The Magic Mountain (121 page)

“Yes,” came the answer. But they now discovered the extent of their perplexity—what should they ask? It was like one of those fairy tales where the genie or fairy grants a wish and you risk wasting the opportunity on something useless. So many things in the present and future world seemed worth knowing, and you had to be responsible about choosing. And since no one else could decide, Hans Castorp rested his left cheek on his clenched fist and, one finger still on the glass, said he would like to know how long his stay up here was going to last yet, since he had originally come for only three weeks.

Fine, no one else had anything better, so let the spirit share this arbitrary item from the fullness of its knowledge. After a brief hesitation, the glass moved. It moved along a very peculiar path, a random pattern, so it appeared, in which no one saw rhyme or reason. It spelled out the word “go” and then “across,” which no one could really make much of, and then it moved to say something about Hans Castorp’s room, so that the laconic advice for the questioner read “go across his room.” Across his room? Across room 34? What was that supposed to mean? And as they sat there, shaking their heads and discussing this, there was the sudden thump of a fist against the door.

They all froze. Was it a raid? Was Dr. Krokowski standing out there ready to break up their forbidden meeting? They stared at one another in chagrin, waiting for the outmaneuvered assistant to enter. But then came a bang from the middle of the table, another thump of a fist, as if to make clear that the first knock, too, had not come from the hall, but from inside the room.

It had been Herr Albin, one of his crude jokes! But he denied it, on his honor; and even had he not given them his word, they were all as good as certain that no one from their group had delivered the blow. So it had been Holger? They looked to Elly, whose total tranquility had suddenly become obvious to them all. She was sitting there with limp wrists, her fingertips barely touching the table’s edge, her back against her chair, her head tilted to one shoulder; her eyebrows were raised, but her little mouth was smaller than ever, drawn downward, but with a hint of a smile that looked both innocent and sly; and her blue childlike eyes were gazing off into space, seeing nothing. They called to her, but not once did she show any sign of consciousness. In that same moment, the lamp on the nightstand went out.

Went out? There was no holding Frau Stöhr back now, she raised a hue and cry—she had heard the switch. The bulb had not burned out, it had been turned off, by a hand, which to describe as
strange
would be to put it mildly. Was it Holger’s hand? He had been so gentle, so disciplined, and poetic up till then; but now he was degenerating into a low practical jokester. Who could guarantee that a hand that banged its fist against doors and furniture, that impishly switched off lights, might not also pack someone by the throat? Voices in the dark called out for matches, for flashlights. Fräulein Levi screeched that someone had pulled her hair. In her panic, Frau Stöhr was not ashamed of breaking into prayer. “Oh Lord, just this once!” she screamed and then whimpered for Him to be more merciful than just, even though they had been flirting with hell. It was Dr. Ting-Fu who came up with the sound idea of turning on the ceiling light—and at once the room was bathed in bright clarity. And while they established that the nightstand lamp had not burned out but had been turned off—it took only a very human flip of the switch to undo the covert maneuver and make it burn again—Hans Castorp quietly made a surprising discovery of his own, which might be seen as evidence that the childish dark powers manifesting themselves here had paid him particular attention. Across his knees was an object, the “souvenir” that had frightened his uncle the day he had picked it up off his nephew’s chest of drawers: the glass negative that revealed the portrait of Clavdia Chauchat’s interior and that he, Hans Castorp, had most definitely not brought into the room.

He put it in his pocket without any fuss. The others were busy with Ellen Brand, whose pose had not changed—she was still sitting in her chair, staring vacantly ahead, a strangely affected expression on her face. Herr Albin blew on her and imitated Dr. Krokowski’s gesture, that casual upward fanning of the hand in front of her face, which roused her. She began—who knew why?—to weep softly. They petted her, comforted her, kissed her brow, and sent her to bed.Fräulein Levi declared she was willing to spend the night with Frau Stöhr, since that limited lady was so frightened that she did not know how she could ever go to sleep. Hans Castorp, his apported object in his breast pocket, had no objection to ending an evening gone awry over a cognac shared with the other gentlemen in Herr Albin’s room, for he found that the effect of events like these was not as hard on his heart or mind as on his stomach—and the effect lasted, too, like that nauseating sway that seasick people claim they can still feel for hours after they have set foot on land.

