The Meowmorphosis Read online

  THE TWO CATS TOSSED GREGOR INTO A DANK CORNER OF THE ROOM.

  Gregor felt that he knew. Had he not held himself in such a tension for days now, unsure of his new body, feeling as though he held himself in this world only by force of will, terrified that it had always been so, that he had always known it was so, and for a moment, just a moment, while he slept, he had let that will slip and all these horrors had resulted? But he felt that, when flanked by two brown-eared creatures with no apparent purpose but to be large and threatening in his direction, it was not the time to interrupt another fellow’s story. And, indeed, the tabby Josef K wrinkled his silky muzzle in such a way that he recalled a professor expectantly awaiting answers from a recalcitrant classroom.

  “Well, what do you think happened? I called out to them, my best meow, but they—incredible, incredible—made no reply. Cats who make no answer to another cat are guilty of a great offense. A hiss or a growl, surely, these I could have accepted, but nothing at all? Perhaps they were not cats at all. Could I not hear on close examination the subdued cries with which they encouraged one another, drew one another’s attention to rising difficulties or coming periods of rest, warned one another against mistakes. Could I not see the last and youngest, to which most of the cries were addressed, the little mackerel not unlike you in his chubby accoutrement, his stripes like a small tiger’s, stealing tiny glances at me as though he dearly wished to reply but refrained, for his fellows would not have allowed it? But why should they not allow it, the very thing that our laws unconditionally demand? I became so indignant at the thought and at once the music lost its power over me. Those cats were breaking the law. Great magicians though they might have been, but the law was valid for them, too! I knew the laws quite well, though I was still a kitten. And having recognized them as criminals I noticed another thing. They had good reason for remaining silent, if they had any good sense of shame. For how were they conducting themselves? Because of all the music I had not noticed it before, but they had flung away all shame, the wretched toms were doing the very thing that is most natural to man but most ridiculous and indecent to a cat—they were walking on their hind legs! Fie on them! They were showing their nakedness, blatantly displaying it, they were doing it as though it were an admirable thing. And when, even for a moment, they yielded to their more proper instincts and their paws happened to all rest upon the ground, they were appalled, as if their very nature was a mortal error, hastily snatching up their paws again, their eyes begging forgiveness for having slid into animalism. Another cat might have asked, Has the world turned on its head? But not I. That was the beginning of understanding for Josef K, who apprehended with all his powers that these cats had been, not very long ago indeed, men, as Josef K had been!” The tabby let loose a long, ragged meow of emphasis and also by means of ending his story.

  The two large, silky cats pressed in on Gregor, crushing his soft feline ribs. Suddenly he felt that his roundness, so pleasing to his sister, might be the death of him. He inquired whether there was more to the story, to the strange music, whether he, Gregor, was meant to take some moral lesson from the tale, some edification with which to enrich his own experience as a cat.

  “That is all there is and there is no more. You will find that, in life as in literature, most episodes are arbitrary, confusing, and not meant for your benefit. I took you for an educated tom, sir, in which case you would have read your German classics and be quite accustomed to a narrator who only loves to hear himself speak—you must admit I speak very well, with many masculine and robust subclauses, romantic dashes, and surprising punctuation—and forgets what the purpose of telling the story was in the first place something like two-thirds of the way through. This is considered traditional! I believe I have shown myself to be quite a high class of cat. There was much symbolism in my monologue if you cared to listen—the music of the seven cats stood at once for the peculiar way in which you must have noticed we felines speak—those seven cats were telling me their life stories all at once, all their woes, their bank clerk sorrows, and the terror of waking up a cat; it’s not really very interesting except as a symbol for how I, Josef K, am cleverer than most other cats, whether they used to be men or not, and as a warning that your smallest prancing step, the way you lift your adorable paws and wriggle your sweet little pink nose when you are afraid, reveals to me your entire life story, everything you could ever wish to keep secret and you cannot help revealing these things to me, so truly you are entirely helpless in my power, and during your trial you will not be allowed to lie in any fashion, nor will you be able to, for I will see through it. In addition, the whole chapter was an allegory for the Bohemian anarchist movement and the essential unknowability of the world. Didn’t you notice?”

  Gregor admitted he had not. He felt deep shame.

  “I used a great number of techniques,” sniffed Josef K with reproach.

  “But how can there be a trial? Am I under arrest? And why is it all proceeding so strangely? I haven’t done anything.”

