One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke up from restless dreams, he found that he had turned into an enormous insect in his bed. He was lying on his back, and it was hard as armour. When he lifted his head a little, he could see his brown, domed belly, divided into stiff arched sections. The blanket could barely stay on top of it and was about to slide off completely. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the rest of him, flickered helplessly in front of his eyes.

"What has happened to me?" he thought. It was not a dream. His room, an ordinary human room, only a little too small, lay quietly between its four familiar walls. Above the table, where a collection of cloth samples lay unpacked and spread out — Samsa was a travelling salesman — hung the picture he had cut out of a magazine a short while ago and put in a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady sitting upright, wearing a fur hat and a fur boa, holding out to the viewer a heavy fur muff that swallowed her whole forearm.

Then Gregor looked towards the window, and the dull weather — he could hear raindrops hitting the metal windowsill — made him feel quite miserable. "What if I slept a little longer and forgot all this nonsense," he thought. But that was completely impossible, because he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he could not get himself into that position. However hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rocked back onto his back again. He must have tried it a hundred times. He shut his eyes so that he would not have to watch his squirming legs, and he only stopped when he began to feel a slight, dull ache in his side that he had never felt before.

"Oh God," he thought, "what an exhausting job I have chosen! Day in, day out, on the road. The stress of the business is far worse than it is back at the office itself, and on top of that I have to put up with the misery of travelling: worrying about train connections, the bad and irregular meals, and meeting people who are always changing, never lasting, never becoming friends. The devil take it all!" He felt a slight itch high up on his belly; slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bedpost so that he could lift his head better; found the itchy place, which was covered with small white spots that he could not make sense of; and went to touch the spot with one leg, but pulled it straight back, because the moment he touched it he was flooded with cold shivers.

He slid back into his earlier position. "Getting up this early," he thought, "makes a person completely stupid. A man has to have his sleep. Other travelling salesmen live like women in a harem. When I go back to the inn during the morning, for example, to write up the orders I have taken, these gentlemen are only just sitting down to breakfast. I should try that with my boss; I would be thrown out on the spot. Though who knows, perhaps that would be very good for me. If I were not holding back for my parents' sake, I would have quit long ago. I would have walked up to the boss and told him exactly what I think, straight from the heart. He would have fallen right off his desk! It is a strange way to behave, too, sitting up on the desk and talking down from that height to an employee, who has to come very close anyway because the boss is hard of hearing. Well, I have not given up hope completely. Once I have saved enough money to pay off my parents' debt to him — it should take another five or six years — I will certainly do it. Then I will make the big break. For now, though, I have to get up, because my train leaves at five."

And he looked over at the alarm clock ticking on the chest of drawers. "Heavenly Father!" he thought. It was half past six, and the hands were moving quietly forward; it was even past the half hour, it was getting on towards a quarter to seven. Had the alarm not gone off? You could see from the bed that it was set correctly for four o'clock; it must have gone off. Yes, but was it possible to sleep peacefully through that furniture-shaking ring? Well, he had not slept peacefully, but probably all the more deeply. But what should he do now? The next train went at seven; to catch it he would have to rush like mad, and the sample case was not packed yet, and he himself did not feel at all fresh or ready to move. And even if he caught the train, there was no avoiding an outburst from the boss, because the office porter had waited for the five o'clock train and had long since reported that he had missed it. The porter was a creature of the boss's, with no backbone and no sense. What if he called in sick? But that would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious, because in five years of service Gregor had not been ill even once. The boss would certainly come with the doctor from the health insurance company, would blame his parents for their lazy son, and would cut off every objection by pointing to that doctor, for whom there are only completely healthy people who are afraid of work. And would he be so very wrong in this case, anyway? Apart from a drowsiness that really was unnecessary after such a long sleep, Gregor actually felt quite well, and was even especially hungry.

As he turned all this over in the greatest hurry, without being able to make up his mind to leave the bed — the alarm clock was just striking a quarter to seven — there was a careful knock at the door by the head of his bed. "Gregor," a voice called — it was his mother — "it is a quarter to seven. Didn't you want to catch your train?" That gentle voice! Gregor was frightened when he heard his own voice answering. It was unmistakably his old voice, but mixed into it, as if from underneath, was a painful squeaking he could not hold back, which left the words clear only for the first moment and then wrecked them in the echo, so that you could not tell whether you had heard them properly. Gregor had meant to answer in detail and explain everything, but in the circumstances he limited himself to saying: "Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I am getting up now." Because of the wooden door, the change in Gregor's voice was probably not noticeable outside, because his mother was satisfied with this explanation and shuffled away. But this short exchange had made the rest of the family aware that Gregor was unexpectedly still at home, and already his father was knocking at one of the side doors, weakly, but with his fist. "Gregor, Gregor," he called, "what is going on?" And after a little while he urged him again in a deeper voice: "Gregor! Gregor!" At the other side door his sister was fretting quietly: "Gregor? Are you unwell? Do you need anything?" Gregor answered towards both sides at once: "I am ready now," and tried to take everything strange out of his voice by pronouncing the words with the greatest care and leaving long pauses between them. His father did go back to his breakfast, but his sister whispered: "Gregor, open the door, I beg you." But Gregor had no intention of opening it. Instead he was grateful for the habit he had picked up from travelling, of locking every door at night even at home.

First he wanted to get up quietly and undisturbed, get dressed and above all have breakfast, and only then think about what to do next; because he could see clearly that in bed his thinking would come to no sensible end. He remembered that he had often felt some slight pain in bed before, perhaps from lying awkwardly, which turned out to be pure imagination once he got up, and he was curious to see how today's fancies would gradually fade. That the change in his voice was nothing more than the first sign of a bad cold, an occupational illness of travelling salesmen, he did not doubt in the slightest.

Throwing off the blanket was quite simple; he only had to puff himself up a little and it fell off by itself. But after that it became difficult, especially because he was so unusually wide. He would have needed arms and hands to push himself up; instead he had only the many little legs, which were constantly moving in every possible direction and which he could not control. If he wanted to bend one of them, it was the first to stretch out; and if he finally managed to do what he wanted with that leg, all the others meanwhile worked away as if set free, in the highest and most painful agitation. "There is no point in lying about in bed," Gregor said to himself.

First he wanted to get out of bed with the lower part of his body, but this lower part, which he had not yet seen and could not really picture, turned out to be too hard to move; it went so slowly; and when at last, almost wild with impatience, he gathered all his strength and shoved himself forward without caring, he had chosen the wrong direction and struck the lower bedpost hard, and the burning pain he felt taught him that just now the lower part of his body was perhaps the most sensitive part of all.

So he tried to get the upper part of his body out of the bed first, and carefully turned his head towards the edge. That worked easily enough, and in spite of its width and weight the mass of his body slowly followed the turn of his head. But when at last he held his head outside the bed in the open air, he became afraid to go on moving this way, because if he finally let himself drop like that, it would take an outright miracle for his head not to be injured. And now of all times he could not afford to lose his senses; he would rather stay in bed.

But when, after the same effort, he lay there sighing just as before, and again watched his little legs struggling against each other, if anything even worse than before, and could find no way to bring peace and order into this chaos, he told himself once more that he could not possibly stay in bed, and that the most sensible thing was to sacrifice everything if there was even the smallest hope of freeing himself from it. At the same time, though, he did not forget to remind himself now and then that calm, the calmest reflection, was far better than desperate decisions. At such moments he fixed his eyes as sharply as he could on the window, but unfortunately there was little confidence or cheer to be drawn from the sight of the morning fog, which hid even the other side of the narrow street. "Seven o'clock already," he said to himself as the alarm clock struck again, "seven o'clock already and still such a fog." And for a little while he lay quietly, breathing weakly, as though he half expected the complete stillness to bring back real and ordinary conditions.

But then he said to himself: "Before it strikes a quarter past seven, I absolutely must be completely out of bed. Besides, by then someone from the firm will have come to ask after me, because the office opens before seven." And he now set about rocking his whole body out of the bed evenly, along its full length. If he let himself fall out of bed this way, his head — which he meant to jerk up sharply during the fall — would probably stay unhurt. His back seemed to be hard; nothing would happen to it in a fall onto the carpet. What worried him most was the loud crash there was bound to be, which would probably cause, if not fright, then at least alarm behind all the doors. But it had to be risked.

When Gregor was already sticking half out of the bed — the new method was more a game than an effort, he only had to rock himself in jerks — it occurred to him how simple everything would be if someone came to help him. Two strong people — he thought of his father and the maid — would have been quite enough; they would only have had to push their arms under his domed back, lever him out of the bed, bend down with the load, and then just wait patiently while he swung himself over onto the floor, where his little legs would hopefully find some purpose. Well, quite apart from the fact that the doors were locked, should he really have called for help? In spite of all his trouble, he could not hold back a smile at the thought.

He had already got so far that with a stronger rock he could barely keep his balance, and very soon he would have to make up his mind for good, because in five minutes it would be a quarter past seven — when the doorbell rang. "That is someone from the firm," he said to himself, and almost froze, while his little legs only danced the faster. For a moment everything stayed quiet. "They are not opening," Gregor said to himself, caught up in some senseless hope. But then, of course, the maid went to the door with her firm step, as always, and opened it. Gregor only had to hear the visitor's first word of greeting to know who it was — the chief clerk himself. Why was Gregor alone condemned to work for a firm where the smallest lapse at once aroused the greatest suspicion? Were all the employees, every single one of them, scoundrels? Was there not one loyal, devoted man among them who, if he had failed to use even a couple of morning hours for the business, went half mad with a guilty conscience and was simply unable to get out of bed? Was it really not enough to send an apprentice to ask — if this asking was necessary at all? Did the chief clerk have to come himself, and did the whole innocent family have to be shown that the investigation of this suspicious business could be trusted only to the chief clerk's intelligence? And more because of the agitation these thoughts stirred up in Gregor than because of any real decision, he swung himself out of bed with all his might. There was a loud thud, but not really a crash. The fall was softened a little by the carpet, and his back was more springy than Gregor had thought, so the dull sound was not so noticeable after all. Only he had not held his head carefully enough and had banged it; he turned it and rubbed it against the carpet in annoyance and pain.

