Chapter II · II

Now, this money was by no means sufficient to allow the family to live, say, off the interest; it might suffice perhaps to maintain the family for one, at most two years, and that was all. It was merely a sum, therefore, that one ought not really to touch, and which had to be put aside for an emergency; but the money for living had to be earned. Now the father was, to be sure, a healthy but nonetheless elderly man, who had not worked for five years and at all events could not be expected to undertake much; in these five years, which had been the first holiday of his laborious yet unsuccessful life, he had put on a great deal of fat and had consequently grown quite sluggish. And was the old mother perhaps supposed to earn money, suffering as she did from asthma, for whom a walk through the flat was already an exertion, and who spent every other day on the sofa by the open window struggling for breath? And was the sister to earn money, who at seventeen was still a child, and whose way of life hitherto had been so entirely enviable, consisting as it did of dressing nicely, sleeping late, helping about the house, sharing in a few modest amusements, and above all playing the violin? Whenever the talk turned to this necessity of earning money, Gregor would always let go of the door and fling himself down upon the cool leather sofa beside it, for he grew hot with shame and grief.

Often he lay there throughout the long nights, not sleeping for a moment and merely scraping against the leather for hours on end. Or he would spare no great effort to push an armchair to the window, then crawl up onto the windowsill and, propped against the armchair, lean against the pane, evidently only out of some recollection of the liberation that looking out of the window had formerly brought him. For in truth, from day to day, he saw things even a short distance away ever more indistinctly; the hospital across the street, whose all too frequent sight he had previously cursed, he could no longer see at all, and had he not known for certain that he lived in the quiet, but thoroughly urban Charlottenstraße, he might have believed he was looking out of his window onto a wasteland in which the grey sky and the grey earth blended indistinguishably together. Only twice did the attentive sister need to see that the armchair was standing by the window, before she began, each time after tidying the room, pushing the armchair right back to the window, and from then on even leaving the inner casement open.

If only Gregor had been able to speak to his sister and thank her for everything she had to do for him, he would have borne her ministrations more easily; as it was, he suffered under them. The sister, to be sure, tried as far as possible to gloss over the awkwardness of it all, and naturally the longer the time that passed, the better she succeeded, but Gregor too, with time, saw through everything far more clearly. Her very entrance was dreadful to him. No sooner had she entered than, without taking time to close the door—careful though she usually was to spare everyone the sight of Gregor’s room—she would run straight to the window and tear it open with hasty hands, as if she were nearly suffocating, and would remain for a little while by the window, no matter how cold it was, breathing deeply. With this running and clatter she terrified Gregor twice a day; all the while he trembled beneath the sofa, yet knew very well that she would certainly have gladly spared him this, had it only been possible for her to endure remaining in a room with Gregor with the window closed.

Once, perhaps a month had already passed since Gregor’s metamorphosis, and there was certainly no particular reason left for the sister to be astonished at Gregor’s appearance, she arrived a little earlier than usual and found Gregor still there, motionless and positioned in such a way as to inspire sheer terror, looking out of the window. It would not have been unexpected for Gregor had she chosen not to enter, since his position prevented her from immediately opening the window; but not only did she not enter, she even shrank back and shut the door; a stranger might have thought that Gregor had been lying in wait for her and meant to bite her. Gregor, of course, hid himself immediately beneath the sofa, but he had to wait until noon before his sister returned, and she seemed far more uneasy than usual. From this he realized that the sight of him was still intolerable to her and was bound to remain intolerable, and that she must have had to overcome a great deal not to run away at the sight of even the small portion of his body that protruded from beneath the sofa. In order to spare her even this sight, he one day carried the bedsheet upon his back—the task took him four hours—over to the sofa, and arranged it in such a way that he was now completely covered, so that his sister, even if she stooped down, could not see him. Had this sheet not been necessary in her opinion, she could have removed it, for it was clear enough that shutting himself off so entirely could be no pleasure for Gregor; but she left the sheet just as it was, and Gregor even fancied he caught a grateful glance when, on one occasion, he carefully lifted the sheet a little with his head to see how his sister took the new arrangement.

