The Meowmorphosis (14 page)

“So the only thing left for me to do would be to hope that my old balding head and gouty leg might emerge again from
this furry body, that I might heal before the world could intervene, which might be sufficient to lessen my family’s rancor—not to wean them from it altogether, naturally, which would be unthinkable after all that has passed. And, indeed, I have often asked myself if I am pleased enough with my present self to be unwilling to change it, and whether I could not attempt some changes in myself, even so far as the power of speech to explain my state or scratching letters in the carpet. Her objection to me, as I am now aware, is a fundamental one, and rightly so; nothing can remove it, not even the removal of myself. If she heard that I had committed suicide, she would fall into a fit of helpless rage against me who left her in such straits.

“Now I cannot imagine that such a sharp-witted woman as she does not understand as well as I do both the hopelessness of her own state and the helplessness of mine, my inability, with the best will in the world, to conform to her requirements. I am now a cat. I am helpless to be otherwise. Of course she understands it, but being a fighter by nature, she forgets it in the lust of battle, and in my unfortunate disposition I cannot help, because in any case it is my nature to purr gently at anyone who flies into a violent passion. In this way, naturally, we shall never come to terms. I wish I could but depart all and everything at once and never have to face her more, to disappoint her ambitions and show by the very presence of my grotesque and
growing body how little she now has to look forward to in the world.

“But on the contrary, such a self-immolation is just what I must avoid; if I am to follow a course of action at all it must be that of keeping the affair within its present narrow limits, growing not too much fatter or silkier, and most certainly not to involve the outside world; that is to say, I must stay quietly where I am and not let it affect my heart as far as can be seen, and that includes being sure my sister mentions it to no one, because it is a kind of dangerous mystery. But I must pretend it is a trivial, purely familial matter and as such to be hidden and to be kept to ourselves.”

Gregor wriggled himself into a position to leap upon the window sash and slip in, for it remained open. “I am less upset by the situation,” he thought, “now that I think I perceive how unlikely it is to come to any sort of definitive crisis; imminent as it often seems to be, one is eagerly disposed—when one is young and, especially, when one is female—to exaggerate the speed with which crises arrive. Things will go on as they have been, I’ve no doubt. Whenever Grete shall grow faint at the very sight of me, I shall sink adorably sideways into a chair, plucking playfully at her bodice strings with my paws while tears of rage and despair roll down her cheeks, and I shall make her laugh and cheer her. I shall always think the moment has
now come, that I am on the point of being summoned to answer as best I can for myself and banished forever. And yet it will not have come. They are family and must endure me; I shall live here until I am an old tom, and they must care for me. Youth casts a bloom of urgency over everything; our more awkward characteristics such as tails and whiskers seem stark in the upswell of youthful energy. If, as a youth, a man is a cat, it may be counted against him; but as an old man it is not even noticed, not even by himself, for the things that survive in old age are necessary and may grow to be appreciated. Everyone says: yes, he has always been a cat, the old monster, but there’s a charm in him. In the end, it will all be all right, I know it. I know it. I shall continue to live my own life for a long time to come, untroubled by the world, despite all the outbursts of my family; I shall bear it all with ease, and be petted, and be given another pretty bell for my collar. I know this is how it shall proceed.”

The windowsill was cold under Gregor’s paws, but he endured it.

Slipping back into the house with the breaking of dawn, Gregor remembered clearly his last impression the previous evening: that his father had badly misunderstood Grete’s plea for help upon his escape and assumed that Gregor had committed some violence upon his mother. It seemed impossible that so little time had passed since that moment, and yet it was so, only
a night, and now nearly morning. Thus, Gregor now had to calm his father straightaway, before breakfast, for yesterday he had neither the time nor the ability to explain things. And so he rushed through the parlor to the door of his own room and pushed himself against it, his furry bulk now really quite substantial, so that his father—who, Gregor saw as he crossed the floor, was already awake, sitting right there at the table—could see right away that Gregor fully intended to return humbly to the familiar state of things, that it was not necessary to force him into his room, but that one only needed to open the door, and he would disappear therein immediately.

But his father was not in the mood to observe such niceties. “Ah,” he yelled as soon as he saw Gregor, with a tone as if he were all at once angry and pleased. Gregor pulled his head back from the door and raised it in the direction of his father, his eyes as large and sweet as he could make them. The terror of remembering his dream and the other cats’ conviction still clung to him, and his only hope, he felt, was to make his family love him once more, to pet him and care for him as Mrs. Grubach did her cats, and of course he would even tolerate Grete’s attentions if it meant everything could return to the way it had been—after all, had they not always kept him as a kind of pet, one who gave them money, and in return they tolerated him? That was all he asked, to be tolerated again.

He had not really pictured his father waiting for him immediately upon his return; Gregor had hoped to have time to organize his strategies. Of course, he now realized, after all this time he had spent huddled, four-legged and furry, in his room, he really should have grasped the fact that he would encounter different conditions in the apartment, especially now that his family had had a night to think themselves free of him and begin planning for the future. Nevertheless, nevertheless—it had been long weeks until now since he had seen his father with his own eyes; was this really his father? This man who, in earlier days, had lain exhausted in bed whenever Gregor was setting out on a business trip; who had received him on the evenings of his return in a sleeping gown and armchair, totally incapable of standing up; whose only sign of approval would be to lift his arm a bit; who, during their rare family strolls a few Sundays a year and on the important holidays, made his way slowly forward between Gregor and his mother, who themselves moved slowly, but he always a bit
more
slowly, bundled up in his old coat, all the time setting down his walking stick carefully; and who, when he had wanted to say something, almost always stood still and gathered his entourage around him? In that instant Gregor felt a kind of boiling feline contempt rise in him; even a cat napping away an afternoon was less useless and lazy than all that.

