The Magic Mountain (116 page)

“The newest model,” said the director, who now entered the room. “The latest achievement, children, top-notch, A-1, nothing better in the warehouse.” He said this last with an impossible, comic twist, the way some poorly educated salesman might have praised the item. “This is no apparatus, no machine,” he went on, extracting a needle from one of the colorful tin boxes set out on the table and screwing it into place, “this is an instrument, this is a Stradivarius, a Guarneri—you’ll hear resonances and vibrations of vintage
raffinemang
. It’s a Polyhymnia, as we are informed here inside the lid. German-made, you see—we make far and away the best. Music most faithful, in its modern, mechanical form. The German soul, up-to-date. There’s the library,” he said and pointed toward a cupboard with rows of broad-backed albums. “I hereby entrust its magic to the public, to be enjoyed at leisure, though I likewise commend it to your tender care. Shall we give a disk a try, let her rip and roar?”

The patients implored him to do so, and Behrens pulled out one of the mute books laden with hidden magic, turned the heavy pages, the colorful titles visible through circular openings, extracted a disk from one of the pockets, and put it on. He flipped the switch that sent current to the turntable, waited two seconds until it had reached top speed, and carefully set the fine steel point down on the rim of the disk. A soft sound, like someone whetting a stone, was heard. He lowered the lid, and in the same moment from between the louvers at the open double doors—no, from the whole chest itself—a bustling, merry instrumental din burst forth, an insistent noisy melody, the first bars of a toe-tapping Offenbach overture.

They listened, mouths open and smiling. They could not believe their ears—how pure and natural the trills of the woodwinds sounded. A violin, in solo, offered a fanciful prelude. They could hear the bowing, the tremolo in the fingers as they slid sweetly from one position to the next and found their melody, a waltz, “
Ach, ich habe sie verloren.
” The harmonies of the orchestra picked up the easy strains and bore them on—and it was simply ravishing the way the whole ensemble repeated it now in a sweeping tutti. Naturally it was not the same as if a real orchestra were giving a concert in the room. The body of sound, though not in any way distorted, had suffered a diminution in perspective; it was, if one may use a visual comparison for an audible phenomenon, as if one were gazing at a painting through the wrong end of opera glasses, so that it looked distant and small, but without forfeiting any definition of line or brilliance of color. The piece was clever, tight, tingly, and was reproduced here in all its witty, giddy invention. It came to a perfectly rollicking close, a droll galop that after a brief hesitation became a shameless cancan, evoking visions of top hats flung into the air, of flying skirts and bouncing knees, and its comic, triumphant ending seemed to have no end. Then the turntable stopped all on its own. It was over. Heartfelt applause.

They called for more and got it: a human voice came from the cabinet, a male voice, both gentle and forceful, accompanied by an orchestra, a celebrated Italian baritone—and now there could be no talk of any diminution or distancing. The splendid vocal organ swelled to its full natural range and power, and indeed if you walked into an adjoining room, leaving the doors open but staying out of the line of sight, it was exactly as if the artist were physically present, as if he were standing there in the salon singing, music in hand. He sang a showpiece aria in his own language—
eh, il barbiere. Di qualità, di qualità! Figaro qua, Figaro là, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!
The audience almost died laughing at his
parlando falsetto
, at the contrast between this bear of a voice and his talent for tongue twisters. Ears more expert could follow and admire the art of his phrasing and his breathing technique. A master of the irresistible effect, a virtuoso in his native
aria da capo
, he held the penultimate note before the resolution—moving downstage now, or so it seemed, one hand thrust into the air—held it so long that they broke into polite bravos before he had finished. It was exquisite.

