Copyright © 1919 Franz Kafka
Translation copyright © 2020 Jack H
Gregor Samsa had drunk poison the night before. For eight days the bottle went untouched under his pillow, and every night Gregor could feel it through the linen and the feathers, hard as a stone on his cheek or the back of his head. When making up the bed his mother had not found it, or did not move it. He died in the morning after hours of dull fever-dreams. Having died he awoke in his bed to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Being alive, he supposed the poisoning to be a vivid part of the night’s delirium. Time, he thought, answers no master in dreams. He put the matter from his mind and considered the day before him, how his employer would upbraid him for being late. Because of his change even the most habitual act was difficult, and in fact he would never again return to work or even set foot outside the front door -- although in truth none of his many legs had feet.
His first attempts to communicate with his family were met with loathing and violence. Gregor understood their reaction, unaccustomed as they were to insects the size of -- a large hog? Not as weighty though. He supposed he was mostly hollow, or full of foam. His father hurled a number of apples at him, one of which lodged painfully in his carapace where for several months it rotted, bringing an infection which resulted in yet another death, this time without distress, quietly in the night.
When Gregor woke again he had transfigured into a violin. He lay on his soundboard, tilted to the left off his bridge, uncomfortable but utterly without the power of motion. He was on a tumbled heap of rubbish among shabby ash cans. This is a fine state of affairs, he thought. Being a monstrous beetle was inconvenient enough, if I even was a beetle. I never thought to count my legs -- perhaps I was a spider or a scorpion, an exotic arachnid of some sort, certainly an arthropod. But now, a, a, -- he cast his senses about to verify his intuition -- yes, a violin, and not even in bed. I am sure I was just on the floor of my room. This is a fine way to treat a violin, face down in garbage in a back alley. Doesn’t moisture damage violins? It could rain at any moment. Who would be so careless? I did not bring myself here. My health used to be so fine -- in five years I was never sick a single day and now I don’t even know myself. In another five years I might have paid off my parents’ debt and been completely free. I would have met a woman and married her and had two children, a boy and a girl.
He could not move or make any sound by his own effort, but his senses were not extinguished by the transformation. His sight -- it could not be called eyesight -- projected from the frontis of his volutes, and while he was unable to change his view, he found he could focus on any object within his field of vision with as much facility as if he had eyes to move. He would later think of it as sliding a game piece across a playing board. He heard as a vibration within his body, as if the f-holes were ears. His entire surface had a sense of touch, most sensitively along the length of his strings. Smell was dim and diffused, like the feel of air on skin when he had lungs to breathe. After he searched himself for a sense of taste, he settled on the impression of a tongue in an empty mouth.
Several times during the morning he heard people passing along the alley, always the sound of feet, sometimes conversation, mostly men, but no one noticed him. I am the color of dirt and rags, Gregor thought. Soon more litter will cover me, or I will be crushed beneath the boot of the ashman. Being face down he could see only the ground, stones and gravel, dirt, dung, the lower part of barrels and at the edge of his vision the brick wall of a building. A column of ants moved endlessly from beneath a crumple of butchers paper toward the wall, into some minute crack no doubt, to a nest within the building’s foundation, feeding their queen and protecting her infinite eggs.
Late in the day he heard feet approach and then a cry of delight. A hand snatched him up by his long neck and held him before the face of the charwoman who worked for his father and mother. “Well my word,” she said, “look at this. Isn’t this a fine violin. Here I brought you to see a giant disgusting flat dead bug as a treat, and right there we find a valuable treasure like this. It is a strange world.” A young boy reached out quickly and took Gregor from the woman’s hand. “Look at me!” he exclaimed, “I’m playing the violin!” and he plucked at Gregor’s strings as if pulling weeds. The strings were untuned and held no pure notes. “Not any music I would dance to,” said the charwoman merrily, shaking her skirts, “and I don’t think you’ll be working in a cafe playing for the toffs. We’ll take it to the junkman and sell it.” The boy now began to flail Gregor around like an axe. “I’ll smash it!” he shouted. “I’m a red indian!” He whooped and hopped in a circle on one leg. “Now you stop that,” the woman snapped -- Gregor thought she was the boy’s mother, although she might have been his grandmother. “Knock over those ash cans if you must break something. This here violin is money to us.” So saying, she snatched Gregor away from the boy and dropped him into a large pocket sewn into her skirt.
