The Magic Mountain (130 page)
They hurl themselves down before projectiles howling toward them, only to leap up and rush on, shouting courage in brash, young voices—they have not been hit. Then they are hit, they fall, flailing their arms, shot in the head, the heart, the gut. They lie with their faces in the mire and do not stir. They lie, arched over their knapsacks, the backs of their heads buried in the soft ground, their hands clutching at the air like talons. But the wood keeps sending new men, who hurl themselves down, leap up, and, with a shout or without a word, stagger forward among those who have already fallen.
Youngsters with their backpacks and bayoneted rifles, with their filthy coats and boots—and in watching, one might also see them with a humanistic, beatific eye, might dream of other scenes. One might imagine such a lad spurring a horse on or swimming in a bay, strolling along the shore with a girlfriend, his lips pressed to his gentle beloved’s ear, or in happy friendship instructing another lad to string a bow. And instead, there they all lie, noses in the fiery filth. That they do it with joy, and also with boundless fear and an unutterable longing for home, is both shameful and sublime, but surely no reason to bring them here to this.
There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognized him a good distance off from that little beard he grew when he moved to the Bad Russian table. He is soaked through, his face is flushed, like all the others. He runs with feet weighed down by mud, his bayoneted rifle clutched in his hand and hanging at his side. Look, he is stepping on the hand of a fallen comrade—stepping on it with his hobnailed boots, pressing it deep into the soggy, branch-strewn earth. But it is him, all the same. What’s this? He’s singing? The way a man sings to himself in moments of dazed, thoughtless excitement, without even knowing—and he uses what tatters of breath he has left to sing to himself:
Upon its bark I’ve ca-arved there
So many words of love—
He stumbles. No, he has thrown himself on his stomach at the approach of a howling hound of hell, a large explosive shell, a hideous sugarloaf from the abyss. He lies there, face in the cool muck, legs spread, feet twisted until the heels press the earth. Laden with horror, this product of science gone berserk crosses thirty yards in front of him, buries itself in the ground, and explodes like the Devil himself, bursts inside the earth with ghastly superstrength and casts up a house-high fountain of soil, fire, iron, lead, and dismembered humanity. For two men had flung themselves down there beside one another—they were friends. Commingled now, they vanish.
Oh, how ashamed we feel in our shadowy security! We’re leaving—we can’t describe this! But was our friend hit, too? For a moment, he thought he was. A large clod of din struck his shin—it certainly hurt, but how silly, it was nothing. He gets up, he limps and stumbles forward on mud-laden feet, singing thoughtlessly:
And all its branches ru-ustled,
As if they called to me—
And so, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, he disappears from sight.
Farewell, Hans Castorp, life’s faithful problem child. Your story is over. We have told it to its end; it was neither short on diversion nor long on boredom—it was a hermetic story. We told it for its own sake, not yours, for you were a simple fellow. But it was your story at last, and since it happened to you, there surely must have been something to you; and we do not deny that in the course of telling it, we have taken a certain pedagogic liking to you, might be tempted gently to dab the corner of an eye with one fingertip at the thought that we shall neither see you nor hear from you in the future.
Farewell, Hans—whether you live or stay where you are! Your chances are not good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. To be honest, we are not really bothered about leaving the question open. Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened your ordinariness, allowed you to survive in the spirit what you probably will not survive in the flesh. There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
FINIS OPERIS
JOHN E. WOODS is the distinguished translator of many books. His translation of
The Magic Mountain
won him the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996, and his other translations of Thomas Mann—
Buddenbrooks
,
Doctor Faustus
and, most recently,
Joseph and His Brothers
—have been highly acclaimed. Other notable translations include Arno Schmidt’s
Evening Edged in Gold
, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Süskind’s
Perfume
, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize, in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s
The Terrors of Ice and Darkness
,
The Last World
(for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Price in 1991) and
The Dog King
; Ingo Schulze’s
33 Moments of Happiness
and
Simple Stories
; Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s
More Than a Champion
; John Rabe’s
The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe
, and Bernhard Schlink’s
Flights of Love
.
A. S. BYATT was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her fiction includes
The Virgin in the Garden
,
Possession
(for which she won the Booker Prize in 1990),
Angels and Insects
and
Elementals
. Her critical work includes studies of Wordsworth and Coleridge and of Iris Murdoch. She is also the author of
Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers
(with Ignês Sodré). She was appointed a CBE in 1990 and a DBE in 1999.
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