The Metamorphosis and Other Stories Read online

  III

  Gregor’s serious injury, from which he suffered for more than a month—the apple, which no one dared to remove, remained stuck in his flesh as a visible reminder—seemed to have caused even his father to remember that Gregor, despite his present sad and repulsive form, was a member of their family, and that they should not be treating him as an enemy. Rather, in accordance with family duty, they should swallow their reluctance and bear it.

  And although Gregor had probably lost some of his mobility forever and presently required many long minutes to cross his room like an old invalid—crawling up on the walls was unthinkable—he believed that he was fully compensated for this worsening of his condition when every evening the living room door, which he was in the habit of observing sharply one or two hours beforehand, was opened so that he, who was lying in the darkness of his room and not visible from the living room, was able to see the entire family at the well-lit table and listen to their conversation, with their general permission as it were, entirely different than before.

  Admittedly, they were no longer the lively conversations of earlier times, which Gregor had invariably thought of in his little hotel room with some longing as he threw himself tiredly into the damp bedding. Now things were usually quite calm. His father fell asleep soon after supper in his armchair; his mother and sister warned one another to be quiet; his mother, bent far forward beneath the light, sewed fine garments for a fashion store; his sister, who had taken a job as a salesclerk, studied stenography and French in the evenings in order to perhaps one day attain a better position. Sometimes his father woke up, and, as though he didn’t know that he had been asleep, said to his mother: “How long you’ve been sewing again today!” and fell asleep again immediately, as his mother and sister smiled wearily at one another.

  With a kind of obstinacy, his father refused even at home to take off his messenger’s uniform; and while his dressing gown hung uselessly on the coat hook, his father dozed fully dressed in his seat, as if he were always ready for duty and waiting even here for his supervisor’s voice. Hence the uniform, which was not new to begin with, lost its cleanliness right from the start, despite all diligence on the part of his mother and sister, and Gregor often spent entire evenings looking at this jacket, with its many stains, shining with its unfailingly polished golden buttons, in which the old man slept quite uncomfortably yet peacefully.

  As soon as the clock struck ten, his mother tried gently to encourage his father to wake up and go to bed, for he was not getting proper sleep here, which his father, who had to appear for duty at six o’clock, desperately needed. But with the obstinacy that had grasped him since becoming a messenger, he always insisted on staying at the table even longer, although he regularly fell asleep and could only then be persuaded to exchange his armchair for his bed with the greatest difficulty. However much his mother and sister tried to pressure him with little warnings, he shook his head slowly for a quarter of an hour with his eyes closed and did not get up. His mother tugged at his sleeve, spoke cajoling words in his ear; his sister left her work to help her mother, but his father would not become roused. He simply sank deeper in his armchair. Only when the women seized him under his arms did he open his eyes, look back and forth between his sister and mother, and say: “What a life. So this is the peacefulness of my old age.” And supported by both women, he rose, laboriously, as though he were the greatest burden to himself, let himself be led by the women to the door, where he waved them away and went on by himself, while his mother hastily threw down her sewing, and his sister her pen, and ran after his father to assist him further.

  Who in this overworked and exhausted family had time to care for Gregor any more than was absolutely necessary? The household had been reduced even further. The maid had been dismissed after all. A huge, bony cleaning woman with white hair flying about her head came in the morning and evening to do the hardest chores. Everything else was managed by his mother in addition to her large amount of sewing work. It even happened that various pieces of family jewelry that his mother and sister had worn with great delight to social events and celebrations had been sold, as Gregor learned in the evening from the general discussion of the prices they had fetched. The greatest complaint, however, was always that they could not leave their apartment, which was far too large for their present circumstances, because they could not even begin to contemplate how to relocate Gregor. But Gregor nevertheless realized that it was not only consideration for him that prevented them from relocating, for he could be transported easily in a suitable box with a few air holes, after all. The primary reason preventing them from changing apartments was far more their utter hopelessness and the thought that they had been struck by misfortune the likes of which no one in their entire circle of friends and relations had seen. What the world demands of the poor they fulfilled to the utmost; his father brought the little bank clerk his breakfast, his mother sacrificed herself for the garments of strangers, his sister ran back and forth behind the counter at the customer’s command, but the family’s strength could be stretched no further. And the wound in Gregor’s back began to pain him anew when his mother and sister returned from bringing his father to bed, left their work unfinished, and moved close together, already sitting cheek to cheek. When his mother then said, pointing to Gregor’s room: “Close that door, Grete,” and when Gregor was then in the dark again, in the next room the women mingled their tears or even stared at the table tearlessly.