From the dark Gregor heard the boy complaining: “We were going to see a giant bug, so where is it? Was it there and somebody stole it?” His tone grew sulky: “I bet stinky gypsies stole it.” The charwoman scoffed: “Nobody wants that filthy thing. I tried to squash it with a chair, but it was a cowardly thing. I would have poisoned it but I couldn’t find the bottle. It finally died and I dragged it here. Disgusting. ” They walked for some time, out of the alley and onto the high street, the charwoman’s large feet sounding purposeful on the paving stones. She had dropped Gregor into the pocket upside-down, and with every step he was jostled about until his scrolls were wedged blindingly into a linty corner and his chinrest slapped against the woman’s slack belly like an impatient palm. Even though he knew he did not breathe, he felt suffocated. Yes, he had a sense of smell -- the sour of unwashed linen, of turning milk, and something of uncooked sausage left in the sun. I had an appetite when I was an insect, he thought, but not for what they left me. So I shrank, I flattened, dry and flat. I am flat now. An insect should always be hungry for anything. I wish I could tell someone it is otherwise. No one knows this except me. I would be a scientific expert -- that would make my employer take notice. Gregor Samsa, renowned for his discoveries about insect appetite, world’s greatest entomologist. I didn’t know I knew that word. Perhaps if I could eat I would grow into a viola, then a cello and then into a contrabass. Let her put me in her oversized pouch then! But that’s like supposing a dachshund could grow into a great dane. Things do not change their natures.
At last they stopped and Gregor heard a door open and the ring of a shop bell. “Now you wait outside, it’s not cold,” the charwoman said, entering and closing the door behind her. “Hello junkman,” she called out, pulling Gregor from the pocket. “Have I brought something special for you today.” They were in a cluttered shop, nearly overflowing with oddments, stacked chairs, piles of gazettes, tilting bookcases crowded with candlesticks and dusty figurines, hinged boxes and mismatched china plates -- rack upon rack of men's hats, top coats and jackets, innumerable boots and shoes piled beneath, most kept in pairs by tied strings.
From a corner a wizened man in a skull cap the color of wet ashes blinked over pince-nez glasses at the charwoman. He blew out air from his long thin nose in a show of disapproval: “So it’s you with your usual rubbish I pray to God not, more bits of thrown-out furniture all creaking and scratched. I cannot sell it for firewood.” Drawing near, he said, “Here, this, give it to me.” He took hold of Gregor and thrust him into the light that leaked through the shop’s grimed window panes. The little man plucked at Gregor’s strings, and with swift fingers twisted the pegs. In a moment Gregor was in tune, which gave him a strange exhilaration, almost the first joy he could remember having. “Where is the bow?” snapped the shopkeeper, holding out an impatient hand. “A violin is not an American banjo in a minstrel show, to smack at like a drum. It is the instrument of genius, and you pull it from your apron like a loaf of bread.” The charwoman shook her head angrily. “Now you just remember what’s what. None of your high hat, just tell me what you’ll pay, bow or no.” With a humph the old man turned and bent behind the long shop counter. He straightened holding a violin bow, and positioning Gregor between his chin and shoulder he ran his deft touch along the fingerboard, bowing with practiced ease the tune of a popular waltz, merry with spiccato.
“Not bad,” he nodded. “Not good but not bad. I do not recognize the maker, which surprises me, but it has the timbre of a better-made student violin. Six kronen, it should be five without the bow but I am a fool.” A gleam shone in the charwoman’s eye, but she said, “The one on Linden Street offered me ten not 30 minutes ago.” The shopkeeper closed his eyes knowingly. “The one on Linden Street went out of business 15 minutes ago and was so blessed to die in his bed. I’ll give you seven, and that is all or do not waste my time.” The bargain was made and the charwoman departed. Through the shop window Gregor watched the woman and the child walk off, almost instantly out of sight -- he felt as if he were sailing out of a port city beneath a smoking volcano. Goodbye forever, and thankful for it.
The shopkeeper went again behind the counter, stooped and placed a violin case on the surface next to Gregor. He took a cloth from the case and began to rub Gregor thoroughly. “Very nice -- not great but nice enough,” he said. “The tone is a bit thready, but this is the strings -- old and never of good quality. And the body is sound enough -- a dent in the back plate, but small. Always only what is important matters.” He continued to polish Gregor, moving the clean soft rag in tight light circles. After a time he went through the door into the rear of his shop, returning with a second violin case, empty. The old man placed Gregor into the case and latched the lid shut. When blackness enveloped him Gregor felt no unease -- calm rather, like a child again in his own bed, asleep or partly so and the dark night no different than the dark of sleep, lying flat, unmoving, armless, legless, no need at all to move. He thought back to when he could walk on his many skittering footless legs -- how was that even possible? He supposed the legs could have ended with toes, or five toes connected end to end like knuckles. Horses he recalled had legs with only a single toe, running on the nail, a hoof -- but which one, he wondered, the big toe, or thumb, or maybe the middle finger? When I was an insect did I walk on my pinkies? Did the top limbs have thumbs and the bottom toes? And all the nails on a single finger, as claws. I did not look to see, but they were unpleasant, those ugly waving thready legs, like algae growing up from the bottom of a pond. Now it is fingers alone that give purpose to my being.
