Already during the first day his father laid out all the
financial circumstances and prospects to his mother and to
his sister as well. From time to time he stood up from the
table and pulled out of the small lockbox salvaged from his
business, which had collapsed five years previously, some
document or other or some notebook. The sound was
audible as he opened up the complicated lock and, after
removing what he was looking for, locked it up again.
These explanations by his father were, in part, the first
enjoyable thing that Gregor had the chance to listen to
The Metamorphosis
43 of 96
since his imprisonment. He had thought that nothing at all
was left over for his father from that business; at least his
father had told him nothing to the contradict that view,
and Gregor in any case hadn’t asked him about it. At the
time Gregor’s only concern had been to devote everything
he had in order to allow his family to forget as quickly as
possible the business misfortune which had brought them
all into a state of complete hopelessness. And so at that
point he’d started to work with a special intensity and
from an assistant had become, almost overnight, a traveling
salesman, who naturally had entirely different possibilities
for earning money and whose successes at work at once
were converted into the form of cash commissions, which
could be set out on the table at home in front of his
astonished and delighted family. Those had been beautiful
days, and they had never come back afterwards, at least
not with the same splendour, in spite of the fact that
Gregor later earned so much money that he was in a