The Magic Mountain (92 page)

Luise Ziemssen had the same beautiful, black, gentle eyes as Joachim. Her hair was black, too, though mixed with gray now, the coiffure held firmly in place by an almost invisible hairnet, befitting, somehow, her whole personality—which was composed, gently restrained, and friendly in a formal sort of way—and lending a certain dignity to her obviously simple nature. It was clear, as Hans Castorp was not surprised to discover, that she did not understand, was in fact slightly offended by Joachim’s good cheer, his rapid breathing, his impulsive words—behavior that presumably contradicted his disposition at home or during the trip. Their arrival here was a sad one for her, and she believed she should act accordingly. She could not reconcile herself to Joachim’s turbulent emotions, to his sense of having returned home, which for the moment outweighed everything else and inspired him to breathe drunkenly of the old air again—our incomparably light, empty, incendiary air up here. This was all obscure to her. “My poor boy,” she thought, and watched while her poor boy abandoned himself to exuberant exchanges with his cousin, reliving a hundred memories, asking a hundred questions, and throwing himself back in his chair with a laugh at every answer. Several times she said, “Now, children!” And then finally she said something meant to sound happy, but it emerged as a dismayed, gentle rebuke: “I’ve truly not seen you like this for ages, Joachim. It seems we had to travel all the way here to get you back to how you were on the day of your promotion. “ Which, of course, put an end to Joachim’s exuberance. His mood turned sour, he came back to earth, fell silent, ate none of his dessert, even though a very tasty chocolate soufflé with whipped cream was served (but Hans Castorp ate it for him, though only an hour had passed since his more than ample supper), and finally did not even dare look up—quite probably because of the tears in his eyes.

That had certainly not been Frau Ziemssen’s intent. She had hoped merely to introduce a more serious note, for decorum’s sake—quite unaware that moderation and the golden mean were out of place here, that there was only the choice between extremes. And seeing her son so downcast, she appeared close to tears herself and was grateful to her nephew for his attempts to revive his despondent cousin’s spirits. Yes, in terms of guests, Joachim would find many changes and novelties, though in his absence there had also been instances of a restoration to a former state of affairs. The great-aunt, for example, had returned—with companions. The ladies were seated, as always, at Frau Stöhr’s table. Marusya laughed a lot, and heartily.

Joachim said nothing. Hans Castorp’s comments had reminded Frau Ziemssen, however, that she had met someone quite by chance, and before she forgot she wanted to extend greetings she had been asked to pass on. A woman, a rather pleasant lady in fact, though she did live alone and her eyebrows were a bit too regular, who had approached their table in a restaurant in Munich, where they had spent a day between trains, came over to say hello to Joachim. A former fellow patient—Joachim would remember the name . . .

“Frau Chauchat,” Joachim said quietly. She was at a sanatorium in the Allgäu at present, and wanted to go on to Spain come autumn. But apparently she intended to return here for the winter. She sent her warmest regards.

Hans Castorp was no child, he could control the nerves to the veins that make your face turn pale or blush. He said, “Oh, her? What do you know, she’s emerged from beyond the Caucasus again. And she’s off to Spain?”

The lady had mentioned some town in the Pyrenees. “A pretty woman, quite a charming lady. Pleasant voice, pretty gestures. But very free in her manners, careless,” Frau Ziemssen remarked. “Spoke to us as if we were old friends, asked a great many questions, went on and on, although Joachim tells me he never actually made her acquaintance. Curious.”

“That comes from the Asiatic East and her illness,” Hans Castorp replied. One ought not to attempt to measure things by humanistic standards there, it didn’t work. But that was something to think about—Frau Chauchat’s plan to go to Spain. Hmm. Spain—it lay equally as far from the humanistic middle, not toward the soft side, but the hard. Spain was not a lack of form, but an excess of form, death as form, so to speak—not death as dissolution, but death as something austere, black, elegant, and bloody, the Inquisition, starched ruffs, Loyola, the Escorial. He would be interested to know how Frau Chauchat liked Spain. She would probably have to get over slamming doors there, and perhaps those two extrahumanistic camps would compensate for one another, have a humane effect on her. But then, too, something very nasty and terroristic might come of the East’s going off to Spain.

