The Magic Mountain (16 page)

“When is the next rest cure?” he asked as they left the building. “That’s the best thing here, as far as I can see. I wish I were lying in my splendid lounge chair again right now. Are we going to walk far?”

“No,” Joachim said, “we don’t dare go very far. Around this time I always take just a short walk down through Davos-Dorf and on into Platz, if I have time. You can window-shop and watch people and buy whatever you need. Not to worry, we’ll lie down for an hour before dinner, and then again till four.”

They walked down the drive in the sunshine and crossed the brook and the narrow-gauge tracks; the line of mountains above the valley’s western slope rose directly ahead of them, and Joachim supplied their names: Little Schiahorn, the Green Towers, and Dorfberg. Across the way, a little distance up the hill, was the walled cemetery of Davos-Dorf—and Joachim pointed it out as well with his walking stick. And now they were on the main road, which was set one terrace-level above the valley floor.

One could not really call Dorf a village; at least, nothing except the name itself was left now. It had been devoured by the resort spreading relentlessly toward the entrance to the valley, and that part of the settlement called Davos-Dorf merged imperceptibly, without transition, into what was called Davos-Platz. Hotels and boardinghouses, all of them amply equipped with covered verandas, balconies, and rest-cure arcades, lay on both sides, as well as private homes with rooms for rent. Here and there new buildings were under construction, but sometimes the line of houses was broken by an open space that allowed a view of the valley’s green meadows.

In his desire for his customary and cherished stimulant, Hans Castorp had lit another cigar; and, thanks apparently to the beer he had drunk and much to his indescribable satisfaction, now and then he was able to whiff something of the aroma he craved—but only rarely and faintly, to be sure. It was a strain on his nerves just to try to detect a hint of his usual enjoyment—and that repulsive leathery taste predominated. Unwilling to accommodate himself to such failure, he struggled for a while to find a pleasure that either was totally denied him or simply teased him with a distant inkling of itself, and finally out of weary disgust he tossed the cigar aside. Despite his dazed state, he felt courtesy demanded that he carry on a conversation, and for that purpose he tried to recall the excellent things he had wanted to say about “time” earlier. Except it turned out that he had forgotten every bit of the whole “complex”—not one single thought about time still resided in any corner of his brain. And so instead he began to speak about bodily functions, although in a rather strange fashion.

“When do you take your temperature again?” he asked. “After dinner? Yes, that’s a good idea. The organism is at the height of its activity, so it would register then. For Behrens to demand that I ought to take mine, too—now listen, that was surely just meant as a joke. Why, Settembrini laughed his head off at the notion. There would be absolutely no point in it. I don’t even own a thermometer.”

“Well,” Joachim said, “that’s no problem whatever. You need only to buy one. There are thermometers for sale here everywhere, in almost any shop.”

“But why should I? No, the rest cure, that’s not a half-bad idea, and I’ll probably go along with it. But keeping track of my temperature would be too much for a visitor, I’ll leave that to the rest of you up here. If I only knew,” Hans Castorp continued, pressing his hands to his breast like a man in love, “why my heart keeps pounding the whole time—it’s so disconcerting. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while now. Because, you see, your heart pounds when you’re looking forward to some joyous event or if you’re afraid—when your emotions are stirred up, isn’t that right? But if your heart starts pounding all by itself, for no earthly reason, of its own accord, so to speak, I find that downright bizarre, if you see what I mean? It’s as if the body were going off on its own and no longer had any connection to your soul, more or less like a dead body that is not really dead—even though there is no such thing—and goes on living a very active life, but all of its own accord. The hair and the nails keep on growing, and for that matter, in terms of the chemistry and physics, or so I’ve heard, it’s a regular hustle and bustle there inside.”

“What sort of an expression is that,” Joachim reprimanded him discreetly. “ ‘A regular hustle and bustle!’ ” And perhaps he was revenging himself a little for the rebuke he had received earlier today for his “glockenspiel.”

“But it’s true! It is a regular hustle and bustle. Why are you so offended by that?” Hans Castorp asked. “And anyway, I only mentioned it incidentally. All I was trying to say is that it’s bizarre and upsetting when the body goes off on its own accord, living with no connection to one’s soul and putting on airs—like a heart pounding for no purpose whatever. One literally searches for some reason for it, some emotional stimulus, a feeling of joy or fear, that could justify it, so to speak—at least that’s how it is with me, I can only speak for myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Joachim said with a sigh, “it’s probably much like having a high fever. There’s quite a hustle and bustle—to use your expression—going on in your body in that case, too, and it may well be that one automatically looks around for some emotional stimulus, as you put it, to provide at least a halfway reasonable explanation for all the hustle and bustle. But we’re talking about such unpleasant things,” he said in a quivering voice and then broke off. To which Hans Castorp merely gave a shrug—in perfect imitation of the shrug he had first seen Joachim give the evening before.

