The Magic Mountain (67 page)

The chipper great-aunt had invited her tablemates—that is, the cousins, the teacher, and Frau Stöhr—to a farewell dinner in the restaurant, a lavish feast with caviar, champagne, and liqueurs, during which Joachim had been very quiet, speaking only a few words in almost a whisper, so that the great-aunt, being the benevolent soul she was, told him to cheer up and, suspending the rules of civilized discourse, even addressed him with informal pronouns. “Never mind, old fellow, don’t worry. Eat, drink, talk—we’ll be coming back soon,” she said. “Let us all eat, drink, and chat, and let sorrow take care of itself. God will bring autumn before we even know what’s happened. So you be the judge—is there any reason to be sad?” The next morning she gave almost everyone in the dining hall a colorful box of
konfekti
as a memento and then left on her little trip with the two girls.

And Joachim, how was he doing? Did he feel liberated, was his mind easier—or did his spirit suffer great privation when he saw one whole side of the table empty? And his uncharacteristic, rebellious impatience, including his threat to carry out a wild departure of his own if they kept on leading him around by the nose—did that have anything to do with Marusya’s being gone? Or was the fact that he did not leave, at least for now, and instead lent an ear to the director’s testimonials on the thaw, traceable to full-bosomed Marusya’s not having departed for good, to her certain return after only five of the smallest units of local time? Ah, it was probably all true at once, and in equal measure. Hans Castorp could well imagine that was the case, without ever speaking to Joachim. For he refrained from mentioning anything about the matter, just as Joachim avoided the name of someone else who had departed for a while.

But meanwhile at Settembrini’s table, who had recently taken the Italian’s place?—amid Dutch guests whose appetites were so immense that they all ordered three extra fried eggs before starting on their soup at each five-course midday meal? It was Anton Karlovitch Ferge, the man who had gone through the hell of pleural shock. Yes, Herr Ferge was up and out of bed, his condition so improved, even without pneumothorax, that he spent most of the day dressed and walking about and appeared for meals with his bushy, good-natured moustache and his prominent Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured. The cousins chatted sometimes with him in the dining hall and lobby, and, as chance dictated, took constitutionals with him now and again, for they had a soft spot in their hearts for this simple martyr, who claimed to know nothing about higher things, but once that was settled, could chat easily about the manufacture of galoshes and the far reaches of the Russian Empire—Samara, Georgia, and such—while they trudged on through fog and slush.

The paths were really barely passable now, were simply melting away, and fogs brewed all around. To be sure, the director claimed it wasn’t fog, only clouds; but that was merely verbal chicanery in Hans Castorp’s opinion. Spring had to fight a difficult battle for months, all the way to June, with a hundred setbacks into bitterest winter. On sunny days in March, it got so hot out on the balcony that it was almost impossible to lie in a lounge chair, even with light clothes and a sunshade; and there were ladies who pretended it was already summer and appeared at first breakfast in muslin dresses. They could be excused to some extent, given the peculiar nature of the climate up here, which encouraged confusion by throwing the seasons into a meteorological jumble; but there was also a great deal of shortsightedness and lack of imagination in their impertinence—theirs was the foolishness of creatures of the moment, incapable of thinking that things may change again, craving constant variety, and devouring time in their impatience. The date was March, it was spring, that was practically summer, and you got out your muslin dresses so that you could show them off before autumn came. Which it did, so to speak. In April, a series of gloomy, chilly, damp days set in, with steady showers that then turned to snow, flurries of new, wet snow. Fingers grew numb as you lay on the balcony—both camel-hair blankets had to be put back into service, and fur-lined sleeping bags were almost required again; management decided to turn on the heat, and people complained they had been cheated out of spring. By the end of the month, everything lay under a heavy blanket of snow; but then foehn winds set in—just as predicted by experienced, impressionable guests, who had scented it in the air: Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Levi of the ivory complexion, even the widow Hessenfeld—they were unanimous in claiming they felt it before even the smallest cloud appeared above the granite peaks to the south.Frau Hessenfeld tended to crying jags, Fräulein Levi took to her bed, and Frau Stöhr, obstinately baring her rabbitlike teeth, announced almost hourly her superstitious fear of a sudden hemorrhage, for it was said foehn winds hastened and caused such things. It was now unbelievably warm, the heat was turned off, people left balcony doors open at night and it would still be fifty-seven degrees in their rooms the next morning; the snow was melting fast—turned ice-gray, became porous and honeycombed; great drifts of it sagged now, seemed to creep back into the earth. Water seeped, trickled, dribbled everywhere—it dripped, then gushed in the forests. The shoveled piles of snow along the streets and the pallid carpets on the meadows disappeared, although the masses of white had been far too thick to vanish quickly. And the strangest things could happen—vernal surprises on a walk to the valley, things you had never seen before, straight out of a fairy tale. Before you lay a wide meadow—the snow-clad cone of Schwarzhorn towered in the background, the snowbound Scaletta Glacier just to its right, and even the wider terrain, with its hayshed hidden somewhere, still lay under a cover of snow, though it was thin and sparse now, interrupted here and there by rough, dark mounds of earth, with tufts of dry grasses sticking up everywhere. But that meadow there, the cousins noticed—what a peculiar sort of snow-cover it had: thicker farther back up near the wooded slope, but nearer in the foreground, where the grass was discolored and ravaged by winter, there was only a sprinkling of snow, like polka dots, like little flowers. They took a closer look, bent down in astonishment—that wasn’t snow, those were flowers, snowdrops, blossoming snow, no doubt of it, little chalices on short stems, white or whitish-blue, a kind of crocus, millions of them, growing so thick you could easily have taken them for snow, into which they blended indiscernibly.