No, he did not turn red or pale, but the impression this unexpected news of Frau Chauchat had on him was obvious from his words, to which, of course, the only possible reply was awkward silence. Joachim was less shocked; he knew from previous experience how subtle his cousin’s mind had become up here. But Frau Ziemssen’s eyes registered great consternation. She reacted exactly as if Hans Castorp’s remarks had been crude and indecent, and after an embarrassed silence she ended their meal with a few tactful words to gloss things over. Before they parted, Hans Castorp passed on the director’s order that Joachim should remain in bed the next day in any case, at least until the director examined him. As for everything else—well, they would see. And the three relatives were soon lying in their rooms, doors open to the fresh air of the Alpine summer night, each lost in her or his thoughts—Hans Castorp engrossed chiefly in the news that Frau Chauchat was expected to return before another six months had passed.

And so, as advised, poor Joachim had marched back home again for a little extra therapy. “A little extra therapy” had evidently been the term employed down in the flatlands, and they let him use it up here as well. Even Director Behrens took up the phrase, although his very first move was to saddle Joachim with four weeks of bed rest: it was necessary just to repair the worst damage, to reacclimatize him, and to stabilize his body temperature for now. He knew how to avoid being nailed down as to how long such extra therapy would last. Frau Ziemssen—a sensible, reasonable, though in no way sanguine lady—took the director aside and suggested the fall, October perhaps, as a date for Joachim’s discharge, and Behrens agreed with her to the extent that by then one would at least be further along than one was at present. She was quite taken by him, by the way. He was chivalrous, he addressed her as “gracious lady,” his bloodshot, protruding eyes gazed at her with manly sincerity, and despite her grief she could not help laughing at all his fraternity phrases. “I know he’s in the best of hands,” she said, and departed for Hamburg only eight days after she had arrived, since there was no serious need for her to offer special care, and besides, Joachim had a relative for company.

“Well, cheer up,” Hans Castorp said, as he sat down on his cousin’s bed in room 28. “It will be this fall—the boss has more or less committed himself. You can depend on it, count on it. October—that’s when it will be. Some people go to Spain then, but you’ll be returning to your
bandera
, to perform distinguished service above and beyond the call of duty.”

It was his daily chore to console Joachim, especially for his having to be here and miss the grand war games that had begun in early August—because he could not get over that, expressed out-and-out self-contempt for being so damned weak-willed, for having succumbed at the last moment.

“
Rebellio carnis
,” Hans Castorp said. “What can you do? The bravest officer can’t help that—even Saint Anthony could hum you a tune about it. For God’s sake, there are maneuvers every year, and you know what time is like up here. It doesn’t exist. You haven’t been gone long enough to have trouble getting back into the swing of things. Your little extra therapy will be over quick as a flash.”

All the same, Joachim had experienced too great a revitalization of his sense of time while down in the flatlands for him to have no fear of the next four weeks. But on all sides there were people willing to help him get through them; the general regard in which his orderly demeanor was held manifested itself in visits from near and far. Settembrini came, was sympathetic and charming—and having always called Joachim “lieutenant,” he now addressed him as “
capitano.
” Naphta dropped by as well, and from the sanatorium itself old acquaintances appeared one by one, making use of a spare fifteen minutes to sit down on his bed, adopt his phrase about “extra therapy” as their own, and have him tell them about what all had happened to him—the ladies Stöhr, Levi, Iltis, and Kleefeld; the Messrs. Ferge, Wehsal, et al. Several even brought him flowers. When his four weeks were over, he got up, and his fever had been dampened to where he could walk about and take a seat in the dining hall between his cousin and Frau Magnus, the brewer’s wife, at the same corner spot where Uncle James had sat, and, for a few days, Frau Ziemssen as well.

And so the young men lived side by side again just as before; yes, and to restore the scene even more precisely, Joachim inherited his old room beside Hans Castorp’s, once Mrs. Macdonald, her son’s photo in her hands, had sighed her last—though to be sure, only after it had been thoroughly sterilized with H
₂
CO. Actually, when viewed from an emotional perspective, it was more that Joachim lived at Hans Castorp’s side, and no longer the other way around—for the latter was now the old-timer, whose existence his cousin simply shared for a brief time as a visitor. For Joachim tried hard to keep his eye squarely on October, although certain nodes in his central nervous system refused to obey humanistic norms and hindered a compensatory distribution of body warmth through the skin.

