The Magic Mountain (79 page)

“But of course, to be sure,” James Tienappel concurred, somewhat intimidated by his foster brother, who spoke so calmly and in a monotone; the crisp autumn evening was close to freezing, yet there beside him sat Hans Castorp without hat or overcoat. “The cold doesn’t affect you, does it?” asked James, who was shivering despite the inch-thick fabric of his coat; and if there was something both hurried and halting about the way he put his question, it was because his teeth were very close to chattering.

“We’re never cold,” Hans Castorp replied calmly and curtly.

The consul could not get his fill of staring at that profile. Hans Castorp did not ask about relatives and acquaintances at home, but James conveyed their regards, including those of Joachim, who had joined his regiment and was glowing with pride and happiness; Hans Castorp calmly accepted these greetings without inquiring further about conditions at home. James felt uneasy about something, though he was not sure whether that something had its origin in his nephew or in his own weariness from travel; looking about him without being able to see much of the Alpine valley’s landscape, he took a deep breath of air and let it out again, declaring it excellent. Certainly, his companion replied, it was not world-famous for nothing. This air had special properties. Although it accelerated the metabolism, the body was still able to store protein. Of course it could heal sickness, but its first effect was greatly to enhance illnesses that everyone carried latent within them, because the impetus and stimulus this air gave the whole organism brought illness to exuberant eruption, so to speak. Beg pardon, exuberant? But of course. Had he never noticed that there is something exuberant about the eruption of illness, as if the body were celebrating? “But of course, to be sure,” his uncle hastened to reply, losing control of his lower jaw; he now explained that he could stay only eight days, or rather, just a week, seven days actually, perhaps even only six. And since, as he had noted, Hans Castorp was looking robust and really quite splendid thanks to his stay at the sanatorium, which had gone on much longer than expected, he assumed that his nephew would be returning home with him now.

“Well, let’s not be reckless about this,” Hans Castorp said. Uncle James was talking like someone from down below. Once he had been here awhile and looked around a bit and settled in, he would soon see things differently. The point was a total cure, totality was the decisive factor, and Behrens had recently saddled him with another six months. At this point his uncle addressed him as “my boy,” and asked if he was crazy. “Have you gone completely crazy?” he asked. A vacation was what it was, a good year and a quarter long, and now six months more! In God’s good name, a man didn’t have all that much time! At which point, Hans Castorp laughed calmly and gazed briefly at the stars. Yes, time—as for human time, well, James would have to revise any ideas about time he had brought up here with him before they could discuss that topic. Tienappel promised he would have a serious discussion with the director about Hans’s case the next morning. “Do that,” Hans Castorp said. “You’ll like him. An interesting fellow, brash and melancholy at the same time.” And then he pointed to the lights up on Schatzalp and casually mentioned how they used the bobsled run to bring bodies down.

The gentlemen dined together in the Berghof’s restaurant, after Hans Castorp had shown his guest to Joachim’s room and given him a chance to tidy himself up a bit. The room had been fumigated with H
₂
CO, Hans Castorp said—just as thoroughly as if it had not been a case of a fraudulent departure, but a departure of a very different sort, not an exodus, but an exitus. And when his uncle asked him what he meant, the nephew replied, “Jargon. Our way of putting things. Joachim deserted—deserted to the colors. That’s possible, too. But hurry now, otherwise you won’t get a hot meal.” And so now there they sat across from one another at the raised table in the cozy warmth of the restaurant. The dwarf promptly arrived to serve them, and James ordered a bottle of burgundy, which was placed on the table cradled in a basket. They toasted glasses and let the gentle glow course through them. The younger man spoke about life up here and the change of seasons, about certain people they would see in the dining hall, about pneumothorax, explained about the operation, mentioning good-natured Ferge’s case in particular and expounding on the ghastly nature of pleural shock—the green, brown, and purple faints Herr Ferge claimed to have experienced, the hallucinated odor that was part of the shock, the burst of laughter as he blacked out. He paid for their meal. As was his custom, James ate and drank heartily, his appetite having been whetted even more by the trip and the change of air. But from time to time he broke off taking nourishment; and he would sit there, his mouth full of food he had forgotten to chew, his knife and fork dangling idly at a low angle over his plate, and fix his eyes on Hans Castorp, apparently without even being aware of it—not that his nephew seemed to mind. The veins at Consul Tienappel’s temples, just below his thinning blond hair, were swollen.

