Page 39 - the-metamorphosis

cool leather sofa beside the door, for he was quite hot from
shame and sorrow.
Often he lay there all night long. He didn’t sleep a mo-
ment and just scratched on the leather for hours at a time.
He undertook the very difficult task of shoving a chair over
to the window. Then he crept up on the window sill and,
braced in the chair, leaned against the window to look out,
obviously with some memory or other of the satisfaction
which that used to bring him in earlier times. Actually from
day to day he perceived things with less and less clarity, even
those a short distance away: the hospital across the street,
the all too frequent sight of which he had previously cursed,
was not visible at all any more, and if he had not been pre-
cisely aware that he lived in the quiet but completely urban
Charlotte Street, he could have believed that from his win-
dow he was peering out at a featureless wasteland, in which
the gray heaven and the gray earth had merged and were
indistinguishable. His attentive sister must have observed
a couple of times that the chair stood by the window; then,
after cleaning up the room, each time she pushed the chair
back right against the window and from now on she even
left the inner casement open.
If Gregor had only been able to speak to his sister and
thank her for everything that she had to do for him, he
would have tolerated her service more easily. As it was he
suffered under it. The sister admittedly sought to cover up
the awkwardness of everything as much as possible, and,
as time went by, she naturally got more successful at it. But
with the passing of time Gregor also came to understand

The Metamorphosis