lodged in his back; Gregor wanted to drag
himself away, as if he could remove the surprising, the incredible
pain by changing his position; but he felt as if nailed to the spot
and spread himself out, all his senses in confusion. The last thing
he saw was the door of his room being pulled open, his sister was
screaming, his mother ran out in front of her in her blouse (as his
sister had taken off some of her clothes after she had fainted to
make it easier for her to breathe), she ran to his father, her
skirts unfastened and sliding one after another to the ground,
stumbling over the skirts she pushed herself to his father, her arms
around him, uniting herself with him totally - now Gregor lost his
ability to see anything - her hands behind his father's head begging
him to spare Gregor's life.

III

No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor's flesh, so it
remained there as a visible reminder of his injury. He had suffered
it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious
enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current
sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated
as an enemy. On the contrary, as a family there was a duty to
swallow any revulsion for him and to be patient, just to be patient.

Because of his injuries, Gregor had lost much of his mobility -
probably permanently. He had been reduced to the condition of an
ancient invalid and it took him long, long minutes to crawl across
his room - crawling over the ceiling was out of the question - but
this deterioration in his condition was fully (in his opinion) made
up for by the door to the living room being left open every evening.
He got into the habit of closely watching it for one or two hours
before it was opened and then, lying in the darkness of his room
where he could not be seen from the living room, he could watch the
family in the light of the dinner table and listen to their
conversation - with everyone's permission, in a way, and thus quite
differently from before.

They no longer held the lively conversations of earlier times, of
course, the ones that Gregor always thought about with longing when
he was tired and getting into the damp bed in some small hotel room.
All of them were usually very quiet nowadays. Soon after dinner,
his father would go to sleep in his chair; his mother and sister
would urge each other to be quiet; his mother, bent deeply under the
lamp, would s