The Magic Mountain (98 page)

This was the director’s way of offering consolation. We shall hope it did some good with a woman as reasonable as Frau Ziemssen. And his assurances did turn out, for the most part, as predicted. In his weakened state, Joachim slept for many hours during his final days, and probably dreamed dreams he thought pleasant—of military maneuvers in the flatlands, we assume. And when he did awaken and was asked how he felt, he would always answer, though somewhat indistinctly, that he felt fine and happy—although he had hardly any pulse left and ultimately did not even notice the prick of the hypodermic. His body felt nothing; they could have burned and pinched him, it would have made no difference to Joachim at that point.

And yet he had undergone great changes since his mother’s arrival. Shaving had become difficult for him, and although he had a heavy beard that grew rapidly, nothing had been done about it for eight or ten days, so that his waxen face with its gentle eyes was now framed by a full black beard—a warrior’s beard, the kind a soldier might grow out in the field. It looked handsome and manly on him, they all said. Yes, the beard—though not it alone—suddenly changed Joachim from a youth to a mature man. Like a clock whirring too fast, he had been living rapidly, galloping through each stage of life that time would never allow him to reach. Over his last twenty-four hours he became an old man. His weak heart caused his face to swell, giving it a strained look that made Hans Castorp think that at the least dying must be a great labor, although Joachim no longer seemed to notice it much, because his senses were diminished and he had lapses in consciousness. The swelling was worst around the lips, and the inside of his mouth was dry or numbed; together these conditions obviously made it difficult for Joachim to speak, he mumbled like a very old man and was himself quite annoyed by the impediment. If only he could speak, he said thickly, everything would be fine—it was a damn nuisance.

What he meant by “everything would be fine” was not exactly clear—it became quite evident that his condition tended to create ambiguities, and he expressed himself equivocally more than once, seemed both to know and not to know, and at one point, apparently overcome by a wave of approaching devastation, he shook his head almost in remorse and declared that he had never felt this bad, never in all his life.

Then his mood turned intransigent, sternly diffident, even boorish; he would not listen to any more fibs or pretty stories, refused to answer them, and stared strangely straight ahead. Especially after the young pastor—whom Luise Ziemssen had summoned and who, to Hans Castorp’s regret, had not worn a starched ruff but only Geneva bands—arrived to pray with him, his attitude grew more officially military and his wishes were only blunt commands.

Around six in the evening he began to do something curious. He repeatedly stretched out his right arm, the one with the gold bracelet around the wrist, until it was at about his hip, then raised his hand slightly and pulled it back again along the blanket with a raking or scraping motion, as if he were collecting or gathering something.

At seven o’clock he died—Alfreda Schildknecht was out in the hall, only his mother and cousin were present. He had slipped down too far in his bed and curtly demanded to be propped back up again. As Frau Ziemssen attempted to follow his instructions and was slipping an arm around his shoulders, he remarked rather hastily that he would have to draft and send a letter requesting his leave be extended, and no sooner had he said it than his “swift passing” took place—which Hans Castorp watched reverently by the light of the red-shaded table lamp. The gaze faltered, the unconscious strain left the features, the painful swelling vanished rapidly from the lips, a more handsome, youthful look spread across our Joachim’s silenced countenance, and it was over.

Luise Ziemssen turned away sobbing, and so it was Hans Castorp who reached out with his ring finger to close the eyelids of the motionless form that no longer breathed, then carefully laid the hands together on the blanket. Then he stood there, too, and wept, let the tears flow down his cheeks, like those that had stung the cheeks of the English naval officer—the colorless liquid that flows at every hour everywhere in the world, so richly and bitterly that earth’s vale has poetically been named after it: an alkaline, salty liquid that our body secretes from glands when our nerves are subjected to the shock of pain, whether physical or psychological. He knew that it also contains traces of mucin and protein.

The director came after being notified by Sister Berta. He had been there only a half hour before to give an injection of camphor, had just missed the moment of swift passing. “Yes, well, he has it behind him,” he said simply, rising back up with his stethoscope from Joachim’s quiet breast. And then he extended a hand to each relative and added a little nod. He stood for a while together with them beside the bed, gazing at Joachim’s impassive face with its warrior’s beard. “Crazy lad, crazy fellow,” he said thrusting his head back over one shoulder at the body lying there. “Wanted to force it, you see—because of course all his duties down below were force and violence—did his duty with a fever, come hell or high water. The field of honor, you see—hightailed it for the field of honor, kicked over the traces. But honor was the death of him, or—if you turn it the other way around—death did him the honor. Crazy kid he was, crazy fellow.” And he left, taking long strides and bent forward so that his neck vertebrae protruded.

It was agreed that Joachim should be returned home, and the Berghof took care of all arrangements necessary for the transport and whatever else seemed fitting and stately. His mother and cousin barely had to lift a finger. By morning, Joachim lay on his bed dressed in a ruffled shirt and with flowers placed beside him, and in the bright light reflected off the snow he looked even more handsome than he had at his passing. Every trace of strain was gone from his face; it had stiffened as it turned cold and was now pure, silent form. Little dark curls fell down across his immobile, yellowish brow, which looked as if it were made of some noble, yet delicate material halfway between wax and marble, and the arch of his lips was full and proud under his slightly curly moustache. An antique helmet would have looked good on that head, as was noted by several visitors who came by to say farewell.

Frau Stöhr wept with enthusiasm at the sight of what had once been Joachim. “A hero! A hero!” she cried several times and demanded that they play Beethoven’s
Erotica
at his graveside.

