The Magic Mountain (19 page)

“No, really, I’m over it,” Hans Castorp protested. “A silent sister, then, is merely a column of mercury without a scale. You see, I was paying complete attention.” But all the same, he took the elevator up with Joachim and several other patients. The festivities were over for today, people were scattering to their balconies or the lounging areas for the evening rest cure. Hans Castorp followed Joachim to his room. The corridor floor with its coconut runners undulated gently under his feet, but he found it was not all that unpleasant a sensation. He sat down in Joachim’s large flowered armchair—there was a chair like that in every room—and lit a Maria Mancini. It tasted like paste, like coal, like anything except what it should; nevertheless he continued to smoke it as he watched Joachim get ready for his rest cure, slipping into his tuniclike house jacket, putting an old overcoat on over that, and then taking the nightstand lamp and his Russian grammar with him out to the balcony, where he turned on the lamp, stuck his thermometer in his mouth, sat down, and began to wrap himself with amazing dexterity in two large camel-hair blankets that lay spread over the chair. Hans Castorp watched in frank admiration of how deftly he performed the task of throwing one blanket over the other—first the left side, flung lengthwise all the way up to under his armpit, then the bottom tucked over his feet, and then the right side, so that it finally built a smooth, regular package, with only head, shoulders, and arms sticking out.

“You do that very well,” Hans Castorp said.

“It’s a matter of practice,” Joachim responded, holding the thermometer firmly between his teeth as he spoke. “You’ll learn how, too. We’ll definitely have to find a couple of blankets for you tomorrow. You’ll be able to use them down below again, too. And they’re an absolute necessity up here, especially since you don’t have a fur-lined sleeping bag.”

“Well, I’m not going to lie out on my balcony at night in any case,” Hans Castorp declared. “I won’t do that, let me tell you. That would seem really too strange. Everything has its limits. And there has to be some way for me to tell that I’m only a visitor up here among you all. I’ll sit here for a while yet and smoke my cigar, just as usual. It tastes terrible, but I know it’s good and that will have to suffice for me today. It’s almost nine o’clock—well, not quite nine yet, sad to say. But once it’s half past, that will be late enough for me to go to bed at something like a normal time.”

He felt a chill and shivered—first once, then several times. Hans Castorp leapt up and ran over to the wall thermometer as if hoping to catch it
flagrante delicto
. It read fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit. He felt the pipes of the radiator; they were cold and dead. He muttered something incoherent, rambling on to the effect that even if it was August, it would be no disgrace to heat the place, because it wasn’t a matter of the month, but of the temperature, and right now it was so low that he was freezing to death. But his face was burning. He sat back down, then stood up again, muttered a request to use the blanket from Joachim’s bed, spread it over his legs, and went back to sitting—flushed, chilled, and tormenting himself with the disgusting taste of his cigar. A wave of misery swept over him—it seemed as if he had never felt this miserable in all his life. “This is wretched,” he murmured. But suddenly, a curiously extravagant sense of joy and hope stirred within him, and he sat up, waiting to see if it would return. But it didn’t; only the misery remained. Finally he stood up, tossed Joachim’s blanket back on the bed, and with wrenched lips he muttered something that sounded like: “Good night. Don’t freeze out there, and call me again for breakfast”—and staggered out to the corridor and into his room.

He hummed to himself while he undressed, but not out of any sense of cheer. Mechanically and without really paying attention, he went through the motions of the civilized ritual of getting ready for bed: poured pink mouthwash from a travel container into a glass and gargled discreetly, washed his hands with a fine, mild violet soap, and put on his long batiste nightshirt, the monogram HC embroidered on the breast pocket. Then he lay down and put out the light, letting his hot, muddled head fall back against the American woman’s death-pillow.

He had been certain that he would sink into sleep at once, but it turned out he was wrong, and whereas he had barely been able to keep his eyes open before, they simply would not remain closed now, but kept fluttering open restlessly the moment he shut them. It was not his normal bedtime, he told himself, and then, of course, he had napped too often during the day. And someone was beating a carpet outside—which was less than probable and indeed not the case. It turned out that it was his heart that he heard pounding somewhere far in the distance outside—just as if someone were walloping a rug with a wicker carpet-beater.

