The Magic Mountain (37 page)

Joachim would leave, and the “midday soup” would arrive—soup was the simplified, symbolic name for what came. Because Hans Castorp was not on a restricted diet—why should he have been? A restricted diet, short commons, would hardly have been appropriate to his condition. There he lay, paying full price, and what they brought him at this hour of fixed eternity was “midday soup,” the six-course Berghof dinner in all its splendor, with nothing missing—a hearty meal six days a week, a sumptuous showpiece, a gala banquet, prepared by a trained European chef in the sanatorium’s deluxe hotel kitchen. The dining attendant whose job it was to care for bedridden patients would bring it to him, a series of tasty dishes arranged under domed nickel covers. She would shove over the bed table, which was now part of the furniture, a marvel of one-legged equilibrium, adjust it across his bed in front of him, and Hans Castorp would dine from it like the tailor’s son who dined from a magic table.

And no sooner had he finished eating than Joachim would return; and then it would be almost two-thirty before he left for his balcony and the silence of the main rest cure settled over the Berghof. Not quite two-thirty, perhaps; to be precise, it was more like a quarter past. But such extra quarter hours left over from nice, round whole ones don’t really count, they are simply swallowed up along the way—at least that is what happens wherever time is managed on a grand scale, on long journeys, for instance, or on train rides that last for hours, or in similar situations when life is emptiness and waiting and all activity is reduced to whiling time away and putting it behind you. A quarter past two—that’s as good as half past; and half past two is the same as half till three, for heaven’s sake. Those thirty minutes can be regarded as a prologue to the full hour from three till four and that takes care of them. That is how it’s done under such circumstances. And so, in the end, the main rest cure was actually reduced to a mere hour—which in turn was abbreviated, contracted, and given an apostrophe, as it were. And the apostrophe was Dr. Krokowski.

Yes, Dr. Krokowski no longer circumvented Hans Castorp when he made his independent afternoon rounds. Hans Castorp counted now. He was no longer an interval or hiatus, he was a patient; he, too, was questioned, instead of being left lying there to his own devices, as he had been every day until now—much to his slight and secret annoyance. It was on

Monday that Dr. Krokowski had first materialized in his room—we say “materialized,” because that is the best word for the strange, almost terrifying impression it had made on Hans Castorp, no matter how hard he tried to shake it that day. He had been lying there dozing for fifteen minutes or half an hour, when he was startled awake by the sudden realization that the assistant was in his room, striding toward him, having entered not by way of the door, but from outside. He had not used the corridor, but had moved along the balconies, and had come in now through the open balcony door, creating the impression that he had materialized out of thin air. At any rate, there he had stood beside Hans Castorp’s bed—black and pale, broad-shouldered, stout, the hour’s apostrophe—and visible under his two-pronged beard had been a manly smile and yellowish teeth.

“You seem surprised to see me, Herr Castorp,” he had said in his gentle baritone; his consciously affected, drawling accent had an exotic, palatalized
r
—not a rolled
r
, but simply a single tap of the tongue just behind the upper front teeth. “I am merely fulfilling a pleasant duty in stopping by to see how you are doing. Your association with us has entered a new phase—overnight our guest has become a comrade.” (The word “comrade” had made Hans Castorp feel rather uneasy.) “Who would have thought it!” Dr. Krokowski had joked in a comradely voice. “Who would have thought that evening when I first had the pleasure of greeting you, and you responded to my mistaken view—it was a mistake at the time—by declaring that you were perfectly healthy. I think I expressed something of my doubts at the time, but I assure you that I did not mean this. I do not wish to represent myself as more perspicacious than I am. I certainly wasn’t thinking at the time of a moist spot, my intentions were quite different, more general, more philosophical. I was articulating my doubts that the words ‘human being’ and ‘perfect health’ could ever be made to rhyme. And even today, despite what happened at your examination, from my viewpoint—which is different from that of my distinguished supervisor—this moist spot here”—and he had lightly touched Hans Castorp’s shoulder with the tip of one finger—“cannot be regarded as the primary object of interest. It is merely a secondary phenomenon. Organic factors are always secondary.”

And Hans Castorp had flinched.

