The Meowmorphosis Page 8

  Then he was so startled by a shout to him from the wider room that he struck his sharp teeth against his tongue.

  “The tabby Josef K is going to speak!” the voice said, and it was Franz’s voice. It was only the shout that startled him, this curt, abrupt, military shout, that he would not have expected from a cat called Franz, nor any of his friends.

  Gregor managed to get a good look by settling back on his haunches, the very act Josef K had called ridiculous and indecent in a cat, so that his head rose up over the haunches of his captors. The tabby was preening at the front of the crowd, a little mouse corpse pinned to his furry breast, bleeding freely, looking from this distance very much like a gay red carnation.

  “Honored members of the Academy of Cats!” he began, and the room fell into reverent silence, awaiting his speech, which Samsa felt would be as long-winded as his previous one and all the worse for it being aimed at his own person instead of some rambling reminiscence.

  “You have done me the honor of allowing my testimony to be entered in the case of the brown and white mackerel Gregor S, on account of my former life as an ape. I regret that my testimony will not be perfect and complete, since it is now nearly five years since I was an ape, a short time, perhaps, according to the calendar, but an infinitely long time to scamper through at full speed, as I have done, more or less accompanied by excellent mentors, good advice, applause and orchestral music, and yet essentially I have been a cat who walked by himself, noble, self-sufficient, all places alike to me. I could never have achieved what I have done had I been stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the memories of my former life. In fact, to give up being human was the chief achievement I set for myself; free cat that I became, I refused to submit to the yokes that bound me as a man. As if in revenge, however, my memory of that life has closed the door against me more and more as the years go by. I have the feeling that at some point in the whole affair I might have returned to my life as it was, through an archway as wide as heaven and as small as a pinprick, returned through whatever means I arrived, to discover one morning, waking up from anxious dreams, that I had been changed into a respectable man. But as I spurred myself on through the society of cats, in my chosen career as a tom among toms, that opening, if ever it existed, twisted slowly shut behind me, narrowed and shrank to nothing. I felt more comfortable in the world of cats and it suited me better; the strong wind that blew after me out of my past, the strong wind full of a bank clerk’s concerns, a husband’s anxieties, a father’s angers, began to slacken; today it is only a gentle puff of air that plays about my paws as I run with my brothers and sisters through the dirty, beautiful streets of Prague, and the opening through which it blows, that leads back to my former life, through which I, the tabby Josef K, once came, has grown so small that even if I wished to get back to it, I should have to scrape the skin from my belly to crawl through. To put it plainly—and you know how I dislike to put things plainly!—life as an ape, gentlecats, insofar as something of that kind lies behind one, lies as far behind him,” and Gregor understood quite sharply that it was he who was meant, “as it does behind me. Yet still he feels a tickle—all of us did, the small kitten and the great old queen alike.”

  It caused Gregor Samsa a very great pain in his stomach to hear the tabby refer to a passage back to that life he had had before. He wished nothing so much as to wake up and find it all some horrible phantasm caused by too much dairy, and to hear Josef K idly ruminate on his feeling that it might be done if only he wished it enough caused his heart to bend inward in a bout of bitterness. All the cats seemed to be looking at him with suspicion and reproach—but then, cats looked at everything that way, did they not?

