The Magic Mountain (68 page)
“Well, comrade, how’s it going, how’s it coming?” Dr. Krokowski said, arriving from the Russian barbarians’ balcony and stepping up to the head of Hans Castorp’s lounge chair; and as on every other day, the patient lying there with his hands folded across his chest smiled up in amiable vexation at the ghastly word “comrade” and gazed at the doctor’s yellow teeth revealed beneath his black beard. “Had a fine rest, did we?” Dr. Krokowski continued. “Fever chart on the decline or on the rise today? Well, doesn’t mean much—it’ll be fine by your wedding day. My regards.” And with that farewell, which likewise sounded ghastly, since he pronounced it like “d’gods,” he would move on, heading for Joachim’s balcony. These were merely his rounds, no more than a quick check on things.
Sometimes, to be sure, Dr. Krokowski might stay a little longer, standing there broad-shouldered, smiling his manly smile, chatting with his “comrade” about this and that—the weather, departures and arrivals, the patient’s general mood, good or bad, and about his personal affairs, too, his home, his prospects—until he would finally say, “My d’gods,” and move on. Hans Castorp, hands clasped behind his head for a change, would respond with a smile of his own to all the questions—with a pervasive sense of revulsion, to be sure, but with a ready answer to everything. They would lower their voices to chat, and although the glass partition did not completely separate the balconies, Joachim next door could not make out what they were saying—did not even try for that matter. He would hear his cousin get up from his lounge chair and walk back into the room with Dr. Krokowski, presumably to show him his fever chart; and then the conversation might continue a while longer, to judge from the delay before the assistant appeared at Joachim’s door by way of the hall.
And what were these comrades chatting about? Joachim did not ask; but if one of us chose not to follow his example and posed the question, then, by way of general observation, it might very well be noted that considerable material was available for an intellectual exchange between such men and comrades, both of whose basic perspectives bore an idealistic stamp—one of them having educated himself to believe that matter is the spirit’s Original Sin, a nasty rank growth in response to a stimulus, whereas the other, as a doctor, was accustomed to teaching that organic illness was a secondary phenomenon. Yes, we might note that there was much to discuss and share: about matter as a disreputable degeneration of the immaterial, about life as an impudency of matter, about illness as life’s lascivious form. With the ongoing series of lectures as a basis, the conversation could then have moved from love as a force conducive to illness, to the nonphysical nature of its indications, to “old” and “new” areas, to soluble toxins and love potions, to light piercing the dark subconscious, to the blessings of psychoanalysis and the transference of symptoms—but then what do
we
know, since for us this is all merely guesswork, a hypothetical answer to the question about the subject of the chats between Dr. Krokowski and young Hans Castorp.
Moreover, they no longer chatted—that was all over, it had lasted only a brief while, a few weeks. More recently, Dr. Krokowski treated this patient no differently from the way he treated all others. On his rounds, he generally confined himself to “Well, comrade?” and “My d’gods.” But Joachim had made a discovery—of the aforementioned act he considered a betrayal on Hans Castorp’s part. Although it should be said that, as a military innocent, he made it quite accidentally, without resorting to any sort of spying. He had simply been summoned one Wednesday morning, in the middle of his first rest cure, to be weighed by the bath attendant in the basement—and that was when it happened. He was coming down the stairs, with their tidy linoleum steps and a view to the door of the general consulting room, which stood between the two X-ray rooms—the organic one on the left, and around the corner on the right, two steps lower, the psychoanalytical one, with Dr. Krokowski’s visiting card on the door. Halfway down the stairs, Joachim stopped in his tracks when he saw Hans Castorp suddenly emerge from the consulting room where he had just been given his injection. Quickly closing the door with both hands and without looking around, Hans Castorp turned now to the right, toward the door with the thumbtacked calling card; with a kind of forward rocking motion, he reached it in a few soundless strides. He knocked, bending forward and holding his ear next to his rapping fingers. And then Joachim heard the word “Enter!” in the resounding baritone of the occupant, with that exotic, tapped
r
sound and a diphthongized distortion of the vowel—and saw his cousin vanish into the twilight of Dr. Krokowski’s analytical pit.
