The Magic Mountain (38 page)

“Rhadamanthus? It’s possible I might have called him that in passing. I don’t always remember everything that may burst from my lips.”

“Rhadamanthus, right! Minos and Rhadamanthus! And you even spoke to us about Carducci that first day . . .”

“If you will pardon me, my friend, we shall leave
him
out of this.
His
name sounds all too strange coming from you at the moment.”

“Fine with me,” Hans Castorp laughed. “But you have taught me a great deal about him, you know. Yes, back then I hadn’t the vaguest, and I told you that I had come for three weeks. How could I have known any different? And Fräulein Kleefeld had just whistled hello to me with her pneumothorax, and I was a little taken aback. Although I felt feverish from the start, too—because the air here is good not only for
fighting off
illness, but it’s also good
for
it, sometimes bringing it to eruption. Which is probably necessary in the end, if there’s to be any healing.”

“An alluring hypothesis. Did Director Behrens also tell you about a certain Russian woman whom we had here for five months last year—no, wait, the year before last? No? He should have. A delightful lady, of German heritage, married, a young mother. She came from somewhere in the Baltic region, anemic, lymphatic, there were perhaps more serious problems as well. Well, she spends a month here and complains of feeling very ill. Just be patient! A second month passes, and she continues to maintain that she’s not getting better, but worse. She is told that the doctor, and the doctor alone, can tell how she is
doing;
she can merely tell him how she is
feeling
—and that doesn’t matter much. They are satisfied with her lung. Fine, she says nothing, she continues her rest cure and loses weight with every week. She faints during her four-month checkup. That’s of no concern, Behrens says; they are really quite satisfied with her lung. But when by month five she can no longer walk, she writes her husband back by the Baltic, and Behrens receives a letter from him—the envelope is marked “personal” and “urgent” in a vigorous hand, I saw it myself. Yes, Behrens says now with a shrug, it has begun to look as if the climate here does not agree with her. The woman was beside herself. They should have told her that before, she cried, she had felt it all along, and now they had ruined her health entirely! We can only hope that she regained her strength once she joined her husband again by the Baltic.”

“Excellent. What a way you have with stories, Herr Settembrini—every word is absolutely graphic! I’ve laughed quietly many a time at your story about the girl who went for a swim in the lake and then was given a silent sister. Yes, the things that happen here. Always something new. My own case is still quite uncertain, by the way. The director claims he has found a little something wrong with me. There are some old spots, where I was sick once before without ever knowing it, I heard those myself when he tapped, and now he says he can hear a fresh one—ha, ‘fresh’ sounds quite peculiar in that context. But so far it’s merely a matter of acoustical observation, and we won’t have any real diagnostic certainty until I’m on my feet again and they X-ray me and take an interior snapshot. Then we’ll know for sure.”

“Do you think so? Did you know photographic plates often show spots that are assumed to be cavities when they are mere shadows, and that sometimes when something
is
there, it doesn’t show
any spots
at all?
Madonna
, the photographic plate! There was a young numismatist here who was feverish; and since he was feverish one could clearly make out cavities on his photographic plate. They even claimed to have heard them! He was treated for phthisis—and died. The autopsy revealed there was nothing wrong with his lungs and that he had died of some coccus infection or other.”

“Now, listen here, Herr Settembrini, you’re already talking about autopsies. I don’t think I’m that far along just yet.”

“My good engineer, you are a wag.”

“And you are a dyed-in-the-wool critic and skeptic, if I do say so! You don’t even believe in exact science. Does
your
plate show spots?”

“Yes, it shows a few.”

“And you really are ill, aren’t you?”

“Yes, unfortunately I am rather ill,” Herr Settembrini replied and hung his head. There was a pause, broken by his cough. Hans Castorp looked up from his bed at his guest, whom he had reduced to silence. With two very simple questions, it seemed, he had dumbfounded him, refuted every possible argument, even the world republic and beautiful style. For his part, he did nothing to start up the conversation again.

After a while Herr Settembrini sat up with a smile. “But tell me now, my good engineer,” he said, “how has your family taken the news?”

“Which news do you mean? About the delay in my departure? Ah yes, my family. My family at home consists of three uncles—a great-uncle and his two sons, who are more like cousins to me. I have no other family than that, since I was orphaned very early. Taken the news? They really don’t know all that much yet. When I first had to take to my bed, I wrote them that I had a bad cold and could not travel. And yesterday, since it has been a little while now, I wrote again and said that in treating my catarrh Director Behrens had become interested in the state of my lungs and insisted I extend my stay until we could achieve some clarity about that. They will have taken it all quite calmly.”

“And your new position? You spoke of a course of practical activity on which you intended to embark shortly.”

“Yes, as an unsalaried engineer-in-training. I asked them to excuse me from my duties on the dock for now. You mustn’t suppose they are in any despair about it. They can get along without a trainee for as long as necessary.”

“Fine, fine. So that from that side, everything is in order. Composure up and down the line. People are generally detached in your native land, are they not? Although they can be energetic, too!”

“Oh yes, energetic, too, very energetic,” Hans Castorp said. From a distance now, he examined life in his homeland and found that his interlocutor had characterized it correctly. “Detached and energetic, you’re probably right there.”

“Well,” Herr Settembrini continued, “should you remain somewhat longer, I have no doubt we shall all make your good uncle’s acquaintance—I mean your great-uncle’s. He’s certain to come up and check on your situation.”