"Something fell in there," said the chief clerk in the room on the left. Gregor tried to imagine whether something like what had happened to him today might not one day happen to the chief clerk too; you really did have to admit it was possible. But as if in a rough answer to this question, the chief clerk now took a few firm steps in the next room and made his patent-leather boots creak. From the room on the right his sister whispered, to warn Gregor: "Gregor, the chief clerk is here." "I know," Gregor said to himself; but he did not dare raise his voice loud enough for his sister to hear.

"Gregor," his father now said from the room on the left, "the chief clerk has come and wants to know why you did not leave on the early train. We do not know what to tell him. Besides, he wants to speak to you personally. So please open the door. He will be good enough to excuse the mess in your room." "Good morning, Mr Samsa," the chief clerk called in pleasantly. "He is not well," his mother said to the chief clerk while his father was still talking at the door, "he is not well, believe me, sir. Why else would Gregor miss a train! The boy has nothing in his head but the business. It almost annoys me that he never goes out in the evening; he has been in town for eight days now, and he was at home every single evening. He sits with us at the table and quietly reads the paper or studies timetables. It is already a treat for him when he can busy himself with his fretsaw. Over two or three evenings, for instance, he carved a little frame; you will be amazed how pretty it is; it is hanging in his room; you will see it the moment Gregor opens up. I am glad you are here, sir; on our own we would never have got Gregor to open the door; he is so stubborn; and he is certainly not well, even though he denied it this morning." "I am coming in a moment," Gregor said slowly and carefully, and did not move, so as not to miss a word of the conversation. "I cannot explain it any other way either, madam," said the chief clerk, "I hope it is nothing serious. Though I must also say that we businessmen — luckily or unluckily, whichever you prefer — very often simply have to shake off a slight indisposition for the sake of business." "So can the chief clerk come in to you now?" asked his impatient father, and knocked at the door again. "No," said Gregor. In the room on the left an awkward silence fell; in the room on the right his sister began to sob.

Why did his sister not go and join the others? She had probably only just got out of bed and had not even begun to dress. And why was she crying? Because he was not getting up and not letting the chief clerk in, because he was in danger of losing his job, and because the boss would then start hounding his parents again over the old debts? Surely those were unnecessary worries for the moment. Gregor was still here and had not the slightest intention of leaving his family. Just now he was lying there on the carpet, and nobody who knew his condition would have seriously demanded that he let the chief clerk in. But Gregor could hardly be dismissed on the spot for this small rudeness, for which a suitable excuse could easily be found later. And it seemed to Gregor that it would be far more sensible to leave him in peace now, instead of disturbing him with tears and coaxing. But it was precisely the uncertainty that was distressing the others and excusing the way they behaved.

"Mr Samsa," the chief clerk now called, raising his voice, "what is the matter? You barricade yourself in your room, answer only with yes and no, cause your parents serious and unnecessary worry, and neglect — I mention this only in passing — your business duties in a really quite outrageous way. I am speaking here in the name of your parents and of your boss, and I ask you in all seriousness for an immediate, clear explanation. I am astonished, quite astonished. I thought I knew you as a quiet, sensible man, and now you suddenly seem to want to start parading strange moods. The boss did hint to me this morning at a possible explanation for your absence — it concerned the cash collection recently entrusted to you — but I practically gave my word of honour that this explanation could not be the right one. Now, however, I see your incomprehensible stubbornness here, and I lose every last bit of desire to speak up for you in even the smallest way. And your position is by no means the most secure. I originally intended to say all this to you privately, but since you are letting me waste my time here for nothing, I do not see why your parents should not hear it too. Your performance lately has been very unsatisfactory; it is not the season for doing exceptional business, we grant you that; but a season for doing no business at all does not exist, Mr Samsa, and must not exist."

"But sir," Gregor cried, beside himself and forgetting everything else in his agitation, "I am opening up at once, this very moment. A slight indisposition, a dizzy spell, kept me from getting up. I am still lying in bed even now. But I am quite fresh again already. I am just getting out of bed. Only a little moment's patience! It is not going as well as I thought. But I am feeling all right already. How a thing like this can just come over a person! Only last night I was perfectly well, my parents know that, or rather, last night I already had a small warning. Someone must have been able to see it in me. Why did I not report it to the office! But you always think you will get over an illness without staying at home. Sir! Spare my parents! There is no ground for any of the accusations you are making against me now; nobody has said a word to me about them. Perhaps you have not read the last orders I sent in. In any case, I shall still be off on the eight o'clock train; these few hours of rest have given me strength. Do not let me hold you up, sir; I shall be at the office myself right away, and please be so good as to say so and to give my regards to the boss!"

And while Gregor was blurting all this out in a rush, hardly knowing what he was saying, he had easily moved close to the chest of drawers — probably because of the practice he had already had in bed — and was now trying to pull himself upright against it. He really did want to open the door, really did want to show himself and speak to the chief clerk; he was eager to find out what the others, who were now so keen to see him, would say at the sight of him. If they were horrified, then Gregor had no more responsibility and could be at peace. But if they took it all calmly, then he too had no reason to get worked up, and, if he hurried, he could actually be at the station by eight. At first he slid off the smooth chest several times, but at last he gave himself one final swing and stood upright; he no longer paid any attention to the pains in his belly, however much they burned. Now he let himself fall against the back of a nearby chair, and clung to its edges with his little legs. With that he had also regained control of himself, and he fell silent, because now he could listen to the chief clerk.

"Did you understand a single word of that?" the chief clerk asked the parents. "He is not making fools of us, surely?" "For God's sake," cried his mother, already in tears, "perhaps he is seriously ill, and we are tormenting him. Grete! Grete!" she then screamed. "Mother?" his sister called from the other side. They were talking to each other through Gregor's room. "You must go to the doctor at once. Gregor is ill. Quick, fetch the doctor. Did you hear Gregor speaking just now?" "That was an animal's voice," said the chief clerk, strikingly quiet beside his mother's shouting. "Anna! Anna!" his father called through the hall into the kitchen, clapping his hands, "fetch a locksmith at once!" And already the two girls were running through the hall with rustling skirts — how had his sister dressed so quickly? — and pulled open the front door. There was no sound of the door slamming; they had probably left it open, as people do in flats where some great misfortune has happened.

But Gregor had grown much calmer. So his words were no longer understood, even though they had seemed clear enough to him, clearer than before, perhaps because his ear had got used to them. But at least people now believed that something was not quite right with him, and were ready to help him. The confidence and firmness with which the first arrangements had been made did him good. He felt drawn back into the human circle, and he hoped for great and surprising things from both of them, from the doctor and the locksmith, without really telling the two apart. To get his voice as clear as possible for the decisive talks that were coming, he coughed a little, though he took care to do it very quietly, since possibly even this noise no longer sounded like a human cough, and he no longer trusted himself to judge that. In the next room it had meanwhile gone completely quiet. Perhaps his parents were sitting at the table with the chief clerk and whispering; perhaps they were all leaning against the door and listening.

Gregor pushed himself slowly towards the door with the chair, let go of it there, threw himself against the door and held himself upright against it — the pads of his little legs had a little stickiness to them — and rested there for a moment from the effort. Then he set about turning the key in the lock with his mouth. Unfortunately it seemed that he had no proper teeth — so what was he to grip the key with? — but his jaws were certainly very strong, and with their help he really did get the key moving. He paid no attention to the fact that he was undoubtedly doing himself some harm, for a brown fluid came out of his mouth, ran over the key and dripped onto the floor. "Just listen," said the chief clerk in the next room, "he is turning the key." That was a great encouragement to Gregor; but they should all have been calling out to him, his father and his mother too: "Go on, Gregor," they should have called, "keep at it, right at that lock!" And imagining that they were all following his efforts with excitement, he bit into the key with everything he could summon, senseless with the strain. As the key turned further, he danced around the lock, holding himself up now only by his mouth, and as it was needed he hung from the key or pressed it down again with the whole weight of his body. The brighter click of the lock finally snapping back positively woke Gregor up. With a sigh of relief he said to himself: "So I did not need the locksmith after all," and laid his head on the handle to open the door all the way.

Since he had to open the door in this way, it was in fact already quite wide open while he himself was still not to be seen. First he had to turn slowly around one wing of the door, and very carefully at that, if he did not want to fall flat on his back right before entering the room. He was still busy with that difficult movement and had no time to pay attention to anything else, when he heard the chief clerk let out a loud "Oh!" — it sounded like the rushing of the wind — and now he saw him too: standing nearest the door, he was pressing his hand against his open mouth and backing slowly away, as though driven off by some invisible, steadily working force. His mother — she was standing there, in spite of the chief clerk's presence, with her hair still undone from the night and sticking up on end — first looked at his father with folded hands, then took two steps towards Gregor and sank down in the middle of her skirts as they spread out around her, her face sunk against her breast and quite lost from view. His father clenched his fist with a hostile look, as if he meant to shove Gregor back into his room, then glanced uncertainly round the living room, then shaded his eyes with his hands and wept until his great chest shook.

Gregor did not step into the room at all, but leaned from inside against the wing of the door that was bolted fast, so that only half his body could be seen, and above it his head, tilted sideways, with which he peered across at the others. It had grown much lighter meanwhile; on the other side of the street a section of the endless, grey-black building opposite stood out clearly — it was a hospital — with its regular windows cutting harshly into the front; the rain was still falling, but only in big drops, each one visible on its own and seemingly thrown down to the earth one by one. The breakfast dishes stood on the table in great abundance, for breakfast was the most important meal of the day for his father, who drew it out for hours over various newspapers. On the wall directly opposite hung a photograph of Gregor from his army days, showing him as a lieutenant, his hand on his sword, smiling without a care, demanding respect for his bearing and his uniform. The door to the hall was open, and since the front door was open too, you could see out onto the landing of the flat and the top of the stairs leading down.

