The Magic Mountain (26 page)

And so now they knew, even if not all of them were able fully to appreciate the knowledge. A sigh went through the room, and Prosecutor Paravant nodded his weighty approval while Dr. Krokowski continued to elaborate his thesis. For his part, Hans Castorp lowered his head to think about what he had heard and to explore whether he really understood it. But being unpracticed in such discursive reasoning and anything but intellectually alert after his unsalutary walk, he was easily diverted, and was in fact diverted almost immediately by the round back in front of him and by the arm extending from it, which lifted and reached back, so that the hand—now right before Hans Castorp’s eyes—could tuck at the braid of hair.

It was almost suffocating to have that hand so close to his eyes—you had to look at it, whether you wanted to or not, to study its inherent humanness and all its defects, as if you were holding a magnifying glass to it. No, it had nothing at all aristocratic about it, this stubby, school-girlish hand with the carelessly trimmed nails—you couldn’t be certain whether the knuckles toward the tips were even clean, and the cuticles were gnawed, there could no longer be any doubt about that. Hans Castorp grimaced, but his eyes remained fixed on Madame Chauchat’s hand, and a vague, halfhearted recollection passed through his mind of something Dr. Krokowski had said about corrective bourgeois forces that counteracted love. . . . But this arm was more beautiful, this arm bent gently behind the head—and was barely clad, because the fabric of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, the flimsiest gossamer, which lent the arm just a hint of delicate illusion, making it even prettier than it probably would have been without any covering. It was both tender and full at the same time—and cool, one could only presume. There could be no question whatever of any counteracting bourgeois forces.

Hans Castorp began to daydream, his eyes directed at Frau Chauchat’s arm. The way women dressed! They displayed this or that portion of their necks and breasts, lent their arms a radiant illusion with transparent gossamer. They did it all over the world, just to arouse our ardent desires. My God, but life was beautiful! And one of the things that made it so beautiful was that women dressed so enticingly, simply as a matter of course. It was second nature to them, and such a universally accepted practice that you hardly even thought about it, just accepted it unconsciously, without further ado. But if you wanted truly to enjoy life, Hans Castorp told himself, you really should keep the custom in mind and never forget how exhilarating and, ultimately, almost magical it was. Granted, there was a very definite reason why women were allowed to dress in that exhilarating, magical way, without at the same time offending propriety. It all had to do with the next generation, the propagation of the human species, yes indeed. But what happened when the woman was sick deep inside, so that she was not at all suited for motherhood—what then? Was there any point in her wearing gossamer sleeves so that men would be curious about her body—about her diseased body? There was obviously
no
point in that whatever, and it ought to be considered improper, to be forbidden. Because for a man to be interested in a sick woman was certainly no more reasonable than . . . well, than for Hans Castorp to have pursued his silent interest in Pribislav Hippe back then. A stupid comparison, a rather embarrassing memory. But it had just come to him, insinuating itself all on its own. His daydreams broke off at that point, primarily because his attention was directed again to Dr. Krokowski, whose voice had risen noticeably now. And in fact, as he stood there behind the table, arms spread wide, head tilted to one side, he looked—despite his frock coat—almost like Jesus on the cross!

It turned out that Dr. Krokowski concluded his lecture with a grand advertisement for psychic dissection—he spread his arms wide, and invited them to come unto him. Come unto me, he said, though not exactly in those words, all ye that labor and are heavy laden! And he left no doubt of his certainty that they all, without exception, labored and were heavy laden. He spoke of hidden suffering, of shame and affliction, of the redemptive effects of analysis; he praised the effects of light piercing the dark unconscious, explained that illness could be transformed again into conscious emotion, admonished them to trust, promised recovery. Then he let his arms fall, set his head erect again, gathered up the printed materials that he had used for his lecture, and holding the bundle against his shoulder with his left hand like an ordinary schoolteacher, he exited into the lobby, head held high.

They all stood up, pushed back their chairs, and began slowly to move toward the same door through which the doctor had left the dining hall. As they gathered in concentric circles from all sides, it was as if they were thronging after him—hesitant, without a will of their own, and yet in dazed unanimity, like a swarm of rats behind the Pied Piper. Hans Castorp stood stock-still in midcurrent, his hand on the back of his chair. “I am only a visitor here,” he thought. “I’m healthy and all this has nothing to do with me, thank God. I won’t even be here for the next lecture.” He watched Frau Chauchat leave—slinking, her head thrust forward. “Does she let herself be dissected, too?” he asked himself, and his heart began to pound. He did not even notice Joachim working his way through the chairs toward him, and he flinched when his cousin spoke to him.

