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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 sew fancy underwear for a fashion shop; his sister, who
had taken a sales job, learned shorthand and French in the evenings
so that she might be able to get a better position later on.
Sometimes his father would wake up and say to Gregor's mother
"you're doing so much sewing again today!", as if he did not know
that he had been dozing - and then he would go back to sleep again
while mother and sister would exchange a tired grin.

With a kind of stubbornness, Gregor's father refused to take his
uniform off even at home; while his nightgown hung unused on its peg
Gregor's father would slumber where he was, fully dressed, as if
always ready to serve and expecting to hear the voice of his
superior even here. The uniform had not been new to start with, but
as a result of this it slowly became even shabbier despite the
efforts of Gregor's mother and sister to look after it. Gregor
would often spend the whole evening looking at all the stains on

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