"Well," said Gregor, well aware that he was the only one who had kept calm, "I shall get dressed at once, pack up the samples and be off. Will you, will you let me go? Well, sir, you see I am not stubborn and I like my work; travelling is hard, but I could not live without it. Where are you going, sir? To the office? Yes? Will you report everything truthfully? A man may be unable to work for the moment, but that is exactly the right time to remember what he has done before and to consider that later, once the obstacle is removed, he will certainly work all the harder and with all the more concentration. I am so deeply indebted to the boss, you know that perfectly well. On the other hand I have my parents and my sister to worry about. I am in a tight spot, but I shall work my way out of it again. Only do not make it harder for me than it already is. Take my side at the office! Nobody likes the travelling salesman, I know that. People think he earns a fortune and has a fine life into the bargain. They simply have no particular reason to think that prejudice through properly. But you, sir, you have a better view of how things stand than the rest of the staff, indeed — quite between ourselves — a better view than the boss himself, who as an employer easily lets his judgement be swayed against an employee. You know very well too that the salesman, who is out of the office almost the whole year round, can so easily fall victim to gossip, to accidents and to groundless complaints, against which it is quite impossible for him to defend himself, since he mostly hears nothing at all about them and only later, when he has finished a journey exhausted, feels the bad results in his own body at home, without being able to see back to their causes. Sir, do not go away without saying a word to show me that you think I am at least a little bit in the right!"

But the chief clerk had already turned away at Gregor's first words, and only over his twitching shoulder did he look back at Gregor with his lips pushed out. And during Gregor's speech he did not stand still for a moment, but withdrew towards the door without letting Gregor out of his sight, and yet quite gradually, as though there were some secret ban on leaving the room. He was already in the hall, and from the sudden movement with which he pulled his foot out of the living room for the last time, you might have believed he had just burned the sole of it. In the hall, though, he stretched his right hand far out towards the stairs, as if some downright unearthly deliverance were waiting for him there.

Gregor realised that he must on no account let the chief clerk go away in this mood, if his position at the firm was not to be put in the greatest danger. His parents did not understand all this so well; over the long years they had formed the conviction that Gregor was set up for life in this firm, and besides they were now so taken up with their immediate worries that they had lost all foresight. But Gregor had that foresight. The chief clerk had to be held back, calmed, persuaded and finally won over; the future of Gregor and his family depended on it! If only his sister had been there! She was clever; she had already been crying while Gregor was still lying quietly on his back. And the chief clerk, that ladies' man, would certainly have let her steer him; she would have shut the front door and talked him out of his fright in the hall. But his sister simply was not there, and Gregor had to act himself. And without stopping to think that he did not yet know at all what he was now able to do by way of moving, and without stopping to think that his speech had possibly, indeed probably, not been understood again, he let go of the wing of the door; pushed himself through the opening; meant to walk over to the chief clerk, who was already clinging ridiculously to the banister of the landing with both hands; but at once, groping for support, fell with a little cry onto his many little legs. No sooner had that happened than he felt, for the first time that morning, a physical well-being; the little legs had firm ground beneath them; they obeyed perfectly, as he noticed with delight; they were even eager to carry him wherever he wanted; and he already believed that the final recovery from all his suffering was close at hand. But at that very moment, as he lay there on the floor rocking with held-back motion, not far from his mother and directly opposite her, she — who had seemed so completely sunk into herself — sprang up all at once, her arms flung wide, her fingers spread, and cried: "Help, for God's sake, help!" She kept her head tilted as though to see Gregor better, but then, contradicting that, ran senselessly backwards; she had forgotten that the laid table stood behind her; when she reached it she sat down on it hurriedly, as if absent-minded, and did not seem to notice at all that beside her the coffee was pouring out in a full stream from the big jug she had knocked over onto the carpet.

"Mother, Mother," said Gregor quietly, and looked up at her. The chief clerk had gone right out of his mind for a moment; on the other hand, at the sight of the flowing coffee he could not stop himself from snapping his jaws several times at the empty air. At this his mother screamed again, fled from the table and fell into the arms of his father, who was hurrying towards her. But Gregor had no time now for his parents; the chief clerk was already on the stairs; with his chin on the banister he looked back one last time. Gregor made a run at him, to be as sure as possible of catching him up; the chief clerk must have sensed something, for he leapt down several steps at once and disappeared; but he still shouted "Huh!", and it rang through the whole stairwell. Unfortunately this flight of the chief clerk's now seemed to throw his father, who had been fairly composed until then, into complete confusion, for instead of running after the chief clerk himself, or at least not hindering Gregor in the chase, he seized with his right hand the chief clerk's walking stick, which had been left behind with his hat and overcoat on a chair, picked up a large newspaper from the table with his left, and, stamping his feet, set about driving Gregor back into his room by waving the stick and the newspaper. No pleading from Gregor helped, no pleading was even understood; however humbly he turned his head, his father only stamped his feet harder. Across the room his mother had thrown open a window in spite of the cool weather, and, leaning out, she pressed her face into her hands far outside it. A strong draught sprang up between the street and the stairwell, the window curtains flew up, the newspapers on the table rustled, single sheets blew across the floor. His father pressed on without mercy, hissing like a wild man. But Gregor had no practice at all yet in going backwards; it really did go very slowly. If only Gregor had been allowed to turn round, he would have been in his room at once, but he was afraid of making his father impatient with the time-consuming turn, and at every moment the stick in his father's hand threatened him with a deadly blow to the back or the head. In the end, though, nothing else was left to him, for he noticed with horror that going backwards he could not even keep to a direction; and so, with constant frightened glances sideways at his father, he began to turn round as fast as he could, which in reality was very slowly indeed. Perhaps his father noticed his good will, for he did not interfere, and even directed the turning movement now and then from a distance with the tip of his stick. If only there had not been that unbearable hissing of his father's! It made Gregor lose his head completely. He had almost turned right round when, still listening to that hissing, he actually made a mistake and turned a little way back again. But when at last he happily had his head in front of the doorway, it turned out that his body was too wide to get through just like that. In his present state it did not of course occur to his father in the least to open the other wing of the door, so as to make a wide enough passage for Gregor. His one fixed idea was that Gregor must get into his room as quickly as possible. He would never have allowed the elaborate preparations Gregor needed in order to raise himself up and perhaps get through the door that way. Perhaps that was why he was now driving Gregor forward with a particular din, as though there were no obstacle at all; behind Gregor it no longer sounded like the voice of just one father; now it really was no joke any more, and Gregor forced himself — come what may — into the doorway. One side of his body lifted, he lay at an angle in the opening, one of his flanks was rubbed quite raw, ugly stains were left on the white door, soon he was stuck fast and could not have moved on his own at all, the little legs on one side hung trembling in the air, those on the other were pressed painfully to the floor — then his father gave him a strong shove from behind, truly a deliverance this time, and he flew far into his room, bleeding heavily. The door was slammed shut with the stick, and then at last it was quiet.

Only at dusk did Gregor wake from his heavy, faint-like sleep. He would certainly have woken not much later even without being disturbed, for he felt rested and slept out; but it seemed to him that a hurried step and a careful closing of the door to the hall had woken him. The glow of the electric street lamps 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 feeling his way clumsily with his feelers, which he was only now learning to value, he pushed himself towards the door to see what had happened there. His left side felt like one long, unpleasantly tight scar, and he had to limp properly along on his two rows of legs. One little leg, by the way, had been badly hurt in the course of the morning's events — it was almost a miracle that only one had been hurt — and it dragged along lifelessly behind him.

Only at the door did he notice what had really drawn him there; it had been the smell of something to eat. For there stood a bowl filled with sweet milk, with little slices of white bread floating in it. He could almost have laughed for joy, since he was even hungrier than he had been in the morning, and he dipped his head into the milk at once, almost up over his eyes. But he soon pulled it back again in disappointment. It was not only that eating was difficult for him because of his tender left side — and he could only eat if his whole body worked at it, snorting — but on top of that he did not like the milk at all, though it had always been his favourite drink and that was surely why his sister had put it in for him; in fact he turned away from the bowl almost with disgust and crawled back into the middle of the room.

In the living room, as Gregor saw through the crack of the door, the gas had been lit; but while at this time of day his father usually read the afternoon paper aloud to his mother and sometimes to his sister as well, raising his voice, now not a sound could be heard. Well, perhaps this reading aloud, which his sister was always telling and writing to him about, had gone out of use lately altogether. But all around it was just as quiet, even though the flat was certainly not empty. "What a quiet life the family leads," Gregor said to himself, and as he stared stiffly ahead of him 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 nice flat. But what if all this calm, all this comfort, all this contentment were now to come to a horrible end? So as not to lose himself in such thoughts, Gregor preferred to get moving and crawled up and down the room.

Once, during the long evening, one of the side doors was opened a small crack, and once the other, and quickly closed again; somebody had probably felt the need to come in, and then too many doubts about it. Gregor now stopped right by the living room door, determined to get the hesitating visitor in somehow, or at least to find out who it was; but the door was not opened again, and Gregor waited in vain. Early on, 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, nobody came any more, and the keys were now in the locks on the outside as well.

It was late at night before the light in the living room was put out, and now it was easy to tell that his parents and his sister had stayed up all that time, for, as could be heard quite clearly, all three of them were now going away on tiptoe. Certainly nobody would come in to Gregor now before morning; so he had a long stretch of time to think undisturbed about how he should arrange his life from now on. But the high, empty room in which he was forced to lie flat on the floor frightened him, without his being able to work out why, since it was after all the room he had lived in for five years — and with a half-unconscious turn, and not without a little shame, he hurried under the couch, where, although his back was pressed down a bit and he could no longer lift his head, he at once felt very comfortable, and only regretted that his body was too wide to fit completely under the couch.

There he stayed the whole night, which he spent partly in a half-sleep out of which hunger kept startling him, and partly in worries and vague hopes. All of them led to the same conclusion: that for the time being he must keep quiet, and by patience and the greatest consideration make it bearable for the family to put up with the unpleasantness that in his present condition he simply could not help causing them.

