The Meowmorphosis Read online

  Gregor wriggled himself into a position to leap upon the window sash and slip in, for it remained open. “I am less upset by the situation,” he thought, “now that I think I perceive how unlikely it is to come to any sort of definitive crisis; imminent as it often seems to be, one is eagerly disposed—when one is young and, especially, when one is female—to exaggerate the speed with which crises arrive. Things will go on as they have been, I’ve no doubt. Whenever Grete shall grow faint at the very sight of me, I shall sink adorably sideways into a chair, plucking playfully at her bodice strings with my paws while tears of rage and despair roll down her cheeks, and I shall make her laugh and cheer her. I shall always think the moment has now come, that I am on the point of being summoned to answer as best I can for myself and banished forever. And yet it will not have come. They are family and must endure me; I shall live here until I am an old tom, and they must care for me. Youth casts a bloom of urgency over everything; our more awkward characteristics such as tails and whiskers seem stark in the upswell of youthful energy. If, as a youth, a man is a cat, it may be counted against him; but as an old man it is not even noticed, not even by himself, for the things that survive in old age are necessary and may grow to be appreciated. Everyone says: yes, he has always been a cat, the old monster, but there’s a charm in him. In the end, it will all be all right, I know it. I know it. I shall continue to live my own life for a long time to come, untroubled by the world, despite all the outbursts of my family; I shall bear it all with ease, and be petted, and be given another pretty bell for my collar. I know this is how it shall proceed.”

  The windowsill was cold under Gregor’s paws, but he endured it.

  Slipping back into the house with the breaking of dawn, Gregor remembered clearly his last impression the previous evening: that his father had badly misunderstood Grete’s plea for help upon his escape and assumed that Gregor had committed some violence upon his mother. It seemed impossible that so little time had passed since that moment, and yet it was so, only a night, and now nearly morning. Thus, Gregor now had to calm his father straightaway, before breakfast, for yesterday he had neither the time nor the ability to explain things. And so he rushed through the parlor to the door of his own room and pushed himself against it, his furry bulk now really quite substantial, so that his father—who, Gregor saw as he crossed the floor, was already awake, sitting right there at the table—could see right away that Gregor fully intended to return humbly to the familiar state of things, that it was not necessary to force him into his room, but that one only needed to open the door, and he would disappear therein immediately.

  But his father was not in the mood to observe such niceties. “Ah,” he yelled as soon as he saw Gregor, with a tone as if he were all at once angry and pleased. Gregor pulled his head back from the door and raised it in the direction of his father, his eyes as large and sweet as he could make them. The terror of remembering his dream and the other cats’ conviction still clung to him, and his only hope, he felt, was to make his family love him once more, to pet him and care for him as Mrs. Grubach did her cats, and of course he would even tolerate Grete’s attentions if it meant everything could return to the way it had been—after all, had they not always kept him as a kind of pet, one who gave them money, and in return they tolerated him? That was all he asked, to be tolerated again.

  He had not really pictured his father waiting for him immediately upon his return; Gregor had hoped to have time to organize his strategies. Of course, he now realized, after all this time he had spent huddled, four-legged and furry, in his room, he really should have grasped the fact that he would encounter different conditions in the apartment, especially now that his family had had a night to think themselves free of him and begin planning for the future. Nevertheless, nevertheless—it had been long weeks until now since he had seen his father with his own eyes; was this really his father? This man who, in earlier days, had lain exhausted in bed whenever Gregor was setting out on a business trip; who had received him on the evenings of his return in a sleeping gown and armchair, totally incapable of standing up; whose only sign of approval would be to lift his arm a bit; who, during their rare family strolls a few Sundays a year and on the important holidays, made his way slowly forward between Gregor and his mother, who themselves moved slowly, but he always a bit more slowly, bundled up in his old coat, all the time setting down his walking stick carefully; and who, when he had wanted to say something, almost always stood still and gathered his entourage around him? In that instant Gregor felt a kind of boiling feline contempt rise in him; even a cat napping away an afternoon was less useless and lazy than all that.