It was not totally dark in his room yet; both Joachim and the couple from the Bad Russian table had taken lamps out onto their balconies, and light was coming in through his own open door. And as Hans Castorp lay there on his back, his eyes blinking open and shut, he was suddenly visited again by an impression—one of many he had experienced that day—an observation that he had tried on the spot to forget, out of both dismay and tact. It was the expression on Joachim’s face when he had mentioned Marusya’s physical attributes—that peculiar, woeful wrenching of Joachim’s mouth and the blotchy pallor of his tanned cheeks. Hans Castorp understood now, saw through it, discerning its meaning in such a new, exhaustive, and intimate fashion that the carpet-beater outside doubled both in pace and intensity, almost drowning out the sounds of the evening concert in Platz—because there was a concert down at the hotel again. An insipid, symmetrically fashioned operetta melody echoed through the darkness, and Hans Castorp whistled along in a whisper (a whistle can be whispered, you know), while his chilled feet kept time under his feather comforter.

This was, of course, no way to fall asleep, and Hans Castorp now felt no inclination to do so, either. Now that he had such a new, vivid understanding of why Joachim had blushed, the whole world seemed new, and that sense of extravagant joy and hope stirred again deep within him. But he was still waiting for something else, too, although he did not really ask himself what it was. But when he heard his neighbors on the right and left ending their evening rest cure and returning to their rooms to exchange one horizontal position outside for another inside, he announced to himself his conviction that the barbaric married couple would be quiet. “I’ll be able to fall peacefully asleep,” he thought. “They’ll be quiet this evening, at least I certainly expect them to be.” But they weren’t, and in all honesty Hans Castorp had not assumed they would be—to tell the truth, from his personal point of view, he would not have understood it if they had remained quiet. Nevertheless, he blurted out a monotone cry of furious amazement at what he now heard. “Scandalous!” he cried under his breath. “That’s outrageous. Who would have thought it possible?” And periodically his lips returned to their whispered whistling of the operetta melody, which was still surging stubbornly in the distance.

Sleep did come later. But with it came dreams even more tortuous than those of the night before and from which several times he started up in fright or in pursuit of some strange fancy. He dreamed that he saw Director Behrens wandering along the paths of the garden, his knees slightly bent, his arms hanging stiffly at an angle in front of him, matching his slow and yet somehow bleak strides to the rhythm of march music in the distance. When the director came to a halt in front of Hans Castorp, he was wearing glasses with thick, circular lenses and was babbling nonsense. “Civilian, of course,” he said and without asking permission extended two fingers of his gigantic hand and pulled down Hans Castorp’s eyelid. “Respectable civilian, I could tell right off. But not without talent, certainly not without talent for raising his general metabolism. Won’t be stingy about a few little years, a few spiffing years of service with us up here. But, whoops, gentlemen, do get on with your promenade!” he cried, sticking both enormous forefingers in his mouth and giving a whistle so euphonious that the teacher and Miss Robinson, both shrunk in size, came flying through the air from different directions and sat down on the director’s shoulders, one to the right, one to the left, just as they sat on either side of Hans Castorp in the dining hall. And then the director went hopping away, all the while pushing his napkin up behind his glasses to dry his eyes—it was unclear whether this was to wipe away sweat or tears.

And now as he dreamed on, it seemed to him that he was in the same schoolyard where he had spent his recesses for so many years, and he was just about to borrow a drawing pencil from Madame Chauchat, who also happened to be present. She gave him a reddish one, about half the normal length, in a silver holder, but at the same time she warned Hans Castorp in a pleasantly husky voice that he definitely had to give it back to her after class, and looked at him with her narrow, bluish-gray-green eyes set above broad cheekbones, and he tore himself out of his dream—because he had it now and wanted to hold on to it: the person and situation that she had so vividly reminded him of. He quickly made sure he would remember it the next morning, because he could feel sleep and dreams enfolding him again; and he soon realized that he was trying to get away from Dr. Krokowski, who was lying in ambush for him in hope of subjecting his psyche to dissection, which aroused in Hans Castorp wild, truly mad terror. His foot was injured and he limped as he fled from the doctor down along the balconies, squeezing past the glass partitions, and he took a possibly fatal leap down into the garden and in his distress tried to climb the reddish-brown flagpole—and woke up in a sweat just as his pursuer grabbed him by the trouser leg.

