II
IT WAS TWILIGHT when Gregor awoke from his deep slumber. Even without being disturbed he doubted he would have slept much later, as he felt so well rested, but it seemed to him that a furtive step and a cautious shutting of the foyer door had roused him. The glow of the electric street lamps shone in pale patches on the ceiling and upper parts of the furniture, but where Gregor slept it was dark. Slowly, still groping awkwardly with his antennas, which he was only now learning to appreciate, he pushed himself over to the door to see what had been happening. His left side felt like a single long unpleasantly taut scar and he actually had to limp on his two rows of legs. One little leg, moreover, had been seriously injured during the course of the morning’s events—it was nearly a miracle that only one had been hurt—and dragged behind him lifelessly.
Only when he reached the door did Gregor discover what had actually tempted him there: the smell of something edible. For there stood a bowl filled with fresh milk in which small slices of white bread were floating. He could have almost laughed for joy, as he was even hungrier than in the morning, and immediately plunged his head, almost up to the eyes, into the milk. But he quickly withdrew it in disappointment; not only was eating difficult on account of his tender left side—and eating had to be a collaboration of the whole heaving body—but he did not care at all for the milk, which was otherwise his favorite drink and surely the reason his sister had set it out for him. In fact, it was almost in revulsion that he turned away from the bowl and crawled back to the middle of the room.
In the living room, as Gregor could see through the crack in the door, the gas was lit; although the father usually liked to read the afternoon paper at this hour in a loud voice to the mother and sometimes to the sister as well, not a sound was heard. Well, perhaps this custom of reading that the sister had told him about and wrote of in her letters had been recently discontinued. But it was so silent everywhere, even though the apartment was certainly not empty. “What a quiet life the family has led,” Gregor said to himself, and felt, as he stared pointedly into the darkness, a great surge of pride that he had been able to provide his parents and his sister such a life and in such a beautiful apartment. But what if all the tranquillity, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end? So as not to dwell on such thoughts, Gregor started to move and began crawling up and down the room.
Once during the long evening, one of the side doors and then the other was opened a small crack and quickly shut again; someone had apparently had the urge to come in but had then thought better of it. Gregor now stationed himself directly before the living room door, determined to persuade the hesitant visitor to come in or at least discover who it might be, but the door was not opened again and Gregor waited in vain. That morning, when the doors had been locked, they all wanted to come in; now after he had opened the one door and the others had been opened during the day, no one came and the keys were now on the other side.
It was late into the night before the light went out in the living room, and it was now obvious that the parents and the sister had stayed awake until then, because he could clearly discern that all three were tiptoeing away. Certainly no one would come in to Gregor until morning, therefore he had a long undisturbed time to ponder how best to reorder his life. But the high-ceilinged, spacious room in which he was forced to lie flat on the floor filled him with an unaccountable dread; it was, after all, his own room which he had inhabited for five years, and with an almost involuntary movement—and not without a faint feeling of shame—he scurried under the sofa, where, despite his back being slightly squashed and being unable to raise his head, he felt immediately cozy and only regretted that his body was too wide to fit completely underneath the sofa.