And they resumed their visits to Settembrini and Naphta, as well as walks with those two antagonistic allies; when they were joined by A. K. Ferge and Ferdinand Wehsal, which frequently happened, that made a party of four before which the two intellectual adversaries could engage in constant duels—and we could not hope to present them in their entirety without fear of likewise losing ourselves in the same desperate infinitude into which they daily threw themselves for their large audience, although Hans Castorp chose to see his own poor soul as the chief object of their dialectic rivalry. He had learned from Naphta that Settembrini was a Freemason—which made no less an impression on him than had the Italian’s revelation of Naphta’s Jesuit origins and patronage. He had been flabbergasted to hear that there really and truly was such a thing; and he had diligently sounded the terrorist out on the beginnings and character of this curious institution, which in a few years would celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary. And whereas Settembrini had spoken behind Naphta’s back in tones of pathos-laden admonition about the Jesuit, as if he were somehow diabolic, Naphta made unperturbed fun of the other man and the sphere he came from, suggesting that the whole thing was terribly old-fashioned and backward, an attempt at bourgeois enlightenment perpetrated by yesterday’s freethinkers, when in fact it was nothing more than a wretched intellectual mirage, which its self-deluded adherents ludicrously believed was full of revolutionary life.

“What do you expect?” Naphta said. “His grandfather was a Carbonaro, which means charcoal-burner, by the way. From him he got his charcoal-burner’s faith in reason, freedom, human progress, and the whole moth-eaten classicistic-bourgeois ideology of virtue. You see, what confuses the world is the incongruity between the swift flight of the mind and matter’s vast clumsy slowness, its dogged persistence and inertia. One must admit such an incongruity would suffice to excuse the mind’s lack of interest in reality, because as a rule the mind is disgusted by reality’s ferment long before it erupts in revolution. Indeed, to a lively mind, a dead intellect is more abhorrent than basalt, which at least does not make any claims to life and thought. Rocks like basalt, remnants of former realities, which the Spirit has left so far behind that it refuses even to associate the notion of reality with them, persist in their dogged way; their very lumpish, dead continuance unfortunately prevents them in their inanity from realizing how inane they are. I am speaking in generalities, but you will know how to apply my words to those humanitarian freethinkers, who believe themselves to be heroes still standing up against authority and domination. Ah, and the catastrophes by which free thought hopes to prove its own vitality—ah, those latter-day, spectacular triumphs for which it prepares itself and which it dreams of someday celebrating! The mere idea would be enough to bore the living Spirit to death, if it did not know that it shall emerge from such catastrophes as the true victor and beneficiary—fusing, as it does, elements of the old with the new to create an authentic revolution. . . . And how is your cousin doing, Hans Castorp? You know I’ve always had a great liking for him.”

“Thanks, Herr Naphta. It seems everyone takes an honest liking to him—he’s obviously such a fine lad. Even Herr Settembrini has a genuine soft spot for him, although he must disapprove, of course, of a certain fanatical terrorism that goes with Joachim’s profession. And now I hear he’s a Freemason—what do you know! Makes a man stop and think, I must say. It puts his personality in a whole new light, makes a lot of things clearer. I wonder if he sometimes places his feet at just the right angle and adds a special grip to his handshake? Not that I’ve ever noticed anything . . .”

“Our good Third-Degree Master,” Naphta replied, “has probably moved beyond such childishness. I assume that the rituals of the lodges have gone through a rather pathetic adjustment to the more prosaic spirit of the modern bourgeoisie. They are probably ashamed of the old ceremonies, see them as uncivilized hocus-pocus—and for good reason, since it really would be rather preposterous to dress atheistic republicanism up as a mystery. I don’t know what horrors they used to test Herr Settembrini’s stamina—whether they led him blindfolded down various corridors and then let him wait in some dark vaulted chamber before the doors were thrown wide to reveal the mirrors and bright lights of the lodge hall. Or if they solemnly catechized him, holding up a skull and three candles, threatening his bared breast with swords. You’ll have to ask him that yourself, but I fear you won’t find him very talkative, because even if it was all done in a more bourgeois fashion, he was nevertheless sworn to silence.”