‘Am I now going to be less sensitive,’ he thought,
already sucking greedily on the cheese, which had strongly
attracted him right away, more than all the other foods.
Quickly and with his eyes watering with satisfaction, he
ate one after the other the cheese, the vegetables, and the
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sauce; the fresh food, by contrast, didn’t taste good to him.
He couldn’t bear the smell and even carried the things he
wanted to eat a little distance away. By the time his sister
slowly turned the key as a sign that he should withdraw,
he was long finished and now lay lazily in the same spot.
The noise immediately startled him, in spite of the fact
that he was already almost asleep, and he scurried back
again under the couch. But it cost him great self-control
to remain under the couch, even for the short time his
sister was in the room, because his body had filled out
somewhat on account of the rich meal and in the narrow
space there he could scarcely breathe. In the midst of
minor attacks of asphyxiation, he looked at her with
somewhat protruding eyes, as his unsuspecting sister swept
up with a broom, not just the remnants, but even the
foods which Gregor had not touched at all, as if these
were also now useless, and as she dumped everything
quickly into a bucket, which she closed with a wooden
lid, and then carried all of it out of the room. She had
hardly turned around before Gregor had already dragged
himself out from the couch, stretched out, 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
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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. Certainly they 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 he
was not comprehensible, 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. 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 which was
intended to be friendly or could be interpreted as such.
‘Well, today it tasted good to him,’ she said, if Gregor had
really cleaned up what he had to eat; whereas, in the
reverse situation, which gradually repeated itself more and
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more frequently, she used to 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 scurried right away to
the relevant door and pressed his entire body against it. In
the early days especially, there was no conversation which
was not concerned with him