📖 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann👁️ 79

CHAPTER 1         

ARRIVAL

An ordinary young man was on his way from his hometown of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graubünden. It was the height of summer, and he planned to stay for three weeks.

It is a long trip, however, from Hamburg to those elevations—too long, really, for so short a visit. The journey leads through many a landscape, uphill and down, descends from the high plain of southern Germany to the shores of Swabia’s sea, and proceeds by boat across its skipping waves, passing over abysses once thought unfathomable.

From there the path, which until now has followed grand, direct routes, turns choppy. There are stopovers and formalities. At Rorschach, a town in Swiss territory, you reboard a train that takes you only as far as Landquart, a small station in the Alps, where you must change trains again. After standing for a while in the wind, gazing at a rather uncharming landscape, you climb aboard a narrow-gauge train, and the moment the small, but uncommonly sturdy engine pulls out, the real adventure begins, a steep and dogged ascent that will never end, it seems. The station at Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude; but now your route takes you on a wild ride up into real mountains, along tracks that squeeze their way between walls of rock.

Hans Castorp—that is the young man’s name—found himself alone in a small compartment upholstered in gray; with him he had an alligator valise, a present from his uncle and foster father— Consul Tienappel, since we are naming names here—a rolled-up plaid blanket, and his winter coat, swinging on its hook. The window was open beside him, but the afternoon was turning cooler and cooler, and, being the coddled scion of the family, he turned up the silk-lined collar of his fashionably loose summer overcoat. On the seat beside him lay a paperbound book entitled Ocean Steamships, which he had perused from time to time earlier on his trip, but which now lay neglected, the cover dirtied by soot drifting in with the steam of the heavily puffing locomotive.

Two days of travel separate this young man (and young he is, with few firm roots in life) from his everyday world, especially from what he called his duties, interests, worries, and prospects— separate him far more than he had dreamed possible as he rode to the station in a hansom cab. Space, as it rolls and tumbles away between him and his native soil, proves to have powers normally ascribed only to time; from hour to hour, space brings about changes very like those time produces, yet surpassing them in certain ways. Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state—indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.

And Hans Castorp experienced much the same thing. He had not planned to take this trip particularly seriously, to become deeply involved in it. His intention had been, rather, to put it behind him quickly, simply because that was how things had to be, to return quite the same person he had been at departure, and to pick up his life again where he had been forced to leave it lying for the moment. Only yesterday he had been totally caught up in his normal train of thought, preoccupied with what had just occurred, his exams, and with what was about to occur, his joining the firm of Tunder and Wilms (dockyards, machine works, and boilers), and looking well beyond these next three weeks with as much impatience as his nature allowed. But now it seemed to him that present circumstances demanded his full attention and that it was inappropriate to shrug them off. Being lifted like this into regions whose air he had never breathed before and whose sparse and meager conditions were, as he well knew, both unfamiliar and peculiar—it all began to excite him, to fill him with a certain anxiety. Home and a settled life not only lay far behind, but also, and more importantly, they lay fathoms below him, and he was still climbing. Hovering between home and the unknown ahead, he asked himself how he would do up there. Was it unwise and unhealthy, perhaps, for him, born only a few feet above sea level and accustomed to breathing that air, to be suddenly transported to such extreme regions without spending at least a few days someplace in between? He wished he had already reached his goal, because once you were up there, he thought, you lived just as people did everywhere, instead of having the climb constantly remind you of how unsuitable these precincts were. He looked out—the train was winding through a narrow pass; you could see the forward cars and the laboring engine, emitting great straggling tatters of brown, green, and black smoke. Water roared in the deep ravine on his right; dark pines on his left struggled up between boulders toward a stony gray sky. There were pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight returned, vast chasms were revealed, with a few villages far below. These views closed again, too, and were followed by new passes with patches of snow left in clefts and crevices. The train pulled into dingy little stations and backed out again on the same set of tracks, confusing your sense of direction until you no longer knew whether you were heading north or south. Magnificent vistas opened onto regions toward which they were slowly climbing, a world of ineffable, phantasmagoric

Alpine peaks, soon lost again to awestruck eyes as the tracks took another curve. Hans Castorp thought about how he had left hardwood forests far below him, and songbirds, too, he presumed; and the idea that such things could cease, the sense of a world made poorer without them, brought on a slight attack of dizziness and nausea, and he covered his eyes with his hand for a second or two. This passed. He realized that their climb was coming to an end, that they had taken the crest. The train was now rolling more comfortably along the level floor of a valley.

It was almost eight o’clock, but still daylight. A lake appeared in the distant landscape; its surface was gray and from its shores black pine forests climbed the surrounding slopes, grew thinner toward the top, and gave way at last to bare, fog-enshrouded rock. They stopped at a little station, Davos- Dorf, as Hans Castorp learned when someone outside shouted the name—he would be at journey’s end shortly. And suddenly, right beside him, he heard his cousin Joachim Ziemssen saying in an easygoing Hamburg voice, “Hello there. This is where you get off.” And when he looked out, there on the platform below his window stood Joachim, wearing a brown ulster but no hat of any sort, and looking healthier than ever. He laughed and said again, “Come on, get off, don’t be shy!”

“But I’m not there yet,” Hans Castorp said, dumbfounded, keeping his seat.

“Sure you are. This is Davos-Dorf. The sanatorium’s closer from here. I’ve got a carriage. Hand me your things.”

And with a laugh that betrayed his confusion and excitement at having arrived and seeing his cousin again, Hans Castorp lifted out his valise and winter coat, his plaid blanket roll plus cane and umbrella, and finally Ocean Steamships. Then he ran along the narrow corridor and jumped down onto the platform for a proper and more or less personal greeting, though this was done without any exuberance, as is fitting between people who are cool and reserved by custom. Strangely enough, they had always avoided calling one another by their first names, purely out of fear of showing too much warmth of emotion. And since they could not very well address one another by their last names, they confined themselves to the use of familiar pronouns—now a deeply rooted habit between the two cousins.

They quickly shook hands with some embarrassment—young Ziemssen never losing his military bearing—watched all the while by a man in livery with a braided cap, who then approached and asked Hans Castorp for his baggage ticket; this was the concierge of the International Sanatorium Berghof, and he proved quite willing to fetch the guest’s large trunk from the station at Davos-Platz while the gentlemen themselves drove on ahead to dinner. The man had an obvious limp, and so the first thing that Hans Castorp asked Joachim Ziemssen was, “Is he a war veteran? Is that why he limps so badly?”

“Right! A war veteran,” Joachim replied, somewhat sarcastically. “He’s got it in the knee—or had it, that is, now that he’s had his kneecap removed.”

Hans Castorp mulled this over as rapidly as possible. “Oh, I see,” he said, lifting his head and hastily looking back as they walked on. “But you’re not going to try to tell me that you still have anything like that, are you? You look as if you’ve already received your commission and were just home from maneuvers.” And he gave his cousin a sidelong glance.

Joachim was taller than he, with broader shoulders, the picture of youthful vigor, a man made for a uniform. He was very dark-haired, a type not all that uncommon in his blond hometown, and his naturally dark complexion was now tanned almost bronze. With his large black eyes and dark little moustache above full, finely chiseled lips, he would have been downright handsome, if his ears had not stood out so badly. For most of his life, they had been his one great sorrow, his only care. Now he had other worries. “You will be coming back down with me, won’t you?” Hans Castorp went on. “I really see nothing standing in your way.”

“Back down with you?” his cousin asked, turning to him with large eyes that had always had a gentle look, but that in the last five months had taken on a weary, indeed sad expression. “When do you mean?”

“Why, in three weeks.”

“Oh, I see—you’re already thinking about heading back home,” Joachim replied. “Well, wait and see, you’ve only just arrived. Three weeks are almost nothing for us up here, of course, but for you, just here on a visit and planning to stay a grand total of three weeks, for you that’s a long time. Acclimatize yourself first—and you’ll learn that’s not all that easy. Besides, the climate’s not the only unusual thing about us. You’ll see quite a few new sights here, just watch. And as for what you’ve said about me—well, I’m not in such fine feather as all that, my friend. ‘Home in three weeks,’ that’s a notion from down below. I’m nicely tanned, of course, but that’s mostly from the snow and doesn’t mean much, as Behrens is always saying, and at my last regular checkup he said that it’s fairly certain it will be another six months yet.”

“Six months? Are you crazy?” Hans Castorp cried. They were taking their seats on the hard cushions of a yellow cabriolet that had stood waiting for them on the gravel apron in front of the station, itself not much more than a shed; and as the pair of bays began to pull, Hans Castorp spun around now in vexation. “Six months? You’ve already been here for almost that long! We don’t have that much time in life!”

“Ah yes, time,” Joachim said, nodding to himself several times, paying no attention to his cousin’s honest indignation. “You wouldn’t believe how fast and loose they play with people’s time around here. Three weeks are the same as a day to them. You’ll see. You have all that to learn,” he said, and then he added, “A man changes a lot of his ideas here.”

Hans Castorp gazed steadily at his profile. “But you really have made a splendid recovery,” he said, shaking his head.

“Do you think so?” Joachim replied. “It’s true, isn’t it? I think so, too!” he said, sitting up taller against the cushioned back, but immediately slumping again a little to one side. “I am feeling better,” he explained, “but I’m not yet entirely well, either. The upper left lobe, where the rattling used to be, there’s only a little roughness there now, it’s not so bad, but the lower lobe is still very rough, and there are also sounds in the second intercostal.”

“How learned you’ve become,” Hans Castorp said.

“Yes, a fine sort of learning, God knows. I would gladly have unlearned it all on active duty,” Joachim retorted. “But I still have sputum,” he said with a nonchalant, but somehow vehement shrug that did not suit him at all; and now he pulled something halfway out of the nearer side pocket of his ulster, showed it to his cousin, and put it away again at once—a curved, flattened bottle of bluish glass with a metal cap. “Most of us up here have one,” he said. “We even have a name for it, a kind of nickname, a joke really. Having a look at the scenery, are you?”

And indeed that was what Hans Castorp was doing, and he exclaimed, “Magnificent!” “You think so, do you?” Joachim asked.

They had first taken a street that was faced by an irregular pattern of buildings and ran along the railroad tracks, following the valley’s axis, but then turned left and crossed the narrow tracks and a brook; and they were now trotting up a gently rising road in the direction of wooded slopes and a low, outcropping meadow where an elongated building stood, its façade turned to the southwest, topped by a copper cupola, and arrayed with so many balconies that, from a distance as the first lights of evening were being lit, it looked as pockmarked and porous as a sponge. Dusk was falling fast. A pale red sunset that had enlivened the generally overcast sky faded now, leaving nature under the transient sway of the lackluster, lifeless, and mournful light that immediately precedes nightfall. Lights were coming up in the long, meandering, populous valley, dotting its floor and the slopes on both sides—particularly on the swelling rise to the right, where buildings ascended a series of terraces. Paths led up the meadowed hills on their left, but were soon lost to sight in the dull black of pine forests. Behind them, the mountains in the more distant background, where the valley tapered to an end, were a sober slate blue. Now that the wind had picked up, the evening had turned noticeably cooler.

“No, to be quite frank, I don’t find it that overwhelming,” Hans Castorp said. “Where are the glaciers and snowcapped, towering peaks? Seems to me, the ones here aren’t all that high.”

“Oh, they’re high all right,” Joachim replied. “You can see the tree line almost everywhere, it’s really quite clearly defined; the pines come to an end, then everything else—the end, then rocks, as you can see. And over there, to the right of the Schwarzhorn, on that jagged peak there, is a glacier for you— can you still see the blue? It’s not that big, but it’s a textbook glacier, the Scaletta Glacier. And there’s Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn in that gap—you can’t see them from here, but they’re always snow- covered, year-round.”

“Eternal snow,” Hans Castorp said.

“Right, eternal, if you like. And they’re all very high. But we’re dreadfully high up ourselves, keep that in mind. Five thousand three hundred feet above sea level. So you don’t notice the difference in height that much.”

“Yes, it was quite a climb. Certainly had me scared, let me tell you. Five thousand three hundred feet. Why, that’s over a mile high. I’ve never been this far up in my whole life.” And in his curiosity, Hans Castorp took a deep breath, testing the alien air. It was fresh—that was all. It lacked odor, content, moisture, it went easily into the lungs and said nothing to the soul.

“Excellent!” he remarked politely.

“Yes, the air is famous. But the landscape is not showing itself to its best advantage this evening. It can look better, especially in the snow. But you soon get your fill of staring at it. Believe me, all of us up here have definitely had our fill of it,” Joachim said, and his mouth wrenched in an expression of disgust that seemed both exaggerated and out of control—and once again it did not suit him. “You’re talking so strangely,” Hans Castorp said.

“Strangely, am I?” Joachim asked, turning to his cousin and looking worried somehow.

“No, no, beg your pardon, it just seemed that way to me for a moment or so,” Hans Castorp hastened to say. But what he really meant was that the phrase “us up here,” which Joachim had used three or four times already, somehow made him feel anxious and queer.

“Our sanatorium lies at a higher altitude than the village, as you can see,” Joachim continued. “A hundred fifty feet. The brochure says ‘three hundred,’ but it’s only half that. The highest of the sanatoriums is Schatzalp, across the way, you can’t see it now. They have to transport the bodies down by bobsled in the winter, because the roads are impassable.”

“The bodies? Oh, I see. You don’t say!” Hans Castorp cried. And suddenly he burst into laughter, a violent, overpowering laugh that shook his chest and twisted his face, stiffened by the cool wind, into a slightly painful grimace. “On bobsleds! And you can sit there and tell me that so calm and cool? You’ve become quite the cynic in the last five months.”

“That’s not cynical at all,” Joachim replied with a shrug. “Why do you say that? It doesn’t matter to the bodies. All the same, it may well be that we do get cynical up here. Behrens is an old cynic himself—a regular brick, by the way, an old fraternity man and a brilliant surgeon, you’ll like him, seems to me. And then there’s Krokowski, his assistant—a very savvy character. They make special note of his services in the brochure. He dissects the patients’ psyches.”

“He what? Dissects their psyches? That’s disgusting!” Hans Castorp cried, and now hilarity got the better of him. He could no longer control it. Psychic dissection had finished the job, and he bent over and laughed so hard that the tears ran out from under the hand with which he had covered his eyes. Joachim laughed heartily, too—it seemed to do him good. And so the two young men were in fine good humor as they climbed down from their carriage, which had borne them at a slow trot up the steep loop of the driveway to the portal of the International Sanatorium Berghof.

ROOM 34

On their immediate right, between the outer and inner doors, was the desk for the concierge, and a French-looking attendant, dressed in the same livery as the limping man at the train station, was sitting by the telephone reading newspapers; he came up to them and led them across the well-lit lobby, with public rooms opening off it on the left. Hans Castorp peered in as they passed, and discovered them empty. Where were the guests? he asked, and his cousin replied, “Taking their rest cure. I was excused from it today because I wanted to meet your train. Otherwise I’d be lying out on my balcony after my evening meal, too.”

It would not have taken much for Hans Castorp to be seized by another fit of laughter. “What? You lie out on your balcony rain or shine, night or day?” he asked, his voice wavering on the edge. “Yes, it’s in the rules. From eight till ten. But come on, let’s have a look at your room, and you can wash up.”

They got on the elevator, the Frenchman operating the electric switches. As they glided upward, Hans Castorp dried his eyes.

“I’m exhausted, I’ve laughed so hard,” he said, catching his breath through his mouth. “It’s all these crazy things you’ve been telling me. The psychic dissection was just too much, I could have done without that. Besides, I’m a little weary from the trip, I suppose. Do your feet get cold so easily, too? And at the same time your face flushes—it’s an unpleasant feeling. I assume we’ll be eating soon? I think I’m getting hungry. Do they feed you properly up here?”

They passed soundlessly down the coconut runners of the narrow corridor. Cool light came from the milk-glass shades of lamps set in the ceiling. The walls were painted with a hard, glistening white enamel. A nurse in a white cap appeared from somewhere, a pince-nez set on her nose, its cord tucked behind one ear. She had the look of a Protestant nurse, of someone with no real devotion to her profession, but kept restless by curiosity and the burden of boredom. Some balloon-shaped objects had been set out in the corridor, beside two of the white-enameled doors—large, potbellied containers with short necks. Hans Castorp was going to ask their purpose, and just as quickly forgot the question.

“Here you are,” Joachim said. “Number thirty-four. I’m on your right, and on your left is a Russian couple—they’re rather slovenly, and loud, I must say, but there was nothing else we could do. Well, what do you say?”

There was a double door, with clothes hooks in the space between the two. Joachim had turned on the ceiling light, and its sharp luster revealed a room that was both cheerful and restful, with white, practical furniture; heavy, washable wallpaper, likewise white; a floor covered with spotless linoleum; and linen curtains, embroidered with a simple, cheerful pattern of modern design. The door to the balcony stood open to a glimpse of lights in the valley and the sound of distant dance music. Joachim had thoughtfully placed a few wildflowers in a small vase on the dresser—some yarrow and a couple of bluebells, in their second bloom this summer, that he had picked on the slopes.

“How kind of you,” Hans Castorp said. “What a nice room. I’ll have no trouble putting up here for a week or two.”

“An American woman died here the day before yesterday,” Joachim said. “Behrens told me he was sure it would be all over with her before you arrived, and that you could have the room. Her fiancé was with her, an English naval officer, but he didn’t exactly keep a stiff upper lip. He kept coming out into the corridor to cry every few minutes, like a little boy. And then he’d rub his cheeks with cold cream because he’d just shaved and the tears stung. The evening before last, the American woman had two first-class hemorrhages, and that was that. But she’s been gone since yesterday morning, and of course it was all thoroughly fumigated with formalin—they say it’s very effective, you know.”

Hans Castorp was listening to this narrative with edgy bemusement. He had rolled up his sleeves and was standing now at the large washbasin, its nickel taps sparkling under the electric light, but he cast no more than a fleeting glance at the bed’s white metal frame and fresh sheets.

“Fumigated, that’s spiffing,” he said glibly and somewhat incongruously while he washed and dried his hands. “Yes, methyl aldehyde, even the toughest bacteria can’t take that—H2CO, but it does burn in your nose, doesn’t it? It’s obvious, of course, that strict cleanliness is essential.” His accent, particularly his it’s, betrayed his Hamburg origins, whereas starting back in his student days, his cousin had adopted more standard pronunciation. Feeling much chattier now, he rambled on, “What I was going to say was . . . that naval officer probably used a safety razor, that’s what I think, it’s easier to cut yourself with those things than with a well-stropped straight razor, that’s been my experience at least, so I alternate between the two. And, of course, salt water does smart on chafed skin, so he probably got in the habit of using cold cream while he was in the service, that doesn’t seem at all peculiar to me.” And he chatted away, telling about how he had packed two hundred Maria Mancinis—his cigars—in his trunk, but that getting through customs had been easy as pie. And then he extended greetings from various people back home. “Don’t they heat the rooms?” he suddenly exclaimed and ran over to put his hand on the radiator.

“No, they keep it rather cool,” Joachim answered. “The weather would have to turn really bad before they would turn on the heat in August.”

“August, August,” Hans Castorp said. “But I’m freezing! I’m ab-so-lute-ly freezing, I mean my body is, although my face feels awfully flushed—here, feel it, it’s burning up.”

The suggestion that someone feel his face was not at all typical of Hans Castorp, and even he was embarrassed by it. Joachim did not acknowledge it, but merely said, “It’s the air here, it doesn’t mean anything. Behrens himself walks around with purple cheeks all day. Some people never get used to it. Well, come on now, or we’ll not get anything to eat.”

In the corridor they ran into the nurse again, who squinted with nearsighted curiosity as she watched them pass. They had reached the second floor, when Hans Castorp suddenly stopped in his tracks, mesmerized by a perfectly ghastly noise he heard coming from beyond a dogleg in the hall—not a loud noise, but so decidedly repulsive that Hans Castorp grimaced and stared wide-eyed at his cousin. It was a cough, apparently—a man’s cough, but a cough unlike any that Hans Castorp had ever heard; indeed, compared to it, all other coughs with which he was familiar had been splendid, healthy expressions of life—a cough devoid of any zest for life or love, which didn’t come in spasms, but sounded as if someone were stirring feebly in a terrible mush of decomposing organic material. “Yes,” Joachim said, “it looks bad. An Austrian aristocrat—you know, an elegant fellow, your born horseman. And now it’s come to this. Although he’s still up and about.”

As they walked on, Hans Castorp remarked, referring to the horseman’s cough, “You must realize that I’ve never heard anything like it, that it’s all quite new to me, and that it does make an impression. There are so many kinds of coughs, dry ones, loose ones, and loose ones are healthier, people say, better than dry barks. Back in my youth”—he actually said “in my youth”—“I caught the croup, and it had me barking like a wolf, and everyone was happy when it loosened up, I still remember it quite well. But a cough like that—that’s something new, to me at least—it’s not even human. It’s not dry, but you can’t call it loose, either, there’s no word for it. It’s as if you were looking right down inside and could see it all—the mucus and the slime . . .”

“Well,” Joachim said, “I hear it every day, so you don’t need to describe it for me.”

But Hans Castorp could not get the cough he had heard out of his mind and kept repeating that it was literally like looking down inside the horseman; and as they entered the restaurant, his eyes, weary from the trip, had taken on a glint of nervous excitement.

IN THE RESTAURANT

The restaurant was well lit, elegant, and comfortable. It was to the right of the lobby, directly across from the social rooms, and was used, as Joachim explained, primarily for new arrivals or residents who either had missed a regularly scheduled meal or had visitors. But birthdays or imminent departures were celebrated there, too, as were favorable results of a general checkup. Things could get very lively in the restaurant on occasion, Joachim said; they even served champagne. There was no one there now except one lady, perhaps thirty years old, sitting alone and reading—humming to herself the whole time while drumming softly on the tabletop with the middle finger of her left hand. When the young gentlemen had seated themselves, she changed places, so that her back was to them now. She was standoffish, Joachim explained in a low voice, and always ate in the restaurant with just her book. Rumor had it that she had entered a tuberculosis sanatorium as a very young girl and had never lived in the outside world since.

“Well then, compared to her you’re a mere novice with your five months, and still will be with a whole year to your credit,” Hans Castorp said to his cousin; to which Joachim merely gave his new, uncharacteristic shrug and reached for the menu.

They had taken the raised table beside a window hung with cream-colored curtains—the nicest table in the room. They sat opposite one another, their faces illumined by an electric table lamp with a red shade. Hans Castorp clasped his freshly washed hands together and rubbed them in congenial expectation, a habit of his whenever he sat down to eat—perhaps because his forebears had prayed before every meal. They were waited on by a friendly girl in a black dress and white apron, whose large face glowed with robust health and who spoke in a guttural dialect. To his great amusement, Hans Castorp was instructed that waitresses here were called “dining attendants.” They ordered a bottle of Gruaud Larose, which Hans Castorp sent back to be brought to room temperature. The food was excellent. There was asparagus soup, followed by stuffed tomatoes, a roast with several vegetables, an especially well done dessert, and a tray of cheese and fruit. Hans Castorp ate heartily, although with not quite the lively appetite he had expected. But he was accustomed to eating large meals—even when he wasn’t hungry—purely out of self-respect.

Joachim did not do much credit to his meal. He had had enough of the cooking here, he said, everyone up here had, and it was customary to disparage the food, because when you had to sit up here forever and a day . . . But he did enjoy drinking, taking to the wine with something like abandon; and while carefully avoiding all sentiment-laden phrases, he repeatedly expressed his satisfaction that at last someone was here with whom it was possible to have a rational conversation.

“Yes, it’s top-notch, your having come,” he said, and there was feeling in his nonchalant voice. “And let me tell you it’s quite an event for me. First of all, just the variety of it—I mean, it’s an interruption, a break in the everlasting, endless monotony.”

“But I would think time ought to pass quickly for you all,” Hans Castorp suggested.

“Quickly and slowly, just as you like,” Joachim replied. “What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t really pass at all, there is no time as such, and this is no life—no, that it’s not,” he said, shaking his head and reaching again for his glass.

Hans Castorp drank as well, although his face was burning like fire by now. But his body still seemed cold, and he felt a pleasurable and yet somehow annoying restlessness in his joints. Words tumbled out, he misspoke himself several times, but went right on with a dismissive wave of his hand. Joachim was likewise in a lively mood, and after the humming, drumming lady suddenly stood up and departed, their conversation turned even more candid and high-spirited. They gesticulated with their forks as they ate, tucked bites of food in their cheeks, looked important, laughed, nodded, shrugged, and went right on talking without even first swallowing their food properly. Joachim wanted to hear about Hamburg and brought the conversation around to plans for making the Elbe more navigable.

“Epoch-making!” Hans Castorp said. “An epoch-making development for our maritime commerce—simply not to be overestimated. We’ve added a line in our budget for an immediate payment of fifty million, and you can be sure that we know exactly what we’re doing.”

But then, despite the importance he attached to navigation on the Elbe, he at once abandoned the topic and demanded that Joachim tell him more about life “up here” and about the guests; which Joachim proved ready and willing to do, happy to open his heart and unburden himself. He had to repeat the part about the bodies being sent down by bobsled and once again asserted unequivocally that he knew it to be true. And when Hans Castorp was taken by another fit of laughter, Joachim joined in, seeming heartily to enjoy the opportunity, and then told more comic stories, just to add fuel to the general merriment. There was a lady who sat at his table, Frau Stöhr was her name, and quite ill by the way, the wife of a musician from Cannstatt—and she was the most illiterate person he had ever met. She said things like “decentfiction”—in all seriousness. And Krokowski, the assistant—she called him the “eighty camp.” You had to sit there and swallow it, without a trace of a smile. And she was a gossip, besides, as were most people up here, by the by, and she claimed that another lady, Frau Iltis, carried a “stirletto” around with her. “She calls it a stirletto—isn’t that capital!” And throwing themselves back in their chairs, half lying, half leaning, they laughed so hard that they shook until they both began to hiccough at almost the same time.

But every now and then, Joachim was reminded of his own fate and would turn gloomy. “Yes, here we sit laughing,” he said with a pained expression, broken by occasional spasms of his diaphragm, “and yet there’s no telling when I’ll get out of here, because when Behrens says another six months, that’s his low estimate, and you need to be prepared for even longer. But it is hard, you must admit. It’s really sad, isn’t it? I had already been accepted and would have taken my officer’s exam next month. And here I am lounging about with a thermometer in my mouth and counting Frau Stöhr’s illiterate howlers, and time is passing me by. A single year plays such an important role at our age, it brings so many changes and so much progress with it when you’re living down below. And here I am stagnating like an old water hole—a stinking pond, and that’s not too crude a comparison, either.”

Strangely enough, Hans Castorp’s only reply came as a question—did they serve porter here? And when Joachim looked at him in astonishment, he realized that his cousin was very near to falling asleep—was in fact already nodding.

“Why, you’re asleep,” Joachim said. “Come on, it’s high time we went to bed, both of us.”

“It’s not time for anything,” Hans Castorp said with a thick tongue. But he joined his cousin all the same, walking on stiff legs and bent so low that he looked like a man being dragged toward the floor by weariness. But as they moved across the now dimly lit lobby, he pulled himself together by sheer force of effort when he heard Joachim say, “That’s Krokowski sitting there. I really must introduce you, I suppose.”

Dr. Krokowski was sitting in the light, close to the fireplace, just inside the sliding door opening onto one of the social rooms. He was reading a newspaper, but stood up as the young men approached. Joachim, striking a military pose, said, “Might I introduce you, doctor, to my cousin Castorp? He’s just arrived from Hamburg.”

Dr. Krokowski greeted the new resident with a kind of jovial, rugged, and reassuring heartiness, as if to imply that in his presence any diffidence was quite superfluous and cheerful mutual trust the only appropriate response. He was about thirty-five years old, broad-shouldered, stout, considerably shorter than the two men across from him, so that he had to tip his head back to look them in the eye, and extraordinarily pale—there was almost a translucence, even phosphorescence, to his pallor, and it was enhanced by dark, glowing eyes, black eyebrows, and a rather long beard that already showed a few gray strands and ended in two diverging points. He wore a black, rather worn, double- breasted business suit and black open-worked shoes, almost sandals really, over gray woolen socks; Hans Castorp had seen a soft, floppy collar like that only once before—sported by a photographer in Danzig—and indeed it did lend something of the artist’s studio to Dr. Krokowski’s general appearance. As he shook the young man’s hand, an effusive smile revealed yellowish teeth under his beard, and in a baritone voice betraying the drawl of a foreign accent, he said, “We bid you welcome, Herr Castorp. I do hope that you’ll make yourself comfortable and soon feel right at home here with us. You have come as a patient, have you not—if you’ll pardon the question?”

It was touching to see how Hans Castorp struggled to be polite and master his drowsiness. He was annoyed with himself for being in such bad shape, and with the leery self-consciousness of youth he detected traces of an indulgent smirk in the assistant director’s reassuring smile. In answering, he said something about three weeks, mentioned his exams, and added that, thank God, he was perfectly healthy.

“You don’t say!” Dr. Krokowski replied, thrusting his head forward at a derisive slant and smiling more broadly. “In that case you are a phenomenon of greatest medical interest. You see, I’ve never met a perfectly healthy person before. And what kind of exams were those, if you’ll pardon the question?”

“I’m an engineer, doctor,” Hans Castorp answered with modest dignity.

“Ah, an engineer.” And Dr. Krokowski’s smile receded, as it were, losing something of both its energy and warmth for a moment. “Bravo, my congratulations. And so you’ll not be availing yourself here of any sort of medical attention, either physical or psychological?”

“No, no, thanks just the same,” Hans Castorp said, almost stepping back. With that, Dr. Krokowski broke into his triumphant smile again, and shaking the young man’s hand once more, he exclaimed in a loud voice, “In that case, sleep well, Herr Castorp—in full enjoyment of your impeccable health. Sleep well, and I’m sure we’ll see more of one another.” And then he dismissed the young men and sat back down to his newspaper.

The elevator was no longer running, and so they used the stairs, climbing in silence, slightly bewildered by their meeting with Dr. Krokowski. Joachim accompanied Hans Castorp to room 34, where they found that the limping concierge had properly delivered the new guest’s luggage; and they chatted for another fifteen minutes while Hans Castorp unpacked his nightclothes and toiletries after first lighting a thick, mild cigarette. He never had got around to a last cigar—which struck him as odd, quite unusual, really.

“He does have a distinguished look about him,” he said, and the inhaled smoke tumbled out with the words. “He’s pale as chalk. But as for his choice of footwear, it’s really dreadful, I must say. Gray wool socks—and then those sandals. Was he offended there at the end?”

“He’s a little sensitive,” Joachim admitted. “You shouldn’t have been so brusque about rejecting medical treatment, at least not the psychological part. He doesn’t like for people to try to avoid it. He’s not all that well disposed toward me, either, because I don’t confide enough in him. But now and then I do tell him a dream, so that he’ll have something to dissect.”

“Then I really did rub him the wrong way just now,” Hans Castorp said with annoyance, for it always upset him when he offended someone; and now weariness overcame him with renewed intensity as well.

“Good night,” he said. “I’m ready to drop.”

“I’ll come by for you for breakfast at eight,” Joachim said and left.

Hans Castorp hastily went through the motions of getting ready for bed. No sooner had he turned out the lamp on his nightstand than sleep overwhelmed him—but he started up again when he recalled that someone had died in that very bed only two nights before. “Not for the first time, either,” he told himself, as if that might serve to reassure him. “It’s just a deathbed, an ordinary deathbed.” And he dozed off.

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.

CHAPTER 2

THE BAPTISMAL BOWL/GRANDFATHER IN HIS TWO FORMS

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.

And this was how the old man was viewed, both during his lifetime and after, by his fellow citizens; and even though little Hans Castorp understood nothing about the affairs of government, the perceptions gained by his own calm, alert child’s eye were much the same—unspoken and therefore uncritical perceptions, though enthusiastic for all that, which when they later became conscious memories retained their exclusively positive stamp, immune to all discussion or analysis. As noted, mutual sympathy was at work here, the kind of family affection and affinity of personality that not infrequently leaps a generation. Children and grandchildren observe in order to admire, and they admire in order to learn and develop what heredity has stored within them.

Senator Castorp was tall and gaunt. The years had bent his back and neck, but he attempted to

compensate for this by pressing against the curvature, which pulled down the corners of his mouth in a kind of painful dignity, while the lips, with no supporting teeth behind them, rested on bare gums—he wore his dentures only to eat—and this counterpressure, which presumably also helped him steady his head (because it had begun to shake of late), was probably what caused him to carry himself with an austere, forward tilt and to prop his chin in the way that so pleased little Hans.

He loved his snuff; he had a longish tortoiseshell box inlaid with gold, and snuff was also the reason he carried red handkerchiefs, the tip of one usually visible dangling from the back pocket of his frock coat. And although this harmless vice added a jaunty touch to his appearance, the ultimate effect was much more that of the license of old age, the kind of carelessness that age either consciously and merrily permits itself or brings with it, cloaked in dignified oblivion; in any case, it was the only such carelessness in his grandfather’s appearance that little Hans Castorp’s sharp eye ever observed. Both to the mind of the seven-year-old and in the memories of the adult, the everyday appearance of the old man was not what was essential and real about him. His essential reality was quite different, much more handsome and authentic than his everyday appearance. That reality, you see, was to be found in a painting—a life-size portrait that at one time had hung in the living room of Hans Castorp’s parents and had been transported along with the boy to the house on the Esplanade, where it had been given a spot above the large red silk sofa in the parlor.

It showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official dress as a town councillor—the sober, even godly attire of citizens from a vanished century, a costume that later citizens, whether staid or dashing, had carried with them through the years, continuing to wear it on pompous occasions in order ceremoniously to make the past present, and the present past, and to proclaim the permanent continuity of all things and the venerable trustworthiness of their official signatures. There, large as life, Senator Castorp stood on a red-tiled floor, against a perspective of columns and Gothic arches. There he stood, his chin lowered, his mouth drawn down, his blue, thoughtful eyes, the bags heavy beneath them, directed into the distance; he was clad in a robelike black jacket, hanging open at the front, edged in fur along the hem and lapels, and reaching well below his knees. Emerging from under its wide, braid-trimmed, puffy sleeves was a second set of tight-fitting sleeves of simpler fabric, ending in lace cuffs that covered the hands to the knuckles. He had pulled black silk stockings over his skinny old-man’s legs, and on his feet he wore shoes with silver buckles. Around his neck, however, lay a wide, starched, heavily pleated ruff, slanted forward, but sloping upward on both sides, beneath which, to top it all, could be seen a pleated batiste jabot and a vest. Under one arm he carried an old-fashioned, broad-brimmed hat that tapered to a point.

It was a splendid portrait, painted by a renowned artist, executed tastefully in the style—as

suggested by its subject—of the old masters and awakening in the observer all sorts of images of the late Middle Ages in the Spanish Netherlands. Little Hans Castorp had often studied it, not with any artistic acumen of course, but with a certain more general, even penetrating understanding; and although he had only once seen his grandfather in real life in the fashion pictured there on canvas— just for a brief moment as part of a dignified procession into the town hall—he could not help, as we have said, regarding this pictorial presence as his authentic and real grandfather, seeing in the everyday one a temporary, imperfectly adapted improvisation, so to speak. From that perspective, the lapses and eccentricities in his everyday appearance were apparently mere imperfections, or inept adaptations, were the vestiges or hints of a pure and true nature that could not be totally eradicated. Granted, his stiff collar and high, white necktie were old-fashioned; but such a term could never be applied to that marvelous article of clothing—he meant the Spanish ruff—of which the former were merely present-day traces. And it was the same with the peculiar rounded top hat that his grandfather wore in public, which on some higher plane of reality corresponded to the broad- brimmed felt hat in the picture—or the long, pleated frock coat, whose genuine prototype little Hans Castorp found in the fur- and braid-trimmed robe.

And so when the day came to say farewell, in his heart of hearts little Hans Castorp was relieved to see his grandfather decked out in his authentic perfection. It was in the dining room, the same room where they had so often sat across the table from one another; in the middle of the room Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay in a silver-trimmed coffin, atop a bier surrounded and besieged with wreaths. He had battled pneumonia to the end, had battled long and obstinately, even though, to all appearances, he had accommodated himself only in part to contemporary life; but now here he lay in state—one could not be sure whether triumphant or vanquished, but in any case, with a stern, satisfied look on his face, though it was greatly changed, his nose looking pinched after his struggles; his lower body shrouded under a coverlet, on which lay a palm frond; his head propped up on the silk pillow so that his chin rested most handsomely in the indentation at the front of the ceremonial ruff. And in his hands—half hidden by lace cuffs, the fingers looking cold and inanimate despite their artificially natural pose—someone had placed an ivory cross, upon which his eyes, beneath their lowered lids, seemed to be fixed.

Hans Castorp had seen his grandfather several times in the early stages of his last illness, but then no more toward the end. He had been spared any sight of the struggle, which had taken place primarily at night, and had been touched by it only indirectly—the anxious atmosphere in the house, old Fiete’s reddened eyes, the comings and goings of doctors. But from its outcome, which he now

found displayed before him in the dining room, he gathered that his grandfather had now received

solemn dispensation from his interim stage and had finally returned to the form appropriate to him—an event of which he could only approve, though old Fiete wept and constantly shook his head, even though Hans Castorp himself wept, just as he had wept at the sight of his unexpectedly deceased mother and, a short time later, of his father lying there equally serene and strange.

For this was now the third time within so few months and at such a young age that little Hans Castorp’s mind and senses had been affected by death—his senses in particular. The sight of it, the impression it left, was no longer new to him, but really quite familiar, and just as on the first two occasions he had behaved responsibly and kept his composure—with no sign of nervous weakness, although much distressed, as is only natural—he did so now as well, but to an even greater degree. Unaware of the practical implications of these events on his life, or perhaps regarding them with childish indifference while trusting that the world would take care of him one way or the other, he betrayed a similarly childish reserve and businesslike attentiveness when viewing coffins, which on this third occasion took on nuances of precociousness, both in his emotional reaction and the look of knowledgeable experience on his face—it being unnecessary likewise to describe his natural reaction of being caught up in the frequent tearful outbursts of others. Within three or four months after his father died, he had forgotten death; now he remembered it, and all the impressions from before reemerged simultaneously—in every precise, piercing, and incomparable detail.

Analyzed and put into words, his feelings might have been expressed as follows: there was something religious, gripping, and sadly beautiful, which was to say, spiritual about death and at the same time something that was the direct opposite, something very material, physical, which one could not really describe as beautiful, or gripping, or religious, or even as sad. The religious, spiritual side was expressed by the pretentious lying-in-state, by the pomp of flowers and palm fronds— which he knew signified heavenly peace—and also, and more to the point, by the cross between the dead fingers of what had been his grandfather, by the blessings a copy of Thorvaldsen’s Christ extended from the head of the coffin, and by two towering candelabra on either side, which on an occasion like this also took on an ecclesiastical character. The explicit and well-intended purpose of all these arrangements was apparently to show that Grandfather had now passed on forever to his authentic and true form. But they also served another purpose—one that little Hans Castorp likewise noted, if not admitting it to himself in so many words; in particular, the masses of flowers and more especially the very well represented tuberoses were there for a more sobering reason—and that was to gloss over the other side of death, the one that is neither beautiful nor sad, but almost indecent in its base physicality, to make people forget it or at least not be reminded of it.

It was this aspect of death that made his dead grandfather look so strange, not really like his

grandfather at all, but like a life-size wax doll that death had slipped into the coffin in his place and for which this whole solemn show was being put on. The man who lay there, or better, what lay there, was not Grandfather himself, but a shell—which, as Hans Castorp knew, was not made of wax, but of its own material. It was just stuff, and that was what was indecent, and so not really even sad—no sadder than things that have to do with the body, and only with it, are sad. Little Hans Castorp gazed at the stuff out of which this life-size dead figure was made, at this waxy, yellow, smooth stuff with the consistency of cheese, gazed at the face and hands of what had been his grandfather. And just then a fly settled on the inert forehead and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete circumspectly shooed it off, though avoiding actually touching the forehead; a shadow of respectability darkened his face, as if he should not know, and did not want to know, what he was doing—an expression of propriety, which apparently was related to Grandfather’s being only a body and nothing more. All the same, after a long, looping flight, the fly came to rest again on Grandfather’s fingers, sitting up pertly very close to the ivory cross. And while all this was going on, Hans Castorp thought he could smell more clearly than before those faint, but very peculiar and persistent fumes that he knew from before, and which, to his shame, always reminded him of a school chum who suffered from an offensive affliction that made everyone avoid him, the same odor that the tuberose scent was supposed to cover up on the sly, but was unable to do, for all its lovely, austere richness.

He returned several times to stand by the body: one time all alone, except for old Fiete; a second time together with his great-uncle Tienappel, the wine merchant, and his two uncles James and Peter; and then a third time as well, when a group of workmen from the harbor in their Sunday best stood for a few moments beside the coffin to take leave of the former head of the house of Castorp and Son. Then came the funeral and a dining room full of people; dressed in his Spanish ruff, Pastor Bugenhagen from Saint Michael’s, the man who had baptized Hans Castorp, performed the service, and afterward he spoke to little Hans Castorp in very friendly tones as they sat together in the coach, the one right behind the hearse and the first in a long, long procession. And with that, this part of Hans Castorp’s life came to an end as well, and a very short time later he changed homes and neighborhoods—for the second time now in his young life.

AT THE TIENAPPELS’/HANS CASTORP’S MORAL STATE

The change did not work to his detriment, because he moved in with Consul Tienappel, his legal guardian, and lacked for nothing—certainly not in any personal sense, or for that matter, as regarded the supervision of his larger interests, about which he still knew nothing. Consul Tienappel, an uncle of little Hans’s late mother, acted as executor for the Castorp estate, putting the property up for sale, taking charge of liquidating the firm Castorp and Son, Imports and Exports, realizing from these transactions some four hundred thousand marks—Hans Castorp’s inheritance, which the consul then invested in gilt-edged securities. At the beginning of each quarter, he deducted from the interest earned—without any prejudice to his sense of family ties—a commission of 2 percent.

Set well back from Harvestehuder Weg, the Tienappel home was fronted by a large garden; to the rear it looked out on a lawn where not the tiniest weed was permitted, a public promenade with roses, and beyond it, the river. Although he owned a fine coach, the consul walked to work in the old city every morning, just to get a little exercise, because he sometimes suffered from congestion of the blood in his head; and he returned home by the same route at five each evening, when, in most civilized fashion, the Tienappels sat down to dinner. He was a heavyset man who always dressed in the best English fabrics. His watery-blue eyes were bulgy behind gold-rimmed spectacles, he had a ruddy nose, a gray seaman’s beard, and he wore a sparkling diamond on the stubby little finger of his left hand. His wife had been dead for years. He had two sons, Peter and James—the one in the navy and seldom at home, the other an employee in the family wine business and the designated heir of the firm. The house had been kept for many years now by Schalleen, the daughter of a goldsmith in Altona, who always wore white starched ruffles at her thick, cylindrical wrists. She was responsible for laying out an extensive cold buffet at breakfast and supper: shrimp and salmon, eel, goose breast and roast beef with tomato ketchup; she kept a vigilant eye on the extra servants hired when Consul Tienappel gave a formal dinner; and she was also the person who, as best she could, acted as a mother to little Hans Castorp.

