The Magic Mountain (66 page)
Already past him now, the Italian looked back over his shoulder and carefully stated: “The gods and mortals have on occasion visited the realm of shades and found their way back. But those who reside in the nether world know that he who eats of the fruits of their realm is forever theirs.” And he walked on, wearing those everlasting pastel checked trousers, leaving Hans Castorp behind, presumably “cut to the quick” by so much trenchant significance—and to some extent he was, although he was also vexed and amused by the notion that he was supposed to be. He muttered to himself, “Latini, Carducci, bibbi-boobi-trappi, just leave me in peace!”
All the same, he was touched and glad that the ice had been broken; for despite his trophy, the macabre gift that he wore next to his heart, he was very fond of Herr Settembrini, set great store by his presence, and the thought of being totally rejected and abandoned would have weighed down on him more heavily than had the feeling of being a schoolboy no longer in the running and enjoying the advantages of disgrace, just like Herr Albin. And yet he did not have the courage to speak to his mentor, and several more weeks passed before Herr Settembrini once again approached his problem child.
The waves of the ocean of time, in their eternal monotone rhythm, washed Easter ashore, and the Berghof celebrated it, just as it took note of all time’s stages and turning points in order to avoid undifferentiated tedium. At early breakfast, each guest found a nosegay of violets beside his place setting; at second breakfast, a dyed egg; and at the festive dinner, a little chocolate rabbit decorated with sugar.
“Have you ever taken an ocean voyage,
tenente
—or you, my good engineer?” Herr Settembrini asked, stepping up to the cousins’ table after the meal, his toothpick in his mouth. Like most of the guests, they were shaving fifteen minutes from the main rest cure by lingering over coffee and cognac. “These rabbits and dyed eggs remind me of life on a great steamer, when for weeks on end you stare at an empty horizon and a briny desert, under conditions of deluxe comfort that only superficially help you forget the enormity of the situation, an awareness of which lives on as a secret horror gnawing in the deeper regions of your mind. I recognize today’s mood; it is the same mood that reigns when the holidays of terra firma are religiously observed on those great arks—as reminders of a world outside, nostalgia as per calendar. Today would be Easter on terra firma, right? Today’s the king’s birthday on terra firma—and so we celebrate it, too, as best we can, we’re only human. Isn’t that right?”
The cousins agreed. It really was true. Touched by having been spoken to and spurred on by his own bad conscience, Hans Castorp had high praise for these sentiments, found them witty, choice, and literary, and made every effort to say what he thought Herr Settembrini wanted to hear. To be sure, just as Herr Settembrini had put it so graphically, the comforts on an ocean liner allowed one only superficially to forget the real situation and its dangers, and there was, if he might be permitted to add a comment of his own, even a kind of frivolous provocation about that perfect comfort, somewhat like what the ancients called hubris (in his desire to please, he was even citing the classics)—“I am the king of Babylon,” and that sort of thing—in a word, sacrilege. On the other hand, however, the luxury on board manifested (“manifested”!) a great triumph of the human spirit and human dignity—for in bearing luxury and comfort out onto the briny, foamy deep and boldly maintaining it there, man was, so to speak, setting his boot on the neck of the elements, of savage forces, and that manifested the triumph of human civilization over chaos, if he might be permitted the phrase.
Herr Settembrini listened attentively, his ankles crossed, his arms ditto, all the while daintily stroking the sweep of his moustache with his toothpick. “It is remarkable,” he said, “how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in an allegory the basic themes and problems of his life. The same thing has just happened with you, my good engineer. What you just said came from the very depths of your personality, and even the present state of your personality found poetic expression. And as before, it is the experimental state.”
“
Placet experiri!
” Hans Castorp said nodding and laughing—and with a soft Italian
c.