  Gregor spent his nights and days almost entirely without sleep. Sometimes he imagined that the next time the door was opened, he would take his family’s affairs in hand again just as he did before. After such a long time, his thoughts returned to the director and chief clerk, the salesmen and the apprentices, the simpleminded porter, two or three friends from other stores, a chambermaid from a country hotel, a dear, fleeting memory, a cashier girl from a millinery whom he had courted seriously but too slowly—they all appeared intermixed with strangers or those already forgotten, but instead of helping him and his family, they were all inaccessible and he was glad when they disappeared. But then he was not at all in the mood to worry about his family, but filled only with rage at their poor treatment of him, and although he could not imagine anything that he might wish to eat, he still made plans for getting into the pantry in order to take what was still due to him, even though he didn’t happen to be hungry. Without thinking anymore about what Gregor might particularly favor, his sister hurriedly shoved any old food into his room with her foot before rushing to the store in the morning and afternoon, and then sweeping it out with a pivot of the broom in the evening, regardless of whether the food had been only tasted or, as was the case most often, left entirely untouched. Cleaning his room, which she always did in the evenings now, couldn’t be done quickly enough. Streaks of dirt ran along the walls; here and there lay balls of dust and refuse. Initially, Gregor would position himself in particularly dirty corners upon his sister’s arrival in order to reproach her, to a certain extent. But he could have remained there for weeks, it seemed, before his sister had made any progress at all; she saw the dirt just as well as he did, after all, but she had simply decided to leave it there. And yet, with a touchiness that was entirely new to her, and which had indeed grasped the entire family, she made sure that the task of cleaning Gregor’s room remained reserved for her. Once his mother had subjected Gregor’s room to a thorough cleaning, which she had only managed with the use of several buckets of water—all the dampness also displeased Gregor, however, and he lay outstretched, resentful, and immobile on the sofa—but his mother did not escape punishment. For hardly had his sister noticed the change in Gregor’s room that evening than she ran into the living room, highly offended, and despite her mother’s imploringly raised hands, broke out in a fit of tears which her parents—her father, of course, had been startled out of his armchair—observed first in amazement and helplessness. Then they too began to stir. His father admonished his mother to his right for not
leaving the cleaning of Gregor’s room to his sister; while to his left, he screamed at his sister that she would never again be allowed to clean Gregor’s room. Meanwhile his mother was trying to drag his father, who was beside himself with agitation, into the bedroom; his sister, shaken by sobs, was hammering on the table with her little fists; and Gregor was hissing loudly in his anger that no one had thought to close his door and spare him this spectacle and commotion.

  But even if his sister, exhausted from her work, had become tired of caring for Gregor as before, it was by no means necessary for his mother to step in for her and there was no reason that Gregor had to be neglected, for now the cleaning woman was there. This old widow, who must have endured the most terrible things in her long life with the help of her powerful frame, was not actually disgusted by Gregor. Without being curious in any way, she happened to open the door to his room once, and, at the sight of Gregor, who, taken by complete surprise, began to run to and fro although no one was chasing him, she stood still in astonishment, her hands folded before her. Since then, she never failed to briefly open the door a little in the mornings and evenings and look in on Gregor. In the beginning she also called for him with words that she probably thought to be friendly, like “Come on over, you old dung beetle!” or “Just look at that old dung beetle!” Gregor did not respond to such appeals but remained motionless where he was, as though the door had not been opened. If only this cleaning woman had been ordered to clean his room daily, rather than being allowed to bother him uselessly whenever she felt like it! Early one morning—a heavy rain, perhaps already a sign of the coming spring, was beating against the window panes—the cleaning woman began calling to him again and Gregor was so resentful that he turned against her, albeit slowly and feebly, as if to attack. But the cleaning woman, instead of being afraid, simply lifted a chair that stood near the door up high above her, and as she stood there with her mouth opened wide, it was clear that she only intended to close her mouth when the armchair in her hand had struck down on Gregor’s back. “Can’t go any further, can you?” she asked, as Gregor turned around again, and put the armchair calmly back in the corner.