Early in the morning, while it was still almost night, Gregor had a chance to test the strength of the decisions he had just made, for his sister, nearly fully dressed, opened the door from the hall and looked in eagerly. She did not find him straight away, but when she noticed him under the couch — God, he had to be somewhere, he could hardly have flown away — she got such a fright that she lost control of herself and slammed the door shut again from outside. But as though she regretted her behaviour, she opened the door again at once and came in on tiptoe, as if she were visiting someone seriously ill, or even 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 standing, and not at all 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 point it out to her, even though he 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 the still full bowl at once, in astonishment, with only a little milk spilled around it; she picked it up straight away, not with her bare hands but with a rag, and carried it out. Gregor was extremely curious about what she would bring instead, and he thought up all sorts of possibilities. But he could never 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, covered in a white sauce that had gone hard; a few raisins and almonds; a cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days ago; a piece of dry bread, a piece of bread and butter, and a piece of bread and butter with salt. Besides all this, she put down the bowl that was probably meant for Gregor once and for all, into which she had poured some water. And out of tact, since she knew that Gregor would not eat in front of her, she hurried away and even turned the key, just so that Gregor would know he could make himself as comfortable as he liked. Gregor's little legs whirred as he now went to eat. His injuries, by the way, must already have healed completely; he felt no hindrance any more. He was amazed at that, 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 been hurting him enough only the day before yesterday. "Am I less sensitive now?" he thought, and he was already sucking greedily at the cheese, which had drawn him at once and more strongly than any of the other food. One after another, and with his eyes watering from satisfaction, he devoured the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the fresh food, on the other hand, he did not like. He could not even bear the smell of it, and he actually dragged the things he wanted to eat a little further away. He had long since finished everything and was just lying lazily in the same spot when his sister slowly turned the key as a sign that he should withdraw. That startled him at once, although he was nearly 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, because the ample meal had rounded out his body a little and he could hardly breathe there in the narrow space. Between little fits of choking he watched, with slightly bulging eyes, as his unsuspecting sister swept up with a broom not only the leftovers but also the food Gregor had not touched at all, as though that too were now unusable, and as she hastily tipped it all into a bucket, closed it with a wooden lid and carried the whole lot out. She had hardly turned round before Gregor pulled himself out from under the couch and stretched and puffed himself up.

In this way Gregor now got his food every day, once in the morning while his parents and the maid were still asleep, and a second time after the family lunch, since his parents slept a little then too and his sister sent the maid off on some errand. They certainly did not want Gregor to starve either, but perhaps they could not have borne to know about his eating except by hearsay; perhaps his sister also wanted to spare them a grief that might have been only a small one, since in fact they were suffering quite enough already.

What excuses had been used to get the doctor and the locksmith out of the flat again on that first morning, Gregor never learned; since nobody understood him, 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 be content with hearing only the odd sigh and appeal to the saints. Only later, when she had got used to it all a little — of course there could never be any question of getting used to it completely — did Gregor sometimes catch a remark that was meant kindly, or could be taken that way. "He enjoyed it today," she would say when Gregor had cleared away a good deal of the food, while in the opposite case, which gradually happened more and more often, she used to say, almost sadly: "Everything has been left standing again."

But although Gregor could get no news directly, he overheard a good deal from the neighbouring rooms, and whenever he heard voices he ran straight to the door in question and pressed his whole body against it. Especially in the early days there was no conversation that was not somehow about him, even if only in secret. For two days there were discussions at every meal about what should be done now; but they talked about the same subject between meals too, because there were always at least two members of the family at home, since nobody wanted to stay at home alone and the flat could not possibly be left completely empty. On the very first day, too, the maid had gone down on her knees and begged his mother to let her go at once — it was not quite clear what and how much she knew about what had happened — and when she said goodbye a quarter of an hour later she thanked them in tears for her dismissal, as if it were the greatest kindness anyone had done her there, and, without being asked, swore a terrible oath never to tell a soul the slightest thing.

Now his sister had to do the cooking as well, together with his mother; though that was not much trouble, since 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 have had enough," or something like it. Perhaps they drank nothing either. His sister often asked his father whether he would like a beer, and warmly offered to fetch it herself; and when his father said nothing, she said, to remove any objection, that she could also send the caretaker's wife for it; but then his father finally said a loud "No," and nothing more was said about it.

Already in the course of the first day his father explained the whole financial position and the outlook, both to his mother and to his sister. Now and then he got up from the table and fetched some receipt or notebook out of the little strongbox he had saved from the collapse of his business five years before. You could hear him unlocking the complicated lock and locking it again after taking out what he was looking for. These explanations of his father's were in part the first pleasant thing Gregor had heard since his imprisonment. He had believed that nothing at all was left to his father from that business; at least his father had not told him otherwise, and Gregor, admittedly, had not 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 thrown them all into complete hopelessness. And so he had begun to work then with quite special fire, and almost overnight he had turned from a junior clerk into a travelling salesman, who of course had very different chances of earning money, and whose successes at work were immediately turned into cash in the form of commission — cash that could be laid on the table at home in front of the astonished and delighted family. They had been good times, and they had never come again afterwards, at least not with that same glow, even though Gregor later earned so much money that he was able to carry the expenses of the whole family, and did carry them. They had simply got used to it, both the family and Gregor; they took the money gratefully, he handed it over gladly, but no special warmth came of it any more. Only his sister had stayed close to Gregor, and it was his secret plan to send her to the conservatory next year — she, unlike Gregor, loved music very much and could play the violin movingly — without regard to the great cost that would involve, which they would make up in some other way. The conservatory had often been mentioned in his talks with his sister during Gregor's short stays in town, but always only as a lovely dream that could not be thought of as ever coming true, and his parents did not even like to hear these innocent mentions of it; but Gregor was thinking of it very definitely, and meant 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 there and listened. Sometimes he could not listen any longer out of sheer tiredness and let his head knock carelessly against the door, but he held it still again at once, because even the small noise he had made with it had been heard next door and had silenced everyone. "What is he up to now," his father said after a while, evidently turned towards the door, and only then was the interrupted conversation gradually taken up again.

Gregor now learned quite thoroughly — for his father often repeated himself in his explanations, partly because he had not dealt with these things for a long time himself, and partly because his mother did not understand everything the first time round — that in spite of all the misfortune a certain sum of money, quite a small one, was still left from the old days, and that the untouched interest had made it grow a little in the meantime. Besides that, the money Gregor had brought home every month — he had kept only a few gulden for himself — had not been used up completely and had built up into a small capital. Behind his door Gregor nodded eagerly, delighted at this unexpected caution and thrift. Strictly speaking, he could have used this surplus money to pay off more of his father's debt to the boss, and the day when he could have got rid of that job would have been much nearer; but as things were, it was undoubtedly better the way his father had arranged it.

But this money was nowhere near enough to let the family live on the interest; it was perhaps enough to keep the family for one year, or two at the most, and no more. So it was merely a sum that ought not really to be touched, and that had to be put aside for an emergency; the money to live on had to be earned. Now his father was a healthy man, but an old one, who had not worked for five years and could not be expected to take much on; in those five years, which were the first holiday of his laborious and yet unsuccessful life, he had put on a lot of weight and had become quite slow and heavy. And was his old mother now supposed to earn money — she 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 his sister supposed to earn money, when she was still a child at seventeen, and so deserved the life she had led up to now, which had consisted of dressing nicely, sleeping late, helping in the house, joining in a few modest pleasures and above all playing the violin? Whenever the talk turned to this need to earn money, Gregor always let go of the door first and threw himself onto the cool leather sofa beside it, because he was burning with shame and grief.

He often lay there through the whole long nights, not sleeping for a moment, just scratching at the leather for hours. Or he did not shrink from the great effort of pushing an armchair to the window, then crawling up the sill and, braced against the chair, leaning against the window — clearly only out of 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 that were only a little way off less and less clearly. The hospital across the street, the all too frequent sight of which he had once cursed, he could no longer see at all; and if he had not known perfectly well that he lived in the quiet but entirely urban Charlottenstrasse, he could have believed that he was looking out of his window into a wasteland where the grey sky and the grey earth joined together indistinguishably. His attentive sister had only had to see twice that the armchair was standing by the window before she began, every time she had tidied the room, to push the chair back to exactly that place by the window, and even to leave the inner casement open from then on.

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, they made him suffer. His sister certainly tried to smooth over the awkwardness of the whole thing as far as she could, and the more time passed the better she naturally managed it; but Gregor too saw through everything much more clearly as time went on. Her very entrance was terrible for him. She had hardly come in before she ran straight to the window, without taking the time to shut the door, careful as she usually was to spare everyone the sight of Gregor's room, and tore it open with hasty hands as if she were suffocating; and even when it was bitterly cold she stayed a while at the window and breathed deeply. With this running about 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 gladly have spared him it if she had only been able to stay in a room where Gregor was with the window shut.

Once — a month had probably already passed since Gregor's transformation, and there was really no particular reason left for his sister to be amazed at how he looked — she came a little earlier than usual and found Gregor still looking out of the window, standing there motionless and quite frightening. It would not have surprised Gregor if she had not come in, since his position was preventing her from opening the window at once; but she not only did not come in, she even started back and shut the door. A stranger might well have thought that Gregor had been lying in wait for her and meant to bite her. Gregor of course hid under the couch at once, but he had to wait until midday before his sister came back, and she seemed much more uneasy than usual. From that he understood that the sight of him was still unbearable to her and would have to go on being unbearable, and that she must have to force herself hard 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 that sight too, one day he carried the sheet over to the couch on his back — the job took him four hours — and arranged it in such a way that he was now completely covered, and that his sister could not see him even if she bent down. If she had thought this sheet unnecessary she could have taken it away, for it was clear enough that it could not be for Gregor's pleasure to shut himself off so completely; but she left the sheet as 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.

For the first fortnight his parents could not bring themselves to come in to him, and he often heard them praising his sister's work now, whereas up to then they had frequently been annoyed with her because she had struck them as a rather useless girl. But now both of them, his father and his mother, often waited outside Gregor's room while his sister tidied up in there, and the moment she came out she had to tell them exactly how the room looked, what Gregor had eaten, how he had behaved this time, and whether there was perhaps some small improvement to be seen. His mother, by the way, wanted to visit Gregor comparatively soon, but his father and his sister held her back at first with sensible arguments, which Gregor listened to very attentively and entirely approved of. Later, though, she had to be held back by force, and when she then cried: "Let me go to Gregor, he is my unfortunate son! Can't you understand that I have to go to him?", Gregor thought that it might perhaps be a good thing if his mother did come 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 and who had perhaps taken on such a hard task only out of childish thoughtlessness.

