The Magic Mountain (58 page)

Tous-les-deux’s
son was named Lauro. He had also been sent flowers—violets from Nice, heavy with the scent of earth—“from two fellow patients, with best wishes for recovery”; anonymity, however, had now become merely a matter of form, and everyone knew from whom such gifts came. And so when
Tous-les-deux
—the pallid, black-clad mother from Mexico—happened to meet the cousins in the corridor, she expressed her gratitude, chiefly by a series of mournfully becoming gestures, and in her clanking French asked for them to receive in person the thanks of her son—
de son seul et dernier fils qui allait mourir aussi
. They did so at once. Lauro turned out to be an astonishingly pretty young man with glowing eyes, an aquiline nose with flared nostrils, and splendid lips above which sprouted a black moustache; but he carried on in such a dramatic, boastful way that the visitors—Hans Castorp no less than Joachim Ziemssen—were both happy to close the patient’s door behind them again. During their visit,
Tous-les-deux
—wrapped in her black cashmere shawl, a black veil knotted under her chin, her narrow brow creased by a frown, enormous bags of skin drooping under her jet-black eyes—had paced the room with knees slightly bent; now and then she would approach the two cousins sitting beside the bed and, with her careworn mouth turned down at one corner, repeat her one tragic, parrotlike sentence: “
Tous les dé, vous comprenez, messiés
. . .
Premièrement l’un et maintenant l’autre.
” Meanwhile, pretty Lauro had gushed on and on in surging, clanking, and unbearably high-flown French phrases about how he intended to die a hero’s death,
comme héros, à l’espagnol
, just like his brother,
de même que son fier jeune frère
, Fernando, who likewise had died a Spanish hero. And he went on like that—speaking with broad gestures, ripping back his shirt to expose his yellow chest to the fatal blow—until a coughing fit stifled his rodomontade, bringing delicate, rusty-colored froth to his lips and giving the cousins an excuse to withdraw on tiptoe.

They said nothing further about their visit with Lauro, and even in the quiet of their own rooms, they refrained from judging his behavior. They both enjoyed, however, their visits with Anton Karlovitch Ferge from Saint Petersburg, a fellow with a huge good-natured moustache and a protruding Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured; he lay there in his bed, recovering very slowly and with great difficulty from an attempted pneumothorax, which, Herr Ferge said, had come within an inch of costing him his life. It had been a severe shock to his system, a pleural shock, which was known to happen sometimes during the fashionable operation. His had been an exceptionally dangerous pleural shock, a total collapse, an alarming swoon—in a word, so severe that the operation had to be broken off and postponed for now.

Whenever Herr Ferge spoke about these events, his good-natured gray eyes grew wide and his face grew pallid—it must have been horrible. “With no general anesthetic, gentlemen. Fine, it’s not permitted in cases like ours, we can’t handle that—which is understandable, and so as a reasonable man you reconcile yourself to the fact. But the local does not go deep, gentlemen, it numbs only the outermost layer of muscle, you feel them make the incision, although only as a bruising pressure. I’m lying there with my face covered so I can’t see anything, and the assistant is holding me on the right and the head nurse on the left. It’s as if someone is pressing me, bruising me—it is the muscle tissue that they open up and hold back with clamps. And then I hear the director say, ‘So!’ And at that same moment, gentlemen, he begins to explore the pleural lining with a blunt instrument—it has to be blunt so it doesn’t puncture too soon; he explores to find the right place to make his puncture and let in the gas, but the way he does it, the way he rubs the instrument around the pleural lining—gentlemen, gentlemen, that’s what did me in. It was all over for me—simply indescribable. The pleural lining, gentlemen, should never be touched—it ought not, cannot, be touched. It is taboo. The pleural lining is covered by flesh, isolated, inaccessible—for good and all. And now he had exposed it, was exploring it. Gentlemen, it made me sick to my stomach. It was ghastly, gentlemen. I never in my life thought that such a totally hideous, filthy feeling could even exist, except perhaps in hell. I fainted dead away, fell into three faints at once—a green, a brown, and a purple. And it stank at the bottom—the pleural shock affected my sense of smell, gentlemen. There was the unbearable stench of hydrogen sulfide, just like hell itself must stink. And as I blacked out, I heard myself laughing—not a human laugh, but the most indecent, disgusting laugh I’ve ever heard in my life. Because when they explore your pleural lining, gentlemen, it’s as if you are being tickled in the most infamous, intense, inhuman way—that’s just what the damn, disgraceful torment feels like. That’s what pleural shock is, and may the good Lord spare you the experience.”