He grew—despite miserable weather, despite wind and fog—grew up, one might say, in his yellow mackintosh, and on the whole was a quite cheerful lad. He was probably a little anemic from the start, or so Dr. Heidekind said, prescribing for him a nice daily glass of porter, to be drunk with his snack when he returned from school—a robust brew, as everyone knows, which Dr. Heidekind believed helped build the blood and which, however that might be, Hans Castorp discovered, much to his satisfaction, had a calming effect on his spirits and pleasantly assisted him in his proclivity to “doze”—as his Uncle Tienappel put it—when he would sit with his mouth slightly open, dreaming away without a single firm thought in his head. But otherwise he was a regular, healthy lad, a passable tennis-player and oarsman, although on summer evenings, instead of manning an oar, he preferred sitting on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst Boathouse, a refreshing drink in hand, listening to music and watching the boats as they drifted among the swans, their lights reflected in the bright, smooth water. And if you were to hear him talking—in his nonchalant, reasonable way, his voice a

little hollow and monotone, with just a hint of Platt—or even if you just saw him there, so blondly

correct, his hair nicely trimmed, his head with the stamp of something classic about it, his air cool and languid, suggesting an inherited, unconscious arrogance, then you could not doubt that this Hans Castorp was an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it—even he himself, had he ever actually considered the matter, would not have doubted it for a moment.

The atmosphere of the metropolitan seaport, the damp atmosphere of global shopkeeping and prosperity, had been the air of life itself for his forefathers, and with great gusto he breathed it now as a matter of course and found it profoundly satisfying. His nose took in the fumes of the harbor, of coal and tar, the pungent odors of the world’s produce piled high, and his eyes watched the huge steam cranes on the docks—so calm, wise, and monumentally strong that they looked like hardworking elephants—as they transferred tons of sacks, bales, crates, barrels, and carboys from the bowels of idle seagoing vessels to railroad cars and sheds. He watched the merchants in yellow mackintoshes, like the one he himself was wearing, as they streamed at noon toward the exchange, where things could get quite fierce, as he well knew, and someone might very suddenly be motivated to hand out invitations to a grand dinner, in hopes of prolonging his credit. He watched—and this would later prove to be his special area of interest—the teeming dry docks, the towering, mammoth cadavers of ships that had sailed to Asia and Africa, but now lay braced on strutbeams thick as trees, looking monstrous and clumsy on dry land, their keels and screws naked, swarmed over by hosts of midget laborers—hammering, scouring, whitewashing. He gazed at the roofed-over slips, which were wrapped in webs of smoky fog and from which the ribs of ships under construction protruded, while engineers, blueprints and pump-charts in hand, gave orders to the workers. From boyhood on, these were all familiar sights to Hans Castorp, awakening in him a warm sense of belonging, a feeling that reached its zenith, perhaps, on those occasions when he would join James Tienappel or his cousin Ziemssen—Joachim Ziemssen—in the pavilion on the Alster for a Sunday breakfast of warm rolls and smoked beef, washed down by a glass of old port, then lean back in his chair and puff devotedly on his cigar. For in this he was true to type: that he dearly and truly loved living well, and despite his thin-blooded, refined appearance, he clung to the cruder pleasures of life as a gluttonous baby clings to its mother’s breast.

The upper class of this commercial and democratic city-state bequeaths its children the burden of higher civilization, and Hans Castorp bore it on his shoulders with a certain easy dignity. He was bathed spotless as a baby, and he had his clothes made by a tailor who enjoyed the trust of the young men in his circle. Schalleen took splendid care of his little treasure of neatly monogrammed underwear and shirts, which were tucked away in the English-style drawers of his wardrobe. Even

when Hans Castorp left home to study, he regularly sent his things home to be laundered and

mended—for it was his maxim that no one in the empire except residents of Hamburg knew how to iron—and a badly creased cuff on one of his pretty pastel shirts filled him with a terrible unease. Although the shape of his hands was not particularly aristocratic, he took good care of them, keeping the skin supple and setting them off with a simple platinum band and his grandfather’s signet ring; his teeth, which were rather soft and subject to damage, had been repaired with gold inlays.

Both when standing and walking, he thrust his lower body forward somewhat, which left the impression of a certain slackness; but his posture at the dinner table was excellent. He would politely turn his erect upper body toward his neighbor for small talk (always reasonable, with a hint of Platt), would rest his elbows easily at his sides when cutting a piece of fowl or deftly extracting the pink meat of a lobster claw with the appropriate utensils. When a meal was over, his first requirement was a finger bowl of perfumed water, his second a Russian cigarette, on which he paid no customs duties, since he had found a way to obtain them with a few well-placed, casual bribes. This was a prelude to his cigar, a Maria Mancini, a very tasty brand from Bremen—we shall come to speak about that again—whose spicy toxins blended so satisfyingly with those of his coffee. Hans Castorp kept his tobacco away from the deleterious effects of the house’s steam heat by storing it in the cellar, and every morning he would descend to provide his cigar case with its daily ration. Only reluctantly would he have eaten butter served in pats rather than in fluted little balls.

As is apparent, we are attempting to include anything that can be said in Hans Castorp’s favor, and we offer our judgments without exaggeration, intending to make him no better or worse than he was. Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word “mediocre” to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance. He was bright enough to meet the demands of a modern secondary school without overtaxing himself; in fact, under no conceivable circumstances would he have been willing to do that, no matter what the goal—not so much out of fear that it might be painful as because he saw absolutely no reason why he should, or to put it better: no unequivocal reason. But perhaps that is why we do not call him mediocre—precisely because he felt that in some way or other such an unequivocal reason was lacking.

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had,

it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by

the lack of critique. All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal—then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual’s physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him—even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why—he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality. Neither the former nor the latter was the case with Hans Castorp, and so he probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

In saying this, we are speaking here of the young man’s innermost state not only during his years in school, but also during the period that followed, when he had already chosen his profession. As to his career at school, he did indeed have to repeat a class or two. But for the most part, his background, his urbane manners, and ultimately a pretty, if rather dispassionate talent for mathematics helped him move ahead; and after receiving his report card in his freshman year, he concluded he would finish school—primarily, truth to tell, because that allowed him to extend a familiar, provisional, indecisive state of affairs and to win time for reflection as to what Hans Castorp would most like to do, because he was not even close to deciding that, not even as a senior, and when it finally was decided (to say he decided would be saying almost too much), he was quite aware that the decision could just as easily have been otherwise.

But this much was true—he had always taken great delight in ships. As a small boy he had filled his notebooks with penciled drawings of fishing cutters, vegetable barges, and five-masters. And when at age fifteen he had the chance to watch from a front-row seat as the Hansa, a new double-screw mail-steamer, was launched from the docks of Blohm and Voss, he painted a strikingly good watercolor of the trim ship, exact down to almost the last detail, which Consul Tienappel had hung in his private office. And he had so lovingly and deftly captured the transparent, glassy-green, rolling sea that someone had said to Consul Tienappel that the lad had talent and would make a good

painter of seascapes—a pronouncement that the consul had no qualms repeating to his ward,

because Hans Castorp simply laughed amiably at the idea and gave not a moment’s thought to a life of eccentricity and starving for art.

“You don’t have much,” his Uncle Tienappel would remind him. “James and Peter will get the lion’s share of my money, that is to say, it stays in the business and Peter will draw an annuity. What belongs to you is invested quite nicely and will yield a secure return. But it’s no fun nowadays trying to live off interest unless one has at least five times as much as you have, and if you fancy living a nice life here in the city, like the one to which you’re accustomed, then you’ll have to earn a tidy sum yourself—take note of that, my boy.”

Hans Castorp took note and looked around for a profession in which he could prove himself—both to himself and others. But he thought quite highly of his profession once he had chosen it—at the suggestion of old Wilms, of the firm of Tunder and Wilms, who said to Consul Tienappel over a game of whist one Sunday evening that Hans Castorp should study shipbuilding, that was the ticket, and join his firm, where he would certainly keep his eye on him. Although damned complicated and demanding, it was nevertheless an excellent, important, splendid profession and far preferable, given his peaceable nature at any rate, to that of his cousin Ziemssen, who was the son of his late mother’s half sister and determined to become an officer. Joachim Ziemssen wasn’t exactly strong in the lungs, of course, but that was precisely the reason why a profession in the open air, one that could hardly be said to involve serious brainwork or stress, was probably just the thing for him—as Hans Castorp had remarked rather patronizingly. For he had the greatest respect for work, although, for his part, he found that he did tire easily.

Which brings us back to our previous suggestion, which proposed that the damage inflicted by the times on someone’s personal life can have a direct influence on that person’s physical organism. How could Hans Castorp not have held work in high esteem? That would have been unnatural. As things stood, work had to be regarded as unconditionally the most estimable thing in the world—ultimately there was nothing one could esteem more, it was the principle by which one stood or fell, the absolute of the age, the answer, so to speak, to its own question. His respect for work was, in its way, religious and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter to love it. And as much as he respected it, he could not love it—for one simple reason: it did not agree with him. The exertion of hard work was a strain on his nerves, tiring him quickly, and he quite candidly admitted that he much preferred his leisure—when time passed easily, unencumbered by the leaden weight of toil, and lay open before you, instead of being divided into a series of hurdles that you had to grit your teeth and take. Strictly speaking, the contradictions in his attitude toward work needed to be

resolved. If he had been able to believe at the foundations of his soul (there where he himself did not

know what was what) that work has unconditional value, is a principle that answers its own question, might not both body and mind—first his mind, and through it, his body—have been more amenable to work and exhibited more stamina? Would that have set his mind at ease? Which brings us back to our previous question about his mediocrity or more-than-mediocrity, to which we do not wish to give a conclusive answer. For we do not see ourselves as Hans Castorp’s eulogist and want to leave room for the suggestion that, for him, work was simply something that stood in the way of the unencumbered enjoyment of a Maria Mancini.

He was not attracted to military service himself. Something deep within him resisted the idea, and he knew how to avoid it. It may also be that Dr. Eberding, the staff surgeon, who was a regular on Harvestehuder Weg, had heard in casual conversation with Consul Tienappel that young Castorp, having just left for the university, would regard being forced to bear arms as a serious disruption in his studies.

His brain, which worked calmly and slowly—particularly since Hans Castorp retained the habit of drinking porter with his morning snack—gradually filled up with analytical geometry, differential equations, mechanics, projective geometry, and graphical statics. He calculated displacements—with full cargo and empty—stabilities, shifts in trim, and metacenters, though it was drudgery at times. His technical drawings, all the sketches of ribbing, waterlines, and full-length projections, were not quite as good as his watercolor depiction of the Hansa on the high sea, but when the abstract graphics required the sensual addition of a wash for shading or lively colors for various materials in a cross section, Hans Castorp proved more skillful than most.

When he came home on vacations—very neat, very well dressed, sporting a little reddish-blond moustache in the middle of his sleepy, young, patrician face, looking for all the world like a young man on his way to a respectable place in life—the people who concerned themselves with the affairs of the community, who kept themselves well informed about various families and the staffing of municipal offices (and that means most people in a self-governing city-state), his fellow citizens, then, looked him over and asked themselves what public role young Castorp might one day grow into. He had tradition behind him, his was a good, old name, and it was almost inevitable that someday he would have to be reckoned with as a political factor. By then he would be sitting in the assembly or on the committee of burghers, making laws, would hold an honorable post where he would participate in the concerns of government, as an administrator, perhaps as director of the finance or building committees. His voice would be listened to and his vote would count. People were curious about which party young Castorp would one day embrace. Appearances were

deceiving, but he looked exactly like someone democrats would not be able to count on, and the

resemblance to his grandfather was undeniable. Perhaps he would take after him, become a conservative, a brake on other elements. That was quite possible—but so was the opposite. For he was an engineer after all, a shipbuilder in the making, a man of global commerce and technology. So that it might well be that Hans Castorp would join up with the radicals, turn out to be a go-getter, a profane destroyer of old buildings and beautiful landscapes, as footloose as a Jew, as irreverent as an American, a man likely to prefer a ruthless break with venerable traditions to cautious development of natural resources, a man who would plunge the state into reckless experiments— that was conceivable, too. Was it in his blood to regard their Excellencies, the men for whom the sentries at the town hall presented arms, as elders who knew best—or would he be inclined to support the opposition in the assembly? His curious fellow citizens could find no answer to such questions in those blue eyes under their reddish-blond brows; and Hans Castorp, being an unwritten page, would probably have had no answer, either.

When he set out on the journey where we met him, he was twenty-three years old. He had four semesters of study at Danzig Polytechnic behind him, plus four more spent at technical colleges in Braunschweig and Karlsruhe, had recently put his first final exams behind him, passing them with no trouble, though without fanfare or drum roll, and was about to join the firm of Tunder and Wilms as an unsalaried engineer-in-training in order to gain practical experience on the docks. And at that point, his life took the following turn.

His exams had meant a long period of concentrated work, and upon returning home he looked paler than he ought—even given his general type. Dr. Heidekind scolded whenever he saw him and insisted on a change of air, and he meant a radical change. Norderney or Wyk on the island of Föhr, he said, would not do it this time, and if you were to ask him, what Hans Castorp needed was a few weeks in the Alps before going to work on the docks.

That was fine, Consul Tienappel told his nephew and ward, but then their paths would have to part for the summer, because wild horses couldn’t drag him, Consul Tienappel, to the Alps. That was not for him, he required sensible barometric pressure or he would have another attack. Hans Castorp could go right ahead and take a trip to the Alps. Why not pay Joachim Ziemssen a visit?

That was a logical suggestion. Joachim Ziemssen was ill in fact—not ill like Hans Castorp, but really, dangerously ill, had even given them all quite a scare. He had always been susceptible to bronchitis and fevers, and then one day he actually coughed up red, and Joachim was shipped off posthaste to Davos—much to his great regret and dismay, because he was very close to seeing his ambition fulfilled. Bowing to the will of his family, he had first spent a couple of semesters studying law, but

then, following an irresistible urge, he had changed horses and volunteered as an ensign, and had

been accepted. And for the last five months he had been sitting in the International Sanatorium Berghof (Dr. Behrens, supervising physician), and was bored half to death, as he wrote in a postcard. And so if Hans Castorp was to treat himself to a little vacation before taking up his job with Tunder and Wilms, nothing could be more sensible than to provide his poor cousin with company up there in the mountains—it was the most pleasant solution for both parties.

It was the height of summer when he decided to take the trip—already the last week of July. He planned to stay three weeks.

CHAPTER 3

THE SHADOW OF RESPECTABILITY

Hans Castorp had been afraid he would oversleep, he had been so thoroughly exhausted, but he was up and about earlier than necessary and had plenty of time leisurely to pursue his usual, highly civilized morning routine—its chief utensils included a rubber basin, a wooden bowl of green, lavender-scented soap, and a straw-colored brush—and was able not only to tend to matters of personal hygiene but also to unpack and put his things away. And as he passed the silver-plated blade across the perfumed foam on his cheeks, he recalled his muddled dreams and smiled an indulgent smile at such nonsense, shaking his head with the superiority of a man shaving by the light of reasonable day. He did not feel all that well rested, but fresh enough to meet the morning. He powdered his cheeks and slipped into his plaid undershorts and red morocco-leather slippers, and still drying his hands, he stepped out onto the balcony, which, although private, was connected to those adjoining and separated from them only by an opaque glass partition that extended almost to the railing. The morning was cool and cloudy. Long banks of fog lay motionless along the hills to both sides, while masses of clouds, white and gray, were draped on the more distant mountains. Patches and streaks of blue sky were visible here and there, and when a ray of sun broke through, the village in the valley below glistened white against the dark forests of pine on the slopes. Somewhere morning music was playing; presumably it came from the same hotel where the concert had been held the evening before. Muted chords of a chorale drifted toward him; a march followed after a brief pause. Hans Castorp loved music with all his heart, its effect being much like that of the porter he drank with his morning snack—profoundly calming, numbing, and “doze”-inducing— and he listened now with pleasure, his head tilted to one side, mouth open, eyes slightly bloodshot. He looked down at the winding road they had followed up to the sanatorium the evening before. Short-stemmed, starlike gentians were blooming in the moist grass of the slope. A section of the level

ground had been fenced in to form a garden with gravel paths, flowerbeds, and an artificial grotto

beneath a stately silver fir. Next to a metal-roofed arcade, open to the south and filled with lounge chairs, stood a flagpole, painted reddish brown and displaying a banner that fluttered full now and then—a fantasy flag, green and white, with a snake-entwined caduceus, the symbol of healing, at its center.

A woman was walking in the garden, an older lady with a gloomy, even tragic look. Clad completely in black, with a black veil wound round her disheveled grayish-black hair, she wandered restlessly along the paths, keeping an even but quick pace, her knees slightly bent, her arms hanging stiffly at an angle in front of her. Her brow was creased by a frown, and her lowered, coal-black eyes, the skin beneath them forming drooping bags, were directed straight ahead. Her aging face, with its pale Mediterranean complexion and large, careworn mouth turned down at one corner, reminded Hans Castorp of a picture he had once seen of a famous tragedian; and it was eerie to watch how this pale woman dressed in black matched her long, somber strides, apparently without realizing it, to the rhythm of march music in the distance.

Hans Castorp gazed down at her in thoughtful sympathy, and it seemed as if her sad appearance darkened the morning sun. Simultaneously, however, he perceived something else, something audible, coming from the adjoining room on his left, the room with the Russian couple, so Joachim had said—noises that were likewise ill suited to this cheerful, fresh morning, that tainted it, making it seem sultry somehow. Hans Castorp remembered that he had heard the same sounds the night before, but had been too tired to pay them any attention. Giggles, gasps, grapplings—there was no disguising the indelicate nature of the sound, although in his kindheartedness the young man at first tried hard to give it a harmless interpretation. One could use other terms for his kindheartedness— an insipid phrase like “purity of soul,” for instance, or a more serious and beautiful word like “modesty,” or disparaging words such as “avoidance of the truth” and “hypocrisy,” or even a phrase about “the mystic piety of shyness”—and Hans Castorp’s reaction to the sounds from the adjoining room combined something of them all and was visible now as a shadow of respectability that darkened his face, as if he should not know and did not want to know anything about what he heard there. It was an expression of propriety—not exactly original, but one he was in the habit of assuming under certain circumstances.

And with this look on his face he returned to his room to avoid having to listen any longer to the proceedings, which despite the giggles sounded terribly serious, disconcertingly so. But the events on the far side of the wall were even more audible from his room. An apparent chase around the furniture, the crash of an upturned chair, a grab, an embrace, slaps and kisses—and then, of all things

to accompany the invisible scene, a waltz was struck up in the distance, the tired melody of a popular

ballad. Hans Castorp stood, towel in hand, and listened against his best intentions. And suddenly a blush rose up under his talcum, because what he had clearly seen coming had now arrived, and beyond any doubt, the game had turned bestial. “Good God in heaven!” he thought, turning away to finish dressing with as much noise as he could manage. “Well, they’re married, for heaven’s sake, that’s as it should be at least. But in broad daylight, that is a bit much. And I’m almost certain that they disturbed the peace last night, too. After all, they are ill, that’s why they’re here, or one of them is at least, and a little self-control wouldn’t be out of place. But of course,” he realized angrily, “the real scandal is that the walls are so thin and that you can hear everything so clearly, and that’s simply intolerable! Cheap construction, naturally, shamefully cheap! I wonder if I shall see these people later, or even be introduced to them? That would be most embarrassing.” But now Hans Castorp realized to his amazement that the flush that had come to his freshly shaven cheeks had not subsided, or at least the warmth that had come with it was not about to depart—the same hot, dry face that had bothered him yesterday evening, and that had disappeared while he slept, was back now in full force. This did not make him feel any friendlier toward the married couple next door, indeed he pouted his lips and muttered something very disparaging about them; and now he made the mistake of splashing his face with water again to cool it, which only made matters worse. And so he was feeling cross and at loose ends when he heard his cousin knock on the wall and call out to him. His expression, as Joachim entered the room, was not that of a man refreshed by sleep and ready to greet the morning.

BREAKFAST

“Hello,” Joachim said. “So that was your first night up here. Are you well satisfied?”

He was ready for a walk, dressed in sporty clothes and sturdy, tooled boots, his ulster flung over his arm, the outline of the flat bottle clearly visible in one pocket. He wasn’t wearing a hat today, either. “Thanks,” Hans Castorp replied, “well enough. I’ll not categorize it any further. I had some rather confused dreams. And the place has one shortcoming, you know, it’s not soundproof—that is rather annoying. Who was the woman in black out in the garden?”

Joachim knew at once whom he meant.

“Ah, that’s Tous-les-deux,” he said. “That’s what we all call her at least, because those are the only words you ever hear out of her. She’s Mexican, you see, and knows not a word of German and almost no French, either, just a few scraps. She’s been here with her eldest son for five weeks now, a perfectly hopeless case, who’ll be making his exit soon enough—it’s all through him, his whole body’s poisoned with it, you could say, and at that stage it looks a lot like typhoid fever, Behrens says— gruesome for all involved, at any rate. And two weeks ago, now, her second son arrived up here, because he wanted to see his brother one last time—handsome young fellow, by the way, but then so is the other—both of them pretty as pictures, with those glowing eyes that drive the ladies crazy. Well, the younger one already had a little bit of a cough down below, but was otherwise in quite good shape. And no sooner does he arrive than he has a temperature—and I mean a high fever, a hundred and three right away—he takes to his bed, and if he ever gets up again, Behrens says, he’ll have more luck than sense. But in any case, it was high time, and then some, for him to come up here. Yes, and since then the mother just wanders about, when she’s not sitting with them, and the only thing she ever says to anyone she meets is: ‘tous les deux!’ Because that’s all she knows how to say, and there’s no one here who understands Spanish.”

“So that’s her problem,” Hans Castorp said. “I wonder if she’ll say the same thing to me when I get to know her? That would be so strange—I mean, it would be comical and weird at the same time,” he said, and his eyes took on yesterday’s look—seemed too hot and heavy, as if he had been weeping for a long time, and shone with the same glint that the

Austrian horseman’s novel cough had enkindled in them. In fact, he felt as if he had only just now reestablished a connection with yesterday, as if he were taking in the whole picture again, as it were, which had not really been the case since he awoke. He was ready, by the way, he declared, shaking a few drops of lavender water on his handkerchief so that he could dab at his brow and under his eyes. “If it’s all right with you, we can go to breakfast—tous les deux,” he added as a joke, in a burst of high spirits. Joachim cast him a gentle glance and smiled a curious smile—melancholy and slightly mocking, it seemed—but why, he kept to himself.

After making sure that he had cigars to smoke, Hans Castorp picked up his walking stick, coat, and hat—the last out of obstinacy, because he was all too definite in his own civilized habits to change them lightly and adopt strange new ones for a mere three weeks. And so they left, taking the stairs, and as they passed one door or another, Joachim would name its occupant—German names, but also all sorts of odd-sounding ones—adding brief remarks about the person’s character and the severity of the case.

They also met people already returning from breakfast, and whenever Joachim said good morning to anyone, Hans Castorp would politely tip his hat. He was tense and nervous, like a young man about to introduce himself to a host of strangers, all the while plagued by the distinct feeling that his eyes and face are red—which was only partly true, because he was actually rather pale.

“Before I forget,” he suddenly said rather impulsively, “you can go ahead and introduce me to the lady in the garden if we happen to meet her, I have no objections. She can repeat her ‘tous les deux’ to me, it won’t matter. I’m ready for it now and understand what it means and will know how to put on the proper face. But I don’t want to make the acquaintance of the Russian couple, do you hear? I definitely don’t want that. They are people devoid of all manners, and although I am going to have to live next door to them for three weeks because there was no other way to arrange things, I do not wish to know them. I am perfectly within my rights in expressly forbidding it.”

“Fine,” Joachim said. “Did they disturb you all that much? Yes, they are barbarians, so to speak— uncivilized, to put a word on it—I did warn you. He always comes to meals in a leather jacket—quite shabby, let me tell you. I’m amazed Behrens doesn’t do something about it. And she’s not all that well groomed herself, despite the plumed hat. But in any case, you needn’t worry, they sit a good distance away, at the Bad Russian table—because there’s also a Good Russian table, where the more refined Russians sit. So there’s hardly any possibility you’d meet them, even if you wanted to. It’s not at all easy to make acquaintances here, if only because there are so many foreigners among the guests. I personally have got to know only a few myself in all my months here.”

“Which of them is ill?” Hans Castorp asked. “He or she?”

“He is, I think. Yes, just him,” Joachim said, obviously preoccupied. They hung their coats on the stands outside the dining hall, and entered it, a bright, low-vaulted room, where voices buzzed, dishes clattered, and “dining attendants” scurried about with steaming pots of coffee.

There were seven tables in the dining hall, five placed lengthwise, only two crosswise. The tables were large, with room for ten persons at each, although not all the places had been set. They took only a few steps diagonally across the room, and Hans Castorp found that he was already at the place set for him, at the end of the middle table toward the front of the room, halfway between the two crosswise tables. Standing erect behind his chair, Hans Castorp bowed stiffly and cordially to his tablemates as Joachim formally introduced them, although he barely looked at them, let alone made a conscious note of their names. The only face and name he put together was Frau Stöhr, noticing her red face and oily, ash-blond hair, and an expression of such willful ignorance that it was easy to believe her guilty of howling gaffes. Then he sat down and noted approvingly that early breakfast here was a serious meal.

There were pots of marmalade and honey, bowls of oatmeal and creamed rice, plates of scrambled eggs and cold meats; they had been generous with the butter. Someone lifted the glass bell from a soft Swiss cheese and cut off a piece; what was more, a bowl of fruit, both fresh and dried, stood in the middle of the table. A dining attendant in black and white asked Hans Castorp what he wanted to drink—cocoa, coffee, or tea? She was as small as a child, with an old, long face—a dwarf, he realized with a shock. He looked at his cousin, who merely shrugged and lifted an eyebrow as if to say, “Right, what else is new?” And so Hans Castorp simply accepted the fact and, since it was a dwarf, asked for his tea with special courtesy. He began with some creamed rice topped with sugar and cinnamon, meanwhile letting his eyes wander over the other items he intended to sample and across the seven tables of assembled guests—Joachim’s colleagues, his companions in misfortune, all with the same illness deep inside, all chatting and breakfasting.

The room was done in the kind of modern decor that combines the most efficient simplicity with just a dash of fantasy. It was not deep in relation to its width, and on all four sides was a kind of passageway where the sideboards stood and that opened as a series of arches onto the central dining area. Its columns were paneled with a sandalwood finish, but only partway up; the top of each was painted white, like the upper half of the walls and the ceiling, but colorfully trimmed with simple, cheerful stenciled stripes, which then continued along the broad arches of the low ceiling. The hall was also decorated with several shiny brass chandeliers, all electric, each a series of three stacked rings joined by delicate filigree, with bells of milk glass set like little moons on the lowest circle. There were four glass doors—two on the long wall opposite, opening onto a veranda outside; a third up front to the left, leading directly into the front lobby; and finally the one through which Hans Castorp had entered and that opened off a different hallway, because Joachim had not used the same set of stairs as the night before.

To his right was a homely creature in black, with a dull, flushed complexion and fuzzy cheeks; he took her to be a seamstress or dressmaker, chiefly because her breakfast consisted of nothing but coffee and buttered rolls—and for some reason he had always associated dressmakers with coffee and buttered rolls. On his left sat an English maiden lady—likewise well on in years, very ugly, with skinny, frigid fingers, who was drinking tea the color of blood and reading letters from home, written in a full, rounded hand. Next to her came Joachim, and then Frau Stöhr in a Scotchplaid woolen blouse. She kept the balled fist of her left hand pressed to her cheek while she ate and took obvious pains to make a refined impression when she talked, primarily by pulling her upper lip back to expose her long, narrow, rabbitlike teeth. A young man with a sparse moustache and an expression on his face as if he had something foul-tasting in his mouth sat down next to her and ate his breakfast in total silence. Hans Castorp had already taken his seat when the fellow entered, his chin sunk against his chest as he walked, and took his place without a glance at anyone, showing by his demeanor that he absolutely did not wish to be introduced to the new guest. Perhaps he was too ill to value or see any point in mere formalities, or even to take any interest in his surroundings. Seated across from him, very briefly, was an extraordinarily gaunt, very blond young woman, who emptied a bottle of yogurt onto her plate, spooned down this dairy product, and promptly departed.

The table conversation was not exactly lively. Joachim chatted politely with Frau Stöhr, inquiring

after her health and expressing gentlemanly regrets that it left something to be desired. She complained of her “listlessness.” “I’m so listless,” she said, drawling it out with the affectation of the uneducated. Her temperature had already been 99.2 degrees when she got up, and what would it be by afternoon? The dressmaker admitted to a temperature equally as high, but declared the effect was just the opposite with her, that she felt quite excitable, nervous and restless inside, as if some special, decisive event were about to happen, which was not the case at all, this being simply a physical excitation with no psychological basis. She was probably not a dressmaker after all, because she spoke correctly, almost pedantically. All the same, Hans Castorp found her excitability, or at least her discussion of it, somehow inappropriate, almost indecent for such a nondescript, insignificant creature. He asked them, first the dressmaker and then Frau Stöhr, how long they had been up here— the former had been a resident for five months, the latter for seven; he marshaled his English to ask his neighbor on the left what sort of tea that was she was drinking—rose-hip, he learned—and whether it tasted good, to which she responded almost stormily in the affirmative. He now gazed out across the room where people were coming and going: early breakfast was not a strictly communal affair.

He had been a little afraid of the dreadful effect all this might have on him, but found himself disappointed in that—the dining hall atmosphere was quite congenial, one had no sense of being in a place of misery. Well-tanned young people of both sexes entered humming a tune, spoke with the dining attendants, and weighed into breakfast with a robust appetite. There were more mature people as well, married couples, a whole family with children, including teenage boys, all speaking Russian. Almost all the women wore close-fitting jackets of wool or silk, called “sweaters,” in white or bright colors, with shawl collars and side pockets; it looked very pretty when they just stood there chatting, both hands buried in their sweater pockets. Photographs were passed around at several tables—recent shots they had taken themselves, no doubt; at one table they were trading postage stamps. The talk was of the weather, of how one had slept and what one’s “oral measurement” had been that morning. Most of them were cheerful—for no particular reason presumably, but simply because they had no immediate cares and were assembled in considerable numbers. A few people, to be sure, sat at the table with heads propped in their hands, staring straight ahead. People let them stare and paid them no attention.

Suddenly Hans Castorp flinched—he was annoyed and offended. A door, the one to his left that led to the lobby, had banged shut—someone had simply let it slam, or perhaps even slammed it intentionally, and that was a noise that Hans Castorp absolutely could not tolerate, he had always

hated it. Perhaps it was a learned dislike, perhaps an inborn idiosyncrasy—whatever it was, he

abhorred banging doors and could have slapped anyone guilty of slamming one within earshot. In this case, the door was divided into little glass panes, which only heightened the shock: it was a bang and a rattle. “Damn it,” Hans Castorp thought angrily, “what kind of sloppiness is that?” Since the seamstress had said something to him at the same moment, he had no chance to determine who the malefactor was. But as he answered the seamstress, there were deep furrows between his blond eyebrows and his face was wrenched with distress.

Joachim asked whether the doctors had been through yet. Yes, they had been there once already, someone replied, but had left the dining hall at almost the same moment the cousins arrived. Then they might as well not wait, Joachim said. There would be an opportunity in the course of the day to make the introductions. But at the door they almost collided with Director Behrens, who came striding through it at high speed, followed by Dr. Krokowski.

“Whoops, heads up, gentlemen!” Behrens said. “That could have meant some badly trodden corns for all parties.” He spoke with a strong Lower Saxon accent, chewing his words broadly. “So, you’re the fellow,” he said to Hans Castorp, after Joachim clicked his heels together and made the introductions. “Well, my pleasure.” And he extended a hand as big as a shovel. He was a bony man, a good three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski, with a shock of white hair; his neck vertebrae stuck out, and his watery, bloodshot blue eyes protruded; he had a snub nose above a little short-cropped moustache, which sat slightly askew because his upper lip was turned up at one corner. What Joachim had said about his cheeks proved to be the absolute truth—they were purple, making his head look that much more colorful against his belted, white surgical smock, which fell just below the knees, revealing striped trousers and colossal feet in a pair of yellow, rather worn, laced boots. Dr. Krokowski was in professional uniform as well, except that his smock was more shirtlike, with elastic at the wrists, and of a black, shiny fabric that only emphasized his pallor. He played the role of the perfect assistant, taking no part whatever in the exchanged greetings—although the tense, critical way he held his mouth suggested that he found his subordinate position a little absurd.

“Cousins?” the director asked, gesturing with his hand, pointing now at one, now at the other, and looking down out of bloodshot blue eyes. “Well, is he going to march to the pipe and drum like you?” he asked Joachim, nodding his head toward Hans Castorp. “Ha, God forbid—right? I spotted it at once.” And now he spoke directly to Hans Castorp: “There’s something so civilian, so comfortable about you—no rattling sabers like our corporal here. You would be a better patient than he, I’d lay odds on that. I can tell right off whether someone will make a competent patient or not, because that takes talent, everything takes talent, and this Myrmidon here hasn’t the least talent for

it. For military drill, maybe, I can’t say as to that, but none for being ill. He constantly wants to leave,

can you believe it? Forever asking to leave, pesters and badgers me and simply can’t wait to live a life of drudgery down below. What a zealot! Won’t give us six months of his time. Even though we have such a lovely place here—you must admit, Ziemssen, it is lovely here, isn’t it? Well, your good cousin will know better how to appreciate us, he’ll be able to amuse himself. There’s no shortage of ladies—we have the most adorable ladies here. Many of them quite picturesque—viewed externally, at least. But you’ll have to improve your color somewhat, too, otherwise the ladies will give you the cold shoulder. ‘The golden tree of life is green,’ true, but a green face is really not quite the thing. Totally anemic, of course,” he said, and mechanically stepped up to Hans Castorp, extended two fingers, and pulled an eyelid down. “No doubt of it, totally anemic, just as I said. Do you know what? It was not all that stupid of you to leave your Hamburg to fend for itself for a while. A highly commendable institution, your Hamburg. Always sends us a nice contingent, what with its intoxicatingly damp meteorology. But if I might use this opportunity to give you some modest advice—quite sine pecunia, of course—as long as you’re here with us, why don’t you do just what your cousin does? In a case like yours, there’s no wiser course than to live for a while as if it were a slight tuberculosis pulmonum, and build up your protein a little. It’s very curious, you see, the way protein is metabolized up here. Although one’s general metabolism increases, the body stores the protein. Well, and you slept well, did you, Ziemssen? Fine, fine. But now, do get on with your promenade! But no more than half an hour. And make sure you stick the old mercury cigar in your mouth afterward. And always jot down the results, right, Ziemssen? Conscientiously doing one’s duty. I’ll want to see your chart come Saturday. And your good cousin should measure, too. Measuring never hurts. Morning, gentlemen. Have a good time. Morning, morning . . .” And Dr. Krokowski joined him as he sailed off, swinging his arms, palms turned clear around to the back, tossing his question right and left as to whether people had slept well, which was universally answered in the affirmative.

TEASING/VIATICUM/INTERRUPTED MERRIMENT

“Very nice man,” Hans Castorp said as they walked out the front door, with a friendly nod to the limping concierge, who was sitting in his office sorting letters. The main door was on the southeast side of the large white building, whose middle section rose one story higher than the two wings and was crowned by a clock tower roofed with slate-colored sheet iron. Leaving the building by this exit, you did not approach the garden, but came out facing directly onto an open slope of mountain meadows, dotted with a few tallish firs and several low mountain pines that hugged the ground. The path they took—actually it was the only one available other than the main road that descended to the valley—led them gently up the rise to their left, past the rear of the sanatorium, where the kitchens and offices were located and steel garbage cans lined the railing beside the cellar stairs, and held to that direction for a good distance, then made a sharp hairpin to the right and began a steeper ascent up the sparsely wooded hill. It was a firm earthen path, reddish in color and a little damp, with boulders here and there along the edge. The cousins quickly learned that they were not alone on their walk. Guests who had finished breakfast shortly after them followed on their heels, and coming toward them were whole groups of people on their way back, stomping the way people tend to do walking downhill.

“Very nice man,” Hans Castorp repeated. “Has such an easy way with words, it’s fun just to listen to him. ‘Mercury cigar’ for ‘thermometer’ is really quite splendid, I caught on right away. But I’m  going to light a real one now,” he said, coming to a halt. “I can’t stand it any longer. I’ve not had a decent smoke since yesterday noon. Excuse me a moment.” And from a buff leather etui monogrammed in silver, he extracted one of his Maria Mancinis—a lovely specimen from the top of the box, flattened on just one side the way he especially liked it—trimmed the tip squarely with a small tool that hung from his watch chain, produced a flame from his pocket lighter, and after a bit of concentrated puffing managed to light the rather long, blunt-ended cigar. “There!” he said. “Now we can get on with our promenade, for all I care. Of course, being a zealot, you’re not smoking these days, are you?”

“I’ve never smoked,” Joachim replied. “Why should I start up here, of all places?”

“I don’t understand,” Hans Castorp said. “I don’t understand how someone can not be a smoker— why it’s like robbing oneself of the best part of life, so to speak, or at least of an absolutely first-rate pleasure. When I wake up I look forward to being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to it again, in fact I can honestly say that I actually only eat so that I can smoke, although that’s an exaggeration, of course. But a day without tobacco—that would be absolutely insipid, a dull, totally wasted day. And if some morning I had to tell myself: there’s nothing left to smoke today, why I don’t think I’d find courage to get up, I swear I’d stay in bed. You see, if a man has a cigar that burns well—and obviously it can’t have any breaks or draw badly, that’s really terribly annoying—what I’m saying is, that if a man has a good cigar, then he’s home safe, nothing, literally nothing, can happen to him. It’s the same as when you’re lying on the beach, because there you lie on the beach, you know? and you don’t need anything else—no work, no other amusements. Thank God, people smoke all over the world, there’s nowhere you could possibly end up, as far as I know, where tobacco’s unknown. Even polar explorers lay in a good supply of smokes to get them over their hardships—that’s always struck a sympathetic chord in me whenever I’ve read about it.

Because things can go very badly—let’s assume, for instance, that things would go miserably for

me—but as long as I had my cigar, I’d carry on, that much I know, it could bring me through anything.”

“All the same, it’s a sign of a rather weak will,” Joachim said, “to be so dependent on tobacco. Behrens is quite right—you’re a civilian. He meant it more in praise, to be sure, but you are an incurable civilian, that’s the point. And besides, you’re healthy and can do what you like,” he said, and a weary look came into his eyes.

“Yes, healthy except for anemia,” Hans Castorp said. “That was a bit much, though, when he told me that I look green. But he’s right, it’s even obvious to me that in comparison to you folks up here I’m downright green—whereas I never really noticed it at home. And that really was very nice of him to just go ahead and offer some advice, quite sine pecunia as he put it. I’ll be happy to do as he says, and I hereby resolve to adapt my habits to yours—what else can I do as long as I’m up here with all of you? And it can’t hurt me, for heaven’s sake, to build up my protein, although that does sound disgusting, you must admit.”

Joachim coughed a couple of times as they walked—the climb was taxing for him, it seemed. When he started coughing a third time, he stopped and scowled. “Go on ahead,” he said. Hans Castorp first hurried on without looking back. Then he slowed his pace and almost came to a stop, assuming that by now he had a considerable lead on Joachim. But he did not look back.

A party of guests of both sexes was coming toward him—he had noticed them moving along a level stretch of path about halfway up the slope, and now they were tramping downhill, moving directly toward him, and he could hear the babble of voices. There were six or seven people of various ages, from very young things to a few who were somewhat further along in years. Still thinking about Joachim, he tilted his head and looked them over. They were all bareheaded and tanned, the ladies in colorful sweaters, the gentlemen without overcoats for the most part, even without walking sticks—they looked as if they had just stepped out the door for a breath of air, hands in their pockets. Since walking downhill is not a matter of strenuous exertion but more a sport, where you brace your legs and apply the brakes to keep from tripping or running—nothing more than helping yourself fall, really—there was a kind of nimble frivolity to their gait, which spread even to their faces, until the whole effect might very well have made you want to join their party.

They were just ahead of him now, and Hans Castorp took a close look at their faces. They were not all tanned, two of the ladies were conspicuously pale: the one thin as a rail, with an ivory complexion; the other shorter and plump, her face blemished by moles and freckles. They all looked at him, all smiling the same cheeky smile. A tall young girl in a green sweater, her hair in untidy disarray and

with doltish, half-closed eyes, brushed past Hans Castorp, so close that she almost touched him with

her arm. And whistled—no, that was just too crazy! She whistled at him, but not with her mouth; her lips weren’t puckered at all, were tightly closed in fact. The whistle came from inside, and all the while she stared at him, with her doltish, half-closed eyes. An extraordinarily unpleasant whistle, harsh, intense, and yet somehow hollow, an extended tone, emerging inexplicably from somewhere in her chest and falling off toward the end—it reminded him of the music you get from those inflatable rubber pigs you buy at a carnival, the way they wail mournfully when you squeeze the air out. And then she and the rest of her party had moved on.

Hans Castorp stood there aghast, staring straight ahead. Then he quickly turned around and decided that the horrid sound must have been a joke, a prearranged prank—that much at least was clear now, because as they moved off he saw their shoulders jiggling with laughter, and one stocky lad with thick lips, his hands stuck in his pants pockets, hitching his jacket up in a rather unbecoming way, blatantly turned to look back—and laughed. Joachim had caught up by now. He greeted the party in his usual chivalrous way, bowing and clicking his heels, almost standing at attention, and there was a gentle look in his eye as he joined his cousin.

“What sort of face is that you’re making?” he asked.

“She whistled!” Hans Castorp answered. “She whistled from her stomach as she passed me by. Would you kindly explain that to me?”

“Oh,” Joachim said, laughing dismissively. “Not from her stomach, what nonsense. That was the Kleefeld girl, Hermine Kleefeld, who can whistle with her pneumothorax.”

“With her what?” Hans Castorp asked. He was terribly agitated, but he didn’t quite know in what sense. Wavering between laughter and tears, he added, “You can’t expect me to understand your jargon.”

“Let’s move on,” Joachim said. “I can just as easily explain it while we walk. You look like you’ve struck root. As you might guess, it has to do with surgery, an operation that they perform up here. Behrens is quite an expert at it. When one lung has been badly ravaged, you see, but the other is healthy or relatively healthy, the infected one is relieved of its duties for a while, given a rest. Which means that they make an incision here, somewhere along the side here—I don’t know precisely where they cut, but Behrens has it down perfectly. And then they let gas in, nitrogen, you see, and that way the caseated lobes of the lung are put out of commission. The gas doesn’t last that long, of course, and has to be replaced twice a month or so—they more or less pump you up, that’s how you have to picture it. And after they’ve done that for a year or so, if all goes well, the lung will have rested long enough to heal. Not always, of course, it’s really rather risky business. But they say

they’ve had some nice successes with their pneumothorax. All the people you just saw have had it

done. Frau Iltis was with them—the one with the freckles—and Fräulein Levi, the skinny one, if you recall—she was confined to bed for a long time. They’ve formed a group—something like pneumothorax brings people together, naturally—and call themselves the ‘Half-Lung Club,’ that’s the name everyone knows them by. But the pride of the club is Hermine Kleefeld, because she can whistle with her pneumothorax—it’s her special talent, it’s certainly not something everyone can do. Not that I can tell you how she manages it, she can’t explain it clearly herself. But if she’s been walking rapidly, then she can whistle from inside, and of course she uses it then to startle people, especially newly arrived patients. I presume, by the way, that she’s wasting nitrogen by doing it, because she has to get a refill every week.”