He must have slept, for when the case was next opened Gregor saw that the high street through the window was bright with morning sunlight. “New strings,” the little man said, “and we will see what bargain we truly made.” The old strings were quickly replaced, the new were tuned, fine tuned, and Gregor was raised to the old man’s chin. A rich and mellow tone issued from Gregor’s body, the melody an uninspired popular ditty, but played with a sprightly humor that could justify a rehearing. “Yes, this will do nicely,” the old man said after a time. He placed Gregor back into the case and snapped shut the lid. How many days then passed Gregor could not say. It did not matter. He would be taken out and tuned and played, ten minutes or twenty, then put away, and so on, many times.
Time had no meaning because Gregor had no needs. To make music, to rest in darkness -- it was enough. Now I am a musical instrument, he thought. Before I was an insect. Before that I was a man, and a boy, and a babe that lived in the womb. I do not know what, before that. I do not know why any of these things, or how. I never wondered why I was a beetle and not a bee or an ant, a single ant marching in a long line stretching from deep in a mound all the way to some store of food, spilled and sweet or dead flesh drying into earth. I was an industrious man, but beetles do nothing meaningful, only scuttling and eating. The scarab was a beetle, a sacred dung beetle, pushing balls of manure around like Sisyphus. The Egyptians supposed something like this made the sun move across the sky. Phaethon. Prometheus. Tantalus. I should have read more. I sold cloth, without which people would be uncovered. Cloth is what civilization is made out of, like a fence makes a paddock -- cloth, not stone or dried mud, or wood or paper. Now I am wood -- will I be rock or dust? There is so little difference. If I were a book, would I know my story? I can make music when someone plays me. Could I have made music as a beetle? Like a cricket, my own music, but my legs could not touch. I rustled as I scrabbled across the floor. My sister said the sound made her skin crawl. I did not have skin -- just a shell, not even wings. Do all beetles have wings? I was just a bug, undefined the way a child would draw.
One morning Gregor was taken from his case by the shopkeeper and handed to a bearded man standing with a young woman. They were not in the junk shop -- the parlor rather of a private residence. The bearded man took Gregor by the neck and inspected him closely with an air of judgement and assumed expertise, making small assessing noises with throat and nose. He paused a moment at the dent in Gregor’s back -- scratched a critical nail at Gregor’s chinrest, but nodded a grudging dismissal of some complaint. After further searching, the bearded man handed Gregor to the young woman, saying, “Give it a play, my dear, and see if it has as fine a tone as we have been told.” The young woman took and rosined the bow, placed Gregor to her chin and played the strong deep opening strains of the third movement of Brahms’s violin concerto. “Oh yes, quite lovely. Thank you darling, it is a lovely gift. My old violin was a child’s instrument and I am to be a married woman,” she said with a demure smile. The bearded man removed a folding wallet from his coat and counted out a number of notes. The shopkeeper bowed and said, “So nice, thank you good sir. Your lovely fiancée plays so nicely. A fine student. I loathe to give up such an instrument but it is in the business of the world. We part from what we hold dear.” The bearded man gave a curt nod. “You hold the money dear enough,” he said stiffly. “That will be all, Herr Shopkeeper. Good day.” The old man donned his overcoat and bowed himself to the door. He placed his hat upon his head and departed unnoticed as the young woman placed Gregor back into the case and latched down the lid. The bearded man said a few words but they were indiscernible.
Gregor felt himself being moved and set down, and heard the closing of a door, perhaps a cupboard or closet. In the silence Gregor could not recall the sound of the music he had just made. Time passed in stillness. He did not think of music -- he knew it as a dream one wakes from and cannot remember, as people do not think of breathing. I do not breathe, Gregor thought, and I am a person. What do I think about. Do I dream? Do I sleep? He let his mind grow still, as listening, as waiting without expectation. Am I asleep now? How can I know? Is time passing? Do I want it to? Does it matter? I was not curious as an insect. As a man I despaired. Now I am an instrument, a thing deliberately constructed. If I do not make music do I have a purpose? Fingers, hands, handle me, manipulate, men and women, two of each, and a boy -- this far have I lived as I am now, simple and shaped, balanced, sanded, varnished, somehow alive, alone and resonant. Her hand, her fingers, the bow strokes on my strings, the breath from her nostrils blowing across my lower bout, beardless jaw and slight shoulder pinching the dimension of my ribs. She was my sister. That is who she is. Gregor felt no surprise that he only now thought to recognize her. She is my sister.
