The Magic Mountain (43 page)

“How very generous of you. And your sentence is?”

“He did not mention any definite length of time.”

“Not bad, either. So let us go and lie down, my good engineer. Assume our positions.”

They said good-bye outside room 34.

“Well, go on up to your roof, Herr Settembrini. It must be more amusing to lie there in the company of others than alone. Do you find it entertaining? Are they interesting people, the ones you take your rest cure with?”

“Oh, nothing but Parthians and Scythians.”

“You mean Russians?”

“Russians, male and female,” Herr Settembrini said, and a tightening was visible at the corner of his mouth. “Adieu, my good engineer.”

No doubt about it, he had meant something by that. Hans Castorp entered his room in confusion. Did Settembrini know what was going on with him? Presumably he had been spying on him for educational reasons, taking careful note of where his eyes were directed. Hans Castorp was angry at the Italian, and at himself, too, because it was his own lack of self-control that had provoked the gibe. He gathered up some writing materials to take out with him for his rest cure—because there could be no more delays, a letter home, his third, would have to be written—and went on being angry, muttering things about this windbag and quibbler, who was sticking his nose into things that were none of his business, but who hummed little songs at girls in public. By now, he no longer felt like taking up the task of writing. This organ-grinder and his insinuations had definitely spoiled the mood for it. But one way or the other, he had to have winter clothes, money, underwear, shoes—everything, in fact, that he would have brought with him had he known he would be here not for just three weeks at the height of summer, but . . . but for a still-undetermined period, which, no matter what, was sure to last into some of winter, indeed, given assumptions and circumstances up here, would very probably include the whole season. And that, or at least the possibility of it, would have to be shared with his family. It would require real work this time—making a clean breast of things and no longer pretending otherwise to himself or them.

And it was in this spirit that he wrote, making use of a technique he had frequently seen Joachim employ—sitting in his lounge chair, with his fountain pen in hand and a writing case against his raised knees. He wrote on sanatorium stationery, taken from an ample supply in his table drawer, to James Tienappel, the uncle to whom he felt closest of the three, and asked him to inform the consul. He spoke of an unforeseen vexation, of misgivings that had proved justified, of the necessity, on good medical advice, of spending a part of the winter, and perhaps all of it, up here, since cases such as his own were often more stubborn than those that began more spectacularly and since the important thing, really, was to intervene decisively and so arrest his case’s progress for good and all. Seen from this angle, he suggested, it was a stroke of fortune, a happy turn of fate, that he had chanced to come up here and had occasion to be examined; because otherwise he would probably have remained unaware of his condition much longer and perhaps have learned of it in a much more distressing fashion. As for the estimated time of his cure, one should not be surprised if he might have to make a winter of it and would be able to return to the plains hardly any earlier than Joachim. Notions of time here were different from those applicable to trips to the shore or stays at a spa. The month was, so to speak, the shortest unit of time, and a single month played no role at all.

It was cool; he was wearing his overcoat, had wrapped himself in a blanket, and his hands turned red as he wrote. At times he would look up from his paper, covered with reasonable and convincing phrases, and gaze out into the familiar landscape, which he hardly noticed anymore: the long valley, its exit blocked today by pale, glassy peaks; the bright pattern of settlement along its floor, glistening now and then in the sun; and the slopes, covered partly by rugged forests, partly by meadows, from which the sound of cowbells drifted. Writing came more easily as he went along, and he no longer understood how he could possibly have been afraid of this letter. As he wrote, he came to see that nothing could be more plausible than his explanations and that of course his family at home would be in perfect agreement with them. A young man of his social class and circumstances took care of himself when that proved advisable, he made use of facilities set aside expressly for him and people like him. That was only proper. Had he returned home, they would have sent him right back up here upon hearing his report. He now asked them to send the things he needed. And in conclusion he asked that necessary funds be sent regularly. Eight hundred marks a month would take care of everything.

