The Meowmorphosis Read online

  And so Gregor did feel, as the woman left off gazing at him through the freezing rain and withdrew into her rooms without so much as dashing across the road to cuddle him or pat his head or give him warm milk and a pillow to sleep on. Now that he had no chance of such luxuries he certainly found that he missed them. He felt his small shoulders slump and turned away toward yet more streets and alleyways, all as unfamiliar now as a foreign country, for never had he seen them at such a height, nor been so conscious of their smells and prone to their dangers and wholly unable to hail a hansom cab. Indeed, so sensitive was he to all things that he could not help seeing each and every thing he passed wholly, with his whole being, as if he had to assess their danger to his soft and admittedly fuzzy person before he could safely observe something else. And so when soon enough he happened upon a square near the docks, he saw with great clarity two boys were sitting on a harbor wall playing at dice—which might be thrown at him, or one of the boys might pull his ears.

  A man—who might have a daughter waiting at home to whom he might wish to give the present of a kitten!—was reading a newspaper on the steps of a monument that seemed to glare down at Gregor with malevolent expression, a hero flourishing his sword on high as if to lord it over himself in particular. A girl, no doubt as enamoured of weak and furry things as Grete herself, was filling her bucket at the fountain. A fruit-seller was lying beside his wares, gazing at the lake. No doubt between the melons he concealed some foul weapon to use against offending strays and thieves. Through the vacant window and door opening of a café, Gregor could see two men quite at the back quaffing down their wine, surely discussing recipes for roast or boiled cat. The proprietor was sitting at a table in front and dozing—but wake him, and see if he would not chase Gregor off with a rolling pin! A barge was silently making for the little harbor, as if borne by invisible mechanisms over the water—water which would drown him as soon as sparkle in the moonlight. A man in a blue blouse climbed ashore and lashed the line to the pier. Behind the boatman two other beefy men in dark coats with silver buttons carried a bier, on which, beneath a silk cloth, a body lay. But Gregor was not convinced—perhaps even the corpse had designs on him. In ancient Aegypt, did they not bury live cats along with the dead?

  And then he saw, near the monument, above which the moon was starting to rise into just the right position to seem to be pierced by the tip of the hero’s sword like a large balloon, lounged a large cat not unlike himself—a tabby with long, bold stripes and a languorous expression similar to his father’s after a beef dinner and a measure of brandy.

  Nobody on the quay took any notice of the reclining cat, nor of the newcomer, as Gregor trotted past the men in black coats who set down the bier and mopped their foreheads, waiting for the boatman. Nobody went near him, nor the tabby; nobody spared them an inquisitive glance.

  NEAR THE MONUMENT LOUNGED A LARGE CAT NOT UNLIKE HIMSELF—A TABBY WITH A LANGUOROUS EXPRESSION.

  It occurred to Gregor that though he could not communicate with Grete or his mother, though his imprecations to his supervisor and his father had sounded even to his own ear like nothing more than a series of tinny squeaks and trills, perhaps those very squeaks and trills would allow him to communicate with that fine tabby gentleman—for the nation of cats was certainly his new family, and if he had any hope of achieving some standing in that household, he ought to begin sooner rather than later his career.

  Now Gregor had seen among his neighbors’ animals the way in which cats were accustomed to greeting each other: First the beasts hung warily back, then made their approach, sniffing hesitantly at the nose, the whiskers, and sometimes at the nether quarters—he did not feel he could masquerade any enthusiasm for that act with much success—and then, depending on some invisible pheromone indicating accord or total war, either hiss and arch the back in preparation for the attack or purr and nuzzle, rubbing pelts one against the other with apparent pleasure and agreeable satisfaction. Going over these memories, he felt sure he could reproduce them faithfully, and proceeded to approach the tabby sideways, as he had seen Mrs. Grubach’s calico do on several occasions.

  To his very great surprise, Gregor found that his new nose once more proved itself a wonder. For he did catch a great wafting smell emanating from the tabby, one which suggested to his mind, without speaking, a kind of comfortably guarded welcome, something like a door into a rich study, left slightly ajar. He wondered what his own glands communicated, but could see no very ready way to control them at this stage in his development. He trotted up to the gentleman cat and pressed his moist pink nose to the slightly darker, grayer nose of his new companion. The smell was very much stronger this close to the source; again he sensed the slightly open door, but now also a kettle of tea boiling just within, and scones with fresh butter laid out ready for a guest, and perhaps a snifter of something already decanted—yet the door still not so open that he could be sure any of that finery was meant for him. What a very great and complex language cats have, Gregor thought, that all this may be transferred without speech, without gesture, but through scent alone!

