The Magic Mountain (128 page)
And so with mixed and unsettled feelings and thoughts, and by the twilight of slowly approaching dawn, he sought out the very narrow path that started at the end of the bobsled run in Dorf; he climbed the slope, reached the woods drifted full with snow, crossed the wooden bridge beneath which the run passed, and set out between the tree trunks, trudging along a path fashioned more by footsteps than by a shovel. He was moving quickly and soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, the latter carrying the pistol-case in one hand under his cape. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and no sooner was he alongside than he spotted Naphta and Wehsal only a short distance ahead.
“Cold morning, at least zero,” he said with every good intention; but then, alarmed at the frivolity of his words, he added, “Gentlemen, I am convinced that . . .”
The others did not respond. Ferge let his good-natured moustache bob up and down. After a while Settembrini stopped, grasped Hans Castorp’s hand, laid his own other hand atop it, and said, “My friend, I will not kill. I will not. I shall offer myself to his bullet, that is all honor demands of me. But I will not kill, you may be assured of that.”
He let go and walked on. Hans Castorp was deeply moved. After a few steps, however, he said, “That is a marvelously beautiful thing for you to do, Herr Settembrini. Except, there is the other side. What if he, for his part . . . ?”
Herr Settembrini only shook his head. And after thinking about it, Hans Castorp decided that if the Italian did not shoot, then his opponent could not possibly dare do otherwise, and so decided that things looked promising, that his assumptions were apparently about to be confirmed. He felt a weight being lifted from his heart.
They crossed the footbridge leading over the gorge where the waterfall, now rigid and mute, would plunge come summer, lending the spot much of its picturesque quality. Naphta and Wehsal were pacing back and forth in front of the bench, covered now with thick white pillows of snow, but on which, while waiting for a nosebleed to end, Hans Castorp had once relived uncommonly vivid memories. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp asked himself whether he would like to do the same and, finding that he had not the least desire, decided this had to be an affectation on Naphta’s part. He looked around him now, delighting as always in this boldly intimate spot, which even under these icy conditions was no less beautiful than during the season of blue blossoms. The trunk and branches of the spruce that jutted at an angle across the scene were laden with snow.
“Good morning,” he wished them in a cheery voice, hoping his words would lend a natural tone to the gathering and help banish all evil—but with no success, for no one replied. The exchange of greetings consisted of mute bows, so stiff they were practically indiscernible. All the same, he remained determined to put to immediate good effect the bustle of arrival, the hearty billowing of his breath in the cold air, the warmth of his quick walk in the winter morning.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “I am convinced that . .
“You will have to elaborate on your convictions some other time,” Naphta said, coldly cutting him off. “The weapons, please, if I may ask,” he added with the same arrogance. And a dumbfounded Hans Castorp had to watch as Ferge pulled the dreadful case from under his cape. Wehsal now walked over to receive one of the pistols from him and then passed it on to Naphta. Settembrini accepted the other one from Ferge’s hand. Then a space had to be cleared; Ferge muttered for them to move aside and began to pace off the distances and make them visible: the outer boundaries he marked by digging his heel into the snow, the inner limits with two canes, his own and Settembrini’s.
The good-natured martyr, what was he up to there? Hans Castorp could not believe his eyes. Ferge was a long-legged man and he stepped it off properly, so that the fifteen paces at least became a handsome distance, although there were also those two damned cane barriers—which were not far apart at all. To be sure, he meant well. And yet what befuddlement compelled him to make preparations of such monstrous significance?
Naphta, who had cast his coat aside in the snow so that the mink lining was visible, started walking, pistol in hand, toward the outer heel mark as soon as it was drawn, before Ferge was even done with the other lines. Once they were marked off, Settembrini also took up his position, letting his frayed beaver-trimmed jacket hang open. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of his paralysis and quickly stepped forward once again.
“Gentlemen,” he said, disconcerted, “let’s not be hasty. Above all else, it is my duty—”
“Be quiet,” Naphta shouted piercingly. “I want the signal.”
