The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (4 page)

"Well now," said Gregor, well aware that he alone had remained calm, "I will get dressed immediately, pack my samples, and be on my way. Will you all, will you let me go catch my train? Now you see, sir, I'm not stubborn and I'm happy to work; traveling is difficult but I couldn't live without it. Where are you going, sir? To the office? Yes? Will you report on everything truthfully? A man can suddenly be incapable of working, but this is the precise moment to remember his past performance and to consider that later, after resolving his difficulties, he would work all the harder and more diligently. I am so deeply obligated to the Chief, as you well know. And besides, I am responsible for my parents and sister. I am in a tough bind but I'll work myself back out of it. Please do not make it more difficult than it already is. I beg you to speak up for me in the office! No one likes traveling salesmen, I know. They think we make a slew of money and lead charmed lives. There's no particular reason for them to further examine this prejudice. But you, sir, you have a better perspective than the rest of the office, an even better perspective, in all confidence, than the Chief himself, who, in his capacity as employer, allows his opinion to be easily swayed against an employee. You know very well that a traveling salesman, out of the office for almost the entire year, can easily fall prey to gossip, coincidences, and unfounded grievances against which he cannot possibly defend himself because he almost never hears about them except when returning home from an exhausting trip; he personally suffers the grim consequences, the causes of which he can no longer determine. Sir, do not leave without giving me a word to show that you think me at least partially right!"

But with Gregor's first words the head clerk had already turned away and with gaping lips simply looked back over his twitching shoulder at Gregor. And during Gregor's speech he did not stand still for a moment but crept step-by-step to the door, his eyes never leaving Gregor, as if obeying some secret injunction to leave the room. He was already in the foyer, and from the sudden movement with which he took his last step from the living room, one might believe he had just burned the sole of his foot. In the foyer, however, he stretched his right hand far out toward the stairs as if some supernatural deliverance were awaiting him there.

Gregor realized that he must on no account let the head clerk leave in this frame of mind or his position in the firm would be seriously jeopardized. The parents did not understand this so well; they had convinced themselves over the years that Gregor was set for life at this firm, and besides, they were so preoccupied with the current problem that they had lost all sense of the future. But Gregor did have this foresight. The head clerk had to be detained, calmed, persuaded, and ultimately won over; the very future of Gregor and his family depended on it. If only the sister had been there! She was perceptive; she had already begun to cry when Gregor was still lying quietly on his back. And the head clerk, that ladies' man, would certainly have let her guide him; she would have closed the apartment door and assuaged his fears in the foyer. But the sister was not there and Gregor would have to handle the situation himself. And without stopping to think that he still had no idea what powers of movement he had or even to think that very possibly—indeed probably—his words would once again be unintelligible, he let go of the wing of the door and flung himself through the opening; desiring to go toward the head clerk, who was already on the landing and ludicrously clutching the banister with both hands, Gregor instead, while groping for support, fell with a little cry onto his numerous little legs. This had barely happened when, for the first time that morning, he felt a sense of physical well-being: The little legs had firm ground beneath them, he was delighted to note that they were completely under his command, they even strained to carry him off wherever he might desire, and he already believed that the final alleviation of all his grief was imminent. But at that same moment, as he lay there rocking from his restrained movement not far from his mother—in fact just in front of her—she, who had seemed so self-absorbed, suddenly sprang up with arms wide and fingers outstretched, shouting: "Help, for God's sake, help!" She bent her head down as if to see Gregor better but instead ran contradictorily and madly backward and, having forgotten that the laden table stood behind her, sat down on it thoughtlessly and hastily, seemingly oblivious to the large overturned coffee pot next to her from which coffee was pouring in a steady stream onto the carpet.

