The Metamorphosis — Episode 2

Only at dusk did Gregor wake from his heavy, swoon-like sleep. The light of the electric street lamps lay pale here and there on the ceiling and on the upper parts of the furniture, but down where Gregor was it was dark. Slowly, still feeling his way clumsily with his antennae, which he was only now learning to value, he pushed himself towards the door to see what had happened there. His left side seemed to be one long, unpleasantly tight scar, and on his two rows of legs he had to limp outright. One little leg had been badly hurt in the course of the morning's events — it was almost a miracle that only one had been hurt — and dragged lifelessly behind.

Only at the door did he notice what had actually drawn him there: it was the smell of something to eat. For there stood a bowl filled with sweet milk, in which small slices of white bread were floating. He could almost have laughed for joy, for he was even hungrier than in the morning, and at once he dipped his head into the milk almost up to the eyes. But soon he drew it back, disappointed. Not only did eating give him trouble because of his tender left side — he could eat only if his whole body joined in, panting — but the milk, which was otherwise his favourite drink and which his sister had surely put there for that very reason, did not taste good to him at all; indeed he turned away from the bowl almost with loathing and crawled back into the middle of the room.

In the living room, as Gregor saw through the crack of the door, the gas was lit; but whereas at this hour his father used to read the afternoon paper aloud to his mother, and sometimes to his sister too, in a raised voice, now there was not a sound. It was so quiet all around, even though the flat was certainly not empty. "What a quiet life the family led, after all," Gregor said to himself, and, staring straight ahead into the dark, he felt a great pride that he had been able to provide his parents and his sister with such a life in such a fine flat. But what if all the peace, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a terrible end? Rather than lose himself in such thoughts, Gregor set himself in motion and crawled up and down the room.

Once during the long evening one of the side doors was opened a small crack and quickly shut again, and later the other; someone had evidently felt the need to come in, but had had too many misgivings. Gregor stopped right by the living-room door, determined somehow to bring the hesitant visitor in, or at least to find out who it was; but the door was not opened again, and Gregor waited in vain. In the morning, when the doors were locked, they had all wanted to come in to him; now, when he had opened one door himself and the others had evidently been opened during the day, nobody came any more, and the keys were on the outside.

Only late at night was the light in the living room put out, and now it was easy to tell that his parents and sister had stayed up all that time, for all three could clearly be heard going off on tiptoe. Nobody would come in to Gregor now until morning; so he had a long time in which to consider, undisturbed, how he should now arrange his life afresh. But the high, open room in which he was forced to lie flat on the floor frightened him, without his being able to find out why — it was, after all, the room he had lived in for five years — and with a half-unconscious turn, and not without a slight shame, he hurried under the sofa, where, although his back was pressed a little and he could no longer lift his head, he at once felt very comfortable, and regretted only that his body was too broad to fit entirely underneath.

There he stayed the whole night, partly in a half-sleep from which hunger kept startling him awake, partly in worries and vague hopes, all of which led to the same conclusion: that for the time being he must keep quiet, and by patience and the greatest consideration make bearable for his family the inconveniences which, in his present condition, he was simply forced to cause them.

Early in the morning, when it was still almost night, Gregor had the chance to test the strength of his new resolutions, for his sister, almost fully dressed, opened the door from the hall and looked in anxiously. She did not find him at once, but when she noticed him under the sofa — God, he had to be somewhere, he couldn't have flown away — she took such a fright that, unable to control herself, she slammed the door shut again from outside. But as if she regretted her behaviour, she opened it again at once and came in on tiptoe, as if visiting someone seriously ill, or even a stranger. Would she notice that he had left the milk, and by no means for lack of hunger, and would she bring in something that suited him better? If she did not do it of her own accord, he would rather starve than draw her attention to it, although he felt an enormous urge to shoot out from under the sofa, throw himself at his sister's feet and beg her for something good to eat. But his sister noticed the still-full bowl at once, with surprise; she picked it up — not with her bare hands, but with a rag — and carried it out.

Never could he have guessed what his sister, in her kindness, actually did. To test his taste, she brought him a whole selection, all spread out on an old newspaper. There were old, half-rotten vegetables; bones from supper, surrounded by white sauce that had set hard; a few raisins and almonds; a cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before; a piece of dry bread, a piece of bread and butter, and a piece of bread and butter with salt. Beside all this she set down the bowl, now apparently reserved for Gregor once and for all, into which she had poured water. And out of tact, since she knew that Gregor would not eat in front of her, she withdrew in haste and even turned the key, so that Gregor should know he could make himself as comfortable as he liked. Gregor's little legs whirred as he went to his food. His wounds, moreover, must already have healed completely, for he felt no hindrance any more; he marvelled at this, and thought how, more than a month ago, he had cut his finger very slightly with a knife, and how that wound had still hurt him only the day before yesterday. "Have I less feeling now?" he thought, and was already sucking greedily at the cheese, to which he had been drawn at once, before everything else. Rapidly, one after another, with eyes watering from satisfaction, he consumed the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the fresh food, on the other hand, he did not like; he could not even bear its smell, and dragged the things he wanted to eat a little way away from it.