And Hans Castorp was laughing now; during Joachim’s explanation, his agitation had resolved into mirth, and as he walked along, bent forward and shading his eyes with his hand, his shoulders were convulsed by his soft, rapid giggles.

“Has the club been registered?” he asked, though he found it hard to speak, and it sounded more like a whine or whimper from suppressed laughter. “Do they have bylaws? What a shame you’re not a member, Joachim, because then they could include me as an honorary guest—or associate member. You should ask Behrens to put you temporarily out of commission. Maybe you’d be able to whistle, too, if you really set your mind to it, after all it must be something you can learn. That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You’ll have to forgive me, really, for talking like this, but they were in a merry mood themselves, your pneumatic friends. Here they come walking up . . . and to think that it was the Half-Lung Club! ‘Tweeet’ she whistles at me—what a harum-scarum! What absolute devil-may-care. And I’m sure you can tell me just why they’re so devil-may-care, can’t you?”

Joachim searched for an answer. “My God,” he said, “they’re so free. I mean, they’re young and time plays no role in their lives, and they may very well die. Why should they go around with long faces? I sometimes think that illness and death aren’t really serious matters, that it’s all more like loafing around, and that, strictly speaking, things are serious only down below in real life. I think maybe you’ll come to understand that in due time, after you’ve been up here with us a little longer.” “Certainly,” Hans Castorp said, “I’m certain I shall. I’m already taking a great deal of interest in all of you up here, and once one is interested, why then understanding follows as a matter of course, doesn’t it? But what’s wrong with me—this doesn’t taste good,” he said, looking at his cigar. “I’ve been asking myself the whole time what was the matter, and now I realize that my Maria is the problem. I swear to you, it tastes like papier-mâché, exactly as if I had a terribly upset stomach. It’s

really quite incredible! I did eat an unusually large breakfast, but that can’t be the reason, because

when you eat a lot, it always tastes especially good at first. Do you think it can be because I slept so restlessly? Perhaps that’s thrown me off track. No, I’m simply going to have to toss it away,” he said after trying once more. “Every puff is a disappointment; there’s no point in forcing it.” He hesitated for a moment and then flicked the cigar down the slope among the wet pines. “Do you know what I’m convinced is to blame?” he asked. “I am thoroughly convinced that it has something to do with this damned flushed face of mine—it’s been bothering me again ever since I got up. Damned if it doesn’t feel as if I’m constantly blushing in embarrassment. Was it the same with you, too, when you first arrived?”

“Yes,” Joachim said, “I felt rather strange, too, at first. Don’t worry about it. I told you, if you remember, that it’s not all that easy to get used to our life up here. But you’ll soon be back on track. Look there, that bench has a nice view. Let’s sit down for a bit and then head home—I need to take my rest cure.”

They were now about a third of the way up the hill, but the path had leveled out, heading now in the direction of Davos-Platz. From between the tall firs and a few stunted ones bent by the wind, the view looked down on the village, which lay white under a brighter sky. The rudely fashioned bench on which they sat had its back to the steep slope. Water fell in an open wooden trough beside them, gurgling and splashing on its way to the valley.

Pointing with the tip of his alpenstock, Joachim set about teaching his cousin the names of the cloud- topped peaks that appeared to close off the valley to the south. But Hans Castorp was bent forward, glancing up only fleetingly while drawing figures in the sand with the silver-trimmed knob of his citified cane. And now he demanded to know other things.

“What I wanted to ask you—” he began. “The case in my room expired just before I arrived, you said. Have there been a lot of other deaths since you’ve been up here?”

“Several, certainly,” Joachim replied. “But they deal with them discreetly, you see, so you don’t hear about them, or only occasionally, later on. When someone dies it’s kept a strict secret, out of consideration for the other patients, in particular the ladies, who might easily go to pieces. If someone dies right next door, you don’t even notice it. The coffin is brought in early in the morning while you’re still sleeping, and then the party in question is removed only at another more suitable time— during meals, for instance.”

“Hmm,” Hans Castorp said and went on drawing. “So that quite a bit is happening backstage.” “Yes, you can put it that way. But recently—it must have been, wait a moment—probably eight weeks ago—”

“Then you can’t call it recently,” an alert Hans Castorp remarked dryly.

“What? Well then, not so recently. You’re so precise. I was just guessing at the date. But anyway, some time ago, I had a peek backstage myself, purely by accident, but it’s as real as if it had happened today. It was the little Hujus girl, Barbara Hujus—she was Catholic—when they brought her the viaticum, the sacrament for the dying, you know, extreme unction. She was still up and about when I arrived here, and could be so playfully funny, so downright silly, a real teenager. But then it all went very fast, she couldn’t get up anymore, lay bedridden just three rooms down from me, and her parents came, and so now the priest arrived, too. He came one afternoon, when everyone was at tea, with nobody in the halls. But you have to picture it—I had overslept, had fallen asleep during my rest cure and hadn’t heard the gong and was a quarter hour late. And so at the decisive moment I happened not to be where everyone else was, but had wandered backstage, as you put it, and as I’m walking down the corridor, I see them coming toward me, in lace shirts, a cross leading the way, a gold cross with little lanterns, one of them carrying it up front like the glockenspiel in a Turkish-style military band.”

“That’s a poor comparison,” Hans Castorp said rather sternly.

“It just seemed that way to me. It automatically reminded me of it. But now listen. They’re coming toward me, left right left, double-time, three of them if I’m not mistaken, the man with the cross first, then the priest, spectacles perched on his nose, and then a boy with a censer. The priest was carrying the sacrament against his chest, it had a cover over it, and holding his head very devoutly to one side—it’s their holy of holies, after all.”

“That’s precisely it,” Hans Castorp said. “That’s the reason why I was astounded when you said what you did about the glockenspiel.”

“Yes, yes. But just wait, if you had been there, you wouldn’t know what kind of face to put on, either, thinking back on it. It was like something you might see in a dream—”

“In what way?”

“Let me tell you. So there I am, asking myself how I ought to act under the circumstances. I didn’t have a hat to take off—”

“You see!” Hans Castorp quickly interrupted yet again. “You see, a man should always wear a hat. I’ve noticed, of course, that you people up here never wear one. But you should, so that you can tip it whenever the occasion demands. But now what happened?”

“I stood back against the wall,” Joachim said, “taking up a respectful pose, and made a little bow as they came even with me—it was right in front of the little Hujus girl’s room, number twenty-eight. The priest was glad to see my response, I think, and returned my greeting very politely, doffing his

cap. But by this time they have all come to a halt, and the altar boy with the censer knocks on the

door, then lifts the latch, and lets his supervisor step ahead into the room. But now, just picture it, just imagine the terror I felt. The moment the priest sets a foot over the threshold, a hue and cry starts up inside, first a shriek like nothing you’ve ever heard, three or four times in a row, and then just screaming without a pause or break, like a mouth gaping wide open, I suppose, ‘Ahhh—’ and with such misery and terror and defiance in it that I can’t describe it, and such ghastly pleading mixed in, too, and then all of a sudden it turns hollow and muffled, as if it has sunk down into the earth or is coming from a deep cellar.”

Hans Castorp had turned abruptly to face his cousin. “And was that the Hujus girl?” he asked in exasperation. “But why ‘from a deep cellar’?”

“She had crawled under her blanket,” Joachim said. “Just imagine how I felt. The priest was standing just on the far side of the threshold, speaking soothing words—I can still see him—the way he constantly thrust his head forward and then jerked it back. The cross-bearer and the altar boy were stuck there at the door and couldn’t get in. But I could see between them into the room. It’s a room just like yours or mine, with the bed to the left of the door along one side, and there were people standing at its head, her family of course, her parents, directing comforting words down at the bed, where you could only see a formless mass, begging and protesting hideously and kicking its legs.” “Are you saying she was kicking with her legs?”

“For all she was worth. But it didn’t help, she had to be given the sacrament of the dying. The pastor walked over to her and the other two stepped inside as well, and then the door was closed. But just before that, I saw the Hujus girl’s head emerge for a mere second, her light blond hair, and her pale eyes, no color to them at all, gaping wide, staring at the priest—and then she ducked under the sheets again with a loud wail.”

“And you’re telling me only now?” Hans Castorp said after a pause. “I can’t understand how you didn’t bring it up yesterday evening. But, my God, she must have had a lot of strength left to fight back like that. That takes strength. You shouldn’t send for a priest until they’re very weak.”

“But she was weak,” Joachim replied. “Oh, there are lots of things I could tell you about; it’s hard to know what to pick out first. She was already weak—it was fear that gave her so much strength. She was terribly frightened, because she realized she was going to die. She was just a young girl, so it is excusable, after all. But even grown men carry on like that sometimes, which is, of course, inexcusably weak-willed of them. Behrens knows how to deal with them, he can strike just the right tone for such cases.”

“What sort of tone?” Hans Castorp asked with a scowl.

“ ‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ he says,” Joachim replied. “At least that’s what he said to one fellow

recently—we heard about it from the head nurse who was present to help restrain the dying man. He was one of those types who makes a dreadful scene right at the end and absolutely refuses to die. And so Behrens simply dressed him down: ‘Would you please not make such a fuss,’ he said, and the patient quieted down at once and died quite peaceably.”

Hans Castorp slapped his thigh with one hand, threw himself back against the bench, and stared at the sky.

“Listen here, that’s weighty stuff,” he cried. “Snaps his head off and says, ‘Don’t make such a fuss!’ To a dying man. Weighty stuff. A dying man deserves a certain amount of respect. You can’t just walk up to him so calm and cool and   There’s something holy about a dying man, as it were—in

my opinion.”

“I won’t deny that,” Joachim said. “But if he starts carrying on in such a weak-willed way  ”

“No,” Hans Castorp insisted with a ferocity not at all appropriate to the mild objection Joachim had offered. “I’ll not let you talk me out of it. A dying man has something nobler about him than your average rascal strolling about, laughing and making money and stuffing his belly. It won’t do.” And his voice began to waver strangely. “It just won’t do to walk up so calm and cool and  ” But now

his words were swallowed in a fit of laughter that suddenly overwhelmed him, the same laughter as yesterday, welling up from deep inside—convulsive, unbounded laughter, until he had to close his eyes for the tears.

“Psst,” Joachim said suddenly. “Quiet!” he whispered and gave his cousin, still laughing uncontrollably, a silent poke in the ribs. Hans Castorp looked up through his tears.

A stranger was coming up the path on their left, a delicate man with brown hair and a black moustache twirled at the ends; he was wearing pastel checked trousers and exchanged a good- morning with Joachim as he came up to them—his greeting was precise and melodious. And now he stopped, striking a graceful pose in front of them by propping himself on his cane and crossing his ankles.

SATANA

It would have been difficult to guess his age, but it surely had to be somewhere between thirty and forty, because, although the general impression was youthful, he was already silvering at the temples and his hair was thinning noticeably, receding toward the part in two wide arcs, making the brow even higher. His outfit—loose trousers in a pastel yellow check and a wide-lapelled, double-breasted coat that was made of something like petersham and hung much too long—was far from laying any claim to elegance. The edges of his rounded high collar were rough from frequent laundering, his black tie was threadbare, and he apparently didn’t even bother with cuffs—Hans Castorp could tell from the limp way the coat sleeves draped around his wrists. All the same, he could definitely see that he had a gentleman before him—the refined expression on the stranger’s face, his easy, even handsome pose left no doubt of that. This mixture of shabbiness and charm, plus the black eyes and a handlebar moustache, immediately reminded Hans Castorp of certain foreign musicians who would appear in his hometown at Christmastime and strike up a tune, then gaze up with velvet eyes and hold out their slouch hats to catch the coins you threw them from the window. “An organ- grinder!” he thought. And so he was not surprised by the name he now heard as Joachim got up from the bench somewhat flustered and introduced him, “Castorp, my cousin—Herr Settembrini.”

Hans Castorp had also stood up by way of greeting, traces of excess merriment still on his face. But the Italian politely remarked that he did not wish to disturb them and urged them to take their seats, whereas he remained standing in his becoming pose. He stood there, smiling and observing the cousins, particularly Hans Castorp, and the delicate line at one corner of his mouth, the mocking curl of the lip just below where his full moustache swept handsomely upward, had a peculiar effect— somehow it exhorted one to be alert and clearheaded, and in a flash so sobered the inebriated Hans Castorp that he felt ashamed of himself.

Settembrini said, “The gentlemen are in high spirits—and with good cause, good cause. A splendid morning! The sky is blue, the sun is smiling.” And with an easy, felicitous wave of his arm he lifted his little, yellowish hand toward the heavens and simultaneously cast an oblique glance in the same upward direction. “One could in fact forget completely just where one is.”

He spoke without any accent—at most one might have recognized him as a foreigner from the precision in the way he shaped his sounds. His lips took a certain delight in forming the words. It was a pleasure to listen to him. “And your journey, sir, to join us here was pleasant, I hope?” he asked, turning to Hans Castorp. “And is one already in possession of the verdict? I mean—has the gloomy ceremony of the first examination taken place yet?” Had he cared for an answer, he would have fallen silent and waited—for he had asked a question and Hans Castorp was about to reply. But the stranger went right on with his inquiries: “And did it go well? Given your hilarity”—he fell silent for a moment and the furrowed curl at the corner of his mouth deepened—“one could draw contradictory conclusions. How many months have our Minos and Rhadamanthus saddled you with?” The phrase “saddled you with” sounded particularly droll coming from him. “Shall I guess? Six? Or nine, right off? They’re not stingy, you know . . .”

Hans Castorp laughed in surprise—meanwhile trying to recall who Minos and Rhadamanthus were, exactly. He answered, “How do you mean? No, you’re mistaken, Herr Septem—” “Settembrini,” the Italian corrected him with particular verve, accompanied by a facetious bow.

“Herr Settembrini—beg your pardon. No, you are mistaken. I am not sick at all. I’m merely visiting my cousin Ziemssen for a few weeks and using the occasion for a little relaxation myself.”

“Great Scott! You are not one of us? You are healthy, you are merely stopping over, as it were, like Odysseus in the realm of shades? How bold of you to descend into the depths, where the futile dead live on without their wits—”

“Into the depths, Herr Settembrini? But I beg your pardon—I climbed a good five thousand feet to join you up here.”

“It only seemed that way to you. Upon my word—it was an illusion,” the Italian said with a decisive gesture of one hand. “We are creatures who have fallen to great depths, are we not, lieutenant?” he asked, turning to Joachim, who took considerable delight in the title, but tried to hide the fact in a sober reply.

“We do become rather tedious, I suppose. But one can always pull oneself together again.”

“Yes, I trust you shall; you’re an upstanding fellow,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes, yes,” he repeated, hissing the s all three times. Turning again to Hans Castorp, he clicked his tongue softly an equal number of times. “I see, I see, I see,” he now said in another triplet of sharp s’s, gazing at the newcomer so steadily that his eyes took on a fixed, vacant look; but then life returned to them again and he went on, “You’ve joined us up here quite voluntarily so that we downsliders may enjoy the pleasure of your company for a while. Well, how lovely. And what sort of a time period do you have in mind? I mean that not as a subtle question—I am simply intrigued to know how long the sentence is when it is pronounced by oneself and not by Rhadamanthus.”

“Three weeks,” Hans Castorp said with a kind of breezy self-complacency, realizing he was the object of envy.

“O Dio, three weeks! Did you hear, lieutenant? Is there not something impertinent about saying: I’m coming here for three weeks and then moving on? We do not know the week as a unit of measurement, sir, if I may be permitted to instruct you. Our smallest unit of time is the month. We measure on a grand scale—it is one of the privileges of shades. We have others as well, all of equal quality. Might I ask what profession you pursue down below—or more correctly, for what profession you are preparing yourself? You see, our curiosity knows no bounds—we count curiosity among our privileges, too.”

“Oh, no offense taken,” Hans Castorp said, and provided the information.

“A shipbuilder—how marvelous!” Settembrini cried. “I assure you, I think that’s marvelous, although my own talents lie in a different direction.”

“Herr Settembrini is a literary man,” Joachim said, explaining with some embarrassment. “He wrote the obituary of Carducci for the German papers—Carducci, you know.” And he grew even more embarrassed when his cousin looked at him in amazement as if to say: “What do you know about Carducci? About as much as I do, I bet.”

“That’s right,” the Italian said with a nod. “I had the honor of telling your countrymen about that great poet and freethinker once his life had drawn to a close. I knew him, I may even say that I was a disciple. I sat at his feet in Bologna. I have him to thank for whatever refinement and good cheer I call my own. But we were speaking of you—a shipbuilder? Do you know that you are visibly growing in stature right before my eyes? Suddenly there you sit, the representative of a whole world of labor and practical genius.”

“But Herr Settembrini—I’m really only a student, I’m just beginning.”

“To be sure, and the first step is always the most difficult. Indeed, all labor truly deserving of the name is difficult, is it not?”

“Devil knows that’s right,” Hans Castorp said, and it came from the heart.

Settembrini’s eyebrows flew up. “And you even call upon the Devil,” he said, “to support your opinions? Satan himself? Did you know that my great teacher once wrote a hymn to him?”

“Excuse me,” Hans Castorp said, “to the Devil?”

“The Devil himself. It is even sung on certain festive occasions in my homeland. ‘O salute, O Satana, O ribellione, O forza vindice della ragione’ . . . a splendid hymn! But that was most probably not the Devil you had in mind, because he is on excellent terms with labor. The one you mean, the Devil who considers labor an abomination because he fears it, is presumably the other one, of whom it is said one shouldn’t give him an inch.”

All this had a very strange effect on Hans Castorp. He did not understand Italian—and felt no more comfortable about the rest of it. There was a preachy flavor to it, although it was delivered in the light, bantering tone of small talk. He looked at his cousin—who simply lowered his eyes—and then said, “Ah, Herr Settembrini, you take my words all too literally. My reference to the Devil was merely a figure of speech, I assure you.”

“Someone must show some wit,” Settembrini said, gazing dolefully into the air. But then he grew animated again, brightened up, and charmingly brought the conversation around. “In any case, I am correct in concluding from your words that you have chosen a profession as demanding as it is honorable. My God, I am a humanist, a homo humanus, and understand nothing of such ingenious matters, however sincere my deep respect for them. But I can well imagine that the theoretical side of your profession demands a clear and keen mind and its practice no less than the whole man—is that not so?”

“It certainly is, yes, I can agree with you unconditionally there,” Hans Castorp responded, instinctively attempting to speak with a little more eloquence. “Its demands are colossal nowadays— one dare not be all too aware of just how exacting or one might truly lose all heart. No, it is no fun. And when one’s constitution is not all that strong—I am here only as a guest, true, but my constitution’s not exactly the strongest, and I would be lying were I to claim that work suits me splendidly. Indeed it rather wears me down, I must say. Actually, I only feel really healthy when I am doing nothing at all.”

“Now, for example?”

“Now? Oh, I’m still so new up here—a little confused, as you can well imagine.” “Ah—confused.”

“Yes, I didn’t sleep all that well, and then the first breakfast was really too sumptuous. I’m used to a good breakfast, but what we had today seemed to me a little too heavy, too ‘rich,’ as the English say. In short, I’m feeling somewhat uneasy, particularly since my cigar didn’t seem to taste good this morning—just imagine! That almost never happens to me, really only when I’m seriously ill. And today it tastes like leather. I had to toss it away, there was no point in forcing it. Are you a smoker, if I may ask? No? Then you can’t imagine what an annoyance, what a disappointment that is for someone like myself, who has smoked with such gusto from youth on.”

“I am inexperienced in that area,” Settembrini replied, “but find myself in rather good company in that lack of experience. A great many noble and prudent minds have detested tobacco smoke. Carducci did not love it, either. But you’ll find sympathy from Rhadamanthus there. He is a devotee of your vice.”

“Now, now—vice, Herr Settembrini . . .”

“Why not? One must apply truth and energy in naming things. It elevates and intensifies life. I have my vices, too.”

“So Director Behrens is also an expert on cigars, I see. A charming man.” “You think so? Ah, and so you have already made his acquaintance?”

“Yes, just now, as we were leaving for our walk. It was almost a kind of consultation, but sine pecunia, you know. He immediately noticed that I am rather anemic. And suggested that I should adopt my cousin’s style of life here—lie out on the balcony a great deal, even said I should measure my temperature, too.”

“Is that right?” Settembrini exclaimed. “Excellent!” he cried into the air above him, throwing his head back and laughing. “How does that go in the opera of your greatest composer? ‘I am the man who catches birds, am always merry, mark my words!’ In short, that’s very amusing. And you wish to follow his advice, do you? Indubitably. Why shouldn’t you? A devil of a fellow, our Rhadamanthus. And truly ‘always merry’—though at times it’s a little forced. He tends to melancholy. His vice is not good for him—but otherwise, it would be no vice—tobacco only makes him melancholy. Which is why our venerable head nurse has taken charge of his supply and allows him only a small daily ration. It has been said that on occasion he succumbs to the temptation of stealing them, and then slips into melancholy. In a word, a confused soul. You do know our head nurse, do you not? No? But that is a mistake—you are in error not to seek out her acquaintance. From the house of the von Mylendonks, sir! She differs from the Medici Venus only in that where the goddess has a bosom, she wears a cross.”

“Ha ha, excellent!” Hans Castorp laughed. “Her given name is Adriatica.”

“You don’t say?” Hans Castorp exclaimed. “That is extraordinary—von Mylendonk and Adriatica, to boot. It sounds as if she ought to have been dead for centuries. It has an absolutely medieval ring.” “My good sir,” Settembrini replied, “there is much here that has a ‘medieval ring’ to it, as you have chosen to express it. I for my part am convinced that our Rhadamanthus has made this fossil the chief supervisor of his palace of horrors simply out of a sense of artistic style. He is after all an artist— you did not know that? He paints in oils. And why not? It is not forbidden, you know—everyone is free to do as he chooses. Frau Adriatica tells anyone who will listen, and others as well, that toward the middle of the thirteenth century a Mylendonk was the abbess of a cloister in Bonn on the Rhine. She herself surely must have first seen the light of the world shortly thereafter.”

“Ha ha ha. What a sarcastic man you are, Herr Settembrini.”

“Sarcastic? You mean malicious. Yes, I am a little malicious,” Settembrini said. “My great worry is that I have been condemned to waste my malice on such miserable objects. I hope that you have nothing against malice, my good engineer. In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.” And all of a sudden he began to speak about Petrarch, whom he called the “Father of Modernity.”

“We must return to our rest cure, however,” Joachim said circumspectly.

The literary man, who had underscored all his words with charming gestures, rounded his thoughts off now with a flourish in Joachim’s direction and said, “Our lieutenant is pressing us into service.

And so let us depart. We are taking the same path—’to the right, which leads to the walls of mightiest

Dis.’ Ah, Virgil, Virgil, gentlemen, he is unsurpassed.

I believe in progress, certainly. But Virgil had a command of epithets beyond that of any modern poet.” And as they made their way home, he began to recite Latin verses with an Italian accent, but broke off when he saw a young girl approaching—a daughter of the town, it appeared, and not an especially pretty one—and switched with a smile to a philanderer’s tune. “Tut, tut, tut,” he clicked his tongue. “Ah, ah, ah! La, la, la! Sweet young thing, won’t you be mine? Ah, behold ‘her flashing eye in the slippery light,’ ” he quoted—God only knew from what—and turned to blow a kiss at the embarrassed girl’s back.

“What a windbag,” Hans Castorp thought, and did not change his mind when Settembrini moved on from this fit of flirtation and returned to casting aspersions. His primary object was Director Behrens—he sneered at the size of the man’s feet and lingered over his title of Hofrat, which had been bestowed on him by a prince suffering from tuberculosis of the brain. The prince’s scandalous behavior was still the talk of the valley, but Rhadamanthus had simply winked an eye, both eyes— every inch a Hofrat. Did the gentlemen know, by the way, that Behrens had been the inventor of the summer season? Yes, he and he alone. Honor to whom honor is due. In days past, only the most faithful of the faithful had held out over the summer in this valley. But then “our humorist” with his incorruptibly keen eye had realized that this unhappy state of affairs was nothing less than the fruit of prejudice. He had set forth the theory that, at least as far as his institution was concerned, the summer cure was to be recommended no less than the winter, that it was especially efficacious, indeed absolutely indispensable. And he had known how to spread his theory among the public— among other methods, by writing popular articles that he had then passed on to the press. And since then business in summer was as lively as that in winter. “A genius!” Settembrini said. “What in-tu- i-tion!” he said. And then he scoffed at the other sanatoriums in town and sarcastically praised the business acumen of their owners. There was Professor Kafka—every year, at the critical moment of thaw, when a great many patients demanded to leave, Professor Kafka would suddenly be called away for a week or so, promising to take care of discharges on his return. But then he would stay away for six weeks while the poor things waited—and, let it be noted, their bills increased. Kafka had once been summoned to consult on a case in Fiume, but he refused to depart before he had been assured of a fee of five thousand

Swiss francs, and that had taken a good two weeks. The day after the celebrissimo’s arrival, the patient had died. And as for Dr. Salzmann, he claimed that Professor Kafka did not keep his syringes sterile and infected his patients with other diseases. He glided on rubber soles, so Salzmann said, to

keep the dying from hearing his approach. Whereas Kafka claimed that Salzmann demanded his

patients drink “the vine’s gladdening gift” in such quantities—likewise with a view to rounding off their bills—that people were dying like flies, and not of phthisis, but of cirrhosis.

And so he continued, while good-natured Hans Castorp laughed heartily at this torrent of glib slander. There was something curiously agreeable in the flow of the Italian’s words, spoken as they were in pure and precise German, free of every trace of dialect. Each one emerged taut, neat, and brand-new from his mobile lips; he savored every educated, biting, nimble turn of phrase that he used, taking obvious, effusive, and exhilarating enjoyment even in grammatical inflections and conjugations, and seemed to have far too much clear presence of mind ever to misspeak himself. “You have such a droll way of speaking, Herr Settembrini,” Hans Castorp said. “It’s so—lively. I don’t really know how to put it.”

“Graphic, perhaps?” the Italian responded, fanning himself with his handkerchief, although the air was actually rather cool. “That would be the word you’re looking for. I have a graphic way of speaking, is what you want to say. But wait,” he cried, “what do I see? Behold the judges of the dead out for a stroll! What a sight!”

The hikers already had the hairpin turn behind them. Whether it was Settembrini’s conversation, the steepness of the path, or their not having left the sanatorium nearly so far behind them as Hans Castorp had thought—because a path always seems considerably longer when we first walk it than when we have come to know it—in any case, the return trip had taken a surprisingly short time. Settembrini was right: there were the two doctors striding across the open area at the back of the sanatorium—the director in his white smock leading the way, his head thrust forward, his hands rowing in the air; and in his wake, Dr. Krokowski, still in his black smock, looking about with an even more self-assured air, because clinical custom demanded he walk behind his supervisor as they made their rounds.

“Ah, Krokowski,” Settembrini exclaimed. “There he goes, filled with all the secrets of our ladies. I beg you, please regard the delicate symbolism of his garb. He wears black to indicate that his particular specialty is the night. The man has but one thought in his head, and it is a filthy one. My good engineer, how is it that we have not yet spoken of the man? Have you made his acquaintance?” Hans Castorp said he had.

“Well, then? I am beginning to surmise that you liked him as well.”

“I really don’t know, Herr Settembrini. I’ve only had the most fleeting introduction. And, then, I’m not all that rash about forming opinions. I look at people and think: So that’s how you are? Well, fine.”

“That’s pure sluggishness,” the Italian replied. “Form opinions! That’s why nature gave you eyes

and reason. You remarked that I speak maliciously, but if I have done so, then it was not without a pedagogic purpose. We humanists all have a pedagogic streak. Gentlemen, the historical connection between humanism and pedagogy only proves the psychological basis of that connection. One should not deny the humanist his position as an educator—indeed it cannot be denied to him, for he alone preserves the tradition of man’s dignity and beauty. There came a time when he took over from the priest, who in murky and misanthropic eras of the past was permitted to arrogate the education of youth to himself. But since then, gentlemen, absolutely no other type of educator has ever emerged. Schools based on humanistic education—you may call me backward if you like, sir, but on principle and in abstracto, do understand me correctly, I beg you—I remain their firm supporter.”

He was still arguing his case in the elevator and fell silent only when the cousins got off at last on the third floor. He rode it on up to the fourth, where, as Joachim explained, he had a small room with a view to the rear.

“He hasn’t much money, I suppose?” Hans Castorp asked as they entered Joachim’s room. It looked exactly like his own next door.

“No,” Joachim said, “probably not. Or just enough so that he can pay for his stay here. His father was a literary type himself, you know, and I believe the grandfather was, too.”

“Well, you see,” Hans Castorp said. “Is he seriously ill, then?”

“It’s not dangerous, as far as I know, but a stubborn case and it keeps recurring. He’s had it for years and has left off and on, but always returns.”

“Poor fellow. Especially since he seems to be such an enthusiast for work. He’s certainly a fantastic talker, just slips easily from one topic to the other. He was really a little fresh with that girl, I was mortified there for a moment. But then what he said about human dignity, afterward, sounded so spiffing, like formal oratory. Do you often spend time with him?”

CLARITY OF MIND

But Joachim could provide only a garbled, impeded reply. A red leather case lined in velvet lay open on the table; from it he had extracted a little thermometer and stuck the end filled with mercury into his mouth. He held it tightly under his tongue so that the glass tube jutted up at an angle from one corner. Then he made himself comfortable, pulling on his house shoes and a tuniclike jacket, picked up a chart and a pencil from the table, plus a book of Russian grammar—he was learning Russian because, as he said, he hoped it would be of use in his career—and thus equipped, he stretched out on the balcony lounge chair, tossing the camel-hair blanket lightly over his feet.

He hardly needed it, because in the last quarter hour the layer of clouds had grown thinner and

thinner, and the summer sun was breaking through—so warm and dazzling now that Joachim had to screen his face with a white canvas sunshade ingeniously fixed to one arm of the chair and adjustable to the angle of the glare. Hans Castorp praised the contraption. He wanted to wait until Joachim had finished measuring, and so in the meantime he watched how things were done, examined the fur-lined sleeping bag stored in one corner of the balcony—Joachim used it on cold days—and propping his elbows on the railing, gazed down into the garden, where the common lounging area had now filled up with recumbent patients—reading, writing, chatting. Only a small portion of the inside of the arcade, about five lounge chairs, was visible.

“And how long does that take?” Hans Castorp turned around to ask. Joachim raised seven fingers.

“Seven minutes must be up by now.”

Joachim shook his head. After a while he took the thermometer out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “Yes, when you pay close attention to it—time, I mean—it goes very slowly. I truly like measuring my temperature four times a day, because it makes you notice what one minute, or even seven, actually means—especially since the seven days of a week hang so dreadfully heavy on your hands here.”

“You said ‘actually.’ But ‘actually’ doesn’t apply,” Hans Castorp responded. He was sitting with one thigh hiked up on the railing; the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. “There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly, then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.”

He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.

Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it’s passed—for you and me and everyone.”

“But wait,” Hans Castorp said, holding up a forefinger next to one bloodshot eye. “You said that a minute is as long as it seems to you while you’re measuring your temperature, correct?”

“A minute is as long as . . . it lasts, as long as it takes a second hand to complete a circle.”

“But how long that takes can vary greatly—according to how we feel it! And in point of fact . . . I repeat, in point of fact,” Hans Castorp said, pressing his forefinger so firmly against his nose that its tip was folded to one side, “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time—the way uneducated people do. It’s twenty hours from Hamburg to Davos—true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds—not even a second!”

“Listen here,” Joachim said, “what’s wrong with you? I think being up here with us is getting to

you.”

“Just be quiet. My mind is very clear today. So then, what is time?” Hans Castorp asked, bending the tip of his nose so forcefully to one side that it turned white and bloodless. “Will you please tell me that? We perceive space with our senses, with vision and touch. But what is the organ for our sense of time? Would you please tell me that? You see, you’re stuck. But how are we ever going to measure something about which, precisely speaking, we know nothing at all—cannot list a single one of its properties. We say time passes. Fine, let it pass for all I care. But in order to measure it . . . no, wait! In order for it to be measurable, it would have to flow evenly, but where is it written that it does that? It doesn’t do that for our conscious minds, we simply assume it does, just for the sake of convenience. And so all our measurements are merely conventions, if you please.”

“Fine,” Joachim said, “then it’s probably also just a convention that my thermometer has risen four and a half lines above normal. And because of those four little lines I have to loaf around here and can’t go on active duty—and that’s a disgusting fact all to itself.”

“Are you at ninety-nine point five?”

“It’s already going back down.” And Joachim entered it on his chart. “Yesterday evening it was almost a hundred point four—your arrival did that. Whenever anyone gets a visitor, his temperature goes up. But that’s a good thing, really.”

“And I’ll go now,” Hans Castorp said. “My head is full of all kinds of ideas about time—a whole complex of thoughts, let me tell you. But I don’t want to get you worked up over them, not when your temperature’s already too high. I’ll keep it all in mind, and we can talk about it later then, after second breakfast perhaps. You will call me when it’s time to eat? I’ll go take my rest cure now, too— it can’t hurt, thank goodness.” And with that he slipped past the glass divider across to his own balcony, where someone had placed an unfolded lounge chair and a table. He fetched his Ocean Steamships and his traveling blanket, a lovely plaid of dark reds and greens, and noticed that his room had been nicely tidied up. And now he stretched out.

But he soon had to put up his sunshade, the blazing glare was unbearable the moment you lay down. Still it was terribly pleasant just to lie there, Hans Castorp discovered at once to his delight—he could not remember ever having used a more comfortable lounge chair. The frame, a little old-fashioned in design—but that was only a stylish touch, really, since the chair was obviously new—was made of polished reddish-brown wood, and the mattress, covered with a soft cottonlike fabric, actually consisted of three thick cushions that reached from the foot of the chair up over the back. And then, attached to a string and slipped into an embroidered linen case was a roll for your neck, neither too firm nor too soft, and it simply worked wonders. Hans Castorp propped one elbow on the broad, smooth surface of the chair arm, and lay there blinking, not even bothering to entertain himself with Ocean Steamships. Seen through the arches of the balcony, the hard, barren landscape lay under the bright sun like a framed painting. Hans Castorp regarded it pensively. Suddenly it came to him— and he said aloud into the silence, “That was a dwarf who served us at breakfast.”

“Shh,” Joachim said. “You have to be quiet. Yes, a dwarf. So what?” “Nothing. Just that we hadn’t spoken about it.”

And then he went on dreaming. It was already ten o’clock when he lay down. An hour passed. It was an ordinary hour, neither long nor short. And when it was over, a gong rang out in the building and across the garden—first distant, then nearer, then distant again.

“Breakfast,” Joachim said, and you could hear him getting up.

Hans Castorp ended his rest cure for now, too, and went back into the room to get ready. The cousins met in the corridor and went downstairs.

Hans Castorp said, “Well, that felt marvelous just lying there. What sort of chairs are those? If they’re for sale up here, I’ll take one with me back to Hamburg, they’re simply heavenly. Or do you think that Behrens has them made up according to his own specifications?”

Joachim did not know. They hung up their coats and for the second time today they entered the dining hall, where the meal was in full swing.

The room glistened with white from all the milk—a large glass at every place, a good pint of it at least.

“No,” Hans Castorp said, taking his seat again at the end of the table between the seamstress and the Englishwoman and conscientiously unfolding his napkin—although he was still weighed down by his first breakfast. “No,” he said, “God help me, but I do not drink milk, and certainly not now. Is there some porter, perhaps?” And he turned to ask this question politely and gently of the dwarf. There was no porter, unfortunately. But she promised him some Kulmbach beer, and indeed she brought it. It was thick and black, with a foamy brown head, and was an excellent substitute for porter. Hans Castorp drank thirstily from the tall pint glass. He ate cold cuts on toast. There was more oatmeal on the table and lots of butter and fruit again. He at least let his eyes pass over it all, since he was incapable of helping himself to any of it. And he observed the other guests, too—the crowd was beginning to sort itself out for him and individuals were emerging.

His own table was full, except for the seat at the head opposite him, which, as he was told, was reserved for the doctors. Because whenever their schedules allowed, the physicians took part in communal meals, but at a different table every time—and a place was kept free for them at the head

of each one. Neither of them was present at the moment; word was that they were operating. The

young man with the moustache entered again, his chin pressed to his chest, and sat down with a worried, self-absorbed look on his face. The very blond, gaunt young woman took her seat and spooned down her yogurt again, as if this were the only thing she ever ate. Next to her this time was a chipper little old lady, who spoke to the silent young man in a steady flow of Russian, to which his only reply was a worried expression and a nod of the head—and that same look on his face as if he had something foul-tasting in his mouth. Across from him, on the other side of the old lady, yet another young girl was seated—she was pretty, with a rosy complexion, prominent breasts, chestnut hair nicely coiffed and waved, round, brown, childlike eyes, and a little ruby on her pretty hand. She laughed a great deal and likewise spoke Russian, only Russian. Her name was Marusya, Hans Castorp heard someone say. He also happened to notice that Joachim would lower his eyes with a stern look whenever she laughed or spoke.

Settembrini came in by way of the side entrance, and twirling his moustache all the while, he strode to his seat, which was catercorner from Hans Castorp’s. His tablemates broke into peals of laughter as he sat down—presumably he had made one of his malicious remarks. And Hans Castorp also recognized the members of the Half-Lung Club. Doltish-eyed Hermine Kleefeld shoved her way to her table, over near one of the doors opening onto the veranda, and greeted the thick-lipped lad who had hitched his jacket up so unbecomingly. At the table set crosswise on his right sat Fräulein Levi with the ivory complexion and, next to her, plump, freckled Frau Iltis and a group of others whom Hans Castorp did not know.

“Those are your neighbors,” Joachim said softly to his cousin and bent his head forward. Passing very close to Hans Castorp was a couple making for the last table on the right—the Bad Russian table, that was—where a family with an ugly boy was already seated, all of them wolfing down great mounds of oatmeal. The man was slightly built and had gray, hollow cheeks. He wore a brown leather jacket, and on his feet were boxy felt boots with clasp buckles. His wife, likewise small and slim, wore a hat with a bouncing feather and minced ahead on tiny, high-heeled boots of red Russia leather; around her neck was draped a shabby feather boa. Hans Castorp stared at the two of them with a tactlessness that was quite foreign to him and that even he found brutal—although what was really brutal about it was the sudden pleasure he took in it. His gaze was simultaneously blunt and piercing. And when at that same moment the glass door on his left slammed shut with a bang and a rattle, just as it had at first breakfast, he did not flinch as he had earlier that morning, but merely grimaced languidly. And just as he was about to turn his head to look in that direction, he suddenly

found that it was simply too much trouble and not worth the effort. And so he did not determine

this time, either, who it was that was so sloppy about the door.

The fact was that his breakfast beer, which normally had only a slightly befuddling effect on the young man, had completely stupefied and lamed him—it was as if he had been struck a blow across his brow. His eyelids were leaden; his tongue simply would not obey the simplest thoughts when he tried out of courtesy to chat with the Englishwoman; even shifting the direction of his eyes demanded a great struggle with himself. Added to all of which, the ghastly flush he had experienced yesterday had returned to his face in full force—his cheeks felt puffy from the heat, he was breathing heavily, his heart was pounding like a hammer wrapped in cloth. But despite it all, he was not suffering particularly—primarily because his head felt as if he had just taken two or three deep breaths of chloroform. Dr. Krokowski had appeared for breakfast and taken the seat opposite him at the head of the table; but, as if in a dream, he barely noticed the fact, although the doctor looked him in the eye, repeatedly and sharply, while carrying on a conversation in Russian with the ladies on his right, during which the younger ones—that is, Marusya with her rosy complexion and the gaunt yogurt-eater—kept their eyes cast down in meek embarrassment. It goes without saying that Hans Castorp kept his dignity, preferring to say not a word once his tongue had proved refractory and handling his knife and fork with special decorum. When his cousin nodded to him and stood up, he did the same; after bowing blindly to his tablemates, he followed Joachim, taking deliberate, careful steps as he went.

“When is the next rest cure?” he asked as they left the building. “That’s the best thing here, as far as I can see. I wish I were lying in my splendid lounge chair again right now. Are we going to walk far?”

ONE WORD TOO MANY

“No,” Joachim said, “we don’t dare go very far. Around this time I always take just a short walk down through Davos-Dorf and on into Platz, if I have time. You can window-shop and watch people and buy whatever you need. Not to worry, we’ll lie down for an hour before dinner, and then again till four.”

They walked down the drive in the sunshine and crossed the brook and the narrow-gauge tracks; the line of mountains above the valley’s western slope rose directly ahead of them, and Joachim supplied their names: Little Schiahorn, the Green Towers, and Dorfberg. Across the way, a little distance up the hill, was the walled cemetery of Davos-Dorf—and Joachim pointed it out as well with his walking stick. And now they were on the main road, which was set one terrace-level above the valley floor.

One could not really call Dorf a village; at least, nothing except the name itself was left now. It had been devoured by the resort spreading relentlessly toward the entrance to the valley, and that part of the settlement called Davos-Dorf merged imperceptibly, without transition, into what was called Davos-Platz. Hotels and boardinghouses, all of them amply equipped with covered verandas, balconies, and rest-cure arcades, lay on both sides, as well as private homes with rooms for rent. Here and there new buildings were under construction, but sometimes the line of houses was broken by an open space that allowed a view of the valley’s green meadows.

In his desire for his customary and cherished stimulant, Hans Castorp had lit another cigar; and, thanks apparently to the beer he had drunk and much to his indescribable satisfaction, now and then he was able to whiff something of the aroma he craved—but only rarely and faintly, to be sure. It was a strain on his nerves just to try to detect a hint of his usual enjoyment—and that repulsive leathery taste predominated. Unwilling to accommodate himself to such failure, he struggled for a while to find a pleasure that either was totally denied him or simply teased him with a distant inkling of itself, and finally out of weary disgust he tossed the cigar aside. Despite his dazed state, he felt courtesy demanded that he carry on a conversation, and for that purpose he tried to recall the excellent things he had wanted to say about “time” earlier. Except it turned out that he had forgotten every bit of the whole “complex”—not one single thought about time still resided in any corner of his brain. And so instead he began to speak about bodily functions, although in a rather strange fashion.

“When do you take your temperature again?” he asked. “After dinner? Yes, that’s a good idea. The organism is at the height of its activity, so it would register then. For Behrens to demand that I ought to take mine, too—now listen, that was surely just meant as a joke. Why, Settembrini laughed his head off at the notion. There would be absolutely no point in it. I don’t even own a thermometer.” “Well,” Joachim said, “that’s no problem whatever. You need only to buy one. There are thermometers for sale here everywhere, in almost any shop.”

