The Magic Mountain (114 page)
He said to Hans Castorp: “Castorp, old pal, you’re bored. I see you every day pulling that long face, tedium written all over it. You’re jaded, Castorp. You’ve been pampered with thrills, and if you don’t get a first-class kick every day, you sulk and fret about in the doldrums. Am I right or wrong?”
Hans Castorp said nothing, and in doing so only revealed the gloom within.
“I’m right, as always, “ Behrens said, answering his own question. “And before you start spreading the poison of imperial tedium, my malcontent citizen, you’re going to see that God and man have not deserted you and that medical authority has an eye on you, an unblinking eye, my good man, that its one ceaseless concern is your diversion. Old man Behrens is still here, after all. Well, all joking aside, my boy, I have an idea about your case. I’ve spent, God knows, sleepless nights coming up with it. You might even call it a revelation—and indeed I see my idea as holding great promise: no more and no less than an unexpectedly speedy detoxification and triumphant return home.
“My, what big eyes you have,” he continued after a brief rhetorical pause, although Hans Castorp’s eyes had not widened at all, but simply gazed at the director rather drowsily and absentmindedly, “and haven’t the vaguest what old man Behrens might mean. I mean this: something’s not quite right about your case, Castorp, that can’t have escaped your keen powers of observation, either. Something’s not quite right, because for some time now your symptoms of toxification have not squared with the undeniable improvement in your localized condition—and I didn’t start meditating on that just yesterday, either. We have here your latest photo. Let us hold the wizardry up to the light. You see, even the worst grouser and crepehanger, as His Imperial Majesty likes to say, won’t find much to object to there. A few foci have been fully reabsorbed, the pocket has grown smaller and is more sharply defined, which, being a well-informed patient, you know indicates healing. On the strength of these findings, then, one can come up with no real explanation for the waywardness of your body temperature. The physician sees himself compelled to explore new causes.”
Hans Castorp’s nod expressed no more than polite curiosity.
“And now, Castorp, you’re saying to yourself: Old man Behrens is going to have to admit he botched the treatment. But you’d be barking up the wrong tree—wrong about the facts, wrong about old man Behrens, too. The treatment wasn’t botched, its orientation was merely a bit one-sided, perhaps. I think it likely that from the very first your symptoms should not have been traced exclusively to tuberculosis, and I draw that conclusion from my presumption that they cannot be traced to it at all now. Some other source of disturbance must be present. In my opinion, you have a coccus infection.
“I am profoundly persuaded,” the director reiterated more strongly upon observing the nods Hans Castorp offered in response, “that you have a strep infection—which is no immediate cause for alarm, by the way.”
(There could be no question of alarm. The expression on Hans Castorp’s face was, rather, more a sort of ironic acknowledgment—either of the brilliant conclusions reached or of the new worthy status hypothetically conferred upon him by the director.)
“No reason for panic,” the latter said, varying his advice. “Everyone has cocci. Every ass has streptococci. You’ve nothing to boast of there. We have learned only recently that one can have streptococci in the blood and yet somehow not show any notable symptoms of infection. Though many of my colleagues do not yet know it, we are on the verge of discovering that one can also have tuberculosis in the blood with no consequences whatever. We aren’t more than three steps away from seeing tuberculosis as a disease of the blood.”
Hans Castorp found that quite remarkable.
“And so when I say ‘strep,’ ” Behrens began anew, “you should not picture the standard severe symptoms, of course. We will have to do a bacteriological’ blood test to see if these poor things but thine own have even taken up residence. But the only way we can learn whether strep is the cause of your febrility—always assuming that it is present—is to observe the effects of a strepto-vaccine therapy that we shall likewise inaugurate. That is the path before us, my good friend, and I repeat, it holds promise of great, quite unanticipated results. Recovery from infections of this sort can be as rapid as the cure for tuberculosis is protracted. And if you respond to these injections at all, you will be in the pink of health within six weeks. What do you say now? Has old man Behrens been holding up his end or not?”
“It is only a hypothesis so far,” Hans Castorp said languidly.
“A provable hypothesis. A highly fertile hypothesis,” the director rejoined. “You will see just how fertile it is when the cocci start growing in our cultures. We’ll tap your keg tomorrow afternoon, Castorp. We’ll bleed a vein with all the style of the old village barber. It’s all kinds of fun, and can have the most blessed effects on both body and soul.”
