The Meowmorphosis (15 page)

GREGOR’S LABORED BREATHING SEEMED TO HAVE REMINDED HIS FATHER THAT HE WAS A MEMBER OF THE FAMILY.

With a determined stubbornness, Gregor’s father refused to take off his bank uniform even at home; his sleeping gown hung on the coat hook, unused, while he dozed off still completely dressed, as if he need always be ready to leap to his duties and even here might be summoned by the voice of his superior. As a result, in spite of all the care given by Gregor’s mother and sister, his father’s uniform, which even at first had not been new, grew dirty, and Gregor often spent the entire evening staring at the outfit—stains all over it, though its gold buttons were always polished—in which the old man, uncomfortable though he must be, nonetheless slept peacefully.

As soon as the clock struck ten, Gregor’s mother tried gently encouraging his father to wake up and go to bed, telling him that he couldn’t sleep properly in his chair and that, since he had to report to work at six o’clock, he really needed a good sleep. But with the obstinacy that had gripped him since he had returned to the workforce, his father invariably insisted on continuing to lounge even longer at the table. No matter how much Gregor’s mother and sister might plead with him, for a
quarter of an hour his father would just keep shaking his head slowly, his eyes closed, without standing up. Gregor’s mother would pull him by the sleeve and speak cajoling words into his ear, and his sister would set down her work to try and help, but nothing worked; Gregor’s father would just settle down more deeply still into his chair. Only when the two women together leaned forward and grabbed him under the armpits would he throw open his eyes, look back and forth between them, and say, “This is the life. This is the peace and quiet of my old age.” Propped up by both women, he would heave himself up elaborately as if it was a tremendous trouble for him, allow himself to be led to the door, wave the women away there and proceed on his own, though Gregor’s mother had put down her sewing implements and his sister her pen in order to go after him and help him some more. “Perhaps,” Gregor once thought he heard his father say, “we should get a little kitten, to keep us company.”

In this overworked and exhausted family, who had time to worry any longer about Gregor—at least, more than was absolutely necessary? The servant girl, of course, had been let go, and so a huge, bony cleaning woman with white hair flying all around her head came every morning and evening to do the heaviest housework; Gregor’s mother took care of everything else in addition to her considerable sewing work. It even happened
that numerous pieces of the family jewelry, which Gregor’s mother and sister had always been so happy to wear on social and festive occasions, were sold, as Gregor learned from overhearing general discussion about the prices they had fetched. But the family’s greatest complaint was always that they could not leave this apartment, which was too big for their present means, since they could imagine no way in which Gregor might be moved. Yet Gregor recognized that it was not just consideration for him that was preventing such a move, for he could have been transported easily enough in a large box with a few air holes and perhaps a saucer of milk. No, the main thing holding them all back from relocating to more affordable living quarters was their complete sense of hopelessness, their despair over the idea that they had been struck by a misfortune the likes of which had been suffered by no one else in their entire circle of relatives and acquaintances.

Gregor’s household, therefore, now took up in earnest the poor family’s lot in life. His father brought breakfast to the petty officials at the bank; his mother sacrificed herself for the undergarments of strangers; his sister sat at her desk, at the beck and call of customers; but the family’s energies could not reach any further. And Gregor’s constricted throat began to pain him all over again, especially when mother and sister, after they had escorted his father to bed, would come back to the living room
and let their work lie that they might sit close together, cheek to cheek, and his mother would say, pointing to Gregor’s room, “Close the door, Grete,” leaving Gregor again in the darkness, while nearby he understood the women were mingling their tears, or, quite dry eyed, staring at the table.

Gregor barely slept now, nights or days. Sometimes he imagined that the next time the door opened, he would take over the family arrangements just as he had before. In his daydreams there began to once again appear the likes of his employer at the sales office, the supervisor and the apprentices, the excessively spineless custodian, two or three friends from other businesses, a chambermaid from a hotel in the provinces—a fleeting memory of love—a girl who worked in a hat shop, whom he had courted seriously but too slowly; they all appeared in his imagination, mixed in with strangers or people he had already forgotten. But instead of helping him and his family, they were all unapproachable, and in the end he was happy to see them disappear.