  “What I have to present of the citizen Gregor S will contribute little new to the Academy; we can see he was a man, he does not argue the point, I assure you. In fact, he was the worst of all men—a salesman who let his family trample his soul underfoot and never once told them to step lightly, who had no personal pride, which we cats know is paramount in a creature of any sort of worth whatsoever, whose entire ambition was to remain unbothered by his father and to perhaps pay for a few violin lessons for his sister. All this, fellow Academy members, I have observed in his gait, the angle of his tail, the quivering of his whiskers in the night wind. The kitten Gregor S could not lie to me if he tried to, and he did not try—he is not clever enough to try! Even I in my most debased state, I was not so utterly dominated as he—for a memory floats up to me now of having been most cruelly reprimanded by my employer at the bank over some small slight, some mix-up of paperwork that in the larger scheme could not have mattered less but caused my employer to get very red in the face, to yell until he was sweating profusely, and myself to shrink and cower in his presence, for I had then not the soul of a cat and knew no better than to crawl on my belly when another man challenged me. I should have raked a paw across his face and had his ear for breakfast! But men are shallow, mouselike creatures at heart, scurrying in terror here and there rather than standing up and using their teeth for Nature’s intended purpose. The kitten Gregor S had no way out of his life, and yet so entirely prostrate had he become that he did not even seek a way out, nor would he have understood what was meant by the phrase. Now, I fear that you may not understand what I mean by ‘way out.’ I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not say that he had no, nor did he seek, ‘freedom.’ As a cat, we all know this thing, and know that men have no proper notion of it. In fact, may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom, which is often bleated by trumpets in their arenas but to which their world provides no road. Cats know freedom; we eat it and drink it, we know it wholly, as a mother or lover. What do men know? And as their poor reflective mockery of ‘freedom’ is counted among the most sublime feelings in their warped philosophies, so the corresponding disillusionment is a kind of hell. I recall as a man in a suit and tails—how amusing was it that even then my wardrobe showed my true nature!—attending variety theaters in which a couple of acrobats performed on trapezes situated high in the roof. They swung in long curves, they rocked to and fro, they leapt high into the air, they floated down into each other’s arms, one hanging by the hair from the teeth of the other. Then I was moved in my bones and thought it beautiful. Now I say: ‘That is human freedom.’ Controlled movement, bound up in ropes and knots, bound to other humans by clenched jaw and torn hair. Now we know what freedom truly is—if there is a knotted rope to be had, then we chase it with gusto and shred it in our claws! Or not! As we like it!

  “People often praise the universal progress made by the cat community throughout the ages, and probably mean by that more particularly the progress in our communal knowledge and wisdom. Certainly our knowledge of ourselves and the world is progressing, its advance is irresistible, it progresses at ever-accelerating speeds, always faster than men’s, certainly faster than mice, birds, or fish, and no one here may seriously argue that dogs outstrip us at any contest of wits. But what is there to praise in this? We are cats; naturally we become more clever. It is like praising someone because with the years he manages to grow older and, in consequence, comes nearer and nearer to death. Moreover, that is a natural yet ugly process, whereas the progress we see among ourselves is hard won and sublime. In the world of men I see only decline, but in ours I see something more awesome, more complex.

  “I do not mean that earlier generations of cats were essentially worse than ours, only younger, and that was their great advantage—it was easier then to get them to speak and mingle in a jocular way, for fewer of them had ever been bank clerks or had any human ancestry to feel ashamed about. Indeed, it is the sense of wholly cattish life and the possibilities of that life that thrill us so deeply when we listen to those old and strangely simple stories told by the dowager-queens and grandfather-toms here tonight. Here and there in their speech we catch a curiously significant phrase that seems to prefigure the New Cat, and we would almost like to leap to ou
r feet, to cry out—yes, there, I see myself in what you say! Yet we are silent. I cannot put it another way—previous generations had not quite yet gotten so catlike as we are today, catdom was still a loose confederation, where now it is beginning to be a great nation. I know there are toms here who were in the war—oh, which war it hardly matters, but some of you were soldiers and brave men, some of you faced death and instead became cats. And while I am sure at the time you were alarmed and not a little put out by the whole business, I say to you there was a logic in your change of clothes, for in the ancient world cats were given their due and worshipped as creatures standing between life and death, guardians of the threshold, and in our paws we weighed the human soul against a feather, and both were toys for our enjoyment. Our generation is lost—we stand between men and cats, more wonderful than either, yet less pure and more miserable, for we carry our unhappiness with us, and we were all miserable bastards before we grew tails, were we not? What has happened to the world where such transformations can now be expected to occur?

