The Magic Mountain (62 page)

Hans Castorp joined the crowd to watch a contestant, stood looking over Joachim’s shoulder, propping one elbow against it while holding his chin tight in all five fingers, his other hand braced at his hip. He talked and laughed. He wanted to draw, too, demanded loudly he be allowed to, and was given the pencil, already just a stump of a thing that you could barely hold between your thumb and forefinger. He cursed the pencil, raised his head toward the ceiling and closed his eyes; loudly damning the useless pencil again and cursing just in general, he hastily drew some atrocity on the paper, at one point missing it entirely and ending up on the tablecloth. “That doesn’t count!” he shouted amid well-deserved laughter. “How can I possibly draw with a thing like that—to hell with it!” And he tossed the offending stump into the punch bowl. “Who has a decent pencil? Who’ll lend me one? I have to try again. A pencil, a real pencil! Does anyone have a pencil?” he called out to all sides, keeping his left forearm propped against the tabletop, but raising his right hand and shaking it in the air. No one had a pencil for him. He turned around and walked back into the room, continuing to shout—headed directly toward Clavdia Chauchat, who, as he well knew, was standing just beyond the portieres in the little salon, smiling and watching the goings-on around the punch bowl.

Behind him he heard someone calling him—in melodious foreign words: “
Eh! Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa! Ingegnere! Un po’ di ragione, sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!
” But he drowned out the voice by shouting even more loudly himself, and Herr Settembrini could now be seen flinging one hand above his head at the end of an extended arm, a common enough gesture in his homeland (but one whose meaning is hard to put into words). And uttering a long drawn-out “
Ehh
—!” he left the Mardi Gras festivities.

Hans Castorp, however, was standing in the brick schoolyard, staring from close up into a pair of blue-gray-green, epicanthic eyes above prominent cheekbones; and he said, “Do
you
have a pencil, perhaps?”

He was pale as death, as pale as on the day when he had returned from his solitary walk, still splattered with blood, to attend the lecture. Nerves controlling the blood vessels to his face were so successful at their task that the skin of his young face was drained of blood, turned pallid and cold, making the nose pinched and the area under his eyes so leaden that he looked almost like a corpse. But Hans Castorp’s sympathetic nerves kept his heart thumping so hard that regular respiration was out of the question, and a shudder ran over the young man, the work of his body’s sebaceous glands, which stood erect now, along with their hair follicles.

The woman in the paper tricorn looked him up and down—and her smile betrayed neither pity nor concern for his ravaged condition. Her sex knows no pity or concern when staring at the horrors of passion, an elemental emotion with which the female is apparently much more familiar than the male, who is not at all at ease with it—and if she finds him in that state, she never fails to greet him with mockery and schadenfreude. But then, he would certainly not have thanked her for either pity or concern, either.

“Do you mean me?” the bare-armed patient replied, in response to the familiar pronoun in his question. “Yes, I might.” At most, her smile and voice suggested the kind of excitement that comes when the first words in a long, silent relationship are spoken at last—a subtle excitement secretly incorporating into this one moment everything that has happened until now. “You are very ambitious . . . You are . . . very . . . eager,” she said, likewise using personal pronouns, continuing to mock him in her exotic accent with its strange
r
and stranger open
e
, and stressing the word “ambitious” on the first syllable, so that in her opaque, pleasantly husky voice it sounded like a word from her mother tongue. She rummaged in her leather handbag, peered down into it, first pulled out a handkerchief, from which she then extracted a silver pencil-holder, a slight, fragile trinket, never intended for serious use. That pencil long ago, the first one, had been more straightforward, handier.

“
Voilà
,” she said and picked the little pencil up by the tip, holding it between thumb and forefinger and waggling it back and forth.

She both gave it to him and held it back, so that he took it without actually taking hold of it—raising his hand, very close to the pencil, his fingers ready to grasp it, but not actually grasping; and the gaze from his leaden eye sockets shifted between the object and Clavdia’s Tartar face. His bloodless lips were open, and they stayed open, unused, as he said, “You see, I knew it—I knew you’d have one.”

