The Magic Mountain (36 page)

Joachim had left him in peace the first day and avoided any long conversation. He stepped cautiously into the sickroom a few times, nodded to his cousin lying there, and out of courtesy asked if there was anything he needed. And he found it that much easier to acknowledge and respect Hans Castorp’s aversion to any discussion, because he shared it, and indeed considered his own situation even more embarrassing than his cousin’s.

But on return from his solitary Sunday-morning constitutional, he could no longer put off consulting his cousin about things that demanded immediate attention. Taking a position beside his bed, he heaved a sigh and said, “Yes, well, it’s no use. We have to do something. They’re expecting you at home.”

“Not yet,” Hans Castorp replied.

“No, but within a few days—Wednesday or Thursday.”

“Oh,” Hans Castorp said, “they’re not expecting me on any particular day. They have other things to do besides waiting for me and counting the days till I return. I’ll arrive when I arrive, and Uncle Tienappel will say, ‘So here you are!’ And Uncle James will say, ‘Well, have a good time?’ And if I don’t arrive just yet, it will be a good while before they even notice, you can be sure of that. Though it goes without saying that in due time they will have to be notified.”

“You can imagine,” Joachim said with another sigh, “how unpleasant the whole affair is for me. What’s going to happen now? Of course I feel more or less responsible. You come up here to visit me, and I introduce you to life up here, and now here you sit, and no one knows when you’ll be able to get away again and start your career. You must realize how terribly embarrassing this is for me.”

“I beg your pardon,” Hans Castorp said, his hands still clasped behind his head. “What are you getting in such a stew about? That’s simply nonsense. Did I come up here to visit you? Yes, that too. But the primary reason, after all, was to take a vacation, on orders of Dr. Heidekind. Well, and now it turns out that I needed a vacation a lot more than he or any of us dreamed I did. I’m surely not the first person who thought he was just dropping by for a visit, and then had things turn out differently. Just think of
Tous-les-deux’s
second son, and how it turned out very differently for him, too. I don’t know whether he’s even still alive, perhaps they removed the body during a meal one day. I really am surprised to learn that I’m a little ill, but I’ll just have to get used to being a patient here, to actually being one of you, instead of merely the visitor I’ve been until now. But, then again, I’m not that surprised, either, because I’ve never really felt all that splendidly healthy, and when I think of how both my parents died young—then where was such splendid health supposed to come from? That you’ve got a little problem yourself—although it’s as good as cured now—why, none of us has ever pretended otherwise. So it may well be that it runs in the family a little—Behrens at least dropped a hint to that effect. At any rate, I’ve been lying here since yesterday asking myself just how I’ve always felt about it all, what my attitudes are, you know, about the whole thing, about life and its demands. I’ve always been rather serious by nature, with a certain aversion to anything loud or robust. We were speaking about the same thing here not long ago, about how I’ve sometimes almost wished I had become a clergyman, what with my interest in sad, edifying things—you know, like a black funeral pall with a silver cross and R.I.P. on it.
Resquiescat in pace
—that’s the loveliest phrase, and I find it personally much more appealing than something rowdy like ‘he’s a jolly good fellow.’ It all comes, I think, from my having a little problem myself and having understood something about illness from the start—which has all become apparent now. But since that’s how things have turned out, I can only say it was a lucky thing I came up here and got myself examined. You don’t have to reproach yourself for anything. You heard him say yourself that if I had stayed down below and continued my life just as before, it’s quite possible my whole pulmonary lobe would have gone, willy-nilly, to the devil.”

“You can’t be sure of that!” Joachim said. “And that’s just it—that you can’t be sure at all. He claims you had some spots before that no one paid any attention to and they healed by themselves, so that all you have left are a few unimportant muffled tones. The same thing might have happened with this moist spot you’ve got now if you hadn’t happened to come up to visit me—you just can’t be sure.”

