Part II

It was not until dusk that Gregor woke from his heavy, swoonlike sleep. He would certainly have woken not much later even without being disturbed, for he felt sufficiently rested and had slept his fill, but it seemed to him that he had been woken by a fleeting footstep and the careful closing of the door to the front hall. The glow of the electric streetcar lay pale here and there on the ceiling and on the upper parts of the furniture, but down below, where Gregor was, it was dark. Slowly, still groping clumsily with his antennae, which he was only now beginning to appreciate, he pushed himself toward the door to see what had happened there. His left side seemed to be one single long, unpleasantly tight scar, and he actually had to limp on his two rows of legs. One little leg, by the way, had been badly injured in the course of the morning’s events—it was almost a miracle that only one had been injured—and dragged along lifelessly behind.

Only at the door did he notice what had actually drawn him there; it had been the smell of something to eat. For there stood a bowl filled with sweet milk, in which little pieces of white bread were floating. He could almost have laughed with joy, for he was even hungrier than he had been in the morning, and at once he dipped his head into the milk almost up over his eyes. But soon he drew it back again in disappointment; not only did eating give him trouble because of his tender left side (and he could eat only if his whole body joined in, panting), but the milk, which had always been his favorite drink, and which was surely why his sister had put it in here for him, did not taste good to him at all; in fact he turned away from the bowl almost with revulsion and crawled back into the middle of the room.

In the living room, as Gregor could see through the crack of the door, the gas had been lit, but whereas at this time of day his father usually read aloud from the afternoon paper to his mother, and sometimes to his sister too, in a raised voice, now there was not a sound. Well, perhaps this reading aloud, which his sister always told him and wrote him about, had lately fallen out of practice altogether. But all around, too, it was so quiet, although the apartment was surely not empty. “What a quiet life the family has been leading,” Gregor said to himself, and as he stared rigidly ahead into the dark he felt a great pride that he had been able to provide such a life for his parents and his sister in such a nice apartment. But what if now all the peace, all the comfort, all the contentment were to come to a horrifying end? So as not to lose himself in such thoughts, Gregor preferred to start moving, and crawled up and down the room.

Once during the long evening one of the side doors was opened a crack, and once the other, and quickly shut again; someone had probably felt the need to come in, but had too many misgivings as well. Gregor now came to a halt right by the living-room door, determined somehow to bring the hesitant visitor in after all, or at least to find out who it was; but now the door was not opened again, and Gregor waited in vain. Early that morning, when the doors were 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.

Not until late at night was the light in the living room put out, and now it was easy to establish that his parents and his sister had stayed awake all this time, for, as could be clearly heard, all three of them were now going away on tiptoe. Now surely no one would come in to Gregor until morning; so he had a long time to consider undisturbed how he should rearrange his life now. But the high, open room, in which he was forced to lie flat on the floor, frightened him without his being able to discover why, for it was, after all, the room he had lived in for five years, and with a half-unconscious turn, and not without a slight feeling of shame, he scurried under the couch, where, although his back was squeezed a little and although he could no longer raise his head, he at once felt very comfortable and only regretted that his body was too wide to fit entirely under the couch.