During the first fortnight the parents could not bring themselves to come in to him, and he often heard them express their complete appreciation of his sister’s current labours, whereas previously they had frequently been annoyed with her because she had seemed to them a somewhat useless girl. But now both of them, father and mother, often waited outside Gregor’s room while his sister tidied up inside, and no sooner had she emerged than she had to relate in exact detail how things looked in the room, what Gregor had eaten, how he had behaved on this occasion, and whether perhaps any slight improvement could be observed. The mother, for that matter, wished to visit Gregor comparatively soon, but the father and the sister restrained her at first with arguments of reason, to which Gregor listened very attentively and of which he fully approved. Later, however, she had to be held back by force, and when she would then cry out: “Do let me go to Gregor, he is my unfortunate son after all! Don’t you understand that I must go to him?”, Gregor would think that it might perhaps be good after all if his mother came in—not every day, of course, but perhaps once a week; she understood everything so much better than his sister, who, for all her courage, was still only a child and had at bottom taken on so grievous a task perhaps only out of childish thoughtlessness.

Gregor’s wish to see his mother was soon fulfilled. During the day, out of consideration for his parents, Gregor did not want to show himself at the window, nor could he crawl about very much on the few square metres of floor; he already found it hard to endure lying still during the night, eating soon ceased to afford him the slightest pleasure, and so, for diversion, he acquired the habit of crawling criss-cross over the walls and ceiling. He especially liked hanging high up on the ceiling; it was quite different from lying on the floor; one breathed more freely; a faint vibration ran through his body, and in the almost happy absentmindedness in which Gregor found himself up there, it could happen that, to his own surprise, he would let go and come smacking down onto the floor. But now, of course, he had his body under far better control than before and did not hurt himself even in so great a fall. The sister soon noticed the new entertainment Gregor had found for himself—for in crawling he also left behind here and there traces of his sticky substance—and so she took it into her head to give Gregor the greatest possible scope for crawling, and to remove the furniture that stood in the way, above all the wardrobe and the writing desk. But she was not able to do this alone; she did not dare ask her father for help; the maidservant would certainly not have assisted her, for this girl of about sixteen, though she had held out bravely since the dismissal of the former cook, had asked the favour of being allowed to keep the kitchen constantly locked and to open it only when specially called; so the sister had no choice but to fetch their mother one day in their father’s absence. The mother came along with exclamations of excited joy, but fell silent at the door of Gregor’s room. First, of course, the sister looked in to see if everything in the room was in order; only then did she let the mother enter. In the greatest haste Gregor had drawn the sheet down even further and in more folds; the whole thing really looked just like a sheet thrown casually over the sofa. This time Gregor also refrained from spying from beneath the sheet; he renounced seeing his mother on this occasion, and was merely glad that she had come after all. “Come along, you can’t see him,” said the sister, evidently leading the mother by the hand. Gregor now heard the two weak women shifting the heavy old wardrobe from its place, and the sister constantly claiming the greater part of the work for herself, refusing to listen to the warnings of the mother, who feared she would overexert herself. It took a very long time. After a good quarter of an hour’s labour, the mother said they had better leave the wardrobe where it was, for in the first place it was too heavy, they would not be finished before the father’s arrival and, with the wardrobe in the middle of the room, they would block Gregor’s every path, and in the second place it was by no means certain that they were doing Gregor a favour by removing the furniture. To her the contrary seemed the case; the sight of the bare wall positively oppressed her heart; and why should not Gregor have the very same feeling, since he had long been accustomed to the room’s furniture and would therefore feel deserted in the empty room. “And wouldn’t it seem,” the mother concluded in a very low voice, as indeed she had been almost whispering all along, as if wishing to prevent Gregor, whose exact whereabouts she did not know, from hearing even the sound of her voice, for that he did not understand the words she was convinced, “and wouldn’t it seem as if, by removing the furniture, we were showing that we have given up all hope of his recovery and are heartlessly abandoning him to his own devices? I think it would be best if we try to keep the room in the exact state it was in before, so that when Gregor comes back to us, he will find everything unchanged and can forget the intervening time all the more easily.”