“But why should I? No, the rest cure, that’s not a half-bad idea, and I’ll probably go along with it. But keeping track of my temperature would be too much for a visitor, I’ll leave that to the rest of you up here. If I only knew,” Hans Castorp continued, pressing his hands to his breast like a man in love, “why my heart keeps pounding the whole time—it’s so disconcerting. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while now. Because, you see, your heart pounds when you’re looking forward to some joyous event or if you’re afraid—when your emotions are stirred up, isn’t that right? But if your heart starts pounding all by itself, for no earthly reason, of its own accord, so to speak, I find that downright bizarre, if you see what I mean? It’s as if the body were going off on its own and no longer had any connection to your soul, more or less like a dead body that is not really dead—even though there is no such thing—and goes on living a very active life, but all of its own accord. The hair and the nails keep on growing, and for that matter, in terms of the chemistry and physics, or so I’ve heard, it’s a regular hustle and bustle there inside.”

“What sort of an expression is that,” Joachim reprimanded him discreetly. “ ‘A regular hustle and bustle!’ ” And perhaps he was revenging himself a little for the rebuke he had received earlier today for his “glockenspiel.”

“But it’s true! It is a regular hustle and bustle. Why are you so offended by that?” Hans Castorp asked. “And anyway, I only mentioned it incidentally. All I was trying to say is that it’s bizarre and upsetting when the body goes off on its own accord, living with no connection to one’s soul and putting on airs—like a heart pounding for no purpose whatever. One literally searches for some reason for it, some emotional stimulus, a feeling of joy or fear, that could justify it, so to speak—at least that’s how it is with me, I can only speak for myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Joachim said with a sigh, “it’s probably much like having a high fever. There’s quite a hustle and bustle—to use your expression—going on in your body in that case, too, and it may well be that one automatically looks around for some emotional stimulus, as you put it, to provide at least a halfway reasonable explanation for all the hustle and bustle. But we’re talking about such unpleasant things,” he said in a quivering voice and then broke off. To which Hans Castorp merely gave a shrug—in perfect imitation of the shrug he had first seen Joachim give the evening before.

They walked along in silence for a while.

Then Joachim asked, “Well, how do you like the people here? I mean the ones at our table?”

Hans Castorp’s face showed his indifference as he reviewed them in his mind. “Oh, Lord,” he said, “they don’t seem very interesting to me. There are more interesting people sitting at some of the other tables, I think, but maybe I’m just imagining that. Frau Stöhr should get her hair washed, it’s so greasy. And little Mazurka, or whatever her name is, seems pretty silly to me. She keeps stuffing her handkerchief in her mouth because she’s constantly giggling.”

Joachim laughed out loud at the bungled name. “ ‘Mazurka’—that’s splendid!” he cried. “Her name’s Marusya, if you please—it’s about the same as our Marie. Yes, she really is too enthusiastic,” he said. “When she has every reason to be more sedate, because she’s more than a little ill.”

“You’d never know it,” Hans Castorp said. “She’s in such good shape. You’d never take her for someone with a weak chest.” And he tried to catch his cousin’s eye, but discovered that Joachim’s tanned face looked all blotchy, the way tanned faces do when the blood rushes out of them, and that he had wrenched his mouth into a peculiar, woeful expression that gave Hans Castorp a vague fright and caused him immediately to change the subject. He asked about certain other people and tried to forget both Marusya and Joachim’s expression—and was totally successful at it. The Englishwoman with the rose-hip tea was named Miss Robinson.

The seamstress was not a seamstress, but a teacher at a public school for well-bred young ladies in Königsberg, and that was why she chose her words so precisely. Her name was Fräulein Engelhart. As for the chipper old lady, Joachim had never learned her name in all the time he had been there. In any case, she was the great-aunt of the yogurt-eating girl, and both were permanent residents of the sanatorium. The sickest person at the table was Dr. Blumenkohl, Leo Blumenkohl from Odessa— the young man with the moustache and the worried, self-absorbed look. He had been up here for years now.

They were now walking on a city sidewalk—it was immediately apparent that this was the main street of an international resort. The strolling tourists they met were mostly young people, the gentlemen in sport coats and without hats, the ladies in white skirts and also without hats. You heard Russian and English spoken; to both left and right were rows of shops with elegant displays in the windows. Hans Castorp’s curiosity was now seriously battling his flushed exhaustion, and forcing his eyes to take it all in, he lingered awhile outside a men’s clothing shore, just to make sure that his own wardrobe was up to snuff.

Then came a rotunda with a covered gallery where a little band was playing. This was the Kurhaus, the spa hotel. Several games were in progress on the tennis courts. Long-legged, clean-shaven young men wearing freshly pressed flannels and rubber-soled shoes had rolled up their shirtsleeves to play opposite tanned young ladies in white, who kept reaching boldly up toward the sun in order to hit the chalk-white ball out of the air. A kind of floury dust drifted over the well-kept courts. The cousins sat down on an unoccupied bench to watch and critique the play.

“You’ve not been playing up here, I take it?” Hans Castorp asked.

“I’m not allowed to,” Joachim answered. “We have to rest, always lying at rest. Settembrini says we live horizontally—we’re the horizontals, he says, it’s another one of his rotten jokes. Those are healthy people playing there, or they’re disobeying their doctors’ orders. Anyway, they’re not playing serious tennis—it’s more for the outfits. And as far as not obeying orders goes, lots of forbidden games are played here—poker, you know, and petits chevaux in certain hotels. We can be discharged for playing that, they say it’s the most unwholesome of all. But there are plenty of people who sneak past the guards in the evening and come down here to gamble. They say the prince who gave Behrens his title of Hofrat did it constantly.”

Hans Castorp was hardly listening. His mouth was hanging open, because he couldn’t breathe through his nose right, although he didn’t have a cold. He dimly noticed the disconcerting effect of his heart’s pounding out of time to the music. And feeling confused and at odds with himself, he was just dozing off when Joachim suggested they needed to start back.

They covered the distance in almost total silence. Hans Castorp stumbled a few times on the level pavement, at which he merely shook his head and smiled wistfully. The elevator operator who took them up to their floor was the man with the limp. Exchanging a brief “till later,” they parted outside room number 34. Hans Castorp steered his way across the room and out to the balcony, where he let himself fall into his lounge chair, just as he was, and without changing his position once, he fell into a dull semistupor, broken now and then by the annoyance of his rapidly beating heart.

BUT OF COURSE—A FEMALE!

How long that lasted he didn’t know. At the appropriate time, the gong rang out. But, as Hans Castorp was aware, it was not the call for dinner itself, merely the warning to get ready for it; and so he lay there for a while until the metallic rumble swelled and fell away a second time. When Joachim came through the room to fetch him, Hans Castorp wanted to change first, but Joachim said it was too late and wouldn’t let him. He hated unpunctuality. How could you ever make any progress and become healthy enough for military service again, he said, if you were so weak-willed that you couldn’t make it to meals on time. He was right, of course, and Hans Castorp could only point out that he wasn’t the one who was sick, although he certainly was incredibly sleepy. He just washed his hands quickly; and they walked down to the dining hall, for the third time.

The guests were streaming in through both entrances. Some were even coming through the veranda doors that stood open opposite, and soon they were all sitting around the seven tables as if they had never left them. That at least was Hans Castorp’s impression, a purely dreamy, irrational impression of course, which he could not get out of his befuddled brain for the moment and which even gave him a certain pleasure—such pleasure, in fact, that he tried to recapture it several times during the course of the meal and, indeed, was able to recreate the illusion perfectly. The chipper old lady was once again keeping up a steady stream of blurry Russian directed diagonally toward Dr. Blumenkohl, who listened with a careworn face. Her skinny grandniece finally ate something other than yogurt: the gooey cream of barley soup that the dining attendants had served in large plates— but only a few spoonfuls, and then she let it stand. Pretty Marusya kept pressing her little handkerchief, fragrant with orange perfume, to her mouth to stifle her giggles. Miss Robinson was reading the same letter in the same rounded hand that she had been reading that morning. Apparently she could speak not a word of German and did not wish to. Joachim struck a chivalrous pose and said something to her in English about the weather, to which, while still chewing, she gave a monosyllabic reply and then fell silent again. As for Frau Stöhr in her Scotch-plaid woolen blouse, she had had her checkup that morning and reported about it in her affected, uneducated way, drawing her upper lip back from her rabbitlike teeth. She complained of a rattle on the upper right, and her breathing was reduced just under her left shoulder blade, and the “boss” had told her she would have to stay another five months. In her unlettered fashion, she called Director Behrens the “boss.” Moreover, she declared her outrage that the “boss” was not sitting at their table again today. The “retardation” schedule (she apparently meant “rotation”) demanded that the “boss” should be sitting at their table for dinner today, whereas the “boss” was once again sitting at the table on their left (and indeed there sat Director Behrens, his gigantic hands folded in front of his plate). Though to be sure, that was also where fat Frau Salomon from Amsterdam was seated, and she came to dinner every day of the week in a low-cut dress, apparently quite to the “boss’s” liking, although she, Frau Stöhr, could not understand it, because, after all, he could see however much of Frau Salomon he wanted at every checkup. A little later she told them in an excited whisper that yesterday evening the lights had been turned out in the upper common lounging area—the one on the roof— for purposes that Frau Stöhr described as “transparent.” The “boss” had noticed it and gone into such a rage that you could hear him all over the building. But of course once again he had not located the guilty party, although one didn’t have to have a university degree to guess that, of course, it had been Captain Miklosich from Bucharest, for whom it could never be dark enough when he was in the company of ladies—a man lacking in every refinement, although he did wear a corset, and who was no better than a beast of prey—yes, a beast of prey, Frau Stöhr repeated in a smothered whisper as beads of sweat appeared on her brow and upper lip. Why, all of Dorf and Platz, too, knew the nature of his relationship with Frau Wurmbrandt from Vienna, the general consul’s wife—one could hardly call it clandestine anymore. It wasn’t enough that the captain frequently paid morning visits to Frau Wurmbrandt in her room, with her still lying in bed, and stayed there the whole time she dressed, but last Tuesday he had not left Wurmbrandt’s room until four o’clock the next morning— the nurse looking after Franz in room 19, the boy whose recent pneumothorax operation had turned out so badly, had run into him in the hall, and had been so embarrassed that she got her doors mixed up and found herself in the room of Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund. And finally Frau Stöhr held forth at length about a “cosmological salon” down in town, where she bought her mouthwash. Joachim stared down at his plate.

The dinner was as splendidly prepared as it was lavish. Including the nourishing soup, it consisted of no fewer than six courses. The fish was followed by a superb roast with vegetables, which was

followed by a salad, then roast fowl, a dumpling dessert in no way inferior to the one Hans had eaten the night before, and, finally, cheese and fruit. Each item was offered twice—and not without good effect. People filled their plates at all seven tables—they ate with the appetites of lions here in these vaulted spaces. Theirs was a hot hunger that it would have been a joy to observe, if its effect had not at the same time seemed somehow eerie, even repulsive. Not only the more lively among them displayed such hunger as they chatted and pelted one another with little pills of bread—no, but also the silent, gloomy ones, who between courses would put their heads in their hands and stare into space. At the next table on their left was an adolescent boy—still of school age, to judge by his appearance—whose coat sleeves were too short, and who wore thick, circular glasses; he chopped up everything heaped on his plate until it was a pasty hodgepodge, then bent over it and wolfed it down, now and then pushing his napkin up behind his glasses to dry his eyes—it was unclear whether this was to wipe away sweat or tears.

During this major meal of the day, two incidents occurred to attract Hans Castorp’s attention, insofar as his condition allowed. First, the glass door slammed shut again—just as the fish course was being served. Hans Castorp flinched in irritation and told himself indignantly that this time he really must find out who the culprit was. He didn’t merely think it—he was so in earnest that he spoke it out loud. “I have to know!” he whispered with exaggerated fervor, so that both Miss Robinson and the teacher glanced at him in amazement. And turning his whole upper body to the left, he opened his bloodshot eyes wide.

It was a lady who crossed the hall now, a young woman, a girl really, of only average height, in a white sweater and brightly colored skirt, with reddish-blond hair, which she wore in a simple braid wound up on her head. Hans Castorp saw only a little of her profile—almost nothing, in fact. In quite marvelous contrast to her noisy entrance, she walked soundlessly, with a peculiar slinking gait, her head thrust slightly forward, and proceeded to the farthest table on the left, set perpendicular to the veranda doors—the Good Russian table. As she walked she kept one hand in the pocket of her close- fitting wool jacket, while the other was busy at the back of her head, tucking and arranging her hair. Hans Castorp looked at that hand—he had a good eye and a fine critical sense for hands, and it was his habit always first to direct his gaze at them whenever he made a new acquaintance. The hand tucking up her hair was not particularly ladylike, not refined or well cared for, not in the way the ladies in young Hans Castorp’s social circle cared for theirs. It was rather broad, with stubby fingers; there was something primitive and childish about it, rather like the hand of a schoolgirl. Her nails had clearly never seen a manicure, and had been trimmed carelessly—again, like a schoolgirl’s; and the cuticles had a jagged look, almost as if she were guilty of the minor vice of nail-chewing. Hans

Castorp only surmised all this, however, more than he actually saw it—she was really too far away.

Her tablemates greeted the latecomer with nods; as she took her seat on the near side of the table— her back to the room and right beside Dr. Krokowski, who was presiding—she turned, her hand still at her hair, and looked back over her shoulder at the assembly. And Hans Castorp caught a fleeting glance of her broad cheekbones and narrow eyes—and at the sight, a vague memory of something or somebody brushed over him.

“But of course—a female!” Hans Castorp thought, and again muttered it so emphatically to himself that the teacher, Fräulein Engelhart, understood what he had said. The shriveled old maid smiled in sympathy.

“That is Madame Chauchat,” she said. “She’s so careless. A charming lady.” And Fräulein Engelhart’s fuzzy cheeks turned a shade rosier—which was the case, actually, whenever she opened her mouth. “French?” Hans Castorp asked sternly.

“No, she’s Russian,” said the teacher. “Perhaps her husband is French, or of French extraction, I can’t say for sure.”

Still incensed, Hans Castorp asked if that was her husband there, and pointed to a gentleman with hunched shoulders sitting at the Good Russian table.

“Oh no, that isn’t he,” the teacher responded. “He’s never been here even once, he’s quite unknown to us.”

“She should learn to close a door properly,” Hans Castorp said. “She always lets it slam. It’s really very impolite.”

But since the teacher meekly accepted his rebuke as if she were the guilty party, nothing more was said about Madame Chauchat.

The second incident consisted of Dr. Blumenkohl’s leaving the room—it was no more than that. Suddenly the slightly disgusted look on his face heightened and he gazed even more worriedly at some particular point in space. Then he slid his chair back in one decisive motion and left the room. At this juncture, however, Frau Stöhr displayed her poor upbringing in the most garish light, because—apparently out of some crude satisfaction that she was less ill than Blumenkohl—she accompanied his departure with a few half-sympathetic, half-contemptuous remarks. “The poor man,” she said. “He’s on his last legs. He’s off to have a talk with his Blue Henry again.” With a stubborn, obtuse look on her face, she uttered the grotesque term “Blue Henry” without the least hesitancy, and Hans Castorp felt an urge both to laugh and to shudder as she said it. Dr. Blumenkohl, by the way, returned after a few minutes, carrying himself in the same diffident fashion as when he left, took his seat again, and went on eating. He, too, ate a great deal, and with a worried, self-absorbed look on his face mutely took a second helping from each course.

Then dinner was over; but thanks to the capable service—and their dwarf in particular was marvelously fleet of foot—it had lasted only a little more than an hour. Breathing heavily and not rightly knowing how he had got there, Hans Castorp found himself lying in the splendid lounge chair on his balcony—because there was a rest cure between dinner and tea, the most important of the day, in fact, and rigorously enforced. He lay there between the opaque glass walls that separated him from Joachim on one side and the Russian couple on the other; his heart pounded as he dozed, and he drew air in through his mouth. When he used his handkerchief, he found red traces of blood, but he did not have the energy to think much about it, although he was easily inclined to worry about himself and tended by nature to play the hypochondriac. He had lit another Maria Mancini and smoked it to the end this time, despite the taste. Feeling dizzy, anxious, and dreamy, he thought how very strangely things were going for him up here. Two or three times he felt his chest shaken by suppressed laughter at the gruesome term that Frau Stöhr had used in her ignorance.

HERR ALBIN

Down in the garden the fantasy flag with the caduceus lifted now and then in a light breeze. The sky had clouded over completely again. The sun was gone, and there was an almost inhospitable chill in the air. It appeared that the lounging arcade was crowded—the area below was filled with conversations and giggles.

“I beg you, Herr Albin, do put that knife away, put it in your pocket before there’s an accident!” a high, wavering female voice fretted.

“My dear Herr Albin, spare our nerves and remove that dreadful lethal object from view!” a second voice chimed in.

And then a blond young man, sitting sideways on a lounge chair clear at the front, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, replied in a flippant voice, “Wouldn’t think of it. You ladies will surely allow me to play with my knife a little. Yes, I’ll grant, it’s a particularly sharp knife. I bought it in Calcutta from a blind magician. He would swallow it, and then his boy would immediately dig it up some fifty paces away. Would you like to see it? It’s much sharper than a razor. You only have to just touch the blade, and it goes right into the flesh as if it were butter. Wait a moment, let me show you up close.” And Herr Albin stood up. General shrieks. “No, I think I’ll go fetch my revolver,” Herr Albin said. “That would interest you all more. A damn fine weapon. Packs quite a punch. I’ll get it from my room.”

“No, Herr Albin, don’t. Herr Albin, don’t do it!” several different voices wailed. But Herr Albin was already emerging from the arcade, heading for his room—very young, with a shambling gait, a rosy childlike face, and narrow sideburns at his ears.

“Herr Albin,” a woman called after him, “you’d do better to get your coat—put it on as a favor to me. You lay bedridden with pneumonia for six weeks, and here you are sitting without an overcoat, without even a blanket, and smoking cigarettes. That’s tempting Providence, Herr Albin, I swear it is.”

But he only laughed derisively as he walked away, and within a few minutes he returned with his revolver. This aroused even more silly shrieks than before, and you could hear several ladies stumble as they tried to jump up from their chairs and got tangled in their blankets.

“Look how small and shiny it is,” Herr Albin said, “but if I press right here—it will bite.” New shrieks. “It’s loaded with live ammunition, of course,” Herr Albin continued. “There are six cartridges in this cylinder here, which moves ahead one chamber with every shot. And by the by, I don’t keep this thing just for fun,” he said, noticing that the effect was wearing off. He slipped the revolver back into his breast pocket, sat back down on his chair, crossed his legs, and lit another cigarette. “Definitely not just for fun,” he repeated, pressing his lips together.

“But why? Why do you have it, then?” several trembling voices asked with foreboding. “How horrible!” one voice suddenly cried—and Herr Albin nodded.

“I see you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “And in fact, that is why I keep it handy,” he went on lightly, after first inhaling and then exhaling a great quantity of smoke, despite his recent bout with pneumonia. “I keep it at the ready for the day when all this malarkey here gets too boring and I shall have the honor of paying my final regards. It really is very simple. I’ve studied the matter at some length, and I have a very clear idea about how best to pull it off.” (Another shriek in response to the words “pull it off.”) “The region of the heart is out of the question—it’s rather awkward to aim there. And besides, I prefer snuffing out the conscious mind on the spot, and can do so by applying one of these pretty little foreign objects to this interesting organ . . .” And Herr Albin pointed with his index finger to his close-cropped blond head. “One aims here”—Herr Albin pulled the nickel- plated revolver from his pocket again and tapped the barrel against one temple—“here, just above the artery. Slick as a whistle, even without a mirror.”

Several voices of pleading protest, including one sobbing violently: “Herr Albin, Herr Albin, put that revolver away, take it away from your temple, I can’t even watch! Herr Albin, you’re young, you’ll get well again, you’ll enjoy life again in a circle of friends who love you, I swear you will! Put on your coat now, lie down here and pull a blanket over you, it’s time for your rest cure. And don’t chase the bath attendant away again when he comes by and offers to rub you down with alcohol.

And you must stop smoking, Herr Albin, do you hear? We implore you, for your own sake, for the sake of your young, precious life!”

But Herr Albin was implacable. “No, no,” he said, “let me alone, everything’s fine, thank you all very much. I have never refused a lady’s request before now, but you’ll see—there’s no point in trying to sabotage fate. This is my third year here—and I’m fed up with it. I’m not going to play along anymore—can you blame me? Incurable, ladies. Just look at me—here I sit before you, an incurable case. The director himself hardly bothers to conceal the fact, not even for appearance’ sake. You simply must grant me the license that results from my condition. It’s much the same as in high school when you know you’ll be held back—they don’t bother to ask you questions, you don’t bother to do any work. And now I’ve finally come to just such a pretty pass again. I don’t need to do anything anymore, I’m no longer in the running—and I can laugh at the whole thing. Would you like some chocolate? Please, help yourselves. No, you won’t exhaust my supply—I’ve got scads of chocolate up in my room. I have eight boxes of assorted fudges, five bars of Gala Peter, and four pounds of Lindt nougats. The ladies of the sanatorium had them delivered to me while I was down with pneumonia.”

From somewhere a bass voice rang out, demanding quiet. Herr Albin let out a brief laugh—a fluttery, ragged laugh. Then it grew quiet in the lounging area—as quiet as if a nightmare or a ghost had been routed. And any word spoken sounded strange in the silence. Hans Castorp listened until the last one had died away, and although he was not quite certain if Herr Albin was a phony or not, he could not help feeling a little envious of him nevertheless. That comparison taken from life at school had made an impression on him, because he had been held back in his sophomore year, and he could recall the somewhat ignominious, but humorous and pleasantly untidy state of affairs that he had enjoyed in the last quarter, once he had given up even trying and was able to laugh “at the whole thing.” But since his thought processes were dull and confused, it is difficult to be very precise about them. On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagining how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace—and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.

SATANA MAKES SHAMEFUL SUGGESTIONS

In time he lost consciousness. His pocket watch said half past three when he was awakened by a conversation behind the glass partition on his left. Dr. Krokowski, who made his rounds at this hour without the director, was speaking in Russian with the rude married couple, inquiring, so it seemed, about the husband’s state of health and checking his fever chart. But now he continued on his journey—not via the balcony, however, but by way of the hall, detouring around Hans Castorp’s room and entering Joachim’s through the door. Hans Castorp felt rather hurt that he had been circumvented and left lying there to his own devices—not that he felt any great need for a tête-à-tête with Dr. Krokowski. To be sure, he happened to be healthy, and so he wasn’t included. Because as things stood with people up here, he thought, anyone who had the honor of being healthy didn’t count and wasn’t going to be asked any questions—and that annoyed young Castorp.

After spending two or three minutes with Joachim, Dr. Krokowski moved on down the row of balconies, and Hans Castorp heard his cousin say that they should get up now and get ready for their afternoon snack.

“Fine,” he said and stood up. But he felt very dizzy from lying there so long, and the unrefreshing semisleep had left his face badly flushed again, although his body felt chilled all over—perhaps he had not been covered warmly enough.

He rinsed his eyes and washed his hands, combed his hair and set his clothes to rights. He joined Joachim in the corridor. “Did you hear that Herr Albin?” he asked as they descended the stairs. “But of course,” Joachim said. “The man should be disciplined. Disrupting the afternoon rest period with his chatter and getting the ladies so upset that he’s set them all back for weeks. Gross insubordination. But who wants to play the informer? And besides, most people find that sort of talk entertaining.”

“Do you really think it possible,” Hans Castorp asked, “that he’s serious about applying that foreign object, ‘slick as a whistle,’ as he puts it?”

“Oh, indeed,” Joachim replied, “it’s certainly not impossible. That sort of thing happens up here. Two months before I arrived, a student who had been here for a long time went for his checkup— and then hanged himself out in the woods. Everyone was talking about it my first few days here.” Hans Castorp’s mouth gaped wide. “Well, I can’t say that I’m feeling all that well here with you,” he declared. “It’s possible I’ll not be able to stay on, that I’ll have to leave—would you be offended?” “Leave? What’s got into you?” Joachim exclaimed. “Nonsense. You’ve only just arrived. How can you judge after only one day?”

“Good Lord, is this still just my first day? It seems to me as if I’d been up here with you all for a long, long time.”

“Now don’t start in theorizing about time again,” Joachim said. “You had me all confused this morning.”

“No, don’t worry, I’ve forgotten it all,” Hans Castorp replied. “The whole complex. And my mind isn’t the least bit clear now, that’s all over And so now it’s time for tea.”

“Yes, and then we’ll walk up to that same bench from this morning.”

“Good God—well, let’s hope we don’t run into Settembrini again. I’m incapable of taking part in another learned conversation today, let me tell you that ahead of time.”

The dining hall offered every beverage one could imagine might be drunk at teatime. Miss Robinson once again drank her bloody-red rosehip tea, and the grandniece was back to spooning yogurt. There were also milk, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, even bouillon; and guests on all sides, who had spent the last two hours resting after their heavy dinner, were busy spreading butter on large slices of raisin cake.

Hans Castorp had them bring him tea, and he dunked zwieback in it. He tried a little marmalade, too. He took a good look at the raisin cake, but the thought of eating any of it literally made him shudder. And once again—for the fourth time—he sat at his place in this hall with its simply but brightly decorated vaulted ceiling and its seven tables. A little later, around seven o’clock, he would sit there a fifth time—that would be for supper. And in the brief, worthless time in between, there was a walk to the bench up on the mountain slope, right next to the water trough—the path was teeming with patients, so that the cousins frequently had to greet people. Then it was back to the balcony for another rest cure—a fleeting, shallow hour and a half. Hans Castorp felt chilled and shivered badly.

He dressed painstakingly for supper, and, seated between Miss Robinson and the teacher, he ate julienne soup, pot roast with vegetables, and two pieces of a torte with layers of just about everything—macaroon, buttercream, chocolate, fruit jam, and marzipan—followed by a very good cheese and pumpernickel. He again ordered a bottle of Kulmbach beer to go with it. But he had drunk only half a glass when it became obvious to him that he belonged in bed. His head was buzzing, his eyelids were like lead, his heart beat like a little kettledrum, and to add to his agony, he took a notion that pretty Marusya, who was sitting bent forward, her face buried in the hand with the ruby ring, was laughing at him, even though he had taken considerable pains not to give her any reason to do so. Far in the distance, he could hear Frau Stöhr telling some story or making some claim that seemed so absolutely crazy that in his confusion he was not sure whether he had heard right or if what Frau Stöhr was saying had been transformed into nonsense inside his head. She was explaining that she knew how to prepare twenty-eight different sauces for fish—and she would stake her reputation on the fact, although her husband had warned her not to speak about it. “Don’t say anything about it!” he had said. “No one will believe it, and even if they do, they’ll simply find it ridiculous.” All the same, she was quite willing to confess before one and all that she could prepare a total of twenty-eight different fish sauces. This was just too horrible for poor Hans Castorp; in his dismay, he pressed his hand to his brow and simply forgot that he had a bite of pumpernickel and cheddar in his mouth, ready to be chewed and swallowed. He still had it in his mouth when everyone stood up to leave.

They exited through the glass door on the left, that nuisance of a door that was always slamming shut and led directly into the front lobby. Almost all the guests went out this way, because it turned out that for an hour or so after supper people gathered informally in the lobby and the rooms opening off it. The majority of the patients stood about chatting in little groups. Two green folding tables had been set up for devotees of games—dominoes at the one, bridge at the other, although only young people were playing cards, among them Herr Albin and Hermine Kleefeld. In the first social room there were also a few optical gadgets for their amusement: the first, a stereoscopic viewer, through the lenses of which you stared at photographs you inserted into it—a Venetian gondolier for example, in all his bloodless and rigid substantiality; the second, a long, tubelike kaleidoscope that you put up to one eye, and by turning a little ring with one hand, you could conjure up a magical fluctuation of colorful stars and arabesques; and finally, a little rotating drum in which you placed a strip of cinematographic film and then looked through an opening on one side to watch a miller wrestle with a chimney sweep, a schoolmaster paddle a pupil, a tightrope-walker do somersaults, or a farmer and his wife dance a rustic waltz. Laying his chilled hands on his knees, Hans Castorp gazed into each of these apparatuses for a good while. He spent some time beside the bridge table, where the incurable Herr Albin, his mouth drooping at the corners, played his cards with a worldly nonchalance. Dr. Krokowski was sitting off in one corner, engaged in lively, cordial conversation with a semicircle of ladies, including Frau Stöhr, Frau Iltis, and Fräulein Levi. The occupants of the Good Russian table had withdrawn to a smaller adjoining salon that was set off from the game room by heavy curtains—they formed their own intimate clique. In addition to Madame Chauchat, this consisted of a blond-bearded, lackadaisical gentleman with a concave chest and pop-eyes; a very dark-skinned girl with an original, droll face, golden earrings, and a mop of frizzy hair; Dr. Blumenkohl, who had likewise joined them; and two hunch-shouldered youths. Madame Chauchat was wearing a blue dress with a white lace collar. The focus of the group, she was sitting on the sofa behind the round table at the far end of the small salon, her face turned toward the game room. Hans Castorp, who could not look at this ill-mannered woman without feeling some disapproval, thought to himself: “She reminds me of something, but I can’t really say what.” A tall man of about thirty and with thinning hair was sitting at a small brown piano, and he played the “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream—three times in a row; and when a few of the ladies begged him, he first gazed deeply and silently into the eyes of each, one after the other, and started playing the melody yet a fourth time.

“Might I inquire how you are feeling, my good engineer, “ asked Settembrini, who had been strolling about among the guests, his hands in his pockets, and now came up to Hans Castorp. He was still wearing the same gray, petersham coat and pastel checked trousers. He smiled as he addressed him, and once again Hans Castorp felt sobered at the sight of that delicate, mocking curl of the lip under the sweep of the black moustache. All the same, he stared at the Italian with bloodshot eyes and a rather foolish, slack mouth.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “The gentleman from this morning’s walk, whom we met up there on the bench . . . next to the water trough. Of course, I recognized you at once. Would you believe,” he went on, although he was quite aware that he should not be saying this, “that at first glance this morning I took you for an organ-grinder? It was, of course, pure foolishness on my part,” he added when he saw Settembrini look at him with a cool, searching eye. “Dreadful foolishness, to be sure. It’s really totally inconceivable how of all things in the world I could have . . .”

“Please, don’t trouble yourself over it—it doesn’t matter,” Settembrini responded, after first silently regarding the young man for another moment. “And how did you spend your day—the first one of your stay at our cozy resort here?”

“Thanks for asking. Quite as per regulation,” Hans Castorp answered. “Primarily in the ‘horizontal fashion,’ as I’ve been told you like to put it.”

Settembrini smiled. “It may be that I have described it that way on occasion,” he said. “Well, and did you find it diverting to live horizontally?”

“Diverting and dull, both, just as you please,” Hans Castorp replied. “It is at times hard to differentiate, you see. I certainly haven’t been bored—there’s all too much hustle and bustle up here among you for that. There are so many new and remarkable things to see and hear. And yet, on the other hand, it’s as if I had been here not for just a day, but considerably longer—almost as if I had grown older and wiser, it seems to me.”

“Wiser, as well?” Settembrini said and raised his eyebrows. “Might I be permitted a question: how old are you really?”

And of all things—Hans Castorp didn’t know! For the moment at least, he didn’t know how old he was, despite intense, indeed desperate attempts to collect his thoughts. And to win some time, he asked for the question to be repeated, and then he said: “Me . . . how old am I? I’m in my twenty-fourth year, of course. That is, I’ll be twenty-four soon. Forgive me, I’m very tired,” he said. “ ‘Tired’ isn’t the word for it. You know what it’s like when you’re dreaming and know that you’re dreaming, and try to wake up, but can’t? Well, that’s just how I feel right now. I definitely have a fever, there’s no other explanation. Would you believe it—my feet are cold all the way up to my knees. If you can put it that way, since knees aren’t part of your feet, of course. You must excuse me—I’m absolutely groggy, but then that’s no wonder, really, when first thing in the morning you get whistled at by a pneumothorax and afterward have to listen to that Herr Albin talking, and from the horizontal position, to boot. Just imagine—it’s as if I can no longer trust my five senses, and I must say I find that bothers me more than a flushed face and cold feet. Tell me quite frankly—do you think it’s possible that Frau Stöhr knows how to make twenty-eight sauces for fish? I don’t mean whether she can actually make them—that’s out of the question, I’m sure—but whether she really claimed she could while we were sitting at the table just now, or if I just imagined she did. That’s all I want to know.”

Settembrini stared at him. He hadn’t seemed to listen; his eyes had “set” again, taking on that same fixed, vacant look. Just as he had earlier that morning, he repeated a threefold “yes, yes, yes” and “I see, I see, I see” with hissing, deliberately ironic s’s.

“Twenty-four, you say?” he then asked.

“No, twenty-eight,” Hans Castorp said. “Twenty-eight sauces for fish. Not just sauces in general, but sauces specifically for fish—that’s what’s so monstrous about it.”

“My good engineer,” Settembrini said, angrily admonishing him, “pull yourself together and leave me out of such depraved nonsense. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t want to know. In your twenty-fourth year, you say? Hmm . . . please permit me one more question, or if you will, a modest suggestion. Since your stay here appears not to be good for you—neither physically nor, if I am not mistaken, mentally—how would it be, if you were to forgo the pleasure of growing older here, in short, if you were to pack your things tonight and be on your way with one of the scheduled express trains tomorrow morning?”

“You mean I should leave?” Hans Castorp asked. “When I’ve only just arrived? But no, how can I possibly decide about that after only one day?”

And as he said it, quite by chance he caught a glimpse of Frau Chauchat in the next room, head-on— her narrow eyes and broad cheekbones. “What is it,” he thought, “what or who is it that she reminds me of, for heaven’s sake?” But try as he might, his weary brain could find no answer.

“Of course I’m not finding it all that easy to get acclimatized up here,” he went on, “but that was to be expected. If I were to throw in the towel so soon, simply because I’ll be a little confused and flushed for a few days—why I’d be ashamed of myself, I’d feel like a coward. And besides, it would be quite counter to reason—no, you must admit . . .”

He was suddenly speaking with great urgency, shifting his shoulders excitedly, as if hoping to convince the Italian to make a formal retraction of his suggestion.

“I salute reason,” Settembrini replied. “And I salute courage as well, by the way. What you say sounds good, and it would be difficult to find any truly cogent objection. Because I, too, have seen some marvelous cases of acclimatization. There was Fräulein Kneifer just last year, Ottilie Kneifer, from a fine family, the daughter of a higher governmental official. She was here for about a year and a half, and became so splendidly accustomed to life up here that once she had been completely restored to health—and that does happen, people do get well up here sometimes—she refused to leave on any account. She fervently begged the director to be allowed to stay—she simply could not, would not return home. This was home to her, this was where she was happy. But there was such a press of people wanting to get in, and they needed her room. Her pleas proved in vain, and they insisted that they would have to dismiss her as healed. Ottilie came down with a high fever, let her chart just shoot up with a vengeance. Except that they found her out—by substituting a ‘silent sister’ for her usual thermometer. You don’t yet know what that is—it’s a thermometer without any markings, and the doctor checks it by laying a scale up against it and draws the chart himself. Ottilie, sir, had a temperature of ninety-eight point four. Ottilie had no fever. And so she went for a swim in the lake. It was only the beginning of May, still with frost at night, but the lake was no longer ice—a degree or two above freezing in fact. She stayed in the water for a good while, trying to catch her death of something—and with what success? She remained perfectly healthy. She left us in agony and despair, deaf to her parents’ words of comfort. ‘What is there for me down below?’ she kept crying. ‘This is my home!’ I don’t know what became of her  But it seems you’re not listening, are you, my good engineer? If I’m not quite mistaken, you’re having difficulty staying on your feet. Lieutenant, do take your cousin here,” he said, turning to Joachim, who had just arrived, “and put him to bed. He is a man who unites reason with courage, but he’s a little indisposed this evening.” “No, really, I’m over it,” Hans Castorp protested. “A silent sister, then, is merely a column of mercury without a scale. You see, I was paying complete attention.” But all the same, he took the elevator up with Joachim and several other patients. The festivities were over for today, people were scattering to their balconies or the lounging areas for the evening rest cure. Hans Castorp followed Joachim to his room. The corridor floor with its coconut runners undulated gently under his feet, but he found it was not all that unpleasant a sensation. He sat down in Joachim’s large flowered armchair—there was a chair like that in every room—and lit a Maria Mancini. It tasted like paste, like coal, like anything except what it should; nevertheless he continued to smoke it as he watched Joachim get ready for his rest cure, slipping into his tuniclike house jacket, putting an old overcoat on over that, and then taking the nightstand lamp and his Russian grammar with him out to the balcony, where he turned on the lamp, stuck his thermometer in his mouth, sat down, and began to wrap himself with amazing dexterity in two large camel-hair blankets that lay spread over the chair. Hans Castorp watched in frank admiration of how deftly he performed the task of throwing one blanket over the other—first the left side, flung lengthwise all the way up to under his armpit, then the bottom tucked over his feet, and then the right side, so that it finally built a smooth, regular package, with only head, shoulders, and arms sticking out.

“You do that very well,” Hans Castorp said.

“It’s a matter of practice,” Joachim responded, holding the thermometer firmly between his teeth as he spoke. “You’ll learn how, too. We’ll definitely have to find a couple of blankets for you tomorrow. You’ll be able to use them down below again, too. And they’re an absolute necessity up here, especially since you don’t have a fur-lined sleeping bag.”

“Well, I’m not going to lie out on my balcony at night in any case,” Hans Castorp declared. “I won’t do that, let me tell you. That would seem really too strange. Everything has its limits. And there has to be some way for me to tell that I’m only a visitor up here among you all. I’ll sit here for a while yet and smoke my cigar, just as usual. It tastes terrible, but I know it’s good and that will have to suffice for me today. It’s almost nine o’clock—well, not quite nine yet, sad to say. But once it’s half past, that will be late enough for me to go to bed at something like a normal time.”

He felt a chill and shivered—first once, then several times. Hans Castorp leapt up and ran over to the wall thermometer as if hoping to catch it flagrante delicto. It read fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit. He felt the pipes of the radiator; they were cold and dead. He muttered something incoherent, rambling on to the effect that even if it was August, it would be no disgrace to heat the place, because it wasn’t a matter of the month, but of the temperature, and right now it was so low that he was freezing to death. But his face was burning. He sat back down, then stood up again, muttered a request to use the blanket from Joachim’s bed, spread it over his legs, and went back to sitting— flushed, chilled, and tormenting himself with the disgusting taste of his cigar. A wave of misery swept over him—it seemed as if he had never felt this miserable in all his life. “This is wretched,” he murmured. But suddenly, a curiously extravagant sense of joy and hope stirred within him, and he sat up, waiting to see if it would return. But it didn’t; only the misery remained. Finally he stood up, tossed Joachim’s blanket back on the bed, and with wrenched lips he muttered something that sounded like: “Good night. Don’t freeze out there, and call me again for breakfast”—and staggered out to the corridor and into his room.

He hummed to himself while he undressed, but not out of any sense of cheer. Mechanically and without really paying attention, he went through the motions of the civilized ritual of getting ready for bed: poured pink mouthwash from a travel container into a glass and gargled discreetly, washed his hands with a fine, mild violet soap, and put on his long batiste nightshirt, the monogram HC embroidered on the breast pocket. Then he lay down and put out the light, letting his hot, muddled head fall back against the American woman’s death-pillow.

He had been certain that he would sink into sleep at once, but it turned out he was wrong, and whereas he had barely been able to keep his eyes open before, they simply would not remain closed now, but kept fluttering open restlessly the moment he shut them. It was not his normal bedtime, he told himself, and then, of course, he had napped too often during the day. And someone was beating a carpet outside—which was less than probable and indeed not the case. It turned out that it was his heart that he heard pounding somewhere far in the distance outside—just as if someone were walloping a rug with a wicker carpet-beater.

It was not totally dark in his room yet; both Joachim and the couple from the Bad Russian table had taken lamps out onto their balconies, and light was coming in through his own open door. And as Hans Castorp lay there on his back, his eyes blinking open and shut, he was suddenly visited again by an impression—one of many he had experienced that day—an observation that he had tried on the spot to forget, out of both dismay and tact. It was the expression on Joachim’s face when he had mentioned Marusya’s physical attributes—that peculiar, woeful wrenching of Joachim’s mouth and the blotchy pallor of his tanned cheeks. Hans Castorp understood now, saw through it, discerning its meaning in such a new, exhaustive, and intimate fashion that the carpet-beater outside doubled both in pace and intensity, almost drowning out the sounds of the evening concert in Platz—because there was a concert down at the hotel again. An insipid, symmetrically fashioned operetta melody echoed through the darkness, and Hans Castorp whistled along in a whisper (a whistle can be whispered, you know), while his chilled feet kept time under his feather comforter.

This was, of course, no way to fall asleep, and Hans Castorp now felt no inclination to do so, either. Now that he had such a new, vivid understanding of why Joachim had blushed, the whole world seemed new, and that sense of extravagant joy and hope stirred again deep within him. But he was still waiting for something else, too, although he did not really ask himself what it was. But when he heard his neighbors on the right and left ending their evening rest cure and returning to their rooms to exchange one horizontal position outside for another inside, he announced to himself his conviction that the barbaric married couple would be quiet. “I’ll be able to fall peacefully asleep,” he thought. “They’ll be quiet this evening, at least I certainly expect them to be.” But they weren’t, and in all honesty Hans Castorp had not assumed they would be—to tell the truth, from his personal point of view, he would not have understood it if they had remained quiet. Nevertheless, he blurted out a monotone cry of furious amazement at what he now heard. “Scandalous!” he cried under his breath. “That’s outrageous. Who would have thought it possible?” And periodically his lips returned to their whispered whistling of the operetta melody, which was still surging stubbornly in the distance.

Sleep did come later. But with it came dreams even more tortuous than those of the night before and from which several times he started up in fright or in pursuit of some strange fancy. He dreamed that he saw Director Behrens wandering along the paths of the garden, his knees slightly bent, his arms hanging stiffly at an angle in front of him, matching his slow and yet somehow bleak strides to the rhythm of march music in the distance. When the director came to a halt in front of Hans Castorp, he was wearing glasses with thick, circular lenses and was babbling nonsense. “Civilian, of course,” he said and without asking permission extended two fingers of his gigantic hand and pulled down Hans Castorp’s eyelid. “Respectable civilian, I could tell right off. But not without talent, certainly not without talent for raising his general metabolism. Won’t be stingy about a few little years, a few spiffing years of service with us up here. But, whoops, gentlemen, do get on with your promenade!” he cried, sticking both enormous forefingers in his mouth and giving a whistle so euphonious that the teacher and Miss Robinson, both shrunk in size, came flying through the air from different directions and sat down on the director’s shoulders, one to the right, one to the left, just as they sat on either side of Hans Castorp in the dining hall. And then the director went hopping away, all the while pushing his napkin up behind his glasses to dry his eyes—it was unclear whether this was to wipe away sweat or tears.

