The Magic Mountain (7 page)

But as soon as he was asleep, he began to dream and kept on dreaming almost nonstop until morning. Most of the time he saw Joachim Ziemssen, in a strangely contorted position, riding down a steep slope on a bobsled. He was as phosphorescently pale as Dr. Krokowski, and up front sat the Austrian horseman, steering, although the face was very vague, like that of someone you’ve only heard cough. “It really doesn’t matter to us—to us up here,” the contorted Joachim said, and now it was he, and not the horseman, who was coughing in that ghastly, slimy way. And this made Hans Castorp weep bitterly, and he realized that he would have to run to the pharmacist to get himself some cold cream. But Frau Iltis was sitting beside the road, a roguish pucker on her face, and she was holding something in her hand that was supposed to be her “stirletto,” but was really nothing more than a safety razor. That only made Hans Castorp laugh again, and so he was tossed back and forth by waves of emotion until the dawn came to the half-open balcony door and awakened him.

Hans Castorp retained only faint recollections of his actual parental home; he had hardly known his father and mother. They had both dropped dead within the brief period between his fifth and seventh years of life. His mother had died first, quite unexpectedly, while awaiting the birth of a second child, of an arterial blockage caused by phlebitis, an embolism, Dr. Heidekind had called it, triggering instantaneous cardiac paralysis—she had been sitting up in bed, laughing, and it looked as if she simply toppled over in a fit of laughter, whereas in fact she did it because she was dead. It was not something that Hans Hermann Castorp, the father, found easy to understand, and since he had been very fond of his wife and was not the most robust man himself, he simply did not know how to get over it. From then on, his mind was muddled, his focus narrow; and in his befuddlement he made mistakes in his business, resulting in serious losses for the firm of Castorp and Son. While inspecting a harbor warehouse on a windy day the following spring, he caught pneumonia, and since, despite all the conscientious attention given him by Dr. Heidekind, his already agitated heart could not hold out against the high fever, he, too, was dead within five days. Escorted by a quite respectable number of his fellow citizens, he joined his wife in the Castorp family grave, a very beautiful plot in the cemetery of Saint Catherine’s Church, with a view to the botanical gardens.

His own father, the senator, survived him, if only by a little, and during the brief period until his death—likewise caused by pneumonia, against which he struggled amid great agony, for unlike his son, Hans Lorenz Castorp was a man rooted firmly in life, a tree hard to fell—during this brief period of a mere year and a half, then, the orphaned Hans Castorp lived in his grandfather’s house, which had been built on a narrow lot on the Esplanade in the early years of the century just past. Its Nordic classical façade, painted a dreary, weather-beaten color, was adorned by pilasters at both sides of the front door, which was set in the center of the first floor and had five stairs leading up to it; the main level was topped off by two more stories, both with windows reaching to the floor and ornamented with wrought-iron grills.

The first floor was taken up exclusively by formal rooms, including the bright dining room—with its ornamental plaster and three windows hung with burgundy curtains and looking out on the little back garden—where during those eighteen months the grandfather and grandson dined together daily at four in the afternoon, served by old Fiete, who had rings in both ears, silver buttons on his swallowtail coat, and a batiste necktie exactly like the one worn by his master, in which, also in imitation of his master, he buried his clean-shaven chin, and whom the grandfather always addressed familiarly in Plattdeutsch, not for any comical effect (for he was a man without humor) but quite matter-of-factly, just as he did whenever he dealt with the commonfolk—warehouse workers, messengers, coachmen, or servants. Hans Castorp enjoyed listening to the dialect, and also enjoyed Fiete’s answers, likewise in Plattdeutsch, delivered while serving from the left and bending around behind his master to speak into his right ear, out of which the senator heard considerably better than the left. The old man understood and nodded and went on eating, sitting very erect between the high mahogany back of his chair and the table, barely bending forward to his plate; and his grandson, seated opposite, would watch with silent, profound, and unconscious attention as his grandfather’s hands—beautiful, white, gaunt, aged hands, with rounded, sharply tapered fingernails and a green signet ring on the right forefinger—arranged a bite of meat, vegetable, and potato on the tip of the fork with a few practiced motions and guided it to the mouth with just the least forward tip of the head. Hans Castorp looked down at his own still awkward hands and sensed stored within them the possibility that one day he would hold and use his knife and fork as adeptly as his grandfather.

