The Magic Mountain (6 page)

In the corridor they ran into the nurse again, who squinted with nearsighted curiosity as she watched them pass. They had reached the second floor, when Hans Castorp suddenly stopped in his tracks, mesmerized by a perfectly ghastly noise he heard coming from beyond a dogleg in the hall—not a loud noise, but so decidedly repulsive that Hans Castorp grimaced and stared wide-eyed at his cousin. It was a cough, apparently—a man’s cough, but a cough unlike any that Hans Castorp had ever heard; indeed, compared to it, all other coughs with which he was familiar had been splendid, healthy expressions of life—a cough devoid of any zest for life or love, which didn’t come in spasms, but sounded as if someone were stirring feebly in a terrible mush of decomposing organic material.

“Yes,” Joachim said, “it looks bad. An Austrian aristocrat—you know, an elegant fellow, your born horseman. And now it’s come to this. Although he’s still up and about.”

As they walked on, Hans Castorp remarked, referring to the horseman’s cough, “You must realize that I’ve never heard anything like it, that it’s all quite new to me, and that it does make an impression. There are so many kinds of coughs, dry ones, loose ones, and loose ones are healthier, people say, better than dry barks. Back in my youth”—he actually said “in my youth”—“I caught the croup, and it had me barking like a wolf, and everyone was happy when it loosened up, I still remember it quite well. But a cough like that—that’s something new, to me at least—it’s not even human. It’s not dry, but you can’t call it loose, either, there’s no word for it. It’s as if you were looking right down inside and could see it all—the mucus and the slime . . .”

“Well,” Joachim said, “I hear it every day, so you don’t need to describe it for me.”

But Hans Castorp could not get the cough he had heard out of his mind and kept repeating that it was literally like looking down inside the horseman; and as they entered the restaurant, his eyes, weary from the trip, had taken on a glint of nervous excitement.

The restaurant was well lit, elegant, and comfortable. It was to the right of the lobby, directly across from the social rooms, and was used, as Joachim explained, primarily for new arrivals or residents who either had missed a regularly scheduled meal or had visitors. But birthdays or imminent departures were celebrated there, too, as were favorable results of a general checkup. Things could get very lively in the restaurant on occasion, Joachim said; they even served champagne. There was no one there now except one lady, perhaps thirty years old, sitting alone and reading—humming to herself the whole time while drumming softly on the tabletop with the middle finger of her left hand. When the young gentlemen had seated themselves, she changed places, so that her back was to them now. She was standoffish, Joachim explained in a low voice, and always ate in the restaurant with just her book. Rumor had it that she had entered a tuberculosis sanatorium as a very young girl and had never lived in the outside world since.

“Well then, compared to her you’re a mere novice with your five months, and still will be with a whole year to your credit,” Hans Castorp said to his cousin; to which Joachim merely gave his new, uncharacteristic shrug and reached for the menu.

They had taken the raised table beside a window hung with cream-colored curtains—the nicest table in the room. They sat opposite one another, their faces illumined by an electric table lamp with a red shade. Hans Castorp clasped his freshly washed hands together and rubbed them in congenial expectation, a habit of his whenever he sat down to eat—perhaps because his forebears had prayed before every meal. They were waited on by a friendly girl in a black dress and white apron, whose large face glowed with robust health and who spoke in a guttural dialect. To his great amusement, Hans Castorp was instructed that waitresses here were called “dining attendants.” They ordered a bottle of Gruaud Larose, which Hans Castorp sent back to be brought to room temperature. The food was excellent. There was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit. Hans Castorp ate heartily, although with not quite the lively appetite he had expected. But he was accustomed to eating large meals—even when he wasn’t hungry—purely out of self-respect.

Joachim did not do much credit to his meal. He had had enough of the cooking here, he said, everyone up here had, and it was customary to disparage the food, because when you had to sit up here forever and a day . . . But he did enjoy drinking, taking to the wine with something like abandon; and while carefully avoiding all sentiment-laden phrases, he repeatedly expressed his satisfaction that at last someone was here with whom it was possible to have a rational conversation.