Gregor's wish to see his mother was soon fulfilled. During the day Gregor did not want to show himself at the window, if only out of consideration for his parents; but he could not crawl about much either on the few square metres of floor. Lying still was already hard to bear at night, eating soon gave him no pleasure at all, and so for distraction he took up the habit of crawling back and forth across the walls and ceiling. He particularly liked hanging up on the ceiling; it was quite different from lying on the floor; he could breathe more freely; a light swinging went through his body; and in the almost happy absent-mindedness he felt 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 much better control than before, and he did not hurt himself even in such a long fall. His sister noticed the new entertainment Gregor had found for himself at once — he did after all leave traces of his sticky stuff here and there as he crawled — and she got it into her head to make it possible for Gregor to crawl as much as he could, and to clear away the furniture that got 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 to ask her father for help; the maid would certainly not have helped her, for although the girl, about sixteen years old, had bravely stayed on since the old cook had been let go, she had asked for the favour of being allowed to keep the kitchen locked all the time and to open it only when specially called; so there was nothing left for his sister but to fetch their mother one day when their father was out. His mother came along with cries of excited joy, but fell silent at the door of Gregor's room. First, of course, his sister checked that everything in the room was in order; only then did she let his mother come in. In the greatest hurry Gregor had pulled the sheet down lower and drawn it into more folds; the whole thing really did look just like a sheet thrown over the couch by chance. This time, too, Gregor did not spy out from under the sheet; he gave up seeing his mother on this occasion, and was simply glad that she had come at all. "Come in, you can't see him," said his sister, and she was evidently leading their mother by the hand. Gregor now heard the two weak women shifting the old chest of drawers, heavy after all, from its place, and heard his sister constantly claiming the greater part of the work for herself, without listening to their mother's warnings, who was afraid she would overstrain herself. It took a very long time. After a good quarter of an hour's work his mother said they had better leave the chest where it was, because in the first place it was too heavy, they would not be finished before his father came home, and with the chest in the middle of the room they would block every path for Gregor; and in the second place it was not at all certain that Gregor would be pleased to have the furniture taken away. To her it seemed to be the other way round; the sight of the bare wall was quite heartbreaking to her; and why should Gregor not feel the same, 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," his mother finished very softly — indeed she was almost whispering the whole time, as though she wanted to avoid Gregor, whose exact whereabouts she did not know, 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 taking the furniture away we were showing that we are giving up all hope of any improvement and leaving him to himself without a thought? I think it would be best if we tried to keep the room exactly in the state it was in before, so that when Gregor comes back to us he will find everything unchanged and can forget the time in between all the more easily."

Hearing these words from his mother, Gregor realised that the lack of any direct human conversation, together with the monotonous life in the middle of the family, must have confused his mind in the course of these two months; he could not explain to himself in any other way how he could have seriously wanted his room to be emptied out. Did he really want the warm room, comfortably furnished with the family's old pieces, to be turned into a cave in which he would certainly be able to crawl about undisturbed in every direction, but at the same time quickly and completely forget his human past? He was close to forgetting it already, and only his mother's voice, which he had not heard for so long, had shaken him awake. Nothing should be taken away, everything had to stay; he could not do without the good effect the furniture had on his condition; and if the furniture stopped him from carrying on his senseless crawling about, then that was no loss but a great gain.

But unfortunately his sister was of a different opinion; she had got into the habit — not entirely without justification — of setting herself up before her parents as a special expert whenever Gregor's affairs were discussed, and so now too their mother's advice was reason enough for her to insist on removing not only the chest of drawers and the desk, which was all she had thought of at first, but all the furniture, with the exception of the indispensable couch. It was of course not only childish defiance and the self-confidence she had so unexpectedly and painfully gained lately that made her demand this; she really had observed that Gregor needed a lot of room to crawl in, and that on the other hand, as far as anyone could see, he made no use of the furniture at all. But perhaps the romantic streak of girls her age also played a part, which looks for its satisfaction at every opportunity, and which now tempted Grete into wanting to make Gregor's situation even more frightening, so that she could then do even more for him than she had done so far. For in 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 be talked out of her decision by her mother, who seemed unsure of herself in that room too out of sheer nervousness, soon fell silent, and helped his sister as best she could to get the chest of drawers out. Well, Gregor could do without the chest at a pinch, but the desk had to stay. And hardly had the women left the room with the chest, which they were pushing against and groaning over, than Gregor stuck his head out from under the couch to see how he could step in carefully and as considerately as possible. But unluckily it was his mother who came back first, while Grete stayed in the next room with her arms around the chest, rocking it back and forth on her own without of course moving it from the spot. But his mother was not used to the sight of Gregor, it might have made her ill, and so Gregor, in a fright, hurried backwards to the other end of the couch, but could no longer stop the sheet from moving a little at the front. That was enough to catch his mother's attention. She faltered, 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, he soon had to admit that this coming and going of the women, their little calls to each other, the scraping of the furniture on the floor, worked on him like a great uproar fed from every side; and however tightly he pulled in his head and legs and pressed his body down to the floor, he had to admit that he would not be able to stand the whole thing for long. They were clearing out his room; taking away everything he was fond of; they had already carried out the chest with the fretsaw and his other tools in it; now they were working loose the desk that was practically rooted in the floor, the desk at which he had written his exercises as a student at the commercial college, at secondary school, even back at primary school — at that point he really had no more time to examine the good intentions of the two women, whose existence he had almost forgotten anyway, for out of exhaustion they were already working in silence, and all that could be heard was the heavy tramp of their feet.

And so he broke out — the women were just leaning on the desk in the next room to catch their breath — and changed direction four times; he really did not know what to save first. Then he saw the picture of the lady dressed all in furs hanging there, standing out on the otherwise empty wall, and he crawled quickly up 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, was certainly not going to be taken away by anyone. He twisted his head towards the living-room door to watch the women as they came back.

They had not allowed themselves much rest and were already returning; Grete had put her arm round his mother and was almost carrying her. "So what shall we take now?" said Grete, and looked around. At that her eyes met Gregor's on the wall. Probably only because his mother was there did she keep her composure; she bent her face down to her mother to stop her from looking round, and said, though shaking and without thinking: "Come, shouldn't we go back into the living room for a moment?" Grete's intention was clear to Gregor: she wanted to get his mother to safety and then chase him down off the wall. Well, she could always try! He was sitting on his picture and he was not giving it up. He would rather fly at Grete's face.

But Grete's words had only made his mother more uneasy. She stepped aside, caught sight of the huge brown patch on the flowered wallpaper, and before it really reached her mind that what she was seeing was Gregor, she cried out in a screaming, rough voice: "Oh God, oh God!" and fell across the sofa with her arms spread wide, as though giving everything up, and did not move. "You, Gregor!" cried his sister, with her fist raised and a hard stare. They were the first words she had spoken straight to him since the change. She ran into the next room to fetch some kind of spirits to wake his mother out of her faint. Gregor wanted to help too — there was still time to save the picture — but he was stuck fast to the glass and had to tear himself away by force. Then he too ran into the next room, as if he could give his sister some advice, the way he used to; but then he had to stand behind her doing nothing. While she was rummaging among various little bottles, she gave herself another fright when she turned round; a bottle fell to the floor and broke; a splinter cut Gregor's face, and some caustic medicine ran over him. Grete now took as many bottles as she could hold, without wasting any more time, and ran in with them to her mother; she kicked the door shut behind her. Gregor was now shut off from his mother, who was perhaps close to death through his fault. He must not open the door if he did not want to drive away his sister, who had to stay with their mother; there was nothing for him to do now but wait. Pressed by self-reproach and worry, he began to crawl, crawled over everything, walls, furniture and ceiling, and at last, in his despair, when the whole room had already begun to spin around him, he fell down into the middle of the big table.

A little while passed. Gregor lay there weakly, all around it was quiet; perhaps that was a good sign. Then the doorbell rang. The maid was of course shut up in her kitchen, so Grete had to go and open the door. His father had come home. "What has happened?" were his first words; Grete's face had probably told him everything. Grete answered in a muffled voice — she was clearly pressing her face against her father's chest: "Mother fainted, but she is better already. Gregor has got out." "I expected it," said his father, "I always told you so, but you women will not listen." It was clear to Gregor that his father had misunderstood Grete's far too short report and was assuming that Gregor had done something violent. So Gregor now had to try to calm his father down, because 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, coming in from the hall, could see at once that Gregor fully intended to go straight back into his room, and that there was no need to drive him back; they only had to open the door and he would disappear immediately.