And now as he dreamed on, it seemed to him that he was in the same schoolyard where he had spent his recesses for so many years, and he was just about to borrow a drawing pencil from Madame Chauchat, who also happened to be present. She gave him a reddish one, about half the normal length, in a silver holder, but at the same time she warned Hans Castorp in a pleasantly husky voice that he definitely had to give it back to her after class, and looked at him with her narrow, bluish- gray-green eyes set above broad cheekbones, and he tore himself out of his dream—because he had it now and wanted to hold on to it: the person and situation that she had so vividly reminded him of. He quickly made sure he would remember it the next morning, because he could feel sleep and dreams enfolding him again; and he soon realized that he was trying to get away from Dr.

Krokowski, who was lying in ambush for him in hope of subjecting his psyche to dissection, which aroused in Hans Castorp wild, truly mad terror. His foot was injured and he limped as he fled from the doctor down along the balconies, squeezing past the glass partitions, and he took a possibly fatal leap down into the garden and in his distress tried to climb the reddish-brown flagpole—and woke up in a sweat just as his pursuer grabbed him by the trouser leg.

But no sooner had he calmed down and dozed off again than his situation took on a new shape. He was trying with his shoulder to push Settembrini off balance, as he stood there smiling that refined, dry, ironic smile, just below where his full moustache swept handsomely upward—and it was the smile that offended Hans Castorp. “You bother me,” he heard himself saying quite clearly. “Go away! You’re only an organ-grinder, and you are in my way here.” Except that Settembrini would not budge, and Hans Castorp was still standing there trying to think what to do next, when quite unexpectedly he had a brilliant insight into what time actually is—nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale, for the purpose of keeping people from cheating. And he awoke definitely intending to share his discovery with his cousin Joachim the next morning.

The night passed amid several such adventures and discoveries, and even Hermine Kleefeld played a nebulous role, as did Herr Albin and Captain Miklosich, who carried Frau Stöhr away in his jaws, only to have Prosecutor Paravant run him through with a spear. But there was one dream that Hans Castorp dreamed twice that night, and it was exactly the same both times. It came the second time toward morning. He was sitting in the dining hall with its seven tables when the glass door banged shut louder than ever, and in came Madame Chauchat, wearing her white sweater, one hand in her pocket, the other at the back of her head. Instead of proceeding to the Good Russian table, the ill- mannered woman walked soundlessly up to Hans Castorp and silently extended her hand for him to kiss—not the back, but the palm. And Hans Castorp kissed her hand—her unrefined, slightly broad hand with its stubby fingers and jagged cuticles. And once again he felt sweeping through him, from head to foot, that sense of dissolute sweetness that had risen up inside him when he had tried out what it must be like to be free of the pressures of honor and to enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace—and he experienced that sweetness again in his dream, except that it was overwhelmingly sweeter.

CHAPTER 4

A NECESSARY PURCHASE

“Is your summer over now?” was the ironic question Hans Castorp posed to his cousin on his third day.

The weather had taken a terrible turn for the worse.

His second day as a visiting guest up here had been a glorious summer day. The sky shone deep blue above the spear-shaped tops of the pines, the town glistened brightly in the heat of the valley floor, and the cheerful, serene sound of bells filled the air as cows wandered the slopes and grazed on short, sun-warmed Alpine grass. Even at early breakfast, the ladies had been wearing sheer washable blouses, some with open-worked sleeves, which did not suit them all equally well. It looked particularly bad, for example, on Frau Stöhr, whose arms were too spongy—diaphanous clothes were simply not for her. And, each in his own way, the gentlemen of the sanatorium had likewise made allowances for the fine weather: some appeared in jackets of luster wool, some in linen suits, and Joachim Ziemssen had worn ivory flannels and a blue sport jacket, a combination that lent him the perfect military look. As for Settembrini, he had in fact repeatedly remarked on his intention to change his suit. “Damn!” he had said as he joined the cousins for a stroll down into town after lunch. “That sun is hot. It appears I shall have to don lighter apparel.” But although he expressed himself elegantly, he went right on wearing his checked trousers and long petersham coat with the wide lapels—presumably that was the full extent of his wardrobe.

On the third day, however, it was as if nature had taken a tumble—everything was turned upside down. Hans Castorp did not believe his own eyes. It was just after dinner and they had all been lying in the rest cure for twenty minutes or so, when the sun abruptly hid itself, ugly peat-brown clouds moved in from over the ridges to the southeast, and a wind bearing cold, alien air that went to your bones and seemed to have come from unknown regions of ice suddenly swept down through the valley, setting the temperature plunging and inaugurating a whole new regimen.

“Snow,” Joachim’s voice said from behind the glass partition.

“What do you mean, ‘snow’?” Hans Castorp asked in response. “You’re not trying to tell me that it’s going to snow now?”

“I certainly am,” Joachim replied. “We know that wind. Once it starts, there’ll be sleigh rides.” “Nonsense!” Hans Castorp said. “If I’m not mistaken this is still the beginning of August.”

But as a man well versed in local conditions, Joachim turned out to be right—for within a few minutes, amid repeated claps of thunder, a powerful snowstorm set in, with flurries so heavy that everything seemed veiled in white mist and both town and valley were lost to sight.

It continued snowing all afternoon. The central heating was turned on, and while Joachim put his fur-lined sleeping bag to good use and held to the regimen of rest cure, Hans Castorp took refuge in his room; he dragged a chair over to the warm radiator and, shaking his head, peered out into the monstrous state of affairs. It was no longer snowing the next morning; but although the thermometer outside registered a few degrees above freezing, there was still a foot of snow and a perfect winter landscape lay spread out before Hans Castorp’s astonished eyes. They had turned off the heat again. The temperature in his room was forty-five degrees.

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin with bitter irony.

“There’s no telling,” Joachim replied matter-of-factly. “God willing, there’ll be some lovely summer days yet. That’s still quite possible, even in September. But the main thing is that the seasons here are not all that different from one another, you see. They get all mixed up, so to speak, and pay no attention to the calendar. In winter the sun is often so strong that you sweat and take off your jacket when you’re out for a walk, and in summer—well, you’ve just seen how summer can be here sometimes. And then there’s the snow—it mixes everything higgledy-piggledy. There’s snow in January, but almost as much in May, and it can snow in August, too, as you’ve noticed. On the whole, you can say there’s not a month when it doesn’t snow—that’s the one rule a man can hold on to. In short, there are winter days and summer days, spring and autumn days, but no real seasons, we don’t actually have those up here.”

“What a pretty mess,” Hans Castorp said. Dressed in his winter overcoat and galoshes, he was walking down into town with his cousin to buy some blankets for his rest cure, because it was obvious that in this weather his old plaid one would not suffice. He even briefly considered whether he ought not to buy a sleeping bag, but backed off from that—indeed felt somewhat frightened by the idea.

“No, no,” he said, “we’ll just stick to blankets. I’ll find some use for them again down below—people have blankets everywhere. There’s nothing so special or sensational about blankets. But a fur-lined sleeping bag is much too distinctive—you see what I mean? I’d feel as if I were planning to make myself at home here for good, as if I’d become one of you, so to speak. So then, I’ll not say anything more about it, except that there would be absolutely no point in my buying a sleeping bag for just these few weeks.”

Joachim agreed, and so they found a lovely, well-stocked shop in the English quarter, where they purchased two camel-hair blankets like the ones Joachim had—extra long and wide, in a natural beige fabric that was delightfully soft to the touch. They left orders for them to be delivered to the sanatorium at once: International Sanatorium Berghof, Room 34. Hans Castorp intended to put them to use for the first time that afternoon.

This occurred, of course, after second breakfast, because that was the only opportunity the schedule offered for going down into town. It was raining now, and the snow on the streets had turned to slush that splashed up on them. On the way home, they caught up with Settembrini, who was also headed for the sanatorium; although bareheaded, he was carrying an umbrella. The Italian looked yellow somehow, and was evidently in an elegiac mood. In exquisite, perfectly enunciated words, he deplored the cold and damp, which were a bitter affliction for him. If only they would heat the rooms. But their wretched overseers let the fire go out the moment it stopped snowing—an idiotic rule that mocked all reason. And when Hans Castorp objected that he assumed a lowered room temperature was part of the regimen for the cure and presumably a way of keeping the patients from getting too spoiled, Settembrini responded with fierce scorn. Ah yes, indeed. The cure regimen—the exalted and inviolable rules. Hans Castorp had indeed adopted the right tone in speaking of them— that of religious submission. It was, however, striking—in the best sense of the word—that precisely those rules that corresponded exactly to their overseers’ economic interests enjoyed unconditional veneration, whereas rules for which said correspondence was less applicable were more likely to be winked at. And while the cousins laughed, Settembrini moved on from the topic of the warmth for which he so yearned, to the subject of his deceased father.

“My father,” he said, protracting the words with relish, “was such a refined man, sensitive equally in body and soul! How he loved his warm little study in winter, loved it with all his heart, and demanded that the temperature be kept at a constant seventy-seven degrees, by means of a little stove that glowed warm and red. And on cold damp days, or those on which the biting tramontana was blowing, one would enter the room from the hallway of his cottage—and warmth draped itself about one’s shoulders like a soft cape, and one’s eyes filled with happy tears. His study was crammed full with books and manuscripts, rarest treasures among them; there he stood dressed in his blue flannel dressing gown, behind a little lectern, and amid all those intellectual riches, he abandoned himself to literature. A short, slight man, a good head shorter even than I, just imagine! With great tufts of gray hair at his temples—and with a long, finely chiseled nose. What a scholar of Romance letters, gentlemen. One of the finest of the age, a master of our tongue, few could match him, and a stylist in Latin, the like of which there is none today, a uomo letterato to warm Boccaccio’s heart. Learned men came from far and wide to consult with him, from Haparanda and from Krakow, expressly to visit Padua, our town, and pay their respects—and were received with cordial dignity. He was likewise a poet of distinction, who in his leisure hours penned narratives in the most elegant Tuscan prose—a virtuoso in the idioma gentile,” Settembrini said, rocking his head back and forth and taking utmost pleasure in letting the native syllables melt on his tongue. “He designed his little garden after Virgil’s models,” he continued, “and his words were robust and beautiful. But it had to be warm, warm in his study, otherwise he would shiver and could weep tears of rage if anyone allowed him to freeze. And now just imagine, my good engineer, and you my fine lieutenant, what I, the son of such a father, must suffer in this damnable and barbaric place, where my body shivers with cold at the height of summer, even as my soul is constantly tortured by debasing sights. Ah, it is hard, surrounded by such creatures. Our director, the Hofrat, a buffoon, an imp of Satan. And Krokowski”—and Settembrini pretended the name was a tongue twister—“Krokowski, our shameless father confessor, who hates me because my dignity as a man will not permit me to subject myself to his monkish excesses. And then at my table—the society in which I am forced to dine! To my right sits a brewer from Halle, Magnus is his name, with a moustache like a wisp of straw. ‘You can forget the literature,’ he says. ‘What’s in it for me? Beautiful characters. What am I supposed to do with beautiful characters? I’m a practical man, and beautiful characters almost never occur in real life.’ That’s his notion of literature. Beautiful characters . . . O Mother of God! His wife sits across from him, sits there and wastes away, losing protein and sinking deeper and deeper into dim- wittedness. It is a filthy, wretched state of affairs . . .”

Without exchanging a word or a sign, Joachim and Hans Castorp were in complete agreement about this little speech: they found it petulant and unsettlingly seditious—but entertaining as well, of course, indeed edifying in its brazen rebelliousness. Hans Castorp laughed genially at the “wisp of straw,” and at the bit about “beautiful characters,” too, or rather, at the droll, despondent way Settembrini related it.

And then he said, “Good Lord, yes, it is a rather mixed society at our establishment here. One cannot choose one’s tablemates—goodness knows what that would lead to. There’s a lady like that at our table, too—Frau Stöhr, I presume you know her, don’t you? She’s gruesomely ignorant, I must say, and sometimes one doesn’t know where to look when she’s babbling on like that. And she complains constantly about her temperature, and that she’s so listless, and unfortunately it’s probably a rather serious case. That is so strange—sick and stupid. I don’t know whether I’m putting it quite right, but it seems to me very peculiar for someone to be stupid and sick besides, and when the two are joined it’s surely the most pitiful thing in the world. One absolutely doesn’t know what sort of face to put on, because for someone who’s ill one wants to express a certain seriousness and deference, doesn’t one? Illness has something more or less venerable about it, if I may put it that way. But when stupidity keeps coming up with things like ‘eighty camp’ and ‘cosmological salon’ and other such gaffes, one truly no longer knows whether to laugh or cry. What a dilemma for our human emotions—and so sad that I can’t even begin to express it. I mean, there’s no rhyme or reason to it—

they don’t belong together, one is not used to picturing them together. One assumes stupid people must be healthy and vulgar, and that illness must ennoble people and make them wise and special. At least that’s what one normally thinks, is it not? I’ve probably said more than I can defend,” he concluded. “It was merely because we just happened to stumble on the subject . . .” And he was completely muddled now.

Joachim, too, was somewhat embarrassed. Settembrini said nothing, just raised his eyebrows, which left the impression that he was waiting out of politeness for the end of the speech. In reality, he was simply allowing Hans Castorp to lose his train of thought completely, before he answered. “Sapristi, my good engineer,” he said now, “you exhibit philosophical talents that I would never have expected of you. According to your theory, you would have to be less healthy than you give the appearance of being, since you apparently possess an intellect. Permit me to observe, however, that I cannot follow your deductions, that I reject them, indeed, that I stand in positive opposition to them. I am, as you see, a little impatient in matters intellectual and would prefer to be denounced as a pedant rather than to leave uncontested views I consider to be as deserving of refutation as those that you have formulated here.”

“But, Herr Settembrini . . .”

“Per-mit me, please, to continue. I know what you wish to say. You wish to say that you did not mean to be taken so seriously, that the view you have advocated is not yours per se, but rather merely one possible view out of many hovering in the air, as it were, which you then seized upon in order to have an irresponsible go at it. It is characteristic of your years to eschew manly resolve in favor of temporary experimentation with all sorts of standpoints. Placet experiri,” he said, pronouncing the c of placet with the soft Italian ch. “A fine maxim. But what disconcerts me is simply that your experiment has taken precisely the direction it has. I doubt this is purely accidental. I fear the presence of a tendency that threatens to become an indelible trait of character unless one opposes it head-on. Which is why I feel it my duty to correct you. You suggested that the combination of sickness and stupidity is the most pitiful thing in the world. I will grant you that much. I, too, prefer a clever invalid to a consumptive idiot. But my protest begins at the point where you regard the conjunction of illness and stupidity as a kind of stylistic blunder, as an aberration of taste on the part of nature and a ‘dilemma for our human emotions’—as you chose to express it. At the point where, or so it appears, you consider illness to be so elegant or—as you put it—so ‘venerable’ that there is absolutely ‘no rhyme or reason’ why it and stupidity should belong together. Those, too, are your words. In that case, no! Illness is definitely not elegant, and certainly not venerable—such a view is itself a sickness, or leads to it. Perhaps I can best arouse your abhorrence of that idea by telling you that it is outdated and ugly. It comes from an era of superstitious contrition, when the idea of humanity was demeaned and distorted into a caricature, a fearful era, when harmony and health were considered suspicious and devilish, whereas infirmity in those days was as good as a passport to heaven. Reason and enlightenment, however, have banished those shadows, which once lay encamped in the human soul—not entirely, however, for even today the battle is still being waged. That battle, however, is called work, sir, earthly labor, work for the earth, for the honor and interests of humankind. And steeled by each new day in battle, the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race entirely and lead it forth on paths of progress and civilization toward an ever brighter, milder, and purer light.”

“Damnation,” Hans Castorp thought, both bewildered and abashed, “that was a regular aria! How did I provoke that? Although it all seems a little dry to me. And what is this fixation he has about work? He’s always going on about work, although it really does not fit all that well here.” And aloud he said, “Very fine, Herr Settembrini. Definitely worth listening to—the way you put it. It could not be expressed more . . . more graphically, I mean.”

“Backsliding,” Settembrini began again, lifting his umbrella high to avoid the head of a passerby, “intellectual backsliding, a return to the views of that dark, tormented age—and believe me, my good engineer, that is itself a sickness, a sickness that has been abundantly researched and for which science has provided various names—one from the language of aesthetics and psychology, another from that of politics, both of them academic terms of no consequence, which you may happily eschew. But since in the life of the mind all things cohere and one idea emanates from another, since one cannot give the Devil an inch but that he takes a mile, and you along with it—and since, on the other hand, a sound principle can give rise only to sound results, no matter with which sound principle one may begin—for all such reasons, then, imprint this on your minds: illness is very far from being something so elegant, so venerable that it may not be associated with stupidity, even in passing. Illness is, rather, a debasement—indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration—imprint that on your minds!—an aberration and the beginning of all intellectual aberrations. The woman of whom you made mention—pardon me for choosing not to recall her name—Frau Stöhr, yes, thank you—in brief, it is this ridiculous woman herself, and not her case, it seems to me, that presents our human emotions with a dilemma, as you put it. Sick and stupid—in God’s name, that is misery itself. The matter is quite simple—we are left only with pity and shrugs. The dilemma begins, sir, the real tragedy begins where nature has been cruel enough to break the harmony of the personality—or to make it impossible from the very start—by joining a noble and life-affirming mind to a body unfit for life. Do you know Leopardi, my good engineer? Or you perhaps, lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my country, a hunchbacked, sickly man with a soul— a large soul originally, but one forever humbled by the misery of his body and dragged to the lower depths of irony, a soul that could produce laments to rend the heart. Just listen—”

And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the lovely syllables melt on his tongue, rocking his head back and forth, even closing his eyes now and then, oblivious to the fact that his companions understood not a word. It was evident that he did it to savor both his own powers of memory and the words themselves—and to show them off to his audience.

Finally he said, “But you do not understand. You hear, and yet you do not comprehend the painful meaning. As a cripple—gentlemen, you must grasp the situation in its entirety—Leopardi lacked the love of a woman, and that in fact was what made him incapable of preventing his soul from being stunted. Fame and virtue lost their luster for him, he viewed nature as evil—and she is evil, stupid and evil, I agree with him there—and he despaired, horrible to say, he despaired of science and progress. That is tragedy, my good engineer. That is your ‘dilemma for our human emotions.’ It is not the woman at your table—I refuse to tax my memory for her name. Do not speak to me of some ‘spiritual redemption’ that may result from illness—for God’s sake, do not speak of it. A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—whereby the first is the rare exception and the latter the rule. Normally it is the body that grows unchecked, usurping all importance, all life to itself, emancipating itself in the most loathsome fashion. A human being who lives as an invalid is only a body, and that is the most inhuman of debasements—in most cases, he is no better than a cadaver  ”

“That’s funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, who was walking on the other side of Settembrini. “You said something very similar quite recently, too.”

“I did?” Hans Castorp said. “Yes, it may well be that something similar ran through my mind.” Settembrini was silent as they strode on for a few paces. Then he said, “All the better, gentlemen. All the better, if that is so. Far be it from me to lecture you with some sort of original philosophy—that is not my calling. If for his part our good engineer has already voiced analogous opinions, that only confirms my surmise that, like so many talented young men, he is playing the intellectual dilettante, temporarily experimenting with possible points of view. The talented young man is no blank page, but is rather a page where everything has already been written, so to speak, in appealing inks, the good with the bad. And it is the educator’s task explicitly to foster the true—and by appropriate practical persuasion forever to eradicate the false when it tries to emerge. The gentlemen have been shopping?” he asked, adopting a lighter tone.

“No, not really,” Hans Castorp said, “that is . . .”

“We bought a couple of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim replied casually.

“For the rest cure, what with this miserable cold weather. I am supposed to join in for these few weeks,” Hans Castorp said with a laugh, looking down at the ground.

“Ah, blankets, rest cure,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes, yes. I see, I see, I see. Indeed: placet experiri!” he repeated, pronouncing it with his Italian c; and now he took his leave, for they had arrived at the sanatorium, where they were greeted by the limping concierge. Once they were in the lobby, Settembrini turned off into one of the social rooms to read the papers before dinner, as he said. He apparently intended to play hooky from the second rest cure.

“Heaven help us!” Hans Castorp said, as he took his place beside Joachim in the elevator. “That’s your true pedagogue—he himself said not long ago that he had a pedagogic streak. You have to be awfully careful not to say one word too many, otherwise you’ll get an extensive lecture. But it is worth listening to, just the way he speaks, how each word leaps from his mouth so round and appetizing—listening to him always reminds me of fresh hot buns.” Joachim laughed. “You’d better not tell him that. I’m sure he’d be disappointed to learn you’re thinking of hot buns when he’s lecturing.”

“Do you think so? Well, I’m not so certain about that. I always have the impression that what is really important to him is not the lecture itself—perhaps that’s only secondary—but more especially the speaking of it, the way he lets his words roll and bounce, like little rubber balls. And that he isn’t at all displeased, in fact, if you pay attention to that, too. Magnus the brewer is certainly a little silly with his ‘beautiful characters,’ but Settembrini should have said what literature is actually about. I didn’t want to ask for fear of leaving myself wide open. I don’t really understand much more about it myself, and I’ve never met a literary man before. But if it’s not a matter of beautiful characters, then evidently it’s a matter of beautiful words, that’s my impression when I’m around Settembrini. And what a vocabulary! He’s not the least embarrassed to use words like ‘virtue’—I mean, really! That word has never passed my lips once in all my life—even in Latin class we always just translated virtus as ‘bravery.’ It made me wince deep inside, let me tell you. And besides, it makes me a little nervous the way he squawks about the cold and Behrens and Frau Magnus, who’s losing protein— about almost everything in fact. He’s a professional naysayer, that much was clear to me right off. He hacks away at everything around him, and I can’t help it—that always makes things rather untidy and disorderly.”

“You could say that,” Joachim said, musing. “But then again, there’s a kind of pride about him, with no hint of anything disorderly, quite the contrary. He’s a man with a lot of self-respect, or better, respect for people in general, and I like that about him, there’s something decent about that, as I see it.”

“You’re right,” Hans Castorp said. “There’s even something rigorous about him. It often makes you quite uneasy because you feel, let’s call it, controlled—controlled, that’s not a bad word for it. Would you believe that I had the definite feeling that he didn’t approve of my having bought those blankets for the rest cure, was against it and ridiculed it somehow?”

“No,” Joachim replied in composed surprise. “How could that be? I really can’t imagine it.” And then he headed off for his rest cure, lock, stock, and thermometer, while Hans Castorp began to wash and change for dinner—it was less than an hour away.

EXCURSUS ON THE SENSE OF TIME

When they came back up from their meal, the package of blankets was lying on a chair in Hans Castorp’s room, and he made use of them that day for the first time. Joachim, as the expert, gave him lessons in the art of wrapping oneself the way they all did it up here, something every novice had to learn right off. You spread the blankets, first one, then the other, over the frame of the lounge chair, but so that a long piece was left dangling to the floor at the foot. Then you sat down and began to wrap the top one around you, first flinging it lengthwise all the way up to under the armpit, then tucking the bottom up over the feet—and for that you had to sit up, bend forward, and grab the fold with both hands—and finally tugging the other side over, making sure that the double foot-tuck fit tight against both sides to form the smoothest and most regular package possible. And then you followed the same procedure with the second blanket—but it was more difficult to handle, and as a bungling beginner Hans Castorp groaned quite a bit while he bent forward and reached out to practice the moves as he was taught them. Only a very few old veterans, Joachim said, were able to fling both blankets around them at once in three deft motions, but that was a rare and coveted skill, which demanded not only years of practice, but also a natural predisposition. And Hans Castorp had to laugh at that word as he leaned back with aching muscles.

Joachim did not understand what was so funny and gazed at him uncertainly, but then joined in the laughter. “So then,” he said—as Hans Castorp, exhausted from all these gymnastics, lay there a solid, unbroken cylinder, the pliant roll tucked behind his neck—“it could be five below now and it wouldn’t matter.” And then he ducked behind the glass partition to wrap himself up as well.

Hans Castorp doubted what he had said about five below, because he was definitely freezing, and he kept shivering as he gazed through the wooden arches into the damp, trickling drizzle out there, which seemed to threaten to turn to snow again at any moment. How strange, too, that despite the wet, his cheeks still felt so hot and dry, as if he were sitting in an overheated room. And he felt

absurdly frazzled from the practice session with his blankets—in fact, when he now looked down at

Ocean Steamships, it lay trembling in his hands. He was not so terribly healthy after all—totally anemic, just as Director Behrens had said, and that was probably why he tended to chill so easily. These unpleasant sensations, however, were counterbalanced by the comfortable position furnished by the lounge chair and its almost mysterious properties, which Hans Castorp found difficult to analyze but which had found his highest approval from the very first and had stood the test again and again. Whether it was the texture of the cushions, the perfect slant of the back support, the proper height and width of the armrests, or simply the practical consistency of the neck roll—whatever it was, nothing could possibly have offered more humane benefits for a body at rest than this splendid lounge chair. And so Hans Castorp’s heart was filled with contentment at the thought that before him lay two empty, safely serene hours: the main rest cure, sacred to the rules of the house. Although he was only a visiting guest up here, he, too, found it to be a very suitable arrangement. For he was a patient man by nature, who could spend long hours doing nothing in particular and loved, as we recall, his leisure time, with no numbing activity to demolish, banish, or overwhelm it. At four there would be afternoon tea with cake and preserves, followed by a little exercise outdoors, and then he would come back up here to rest in the lounge chair again, with supper at seven—which, like all the meals, brought with it certain sights and tensions that he looked forward to—and afterward a peep or two into the stereoscopic viewer, the kaleidoscopic tube, or the cinematographic drum. Hans Castorp had the daily schedule down pat, though it would perhaps be too much to say that he had now “settled in,” as the expression goes.

Ultimately, there is something odd about settling in somewhere new—about the perhaps laborious process of getting used to new surroundings and fitting in, a task we undertake almost for its own sake and with the definite intention of abandoning the place again as soon as it is accomplished, or shortly thereafter, and returning to our previous state. We insert that sort of thing into the mainstream of our lives as a kind of interruption or interlude, for the purpose of “recreation,” which is to say: a refreshing, revitalizing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life, of languishing and growing indifferent. And what is the cause of the enervation and apathy that arise when the rules of life are not abrogated from time to time? It is not so much the physical and mental exhaustion and abrasion that come with the challenges of life (for these, in fact, simple rest would be the best medicine); the cause is, rather, something psychological, our very sense of time itself—which, if it flows with uninterrupted regularity, threatens to elude us and which is so closely related to and bound up with our sense of life that the one sense cannot be weakened without the second’s experiencing pain and

injury. A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally

believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it “boring,” but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone. What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air, for a trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes. The first few days in a new place have a youthful swing to them, a kind of sturdy, long stride—that lasts for about six to eight days. Then, to the extent that we “settle in,” the gradual shortening becomes noticeable. Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week—of, let us say, four— is uncanny in its fleeting transience. To be sure, this refreshment of our sense of time extends beyond the interlude; its effect is noticeable again when we return to our daily routine. The first few days at home after a change of scene are likewise experienced in a new, broad, more youthful fashion—but only a very few, for we are quicker to grow accustomed to the old rules than to their abrogation. And if our sense of time has grown weary with age or was never all that strongly developed—a sign of an inborn lack of vitality—it very soon falls asleep again, and within twenty-four hours it is as if we were never gone and our journey were merely last night’s dream.

These remarks are inserted here only because young Hans Castorp had something similar in mind when, after a few days, he said to his cousin (while gazing at him with bloodshot eyes), “I’ve always found it odd, still do, how time seems to go slowly in a strange place at first. What I mean is, of

course there’s no question of my being bored here, quite the contrary—I can assure you that I’m

amusing myself royally. But when I look back, retrospectively as it were—you know what I mean?— it seems as if I’ve been up here for who knows how long already, and that it’s been an eternity since I first arrived and didn’t quite understand right off that I actually had, until you said, ‘This is where you get off!’—do you remember? It has absolutely nothing to do with reason or with measurements of time—it’s purely a matter of feeling. Of course it would be absurd to say, ‘It’s as if I’d been here two months already’—that would be pure nonsense. All I really can say is ‘a very long time.’ ” “Yes,” Joachim replied, a thermometer in his mouth, “it’s good for me, too. Since you’ve been here, I feel as if I have you to hold on to, so to speak.” And Hans Castorp laughed at the way Joachim said this so straight-out, without any explanation.

HE TRIES OUT HIS CONVERSATIONAL FRENCH

No, he had not actually settled in yet, neither in terms of his intimacy with life here in all its peculiarities—an intimacy it would be impossible to gain in so few days, or as he told himself (and admitted quite candidly to Joachim), in three weeks, sad to say—nor as regarded the adaptation of his organism to the very peculiar atmospheric conditions found among “the people up here,” because it seemed to him that his physical adjustment was proceeding only painfully, very painfully, if indeed at all.

The normal day was carefully organized and neatly divided into its constituent parts; one quickly fell in with the routine and learned to move with its turning gears. In the framework of a week or larger units of time, however, there were certain recurring deviations that made their appearance little by little—one variation might appear, for instance, only after another had already repeated itself. And even in terms of the objects and faces that made up the details of a day, Hans Castorp had to learn at every step to take a closer, less casual look at accustomed facts and faces and assimilate new things with youthful receptivity.

Those balloon-shaped containers with short necks, for example, which were set out beside the doors in the corridor and which had caught his eye on the evening of his arrival—Joachim explained about them when he asked. They held pure oxygen, for six francs the demijohn, and the stimulating gas was provided to dying patients in order to help preserve their energies and rouse them one last time—it was sipped through a rubber hose. And behind the doors where these potbellied containers stood lay the dying or the moribundi, as Director Behrens called them one day, when Hans Castorp chanced to meet him on the second floor—just as the purple-cheeked director in his white smock came rowing down the corridor. They walked down to the next floor together.

“Well, my innocent bystander,” Behrens said, “what are you up to, have we found favor in your searching eyes? We are honored, we are honored. Yes, our summer season’s quite the thing, of very good parentage. It cost me a pretty penny to puff it a bit, too. But what a shame, really, that you don’t want to stay through the winter with us—want to spend a mere eight weeks, I’ve heard, correct? Oh, three? But that’s just dropping by, not even worth taking off your hat and coat. Well, just as you like. But it really is a shame that you’ll not be spending the winter, because the crème de la crème”—he made a joke of his outrageous pronunciation—“the international crème de la crème down in Platz doesn’t arrive until winter, and you really must see them, just for educational purposes. Split your sides, watching these lads leaping about on planks tied to their feet. And the ladies—Lord, Lord, the ladies! Regular birds of paradise, I tell you, and eminently amorous. Well, now I have to attend to my moribundus,” he said, “in room twenty-seven here. Last stage, you know. Exit up center. He’s downed five dozen fiascoes between yesterday and today, the guzzler. But he will probably be joining his ancestors by noon. Well, my dear Reuter,” he said, stepping into the room, “how would it be if we crack another bottle . . .” His words were lost behind the door as he closed it. But for a moment Hans Castorp could see across the room to a waxen profile against pillows, a young man with a sparse goatee, who slowly rolled his very large eyes toward the door.

This was the first moribundus that Hans Castorp had ever seen in his life, inasmuch as both his parents and his grandfather had died behind his back, so to speak. What dignity in the way the young man laid his head against the pillows, his goatee jutting upward. What meaning in the gaze of those huge eyes as he turned them slowly toward the door. Returning to the stairway now, still absorbed in that fleeting glimpse, Hans Castorp instinctively tried to make the same large, meaningful, and deliberate eyes as those:-of the dying man; and it was with that look that he greeted a lady who had emerged from a door behind him and caught up with him now at the head of the stairs. He did not realize at once that it was Madame Chauchat. She smiled wanly at the eyes he was making, put a hand to the braid at the back of her head, and preceded him down the stairs— soundlessly, supplely, her head thrust slightly forward.

He made almost no new acquaintances in those first days, and not for some time afterward, either. On the whole, the daily routine was not conducive to it. Reserved by nature in any case, Hans Castorp felt that he was merely a visitor here, an “innocent bystander,” as Director Behrens had put it, and so for the most part he was quite content with Joachim’s conversation and company. To be sure, the nurse on their corridor kept craning her neck as they passed, until Joachim, who had stopped to chat with her on occasion before, introduced her to his cousin. The cord of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, she spoke with an affectation that was absolutely excruciating, and from up close, one had the impression of a woman whose reason had long suffered the tortures of boredom.

It was very difficult to get away from her, because she displayed an almost pathological fear of a conversation’s drawing to a close; and as soon as the young men assumed an air of wanting to move on, she would cling to them with hasty words and looks and a desperate little smile, until they took pity on her and stood there a while longer. She spoke at great length about her papa, the lawyer, and her cousin, the doctor—apparently to cast herself in a favorable light and to indicate that she came from the educated strata of society. As for the patient she tended behind the closed door there, he was the son of a doll-manufacturer in Coburg, Rotbein was the name—and recently it had spread to young Fritz’s intestines as well. That made things hard for everyone involved, as she was sure the gentlemen could well understand, particularly hard if one came from an academic household and possessed the sensitivities of the upper classes. One dared not turn one’s back for a moment. And recently, if the gentlemen could believe it, when she returned from having gone out for just a moment, merely to purchase some tooth powder, she found her patient sitting up in bed, with a glass of dark, heavy beer, a salami, a piece of coarse rye bread, and a pickle, all spread out before him. His relatives had sent him these homey delicacies to help him build up some strength. But the next day, of course, he had been more dead than alive. He was hastening his own demise. And that would in fact be a release, but only for him, not for her—Sister Berta was her name, by the way, or more accurately, Alfreda Schildknecht—because she would only move on then to another patient in a more or less advanced stage of the illness, here or at some other sanatorium. Such were her prospects, and no others would ever open before her.

Yes, Hans Castorp said, her profession was certainly difficult, but it did have its satisfactions, or so he would presume.

Certainly, she replied, there were satisfactions, although it was very difficult. Well, their best wishes for Herr Rotbein. And the cousins made to go.

But she clung to them with words and looks, and her exertions, as she tried to hold on to the young men for just a while longer, were so pitiful to watch that it would have been cruel not to grant her a little more time.

“He’s sleeping,” she said. “He doesn’t need me. I stepped into the hall for just a few minutes.” And she began to complain about Director Behrens and the tone of voice he used with her—all too offhand, considering her background. She much preferred Dr. Krokowski—she found him so full of soul. Then she came back around to her papa and her cousin. Her brain would yield nothing more. In vain she grappled to find something to hold the cousins still longer, and as they started to go, she suddenly made another running leap at them, raising her voice almost to a shriek—they escaped and went their way. But the nurse gazed after them for a long time, her body bent forward, her eyes following them as if she hoped to suck them back to her. Then she heaved a great sigh and returned to her patient in his room.

The only other person whom Hans Castorp met during these first days was the pale lady in black, the Mexican woman, whom he had seen in the garden and who was known as Tous-les-deux. And  indeed it came to pass that he himself heard her lips form the mournful phrase that had become her nickname. But since he was now prepared for it, he maintained his demeanor and afterward found he was quite satisfied with his behavior. The cousins met her at the front door as they stepped out after early breakfast for their morning constitutional. Veiled in a black cashmere scarf, her knees slightly bent, she was strolling aimlessly in long, restless strides; and her aging face, with its large, careworn mouth, shimmered dull white against the black veil she had wound around her silver- streaked hair and tied beneath her chin. Joachim, bareheaded as usual, greeted her with a bow, and she looked up and slowly acknowledged him while the long creases deepened on her narrow brow. Noticing a new face, she stopped, and gently nodding her head, she waited for the young men to approach, because she apparently felt it necessary to learn whether the stranger knew of her fate and to accept his condolences. Joachim presented his cousin. From under her mantilla she extended a hand to the visitor—a skinny, yellowish, heavily veined hand, adorned with rings—and went on looking at him and nodding.

Then it happened: “Tous les dé, monsieur,” she said. “Tous les dé vous savez . . .”

“Je le sais, madame,” Hans Castorp replied in a muted voice. “Et je le regrette beaucoup.”

The drooping bags of skin under her jet-black eyes were larger and heavier than any he had ever seen. A faint, wilted odor came from her. A mild, grave warmth stole over his heart.

“Merci,” she said with a clanking accent that stood in strange contrast to her fragility, and one corner of her large mouth drooped tragically low. Then she pulled her hand back up under the mantilla, nodded, and turned to take up her wanderings again.

As they walked on, Hans Castorp said, “You see, it didn’t bother me at all. I managed very nicely with her. I can handle people like that very nicely in general. I believe I have a natural understanding of how to deal with them—don’t you think so, too? I even think that on the whole I get along with sad people better than with happy ones—God only knows why, perhaps because I am an orphan and lost my parents so early on. But when people are serious and sad or if death is involved, it doesn’t really depress or embarrass me. Instead, I feel in my element somehow, or at least better than when things are just chugging right along—I’m less good at that. I was thinking only recently that it’s really foolish the way the local ladies carry on about death and things connected with it, that

everyone is so skittish, protecting them and making sure the last rites are brought while they’re

downstairs eating. No, phooey! That’s silly. Don’t you love to look at coffins? I’ve always enjoyed looking at one now and then. I think of a coffin as an absolutely lovely piece of furniture, even when it’s empty, and if there’s someone lying in it, it’s really quite sublime in my eyes. There’s something so edifying about funerals—I’ve sometimes thought that when we need a little spiritual uplift, we should attend funerals rather than church. People wear their best black clothes and take their hats off and gaze at the coffin and seem so serious and devout—and no one dares make bad jokes, the way they normally do. I really do like it for people to be a little more devout once in a while. Sometimes I’ve asked myself if I shouldn’t have been a pastor—in some ways I don’t think I would have made a bad one   I hope there weren’t any mistakes in my French when I answered—were

there?”

“No,” Joachim said. “ ‘Je le regrette beaucoup’ was quite correct as far as that goes.”

POLITICALLY SUSPECT

Deviations from the normal schedule occurred regularly. First of all, there was Sunday—a Sunday with a band concert on the terrace, offered every fourteen days as a way of marking the passage of two weeks; and it was in the middle of week number two when Hans Castorp entered from the outside world. He had arrived on a Tuesday and so it was his fifth day, an almost springlike day after the bizarre turn in the weather that had thrown them back into winter—mild, yet fresh, with tidy clouds in a bright blue sky and a sun shining gently on the slopes and valley, which now had returned to their proper summer green, because the recent snowfall had been doomed to melt quickly.

It was clear that everyone took pains to dignify and honor Sunday; both management and residents supported one another in the effort. There was crumb cake at early breakfast, and beside each setting was a little vase with a few flowers, wild mountain pinks and even Alpine roses, which the gentlemen then took as boutonnières. Prosecutor Paravant went so far as to don a black swallowtail coat with a dotted vest, and the ladies’ attire had a diaphanous and festive look. Frau Chauchat appeared at breakfast in a flowing open-sleeved lace peignoir, and stood there at attention—having first slammed the glass door—and charmingly presented herself, as it were, to the dining hall, before proceeding in her slinking gait to her table; and her attire suited her so splendidly that Hans Castorp’s neighbor, the teacher from Königsberg, expressed her unequivocal enthusiasm. Even the barbaric couple from the Bad Russian table gave the Sabbath its due, the male portion having exchanged leather jacket and felt boots for a kind of short frock coat and leather shoes; whereas she still wore her shabby boa, but beneath it was a green silk blouse with a ruffled collar. Hans Castorp scowled as he spotted the two of them, and blushed—something he tended to do often here. Immediately after breakfast, the concert began out on the terrace; all sorts of brass and woodwinds had gathered there, and alternating lively and slow pieces, they played almost until the midday meal. The rest cure was not strictly enforced during the concert. True, some people did enjoy sweet melodies from their balconies, and three or four of the chairs in the arcade were occupied; but the majority of the guests sat at little white tables placed out on the covered porch, although frivolous and fashionable society, for whom sitting on chairs was apparently too respectable, took up a position on the stone steps leading down to the garden and gave free rein to merriment—youthful patients of both sexes, most of whose faces or names Hans Castorp knew by now. Hermine Kleefeld was part of the group, as was Herr Albin, who passed around a large flowered box of chocolates from which all the others ate, whereas he did not touch them, but instead assumed a paternal air and smoked gold-tipped cigarettes. Also in the party were the thick-lipped lad from the Half-Lung Club; Fräulein Levi, looking as thin and ivory-skinned as ever; an ash-blond young man who answered to the name of Rasmussen and dangled his hands chest-high, like fins at the end of limp wrists; Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, a lady of ample proportions, who was dressed in red and had joined the young people; the tall gentleman with the thinning hair who could play selections from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and who now sat behind her, his arms hugging pointed knees, his gloomy eyes fixed on the brown hair at the nape of her neck; a red-haired young lady from Greece; another girl of unknown origin with the face of a tapir; the gluttonous adolescent with the thick, circular glasses; another fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy, who squinted through a monocle and at every cough put his little finger, its long nail shaped very much like a saltcellar spoon, to his lips—a first-class ass, it would seem; and several others.

The boy with the fingernail, Joachim explained in a low voice, had been only very slightly ill on arrival, with no temperature—his being sent up was more a precautionary measure by his father, a physician—and had been advised by the director that he would have to stay about three months. And now, after three months, with a temperature between 100 and 100.4 degrees, he was seriously ill. But he led such a reckless life that he deserved to have his ears boxed.

The cousins had a table to themselves, off to one side from the others, because Hans Castorp wanted to smoke a cigar with the dark beer he had brought out with him from breakfast—and from time to time the cigar even tasted rather good. Dazed from the beer and the music, which as always made him lay his head a little to one side with his mouth hanging open, he looked with bloodshot eyes out at the resort life around him. It came to him that all these people were subject to an inner decay that would be halted only with great difficulty and that most of them were slightly feverish, but the realization did not bother him at all—on the contrary, there was a certain special intensity and intellectual charm to the whole scene. People sat at their tables drinking sodas; someone was taking photographs down on the steps. Others were trading stamps. The red-haired young lady from Greece had been sketching Herr Rasmussen on her pad, but she refused to show him the picture now, and with a broad smile that revealed her gap teeth, she kept turning from side to side, and it was a long time before he managed to grab the pad away from her. Hermine Kleefeld sat on the steps, her eyes half-closed, and beat time to the music with a rolled-up newspaper, and simultaneously she let Herr Albin pin a little bouquet of wildflowers to her blouse. The thick-lipped lad, sitting at Frau Salomon’s feet, turned his head around, gazed up at her, and chatted away, while the pianist with the thinning hair stared resolutely at the nape of her neck.

The doctors arrived and mingled among the hotel guests—Director Behrens in his white smock, Dr. Krokowski in his black. They walked along the rows of tables, the director dispensing a casual, witty remark to almost everyone, so that a wake of mirth rippled behind him. They now moved down to the young people, where the females, with wagging heads and sidelong glances, flocked around Dr. Krokowski. In honor of the Sabbath, the director showed the gentlemen a little stunt with his lace boots: placing one huge foot on a higher step, he undid the laces, then gathered them with a special grip in one hand, and without help of the other, crisscrossed them through the hooks so deftly that everyone stood there amazed—and several lads tried the trick out themselves, with no success.