Upon hearing these words of his mother’s, Gregor realized that the lack of any direct human conversation, coupled with the monotonous life amidst the family, must have confused his mind in the course of these two months, for in no other way could he explain to himself how he could seriously have longed for his room to be emptied. Did he really desire to have the warm room, so comfortably appointed with inherited furniture, transformed into a cavern in which he would admittedly be able to crawl unhindered in all directions, yet only at the cost of simultaneously, swiftly, and completely forgetting his human past? Why, he had already been close to forgetting, and only his mother’s voice, which he had not heard for so long, had roused him. Nothing was to be removed; everything must remain; he could not dispense with the beneficial influence of the furniture on his condition; and if the furniture hindered him from engaging in this senseless crawling about, that was no detriment, but rather a great advantage.

Unfortunately, however, the sister was of another mind; she had grown accustomed, not altogether without justification, to presenting herself before their parents as an exceptional expert whenever Gregor’s affairs were discussed, and so the mother’s counsel was now reason enough for the sister to insist on the removal not merely of the wardrobe and the writing desk, which had been all she had thought of at first, but of all the furniture, with the exception of the indispensable sofa. It was, of course, not merely childish defiance and the self-confidence so unexpectedly and hard-won in recent times that determined her demand; she had indeed also observed that Gregor needed plenty of room to crawl, whereas he did not make the slightest use of the furniture, so far as could be seen. But perhaps there was also at work the romantic disposition of girls of her age, which seeks its gratification on every occasion, and by which Grete was now tempted to make Gregor’s situation even more terrifying, so that she might then be able to do even more for him than hitherto. For into a room in which Gregor held sway over the bare walls all alone, no human being besides Grete would ever dare set foot.

And so she would not be dissuaded from her resolution by the mother, who in this room seemed unsure of herself from sheer anxiety, soon fell silent, and helped the sister with all her might to move the wardrobe out. Well, the wardrobe Gregor could dispense with at a pinch, but the writing desk simply had to stay. And no sooner had the women left the room with the wardrobe, against which they were pressing and groaning, than Gregor poked his head out from under the sofa to see how he might intervene cautiously and with as much consideration as possible. But unluckily it was the mother who returned first, while Grete in the adjoining room had her arms round the wardrobe and was rocking it back and forth by herself, without, of course, budging it an inch. The mother, however, was not used to the sight of Gregor; it might have made her ill; and so Gregor, terrified, scurried backwards as fast as he could to the other end of the sofa, but he could no longer prevent the sheet from stirring slightly in front. That was enough to catch the mother’s eye. She stopped short, stood still for a moment, and then went back to Grete.

Although Gregor kept telling himself that nothing extraordinary was happening, that only a few pieces of furniture were being moved about, he soon had to admit to himself that this coming and going of the women, their brief calls to one another, the scraping of the furniture upon the floor, affected him like a vast turmoil fed from all sides, and he was forced, tightly as he drew in his head and legs and pressed his belly against the floor, inevitably to tell himself that he would not be able to endure the whole business for long. They were clearing out his room; taking from him everything that was dear to him; the wardrobe, in which his fret-saw and other tools were kept, they had already carried out; they were now loosening the writing desk, which was firmly embedded in the floor, at which he had written his assignments as a student at the commercial academy, as a secondary school pupil, yes, even as an elementary school boy—he truly had no time left now to consider the good intentions of the two women, whose existence, for that matter, he had almost forgotten, for from sheer exhaustion they were already working in silence, and only the heavy thudding of their feet could be heard.