But his father was in no mood to notice such fine points. "Ah!" he cried the moment he came in, in a tone that sounded furious and glad at the same time. Gregor pulled his head back from the door and lifted it towards his father. He had really not pictured his father like this, standing there as he did now. Admittedly, in recent days he had been so taken up with the new business of crawling about that he had neglected to follow what was going on in the rest of the flat as he used to, and he ought really to have been prepared to find things changed. And yet, and yet — was this still his father? The same man who used to lie buried and tired in bed when Gregor set off on a business trip; who received him on the evenings of his return in his dressing gown in the armchair, not really able to get up, and only raising his arms as a sign of joy; and who, on the rare walks they took together on a few Sundays in the year and on the great holidays, would work his way forward between Gregor and his mother — who already walked slowly — a little more slowly still, wrapped in his old coat, always setting down his walking stick with care, and who, whenever he wanted to say something, almost always stopped and gathered his companions around him? But now he was standing up quite straight, dressed in a tight blue uniform with gold buttons, the kind worn by porters at banks. Above the high stiff collar of the coat his heavy double chin spread out; under his bushy eyebrows the look in his black eyes came out fresh and alert; his white hair, usually untidy, was combed down flat into a painfully exact, shining parting. He threw his cap, which had a gold monogram on it, probably that of a bank, in an arc right across the room onto the sofa, and moved towards Gregor with the tails of his long uniform coat thrown back, his hands in his trouser pockets, and a grim look on his face. He probably did not know himself what he meant to do; still, he lifted his feet unusually high, and Gregor was amazed at the enormous size of the soles of his boots. But he did not stop to think about it; he had known since the very first day of his new life that his father considered only the greatest severity suitable where he was concerned. 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 stirred. In this way they went round the room several times without anything decisive happening, indeed without the whole thing even looking like a chase, it went so slowly. That was also why Gregor stayed on the floor for now, especially since he was afraid his father might take an escape up the walls or the ceiling as a piece of special wickedness. All the same, Gregor had to admit to himself that he could not keep up even this running for long, because while his father took one step he had to carry out any number of movements. He was already beginning to feel short of breath, just as in his earlier days his lungs had never been altogether reliable. As he now staggered along, gathering all his strength for the run, hardly keeping his eyes open; in his dullness not even thinking of any escape other than running; and having almost forgotten that the walls were open to him, though here they were blocked by carefully carved furniture full of points and spikes — just then something flew down close beside him, lightly thrown, and rolled along in front of him. It was an apple; a second flew after it at once. Gregor stopped still in fright; running on was pointless, because his father had decided to bombard him. He had filled his pockets from the fruit bowl on the sideboard and was now throwing apple after apple, without taking careful aim for the moment. These small red apples rolled about the floor as if electrified and knocked into one another. One weakly thrown apple grazed Gregor's back but slid off without doing any harm. The one that flew after it immediately, though, actually drove into Gregor's back. Gregor wanted to drag himself further, as if the sudden, unbelievable pain might pass off if he changed his place; but he felt as though nailed down, and stretched himself out with all his senses in complete confusion. With his last look he still saw the door of his room being torn open, and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her chemise, because his sister had undressed her to let her breathe in her faint; he saw his mother run towards his father, her loosened skirts sliding to the floor one after another on the way, and how, stumbling over the skirts, she pressed on to his father and threw her arms around him, in complete union with him — but now Gregor's sight was already failing — and, with her hands at the back of his father's head, begged him to spare Gregor's life.

Gregor's serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month — the apple stayed lodged in his flesh as a visible reminder, since nobody dared to remove it — seemed to have reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite of his present sad and disgusting shape, and that he must not be treated as an enemy; on the contrary, family duty demanded that they swallow their revulsion and put up with him, nothing but put up with him.

And even though the wound had probably cost Gregor his freedom of movement for good, and for the time being he needed long, long minutes to cross his room like an old invalid — crawling up high was out of the question — he was given what he considered a completely sufficient compensation for this worsening of his condition. Every evening the living-room door, which he had got into the habit of watching closely an hour or two beforehand, was opened, so that lying in the dark of his room, invisible from the living room, he could see the whole family at the lighted table and listen to their talk, with what amounted to general permission, and so quite differently from before.

Of course they were no longer the lively conversations of earlier days, which Gregor had always thought of with a certain longing in the small hotel rooms, when he had to throw himself wearily into the damp bedding. Now it was mostly very quiet. His father fell asleep in his chair soon after supper; his mother and sister told each other to be quiet; his mother, bent far forward under the light, sewed fine underwear for a fashion shop; his sister, who had taken a job as a shop assistant, studied shorthand and French in the evenings, so that she might get a better position one day. Sometimes his father woke up and, as if he had no idea that he had been asleep, said to his mother: "How long you have been sewing again today!" and fell asleep again at once, while his mother and sister smiled tiredly at each other.

With a kind of stubbornness his father refused to take off his uniform even at home; and while his dressing gown hung uselessly on its hook, he dozed fully dressed in his place, as if he were always ready for duty and were waiting even here for his superior's voice. As a result, the uniform, which had not been new to begin with, lost its cleanness in spite of all the care his mother and sister took, and Gregor often spent whole evenings looking at this coat, covered all over with stains and shining with its constantly polished gold buttons, in which the old man slept most uncomfortably and yet peacefully.

As soon as the clock struck ten, his mother tried to wake his father with quiet words and then to persuade him to go to bed, because this was not proper sleep, and his father, who had to start work at six, badly needed it. But in the stubbornness that had taken hold of him since he became a porter, he always insisted on staying at the table longer, although he regularly fell asleep, and it then took the greatest effort to get him to exchange the chair for the bed. His mother and sister could press him with little reminders as much as they liked; for a quarter of an hour he would slowly shake his head, keep his eyes shut and not get up. His mother tugged at his sleeve and whispered flattering words in his ear, his sister left her work to help their mother, but none of it worked on his father. He only sank deeper into his chair. Only when the women took him under the arms did he open his eyes, look first at his mother and then at his sister, and say, as he usually did: "What a life. So this is the peace of my old age." And leaning on the two women he got up, awkwardly, as if he were the greatest burden to himself, let them lead him to the door, waved them away there and went on by himself, while his mother threw down her sewing and his sister her pen in a hurry, to run after him and go on helping him.

Who in this overworked and exhausted family had time to bother about Gregor any more than was absolutely necessary? The household was cut back further and further; the maid was dismissed after all; a huge, bony charwoman with white hair that fluttered around her head came in the morning and in the evening to do the heaviest work; everything else his mother took care of, on top of all her sewing. It even happened that various pieces of family jewellery, which his mother and sister had once worn with delight at parties and celebrations, were sold, as Gregor learnt in the evening from the general discussion of the prices they had fetched. But the greatest complaint was always that they could not leave this flat, which was far too big for their present circumstances, since there was no way of imagining how Gregor could be moved. Gregor understood well enough, though, that it was not only consideration for him that stood in the way of a move, since he could easily have been transported in a suitable crate with a few air holes. What really kept the family from changing flats was their complete hopelessness, and the thought that they had been struck by a misfortune such as no one else in their whole circle of relatives and acquaintances had suffered. What the world demands of poor people they did to the utmost: his father fetched breakfast for the junior bank clerks, his mother wore herself out over other people's laundry, his sister ran back and forth behind the counter at the customers' orders — but the family's strength went no further than that. And the wound in his back began to hurt Gregor as if it were new whenever his mother and sister, having put his father to bed, came back, left their work lying, moved close together and sat cheek to cheek; when his mother, pointing to Gregor's room, said: "Shut that door, Grete," and when Gregor was in the dark again, while next door the women mingled their tears or simply stared at the table without any tears at all.

Gregor spent his nights and days almost entirely without sleep. Sometimes he thought that the next time the door opened he would take the family's affairs in hand again, exactly as before. In his mind, after a long absence, the boss and the chief clerk appeared again, the salesmen and the apprentices, the porter who was so slow on the uptake, two or three friends from other firms, a chambermaid from a hotel in the provinces, a dear, fleeting memory, a cashier from a hat shop whom he had courted seriously but too slowly — they all appeared, mixed in with strangers or people he had already forgotten; but instead of helping him and his family they were all unapproachable, and he was glad when they disappeared. Then again he was in no mood at all to worry about his family; he was filled with nothing but rage at how badly he was looked after, and although he could not think of anything he would have had an appetite for, he still made plans for getting into the pantry to take what was his by right, even if he was not hungry. His sister no longer thought about what might give Gregor particular pleasure; in the morning and at midday, before she ran off to the shop, she hurriedly shoved some food or other into Gregor's room with her foot, only to sweep it out again in the evening with one swing of the broom, indifferent to whether the food had merely been tasted or — the most usual case — had not been touched at all. The cleaning of the room, which she now always did in the evening, could not have been done any faster. Streaks of dirt ran along the walls, and here and there lay balls of dust and rubbish. At first Gregor used to place himself in some particularly telling corner when his sister arrived, so as to reproach her, so to speak, by taking up that position. But he could probably have stayed there for weeks without his sister doing any better; she saw the dirt just as well as he did, but she had simply decided to leave it. At the same time she watched, with a touchiness quite new in her, and which had in fact taken hold of the whole family, that the cleaning of Gregor's room should be left to her. Once his mother had given Gregor's room a thorough cleaning, which she had only managed after using several buckets of water — all that damp upset Gregor too, and he lay spread out on the sofa, bitter and motionless — but his mother did not escape punishment for it. For hardly had his sister noticed the change in Gregor's room that evening than she ran into the living room, deeply offended, and, in spite of their mother's imploringly raised hands, burst into a fit of weeping. Her parents — his father had of course been startled out of his chair — watched at first in astonishment and helplessness; until they too began to stir; his father, on the right, reproached his mother for not leaving the cleaning of Gregor's room to his sister; on the left, he shouted at his sister that she would never be allowed to clean Gregor's room again; while his mother tried to drag his father, who was beside himself with excitement, into the bedroom; his sister, shaken with sobs, beat the table with her small fists; and Gregor hissed loudly with rage that nobody thought of shutting the door and sparing him this sight and this noise.

But even if his sister, worn out by her work, had grown tired of caring for Gregor as she used to, there was still no need at all for his mother to take her place, and Gregor need not have been neglected. For now there was the charwoman. This old widow, who in her long life had probably got through the worst with the help of her strong frame, had no real horror of Gregor. Without being at all curious, she had once happened to open the door of Gregor's room, and at the sight of Gregor, who was completely taken by surprise and began running back and forth although nobody was chasing him, she had stood there in astonishment with her hands folded in her lap. After that she never failed to open the door a little, briefly, every morning and evening, and look in at Gregor. At first she even called him over to her with words she probably thought were friendly, such as "Come over here, you old dung beetle!" or "Look at the old dung beetle!" Gregor gave no answer at all to such greetings, but stayed motionless where he was, as if the door had not been opened. If only they had given this charwoman orders to clean his room every day, instead of letting her disturb him pointlessly whenever the mood took her! Once, early in the morning — a heavy rain, perhaps already a sign of the coming spring, was beating on the windows — Gregor was so exasperated when the charwoman started up with her talk again that he turned on her as if to attack, though slowly and feebly. But the charwoman, instead of being afraid, simply lifted high a chair that stood near the door, and as she stood there with her mouth wide open her intention was clear: she would only close her mouth once the chair in her hand had come down on Gregor's back. "So that's as far as it goes, is it?" she asked, when Gregor turned round again, and quietly set the chair back in the corner.