Later Settembrini appeared on the terrace. He emerged from the dining hall, stopped, and leaned on his cane; dressed today as well in his petersham coat and pale yellow trousers, he first looked about with a refined, alert, and critical air and then approached the cousins’ table with a cry of “Ah, bravo!” He asked permission to join them. “Beer, tobacco, and music,” he said. “Behold the Fatherland. I see you’re caught up in the patriotic mood, my good engineer. I’m happy to see you in your element. Permit me, please, to take some part in your harmonious state.”

Hans Castorp ordered his facial expression—had, in fact, already done so the moment he spotted the Italian. He said, “You’re late for the concert, Herr Settembrini. It will soon be over, I fear. Don’t you enjoy listening to music?”

“Not when I’m ordered to do so,” Settembrini replied. “Not if it’s decreed by the day of the week. Not when it has a pharmaceutical odor and is prescribed from on high for reasons of health. I have some little regard for my freedom or what is left to us of our freedom and human dignity. On such occasions I am merely a visitor, much as you play the full-time visitor. I drop by for fifteen minutes and then go my way. It gives me the illusion of independence. I’m not saying it is anything more than an illusion, but who can object if it gives me a certain satisfaction? It’s quite different with your cousin. For him it is a duty. You do regard this as one of your duties here, am I not right, lieutenant? Oh, I know, you’ve learned the trick of keeping your pride, even in slavery. A puzzling trick. Not everyone in Europe knows how to pull it off. Music? You asked if I consider myself a fancier of music, did you not? Well, when you say ‘fancier’ ” (actually, Hans Castorp did not recall putting it that way) “that’s not a bad word for it—it has a hint of delicate frivolity. So then, fine, I’ll accept your term. Yes, I am a fancier of music—which is not to say that I particularly revere it—not, for instance, as I love and revere the written word, the bearer of the human intellect, the tool, the shining plow of progress. Music . . . there is something only semi-articulate about it, something dubious, irresponsible, indifferent. You will object, I presume, that it can also be quite clear. But nature can be clear as well—a brook can be clear, but what good does that do us? It is not true clarity, but a dreamy, empty clarity that demands nothing of us, a clarity without consequences, and therefore dangerous, because it seduces us to take our ease beside it. But, if you like, let music assume its most high- minded pose. Fine! And then our emotions are inflamed. And yet the real point should be to inflame our reason. Music, it would appear, is movement for its own sake—although I suspect it of quietism. Let me overstate my case: my distaste for music is political.”

At this point Hans Castorp could not help slapping his knee and exclaiming that he had never heard anything like that in all his life.

“Please consider it, nevertheless,” Settembrini said with a smile. “Music is invaluable as the ultimate means for awakening our zeal, a power that draws the mind trained for its effects forward and upward. But literature must precede it. By itself, music cannot draw the world forward. By itself, music is dangerous. And for you in particular, my good engineer, it is absolutely dangerous. I read that at once from your face as I arrived just now.”

Hans Castorp laughed. “Ah, you mustn’t even look at my face, Herr Settembrini. You can’t imagine how your air up here plays havoc with me. I find it much more difficult to get acclimatized than I thought I would.”

“I’m afraid you’re deluding yourself.”

“No, what do you mean? Damn if I’m not more tired and flushed than I’ve ever been.”

“It seems to me, however, that we should be grateful to the management for these concerts,” Joachim said circumspectly. “You are viewing the matter from a higher standpoint, Herr Settembrini, as a writer, so to speak, and I would not want to contradict you there. It seems to me, however, that we should be grateful for this bit of music here. I am not particularly musical myself, and there’s nothing remarkable about the pieces as such—neither classical nor modern—especially the way they’re playing them, merely a little band music. But it is an enjoyable change. It fills a few hours up so nice and properly, I think. It divides them up and gives some content to each, so that there’s something to them after all—whereas normally the hours and days and weeks hang so awfully heavy on one’s hands. Such an unpretentious concert piece lasts perhaps seven minutes, am I correct? And each piece is something all to itself, has a beginning and an end, stands out in contrast to the rest, and that is what keeps them, in some sense, from being swallowed up in the general routine. And, besides, each is then divided up into several parts itself—into melodic phrases, and those by the rhythm itself—so that something’s always going on and every moment takes on a certain meaning that a person can hold on to, whereas otherwise—I don’t know if I’m putting it right, but . . .”

“Bravo!” Settembrini cried. “Bravo, lieutenant. You have described very nicely an indubitably moral element in the nature of music: to wit, that by its peculiar and lively means of measurement, it lends an awareness, both intellectual and precious, to the flow of time. Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time. Music awakens—and in that sense it is moral. Art is moral, in that it awakens. But what if it were to do the opposite? If it were to numb us, put us asleep, counteract all activity and progress? And music can do that as well. It knows all too well the effect that opiates have. A devilish effect, gentlemen. Opiates are the Devil’s tool, for they create dullness, rigidity, stagnation, slavish inertia. There is something dubious about music, gentlemen. I maintain that music is ambiguous by its very nature. I am not going too far when I declare it to be politically suspect.”

He went on speaking in these terms for a while, and Hans Castorp listened, too, but was unable to follow the argument very well—not only because of his weariness, but also because he was distracted by the conviviality among the flighty young people down on the steps. Was he seeing right—or what was that exactly? The girl with the face of a tapir was busy sewing on a button at the knee of the knickerbockers worn by the boy with the monocle. But she was panting hot and hard because of her asthma, and all the while he coughed and held his saltcellar-spoon fingernail to his lips. They were ill, both of them—all the same, it certainly showed what peculiar social customs young people had up here. The band was playing a polka.

HIPPE

And so Sundays stood out—including the afternoons, which were marked by carriage rides undertaken by various groups of guests. After tea, several pairs of horses trotted up the loop of the drive, pulling carriages that stopped outside the front door for those who had ordered them—mainly Russians, particularly Russian ladies.

“Russians love to go for rides,” Joachim told Hans Castorp as they stood together at the front door and amused themselves by watching people depart. “And now they’ll ride to Clavadel or to the lake or to Flüela Valley or Klosters, those are the usual destinations. We could take a ride ourselves sometime while you’re here, if you like. But I think you’ve probably got enough to do for right now just getting settled in, and don’t need any adventures.”

Hans Castorp agreed. He had a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his trouser pockets. He watched as the chipper little old Russian lady and her skinny niece took their seats in the carriage and were joined by two other ladies—Marusya and Madame Chauchat. The latter was wearing a light duster, belted across the back, but no hat. She sat down next to the old woman at the front, with the two young girls on the backseat. All four were in a merry mood and their mouths worked ceaselessly at their soft, rather boneless language. They talked and laughed about the difficulty of fitting under the blanket, about the wooden box of Russian candies, wrapped in paper and bedded in cotton, which the great-aunt had brought along as provisions and now offered around. Hans Castorp was pleased to discover that he could pick out Frau Chauchat’s opaque voice. As always when he set eyes on this careless woman, he was reminded of the resemblance that he had been trying to recall for some time now and that had flashed across his dream. Marusya’s laugh, however, the sight of her round, brown eyes, blinking childishly out over the handkerchief with which she covered her mouth, and her full, prominent chest—said to be more than a little ill on the inside— reminded him of something else that had shaken him when he had noticed it recently, and so without turning his head, he glanced cautiously toward Joachim. No, thank God, Joachim’s face wasn’t turning blotchy as it had that day, and his lips were not in their woeful grimace. But he was watching Marusya—and in a pose, with a look in his eyes, that could not possibly be called military, but rather so gloomy and self-absorbed that one would have to term it downright civilian. He pulled himself together, all the same, and quickly peered at Hans Castorp, who just had time to pull his own eyes away and gaze off vaguely into the air. As he did, he felt his heart pounding—for no reason, all of its own accord, as it had taken to doing up here.

In other respects Sunday offered nothing out of the ordinary, apart perhaps from the meals, which, since they could hardly be more sumptuous, were at least marked by a refinement in the cuisine. (Dinner included a chaudfroid of chicken, garnished with shrimps and halved cherries; ices with pastries in little baskets of spun sugar; even fresh pineapple.) After drinking his beer that evening, Hans Castorp felt more exhausted, chilled, and torpid than on any day thus far; he said good night to his cousin a little before nine, quickly slipped in under his comforter, pulling it up over his chin, and fell dead asleep.

But the very next day, his first Monday up here as a visitor, brought another standard deviation from the routine—and that was one of the lectures Dr. Krokowski gave in the dining hall every two weeks before the entire German-speaking, nonmoribund, adult population of the Berghof. As Hans Castorp learned from his cousin, this was one of a series of popular-scientific talks presented under the general title “Love as a Force Conducive to Illness.” This instructive entertainment took place after second breakfast, and, as Joachim likewise informed him, it was not permitted, or was at the very least frowned upon, for anyone to absent himself—and it was therefore considered an amazing license that Settembrini, who surely was fluent in German as few others were, not only had never attended these lectures, but also vilified them at length. As for Hans Castorp, he had decided at once that he would attend—primarily out of courtesy, but also out of undisguised curiosity. Before the lecture, however, he did something quite perverse and ill advised: he took the notion of going for an extended walk all by himself, which turned out bad beyond all expectation.

“Now listen”—these had been his first words when Joachim came into his room that morning—“I have decided that things can’t go on like this. I have had my fill of horizontal living—it’s as if my blood were practically falling asleep. Needless to say, it is quite another matter for you—you’re a patient here, and I have no intention of corrupting you. But if you don’t mind, I want to take a real walk this morning right after breakfast, a couple of hours of just walking out into the wide world wherever the path leads. I’ll stick a little something in my pocket for a snack, and I’ll be on my own. And then we’ll see if I’m not a new man when I get back.”

“Fine,” Joachim said, realizing that his cousin was quite serious about following through on his plan. “But don’t overdo it—that’s my advice. It’s not the same up here as at home. And make sure you’re back in time for the lecture.”

In reality, there were other reasons beyond the purely physical that had put this idea into young Hans Castorp’s head. It seemed to him that his difficulties in acclimatizing himself had less to do with his flushed face, or the bad taste he usually had in his mouth, or the pounding of his heart, and more with things like the activities of the Russian couple next door, the table talk of someone as sick and stupid as Frau Stöhr, the Austrian horseman’s flabby cough that he heard every day in the corridor, Herr Albin’s opinions, the impression left on him by the social customs of sickly adolescents, the expression on Joachim’s face when he looked at Marusya, and all sorts of similar matters he had observed. He thought it could only do him good to break the grip of the Berghof for once, to breathe deep of the open air, to get some real exercise, and if one was going to be exhausted of an evening, at least to know the reason why. And so after breakfast, he boldly took his departure from Joachim—who dutifully started out on his measured promenade up to the bench beside the water trough—and swinging his walking stick, he now marched off down the main road on his own. It was almost half past eight on a cool, cloudy morning. As he had planned, Hans Castorp breathed deeply of fresh, light, early-morning air that went so easily into the lungs and had neither odor nor moisture nor content, that evoked no memories. He crossed the brook and the narrow-gauge tracks, came out on the main road with its irregular pattern of buildings, and left it almost at once for a meadow path, which ran on level ground for only a short while and then led up the slope on his right at a rather steep angle. Hans Castorp enjoyed the climb; his chest expanded, he pushed his hat back from his brow with his cane, and when from a good height he looked back around and saw in the distance the surface of the lake his train had passed on arrival, he began to sing.

He sang the kind of songs he knew—sentimental folk melodies, the ones you find in the handbooks of sport and business clubs, including one that contained the lines:

The bards do praise both love and wine, Yet virtue still more often— and he hummed them softly at first, but soon was singing at the top of his voice. It was a brash baritone, but he found it lovely today, and his own singing inspired him more and more. If he started in too high a key, then he would sing falsetto, and he found that lovely, too. When memory failed him, he made do by singing the melody to nonsense syllables and words, tossing them off into the air with the splendid back-rolled r and well-rounded vowels of opera singers, and at last moved on simply to fantasizing both text and music and accompanying these vocalizations with theatrical gestures. But since it is quite an exertion to both climb and sing, he soon found he was short of breath—and it kept getting shorter. But out of idealism and love for the beauty of song, he ignored his distress and, despite frequent sighs, gave it all he had, until finally he sank down at the base of a thick pine tree—totally out of breath and gasping, half-blind, with only bright patterns dancing before his eyes, his pulse skittering. After such exaltation, his sudden reward was radical gloom, a hangover that bordered on despair.

Once his nerves had settled a bit again, he got up to continue his walk, but his neck was twitching so violently that, young though he was, his head was wobbling just as old Hans Lorenz Castorp’s once had done. The phenomenon suddenly awakened in him warm memories of his late grandfather, and instead of finding it repulsive, he took a certain pleasure in imitating the venerable chin- propping method that the old man himself had used to control his shaking head and that had so delighted Hans Castorp as a boy.

He kept climbing along the serpentine path. The sound of cowbells drew him on and he found the herd, too; they were grazing near a wooden hut, whose roof was weighed down with stones. Two bearded men were coming toward him, axes on their shoulders, but then, not all that far from him, they took leave of one another. “Well, fare thee well and much obliged,” the one said to the other in a deep, guttural voice; he now switched his axe to his other shoulder and began to stride down toward the valley, his steps cracking loudly as he forged a path through the pines. It had sounded so strange there in this lonely, remote place, that “fare thee well and much obliged,” like words in a dream brushing past Hans Castorp’s senses, numbed by climbing and singing. He spoke the words softly to himself, trying to imitate the guttural and sober rustic dialect of these mountain men; and he kept climbing for some distance beyond the hut, determined to reach the tree line. But one glance at his watch, and he gave up that plan.

He followed a path—level at first and then descending—that led around to the left in the direction of town. A forest of tall pines swallowed him, and wandering through it now, he even began to sing a little again, although more prudently—but as he descended his knees shook still more unsettlingly than before. When he emerged from the woods, he was astonished by the splendid view opening up before him—an intimate, closed landscape, like some magnificent, peaceful painting.

From the slope on his right, a mountain stream swept along a flat, stony bed, then rushed foaming over terraced boulders in its path, and finally flowed more serenely toward the valley, crossed at that point by a picturesque wooden bridge with simple railings. The ground about was blue with bell-like flowers of a lushly growing shrub. Dour spruces, symmetrical and gigantic, stood solitary and in small groups along the bottom of the gorge and farther up the slopes. One of them, rooted in the steep bank of the brook, jutted across the view at a bizarre angle. The murmur of isolation reigned above this beautiful, remote spot. Hans Castorp spied a bench on the far side of the brook.

He crossed the wooden bridge and sat down to enjoy the sight of the falling water and rushing foam, to listen to its idyllic chatter, a monotone filled with interior variety. Hans Castorp loved the purl of water as much as he loved music, perhaps even more. But he had no sooner made himself comfortable than his nose began to bleed—so suddenly that he was unable to keep his suit from being stained a little. The flow of blood was strong and persistent and kept him occupied for a good half hour, forcing him to run back and forth between the bench and the brook, rinsing out his handkerchief, sniffing water to rinse his nostrils, then lying down flat on the planks again, the wet cloth over his nose. There he lay quietly until the bleeding finally stopped—his hands clasped behind his head, his knees drawn up, his eyes closed, his ears filled with the rushing of the water. It was not that he felt sick, but rather that the profuse bloodletting soothed him and left him in a state of strangely reduced vitality; he would exhale, and for a long time feel no need to take in new air, but simply lie there, his inert body calmly letting his heart run through a series of beats, until at last he would lazily take another shallow breath.

And he found himself transported to an earlier stage of life, one which only a few nights before had served as the basis for a dream filled with more recent impressions. And as he was pulled back into the then and there, time and space were abrogated—so intensely, so totally, that one might have thought a lifeless body lay there on the bench beside the torrent, while the real Hans Castorp was moving about in an earlier time, in different surroundings, confronted by a situation that, for all its simplicity, he found both fraught with risk and filled with intoxication.

He was thirteen years old, a seventh-grader in short pants, and he was standing in the schoolyard talking with another boy about his age, but from a different class—a conversation that Hans Castorp had initiated more or less arbitrarily and that delighted him no end, although it would be a short one, given the limited scope offered by the physical object under discussion. It was during recess between the last two periods of the day for Hans Castorp’s class—between history and drawing. The schoolyard—paved with red bricks and cut off from the street by a high shingled wall with two entrance gates—was filled with pupils, some walking back and forth in little rows, some standing in groups, some leaning or half sitting against the tiled abutments of the school building. There was a babel of voices. Supervising these activities was a teacher in a slouch hat, who now bit into a ham sandwich.

The boy that Hans Castorp was talking to was named Hippe, Pribislav Hippe—and the remarkable thing was that the r in his first name was pronounced like an sh: he called himself “Pshibislav.” And that outlandish name did not fit badly with his looks, which were not ordinary at all, indeed were decidedly foreign. Hippe, the son of a high-school history teacher—and so a notorious model student—was already a grade ahead of Hans Castorp, although he was not much older. He came from Mecklenburg, and to judge from appearances, he was obviously the product of an ancient mixing of races, the blending of Germanic blood with Slavic-Wendish, or vice versa. He was blond, and his hair was kept trimmed close to his round head. But his eyes, bluish-gray or grayish-blue eyes (a rather indefinite and equivocal color, much like that of distant mountains) had a curious, narrow, and, if you looked closely, slightly slanted shape, and right below them were prominent, strong, distinctive cheekbones—features not at all ill proportioned in his case, but really quite pleasing, although they sufficed for his schoolmates to award him the nickname of “the Kirghiz.” Hippe, by the way, already wore long trousers, plus a blue jacket, gathered at the back and buttoning up to the collar, where a few flakes of dandruff usually lay scattered.

The thing was that Hans Castorp had had his eye on young Pribislav for a long time, had chosen him from among all the boys in the bustling schoolyard, those he knew and those he didn’t know, had been interested in him, had followed him with his glances—should one say, admired him?—in any case, observed him with ever-growing sympathy. Even when walking to and from school, he looked forward to spotting him among the other boys, to watching him talk and laugh, to picking out his voice from a good distance—that husky, opaque, slightly gruff voice. Granted, there was no sufficient reason for this sympathy—particularly if one disregarded such things as his heathen name, his status as a model pupil (which, indeed, could have played no role whatever), or those Kirghiz eyes, which from time to time, in certain sidelong glances, when gazing at nothing in particular, could darken, almost melt, to a veiled dusky look—but whatever the reason, Hans Castorp did not worry about the intellectual or emotional basis of his reaction, or even what name he would give it if he had to. It could not be called friendship, because he didn’t really “know” Hippe. But from the start, there was not the least reason to give it a name; the furthest thing from his mind was ever to talk about the matter—that would have been most unlike him and he felt no need to do so. Besides, to give it a name would have meant, if not to judge it, at least to define it, to classify it as one of life’s familiar, commonplace items, whereas Hans Castorp was thoroughly convinced at some subconscious level that anything so personal should always be shielded from definition and classification.

But with or without a reason for them, these feelings, though far from having a name or being shared, were so powerful that Hans Castorp carried them silently about with him for almost a year— approximately a year, since it was impossible to fix their beginnings exactly—which at least spoke for the loyalty and steadfastness of his character, particularly when one thinks what a huge chunk of time a year is at that age. Unfortunately, there is normally some sort of moral judgment involved in identifying traits of character, whether for the purpose of praise or censure, even though every such trait has its two sides. Hans Castorp’s “loyalty” (in which he did not take any particular pride, by the way) consisted—and no value judgment is intended—of a certain stodginess, slowness, and stubbornness of spirit, a sustaining mood that caused him to regard conditions and relationships of long-standing attachment to be that much more valuable the longer they lasted. He also tended to believe in the infinite duration of the state and mood in which he happened to find himself at a given moment, cherished it for just that reason and was not eager for change. And so his heart had become accustomed to this mute, distant relationship with Pribislav Hippe, and he considered it a fundamental, permanent fixture in his life. He loved the surges of emotion that came with it, the tension of whether he would meet him on a given day, whether Pribislav would pass close by him, perhaps even look at him, loved the silent, tender satisfaction that his secret bestowed upon him, loved even the disappointments it sometimes brought, the greatest of which was when Pribislav was “absent”—and then the schoolyard was desolate, the day lacked every spice, but enduring hope remained.

And so things continued for a year, until that adventurous high-point; and another year passed as well—the result of Hans Castorp’s abiding loyalty. And then it was all over—without his ever noticing the loosening and breaking of the bonds that tied him to Pribislav Hippe, any more than he had noticed their strengthening. Pribislav left the school and the city, too, when his father was transferred. But Hans Castorp barely noticed, he had already forgotten him by then. One might say that the figure of this “Kirghiz” emerged imperceptibly out of the fog and into his life, slowly taking on clarity and palpability, until the moment when he was most near, most physically present, there in the schoolyard, stood there in the foreground for a while, and then gradually receded and vanished again into the fog, without even the pain of farewell.

But Hans Castorp now found himself transported back to that moment, to that risky, adventurous moment when he had had a conversation, a real conversation with Pribislav Hippe. And this is how it had come about. Drawing class was next, and Hans Castorp noticed that he did not have his drawing pencil with him. All his classmates needed theirs; but he had acquaintances here and there among the boys in other classes whom he could have approached for a pencil. But the boy he knew best, he discovered, was Pribislav—he felt closest to him, he was the one with whom he had spent so many silent hours. And on a joyful impulse of his whole being, he decided to seize the opportunity—he even called it an opportunity—and ask Pribislav for a pencil. He wasn’t even aware what an odd thing this was for him to do, since he really didn’t know Pribislav—or maybe he simply did not care, blinded as he was by some peculiar recklessness. And so there he stood in the tumult of the brick schoolyard, face to face with Pribislav Hippe. And he said, “Excuse me, could you lend me a pencil?”

And Pribislav looked at him out of Kirghiz eyes set above prominent cheekbones and in his pleasantly husky voice and without any astonishment—or at least without betraying any astonishment—he said, “Glad to. But be sure to give it back to me after class.” And he pulled a pencil from his pocket, in a silver-plated holder with a ring you had to push up to make the reddish pencil emerge from its metal casing. As he explained its simple mechanism, both their heads bent down over it.

“And don’t break it,” he added.

What made him say that? As if Hans Castorp intended to treat it carelessly—or worse, not give it

back at all.

Then they looked at one another and smiled, and since there was nothing more to say, they turned away, first shoulders, then backs, and walked off.

That was all. But Hans Castorp had never been happier in all his life than during that drawing class as he sketched with Pribislav Hippe’s pencil—and before him lay the prospect of returning it to its owner in person, which came as a simple, natural part of the bargain. He even took the liberty of sharpening the pencil a little, and he kept three or four of the red-lacquered shavings in the drawer of his desk for a year or two—anyone who might have seen them would never have guessed their significance. The return of the pencil, moreover, took the simplest form possible; but that was just what Hans Castorp intended, indeed he took a special pride in it—after all, he was more than a little spoiled and blasé after his long, intimate relationship with Hippe.

“There,” he said. “Thanks.”

And Pribislav said nothing at all, simply gave the mechanism a quick check and shoved the holder into his pocket.

And they never spoke another word—but just that one time, it really did happen, thanks to Hans Castorp’s enterprising spirit.

He opened his eyes wide, confused by the depth of his trance. “I suppose I was dreaming,” he thought. “Yes, that was Pribislav. I haven’t thought of him in a long time. What ever became of those shavings? The desk is up in the attic at Uncle Tienappel’s. They must still be in that same little drawer, clear at the back on the left. I never removed them. Didn’t even pay them enough attention to throw them out. It was Pribislav, it was him all over. I never would have thought that I’d see him so clearly again. And he looked so strangely like her—that woman up here. Is that why I’ve been so intrigued by her? Or maybe that’s why I was suddenly so interested in him. What nonsense. What a lot of nonsense. I’ve got to be on my way, and I mean right now.” But he lay there a while longer, pondering and remembering. Then he sat up. “Well, fare thee well and much obliged!” he said out loud, and tears came to his eyes even as he smiled. And with that he stood up to go, and just as quickly sat back down, hat and cane in hand, forced to admit that his knees couldn’t support him. “Whoops,” he thought, “I don’t think that’s going to work. And I’m supposed to be at the lecture in the dining hall at eleven on the dot. A long walk up here can be lovely, but it has its drawbacks, too, it seems. Yes, indeed—but I can’t stay here. It’s just that I’m a little stiff from lying down; it will get better once I’m moving.” And he tried to get to his feet again—and making a concerted effort to pull himself together, he succeeded.

But it was a miserable walk home, especially after such an optimistic start. He repeatedly had to stop

to rest—the blood would suddenly drain from his face, cold sweat would break out on his brow, and his irregular heartbeat made it hard to breathe. He wearily struggled down the serpentine path, finally reaching the valley close to the spa hotel in Platz; he now realized all too clearly that he would never be able to manage the long walk back to the Berghof on his own; and since there was no tram and he didn’t see any carriages for hire, he asked the driver of a delivery wagon headed for Dorf with a load of empty boxes to let him climb aboard. Back to back with the driver, his legs dangling over the side of the wagon, half-asleep as he swayed and nodded with each jolt, he rode along, the object of the amazed sympathy of passersby. He got off at the railroad crossing, offered some money without bothering to look if it was too much or too little, and lurched headlong up the loop of the drive.

“Dépêchez-vous, monsieur!” the French doorman said. “La conférence de Monsieur Krokowski vient de commencer.”

And Hans Castorp tossed his hat and cane on the hallstand—and carefully, cautiously, his tongue between his teeth, he squeezed his way past the glass door, only just ajar, and entered the dining hall, where the residents were sitting in rows of chairs. To his right, at the narrow end of the room, Dr. Krokowski stood in his frock coat, behind a cloth-covered table, graced by a carafe of water—he was already speaking.

ANALYSIS

Luckily there was a corner seat available near the door. He sidled down into it and put on a face as if he had been there all along. The audience was listening attentively to Dr. Krokowski’s every word and paid Hans Castorp barely any notice. And that was a good thing, because he looked dreadful. His face was as pale as linen and his suit was bloodstained, so that he looked like a murderer fresh from his awful deed. The lady in front of him did turn her head as he sat down, studying him with her narrow eyes. It was Madame Chauchat, he realized with something like indignation. What a hell of a thing to have happen! Wasn’t he ever going to be able to calm down? He had thought that, having arrived at his goal, he could sit there quietly and recover a little, and now he had to have her right in front of his nose—a coincidence that might possibly have pleased him under other circumstances, but what good did it do him in his weary, frazzled state? It only made new demands of his heart, and he would be preoccupied and tense all through the lecture. She had looked at him with eyes exactly like Pribislav’s, staring into his face and at the bloodstains—a rather impolite, brazen stare, by the way, that matched the manners of a woman who slammed doors. What awful posture she had! Not like the women in Hans Castorp’s social circle at home, who sat straight-backed at the table and turned only their heads to speak with pursed lips to gentlemen on either side. Frau Chauchat sat in a limp slouch, her back rounded, her shoulders drooping forward, and at the same time she thrust her head out so that her neck bones were visible above the collar line of her white blouse. Pribislav had held his head like that, too; but he had been a model student and led a life full of honors (although that had not been the reason why Hans Castorp had borrowed a pencil from him)—whereas it was all too clear that Frau Chauchat’s careless posture, her door-slamming, and her brazen stares were bound up with her illness, that in fact they were all expressions of that same license young Herr Albin had praised, the advantages of which, if not honorable, were at least almost endless.

As he gazed at Frau Chauchat’s limp back, Hans Castorp’s thoughts grew jumbled, ceased being thoughts, became daydreams into which Dr. Krokowski’s drawling baritone and gently rolled r drifted from some great distance. But the stillness in the room, the profound, spellbound attention displayed all around him, had its own effect and literally roused him from his doze. He looked about—next to him sat the pianist with thinning hair, arms crossed, head thrown back, mouth hanging open as he listened. Fräulein Engelhart, the teacher, a little farther down the row, had eager eyes and downy red spots on both cheeks, a flush that Hans Castorp discovered on other ladies’ cheeks as well when he looked more closely—even Frau Salomon there, next to Herr Albin, and the wife of Magnus the brewer, the woman who was losing protein. Frau Stöhr, sitting just a little behind him, had an expression on her face revealing such ignorant ecstasy that it was pitiful to behold, while Fräulein Levi of the ivory complexion sat leaning back in her chair with half-closed eyes and hands resting palms-up in her lap—and one would have taken her for a corpse if her chest had not risen and fallen with such striking regularity, although Hans Castorp thought she looked more like a mechanically driven wax figure he had once seen in a sideshow. Several people held their hands cupped to their ears; others merely held their hands up halfway, suggesting that the strain of concentration had frozen them in that pose. Prosecutor Paravant, a tanned, primally robust man, or so he appeared, first flicked at his ear with his forefinger to hear better, then pulled it forward to catch the flow of Dr. Krokowski’s words.

And what was Dr. Krokowski talking about? What train of thought was he pursuing? Hans Castorp gathered his wits to try to catch up, but did not succeed right away, since he had not heard the beginning and then had missed still more of it while contemplating Frau Chauchat’s rounded back. The subject was a force, the force . . . ah yes, the subject was the force of love. But of course, the same topic as in the title of the lecture series—what should Dr. Krokowski be talking about if not his specialty? It was indeed rather odd to hear a lecture about love, since the lectures he usually attended were about things like gear transmissions in ships. How did one go about discussing such a delicate subject, something of such a private nature, here in broad daylight, before an audience of both ladies and gentlemen? Dr. Krokowski discussed it by using a hybrid terminology, a blend of poetical and academic styles, all of it uncompromisingly scientific, but in an ornate, lilting tone, which seemed rather unsuitable to Hans Castorp, but which perhaps accounted for the flush on the ladies’ cheeks and the way the gentlemen kept flicking their ears. In particular, the orator constantly used the word “love” in a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he meant its sanctified or more passionate and fleshly forms—leaving one feeling slightly nauseated and seasick. Never in his life had Hans Castorp heard this word spoken so many times in a row as he did here and now; indeed, when he thought about it, it seemed to him as if he had never spoken it himself before or heard it pass anyone else’s lips. He might have been mistaken—but at least he did not think such frequent repetition did the word any good, either. On the contrary, this slippery syllable with its lingual and labial consonants and scanty vowel in the middle really began to disgust him after a while, conjuring up for him somehow images of watery milk—something whitish-blue and insipid, particularly when compared with all the robust fodder that Dr. Krokowski was serving up. Because this much was clear, that if one went about it the way he did, one could say some very stiff things without driving people from the room. It was not enough for him to speak in tactful, intoxicating tones about matters that, although generally well known, are usually left under a veil of silence. He destroyed illusions, he was merciless in giving knowledge the honor it was due, he left no room for tender faith in the dignity of silver hair or in the angelic purity of little children. Along with his frock coat, by the way, he wore his soft, floppy collar and his sandals over gray socks, which gave the impression of some fundamental idealism, although Hans Castorp found the look rather startling. Supporting his arguments with all kinds of examples and anecdotes from the books and loose pages that lay on the table before him, even reciting poetry a few times, Dr. Krokowski discussed love’s frightening forms—bizarre, agonized, eerie mutations of its symptoms and omnipotence. Of all our natural instincts, he said, it was the most unstable and exposed, fundamentally prone to confusion and perversion—and no one should be surprised at that. Because there was nothing simple about this powerful instinct. It was by its very nature composed of many elements, and however legitimate this instinct was when regarded as a whole, each of its constituent elements was a perversion. But since, and quite rightly so, Dr. Krokowski continued, one ought not conclude that the whole was itself a perversion simply because its parts were, one was therefore compelled to enlist the legitimacy of the whole, if not its whole legitimacy, and apply it to each of the perverse parts. Logic demanded it, and he begged his listeners to keep that in mind. There were counteracting and corrective psychic factors, wholesome and ordering instincts—one might almost call them bourgeois—under whose compensating and modifying effects perverse components were fused to a consistent and useful whole; and this was, all in all, a common and welcome process, whose consequences, however (as  Dr. Krokowski rather superciliously remarked), were of no importance to the physician or thinker. But in other cases that process might not succeed—would not, indeed could not, succeed—and who could say, Dr. Krokowski asked, if those psyches were not perhaps the more noble, the more precious? In such a case, to be precise, the two clusters of forces, both those of the love instinct and the impulses hostile to it, among which shame and disgust were to be noted in particular, exhibited tensions and passions that exceeded all normal bourgeois bounds; and the ensuing battle between these two forces, which was now carried out in the depths of the soul, prevented wayward instincts from being restrained, steadied, and civilized in the manner necessary for a normal, harmonious, and appropriate love life. And how did it end, this clash between the forces of chastity and love— for those were indeed the forces involved? It ended to all appearances with the triumph of chastity. Fear, conventionality, aversion born of modesty, the quivering longing for purity—all these repressed love, held it chained in darkness, at best giving in only partially to its wild demands, but certainly never permitting them a conscious, active existence in all their variety and vigor. Except that chastity only apparently triumphed, its victory was a Pyrrhic victory, because the demands of love could not be fettered, or coerced; suppressed love was not dead, it continued to live on in the dark, secret depths, straining for fulfillment—and broke the bands of chastity and reappeared, though in transmuted, unrecognizable form. And in what form or mask did suppressed and unsanctioned love reappear? Dr. Krokowski looked up and down the rows as he asked this question, as if seriously expecting an answer from his listeners. But no, he would have to provide the answer himself, though he had already provided so many. No one else knew the answer, but he would be sure to know this, too—you could see it just by looking at him. With his glowing eyes, his waxen pallor, his black beard, and those monastic sandals over gray woolen socks, he seemed to symbolize in his person the battle between chastity and passion about which he had been speaking. At least this was Hans Castorp’s impression, as he sat there expectantly waiting, along with all the others, to learn in what form unsanctioned love would reappear. The women were barely breathing. Prosecutor Paravant quickly gave his ear another flick, to make sure that it would be open and receptive. And Dr. Krokowski said: In the form of illness! Any symptom of illness was a masked form of love in action, and illness was merely transformed love.

And so now they knew, even if not all of them were able fully to appreciate the knowledge. A sigh went through the room, and Prosecutor Paravant nodded his weighty approval while Dr. Krokowski continued to elaborate his thesis. For his part, Hans Castorp lowered his head to think about what he had heard and to explore whether he really understood it. But being unpracticed in such discursive reasoning and anything but intellectually alert after his unsalutary walk, he was easily diverted, and was in fact diverted almost immediately by the round back in front of him and by the arm extending from it, which lifted and reached back, so that the hand—now right before Hans Castorp’s eyes—could tuck at the braid of hair.

It was almost suffocating to have that hand so close to his eyes—you had to look at it, whether you wanted to or not, to study its inherent humanness and all its defects, as if you were holding a magnifying glass to it. No, it had nothing at all aristocratic about it, this stubby, school-girlish hand with the carelessly trimmed nails—you couldn’t be certain whether the knuckles toward the tips were even clean, and the cuticles were gnawed, there could no longer be any doubt about that. Hans Castorp grimaced, but his eyes remained fixed on Madame Chauchat’s hand, and a vague, halfhearted recollection passed through his mind of something Dr. Krokowski had said about corrective bourgeois forces that counteracted love  But this arm was more beautiful, this arm bent gently behind the head—and was barely clad, because the fabric of the sleeve was thinner than that of the blouse, the flimsiest gossamer, which lent the arm just a hint of delicate illusion, making it even prettier than it probably would have been without any covering. It was both tender and full at the same time—and cool, one could only presume. There could be no question whatever of any counteracting bourgeois forces.

Hans Castorp began to daydream, his eyes directed at Frau Chauchat’s arm. The way women dressed! They displayed this or that portion of their necks and breasts, lent their arms a radiant illusion with transparent gossamer. They did it all over the world, just to arouse our ardent desires. My God, but life was beautiful! And one of the things that made it so beautiful was that women dressed so enticingly, simply as a matter of course. It was second nature to them, and such a universally accepted practice that you hardly even thought about it, just accepted it unconsciously, without further ado. But if you wanted truly to enjoy life, Hans Castorp told himself, you really should keep the custom in mind and never forget how exhilarating and, ultimately, almost magical it was. Granted, there was a very definite reason why women were allowed to dress in that exhilarating, magical way, without at the same time offending propriety. It all had to do with the next generation, the propagation of the human species, yes indeed. But what happened when the woman was sick deep inside, so that she was not at all suited for motherhood—what then? Was there any point in her wearing gossamer sleeves so that men would be curious about her body—about her diseased body? There was obviously no point in that whatever, and it ought to be considered improper, to be forbidden. Because for a man to be interested in a sick woman was certainly no more reasonable than . . . well, than for Hans Castorp to have pursued his silent interest in Pribislav Hippe back then. A stupid comparison, a rather embarrassing memory. But it had just come to him, insinuating itself all on its own. His daydreams broke off at that point, primarily because his attention was directed again to Dr. Krokowski, whose voice had risen noticeably now. And in fact, as he stood there behind the table, arms spread wide, head tilted to one side, he looked—despite his frock coat— almost like Jesus on the cross!

It turned out that Dr. Krokowski concluded his lecture with a grand advertisement for psychic dissection—he spread his arms wide, and invited them to come unto him. Come unto me, he said, though not exactly in those words, all ye that labor and are heavy laden! And he left no doubt of his certainty that they all, without exception, labored and were heavy laden. He spoke of hidden suffering, of shame and affliction, of the redemptive effects of analysis; he praised the effects of light piercing the dark unconscious, explained that illness could be transformed again into conscious emotion, admonished them to trust, promised recovery. Then he let his arms fall, set his head erect again, gathered up the printed materials that he had used for his lecture, and holding the bundle against his shoulder with his left hand like an ordinary schoolteacher, he exited into the lobby, head held high.

They all stood up, pushed back their chairs, and began slowly to move toward the same door through which the doctor had left the dining hall. As they gathered in concentric circles from all sides, it was as if they were thronging after him—hesitant, without a will of their own, and yet in dazed unanimity, like a swarm of rats behind the Pied Piper. Hans Castorp stood stock-still in midcurrent, his hand on the back of his chair. “I am only a visitor here,” he thought. “I’m healthy and all this has nothing to do with me, thank God. I won’t even be here for the next lecture.” He watched Frau Chauchat leave—slinking, her head thrust forward. “Does she let herself be dissected, too?” he asked himself, and his heart began to pound. He did not even notice Joachim working his way through the chairs toward him, and he flinched when his cousin spoke to him.

“You arrived at the last moment,” Joachim said. “Did you go very far? How was it?”

“Oh, nice,” Hans Castorp replied. “But I did walk rather far. And I must admit it did me less good than I expected. It was perhaps a little too soon for it, or maybe just the wrong idea altogether. I’ll not be doing it again right away.”

Joachim did not ask him whether he had liked the lecture, and Hans Castorp said nothing about it, either. As if by tacit agreement, neither of them ever mentioned the lecture again.

DOUBTS AND CONSIDERATIONS

Tuesday came. Our hero had been up here for seven days now, and when he returned from his constitutional that morning, he found a bill totaling up the charges for his first week—a tidy commercial document in a green envelope, with an exquisite picture of the Berghof at the top of the page and excerpts from the brochure arranged attractively in a narrow column along the left margin, where italicized mention was also made of “psychological therapy by the most modern methods.” The list itself, done in elegant calligraphy, came to almost exactly 180 francs, which was broken down into 8 francs a day for room, 12 francs a day for board and medical treatment, plus separate entries of 20 francs “entrance fee,” and 10 francs for “disinfection of the room,” with the final total rounded out by smaller fees for laundry, beer, and the wine he had drunk at his first supper here.

Hans Castorp saw nothing to complain about when he and Joachim checked the addition. “True, I make no use of medical treatment,” he said, “but that’s my business. It’s included in the daily rate, and I can’t ask them to deduct it. How could they do that? They’ve overcharged for the disinfection— they couldn’t possibly have gone through ten francs worth of H2CO to smoke out the American woman. But on the whole, I must say I find the rates reasonable—not really expensive, considering what they offer.” And so before second breakfast, they went down to the management office to take care of the bill.

“Management” was on the ground floor: after crossing the lobby and following the hallway past the cloakroom, kitchen, and housekeeping, you could not miss it, especially given the porcelain sign on the door.

Hans Castorp’s interest was aroused by the glimpse it offered him into the business side of the establishment. It was a normal, small office where a woman was busy at a typewriter, and three male employees stood bent over lecterns, while in the adjoining room a gentleman with the imposing look of a department head or manager sat working at a freestanding, barrel-like desk and cast his clients a glance just over the top of his glasses, measuring them with cold, practical eyes. While their business was being taken care of—payment made with a large bill, change returned, a receipt written out—they both took on that serious, modest, silent, even subservient look by which young Germans show that their respect for authority applies to all offices, to any room where records are kept and services rendered; but once they were outside and were heading off to breakfast—and later on that day, too—they chatted about the general setup of the Berghof, with Joachim, as the older, more knowledgeable resident, answering his cousin’s questions.

Director Behrens was neither the owner nor the proprietor of the sanatorium—although one might get that impression. Above and behind him stood invisible forces, made manifest only to a certain degree in the management office: a board of directors, a joint-stock company—and the stock would not be a bad thing to have, because according to Joachim’s trustworthy assertions, juicy dividends were distributed annually to the shareholders, despite the high salaries paid the doctors and some very liberal business practices. The director, then, was not an independent man, but merely an agent, a functionary, an associate of those higher powers—though, of course, the highest and supreme associate here, the soul of the place, the determining factor for the whole organization, including the management office. As the supervising physician, to be sure, he stood far aloof from anything to do with the commercial side of the operation. He came from somewhere in northwestern Germany; and it was general knowledge that he had fallen into the position years ago quite by accident and without any planning on his part. He had been brought here by his wife, whose remains had long since been given over to the cemetery in Davos-Dorf—the picturesque graveyard above the village, on the right- hand slope, toward the entrance of the valley. She had been a very charming woman, if a little cross- eyed and gaunt, to judge from photos you found scattered about the director’s official residence, not to mention oil portraits of her that were hung on the walls—painted by his own amateur hand. After she had presented him with two children, a son and a daughter, they had brought her up to this valley, her body already frail and feverish, and within a few months that body had wasted away entirely. People said that Behrens, who idolized her, had been so overwhelmed by the blow that he had temporarily fallen into a strange melancholy and had been seen walking the streets giggling, gesticulating, and talking to himself. He had not returned to his former life, then, but had stayed on here—in part, to be sure, because he did not want to leave her grave behind; but the deciding, and less sentimental, factor had probably been that he had become slightly infected himself and, in his own professional opinion, actually belonged here. So he had taken up residence as one of those physicians who not only supervised people’s stay here, but also shared their sufferings, who did not battle disease from a position of personal wholeness and independence, but who bore its marks themselves. It was a curious, but certainly not unique situation, with presumably both its beneficial and dubious sides. A warm relationship between doctor and patient is certainly to be welcomed, and there is something to the proposition that only he who suffers can be the guide and healer of the suffering. But can someone truly be the intellectual master of a power to which he is himself enslaved? Can he liberate if he himself is not free? To the average person, the idea of a sick physician remains a paradox, a problematical phenomenon. Instead of being intellectually enriched and morally strengthened by his experience, may he not perhaps find that his knowledge of the disease becomes clouded and confused? He no longer stares down the illness with a hostile eye; he is a biased and hardly unequivocal foe. With all due respect, one must ask whether someone who is part of the world of illness can indeed be interested in curing or even nursing others in the same way a healthy person can.