Long days, the longest, in terms of hours of sunlight—objectively speaking, that is, since their astronomical length has nothing whatever to do with whether they seem to pass swiftly or can divert us. The vernal equinox now lay three months in the past, the summer solstice had arrived. But the natural year followed the calendar only very reticently up here; only now, within the last few days, had spring definitely arrived, a spring without any hint of summer’s oppressiveness—with spicy, light, thin air, with a radiant, silvery-blue sky and blossoming meadows as colorful as a child’s paint box.
Hans Castorp found the slopes full of flowers, the same ones that had just been ending their bloom when Joachim had gathered a few to put in his room as a friendly greeting—yarrow and bluebells. It was a sign that the year was coming full circle. But along with new emerald-green grass, what a wealth of organic life had now emerged from the soil on the slopes and wide meadows—stars, chalices, bells, and whimsies that filled the sun-drenched air with subtle fragrances: great masses of Alpine campion and wild pansies, daisies, marguerites, cowslips in red and yellow—much larger and more beautiful than any Hans Castorp remembered seeing in the flatlands, that is, to the extent that he had ever paid attention to them—plus nodding soldanella, little ciliated bells of blue, purple, and pink, a specialty of the region.
He gathered up these delights, brought bouquets home, but for serious purposes—less to decorate his room than to follow through on his plan and study them with a strictly scientific eye. He had bought some paraphernalia for his project: a book on general botany, a handy trowel for digging up plants, a herbarium, a powerful magnifying glass; and the young man went to work on his balcony, dressed for summer again now, in one of the suits he had brought with him at the very start—this, too, another token that the year had come full circle.
Fresh flowers stood in several water glasses on various surfaces provided by the furniture in his room, even on the little lamp table next to his splendid lounge chair. Half-faded flowers, wilting but not yet dry, were strewn across the balcony floor and scattered along the railing; others had already been carefully spread out between sheets of blotting paper that absorbed their moisture and were weighted down with stones, so that once the specimens were dry, Hans Castorp could paste them in his album with strips of gummed paper. There he lay, his knees pulled up, one leg crossed over the other, his field guide facedown on his chest, the spine forming a little gable; he held the thick beveled circle of his magnifying glass up to his ordinary blue eyes and examined a blossom, whose corolla he had partly removed with his pocketknife so that he could study its receptacle, which now swelled to a bizarre fleshy structure under the powerful lens. The anthers on the tips of filaments spilled their yellow pollen, the pitted pistil stood up rigid from the ovary, and if you cut through it, you could see the delicate channel down which a sugary excretion flushed grains and bags of pollen into the receptacle itself. Hans Castorp counted, probed, and compared; he investigated the structure and placement of sepals and petals, of male and female sex organs, compared them to diagrams and illustrations, determined to his satisfaction that the structures of plants he knew were scientifically correct, and then proceeded to those whose names he did not know, identifying them with his Linnaeus according to class, cohort, order, family, genus, and species. With so much time on his hands, he put comparative morphology to work and made considerable progress in botanical taxonomy. Under each of the dried plants in his herbarium, he wrote in a fine calligraphic hand the Latin names humanistic science had gallantly bestowed upon them, plus a list of their distinguishing characteristics. He showed this to good Joachim, who was quite amazed.
In the evening he would study the stars. He became fascinated by the passing year—although he had watched some twenty summers pass on earth without ever having been concerned about it before. We automatically used a term like “vernal equinox,” because we knew that when we came to this topic, such terminology would reflect Hans Castorp’s own thinking. For of late he had developed a fondness for tossing around such nomenclature, and his cousin was amazed by his knowledge of this subject as well.
“The sun will very soon enter Cancer,” he might remark while they were out on a walk. “Do you understand what that means? It’s the first summer sign of the zodiac, you see. And then the sun moves on through Leo and Virgo to the point where autumn begins, at the equinox toward the end of September, when the sun passes across the celestial equator, just as it did recently in March, when it entered Aries.”