“So in my eyes at least, your catarrh is merely a tertiary phenomenon,” Dr. Krokowski had added very nonchalantly. “How is that cold, by the way? I’m certain bed rest will soon take care of it. Have you been measuring your temperature today?” And at that point the assistant’s visit had taken on the character of a rather harmless inspection, which continued to be the case in the following days and weeks. Dr. Krokowski would enter by way of the balcony at a quarter till four or a little earlier, greet the recumbent patient in his cheerful, manly way, make a few very elementary medical inquiries, bring the conversation around briefly to more personal topics, and make a comradely joke or two. And although these visits never failed to have a certain dubious aura about them, one can eventually become accustomed to dubious things—if they remain within limits. And Hans Castorp soon found he had no objections to Dr. Krokowski’s regular “materializations.” They simply belonged to the fixed schedule of a normal day, and ended the main rest cure with an apostrophe.

And so by the time the assistant stepped back out onto the balcony, it was four o’clock—which meant late, late afternoon. Suddenly and before you even realized it, it was late afternoon, which would deepen now seamlessly into oncoming evening. And by the time tea had been taken, both in the dining room below and in room 34, it was very close to five o’clock; and by the time Joachim had returned from his third obligatory walk and had dropped in on his cousin again, it was so close to six o’clock that, once you rounded it off a little, the time left in the rest cure until supper was reduced to just one hour—and it was child’s play to drive such paltry forces of opposing time from the field of battle, particularly if you had thoughts in your head and an
orbis pictus
on the nightstand.

Joachim would look in before leaving for supper. His own tray would be brought in. The valley would long since have filled with shadows, and while Hans Castorp ate, it would grow discernibly darker in the white room. When he had finished, he would sit there propped up against his pillows, his empty dishes and his magic table before him, and gaze out into the quickly falling dusk—today’s dusk, which was hardly distinguishable from yesterday’s, or the dusk of the day before yesterday, or of a week ago. There was evening—and there had just been morning. The day, chopped into little pieces by all these synthetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust—and he would notice it now, either in cheerful amazement or, at worst, with a little pensiveness, since to shudder at the thought would have been inappropriate to his young years. It seemed to him that he was simply gazing, “on and on.”

One day, ten or twelve days perhaps after Hans Castorp had taken to his bed, there was a knock on his door at that same hour—that is to say, just before Joachim was due to return from supper and the evening social. And in response to Hans Castorp’s tentative “come in,” Lodovico Settembrini appeared on the threshold. All of a sudden the room was dazzlingly bright—because the visitor’s first gesture upon opening the door had been to switch on the ceiling lamp, and in a flash the room was overflowing with a sudden clarity that was reflected off the white of the ceiling and furniture.

The Italian was the only person among the sanatorium’s residents about whom Hans Castorp had expressly asked during this period. All the same, every time Joachim sat or stood beside his cousin’s bed for ten minutes or so—and that happened ten times a day at least—he would report about all the little events and anomalies in the institution’s daily life, and if Hans Castorp had questions they were always of a more general, impersonal nature. Despite his isolation, his curiosity did not go beyond asking if new guests had arrived or any familiar faces had departed; and he seemed content to learn that only the former was the case. There was one newcomer, a young man with a greenish, sunken face, and he had been given a place at the table to the cousins’ right, between Levi of the ivory skin and Frau Iltis. Well, Hans Castorp could wait to see him with his own eyes. And so no one had left? Joachim replied curtly in the negative, his eyes lowered. But he had to answer the same question several times, every other day really, and finally, with some impatience in his voice, he tried to settle the issue once and for all, declaring that as far as he knew no one was planning to depart—people didn’t normally leave here that abruptly.

But as for Settembrini, Hans Castorp had expressly asked about him, demanding to know what he had “to say about it.” —About what? —“Why, that I’m lying here, presumably ill.”

And, in fact, Settembrini had responded, although very briefly. On the day Hans Castorp vanished, he had approached Joachim and asked where their visitor might be, obviously expecting to be told that Hans Castorp had departed. And in reply to Joachim’s account, he had uttered just two words in Italian. The first was, “
Ecco!
” the second, “
Poveretto
!
”—meaning “There you are!” and “Poor fellow!”—you did not have to understand any more Italian than these young men to grasp the meaning of those two words.

