The Magic Mountain (63 page)

“
I deeply regret never having had the pleasure of making the gentleman’s acquaintance.
”

“
I can well believe it.
”

“
Ah! You believe it.
”

“
What? But that’s just a phrase one uses, with no real significance whatever. As you’ve surely noticed, I barely speak French. All the same, I would rather speak with you in it than in my own language, since for me speaking French is like speaking without saying anything somehow—with no responsibilities, the way we speak in a dream. Do you understand?
”

“
More or less.
”

“
That will do. Speech—
” Hans Castorp continued, “
what a poor business it is! In eternity, people won’t speak at all. Eternity, you see, will be like drawing that piglet: you’ll turn your head away and close your eyes.
”

“
Not bad! You seem quite at home in eternity, know its every detail, no doubt. I must say I find you a very curious little dreamer.
”

“
Besides,
” Hans Castorp said, “
if I had spoken to you before this, I would have had to use the formal pronoun.
”

“
I see. Do you intend to use only the informal with me from now on?
”

“
But of course. I’ve used it with you all along, and will for all eternity.
”

“
That’s a bit much, I must say. In any case, you won’t have the opportunity to use informal pronouns with me for much longer. I’m leaving.
”

It took a while before what she had said penetrated his consciousness. But then he started up, looking about in befuddlement, like someone rudely awakened from sleep. Their conversation had proceeded rather slowly, because Hans Castorp’s French was clumsy and he spoke haltingly as he tried to express himself. The piano, which had briefly fallen silent, struck up again, now under the hands of the man from Mannheim, who had taken over for the Slavic lad. He had spread his music out before him, and Fräulein Engelhart now sat down next to him to turn pages. The party was thinning out. The majority of the residents appeared to have assumed the horizontal position. There was no one sitting in front of them now. People were again playing cards in the reading room.

“What are you going to do?” Hans Castorp asked, flabbergasted.

“I am leaving,” she repeated, smiling in apparent amazement at the frozen look on his face.

“It’s not possible,” he said. “You’re joking.”

“Most certainly not. I am perfectly serious. I am leaving.”

“When?”

“Why, tomorrow.
After dinner
.”

A whole world was collapsing inside him. He said, “And where are you going?”

“Very far away.”

“To Daghestan?”

“
You’re not badly informed. Perhaps—for now at least.
”

“Are you cured, then?”

“
As for that. . . no
. But Behrens doesn’t think I can achieve much more here, for the present at least.
Which is why I may now risk a little change of air
.”

“So you will be coming back?”

“That’s an open question. Or, rather, the real question is when.
As for me, you know, I love freedom above all else—especially the freedom to choose my place of residence. I can hardly expect you to understand what it means to be obsessed with independence. It’s in the blood, perhaps.
”

“
And your husband in Daghestan consents to—your liberty?
”

“
It is my illness that allows me liberty. You see, this is now my third time here. I’ve been here a year now. I may well return. But you will be far from here long before that.
”

“Do you think so, Clavdia?”

“
And my first name, tool You certainly do take the customs of carnival very seriously!
”

“So you do know how sick I am?”

“
Yes—no—the way one knows things here. You have a little moist spot there inside, a bit of fever, isn’t that right?
”

“
A hundred, a hundred point two in the afternoon,
” Hans Castorp said. “And you?”

“
Oh, my case is a little more complicated, you see—it’s not that simple.
”

“
Within the humanist branch of letters called medicine, there is something,
” Hans Castorp said, “
that they call tubercular congestion in the lymphatic vessels.
”

“
Ah! You have a spy, my dear, that’s quite clear.
”

“
And you
—please, forgive me! I must ask you something, ask you something very urgent, but in German. That day, six months ago, when I left the table for my checkup—you looked up and watched me go, do you remember?”

“
What sort of question is that? Six months ago!
”

“Did you know where I was going?”

“
Certainly, but only quite by accident.
”

“So Behrens had told you, hadn’t he?”

“
You and your Behrens!
”

“
Oh, he rendered your skin in absolutely lifelike fashion. Moreover, he is a widower with glowing cheeks who happens to own a really remarkable coffee service. I can well believe that he knows your body not merely as a doctor, but also as an initiate in another humanistic discipline.
”

“
You have every reason to say you speak as if in a dream, my friend.
”

“
That may be. But you must first let me dream anew, now that you’ve awakened me so cruelly with that alarm bell about your departure. Seven months beneath your gaze—and now, when I’ve come to know you in reality, you tell me you’re leaving!
”

“
And I repeat, we should have chatted long before this.
”

“So you would have liked that?”

“
Me? You won’t slip out of it that easily, my boy. This is about your interests, about you. Were you too shy to approach a woman with whom you are now speaking as if in a dream, or was there someone else who prevented your doing so?
”

“
I told you. I didn’t want to address you with formal pronouns.
”

“
What a fraud. Answer me—the gentleman who speaks so eloquently, that Italian who just left our soiree—what words did he let fly just now?
”

“
I didn’t understand any of it. The gentleman meant not a whit to me the moment I laid eyes on you. But you forget—it would not have been at all easy to have made your acquaintance in society. Besides, there is my cousin with whom I am involved and who has little or no inclination to amuse himself here; he thinks about nothing except returning to the plains to be a soldier.
”

“
Poor devil. He is, in fact, more ill than he knows. Your friend the Italian, by the way, is not doing very much better.
”

“
He says so himself. But my cousin—is that true? You frighten me.
”

“
It is quite possible that he will die if he tries to be a soldier on the plains.
”