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

Early the next morning, while it was still almost night, Gregor had the opportunity to test the strength of the resolutions he had just made, for his sister, almost fully dressed, opened the door from the front hall and looked in, tense with expectation. She did not find him at once, but when she noticed him under the couch—God, he had to be somewhere, he couldn’t have flown away—she was so frightened that, unable to control herself, she slammed the door shut again from the outside. But as if she regretted her behavior, she immediately opened the door again and came in on tiptoe, as if she were visiting someone gravely ill, or even a stranger. Gregor had pushed his head forward to just the edge of the couch and was watching her. Would she notice that he had left the milk standing, and by no means for lack of hunger, and would she bring in some other food that suited him better? If she did not do it of her own accord, he would rather starve than call her attention to it, even though he actually felt a tremendous urge to shoot 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 surprise, the bowl that was still full, with only a little milk spilled around it; she picked it up immediately, not with her bare hands, to be sure, but with a rag, and carried it out. Gregor was extremely curious to see what she would bring instead, and he imagined all sorts of things. But 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 the evening meal, coated with white sauce that had gone solid; a few raisins and almonds; a cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before; a piece of dry bread, a piece of bread spread with butter, and a piece of bread spread with butter and salted. In addition to all this she set down the bowl, probably now intended for Gregor once and for all, into which she had poured water. And out of delicacy, since she knew that Gregor would not eat in front of her, she left in great haste and even turned the key, just so that Gregor could see that he might make himself as comfortable as he liked. Gregor’s little legs whirred as he now went at the food. His wounds, incidentally, must already have healed completely; he no longer felt any handicap; he was amazed at this, and thought of how more than a month ago he had cut his finger very slightly with a knife, and how that wound had still hurt him quite a bit only the day before yesterday. “Am I less sensitive now?” he thought, and was already sucking greedily at the cheese, which had attracted him at once and insistently, before any of the other foods. In quick succession, and with his eyes watering with satisfaction, he devoured the cheese, the vegetables, and the sauce; the fresh foods, on the other hand, did not taste good to him; he could not even stand their smell, and he dragged the things he wanted to eat a little distance away. He had long since finished everything and was just lying lazily on the same spot when his sister slowly turned the key as a sign that he should withdraw. That startled him at once, even though he was almost dozing, and he hurried back under the couch. But it cost him great self-control to stay under the couch even for the short time his sister was in the room, for his body had swelled a little from the plentiful meal, and in that cramped space he could hardly breathe. Amid little fits of suffocation he watched with somewhat bulging eyes as his sister, unsuspecting, swept up with a broom not only the leftovers but even the foods Gregor had not touched at all, as if these too could no longer be used, and how she hastily dumped everything into a bucket, which she closed with a wooden lid, and then carried it all out. Hardly had she turned around when Gregor dragged himself out from under the couch and stretched and puffed himself out.

This was how Gregor was now given his food every day, once in the morning, while his parents and the maid were still asleep, and the second time after the family’s midday dinner, for then his parents likewise slept for a little while, and the maid was sent out by his sister on some errand or other. Of course they did not want Gregor to starve either, but perhaps they could not have borne to know more about his eating than what they heard secondhand; perhaps, too, his sister wanted to spare them what might be only a small sorrow, for they really were suffering quite enough.

With what excuses the doctor and the locksmith had been got out of the apartment that first morning, Gregor could never find out, for since he could not be understood, it occurred to no one, not even his sister, that he could understand the others, and so, when his sister was in his room, he had to content himself with hearing only her sighs, now and then, and her appeals to the saints. Only later, when she had grown a little used to everything (there could never, of course, be any question of growing completely used to it), did Gregor sometimes catch a remark that was meant kindly or could be taken that way. “He liked it today,” she would say when Gregor had made a good clearance of the food, whereas in the opposite case, which gradually became more and more frequent, she used to say almost sadly, “Everything’s been left again.”

But while Gregor could not learn any news directly, he overheard a good deal from the neighboring rooms, and as soon as he heard voices anywhere, he would run at once to the door in question and press his whole body against it. Especially in the early days, there was no conversation that was not somehow about him, if only secretly. For two days, at every meal, there were discussions about how they ought to behave now; but between meals, too, they talked about the same subject, for at least two members of the family were always at home, since probably no one wanted to stay home alone, and in no case could they leave the apartment entirely empty. Also, on the very first day, the maid (it was not quite clear what or how much she knew of what had happened) had begged his mother on her knees to dismiss her at once, and when she said good-bye a quarter of an hour later, she thanked them in tears for her dismissal, as if for the greatest kindness that had ever been done her in this house, and swore a terrible oath, without anyone asking her to, that she would not betray the slightest thing to anyone.

Now his sister had to do the cooking too, together with his mother; admittedly 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 getting no other answer than “Thank you, I’ve had enough,” or something similar. Perhaps they did not drink anything either. His sister often asked his father whether he would like some beer, and warmly offered to fetch it herself, and when his father was silent, she said, to remove any qualms he might have, that she could also send the caretaker for it, but then his father finally said a loud “No,” and nothing more was said about it.