He signed it. That was done. This third letter home was comprehensive, it did the job—not in terms of conceptions of time valid down below, but in terms of those prevailing up here. It established Hans Castorp’s
freedom
. This was the word he used, not explicitly, not by forming the syllables in his mind, but as something he felt in its most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which he had learned to understand it during his stay here—though that was a sense that had little to do with the meaning Settembrini attached to the word. And as he heaved a sigh, his chest quivered as the wave of terror and excitement that he knew quite well by now swept over him.

Blood had rushed to his head as he wrote, his cheeks burned. He picked up Mercury from the nightstand and took his temperature, as if he could not let this opportunity pass. Mercury climbed to one hundred degrees.

“You see?” Hans Castorp thought. And he added a postscript: “This letter has been quite an effort. My temperature stands at a hundred degrees. I see that for the time being I shall have to keep very quiet. You will have to excuse me if I do not write often.” Then he lay back and lifted a hand to the sky, palm out, just as he had held it behind the fluorescent screen. But daylight had no effect on its living form, the stuff of it grew even darker and more opaque against the brightness and just its outer edge shone reddish. It was the living hand he was accustomed to seeing, washing, using—not the alien scaffold he had seen in the screen. The analytical pit he had seen open up before him that day had closed again.

October began as new months are wont to do—their beginnings are perfectly modest and hushed, with no outward signs, no birthmarks. Indeed, they steal in silently and quite unnoticed, unless you are paying very strict attention. Real time knows no turning points, there are no thunderstorms or trumpet fanfares at the start of a new month or year, and even when a new century commences only we human beings fire cannon and ring bells.

In Hans Castorp’s case the first day of October was exactly like the last day of September. The one was just as cold and inclement as the other, and those that followed were the same. He needed his winter overcoat and both camel-hair blankets for his rest cure, and not just of an evening, but during the day, too. If he tried to hold a book, his fingers turned clammy and stiff, even though his cheeks were flushed with dry heat. And Joachim was very tempted to put his fur-lined sleeping bag to use, but then thought better of it, not wanting to pamper himself too soon.

But several days later, somewhere between the beginning and the middle of the month, things turned around again, and a belated summer burst upon them with absolutely astonishing splendor. Not without good reason, then, had Hans Castorp heard people praise October in these regions. For a good two and a half weeks a splendid sky reigned above mountains and valley, each new day outdoing the last for sheer blue purity; and the sun burned with such intensity that everyone found good reason to dig out his or her lightest summer clothes, the cast-aside muslin dresses and linen trousers; and even the large white canvas sunshade, which had no handle but was ingeniously fixed with a peg and several holes to the arm of the lounge chair, offered only inadequate protection from the midday glare.

“I’m glad I’m still here to enjoy this,” Hans Castorp said to his cousin. “It’s been so wretched at times—and now it seems as if we already had winter behind us and the nice weather lay ahead.” And he was right. There were few signs to indicate the true state of affairs, and even those were inconspicuous. Some maples that had been planted down in Platz, but were barely surviving, had long since despondently shed their leaves; otherwise there were no hardwoods here to give the landscape the characteristic look of the season—only the hybrid Alpine alders, which drop their soft needles like leaves, were bare and autumnal. The rest of the trees adorning the region, whether tall or stunted, were evergreens steeled against winter, the boundaries of which were so vague that it could scatter snowstorms across the whole year; and only several subtle shades of rusty red that lay over the forest told of a dying year, despite the blazing sun. To be sure, if you looked more closely, there were wildflowers that gently made the same point. Gone now were the purple orchis and bushy columbine, even the wild pink, all of which had adorned the slopes at the visitor’s arrival. Only the gentian and stubby meadow crocus were still in bloom, and they attested to a freshness hidden within the superficially heated air, a chill that could suddenly go straight to the bone as you lay there singed by the sun, like an icy shiver in the midst of fever.