In this way Gregor now received his food every day, once in the morning while his parents and the maid were still asleep, and again after the family's midday meal, for then his parents slept a little while longer, and the maid was sent off by his sister on some errand. Certainly they too did not want Gregor to starve; but perhaps they could not have borne to learn about his eating more than by hearsay. Since nobody thought — not even his sister — that he could understand them, he had to be content, when she was in his room, with hearing now and then her sighs and her appeals to the saints. "Well, he enjoyed that today," she would say when Gregor had cleared his plate thoroughly, while in the opposite case, which gradually happened more and more often, she would say, almost sadly: "Now everything's been left again."

The maid, on the very first day, had begged the mother on her knees to dismiss her at once, and had sworn a fearful oath never to reveal the slightest thing to anyone. So the sister, together with the mother, now had to do the cooking as well; though that was not much trouble, for they ate almost nothing. Again and again Gregor heard one of them urging another to eat, in vain, and receiving no other answer than: "Thank you, I've had enough."

Already in the course of the first day the father laid out the whole financial situation and prospects to the mother and the sister. Now and then he got up from the table and fetched some receipt or notebook from the little safe he had rescued from the collapse of his business five years before. One could hear him unlocking the complicated lock and locking it again once he had taken out what he wanted. These explanations of the father's were, in part, the first pleasant thing Gregor had heard since his captivity. He had been of the opinion that nothing whatever was left to his father from that business; at least his father had told him nothing to the contrary, and Gregor, admittedly, had not asked.

Gregor's only concern at the time had been to do everything he could to let the family forget, as quickly as possible, the business disaster that had plunged them all into complete hopelessness. And so he had begun to work with quite special zeal, and almost overnight had turned from a little clerk into a travelling salesman, whose successes were at once transformed, in the form of commission, into cash that could be laid on the table at home before the astonished and delighted family. Those had been fine times, and they had never since been repeated, at least not with that glow, although Gregor later earned so much that he was able to bear the expenses of the whole family, and did. They had simply grown used to it, the family as well as Gregor; they accepted the money gratefully, he handed it over gladly, but no special warmth would come of it any more. Only his sister had still remained close to him, and it was his secret plan to send her next year to the Conservatory — she, who unlike Gregor loved music and could play the violin movingly — regardless of the great cost, which would be met in some other way. He intended to announce it solemnly on Christmas Eve.

Such thoughts, quite useless in his present condition, went through his head while he stood upright there, glued to the door, eavesdropping. Sometimes, from sheer weariness, he let his head knock carelessly against the door, but held it firm again at once, for even that small noise had been heard next door and had silenced them all. "What's he up to now?" said his father after a while, evidently turned towards the door, and only then was the interrupted conversation gradually resumed.

Gregor now learned amply — for his father repeated himself often, partly because he had not dealt with these matters for a long time, partly because his mother did not understand everything the first time — that despite all the misfortune a small fortune, a very small one, was still left over from the old days, which the untouched interest had allowed to grow a little in the meantime. Besides this, the money Gregor had brought home every month — he had kept only a few coins for himself — had not been used up entirely, and had accumulated into a small capital. Gregor, behind his door, nodded eagerly, delighted at this unexpected caution and thrift. True, with this surplus he could have paid off more of his father's debt to the chief, and the day on which he could have been rid of that post would have been far nearer; but now it was undoubtedly better as his father had arranged it.

But this money was by no means enough to let the family live off the interest; it was enough, perhaps, to keep them for one year, at most two. It was merely a sum that ought not to be touched, and had to be put aside for an emergency; the money to live on had to be earned. Now the father was a healthy man, but an old one, who had done no work for five years and could not expect much of himself; in those five years, which were the first holidays of his laborious and yet unsuccessful life, he had put on a good deal of fat and had become quite sluggish. And was the old mother now to earn money — who suffered from asthma, for whom a walk through the flat was already an effort, and who spent every second day on the sofa by the open window, struggling for breath? And was the sister to earn money, who was still a child at seventeen, and whose way of life so far one so much wished her to keep — dressing nicely, sleeping late, helping in the house, joining in a few modest pleasures and, above all, playing the violin? Whenever the talk came round to this necessity of earning money, Gregor always let go of the door first and threw himself on the cool leather sofa beside it, for he was burning with shame and grief.