In his own way, Hans Castorp expressed some of these same doubts and considerations as he chatted with Joachim about the Berghof and its supervising physician; but Joachim countered that one had no way of knowing if Director Behrens was still a patient himself nowadays—presumably he had recovered long ago. It was ages now since he first began to practice here—on his own at first, quickly making a name for himself as both a specialist with a fine ear for auscultation and a surehanded lung surgeon. And then the Berghof had secured his services, and in the course of what would soon be a decade now, his life had become intimately interwoven with that of the sanatorium. His residence was back there, at the far end of the northwest wing—Dr. Krokowski lived close by. That lady of noble lineage, the head nurse of whom Settembrini had spoken so scornfully and whom Hans Castorp had seen only fleetingly a few times, was in charge of the widower’s household. The director lived alone, by the way—his son was studying at a university in imperial Germany and his daughter was already married, to a lawyer in the French part of Switzerland. Young Behrens came home on vacation now and then, and had in fact been there once already during Joachim’s stay; and he told how it had been such a thrill for the ladies of the sanatorium—temperatures rose, little jealousies erupted into spats and skirmishes in the public lounging area, and a press of patients had appeared for Dr. Krokowski’s private consultations.

The assistant director had a private consulting room, which, like the general examination room, the laboratory, the operating room, and the X-ray room, was located in the well-lit basement of the building. We have called it a basement, but although the stone stairway leading down to it from the ground floor did indeed create the impression of a descent into a basement, this was almost entirely an illusion, the reasons for which were, first, that the ground floor sat rather high, and second, that the whole edifice had been built on a steep, mountainous slope, so that the “basement” rooms faced the front and looked out onto the garden and the valley—a state of affairs countered and negated, as it were, by the effect of the stairway. You had the sense you were descending below ground level, but in fact, once downstairs, you were right back on ground level again, or at most a foot or two below it—an effect that delighted Hans Castorp when he discovered it for the first time that afternoon as he accompanied his cousin “down” to those regions, where Joachim was scheduled to have himself weighed by the bath attendant. It was a realm where clinical brightness and cleanliness held sway, everything done in white on white, the doors glistening with white enamel—even the one to Dr. Krokowski’s reception room, to which one of the learned man’s calling cards had been tacked and which lay two steps lower than the hallway itself, so that the room behind the open door looked rather like a suite. This door was just to the right of the stairway, at the near end of the hall, and Hans Castorp kept his eye on it as he paced up and down the corridor, waiting for Joachim. He saw someone come out, too, a lady who had arrived only recently and whose name he did not know—a small, dainty woman, with curls across her forehead and golden earrings. Gathering her skirts in one hand, she bent low as she took those two steps, and with her other small, heavily ringed hand, she pressed a handkerchief to her mouth—above it, her large, pale, distraught eyes stared at nothing. Still hunched over, she hurried toward the stairway with mincing steps that made her petticoats rustle, stopped suddenly as if pondering something, then began to mince her way up the steps, and vanished up the stairwell—still hunched over, her handkerchief still at her lips.

Behind her, where the door had opened, it was much darker than in the white hallway—the clinical brightness of these lower rooms apparently did not penetrate that far; Hans Castorp noted that murky twilight, deep dusk, reigned in Dr. Krokowski’s analytical chamber.

TABLE TALK

When he sat down to meals in the bright dining hall, young Hans Castorp found to his embarrassment that he was still subject to the grandfatherly tremor he had first noticed on his long, solitary walk. It would start up again with amazing regularity at almost every meal—it was impossible to stop and hard to hide. The venerable chin-propped-against-chest method offered no permanent solution, and so he looked for other ways to disguise his weakness—for instance, he kept his head in motion as much as possible, turning it to the right and left when conversing, or if he was guiding his soupspoon to his mouth, he would press his left forearm firmly against the table to stabilize himself, and he would even put both elbows on the table and prop his chin in his hand between courses, although he considered that boorish and permissible, at best, in the dissolute company of the sick. But it was all an annoyance, and it would not have taken much for him to have given up meals entirely in disgust, although he had come to value them for the sights and tensions associated with them.

But the fact was—and Hans Castorp knew it only too well—that this deplorable phenomenon with which he was struggling was not merely of organic origin, was not attributable solely to the local air or the strain of adjusting to it, but was also the expression of an inner excitement and was bound up intimately with those same sights and tensions.

Madame Chauchat almost always came late for meals, and until she arrived Hans Castorp would sit there with fidgeting feet, waiting for the glass door to slam, a sound that inevitably accompanied her entrance; and he knew that he would flinch and his face would suddenly feel cold—and that is what happened almost every time. At first he would whip his head around indignantly each time and with angry eyes follow the latecomer to her place at the Good Russian table, even scold her under his breath, rebuking her between his teeth with a cry of outraged protest. But he had given that up, and now he would bend his head farther over his plate, even bite his lips sometimes, or intentionally and elaborately turn to look the other way; because it seemed to him that he no longer had a right to be angry and was not really free to censure her, but that he was an accessory to the offense and answerable for it to the others—in short, he was ashamed. It would be less than precise to say that he was ashamed for Frau Chauchat; rather, he felt personally ashamed in front of all these people. He could have spared himself that, by the way, because no one in the dining hall cared about either Frau Chauchat’s vice or Hans Castorp’s embarrassment for her—except, perhaps, Fräulein Engelhart, the schoolteacher on his right.

This pitiful creature had understood from Hans Castorp’s sensitivity about slamming doors that a certain emotional bond was developing between her young tablemate and the Russian woman, and what was more, that the nature of such a bond was less important than that it existed at all, and finally, that his pretended indifference—and given his lack of talent or experience as an actor, he was very poor at pretending—did not diminish but rather strengthened that bond, was a sign that it had moved to a higher plane. Having given up all hopes and pretensions for herself, Fräulein Engelhart was constantly breaking into raptures about Frau Chauchat; and the remarkable thing was that although Hans Castorp recognized and saw through her rabble-rousing—if not at once, then at least over time—and was indeed disgusted by it, he proved no less willing to allow her to influence him and egg him on.

“Bang!” the old maid said. “That’s her! You don’t even have to look up to make sure who just came in. Of course, there she goes—and what a charming way she has about her—like a kitten slinking to its bowl of milk. I wish you could change seats with me so you could observe her as easily and effortlessly as I can. I do understand that you don’t always want to turn your head to watch. God only knows what she might think if she noticed. Now she’s greeting her table. You really should have a look, it’s so refreshing to watch her. When she talks and smiles the way she’s doing now, a little dimple shows in one cheek—but not always, only when she wants it to. Yes, she’s a darling woman, a spoiled creature, that’s why she’s so careless. We all love people like that, whether we want to or not, because when they annoy us with their carelessness, the annoyance becomes just one more reason for being fond of them. What fun it is to be annoyed at people and yet have no choice but to love them.”

The teacher whispered all this behind her hand to keep others from hearing. Her flushed, downy spinster’s cheeks suggested a temperature above normal, and her titillating remarks stirred Hans Castorp’s blood. A certain lack of self-reliance created in him the need to hear confirmed from a third party that Madame Chauchat was indeed an enchanting woman, and the young man also wanted others to encourage him to give himself over to his feelings, when both his reason and conscience were offering unsettling resistance.

These conversations, however, were much less fruitful when it came to facts, because, for the life of her, Fräulein Engelhart knew little or nothing about Frau Chauchat, no more than was general knowledge in the sanatorium; she did not know her, could not claim even to have any acquaintance in common with her. The only thing that could possibly increase her standing in Hans Castorp’s eyes was that she herself was from Königsberg, a city not all that far from the Russian border, and so could manage a little broken Russian—very meager attributes indeed; all the same, Hans Castorp was prepared to regard them as some kind of extended personal connection to Frau Chauchat. “She doesn’t wear a ring,” he said. “I don’t see a wedding ring. Why is that? She is a married woman, you said, did you not?”

The teacher felt so responsible for representing Frau Chauchat to Hans Castorp that his question embarrassed her—as if she had been driven into a corner and would have to talk her way out of it. “You mustn’t take that all too seriously,” she said. “She is married, most assuredly. There can be no doubt about that. She does not use the title of Madame merely for the greater respect that comes with it, as is common, for instance, among young foreign ladies once they are a little older, but as we all know, she really does have a husband somewhere in Russia—it’s common knowledge here. She has a maiden name, a Russian one, not French, something ending in -avov or -ukov, I did hear it somewhere but I’ve forgotten it. If you’d like I could find out for you. There are surely several people here who know the name. A ring? No, she doesn’t wear one, I have noticed that myself. Good heavens, perhaps it doesn’t become her, perhaps it makes her hand too broad. Or she finds it rather bourgeois to wear a wedding ring, just a plain gold band—all she’d need then is a little basket for her keys. No, she’s certainly too liberal for that. I know it well—Russian women are by their very nature so very free and liberal. And besides, there’s something so cold, so disillusioning about a ring—it is a symbol of a woman’s dependence, it seems to me; it makes a woman seem practically a nun, turns her into a wallflower, a touch-me-not. I’m not at all surprised that Frau Chauchat has no use for it. Such a charming woman, at the very peak of her beauty. I presume she has neither reason nor desire to remind every gentleman to whom she gives her hand of her marital bonds.”

“Good God, how she does go on,” Hans Castorp thought, staring in alarm into her eyes, but she returned his gaze with a kind of defiant, savage awkwardness. Then both of them fell silent for a while to recover. Hans Castorp ate, meanwhile suppressing the tremor of his head. At last he said,

“And what about her husband? Doesn’t he care about her at all? Doesn’t he ever visit her up here?

What does he do, actually?”

“Civil servant. An administrator for the Russian government, in some remote province, Daghestan, you know, it’s somewhere far to the east, beyond the Caucasus—he was transferred out there. No, I told you already, he’s never been seen up here once. And she’s been here now for three months this time.”

“So this is not her first time here?”

“Oh no, this is her third time already. And in between she’s somewhere else, at other places like this. It’s just the other way around—she visits him now and again, not often, once a year for a little while. They live separate lives, one might say, and she visits him now and again.”

“Well, after all, she is ill.”

“Certainly, that she is. But not all that ill. Not so seriously ill that she would have to live in sanatoriums, separated from her husband. There must be other reasons beyond that. People here generally assume there are. Perhaps she doesn’t like it out there in Daghestan beyond the Caucasus, in such a savage, remote region—there really would be nothing so surprising about that. But it must be at least partly the husband’s fault if she doesn’t like being with him. He has a French name, true, but he is a Russian official, and believe me, those are coarse people. I even saw one once—he had iron-gray whiskers and such a red face. It’s terribly easy to bribe them, and then they are all given to vodka, Russian schnapps, you know. For the sake of propriety they’ll order a little something to eat, a couple of marinated mushrooms or a piece of sturgeon, and chase it down with drink, quite to excess. And that’s what they call a snack.”

“You blame it all on him,” Hans Castorp said. “But we really don’t know if it might not be her fault that they don’t get along together. One must be fair. I just have to look at her—and then there’s the unmannerly way she slams doors, too—I certainly don’t imagine she’s an angel. Please don’t take offense, but I simply would not trust her out of my sight. But then you’re not without bias in the matter. You sit there up to your ears in prejudice in her favor.”

That is how he worked it sometimes. With a cunning that was actually foreign to him, he pretended that Fräulein Engelhart’s enthusiasm for Frau Chauchat was not in reality what he very well knew it to be, but that her enthusiasm was some neutral, droll fact that he, Hans Castorp, as an uninvolved party standing off at a cool, amused distance, could use to tease the old maid. And since he was certain that his accomplice would accept this audacious distortion and go along with it, it was not a risky tactic at all.

“Good morning,” he said. “Did you rest well? You did dream about lovely Minka, your Russian

miss, didn’t you? No, look at you blush at the mere mention of her. You’re terribly infatuated, don’t try to deny it.”

And the teacher, who had indeed blushed and was now bent deep over her cup, whispered out of the left corner of her mouth, “Shame, shame, Herr Castorp. It isn’t at all nice of you to embarrass me with your insinuations. Everyone has already noticed that it’s her we’re talking about and that you’re saying things to make me blush.”

What a strange game these two tablemates were playing. Both of them knew that their lies had double and triple twists—that Hans Castorp teased the teacher just so he could talk about Frau Chauchat, but that at the same time he took unwholesome delight in flirting with the old maid; and that for her part, she welcomed all this: first, because it allowed her to play the matchmaker, and second, because she probably had become smitten with Frau Chauchat, if only to please the young man, and finally, because she took some kind of wretched pleasure in being teased and made to blush. They both knew this about themselves and each other, and they also knew that each of them knew this about themselves and one another—and that it was all tangled and squalid. But although Hans Castorp was usually repelled by tangled and squalid affairs and even felt repelled in this instance as well, he continued to splash about in these murky waters, taking consolation in the certainty that he was here only on a visit and would soon be leaving. Affecting a businesslike tone, he offered his expert opinion about the appearance of this “careless” woman, that she looked decidedly younger and prettier in full face than in profile, that her eyes were set too far apart, that her posture left a great deal to be desired, although he did have to admit that her arms were beautiful and “softly formed.” And as he was saying all this, he attempted to hide his wobbling head—and all the while he was not only aware that the teacher had spotted his futile attempts to do so, but he also realized to his profound disgust that she, too, suffered from the same tremor.

It was also a purely political tactic, a bit of unnatural cunning, that he had called Frau Chauchat “lovely Minka,” since it allowed him to continue: “I call her ‘Minka,’ although I don’t know what her real name is, actually. I mean her first name. As infatuated as you undeniably are, you must surely know her first name.”

The teacher thought hard. “Now wait, I do know it,” she said. “Or I did know it. Isn’t her name Tatyana? No, that wasn’t it, and not Natasha, either. Natasha Chauchat? No, that’s not what I heard her called. Wait, I have it. Her name’s Avdotya. Or something of that sort. Because she’s definitely not named Katyenka or Ninotchka. It has simply slipped my mind. But I can easily ascertain it for

you, if that’s of some consequence to you.” And the very next day she knew the name. She told him

over dinner, just as the glass door banged shut. Frau Chauchat’s first name was Clavdia.

Hans Castorp did not understand right away. He had her repeat the name and spell it for him before he actually grasped it. Then he pronounced it a few times himself, all the while looking over at Frau Chauchat with his bloodshot eyes, trying it out on her, so to speak.

“Clavdia,” he said, “yes, that’s very likely it, the name suits her very well.” He made no secret of his delight at having acquired this intimate knowledge, and from now on he spoke only of “Clavdia” when he meant Frau Chauchat. “Your Clavdia is rolling her bread up into little pills, I just noticed. Not very refined, I’d say.”

“It all depends who’s doing it,” the teacher responded. “It’s very becoming for Clavdia.”

Yes, the meals in the dining hall with its seven tables held the greatest fascination for Hans Castorp. He regretted the end of each, but his consolation was that very soon, in two or two and a half hours, he would be sitting there again—and once he sat down it would be as if he had never stood up. What happened in the meantime? Nothing. A brief walk up to the water trough or to the English quarter, a little rest in his lounge chair. Those were no serious interruptions, no obstacles worth taking seriously. It would have been different had it been work, some worry or trouble, that interposed itself—his mind could not have overlooked or bridged that sort of thing quite so easily. But such was not the case in the cleverly and pleasantly regimented life of the Berghof. When he stood up from one communal meal, Hans Castorp was already delighting in the next—insofar as “delighting” was the right word, and not too cheery, simple, light, or common a word for the anticipation bound up with being together again with a lady as ill as Frau Clavdia Chauchat. It is possible that the reader may be inclined to see only such expressions, that is, cheery and common ones, as fitting and proper for the emotional life of a person like Hans Castorp; but we would like to remind the reader that as a young man of reason and conscience he could not simply “delight” in watching and being near Frau Chauchat; and since we must know, we can unequivocally state that had this word been suggested to him, he would have shrugged and cast it aside.

Indeed, he was getting to be very particular about how he did express himself—a characteristic well worth noting. As he walked around, his cheeks flushed with dry fever, he hummed to himself, sang to himself, because in his present state he was sensitive to all things musical. He hummed a little song that he had heard sung in a light soprano voice, who knew where or when, at some party or charity concert, and that had turned up now in his memory, a gentle bit of nonsense that began: How oft it thrills me just to hear

You say some simple word,

and he was about to add:

That spoken from your lips, my dear, Does leave my heart so stirred!

and suddenly he shrugged and said, “Ridiculous!” and cast aside the delicate little song as tasteless and insipidly sentimental—rejecting it, however, with a certain austere melancholy. Some young man who had “given his heart,” as they say, given it calmly, legitimately, and with a promising view to the future, to a healthy little goose down there in the flatlands—such a young man might have found satisfaction and taken pleasure in such a heartfelt song, abandoning himself to his legitimate, promising, reasonable, and ultimately cheerful emotions. When applied to him and his relationship with Madame Chauchat, however—and the word “relationship” must be credited to Hans Castorp, we refuse any responsibility for it—such verses were most decidedly inappropriate. Lying in his lounge chair, he found himself moved to pronounce upon them an aesthetic verdict of “Silly!”—and broke off now, turning up his nose, although he knew of nothing more suitable to replace them with. He did take satisfaction in one thing, however, as he lay there listening to his heart, his physical heart, pounding rapidly and audibly in the stillness—the stillness that was prescribed by house rules and reigned over the entire Berghof during the main rest cure of the day. His heart was pounding insistently, urgently, the way it had done almost constantly ever since he had arrived here; and yet of late that did not upset Hans Castorp as it had the first few days. One could no longer say that it thudded on its own accord, for no reason, and without any connection to his soul. There was a connection now, or at least it would not have been difficult to establish one—a justifiable emotion could easily be assigned to his body’s overwrought activity. Hans Castorp needed only to think of Frau Chauchat—and he did think of her—and his heart had a suitable emotion to make it pound.

GROWING ANXIETY/TWO GRANDFATHERS AND A TWILIGHT BOAT RIDE

The weather was vile—in that regard Hans Castorp had no luck with his short vacation in these climes. It wasn’t snowing, exactly, but it had been raining heavily for days; ugly, thick fog filled the valley, where thunderstorms raged and rolled in knotty reverberations—absurdly superfluous, really, considering it was so cold that the heat had been turned on in the dining hall.

“What a shame,” Joachim said. “I had thought we would have breakfast up on Schatzalp or wherever at least once. But it looks as if it’s not to be. Let’s hope your last week will be better.”

But Hans Castorp replied, “No matter. I’m not itching for another excursion. My first didn’t turn out all that well. It does me more good just to live each day as it comes, without much variety. That’s for those who spend years up here. But with my three weeks, what do I need variety for?”

And that was how it was—he kept himself occupied, felt his days were full enough as things stood.

Whatever hopes he might have were just as easily fulfilled or disappointed here as on some Schatzalp or other. It wasn’t boredom that bothered him; on the contrary, he began to fear that the end of his stay was winging its way toward him. His second week was passing quickly now; two-thirds of his time would soon be gone, and once the last third began, he would have to start thinking of packing. For Hans Castorp, the initial refreshment of his sense of time was long since past; the days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain. Is it necessary to spell out those private experiences, which both weighed down Hans Castorp’s days and gave them wings? But everyone knows them: flimsy, tender, perfectly normal experiences that would have taken the same course even in a more reasonable and promising situation, where the sentimental little song about “how oft it thrills me” would have been more applicable.

It was impossible for Madame Chauchat not to notice at least something of the threads strung between a certain table and her own; and it was definitely part of Hans Castorp’s uninhibited plan that she should notice something, indeed as much as possible. We call his plan uninhibited, because he was fully aware of just how irrational his situation was. But then, anyone in his condition, or incipient condition, will want the other side to be aware of it, even if there is no reason or common sense in doing so. That is how we humans are.

After Frau Chauchat had turned toward his table two or three times at meals, drawn either quite by chance or by some magnetic effect, and each time found her eyes met by Hans Castorp’s, she looked his way a fourth time on purpose—and met his eyes again. The fifth time, she did not catch him looking at her; he was not on guard at just that moment. And yet he immediately felt she was looking at him and turned his gaze so eagerly to her that she smiled and glanced away. Her smile filled him with apprehension and delight. If it meant she thought him childish, she was mistaken. But he definitely had to refine his tactics. And so at the sixth opportunity, when he felt, sensed, knew somewhere deep within, that she was looking his way, he pretended to stare with emphatic distaste at a pimply lady who had stepped up to his table to chat with the great-aunt; he held his eyes fixed on her for a good two or three minutes, never yielding until he was certain that the Kirghiz eyes across the way had given up—a strange bit of playacting that Frau Chauchat could easily have seen through, indeed was meant to see through, so that Hans Castorp’s refinement and self-control would give her pause. But something happens now: in a break between courses, Frau Chauchat turns around nonchalantly to survey the room. Hans Castorp has been on guard. Their eyes meet. And as they look at each other—the sick woman peering at him with vague mockery, Hans Castorp staring back fiercely, even clenching his teeth as he holds firm—her napkin begins to slip from her lap to the floor. With an anxious start, she reaches for it; he, too, is unnerved, is pulled up halfway from his chair, and is about to dash blindly across eight yards and around an intervening table to come to her aid, as if it would be a catastrophe for her napkin to touch the ground. She manages to grab it just before it reaches the stone tiles. But in that stretched and bent position and still holding the napkin by one corner, she scowls, evidently annoyed at her unreasonable little burst of panic, for which she apparently blames him. Now she glances his way again, notices his wide eyes and the way he is poised to leap—and she turns away with a smile.

The event left Hans Castorp triumphant, absolutely exuberant. But it came not without its setback, because Madame Chauchat did not turn his way even once for two whole days, for ten long meals— indeed, refrained from her custom of “presenting” herself to her audience as she entered the dining hall. That was hard. But since such acts of omission were without doubt committed for his sake, there was clearly a connection between the two of them now, even if it had taken a negative form; and that would have to suffice.

He had come to realize that Joachim had been quite right when he said that it was not all that easy to make acquaintances here, except for tablemates. During the one brief hour after supper—and sometimes that shrank to a mere twenty minutes—when there was some regular social interchange, without exception Madame Chauchat would take her seat at the back of the little salon, an area reserved apparently for the Good Russian table, where she was joined by the gentleman with the concave chest, the droll frizzy-haired girl, silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the two hunch-shouldered youths. And Joachim was always trying to urge an early departure so as not to cut short his evening rest cure, as he said, and perhaps for other reasons of regimen, which he did not go into but which Hans Castorp guessed and respected. We accused Hans Castorp before of being uninhibited, but whatever the aim of his desires, a social acquaintance with Frau Chauchat was not what he had in mind, and he was in fundamental agreement with those circumstances that worked against it. The vague, tense connection that his looks and actions had established between him and the Russian woman was of an extrasocial nature, entailing no obligations, indeed intended not to entail them. From his standpoint, a considerable amount of social distance suited their connection, but the fact that thoughts of “Clavdia” set his heart pounding was certainly not a sufficient reason for a grandson of Hans Lorenz Castorp to have his firmly held convictions shaken. In reality—that is, in any sense beyond this secret connection with her—he could not possibly have anything to do with a strange woman who lived her life at various resorts, separated from her husband and yet never wearing a wedding ring, who had bad posture, slammed doors behind her, rolled her bread into little pills, and doubtless chewed her fingernails; deep chasms separated her existence from his, and he could never

have defended her against criticisms that he himself acknowledged. Quite understandably, Hans Castorp was a man without any personal arrogance; but an arrogance of a more general and traditional sort was written on his face and in the drowsy look in his eyes. It was the source of the sense of superiority that he could not and would not throw off when considering Frau Chauchat’s character and person. Strangely enough, it was the day he heard Frau Chauchat speak German that this general sense of superiority became especially vivid, that he was perhaps even conscious of it for the first time. It was after a meal, she was standing in the dining room with both hands in the pockets of her sweater, trying to carry on a conversation with another patient, an acquaintance from the lounging arcade presumably, struggling in a most charming way, as Hans Castorp could hear, to speak German; and he suddenly discovered a pride in his own mother tongue that he had never known before—and, simultaneously, an urge to sacrifice that pride to the enchantment that filled him at the sound of her winsomely bungled, broken stammering.

In a word, Hans Castorp saw his silent relationship to this one careless person among all the others up here as a vacation adventure, which had no claim before the court of reason—or of his own reasonable conscience—and that was primarily because Frau Chauchat was sick, listless, feverish, and worm-eaten deep inside, a condition that was closely bound up with the dubious nature of her whole being and that itself contributed strongly to Hans Castorp’s sense of caution and need to keep his distance. No, it never entered his mind to seek out a real acquaintanceship. As for the rest, it would all be over with no consequences, for better or worse, in another week and a half, when he would enter training with Tunder and Wilms.

For the present, however, he found himself beginning to see the emotions, tensions, satisfactions, and disappointments growing from his tender relationship to this patient as the true purpose and meaning of his vacation, to live entirely for them and allow his mood to be dependent on their success. Conditions here were most beneficial for encouraging him, because people lived together in a restricted area and followed a rigid schedule mandatory for all. Granted, Frau Chauchat’s room was on a different floor—the second—from his own, and she took her rest cures, as Hans Castorp learned from Fräulein Engelhart, in the general lounging area located on the roof, the same one where Captain Miklosich had turned off the lights recently. But the possibility, indeed inevitability, of meeting her presented itself at each of the day’s five meals and on countless other routine occasions from morning till evening. And Hans Castorp thought that was marvelous—as was also the fact that life here had no cares or worries to block the view. At the same time, however, there was something suffocating about being locked up in a box together with auspicious chance.

And yet he did help things along a bit, by putting his mind to the task and figuring out how best to

improve his luck. Since Frau Chauchat normally arrived late for meals, he made a point of being late himself, so that he could meet her on the way. He dawdled in his room and wasn’t ready when Joachim came by to fetch him, told his cousin to go on ahead, said he would catch up. Following the advice of instinct, he would wait the few moments he thought necessary and then hurry down to the second floor; but instead of continuing down the same set of stairs, he would follow the corridor almost to the far end, to a second stairway, which was very close to a door he had come to know quite well—room 7. And at every step of the way along this hall connecting the two sets of stairs, there was a chance that one particular door might open at any moment—and so it did, on repeated occasions, slamming shut behind Frau Chauchat, who would emerge soundlessly and glide soundlessly toward the stairs. She might precede him, tucking her hair with her hand, or Hans Castorp might precede her, and then he would feel her eyes on his back, which made his legs cramp and caused pins and needles up and down his spine. But playing the role to the hilt, he would pretend not to know she was even there, as if he led his life in solitary, stout independence. He would bury his hands in his coat pockets and roll his shoulders pointlessly or clear his throat noisily while pounding his chest with his fist—all to proclaim his indifference.

On two occasions he carried this bit of roguery even further. After taking his seat at the table, he patted himself with both hands and said in dismayed annoyance, “I knew it—I’ve forgotten my handkerchief. That means I’ll have to go back upstairs again.” Which he did—just so that he and “Clavdia” could meet head-on, which was something quite different, more dangerous and more intensely alluring than when she walked before or behind him. The first time he tried this maneuver, she measured him with her eyes, from top to bottom, quite brazenly and without the least embarrassment, while still some distance off; but as she drew nearer she turned her face away indifferently and walked right by him. He could not give the results of this meeting a very high rating. The second time, however, she looked directly at him, and not just from a distance; she looked at him the whole time, gazed firmly at him during the entire encounter, scowling just a little, and as they passed one another, she turned her head toward him—and his blood ran cold. Not that we should pity him—he had not wanted it any other way and had arranged the whole affair himself. But this meeting had a powerful effect as it was happening—and afterward, too, because only when it was all over did he see quite clearly how it had been. Never had he observed Frau Chauchat’s face so close up, with every detail plainly visible: he could have counted every strand of reddish-blond hair—each with a slight metallic sheen—that had come free from the simple braid wound around her head. Only a few handbreadths separated his face from hers, its features so extraordinary and

yet familiar to him for so long now—and that face spoke to him like nothing in the world. It was

both foreign and full of character (but then, only things foreign to us always seem to have character), an exotic and mysterious look of the North, demanding you probe further, for its features and proportions were not easily fathomed. Probably the most distinctive characteristic was the prominent, high cheekbones: they pushed against her unusually wide-set eyes, flattening and lifting them at a subtle slant, and at the same time they were the reason for the soft concavity of her cheeks, which was, then, the direct cause for the slightly voluptuous pout to her lips. And then there were the eyes themselves, those narrow and absolutely magical (or so they seemed to Hans Castorp), Kirghiz-shaped eyes, bluish-gray or grayish-blue like distant mountains, which from time to time, in certain sidelong glances, when gazing at nothing in particular, could darken, almost melt, to a veiled dusky look—Clavdia’s eyes, which had examined him brazenly and somewhat sternly from close up, and which in shape, color, and expression so amazingly and frighteningly resembled those of Pribislav Hippe. “Resembled” was not the right word—they were the same eyes; and the breadth of the upper half of the face, the flattened nose, everything, including the flush of the white skin, the healthy color of the cheeks—which in Frau Chauchat’s case only feigned health and as with all the people up here was merely the superficial by-product of rest cures in the open air—it was all exactly like Pribislav, who had looked no different when they had passed one another in the schoolyard.

It was thrilling in every sense of the word. Hans Castorp was inspired by this meeting, and at the same time he sensed something like a growing anxiety, much like that suffocating feeling of being locked up in a box together with auspicious chance; what was more, the fact that the long-forgotten Pribislav had reappeared up here as Frau Chauchat and had looked at him with Kirghiz eyes made him feel as if he were locked up together with something inevitable and inescapable—an inescapability that both cheered and alarmed him. It filled him with hope; and at the same time an eerie, even threatening sense of helplessness stole over young Hans Castorp, setting in motion a vague, instinctual groping, a search for help—one might say he was looking about deep inside himself for advice and support. He thought of various people, one after the other, hoping the mere thought of them might prove beneficial somehow.

There was Joachim, good, upright Joachim there at his side, whose eyes had taken on such a sad expression in these last months, and who at times would shrug in that dismissive, vehement way he had never, ever done before—Joachim with his Blue Henry in his pocket, as Frau Stöhr liked to call the item, with that willfully shameless look on her face that shocked Hans Castorp every time. There was honest Joachim, then, who pestered and badgered Director Behrens so that he could return to the “plains,” to the “flatlands”—as people up here called the world of the healthy with a gentle, but

clear trace of contempt—and take up the military duties he so longed for. And both to do that and

to save time (which people simply wasted up here), he had from the first been as conscientious as possible in doing his rest-cure duty—doing it, no doubt, in order to recuperate as soon as possible, but as Hans Castorp sometimes thought he could sense, doing it just a little for the sake of the cure itself, which ultimately was a sort of service like any other, since doing one’s duty was doing one’s duty. And so each evening, after perhaps fifteen minutes, Joachim would propose that they leave the social gathering for their rest cure; which was fine, since his military scruples made up somewhat for Hans Castorp’s civilian attitudes, for he would probably have preferred to linger there, for no good reason and with no prospects, except a view to the little Russian salon. But Joachim was so insistent about cutting the party short that there had to be another, unspoken reason—one that Hans Castorp had come to understand only too well ever since he had realized the precise meaning of Joachim’s blotchy pallor and the peculiar, woeful way he wrenched his mouth at certain moments. Because Marusya, laughter-loving Marusya, with the little ruby on her pretty finger, her orange- blossom perfume, and her prominent, worm-eaten chest, was usually present at the gathering as well; and Hans Castorp understood that it was this circumstance that drove Joachim away, precisely because it held such a strong, terrible attraction for him. Was Joachim “locked up” here, too? Was it even more narrow and suffocating for him than for Hans Castorp himself? Marusya, after all, with her little orange-scented handkerchief, sat down at the same table with them five times a day. In any case, Joachim was much too preoccupied with himself to have been of any real inner help to Hans Castorp. His flight from the festivities each evening seemed honorable enough, but the effect was anything but calming; and then, too, there were certain moments when it seemed as if Joachim’s good example at doing one’s rest-cure duty—and even his expert introduction to its procedures— had a dubious side as well.

Hans Castorp had not been up here for two weeks, but it seemed much longer to him, and the Berghof’s daily schedule, which Joachim observed so dutifully, had begun to take on the stamp of sacred, axiomatic inviolability in his eyes as well, so that when viewed from up here, life in the flatlands below seemed strange and perverse. He had already gained great proficiency in manipulating his two blankets to form a smooth, regular package, turning himself into a veritable mummy for his cold-weather rest cures. It would not be long before he would be as skilled as Joachim in the art of wrapping them around himself in the prescribed fashion, and the thought that no one in the plains down there knew anything about the rules of the art seemed almost amazing. Yes, that was peculiar—but at the same time Hans Castorp was astonished that he found it peculiar, and the uneasy feeling that had sent him searching for advice and support rose up inside him again.

He was forced to think of Director Behrens, of the advice he had given him sine pecunia to live the

life of a patient and even keep track of his temperature—and of Settembrini, who had thrown back his head and laughed out loud at the advice and then quoted something from The Magic Flute. So he gave thinking about these two men a try, just to see if that would do him any good. Director Behrens was a man whose hair had turned white, he could have been Hans Castorp’s father. He was in charge of the sanatorium, its highest authority—and Hans Castorp’s heart felt a restive longing for paternal authority. And yet try as he would, he found he could not regard the director with a child’s trust. The man had buried his wife here, the grief of it had even made him rather odd for a while, and then he had stayed on, both because he felt bound to her grave and because he had become slightly infected himself. But was he over it now? Was he healthy and single-mindedly bent on making others healthy so that they could quickly return to the flatlands and take up their duties there? His cheeks were always purple, and without doubt he looked as if he had a fever. But that might be an illusion, his color could be the result of the air up here. Hans Castorp himself had felt a dry flush, day in, day out, without having a fever—at least as far as he could judge without a thermometer. True, when you listened to the director talk you might sometimes think he had a temperature—there was something not quite right about the way he spoke, it sounded so brash and jovial and easygoing, but there was also something strange about it, something overwrought, especially when you considered those purplish cheeks and watery eyes, which looked as if he were still weeping for his wife. Hans Castorp remembered what Settembrini had said about the director’s “melancholy” and tendency to “vice,” even calling him a “confused soul.” That might have been malice or hot air; but nevertheless he did not feel particularly fortified by the thought of Director Behrens.

And then, of course, there was Settembrini himself—naysayer, windbag, and homo humanus, as he called himself—who had rebuked him with a lot of taut words for calling sickness and stupidity a contradiction and a dilemma for human emotions. What about him? Was it beneficial to think of him? Hans Castorp recalled quite well how in several of the exceedingly vivid dreams that filled his nights up here, he had been annoyed by the Italian’s delicate, dry smile, the mocking curl of the lip just below where the full moustache swept handsomely upward, how he had berated him as an organ-grinder because he was in the way up here. But that had been a dream, and the waking Hans Castorp was a different man, less uninhibited than in his dreams. Things might be different awake; maybe in looking for inner support he would do well to give Settembrini’s novel nature a try— rebellious and critical, though sentimental and bombastic, too. He had called himself a pedagogue, after all; apparently he wanted to exert some influence; and young Hans Castorp craved to be

influenced; but, of course, that did not mean he was going to let Settembrini run his affairs—or that

he was going to pack his bags and leave early as the fellow had recently suggested in all seriousness. “Placet experiri,” he said to himself with a smile, because he understood that much Latin at least, without having to call himself a homo humanus. And so he turned an eye to Settembrini and reviewed eagerly, but cautiously and attentively, too, all the things the man had favored him with at their various encounters—on regular constitutionals to the bench on the mountain slope, or when they happened to meet on the way down to Platz, or on other occasions, too, as when, for example, Settembrini would be the first to get up after a meal, stroll through the dining hall with its seven tables, and, contrary to all customs and usages, stop to visit awhile with the cousins at their table. He would stand there in his checked trousers, a toothpick between his lips, assume his graceful pose with his ankles crossed, and chatter away, gesticulating now and then with the toothpick. Or he would pull up a chair and sit down at one corner, either between Hans Castorp and the teacher or between Hans Castorp and Miss Robinson, and watch his new tablemates consume a dessert he had apparently turned down.

“I beg admission to this noble circle,” he would say, shaking both cousins’ hands and including all the others in his bow. “It’s my beer-brewer yonder—not to mention the depressing sight of Madame Beer-brewer. But as for Herr Magnus himself—he has just delivered a lecture on ethnic psychology. Would you like to hear? ‘Our beloved Germany is one huge barracks, granted. But a great deal of hard work went into it, and I would not trade our sturdy honesty for the fine manners of other nations. What good are fine manners if I’m being cheated up one side and down the other?’ In that sort of style. I’m at the breaking point. And then across from me sits a poor creature with graveyard blossoms on her cheeks, an old maid from Transylvania, who goes on endlessly about her ‘brother- in-law,’ a gentleman whom no one knows, nor wishes to know. In short, I could not take any more— I bolted.”

“And so hastily vacated the primroses,” Frau Stöhr said. “It’s easy to see why.”

“Precisely,” Settembrini cried. “The primroses! I see there’s quite a different wind blowing here—no doubt of it, I’ve found the right shop. And so I hastily vacated them—what a way you have with words, Frau Stöhr! Might I presume to inquire as to the state of your health?”

Frau Stöhr’s affectations were dreadful to behold. “Good God,” she said, “it’s always the same, as the gentleman knows himself. One takes two steps forward and three back—and when one has served one’s five months, the boss comes and adds another six to your sentence. Ah, the tortures of Tantalus. You push and push, and you think you’ve reached the top of the hill . . .”

“Oh, how prettily you express it. You’ve finally put a little variety into poor Tantalus’s life. You’ve

let him roll the famous marble boulder for a change. I call that genuine kindness. But what is this I’ve heard, madam, about mysterious things happening to you? There are stories about a doppelgänger and astral bodies. I would never have believed such things until now, but what I hear you’ve experienced quite perplexes me  ”

“It seems the gentleman is trying to reticule me.”

“Most assuredly not—I wouldn’t think of it! But please, first set my mind at rest about a certain dark side of your life, and then we can talk about reticules. I was taking a little walk yesterday evening between nine-thirty and ten, and I happened to glance up along the balconies, and the electric lamp on yours was glimmering in the darkness. You were, therefore, taking your rest cure, just as duty, reason, and regulation demand. ‘There our lovely patient lies,’ I said to myself, ‘faithfully observing the rules so that she may return speedily to the arms of Herr Stöhr.’ But what did I hear a few minutes ago? That at the same hour you were seen at the cinematographo”—Herr Settembrini accented the word on its fourth syllable—“at the cinematographo in the arcade of the Kurhaus, and afterward as well in the pastry shop, over dessert wine and some sort of meringues, and indeed  ”

Frau Stöhr wiggled her shoulders and tittered into her napkin, poked an elbow in the ribs of both Joachim Ziemssen and silent Dr. Blumenkohl, gave a sly, intimate wink—all varied displays of her asinine smugness. In order to deceive the authorities, she was in the habit of putting her nightstand lamp out on her balcony each evening, then stealing away to amuse herself in the English quarter down in town. Meanwhile, her husband waited for her in Cannstatt. Nor was she the only patient who engaged in this practice.

“And indeed,” Settembrini continued, “you partook of these meringues in the company of a gentleman. And of whom? Of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. I have been assured that he wears a corset, but good God, that is of little or no consequence here. I implore you, madam—where were you? There must be two of you! Or at the least, you fell asleep and while the earthly part of your nature held its solitary rest cure, the spiritual part was making merry in the company of Captain Miklosich over foamy meringues.”

Frau Stöhr wriggled and squirmed as if someone were tickling her. “One really cannot say whether one might not prefer it the other way around,” Settembrini said, “so that you could have enjoyed your meringues alone and taken your rest cure with Captain Miklosich.”

“Tee-hee-hee  ”

“Have the ladies and gentlemen heard what happened the day before yesterday?” he asked out of the blue. “Someone was snatched away—by the Devil, or to be more accurate, his mother, an

energetic lady. I rather liked her. It was young Schneermann, Anton Schneermann, who sat up there

at the same table with Mademoiselle Kleefeld. As you see, his chair is empty. It will soon be occupied again, I’m not worried about that, but

Anton is gone on the wings of the storm, like a shot! before he knew what hit him. He had been here a year and a half—and was only sixteen himself. And another six months had just been added. And what happens? I don’t know who passed the word on, but at any rate Madame Schneermann got wind that her little son was leading a life in Baccho et ceteris. She shows up here quite unannounced, a matron three heads taller than I, white-haired and hot-tempered, doesn’t say a word, but gives our Herr Anton a few quick boxes on the ear, grabs him by the collar, and sets him on the train. ‘If he’s going to the dogs,’ says she, ‘he can just as well do it down below.’ And home they go.”

Everyone within earshot began to laugh, because Herr Settembrini had a droll way of telling stories. For all his mocking and criticizing of the social life of people up here, he kept up with the latest gossip. He knew the names and more or less the general circumstances of every new arrival; he could report that yesterday somebody or other had undergone a rib resection and had it on best authority that beginning in autumn no one with a temperature above 101.3 degrees would be admitted. The night before, or so he said, the little dog kept by Madame Kapatsoulias from Mytilene had sat on the emergency button on her nightstand, which resulted in considerable commotion and tumult, particularly since Madame Kapatsoulias was not alone, but in the company of Judge Düstmund from Friedrichshafen. Even Dr. Blumenkohl had to laugh at the story. Pretty Marusya almost choked on her orange-scented handkerchief, and Frau Stöhr began to shriek, holding both hands to her left breast.

But Lodovico Settembrini spoke, too, about himself and his origins when he was alone with the cousins—during walks or at the evening gatherings or after the noonday meal when a large majority of patients had already left the dining hall and the three gentlemen remained seated at one end of the table for a while as dining attendants cleared dishes and Hans Castorp smoked a Maria Mancini, which by the third week had regained some of its flavor. Cautious, attentive, puzzled, but willing to let himself be influenced, he listened to the Italian’s tales, which opened up a strange and very new world for him.

Settembrini spoke about his grandfather, who had been a lawyer in Milan, but above all a great patriot, playing a considerable role as a political agitator, orator, and contributor to various periodicals—he, too, a naysayer like his grandson, though one who went about it all in grander, bolder style. For whereas Lodovico, as he himself reported with bitterness, found himself restricted to deriding life and manners at the International Sanatorium Berghof, to offering his sardonic

criticism and protesting in the name of beautiful, vigorous humanity, his grandfather had given

governments trouble, had conspired against Austria and the Holy Alliance, which in those days held his dismembered fatherland in the grip of darkest bondage, and had been a zealous member of certain secret societies that had spread throughout Italy—a Carbonaro, as Settembrini suddenly declared, lowering his voice, as if it were still dangerous even now to speak the word. In short—at least as he was presented to the cousins in the tales of his grandson—this Giuseppe Settembrini was a shadowy, passionate, and incendiary figure, a ringleader of conspiracy; and despite the polite pains they took to show their respect, they did not quite succeed in banishing from their faces an expression of apprehension and aversion, indeed of outright disgust. True, things were different then—the stories they heard now were from long ago, almost a century past; it was history, and from history, at least ancient history, they had learned in theory about the type of person presented here—a man of courage, uncompromising in his hatred of tyrants and consumed by the fire of liberty—though they had never thought they would come into such direct human contact with one. And then, too, this grandfather’s seditious conspiracy, or so they were told, had been bound up with the love of his fatherland, which he hoped to see free and united—indeed, his subversive activities were the fruit and outcome of that honorable affection; and however strange this mixture of rebellion and patriotism might seem to both cousins (accustomed as they were to equating patriotic feelings with preservation of the established order), they did have to admit in private that as things had stood back then, rebellion might very well have been commensurate with civic virtue and sober loyalty with idle unconcern about matters of public order.