In the course of that very first day, his father laid out the family’s entire financial situation and prospects to both his mother and his sister. Now and then he got up from the table and took some receipt or notebook out of his little Wertheim strongbox, which he had saved from the collapse of his business five years before. You could hear him unlock the complicated lock and, after taking out what he was looking for, lock it again. These explanations of his father’s were, in part, the first good news Gregor had heard since his captivity began. He had been of the opinion that his father had nothing whatever left over from that business; at least his father had never told him anything to the contrary, though Gregor, admittedly, had never asked him about it either. Gregor’s only concern at the time had been to do everything he could to make 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 a quite special ardor and had risen almost overnight from minor clerk to traveling salesman, a man who naturally had quite different opportunities for earning money, and whose successes at work were immediately turned, 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 come again, at least not with that luster, even though Gregor later earned so much money that he was able to bear the expenses of the whole family, and did bear them. They had simply got used to it, both the family and Gregor; they accepted the money gratefully, he handed it over gladly, but no special warmth would come of it anymore. Only his sister had remained close to Gregor, and it was his secret plan that she, who unlike Gregor loved music very much and could play the violin movingly, should be sent to the conservatory next year, regardless of the great expense this was bound to involve, which would be made up in some other way. Often during Gregor’s short stays in town the conservatory was mentioned in his conversations with his sister, but always only as a beautiful dream whose realization was not to be thought of, and his parents did not like to hear even these innocent mentions; but Gregor was thinking of it very definitely and intended to announce it solemnly on Christmas Eve.

Such thoughts, completely useless in his present condition, went through his head while he clung upright to the door, listening. Sometimes out of general weariness he could not listen anymore and let his head bump carelessly against the door, but immediately held it still again, for even the slight noise he had made by this had been heard in the next room and had silenced them all. “What’s he up to now,” his father would say after a while, obviously turned toward the door, and only then was the interrupted conversation gradually taken up again.

Gregor now learned well enough (for his father tended to repeat himself often in his explanations, partly because he himself had not dealt with these matters for a long time, partly also because his mother did not understand everything the first time) that in spite of all their misfortune a fortune, a very small one, it is true, was still left from the old days, which the untouched interest had meanwhile allowed to grow a little. Besides that, the money Gregor had brought home every month (he had kept only a few gulden for himself) had not been entirely used up and had accumulated into a small capital. Gregor, behind his door, nodded eagerly, delighted at this unexpected foresight and thrift. Actually, with this surplus money he could have paid off more of his father’s debt to the boss, and the day on which he could have been rid of this job would have been much closer, but now it was undoubtedly better the way his father had arranged it.

Now, this money was not nearly enough to let the family live on the interest, say; it might be enough to keep the family for one year, or two at most, no more. So it was merely a sum that really should not be touched and had to be put aside for an emergency; the money to live on had to be earned. But his father, though healthy, was an old man who had not worked for five years and in any case could not expect too much of himself; in these five years, which were the first holiday of his laborious and yet unsuccessful life, he had put on a lot of fat and had become quite sluggish as a result. And was his old mother now supposed to earn money, she who suffered from asthma, for whom even a walk through the apartment was a strain, and who spent every other day on the sofa by the open window, struggling for breath? And was his sister to earn money, she who was still a child at seventeen, and who so deserved to keep the life she had led until now, which had consisted of dressing nicely, sleeping late, helping in the household, taking part in a few modest amusements, and above all playing the violin? Whenever the conversation turned to this necessity of earning money, Gregor would always be the first to let go of the door and throw himself onto the cool leather sofa beside it, for he was burning hot with shame and grief.

