Then all three left the apartment together, which they had not done in months, and took a trolley to the countryside on the outskirts of town. Their trolley car had no other passengers and was flooded with warm sunshine. Leaning back comfortably in their seats, they discussed their prospects for the future and concluded, on closer inspection, that these were not at all bad; for all three had jobs which, although they had never really questioned each other about this, were entirely satisfactory and seemed to be particularly promising. The greatest immediate amelioration of their circumstances would easily come to fruition with a change of residence: They wanted to take some place smaller and less expensive but better situated and more efficiently designed than the apartment they had, which had been Gregor’s choice. It occurred almost simultaneously to both Herr and Frau Samsa, while they were conversing and looking at their increasingly vivacious daughter, that despite the recent sorrows that had paled her cheeks, she had blossomed into a pretty and voluptuous young woman. Growing quieter and almost unconsciously communicating through exchanged glances, they thought it was time to find her a good husband. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions that at their journey’s end their daughter jumped to her feet and stretched her young body.
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The Judgment
IT WAS A SUNDAY MORNING AT THE peak of spring. Georg Bendemann, a young businessman, sat in his own room on the second floor of one of the low, shabbily constructed houses that stretched alongside the river in an extensive row, almost indistinguishable from each other except in height and color. He had just finished writing a letter to a childhood friend who now lived abroad, he fiddled with the letter as he languidly sealed it, and then, with his elbow propped up on the writing desk, gazed out the window at the river, the bridge, and the faintly green hills on the far bank.
He recalled how his friend, disgruntled by his prospects at home, had more or less fled to Russia. Now he ran a business in St. Petersburg that started off very well but had long since faltered, as the friend bitterly complained during his increasingly rare visits. And so he was pointlessly grinding himself down in a foreign country, an unfamiliar full beard barely hiding the face Georg had known so well since childhood and a sallow complexion indicating an advancing disease. By his own account he had no real contact with the local colony of his countrymen and virtually no social intercourse with the Russian families and so resigned himself to becoming an incurable bachelor.
What could one write to such a man, a man who had obviously gone astray and who was certainly to be pitied but could not be helped? Should he be advised to come home, to transplant his life and resume all the old friendships—nothing prevented this—and generally rely on the help of friends? But all this would mean to him, and the more tactfully it was put the more offensive it would be, was that his every effort had been for naught and he should finally abandon them, that he should return home and suffer being viewed by everyone as the prodigal returned forever, that only his friends had any understanding of things, and that he was a big child who must simply listen to those friends who had remained home and been successful. And after all, could one be assured that there would be any purpose to all this certain pain inflicted upon him? Perhaps it would be impossible to coax him home at all—he himself said that he no longer understood the goings-on here at home—and so he would remain banished despite everything, embittered by his friends’ advice and further alienated from them. But if he did actually follow their advice and then could not get along at home—not out of malice but through force of circumstance—either with his friends or without them, suffering the humiliation of becoming truly friendless and homeless, would it not be better for him to stay abroad, just as he was? Could one really imagine, considering the circumstances, that he could make a successful go of it back here?