The Magic Mountain (50 page)

“Yes, that’s a tool for single gentlemen,” Behrens said. “That’s why I keep it locked up, you know. It might ruin my little kitchen fay’s eyes. You’ll suffer no further harm, I’m sure. It was presented to me as a gift by a patient, an Egyptian princess, who honored us with her presence for one brief year. You see, the pattern is repeated on each of the items. Droll, eh?”

“It’s quite remarkable,” Hans Castorp replied. “No, no, it doesn’t bother me, of course. One can even view it in dead earnest if one likes—although, after all, it’s not exactly appropriate on a coffee service. The ancients are said to have decorated their coffins with things like this on occasion. The obscene and the sacred were more or less one and the same for them.”

“Well, as far as the princess goes,” Behrens said, “she was, I think, given more to the former. I also have some very lovely cigarettes she gave me, extra-fine quality, the sort you bring out on tip-top occasions.” And he fetched a bright green box from the cupboard to offer them one. Joachim declined with a click of his heels. Hans Castorp helped himself and smoked the unusually large, wide cigarette, imprinted with a golden sphinx—and it was indeed wonderful.

“If you would be so kind, Director Behrens,” he requested, “do tell us something more about skin.” He had picked up Frau Chauchat’s portrait again, balancing it on one knee. Leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips, he regarded it now. “Not specifically about the fatty layer—we’ve learned what that’s about. But about human skin in general, since you’re so good at painting it.”

“About skin? Are you interested in physiology?”

“Very much. Yes, I’ve always taken a great deal of interest in it. The human body—I’ve always had a singular fondness for it. Sometimes I’ve asked myself if I shouldn’t have become a doctor. In a certain sense, I think, I would not have done badly at it. Because if a man is interested in the body, he is also interested in illness—particularly in that—isn’t he? Not that it means all that much, by the way. I could have become any number of things. I could have become a clergyman, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sometimes I’ve had the fleeting impression that I would actually have been in my element there.”

“But then why did you become an engineer?”

“Purely by chance. External circumstances tipped the scale more or less.”

“Well, then—skin, you say? What should I tell you about your sensory envelope? It is your external brain, you see. Ontogenetically speaking, it has the same origin as the apparatus for the so-called higher sensory organs up there in your skull. You should know that the central nervous system is simply a slight modification of the external skin. Among lower animals there is no differentiation whatever between central and peripheral—they smell and taste with their skin. Just imagine it—the skin is their only sensory organ. Must be quite a cozy sensation, when one thinks about it. Whereas with highly differentiated beings like you and me, the skin’s sole aspiration is to be tickled. It is an organ that merely wards off danger, sends up signals, though it does keep a damned good eye out for anything that gets too near the body. It even sticks its tactile apparatus out beyond itself—as hair, body hair, which is nothing but keratinized skin that can sense something approaching before the skin itself is touched. Just among us, it’s even possible that the skin’s task of protecting and defending us may go beyond the merely physical. Do you know how you blush or turn pale?”

“Not precisely.”

“Yes, well, frankly, we don’t know all that precisely ourselves, at least not when it comes to blushing for shame. The process has not been totally explained, since so far we have been unable to locate dilating muscles along the blood vessels that are activated by the vasomotor nerves. Why the cock’s comb actually swells—or whatever other bombastic examples one might mention—remains a mystery, so to speak, particularly since psychological influences are involved. We assume that there are connections between the cerebral cortex and the vascular center in the medulla. And in response to certain stimuli—if you are terribly embarrassed, for instance—both these connections and the vascular nerves to the face come into play, which causes the blood vessels to dilate and fill up, so that you get a head as red as a turkey-cock’s—and there you are all swollen with blood till you can hardly see a thing. Whereas in other cases—God knows what awaits you, something perilously beautiful perhaps—the blood vessels of the skin contract, and the skin turns cold and pale and shrinks, and your emotions make you look like a corpse, with leaden eye sockets and a white, pinched nose. But all the while the sympathetic nerves keep the heart thumping right along.”

“So that’s what happens,” Hans Castorp said.