They did not talk about home, said nothing about personal or family affairs, business or civic matters, did not mention the firm of Tunder and Wilms (dockyards, machine works, and boilers), where they were still waiting for their young trainee to join the firm, though they surely had so many other things to do that one might well ask if they were still waiting at all. James Tienappel had mentioned all these matters during their carriage ride, of course, but the topics had fallen away, as good as dead, as if they had bounced off Hans Castorp’s calm, resolute, and genuine indifference, which acted as a kind of immunity that kept anything from touching him, just as he was insensitive to the chill of the autumn evening and could reply, “We’re never cold.” Maybe that was also why his uncle sometimes gazed at him with that fixed stare. Their conversation also included the head nurse, the doctors, Dr. Krokowski’s lectures—it turned out that James would be able to attend one if he stayed eight days. Who had told him, the nephew, that he, the uncle, wanted to attend the lecture? No one. He had simply assumed it, taken it for granted, so calmly, so resolutely, that the mere idea of not participating suddenly appeared in such a strange light to James himself that he hastily added, “But of course, to be sure,” in an attempt to forestall any suspicion that he had, even for a moment, planned something so outrageous. Such was indeed the vague, yet compelling power that caused Herr Tienappel to stare, quite unconsciously, at his cousin—with his mouth open now, by the way, because he could no longer breathe through his stuffy nasal passages, although the consul did not have a cold as far as he knew. He listened to his relative talk about the disease that formed the common professional bond for everyone here, and of people’s susceptibility to it; about Hans Castorp’s own modest, but chronic case, about how the bacillus irritated the cells of the tissue in the bronchi and air sacs of the lungs, about the formation of tubercles and the production of soluble intoxicating toxins, the deterioration of the cells and the process of caseation, which if it continued to petrify into chalky scar tissue meant a beneficial arrest of the disease, but if it went on to build ever-larger soft foci, created cavities that ate away at everything around them and finally destroyed the entire organ. He heard about the accelerated or galloping form of this process, which could lead to one’s exitus within a few months, even weeks, heard about pneumectomy, the director’s skillfully executed craft, about lung resections, like the one that would be performed the next day, or at least very soon, on a recently arrived serious case, a once very attractive Scottish woman, who was now suffering from
gangraena pulmonum
, gangrene of the lungs, so that a blackish-green infection was raging inside her, forcing her to breathe a vaporized solution of powdered carbolic acid all day just to keep from losing her mind in revulsion at her own body—and suddenly, much to his own surprise and great embarrassment, the consul burst out laughing. The laughter came in loud snorts, until in his dismay he thought better of it and suddenly recovered, coughed, and tried to gloss over his inane conduct by any means possible; but he was relieved to see—a relief that contained the seeds of renewed disquiet—that Hans Castorp had paid no attention at all to what had happened, although he could hardly not have noticed, but simply passed over it with a disregard that did not look like tact, consideration, or politeness, but instead like pure indifference or callousness—a tolerance so vast it was almost eerie, as if he had taught himself long ago not to be surprised by such incidents. But now—and it was unclear whether he hoped to cloak this outburst of levity with common sense and reason, or whether he had something else in mind—quite out of the blue, the consul picked up on a topic one might hear at a men’s club, and with the swollen veins pulsing at his temples, began to talk about a so-called
chansonette
whom he had heard singing in a café, a quite incredible young thing, who was currently appearing in Sankt Pauli and whose fiery charms, which he described in detail for his cousin, had simply knocked the breath out of all the gentlemen in the city-state they called home. His tongue grew a little thick as he talked, although he need not have let it disturb him, since his companion’s eerie tolerance apparently extended to that phenomenon as well. In any case, the overpowering fatigue of travel, to which he now fell victim, gradually became so obvious that it was not even half past ten when he suggested they end their tête-à-tête; and he was not exactly pleased when, as they crossed the lobby, they ran into the frequently mentioned Dr. Krokowski, who had been sitting with his newspaper right by the door of the reading room and whom the nephew now introduced to his uncle. The consul hardly knew what else to reply to the doctor’s jovial, rugged greeting except, “But of course, to be sure,” and was glad when his nephew announced he would fetch him for breakfast the next morning at eight and he could then proceed by way of the balcony to Joachim’s disinfected room, light his usual bedtime cigarette, and stretch out at last on the deserter’s bed. Dozing off twice with the glowing cigarette between his lips, he only by a hair missed starting a general conflagration.