“You arrived at the last moment,” Joachim said. “Did you go very far? How was it?”

“Oh, nice,” Hans Castorp replied. “But I did walk rather far. And I must admit it did me less good than I expected. It was perhaps a little too soon for it, or maybe just the wrong idea altogether. I’ll not be doing it again right away.”

Joachim did not ask him whether he had liked the lecture, and Hans Castorp said nothing about it, either. As if by tacit agreement, neither of them ever mentioned the lecture again.

Tuesday came. Our hero had been up here for seven days now, and when he returned from his constitutional that morning, he found a bill totaling up the charges for his first week—a tidy commercial document in a green envelope, with an exquisite picture of the Berghof at the top of the page and excerpts from the brochure arranged attractively in a narrow column along the left margin, where italicized mention was also made of “psychological therapy by the most modern methods.” The list itself, done in elegant calligraphy, came to almost exactly 180 francs, which was broken down into 8 francs a day for room, 12 francs a day for board and medical treatment, plus separate entries of 20 francs “entrance fee,” and 10 francs for “disinfection of the room,” with the final total rounded out by smaller fees for laundry, beer, and the wine he had drunk at his first supper here.

Hans Castorp saw nothing to complain about when he and Joachim checked the addition. “True, I make no use of medical treatment,” he said, “but that’s my business. It’s included in the daily rate, and I can’t ask them to deduct it. How could they do that? They’ve overcharged for the disinfection—they couldn’t possibly have gone through ten francs worth of H
₂
CO to smoke out the American woman. But on the whole, I must say I find the rates reasonable—not really expensive, considering what they offer.” And so before second breakfast, they went down to the management office to take care of the bill.

“Management” was on the ground floor: after crossing the lobby and following the hallway past the cloakroom, kitchen, and housekeeping, you could not miss it, especially given the porcelain sign on the door.

Hans Castorp’s interest was aroused by the glimpse it offered him into the business side of the establishment. It was a normal, small office where a woman was busy at a typewriter, and three male employees stood bent over lecterns, while in the adjoining room a gentleman with the imposing look of a department head or manager sat working at a freestanding, barrel-like desk and cast his clients a glance just over the top of his glasses, measuring them with cold, practical eyes. While their business was being taken care of—payment made with a large bill, change returned, a receipt written out—they both took on that serious, modest, silent, even subservient look by which young Germans show that their respect for authority applies to all offices, to any room where records are kept and services rendered; but once they were outside and were heading off to breakfast—and later on that day, too—they chatted about the general setup of the Berghof, with Joachim, as the older, more knowledgeable resident, answering his cousin’s questions.

Director Behrens was neither the owner nor the proprietor of the sanatorium—although one might get that impression. Above and behind him stood invisible forces, made manifest only to a certain degree in the management office: a board of directors, a joint-stock company—and the stock would not be a bad thing to have, because according to Joachim’s trustworthy assertions, juicy dividends were distributed annually to the shareholders, despite the high salaries paid the doctors and some very liberal business practices. The director, then, was not an independent man, but merely an agent, a functionary, an associate of those higher powers—though, of course, the highest and supreme associate here, the soul of the place, the determining factor for the whole organization, including the management office. As the supervising physician, to be sure, he stood far aloof from anything to do with the commercial side of the operation. He came from somewhere in northwestern Germany; and it was general knowledge that he had fallen into the position years ago quite by accident and without any planning on his part. He had been brought here by his wife, whose remains had long since been given over to the cemetery in Davos-Dorf—the picturesque graveyard above the village, on the right-hand slope, toward the entrance of the valley. She had been a very charming woman, if a little cross-eyed and gaunt, to judge from photos you found scattered about the director’s official residence, not to mention oil portraits of her that were hung on the walls—painted by his own amateur hand. After she had presented him with two children, a son and a daughter, they had brought her up to this valley, her body already frail and feverish, and within a few months that body had wasted away entirely. People said that Behrens, who idolized her, had been so overwhelmed by the blow that he had temporarily fallen into a strange melancholy and had been seen walking the streets giggling, gesticulating, and talking to himself. He had not returned to his former life, then, but had stayed on here—in part, to be sure, because he did not want to leave her grave behind; but the deciding, and less sentimental, factor had probably been that he had become slightly infected himself and, in his own professional opinion, actually
belonged
here. So he had taken up residence as one of those physicians who not only supervised people’s stay here, but also shared their sufferings, who did not battle disease from a position of personal wholeness and independence, but who bore its marks themselves. It was a curious, but certainly not unique situation, with presumably both its beneficial and dubious sides. A warm relationship between doctor and patient is certainly to be welcomed, and there is something to the proposition that only he who suffers can be the guide and healer of the suffering. But can someone truly be the intellectual master of a power to which he is himself enslaved? Can he liberate if he himself is not free? To the average person, the idea of a sick physician remains a paradox, a problematical phenomenon. Instead of being intellectually enriched and morally strengthened by his experience, may he not perhaps find that his knowledge of the disease becomes clouded and confused? He no longer stares down the illness with a hostile eye; he is a biased and hardly unequivocal foe. With all due respect, one must ask whether someone who is part of the world of illness can indeed be interested in curing or even nursing others in the same way a healthy person can.