Often he lay there through the long nights, not sleeping a wink, only scratching at the leather for hours on end. Or he did not shrink from the great effort of pushing a chair over to the window, then crawling up the windowsill and, propped against the chair, leaning on the window, 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 things even a short distance away less and less clearly; the hospital across the street, the all too frequent sight of which he used to curse, he could no longer see at all, and if he had not known for certain that he lived on Charlottenstrasse, a quiet but thoroughly urban street, he might have believed that he was looking out of his window into a wasteland where the gray sky and the gray earth merged indistinguishably. Only twice did his attentive sister have to see that the chair was standing by the window before, every time she had finished tidying the room, she pushed the chair back exactly to the window, and from then on she even left 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 services more easily; as it was, he suffered from them. His sister, of course, tried to blur the awkwardness of it all as much as possible, and the more time went by, the better she naturally succeeded, but Gregor, too, saw through everything much more clearly as time went on. Even her coming in was terrible for him. Hardly had she come in when, without taking the time to close the door, however careful she otherwise was to spare everyone the sight of Gregor’s room, she ran straight to the window and tore it open with hasty hands, as if she were almost suffocating, and stayed at the window for a little while, no matter how cold it was, breathing deeply. With this running and noise she frightened Gregor twice a day; the whole time he trembled under the couch, and yet he knew very well that she would certainly have gladly spared him this if only she had been able to stay in a room where Gregor was with the window closed.

Once, when a month or so had probably passed since Gregor’s transformation and there was really no longer any particular reason for his sister to be astonished at Gregor’s appearance, she came a little earlier than usual and found Gregor still looking out of the window, motionless and placed so as to give anyone a real fright. It would not have surprised Gregor if she had not come in, since his position prevented her from opening the window right away, but not only did she not come in, she even shrank back and shut the door; a stranger might have thought that Gregor had been lying in wait for her and had meant to bite her. Gregor of course hid under the couch at once, but he had to wait until noon before his sister came back, and she seemed much more uneasy than usual. He realized from this that the sight of him was still unbearable to her and would have to go on being unbearable to her, and that she must have had to make a great effort not to run away at the sight of even the small part of his body that stuck out from under the couch. To spare her even this sight, one day he carried the bedsheet on his back onto the couch (the job took him four hours) and arranged it in such a way that he was now completely covered, and that his sister, even if she bent down, could not see him. If in her opinion this sheet had not been necessary, she could of course have removed it, for it was clear enough that it could not be Gregor’s idea of pleasure to shut himself off so completely, but she left the sheet the way it was, and Gregor even thought he had caught a grateful look when he once carefully lifted the sheet a little with his head to see how his sister was taking the new arrangement.

During the first two weeks 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 then they had often been annoyed with his sister because she had seemed to them a rather useless girl. But now both of them, his father and his mother, often waited outside Gregor’s room while his sister was tidying it, and as soon as she came out she had to tell them in exact detail what the room looked like, what Gregor had eaten, how he had behaved this time, and whether perhaps some slight improvement could be noticed. His mother, for that matter, wanted to visit Gregor relatively soon, but his father and his sister at first held her back with sensible arguments, which Gregor listened to very attentively and fully approved of. Later, though, she had to be held back by force, and when she cried, “Let me go to Gregor, he’s my unhappy son! Don’t you understand that I have to go to him?” 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 so much better than his sister, who, for all her courage, was still only a child and had perhaps, in the end, taken on such a difficult task only out of childish thoughtlessness.