And there was more. A French horn executed lovely, discreet variations on a folk song. With the most charming, cool precision in her staccato, a soprano warbled and trilled an aria from
La Traviata
. The ghost of a world-famous violinist played as if behind veils, accompanied by a piano with the arid sound of a spinet—a romance by Rubinstein. From the gently simmering chest of wonders came the peal of bells, the glissando of harps, the blare of trumpets, the roll of drums. Finally, some dance records were put on. There were even copies of the latest imports—tangos, born in the dives of a port city and destined to turn the waltz into a dance for grandpas. Two couples who had learned the fashionable step now took to the carpet and showed it off for the others. After a final admonition to use each needle only once and to treat the disks “the way you would raw eggs,” Behrens had retired for the evening. Hans Castorp now operated the machine.

And why him? He had managed it as follows. After the director had departed, a small group formed to take over the task of changing records and needles, of turning the switch off and on; he abruptly walked up to them, said, “Let me do that,” in a subdued voice, and pushed them aside. They yielded, unruffled—first, because his expression seemed to say that he had years of experience at this, and second, because they were much less interested in occupying themselves at the source of this new pleasure than in letting someone serve it up to them in comfort, just so long as they didn’t get bored.

Not so Hans Castorp. He had stood quietly in the background while the director demonstrated this new acquisition; and although he had not laughed or shouted bravo, he had followed the performances intently, twirling one eyebrow between two fingers, an occasional habit of late. There was something restless about the way he had changed position several times behind the others’ backs, first walking into the library to listen from there, and then later stepping up to Behrens, his hands behind his back, a reserved look on his face, to take a closer look at the cabinet and ask about its basic functions. Somewhere inside him a voice said: “Wait! Look out! An epoch begins! For me!” He was filled with the very definite premonition of a new passion and enchantment, a new burden of love. What he felt was no different from what a lad in the flatlands feels when he casts that first glance at a girl and Cupid’s barbed arrow unexpectedly pierces his heart. And suddenly there was jealousy in each of Hans Castorp’s strides. Public property? Flaccid curiosity has no right to property, no strength for ownership. “Let me do that,” he had said between clenched teeth, and they were quite content to let him. They danced a little longer to the casual pieces he played, and demanded another vocal number, an opera duet, the “Barcarole” from
The Tales of Hoffmann
, which sounded sweet enough to their ears. When he closed the lid, they departed for the peace of rest cure, chatting in fleeting excitement as they went. They left everything behind just as it was—the open box of needles, albums and disks strewn about. How like them. He pretended to join them, but quietly left the crowd on the stairs, came back to the music room, closed the doors, and stayed there half the night, hard at work.

He familiarized himself with the new acquisition; with no one to disturb him now, he examined the treasury of works that came with it, inspected the contents of the heavy albums. There were twelve in all, in two different formats, twelve records to each; and since many of the circular disks were minutely etched on both sides—not simply because many pieces required two sides, but also because a good number of them offered two different selections—it was difficult at first to get an overview of this confusing world of beautiful possibilities waiting to be conquered. Trying not to disturb the nighttime silence, he made use of certain needles that sat more lightly on the disks and thus dampened the sound. He played a good twenty-five disks, but that was barely an eighth of the temptations offered on all sides. Just a scan of the tides had to suffice for now, though from time to time he would select one at random and insert yet another example of these mute engravings into the cabinet and turn it into sound. The labels in the middle of the ebonite disks were different colors, but otherwise the eye could not differentiate them. Each looked like the other, each was filled to the center, or almost to the center, with a dense pattern of concentric circles; and yet this delicate tracery contained more sound than one could imagine, exquisite renditions of the happiest inspirations from every domain of the art of music.

There were a lot of overtures and single movements from the world of lofty symphonies, played by famous orchestras under well-known directors. He found a long list of lieder, too, sung to piano accompaniment by artists from the great opera houses—both those composed out of conscious, sublime, personal art, and simple folk songs, plus those that fell somewhere in the middle, as it were, which were products of the intellect and yet written with a genuinely profound, devout understanding of a given national spirit—artistic folk songs, if one may put it that way, with no implication of compromised sincerity in the word “artistic.” There was one in particular that Hans Castorp had known since childhood, for which he now developed a mysterious, multifaceted love and of which we shall speak later. And what else was there, or better, what wasn’t there? There was opera in every shape and form. To discreet orchestral accompaniment, a veritable international chorus of celebrated singers, male and female, put their highly trained, God-given talents to good use in arias, duets, ensemble scenes from all the many epochs and genres of musical theater: the Mediterranean bel canto, captivating in both its lighthearted and noble forms; a German world of folklore, rogues, and demons; French opera, grand and comic. And was that it, then? Oh, no. There was a chamber music series: quartets and trios; instrumental solos for violin, cello, and flute; concert pieces with violin or flute obligato; solo piano works. Not to mention simpler amusements—music-hall numbers, topical songs, melodies recorded by small dance orchestras that required a coarser needle to do them justice.

