The Meowmorphosis (11 page)

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.

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.

“What did
you
dream, the night before you changed into an animal?” he asked his jailor, so that he could cease asking himself.

“The tabby Josef K does not like us to remember our lives, for that opening he speaks of is always behind us, the cloaca of the soul, and he fears to fall into it, much as he pretends it is not so; but I will tell you what I dreamt of, for I suspect that you dreamt it, too, your night of anxious dreams. I suspect we all dreamt it, and perhaps one day before death we will dream it again, or its reverse, its mirror, everything happening in opposition to the original so that when we leave our corpses on the street they are suddenly once more old Bohemian men gone to paunch and wrinkles, with tattered waistcoats half a century old barely covering their nakedness. I dreamed of an insect—I could not tell what sort, only that it was blackish brown and
large, though its size changed often and sometimes it could hide from me, scurrying beneath furniture, and sometimes it was so large it filled my vision, a terrible six-legged thing that squeaked wretchedly and waggled its miserable wings as if it meant to fly away from itself. I dreamed this insect dwelled in an apartment little different from the one I recall from my days as a man, with chairs and sofas and sinks indistinguishable from my own, but not my own, only of the same type and general appearance, for there is little difference in the homes of men of our station, so eager are we to belong and style ourselves alike so as to avoid the slightest glimpse of strangeness leaking into our waistcoats and sinks and evening chairs. The insect rose up before me as if to injure me, but in the end it did not, merely slumped down and crawled into a bed that was not my bed but looked very much like it, burrowing its triangular head under the covers and weeping softly. As I watched, the insect tossed its rigid body as if occupied by anxious dreams of its own, and I must have let my head droop and sleep in the night, for when I woke, and it woke, the insect had become a novelist with pomade in his hair, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling as if he had no notion of how he had changed or that he had. He lay on his soft, sweaty back and saw, as he lifted his head a little, his flat abdomen covered in a striped shirtfront. The blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, stayed in its proper place. His
legs—so few now—pitifully thin compared to the rest of his more or less healthy person, lay motionless on the mattress.

“ ‘What’s happened to me?’ he said softly, and I had no answer for him. I only dreamed; I could not help. His room, a proper room for a human being if somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. The novelist’s glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather—the raindrops were falling audibly onto the metal window ledge—made him quite melancholy. ‘If I keep sleeping for a while, all this will disappear,’ he whispered, putting his hands over his face. ‘O God, what a relentless job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out, the pen in my hand alone. The stresses of writing are much greater than I ever imagined, and, in addition to that, I have to cope with the problems of meaning, the worries about metaphor and symbols, irregular bad food, fleeting human relationships that never come from the heart, friends who look at me and see only an investor or a poor sack of a man with the soul of a crawling thing. To hell with it all! None of it has a meaning—well, today I meant to give it one; I meant to take up each of my stories and give them new endings, in which all would be explained and made well, in which no one could be left wondering how they had managed to get themselves into any unhappy state, in which the world would be well ordered and calm. I meant to do all of this, but now I find myself this morning
changed utterly into a beast, and all I know is fear, my heart degraded and alone, my lungs filling up with water that might as well be tears.’ I tried to argue with the novelist, to tell him that, on the contrary, he had been a monster that made my soul shiver with cold, but now he seemed quite respectable, if in need of a bath and a solid breakfast; but he would not hear it, only went to his desk and held sheaf after sheaf of paper to his heart, tearing them into pieces. He coughed horribly, quite horribly, and a spot of blood spattered upon the wall. ‘I cannot speak so that I am understood,’ he whispered. ‘I try to speak like a man, well and orderly, and all that comes out is a series of alien clicks and squeaks full of dark patterns and crawling, anxious terrors, and I am never understood and my stories are warrens where no one may find their way. I know myself, and I know I am a monster, that I have always been a monster—it was only that, for a brief moment, no one knew it, and I looked somewhat like a man, from the right angle—but I am a creature and a monster and I know it, I have always known it.’ He slid back again into his earlier position. ‘This getting up early,’ he moaned, ‘makes a man quite melancholy.’ And at that moment, I believe, I became a cat, not in the dream but in the world—in the dream I remained a man, and though never before had I felt so uncharitably toward a soul, I suddenly found the novelist tiresome and wished only to be about my own
business and cease listening to his desolate speech; besides, the sun was streaming in the window in a most enticing manner, and I thought I spied a bit of string in the corner, and both of these seemed infinitely more absorbing than the novelist, who in the end was more endearing as an insect. This is the essence of a cat’s psychology: we can only endure humans for so long before, well, there is a sunbeam or a bit of fish in the larder, and who can really be asked to listen to modernist symbolism when such things are at hand? I curled up in the sunbeam, with my suit flowing around me like a tail, and the novelist said: ‘Why did I change?‘ and I answered with a yawn, for truly I did not care, but ventured that I expected it was all to do with the state of the modern world and man’s alienation from man, somehow. When I woke from this uneasy dream, I was as you see me now, and the howls of inmates echoed around me.”