  “That’s quite enough,” said the tabby. “You are new at this; I will not ask you to embarrass yourself further.”

  Gregor felt himself at a loss. He understood the other cat well; though he had made little more than a mild meowing, he heard it as a pleasant, deep voice, cultured, slightly foreign—German, perhaps, or Swiss. He was terrified at how his own voice might sound. A kitten, still, his fat making his cheeks puff out and his body very sweetly round instead of the largesse of this grand specimen: Would his greeting sound like a boy’s tremulous voice? A castrato or worse? He felt a piercing shame, as often he had when trying to converse with his father on the issues of the day, for no matter what opinion he ventured his father disdained it, even if he himself had defended that same position the evening before, chalking up his son’s paucity of intelligence to natural defects in his character and sneering at his efforts to sustain the argument, all the while drinking port Gregor had purchased and sitting upon a couch bought with Gregor’s earnings. It was with this burning memory of humiliation fresh in his mind that he spoke:

  “Who are you?” He had been too brusque, he saw that immediately. He could smell his own scent now, so strong had his fear of shaming himself become, his mind flooded with the image of a door slammed tight—but creaking open to let a terrified child peer through, trembling with mortification.

  “I am the tabby Josef K,” announced the cat calmly, and began to nonchalantly groom his large, slate-colored paw as though Gregor were not standing before him, desperate for approval and comradeship. “And whatever your name may be I can smell that you were a man with a profession just a few days past—I was once a bank clerk, so you see I understand your predicament completely and can even sympathize, though of course it was all so long ago in my case that I can hardly recall the state of having been a bank clerk, which I understand was a common enough profession and for all I know still is, though why anyone would want to spend all day indoors chasing bits of paper money I cannot begin to speculate, I truly cannot. Indeed when I reflect on it—and I have time and disposition and capacity in abundance for such exercises now—I see that catdom is in every way a superior and more marvelous institution than clerkdom. After all, when I chase bits of paper, I really commit to it! Apart from us cats there are all sorts of creatures in the world, wretched, limited, dumb creatures who have no language but mechanical cries without any scent to enrich and deepen them; many of us cats study them and give them names, try to help them, educate them, uplift their moods, and so on. For my part I am quite indifferent to them except when they try to disturb me; I confuse them with one another, for they all look alike, I ignore them when at all possible. But one thing is too obvious to have escaped me, namely, how little inclined they are, compared with us cats, to stick together, how silently and sullenly and with what unspoken hostilities they pass one another by, how only the basest of interests such as food, d
rink, or breeding can bring them together for a little time in ostensible union—and how often those very interests give rise to violent conflict among them! Consider us cats on the other hand! One can easily see that we live all together in a heap, all of us, wherever we find ourselves, different as we are from one another on account of numberless profound and infinitesimal modifications that have arisen over the course of time. All in one heap! Of course I am not in a heap now, you might say, but all I had to do was stretch out and you immediately arrived, as if drawn by some invisible force, and though one cannot in seriousness call two cats a heap, they are well on their way! Where there is one there shall be two; where there are two, four cannot be far distant; where there are four, well, might as well give up the game! We are drawn to each other, and nothing can prevent us from satisfying that communal impulse; all our bylaws and institutions, the few we have and that I can be bothered with remembering, are rooted in this longing for the greatest bliss we know, the warm comfort of being together, tail to nose, belly to back, piled one atop the other against the cold of the world! I recall in my life as a man I was hounded from place to place, imprecated with accusations and harangued by men I did not know—what’s worse, when I desired a female I could almost never have her; if I wanted drink I would almost certainly have to endure the harsh looks of my landlady; and all day long my vital energy was sapped by folk who had no natural right to it—my employers, my debtors, my parents—everyone, in short, but myself, the one with the most interest in spending it! I know what you will say, kitten: Do not I have to worry now that some other cat might happen upon me in an alley, bite my ear or sever my tail, have some secret argument with me which I know nothing about, so that I must walk in fear every moment that doom in the form of a Persian or a Siamese might fall on me from the night? Well, certainly, certainly, but this is only the way of the world and one cannot blame the world for continuing in its way. If two cats in black fur appear to escort me away from my provender and to some dank hole where they might assail me more conveniently, well, at least I have a fighting chance to claw their eyes out in turn, where I promise you, in the world of men you will get no such opportunity!”