  “I can understand our hesitation to open those old questions—it is not hesitation but the thousandth forgetting of a dream dreamt a thousand times and forgotten a thousand times, and who can damn us for merely forgetting for the thousandth time what giants we had hoped to be as men? What world we had hoped to make with out meaty, five-fingered, devil-bethumbed paws? Some of us discovered that to be ripped from those ambitions and deposited in a furry body was no tragedy—some thought not, and they are not allowed to supper with us fashionable felines. When our first fathers turned from men to animals they doubtless had no notion that their aberration was to be an endless one; they could still see, literally, the crossroads where something could have been taken back, made other than it was. It seemed an easy task to turn back whenever they pleased, and if they did not immediately ring Parliament and demand that a health committee be convened on their behalf and an epidemic declared, it was merely because they fancied it would be pleasant to enjoy a cat’s life for a little while longer; it was not yet a genuine cat’s life, though it had become already intoxicatingly beautiful to them, and so they strayed farther into the streets and discovered the pleasures of hunting and breeding queens and kipper-heads tossed out with as little care as a girl plucking petals. They did not yet know what we can guess at, contemplating the course of all our histories: that change begins in the soul before it appears in ordinary existence, and that, when they began to enjoy a cat’s life, they must already have begun to possess cats’ souls and were by no means so near their starting point as they had once thought, or as their eyes feasting on all kittenish joys might try to persuade them.

  “But what has all this to do with Gregor S? I do not try to be mysterious. I see you nodding—you know what I know. What testimony do we need to know: he is a miserable bastard and has no more good instinct than a hound raced half to death. Change begins in the soul, and he must have had a cat’s soul somewhere, a cat’s soul that was being crushed by the attentions of his ungrateful, brutish family who wish to catch him up in their arms even when he did not wish to be cuddled or coddled at all and squeeze him to death for their own pleasure. And yet he bore it, he bore it all, without a scratch or a hiss or the smallest standing up for his pride, and with as little joy or affect as he shows us now, even though he has a fine coat and a shapely tail and, given time, could have any queen here; he owns no liveliness or vigor. He did violence to his feline self in that apartment, and violence to his soul now—can nothing rouse this man? He shows his throat when no one’s growled at him to do it! I am his prosecutor. In one paw I weigh him and in the other, well, I dare not show the counterweight. He stands accused—”

  And Gregor felt great alarm, for he sensed the ending of the proceedings when they had not rightly even begun.

  “Of what? Of what am I accused?” he cried piteously.

  “He stands accused,” the tabby Josef K went on unperturbed as if he had not spoken. “How do you find him, my fellow Academy members?”

  “GUILTY,” came the answering howl, and then all went silent.

  IV.

  Someone must have been telling lies about Gregor Samsa; he knew he had done nothing wrong.

  He purred miserably to himself and gnawed briefly at a scrap of mouse that had been brought for him. “It has all gone so horribly wrong.” He addressed himself only to Franz’s ample, silky backside, which was turned firmly toward him as a kind of jail door. Other cats milled about somewhere beyond his well-padded rump, enervated after the excitement of the trial. “I’m not trying to be a grand orator and arouse your pity; that’s probably more than I’m capable of anyway. I’m sure my defense can speak far better than I can; it is part of the job of a defense in general to do so. And I’m sure I shall have a defense, even though the verdict has already been read. It’s not a trial without a defense. The prosecution came before the accusation, after all. Perhaps this is merely how cats understand the law? All that I want is a public discussion of a public wrong. Listen: Ten days ago I was changed utterly—this whole trial itself is something I laugh about when you put it beside the essential point of my being a cat, but that’s no matter. You came for me when I had no way of preparing myself. Maybe it was all a mistake! Maybe the order had been given to arrest some house painter who had been transformed into—what did you say of your unfortunate friend?—a cockroach, yes, that seems possible after what has been said, someone who is as innocent as I am but had a worse time of it in the luck of the animal draw, as it were. Or perhaps he had a cockroach’s soul, as Josef K has opined! However it sorted out for that poor, benighted wretch, you came for me, you and Willem, two police thugs. You could not have treated me more roughly if I had been a violent robber. Josef K talked at me till I was sick of it. And even that was not enough, I had to sit through his prosecutorial arguments, which were endless and went nowhere, I must say. Ægypt! Can you imagine. It was not easy to stay calm, but I managed to do so and was completely calm when I asked all of you why it was that I was under arrest. What do you think any of you louts answered? Nothing at all, that’s what. Perhaps you really did know nothing—you just made your arrest and were satisfied. But I cannot believe you are wholly without gentle inclinations, that you view me entirely with contempt and have no pity in you whatever, Franz. I cannot believe that. But I repeat: This whole affair has caused me nothing but unpleasantness and irritation. But could it not also have had some far worse consequences? After all, what comes after arrest, trial, and conviction—even if their order is entirely chaotic and un-hinged—but execution?”

