The young man had the feeling that the King was a noble man who was deeply depressed, and he could not refrain from breaking a rule of courtesy and asking him a straightforward question: “But tell me, please, why are you waging such wars on your planet? Who’s to blame for all this? Are you yourself responsible?”
The King stared at the messenger for a long time. He seemed indignant and angry at the audacity of this question. However, he was not able to maintain his gloomy look as he peered into the bright and innocent eyes of the stranger.
“You’re a child,” said the King, “and there are things that you can’t understand. The war is nobody’s fault. It occurs by itself, like thunder and lightning. All of us who must fight wars are not the perpetrators. We are only their victims.”
“Then you must all die very easily?” the young man asked. “In my country death is not at all feared, and most people go willingly to their death. Many approach their transformation with joy. But nobody would ever dare to kill another human being. It must be different on your planet.”
“People are indeed killed here,” said the King, shaking his head. “But we consider it the worst of crimes. Only in war are people permitted to kill because nobody kills for his own advantage. Nobody kills out of hate or envy. Rather, they do what society demands of them. Still, you’d be mistaken if you believed that my people die easily. You just have to look into the faces of our dead, and you can see that they have difficulty dying. They die hard and unwillingly.”
The young man listened to all this and was astounded by the sadness and gravity in the lives of the people on this planet. He would have liked to ask many more questions, but he had a clear sense that he would never grasp the complex nature of all these obscure and terrible things. Indeed, he felt no great desire now to understand them. Either these sorrowful people were creatures of an inferior order, or they had not been blessed by the light of the gods and were still ruled by demons. Or perhaps a singular mishap was determining the course of life on this planet. It seemed to him much too painful and cruel to keep questioning the King, compelling him to provide answers and make confessions that could only be bitter and humiliating for him. He was sorry for these people—people who lived in gloom and dread of death and nevertheless killed each other in droves. These people, whose faces took on ignoble, crude countenances like that of the farmer, or who had expressions of deep and terrible sorrow like that of the King. They seemed to him to be rather peculiar—and almost ridiculous, to be ridiculous and foolish in a disturbing and shameful way.
There was one more question, however, that the young man could not repress. Even if these poor creatures were backward, children behind the times, sons of a latter-day planet without peace; even if their lives ran their course as a convulsive cramp and ended in desperate slaughter; even if they let their dead lie on the fields and perhaps even ate them—for horror tales were told about such things occurring in primeval times—they must still have a presentiment of the future, a dream of the gods, some spark of soul in them. Otherwise this entire unpleasant world would be only a meaningless mistake.
“Forgive me, King,” the young man said with a flattering voice. “Forgive me if I ask you one more question before I leave your strange country.”
“Go ahead,” replied the King, who was perplexed by this stranger, for the young man seemed to have a sensitive, mature, and insightful mind in many ways, but in others he seemed to be a small child whom one had to protect and was not to be taken seriously.
“My foreign King,” spoke the messenger, “you’ve made me sad. You see, I’ve come from another country, and the great bird on the temple roof was right. There is infinitely more misery here than I could have imagined. Your life seems to be a dreadful nightmare, and I don’t know whether you are ruled by gods or demons. You see, King, we have a legend—I used to believe that it was all fairy-tale rubbish and empty smoke. It is a legend about how such things as war and death and despair were common in our country at one time. These terrible words, which we have long since stopped using in our language, can be read in collections of our old tales, and they sound awful to us and even a little ridiculous. Today I’ve learned that these tales are all true, and I see you and your people dying and suffering what I’ve known only from the terrible legends of primeval times. But now tell me, don’t you have in your soul a sort of intimation that you’re not doing the right thing? Don’t you have a yearning for bright, serene gods, for sensible and cheerful leaders and mentors? Don’t you ever dream in your sleep about another, more beautiful life where nobody is envious of others, where reason and order prevail, where people treat other people only with cheerfulness and consideration? Have you never thought that the world might be a totality, and that it might be beneficial and salutary to honor this unity of all things? Don’t you know anything about what we at home call music and divine worship and blessedness?”
As he listened to these words, the King’s head sank, and when he raised it again, his face had been transformed, and it glowed radiantly with a smile, even though there were tears in his eyes.
“Beautiful boy,” said the King, “I don’t know for certain whether you’re a child, a sage, or perhaps a god. But I can tell you that we sense all this and cradle it in our souls, all that you have mentioned. We have intimations of happiness, freedom, and gods. Indeed, we have a legend about a wise man who lived long ago and who perceived the unity of the worlds as harmonious music of the heavenly spheres. Does this answer suffice? You may be, you see, a blessed creature from another world, or you may even be God Himself. Whatever the case may be, you have no happiness in your heart, no power, no will that does not live as a presentiment, a reflection, a distant shadow in our hearts, too.”
Suddenly the King stood up, and the young man was surprised, for the King’s face was soaked in a bright, clear smile for a moment like the first rays of the sun.
