The Magic Mountain (27 page)

Behind her, where the door had opened, it was much darker than in the white hallway—the clinical brightness of these lower rooms apparently did not penetrate that far; Hans Castorp noted that murky twilight, deep dusk, reigned in Dr. Krokowski’s analytical chamber.

When he sat down to meals in the bright dining hall, young Hans Castorp found to his embarrassment that he was still subject to the grandfatherly tremor he had first noticed on his long, solitary walk. It would start up again with amazing regularity at almost every meal—it was impossible to stop and hard to hide. The venerable chin-propped-against-chest method offered no permanent solution, and so he looked for other ways to disguise his weakness—for instance, he kept his head in motion as much as possible, turning it to the right and left when conversing, or if he was guiding his soupspoon to his mouth, he would press his left forearm firmly against the table to stabilize himself, and he would even put both elbows on the table and prop his chin in his hand between courses, although he considered that boorish and permissible, at best, in the dissolute company of the sick. But it was all an annoyance, and it would not have taken much for him to have given up meals entirely in disgust, although he had come to value them for the sights and tensions associated with them.

But the fact was—and Hans Castorp knew it only too well—that this deplorable phenomenon with which he was struggling was not merely of organic origin, was not attributable solely to the local air or the strain of adjusting to it, but was also the expression of an inner excitement and was bound up intimately with those same sights and tensions.

Madame Chauchat almost always came late for meals, and until she arrived Hans Castorp would sit there with fidgeting feet, waiting for the glass door to slam, a sound that inevitably accompanied her entrance; and he knew that he would flinch and his face would suddenly feel cold—and that is what happened almost every time. At first he would whip his head around indignantly each time and with angry eyes follow the latecomer to her place at the Good Russian table, even scold her under his breath, rebuking her between his teeth with a cry of outraged protest. But he had given that up, and now he would bend his head farther over his plate, even bite his lips sometimes, or intentionally and elaborately turn to look the other way; because it seemed to him that he no longer had a right to be angry and was not really free to censure her, but that he was an accessory to the offense and answerable for it to the others—in short, he was ashamed. It would be less than precise to say that he was ashamed for Frau Chauchat; rather, he felt personally ashamed in front of all these people. He could have spared himself that, by the way, because no one in the dining hall cared about either Frau Chauchat’s vice or Hans Castorp’s embarrassment for her—except, perhaps, Fräulein Engelhart, the schoolteacher on his right.

This pitiful creature had understood from Hans Castorp’s sensitivity about slamming doors that a certain emotional bond was developing between her young tablemate and the Russian woman, and what was more, that the nature of such a bond was less important than that it existed at all, and finally, that his pretended indifference—and given his lack of talent or experience as an actor, he was very poor at pretending—did not diminish but rather strengthened that bond, was a sign that it had moved to a higher plane. Having given up all hopes and pretensions for herself, Fräulein Engelhart was constantly breaking into raptures about Frau Chauchat; and the remarkable thing was that although Hans Castorp recognized and saw through her rabble-rousing—if not at once, then at least over time—and was indeed disgusted by it, he proved no less willing to allow her to influence him and egg him on.

“Bang!” the old maid said. “That’s
her!
You don’t even have to look up to make sure who just came in. Of course, there she goes—and what a charming way she has about her—like a kitten slinking to its bowl of milk. I wish you could change seats with me so you could observe her as easily and effortlessly as I can. I do understand that you don’t always want to turn your head to watch. God only knows what she might think if she noticed. Now she’s greeting her table. You really should have a look, it’s so refreshing to watch her. When she talks and smiles the way she’s doing now, a little dimple shows in one cheek—but not always, only when she wants it to. Yes, she’s a darling woman, a spoiled creature, that’s why she’s so careless. We all love people like that, whether we want to or not, because when they annoy us with their carelessness, the annoyance becomes just one more reason for being fond of them. What fun it is to be annoyed at people and yet have no choice but to love them.”