Hans Castorp declared himself prepared to be diverted and thanked Behrens nicely for keeping such a steady eye out. His head tilted toward one shoulder, he watched the director row away. The boss’s little speech had come at a critical moment. Rhadamanthus had been very close to the mark in interpreting his guest’s expression and mood, and his new initiative was intended—expressly intended, he did not deny it at all—to help Hans Castorp move beyond the dead standstill at which he found himself of late, as was obvious in his body language, so clearly reminiscent of Joachim’s in the days when certain wild, defiant decisions were forming inside him.
And we can say more. It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he had come to this dead standstill, but that the world, all of it, the “whole thing,” was in much the same state—or rather, he found it difficult up here to separate the particular from the general. Ever since the eccentric conclusion to his relationship with a certain personality and all the changes that conclusion had set into motion in the sanatorium; ever since Clavdia Chauchat’s renewed departure from the society of those up here, including a respectful, considered farewell to her master’s surviving “brother” exchanged beneath the shadow cast by the tragedy of a great failure—ever since that turning point, it had seemed to the young man as if there were something uncanny about the world and life, as if there were something peculiar, something increasingly askew and disquieting about it, as if a demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained candor that he could instill in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing. The demon’s name was Stupor.
It will be said that the narrator is laying it on too thick, being too romantic in associating stupor with demonic forces, even ascribing to it some sort of mystic horror. And yet we are not fabricating tales here, but are keeping exactly to our prosaic hero’s personal experience—knowledge of which has been granted to us in ways that, to be sure, elude all investigation, but that plainly prove that under certain circumstances stupor can take on such character and instill such feelings. Hans Castorp looked around him—and what he saw was indeed uncanny and malicious. And he knew what it was he saw: life without time, without care or hope, life as a stagnating hustle-bustle of depravity, dead life.
It was a busy world, with all sorts of activities taking place concurrently; and every now and then, one of them would become the rage, a mania that conquered all else. Amateur photography had always played an important role in the world of the Berghof; but twice now—and we have lingered up here long enough to experience periodic reoccurrences of such epidemics—it had become a passion that made fools of everyone for weeks and months. There was not a soul who at some point had not bent his head down over a camera wedged in the pit of his stomach, made a worried face, and snapped the shutter. There was no end of prints to be passed around at meals. Suddenly it was a matter of honor to do one’s own developing. The darkrooms available did not come close to meeting the demand. The windows and balcony doors of rooms were hung with black curtains, and people dabbled with chemicals under red lights—until a fire broke out, and the Bulgarian student from the Good Russian table came within an inch of being reduced to ashes. A general prohibition decreed by sanatorium authorities followed. Simple snapshots were soon considered déclassé and color photography à la Lumière was the thing. They all reveled in pictures of people caught in the flash of magnesium, with vacant eyes staring dully from faces frozen in cramped expressions, as if the corpses of murder victims had been set up in chairs, eyes wide open. Even Hans Castorp kept a glass plate framed in cardboard, which, when held up to the light, showed him standing in a garish green woodland meadow, between Frau Stöhr and Fräulein Levi of the ivory complexion, the former in a sky-blue sweater, the latter in a blood-red one, his own face coppery against a field of pale yellow buttercups, one of which glowed in his buttonhole.
Then there was stamp collecting, which was always pursued by a few individuals, but occasionally ran rampant as a general obsession. Everyone pasted, haggled, traded. People subscribed to philatelic magazines, corresponded with special vendors, clubs, and private hobbyists, at home and abroad; and amazing sums were spent to purchase rare specimens, even by those whose budgets barely permitted them to stay at a deluxe sanatorium for months or years on end.
That would continue until the next fad took over—when, for instance, the collection and incessant consumption of chocolate in every conceivable form might become the fashion. Everyone had brown lips, and the most delicious productions of the Berghof kitchens were greeted by lethargic, carping gourmets, who had already stuffed and ruined their stomachs with Milka nougats,
chocolat à la crème d’amandes, Marquis napolitains,
and little “cat’s tongues” sprinkled with gold.
Sketching pigs with one’s eyes closed—introduced one long-ago Mardi Gras evening by a high-placed personage and enjoyed frequently since—had led to successive geometric teasers, which occasionally engaged the mental powers of all Berghof residents, even the last thoughts and energies of the moribund. Week after week, the sanatorium stood beneath the banner of an intricate figure composed of no less than eight large and small circles, plus several interlocked triangles. The task was to trace this polygram freehand, without ever lifting your pencil from the paper; the ultimate goal, however, was to accomplish this blindfolded—which in the end, apart from a few minor blemishes that were easily disregarded, was managed only by Prosecutor Paravant, the primary booster of such intellectual crazes.