“Silence!” Settembrini hissed in her direction. Both he and Naphta were in the room with her, and he was sincerely moved. He gestured with both hands for those present to look at Joachim, insisting they mourn with him. “
Un giovanotto tanto simpatico, tanto stimabile!
” he exclaimed over and over.

Naphta did not look up from his own constrained pose, but he could not refrain from whispering a cutting remark in Settembrini’s direction: “I’m glad to see you have feelings not just for freedom and progress, but for serious matters as well.”

Settembrini swallowed the insult. Perhaps he felt that under the circumstances Naphta was temporarily in a superior position; perhaps it was this momentary supremacy of his foe that he had been attempting to counter with lively expressions of grief and that now silenced him—and kept him silent when Leo Naphta exploited his fleeting advantage by declaring with caustic sententiousness: “The error of literary men is to believe that only the Spirit makes us respectable. The opposite is closer to the truth. Only where there is
no
Spirit are we respectable.”

“Well,” Hans Castorp thought, “there’s a Delphic remark for you. And if you purse your lips tight after delivering it, that will certainly intimidate everyone for a bit.”

That afternoon the metal coffin arrived. Joachim’s transfer into this stately container trimmed with rings and lion’s heads was strictly a one-man job, or so the fellow who brought it claimed, an associate of the undertaking establishment that had been hired, who was dressed in a short, black frock coat and wore a wedding ring on his plebeian hand, the yellow circlet embedded deep in flesh, which had, so to speak, overgrown it. One might have been tempted to think his frock coat gave off a grisly odor, but that would have been pure prejudice. The man made it clear, however, that he fancied himself a specialist whose activities had to take place backstage, with only the results of his endeavors displayed for pious review by the bereaved—all of which aroused Hans Castorp’s mistrust. This was not at all what he had in mind. He agreed that Frau Ziemssen should withdraw, but refused to bow out himself and stayed behind to lend a hand; he grabbed the body under the armpits and helped transfer it from bed to coffin, where Joachim’s remains then lay solemnly bedded atop linen sheets and a tasseled pillow, with candelabra provided by the Berghof set on either side.

Two days later, however, something occurred to convince Hans Castorp to detach himself emotionally from this shell and leave things to the professional, that offensive guardian of piety. Joachim, whose expression so far had been earnest and honorable, began to smile under his beard. Hans Castorp could not help admitting that this smile bore within it the seeds of degeneration—and it filled his heart with a sense of haste. Thank God, the body would soon be picked up, the coffin closed and screwed shut. Setting aside his native reserve, Hans Castorp touched his lips in a gesture of tender farewell to the stone-cold brow of what had once been Joachim, and despite his misgivings, turned his back on the undertaker and meekly followed Luise Ziemssen out of the room.

We let the curtain fall now, to rise but one more time. But while it rustles to the floor, we wish to join Hans Castorp, left behind on those distant heights, as he gazes in his mind down on a wet garden of crosses in the lowlands, watches a sword flash and then lower, hears barked commands and the three volleys that follow, the three fervent rounds of honor bursting above Joachim Ziemssen’s soldier’s grave, thick with matted roots.

Can one narrate time—time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: “Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,” and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative. It would be the same as if someone took the harebrained notion of holding a single note or chord for hours on end—and called it music. Because a story is like music in that it
fills
time, “fills it up so nice and properly,” “divides it up,” so that there is “something to it,” “something going on”—to quote, with the melancholy reverence one shows to statements made by the dead, a few casual comments of the late Joachim, phrases that faded away long ago, and we are not sure if the reader is quite clear just how long ago that was. Time is the
element
of narration, just as it is the element of life—is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space. It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious; and related to music, as we have noted, is the story, which also can only present itself in successive events, as movement toward an end (and not as something suddenly, brilliantly present, like a work of visual art, which is pure body bound to time), and even if it would try to be totally here in each moment, would still need time for its presentation.

That much is perfectly obvious. But that there is a difference is equally clear. The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which it gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life. Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative’s imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years. A musical piece entitled “Five Minute Waltz” lasts five minutes—this and only this defines its relationship to time. A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes, however, could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filling up those five minutes, last a thousand times as long—and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand, it is possible for a narrative’s content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment—and we use this term to describe an illusory, or, to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyperperspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended. The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person’s dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man’s ability to experience time—dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user’s brain seems “to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch.”

A narrative, then, can set to work and deal with time in much the same way as those depraved dreams. But since it can “deal” with time, it is clear that time, which is the element of the narrative, can also become its
subject
; and although it would be going too far to say that one can “narrate time,” it is apparently not such an absurd notion to want to narrate
about time
—so that a term like “time novel” may well take on an oddly dreamlike double meaning. And indeed we posed the question about whether one could narrate time precisely in order to say that we actually have something like that in mind with this ongoing story. And in touching upon the wider question of whether those gathered around us were quite clear about how long it had actually been since the now-deceased, honor-loving Joachim wove those comments about time and music into a conversation (which in fact revealed a certain alchemistic enhancement of his own character, since such remarks were not part of his upright nature), we would hardly have been irritated to learn that our readers really were no longer quite clear about the matter at the moment—hardly irritated, indeed we would be content, for the simple reason that a general sympathy for our hero and his experiences naturally lies in our own interest. And he, Hans Castorp, was not quite certain about the matter himself, and had not been for a good while. That uncertainty is very much part of his novel, a “time novel”—whether taken in one sense or the other.