But no one gave the signal. They had not arranged that part well. Someone was supposed to say, “Go!”—except no one had recalled that it was the neutral party’s task to issue this dreadful invitation, or at least no one had mentioned it. Hans Castorp remained silent and no one jumped in to take his place.
“We shall begin,” Naphta declared. “Advance, sir, and shoot,” he called across to his opponent and began to advance himself as well, his pistol held out chest-high at arm’s length and directed at Settembrini—an incredible sight.
Settembrini did the same. After taking his third step—Naphta had already reached the cane barrier, without firing—he raised his pistol high in the air and squeezed the trigger. The crack of the shot raised echoes all around. The mountains reverberated, the valley boomed with it, and Hans Castorp was certain it would bring people running.
“You shot into the air,” Naphta said, controlling his temper and letting his own pistol sink.
Settembrini replied, “I shoot in whatever direction I choose.”
“You shall fire again!”
“I wouldn’t think of it. It’s your turn.” Lifting his head to gaze at the heavens, Herr Settembrini turned somewhat to one side instead of facing directly ahead—it was a touching sight. It was obvious he had been told one should not offer one’s foe a fully exposed chest and was obeying instructions.
“Coward!” Naphta screamed, conceding with this very human cry that it requires more courage to shoot than to be shot at, raised his pistol to a position that had nothing to do with the duel, and shot himself in the head.
What a sorry, unforgettable sight! As the mountains played catch with the sharp crack of his awful deed, he staggered or stumbled a few steps backward, his legs slipping out in front of him, flung his whole body around in one complete turn to the right, and fell on his face in the snow.
They all stood there frozen in place for a moment. Hurling his gun to one side, Settembrini was the first to reach him.
“
Infelice!
” he cried. “
Che cosa fai per l’amor di Dio!
”
Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They could see the blackish-red hole at the temple. They looked into a face that it was best to cover with a silk handkerchief; they used the one dangling from Naphta’s breast pocket.
Hans Castorp remained with “those up here” for seven years—no round number for devotees of the decimal system, and yet a good, handy number in its way, a mythic, romantic bundle of time, one might say, more satisfying to the soul than a plain half-dozen. He had sat at all seven tables in the dining hall, spending approximately a year at each. At the end, his place was at the Bad Russian table, along with two Armenians, two Finns, one Bukharan, and one Kurd. There he sat, sporting a little beard that he had let grow by then, a blond goatee, the color of straw and of rather indefinite shape, which we are forced to interpret as a sign of a certain philosophical indifference to his appearance. Yes, we might go even further and see some connection between his tendency to neglect his own person and a similar attitude on the part of the outside world toward him. Medical authority had ceased to invent diversions for him. Except for the question each morning whether he had slept “well,” which, however, was purely rhetorical in nature and summarily posed, the director no longer addressed him all that often, and even Adriatica von Mylendonk (who had a sty ripe for lancing at the time of which we speak) did not speak to him for days at a time. Indeed, to be exact, they spoke seldom, almost never. People left him in peace—rather like a student who enjoys the peculiarly amusing situation of no longer being asked questions, of not having to do any work, because the decision has already been made to hold him back and so he is no longer in the running—an orgiastic sort of freedom, we may add, while asking ourselves whether there can be freedom of any other sort. In any case, here was a man whom medical authority no longer needed to keep under its watchful eye, because it was certain that no wild and defiant decisions would ever ripen in his breast—a dependable man, here for good and all, who had long since lost track of where else he might go, who was no longer even capable of forming the thought of a return to the flatlands. Did not the simple fact that he had been transferred to the Bad Russian table express a certain carelessness about his person? By which we do not mean to cast any aspersions whatever against the so-called Bad Russian table. There were no tangible advantages or disadvantages to one or another of the seven. It was a democracy of banquet tables, to put it bluntly. The same prodigious meals were also served at the so-called Bad Russian table; moving in rotation, even Rhadamanthus folded his gigantic hands before his plate there; and the people of several nations who dined at it were honorable members of humanity, even if they did not understand Latin and were not excessively dainty about their table manners.