“
Prenez
garde,
il est un peu fragile
,” she said. “
C’est à visser, tu sais
.” And as they both bent their heads down over the pencil, she showed him the standard screw mechanism, from which emerged a very thin, hard needle of graphite that could leave no real mark.

They stood there bending toward one another. He had donned a formal, stiff collar for this evening and so could support his chin on that.

“A poor thing, but thine own,” he said, brow to brow with her, gazing down at the pencil, his lips never moving, so that the two labials were left unsounded.

“Oh, and you are witty, too,” she replied with a brief smile, raising her head now and letting him take the pencil. (Though God only knew how he had managed to be witty—with apparently not a drop of blood left in his head.) “And so go, step lively, draw, draw well, withdraw to draw.” She was sending him wittily on his way, too, it seemed.

“No,
you
haven’t drawn yet.
You
must draw now,” he said, leaving out the
m
in “must” and taking a step back to let her pass.

“Do you mean me?” she said again, and this time her astonishment seemed directed at more than his request. At first she stood there smiling in some confusion, but then, as if pulled by a magnetic force, followed him as he backed away toward the punch table.

But it turned out that the diversion had lost its appeal, was in its last throes. One person was still drawing, but had no audience. The calling cards were covered with nonsense, everyone having given it a helpless try—but the table was as good as deserted, particularly since a current was now flowing in the opposite direction. Once it became clear that the doctors had left, word quickly spread that there would be dancing. The table was shoved to one side. Scouts were posted at the doors to the reading and music rooms and instructed to give the signal if the “boss,” Krokowski, or the head nurse was sighted. A Slavic lad passionately attacked the keyboard of the little walnut piano. The first couples began to spin inside a little circle of spectators seated in chairs and on stools.

Hans Castorp waved good-bye to the table as it drifted away—“Farewell!” he said. He pointed with his chin first to some free chairs he had spotted in the little salon, and then to a sheltered corner just to the right of the portieres. He said nothing, perhaps because the music was too loud. He dragged one chair—this was for Frau Chauchat, almost a reclining throne, with a high, wooden-frame back and plush upholstery—over to the spot he had indicated in his pantomime, and for himself he selected a crackling, creaking wicker chair with scrolled armrests, on which he now sat down beside her, bending forward, his arms on the scrolls, her pencil in his hand, his feet well hidden under his chair. She, however, was forced to lie far back into the plush cushions, with her knees pulled up; nevertheless, she managed to cross one leg over the other and wiggled a foot in the air—her ankle, visible above the rim of her black patent leather shoe, was wrapped in a taut black silk stocking. The people seated in front of them would occasionally get up to dance, making room for those who had tired of dancing. There was a constant coming and going.

“You’re wearing a new dress,” he said, as an excuse for gazing at her. And now he heard her answer.

“New? You are conversant with my wardrobe?”

“I am right, am I not?”

“Yes. I recently had it made here, by Lukaček, the tailor in the village. He does work for many of the ladies up here. Do you like it?”

“Very much,” he said, letting his gaze pass over her again before casting his eyes down. “Do you want to dance?” he added.

“Would you like to?” she asked, her brows raised in surprise, but still with a smile.

“I’d do it, if that’s what you want.”

“You’re not quite as well-mannered as I thought you were,” she said. When he dismissed this with a laugh, she added, “Your cousin has already gone.”

“Yes, he is my cousin,” he confirmed quite unnecessarily. “I also noticed a while ago that he had left. I’m sure he’s taking his rest cure.”

“
He is a very rigid, very respectable, very ‘German’ young man
.”