  “Now you’re starting again,” said the larger of the two burly cats, Franz, dipping into a low alleyway and dragging him along with the brute force of his furry shoulder. “We don’t answer questions like that.” They all crept on their bellies over and under several unpleasant things, greasy pipes and broken masonry and overturned rubbish canisters. Finally they squeezed in single file through an opening in a crumbling, moldering wall and into a large area crawling with cats of every description and color, piled together in decadent heaps just as Josef K had described, some of their paws trailing in huge saucers of milk, some of them slurping kippers with relish and miowling at one another drunkenly. It reminded Gregor on the whole of gentlemen’s clubs of which he had never been a member, not because he could not afford it—rather he was very near to being able to purchase membership, and at that point the clubs habitually allowed you to attend on a trial basis—but because he was not well liked by the other gentlemen of his economic station. He was short and dark and a salesman besides, which seemed to them an unsavory occupation. And besides he had neither wife nor child nor particularly distinguished family name, and what could he bring to such a club, what could he add that they did not already have? He considered that all of this had been communicated to him by the angles of the board members’ eyebrows and the tenor of their very polite promises to take his future membership under advisement rather than by direct address, and perhaps the ways in which men and cats were different were perhaps very small, indeed.

  Just at that moment the two beefy cats snatched Gregor by the scruff, their teeth biting into him painfully, and tossed him without too much trouble—for he was still a kitten, albeit a large one, soft and pliable and fluffy—into a dank corner of the room and then stood in front of him like two dark walls, creating a little cell out of which he had little hope of forcing his way. Gregor cried out in alarm and fright, scrabbling his large white paws under his captors’ heavy bellies, an act they seemed to notice not at all.

  Willem, who could be differentiated from Franz by a blaze of dark brown on his chest and a certain blunt fatness to his face, yawned so widely that his face seemed to split open from ear to ear.

  “The way you’re carrying on, it’s worse than a child. Your little paws wiggling say there has been a mistake and you’re such a good kitty, a sweet kitty, not a bad, naughty, guilty one at all. Well, what is it you want? Do you want to get this great, bloody trial of yours over with quickly? We’re just cats, that’s all we are. Muscle. Junior officers like us hardly know one end of Prague from the other: all we’ve got to do is do what K. says and get paid for it in kippers and sparrows. That’s all we are; that’s all we care about. Josef K said, ‘Come on, there’s a new one, best round him up before he makes trouble,’ and we reported to the docks just in time. Mind you, if you have a few scraps of trout or whatnot hidden away somewhere, what we can do is make sure that our testimony says this here is a right sort of fellow, not a lick of trouble. There’s no
mistake there. We can make it easy on you. Our authorities as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us out. That’s the law. Where d’you think there’d be any mistake there?”

  “I don’t know this law you mean,” said Gregor. “I haven’t done anything at all, and if it’s an issue of my having been a traveling salesman a few days ago, why, Josef K was also a man, and a bank clerk besides, which is a wretched sort of profession, and so it can’t be that my crime is simply one of birth.”

  “As to that, I was born an insurance man,” Willem purred. “I had two sons and they were both only so-so in the face, but what else can you ask, with an old tom like me as a father? I was going about life as fine as you please, not rich but not poor, not fat but not hungry, and when bad things happened to other people I felt happy about it, because it meant that I had work. You shouldn’t judge me for that, but given the circumstances I’ll be generous and say you can if you like, if it makes you feel better, more comforted in your hour of need. But then, one morning, I woke up and I was just a ball of cuddly soft kitten, and nothing anyone did could set me to rights! Well, my boys were only so-so in the soul as well, it turned out, and they pulled my ears and shaved my tail and tried to set my whiskers on fire, so I took flight out a window, and there you have the story of Willem, who is now a bachelor, thank you very much, and a respectable policecat with as much mackerel as he can chew, most days. The life of a police officer is a good one, I must say—one is safe from most predations and one gets to pounce on a great number of unsuspecting folk.”

  “Do you never worry that you pounce upon the innocent?” pleaded Samsa.

  “It doesn’t trouble me. If they were innocent, they wouldn’t have gotten arrested. After all, I’ve never been arrested.”

  Franz, whose face was a good deal narrower, as in the habit of some Ægyptian statues, turned his head while keeping his body firmly in place, imprisoning poor Samsa.