“Yes, it’s top-notch, your having come,” he said, and there was feeling in his nonchalant voice. “And let me tell you it’s quite an event for me. First of all, just the variety of it
—
I mean, it’s an interruption, a break in the everlasting, endless monotony.”

“But I would think time ought to pass quickly for you all,” Hans Castorp suggested.

“Quickly and slowly, just as you like,” Joachim replied. “What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t really pass at all, there is no time as such, and this is no life—no, that it’s not,” he said, shaking his head and reaching again for his glass.

Hans Castorp drank as well, although his face was burning like fire by now. But his body still seemed cold, and he felt a pleasurable and yet somehow annoying restlessness in his joints. Words tumbled out, he misspoke himself several times, but went right on with a dismissive wave of his hand. Joachim was likewise in a lively mood, and after the humming, drumming lady suddenly stood up and departed, their conversation turned even more candid and high-spirited. They gesticulated with their forks as they ate, tucked bites of food in their cheeks, looked important, laughed, nodded, shrugged, and went right on talking without even first swallowing their food properly. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg and brought the conversation around to plans for making the Elbe more navigable.

“Epoch-making!” Hans Castorp said. “An epoch-making development for our maritime commerce—simply not to be overestimated. We’ve added a line in our budget for an immediate payment of fifty million, and you can be sure that we know exactly what we’re doing.”

But then, despite the importance he attached to navigation on the Elbe, he at once abandoned the topic and demanded that Joachim tell him more about life “up here” and about the guests; which Joachim proved ready and willing to do, happy to open his heart and unburden himself. He had to repeat the part about the bodies being sent down by bobsled and once again asserted unequivocally that he knew it to be true. And when Hans Castorp was taken by another fit of laughter, Joachim joined in, seeming heartily to enjoy the opportunity, and then told more comic stories, just to add fuel to the general merriment. There was a lady who sat at his table, Frau Stöhr was her name, and quite ill by the way, the wife of a musician from Cannstatt—and she was the most illiterate person he had ever met. She said things like “decentfiction”—in all seriousness. And Krokowski, the assistant—she called him the “eighty camp.” You had to sit there and swallow it, without a trace of a smile. And she was a gossip, besides, as were most people up here, by the by, and she claimed that another lady, Frau Iltis, carried a “stirletto” around with her. “She calls it a stirletto—isn’t that capital!” And throwing themselves back in their chairs, half lying, half leaning, they laughed so hard that they shook until they both began to hiccough at almost the same time.

But every now and then, Joachim was reminded of his own fate and would turn gloomy. “Yes, here we sit laughing,” he said with a pained expression, broken by occasional spasms of his diaphragm, “and yet there’s no telling when I’ll get out of here, because when Behrens says another six months, that’s his low estimate, and you need to be prepared for even longer. But it is hard, you must admit. It’s really sad, isn’t it? I had already been accepted and would have taken my officer’s exam next month. And here I am lounging about with a thermometer in my mouth and counting Frau Stöhr’s illiterate howlers, and time is passing me by. A single year plays such an important role at our age, it brings so many changes and so much progress with it when you’re living down below. And here I am stagnating like an old water hole—a stinking pond, and that’s not too crude a comparison, either.”

Strangely enough, Hans Castorp’s only reply came as a question—did they serve porter here? And when Joachim looked at him in astonishment, he realized that his cousin was very near to falling asleep—was in fact already nodding.

“Why, you’re asleep,” Joachim said. “Come on, it’s high time we went to bed, both of us.”

“It’s not time for anything,” Hans Castorp said with a thick tongue. But he joined his cousin all the same, walking on stiff legs and bent so low that he looked like a man being dragged toward the floor by weariness. But as they moved across the now dimly lit lobby, he pulled himself together by sheer force of effort when he heard Joachim say, “That’s Krokowski sitting there. I really must introduce you, I suppose.”

Dr. Krokowski was sitting in the light, close to the fireplace, just inside the sliding door opening onto one of the social rooms. He was reading a newspaper, but stood up as the young men approached. Joachim, striking a military pose, said, “Might I introduce you, doctor, to my cousin Castorp? He’s just arrived from Hamburg.”