But now his father rose from his seat, standing up really straight, already dressed for the day in a tight-fitting blue uniform with gold buttons, like the ones worn by bank employees. Above the high stiff collar of his jacket, his firm double chin stuck out prominently; beneath his bushy eyebrows the glance of his black eyes was freshly penetrating and alert, and his otherwise disheveled white hair was combed down into a carefully exact shining part. He threw his cap—on which a gold monogram, apparently the symbol of the bank, was affixed—in an arc all the way across the room onto the sofa, and flipping back the edge of the long coat of his uniform with a grim face, he stepped right up to Gregor.

Gregor really didn’t know what his father had in mind, but now the man raised his foot uncommonly high, and Gregor was astonished at the gigantic size of the sole of his boot. However, he did not linger on that point, for he recalled from the first day of his new life that, as far as he was concerned, his father considered the greatest force the only appropriate response. And it seemed that finding him returned to the house now, after they had surely all taken a breath of relief upon deciding him gone, had not improved his father’s disposition. So Gregor scurried quickly away from his father, sliding on the polished floors; he stopped when his father remained standing in place and then scampered forward again when his father so
much as stirred.

In this way they made their way round and round the room, without anything decisive taking place; because of their stop-and-start progress, it didn’t look precisely like a chase, more like the sort of game a dog would enjoy, though a cat does not. Gregor remained on the floor for the time being, especially since he was afraid that his father would interpret jumping onto the draperies or the bookcases as an act of real malice. In any case, Gregor was forced to admit to himself that he couldn’t keep up this running around for a long time, that in fact it was all worse than before—and worse even than being caught by the cats, because whenever his father took a single step, Gregor had to rush through an enormous number of movements, his paws scrabbling on the floor as he frantically sought a new haven. Already he was starting to suffer from a shortage of breath, just as in his earlier days when his lungs had been quite unreliable, and besides he had been up without sleep all night.

As he now began to stagger in place, trying to gather all his energies to continue running but having trouble keeping his eyes open, feeling so exhausted of mind that he could form no notion of any plan for escape besides running and had already all but forgotten that the window was still available to him—at that moment something flew through the air, smacking down onto the ground in front of him and rolling right
past. It was an apple. Immediately a second one flew after it. Gregor stood still in fright: further running away was useless, for his father had decided to bombard him.

From the fruit bowl on the sideboard his father had filled his pockets. And now, for the moment not bothering to take accurate aim, he was throwing apple after apple. These small red orbs rolled around on the floor, colliding with one another as if doing battle. A weakly thrown apple grazed Gregor’s back but skidded off harmlessly. Then, running out of fruit but with his fury still unabated, Gregor’s father promptly grabbed and threw the next fist-size thing within reach, which was a ball of yarn that Gregor’s sister had been saving to knit a winter scarf for herself. It brushed harmlessly against Gregor’s ear, but then abruptly he yowled as he felt his head jerk tight; a loop of yarn had caught the latch of his collar, which now was pulling at his neck painfully.

Gregor wanted to drag himself away, as if he could leave behind the unexpected and incredible pain simply by moving from the spot where it had struck him. But he felt as if he was nailed in place; he lay stretched out, completely confused in all his senses. Only with luck did he glance across the room and notice that the door of his room had been pulled open, and that right in front of his sister, who was yelling, his mother ran out in her undergarments—for his sister had undressed her in
order to give her some freedom to breathe amid her fainting spell, and thus had she gone to bed—his mother ran up to his father, her skirts falling to the floor one after the other, tripping her as she hurled herself onto his father, throwing her arms around his neck and seeming to melt completely into his body as she begged him to spare Gregor’s life—and at this moment Gregor’s vision began to blur and fade.

How quickly it had all happened, he thought as he stumbled toward his room. Franz was right. He was always meant to die here.

Gregor’s labored breathing, from which he had now suffered for over a month—he had managed to chew off the ball of yarn, but a short length remained unreachably twisted in his collar, invisible to all beneath his tufting fur yet continuing as he grew larger and larger to pull the collar alarmingly tight against his throat—seemed by itself to have reminded his father that, in spite of Gregor’s inexplicable and often undignified appearance, Gregor was a member of the family, not a thing to be treated as an enemy, and that it was, on the contrary, a requirement of family duty to suppress one’s aversion to a son who could lick his hindquarters with acrobatic ease, and to endure—nothing else, just endure. And if,
through his afflicted throat and tightened breath, Gregor had now apparently lost for good his ability to move with any ease, and for the time being needed many long minutes to crawl across his room, like an aged invalid—climbing up high, of course, had become unimaginable—nevertheless, he felt that for this worsening of his condition he was compensated satisfactorily, because every day toward evening, the door to the living room, on which he was now in the habit of keeping a sharp eye for an hour or two beforehand, was opened, so that he, lying down in the darkness of his room, invisible from the living room, could see the entire family at the illuminated table and listen to their conversation with, to at least some extent, their permission—a situation quite improved from what had been the arrangement before.

Of course, there was no longer the lively socializing of years gone by, which Gregor had used to think about in small hotel rooms with a certain longing, when, tired out, he had been prone to throw himself upon damp bedclothes. What went on now was, for the most part, very quiet. After the evening meal, Gregor’s father fell asleep quickly in his armchair. His mother and sister talked mutedly in the stillness while his mother, hunching over, worked at sewing fine undergarments for a fashion shop. Grete, who had taken on a job as a salesgirl, studied stenography and French in the evening, so as perhaps
later to obtain a better position. Sometimes their father woke up and, as if quite unaware that he had been sleeping, said to their mother, “How long you have been sewing today?” and went right back to sleep, leaving Grete and their mother to smile tiredly at one another.