Gregor now ate almost nothing at all. Only when he happened to pass the food that had been put out for him did he take a bite into his mouth for the game of it, hold it there for hours and then usually spit it out again. At first he thought it was grief over the state of his room that kept him from eating, but he very soon made his peace with the changes in the room. The family had got into the habit of putting things into this room that there was no space for elsewhere, and there were plenty of such things now, since one room in the flat had been let to three lodgers. These serious gentlemen — all three had full beards, as Gregor once noticed through a crack in the door — were painfully set on order, not only in their own room but, since they had after all taken lodgings here, throughout the whole household, and especially in the kitchen. They could not stand useless or dirty junk. Besides, they had brought most of their own furniture with them. For this reason many things had become superfluous which could not be sold but which nobody wanted to throw away either. All of them found their way into Gregor's room. So did the ash bin and the rubbish bin from the kitchen. Anything that was of no use for the moment the charwoman, who was always in a great hurry, simply flung into Gregor's room; luckily Gregor usually saw only the object in question and the hand that held it. The charwoman may have meant to fetch the things back again when she had the time and the chance, or to throw them all out at once; but in fact they stayed lying where the first throw had put them, unless Gregor worked his way through the lumber and set it moving — at first because he had to, since there was no other space free for crawling, but later with growing pleasure, although after such wanderings he lay without stirring for hours, tired to death and miserable.

Since the lodgers sometimes ate their evening meal at home in the shared living room, the living-room door stayed shut on some evenings; but Gregor gave up the open door quite easily, as there had already been evenings when it was open and he had not made use of it, but had lain in the darkest corner of his room without the family noticing. Once, though, the charwoman had left the door to the living room slightly open, and it stayed open even when the lodgers came in that evening and the light was turned on. They sat down at the head of the table, where in earlier days his father, his mother and Gregor had sat, unfolded their napkins and took up their knives and forks. At once his mother appeared in the doorway with a dish of meat, and just behind her his sister with a dish piled high with potatoes. The food gave off thick steam. The lodgers bent over the dishes set before them as though they wanted to inspect them before eating, and in fact the one who sat in the middle, and who seemed to count as an authority for the other two, cut a piece of meat while it was still on the dish, clearly to establish whether it was tender enough and whether it ought not to be sent back to the kitchen. He was satisfied, and his mother and sister, who had been watching anxiously, began to smile with relief.

The family themselves ate in the kitchen. All the same, before he went into the kitchen his father came into this room and made one single bow, cap in hand, as he walked round the table. The lodgers all rose and murmured something into their beards. Then, when they were alone, they ate in almost complete silence. It seemed strange to Gregor that out of all the various noises of eating he kept picking out their chewing teeth, as if this were meant to show him that you need teeth to eat, and that with the finest toothless jaws you can do nothing at all. "I do have an appetite," Gregor said to himself unhappily, "but not for these things. The way these lodgers feed themselves, while I am dying!"

On that very evening — Gregor could not remember having heard the violin in all this time — it sounded from the kitchen. The lodgers had already finished their supper; the middle one had brought out a newspaper and given the other two a sheet each, and now they were leaning back, reading and smoking. When the violin began to play, they pricked up their ears, got to their feet and went on tiptoe to the hall door, where they stood pressed together. They must have been heard in the kitchen, because his father called: "Do the gentlemen find the playing unpleasant? It can be stopped at once." "On the contrary," said the middle gentleman, "wouldn't the young lady like to come in here and play in this room, where it is much more comfortable and pleasant?" "Oh, by all means," cried his father, as if he were the violinist himself. The gentlemen went back into the room and waited. Soon his father came in with the music stand, his mother with the sheet music and his sister with the violin. His sister calmly prepared everything for playing; his parents, who had never let rooms before and therefore overdid their politeness to the lodgers, did not even dare to sit on their own chairs; his father leaned against the door with his right hand pushed between two buttons of his closed uniform coat; his mother, however, was offered a chair by one of the gentlemen, and since she left it where he happened to have put it, she sat off to one side in a corner.

His sister began to play; his father and mother, each from their own side, watched the movements of her hands closely. Drawn by the playing, Gregor had ventured a little further forward and already had his head in the living room. He hardly wondered at himself for showing so little consideration for the others lately; once that consideration had been his pride. And just now he would have had more reason to hide, because of the dust that lay everywhere in his room and flew up at the slightest movement; he too was completely covered in it. He dragged threads, hairs and scraps of food about with him on his back and along his sides. His indifference to everything was far too great for him to lie on his back and scrub himself on the carpet, as he had done several times a day before. And in spite of this state he had no qualms about moving a little way out onto the spotless floor of the living room.

In any case, nobody was paying attention to him. The family was entirely taken up with the violin playing; the lodgers, on the other hand, had at first stationed themselves with their hands in their trouser pockets much too close behind his sister's music stand, so that they could all read the music, which must certainly have disturbed her. Before long they withdrew to the window, talking under their breath with lowered heads, and there they stayed, watched anxiously by his father. It really did look all too obvious now that they were disappointed in their assumption that they would hear some fine or entertaining violin playing, that they had had enough of the whole performance, and that they were only letting their peace be disturbed out of politeness. The way they all blew their cigar smoke up into the air through nose and mouth in particular suggested great impatience. And yet his sister was playing so beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side, and her eyes followed the lines of the music, searching and sad. Gregor crept a little further forward and held his head close to the floor, so that he might possibly meet her eyes. Was he an animal, that music moved him so? It seemed to him that the way was opening to the unknown food he longed for. He was determined to press on as far as his sister, to tug at her skirt and let her know that way that she should come into his room with her violin, because nobody here rewarded her playing the way he wanted to reward it. He would never let her out of his room again, at least not as long as he lived; his frightening shape would be of use to him for the first time; he would be at all the doors of his room at once and hiss at anyone who attacked; but his sister was not to be forced, she was to stay with him of her own free will; she was to sit beside him on the sofa and bend her ear down to him, and then he would tell her that he had firmly intended to send her to the conservatory, and that, if the disaster had not come between, he would have told everyone last Christmas — Christmas surely was past by now? — without caring in the least about any objections. After this declaration his sister would burst into tears of emotion, and Gregor would raise himself up to her shoulder and kiss her neck, which she had worn bare, without ribbon or collar, ever since she started going out to work.

"Mr Samsa!" the middle gentleman called out to his father, and without wasting another word he pointed with his forefinger at Gregor, who was slowly moving forward. The violin fell silent, the middle lodger first smiled at his friends and shook his head, then looked at Gregor again. His father seemed to think it more urgent to calm the lodgers than to drive Gregor away, although they were not at all upset and Gregor seemed to entertain them more than the violin playing had. He hurried over to them and tried with outspread arms to push them into their room, and at the same time to block their view of Gregor with his body. Now they really did become a little annoyed, though it was no longer clear whether it was at his father's behaviour or at the realisation that was dawning on them now, that they had had a room neighbour like Gregor without knowing it. They demanded explanations from his father, raised their own arms, plucked uneasily at their beards, and only slowly retreated towards their room. Meanwhile his sister had got over the lost feeling that had come over her when the playing suddenly broke off. For a while she had held the violin and bow in her loosely hanging hands and gone on looking at the music as though she were still playing; then all at once she had pulled herself together, laid the instrument in the lap of her mother, who was still sitting in her chair struggling for breath with heaving lungs, and run into the next room, which the lodgers were already approaching faster under his father's pressure. You could see the blankets and pillows in the beds flying up and settling into place under his sister's practised hands. Before the gentlemen had even reached the room she had finished making the beds and slipped out. His father seemed once again so gripped by his obstinacy that he forgot all the respect he owed his tenants after all. He just pushed and pushed, until in the doorway of the room the middle gentleman stamped his foot with a crash and brought his father to a halt. "I hereby declare," he said, raising his hand and looking round for the mother and the sister as well, "that in view of the disgusting conditions in this flat and this family" — here he spat on the floor without a moment's hesitation — "I give notice on my room at once. Naturally I will not pay a penny for the days I have lived here either; on the contrary, I shall consider whether I do not bring some claims against you — believe me — that would be very easy to justify." He fell silent and stared straight ahead, as though waiting for something. And indeed his two friends chimed in at once with the words: "We give notice at once too." At that he took hold of the door handle and slammed the door shut.

His father staggered to his chair with groping hands and let himself fall into it; it looked as if he were stretching out for his usual evening nap, but the heavy nodding of his head, as though it had nothing to hold it up, showed that he was not asleep at all. Gregor had lain still the whole time in the spot where the lodgers had caught sight of him. Disappointment at the failure of his plan, and perhaps also the weakness caused by so much going hungry, made it impossible for him to move. He was fairly certain that the whole thing would come crashing down on him in the very next moment, and he waited. Not even the violin startled him when it slipped from his mother's trembling fingers, fell from her lap and gave out a ringing note.

"Dear parents," said his sister, striking the table with her hand by way of an opening, "this cannot go on. If you cannot see that, I can. I will not say my brother's name in front of this monster, so I will simply say: we have to try to get rid of it. We have tried everything humanly possible to look after it and put up with it; I do not think anyone can reproach us in the slightest."

"She is absolutely right," his father said to himself. His mother, who still could not get enough air, began to cough dully into her cupped hand with a wild look in her eyes.

His sister hurried over to his mother and held her forehead. His father seemed to have been brought to more definite thoughts by his sister's words. He had sat up straight, was playing with his uniform cap among the plates that still stood on the table from the lodgers' supper, and now and then looked over at the silent Gregor.

"We have to try to get rid of it," his sister now said, speaking only to his father, because his mother could hear nothing through her coughing, "it will be the death of you both, I can see it coming. When people have to work as hard as we all do, they cannot put up with this endless torment at home as well. I cannot bear it any longer either." And she burst into tears so violently that they ran down onto her mother's face, where she wiped them away with mechanical movements of her hand.

"Child," said his father with pity and with striking understanding, "but what are we to do?"

His sister only shrugged her shoulders to show the helplessness that had come over her while she cried, in place of her earlier certainty.

"If he understood us," his father said, half as a question; his sister, still crying, shook her hand violently to show that this was out of the question.

