- end_line
- 1445
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-28T02:25:26.309Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 1409
- text
- sister; from her left, Gregor’s sister screamed at her that she was
never to clean Gregor’s room again; while his mother tried to draw his
father, who was beside himself with anger, into the bedroom; his
sister, quaking with tears, thumped on the table with her small fists;
and Gregor hissed in anger that no-one had even thought of closing the
door to save him the sight of this and all its noise.
Gregor’s sister was exhausted from going out to work, and looking after
Gregor as she had done before was even more work for her, but even so
his mother ought certainly not to have taken her place. Gregor, on the
other hand, ought not to be neglected. Now, though, the charwoman was
here. This elderly widow, with a robust bone structure that made her
able to withstand the hardest of things in her long life, wasn’t really
repelled by Gregor. Just by chance one day, rather than any real
curiosity, she opened the door to Gregor’s room and found herself face
to face with him. He was taken totally by surprise, no-one was chasing
him but he began to rush to and fro while she just stood there in
amazement with her hands crossed in front of her. From then on she
never failed to open the door slightly every evening and morning and
look briefly in on him. At first she would call to him as she did so
with words that she probably considered friendly, such as “come on
then, you old dung-beetle!”, or “look at the old dung-beetle there!”
Gregor never responded to being spoken to in that way, but just
remained where he was without moving as if the door had never even been
opened. If only they had told this charwoman to clean up his room every
day instead of letting her disturb him for no reason whenever she felt
like it! One day, early in the morning while a heavy rain struck the
windowpanes, perhaps indicating that spring was coming, she began to
speak to him in that way once again. Gregor was so resentful of it that
he started to move toward her, he was slow and infirm, but it was like
a kind of attack. Instead of being afraid, the charwoman just lifted up
one of the chairs from near the door and stood there with her mouth
open, clearly intending not to close her mouth until the chair in her
hand had been slammed down into Gregor’s back. “Aren’t you coming any
closer, then?”, she asked when Gregor turned round again, and she
calmly put the chair back in the corner.
- title
- Chunk 4