In his own way, Hans Castorp expressed some of these same doubts and considerations as he chatted with Joachim about the Berghof and its supervising physician; but Joachim countered that one had no way of knowing if Director Behrens was still a patient himself nowadays—presumably he had recovered long ago. It was ages now since he first began to practice here—on his own at first, quickly making a name for himself as both a specialist with a fine ear for auscultation and a surehanded lung surgeon. And then the Berghof had secured his services, and in the course of what would soon be a decade now, his life had become intimately interwoven with that of the sanatorium. His residence was back there, at the far end of the northwest wing—Dr. Krokowski lived close by. That lady of noble lineage, the head nurse of whom Settembrini had spoken so scornfully and whom Hans Castorp had seen only fleetingly a few times, was in charge of the widower’s household. The director lived alone, by the way—his son was studying at a university in imperial Germany and his daughter was already married, to a lawyer in the French part of Switzerland. Young Behrens came home on vacation now and then, and had in fact been there once already during Joachim’s stay; and he told how it had been such a thrill for the ladies of the sanatorium—temperatures rose, little jealousies erupted into spats and skirmishes in the public lounging area, and a press of patients had appeared for Dr. Krokowski’s private consultations.

The assistant director had a private consulting room, which, like the general examination room, the laboratory, the operating room, and the X-ray room, was located in the well-lit basement of the building. We have called it a basement, but although the stone stairway leading down to it from the ground floor did indeed create the impression of a descent into a basement, this was almost entirely an illusion, the reasons for which were, first, that the ground floor sat rather high, and second, that the whole edifice had been built on a steep, mountainous slope, so that the “basement” rooms faced the front and looked out onto the garden and the valley—a state of affairs countered and negated, as it were, by the effect of the stairway. You had the sense you were descending below ground level, but in fact, once downstairs, you were right back on ground level again, or at most a foot or two below it—an effect that delighted Hans Castorp when he discovered it for the first time that afternoon as he accompanied his cousin “down” to those regions, where Joachim was scheduled to have himself weighed by the bath attendant. It was a realm where clinical brightness and cleanliness held sway, everything done in white on white, the doors glistening with white enamel—even the one to Dr. Krokowski’s reception room, to which one of the learned man’s calling cards had been tacked and which lay two steps lower than the hallway itself, so that the room behind the open door looked rather like a suite. This door was just to the right of the stairway, at the near end of the hall, and Hans Castorp kept his eye on it as he paced up and down the corridor, waiting for Joachim. He saw someone come out, too, a lady who had arrived only recently and whose name he did not know—a small, dainty woman, with curls across her forehead and golden earrings. Gathering her skirts in one hand, she bent low as she took those two steps, and with her other small, heavily ringed hand, she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth—above it, her large, pale, distraught eyes stared at nothing. Still hunched over, she hurried toward the stairway with mincing steps that made her petticoats rustle, stopped suddenly as if pondering something, then began to mince her way up the steps, and vanished up the stairwell—still hunched over, her handkerchief still at her lips.