  “If you’re curious, I was a psychiatrist with my own sanatorium—lovely place, very clean, as humane as such can be, given that they are built to house the inhumane. But I had a comfortable office, and a very fine rug, several kinds of brandy, and a mistress in another city, which is the best place for mistresses. I did not wish to marry, for it did not interest me, and children interested me far less than the latest journals on abnormal behavior. I felt reasonably optimistic about the course of my life and hoped to make a discovery or two before I died and to be bothered as little as possible, which, truly, is not very likely in a sanatorium, but that is what God gave us morphine for, is it not, Willem? And yet, like my fellow officer here, I went to bed one night and suffered unpleasant dreams such as I often had when ingesting a great deal of dairy and woke in my current state, though somewhat smaller, with what I may humbly suggest were the finest set of paws ever set on a cat. Unfortunately the fate of cats in Bohemian sanatoriums is more often some poor schizophrenic’s supper or a psychotic’s personal toy, and I immediately realized my danger and made use of the front exit. Be grateful, I say. I once knew a man who woke up a cockroach.”

  Gregor was not depressed by these tales of unfortunate transformations but rather energized. He suggested that they might, if they put their intellects to the task, discover the ultimate metaphysical reason behind their situations and uncover some method of reversing them and returning to their old lives. But his eager imprecations were greeted with laughter.

  “If you’re unhappy with your affairs, so much the worse for you, then,” said Willem. “Life has worked out all to my satisfaction.”

  Franz concurred. “As we are not on trial, we have no particular worries.”

  “It probably exists only in our heads,” Gregor said without much hope. He wanted, in some way, to insinuate himself into the thoughts of the cats, to reshape those thoughts to his benefit or to make himself at home there. But Willem just said dismissively, “What do you want reasons for? You broke the law, you go to trial, you take your punishment. Metaphysics doesn’t figure into it. Not our field.”

  “But I haven’t done anything!”

  Franz joined in and said, “Look at this, Willem, he doesn’t even know feline law and at the same time insists he’s innocent. As for it being all in our heads, I think I would have noticed if I had gone mad. It was my profession, after all.”

  “You’re quite right, but we can’t get him to understand a thing,” said the other cat.

  Gregor stopped talking with them. “Do I,” he thought to himself, “do I really have to carry on getting tangled up with the chattering of lackeys like this? They admit that they are of the lowest position. They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves. I just need a few words with Josef K and everything will be incomparably clearer, much clearer than a long conversation with these two can make it.”

  He walked up and down the free space in his little cell a couple of times. He had to put an end to this display.

  “Take me to your superior, the tabby Josef K,” he said.

  “As soon as he wants to see you. Not before,” said the one called Willem. “And now my advice to you,” he added, “is to sit down, stay calm, and wait and see what’s to be done with you. If you take our advice, you won’t tire yourself out thinking about philosophical things to no purpose. You need to pull yourself together, for there’s a lot of sitting and listening to your personal faults that’s going to be required of you. You’ve behaved toward us decently enough so far, but you forget that we, whatever we are, we’re still free cats and you’re not, and that’s quite an advantage and an indication you ought to take seriously that we are in all the important ways superior to you.”

  Gregor stood still for some time. Perhaps, if he barged into them head-first, the two of them would not be able to stand in his way—perhaps that would be the simplest way to settle the whole thing, by bringing it to a head, as it were. But maybe they would grab him, and if he were thrown down on the ground he would lose all the advantage he, in a certain respect, had over them, having been a man much more recently. But perhaps it was no advantage at all, since he had no notion of how to compete in a feline brawl, or any brawl, for that matter, as that sort of thing was rarely required of salesmen. So he decided on the more certain solution, the way things would go in the natural course of events, and curled up with his tail brought round to hide his face, without another word either from him or from the burly cats.

  He pawed helplessly and a little pathetically at the stone floor and thought back fondly on the half-frozen tossed-out fish he had enjoyed earlier. For just a moment, then, between the window of his old apartment and the square where he had met Josef K, he had felt well and confident—now all that good feeling was gone. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to go on at all. It would have been so pointless to kill himself when he had been a man and unhappy, so that even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable. And now he was a cat with no clear idea how such a thing could be accomplished, without the advantages of hanging, poisoning, or a respectable revolver. All those methods were unavailable and seemed to intend on remaining so. If only he could have a bit of schnapps, he could clear his head, but of course that was impossible, and he could no more discern what a cat would quaff in place of schnapps than how a cat might manage suicide.