The Magic Mountain (125 page)
“Affidavit, translated from the Polish original: On 27 March 19—, Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski approached Herr Dr. Anton Cieszynski and Herr Stefan von Rosinski with the request to call upon Herr Kasimir Japoll in his name and to demand satisfaction from same in the manner prescribed by the law of honor for ‘gross insult and slander’ inflicted by Herr Kasimir Japoll upon Herr von Zutawski’s wife, Jadwiga von Zutawski, during a conversation with Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart and Herr Leo von Asarapetian.
“When only a few days ago, Herr von Zutawski learned of that aforesaid conversation, which took place toward the end of November, he promptly took timely steps to ascertain beyond doubt the full factual nature of the insult. Yesterday, 27 March 19—, the insult and slander were confirmed orally by Herr Leo von Asarapetian, a direct witness to said conversation, during the course of which those insulting words and insinuations were uttered; thereupon . Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski felt constrained to apply without delay to the undersigned and authorize them to begin proceedings as prescribed by the law of honor against Herr Kasimir Japoll.
“The undersigned wish to make the following statement:
“1. On the basis of an affidavit prepared by one party on 9 April I 9—summarizing the testimony given in Lemberg by Herr Zdzistaw Zygulski and Herr Tadeusz Kadyj concerning a suit brought by Herr Ladislaw Goduleczny against Herr Kasimir Japoll, and further on the basis of a decision rendered in that suit by the Court of Honor in Lemberg on 18 June 19—, both documents being in complete agreement in stating that Herr Kasimir Japoll ‘cannot be regarded as a gentleman as a result of repeated conduct that is irreconcilable with the definition of honor,’
“2. the undersigned, drawing full consequences from the aforementioned documents, declare it impossible for Herr Kasimir Japoll ever to be capable of affording satisfaction.
“3. For their part, they likewise consider it inadmissible to pursue any affair of honor, or to mediate therein, with a man who stands outside the definition of honor.
“4. In consideration of these facts, the undersigned wish to inform Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski that it would be pointless to pursue a suit against Herr Kasimir Japoll before a court of honor, and suggest he prosecute the matter in the criminal courts in order to prevent further insult from a person who is so fully incapable of providing satisfaction.” —Dated and signed: Dr. Anton Cieszynski, Stefan von Rosinski.” Further, Hans Castorp read:
“Affidavit
“of witnesses concerning events transpiring between Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski and Herr Michael Lodygowski, parties of the first part,
“and Herr Kasimir Japoll and Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart, parties of the second part, in the bar of the Kurhaus in Davos, on 2 April 19—, between 7:30 and 7:45 p.m.
“Inasmuch as Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski, having received and duly considered the declaration pertaining to the matter of Herr Kasimir Japoll, dated 28 March 19—and signed by his representatives, Herr Dr. Anton Cieszynski and Stefan Rosinski, had come to the conclusion that the suggested pursuit of criminal prosecution of Herr Kasimir Japoll for ‘gross insult and slander’ of his wife, Jadwiga, would provide him no satisfaction,
“1. since there was legitimate reason to believe that Herr Kasimir Japoll would not appear in court and that, Herr Japoll being a citizen of Austria, any further pursuit would not only be made more difficult, but indeed almost impossible as well, and
“2. since no legal sentence imposed could compensate for the insult Herr Kasimir Japoll had slanderously brought upon the name and house of Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski and his wife, Jadwiga,
“Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski chose the shortest, and in his considered opinion most thorough and, given the circumstances, most appropriate course of action, after having been indirectly informed that Herr Kasimir J apoll intended to leave the aforementioned town the following day,
“and therefore on 2 April 19—, between 7:30 and 7:45 p.m., in the presence of his wife, Jadwiga, Herr Michael Lodygowski, and Herr Ignaz von Mellin, administered several slaps to the face of Herr Kasimir Japoll, who was sitting and drinking alcoholic spirits with Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart and two unidentified young women in the American Bar of the Kurhaus.
“Immediately thereafter, Herr Michael Lodygowski also slapped Herr Kasimir Japoll, stating that this was in payment for the gross insult rendered to Fräulein Krylow and himself.
“Herr Michael Lodygowski then promptly slapped Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart for the objectionable injury he had done to Herr and Frau von Zutawski, whereupon,
“without a moment lost, Herr Stanislaw von Zutawski repeatedly delivered a series of slaps to the face of Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart for the latter’s slanderous defamation of both his wife, Jadwiga, and Fräulein Krylow.
“Herr Kasimir Japoll and Herr Janusz Teofil Lenart remained fully passive during the entire course of these events.” —Dated and signed: Michael Lodygowski, Ign. v. Mellin.”