They laughed at their mistake, laughed for joy at the miracle before their eyes, this charming mimicry of snow by organic life hesitantly finding its way back into the world. They picked a few, examined them, studied their delicate chalices, made boutonnieres of them, wore them home, put them in water glasses in their rooms—for the valley’s inorganic paralysis had lasted a long, long time, despite its diversions.

But the snow flowers were soon covered again by real snow, and the same thing happened to the blue soldanella and the red cowslips that had next appeared. Yes, what a very difficult time spring had making any headway in its conquest of winter. It was thrown back ten times before it finally gained a toehold up here—until the next burst of winter, with white flurries, icy winds, and warm radiators. At the beginning of May (for May arrived while we were talking about snowdrops), it was absolute torment to sit out on the balcony and try to write a postcard to the plains, your fingers aching from the raw November damp; and the half-dozen hardwoods in the valley were as bare as flatland trees in January. The rain went on for days, it poured one whole week, and without the compensations of the lounge chair it would have been very hard to spend so many hours reclining out there, your face numbed and wet from the damp murk of clouds. But ultimately, it proved to be a clandestine spring rain, and more and more, the longer it lasted, disclosed itself as such. Almost all the snow melted away beneath it; there was no white left, only patches of dirty ice-gray here and there, and now the meadows truly began to turn green.

What a comforting sight those green meadows were after an infinity of white. And another green appeared as well, its delicate, tender softness far exceeding the green of new grass—young clusters of needles on the larches. When taking his constitutionals, Hans Castorp could not help caressing them and brushing them against his cheek—their softness and freshness were so irresistibly enchanting. “It’s enough to make a botanist of you,” the young man said to his companion. “A man could really and truly decide to become a scientist from the pure joy of watching nature reawaken after one of our winters up here. That’s gentian you see there on that slope, my man, and right there is a kind of little yellow violet I don’t recognize. But here we have buttercups, no different from the ones down below, from the family Ranunculaceae, a compound flower, as I recall, an especially charming plant, bisexual, you can see the great number of stamens and several pistils, the androecium and gynoecium, if I remember correctly. I really think I shall add some botanical tomes to my collection, just to become somewhat better informed about this part of life, this realm of knowledge. Yes, just look at the world’s colorful variety.”

“It gets even better in June,” Joachim said. “The valley’s famous for its wildflowers. But I don’t think I’ll wait for them. Your wanting to study botany—picked that up from Krokowski, did you?”