"If he understood us," his father repeated, and by closing his eyes he took in his sister's conviction that it was impossible, "then perhaps we could come to some arrangement with him. But as it is —"

"It has to go," his sister cried, "that is the only way, Father. You simply have to get rid of the idea that it is Gregor. The fact that we believed it for so long is really our whole misfortune. But how can it be Gregor? If it were Gregor, he would have realised long ago that people cannot live together with an animal like that, and he would have gone away of his own accord. Then we would have no brother, but we could go on living and keep his memory in honour. As it is, this animal hounds us, drives the lodgers away, obviously means to take over the whole flat and leave us to sleep in the street. Look, Father," she suddenly shrieked, "he is starting again!" And in a fright that Gregor could not understand at all, his sister even abandoned her mother, actually pushed herself off from her chair as though she would rather sacrifice her mother than stay near Gregor, and hurried behind her father, who, worked up simply by her behaviour, also stood and half raised his arms in front of her as if to protect her.

But it had not occurred to Gregor at all to want to frighten anyone, least of all his sister. He had simply begun to turn round in order to make his way back into his room, and that certainly did look strange, because in his weakened state he had to help himself through the difficult turns with his head, lifting it many times and knocking it against the floor. He stopped and looked round. His good intention seemed to have been recognised; it had only been a momentary fright. Now they all looked at him in silence and sadness. His mother lay in her chair with her legs stretched out and pressed together, her eyes almost closing with exhaustion; his father and his sister sat side by side, and his sister had put her hand round her father's neck.

"Perhaps I may turn round now," Gregor thought, and began his work again. He could not hold back the wheezing of the effort, and had to rest now and then as well. Otherwise nobody hurried him; it was all left to him. When he had completed the turn, he started at once to make his way straight back. He was amazed at the great distance that separated him from his room, and could not understand at all how, weak as he was, he had covered the same way a short time ago almost without noticing it. Intent the whole time only on crawling quickly, he barely noticed that not a word, not a sound from his family disturbed him. Only when he was already in the doorway did he turn his head, not all the way, because he felt his neck growing stiff, but he still saw that nothing behind him had changed; only his sister had stood up. His last glance brushed his mother, who had now fallen fast asleep.

He was hardly inside his room before the door was hurriedly pushed shut, bolted and locked. Gregor was so frightened by the sudden noise behind him that his little legs gave way under him. It was his sister who had been in such a hurry. She had been standing there upright, waiting, and then she had sprung forward on light feet — Gregor had not heard her coming at all — and she called "At last!" to her parents as she turned the key in the lock.

"And now?" Gregor asked himself, and looked around in the dark. He soon discovered that he could no longer move at all. He was not surprised by this; it seemed to him rather unnatural that he had actually been able to get about until now on these thin little legs. Otherwise he felt comparatively comfortable. He had pains all over his body, it was true, but it seemed to him that they were slowly growing weaker and weaker and would finally go away altogether. He could hardly feel the rotten apple in his back any more, or the inflamed area around it, which was covered all over with soft dust. He thought back on his family with tenderness and love. His own opinion that he had to disappear was, if anything, even firmer than his sister's. He stayed in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the church clock struck three in the morning. He lived to see the first light spreading outside the window. Then his head sank down completely, against his will, and his last breath streamed weakly out of his nostrils.

When the charwoman came early in the morning — out of sheer strength and haste she slammed every door so hard, however often she had been asked not to, that from the moment she arrived there was no more quiet sleep anywhere in the flat — she noticed nothing unusual at first on her usual short visit to Gregor. She thought he was lying there so still on purpose, playing the injured party; she credited him with all sorts of understanding. Because she happened to have the long broom in her hand, she tried to tickle Gregor with it from the doorway. When that produced no result either, she became annoyed and gave Gregor a little poke, and only when she had pushed him out of his place without any resistance did she take notice. When she soon realised how things really stood, her eyes went wide and she whistled to herself, but she did not linger; she tore open the bedroom door and called out loudly into the darkness: "Come and have a look, it's snuffed it; there it lies, well and truly snuffed it!"

Mr and Mrs Samsa sat up in their double bed and had enough to do getting over the shock of the charwoman before they could take in what she was telling them. But then Mr and Mrs Samsa climbed hurriedly out of bed, each on their own side; Mr Samsa threw the blanket over his shoulders, Mrs Samsa came out in nothing but her nightdress; and so they went into Gregor's room. Meanwhile the door of the living room had opened too, where Grete had been sleeping since the lodgers moved in; she was fully dressed, as though she had not slept at all, and her pale face seemed to bear that out. "Dead?" said Mrs Samsa, looking up questioningly at the charwoman, although she could check everything herself and could see it even without checking. "I should say so," said the charwoman, and to prove it she pushed Gregor's body a good way sideways with the broom. Mrs Samsa made a movement as if to hold the broom back, but she did not do it. "Well," said Mr Samsa, "now we can thank God." He crossed himself, and the three women followed his example. Grete, who did not take her eyes off the body, said: "Look how thin he was. He had eaten nothing for such a long time. The food went out again just as it came in." Gregor's body was in fact completely flat and dry; you only really saw it now that he was no longer lifted up by his little legs and there was nothing else to draw the eye away.

"Come in with us for a little while, Grete," said Mrs Samsa with a rueful smile, and Grete went into the bedroom behind her parents, not without looking back at the body. The charwoman shut the door and opened the window wide. Early as it was, there was already a touch of mildness in the fresh air. It was the end of March by now.

The three lodgers came out of their room and looked round in surprise for their breakfast; they had been forgotten. "Where is breakfast?" the middle one of the gentlemen asked the charwoman crossly. But she put her finger to her lips and then beckoned to the gentlemen, quickly and without a word, to come into Gregor's room. They came, and stood there with their hands in the pockets of their rather worn jackets, in the room that was quite bright by now, around Gregor's body.

Then the bedroom door opened and Mr Samsa appeared in his uniform, his wife on one arm and his daughter on the other. They had all been crying a little; now and then Grete pressed her face against her father's arm.

"Leave my flat at once!" said Mr Samsa, and pointed at the door without letting go of the women. "What do you mean by that?" said the middle one of the gentlemen, somewhat taken aback, and smiled a sugary smile. The other two held their hands behind their backs and rubbed them together without stopping, as though in happy expectation of a great quarrel that was bound to turn out in their favour. "I mean exactly what I say," answered Mr Samsa, and walked in a line with his two companions towards the lodger. At first the man stood still and looked at the floor, as though things were arranging themselves into a new order in his head. "Then we will go," he said at last, and looked up at Mr Samsa as though, in a sudden fit of humility, he needed fresh permission even for this decision. Mr Samsa merely nodded at him a few times, briefly, with his eyes wide. At that the gentleman really did go straight into the hall with long strides; his two friends had been listening for a while with quite still hands, and now they positively hopped after him, as if afraid that Mr Samsa might get into the hall ahead of them and break the connection with their leader. In the hall all three took their hats from the rack, pulled their sticks out of the stand, bowed in silence and left the flat. In what turned out to be entirely groundless suspicion, Mr Samsa stepped out onto the landing with the two women. Leaning on the banister, they watched the three gentlemen go down the long staircase, slowly but steadily, disappearing at each floor at a certain turn of the stairwell and coming into view again a few moments later. The lower they got, the more the Samsa family lost interest in them, and when a butcher's boy came up towards them and then past them, carrying his tray on his head and holding himself proudly, Mr Samsa and the women soon left the banister, and they all went back into their flat as if relieved.

They decided to spend the day resting and going for a walk; they had not only earned this break from work, they absolutely needed it. So they sat down at the table and wrote three letters of excuse, Mr Samsa to his management, Mrs Samsa to the firm she worked for, and Grete to her employer. While they were writing, the charwoman came in to say that she was going, as her morning work was done. The three of them at first only nodded without looking up; it was only when the charwoman still would not go away that they looked up in annoyance. "Well?" asked Mr Samsa. The charwoman stood smiling in the doorway, as though she had a great piece of good news to give the family, but would only do so if she were thoroughly questioned about it. The little ostrich feather standing almost upright on her hat, which had annoyed Mr Samsa the whole time she had worked for them, swayed gently in all directions. "Well, what is it you actually want?" asked Mrs Samsa, for whom the charwoman had the most respect. "Yes," answered the charwoman, and could not go on at once for friendly laughter, "well, you needn't worry about how that stuff next door is to be got rid of. It has been seen to." Mrs Samsa and Grete bent down over their letters as if they meant to go on writing; Mr Samsa, who noticed that the charwoman was about to start describing it all in detail, firmly waved her off with an outstretched hand. But since she was not allowed to tell her story, she remembered how much of a hurry she was in, called "Bye, all," clearly offended, turned round wildly and left the flat, slamming the doors terribly.

"This evening she will be dismissed," said Mr Samsa, but he got no answer from either his wife or his daughter, because the charwoman seemed to have disturbed the calm they had only just found. They got up, went to the window and stayed there, holding one another. Mr Samsa turned round in his chair towards them and watched them quietly for a while. Then he called: "Come over here, then. Let the old business go at last. And have a little consideration for me as well." The women obeyed him at once, hurried over to him, made a fuss of him and quickly finished their letters.

Then all three left the flat together, which they had not done for months, and took the tram out into the open country beyond the town. The carriage, in which they sat alone, was filled with warm sunlight. Leaning back comfortably in their seats, they talked over the prospects for the future, and it turned out that on closer inspection these were not bad at all, because all three of their jobs — something they had never actually asked one another about — were thoroughly good ones and especially promising for later on. The greatest immediate improvement in their situation would of course come easily from moving house; they wanted to take a smaller and cheaper flat, but one better placed and altogether more practical than the present one, which Gregor had chosen. While they were talking like this, it struck Mr and Mrs Samsa almost at the same moment, as they looked at their daughter growing livelier and livelier, that lately, in spite of all the trouble that had made her cheeks pale, she had blossomed into a beautiful, full-figured young woman. Growing quieter, and understanding one another almost without knowing it through their glances, they thought that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her too. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when, at the end of their journey, their daughter got up first and stretched her young body.