Anton Karlovitch Ferge came back again and again—and always with that same pallor of horror—to his “filthy” ordeal, reliving many of its torments every time he told about it. He had explained from the start that, being an ordinary man, “higher things” were utterly foreign to him. They shouldn’t make any special intellectual or emotional demands of him, and he wouldn’t make any of them. But once that was settled, he could tell some very interesting tales about the life he had led before illness wrenched him out of it—the life of a traveling fire-insurance salesman. With Petersburg as home base, he had traveled the length and breadth of Russia, visiting insured factories and ferreting out those in dubious financial condition—because statistics showed that fires occurred most often in factories where business was going badly. Which was why he was sent to investigate each factory on some pretext or other, and report back to his bank, so that they could have time to prevent serious losses by reinsuring or spreading the risk. He told about trips across the great empire in winter, about traveling all night in the incredible cold, stretched out in a sleigh under sheepskins, and when he awoke he could see the eyes of wolves glowing like stars out there in the snow. He had brought boxes of provisions with him, frozen cabbage soup and white bread, which he would thaw out and enjoy whenever they stopped to change horses, and the bread would be as fresh as on the day it was baked. The worst thing was if a sudden thaw set in—then the chunks of cabbage soup he had brought along would melt and leak.

And so Herr Ferge would tell his tales, occasionally interrupting himself to heave a sigh and remark how everything was quite fine now—if only they didn’t try to perform another pneumothorax on him. He never spoke of “higher things,” but simply stuck to the facts, and it was a delight to listen to him—particularly for Hans Castorp, who thought it useful to hear about the Russian Empire and the life lived there, about samovars, piroshki, Cossacks, and wooden churches with so many onion-shaped steeples that they looked like mushroom colonies. He also had Herr Ferge tell them about the people who lived there, people from the Far North—and so all the more exotic in Hans Castorp’s eyes—with Asia in their blood, prominent cheekbones, and a Finno-Mongolian set to their eyes. He listened to it all with anthropological interest, even asked to hear some Russian spoken as well; and the muddy, barbaric, boneless tongue from the East flowed swiftly out of Herr Ferge’s good-natured protruding Adam’s apple and from under his good-natured moustache. And youth being what it is, Hans Castorp felt all the more entertained because he was now romping in pedagogically forbidden territory.

They often dropped by to spend fifteen minutes with Anton Karlovitch Ferge. From time to time they also visited Teddy, the boy from the Fridericianum, an elegant, refined, blond fourteen-year-old, who had a private nurse and wore white silk tie-string pajamas. He was an orphan, but rich, as he himself admitted. He was waiting now for a serious operation—they hoped to remove some of his worm-eaten parts—but on days when he was feeling better he would sometimes leave his bed for an hour, put on a handsome, sporty outfit, and join the social whirl downstairs. The ladies liked to tease him, and he enjoyed listening to their conversations—when, for example, the talk turned to Einhuf the lawyer, the young lady in bloomers, and Fränzchen Oberdank. Then he would go lie down again. And so Teddy idled his time away elegantly, making it clear that he expected nothing more of life than this.