Often he lay there the whole long night, not sleeping a moment, only scraping at the leather for hours. Or he did not shrink from the great effort of pushing an armchair to the window, then crawling up onto the sill and, propped in the chair, leaning against the glass — evidently only in some memory of the sense of freedom that looking out of the window used to give him. For in fact, from day to day, he saw even things a little way off less and less distinctly; the hospital opposite, whose all-too-frequent sight he used to curse, he now could not see at all, and if he had not known for certain that he lived in the quiet but entirely urban Charlottenstrasse, he might have believed he was looking out of his window into a wilderness in which the grey sky and the grey earth merged indistinguishably. His attentive sister needed to see only twice that the armchair stood by the window; from then on, each time she had tidied the room, she pushed the chair back exactly to the window, and even left the inner casement open.

If Gregor could only have spoken to his sister and thanked her for everything she had to do for him, he would have borne her services more easily; as it was, he suffered under them. Her very entrance was terrible for him. Hardly had she come in than, without taking time to close the door, she ran straight to the window and tore it open with hasty hands, as if she were almost suffocating, and stayed a little while by the window, however cold it was, breathing deeply. With this running and noise she frightened Gregor twice a day; the whole time he trembled under the sofa, and yet knew very well that she would surely have spared him it, if only she could have brought herself to stay, with the window closed, in a room where Gregor was.

Once — a month had probably passed since Gregor's transformation, and there was no longer any particular reason for his sister to be astonished at his appearance — she came a little earlier than usual and found Gregor still looking out of the window, motionless, set up as if to frighten her. She not only did not come in; she actually started back and shut the door; a stranger might have thought Gregor had lain in wait for her and meant to bite her. He saw from this that the sight of him was still unbearable to her, and must remain unbearable, and that she had to overcome herself severely not to run away from the small part of his body that stuck out from under the sofa. To spare her even that, one day he carried the sheet on his back to the sofa — the job took him four hours — and arranged it so that he was now completely covered, and his sister, even if she bent down, could not see him. She left the sheet as it was, and Gregor even thought he caught a grateful look when he once carefully lifted the sheet a little with his head to see how she was taking the new arrangement.

For the first fortnight his parents could not bring themselves to come in to him, and he often heard them fully acknowledging his sister's present work, whereas until now they had often been annoyed with her, because she had seemed to them a somewhat useless girl. Now both of them often waited outside Gregor's room while she tidied it, and hardly had she come out than she had to tell them exactly how the room looked, what Gregor had eaten, how he had behaved this time, and whether perhaps a small improvement could be noticed. His mother wanted to visit Gregor relatively soon, but his father and sister held her back at first with reasoned arguments, to which Gregor paid close attention and which he fully approved. Later, though, she had to be held back by force, and when she cried, "Let me go to Gregor, he is my unhappy son! Don't you understand that I have to go to him?" then Gregor thought that it might be good after all if his mother came in — not every day, of course, but perhaps once a week; she understood everything much better than his sister, who for all her courage was still only a child.

During the day, out of consideration for his parents, Gregor did not want to show himself at the window; but he could not crawl very far on the few square metres of floor either; lying still he already found hard to bear at night; eating soon gave him not the slightest pleasure any more; and so, for distraction, he took up the habit of crawling this way and that across the walls and ceiling. He especially liked hanging up on the ceiling; it was quite different from lying on the floor; one breathed more freely; a light swinging went through the body; and in the almost happy absent-mindedness in which Gregor found himself up there, it could happen that, to his own surprise, he let go and smacked down on the floor. But now he had his body under control quite differently from before, and did not hurt himself even in such a great fall. His sister at once noticed the new entertainment Gregor had found for himself — he left traces of his sticky substance here and there as he crawled — and she got it into her head to make it possible for Gregor to crawl on the largest possible scale, and to remove the furniture that stood in the way: above all the chest of drawers and the desk.

But she was not able to do this alone; she did not dare ask her father for help; the maid would certainly not have helped her, for this girl of about sixteen had begged for the favour of keeping the kitchen locked at all times and opening it only when specially called. So nothing remained for the sister but to fetch her mother one day while her father was out. The mother came with cries of excited joy, but fell silent at the door of Gregor's room. Gregor had hurriedly pulled the sheet lower and into more folds; the whole thing really looked like a sheet thrown casually over the sofa. "Come on, you can't see him," said the sister, evidently leading her mother by the hand. Gregor now heard how the two weak women shifted the old chest, heavy as it was, from its place. It took a very long time. After perhaps a quarter of an hour's work the mother said they had better leave the chest where it was: firstly it was too heavy, and secondly it was not at all certain that they were doing Gregor a favour by removing the furniture. To her the opposite seemed to be the case; the sight of the empty wall positively oppressed her heart; and why should Gregor not feel the same, since he had long been used to the furniture and would feel abandoned in an empty room?

