The Meowmorphosis (7 page)

A short time elapsed. Gregor lay there limply. All around was still. Perhaps that was a good sign. Then there was a ring at the door. At this, caught outside his designated room, Gregor sprang guiltily away, and noting that the parlor window was
quite ajar, slipped out in abject humiliation—and yet with a sharp feeling of release, finally feeling the air on his whiskers. He leapt upon the rose trellis and, half-climbing, half-falling, descended to the wet, cold street below.

Grete went to open the door; their father had arrived. Seeing her alarmed appearance, he immediately asked: “What’s happened?” Grete replied with a dull voice—evidently she was pressing her face into her father’s chest—“Mother fainted, but she’s getting better now. Gregor has broken loose.”

“Yes, I have expected that,” said his father, “I always told you it would happen, but you women never want to listen.”

It was late evening when Gregor landed. The city lay deep in snow. There was nothing to be seen of his old apartments, for mist and darkness surrounded them, and not the faintest glimmer of light showed where the great building stood. Gregor stood on the road leading back to his house for a long time, looking up at what seemed to be a void. The stones of the street pressed painfully against his paws, nothing at all like the plush carpet of his former apartments, and though the rush of traffic assailed his sensitive ears from the roadway beyond the alley, these discomforts were ameliorated by the wonderful smells of old food and scraps of fish that littered the frozen ground, no doubt tossed out from some high
window by a soul not weighed down by such predicaments as Gregor currently faced.

Gregor began to investigate the possibilities of the rubbish heaps, amazed at the delicacy of his nose, its ability to discern haddock from cod, its unerring sense of what had gone to rot and what remained good for a cat’s stomach—which indeed he already knew would tolerate much a man’s would not—and its cheerful performance of many operations at once, not only snuffling out fish but ascertaining what other creatures had visited the alley before him, what sorts of moods they had been in, and whether or not he could expect rain later this evening. When at home, Gregor had not noticed his nose behaving in this manner; he supposed he had been surrounded entirely by familiar things that he had no need to inspect in any great detail. Nor, truly, had his nose had any pressing need to care for him, as Grete had performed most functions of a nose quite admirably.

“How much my life has changed,” Gregor thought,” and yet how unchanged it has remained at the bottom of it all!” Even as a man among men, he thought, he had long sensed some small dissonance, some infinitesimal maladjustment in his spirit, causing a vague feeling of discomfiture that not even the most pleasant public functions could ease entirely; and even more than that, that sometimes—no, not sometimes, but
very
often
—the mere look of some fellow man of his own station, the mere
look
of him would fill Gregor with helpless embarrassment and panic, even with despair. If he were to dig deep into his most shameful thoughts, he would have to admit that he had even looked at his own sister with such detached horror, at how like an insect she went about her daily routines, never seeming to enjoy them or despise them, or indeed to think at all, seeming so wholly different from Gregor himself that he wondered that they could truly be related, so like different species they lived. Even her violin playing, in which he often took some portion of pleasure, would, when he had fallen out of sorts, sound to him like nothing more than a huge insect’s legs rubbing together in some arcane attempt at language.

Finding a choice bit of herring in the road, Gregor licked it thoroughly before beginning to slurp it up, and he considered that he had always tried to quiet his feelings of apprehension as best he could. Friends, if he had had any, might have helped him, if he could have found a kindred heart, a true fellow man to divulge his troubles to; yet the source of all his troubles seemed to be that he did not feel he
had
a fellow man, that he, Gregor Samsa, was singular in the world—alien, even—that to no corner of the city or even the continent could he turn to find a sympathetic person who had felt as he had felt, act as he had acted, suffered as he had suffered. Perhaps he had taken the
job as a salesman in order to escape those very apartments where he suffocated alongside his family—perhaps, worse still, he had done it in a vain, desperate hope of finding anyone at all in whom he could confide these unformed, unsettling feelings of unbelonging.

