The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Page 3

  “Comedian!” Georg could not help calling out, recognizing the damage immediately and biting, only too late,—his eyes frozen—into his tongue, so that he buckled under the pain.

  “Yes, I have indeed been performing a comedy! Comedy! A good word for it! What other consolation does the old widowed father have left? Tell me—and for the moment of your answer, remain my living son—what choice did I have, in my back room, persecuted by unfaithful staff, old to the bones? And my son went through the world in jubilation, closing deals that I had prepared, falling over himself with pleasure, and walked away from his father with the barred face of an honorable man! Do you believe I never loved you, I, from whom you stem?”

  “Now he is going to lean forward,” thought Georg, “what if he were to fall and shatter to pieces!” These words hissed through his head. His father leaned forward, but did not fall. Because Georg had not come closer as he had expected, he stood up again.

  “Stay where you are, I don’t need you! You think you still have the strength to come over here and only hold yourself back because you want to. You are mistaken! I am still the much stronger one. Alone I may have had to retreat, but as it is, your mother has given me her strength, I have bonded wonderfully with your friend, I have your customers here in my pocket!”

  “He even has pockets in his nightshirt!” Georg said to himself and believed that he could embarrass him before the entire world with that remark. He thought this for just a moment, for he was constantly forgetting everything.

  “Hook arms with your bride and come my way! I will sweep her from your side, you’ll be amazed how!”

  Georg grimaced in disbelief. His father merely nodded, asserting the truth of what he had said, into Georg’s corner.

  “How you amused me today when you came and asked whether you should write to your friend about your engagement. He knows all about it, silly boy, he knows all about it! I wrote him, of course, because you forgot to take my writing things away from me. That is why he hasn’t been here for years, he knows everything a hundred times better than you yourself, your letters crumpled up and unread in his left hand, while he holds out my letters to read in his right!”

  He swung his arm over his head in his enthusiasm. “He knows everything a thousand times better!” he cried.

  “Ten thousand times!” said Georg, to ridicule his father but, still in his mouth, the words took on a deadly serious ring.

  “For years now I’ve been waiting for you to come to me with this question! Do you think I worry about anything else? Do you think I read the news? Here!” and he threw Georg a newspaper that must have been carried along into his bed. An old newspaper with a name entirely unfamiliar to Georg.

  “How long you have taken to grow up! Your mother had to die, she couldn’t live to see the happy day; your friend is perishing in his Russia, three years ago he was already yellow enough to dispose of; and me, you see how things have become for me. You certainly have eyes for that!”

  “So you’ve been lying in wait for me!” cried Georg.

  His father said compassionately: “You probably wanted to say that earlier. Now it’s out of place.”

  And louder: “So now you know what there was other than yourself; until now you only knew about yourself! After all, you were actually an innocent child, but more actually you were a devilish person!—And therefore be aware: I condemn you now to death by drowning!”

  Georg felt chased out of the room, he still carried the blow, with which his father fell onto the bed behind him, in his ears. On the stairs, over whose steps he rushed as though they were a slanted surface, he startled his maid, who was on her way upstairs to clean up the room after the night. “Jesus!” she cried and covered her face with her apron, but he was already gone. He leapt through the gate, compelled to cross the road toward the water. He was already clinging to the railing, like a hungry man to his food. He flung himself over, like the excellent gymnast that, to his parents’ pride, he had been in his youth. He still held on with increasingly weak hands, spotted an omnibus between the bars of the railing that would easily cover the sound of his fall, called softly, “Dear Parents, I always did love you,” and let himself fall.

  At this moment, a positively endless stream of traffic passed over the bridge.

  THE METAMORPHOSIS

  I

  As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from restless dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect. He lay on his hard, armor-like back and saw, when he lifted his head a little, his curved, brown abdomen, segmented by stiff arches, the height of which was barely covered by his blanket, which was ready to slip down entirely at any moment. His numerous and, in comparison to his girth, pathetically thin legs flickered helplessly before his eyes.

  “What has happened to me?” he thought. It was not a dream. His room, a proper human being’s room, only slightly too small, lay calmly between the four familiar walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of textile samples was spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture that he had recently cut from an illustrated magazine and placed in a pretty, gilded frame. It depicted a lady, who, dressed in a fur hat and fur boa, was sitting upright and raising toward the viewer a heavy fur muff, in which her entire forearm had disappeared.

  Gregor’s gaze then turned to the window, and the dreary weather—one could hear raindrops striking the tin windowsill—made him quite melancholy. “What if I were to sleep a little longer and forget all this foolishness,” he thought, but that was entirely unfeasible because he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side, and in his current state he was unable to bring himself into this position. No matter how much force he used to throw himself onto his right side, he always rocked back to lie on his back. He must have tried it a hundred times, closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see his wriggling legs, and only let off when he began to feel a slight, dull pain in his side that he had never felt before.

