The Meowmorphosis (10 page)

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.

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 our 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—”