Other times, he was in no mood to worry about his family. He seethed with fury over the wretched care he was getting, even though he couldn’t imagine anything that he might have an appetite for. Still, he made plans about how he could take from the larder all the food he certainly deserved, even if he wasn’t hungry. About how he would return to Josef K and
Franz and, depending on how miserable his affliction felt, either show them what a noble cat he could be, how he could hunt with them and be of use to the court, or else claw their eyes out and eat their ears.

Gregor’s sister, without thinking anymore about how she might be able to give him any special pleasure, now quickly tossed a bit of food into his room every morning and noon before she ran off to her shop; then in the evening, quite indifferent to whether the food had perhaps only been tasted or, as happened more frequently, remained entirely untouched, she whisked it out with one sweep of her broom. The task of cleaning his room, which she now always carried out in the evening, could not be done any more hurriedly. Streaks of dirt ran along the walls; here and there lay tangles of dust and garbage. At first, when his sister arrived, Gregor would position himself in a particularly filthy corner in hopes of making evident a sort of protest. But he could have well stayed there for weeks without his sister’s taking care to do anything differently. She saw the dirt just as clearly as he did—she had decided just to let it stay.

With a pronounced touchiness that was quite new to her, and had in fact generally taken over the entire family, Grete insisted that the upkeep of Gregor’s room remained reserved for her alone. Once, just once, his mother had undertaken a major cleaning of the room, which employed the use of several
buckets of water. But the extensive dampness made Gregor sick, and he lay supine, embittered and immobile on the couch. His mother’s punishment was not delayed for long, in any case, for that evening, as soon as his sister observed the change in Gregor’s room, she ran into the living room mightily offended and broke out in a fit of crying, uncaring of her mother’s pleading entreaties. Their father, of course, woke up with a start in his chair, and the parents stared at her astonished and helpless, until they, too, started to grow agitated. Turning to Gregor’s mother, his father reproached her, ordering that she was not to take over the cleaning of Gregor’s room from the sister—and then, turning to Grete on his other side, he shouted that she would no longer be allowed to clean Gregor’s room ever again. As he grew increasingly beside himself, Gregor’s mother tried to pull his father into their bedroom; meanwhile, Grete, still shaking with her crying fit, pounded on the table with her tiny fists, and Gregor sat and hissed at all this, angry that no one thought about shutting the door and sparing him the sight of such commotion.

As it happened, even after his sister, exhausted from her daily work, had grown tired of caring for Gregor as she used to, even then his mother did not have to take up the burden—and yet Gregor was not neglected. For now the cleaning woman was there. This old widow, who had clearly survived much in her long life with the help of her bony frame, had no real
horror of Gregor. Without being in the least curious, she had once by chance opened Gregor’s door. At the sight of Gregor—who, totally surprised, began to scamper here and there though no one was chasing him, playing almost as if he were his old self and occupiable with a bit of yarn or mouse—she remained standing with her hands folded across her stomach, staring at him. Since that day, she never failed to open the door furtively a little every morning and evening to look in on Gregor. At first, she also called him to her with words that she presumably thought were friendly, like “Come here for a bit, old kitty!” or “Hey, look at the sweet kitty!” Addressed in such a manner, Gregor answered nothing, but remained motionless in his place, as if the door had not been opened at all. If only, instead of allowing this cleaning woman to disturb him uselessly whenever she felt like it, they had given her orders to clean up his room every day!