It was quite a different matter whether he would ever be able to bury his chin in such a necktie, tied so that it filled the wide opening created by his grandfather’s peculiarly shaped collar, whose pointed tips brushed the old man’s cheeks. Because for that you would have to be as old as he was, and even in those days no one, far and wide, wore such collars and neckties, except him and his old Fiete. What a shame that was, because little Hans Castorp was delighted by the way his grandfather could rest his chin in the high, snow-white necktie; and even as an adult, the memory of it pleased him no end—there was something about it that found approval in the very depth of his soul.

When they were finished eating and had folded their napkins, rolling them up and pushing them through their silver rings—a procedure that Hans Castorp managed only with difficulty, because the napkins were as large as small tablecloths—the senator would rise from his chair while Fiete pulled it back and then walk, shuffling his feet as he went, to the “den” to fetch a cigar. Sometimes his grandson would follow him.

This “den” was the result of the dining room’s having been designed with three windows, so that it extended across the full width of the house, thus leaving no space for three drawing rooms, as was usual with this style of house, but for only two, one of which, placed at right angles to the dining room, would have been disproportionately deep, with only one window to the street. This was why one quarter of its length had been partitioned off, forming the “den,” a dim, narrow room lit by a skylight and furnished with only a few items: a whatnot stand for the senator’s cigar cabinet, a card table with a drawer full of enticing objects—a deck of whist cards, game tokens, scorecards with little hinged stands, a slate and chalk styluses, paper cigar holders, and other things, too—and finally, set back in one corner, a rococo china cabinet made of rosewood, with yellow silk curtains pulled across the inside of its window-panes.

“Grampa,” little Hans Castorp might say once they were in the den, raising himself up on tiptoe and stretching to reach the old man’s ear, “please show me the baptismal bowl.”

And his grandfather, who had already pushed back the long, soft flap of his frock coat and pulled a bundle of keys from his trouser pocket, now opened the china cabinet, from whose interior rose a fragrance the boy found both strange and pleasant. All sorts of objects that had fallen out of use, which made them all the more captivating, were kept inside: a pair of sinuous silver candlesticks; a broken barometer, its wooden case carved with figures; an album of daguerreotypes; a cedar chest for liqueurs; a little Turk in a bright silk costume, whose body was rigid to the touch but contained a mechanism that, though it had long since fallen into disrepair, had once enabled him to run across the table; a model of an old-fashioned ship; and way at the bottom, a rattrap no less. But from the middle shelf, the old man took a heavily tarnished, round silver bowl set on a silver plate and showed the boy both pieces, separating them and turning them both about in his hands, all the while reciting a story he had told many times before.

The bowl and the plate were not originally a set, as one could plainly see and as the boy was now instructed yet again; but they had been used together, his grandfather said, for around a hundred years now, ever since the bowl had been acquired. The bowl was beautiful, its lines simple and elegant, fashioned according to the austere taste of the early years of the last century. Smooth and massive, it rested on round feet, its interior lined with gold, though the yellow luster had faded with the years. The only ornamentation was an embossed wreath of roses and serrated leaves around its rim. As for the plate, one could read its much greater age right on its surface. There stood “1650” in ornate numbers, and framing the date were all sorts of curlicued engraved lines, done in the “modern fashion” of the period, bombastic and capricious arabesques and crests that were half stars, half flowers. The underside, however, was inscribed in a variety of ever-changing scripts with the names of those heads of the household who had been its owners over the course of time. There were seven names in all now, each rounded out with the date of inheritance, and the old man in the white necktie pointed with his ringed forefinger as he read off each of them to his grandson. His father’s name was there, as was in fact his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s; and now that syllable came doubled, tripled, and quadrupled from the storyteller’s mouth; and the boy would lay his head to one side, his eyes fixed and full of thought, yet somehow dreamily thoughtless, his lips parted in drowsy devotion, and he would listen to the great-great-great-great—that somber sound of the crypt and buried time, which nevertheless both expressed a reverently preserved connection of his own life in the present to things now sunk deep beneath the earth and simultaneously had a curious effect on him: the same effect visible in the look on his face. The sound made him feel as if he were breathing the moldy, cool air of Saint Catherine’s Church or the crypt in Saint Michael’s, as if he could sense the gentle draft of places where as you walked, hat in hand, you fell into a certain reverential, forward rocking motion, your heels never touching the ground; and he also thought he could hear the remote, cloistered silence of those reverberating spaces. At the sound of those somber syllables, religious feelings got mixed up with a sense of death and history, and all of it together somehow left the boy with a pleasant sensation—indeed, it may well have been that it was solely for the sake of that sound, just to hear it and join in reciting it, that he had once again asked to be allowed to see the baptismal bowl.