“More or less. Those are all reactions, you see. But since all reactions and reflexes, by their very nature, serve some purpose, we physiologists are almost forced to conclude that such secondary phenomena due to psychological factors are actually meant to protect the body, are defense mechanisms, much like goose bumps. Do you know how you get goose bumps?”

“Can’t say I know that exactly, either.”

“That’s a display put on by the skin’s sebaceous glands, which give off the skin’s oils, a kind of protein-rich, fatty secretion, you know—not exactly appetizing, but it keeps the skin supple, so that it doesn’t dry out and crack or break and remains pleasant to the touch. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to touch human skin without greasy cholesterol. The sebaceous glands have little muscles that can make the glands stand up erect, and when they do that, your skin feels like a rasp—just like the lad in the tale when the princess dumped a pail of minnows over him. And if the stimulus is very strong, the hair follicles become erect, too—and your hair stands on end, on your head and all over your body, like a porcupine defending itself. So now you can say you’ve learned what it means to have your flesh creep.”

“Oh my,” Hans Castorp said, “I’ve already learned that numerous times. I get the shivers rather easily in fact, on all sorts of occasions. What amazes me is that these glands go erect under such a variety of circumstances. When someone runs a stylus over glass, you’ll get goose bumps, but it can also suddenly appear at the sound of especially beautiful music. And when I first took communion at my confirmation, it came in waves—the tingling and prickling just wouldn’t stop. It’s really strange what all puts those little muscles into motion.”

“Yes,” Behrens said, “a stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn’t give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands stand up erect.”

“Director Behrens,” Hans Castorp said, studying the portrait across his knees, “I wanted to come back to what you were saying about the inner processes, the circulation of lymph and such. What is that about? I would love to hear more about it. Lymph circulation, for example, interests me a great deal—if you would be so kind.”

“I can well believe it,” Behrens replied. “Lymph is the most refined, intimate, and delicate mechanism in the human body. I presume that’s what you had in mind in asking. People always talk about the blood and its mysteries, that special juice, as it’s called. But the lymph, now that’s the juice of juices, the essence, you see, the blood’s own milk, a very rarefied liquid—a fatty diet will make it look just like milk, in fact.” And in high spirits, employing his special jargon, he began to describe how blood—turned crimson as an opera cape from respiration and digestion, saturated with gases, laden with the slag of waste, brewed out of fat, protein, iron, salt, and sugar, forced through arteries at a temperature of 98.6 degrees by the pumping heart, and keeping both metabolism and animal warmth, in a word, sweet life itself, running in our bodies—began to describe, then, how blood does not enter cells directly, but under pressure sweats an extract, a milky fluid, through the arterial walls and into the tissues, so that it oozes in everywhere, a histological fluid that fills every little crack, stretching and expanding elastic cell tissue. That was what was called cellular tension, or turgor, and in turn turgor was what caused the lymph, after it had exchanged materials with the cells and tenderly rinsed them clean, to be forced back into the lymphatic vessels, the
vasa lymphatica
, and from there into the blood—a liter and a half of it per day. He described the lymphatic vessels, the system of arteries and absorbent tubes; spoke about how breast milk was formed from lymph collected from the legs, abdomen, chest, one arm, and one side of the head; then went on to talk about how at various points in the lymph vessels there were delicate filters called lymph glands, located along the neck, in the armpits, at the crooks of the elbows, the backs of the knees, and similar intimate, sensitive spots on the body. “Swelling can occur at such points,” Behrens explained. “That’s what got us started on all this—thickening of the lymph glands, here and there, at the back of the knee or the crook of the elbow for instance, rather like the tumors associated with dropsy. And there is always a reason for them, though hardly a welcome one. Under certain circumstances, it may arouse more than a suspicion of tubercular congestion in the lymphatic vessels.”

Hans Castorp said nothing. “Yes,” he remarked softly after a pause, “it’s true. I could easily have become a doctor. The formation of breast milk . . .the lymph of the legs—it all interests me very much. The body!” he suddenly cried in a rapturous outburst. “The flesh! The human body! What is it? What is it made of? Tell us now, this very afternoon, Director Behrens. Tell us, for once and for all, in precise terms, so that we may know.”