"Mother, Mother," Gregor said softly, and looked up at her. The head clerk had momentarily slipped his mind and he could not help snapping his jaws in the air at the sight of the flowing coffee. This caused the mother to scream again; she fled from the table and fell into the father's arms as he rushed to her. But Gregor now had no time to waste on his parents; the head clerk was already on the stairs, with his chin on the banister he was looking back one last time. Gregor broke into a run to be sure to catch him; the head clerk must have suspected this because he leaped down several steps and disappeared; he was still yelling, "Aaahh!" which rang throughout the whole staircase. Unfortunately the head clerk's flight seemed to totally confuse the father, who until now had remained relatively calm, for instead of going after the head clerk or at least not hindering Gregor's pursuit, he seized in his right hand the head clerk's walking stick (which along with his hat and overcoat had been left behind on a chair) and with his left hand grabbed a large newspaper from the table and, stamping his feet, proceeded to brandish the walking stick and newspaper in order to drive Gregor back into his room. No plea of Gregor's helped, nor indeed was any plea understood; however humbly he turned his head, the father merely stamped his feet all the more forcefully. Across the room the mother, despite the cool weather, had thrown open a window and was leaning far out of it with her face buried in her hands. A strong draft swept in from the street to the staircase, the window curtains swelled, the newspapers on the table rustled, stray pages fluttered over the floor. The father drove Gregor back relentlessly, hissing like a savage. As Gregor was as yet unpracticed in moving backward, it was very slow going. If only Gregor had been permitted to turn around, he would have been in his room at once, but he was afraid to make the father impatient by this time-consuming rotation, and at any moment the stick in the father's hand threatened to deal a fatal blow to the back or the head. In the end, however, there remained no other choice, for Gregor observed to his horror that he could not control his direction when moving backward, and so he began as quickly as possible, which was actually very slowly, to turn himself around. Perhaps the father recognized his good intentions because he did not interfere; instead he occasionally even directed the movement from a distance with the tip of his stick. If only the father would quit that infernal hissing! It made Gregor completely lose his head. He was almost turned all the way around when, distracted by the hissing, he made a mistake and turned back the other way for a stretch. When he successfully ended up headfirst in front of the doorway, it was obvious that his body was too wide to get through as it was. Naturally it did not occur to the father in his present mood to open the other wing of the door to give Gregor a wide enough passage. He was fixed on the idea of getting Gregor back in his room as quickly as possible. And he would never have allowed the elaborate preparations that Gregor needed to pull himself upright and perhaps attempt to go through the door that way. Rather, he drove Gregor forward, as if there were no obstacle, with a considerable amount of noise; it no longer sounded like just one father behind him and now it was really no longer a joke, and Gregor—come what may—thrust himself into the doorway. One side of his body rose up and he lay at an angle in the doorway, one of his flanks was scraped raw and the white door was stained with ugly blotches, he was soon stuck fast and could not move on his own, the little legs on one side hung trembling in midair and on the other side they were pinned painfully to the floor—when his father gave him a terrific shove from behind and he flew, bleeding profusely, far into the room. The door was slammed shut with the stick, then all was still.

II

IT WAS TWILIGHT when Gregor awoke from his deep slumber. Even without being disturbed he doubted he would have slept much later, as he felt so well rested, but it seemed to him that a furtive step and a cautious shutting of the foyer door had roused him. The glow of the electric street lamps shone in pale patches on the ceiling and upper parts of the furniture, but where Gregor slept it was dark. Slowly, still groping awkwardly with his antennas, which he was only now learning to appreciate, he pushed himself over to the door to see what had been happening. His left side felt like a single long unpleasantly taut scar and he actually had to limp on his two rows of legs. One little leg, moreover, had been seriously injured during the course of the morning's events—it was nearly a miracle that only one had been hurt—and dragged behind him lifelessly.

Only when he reached the door did Gregor discover what had actually tempted him there: the smell of something edible. For there stood a bowl filled with fresh milk in which small slices of white bread were floating. He could have almost laughed for joy, as he was even hungrier than in the morning, and immediately plunged his head, almost up to the eyes, into the milk. But he quickly withdrew it in disappointment; not only was eating difficult on account of his tender left side—and eating had to be a collaboration of the whole heaving body—but he did not care at all for the milk, which was otherwise his favorite drink and surely the reason his sister had set it out for him. In fact, it was almost in revulsion that he turned away from the bowl and crawled back to the middle of the room.

In the living room, as Gregor could see through the crack in the door, the gas was lit; although the father usually liked to read the afternoon paper at this hour in a loud voice to the mother and sometimes to the sister as well, not a sound was heard. Well, perhaps this custom of reading that the sister had told him about and wrote of in her letters had been recently discontinued. But it was so silent everywhere, even though the apartment was certainly not empty. "What a quiet life the family has led," Gregor said to himself, and felt, as he stared pointedly into the darkness, a great surge of pride that he had been able to provide his parents and his sister such a life and in such a beautiful apartment. But what if all the tranquillity, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end? So as not to dwell on such thoughts, Gregor started to move and began crawling up and down the room.