  Gregor was now eating almost nothing. Only when he happened to pass by the food that had been prepared for him did he take a bite for the fun of it in his mouth, hold it there for hours, and usually spit it out again. At first he thought that his sadness about the state of his room was keeping him from eating, but it was precisely these changes to his room that he reconciled himself to very quickly. The family had become accustomed to putting things in his room that they could not store elsewhere, and these things were many, for they had let one room in the apartment to three boarders. These serious gentlemen—all three had full beards, as Gregor ascertained once through a crack in the door—were meticulously intent on orderliness, not only in their room, but, as they had taken lodgings here, in the entire household, particularly in the kitchen. They did not tolerate things that were unnecessary, let alone dirty. And furthermore, they had for the most part brought their own furnishings with them. For this reason, many things that could not be sold, but that they also didn’t want to throw away, had become superfluous. All these things made their way into Gregor’s room and the ash can and rubbish bin from the kitchen as well. The cleaning lady, who was always in a hurry, simply hurled anything that happened to be useless at the moment into Gregor’s room; fortunately, Gregor usually saw only the object in question and the hand that was holding it. The cleaning woman may have intended to fetch these things again, given time and opportunity, or to throw them out all at once, but in fact they remained where they had been initially thrown, unless Gregor shifted them as he wriggled through all the clutter, first out of necessity, for no other place was free for him to crawl, but later with growing pleasure, although he lay motionless again for hours after such excursions, deadly tired and sad.

  Because the boarders sometimes took their evening meal in the common living room, the living room door remained closed some evenings, but Gregor could do quite easily without the door being opened. After all, he had not taken advantage of it on some evenings when the door had been open, but had lain in the darkest corner of his room without his family noticing. On one occasion the cleaning woman had left the door to the living room open slightly, and it remained open, even when the boarders entered in the evening and the lamps were lit. They seated themselves at the head of the table, where his father, mother, and Gregor used to sit, unfolded their napkins and took their knives and forks in hand. His mother appeared immediately in the door with a dish of meat, and close behind her followed his sister with a dish piled high with potatoes. From the food rose a dense cloud of steam. The boarders leaned over the dishes that had been placed before them, as though they intended to assess them before eating, and indeed the one sitting in the middle, who was apparently regarded as the authority by the other two, cut a piece of the meat while it was still on the dish, apparently to determine whether it was tender enough and whether it may need to be sent back to the kitchen. He was satisfied, and mother and daughter, who had watched with suspense, began to smile as they breathed a sigh of relief.

  The family itself ate in the kitchen. Nevertheless, the father came into this room before he went into the kitchen and took a single bow as he walked around the table with his cap in hand. All three boarders rose and mumbled something into their beards. Then, when they were alone, they ate in almost perfect silence. It seemed strange to Gregor that one could always discern the sound of chewing teeth from all the multiple eating sounds, as if to show him that one needed teeth in order to eat, and that even with the finest of toothless jaws one could accomplish nothing. “I do have an appetite,” Gregor told himself worriedly, “but not for these things. How these boarders feed themselves, while I perish!”

  On this same evening—Gregor could not remember having heard the violin all this time—its sound could be heard from the kitchen. The boarders had already finished their supper; the middle one had pulled out a newspaper, given the other two one page each, and they now leaned back as they read and smoked. As the violin began to play, they became attentive, rose, and walked on tiptoe to the doorway to the hall, in which they stopped and stood huddled together. They must have been heard from the kitchen, for his father called: “Are the gentlemen disturbed by the violin playing? It can be stopped right away.” “On the contrary,” said the gentleman in the middle, “wouldn’t the young lady like to come in here and play in the living room, where it is far more pleasant and comfortable?” “Oh, certainly,” called the father, as though he were the violinist. The gentlemen went back into the room and waited. His father soon came with the music stand, his mother with the music, and his sister with the violin. His sister calmly prepared everything for playing. His parents, who had never let a room before and were therefore excessively polite to the boarders, did not dare to sit in their own armchairs. His father leaned against the door, his right hand stuck between two buttons of his fastened uniform jacket. His mother, however, was offered a chair by one of the gentlemen and sat off to the side in a corner, where he had happened to set it down.