True, there had been peaceful times, times in which these sudden fits of melancholy were still not lacking but in which they were accepted with more philosophy, perhaps inducing a certain lethargy and laziness of habit, but nevertheless allowing him to carry on as a somewhat cold, reserved, canny, and calculating—but all things considered, a normal and civilized enough—man. And yet a man he was no longer, and soon, he felt certain, he would no longer be a kitten either, but a cat, full in the belly and strong in the leg, with ears most pointed and capable. Between Grete’s care and his occasional, spontaneous, excited careening about his room, he was becoming quite large and strong, and surely this had been a factor in the great frights he continued to give his family. How long would he keep growing? More pressing—how long could he provide food and warmth for himself now that he had escaped his confinement at home? Gregor had no fear that his father’s round, angry face would appear out of the upper windows and alert the neighbors to his presence, leading to a recapture and a swift return to his previous miserable circumstances. More likely, they would
all be glad to be rid of him, as he could not in his present state serve any purpose to them, neither to pay his father’s debt nor to provide the household nor—but Gregor, thinking clearly now, as sharp-eyed animals will when they find themselves in frozen alleys with their supper in question, could not think of another way in which he was of any use to his relations, nor indeed could he think of the smallest fashion in which they were any use to him.

Perhaps, Gregor thought, this new hardness of feeling could be attributed to the fresh exercise of his altered shape. He had often observed that the cats belonging to his neighbors showed no particular warmth or love for their owners, no matter how fine or poor their food and bedding. If those cats wished to claw up a drapery, they did so without considering the expense to be entered in their masters’ ledger, nor the swings of the kitchen maid’s broom against their backsides, nor anything save their personal desires. Gregor licked the remainder of the herring from his white paw. He had never acted according to his desires alone, but only according to the dicta of his kin, his duty, and that great filial ledger that ruled his life. He had not resented it; but he had to adapt to his current situation, and despite what they had all hoped, his current situation seemed to be permanent. That difference of spirit he had always felt on the inside was now evident on the outside—and perhaps
if all this meant to continue, Gregor might be entitled to some portion of the freedom and uncaring disposition he had always found baffling in the feline species before now.

With this sense of purpose then, Gregor raised his tail, fully erect, and strode from the dark alley of his earlier existence.

WHEN GREGOR SAMSA
, coming along the alleyway, walked into the open street, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much.

On the pavement straight in front of him there were many people walking in the various rhythms of city business. Every now and again one would step forward and cross the road. A little girl was holding a tired puppy in her outstretched arms. Two gentlemen were exchanging information of some sort. The one held his hands palms-up, lifting and lowering them in a regular motion, as though he were balancing a weight. Then one caught sight of a lady whose hat was heavily festooned with ribbons, buckles, and flowers. Gregor shuddered, thinking of the collar that even now itched against his neck. He batted at it with a hindpaw, burning with shame. And hurrying past was a young man with a slim walking cane, his left hand, as though paralyzed, pressed flat to his chest at an odd angle. Now and then there came men who were smoking, trailing clouds along ahead of them. Three gentlemen—two holding lightweight
overcoats on their up-crooked forearms—several times made a ritual of walking out from the front of the buildings on the opposite edge of the sidewalk, surveying what was afoot there, and then drawing back into the doorway again, talking all the while.

Gregor darted through the gaps between the passers-by. Instantly he was accosted by carriages on delicate high wheels, drawn along by horses with arched necks. As he tumbled this way and that he caught glimpses of people sitting at ease on the upholstered seats, gazing silently at the pedestrians, the ships in the river-yards, the balconies, and the evening sky. It happened that one carriage surged up behind him and overtook another; the horses pressed against each other, and the harness straps hung dangling. The animals tugged at the reins, the carriage barreled forward, swaying side to side as it came up to speed, until the swerve around the first carriage was completed and the horses moved apart again, only their narrow quiet heads inclined toward each other, and poor Gregor, quite soaked in a frozen slushy slurry of muddy water, had achieved transit across a busy street in his middlingly fashionable district of Prague. He congratulated himself, and then bent immediately to licking himself from head to foot, a compulsion he still found humiliating but undeniable, irresistible, as the sensation of the very slightest speck of dirt caused him to descend into a frenzy of washing, and his fur was now laden with quite a bit more than
a speck of filth from his adventures.