  Franz looked mildly over his shoulder, his long white whiskers showing against gleaming fur. “You are concerned that you will be executed?”

  “Like a dog,” Gregor confirmed.

  “Everything seems so simple to you, doesn’t it,” Franz yawned, his yellow eyes bulging, “so you think we should bring the matter to a peaceful close, do you. Claw out your throat or drown you in the river? No, no, that won’t do. Mind you, on the other hand I certainly wouldn’t want you to think there’s hope for you. No, why should you think that? You’re simply under arrest, nothing more than that. That’s what I had to do, arrest you, that’s what I’ve done and now I’ve seen how you’ve taken it.”

  “How else should I have taken it? Please, please do tell me how I might have behaved that would have altered the events of this evening in the smallest fashion. And where has Willem gone? Do you think you can contain me yourself? I could run off at any moment! I’m quite good on these paws, I tell you.”

  SOMEONE MUST HAVE BEEN TELLING LIES ABOUT GREGOR SAMSA.

  “Willem has affairs. We all do; we can’t spend all day trying former salesmen. He’ll return presently, if he has a mind to. Willem can be somewhat distracted by parades, queens in heat, rats, passing bits of dust, he really is a bit of a fool. And you will not run off.”

  “How do you know I won’t?”

  “You never ran off from your father, and he was far worse
to you than we are. After all, we address you courteously most of the time and provide for your supper, we try to teach you things, and in the morning we will all go off to our hunting or our preening or our napping in sunbeams, and any one of those is more than your fat patriarch occupies himself with in a week.”

  Gregor sunk his handsome face in his fuzzy chest. A bit of fish clung there in his ruff and he made haste to deal with it, scrupulously licking his coat, though bits of fur kept getting caught in his mouth in a most undignified way. He began to wonder if he really understood at all what was meant by “arrest” or “trial” or any of this business. It seemed to be formulated by a particularly clever devil for the purposes of torment alone, but he could see no purpose behind it, no reason at all. In his former life, if he were to—God forbid it—be arrested, he expected he would know what crime he had committed and be somewhat ashamed already when the police arrived, chagrined at least a little, perhaps somewhat relieved to be finally caught out, and he would go to the docket and have a fine attorney, for he had some money, had he not? The attorney would cross-examine and perhaps get him off with a light sentence and send him home in time to see his sister graduate from the conservatory he still dreamed of sending her to, and he would be a criminal, yes, but still understand his place in the world. Yet he could not be entirely certain this is how it would go, could he? The soul of a cat in the body of a man—what lawyer, what judge, did that not describe, sitting behind a bench in a white wig, licking his paws and waiting for the pounce, or else prowling the night streets seeking out easy prey: innocent, fat creatures who would go into the gallows without much of a fight, their paws padding everywhere, silent, unseen, shadows appearing and disappearing as they liked. “The world is full of beasts who are men and men who are beasts,” thought Gregor. “I suppose my little incident is symbolic, like Josef K’s dancing cats. Nothing else. Symbolism is depressing; its meaning is always deferred. Nothing is what it is, only what it means, and I mean nothing but that the world is ugly and men are uglier still.” What, Gregor wondered, did he dream that night, when he tossed and turned and grew long tufted ears and a tail like a quill pen and such long teeth, what did he dream that was so full of a cat’s desires, a cat’s thoughts, a cat’s motions and morals? For surely, in the end, it was the dreams that did it, for dreams are symbols; even Gregor, who had busied his life with the eating of potatoes and accumulating of compound interest, knew that, and knowing that he knew he must have dreamt something significant in order to enter into this world where meaning was forever further off than he could reach. Men before the gallows are always philosophical, and now he supposed that cats were, too.