  “Oh God,” he thought, “what a strenuous profession I have chosen! Traveling around day in, day out. The business dealings are much more demanding than those in the actual business at home, and I am additionally burdened with the menace of traveling, worrying about train connections, the irregular and bad meals, a stream of people that is constantly changing, never lasting, never becoming more cordial. Let the devil take it all!” He felt a slight itching high on his abdomen; pushed himself slowly on his back closer to the bedpost in order to raise his head better; found the place that was itching, which was covered with small white spots that he was not able to assess; and wanted to feel the area with one of his legs but pulled it back immediately, for his touch sent a wave of cold shivers through him.

  He slid back into his previous position. “Getting up so early,” he thought, “makes one entirely stupid. People must have their sleep. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women. If I return to the guesthouse during the morning, for example, in order to transfer the acquired orders, these men are still sitting at the breakfast table. I should try that with my boss; I would be thrown out on the spot. Who knows, by the way, whether that wouldn’t be quite good for me. If I weren’t holding myself back on account of my parents, I would have quit long ago. I would have stood before the boss and spoken my mind from the bottom of my heart. He would have fallen from his desk! It is a peculiar habit, after all, to sit on the desk and talk down to one’s employees, who are also forced to approach the desk quite closely because the boss is hard of hearing. Well, all hope is not yet lost; once I have the money together to pay off the debt that my parents owe him—it may take five to six more years—I’ll carry it out for sure. Then I’ll make a big cut. For the time being, however, I must get up, for my train leaves at five.”

  And he looked over at his alarm clock, which was ticking on the chest. “Heavenly Father!” he thought. It was half past six and the hands were progressing steadily; they had actually passed the half-hour mark already and had almost reached three-quarters. Had the alarm fail
ed to ring? One could see from the bed that it was set correctly at four o’clock; it had certainly also rung. Yes, but was it possible to sleep peacefully through that furniture-rattling noise? Well, his sleep had not been peaceful, after all, but probably all the sounder for it. But what was he to do now? The next train left at seven o’clock; in order to catch it, he would have to hurry around ridiculously, and the collection was not yet packed, and he himself was definitely not feeling particularly fresh and agile. And even if he caught the train, a good scolding was not to be avoided, for the shop’s attendant had waited at the five o’clock train and long since reported his failure to appear. He was the boss’s creature, spineless and stupid. And what if he said that he was ill? That would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious, for Gregor had not been ill even once during his five years of service. The boss would certainly arrive with the health insurance doctor, would reproach his parents for having such a lazy son, and stifle all objections with a reference to the health insurance doctor, for whom there are only completely healthy people, after all, with an aversion to work. And would he be entirely wrong in this case? Aside from a drowsiness that was really unreasonable considering that he had slept so long, Gregor felt quite well, in fact, and was even feeling particularly hungry.

  As he contemplated all of this in great haste, without being able to decide to leave his bed—the alarm clock had just struck a quarter to seven—there was a cautious knock at the door behind the head of his bed. “Gregor,” someone called—it was his mother—“it’s a quarter to seven. Weren’t you going to leave town?” That gentle voice! Gregor was startled as he heard his voice responding, for although it was unmistakably his own voice, it had been mixed, as though from below, with an insuppressible, painful chirping sound that allowed his words their formal clarity at first, only to destroy them as they resonated so that one was not sure if they had been heard correctly. Gregor wanted to answer thoroughly and explain everything, but limited himself, given the circumstances, to saying: “Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I’m getting up.” Due to the wooden door, the change in Gregor’s voice did not seem to be noticeable outside, for his mother was reassured by this explanation and shuffled away. But through this brief conversation, the other family members were now aware that Gregor, contrary to their expectations, was still at home, and soon his father knocked on one side door, weakly, but with his fist. “Gregor, Gregor,” he called, “what’s wrong?” And after a little while, he urged again with a deeper voice: “Gregor! Gregor!” But at the other side door, his sister pleaded softly: “Gregor? Are you not well? Do you need anything?” Toward both sides Gregor answered: “I’m already finished,” and tried, with the most careful pronunciation and by inserting long pauses between the individual words, to remove all conspicuousness from his voice. And his father returned to his breakfast, but his sister whispered: “Gregor, open the door, I beg you.” But Gregor wouldn’t even think of opening the door, and instead commended himself for the precaution to which he had become accustomed from traveling of locking all doors at night, even at home.

  First he wanted to get up calmly and, without disturbance, get dressed, and, most importantly, eat breakfast before thinking about the rest, because, as he was well aware, thinking would not come to any sensible conclusion in bed. He remembered having often felt some slight pain in bed, perhaps caused by lying in an awkward position, which then turned out to be purely imaginary when he got up, and he was curious to find out how today’s illusions would gradually dissolve. He did not doubt in the least that the changes in his voice were nothing but the first signs of a bad cold, an occupational illness for traveling salesmen.

  Throwing the blanket off was quite simple; he only needed to inflate himself a little and it fell on its own. But beyond that, things became difficult, especially because he was so incredibly wide. He would have needed arms and hands to prop himself upright; but instead of these he had only the many little legs, which were continually moving about in different directions and which he could not control to begin with. If he tried to bend one of them, it was the first one to stretch out; and by the time he finally succeeded in getting one leg to do what he wanted it to, all the other legs would be waving about as though set free at the greatest, most painful, level of excitement. “It’s no good staying in bed unnecessarily,” Gregor said to himself.

