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and let his body expand.
    IN THIS WAY Gregor got his food every day: once in the morning, when his parents and the servant girl were still asleep, and a second time after the common noon meal, for his parents were, as before, asleep then for a little while, and the servant girl was sent off by his sister on some errand or other. They certainly would not have wanted Gregor to starve to death, but perhaps they could not have endured finding out what he ate other than by hearsay. Perhaps his sister wanted to spare them what was possibly only a small grief, for they were really suffering quite enough already.
    What sorts of excuses people had used on that first morning to get the doctor and the locksmith out of the house Gregor was completely unable to ascertain. Since they could not understand him, no one, not even his sister, thought that he might be able to understand others, and thus, when his sister was in her room, he had to be content with listening now and then to her sighs and invocations to the saints, her occasional kissing, smacking sounds, meant to entice him to her lap. Only later, when she had grown somewhat accustomed to everything—naturally there could never be any talk of her growing
completely
accustomed to it—Gregor sometimes caught a comment that sounded almost as though the situation were normal and no source of alarm. “Well, today it tasted good to him,” she said, if Gregor had really cleaned his plate; whereas, on the otherhand, when she insisted (as she did with increasing frequency) on bringing him bread and vegetables, cakes, candies and other unappetizing foodstuffs that were not fish or other soft meats, or even the milk he had been too injured to enjoy fully, his sister would say sadly, “Now everything has stopped again.”
    But while Gregor could get no new information directly, he did hear a good deal from the room next door, and as soon as he heard voices, he would scurry right away to the appropriate door and press his entire body against it, purring and rubbing his cheek against the grain of the wood in a fashion he found most embarrassing yet a distinct source of pleasure. In the early days especially, there was no conversation that was not concerned with him in some way or other, even if only in secret. For two days, all the family’s meal-time discussions he could hear were about how people should now behave toward him; but they also talked about the same subject in the times between meals, for there were always at least two family members at home, since no one really wanted to remain there alone with him and they could not under any circumstances imagine leaving the apartment completely empty. In addition, on the very first day the servant girl—it was not completely clear what and how much she knew about what had happened—on her knees had begged his mother to let her go immediately, and when she said goodbye about fifteen minutes later, she thanked themfor the dismissal with tears in her eyes, as if she was receiving the greatest favor that people had shown her there, and, without anyone demanding it from her, she swore a fearful oath not to betray anyone, not even the slightest bit, if they would only allow her to stroke Gregor’s large, striped head just once, which she found adorable, yet terrifying.
    Gregor endured this imposition as stoically as he was able; no others witnessed it, a fact for which he was glad, and again, he found that purring which he could neither control nor predict, rumbling up from his furry chest, even now growing broader and more stately.
    Now his sister had to team up with his mother to do the cooking, although that didn’t create much trouble because people were eating almost nothing. Again and again Gregor listened as one of them vainly invited another one to eat and received no answer other than, “Thank you. I’ve had enough,” or something like that. And perhaps they had stopped having anything to drink, too. His sister often asked his