“
Sicuro
—when it is a matter of a respectable passion to explore the world and not a matter of depravity. You spoke of ‘hubris,’ used that very word. But the hubris of reason set against the dark powers is the highest form of humanity, and as such it evokes the rage of the envious gods;
per esempio
, when such a luxury ark founders and plummets to the depths, that is a downfall with honor. Prometheus’s deed was one of hubris as well, and his torments on the Scythian cliffs are for us a sacred martyrdom. But what about the other kind of hubris, when a man perishes in wanton experiments with the powers of unreason, with forces hostile to the human race? Is there honor in that? Can that ever be honorable?
Sì o no!
”
Hans Castorp stirred his spoon in his cup, although there was nothing in it.
“My good engineer, my good engineer,” the Italian said, bending his head forward thoughtfully and letting his black eyes “set.” “Are you not afraid of the second circle of hell and the cyclone that tosses and whirls the sinners of the flesh about, those unhappy souls who sacrificed reason for lust?
Gran Dio
, when I picture you being blown and blasted about, tumbling head over heels, it worries me until I could simply topple over myself, like a tumbling corpse.”
They laughed, happy to hear him joking and speaking poetically. But then Settembrini added, “Over a glass of wine, on the evening of Mardi Gras, my good engineer, you will recall that you more or less took your leave of me—yes, it was very like a good-bye. And so today it is now
my
turn. You see me standing here before you, gentlemen, about to say my farewells. I am leaving the sanatorium.”
They were both totally taken aback.
“It’s not possible! You’re joking!” Hans Castorp cried, just as he had on another, similar occasion. He was almost as shocked as he had been then.
But Settembrini replied, “Most certainly not. It is just as I’ve said. Nor should you be all that surprised by my news. I’ve already explained to you that the moment my hopes of being able to return to the world of work in the foreseeable future should prove untenable, I was determined to fold my tents here and set myself up for the duration somewhere else in the valley. Well, what would you have me do? The moment has come. I cannot get well, that is settled. I can eke out an existence here—but only here. My sentence, my final sentence has been spoken—and it is life. It has been pronounced by Director Behrens, in that special cheerful way of his. Fine, then I shall accept the consequences. I have rented lodgings, and my few worldly goods and the tools of my literary trade are about to be transported there. It’s in Dorf, not very far from here at all. We’re sure to meet, I’ll not lose sight of you. But as your fellow resident, I now take my leave of you.”
This was Settembrini’s Easter disclosure. The cousins were plainly extraordinarily moved by it all. They spoke repeatedly and at length with the literary man about his decision: whether he would be able to follow the rules of rest cure on his own; how he would continue the complex, encyclopedic task he had taken upon himself—that survey of literary masterpieces from the perspective of human sufferings and their eradication; and finally, about his future quarters in a building belonging to a “retailer of foodstuffs,” as Herr Settembrini put it. The retailer, he reported, had rented the upper floors of his property to a Bohemian ladies’ tailor, who was now subletting some of the space.
But these conversations now lay in the past. Time had swept onward, bringing forth more than one change. No longer a resident of the International Sanatorium Berghof, Settembrini had been living with Lukaček, the ladies’ tailor, for several weeks. His departure had not been by sleigh, but on foot. Wearing his short yellow overcoat, with a bit of fur trim at the collar and sleeves, and accompanied by a man who transported the writer’s earthly and literary baggage in a wheelbarrow, he had been seen walking off, swinging his cane—but only after first stopping at the front door to give a dining attendant’s cheek a little pinch with the backs of two fingers. As noted, a good part of April, three-quarters of it, already lay in the shadows of the past, but it was still deepest winter, with room temperatures of barely forty-two degrees each morning, and of twelve degrees outside; and if you left an inkwell out on the balcony overnight, it would be a clump of ice the next morning, a piece of hard coal. But spring was coming, they knew that; on days when the sun shone, there was an occasional, gentle hint of it in the air. Longer periods of thaw could be expected soon, and with them would come inevitable changes at the Berghof—changes that not even the authority of the director’s word could hold back, although every day, in the dining hall, in patients’ rooms, at every checkup, at every meal, he vigorously combated the prejudice that prevailed against the season of thaw.