  This entire speech the tabby Josef K delivered by means of a few long, plaintive meows, a bit of purring, and some kneading of his impressive paws against the base of the monument. The rest Gregor understood through his nose and his whiskers, which was, he felt, a most extraordinary thing.

  “I am Gregor Samsa,” he essayed the technique himself, and found that though he worried about his accent the whole thing was as natural to him as folding a newspaper under his arm and hopping onto the commuter train in the morning had been not so very long ago. “And until Tuesday last I was a traveling salesman, though I could not begin to explain why I should happen to find myself no longer a traveling salesman but, as you see and hear, a very round and furry kitten—or cat, as I seem to be growing at a rapid rate—and as you say nothing about how you came to be the tabby Josef K instead of the bank clerk Josef K, I presume you know nothing about it either, but we are both in the same predicament and in a position to help each other—you to provide introduction for myself into the society of cats, and myself perhaps to provide some understanding of men that you have forgotten, being so long separated from your own transformation.” It seemed to him that endless sentences were the natural formulations of the feline tongue, for he did not feel capable of putting an end to any thought at all before he had appended seven or eight more onto the rear of it.

  The tabby Josef K stood up and arched his back, stretching first one hind leg and then the other. Two other cats silently arrived and flanked him, their fur cream colored and close fitting with deep brown accents upon their ears and tails and paws. Their pelts were silky and flat, unlike his own unruly coat. They all purred, disconcertingly, in unison. Josef K said:

  “Instead, while my comrades Franz and Willem accompany you—say good evening, gentlemen—no, I’m afraid you cannot resist, as I informed you in my earlier statement we cats do long to be together at all times and in all ways, and you are very fortunate that I and my fellows here are so eager and willing to be together in a heap with your own person—you are, you must admit, both a newcomer and a foreigner, and might have it much worse if you understand my meaning, which I think you must. While we all three of us go very efficiently and directly to the Academy for your trial, I will recall an incident from my youth. Did I say your trial? I meant your conviction. Did I say your conviction? I meant your execution. Did I say execution? No, no, good sir, I meant only your introduction to society.” The cream-colored cats pressed in on him so closely that Gregor felt himself truly in restraints and was compelled to move along rather quickly with his new comrades as Josef K went on. “Now, I was at the time in one of those inexplicable joyous states of exaltation that everyone must have experienced once or twice as a kitten; I was still quite a kitten myself, having only recently departed the position of bank clerk and entered the position of tabby. Everything delighted me, everything was my concern. I believed that great events were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my authoritative voice, things which would quite literally cease to be if I did not run after them and investigate them and wrap my tail around them—and presently something did happen that seemed to justify my wild assumptions. In itself it was nothing very extraordinary, for I have seen many such things often enough since, and more remarkable things, too, but at the time it struck me with all the force of a first impression, one of those impressions that can never be erased and influence a great deal of one’s later conduct.” And here the two burlier cats physically lifted Gregor between their bodies, hurrying him along down a corridor between buildings and away from the little square near the quay, away from the men carrying the bier and the girl filling her bucket and the fruit seller.