From inside his case Gregor heard the music of a small wedding orchestra. He thought he must have been asleep. His case opened and he was lifted out, and a man in formal dress quickly plucked each string, making slight turns of Gregor’s fine tuners. Then the man stepped onto the small stage at the side of the reception hall and joined the other musicians. In the open case by his chair was another violin, the E string broken. Gregor was played for another half hour or so as part of the ensemble, then the musicians stepped away to refresh themselves. The violinist lingered a moment, staring distractedly after one of the musicians, then placed Gregor on the seat of his chair and followed after. Gregor could see the wedding party, the bride who was his sister, the bearded man she had just married, and there too were his father and mother. His father moved with a lightness of foot Gregor had never before seen in him. He looks so young, Gregor thought, like me as I was, taller now and larger, very large in fact, like a wrestler -- and even my mother looks younger, and both are smiling and calm, happy in the blessings of the day.
His father went and embraced the bride, kissing each cheek and smiling into her eyes. They strode as a couple toward the small stage where Gregor was. “In a moment I will make a speech,” Gregor’s father said. “I will welcome my new son into our family, as a blessing to me and your mother in our old age. Now I know we will have grandchildren. You do not know yet that worry, what a worry that has been to me, the thought that my name and line would wither and waste away like something starved of vitality. We cannot live alone and be human. So many generations behind me, and any continuation into the future depends entirely on you, my dearest child.” Gregor’s sister nodded and smiled, and said, “It is so strange, like a jump into a river. I will have a boy and a girl.” His father chuckled agreement, and asked, “What will you name the boy?” The bride smiled knowingly and said, “Just you wait and see.” He chuckled again and sat down heavily into the chair where Gregor lay. Gregor’s neck, his fingerboard, his front and back plate, his ribs smashed and snapped and flattened like cracking teeth and shattering glass. Gregor’s entire body was possessed by brilliant pain more shocking than ice, his mind like a hiding child able only to observe the savage ravening of wolves, slashing ripping claws and fangs and a bloodless splatter dry like hunger at the moment of death. The pain ended however as quickly as it came, and Gregor thought, yes, he has broken me, my neck and every part. There’s another sense I had not thought about, pain with its sheer and its brevity. If I were human flesh and bone I would be paralysed. Now only my strings hold my head to my body. I will never be played again.
Gregor’s father had risen, now standing with the bride staring at the wreckage. “Oh father,” she said, “you great oaf. I was going to perform. My husband paid twenty-four kronen for that violin. It had a fine sound. It was cheap because we do not know the maker.” The father replied, “No matter, do not worry. I am so sorry but honestly it is not hard to replace. We will celebrate with a truly noble violin that I myself shall buy for you.” At which the bridegroom approached, smiling thinly. “Well father, you did not approve of my little gift I see, or should I say I heard, as did we all, with that loud crunching. But as you say, it is an accident easily fixed.” With that he gathered up the pieces, brought them to the fireplace and dropped Gregor into the flames. Gregor felt again yet another kind of pain, but only a moment and he was beyond agony and he could once more think and his mind was still with a subsumming calm. Touch is more than one sense, he thought. Flames do not caress. And as the fire snapped and sizzled through his blistering varnish, his shards and splinters, he thought his final thought.
The bridegroom had turned away from the fire as soon as he dropped the pieces in. The flames blazed briefly, then fell down to glowing embers. It was early summer but the day was brisk -- the fire had been built more for cheer than warmth. The wedding party ended and the hall emptied, guests to their homes, the newlyweds to their marriage bed. Toward evening a charwoman entered and tidied up, resetting chairs, bundling linen, sweeping the buffed bare floor. She brushed the fireplace ashes into a pan and spilled them into a small tin pail. Later she carried the trash down the stairs to the back alley, where she dumped the ashes into an ash can.
***
When Gregor Samsa wakes again he finds no sense of duration or dimension or warm or dim or of himself in a breathless space, distant silence, deep. Time passes because there must be time, and change is like the rolling of a world, and then always the sound of pervading rain, of far-off waterfalls, of lake waves filtered through a hedge of willow, slow wind in long rye. He feels sight now as an effortless red blackness, less than lunar light through closed eyelids. He does not remember music, or hunger, or movement. If he has flesh, it is weightless as a sleeper aware of a body. He floats nameless in a void like a star before God makes light, suffused by a tuneless hum, meaningless as time, sufficient as death, infinite as dreams, as hope.
J