The teacher whispered all this behind her hand to keep others from hearing. Her flushed, downy spinster’s cheeks suggested a temperature above normal, and her titillating remarks stirred Hans Castorp’s blood. A certain lack of self-reliance created in him the need to hear confirmed from a third party that Madame Chauchat was indeed an enchanting woman, and the young man also wanted others to encourage him to give himself over to his feelings, when both his reason and conscience were offering unsettling resistance.

These conversations, however, were much less fruitful when it came to facts, because, for the life of her, Fräulein Engelhart knew little or nothing about Frau Chauchat, no more than was general knowledge in the sanatorium; she did not know her, could not claim even to have any acquaintance in common with her. The only thing that could possibly increase her standing in Hans Castorp’s eyes was that she herself was from Königsberg, a city not all that far from the Russian border, and so could manage a little broken Russian—very meager attributes indeed; all the same, Hans Castorp was prepared to regard them as some kind of extended personal connection to Frau Chauchat.

“She doesn’t wear a ring,” he said. “I don’t see a wedding ring. Why is that? She is a married woman, you said, did you not?”

The teacher felt so responsible for representing Frau Chauchat to Hans Castorp that his question embarrassed her—as if she had been driven into a corner and would have to talk her way out of it. “You mustn’t take that all too seriously,” she said. “She is married, most assuredly. There can be no doubt about that. She does not use the title of Madame merely for the greater respect that comes with it, as is common, for instance, among young foreign ladies once they are a little older, but as we all know, she really does have a husband somewhere in Russia—it’s common knowledge here. She has a maiden name, a Russian one, not French, something ending in
-avov
or
-ukov
, I did hear it somewhere but I’ve forgotten it. If you’d like I could find out for you. There are surely several people here who know the name. A ring? No, she doesn’t wear one, I have noticed that myself. Good heavens, perhaps it doesn’t become her, perhaps it makes her hand too broad. Or she finds it rather bourgeois to wear a wedding ring, just a plain gold band—all she’d need then is a little basket for her keys. No, she’s certainly too liberal for that. I know it well—Russian women are by their very nature so very free and liberal. And besides, there’s something so cold, so disillusioning about a ring—it is a symbol of a woman’s dependence, it seems to me; it makes a woman seem practically a nun, turns her into a wallflower, a touch-me-not. I’m not at all surprised that Frau Chauchat has no use for it. Such a charming woman, at the very peak of her beauty. I presume she has neither reason nor desire to remind every gentleman to whom she gives her hand of her marital bonds.”

“Good God, how she does go on,” Hans Castorp thought, staring in alarm into her eyes, but she returned his gaze with a kind of defiant, savage awkwardness. Then both of them fell silent for a while to recover. Hans Castorp ate, meanwhile suppressing the tremor of his head. At last he said, “And what about her husband? Doesn’t he care about her at all? Doesn’t he ever visit her up here? What does he do, actually?”

“Civil servant. An administrator for the Russian government, in some remote province, Daghestan, you know, it’s somewhere far to the east, beyond the Caucasus—he was transferred out there. No, I told you already, he’s never been seen up here once. And she’s been here now for three months this time.”

“So this is not her first time here?”

“Oh no, this is her third time already. And in between she’s somewhere else, at other places like this. It’s just the other way around—
she
visits
him
now and again, not often, once a year for a little while. They live separate lives, one might say, and she visits him now and again.”

“Well, after all, she is ill.”

“Certainly, that she is. But not all
that
ill. Not so seriously ill that she would have to live in sanatoriums, separated from her husband. There must be other reasons beyond that. People here generally assume there are. Perhaps she doesn’t like it out there in Daghestan beyond the Caucasus, in such a savage, remote region—there really would be nothing so surprising about that. But it must be at least partly the husband’s fault if she doesn’t like being with him. He has a French name, true, but he is a Russian official, and believe me, those are coarse people. I even saw one once—he had iron-gray whiskers and such a red face. It’s terribly easy to bribe them, and then they are all given to
vodka
, Russian schnapps, you know. For the sake of propriety they’ll order a little something to eat, a couple of marinated mushrooms or a piece of sturgeon, and chase it down with drink, quite to excess. And that’s what they call a snack.”