Inwardly, then, Hans Castorp ignored the structure by which those who husband time measure its passing and divide it into units, counting and naming each. He had paid no attention to the silent onset of the tenth month; he felt only what his senses felt—blazing heat with icy frost hidden within and beneath it, a sensation that was new to him in this intensity and that suggested a culinary comparison: it reminded him, he remarked to Joachim, of an
omelette en surprise
, where ice cream lay wrapped in hot meringue. He often made such comments, letting them fall quickly and offhandedly, though with emotion in his voice, like a man who is chilled and feverish at the same time. To be sure, in between such moments, he could be silent, too, if not to say turned in upon himself; for although his attention was directed outward, it was focused on just one point. All the rest, whether people or objects, lay in a blur of fog—a fog that was engendered in Hans Castorp’s own brain and that Director Behrens and Dr. Krokowski would doubtless have declared to be the product of soluble toxins. He even told himself this was the case—not that the insight aroused in him the capacity or even the slightest wish to be rid of his intoxication.

For it is an intoxication that cares only for itself—nothing could be less desirable or more abhorrent than becoming sober again. It holds its own against all impressions that might suppress it, does not tolerate them out of self-preservation. Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat’s profile did not flatter her, but made her look rather severe and not all that young—he had even mentioned it himself on occasion. And the result? He avoided looking at her in profile, literally closed his eyes if by chance, whether at a distance or up close, this was the view offered him—it pained him. And why? His reason should have jumped at the chance to assert itself. But we are asking too much of him. At second breakfast on each of these sparkling mornings, he would turn pale at the thrill of seeing Clavdia appear in the lace peignoir that she wore on warm days and that only added to her special fascination—late as always, slamming the door, smiling, both arms lifted slightly at different angles, standing there at attention to present herself to the dining hall. But he was thrilled not so much because she looked so charming, but because her looking that way only enhanced the sweet fog in his head, increased the intoxication that desired itself, that wanted only nourishment and self-justification.

An observer with a mind like Lodovico Settembrini’s would surely have seen such a lack of good intentions as depravity, as “a form of depravity.” Hans Castorp occasionally thought about the literary views that the man had offered on “illness and despair”—which he had found incomprehensible, or so at least he had pretended. He gazed at Clavdia Chauchat, at the limpness of her back and the way she thrust her head forward; he watched her arrive for meals, always very late, without reason or apology, but simply because she lacked the discipline and energy of good manners; watched how, because of that basic flaw, whether coming or going, she let every door slam behind her, rolled her bread into little pills, and occasionally gnawed at her cuticles. And the unspoken suspicion rose up in him that if she was ill—which she surely was, almost hopelessly ill, since she had been forced to come up here so often and for such long periods—her illness was, if not entirely, then at least in large part, of a moral nature, and was therefore, just as Settembrini had said, not the cause or result of her “carelessness” but in fact identical with it. He also recalled the dismissive gesture with which the humanist had spoken of the “Parthians and Scythians” with whom he had to share his rest cure, a gesture of natural, immediate disdain and disapproval that needed no explanation and that Hans Castorp had understood quite well at one time—back when he, a man who sat up very straight at the dinner table, had detested slamming doors from the bottom of his heart, had never felt tempted to chew his fingernails (if for no other reason than because he had his Maria Mancinis), had been deeply offended by Frau Chauchat’s lack of manners, and had been unable to throw off a feeling of superiority whenever he heard this narrow-eyed foreigner attempt his mother tongue.

As matters now stood, Hans Castorp had almost totally renounced such feelings, and instead it was the Italian who annoyed him with that conceited talk about “Parthians and Scythians”—without even specifying the Bad Russian table, where those students sat with heads of thick hair and not a trace of collar or cuff, arguing in their alien tongue, apparently unable to express themselves in any other, a boneless language that reminded Hans Castorp of a thorax without ribs, like the one Director Behrens had described recently. It was true—these people’s manners might very well arouse lively distaste in a humanist. They ate with their knives and made an unspeakable mess of their clothes. Settembrini claimed that one of these fellows, a medical student well advanced in his studies, had turned out to be totally ignorant of Latin and did not know, for example, what a
vacuum
was; and from daily first-hand knowledge, Hans Castorp was fairly sure that Frau Stöhr was not lying when she told her tablemates that the couple in room 32 were always still in bed together when the bath attendant came to give them their morning massage.