"And isn't it," the mother concluded, very softly — indeed she was almost whispering the whole time, as if she wanted to avoid Gregor hearing even the sound of her voice, for that he did not understand the words she was convinced — "isn't it as if, by removing the furniture, we were showing that we're giving up all hope of improvement, and abandoning him to himself? I think it would be best if we tried to keep the room exactly as it was before, so that when Gregor comes back to us he finds everything unchanged, and can forget the time in between all the more easily."

On hearing these words of his mother's, Gregor realised that the lack of any direct human speech, together with the monotonous life in the midst of the family, must have confused his mind over these two months, for he could not otherwise explain to himself how he could seriously have wanted his room emptied. Did he really want to let the warm room, comfortably furnished with inherited furniture, be turned into a cave, in which he would, it is true, be able to crawl undisturbed in every direction, but at the same time would quickly and completely forget his human past? He was close to forgetting already, and only his mother's voice, unheard for so long, had shaken him. Nothing should be removed; everything must stay; and if the furniture prevented him from carrying on his senseless crawling about, that was no loss but a great advantage.

But his sister, unfortunately, was of another opinion. She had grown used — not entirely without justification — to presenting herself, when Gregor's affairs were discussed, as the special expert in front of her parents, and so now her mother's advice was reason enough for her to insist on removing not only the chest and the desk, which she had first had in mind, but all the furniture except the indispensable sofa. It was not only childish defiance and the self-confidence she had acquired so unexpectedly of late; she had also actually observed that Gregor needed a great deal of room to crawl in, whereas, as far as one could see, he did not use the furniture in the slightest. And in a room where Gregor alone ruled over the empty walls, no human being except Grete would ever dare to set foot.

And so she would not let her mother talk her out of it. Well, the chest Gregor could do without at a pinch, but the desk had to stay. Although Gregor kept telling himself that nothing out of the ordinary was happening — only a few pieces of furniture being moved — this coming and going of the women, their little calls to each other, the scraping of the furniture on the floor, affected him like a great commotion fed from every side, and however tightly he drew in his head and legs and pressed his body to the floor, he was forced to tell himself that he would not be able to bear it for long. They were clearing out his room; taking from him everything he was fond of; the chest, in which his fretsaw and other tools lay, they had already carried out; now they were loosening the desk, dug firmly into the floor, at which he had written his exercises as a student at the commercial academy, as a secondary schoolboy, even as a small boy at primary school — and now he really had no time left to weigh the good intentions of the two women, whose existence, in fact, he had almost forgotten, for from exhaustion they were now working in silence, and one heard only the heavy tramp of their feet.

And so he broke out — the women were just leaning on the desk in the next room to get their breath back — changed the direction of his run four times, he really did not know what to rescue first; then he saw, hanging conspicuously on the otherwise bare wall, the picture of the lady dressed all in furs, crawled up to it in haste and pressed himself against the glass, which held him fast and soothed his hot belly. This picture at least, which Gregor now completely covered, nobody was going to take away.

They were already coming back; Grete had put her arm round her mother and was almost carrying her. "Well, what shall we take now?" said Grete, and looked round. Then her eyes met Gregor's on the wall. It was probably only because of her mother's presence that she kept her composure; she bent her face towards her mother to keep her from looking round, and said, trembling and without thinking: "Come, hadn't we better go back into the living room for a moment?" Grete's intention was clear to Gregor: she wanted to get her mother to safety and then chase him down from the wall. Well, she could try! He sat on his picture and would not give it up. He would sooner spring in Grete's face.

But Grete's words had only made her mother more anxious; she stepped aside, caught sight of the huge brown patch on the flowered wallpaper, and before it properly dawned on her that what she saw was Gregor, cried in a hoarse, screaming voice, "Oh God, oh God!" and fell with outspread arms across the sofa, as if giving everything up, and did not move. "You, Gregor!" cried his sister, with raised fist and piercing eyes. They were the first words she had addressed directly to him since the transformation. She ran into the next room to fetch some essence with which she could wake her mother from her faint; Gregor wanted to help too — there was still time to rescue the picture — but he was stuck fast to the glass and had to tear himself free by force; then he too ran into the next room, as if he could give his sister some advice, as in earlier times; but had to stand idly behind her; she started when she turned round and saw him; a bottle fell on the floor and broke; a splinter cut Gregor in the face, and some corrosive medicine ran over him. Grete took as many bottles as she could hold, ran with them in to her mother, and slammed the door shut with her foot. Gregor was now cut off from his mother, who through his fault was perhaps near death; he had nothing to do now but wait; and, beset by self-reproach and worry, he began to crawl, crawled over everything, walls, furniture and ceiling, and finally, in his despair, as the whole room began to spin around him, fell down in the middle of the big table.