  “I encountered, in short, a little company of cats,” the tabby Josef K continued, “or rather I did not encounter them but they appeared before me, as cats have their habit of doing. Before that I had been running in darkness a long time, filled with a premonition of great things—of mice and of the possibility of not-too-rotten fish to be discovered but also of gripping a certain blue by the neck and mounting her, as well as settling a score with a couple of fellows who had been rude to me and squashed my ear, leaping upon them until they accepted my domination completely. I had run in darkness for a long time, just as we are doing now, up and down, listening sharply to everything, led on by vague, unfocused desires for everything I have already mentioned, and then I suddenly came to a stop with the feeling that I was in the right place, and looking up I saw suddenly that it was a bright day, only a little hazy, and everywhere was a riot of intoxicating smells; I greeted the morning with an uncertain growling in my throat, when—as if I had conjured them up out of some well of darkness, to the accompaniment of terrible sounds such as I had never heard before even when I was a man, seven cats stepped into the light. Had I not clearly seen that they were cats and that they themselves brought those sounds with them—though I could not understand how they were producing it—I would have run away at once, but things were more or less as I have stated, so I stayed. At that time I still knew almost nothing of that peculiar creative gift for music with which the feline race is uniquely endowed—certainly you have some inkling of it already having heard my humble symphonies—though music had surrounded me as a perfectly natural and indispensable element of existence while I was a man, I had not yet discovered it as a cat, and so all the more astonishing to me were these seven great musicians, standing before me, not speaking, not singing, but remaining generally quite silent, intently silent, as though silent with a purpose—but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music, the lifting and settling down of their feet, certain turns of their heads, their running and their abruptly standing still, the positions they took up in relation to one another, the symmetrical patterns they produced by one cat kneading the belly of another wi
th his front paws and the rest doing likewise until the first bore all the weight of the other six, or by all lying flat on the ground and whirling their tails in several complicated revolutions, and none made a false move or note, not even the last cat, though he was a little unsure compared to the others, did not always seem to enjoy being the one whose belly was kneaded rather than a kneader, who sometimes hesitated on the stroke of the downbeat, but yet was uncertain and lesser only by comparison with the superb performance of the others, and even if he had been much more uncertain, which is to say quite uncertain, indeed, he could not have done very much harm, the others, great maestros all of them, having kept the rhythm so precisely. But it is too much to say that I saw them, that I actually saw them at all. They appeared from somewhere; I greeted them as fellow cats. And although I was profoundly confused by the sounds that accompanied them, they were cats nevertheless—cats like you and me, and you may perceive being at least somewhat intelligent that I have a secondary narrative purpose in saying so. But I regarded them by force of habit simply as cats I happened to meet upon my way, and felt a profound wish to approach them and exchange scents and bristlings; they were quite near to me as well, cats certainly much older than I, and sleek, rather than of the woolly-haired breed shared by myself and yourself, yet not at all alien in size or shape, and indeed quite familiar to me, for I had seen many such or similar cats throughout Prague. But while I was still involved in these reflections—and reflections do involve me deeply, one might say I can hardly be shaken out of them no matter how much a soul might wish to interrupt and silence me—no, he will not do it, or I will scratch him soundly, or have my fellows do it if I do not wish to dull my claws by the action!—the music gradually became deafening, literally knocking the breath out of me and pushing me by brute melodic force far from those little cats, quite against my will—why, just as you have been swept!—and while I howled as if some noxious pain were being inflicted upon me, my mind could attend to nothing but that music that seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the heights, from the depths, from everywhere, surrounding anyone who might listen—how can humans hear nothing of this?—overwhelming his senses, crushing him, and over his insensate body still blowing its quiet horns. And then a respite came, for I was too spent, too enervated, too beggared by their voices to endure any more, a respite came and I beheld again the seven cats carrying out their revolutions, making their circus leaps. I longed to call out to them despite their aloof natures, to beg them to enlighten me, poor kitten who still felt as a man of position feels that he could ask anyone anything and receive a sensible answer. But hardly had I begun my interrogation, hardly did I feel as if I was getting toward good and familiar cattish terms with the seven of them, when their psychic music began again, stole my wits away, whirled me in circles as if I were one of the musicians and not merely a victim of their strange spell, cast me here and there, no matter how I begged for mercy. The sounds rescued me finally from their own violence by driving me into a labyrinth of wooden boxes that rose around that alley, though I had never noticed them before, when my business as a man took me briskly from place to place—but then it trapped me wholly, kept my belly pressed to the earth, though that vibratory music still echoed in the space behind me, egging me on like a dog chasing me down. Briefly I thought I had escaped it, and I snatched a moment to get my breath back. I must admit that I was less surprised by the artistry of the seven cats—it was incomprehensible to me, and also quite definitely beyond my capabilities—at least then—than by their courage in facing so openly the music of their own souls—for surely that’s what it was, their power to endure it so calmly without turning away from its cacophony, its strength. But now from my hiding hole I saw more closely that it was not so much coolness or disinterest as the most exquisite tension that fueled their performance; those limbs, so apparently sure in their movements quivered at every step with a perpetual apprehensive stiffness; as if rigid with despair the cats kept their eyes fixated on one another, and their tails, whenever the tension weakened for a moment, drooped miserably. It could not be fear of failure that agitated them so deeply; cats do not worry themselves over failure as men do, for a cat cannot fail—if a creature fails, he is not a cat, and if he is a cat, he cannot fail. But then why were they so afraid?”