But no sooner had he calmed down and dozed off again than his situation took on a new shape. He was trying with his shoulder to push Settembrini off balance, as he stood there smiling that refined, dry, ironic smile, just below where his full moustache swept handsomely upward—and it was the smile that offended Hans Castorp. “You bother me,” he heard himself saying quite clearly. “Go away! You’re only an organ-grinder, and you are in my way here.” Except that Settembrini would not budge, and Hans Castorp was still standing there trying to think what to do next, when quite unexpectedly he had a brilliant insight into what time actually is—nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating. And he awoke definitely intending to share his discovery with his cousin Joachim the next morning.

The night passed amid several such adventures and discoveries, and even Hermine Kleefeld played a nebulous role, as did Herr Albin and Captain Miklosich, who carried Frau Stöhr away in his jaws, only to have Prosecutor Paravant run him through with a spear. But there was one dream that Hans Castorp dreamed twice that night, and it was exactly the same both times. It came the second time toward morning. He was sitting in the dining hall with its seven tables when the glass door banged shut louder than ever, and in came Madame Chauchat, wearing her white sweater, one hand in her pocket, the other at the back of her head. Instead of proceeding to the Good Russian table, the ill-mannered woman walked soundlessly up to Hans Castorp and silently extended her hand for him to kiss—not the back, but the palm. And Hans Castorp kissed her hand—her unrefined, slightly broad hand with its stubby fingers and jagged cuticles. And once again he felt sweeping through him, from head to foot, that sense of dissolute sweetness that had risen up inside him when he had tried out what it must be like to be free of the pressures of honor and to enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace—and he experienced that sweetness again in his dream, except that it was overwhelmingly sweeter.

“Is your summer over now?” was the ironic question Hans Castorp posed to his cousin on his third day.

The weather had taken a terrible turn for the worse.

His second day as a visiting guest up here had been a glorious summer day. The sky shone deep blue above the spear-shaped tops of the pines, the town glistened brightly in the heat of the valley floor, and the cheerful, serene sound of bells filled the air as cows wandered the slopes and grazed on short, sun-warmed Alpine grass. Even at early breakfast, the ladies had been wearing sheer washable blouses, some with open-worked sleeves, which did not suit them all equally well. It looked particularly bad, for example, on Frau Stöhr, whose arms were too spongy—diaphanous clothes were simply not for her. And, each in his own way, the gentlemen of the sanatorium had likewise made allowances for the fine weather: some appeared in jackets of luster wool, some in linen suits, and Joachim Ziemssen had worn ivory flannels and a blue sport jacket, a combination that lent him the perfect military look. As for Settembrini, he had in fact repeatedly remarked on his intention to change his suit. “Damn!” he had said as he joined the cousins for a stroll down into town after lunch. “That sun is hot. It appears I shall have to don lighter apparel.” But although he expressed himself elegantly, he went right on wearing his checked trousers and long petersham coat with the wide lapels—presumably that was the full extent of his wardrobe.

On the third day, however, it was as if nature had taken a tumble—everything was turned upside down. Hans Castorp did not believe his own eyes. It was just after dinner and they had all been lying in the rest cure for twenty minutes or so, when the sun abruptly hid itself, ugly peat-brown clouds moved in from over the ridges to the southeast, and a wind bearing cold, alien air that went to your bones and seemed to have come from unknown regions of ice suddenly swept down through the valley, setting the temperature plunging and inaugurating a whole new regimen.

“Snow,” Joachim’s voice said from behind the glass partition.

“What do you mean, ‘snow’?” Hans Castorp asked in response. “You’re not trying to tell me that it’s going to snow now?”