Then his grandfather would put the basin back on its tray and let the boy look into its smooth, soft golden hollow, which began to shimmer as it caught the light falling from above.

“And it will soon be eight years now,” he said, “since we held you over it and the water with which you were baptized trickled down into it. Lassen, the sexton from Saint Jacob’s, poured it into the cupped hands of our good Pastor Bugenhagen, and then it ran down over your hair and into the bowl here. But we had warmed it first, so that you wouldn’t be frightened and start crying, and you didn’t, either, quite the contrary, you had been bawling beforehand, making it difficult for Bugenhagen to give his homily, but then came the water, and you fell silent, and that was out of respect for the holy sacrament, let us hope. And in a very few days now, it will be forty-four years since your dear departed father was the baby being baptized, and water ran down from his head into this same bowl. That happened here, in his parents’ home, across the way in the drawing room, in front of the middle window, and it was old Pastor Hesekiel who baptized him, the same one who almost got himself shot by the French when he was a young man, for preaching against their looting and burning—he’s been resting in the Lord for a long, long time now. But seventy-five years ago, it was me they baptized, that was in the drawing room, too, and they held my head over this same bowl sitting on its tray here, and the pastor spoke the same words that were spoken over you and your father, and warm, clear water ran down over my hair, too—there wasn’t much more of it in those days than I have on my head now—and flowed into this golden basin.”

The boy looked up at his grandfather’s narrow gray head which was bent over the bowl again, just as it had been in that long-vanished hour he was talking about, and a familiar feeling stole over him—a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something and a dizzying, everlasting sameness, a feeling that he knew well from previous occasions and that he had been waiting for, hoping it would touch him again. It was partly for the sake of that feeling that he had contrived to have this abiding, mutable heirloom shown to him.

When considering it later, as a young man, he realized that the image of his grandfather was imprinted much more deeply, clearly, and significantly in his memory than that of his parents—and this may possibly have had its basis both in mutual sympathy and a special physical affinity, because the grandson did look like his grandfather, to the extent that a lad with down on his rosy cheeks can resemble a sallow and stiff septuagenarian. Probably the most significant factor, however, was that without question the old man had been the central figure in the family, its picturesque personality.

From the viewpoint of the outside world, time had made Hans Lorenz Castorp’s character and convictions obsolete long before his passing. He was a most Christian gentleman, a member of a Reformed parish, with strict traditional opinions, so stubborn an advocate of restricting qualifications for those who govern to the aristocracy that it was as if he were living in the fourteenth century, when, against the dogged resistance of the old free patricians, tradesmen had first begun to win seats and voices in the town council—in sum, a man who opposed anything new. His active years had come during decades of violent expansion and numerous upheavals, decades of progress at a forced march, all of which constantly demanded great public courage and sacrifice. But it had not been old Castorp’s fault, God knows, that the modern spirit had enjoyed its celebrated, brilliant victories. He had held the customs of his forefathers and their old institutions in far higher regard than any expansion of the harbor at breakneck speed or the godless tomfooleries of a great city, had impeded and tempered wherever he could. And had it been up to him, the city administration nowadays would look just as old-fashioned and idyllic as his office had looked when he was in his prime.