Chapter II · I

It was not until dusk that Gregor awoke from his deep, swoon-like sleep. He would certainly not have woken much later even without disturbance, for he felt sufficiently rested and slept out, yet it seemed to him as though a fleeting step and a cautious closing of the door leading to the hall had awakened him. The reflection 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 groping awkwardly with his antennae, which he was only now learning to appreciate, he thrust himself toward the door to see what had happened there. His left side seemed one single, unpleasantly taut scar, and he had to limp outright on his two rows of legs. One little leg, moreover, had been severely injured in the course of the morning’s events—it was almost a miracle that only one had been injured—and dragged lifelessly behind.

Only at the door did he notice what had really lured him there; it was the smell of something edible. For there stood a basin filled with sweet milk, in which floated little slices of white bread. 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 over his eyes. But he soon drew it back in disappointment; not only did eating cause him difficulty on account of his tender left side—and he could only eat if his whole body collaborated, wheezing—moreover, the milk, which had otherwise been his favorite drink and which his sister had certainly set out for that reason, did not taste good to him at all; indeed, he turned away from the basin almost with revulsion and crawled back to the center of the room.

In the living room, as Gregor saw through the crack of the door, the gas was lit, but while at this time of day his father was otherwise accustomed to reading the afternoon newspaper aloud in a raised voice to his mother and sometimes also to his sister, not a sound was to be heard now. Well, perhaps this reading aloud, of which his sister always spoke and wrote to him, had fallen out of practice altogether of late. But all around, too, it was so quiet, though certainly the flat was not empty. “What a quiet life the family has been leading,” Gregor said to himself, and, as he stared straight ahead into the dark, he felt a great pride that he had been able to provide such a life in so fine an apartment for his parents and his sister. But what if all this peace, all this prosperity, all this contentment were now to come to a fearful end? In order not to lose himself in such thoughts, Gregor preferred to set himself in motion and crawled up and down the room.

Once during the long evening one side door, and once the other, was opened a tiny crack and quickly shut again; someone, it seemed, felt the need to come in, but also had too many qualms. Gregor now came to a halt right by the living-room door, determined to bring the hesitant visitor in somehow, 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 had been locked, everyone had wanted to come in to him; now that he had opened one door and the others had evidently been opened during the day, no one came anymore, and the keys were now in the locks on the outside, too.

It was not until late at night that the light in the living room was put out, and now it was easy to tell that his parents and his sister had stayed awake all that time, for, as could be clearly heard, all three were now tiptoeing away. Surely no one would come in to Gregor until morning now; so he had a long time to reflect, undisturbed, on how he was to rearrange his life now. But the high, airy room in which he was compelled to lie flat on the floor filled him with an anxiety he could not account for, since it was, after all, his own room, which he had inhabited for five years—and with a half-unconscious turn and not without a slight feeling of shame, he scurried under the sofa, where, although his back was squeezed a little and he could no longer raise his head, he felt very comfortable at once and only regretted that his body was too broad to be accommodated entirely beneath it.

There he remained the whole night, which he spent partly in a doze, from which hunger kept startling him awake, but partly in worries and vague hopes, all of which led to the conclusion that for the time being he must keep calm and, through patience and the greatest consideration, make bearable for his family the unpleasantness that in his present condition he was now forced to cause them.

Early in the morning—it was still almost night—Gregor had an opportunity to test the strength of the resolutions he had just formed, for from the hall his sister, almost completely dressed, opened the door and looked in with suspense. She did not find him right away, but when she noticed him under the couch—good heavens, he had to be somewhere, he couldn’t have flown away—she took such fright that, unable to master herself, she slammed the door shut again from the outside. But as if repenting of her conduct, she opened the door again at once and stepped in on tiptoe, as though entering the room of a gravely ill patient or even of a stranger. Gregor had pushed his head forward almost to the edge of the couch and was watching her. Would she notice that he had left the milk untouched, and that not at all from any lack of hunger, and would she bring in some other food more suited to him? If she did not do so of her own accord, he would rather starve than draw her attention to it, although he felt a tremendous urge to dart out from under the couch, throw himself at his sister’s feet, and beg her for something good to eat. But his sister noticed at once, with astonishment, the still full bowl, from which only a little milk had been spilled round about; she picked it up immediately, not with her bare hands, to be sure, but with a rag, and carried it out. Gregor was exceedingly curious as to what she would bring as a substitute, and he turned over all kinds of thoughts in his mind. But he could never have guessed what his sister, in her goodness, actually did. To test his taste, she brought him a whole selection, spread out upon an old newspaper. There were old, half-decayed vegetables; bones left over from the evening meal, coated in congealed white sauce; a few raisins and almonds; a cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before; a slice of dry bread, a slice of bread and butter, and a slice of bread with butter and salt. In addition to all this, she set down the bowl, probably assigned once and for all to Gregor, into which she had poured some water. And out of delicate consideration, knowing that Gregor would not eat in front of her, she withdrew in great haste and even turned the key in the lock, merely so that Gregor might know he was free to make himself as comfortable as he pleased. Gregor’s little legs whirred as he now made for the food. His wounds, moreover, must already have healed completely; he felt no hindrance whatever, marveled at this, and thought of how, more than a month ago, he had cut his finger ever so slightly with a knife, and how this wound had still pained him sufficiently only the day before yesterday. “Could I have grown less sensitive now?” he thought, already sucking greedily at the cheese, to which he had been drawn immediately and irresistibly before all the other foods. In rapid succession, and with eyes weeping with gratification, he devoured the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce; the fresh food, on the other hand, did not appeal to him, he could not even bear its smell, and he actually dragged the things he wished to eat a little distance away. He had long since finished with everything and was merely lying lazily in the same spot, when his sister slowly turned the key as a sign that he should retreat. This startled him at once, although he was already half-dozing, and he scurried back under the couch. But it cost him a great effort of will to remain under the couch even for the short time that his sister was in the room, for from the copious meal his belly had rounded out a little, and in that cramped space he could scarcely breathe. Amid slight fits of suffocation, he watched with bulging eyes as his unsuspecting sister swept up with a broom not only the leftovers, but even the food Gregor had not touched at all, as if these too were of no further use, and how she hastily dumped everything into a bucket, which she closed with a wooden lid, whereupon she carried it all out. Scarcely had she turned her back before Gregor pulled himself out from under the couch, stretching and puffing himself up.