All alone and very busy, Hans Castorp sorted and arranged, surrendering a small number of the disks to the instrument, which awakened them to sonorous life. It was at about the same late hour as on that first night of revels with Pieter Peeperkorn of majestic, brotherly memory when he finally went to bed, his head hot and flushed; and from two to seven o’clock he dreamed of his magic box. In his dream he saw the turntable whirling around its spindle, so fast it became invisible, inaudible, not simply rotating wildly in place, but moving in a strange lateral undulation so that the arm beneath which it turned began to oscillate supplely, as if it were breathing—very useful, one might suppose, for the vibrato and portamento of strings and human voices. And yet in his dreams, no less than when he was awake, Hans Castorp was unable to comprehend it: how could these rich combinations of harmony now filling his sleeping ear be re-created simply by tracing a line, fine as a human hair, above an acoustic chamber, assisted only by the vibrating membrane in the sound-box?

He was back again in the salon early the next morning, before breakfast even; sitting down in an armchair and folding his hands in his lap, he let a splendid baritone sing to him from the cabinet: “
Blick’ ich umher in diesem edlen Kreise.
” And along with the swelling, breathing, articulating male voice, there came the natural sound of a harp accompaniment, absolutely authentic, not diminished in the least—perfectly amazing. And then Hans Castorp followed this with a duet from a modern Italian opera; and there could be nothing on earth more tender than the demure, intense mingling of emotions between a world-famous tenor, who was well represented in the albums, and a little soprano with a voice sweet and clear as glass—than his “
Da’ mi il braccio, mia piccina,
” and her answering melodic phrase, so simple, sweet, and succinct.

Hans Castorp flinched as the door opened at his back. It was the director, who was checking on him; dressed in his clinical smock, a stethoscope peeking out of his breast pocket, Behrens stood there for a moment with one hand on the door handle and nodded to this new “lab assistant,” who responded with a nod over his shoulder. The boss’s purple-cheeked face and skewed moustache vanished as he pulled the door to behind him, and Hans Castorp turned back to his pair of invisible lyric lovers.

Later that day, after both the noon meal and supper, there were other listeners, a constantly changing audience—that is if you did not count Hans Castorp himself as part of the audience but as the dispenser of these pleasures. He was himself inclined to this latter view, and his fellow residents granted him as much, at least in the sense that, from the very beginning, they silently acquiesced in his determined self-appointment as administrator and custodian of this public facility. It cost them nothing; for apart from the superficial thrills of listening to their idolized tenor wallow in molten splendor, to a voice surging in a cantabile that blessed the world with the high arts of passion—apart from such thrills, they had no love for the instrument and were quite willing to let anyone who liked take care of it. It was Hans Castorp, then, who kept the treasured disks in order, writing the contents of each album on the inside of its cover so that every piece was immediately accessible upon request, and who operated the instrument itself—they soon noticed how deftly and gently he went about it once he had some practice. And how would the others have treated it? They would have ruined the records by playing them with used needles and leaving them lying around just anywhere on chairs, would have used the apparatus for stupid jokes like playing some sublime piece with the dial set at a speed of 110 or 0, yielding hysteric tweets or intermittent groans. They had already done it. They might be ill, but they were crude. And that was why within a very short time, Hans Castorp simply pocketed the key to the cupboard containing the albums and needles and had to be called if someone wanted to play records.