Normally Hans Castorp would surely have laughed at this rapid-fire sequence of formal slaps, but his own inner state prevented that. He trembled as he read and was profoundly stirred by the rigid, but impressive antitheses so evident from the pages of these documents: impeccable deportment on the one side and rascally, disreputable laxness on the other. It was how they all felt. The Polish affair of honor was everywhere studied with great passion, and people clenched their teeth when they discussed it. A counterblast distributed by Herr Kasimir Japoll had a somewhat sobering effect, however, since it pointed out that von Zutawski had been perfectly aware that at one point some arrogant stuffed shirts in Lemberg had declared him, Japoll, incapable of providing satisfaction, and so all those prompt and timely measures had been merely for show, since von Zutawski had to have known from the start that it would never come to a duel. And he had also refrained from filing suit for one reason alone: because as he and everyone else knew perfectly well, his wife, Jadwiga, had provided him with a whole collection of horns, proof of which he, Japoll, could have effortlessly provided—nor, for that matter, would a court appearance by Fräulein Krylow have redounded to her honor. Moreover, only his, Japoll’s, inability to provide satisfaction had been confirmed in a court of law, not however that of Lenart, who had likewise taken part in said conversation; and so in hiding behind the court’s decision, von Zutawski had avoided any risk. He preferred not to say anything about Herr Asarapetian’s role in the whole affair. But as for the scene in the bar of the Kurhaus, he, Japoll, despite his wit and sharp tongue, was a man in very frail health; von Zutawski, his friend, and the unusually robust Frau von Zutawski, had had the physical advantage of him, particularly since the two young ladies, who had been in his and Lenart’s company, although very amusing creatures, were as easily frightened as chickens; and so in order to avoid an ugly brawl and public scandal, he had bidden Lenart, who had wanted to defend himself, to remain calm and for God’s sake simply to put up with this fleeting social contact with Herr von Zutawski and Herr Lodygowski, which had not hurt in any case and had been taken by those seated in the vicinity as a bit of friendly teasing.
That was Japoll—but there wasn’t much to salvage there. His revisions only superficially disturbed the pretty contrast of honor and shabbiness apparent in the affidavits of the opposing side, particularly since he did not have at his disposal the Zutawskian party’s duplicating machinery, but could only circulate a few typed carbon copies of his rejoinder. Everyone, however, received the affidavits, even people quite removed from the matter. Naphta and Settembrini, for example, had likewise been sent copies—Hans Castorp saw them in their hands, and noted to his surprise that they, too, examined them with sour and strangely intense faces. He had at least expected Herr Settembrini to respond with the jaunty mockery he had been unable to summon himself, given his own inner state. But the infection Hans Castorp knew was going round had even influenced the Freemason’s clear intellect, robbing him of his laughter, leaving him seriously vulnerable to the inflammatory charms of slaps exchanged in the name of honor; in addition, though he had his good days, which were more like teasing setbacks, the old affirmer of life had turned gloomy watching the inexorable deterioration in his health; feeling intensely ashamed, he cursed it and despised himself when it forced him to take to his bed every few days now.
His housemate and antagonist was doing no better. In Naphta’s organic interior, the illness that had been the physical cause—or, must we say, pretext—for the premature end to his career in the order was making rapid strides, and the elevated and spare conditions under which he lived could not arrest its spread. He, too, was often confined to bed; the cracked-porcelain sound in his voice rattled more loudly now when he spoke, and as his fever rose, he spoke more—and more caustically and cuttingly than ever. Those idealistic powers of resistance to illness and death, whose defeat by the overwhelming forces of base nature so pained Herr Settembrini, were absolutely alien to little Naphta; and his method for coping with the deterioration of his body was not sorrow and gloom, but scornful high spirits and an unparalleled aggressiveness, a mania for intellectual doubt, negation, and confusion, all of which severely aggravated the other man’s melancholy and daily intensified their intellectual arguments. Hans Castorp, of course, could only speak of those at which he was present. But he was fairly sure that he did not miss out on any that required the presence of a pedagogic object to ignite a meaningful colloquy. And although he did not spare Herr Settembrini, but let the Italian worry that he found Naphta’s malice worth listening to, he nevertheless had to admit that it was now out of control, indeed often went beyond the bounds of a sane, healthy mind.