One day in the early morning—a hard downpour, perhaps an early sign of the coming spring, struck the window panes—when the cleaning woman started up once again with her usual conversation, Gregor was so bitter that he turned toward her, as if for an attack, arching his back, although slowly and weakly. But instead of reacting with fear, the cleaning woman merely lifted up a chair standing close by the door and, as she stood there with her mouth wide open, her intention was clear: she
would close her mouth only when the chair in her hand had been thrown down on Gregor’s back. “Enough of this—got it?” she asked, as Gregor turned himself around again, and she placed the chair calmly back in the corner. He was helpless; why did she hate him so, when those ginger cats of Mrs. Grubach’s enjoyed the run of the neighborhood, leaping blithely on and off the window sill just outside, as if they’d never been brought to meet him and had no obligation to him at all? Perhaps she had a phobia, or perhaps she needed a good biting to improve her disposition.

GREGOR ATE HARDLY
anything anymore. Only when he chanced to walk past the food that had been prepared would he, almost as a game, take a bit into his mouth and make a perfunctory attempt at swallowing before, usually, spitting it out again. At first he thought it might be his sadness over the condition of his room and the loss of all possibilities, the loss of the life he might have had as a street cat, that kept him from eating; but he very soon became reconciled to the new, lessened state of his room and his life. The family and the cleaning woman had grown accustomed to storing in his room things that had no place anywhere else—and at this point there were many such things, now that they had rented one room of the apartment to three lodgers. These solemn gentlemen—all three had full
beards, as Gregor once found out through a crack in the door—were meticulously intent on tidiness, not only in their own room but, since they were now living here, in the entire household, and particularly in the kitchen. They simply did not tolerate any useless or shoddy stuff. Moreover, they had brought along many of their own pieces of furniture. Many of the family’s items had thus become superfluous, and these were not really things one could sell or things one wanted to throw out. All these items, then, ended up in Gregor’s room, even the box of ashes and the garbage pail from the kitchen. The cleaning woman, always in a hurry, simply flung anything that was momentarily useless into Gregor’s room. (Fortunately, Gregor generally saw only the object and the hand that held it.) The cleaning woman perhaps meant, when time and opportunity allowed, to take the stuff out again or to eventually dispose of it all at once, but in fact the mess just remained there, however it had landed upon being tossed, unless Gregor squirmed his way through the accumulation of junk and pushed things around himself. At first he was forced to do this because otherwise there was no room for him to slink around, but later he did it with a growing pleasure—although after such exertion, tired to death and feeling wretched, he wouldn’t budge for hours.

Because the lodgers sometimes took their evening meal at home at the common table, the door to the living room now
stayed shut on many evenings. But Gregor had no trouble at all going without the open door. Even on many evenings when it was open he had stopped availing himself of it; without the family noticing, he would instead simply stretch out in the darkest corner of his room. However, one night the cleaning woman left the door to the living room slightly ajar, and it remained open even when the lodgers arrived in the evening and the lights were put on. They sat down at the head of the table where in earlier days his mother, his father, and Gregor had eaten, unfolded their napkins, and picked up their knives and forks. Gregor’s mother promptly appeared from the kitchen with a dish of meat; right behind her came his sister carrying a dish piled high with potatoes. The food gave off a lot of steam. The gentlemen lodgers bent over the plates set before them, as if they wanted to examine the meal before eating, and in fact the one who sat in the middle—he seemed to serve as the leader of the three—cut off a piece of meat still on the plate, obviously to establish whether it was sufficiently tender or whether it should be shipped back to the kitchen. He was satisfied, and Gregor’s mother and sister, who had looked on in suspense, now breathed easily and smiled.

The family themselves ate in the kitchen. But before Gregor’s father went into the kitchen, he came into the common room and with a bow, cap in hand, made a tour of the table. The
lodgers rose up collectively and murmured something in their beards. Then, when they were alone, they ate almost in complete silence. It seemed odd to Gregor that, out of all the many different sorts of sounds of eating, what was always audible was their swallowing, as if demonstrating to Gregor that people needed the full use of their throats to eat and nothing productive could be accomplished with even the keenest teeth and tongue alone. “I really do have an appetite,” Gregor said to himself sorrowfully, “but not for these things. How these lodgers stuff themselves, and I am starving to death.”