Gregor’s wish to see his mother was soon fulfilled. During the day, if only out of consideration for his parents, Gregor did not want to show himself at the window, but he could not crawl very much either on the few square yards of floor; he found it hard to bear lying still even during the night; eating soon no longer gave him the slightest pleasure; and so, for distraction, he took up the habit of crawling crisscross over the walls and ceiling. He especially liked hanging up there on the ceiling; it was quite different from lying on the floor; you breathed more freely; a gentle swaying went through your body; and in the almost happy absentmindedness Gregor fell into up there, it could happen that, to his own surprise, he let go and smacked down onto the floor. But now, of course, he had his body under quite different control than before and did not hurt himself even in so great a fall. His sister noticed at once the new amusement Gregor had found for himself (after all, he left traces of his sticky substance here and there as he crawled), and so she got it into her head to let Gregor crawl as widely as possible and to remove the furniture that prevented it, above all the wardrobe and the desk. But she was not able to do this by herself; she did not dare ask her father for help; the maid would certainly not have helped her, for this girl of about sixteen had indeed bravely held out since the former cook was dismissed, but had asked for the privilege of keeping the kitchen locked at all times and having to open it only when specially called; so his sister had no choice but to fetch her mother once when her father was out. And his mother did come, with exclamations of excited joy, but fell silent at the door of Gregor’s room. First, of course, his sister looked to see whether everything in the room was in order; only then did she let her mother come in. In the greatest haste Gregor had pulled the sheet lower still and into more folds; the whole thing really looked like nothing but a sheet thrown over the couch by chance. This time, too, Gregor refrained from spying out from under the sheet; he gave up seeing his mother this time and was simply glad that she had come after all. “Come on, you can’t see him,” said his sister, and she was evidently leading her mother by the hand. Gregor now heard the two frail women shifting the old wardrobe, which was heavy, after all, from its place, and heard his sister constantly claiming the greater part of the work for herself, without listening to the warnings of her mother, who was afraid she would overexert herself. It took a very long time. After about a quarter of an hour’s work his mother said that they had better leave the wardrobe where it was, for in the first place it was too heavy, they would not be finished before his father came home, and with the wardrobe in the middle of the room they would block Gregor’s every path, but in the second place it was not at all certain that removing the furniture would be doing Gregor a favor. To her it seemed the opposite was the case; the sight of the bare wall positively weighed on her heart; and why shouldn’t Gregor have this feeling too, since he had long been used to the furniture in the room and would therefore feel abandoned in an empty one. “And isn’t it then,” his mother concluded very softly (in fact she was almost whispering the whole time, as if she wanted to keep Gregor, whose exact whereabouts she did not know, from hearing even the sound of her voice, for she was convinced that he did not understand the words), “and isn’t it as if, by removing the furniture, we were showing that we’re giving up all hope of improvement and leaving him to himself without any consideration? I think it would be best to try to keep the room exactly the way it was before, so that when Gregor comes back to us he’ll find everything unchanged and can forget the time in between all the more easily.”

On hearing these words of his mother’s, Gregor realized that the lack of any direct human conversation, combined with the monotonous life in the midst of the family, must have confused his mind in the course of these two months, for he could not explain otherwise how he could seriously have wanted his room to be emptied. Did he really want to have the warm room, comfortably furnished with inherited pieces, turned into a cave in which he would then, of course, be able to crawl around undisturbed in every direction, but at the price of forgetting, quickly and completely and at the same time, his human past? He was already close to forgetting now, and only his mother’s voice, which he had not heard for so long, had shaken him awake. Nothing was to be removed; everything had to stay; he could not do without the good effects of the furniture on his condition; and if the furniture kept him from carrying on this senseless crawling around, that was no loss but a great advantage.

But his sister, unfortunately, was of a different opinion; she had grown used, not entirely without justification, to be sure, to acting as the special expert whenever Gregor’s affairs were discussed with her parents, and so now too her mother’s advice was reason enough for his sister to insist on the removal not only of the wardrobe and the desk, which was all she had thought of at first, but of all the furniture except the indispensable couch. Of course it was not only childish defiance and the self-confidence she had so unexpectedly and so painfully acquired of late that led her to this demand; she had in fact also observed that Gregor needed a lot of room to crawl, whereas, as far as anyone could see, he did not use the furniture in the least. But perhaps the romantic enthusiasm of girls her age also played a part, an enthusiasm that seeks satisfaction at every opportunity and by which Grete now let herself be tempted into wanting to make Gregor’s situation even more frightening, so that she could then do even more for him than before. For into a room where Gregor ruled the bare walls all alone, no one but Grete would ever dare to set foot.

