Free The Meowmorphosis by Franz Kafka Page B

truly in restraints and was compelled to move along rather quickly with his new comrades as Josef K went on. “Now, I was at the time in one of those inexplicable joyous states of exaltation that everyone must have experienced once or twice as a kitten; I was still quite a kitten myself, having only recently departed the position of bank clerk and entered the position of tabby. Everything delighted me, everything was my concern. I believed that great events were going on around me of which I was the leader and to which I must lend my authoritative voice, things which would quite literally cease to be if I did not run after them and investigate them and wrap my tail around them—and presently something did happen that seemed to justify my wild assumptions. In itself it was nothing very extraordinary, for I have seen many such things often enough since, and more remarkable things, too, but at the time it struck me with all the force of a first impression, one of thoseimpressions that can never be erased and influence a great deal of one’s later conduct.” And here the two burlier cats physically lifted Gregor between their bodies, hurrying him along down a corridor between buildings and away from the little square near the quay, away from the men carrying the bier and the girl filling her bucket and the fruit seller.
    “I encountered, in short, a little company of cats,” the tabby Josef K continued, “or rather I did not encounter them but they appeared before me, as cats have their habit of doing. Before that I had been running in darkness a long time, filled with a premonition of great things—of mice and of the possibility of not-too-rotten fish to be discovered but also of gripping a certain blue by the neck and mounting her, as well as settling a score with a couple of fellows who had been rude to me and squashed my ear, leaping upon them until they accepted my domination completely. I had run in darkness for a long time, just as we are doing now, up and down, listening sharply to everything, led on by vague, unfocused desires for everything I have already mentioned, and then I suddenly came to a stop with the feeling that I was in the right place, and looking up I saw suddenly that it was a bright day, only a little hazy, and everywhere was a riot of intoxicating smells; I greeted the morning with an uncertain growling in my throat, when—as if I had conjured them up out of some well of darkness, to theaccompaniment of terrible sounds such as I had never heard before even when I was a man, seven cats stepped into the light. Had I not clearly seen that they were cats and that they themselves brought those sounds with them—though I could not understand how they were producing it—I would have run away at once, but things were more or less as I have stated, so I stayed. At that time I still knew almost nothing of that peculiar creative gift for music with which the feline race is uniquely endowed—certainly you have some inkling of it already having heard my humble symphonies—though music had surrounded me as a perfectly natural and indispensable element of existence while I was a man, I had not yet discovered it as a cat, and so all the more astonishing to me were these seven great musicians, standing before me, not speaking, not singing, but remaining generally quite silent, intently silent, as though silent with a purpose—but from the empty air they conjured music. Everything was music, the lifting and settling down of their feet, certain turns of their heads, their running and their abruptly standing still, the positions they took up in relation to one another, the symmetrical patterns they produced by one cat kneading the belly of another with his front paws and the rest doing likewise until the first bore all the weight of the other six, or by all lying flat on the ground and whirling their tails in several complicated revolutions, and none made a false move or note, not eventhe last cat, though he