His curiosity was satisfied for now. Holger’s poem had really not been bad, but, as he had suspected, the hopelessness and preposterousness of the whole affair had borne down upon him so forcefully that even those few flakes of brimstone that had drifted his way were quite sufficient, he decided. When Hans Castorp told Herr Settembrini about his experiences, his mentor, as might be imagined, reinforced him in this resolve with might and main. “That,” he cried, “was all you needed. Oh, calamity and desolation!” And on the spot he declared little Elly to be a cunning fraud.

His pupil did not say yes or no to that. He shrugged and observed that since reality could not be determined beyond the shadow of a doubt, neither, then, could fraud. Perhaps the boundaries were fluid. Perhaps there were transitional stages between the two, degrees of reality within nature, which, being mute, could not be evaluated and thus eluded a determination that, as he saw it, had something very moralistic about it. What did Herr Settembrini think of the term “illusion”—a state in which elements of dream and reality were blended in a way that was perhaps less foreign to nature than to our crude everyday thoughts? The secret of life was literally bottomless, and it was no wonder, then, that occasionally there rose up out of it illusions that—and so on and so forth, in our hero’s amiably self-effacing and exceedingly easy manner.

Herr Settembrini hauled him over the coals quite properly and managed to firm up his conscience at least temporarily, extracting something like a promise never again to participate in such horrors. “Pay attention,” he demanded, “to the human being inside you, my good engineer. Trust its clear and humane thoughts and abhor this wrenching of the brain, this intellectual swamp. Illusions? Secret of life?
Caro mio!
When the moral courage to decide and differentiate between fraud and reality begins to melt away, that marks the end of life itself, of formed opinions, of values, of any improving deed, and the corruptive process of moral skepticism begins its awful work.” Man was the measure of all things, he added. Man had an inalienable right to make knowledgeable judgments about good and evil, about truth and the sham of lies, and woe to anyone who dared confound his fellowman’s belief in that creative right. It would be better a millstone were hung about his neck and he were drowned in the deepest well.

Hans Castorp nodded in agreement and for a while did indeed keep his distance from such activities. He heard that Dr. Krokowski was holding sessions with Ellen Brand in his analytical basement, to which selected residents were invited. But he calmly refused to participate—though, of course, not without learning this and that from the attendees and from Dr. Krokowski himself. There had been fierce, involuntary manifestations of energy much like those that had occurred in Hermine Kleefeld’s room; at such meetings, Comrade Krokowski would use his skill to hypnotize little Elly, putting her into a waking trance, and then, under all possible safeguards of authenticity, systematically obtain and cultivate phenomena: the turning on and off of lights, hangings on tables and walls, and much, much more. It had turned out that musical accompaniment facilitated these exercises, and so on such evenings the gramophone would be confiscated by this magical fellowship and moved from its usual place. But since Wenzel the Bohemian, a man of musical sensitivities, who would certainly never mishandle or damage the instrument, was in charge on these occasions, Hans Castorp could hand it over with reasonable equanimity. From the treasury of disks, he assembled a special album, a collection of light favorites, dances, short overtures, and other such folderol, which he made available to them and which admirably served the purpose, since Elly had no need of more sublime tones.

To these strains, then, or so Hans Castorp was told, a handkerchief had spontaneously sprung into action, or better, had risen from the floor, controlled by a “claw” hidden within its folds; the doctor’s wastepaper basket had ascended to the ceiling and hovered there; the pendulum of a wall clock had been alternately held back by “no one” and then set in motion again; a serving bell had been “picked up” and rung—a whole series of these and other murky, trivial goings-on. The learned conductor of these experiments was put in the happy situation of supplying a Greek name, replete with scientific decorum, to these feats. They were, so he explained in lectures and private conversations, “telekinetic” events, movements of objects from place to place; the doctor included them in a range of phenomena that science had baptized with the name of “materialization,” and it was to these events that all his aspirations were directed in his experiments with Ellen Brand.