And so she would not let her mother talk her out of her decision; her mother, too, seemed unsure of herself in this room out of sheer uneasiness, soon fell silent, and helped his sister as best she could to get the wardrobe out. Well, in an emergency Gregor could do without the wardrobe, but the desk at least had to stay. And hardly had the women left the room with the wardrobe, pressing against it and groaning, when Gregor thrust his head out from under the couch to see how he could intervene, carefully and as considerately as possible. But as bad luck would have it, it was his mother who came back first, while Grete in the next room had her arms around the wardrobe and was rocking it back and forth by herself, without, of course, budging it from the spot. His mother, however, was not used to the sight of Gregor; it might have made her ill; and so Gregor, alarmed, hurried backward to the far end of the couch, but could no longer prevent the sheet in front from moving a little. That was enough to catch his mother’s attention. She stopped short, stood still for a moment, and then went back to Grete.

Although Gregor kept telling himself that nothing out of the ordinary was happening, that only a few pieces of furniture were being moved around, this coming and going of the women, their little calls to each other, the scraping of the furniture on the floor soon affected him, as he had to admit to himself, 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 had to tell himself, inescapably, that he would not be able to stand it all for long. They were clearing out his room; taking from him everything he loved; the wardrobe in which his fretsaw and other tools were kept they had already carried out; now they were loosening the desk, which had sunk firmly into the floor, the desk at which he had done his homework as a student at the commercial academy, as a pupil at middle school, and even back in grade school—and now he really had no more time to weigh the good intentions of the two women, whose existence, incidentally, he had almost forgotten, for they were so exhausted that they were already working in silence, and all you could hear was the heavy shuffle of their feet.

And so he broke out (the women were just leaning on the desk in the next room to catch their breath a little), changed the direction of his run four times, he really did not know what to rescue first, and then he saw, conspicuous on the wall, which was otherwise already bare, the picture of the lady dressed in nothing but furs, crawled hurriedly up to it, and pressed himself against the glass, which held him fast and felt good against his hot belly. This picture at least, which Gregor now covered completely, no one would take away now, surely. He twisted his head toward the living-room door to watch the women when they came back.

They had not allowed themselves much rest and were already coming back; Grete had put her arm around her mother and was almost carrying her. “So, what do we take now?” said Grete, and looked around. Then her eyes met Gregor’s on the wall. Probably only because her mother was there did she keep her composure; she bent her face toward her mother to keep her from looking around, and said, trembling, though, and without thinking: “Come on, 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 off the wall. Well, she could always try! He was sitting on his picture and would not give it up. He would rather leap at Grete’s face.

But Grete’s words had only made her mother all the more uneasy; she stepped aside, caught sight of the enormous brown blotch on the flowered wallpaper, and before it really dawned on her that what she was seeing was Gregor, she cried in a screaming, raw voice, “Oh God, oh God!” and fell across the couch with her arms outspread, as if she were giving up everything, and did not move. “You, Gregor!” cried his sister, with a raised fist and a piercing look. These were the first words she had addressed directly to him since the transformation. She ran into the next room to fetch some kind of smelling salts with which she could rouse 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 loose by force; then he too ran into the next room, as if he could give his sister some advice, as in the old days; but then he had to stand behind her doing nothing; while she was rummaging among various little bottles, he gave her another fright when she turned around; a bottle fell to the floor and broke; a splinter cut Gregor in the face; some corrosive medicine flowed around him; Grete, without lingering any longer, now took as many little bottles as she could hold and ran in with them to her mother; she kicked the door shut with her foot. Gregor was now cut off from his mother, who, through his fault, was perhaps near death; he must not open the door if he did not want to drive away his sister, who had to stay with his mother; there was nothing for him 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 was beginning to spin around him, fell down onto the middle of the big table.

A short while passed; Gregor lay there limply; all around it was quiet; perhaps that was a good sign. Then the doorbell rang. The girl, of course, was locked in her kitchen, and so Grete had to go and open the door. His father had come home. “What’s happened?” were his first words; Grete’s appearance must have told him everything. Grete answered in a muffled voice; evidently she was pressing her face against her father’s chest: “Mother fainted, but she’s better now. Gregor broke out.” “I knew it,” said his father, “I always told you so, but you women never want to listen.” It was clear to Gregor that his father had misinterpreted Grete’s all too brief report and assumed that Gregor had been guilty of some act of violence. Therefore Gregor now had to try to calm his father down, for he had neither the time nor the means to explain things to him. And so he fled to the door of his room and pressed himself against it, so that his father, as he came in from the front 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, that they had only to open the door and he would disappear at once.