“
That he will die. Death. A terrible word, isn’t it? But it’s strange, the word doesn’t impress me so much today. It was more just a conventional phrase when I said, ‘You frighten me.’ The idea of death doesn’t frighten me. It leaves me calm. It arouses no pity—either for dear old Joachim or for myself—to hear that he may die. If that’s true, then his condition is very much like my own, and I don’t find mine particularly grand. He is dying, and me, I’m in love—fine! You spoke with my cousin once, in the waiting room outside where they take intimate photographs, if you recall.
”

“
I vaguely recall.
”

“
It was the same day that Behrens took your transparent portrait!
”

“
But of course.
”

“
My God! And do you have it with you?
”

“
No, I keep it in my room.
”

“
Ah, in your room. As for mine, I always keep it in my wallet. Would you like me to show it to you?
”

“
A thousand thanks, but I’m not overwhelmed with curiosity. It is sure to look quite innocent.
”

“
Well, I have seen your exterior portrait. But I would much prefer to see the interior portrait you have locked up in your room. Let me ask you something else. From time to time a Russian gentleman who lives in town comes to visit you. Who is he? What is his purpose in coming?
”

“
You’re enormously skilled at espionage, I must say. All right—I’ll give you an answer. Yes, he is an ailing compatriot, a friend. I made his acquaintance at another resort, some years ago. Our relationship? We have tea together, we smoke two or three
papyrosy
, we gossip, we philosophize, we talk about man, God, life, morality, a thousand things. And with that my tale is ended. Are you satisfied?
”

“
About morality as well! And what discoveries have you in fact made about morality, for example?
”

“
Morality? It interests you, does it? All right—it seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability—but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us. It seems to us that it is more moral to lose oneself and let oneself be ruined than to save oneself The great moralists have never been especially virtuous, but rather adventurers in evil, in vice, great sinners who teach us as Christians how to stoop to misery. You must find that all very repugnant.
”

He fell silent. He was still sitting just as at the start—bending toward the woman reclining there in her paper tricorn, his intertwined feet far back under his creaking chair, her pencil between his fingers—and from lowered eyes, Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes, he looked out into the room, which was empty now. The guests had scattered. The piano in the far corner across from them tinkled softly, disjointedly; the patient from Mannheim was playing with just one hand, while the teacher at his side paged through the music, which she now held on her knees. As the conversation between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat died away, the pianist stopped playing altogether, laying the hand with which he had been doodling back in his lap. Fräulein Engelhart went on thumbing through the music. Only these four were left now from the Mardi Gras party—they sat there motionless. The stillness lasted several minutes. Slowly it weighed down on the couple at the piano until their heads sank deeper and deeper, the Mannheimer’s toward the keyboard, Fräulein Engelhart’s toward her music. Finally, almost simultaneously, as if by some silent agreement, they stood up circumspectly; ingeniously avoiding any glances toward the other occupied corner of the room, with heads tucked low and arms stiff to their sides, the man from Mannheim and the teacher softly vanished together on tiptoe by way of the reading room.

“
They’re all retiring to their rooms
,” Frau Chauchat said. “
Those were the last; it’s getting late. Ah yes, our carnival festivities are over.
” And she raised both arms to remove her paper hat from her reddish hair, wound in a braid around her head. “
You know the consequences, monsieur.
”

But Hans Castorp rejected this, keeping his eyes closed and not changing his position in the least. He replied, “
Never, Clavdia. Never will I address you formally, never in life or in death
,
if I may put it that way, and surely I may. That form of address, as cultivated in the West and in civilized society, seems terribly bourgeois and pedantic to me. Why, indeed, use such forms? Formality is the same thing as pedantry! All those things you have established in regard to morality, you and your ailing compatriot—do you seriously suppose they surprise me? What sort of dolt do you take me for? So then tell me, what do you think of me?
”

“
That is a subject requiring little thought. You are a decent, simple fellow from a good family, with handsome manners, a docile pupil to his teachers, who will soon return to the flatlands in order to forget completely that he ever spoke in a dream here and to help repay his great and powerful fatherland with honest labor on the wharves. And there you have your own intimate photograph, taken with no apparatus at all. You do find it a good likeness, I hope?
”

“
It lacks some of the details that Behrens found there.
”

“
Ah, the doctors are always finding something, it’s what they’re good at.
”

“
You sound like Monsieur Settembrini. And my fever? Where does it come from?
”

“
Oh, go on, it’s an episode of no consequence that will pass quickly.
”

“
No, Clavdia, you know perfectly well that what you say is not true and is spoken without conviction, of that I am certain. The fever in my body and the pounding of my exhausted heart and the trembling in my hands, it is anything but an episode, for it is nothing but
”—and he bent his pale face deeper toward hers, his lips twitching—“
nothing but my love for you, yes, the love that overwhelmed me the instant I laid eyes on you, or better, the love that I acknowledged once I recognized you—and it is that love, obviously, that has led me to this place.
”

“
What foolishness!
”

“
Oh, love is nothing if not foolish, something mad and forbidden, an adventure in evil. Otherwise it is merely a pleasant banality, good for singing calm little songs down on the plains. But when I recognized you, recognized my love for you—it’s true, I knew you before, from days long past, you and your marvelously slanting eyes and your mouth and the voice with which you speak—there was a time long ago, when I was still just a schoolboy, that I asked you for a pencil, just so I could meet you at last, because I loved you with an irrational love, and no doubt what Behrens found in my body are the lingering traces of my age-old love for you, proof that I was sick even back then.
”

His teeth banged together. While he fantasized, he had pulled one foot out from under his creaking chair, and shoving it out in front of him and letting his other knee touch the floor, he was now kneeling beside her, his head bent low, his whole body quivering. “
I love you
,” he babbled, “
I have always loved you, for you are the ‘intimate you’ of my life, my dream, my destiny, my need, my eternal desire
.”