A little while passed; Gregor lay there limply; all around it was quiet; perhaps that was a good sign. Then the bell rang. The maid, of course, was locked in her kitchen, and so Grete had to go and open. His father had come. "What's happened?" were his first words; Grete's appearance had evidently told him everything. Grete answered in a muffled voice, evidently pressing her face to her father's chest: "Mother fainted, but she's better now. Gregor has broken out." "I expected it," said his father. "I always told you so, but you women won't be told."

It was clear to Gregor that his father had put the worst interpretation on Grete's all-too-brief report, and assumed that Gregor had been guilty of some violence. So Gregor had now to try to placate his father, for to explain to him he had neither the time nor the means. And so he fled to the door of his room and pressed himself against it, so that his father, coming in from the hall, could see at once that Gregor had every intention of returning to his room immediately, and that there was no need to drive him back: one had only to open the door, and he would disappear.

But his father was not in the mood to notice such subtleties. "Ah!" he cried as soon as he came in, in a tone as if he were at once furious and glad. Gregor drew his head back from the door and raised it towards his father. He had really not imagined his father as he now stood there. Still, still — was this really his father? The same man who used to lie buried wearily in bed when Gregor set off on a business trip; who had received him, on the evenings he came home, in his dressing gown in the armchair, not really capable of getting up, but only raising his arms as a sign of pleasure; and who, on the rare walks they took together, on a few Sundays a year and on the highest holidays, worked his way forward between Gregor and his mother — who walked slowly enough themselves — a little more slowly still, wrapped in his old coat, his walking-stick always carefully set down, and who, when he wanted to say something, almost always stopped and gathered his companions round him?

Now, though, he was standing well upright; dressed in a tight blue uniform with gold buttons, of the kind worn by the messengers at banks; above the high stiff collar of the coat his heavy double chin spread out; from under the bushy eyebrows the black eyes looked out fresh and alert; the once tousled white hair was combed down flat into a painfully exact, shining parting. He threw his cap, which bore a gold monogram, probably that of a bank, in an arc across the whole room onto the sofa, and, the tails of his long uniform coat thrown back, his hands in his trouser pockets, advanced on Gregor with a grim face.

He probably did not know himself what he intended; at any rate he lifted his feet unusually high, and Gregor was amazed at the gigantic size of his boot-soles. But he did not linger over that; he had known since the first day of his new life that his father considered only the greatest severity appropriate towards him. And so he ran ahead of his father, stopped when his father stood still, and hurried on again as soon as his father so much as stirred. In this way they circled the room several times without anything decisive happening — indeed, at its slow pace, without the whole thing even looking like a chase. For that reason Gregor stayed on the floor, especially as he feared his father might take a flight up the walls or across the ceiling for particular wickedness. All the same, he could not keep up even this running for long, for while his father took one step he had to perform a countless number of movements. Breathlessness was already beginning to make itself felt, for in his earlier life, too, he had never had entirely trustworthy lungs. As he staggered along, gathering all his strength for the run, hardly keeping his eyes open, and having almost forgotten that the walls were open to him, something lightly thrown flew down right beside him and rolled ahead of him. It was an apple; a second one flew after it at once; Gregor stood still in terror; running on was useless, for his father had decided to bombard him.

From the fruit bowl on the sideboard he had filled his pockets, and now, without taking careful aim for the moment, threw apple after apple. These little red apples rolled about on the floor as if electrified, knocking against one another. A weakly thrown apple grazed Gregor's back but slid off harmlessly. One that flew straight after it, however, positively drove into Gregor's back; Gregor wanted to drag himself on, as if the surprising, unbelievable pain might pass with a change of place; but he felt as if nailed to the spot, and stretched himself out in complete confusion of all his senses. Only with his last glance did he still see the door of his room torn open, and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her underclothes — for his sister had loosened her clothing to give her air in her faint — and how his mother then ran to his father, her loosened skirts slipping to the floor one after another as she went, and how, stumbling over the skirts, she pressed herself on his father and, embracing him, in complete union with him — but now Gregor's sight was already failing — her hands clasped round the back of his father's head, begged him to spare Gregor's life.