But his father was in no mood to notice such subtleties. “Ah!” he cried as soon as he came in, in a tone as if he were furious and glad at the same time. Gregor drew his head back from the door and raised it toward his father. He really had not imagined his father the way he was standing there now; admittedly, he had lately been so absorbed in his new sport of crawling around that he had neglected to concern himself as before with what went on in the rest of the apartment, and he really should have been prepared to find things changed. Even so, even so, was this still his father? The same man who used to lie wearily buried in bed when Gregor set out on a business trip; who, on the evenings when Gregor came home, had received him in his dressing gown in the armchair; who was not really capable of getting up but had only raised his arms as a sign of joy; and who, on the rare walks they took together on a few Sundays a year and on the most important holidays, between Gregor and his mother, who were slow walkers themselves, would toil along still a little more slowly, bundled up in his old overcoat, always carefully planting his crook-handled cane, and who, whenever he wanted to say something, almost always stood still and gathered his companions around him? But now he was holding himself very erect, dressed in a tight-fitting blue uniform with gold buttons, the kind worn by attendants at banking houses; his strong double chin spread out over the high, stiff collar of the jacket; from under his bushy eyebrows his black eyes looked out alert and attentive; his white hair, usually disheveled, was combed down flat into a painfully exact, gleaming part. He threw his cap, which bore a gold monogram, probably that of a bank, in an arc right across the room onto the couch, and with the tails of his long uniform jacket thrown back, his hands in his trouser pockets, he walked toward Gregor with a grim face. He probably did not know himself what he meant to do; in any case he lifted his feet unusually high, and Gregor was amazed at the gigantic size of the soles of his boots. But he did not dwell on this; he had known ever since the first day of his new life that his father considered only the greatest severity appropriate in dealing with him. And so he ran ahead of his father, stopped when his father stood still, and hurried forward again as soon as his father so much as moved. In this way they went around the room several times without anything decisive happening; indeed, because of its slow pace the whole thing did not even look like a pursuit. That was why Gregor stayed on the floor for the time being, especially since he was afraid his father might regard a flight onto the walls or the ceiling as particular malice. Still, Gregor had to admit to himself that he would not be able to keep up even this running for long, for while his father took one step, he had to carry out countless movements. He was already beginning to be short of breath, just as even in his earlier days he had not had entirely reliable lungs. As he staggered along like this, scarcely keeping his eyes open, so as to gather all his strength for running; in his dullness not even thinking of any other way of escape than running; and having almost forgotten that the walls were free to him, though here they were obstructed by carefully carved furniture full of sharp points and prongs—something, lightly flung, flew down right beside him and rolled along in front of him. It was an apple; a second one followed immediately; Gregor stopped short in terror; running any farther was useless, for his father had resolved to bombard him. He had filled his pockets from the fruit bowl on the sideboard and was now throwing apple after apple, not aiming very carefully for now. These little red apples rolled around on the floor as if electrified and knocked into one another. A weakly thrown apple grazed Gregor’s back but slid off harmlessly. One that came flying right after it, however, actually lodged itself in Gregor’s back; Gregor wanted to drag himself onward, as if the startling, unbelievable pain might pass if he changed his place; but he felt as if he were nailed to the spot and sprawled out, all his senses in utter confusion. Only with his last glance did he still see the door of his room being flung open, and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her chemise, for his sister had undressed her to let her breathe more freely in her faint; saw his mother then running toward his father, and her loosened petticoats sliding to the floor one after another on the way, and how, stumbling over the petticoats, she threw herself upon his father and, embracing him, in complete union with him—but now Gregor’s sight was already failing—with her hands clasped around the back of his father’s head, begged him to spare Gregor’s life.