  But now his father rose from his seat, standing up really straight, already dressed for the day in a tight-fitting blue uniform with gold buttons, like the ones worn by bank employees. Above the high stiff collar of his jacket, his firm double chin stuck out prominently; beneath his bushy eyebrows the glance of his black eyes was freshly penetrating and alert, and his otherwise disheveled white hair was combed down into a carefully exact shining part. He threw his cap—on which a gold monogram, apparently the symbol of the bank, was affixed—in an arc all the way across the room onto the sofa, and flipping back the edge of the long coat of his uniform with a grim face, he stepped right up to Gregor.

  Gregor really didn’t know what his father had in mind, but now the man raised his foot uncommonly high, and Gregor was astonished at the gigantic size of the sole of his boot. However, he did not linger on that point, for he recalled from the first day of his new life that, as far as he was concerned, his father considered the greatest force the only appropriate response. And it seemed that finding him returned to the house now, after they had surely all taken a breath of relief upon deciding him gone, had not improved his father’s disposition. So Gregor scurried quickly away from his father, sliding on the polished floors; he stopped when his father remained standing in place and then scampered forward again when his father so much as stirred.

  In this way they made their way round and round the room, without anything decisive taking place; because of their stop-and-start progress, it didn’t look precisely like a chase, more like the sort of game a dog would enjoy, though a cat does not. Gregor remained on the floor for the time being, especially since he was afraid that his father would interpret jumping onto the draperies or the bookcases as an act of real malice. In any case, Gregor was forced to admit to himself that he couldn’t keep up this running around for a long time, that in fact it was all worse than before—and worse even than being caught by the cats, because whenever his father took a single step, Gregor had to rush through an enormous number of movements, his paws scrabbling on the floor as he frantically sought a new haven. Already he was starting to suffer from a shortage of breath, just as in his earlier days when his lungs had been quite unreliable, and besides he had been up without sleep all night.

  As he now began to stagger in place, trying to gather all his energies to continue running but having trouble keeping his eyes open, feeling so exhausted of mind that he could form no notion of any plan for escape besides running and had already all but forgotten that the window was still available to him—at that moment something flew through the air, smacking down onto the ground in front of him and rolling right past. It was an apple. Immediately a second one flew after it. Gregor stood still in fright: further running away was useless, for his father had decided to bombard him.

  From the fruit bowl on the sideboard his father had filled his pockets. And now, for the moment not bothering to take accurate aim, he was throwing apple after apple. These small red orbs rolled around on the floor, colliding with one another as if doing battle. A weakly thrown apple grazed Gregor’s back but skidded off harmlessly. Then, running out of fruit but with his fury still unabated, Gregor’s father promptly grabbed and threw the next fist-size thing within reach, which was a ball of yarn that Gregor’s sister had been saving to knit a winter scarf for herself. It brushed harmlessly against Grego
r’s ear, but then abruptly he yowled as he felt his head jerk tight; a loop of yarn had caught the latch of his collar, which now was pulling at his neck painfully.

  Gregor wanted to drag himself away, as if he could leave behind the unexpected and incredible pain simply by moving from the spot where it had struck him. But he felt as if he was nailed in place; he lay stretched out, completely confused in all his senses. Only with luck did he glance across the room and notice that the door of his room had been pulled open, and that right in front of his sister, who was yelling, his mother ran out in her undergarments—for his sister had undressed her in order to give her some freedom to breathe amid her fainting spell, and thus had she gone to bed—his mother ran up to his father, her skirts falling to the floor one after the other, tripping her as she hurled herself onto his father, throwing her arms around his neck and seeming to melt completely into his body as she begged him to spare Gregor’s life—and at this moment Gregor’s vision began to blur and fade.

  How quickly it had all happened, he thought as he stumbled toward his room. Franz was right. He was always meant to die here.

  VI.