Dr. Krokowski greeted the new resident with a kind of jovial, rugged, and reassuring heartiness, as if to imply that in his presence any diffidence was quite superfluous and cheerful mutual trust the only appropriate response. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered, stout, considerably shorter than the two men across from him, so that he had to tip his head back to look them in the eye, and extraordinarily pale—there was almost a translucence, even phosphorescence, to his pallor, and it was enhanced by dark, glowing eyes, black eyebrows, and a rather long beard that already showed a few gray strands and ended in two diverging points. He wore a black, rather worn, double-breasted business suit and black open-worked shoes, almost sandals really, over gray woolen socks; Hans Castorp had seen a soft, floppy collar like that only once before—sported by a photographer in Danzig—and indeed it did lend something of the artist’s studio to Dr. Krokowski’s general appearance. As he shook the young man’s hand, an effusive smile revealed yellowish teeth under his beard, and in a baritone voice betraying the drawl of a foreign accent, he said, “We bid you welcome, Herr Castorp. I do hope that you’ll make yourself comfortable and soon feel right at home here with us. You have come as a patient, have you not—if you’ll pardon the question?”

It was touching to see how Hans Castorp struggled to be polite and master his drowsiness. He was annoyed with himself for being in such bad shape, and with the leery self-consciousness of youth he detected traces of an indulgent smirk in the assistant director’s reassuring smile. In answering, he said something about three weeks, mentioned his exams, and added that, thank God, he was perfectly healthy.

“You don’t say!” Dr. Krokowski replied, thrusting his head forward at a derisive slant and smiling more broadly. “In that case you are a phenomenon of greatest medical interest. You see, I’ve never met a perfectly healthy person before. And what kind of exams were those, if you’ll pardon the question?”

“I’m an engineer, doctor,” Hans Castorp answered with modest dignity.

“Ah, an engineer.” And Dr. Krokowski’s smile receded, as it were, losing something of both its energy and warmth for a moment. “Bravo, my congratulations. And so you’ll not be availing yourself here of any sort of medical attention, either physical or psychological?”

“No, no, thanks just the same,” Hans Castorp said, almost stepping back. With that, Dr. Krokowski broke into his triumphant smile again, and shaking the young man’s hand once more, he exclaimed in a loud voice, “In that case, sleep well, Herr Castorp—in full enjoyment of your impeccable health. Sleep well, and I’m sure we’ll see more of one another.” And then he dismissed the young men and sat back down to his newspaper.

The elevator was no longer running, and so they used the stairs, climbing in silence, slightly bewildered by their meeting with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim accompanied Hans Castorp to room 34, where they found that the limping concierge had properly delivered the new guest’s luggage; and they chatted for another fifteen minutes while Hans Castorp unpacked his nightclothes and toiletries after first lighting a thick, mild cigarette. He never had got around to a last cigar—which struck him as odd, quite unusual, really.

“He does have a distinguished look about him,” he said, and the inhaled smoke tumbled out with the words. “He’s pale as chalk. But as for his choice of footwear, it’s really dreadful, I must say. Gray wool socks—and then those sandals. Was he offended there at the end?”

“He’s a little sensitive,” Joachim admitted. “You shouldn’t have been so brusque about rejecting medical treatment, at least not the psychological part. He doesn’t like for people to try to avoid it. He’s not all that well disposed toward me, either, because I don’t confide enough in him. But now and then I do tell him a dream, so that he’ll have something to dissect.”

“Then I really did rub him the wrong way just now,” Hans Castorp said with annoyance, for it always upset him when he offended someone; and now weariness overcame him with renewed intensity as well.

“Good night,” he said. “I’m ready to drop.”

“I’ll come by for you for breakfast at eight,” Joachim said and left.

Hans Castorp hastily went through the motions of getting ready for bed. No sooner had he turned out the lamp on his nightstand than sleep overwhelmed him—but he started up again when he recalled that someone had died in that very bed only two nights before. “Not for the first time, either,” he told himself, as if that might serve to reassure him. “It’s just a deathbed, an ordinary deathbed.” And he dozed off.