“No, you can’t be sure of anything,” Hans Castorp replied. “Which is precisely why no one has any right to assume the worst—about how long I’ll have to stay on here at your spa, for instance. You say that no one knows when I’ll get away and start work on the docks, but you say it from the pessimistic point of view. And that, I think, is premature, precisely because you can’t be sure. Behrens mentioned no dates—he’s a prudent fellow and doesn’t want to play the fortune-teller. And I haven’t even had my picture taken with X-rays yet, and only that will give us an objective view of the facts. Who knows whether anything worth mentioning will even show up, or whether I won’t have rid myself of my fever by then and can bid you all adieu. I’m for not playing this thing up too soon, so that we end up crying wolf back home. It will be enough if we write a letter—I can write it myself with my fountain pen if I prop myself up a little—and tell them I’ve got a bad cold and a fever, that I’m staying in bed and won’t be traveling just yet. And then we shall see what we shall see.”

“Fine,” Joachim said, “that’s what we’ll do for now. And the rest of it can wait, too.”

“What rest of it?”

“Well, just stop and think! You arrived here with a steamer trunk packed for a three-week stay. You’ll need underwear, shirts, winter clothes, and some other footwear. And finally, you’ll need to have more money sent, too.”

“
If
,” Hans Castorp said, “
if
I need it.”

“Good, let’s wait and see,” Joachim said and began to pace the room. “But we ought not—no, we cannot allow ourselves to have any illusions. I’ve been here too long not to know what’s what. Once Behrens says that you have a rough spot, almost a rattle . . . But, of course, of course, we can wait and see.”

And that was how they left things for now. The regular schedule, with its weekly and fortnightly deviations, took its course. Even in his present situation Hans Castorp participated in it all—if not by direct enjoyment, then at least through the reports Joachim gave him when he visited and sat down on the edge of the bed for fifteen minutes.

His Sunday breakfast tea tray was decorated with a little vase of flowers, and they had not forgotten to send along some of the pastries served in the dining hall on Sundays. Later in the morning, things turned lively in the garden and on the terrace. With a fanfare of trumpets and screechy clarinets the fortnightly Sunday concert began, for which Joachim had joined his cousin in his room, taking a seat out on the balcony to listen. Hans Castorp sat half propped up in bed, his head tilted to one side and a blurry look of fond devotion in his eyes, and he listened now to the harmonies drifting in through the open balcony door—though not without a mental shrug at the thought of Settembrini’s babblings about music being “politically suspect.”

But, as we have noted, when it came to the rest of the day’s sights and events, he had Joachim provide him a report; he asked him about the festive outfits that had been brought out for Sunday, the lace peignoirs and such (although it had turned too cold for lace peignoirs); about whether there had been any afternoon carriage rides (there had indeed—the entire Half-Lung Club had left on an excursion to Clavadel). On Monday, when Joachim looked in on him on his way back from Dr. Krokowski’s lecture and before his afternoon rest cure, Hans Castorp demanded to hear everything that had been said. Joachim proved rather closemouthed and reluctant to report on the lecture—but then, the two of them had not said much about the previous one, either. Nevertheless, Hans Castorp insisted on hearing details.

“Here I lie, paying full price,” he said, “and I want to get something out of what is offered, too.” He recalled his independent walk on Monday two weeks before and that it had not done him much good; he even expressed a rather definite conjecture that it had created a revolution in his body and caused his silent, latent illness to erupt.

“And the way the people up here talk,” he exclaimed, “the common people, I mean. It sounds so dignified and solemn, almost like poetry sometimes. ‘Fare thee well and much obliged!’ ” he repeated, imitating the woodsman. “I heard that up in the forest, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. That sort of thing gets caught up with other impressions and memories, you know, and just keeps ringing in your ears till the day you die. And so Krokowski spoke about ‘love’ again, did he?” he asked, grimacing as he said the word.

“But of course,” Joachim said. “What else? It is his topic, after all.”

“What did he have to say about it today?”

“Oh, nothing special. You know yourself from last time the way he puts things.”

“But what new ideas did he treat us to?”

“Nothing new, really . . . yes, well, he was selling basic chemistry today,” Joachim reluctantly and patronizingly reported. It was all about a kind of poisoning, about the organism poisoning itself, which, Dr. Krokowski had said, was the result of the decomposition of a certain, still-unidentified substance present throughout the body; the by-products of that decomposition had an intoxicating effect on certain centers in the spinal cord, not all that different from what happens when other poisons, such as morphine or cocaine, are introduced into the body.