“Out of the question!” Hans Castorp cried. “Under no circumstances! Wild horses couldn’t get him here. My uncle is very apoplectic, you see—stout, hardly any neck. No, he requires sensible barometric pressure. He would do worse here than the Russian lady from the Baltic region. He’d be in an awful mess.”

“What a disappointment. Apoplectic, you say? What good are detachment and energy in that case? Your good uncle is a rich man, I take it? And you are rich, too, aren’t you? People are generally rich where you come from.”

Hans Castorp smiled at Herr Settembrini’s literary generalization and from his bed he looked again into the distance, to the world at home from which he was now removed. He thought back, trying to judge impersonally, and found that distance helped him to do so.

“Some people are rich, yes,” he answered now, “and some are not. And if not—so much the worse. And me? I’m no millionaire, but what I have is well invested. I’m independent, have enough to live. But let’s leave me out of it. If you had said one
has
to be rich back there—I would have agreed with you. Because let us assume you are
not
rich, or stop being rich—you are in a sorry state! ‘Him? Does he still have some money left?’ they ask. Those are their very words, and that’s the face they make. I’ve heard those words often enough, and I realize now that they are engrained in my mind. And so they must have struck me as rather strange even though I was used to hearing them—otherwise they would not be engrained in my mind. Don’t you think? No, I don’t suppose that as a
homo humanus
you would feel at home with us. Even for someone like me whose home it is, it all seems rather crude sometimes—though I must add I’ve never personally had to suffer under it. If someone doesn’t make sure that the best, most expensive wines are served at his dinners, people simply don’t go, and his daughters end up old maids. That’s how people are. As I lie here now and look at it all from a distance, it does seem crude to me. What were the terms you used—detached and . . . And energetic! Fine, but what does that really mean? That means hard, cold. And what does hard and cold mean? It means cruel. The air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder.”

Settembrini listened, nodding. He nodded again when Hans Castorp finished his critical remarks for now and fell silent. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “I will not attempt to gloss over the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may—the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most, he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’—or better, flawed and ignorant. You love stories—let me supply you with one. Let me tell you about a young man, someone’s husband and son, who was here for eleven months, whom I got to know. He was a little older than you, I believe—several years older in fact. He improved and was released on probation. He returned home and was received with open arms by his family—not just uncles, but a mother and a wife. He lay around the whole day with a thermometer in his mouth and paid no attention to anything else. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You have to have lived up there to know how things really are. You people down here lack the basic concepts.’ It finally came to the point where his mother declared, ‘Go back up. There’s no living with you here.’ And he came back up. He returned to his ‘home.’ You do know, don’t you, that people call this ‘home’ once they’ve lived up here? He was a total stranger to his young wife, she likewise lacked the ‘basic concepts’—and decided not to join him. She realized he would stay on and find a lady friend at ‘home’ whose ‘basic concepts’ agreed with his own.”

Hans Castorp had apparently been only half listening. He went on staring at the incandescent clarity of his white room, as if gazing into the distance beyond. His laugh came a little late now and he said, “He called it home, did he? That’s really rather sentimental, as you put it. Yes, you do know an endless number of stories. I was still considering what we were saying about hardness and cruelty. I’ve been mulling over the same thing in one form or another for the last few days. You see, a person probably needs a rather thick skin to be in perfect natural agreement with the way people think down there in the flatlands, asking questions like ‘Does he still have some money left?’ and making those faces they make. I never found it all that natural, even if I’m not a
homo humanus
. It has always struck me that way, although I’ve only noticed it just now, after the fact. Maybe my own unconscious tendency to illness had something to do with my finding it unnatural. I heard those old spots myself, and now Behrens has evidently found a fresh minor problem. It was something of a surprise, I suppose, and yet I really wasn’t all that astonished, either. I’ve never felt all that robust, actually; and besides, both my parents died so young—I was orphaned twice as a child, you know.”

Herr Settembrini coordinated head, shoulders, and hands in a serene, polite gesture to illustrate his question: Yes, well? And what of it?

“You’re a writer,” Hans Castorp said, “a literary man. You really should be able to understand and appreciate how under such circumstances a person might not be so tough-minded or find it perfectly natural for people to be so cruel—normal people, you know, who stroll about and laugh and make money and stuff their bellies. I don’t know if I’m expressing myself . . .”

Settembrini bowed. “You wish to say,” he explained, “that early and repeated contacts with death give rise to a basic mind-set against the cruelties and crudities of life as it is thoughtlessly lived out in the world. Or, let us say, it makes one aware of and sensitive to its cynicism.”

“Precisely,” Hans Castorp exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. “You’ve put it perfectly, dotted the i and crossed the t, Herr Settembrini. Contacts with death! I know that as a man of letters you . . .”

Laying his head to one side and closing his eyes, Settembrini held out a hand toward him in a very beautiful and gentle gesture of restraint, a plea to be heard further. He held this pose for several seconds, long after Hans Castorp had fallen silent to wait somewhat awkwardly for what was to come. Finally he opened his black eyes—those organ-grinder eyes—and said, “Permit me, permit me, my good engineer, to tell you something, to lay it upon your heart. The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only
religious
way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and
not
to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. The ancients decorated their sarcophagi with symbols of life and procreation, some of them even obscene. For the ancients, in fact, the sacred and the obscene were very often one and the same. Those people knew how to honor death. Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind.”