  He wanted to get out of bed with the bottom part of his body first, but this bottom part, which he had, by the way, not yet seen, and which he could not really picture, proved to be too inflexible; it moved so slowly. When he had finally grown almost wild, gathered his strength, and thrust himself forward without restraint, he had chosen the wrong direction and slammed heavily against the bedpost. The burning pain that he felt instructed him that particularly the bottom part of his body was perhaps the most sensitive at the moment.

  He therefore tried to get his upper body out of the bed first, and turned his head carefully toward the edge of the bed. This worked easily, and eventually, despite its width and weight, the bulk of his body slowly followed his turning head. But as he finally held his head freely in the air outside of his bed, he became afraid of moving forward in this fashion, for if he were to ultimately let himself fall in this way, it would take a downright miracle for his head not to be injured. And his consciousness could not be lost now at any cost; he would sooner remain in bed.

  However, after repeating the effort only to lie there sighing just as he was before, and seeing his little legs fighting one another again, possibly worse than before, and finding no possibility of bringing peace and order into this arbitrariness, he told himself again that he could not possibly remain in bed, and that it would be the most sensible decision to sacrifice everything, even if there was only the slightest hope of freeing himself of his bed. But at the same time he didn’t forget to remind himself from time to time that calm, the calmest deliberation, was much better than desperate decisions. At such moments he focused his eyes as sharply as possible on the window, but unfortunately the sight of the morning fog, which even enveloped the other side of the narrow street, offered little by way of assurance or cheer. “Already seven o’clock,” he said to himself as the alarm clock struck anew. “Already seven o’clock and still such a fog.” And for a while he lay calmly, breathing shallowly, as though he were expecting the utter stillness to return everything to its real and natural state.

  But then he said to himself: “Before it strikes a quarter-past seven, I must absolutely have gotten myself completely out of bed. Besides, someone from the office will have come by then to ask after me, for the office is opened before seven o’clock.” And then he began to rock the entire length of his body steadily out of bed. If he were to let himself fall out of bed in this way, his head, which he intended to lift sharply as he fell, would presumably remain uninjured. His back seemed to be hard; it was unlikely that anything would happen to it as he fell on the carpet. His greatest reservation was his deliberation about the loud crash that would certainly result, and the concern, if not fear, that it was certain to provoke behind all the doors. That would have to be risked however.

  As Gregor was already jutting halfway out of bed—the new method was more of a game than a strain, all he needed to do was rock back and forth jerkily—it occurred to him how easy everything would be if someone were to come help him. Two strong people—he thought of his father and the maid—would suffice entirely; they would only have to slide their arms beneath his arched back, extract him in this way from his bed, bend down under his weight, and then simply wait carefully for him to complete his swing over onto the floor, where his legs would hopefully gain some purpose. Now, quite apart from the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call for help? Despite all distress, he could not suppress a smile at this thought.

  He had already gotten to the point where he was rocking so strongly that he could barely maintain his balance, and he would have to make a final decision very soon because it was five minutes before a quarter-past seven
—when the doorbell rang. “That’s someone from the office,” he said to himself and almost froze, while his little legs only danced all the more urgently. For a moment, everything remained quiet. “They’re not going to open,” Gregor told himself, caught in some sort of senseless hope. But then, of course, the maid walked in firm steps to the door and opened it, as always. Gregor only needed to hear the visitor’s first word of greeting and already knew who it was—the chief clerk himself. Why did Gregor have to be the one condemned to serve in a company that immediately conceived the greatest suspicions at the slightest lapse? Were all the employees, the whole lot, scoundrels with not one faithful, obedient person among them who, if he failed to exploit even a few morning hours for the business, would go mad with remorse and be literally incapable of leaving his bed? Would it really not have sufficed to have an apprentice ask after him—if this asking was even necessary? Did the chief clerk have to come himself, and, in doing so, show his entire, innocent family that the investigation of this suspicious matter could only be entrusted to the chief clerk’s judgment? And more as the result of the agitated state that Gregor had reached through this deliberation than as the result of a proper decision, he swung himself with all his might out of bed. There was a loud thud, but not an actual crash. The fall was alleviated slightly by the carpet, and his back was also more elastic than Gregor thought, producing a not-so-conspicuous dull sound. But he had not managed to hold his head carefully enough and had hit it; he turned it and rubbed it on the carpet in anger and pain.

  “Something has fallen in there,” said the chief clerk in the room to the left. Gregor sought to imagine whether something similar to what had happened to him today could also happen to the chief clerk; this possibility really must be acknowledged, after all. But as if in blunt response to this question, the chief clerk then took a few decisive steps in the next room and let his patent leather boots creak. From the room to the right, his sister whispered to inform Gregor: “Gregor, the chief clerk is here.” “I know,” said Gregor under his breath; but he didn’t dare to raise his voice loudly enough for his sister to have been able to hear.