We know that he studied mathematics—know it from the director himself—and recall the chaste motive behind his devotion to the discipline, whose cooling effects and ability to blunt the thorn in the flesh we have heard praised and whose more general rewards would probably have rendered unnecessary certain measures that the authorities had recently been forced to adopt. Chief among these had been the barricading of the passage from balcony to balcony—there where the milk-glass partitions did not quite reach the railing—with little doors that were locked at night by the bath attendant, amid general smirks and sniggers. Since then, demand had grown considerably for second-floor apartments, from where, after climbing over the railing, one could avoid the little doors and move from room to room by way of the projecting glass roof of the veranda below. These disciplinary reforms would certainly not have had to have been introduced on the prosecutor’s account. The severe temptation that had coincided with the arrival of his Egyptian Fatima had long since been overcome, was indeed the last of its sort to tax Paravant’s system. After that, he threw himself with redoubled fervor into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, about whose soothing powers Director Behrens had so many virtuous things to say; and the problem that consumed his every thought day and night, to which he devoted all the persistence, all the sportsman’s tenacity he had once brought to the conviction of poor sinners—back in the days before his frequently extended leave of absence, which now threatened to become permanent retirement—that problem was nothing less than the squaring of the circle.
In the course of his studies, this sidetracked civil servant had succeeded in convincing himself that the proofs science claimed substantiated the impossibility of this construction were invalid and that Providence had removed him, Paravant, from the world of the living below and brought him here, because it had chosen him to grab hold of that transcendent goal and drag it down into earthly realms of exact realization. That was what he was about. Wherever he went, he drew circles and made calculations, filled vast quantities of paper with figures, letters, numbers, and algebraic symbols; his tanned face, the face of an obviously unwell man, bore the visionary and mulish look of the monomaniac. He knew only one, dreadfully tedious topic of conversation: the ratio pi, that forlorn fraction, which a lesser genius of mental arithmetic named Zacharias Dase had once worked out to two hundred decimal places—a superfluous task, since even at two thousand places he would have had no greater prospect of approaching unattainable accuracy, indeed would not have been one whit closer to it. People fled before this tortured thinker, for whoever he managed to buttonhole was subjected to a passionate torrent of words intended to awaken a deeper sensitivity to the hopeless irrationality of this mystical ratio and to its shameful defilement of the human spirit. After pointlessly multiplying pi by diameter to find the circumference of innumerable circles, pi by the square of the radius to find their area, the prosecutor increasingly began to wonder if since the days of Archimedes humanity had not just been making the whole thing too complicated, if the solution to the problem was not childishly simple. What, you weren’t supposed to be able to rectify circumference, or turn any given straight line into a circle? At times Paravant thought he was close to a revelation. Of an evening, he was often seen in the deserted and dimly lit dining hall, still sitting at his place, a piece of string carefully laid out in a circle on the bare tabletop; suddenly he would reach out in a surprise attack and pull it straight, only to hunch over again, prop himself on his elbows, and sink into bitter brooding. The director occasionally lent Paravant a hand in his melancholy puttering, even encouraged him in the fixation. In his suffering, the prosecutor brought his sweet anguish to Hans Castorp one day, and came back again and again, for in him he found a friend, someone with understanding and sympathy for the mystery of the circle. He illustrated the despairs of pi for the young man with a precise, painfully executed drawing of a circle trapped between two polygons, circumscribing one, circumscribed by the other, each with as many countless tiny sides as it was humanly possible to draw. The rest, however, the curvature that by some ethereal, spiritual means escaped the calculable embrace that could turn it into a rational number—that, said the prosecutor, his jaw trembling, that was pi! Sensitive as he was, however, Hans Castorp proved less susceptible to pi than Paravant. He called it smoke and mirrors, advised the prosecutor not to take this little game of tag so seriously, not to get so overheated, and spoke of the elastic turning points of which every circle consists, from its nonexistent beginning to its imaginary end, mentioning as well the mirthful melancholy of eternity, which has no permanent direction and keeps coming back onto itself—and spoke with such serene religiosity that it had a brief calming effect on the prosecutor.