  Gregor’s labored breathing, from which he had now suffered for over a month—he had managed to chew off the ball of yarn, but a short length remained unreachably twisted in his collar, invisible to all beneath his tufting fur yet continuing as he grew larger and larger to pull the collar alarmingly tight against his throat—seemed by itself to have reminded his father that, in spite of Gregor’s inexplicable and often undignified appearance, Gregor was a member of the family, not a thing to be treated as an enemy, and that it was, on the contrary, a requirement of family duty to suppress one’s aversion to a son who could lick his hindquarters with acrobatic ease, and to endure—nothing else, just endure. And if, through his afflicted throat and tightened breath, Gregor had now apparently lost for good his ability to move with any ease, and for the time being needed many long minutes to crawl across his room, like an aged invalid—climbing up high, of course, had become unimaginable—nevertheless, he felt that for this worsening of his condition he was compensated satisfactorily, because every day toward evening, the door to the living room, on which he was now in the habit of keeping a sharp eye for an hour or two beforehand, was opened, so that he, lying down in the darkness of his room, invisible from the living room, could see the entire family at the illuminated table and listen to their conversation with, to at least some extent, their permission—a situation quite improved from what had been the arrangement before.

  Of course, there was no longer the lively socializing of years gone by, which Gregor had used to think about in small hotel rooms with a certain longing, when, tired out, he had been prone to throw himself upon damp bedclothes. What went on now was, for the most part, very quiet. After the evening meal, Gregor’s father fell asleep quickly in his armchair. His mother and sister talked mutedly in the stillness while his mother, hunching over, worked at sewing fine undergarments for a fashion shop. Grete, who had taken on a job as a salesgirl, studied stenography and French in the evening, so as perhaps later to obtain a better position. Sometimes their father woke up and, as if quite unaware that he had been sleeping, said to their mother, “How long you have been sewing today?” and went right back to sleep, leaving Grete and their mother to smile tiredly at one another.

  GREGOR’S LABORED BREATHING SEEMED TO HAVE REMINDED HIS FATHER THAT HE WAS A MEMBER OF THE FAMILY.

  With a determined stubbornness, Gregor’s father refused to take off his bank uniform even at home; his sleeping gown hung on the coat hook, unused, while he dozed off still completely dressed, as if he need always be ready to leap to his duties and even here might be summoned by the voice of his superior. As a result, in spite of all the care given by Gregor’s mother and sister, his father’s uniform, which even at first had not been new, grew dirty, and Gregor often spent the entire evening staring at the outfit—stains all over it, though its gold buttons were always polished—in which the old man, uncomfortable though he must be, nonetheless slept peacefully.

  As soon as the clock struck ten, Gregor’s mother tried gently encouraging his father to wake up and go to bed, telling him that he couldn’t sleep properly in his chair and that, since he had to report to work at six o’clock, he really needed a good sleep. But with the obstinacy that had gripped him since he had returned to the workforce, his father invariably insisted on continuing to lounge even longer at the table. No matter how much Gregor’s mother and sister might plead with him, for a quarter of an hour his father would just keep shaking his head slowly, his eyes closed, without standing up. Gregor’s mother would pull him by the sleeve and speak cajoling words into his ear, and his sister would set down her work to try and help, but nothing worked; Gregor’s father would just settle down more deeply still into his chair. Only when the two women together leaned forward and grabbed him under the armpits would he throw open his eyes, look back and forth between them, and say, “This is the life. This is the peace and quiet of my old age.” Propped up by both women, he would heave himself up elaborately as if it was a tremendous trouble for him, allow himself to be led to the door, wave the women away there and proceed on his own, though Gregor’s mother had put down her sewing implements and his sister her pen in order to go after him and help him some more. “Perhaps,” Gregor once thought he heard his father say, “we should get a little kitten, to keep us company.”

  In this overworked and exhausted family, who had time to worry any longer about Gregor—at least, more than was absolutely necessary? The servant girl, of course, had been let go, and so a huge, bony cleaning woman with white hair flying all around her head came every morning and evening to do the heaviest housework; Gregor’s mother took care of everything else in addition to her considerable sewing work. It even happened that numerous pieces of the family jewelry, which Gregor’s mother and sister had always been so happy to wear on social and festive occasions, were sold, as Gregor learned from overhearing general discussion about the prices they had fetched. But the family’s greatest complaint was always that they could not leave this apartment, which was too big for their present means, since they could imagine no way in which Gregor might be moved. Yet Gregor recognized that it was not just consideration for him that was preventing such a move, for he could have been transported easily enough in a large box with a few air holes and perhaps a saucer of milk. No, the main thing holding them all back from relocating to more affordable living quarters was their complete sense of hopelessness, their despair over the idea that they had been struck by a misfortune the likes of which had been suffered by no one else in their entire circle of relatives and acquaintances.