Was he dealing with winter athletes, he asked, or patients, people who were ill? Why in the world did they have to have snow, frozen snow? The coming period of thaw, an unhealthy season? It was the healthiest of all. It could be proven that during thaw there were relatively fewer bedridden patients throughout the valley than during any other time. At this point in the year, the weather everywhere else in the world was worse for patients with lung disease. Anyone with a scintilla of common sense would remain here and make good use of the bracing effects of local conditions. After that, a person would be immune to the effects of any climate anywhere, could stand firm against every onslaught—provided, of course, he waited for healing to take hold completely, and so forth. But that was easy for the director to say—the prejudice against the thaw was firmly entrenched in their minds, and the resort was emptying out. It may well have been that approaching spring was stirring in their bones and making even sedentary folk restless and eager for change—in any case the number of “wild” and “fraudulent” departures from the Berghof was increasing to acute levels. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, for example—despite the pleasure she took in checkups that allowed her to show off her best lace undergarments—departed on a totally wild and fraudulent basis, without permission of any kind, and not because she was getting better but because she was doing worse and worse. Her stay up here went back to long before Hans Castorp’s arrival; it was more than a year since she had first come here—with a slight infection for which she had been sentenced to three months. After four months she was then told she would “be cured inside of four weeks,” but six weeks later, any talk of being cured was simply out of the question—she would have to stay at least another four months. And so it went—after all, this was no prison ship, no Siberian salt mine; and Frau Salomon stayed on and used the time to show off her finest lingerie. But when, with thaw looming up ahead, she had been sentenced to an additional five months—as a result of her latest checkup, revealing a whistle in her left upper lobe and unmistakably harsh tones under her left shoulder—she lost all patience, raised loud protests, and, cursing Dorf and Platz, the famous air, the International Sanatorium Berghof, and its doctors, departed for home, for windy, wet Amsterdam.
Was that a wise thing to do? Director Behrens threw his arms above his shoulders and let them fall, noisily slapping his thighs. By autumn at the latest, he said, Frau Salomon would be back again—but then for good. Would he be proved right? We shall see—for we are bound to this cozy resort for many earthly days yet. But Frau Salomon’s case was certainly not the only one of its kind. Time brought forth changes—just as it always had, but those changes had been more gradual, not so striking. There were gaps now in the dining hall, at all seven tables, at both the Good and Bad Russian tables, at those set both lengthwise and crosswise. One could not, however, have gained from this fact a complete picture of the hotel’s occupancy rate; there had been arrivals as well, just as at any time of the year; rooms might very well be occupied, but by guests whose freedom of movement was limited by the final stages of their condition. But in the dining hall, as we have said, some persons were missing because they still had such freedom of movement. And others left a gap, a void, much more profound—like Dr. Blumenkohl, who was dead. That look on his face, as if he had something foul-tasting in his mouth, had become more and more pronounced; then he had been confined to his bed, and then he died—no one knew exactly when; the matter was handled with customary tact and discretion. A gap. Frau Stöhr sat next to the gap, and it made her shudder. And so she moved to the other side of young Ziemssen, to the place previously belonging to Miss Robinson, who had been released as cured; across from her now was the teacher, who still sat on Hans Castorp’s left, having held faithfully to her post. She was all alone on her side of the table, where three more places were now free. Rasmussen the student, who had daily grown thinner and more listless, was now bedridden and considered moribund; and the great-aunt had gone on a trip with her niece and Marusya of the prominent breasts. We say “on a trip,” because that is what everyone said, since it was understood that they would be returning soon enough. They would be back by autumn at the latest—how could one call that a departure? And how very near Midsummer Night already was, especially with Pentecost just around the corner; and once the longest day had come and gone, the year raced downhill from there, toward winter—so that in a way the great-aunt and Marusya were as good as back again. And that was a fine thing, because laughter-loving Marusya was not cured and detoxified by any means; Fräulein Engelhart knew all about some tubercular tumors brown-eyed Marusya had on her full bosom, which had been operated on several times already. And when the teacher shared this information, Hans Castorp glanced furtively at Joachim, whose face had turned blotchy and was bent down over his plate.