James Tienappel, whom Hans Castorp addressed by turns as “Uncle James” or simply “James,” was a long-legged gentleman nearing forty, who wore English suits and linens white as cherry blossoms; he had thinning, canary-yellow hair, very close-set blue eyes, a straw-colored moustache trimmed so close that it was almost not there, and perfectly manicured hands. A husband and father now for several years, he had not, however, been required to leave the old consul’s roomy villa on Harvestehuder Weg. He was married to a woman who had come from his own social circle, a lady as civilized and refined as he, who spoke in the same soft, rapid, pointedly polite fashion. At home he gave the impression of a very energetic, prudent, and—despite his elegance—cold, practical man of business; but when traveling in regions whose customs were strange to him, in the south of Germany, for instance, he was all too quick to be polite and self-effacing and assumed a certain impetuous amiability, which was in no way the result of insecurity about his own culture, but on the contrary reflected both an awareness of its solid integrity and a desire to improve on his own aristocratic tendencies—even amid customs he found simply incredible, he would show no surprise whatever. “Naturally, but of course, to be sure,” he was always prompt to say, so that no one would think that, although he might be quite refined, he
was
rather narrow-minded. Having come here on a definite practical mission—that is, for the express purpose of having an energetic look around, of checking up on his “lackadaisical” young relative, as he put it, of “prying him loose” and taking him home—he was quite aware that he was operating on foreign soil; and from the first moment, he had been acutely sensitive to a suspicion that he was now the guest of a world, a social community, with a self-assurance as intact as that of the world from which he came, indeed surpassing it in that regard, so that his business energies were at once in conflict with his good breeding—in very serious conflict, because the self-assurance of the world of his hosts turned out to be truly overwhelming.

This was precisely what Hans Castorp had foreseen when he responded to the consul’s telegram with, “Just as he pleases.” But one should not suppose he consciously took advantage of the inner strengths of the world around him and used them against his uncle. He had been part of this world too long for that; and it was not he who made use of it against this aggressor, but vice versa; so that everything happened now with a kind of matter-of-fact simplicity—from the first moment when the consul felt a vague suspicion drift over him, emanating from his nephew and telling him that his project was hopeless, until the very end, the final conclusion, to which, admittedly, Hans Castorp could not help appending a melancholy smile.

The next morning, right after breakfast, during which the permanent resident introduced his guest to the circle of tablemates, Tienappel learned from tall, colorful Director Behrens—who came rowing through the dining hall, gliding about, his black and pale assistant in his wake, and strewing his rhetorical morning question, “Sleep well?”—learned, as we said, from the director that not only had it been a tip-top notion to provide his lonely nephew a little company up here, but that he had also acted very much in his own interest, since he was apparently totally anemic. Anemic—he, Tienappel, was anemic? Was he ever, Behrens said, and pulled one of James’s eyelids down with a forefinger. First-class case, he said. It would be a very clever move if Hans Castorp’s good uncle would spend a few weeks here reclining comfortably on his balcony and in general emulate the fine example set by his nephew. In his condition one could do nothing wiser than to live for a while as if one had a light case of
tuberculosis pulmonum
, which was always present at any rate. “But of course, to be sure,” the consul promptly replied and his mouth hung politely, eagerly open for quite a while as he watched the long-necked man row away, while his nephew stood there callous and casual beside him. Then, as prescribed, they promenaded to the bench beside the wooden trough, and afterward James Tienappel enjoyed his first hour of rest cure, to which practice he was introduced by his nephew, who supplemented the plaid roll James had brought along with a camel-hair blanket of his own—one being more than enough for Hans Castorp, given the lovely autumn weather—and instructed his uncle, step by step, in the traditional art of wrapping oneself; in fact, once the consul had been transformed into a smooth, cylindrical mummy, Hans Castorp undid it all, in order to have his uncle repeat the whole established procedure on his own, intervening only occasionally to improve his technique. He also taught his uncle how to attach the canvas sunshade to the arm of his chair.