“Go now,” he cried to the messenger. “Go, and let us fight and murder! You’ve made my heart soft. You’ve reminded me of my mother. Enough, enough of this, you dear handsome boy. Go now, and flee before the next battle begins! I’ll think of you when the blood flows and the cities burn, and I’ll think of the world as a whole, and how our folly and fury and ruthlessness cannot separate us from it. Farewell, and give my regards to your planet, and give my regards to your deity, whose symbol is a heart being devoured by a wild bird. I know this heart, and I know the bird very well. And don’t forget, my handsome friend from a distant land: When you think of your friend, the poor King in war, do not think of him as he sat on the cot plunged in deep sorrow. Think of him with tears in his eyes and blood on his hands and how he smiled!”
The King raised the flap of the tent with his own hand so as not to wake the servant, and he let the stranger out. The young man crossed the plain again steeped in thought, and as he went, he saw a large city blazing in flames on the horizon in the evening light. He climbed over dead people and the decayed carcasses of horses until it grew dark and he reached the edge of the forest.
Suddenly the great bird swooped down from the clouds and took the young man on its wings, and they flew through the night silently and softly like the flight of the owl.
When the young man awoke from a restless sleep, he lay in the small temple in the mountains, and his horse stood before the temple in the wet grass, greeting the day with a neigh. However, the messenger recalled nothing of the great bird and his flight to a foreign planet, nothing of the King and the battlefield. All this remained only as a shadow in his soul, a tiny, obscure pain, as if from a sharp thorn. It hurt, just as sympathy hurts when nothing can be done, just as a little unfulfilled wish can torment us in dreams until we finally encounter the person we have secretly loved, with whom we want to share our joy and whose smile we wish to see.
The messenger mounted his horse and rode the entire day until he came to the capital, where he was admitted to the King. And he proved to be
the right messenger, for the King received him with a greeting of grace by touching his forehead and remarking, “Your request was fulfilled before I even heard it.”
Soon thereafter the messenger received a charter from the King that placed all the flowers of the whole country at his command. Companions and messengers went with him to the villages to pick them up. Joined by wagons and horses, they took a few days to go around the mountain on the flat country road that led back to his province and community. The young man led the wagons and carts, horses and donkeys, all loaded with the most beautiful flowers from gardens and greenhouses that were plentiful in the north. There were enough flowers to place wreaths on the bodies of the dead and to adorn their graves lavishly, as well as enough to plant a memorial flower, a bush, and a young tree for each dead person, as custom demanded. And the pain caused by the death of his friend and his favorite horse subsided in the young man and turned into silent, serene memories after he adorned and buried them and planted two flowers, two bushes, and two fruit trees over their graves.
Now that he had done what he had desired and fulfilled his obligations, the memory of that journey through the night began to stir in his soul, and he asked his friends and relatives to permit him to spend a day all alone. So he sat under the Tree of Contemplation one whole day and night. There he unfolded, clean and unwrinkled in his memory, the images of all that he had seen on the foreign planet. One day later on, he went to the Elder, requested a private talk with him, and told him all that had happened.
The Elder sat and pondered everything as he listened. Then he asked, “Did you see all this with your eyes, my friend, or was it a dream?”
“I don’t know,” said the young man. “I believe that it may have been a dream. However, with your permission, may I say that it seems to me there is hardly a difference whether I actually experienced everything in reality. A shadow of sadness has remained within me, and a cool wind from that other planet continues to blow upon me, right into the midst of the happiness of my life. That is why I am asking you, my honorable Elder, what to do about this.”
“Return to the mountains tomorrow,” the Elder said, “and go up to the place where you found the temple. The symbol of that god seems odd to me, for I’ve never heard of it before. It may well be that he is a god from another planet. Or perhaps the temple and its god are so old that they belong to the epoch of our earliest ancestors, to those days when there are supposed to have been weapons, fear, and dread of death among us. Go to that temple, my dear boy, and bring flowers, honey, and song.”
The young man thanked the Elder and followed his advice. He took a bowl of honey, such as was customarily presented to honored guests at the first festival of the bees in early summer, and carried his lute with him. In the mountains he found the place where he had once picked the bluebell, and he found the steep rocky path in the forest that led up the mountain, where he had recently gone on foot leading his horse. However, he could not find the place of the temple or the temple itself, the black sacrificial stone, the wooden pillars, the roof, or the great bird on the roof. He could not find them on that day, nor on the next, and nobody he asked knew anything about the kind of temple that he described. So he returned to his home, and when he walked by the Shrine of Lovely Memories, he went inside and offered the honey, played the lute and sang, and told the god of lovely memories all about his dream, the temple and the bird, the poor farmer, and the dead bodies on the battlefield. And most of all, he told about the King in his war tent. Afterward he returned to his dwelling with a light heart, hung the symbol of the unity of the world in his bedroom, and recuperated from the events of the past few days in deep sleep. The next morning he helped his neighbors remove the last traces of the earthquake from the gardens and fields, singing as they worked.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was a Jewish novelist born in what is now the Czech Republic, although he wrote in German. Before his death, Kafka asked that all his unpublished works be destroyed but his literary executor, the writer Max Brod, ignored his wishes and published many instead. If Brod had listened, the world would have never known the novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), or Amerika (1927). Kafka did not publish much during his lifetime due to his job at an insurance company; he simply did not have as much time as he would have liked to write, and at the time he died in 1924 was underappreciated by the literary community. The Metamorphosis is by far his most renowned work. The novella has been made into a play and a comic by R. Crumb, and in 2009 it was adapted into a film told from the eyes of Elsa, Gregor’s older sister.