  Gregor’s household, therefore, now took up in earnest the poor family’s lot in life. His father brought breakfast to the petty officials at the bank; his mother sacrificed herself for the undergarments of strangers; his sister sat at her desk, at the beck and call of customers; but the family’s energies could not reach any further. And Gregor’s constricted throat began to pain him all over again, especially when mother and sister, after they had escorted his father to bed, would come back to the living room and let their work lie that they might sit close together, cheek to cheek, and his mother would say, pointing to Gregor’s room, “Close the door, Grete,” leaving Gregor again in the darkness, while nearby he understood the women were mingling their tears, or, quite dry eyed, staring at the table.

  Gregor barely slept now, nights or days. Sometimes he imagined that the next time the door opened, he would take over the family arrangements just as he had before. In his daydreams there began to once again appear the likes of his employer at the sales office, the supervisor and the apprentices, the excessively spineless custodian, two or three friends from other businesses, a chambermaid from a hotel in the provinces—a fleeting memory of love—a girl who worked in a hat shop, whom he had courted seriously but too slowly; they all appeared in his imagination, mixed in with strangers or people he had already f
orgotten. But instead of helping him and his family, they were all unapproachable, and in the end he was happy to see them disappear.

  Other times, he was in no mood to worry about his family. He seethed with fury over the wretched care he was getting, even though he couldn’t imagine anything that he might have an appetite for. Still, he made plans about how he could take from the larder all the food he certainly deserved, even if he wasn’t hungry. About how he would return to Josef K and Franz and, depending on how miserable his affliction felt, either show them what a noble cat he could be, how he could hunt with them and be of use to the court, or else claw their eyes out and eat their ears.

  Gregor’s sister, without thinking anymore about how she might be able to give him any special pleasure, now quickly tossed a bit of food into his room every morning and noon before she ran off to her shop; then in the evening, quite indifferent to whether the food had perhaps only been tasted or, as happened more frequently, remained entirely untouched, she whisked it out with one sweep of her broom. The task of cleaning his room, which she now always carried out in the evening, could not be done any more hurriedly. Streaks of dirt ran along the walls; here and there lay tangles of dust and garbage. At first, when his sister arrived, Gregor would position himself in a particularly filthy corner in hopes of making evident a sort of protest. But he could have well stayed there for weeks without his sister’s taking care to do anything differently. She saw the dirt just as clearly as he did—she had decided just to let it stay.

  With a pronounced touchiness that was quite new to her, and had in fact generally taken over the entire family, Grete insisted that the upkeep of Gregor’s room remained reserved for her alone. Once, just once, his mother had undertaken a major cleaning of the room, which employed the use of several buckets of water. But the extensive dampness made Gregor sick, and he lay supine, embittered and immobile on the couch. His mother’s punishment was not delayed for long, in any case, for that evening, as soon as his sister observed the change in Gregor’s room, she ran into the living room mightily offended and broke out in a fit of crying, uncaring of her mother’s pleading entreaties. Their father, of course, woke up with a start in his chair, and the parents stared at her astonished and helpless, until they, too, started to grow agitated. Turning to Gregor’s mother, his father reproached her, ordering that she was not to take over the cleaning of Gregor’s room from the sister—and then, turning to Grete on his other side, he shouted that she would no longer be allowed to clean Gregor’s room ever again. As he grew increasingly beside himself, Gregor’s mother tried to pull his father into their bedroom; meanwhile, Grete, still shaking with her crying fit, pounded on the table with her tiny fists, and Gregor sat and hissed at all this, angry that no one thought about shutting the door and sparing him the sight of such commotion.