strange tale to get so far as belief; they would simply note the ungrateful adjectives I used concerning such a frail, sick girl, and that would be little in my favor. Any answer I made would inevitably come up against the world’s incapacity to keep down the suspicion that there must be black magic behind such a case as this, and that if such a thing existed it would hardly come from me, since I scarcely have benefitted from the whole affair! Grete, at any rate, shows not a trace of grief concerning my absence, nor will she show any kindness toward me anymore that I can see; therein would lie my last hope for love—that her old habit might resurface and, out of accustomed loving, new love might arise. But if any of it got out, public opinion, which is wholly insensitive in such matters, would of course abide by its prejudices and denounce me.

  “So the only thing left for me to do would be to hope that my old balding head and gouty leg might emerge again from this furry body, that I might heal before the world could intervene, which might be sufficient to lessen my family’s rancor—not to wean them from it altogether, naturally, which would be unthinkable after all that has passed. And, indeed, I have often asked myself if I am pleased enough with my present self to be unwilling to change it, and whether I could not attempt some changes in myself, even so far as the power of speech to explain my state or scratching letters in the carpet. Her objection to me, as I am now aware, is a fundamental one, and rightly so; nothing can remove it, not even the removal of myself. If she heard that I had committed suicide, she would fall into a fit of helpless rage against me who left her in such straits.

  “Now I cannot imagine that such a sharp-witted woman as she does not understand as well as I do both the hopelessness of her own state and the helplessness of mine, my inability, with the best will in the world, to conform to her
requirements. I am now a cat. I am helpless to be otherwise. Of course she understands it, but being a fighter by nature, she forgets it in the lust of battle, and in my unfortunate disposition I cannot help, because in any case it is my nature to purr gently at anyone who flies into a violent passion. In this way, naturally, we shall never come to terms. I wish I could but depart all and everything at once and never have to face her more, to disappoint her ambitions and show by the very presence of my grotesque and growing body how little she now has to look forward to in the world.

  “But on the contrary, such a self-immolation is just what I must avoid; if I am to follow a course of action at all it must be that of keeping the affair within its present narrow limits, growing not too much fatter or silkier, and most certainly not to involve the outside world; that is to say, I must stay quietly where I am and not let it affect my heart as far as can be seen, and that includes being sure my sister mentions it to no one, because it is a kind of dangerous mystery. But I must pretend it is a trivial, purely familial matter and as such to be hidden and to be kept to ourselves.”