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Translated by Ian Johnston
ONE MORNING, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He lay on his armor-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. His blanket perched high on this belly could hardly stay in place; it seemed about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. She sat erect, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.
Gregor’s glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather—you could hear the raindrops falling on the metal window ledge—made him quite melancholy. “Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness?” he thought. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side; and in his present state he could not get himself into this position. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled onto his back again. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side that he had never felt before.
“O God,” he thought, “what a demanding job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out, on the road. The stresses of selling are much greater than the actual work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I still have to cope with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human interactions, which never come from the heart. To hell with it all!” He felt a slight itching on the top of his abdomen. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bedpost so that he could lift his head more easily, and found the itchy part, which was entirely covered with small white spots. He did not know what to make of them and wanted to feel the place with a leg, but he retracted it immediately, for the contact felt like a cold shower all over him.
He slid back again into his earlier position. “This getting up early,” he thought, “makes a man quite idiotic. A man must have his sleep. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the inn during the course of the morning to write up the necessary orders, these gentlemen are just sitting down to breakfast. If I were to try that with my boss, I’d be fired on the spot. Still, who knows whether that mightn’t be really good for me. If it weren’t for my parents’ sake, I’d have quit ages ago. I would’ve gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart. He would’ve fallen right off his desk! How weird it is for him to sit up at that desk, talking down to the employee from way up there—and even more weird because the boss has trouble hearing, so the employee has to step up quite close to him. Anyway, I haven’t completely given up that hope yet. Once I’
ve got together the money to pay off my parents’ debt to him—that should take another five or six years—I’ll do it for sure. Then I’ll make my big break. In any case, right now I have to get up. My train leaves at five o’clock.”
He looked over at the alarm clock ticking away on the chest of drawers. “Good God!” he thought. It was half past six, and the hands were going quietly on. It was even past the half hour, already nearly quarter to. Could the alarm have failed to ring? You could see from the bed that it was properly set for four o’clock. Certainly it had rung. Yes, but was it possible to sleep peacefully through that noise which made the furniture shake? Now, it is true he had not slept peacefully, but evidently he had slept all the more deeply. Still, what should he do now? The next train left at seven o’clock. To catch that one, he would have to go in a mad rush. The case of samples was not packed up yet, and he really did not feel particularly bright and lively. And even if he caught the train, there was no avoiding a blow-up with the boss; the firm’s errand boy would have waited for the five o’clock train and reported the news of his absence long ago. He was the boss’s minion, without backbone or intelligence. Well then, what if he reported in sick? But that would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious, because during his five years’ service Gregor had not been sick even once. The boss would certainly come with the doctor from the health insurance company and would reproach his parents for their lazy son and cut short all objections by asking for the insurance doctor’s comments; for this doctor, everyone was completely healthy but really lazy about work. And besides, would the doctor in this case be totally wrong? Apart from a really excessive drowsiness after the long sleep, Gregor, in fact, felt quite well and even had a really strong appetite.
As he was thinking all this over in the greatest haste, without being able to make the decision to get out of bed—the alarm clock was indicating exactly quarter to seven—there was a cautious knock on the door by the head of the bed. “Gregor,” a voice called—it was his mother—“it’s quarter to seven. Don’t you want to be on your way?” That soft voice! Gregor was startled when he heard his own voice answering. It was clearly and unmistakably the voice he’d had before, but in it was intermingled, as if from below, an irrepressible, painful squeaking, which left the words positively distinct only in the first moment and distorted them in the reverberation, so that anyone listening did not know if he had heard correctly. Gregor wanted to answer in detail and explain everything, but in these circumstances he confined himself to saying, “Yes, yes, thank you, Mother. I’m getting up right away.” Because of the wooden door the change in Gregor’s voice was not really noticeable outside, so his mother calmed down with this explanation and shuffled off. However, as a result of the short conversation, the other family members became aware that Gregor was unexpectedly still at home, and already his father was knocking on one side door, weakly but with his fist. “Gregor, Gregor,” he called out, “what’s going on?” And, after a short while, he urged him on again in a deeper voice: “Gregor! Gregor!” At the other side door, however, his sister knocked lightly. “Gregor? Are you all right? Do you need anything?” Gregor directed answers in both directions: “I’ll be ready right away.” He made an effort with the most careful articulation and inserted long pauses between the individual words to remove everything remarkable from his voice. His father turned back to his breakfast. However, his sister whispered, “Gregor, open the door—I beg you.” Gregor had no intention of opening the door; he congratulated himself on his precaution, acquired from traveling, of locking all doors during the night, even at home.
The Big Book of Classic Fantasy Page 97