“You blame it all on him,” Hans Castorp said. “But we really don’t know if it might not be her fault that they don’t get along together. One must be fair. I just have to look at her—and then there’s the unmannerly way she slams doors, too—I certainly don’t imagine she’s an angel. Please don’t take offense, but I simply would not trust her out of my sight. But then you’re not without bias in the matter. You sit there up to your ears in prejudice in her favor.”

That is how he worked it sometimes. With a cunning that was actually foreign to him, he pretended that Fräulein Engelhart’s enthusiasm for Frau Chauchat was not in reality what he very well knew it to be, but that her enthusiasm was some neutral, droll fact that he, Hans Castorp, as an uninvolved party standing off at a cool, amused distance, could use to tease the old maid. And since he was certain that his accomplice would accept this audacious distortion and go along with it, it was not a risky tactic at all.

“Good morning,” he said. “Did you rest well? You did dream about lovely Minka, your Russian miss, didn’t you? No, look at you blush at the mere mention of her. You’re terribly infatuated, don’t try to deny it.”

And the teacher, who had indeed blushed and was now bent deep over her cup, whispered out of the left corner of her mouth, “Shame, shame, Herr Castorp. It isn’t at all nice of you to embarrass me with your insinuations. Everyone has already noticed that it’s her we’re talking about and that you’re saying things to make me blush.”

What a strange game these two tablemates were playing. Both of them knew that their lies had double and triple twists—that Hans Castorp teased the teacher just so he could talk about Frau Chauchat, but that at the same time he took unwholesome delight in flirting with the old maid; and that for her part, she welcomed all this: first, because it allowed her to play the matchmaker, and second, because she probably had become smitten with Frau Chauchat, if only to please the young man, and finally, because she took some kind of wretched pleasure in being teased and made to blush. They both knew this about themselves and each other, and they also knew that each of them knew this about themselves and one another—and that it was all tangled and squalid. But although Hans Castorp was usually repelled by tangled and squalid affairs and even felt repelled in this instance as well, he continued to splash about in these murky waters, taking consolation in the certainty that he was here only on a visit and would soon be leaving. Affecting a businesslike tone, he offered his expert opinion about the appearance of this “careless” woman, that she looked decidedly younger and prettier in full face than in profile, that her eyes were set too far apart, that her posture left a great deal to be desired, although he did have to admit that her arms were beautiful and “softly formed.” And as he was saying all this, he attempted to hide his wobbling head—and all the while he was not only aware that the teacher had spotted his futile attempts to do so, but he also realized to his profound disgust that she, too, suffered from the same tremor.

It was also a purely political tactic, a bit of unnatural cunning, that he had called Frau Chauchat “lovely Minka,” since it allowed him to continue: “I call her ‘Minka,’ although I don’t know what her real name is, actually. I mean her first name. As infatuated as you undeniably are, you must surely know her first name.”

The teacher thought hard. “Now wait, I do know it,” she said. “Or I did know it. Isn’t her name Tatyana? No, that wasn’t it, and not Natasha, either. Natasha Chauchat? No, that’s not what I heard her called. Wait, I have it. Her name’s Avdotya. Or something of that sort. Because she’s definitely not named Katyenka or Ninotchka. It has simply slipped my mind. But I can easily ascertain it for you, if that’s of some consequence to you.” And the very next day she knew the name. She told him over dinner, just as the glass door banged shut. Frau Chauchat’s first name was Clavdia.

Hans Castorp did not understand right away. He had her repeat the name and spell it for him before he actually grasped it. Then he pronounced it a few times himself, all the while looking over at Frau Chauchat with his bloodshot eyes, trying it out on her, so to speak.

“Clavdia,” he said, “yes, that’s very likely it, the name suits her very well.” He made no secret of his delight at having acquired this intimate knowledge, and from now on he spoke only of “Clavdia” when he meant Frau Chauchat. “Your Clavdia is rolling her bread up into little pills, I just noticed. Not very refined, I’d say.”

“It all depends who’s doing it,” the teacher responded. “It’s very becoming for Clavdia.”