In this way Gregor now received his food every day: once in the morning, while his parents and the maid were still asleep, and the second time after the general midday meal, for then the parents likewise slept for a little while, 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 knowing about his meals except by hearsay, or perhaps his sister wished to spare them what might be only a small sorrow, for in truth they were suffering quite enough already.

With what excuses the doctor and the locksmith had been gotten out of the flat that first morning Gregor was unable to discover, for since he was not understood, no one, not even his sister, imagined that he could understand others, and so when his sister was in his room, he had to content himself with hearing only now and then her sighs and invocations of the saints. Only later, when she had grown a little accustomed to everything—of complete habituation there could, of course, never be any question—Gregor occasionally caught a remark that was kindly meant or could be interpreted as such. “He really enjoyed it today,” she would say when Gregor had cleared away his food with an appetite, whereas in the opposite case, which gradually became more and more frequent, she was accustomed to say, almost sorrowfully: “Now everything has been left untouched again.”

Yet while Gregor could learn no news directly, he overheard a great deal from the adjoining rooms, and wherever he heard voices, he ran at once to the door in question and pressed his whole body against it. Especially in the early days, there was no conversation that was not, in some way or other, even if only in secret, about him. For two days, at all meals, deliberations could be heard as to what course of action should now be taken; but between meals, too, they spoke of the same subject, for at least two members of the family were always at home, since no one, presumably, wished to stay at home alone, and to leave the flat entirely unattended was out of the question. Moreover, on the very first day—it was not quite clear what and how much she knew of what had occurred—the maid had begged the mother on bended knee to dismiss her at once, and when she took her leave a quarter of an hour later, she thanked them for her dismissal with tears, as if for the greatest kindness that had ever been shown her there, and without being asked to do so, swore a terrible oath never to betray the least thing to anyone.

Now the sister, in league with the mother, had to do the cooking as well; to be sure, this gave little trouble, for they ate almost nothing. Again and again Gregor heard one of them urge the other in vain to eat, receiving no other answer than: “Thank you, I’ve had enough,” or something of the kind. Perhaps they drank nothing either. Often the sister asked the father whether he would like some beer, warmly offering to fetch it herself, and when the father remained silent, she said, in order to remove any hesitation on his part, that she could also send the caretaker’s wife for it; but then the father would finally utter a resounding “No,” and nothing more was said of the matter.

In the course of the very first day, the father explained their entire financial situation and prospects to both the mother and the sister. From time to time he got up from the table and fetched some document or ledger from his small Wertheim safe, which he had rescued from the collapse of his business five years before. One could hear him unlocking the intricate lock and, having taken out what he sought, locking it again. These explanations by his father were, in part, the first pleasant thing Gregor had heard since his imprisonment. He had been of the opinion that not the least thing remained to his father from that business; at any rate, his father had said nothing to the contrary, and Gregor, to be sure, had not asked him about it either. Gregor’s only concern at the time had been to do his utmost to make the family forget, as quickly as possible, the commercial misfortune that had plunged them all into complete despair. And so he had begun to work at that time with quite exceptional ardour, and had risen almost overnight from a minor clerk into a traveling salesman, who naturally had quite different opportunities for earning money, and whose success at work was instantly converted, 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 never afterward had they been repeated, at least not with that same splendour, even though Gregor later earned so much money that he was in a position to bear, and did bear, the expenses of the whole family. They had simply grown used to it, both the family and Gregor; they accepted the money gratefully, he handed it over gladly, but no particular warmth was generated any longer. Only the sister had still remained close to Gregor, and it was his secret plan to send her, who unlike Gregor loved music dearly and could play the violin movingly, to the conservatory next year, regardless of the great expense this was bound to entail and which would somehow be made up by other means. Often during Gregor’s brief stays in town, the conservatory was mentioned in conversations with his sister, but always merely as a lovely dream whose realization was out of the question, and the parents did not care to hear even these innocent mentions of it; but Gregor thought of it quite resolutely and intended to make the solemn announcement on Christmas Eve.

Such thoughts, utterly futile in his present condition, passed through his head while he stuck upright against the door, listening. Sometimes, out of general weariness, he could listen no longer and let his head thump carelessly against the door, but he drew it back again at once, for even the slight sound he had caused thereby had been heard next door and had reduced them all to silence. “Whatever can he be up to now,” said the father after a while, evidently turned toward the door, and only then was the interrupted conversation gradually resumed.

Gregor now learned in full detail—for the father tended to repeat himself in his explanations, partly because he himself had not occupied himself with these matters for a long time, partly also because the mother did not understand everything the first time round—that in spite of all their misfortune, a very small fortune from the old days was, after all, still in existence, which the untouched interest had allowed to increase a little in the meantime. Besides this, however, the money that Gregor had brought home every month—he had kept only a few gulden for himself—had not been entirely spent, and had accumulated into a modest capital. Gregor, behind his door, nodded eagerly, delighted at this unexpected prudence and thrift. Strictly speaking, he might have used this surplus money to pay down further his father’s debt to the boss, and that day on which he might have rid himself of this post would have been far closer; but now it was undeniably better the way his father had arranged it.