In his jargon, they were dealing with biopsychic projections of subconscious complexes into the objective world, processes whose source one should attribute to the medium, a person whose constitution was in a somnambulant state; one might speak of such events as objectified dreams to the extent that they demonstrated an ideoplastic capability in nature—the capacity of thoughts, under certain conditions, to assume substance and thus reveal themselves in ephemeral reality. This substance could then stream from the medium and temporarily congeal outside his or her body to form biologically living organs, which served as grasping mechanisms, the hands that performed those astonishing trifles they had all witnessed in Dr. Krokowski’s laboratory. Under some conditions, these mechanisms were visible and palpable, left their imprint in paraffin or plaster of Paris. Under certain other conditions, however, the formation of organs did not have to end there. Heads, individual human countenances, phantoms in full figure might materialize before the eyes of the experimenters, even engage in intercourse with them, within certain limits. But here Dr. Krokowski’s teachings began to get blurry, a little cross-eyed, to take on an ambiguous, irresolute character that would have been suitable to his gushings on “love.” For at this point he no longer spoke with a clearly scientific mien. It was no longer a simple case of lending assistance to the medium’s subjectivity so that it might find a mirror in reality, but rather—at least partially, at least tentatively—certain “selves” from outside, from beyond, got mixed up in things; what they were dealing with—possibly, though never expressly admitted—were nonvital elements, entities that used the convoluted, furtive opportunity of the moment to return to matter and manifest themselves to whoever called them—in short, the spiritualistic conjuring of the dead.

Such were the results, then, that Comrade Krokowski worked hard to produce with the help of his followers. With a rugged, pithy smile he cheerfully bade them trust him as he strove to make them feel at home in these swampy, suspicious, and subhuman regions, enjoined them to see in his stout person a true leader, even for the timid and those dubious about such matters. And thanks to Ellen Brand’s extraordinary talents, which he had made it his business to develop and cultivate, success smiled on him—to judge from everything Hans Castorp heard. Various participants had been touched by materialized hands. Prosecutor Paravant had been given a hefty slap on the cheek from the transcendent world, and had received it with scientific amusement, had even eagerly turned the other cheek—despite his being a cavalier, lawyer, and alumnus of a dueling fraternity, all of which would have demanded quite different conduct had the blow’s origin been from the world of the living. A. K. Ferge, the simple martyr to whom all higher things were foreign, had held such a ghostly hand in his own hand one evening and had determined by touch that it was well formed and whole, whereupon, by some means he could not quite describe, it had withdrawn itself from his grip, which though hearty had been quite within the bounds of respect. It took a good while, some two and a half months, with two sittings per week, until a hand of otherworldly origins appeared for all to see, a young man’s hand—or so it seemed under the reddish light of a ceiling lamp covered with red paper—that fingered its way across the tabletop and left traces in an earthen bowl of flour. But only eight days later, a group of Dr. Krokowski’s assistants—Herr Albin, Frau Stöhr, Herr and Frau Magnus—appeared around midnight on Hans Castorp’s balcony, where he had lain dozing in the biting chill; and with all the signs of distracted excitement and feverish delight, they told him in a hasty jumble of voices that Elly’s Holger had let himself be seen, had shown his head above the shoulder of that somnambulant lady—and he really did have “beautiful brown, brown locks”—and had smiled an unforgettably gentle and melancholy smile before vanishing.

How did such noble sadness square with the rest of Holger’s behavior, Hans Castorp wondered, with his unimaginative childish pranks and silly practical jokes, with that unmelancholy slap, for example, to which the prosecutor had been subjected? One apparently could not demand consistency and unity of character in this case. Perhaps they were dealing with a temperament similar to that of the miserable, hunchbacked man of the folk song, who in his wickedness begged for people’s prayers. Holger’s admirers seemed not to be troubled by any of it. What they cared about was convincing Hans Castorp to renounce his abstinence. He absolutely had to take part in the next session, now that everything was going so splendidly. For Elly had promised in her trance that next time she would produce any deceased person that the group might demand to see.