“But why ‘
poveretto
’?” Hans Castorp had asked. “Here he sits with his literature, made up of equal parts of humanism and politics, but he can’t do much by way of improving the more mundane issues in life. He shouldn’t be so arrogant about pitying me. I’ll be back down in the flatlands before he is.”

And now here stood Herr Settembrini in the abruptly illuminated room. Bracing himself on an elbow to turn toward the door and blinking into the light, Hans Castorp recognized him now, and blushed. As always, Settembrini was wearing his heavy coat with the wide lapels, a frayed turndown collar, and checked trousers. He had come directly from supper and, as was his habit, had a wooden toothpick between his lips. Under the handsome upward sweep of his moustache, the corners of his mouth were drawn into the familiar, delicate, dry, critical smile.

“Good evening, my good engineer. Do the rules allow my looking in on you? If so, we needed some light for it—please forgive my arbitrarily taking care of the matter,” he said, waving one small hand toward the ceiling lamp. “You are engaged in deep contemplation—I certainly don’t mean to disturb you. An inclination to ponder matters would be quite understandable in your situation, and there’s always your cousin if you wish to chat. You see, I am perfectly aware of just how superfluous I am. All the same, one lives in such close proximity, one senses a mutual regard, man to man, a certain sympathy, a sympathy of both the mind and the heart. It is almost a week now since we last saw one another. I had indeed begun to suspect that you had departed when I saw your place vacant down in the refectory. The lieutenant set me to rights—hmm, or should we say, set me to what was wrong, if that does not sound impolite. In short, how are you doing? What are you doing? How do you feel? Not all too depressed, I hope?”

“It’s you, Herr Settembrini. How kind of you. Ha, ha—‘refectory’? Another one of your jokes. Please, have a chair. You’re not disturbing me in the least. I’ve been lying here musing—and musing is probably an exaggeration. I was simply too lazy to turn on the light. Thanks so much, I’m feeling almost normal, subjectively at least. My cold is almost gone, thanks to the bed rest, but it’s apparently only a secondary phenomenon, or so I’ve been told. My temperature still is not quite what it should be—sometimes ninety-nine point five, sometimes ninety-nine point nine. That hasn’t changed in the past few days.”

“You’ve been measuring regularly, have you?”

“Yes, six times a day, just like all of you up here. Ha, ha—excuse me for laughing, I was just thinking about your calling our dining hall a refectory. That’s what they call it in a monastery, is it not? There really is some resemblance—I’ve never been in a monastery, but I can imagine it’s much like here. And I can rattle off the litany of the ‘rule’ and observe it quite faithfully.”

“Like a pious monk. One might say you’ve ended your novitiate and have taken your vows. My solemn congratulations. You’re already calling it ‘our dining hall,’ yourself. By the way—not that I wish to cast any aspersions on your masculinity—but you almost remind me more of a young nun than a monk, one of those innocent young brides of Christ, her hair newly shorn, with great martyr’s eyes. Whenever I happened to notice those sacrificial lambs, it was never without . . . without a certain flood of sentimentality. Ah, yes, yes, your good cousin has told me all about it. And so at the last moment you let them examine you.”

“Because I was feverish. What would you have me do about such a cold, Herr Settembrini? I would have consulted our family doctor down in the plains. And up here, with two specialists, where information comes from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—it would have been strange if . . .”

“Quite so, quite so. And you had been measuring your temperature, too, before anyone instructed you to do so. Although that was suggested to you right from the start. Nurse Mylendonk slipped you a thermometer, am I right?”

“Slipped me one? Since I needed it, I bought one from her.”

“I understand. Purely a business transaction. And how many months has the director saddled you with? Good God, I asked you that same question once before. Do you remember? You had just recently arrived. You were very cocky with your answers that day.”

“I certainly do remember, Herr Settembrini. I’ve had a great many new experiences since then, but I can remember it as if it were yesterday. You were so amusing, even that first day. You turned Director Behrens into one of the judges of hell—Radames? No, wait, that’s somebody else.”