They walked along in silence for a while.

Then Joachim asked, “Well, how do you like the people here? I mean the ones at our table?”

Hans Castorp’s face showed his indifference as he reviewed them in his mind. “Oh, Lord,” he said, “they don’t seem very interesting to me. There are more interesting people sitting at some of the other tables, I think, but maybe I’m just imagining that. Frau Stöhr should get her hair washed, it’s so greasy. And little Mazurka, or whatever her name is, seems pretty silly to me. She keeps stuffing her handkerchief in her mouth because she’s constantly giggling.”

Joachim laughed out loud at the bungled name. “ ‘Mazurka’—that’s splendid!” he cried. “Her name’s Marusya, if you please—it’s about the same as our Marie. Yes, she really is too enthusiastic,” he said. “When she has every reason to be more sedate, because she’s more than a little ill.”

“You’d never know it,” Hans Castorp said. “She’s in such good shape. You’d never take her for someone with a weak chest.” And he tried to catch his cousin’s eye, but discovered that Joachim’s tanned face looked all blotchy, the way tanned faces do when the blood rushes out of them, and that he had wrenched his mouth into a peculiar, woeful expression that gave Hans Castorp a vague fright and caused him immediately to change the subject. He asked about certain other people and tried to forget both Marusya and Joachim’s expression—and was totally successful at it. The Englishwoman with the rose-hip tea was named Miss Robinson.

The seamstress was not a seamstress, but a teacher at a public school for well-bred young ladies in Königsberg, and that was why she chose her words so precisely. Her name was Fräulein Engelhart. As for the chipper old lady, Joachim had never learned her name in all the time he had been there. In any case, she was the great-aunt of the yogurt-eating girl, and both were permanent residents of the sanatorium. The sickest person at the table was Dr. Blumenkohl, Leo Blumenkohl from Odessa—the young man with the moustache and the worried, self-absorbed look. He had been up here for years now.

They were now walking on a city sidewalk—it was immediately apparent that this was the main street of an international resort. The strolling tourists they met were mostly young people, the gentlemen in sport coats and without hats, the ladies in white skirts and also without hats. You heard Russian and English spoken; to both left and right were rows of shops with elegant displays in the windows. Hans Castorp’s curiosity was now seriously battling his flushed exhaustion, and forcing his eyes to take it all in, he lingered awhile outside a men’s clothing shore, just to make sure that his own wardrobe was up to snuff.

Then came a rotunda with a covered gallery where a little band was playing. This was the Kurhaus, the spa hotel. Several games were in progress on the tennis courts. Long-legged, clean-shaven young men wearing freshly pressed flannels and rubber-soled shoes had rolled up their shirtsleeves to play opposite tanned young ladies in white, who kept reaching boldly up toward the sun in order to hit the chalk-white ball out of the air. A kind of floury dust drifted over the well-kept courts. The cousins sat down on an unoccupied bench to watch and critique the play.

“You’ve not been playing up here, I take it?” Hans Castorp asked.

“I’m not allowed to,” Joachim answered. “We have to rest, always lying at rest. Settembrini says we live horizontally—we’re the horizontals, he says, it’s another one of his rotten jokes. Those are healthy people playing there, or they’re disobeying their doctors’ orders. Anyway, they’re not playing serious tennis—it’s more for the outfits. And as far as not obeying orders goes, lots of forbidden games are played here—poker, you know, and
petits chevaux
in certain hotels. We can be discharged for playing that, they say it’s the most unwholesome of all. But there are plenty of people who sneak past the guards in the evening and come down here to gamble. They say the prince who gave Behrens his title of
Hofrat
did it constantly.”

Hans Castorp was hardly listening. His mouth was hanging open, because he couldn’t breathe through his nose right, although he didn’t have a cold. He dimly noticed the disconcerting effect of his heart’s pounding out of time to the music. And feeling confused and at odds with himself, he was just dozing off when Joachim suggested they needed to start back.