Krokowski? What did he mean? Oh, that’s where he got it—because Dr. Krokowski had recently been carrying on botanically in his lectures. (It would be quite a mistake, in fact, to assume that just because time had brought forth so many changes, Dr. Krokowski was no longer giving his lectures.) Dressed in his frock coat—though no longer in sandals, which he wore only in summer and so would soon be wearing again—he delivered them, as before, every two weeks, every second Monday in the dining hall, just as on that day when Hans Castorp, early in his stay, had arrived late, splattered with blood. The psychoanalyst had spoken for nine months about love and illness—never too much at once, always in small portions, little talks of half or three-quarters of an hour, in which he displayed the treasures of his knowledge and thought; and everyone was under the impression that he would never have to stop, that it would go on like this forever. It was kind of a biweekly
Thousand and One Nights
spun out at random, and, like Scheherazade’s stories for a curious prince, each lecture was calculated to please its audience and prevent acts of violence. In its very boundlessness, Dr. Krokowski’s theme recalled an enterprise to which Settembrini was devoting his labor, the encyclopedia of suffering; and like that project, it proved equally rich in its applications—as witnessed by the lecturer’s recent digression into botany, or more precisely, fungi. He had, by the way, changed his topic somewhat perhaps—it was now more a discussion of love and
death
, which led to numerous reflections of a half poetic, half ruthlessly scientific nature. And it was in this context that the scholar had come around to speak—in his drawling East European accent with its
r
produced by a single tap of the tongue—of botany, or better, of mushrooms: those rank, fantastic creatures from life’s twilight world, fleshly by nature, so similar to animal life that products of animal metabolism, proteins and glycogen, an animal carbohydrate, were found in their chemical makeup. And Dr. Krokowski had spoken about one fungus, famous since classical antiquity for its form and the powers ascribed to it—a morel, its Latin name ending in the adjective
impudicus
, its form reminiscent of love, and its odor, of death. For the stench given off by the
impudicus
was strikingly like that of a decaying corpse, the odor coming from a greenish, viscous slime that carried its spores and dripped from the bell-shaped cap. And even today, among the uneducated, this morel was thought to be an aphrodisiac.

Well, that had been a little much for the ladies, declared Prosecutor Paravant—who was managing to survive the thaw with the moral assistance of the director’s propaganda. And even Frau Stöhr, who as a woman of principle had likewise held her ground and met head-on every temptation to make her own wild departure, had remarked to her tablemates that Krokowski had really been rather “obscure” today with his classical mushroom. The unfortunate woman actually said “obscure”—disgracing her illness with her unspeakable malapropisms.

What Hans Castorp found amazing, however, was that Joachim would refer at all to Dr. Krokowski’s botany, for they spoke as little of the psychoanalyst as they did of Clavdia Chauchat or Marusya—they never alluded to him, passing over his ways and works in silence. But now suddenly Joachim had mentioned the assistant by name—in an ill-tempered tone of voice, just as his remark that he would not be waiting for the wildflowers to bloom had sounded quite ill-tempered, too. Dear old Joachim—of late he appeared to be close to losing his equilibrium. There was an edgy quaver to his voice whenever he spoke, and he was not at all his old gentle, prudent self. Was it orange-blossom perfume that he lacked? Was their teasing him with Gaffky numbers driving him to despair? Could he not resolve in his own mind whether to stay here until autumn or to depart on a fraudulent basis?

In reality, it was something entirely different that brought the edginess to Joachim’s voice and made him mention the recent lecture on botany in such a sarcastic tone. Hans Castorp knew nothing at all about it—or rather, he did not know that Joachim knew; for as a man who had kicked over the traces, as a pedagogic problem child of life, he himself knew what that something was only too well. In a word, Joachim was onto his cousin’s tricks, he had accidentally eavesdropped on an act of betrayal, much like the one Hans Castorp had committed on the evening of Mardi Gras—a new treachery, exacerbated by the indisputable fact that it had become a habit with him.

One part of the eternal monotony of time’s rhythm, of the diverting, standard segmentation of the normal day, which was always the same, to the point where each day was so confusingly like, so identical with, the next that it could be taken for it, a fixed eternity that made it hard to understand how time could ever bring forth changes—one part of the undeviating schedule (as our readers will recall) was that Dr. Krokowski made his rounds every day between half past three and four o’clock, moving from room to room, or rather balcony to balcony, lounge chair to lounge chair. And the Berghof day had itself come round many times now since that day when Hans Castorp, lying there in his horizontal position, had felt hurt because the assistant had made a detour around his room, leaving him to his own devices. The visitor in August had long ago become a comrade—Dr. Krokowski frequently called him that when he stopped to check on him, and although, as Hans Castorp remarked to Joachim, that military word, with its exotic
r
, a single palatalized tap of the tongue, sounded dreadful coming from the assistant, it did not fit all that badly with his rugged, virile, jovial manner, which both demanded your cheerful trust and yet at the same time had its dubious side, since it was always contradicted somehow by his black pallor.