In room number 50 lay Frau von Mallinckrodt—Natalie was her first name. She had black eyes and wore golden earrings; a flirt who loved her finery, she was nevertheless a perfect Job, a Lazarus in a female body, whom God had visited with every sort of affliction. Her organism seemed to be so inundated by toxins that she was ravaged by numerous illnesses, sometimes alternately, sometimes all at once. Her skin was a particular problem, great portions of it subject to a tormenting itch that erupted here and there into the open sores of eczema, even around the mouth—which was why she found it difficult to use a spoon. Frau von Mallinckrodt suffered by turns from various internal inflammations—of the pleura, the kidneys, the lungs, the periosteum, even of the brain, which would cause her to lapse into unconsciousness; a weak heart, the result of fever and constant pain, was her greatest worry, for it sometimes resulted in food becoming lodged at the top of the esophagus, making it difficult for her to swallow normally. In short, the woman’s life was a horror. She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children—as she freely admitted to the cousins—for another man (still half a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover. She now had no home, although she was not penniless—her former husband saw to that. She did not take herself seriously and therefore did not let false pride prevent her from making full use of his decency—or was it enduring love? Well aware that she was a faithless and sinful woman, she bore all the plagues of Job with amazing patience and poise, with a fiery female’s elemental powers of resistance; she triumphed over the misery of her dark-skinned body, even turned a white gauze bandage, which she was forced to wear wrapped around her head for some awful reason, into a becoming piece of attire. She was constantly changing her jewelry—beginning each morning with corals and ending each evening with pearls. She had been delighted by the flowers Hans Castorp had sent, regarding them as a gesture more of gallantry than charity, and she invited the two young men for tea at her bedside—drinking hers from a spouted cup; her fingers, including thumbs, were adorned to the knuckles with opals, amethysts, and emeralds. With golden rings dangling at her ears, she quickly told the cousins what had happened to her: about her respectable, but boring husband, her equally respectable and boring children, who had turned out just like their father and whom she had never especially warmed to, and about the half-grown boy with whom she had run off and whose poetic displays of affection she praised at length. But by ruses and coercion, his family had taken him away from her—and the lad had probably been. repulsed by her illness, too, which by then had begun to evidence itself in various violent eruptions. Were the gentlemen repulsed by it, too? she asked coquettishly; and her fiery femininity triumphed over the eczema covering half her face.

Hans Castorp felt only disdain for the lad’s allowing himself to be repulsed, and he let his disdain be known with a shrug. The poetic adolescent’s delicacy only served to spur him to take the opposite course, to find occasion for paying frequent visits to unhappy Frau von Mallinckrodt and for performing little nursing services that required no special training. He would arrive, for instance, just in time carefully to spoon her midday porridge into her mouth, to help her drink from her spouted cup if a bite got stuck in her throat, or to assist her in shifting position in bed—for, in addition to all her other problems, an incision from an operation made it difficult for her to lie down. He performed these little services when he would drop by on his way to the dining hall or after a walk, telling Joachim to go on ahead, that he was just going to check quickly on the case in room 50; and each time he felt his whole being expand with a joy rooted in a sense of helpfulness and quiet importance, but intermingled with a certain jaunty delight in the spotless Christian impression his good deeds made—an impression so devout, caring, and praiseworthy, in fact, that no serious objections whatever could be raised against it, either from a military or a humanistic-pedagogic standpoint.

We have not yet mentioned Karen Karstedt, although Hans Castorp and Joachim took special interest in her. She was one of Behrens’s private outpatients, and the director had commended her to the cousins’ charity. She had been up here four years now, was penniless herself and dependent on skinflint relatives, who had already taken her away once—she was going to die anyway—and had sent her back only when the director protested. She lived in an inexpensive boardinghouse in Dorf—nineteen years old, a slip of a thing, with smooth oily hair, eyes that shyly tried to hide a glint that matched the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a distinctively husky but sympathetic voice. She coughed almost incessantly and had bandages on all her fingers, the result of open sores from the toxins in her body.

The director had pled her cause to the two cousins—since they were such good-hearted lads—and they were now devoted to her. Flowers were sent, this was followed by a visit with poor Karen on her little balcony in Dorf, and then the three of them began to undertake special outings together. They attended an ice-skating contest, a bobsled race—for the winter sport season in our Alpine valley was in full swing. There was a festival week with any number of entertainments—sports events and performances to which the cousins had paid only occasional, fleeting attention until now. Joachim had been averse to all amusements up here. He had not come here for that sort of thing, was certainly not here to enjoy his stay by organizing his life around a variety of diversions, but solely for the purpose of detoxifying his body as quickly as possible, so that he could take up his duties in the plains below, real duties, not just the duties of rest cure—which, even though it was only a substitute, he was loath to slight in any way. It was forbidden to take part in winter sports, and he had no desire to play the gaping onlooker. And as for Hans Castorp, he felt himself to be, in a very restricted and intimate sense, so very much a part of “the people up here” that he wasted not a thought or a glance on people who saw the valley as a sports arena.