Time—not the sort that train station clocks measure with a large hand that jerks forward every five minutes, but more like the time of a very small watch whose hands move without our being able to notice, or the time grass keeps as it grows without our eyes’ catching its secret growth, until the day comes when the fact is undeniable—time, a line composed of elastic turning points (and here the late, ill-fated Naphta would presumably have asked how purely elastic points can ever begin to form a line), time, then, had continued to bring forth changes in its furtive, unobservable, secret, and yet bustling way. The boy named Teddy, to take just one example, was no longer a boy one day—though of course that did not happen “one day,” but emerged out of some quite indefinite day. The ladies could no longer set him on their laps on those occasions when he left his bed, exchanged his pajamas for a sporty outfit, and came downstairs. The tables were turned, and no one had noticed. He now set them on his lap on such occasions, which both parties found just as delightful, even more so. He had—we won’t say blossomed, but rather—sprouted into a young man. Hans Castorp had not seen it happen, but then he saw it. Time and sprouting, by the way, did not agree with the young man Teddy, he was not made for such things. Time proved no blessing—in his twenty-first year of life he died of the illness to which he had been susceptible. They fumigated his room. We can relate all this quite calmly, since there was no significant difference between his new condition and his previous one.
But more important deaths had occurred, deaths down in the flatlands, which were of greater concern to our hero, or would have been of greater concern at one time. We are thinking of the recent demise of old Consul Tienappel, Hans’s great-uncle and foster father, of faded memory. He had most carefully avoided regions of unwholesome barometric pressure and had left it to Uncle James to make a fool of himself there; but in the long run, he had been unable to elude apoplexy; and one day news of his passing, in the form of a brief but delicately considerate telegram (delicate and considerate more in deference to the departed than to the receiver of the message), had reached Hans Castorp as he lay in his splendid lounge chair, whereupon he had purchased black-bordered stationery and written to his uncles or quasi cousins that having been orphaned twice, he now felt as if he had been orphaned yet a third time, and, still more distressing, was prevented, indeed prohibited, from interrupting his present sojourn to pay last respects to his great-uncle.
It would be disingenuous to speak of mourning, but all the same, for a while the expression in Hans Castorp’s eyes was more pensive than usual. This death, which would never have been of great emotional consequence to Hans Castorp—and indeed after an estrangement of so many adventurous little years, all emotional content had been reduced to almost nothing—seemed to him nevertheless very like the breaking of yet another tie, a last connection, to the world below, bringing to perfection what he so rightly called his freedom. In truth, in the recent past of which we speak, there had been a total abrogation of every emotional bond between him and the flatlands. He wrote and received no letters. He no longer ordered his Maria Mancinis from there. He had found another brand up here, one that suited him and to which he was now as faithful as he had once been to his former girlfriend—a brand that would even have helped polar explorers get over their worst hardships in the ice and that when you smoked it made you feel as if you were lying on the beach and would be able to carry on. It had an especially well cured wrapper and was named Oath of Rütli; somewhat stubbier than Maria, mouse gray in color with a bluish band, it was very tractable and mild by nature; it had a snow-white durable ash that still showed the veins of the wrapper. It drew so evenly that it could easily have served as an hourglass for the man enjoying it, and indeed, given Hans Castorp’s needs, did serve as such, for he no longer carried his pocket watch. It had stopped, having fallen from his nightstand one day, and he had refrained from having it put into measuring rotation again—for the same reasons he had long ago dispensed with calendars, whether the kind you tear off each day or the kind that provide an instructive preview of days and feasts, for reasons of “freedom,” that is. It was his way of honoring the stroll by the shore, the abiding ever-and-always, the hermetic magic, to which, once withdrawn from the world, he had proved so susceptible—the magic that had been his soul’s fundamental adventure, in which all the alchemistic adventures of that simple stuff had been played out.