“So that’s what causes flushed cheeks,” Hans Castorp said. “Think of it, that’s something worth learning. The things that man knows! He’s a regular fountain of information. Just wait, someday soon he’ll identify that substance present throughout the body, and he’ll manufacture those by-products himself, the ones with the intoxicating effect on the spinal cord. He can really get folk tipsy, then. It may well be that people knew the trick of it at one time. Listening to him makes you think there’s something to those stories about love potions and the other stuff they talk about in old sagas. Are you going now?”

“Yes,” Joachim said, “I really have to take my rest cure. The curve on my chart has been rising since yesterday. This problem of yours has definitely had its effect on me after all.”

And so Sunday, and Monday, passed. And the evening and the morning were the third day of Hans Castorp’s stay in the “stall,” a weekday with nothing to distinguish it—a Tuesday, the day of his arrival. He had been here for three weeks, and so he felt compelled to write a letter home and inform his uncle, however superficially for now, of how things stood. His pillows stuffed behind his back, he wrote on sanatorium stationery about how his scheduled departure had been delayed. He was lying in bed with a fever and a cold, which Director Behrens, being the overconscientious doctor he was, had evidently refused to take all that lightly and instead saw within the larger context of his—the letter-writer’s—general constitution. At their very first meeting, in fact, the supervising physician had found him very anemic, and in consequence of all this, it now appeared that the length of stay that he—Hans Castorp—had originally planned could no longer be regarded as sufficient. Further details as soon as possible. “Just right,” Hans Castorp thought, “not one word too many, and yet it takes care of things for a while, no matter what.” The letter was handed to the porter, who avoided the postal detour of a mailbox, and took it down to meet the next scheduled train.

This done, our adventurer felt he had put things in general good order and his mind was at ease; and although tormented by the cough and stuffy head of a cold, he lived each day as it came—each normal day, its established sameness divided into little segments, neither diverting nor boring, and always the same. Each morning there would be a robust knock on his door, and the bath attendant would enter, a sinewy fellow named Turnherr, with rolled-up sleeves and heavily veined forearms. In a gurgling voice with a serious impediment, he would address Hans Castorp—as he did all the patients—by his room number and then proceed to rub him down with alcohol. Not long after he left, Joachim would appear, already dressed by then, to say good morning and ask his cousin about his seven o’clock temperature and inform him of his own. While Joachim was eating his breakfast downstairs, Hans Castorp would sit up, pillows stuffed behind his back, and do the same, with the healthy appetite that a change in life can bring—and would be disturbed hardly at all by the bustling, businesslike invasion of the doctors, who by this time had passed through the dining hall and were now making their rounds, moving at double time through the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. His mouth full of jam, he would announce that he had slept “quite well” and gaze across the rim of his cup at the director, who was standing in the center of the room, one fist braced against the table, hastily scanning the temperature chart; he would respond in a calm, drawling voice as they wished him good morning and departed. He would light a cigarette, and before he had even realized that Joachim was gone, here would come his cousin, already back from his morning constitutional. They would chat about one thing or another, and the time until second breakfast, which Joachim faithfully used for a rest cure, was so brief that even a downright dimwit or lamebrain could not have managed to be bored, whereas it gave Hans Castorp an opportunity to feast on his impressions of the first three weeks up here and to meditate on his current situation and what it perhaps might lead to—so that he had almost no use for the two thick illustrated magazines from the sanatorium library that lay on his nightstand.

It was the same with the time required for Joachim’s second walk, this time down to Davos-Platz—another easy hour. He would look in again on Hans Castorp and, standing or sitting beside the sickbed for a moment, tell him about whatever he had happened to notice on his walk, then leave to take his noon rest cure. And how long was that? Again, just a brief hour. No sooner had you clasped your hands behind your head to gaze at the ceiling and pursue some passing thought than the gong sounded for those who were not bedridden or moribund to get ready for the day’s main meal.