Once during the long evening, one of the side doors and then the other was opened a small crack and quickly shut again; someone had apparently had the urge to come in but had then thought better of it. Gregor now stationed himself directly before the living room door, determined to persuade the hesitant visitor to come in or at least discover who it might be, but the door was not opened again and Gregor waited in vain. That morning, when the doors had been locked, they all wanted to come in; now after he had opened the one door and the others had been opened during the day, no one came and the keys were now on the other side.

It was late into the night before the light went out in the living room, and it was now obvious that the parents and the sister had stayed awake until then, because he could clearly discern that all three were tiptoeing away. Certainly no one would come in to Gregor until morning, therefore he had a long undisturbed time to ponder how best to reorder his life. But the high-ceilinged, spacious room in which he was forced to lie flat on the floor filled him with an unaccountable dread; it was, after all, his own room which he had inhabited for five years, and with an almost involuntary movement—and not without a faint feeling of shame—he scurried under the sofa, where, despite his back being slightly squashed and being unable to raise his head, he felt immediately cozy and only regretted that his body was too wide to fit completely underneath the sofa.

There he stayed the whole night, sometimes dozing but then waking up with a start from hunger pains; sometimes he worried and entertained vague hopes, but it all led him to the same conclusion: For now he must lie low and try, through patience and the greatest consideration, to help his family bear the inconvenience he was bound to cause them in his present condition.

So early in the morning that it was almost still night, Gregor had an opportunity to test the strength of his new resolutions, because the sister, nearly fully dressed, opened the door from the foyer and eagerly peered in. She did not immediately find him, but when she noticed him underneath the sofa—well, he had to be somewhere, he couldn't have just flown away—she was so startled that, unable to control herself, she slammed the door shut from the outside. But, as if regretting her behavior, she instantly reopened it and tiptoed in as though she were visiting someone seriously ill or even a stranger. Gregor had pushed his head forward to the edge of the sofa and was watching her. Would she notice that he had left the milk untouched not from any lack of hunger and bring something he liked better? If she did not do so on her own, he would rather starve than bring it to her attention, although he was extremely hard-pressed not to dart out from under the sofa and throw himself at her feet to beg for something good to eat. But the sister immediately and with surprise noticed the bowl, still full except for a little milk that had spilled around it, and promptly picked it up, not with bare hands of course but with a rag, and carried it out. Gregor was exceedingly curious as to what she would bring instead, and he advanced all sorts of theories. But he could never have guessed what in the goodness of her heart the sister actually did. To find out his likes and dislikes, she brought him a wide selection all spread out on an old newspaper. There were old, half-rotten vegetables, bones covered with congealed white sauce from supper the night before, some raisins and almonds, a cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before, dry bread, bread with butter, and bread with butter and salt. Beside this she set down the bowl, now presumably reserved for Gregor's exclusive use, which she had filled with water. And it was out of delicacy, knowing Gregor would not eat in her presence, that she hurriedly removed herself and even turned the key in the lock to indicate to Gregor that he was free to indulge himself as comfortably as he pleased. Gregor's little legs whizzed toward the food. His wounds must have already been fully healed, he felt no more injury; he marveled at this and thought about when he had cut his finger with a knife over a month ago and how this wound had still bothered him just the day before yesterday. "Have I become less sensitive?" he thought, sucking greedily at the cheese, to which he was initially and primarily drawn before all the other food. With tears of gratitude he quickly devoured, one after the other, the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce; the fresh food on the other hand did not appeal to him and he even dragged what he did want to eat a bit farther away. He had long finished with everything and lay drowsily on the same spot when the sister, to signify her return, slowly turned the key in the lock. This jerked him into action, as he was dozing, and he rushed back under the sofa. But he truly had to force himself, even for the short time that the sister was in the room, to stay beneath the sofa, because he had bloated slightly from the large meal and he could barely breathe in such strict confinement. In between minor bouts of suffocation, he watched with bulging eyes as the unsuspecting sister swept up not only the remaining scraps but even what Gregor had not touched, as if they now had no more use, and dumped it all quickly into a bucket that she covered with a wooden lid and carried away. Hardly had she turned her back when Gregor came out from under the sofa, stretched, and puffed himself out.