They covered the distance in almost total silence. Hans Castorp stumbled a few times on the level pavement, at which he merely shook his head and smiled wistfully. The elevator operator who took them up to their floor was the man with the limp. Exchanging a brief “till later,” they parted outside room number 34. Hans Castorp steered his way across the room and out to the balcony, where he let himself fall into his lounge chair, just as he was, and without changing his position once, he fell into a dull semistupor, broken now and then by the annoyance of his rapidly beating heart.

How long that lasted he didn’t know. At the appropriate time, the gong rang out. But, as Hans Castorp was aware, it was not the call for dinner itself, merely the warning to get ready for it; and so he lay there for a while until the metallic rumble swelled and fell away a second time. When Joachim came through the room to fetch him, Hans Castorp wanted to change first, but Joachim said it was too late and wouldn’t let him. He hated unpunctuality. How could you ever make any progress and become healthy enough for military service again, he said, if you were so weak-willed that you couldn’t make it to meals on time. He was right, of course, and Hans Castorp could only point out that he wasn’t the one who was sick, although he certainly was incredibly sleepy. He just washed his hands quickly; and they walked down to the dining hall, for the third time.

The guests were streaming in through both entrances. Some were even coming through the veranda doors that stood open opposite, and soon they were all sitting around the seven tables as if they had never left them. That at least was Hans Castorp’s impression, a purely dreamy, irrational impression of course, which he could not get out of his befuddled brain for the moment and which even gave him a certain pleasure—such pleasure, in fact, that he tried to recapture it several times during the course of the meal and, indeed, was able to recreate the illusion perfectly. The chipper old lady was once again keeping up a steady stream of blurry Russian directed diagonally toward Dr. Blumenkohl, who listened with a careworn face. Her skinny grandniece finally ate something other than yogurt: the gooey cream of barley soup that the dining attendants had served in large plates—but only a few spoonfuls, and then she let it stand. Pretty Marusya kept pressing her little handkerchief, fragrant with orange perfume, to her mouth to stifle her giggles. Miss Robinson was reading the same letter in the same rounded hand that she had been reading that morning. Apparently she could speak not a word of German and did not wish to. Joachim struck a chivalrous pose and said something to her in English about the weather, to which, while still chewing, she gave a monosyllabic reply and then fell silent again. As for Frau Stöhr in her Scotch-plaid woolen blouse, she had had her checkup that morning and reported about it in her affected, uneducated way, drawing her upper lip back from her rabbitlike teeth. She complained of a rattle on the upper right, and her breathing was reduced just under her left shoulder blade, and the “boss” had told her she would have to stay another five months. In her unlettered fashion, she called Director Behrens the “boss.” Moreover, she declared her outrage that the “boss” was not sitting at their table again today. The “retardation” schedule (she apparently meant “rotation”) demanded that the “boss” should be sitting at their table for dinner today, whereas the “boss” was once again sitting at the table on their left (and indeed there sat Director Behrens, his gigantic hands folded in front of his plate). Though to be sure, that was also where fat Frau Salomon from Amsterdam was seated, and she came to dinner every day of the week in a low-cut dress, apparently quite to the “boss’s” liking, although she, Frau Stöhr, could not understand it, because, after all, he could see however much of Frau Salomon he wanted at every checkup. A little later she told them in an excited whisper that yesterday evening the lights had been turned out in the upper common lounging area—the one on the roof—for purposes that Frau Stöhr described as “transparent.” The “boss” had noticed it and gone into such a rage that you could hear him all over the building. But of course once again he had not located the guilty party, although one didn’t have to have a university degree to guess that, of course, it had been Captain Miklosich from Bucharest, for whom it could never be dark enough when he was in the company of ladies—a man lacking in every refinement, although he did wear a corset, and who was no better than a beast of prey—yes, a beast of prey, Frau Stöhr repeated in a smothered whisper as beads of sweat appeared on her brow and upper lip. Why, all of Dorf and Platz, too, knew the nature of his relationship with Frau Wurmbrandt from Vienna, the general consul’s wife—one could hardly call it
clandestine
anymore. It wasn’t enough that the captain frequently paid morning visits to Frau Wurmbrandt in her room, with her still lying in bed, and stayed there the whole time she dressed, but last Tuesday he had not
left
Wurmbrandt’s room until four o’clock the next morning—the nurse looking after Franz in room 19, the boy whose recent pneumothorax operation had turned out so badly, had run into him in the hall, and had been so embarrassed that she got her doors mixed up and found herself in the room of Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund. And finally Frau Stöhr held forth at length about a “cosmological salon” down in town, where she bought her mouthwash. Joachim stared down at his plate.