“
Rigid? Respectable?
” he repeated. “I understand French better than I speak it. What you mean to say is that he’s pedantic. Do you consider us Germans pedantic—
us other Germans?
”

“
We are talking about your cousin. But it’s true,
you are all a little bourgeois.
You love order more than liberty, all Europe knows that.
”

“
Love . . . love. What is it, exactly? The word lacks definition.
What one man has, the other loves
, as the German proverb puts it,
” Hans Castorp contended. “I have been giving freedom some thought of late,” he continued. “That is, I heard the word mentioned so often, that I started thinking about it.
I’ll tell you in French
what it is I’ve been thinking
. What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that’s the point!
”

“
You don’t say! How amusing. Was it really your cousin who got you thinking such strange things?
”

“No
, he is truly a good soul,
his is a simple temperament, not prone to dangers,
you understand. But he is not a bourgeois, he is a military man.
”

“Not prone to dangers?” she repeated with difficulty. “
By which you mean to say: a thoroughly steadfast nature, secure in itself? But your poor cousin is seriously ill.
”

“Who told you that?”

“We all know about one another here.”

“Did Director Behrens tell you that?”

“
Possibly, when he let me see his paintings.
”

“
Don’t you mean, when he was painting your portrait?
”

“
Why not? Did you think it successful, my portrait?
”

“
Oh yes, extremely. Behrens captured your skin perfectly, oh, truly quite lifelike. I would very much have liked to have been a portrait painter myself, if only to have had the chance to study your skin, as he did.
”

“
Please, sir, speak German!
”

“Oh, but I am speaking German, even if I am speaking French.
Painting is the kind of study that is both artistic and medical—in a word: it is, you see, a humanist pursuit.
So what do you say, wouldn’t you like to dance?”

“Certainly not—how childish.
Behind the doctor’s back. The moment Behrens returns, they will all throw themselves on their lounge chairs. How utterly ridiculous it all is.
”

“Do you hold him in such high respect, then?”

“Whom?” she asked, pronouncing the word in a strange, clipped way.

“Behrens.”

“
Enough of your Behrens already!
It’s much too small a space for dancing.
And on the carpet besides
. . . Let’s just watch the others.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” he concurred, and with her beside him, he turned his grandfather’s blue, thoughtful eyes, framed in a pallid face, to watch the costumed patients skip about in the salon here and in the reading room beyond. Silent Sister was capering with Blue Henry, and Frau Salomon, who was dressed like a gentleman in evening clothes—swallowtail coat, white vest, amply filled shirt, monocle, and painted-on moustache—spun about on her little patent leather high-heeled shoes (which looked very out of place with her long, black men’s trousers) in the arms of her Punchinello, whose lips shone bloody red in his whitened face and whose eyes looked like an albino rabbit’s. The caped Greek moved his legs in their purple tights in perfect harmony with Rasmussen, whose black, low-cut dress sparkled. The prosecutor in his kimono, Frau Wurmbrandt, the general consul’s wife, and young Gänser were dancing as a threesome, their arms thrown around one another. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to her heart and caressing its bristles as if they were the hair on a man’s head.

“Let’s do that,” Hans Castorp said mechanically again. And so they went on speaking softly, their conversation covered by the piano. “Let’s sit here and watch, as if in a dream. It is like a dream for me, you know,
for me to be sitting here like this—like an especially deep dream, for a man must sleep very heavily to dream like this. What I’m trying to say is: it is a dream I know well, have dreamed for a long time, yes, eternally, sitting here with you as I am now. Behold—eternity.
”

“
A poet!
” she said. “
A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet—behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!
”

“
I’m afraid we are not at all, not in the least, as we should be,
” he replied. “
Not in any way. We are perhaps
life’s problem children
, that’s all.
”

“
Nicely put. Tell me . . . surely it would not have been too difficult to dream your dream before now. It is a little late for monsieur to decide to address his words to his humble servant.
”

“
What good are words?
” he said. “
Why speak? Speech, discourse—those are nice republican things, I admit. But I doubt if they are equally poetic. One of our fellow residents, who has in fact become something of a friend, Monsieur Settembrini . . .
”

“
Who just let fly with a few words in your direction.
”

“
Be that as it may, he is no doubt an eloquent speaker, indeed loves to recite beautiful verses—but does that make the man a poet?
”