Vasilich, the Transformation

  After Franz Kafka’s «The Metamorphosis»
  By Boris Bakhmetyev
  24 June 2025

  Vasilich worked in a dull office in Moscow, whose main task was essentially rewriting, reshuffling, and forwarding papers that came from other offices. But Vasilich never lost heart and approached his work with unwavering enthusiasm. While some of his colleagues were repelled by the stale smell of the office cubicles, Vasilich felt like a fish in murky bureaucratic waters — he had sniffed them out, grown accustomed to them, and suffered not at all, since he himself was hardly fresh.

Vasilich wasn’t distinguished by outstanding intellectual abilities. Then again, they weren’t particularly important for his job. What he did have was a unique bureaucratic memory: he remembered perfectly where each document was kept, how many pages it had, and what instructions were scribbled on it.

Vasilich also had another remarkable trait. Outwardly, he looked very much like the chief executive of the entire office. He rarely saw the man in person, mostly from a distance. More often, he saw him in a portrait hanging in the office of a lower-ranking boss. Sometimes it seemed to Vasilich that the portrait resembled him more than it did the original. Occasionally, rather immodest thoughts crossed his mind. He imagined that he could easily stand in for the chief at meetings in his office — where one didn’t need to speak much, but only lend a solemn and stern air to the discussion. Vasilich especially enjoyed it when new employees, encountering him in the office corridors, blushed with embarrassment and bowed respectfully.

And then came that ill-fated evening that so drastically changed Vasilich’s life — a life filled with a sense of his own importance and grandeur. That evening, he had to stay late in his office, waiting for the chief executive to scribble a suggestion on a very important document, which then had to be sent to all the other offices. After the guideline was signed, a red light on Vasilich’s desk was supposed to flash — the signal that he should rush to the chief’s office. Vasilich waited, but the light never came on. Suddenly, he was startled by a sharp ring of the telephone: the chief’s secretary told him to come to the office immediately to receive instructions…

…After spending more than two hours in the boss’s office, Vasilich no longer felt either fear or pleasure. The chief executive still hadn’t appeared. Just before Vasilich arrived, he had suddenly rushed off to an urgent meeting at an even more important office. Waiting for his return, sipping the now-cold tea from the special canteen, and barely even worried anymore, Vasilich mentally reconstructed the contents of the five-page document on which the chief was supposed to write a suggestion. This task eventually exhausted Vasilich so much that he didn’t notice falling asleep, his head slumping onto the very table where the chief held meetings…

…Vasilich was awakened by a bright ray of sunlight piercing through the drawn white curtain. To his surprise, the chief executive was in the office but paid him not the slightest attention. Suddenly, the boss called his secretary and asked her to bring a glass of water. Vasilich wanted to remind him about the important document, but for some reason couldn’t utter a word. The next moment, he was stunned and nearly choked: the boss poured the glass of water directly onto him. Vasilich tried to shake himself off, but couldn’t do it. It turned out that he was half-buried in soil inside some tight clay pot — right on the spot on the table where he had fallen asleep the night before.

And then the boss finally spoke to him:

«Vasilich, how prickly you are! And why do you bloom so rarely? Only once every four years. You just swell up and swell up with importance. Do you really think you’re more important than me? You don’t look like me at all. Don’t forget that you’re just a cactus. Even if you do work in an office. And from this morning on — in the boss’s office…»

To be continued…