Gregor felt tired already. The fur of his cheeks was pale as the faded brownish red of his flanks, which had a kind of Moorish pattern to their stripes and spots. The lady by the doorsteps over there, who had up to now been contemplating her shoes, which were quite visible under her tightly drawn skirt, now looked at him. She did so indifferently, with perhaps a bit of scorn or protective instincts toward the supper she was no doubt preparing beyond the lintel frame. Gregor thought perhaps she looked a bit bored as well. “Well,” he thought. “If I could tell her the whole story, she would be astonished! She would certainly give me supper, then, and beg me to tell her more! On the street one works so hard at surviving that one is too tired even to enjoy anything at all. But even all that work does not give a kitten the right to be treated lovingly by everyone; on the contrary, a cat is always alone, an utter stranger and rarely even an object of curiosity. And oh, so long as I say ‘one’ or ‘a cat’ instead of ‘I,’ there is nothing to it and one can easily tell the story, even laugh at its twists and turns; but as soon as I admit to myself that it is me, it is Gregor that has been so ruined, I feel a horror, and a weeping within me.”

And so Gregor did feel, as the woman left off gazing at him through the freezing rain and withdrew into her rooms without so much as dashing across the road to cuddle him or
pat his head or give him warm milk and a pillow to sleep on. Now that he had no chance of such luxuries he certainly found that he missed them. He felt his small shoulders slump and turned away toward yet more streets and alleyways, all as unfamiliar now as a foreign country, for never had he seen them at such a height, nor been so conscious of their smells and prone to their dangers and wholly unable to hail a hansom cab. Indeed, so sensitive was he to all things that he could not help seeing each and every thing he passed wholly, with his whole being, as if he had to assess their danger to his soft and admittedly fuzzy person before he could safely observe something else. And so when soon enough he happened upon a square near the docks, he saw with great clarity two boys were sitting on a harbor wall playing at dice—which might be thrown at him, or one of the boys might pull his ears.

A man—who might have a daughter waiting at home to whom he might wish to give the present of a kitten!—was reading a newspaper on the steps of a monument that seemed to glare down at Gregor with malevolent expression, a hero flourishing his sword on high as if to lord it over himself in particular. A girl, no doubt as enamoured of weak and furry things as Grete herself, was filling her bucket at the fountain. A fruit-seller was lying beside his wares, gazing at the lake. No doubt between the melons he concealed some foul weapon to use
against offending strays and thieves. Through the vacant window and door opening of a café, Gregor could see two men quite at the back quaffing down their wine, surely discussing recipes for roast or boiled cat. The proprietor was sitting at a table in front and dozing—but wake him, and see if he would not chase Gregor off with a rolling pin! A barge was silently making for the little harbor, as if borne by invisible mechanisms over the water—water which would drown him as soon as sparkle in the moonlight. A man in a blue blouse climbed ashore and lashed the line to the pier. Behind the boatman two other beefy men in dark coats with silver buttons carried a bier, on which, beneath a silk cloth, a body lay. But Gregor was not convinced—perhaps even the corpse had designs on him. In ancient Aegypt, did they not bury live cats along with the dead?

And then he saw, near the monument, above which the moon was starting to rise into just the right position to seem to be pierced by the tip of the hero’s sword like a large balloon, lounged a large cat not unlike himself—a tabby with long, bold stripes and a languorous expression similar to his father’s after a beef dinner and a measure of brandy.

Nobody on the quay took any notice of the reclining cat, nor of the newcomer, as Gregor trotted past the men in black coats who set down the bier and mopped their foreheads, waiting for the boatman. Nobody went near him, nor the tabby;
nobody spared them an inquisitive glance.