“I must have missed that,” Joachim said peevishly. “What are you rattling on about? Entered Aries—and that’s part of the zodiac?”
“Quite right, the zodiac. The ancient heavenly signs—Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and all the rest—how can someone not be interested in it? There are twelve of them, you should at least know that much, three for each season, ascending and descending, a circle of constellations through which the sun moves—it’s all so splendid! Imagine, they found it painted on the ceiling of an Egyptian temple—a temple of Aphrodite, by the way—not far from Thebes. The Chaldeans already knew about it, too—the Chaldeans, if you please, that ancient tribe of Semitic or Arabic magicians, highly trained astrologists and diviners. They had already studied the celestial zone in which the planets move, dividing it into twelve constellations or signs, the
dodecatemoria
, which have come down to us. Now that’s splendid! That’s humanity!”
“And now you’re starting in on ‘humanity,’ just like Settembrini.”
“Yes, like him—or not quite like him, either. You have to take humanity as it is, but it’s still splendid. I like to think back to the Chaldeans when I’m lying there watching the planets, the ones they already knew about, because they didn’t know them all, clever as they were. But I can’t see the ones they didn’t know, either. Uranus was only recently discovered through a telescope, about a hundred and twenty years ago.”
“Recently?”
“I’d call it ‘recently’ in comparison to the previous three thousand years, if you please. But when I’m lying there and watching the planets, then those last three thousand years seem fairly ‘recent’ themselves, and somehow I feel very intimate with those Chaldeans, who watched them, too, and wrote poetry about them—and that’s what humanity means.”
“Well, that’s nice. You certainly have some grand ideas in your head.”
“You call them ‘grand’ and I call them ‘intimate’—what they’re called doesn’t make any difference. But when the sun enters Libra, about three months from now, then the length of the days will have decreased until day and night are equal, and will continue to decrease until around Christmas—you know all that. But, please consider this: that while the sun moves through the winter signs—Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces—the length of the days is increasing .again. And then we come back to the point where spring begins, for the three thousandth time since the Chaldeans, and the days go on lengthening until the year comes round again and summer begins.”
“That’s obvious enough.”
“No, it’s all smoke and mirrors! The days get longer during winter, and when we get to the longest one, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they start getting shorter again and it all heads right back downhill toward winter. You call it obvious, but once you disregard the obvious part, it can momentarily set you into a panic, make you want to grab something to hold on to. It’s really like some great practical joke, so that the beginning of winter is actually spring, and the beginning of summer is actually autumn. It’s as if we’re being led around by the nose, in a circle, always lured on by the promise of something that is just another turning point—a turning point in a circle. For a circle consists of nothing but elastic turning points, and so its curvature is immeasurable, with no steady, definite direction, and so eternity is not ‘straight ahead, straight ahead,’ but rather ‘merry-go-round.’ ”
“Stop!”
“Midsummer Night!” Hans Castorp said. “Midsummer Night celebrations, with fires and dances around the leaping flames, everyone joining hands. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard that’s how primitive tribes do it, celebrating the first night of summer, which is actually the beginning of autumn—the year’s high noon, its zenith, and it’s all downhill from there. They dance and whirl and cheer. And what are these primitives cheering about—can you explain that to me? Why are they so boisterous and merry? Because they are now headed back down into the dark, maybe? Or is it because things have gone uphill until now, and the turning point has come, the slippery turning point, Midsummer Night? Is it melancholy mirth at the high-point? I’m just describing it as I see it, in the words that come to mind. Melancholy mirth and mirthful melancholy—that’s the reason why those primitives are cheering and dancing around the flames. They do it out of constructive despair, if you want to put it that way, in honor of the practical joke of the circle, of eternity that has no permanent direction, but in which everything keeps coming back.”
“I don’t want to put it that way,” Joachim muttered, “please don’t lay the blame on me. Those are awfully grand notions you’re playing with when you’re lying there of an evening.”
“Yes, I won’t deny it—you keep yourself busy with more practical matters, with your Russian grammar. You should soon be fluent, my man, and that can only be to your great advantage—if there should be a war, which God forbid.”