This sick man possessed neither the energy nor the goodwill to rise above his sickness, but saw the world in its image, under its sign. To the fury of Herr Settembrini, who would have loved to have escorted his pupil from the room or at least to have held his ears shut, Naphta declared matter to be much too paltry a substance for the Spirit ever to be realized within it. The attempt was pure folly. What was the result? An ugly caricature. The real outcome of the vaunted French Revolution had been the capitalist bourgeois state—a fine how-do-you-do, which people hoped to improve upon by making the abomination universal. The world republic, that would certainly be a blessing! Progress? Ah, that was like the proverbial patient who keeps shifting in bed, hoping each new position will bring relief. The unadmitted, secret, universal desire for war was another manifestation. It would come, war would, and that was fine, although it would bring forth very different things from what its organizers expected. Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella above every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the
Titanic
was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. There was always immense outrage when “security” was threatened. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war! He was all for it—the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.
But the moment Herr Settembrini introduced the word “justice” into the conversation, recommending that high principle as the means by which to prevent catastrophes, both domestic and foreign, Naphta—who only a moment before had declared the spiritual as too good ever to find earthly expression worthy of it—endeavored to cast doubt on the very notion of the spiritual and to revile it. Justice—was that a concept worthy of our adoration? Something divine? An idea of the first order? God and nature were both unjust, they had their favorites, chose to be gracious at random, adorned one man with precarious honors and the next with an easy, but ordinary fate. And for the man who would act? For him justice was, on the one hand, a paralyzing weakness, the very essence of doubt, and on the other hand, it was a trumpet call to reckless deeds. In order to remain within the sphere of morality, man was constantly correcting one meaning of “justice” with the other—so how could there be anything absolute and radical about the concept? And in any case, one was “just” either on the basis of one given standpoint
or
on the basis of the other. The rest was liberalism, and no one was going to fall for that nowadays. Justice was, of course, one more empty husk of bourgeois rhetoric, and in order to act one first had to know, above all else, which justice was meant: the one that gave every man his due, or the one that was meted out equally to all.
We have lifted one example, quite at random, from among his infinite attempts to rupture reason. But things got even worse when he turned to science—in which he did not believe. He did not believe in it, he said, for every man was perfectly free to believe in it or not. It was a faith like any other, only worse and more obtuse than all the rest; and the word “science” itself was the expression of the most stupid sort of realism, which did not blush at taking at face value the dubious reflections that objects left on the human mind and seeing them as the basis for the most dismal and vapid dogma anyone ever foisted on humanity. Was not the very idea of a world of senses that existed in and of itself the most ridiculous of all possible self-contradictions? But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognize and organize reality—space, time, causality—reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge. That monistic claim was the most naked piece of effrontery the Spirit had ever had to endure. Space, time, and causality—in monistic terms that meant evolution. And there you had the central dogma of atheistic freethinkers and their pseudo-religion, which presumed to abolish the Book of Genesis and replace it with a stultifying fable of enlightened knowledge, as if Haeckel had been present at the creation of the earth. Empiricism? The ether of space—that was exact, was it? The atom, that nice little mathematical joke, “the smallest, indivisible particle”—proved, was it? The theory of infinite space and time—that was definitely based on experience, was it? Indeed, with just a modicum of logic, one could achieve very amusing results from the dogma of infinite space and time—to wit: nothing. To wit, the insight that realism was true nihilism. And why? For the simple reason that in relation to infinity any given unit of mass approached zero. There was no size in infinity, and no duration or change in eternity, either. In infinite space, given that every distance is the mathematical equivalent of zero, there could be no two adjacent points, let alone a body, let alone movement. He, Naphta, asserted this to counter the impudence with which materialistic science passed off as absolute knowledge all its astronomical bunkum and windy palaver about the “universe.” We ought to pity a humanity that had let a tawdry array of flimsy numbers compel it to believe in its own nothingness, that had allowed itself to be deprived of the pathos of its own importance. For although it might be tolerable if human reason and knowledge held themselves within earthly bounds and treated the subject-object experience as real within that sphere, the moment it reached out into the eternal riddle, into so-called cosmology or cosmogony, the joke was over, and presumptuousness had achieved the acme of monstrosity. What blasphemous nonsense, ultimately, to measure the “distance” of some star or other from the earth in trillions of miles or even light-years and to imagine that by the ruse of numbers you had given the human spirit an insight into the nature of infinity and eternity—when infinity had absolutely nothing to do with size, nor eternity with duration and distances in time, had nothing in common with the notions of natural science, were the abrogation of what we meant by the word “nature.” Indeed, the child’s simple belief that stars were holes in the tent of heaven through which eternal brightness shone was many thousand times dearer to his heart than all the empty, absurd, and presumptuous babble about the “cosmos” perpetrated by monistic science.