“It’s made of water,” Behrens replied. “So you’re interested in organic chemistry, too, are you? The human body consists of water for the most part. Nothing better, nothing worse than water—nothing to get excited about. The dry stuff is a mere twenty-five percent of the whole, twenty percent being ordinary egg white, or protein, if you want a little more noble word for it, to which just a little fat and salt is then added. That’s about all.”

“But what about protein? What is it?”

“Various elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur. Sometimes phosphorus, too. Your curiosity is becoming quite excessive, I must say. Some proteins are bonded with carbohydrates, mainly glucose and starch. As we age, muscles grow tough, because of increased collagen in the connective tissue—that’s the glue, you see, the chief component of bones and cartilage. What else should I tell you? There’s a protein in muscle plasma called myosin that coagulates in the muscle fiber and causes rigor mortis.”

“Oh, right, when the body goes stiff after death,” Hans Castorp said cheerfully. “Very good, very good. And then comes the autopsy, the anatomy of the grave.”

“But of course. And you’ve put it very nicely. Then everything gets a lot more diffuse. We evaporate, so to speak. Just think of all that water. All those other ingredients are not very stable without life. Decomposition takes over, and they resolve into simpler chemical compounds, into inorganic matter.”

“Decomposition, corruption,” Hans Castorp said, “but that’s really just a kind of burning off, isn’t it? It all binds with oxygen, if I recall.”

“Absolutely correct, oxidation.”

“And life?”

“That, too. That, too, my lad. That’s oxidation, too. Life is primarily the oxidation of cell protein, that’s where our pretty animal warmth comes from, of which some people have a bit too much. Ah yes, life
is
dying—there’s no sense in trying to sugarcoat it
—une destruction organique
, as some Frenchman once called it in that flippant way the Frenchies have. And it smells of dying, too, life does. And if we sometimes think otherwise, it’s because we have a natural bias in the matter.”

“And so if someone is interested in life,” Hans Castorp said, “it’s death he’s particularly interested in. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, there’s a certain difference all the same. Life means that the form is retained even though matter is being transformed.”

“But why retain the form?” Hans Castorp asked.

“Why? Now listen here—there’s nothing the least bit humanist about a comment like that.”

“Form is namby-pamby nonsense.”

“You’re in very bold and daring form today, yourself. Literally kicking over the traces. But I’m fading quickly here,” the director said. “I’m beginning to feel melancholy,” he added, rubbing his eyes with his gigantic hands. “It just comes over me, you see. I’ve joined you in a cup of coffee, and certainly it tasted good—but suddenly it just comes over me and I get melancholy. You gentlemen will have to excuse me. It was quite a special occasion. I found it great sport.”

The cousins had sprung to their feet. They apologized, blaming themselves for keeping the director so long. But he reassured them the contrary was the case. Hans Castorp hastened to return Frau Chauchat’s portrait to the adjoining room and hung it in its place again. They did not go back to their quarters by way of the garden. Behrens showed them the way through the building, letting them out through the glass-paned door. In the melancholy mood that had suddenly come over him, his neck vertebrae seemed to protrude even more than usual. He kept blinking his pop-eyes, and the skew of his moustache, caused by that hitch of his upper lip, gave him a mournful look.

As they walked along the corridor and started up the stairs, Hans Castorp said, “Now admit it—that was a good idea of mine.”

“It was a change of pace at any rate,” Joachim replied. “And you two certainly did use the occasion to discuss a lot of things, I must say. It was all a little haphazard for me. But it’s high time we went off to our rest cure—twenty minutes at most until tea. You’ll find it a little namby-pamby of me to insist on it, I suppose—now that you’ve taken to kicking over the traces. But then you don’t need your rest cure as badly as I need mine.”

And so what had to happen happened, and Hans Castorp experienced what he would never have dreamed possible only a short while before. Winter was upon them, the local winter, with which Joachim was already familiar, because it had been raging at full force when he had arrived the previous year. Hans Castorp, however, had been somewhat afraid of its onslaught, although he knew he was definitely well equipped for it. His cousin tried to calm him.