But Settembrini’s grandfather had been not only an Italian patriot, but also a fellow citizen and brother-in-arms with all peoples thirsting for freedom. For after the failure of a certain plot to overthrow the state in Turin, in which he had been involved both in word and deed, he very narrowly escaped Prince Metternich’s hirelings and spent the years of his banishment fighting and bleeding for a constitution in Spain and the independence of the Hellenic peoples. It was in Greece that Settembrini’s father had first seen the light of the world—which probably explained why he was such a great humanist and lover of classical antiquity—born, by the way, of a mother with German blood, a girl whom Giuseppe had married in Switzerland and taken along with him throughout the course of his adventures. Later, after ten years of exile, he was able to return to his native land and work as a lawyer in Milan, but that in no way prevented him from continuing to call—with voice and pen, in verse and prose—for the freedom and unity of his country, to draft revolutionary programs with passionate autocratic élan and to proclaim in a lucid style that liberated peoples must unite and forge their universal happiness. Grandson Settembrini mentioned one detail that made a

special impression on young Hans Castorp: Grandfather Giuseppe had worn only black when

appearing among his fellow citizens, because, as he said, he was in mourning for Italy, his fatherland, which languished in misery and bondage. As had been the case with several items in the story, this piece of information reminded Hans Castorp of his own grandfather, who likewise had worn black all the years his grandson had known him, although for reasons profoundly different from those of this grandfather here; Hans Castorp thought now of those old-fashioned clothes, the makeshift adaptation by which Hans Lorenz Castorp’s true nature, belonging to a time long past, had indicated its dislike of the present, until in death he had solemnly returned to the form appropriate to him— in Spanish ruff. Those had indeed been two spectacularly different grandfathers! And as Hans Castorp thought about it, he closed his eyes tight and shook his head cautiously, which could just as easily have been taken as an expression of admiration for Giuseppe Settembrini as of dismay and rejection. And he honestly did attempt not to judge what was alien to him, but simply to define and compare. He was back in the “den” and saw Hans Lorenz’s narrow head bent down over the pale golden circle of the baptismal bowl, that abiding, mutable heirloom; and he saw him round his lips to form the syllable “great,” that pious, somber sound that reminded you of places where as you walked you fell into a reverential, forward rocking motion. And he saw Giuseppe Settembrini—the tricolor in one hand, a swinging saber in the other, black eyes turned heavenward to seal his vow— at the head of a troop of revolutionaries storming the phalanx of despotism. Each had his beauty and honor, he thought, trying all the harder to be fair because he knew his own personal or partly personal biases. Grandfather Settembrini had struggled for political rights—but his own grandfather, or at least his ancestors, had originally possessed all those rights, which over the course of four centuries the rabble had wrested from them by force and slogans. And so they had both worn black, the grandfather in the North and the one in the South, and both for the purpose of drawing a strict line between themselves and the evil present. But the one had done so to show his reverence for the past and to honor death, to which his whole being already belonged; the other, in contrast, had done so out of rebellion and a belief in irreverent progress. “Yes, those were two worlds, two opposing points of the compass,” Hans Castorp thought, and as Herr Settembrini went on talking, he stood there halfway between them, so to speak, casting a critical eye first on the one and then the other; and it seemed to him that he had experienced all this once before. He remembered a lonely boat ride on a lake in Holstein several years before—in late summer, at twilight. It had been around seven o’clock, the sun had set, an almost full moon had already risen above the wooded shore to the east. And for ten minutes, while Hans Castorp rowed across the still water, it all became a baffling, dreamlike scene. Bright daylight reigned in the west—glassy, cool, definitive light; but if he turned

his head, he found himself gazing into utterly magical moonlit night draped in a web of mist. This

strange condition was held in balance for almost a quarter of an hour before it tipped in favor of night and the moon, and all the while Hans Castorp’s dazzled and bewildered eyes moved in serene amazement between one landscape and luminary and the other, from day to night and out of night back into day. It all came back to him now.

Given the kind of life lawyer Settembrini had led and all his extensive activities, he could not have been a great scholar of the law, or so Hans Castorp thought. But the universal principle of the law had inspired him from infancy on, or so his grandson would have them believe; and although Hans Castorp was not feeling all that clearheaded as his organism strained to deal with one of the Berghof’s six-course meals, he struggled to understand what Settembrini might mean by calling this principle “the source of freedom and progress.” As for the latter concept, until now Hans Castorp had understood it as something like the improvement of hoists and cranes during the nineteenth century; and he discovered that Herr Settembrini had no low opinion himself of such things, nor had his grandfather for that matter. Indeed, the Italian paid high tribute to his listeners’ fatherland for two inventions: gunpowder, which had turned feudalism’s suits of armor into junk, and the printing press, which had made possible the democratic propagation of ideas, or rather, the propagation of democratic ideas. And so in that regard, and insofar as the past was concerned, he had praise for Germany, although to be fair he thought his own nation should be given the palm for having unfurled the banner of enlightenment, culture, and freedom while other nations had still lain sleeping in superstition and bondage. But although he paid due honor to technology and transportation, Hans Castorp’s own field of labor—as he had, for instance, on that first day beside the bench up on the slope—he seemed to do so not for the sake of those forces themselves, but rather for their significance in helping humankind reach moral perfection, for, as he explained, he happily ascribed such significance to them. As technology brought nature increasingly under its control, he said, by creating new lines of communication—developing networks of roads and telegraph lines— and by triumphing over climatic conditions, it was also proving to be the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, furthering their knowledge of one another, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations. The human race had come out of darkness, fear, and hate, but now it was moving forward and upward along a shining road toward a final state of understanding, inner illumination, goodness, and happiness—and technology was the most useful vehicle for traveling that road. But as he spoke, he brought together, in a single breath, categories that until now Hans Castorp had been accustomed to think of as widely divergent. “Technology and morality,” he said.

And then he actually spoke about the Savior of the Christians, who had first revealed the principle

of equality and brotherhood; the propagation of that same principle had been considerably advanced by the printing press, and finally the great French Revolution had raised it to the status of law. But in fact, it all sounded most decidedly confused to Hans Castorp, though for reasons not quite apparent to him and despite Herr Settembrini’s having put it in clear and taut words. Once, only once, just at the beginning of the prime of his life, the Italian said, had his grandfather rejoiced with all his heart—in the days of the July Revolution in Paris. He had publicly proclaimed that all men would one day place those three days in Paris alongside the six days of Creation. And at that a flabbergasted Hans Castorp could not help banging his hand on the table. For someone to place three days in the summer of 1830, during which the Parisians had written a new constitution for themselves, alongside the six in which the Lord God had divided the waters of the firmament and created great lights in the heavens and the flowers, trees, fish, birds, and life itself—that really seemed a bit much. And afterward, when he was alone with his cousin Joachim, he expressly let it be known that he found it more than a bit much, indeed absolutely offensive.

But he was willing to let himself be influenced, in the sense that it was pleasant to experiment, and so he reined in the protests that piety and good taste would have raised against the Settembrinian order of things and decided that what seemed blasphemous to him might be termed bold and what he found in bad taste might, at least in those days and under those conditions, be considered the excesses of a high-minded and noble nature—as, for example, when Grandfather Settembrini called barricades the “people’s throne” or declared it necessary to “consecrate the citizen’s pike on the altar of humanity.”

Hans Castorp knew why he listened to Herr Settembrini, not in so many words, but he knew. It was partly out of a sense of duty—but it was also the irresponsibility of the vacationer and visitor who does not wish to harden himself against new impressions and takes things as they come, well aware that tomorrow or the day after he will spread his wings and return to his accustomed routine. But conscience—or more precisely, the qualms of a conscience uneasy for some reason—demanded that he listen to the Italian, whether he was sitting there with one leg crossed over the other, puffing on his Maria Mancini, or all three of them were on their way back from the English quarter, climbing the hill to the Berghof.

According to the outline Settembrini presented, two principles were locked in combat for the world: might and right, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge, the law of obduracy and the law of ferment, change, and progress. One could call the first the Asiatic principle, the other the European, for Europe was the continent of rebellion, critique, and transforming action, whereas the

continent to the east embodied inertia and inactivity. There was no doubt which of these two forces

would gain the victory—that of enlightenment, of reasoned advancement toward perfection. Because human progress was always gathering up new nations in the course of its brilliant advance, conquering new continents—indeed all of Europe itself—and had even started to press on into Asia. Yet there was much to be done before total victory, and great and noble efforts would have to be made by those to whom the light had been passed on, if that day were ever to come when monarchies and religions would at last collapse in those European nations that, truth to tell, had experienced neither an eighteenth century nor a 1789. But that day would come, Settembrini said, smiling delicately beneath his moustache—it would come, if not on the feet of doves, then on the pinions of eagles, and would burst as the dawn of universal brotherhood under the emblem of reason, science, and justice; it would bring about a new Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracies, the shining antithesis of that thrice-infamous alliance of princes and ministers whom Grandfather Giuseppe had declared his personal enemies—in a word, the Republic of the World. But to achieve this goal, it was necessary above all to strike at the Asiatic principle of bondage and obduracy at its vital center point, at the very nerve of resistance—in Vienna. One must deal a fatal blow to Austria and crush her, first to avenge past wrongs and second to open the way for the rule of justice and happiness on earth.

This final twist to the melodious torrent of Settembrini’s argument did not interest Hans Castorp at all. He did not like it, in fact, and every time it reappeared he found it embarrassing, as if it were some testy personal or nationalistic prejudice—not to mention the reaction of Joachim Ziemssen, who would refuse to listen whenever the Italian started down that road, would scowl and look away, sometimes diverting the conversation or reminding them that the duties of the rest cure called. Indeed, Hans Castorp did not feel he was required to pay any regard to such aberrations, evidently they lay beyond the limits set by an uneasy conscience demanding that he at least try to be influenced—and its demands were indeed audible, so audible that whenever Herr Settembrini would sit down with them or join them in the open air, he would ask the Italian to expand on his ideas.

These ideas, both as ideals and efforts of the will, Settembrini remarked, had been handed down as a tradition in his family. Three generations had dedicated their lives and intellects to them— grandfather, father, and son, each in his own fashion, the father no less than Grandfather Giuseppe, though unlike him, he had not been a political agitator and freedom-fighter, but a quiet and gentle scholar, a humanist at his desk. But what was humanism? Love of humankind, nothing more, and so it, too, was political, it, too, was a rebellion against everything that had soiled and degraded the ideal of humanity. Humanism had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form; but it

cultivated beautiful form purely for the sake of the dignity of man—in brilliant antithesis to the

Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into misanthropy and superstition, but also into ignominious formlessness. From the very first, his father had fought for the cause of humanity, for earthly interests, for freedom of thought and the pursuit of happiness, and had firmly believed that we can leave heaven to the birds. Prometheus! He had been the first humanist and was identical with Satana, whom Carducci had apostrophized in his hymn. Oh, good God, if only the cousins could have come to Bologna and heard that old enemy of the Church taunting and inveighing against the Christian sensitivities of the Romantics. Against Manzoni’s Sacred Hymns. Against the shadowy moonshine of the Romanticismo, which he had compared to “Luna, that pallid nun of heaven.” Per Bacco, what an exquisite delight it had been! If only they could have also heard Carducci’s interpretation of Dame—celebrating him as a citizen of a great city, who had defended the revolutionary and reforming spirit of human enterprise against asceticism and all denial of the world. Because it had not been the sickly and mystagogic Beatrice whom the poet had honored in his poem with the title of “donna gentile e pietosa,” but rather his wife, the embodiment of this-worldly knowledge and practical, lifelong labor.

And so now Hans Castorp had heard a thing or two about Dante, and from the best of sources. Given the fact that it came from a windbag, he did not trust the information entirely, but it was worth hearing about how Dante had been a quick-witted citizen of a great city. And it was likewise worthwhile listening to Settembrini talk about himself, declaring that he, the grandson Lodovico, had united the propensities of his two immediate forebears—the political bent of his grandfather and the humanistic bent of his father—by becoming a man of letters, a free-lance writer. For literature was nothing other than the union of humanism and politics, which could come about all the more easily since humanism was already politics and politics already humanism. Hans Castorp pricked up his ears at this and took pains to understand it, because he had reason to hope that he would now be able to grasp the nature of Magnus the brewer’s crass ignorance and learn in what way literature was something totally different from “beautiful characters.” And had the cousins ever heard of a Signore Brunetto, Settembrini asked, Brunetto Latini, who had become the town clerk of Florence around 1250, and had written a book on virtue and vice? He was the great master who had first given the Florentines their polish and taught them both how to speak and the fine art of guiding their republic by the rules of politics.

“There you have it, gentlemen!” Settembrini cried. “There you have it!” And he spoke now about the “Word,” about the cult of the Word, about eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. Because the Word was the glory of humankind, and it alone gave dignity to life. Not just humanism,

but humanity itself, man’s dignity and self-respect—they were inseparable from the Word, from

literature. (“You see,” Hans Castorp said later to his cousin, “you see? Literature is a matter of beautiful words. I saw that right off. “) And politics were bound up with literature, too—or rather they were derived from the oneness of humanity and literature. For the beautiful Word gave birth to the beautiful deed.

“Two hundred years ago,” Settembrini said, “you had a poet in your own country, a fine old confabulator, who set great store by beautiful handwriting, because he said it leads to a beautiful style. He should have taken that one step further and said that a beautiful style leads to beautiful actions.” Writing beautifully was almost synonymous with thinking beautifully, and from there it was not far to acting beautifully. All moral conduct and all moral perfection emanated from the spirit of literature, from the spirit of human dignity, which simultaneously was also the spirit of humanity and of politics. Yes, they were all one and the same force, one and the same idea, and could be summarized in a single word. And what was that word? Well, it consisted of familiar syllables, but the cousins had probably never truly grasped their meaning and majesty. And that word was— civilization! And as Settembrini released the word from his lips, he thrust his small yellow right hand into the air, as if proposing a toast.

Young Hans Castorp found all this well worth listening to—not that he was obliged to, of course, it was more an experiment—but in any case, well worth listening to, and he said as much to Joachim Ziemssen, who had just stuck a thermometer in his mouth and so could only mumble a reply and then became too involved in reading the numbers and entering them on his chart to be able to comment on Settembrini’s views. Hans Castorp, as we have said, took note of them in his kindhearted way and he opened himself to them as a way of testing them—from which it became particularly clear that the waking Hans Castorp was a very different person from the fatuously dreaming Hans Castorp, who had called Settembrini an “organ-grinder” to his face and tried with all his might to push him out of the way because he was “bothering” him. Awake, however, he listened to him politely and attentively and tried to be fair, compensating for or suppressing feelings that he felt rising in opposition to his mentor’s opinions and characterizations. For it cannot be denied that opposition was stirring in his soul—both the sort that had always been there naturally from the start and the sort that arose specifically from the present situation, partly from indirect observation, partly from personal experience among these people up here.

What a piece of work is a man, and how easily conscience betrays him. He listens to the voice of duty—and what he hears is the license of passion. And out of a sense of duty to be fair and balanced, Hans Castorp listened to Herr Settembrini. With the best of intentions he tested the man’s views on

reason, the world republic, and beautiful style—and was prepared to be influenced by them. And

each time, he found it all the more permissible afterward to let his thoughts and dreams run free in another direction, in the opposite direction. To put our suspicions and true understanding of the matter into words—he had probably listened to Herr Settembrini for one purpose only: to be given carte blanche by his conscience, a license it had been unwilling to grant him at first. And what or who stood on the opposing side of patriotism, the dignity of man, and beautiful literature—the side toward which Hans Castorp believed he should direct his thoughts and deeds? There stood . . . Clavdia Chauchat—listless, worm-eaten, Kirghiz-eyed; and whenever Hans Castorp thought of her (although “thought” is an all-too-inhibited word for describing how he turned inwardly toward her), it seemed to him that he was sitting again in that boat on the lake in Holstein and gazing with dazzled and bewildered eyes out of glassy daylight across to the eastern sky and the moonlit night draped in a web of mist.

THE THERMOMETER

Hans Castorp’s week here ran from Tuesday to Tuesday, because it was on a Tuesday that he had arrived. A few days had passed since he had gone down to the office and paid his bill for the second week—the modest weekly sum of 160 francs. And it was modest and fair to his mind, even if you disregarded the priceless benefits of his stay—which were not on the bill because they were priceless; but then neither were certain other entertainments, which could very well have been calculated, the band concerts every two weeks, for example, or Dr. Krokowski’s lectures. The bill was solely for room and board, for the basic services of the hotel—comfortable lodging and five prodigious meals. “It’s not so much, it’s rather cheap. You can’t complain they’re overcharging,” the visitor said to the long-term guest. “You need around six hundred fifty francs a month for room and board, and that’s with medical treatment included. Fine. Let’s assume you give out about thirty francs a month in tips—if you’re a decent fellow and like to see friendly faces. That makes six hundred eighty. Fine. And now you’ll say that there are other fees and expenses. You have to lay out money for drinks, toiletries, cigars, an occasional excursion, a carriage ride if you like, and now and then a bill for the cobbler or tailor. Fine, but even with all that included, try as you will, you’ll still be under a thousand francs a month. That’s not even eight hundred marks! Which adds up to less than ten thousand marks a year. It certainly can’t be more than that. That’s all it costs you.”

“First-rate mental arithmetic,” Joachim said. “I didn’t know you were so good at it. And how generous of you to figure up the charges by the year, too—you’ve definitely learned a thing or two up here. But your figures are on the high side, you know. I don’t smoke cigars, and I hope I won’t need to have any suits made for me up here, thanks all the same.”

“So that was still too high,” Hans Castorp said, slightly confused. And no matter how it had come about that he had included cigars and new suits in his cousin’s bill, as far as the nimble mental arithmetic went, that was nothing more than intentional deception about his natural talents. Because as in everything else, Hans Castorp was somewhat slow and uninspired at that, too; and his quick reckoning in this case was not ad lib, but the result of preparation, with paper and pencil in fact, carried out one evening when he had been taking his rest cure (because he had begun taking it in the evenings now, too, since everyone else did). On a sudden inspiration, he had got up out of his splendid lounge chair and gone back into the room for what he needed to do the figuring. And he had determined that his cousin, or rather, anyone just in general would need, all things considered, twelve thousand francs a year here. Just for the fun of it, he had pointed out to himself that his own funds were more than adequate for a life up here, seeing as he was a man with an annual income of eighteen to nineteen thousand francs.

And so three days had passed since the bill for his second week had been taken care of with a thank- you and a receipt—which is the same thing as saying that he was now in the middle of the third and last week of his scheduled stay up here. On the coming Sunday he would be present for another of the regular fortnightly band concerts, and on Monday he would likewise attend another of Dr. Krokowski’s fortnightly lectures—or so he said to himself and to Joachim. On Tuesday or Wednesday, however, he would depart, and leave Joachim behind alone, poor Joachim, for whom Rhadamanthus had decreed who-knew-how-many more months and whose gentle black eyes dimmed with melancholy every time Hans Castorp made a passing reference to his approaching departure. Yes, good Lord, where had his vacation gone! It had flowed past, sped past, vanished— and one could not rightly say just how. After all, they had intended to spend twenty-one days together—quite a number really, too many to take them all in at once at the beginning. And suddenly there were only three or four paltry days left, a remnant hardly worth considering, though given some weight by the two upcoming periodical deviations in the daily routine, but already filled with thoughts of packing and farewell. Three weeks were as good as nothing up here—they had all told him that right off. The smallest unit of time here was the month, Settembrini had said, and since Hans Castorp’s stay came in under that, it was not really a stay at all—he was merely dropping by, as Director Behrens had put it. He wondered if the increase in one’s general metabolism here made three weeks seem no more than a moment or two. Such a velocity of life was some consolation for Joachim in light of the five months that still awaited him—if five would in fact be the end of it. But they should have paid more careful attention to time during those three weeks, the way you did measuring your temperature, when the prescribed seven minutes became a significant period of time. Hans Castorp felt sincerely sorry for his cousin—you could read in his eyes his sadness at the impending loss of a human companion—but he pitied him most when he thought about how the poor fellow would have to stay on here without him, whereas he would be living down in the flatlands, hard at work in the service of transportation technology, which brought nations closer together. There were moments when he felt the pity as a burning pain in his chest, felt it so intensely that now and again he seriously doubted he would be able to bring himself to leave Joachim here alone. And so pity became at times a searing pain, and that was probably the reason why, all on his own, he spoke less and less about his departure. It was Joachim who would bring the conversation around to it once in a while. Given his natural tact and delicacy, Hans Castorp seemed not to want to think of it until the very last moment.

“Well, at least we can hope,” Joachim said, “that you’ve recuperated here with us and will feel refreshed once you’re back down.”

“Yes, and I’ll give everyone your greetings,” Hans Castorp replied, “and tell them that you’ll follow in five months at the most. Recuperated? You’re asking if I’m feeling better after these few days, is that it? I would certainly like to think so. A certain amount of relaxation probably comes just by itself even after a short time. Although there were a lot of novel things to experience up here, novel in every regard, very exciting, but also very taxing to both mind and body. I don’t have the feeling that I’ve quite got used to it all yet and acclimatized myself, although that would be a precondition for any real recuperation. Maria is back to her old self, thank God, she’s been tasting good for several days now. But from time to time my handkerchief shows a little red when I use it, and it doesn’t look as if I’m going to be rid of either this damn flushed face or this silly pounding in my heart before I leave. No, no, you can’t really say I’ve acclimatized myself, but how could anyone in such a short time? It takes longer to get acclimatized here, to get used to all these new impressions. It’s only then that you can begin to recuperate and build up protein. And that’s a shame, because it was definitely a mistake for me not to have arranged for a longer stay—more time certainly would have been available. I feel as if once I’m back home in the flatlands I’m going to have to recuperate from my recuperation and sleep for three weeks, that’s how run-down I feel sometimes. And then to top it all there’s this catarrh I’ve caught.”

Indeed, it did look more and more as if Hans Castorp would be returning to the flatlands with a first- class case of the sniffles. He had caught a cold, presumably from lying outside in the rest cure—the evening rest cure, to carry the presumption further, in which he had been participating for about a week now, despite the cold, damp weather, which did not look as if it would improve before his departure—although he had learned that it was simply not recognized as such, that the notion of bad weather had no right to exist up here, that no one paid it any attention or feared it; and with the docility of youth, with its ability to adapt to the ideas and customs of almost any environment in which it may find itself, Hans Castorp had begun to make this indifference his own. Even when it was raining cats and dogs, you were not allowed to assume that it made the air any less dry. And it probably wasn’t in fact, because it left his head feeling just as hot as before, as if he were sitting in an overheated room or had drunk too much wine. And however cold it got—and it did get very cold— there was no point in his taking refuge in the room, because as long as it wasn’t snowing, there was no heat, so that it was no more comfortable for him to sit in his room than to put on a winter overcoat, artfully wrap himself in his two good camel-hair blankets, and lie out on the balcony. On the contrary, it was better out there, incomparably more comfortable, by any criterion the most agreeable state of affairs that Hans Castorp could remember ever having tried out—a judgment from which he could not be dissuaded by some writer and Carbonaro who made malicious remarks with snide connotations about the “horizontal life.” In particular, he found evenings there agreeable—the little lamp glowing on the table beside him, a Maria between his lips and tasting good once more, he would wrap himself in his blankets and savor the advantages offered by this style of lounge chair, though they were difficult to describe exactly. The tip of his nose froze, of course, and he had to hold his book (it was still Ocean Steamships) in terribly numbed, chapped hands, but he could gaze out through the arches of the balcony to the valley, which was adorned with scattered lights that clustered brightly here and there and from which almost every evening, for at least an hour, music came drifting his way, pleasantly muted, familiar melodic airs: fragments of operas, selections from Carmen, Il Trovatore, or Der Freischütz ; well-constructed, smooth waltzes as well as marches to which you could jauntily rock your head back and forth; and cheerful mazurkas, too. Mazurkas? Marusya was her name, the girl with the little ruby ring—and in the next balcony, behind the thick milk-glass partition, lay Joachim. Now and then Hans Castorp would exchange a word or two with him, though discreetly, out of consideration for other “horizontals.” Life was just as good for Joachim out on his balcony as it was for Hans Castorp—although he was unmusical and unable to enjoy the evening concerts as much. What a shame—instead of listening, he was probably reading his Russian grammar. Hans Castorp, however, left Ocean Steamships lying on his blanket and listened with ardent interest to the music, gazing with contentment into the transparent depths of its structure and taking such genuine delight and inspiration in each melodic invention that he felt nothing but hostility when he occasionally recalled Settembrini’s opinions about music, annoying statements, such as how music was politically suspect—which was no better than Grandfather Giuseppe’s slogan about the July Revolution and the six days of Creation.

Joachim, then, did not participate in these musical pleasures, and the spicy diversion of smoking was likewise alien to him; but otherwise he, too, lay there on his balcony—safe, secure, content. The day was over, everything was over for now; one could be sure that nothing more would happen—no more upsets, no more unreasonable demands on the musculature of the heart. And at the same time one could be sure that such would also be the case come tomorrow, when, given the favorable probabilities of narrow space and regular schedules, everything would begin all over again. This double sense of security and safety left Hans Castorp feeling very cozy and, together with the music and the rediscovered flavor of his Maria, made his evening rest cure a truly delightful state of affairs. This, however, did not prevent the visitor, a frail novice at all this, from catching a very bad cold while outside in his rest cure—if that was where he caught it. A bad case of the sniffles appeared to be in the making. He felt it as a pressure in his sinuses; his throat and uvula were sore and scratchy; air didn’t pass normally through the channel prescribed by nature, but was impeded, and its steady cold draft unleashed fits of coughing; overnight his voice had taken on the hollow timbre of a whiskey bass; and as he told it, he had not slept a wink—he had kept starting up from his pillow because of the stifling dryness in his throat.

“Very annoying,” Joachim said, “almost embarrassing, really. You should know that colds are not reçus here. It is denied that they exist, they do not occur—the air is officially much too dry here. And you won’t have much success as a patient if you go to Behrens with a cold. But it’s different with you, after all, you have a right to catch cold. It would be good if we could fend off your catarrh somehow—there are the methods practiced in the flatlands. But here—well, I doubt if they’ll be interested up here. It’s better not to get sick here, no one pays you any attention. It’s a well-known fact, but you’re learning it at the end of your stay. When I arrived there was a lady here who kept one hand pressed to her ear for a whole week, complaining of the pain, and finally Behrens took a look at it. ‘You can set your mind at ease,’ he said, ‘it’s not tubercular.’ And that was that. Yes, we’ll have to see what can be done. I’ll mention it to the bath attendant tomorrow morning when he comes for my massage. That’s the usual official channel—he’ll pass it on, and perhaps we can do something for you then.”

That was Joachim’s advice; and official channels worked. Hans Castorp had no sooner returned from his morning constitutional on Friday than there was a knock at his door, and he was given the opportunity of making the acquaintance of Fräulein von Mylendonk, or Head Nurse Mylendonk, as she was titled. Until now he had seen this evidently very busy woman only from afar—leaving one sickroom and crossing the corridor to a room opposite. Or he had caught a fleeting glimpse of her in the dining hall, or heard her squawky voice. But now she was paying him a personal visit; drawn here by his catarrh, she gave a bony, sharp rap on his door and entered almost before he could say “come in,” although at the threshold she leaned back to make sure she had the right room number. “Thirty-four,” she croaked at full voice. “Right. Well, man alive, on me dit, que vous avez pris froid, ich höre, Sie sind erkältet, vy, kazhetsya, prostudilis’, I hear you have caught a cold. Which language do you prefer? German, I see. Ah, young Ziemssen’s visitor, I see. I should be in the operating room. There’s a gentleman who’s to be chloroformed, and he’s gone and eaten bean salad—if I didn’t keep my eyes open . . . And, man alive, you claim you’ve caught a cold here with us, do you?”

Hans Castorp was taken aback by the old noblewoman’s manner of speech. She seemed to dismiss her own words as she spoke—her head moving about in a restless, looping roll, her nose lifted in the air, searching, like some caged beast of prey. Her freckled right hand was closed in a loose fist, the thumb sticking upward, and by keeping it in constant motion, twisting her wrist back and forth, she seemed to say, “Quick, quick, quick! Don’t listen to what I’m saying, but speak up so I can be on my way.” She was a woman in her forties, with a stunted, shapeless figure under a white, belted clinical smock. A garnet cross dangled at her chest, and sparse tufts of reddish hair stuck out from under her nurse’s cap. Her watery-blue, bloodshot eyes wandered unsteadily, and to make matters worse, one had a sty in a very advanced stage; the nose was turned up, the mouth froglike, the lower lip protruding at an angle and moving like a shovel as she spoke. Hans Castorp gazed at her meanwhile with all the modest, patient, and gullible kindness native to him.

“What sort of a cold is it, eh?” the head nurse asked now, trying to fix her eyes in a piercing stare— but did not succeed, since they began to wander. “We don’t like these colds. Do you catch cold often? Hasn’t your cousin caught a lot of colds, too? How old are you? Twenty-four? Not an easy age. And  so you’ve come up here and caught a cold? Good man alive, one should not speak of ‘colds’ here— that’s twiddle-twaddle from down below.” The word “twiddle-twaddle” sounded ghastly and bizarre when she spoke it, with her lower lip shoveling away. “You have the loveliest catarrh of the upper respiratory tract, I will admit, one can see it in your eyes.” And she made another of her odd attempts to stare directly at him, without any real success. “But catarrhs are not colds, they come from an infection to which one is already susceptible, and the only question is whether what we have here is an innocent infection or one that is less innocent, all the rest is twiddle-twaddle.” (There was that gruesome “twiddle-twaddle” again.) “It is of course possible that you tend to be more susceptible to the harmless type,” she said and seemed to look at him with the well-advanced sty— he was not sure how she managed that. “Here we have a harmless antiseptic. It may do you some good.” And from the black leather bag that hung from her belt she pulled out a little box and put it on the table. It was Formamint. “Though you do look rather hectic, too—as if you had a fever.” And she would not release him from her gaze, although her eyes kept ranging off a little to one side.

“Have you measured your temperature?” He said he had not.

“And why not?” she asked, letting her protruding lower lip dangle in the air.

He had no reply. The good fellow was still young enough that he could respond with the silence of a schoolboy who doesn’t know the answer and so just sits there mutely on his bench.

“Don’t you ever measure it?”

“Oh certainly, Nurse Mylendonk. When I have a fever.”

“Man alive, the point of taking one’s temperature is to find out if one has a fever. And you are of the opinion that you have none, is that it?”

“I don’t really know, Nurse Mylendonk. It’s hard to tell the difference. I’ve been both a little chilled and flushed since my arrival up here.”

“Aha! And where is your thermometer?”

“I don’t have one here with me, Nurse Mylendonk. Why should I? I’m here just as a visitor. I’m healthy.”

“Twiddle-twaddle! Did you call me because you’re healthy?”

“No,” he said with a polite laugh, “but because I’ve caught a little—”

“Cold. We’ve seen colds like that here often enough. Here—” she said and rummaged in her bag again, pulling out two longish leather cases, one black, one red, which she also laid on the table now. “This one costs three francs fifty, and this one five francs. You’ll do better to take the one for five, of course. It will last a lifetime if you take proper care of it.”

He picked up the red case with a smile and opened it. The glass instrument lay bedded like a precious gem in its red velvet cushion, the indentation exactly matched to its form. The full degrees were marked in red, the tenths in black. The numbers were red; the lower, tapered end was filled with lustrous, glistening mercury. The column stood at a cool low-point, well below normal animal warmth.

Hans Castorp knew what he owed himself and his social station. “I’ll take this one,” he said, without giving the other so much as a glance. “The one for five francs. May I use it now?”

“That settles that!” the head nurse squawked. “Never be niggardly when it comes to important procurements. No hurry—it will be on your bill. Give it to me, we need to shrink him down to nothing, all the way down—like this.” And she took the thermometer out of his hand, thrusting it at the air several times and driving the mercury down even further, below ninety-five degrees. “He’ll climb back up, wander right up the column, old Mercury will,” she said. “Here is your purchase.

You do know, don’t you, how we do things up here? We put it under our pretty tongue, for seven minutes, four times a day, and keep our lips nicely tucked around it. Adieu! Good man alive, my best wishes for good results.” And she was out of the room.

Hans Castorp bowed as she left and stood now beside the table, staring at the door through which she had vanished—and at the apparatus she had left behind. “So that was Head Nurse von Mylendonk,” he thought. “Settembrini doesn’t like her, and there is something disagreeable about her, it’s true. The sty is not pretty, although I don’t suppose she always has one. But why does she keep saying ‘man alive,’ as if she were addressing me? It’s so odd, so slangy. And now she’s sold me  a thermometer—always has a couple in her bag. They’re for sale here everywhere, in all the shops, even those you wouldn’t expect to carry them. Joachim said so. But I didn’t have to go to the trouble, it simply fell right into my lap.”

He took the instrument from its case, examined it and walked restlessly with it back and forth in the room a few times. His heart was beating fast and strong. He looked out through the open door to the balcony, then moved in the direction of the hall door, with the idea of looking in on Joachim, but then gave that up and stood there again beside the table. He now cleared his throat to see just how hollow his voice sounded. He then coughed. “Yes, I do need to see if I have a little fever with my cold,” he said and quickly stuck the thermometer in his mouth, the mercury tip under his tongue, the glass tube jutting up at an angle from one corner, his lips tucked tightly around it to keep air out. Then he looked at his wristwatch—it was 9:36. And he began to wait for seven minutes to pass. “Not one second too many,” he thought, “or too few. You can depend on me, whether up or down. They won’t need to exchange mine for a silent sister, like that girl Settembrini was talking about . . . Ottilie Kneifer.” And he walked around the room, keeping the thermometer clamped tightly under his tongue.

Time crept by—seven minutes seemed endless. Only two and a half had passed when he looked at his watch again, worried that he might have missed the precise moment. He did a thousand things, picked up objects, put them back down, walked out onto the balcony, but not so that his cousin could notice, looked at the landscape of this Alpine valley, his eyes now more than familiar with its shapes and forms—its peaks, ridges, and cliffs; in the background on his left, though somewhat closer, was the jutting Brämenbühl, whose crest fell abruptly toward town and whose flank was thickly covered with coarse grasses; there were the mountain formations on his right, whose names he also knew by now; and then to the south was the Alteinwand, which from here looked as if it closed off the valley. He looked down at the paths and flowerbeds of the level gardens, the grotto, the silver fir, listened to whispers drifting up from the lounging area, where people were taking their rest cure—and turned back into the room, where he tried to correct the way the instrument sat in his mouth.

Stretching his arm to free his wrist from its sleeve, he brought his forearm up to his eyes. With much trouble and effort—as if he were shoving, pushing, kicking them—he had got rid of six minutes. But now, standing there in the middle of the room, he fell to daydreaming and let his thoughts wander, and the one remaining minute scurried away on little cat’s feet, until another motion of his arm told him that the minute had secretly escaped and that it was a little late now. Almost a third of the next had passed before he grabbed the thermometer from his mouth, telling himself that it did not really matter, would not alter the results, could not hurt anything—and he stared down at it now with confusion in his eyes.

He was not immediately the wiser. The sheen of the mercury blended with the refraction of the light in the elliptical glass tube; the column seemed now to reach clear to the top, now not to be present at all. He held the instrument close to his eyes, turned it back and forth—and could make out nothing. Finally, after a lucky turn, the image became clear; he held it tightly and hastily applied his intellect to the task. And indeed Mercury had stretched himself, very robustly. The column had risen rather high, it stood several tenths above the limit of normal body temperature. Hans Castorp had a temperature of 99.7 degrees.

Between nine-thirty and ten, in the middle of the morning, his body temperature was 99.7 degrees— that was too high, it was a fever, the result of an infection to which he had been susceptible. And now the question was: what sort of infection? At 99.7 degrees—Joachim’s wasn’t any higher than that, nor was anyone else’s, who wasn’t bedridden, terribly ill, or moribund. Not young Kleefeld with her pneumothorax . . . nor Madame Chauchat. In his case, of course, it surely wasn’t anything like that—just the usual fever that went with the sniffles, people would have said down below. But there was no way to differentiate it precisely, to keep the kinds of fever apart. Hans Castorp doubted that the fever had only appeared just now in conjunction with his cold; and he truly regretted not having consulted Mercury before this, right at the beginning, when the director had suggested it to him. It had been very sensible advice, that was apparent now, and Settembrini had been wrong to throw his head back and laugh so scornfully—Settembrini with his republic and his beautiful style. Hans Castorp despised the Italian’s republic and his beautiful style; but he also went on examining the thermometer reading, which he lost several times in the glare, and then recovered after twisting and turning the instrument. It still said 99.7 degrees—and in the middle of the morning.

He was terribly agitated. He paced the room a few times, still holding the thermometer— horizontally, so as to not disturb the reading by some vertical shake. He then laid it as carefully as possible on the rim of his washstand and decided for now to put on his overcoat and finish his rest cure. He sat down, flung his blankets around him—just as he had learned, from both sides, from below, one after the other, with a skilled hand now—and lay still as he waited for the hour of second breakfast and Joachim’s arrival. Now and then he smiled, and it was as if he were smiling at someone. Now and then his chest gave an uneasy heave, and then he would have to cough his bronchial cough. When the eleven o’clock gong sounded, Joachim came by to fetch him for second breakfast and found him still lying there.

“Well?” he asked, stepping up beside the lounge chair.

Hans Castorp stared straight ahead in silence for a while. Then by way of reply, he said, “Yes, the latest is that I have a little temperature.”

“What do you mean?” Joachim asked. “Do you feel feverish?”

Hans Castorp again waited awhile before answering, but then at last he said with a certain lethargy, “I’ve felt feverish for a long time now, my friend—almost the whole time. It’s no longer a matter of a subjective feeling now, but of precise evidence. I measured it.”

“You took your temperature? With what?” Joachim cried, stunned. “With a thermometer, of course,” Hans Castorp replied, not without a mixture of severity and scorn. “The head nurse sold me one. Why she keeps saying ‘man alive,’ I really don’t know. It’s very slangy. But she did sell me a first- rate thermometer with utmost dispatch, and if you want to check for yourself what it read, you’ll find it in there on my washstand. It’s only slightly elevated.”

Joachim did an about-face and walked back into the room. When he returned, he said tentatively, “Yes, it reads ninety-nine point six.”

“Then it’s gone down a little,” Hans Castorp responded quickly. “It was point seven.”

“You can’t really call that just slightly elevated, not in the middle of the morning,” Joachim said. “Now isn’t this a nice mess,” he said, standing beside his recumbent cousin the way one stands beside a nice mess, his hands on his hips, his head lowered. “You need to be in bed.”

Hans Castorp had his answer at the ready. “I don’t see,” he said, “why I should go to bed with ninety-nine point seven, when you and a lot of other people with temperatures that are no lower are running about just as you please here.”

“But that’s a totally different matter,” Joachim said. “Yours is acute, but harmless. It’s the fever that goes with a cold.”

“First,” Hans Castorp replied, dividing his response into a first and second, “I don’t understand why someone with a harmless fever—we’ll assume there is such a thing—with a harmless fever, then, has to stay in bed, but not in the opposite case. And second, I’m telling you that my cold has not made me hotter than I already was. My position remains,” he concluded, “that ninety-nine point seven is ninety-nine point seven. And if you can run around with that, so can I.”

“But I had to lie in bed for four weeks when I first arrived,” Joachim objected. “And they let me get up again only when it became clear that my temperature wasn’t going away with bed rest.”

Hans Castorp smiled. “So what?” he asked. “I thought yours was an entirely different problem, was it not? It seems to me you’re getting tangled up in contradictions. First you differentiate the two cases, then equate them. That’s just twiddle-twaddle.”

Joachim turned on his heels, and when he turned back to his cousin his tanned face was visibly a shade darker. “No,” he said, “I am not equating them—you’re the muddlehead. I’m simply saying that you’ve caught a wretched cold—I can hear it in your voice—and you should go to bed, so that you can be over it sooner, especially since you want to go home next week. But if you don’t want to—I mean, if you don’t want to lie in bed, then you don’t have to. I’m not going to make rules for you. At any rate, we have to go to breakfast now. Come on, we’re late.”

“Fine, let’s go!” Hans Castorp said, tossing his blankets aside. He went back into the room to run a brush through his hair; as he did, Joachim took another look at the thermometer on the washstand— and Hans Castorp watched him from a distance. They left, not saying a word, and took their places in the dining hall, which, as always at this hour, glistened white from all the milk.

When the dwarf brought Hans Castorp his Kulmbach beer, he refused it with some seriousness. He would rather not drink beer today—wanted nothing at all, thanks, at most a little water. This caused a general stir. What was this? What innovations were these? Why no beer?—He had a slight temperature, Hans Castorp remarked casually—ninety-nine point seven, insignificant.

And now they wagged their forefingers, cautioning him—it was all very curious. They began to tease him, laying heads to one side, winking, and putting fingers up to their ears, as if these were racy, risqué revelations about someone who had played the innocent until now. “Now, now, my friend,” the teacher said, laughing as she chided him, her downy cheeks turning red. “What pretty goings- on—sowing his oats. Just wait and see.”

“My, my, my,” Frau Stöhr said, admonishing him with a stubby red finger waved in the vicinity of her nose. “So Mr. Visitor has a little temp himself. Look at you—what a fine fellow you turn out to be, quite the gay blade.”

And when the news reached the great-aunt at the other end of the table, even she made a sly joke of chiding him; pretty Marusya, who had paid him barely any attention before now, bent forward to look at him, her orange-scented handkerchief pressed to her lips, and reprimanded him with her brown, round eyes. And Dr. Blumenkohl, too, who heard of it now from Frau Stöhr, could not help joining in the general reaction—not that he looked directly at Hans Castorp. Only Miss Robinson, closed off to the world as always, appeared indifferent. Joachim behaved with perfect propriety and kept his eyes lowered.

Hans Castorp, flattered by so much teasing, felt that modesty required him to demur. “No, no,” he said, “you’re mistaken, my case is the most harmless imaginable. I have the sniffles. As you can see: my eyes are watery, my chest is congested, I coughed half the night away—that’s quite unpleasant enough.”

But they would not accept his explanations. They laughed, they waved this off, they cried: “Yes, yes, yes. No fibbing, no excuses, we know all about sniffles and fever, know all about it.” And then all of a sudden they demanded that Hans Castorp immediately make an appointment to be examined. His news had animated them; the conversation at their breakfast table was livelier than at any of the other six.

Frau Stöhr in particular became wildly talkative, and her willful face, its cheeks lined with tiny wrinkles, turned scarlet above her ruffled collar. She expatiated on the pleasures of coughing—yes, there was something perfectly delightful and enjoyable about a tickle in the depths of your chest, that got worse and worse until you reached down deep for it, squeezing and pressing to let it have its way. Sneezing was just as much fun—the way you felt it swelling up with a vengeance inside you, until it became irresistible and you breathed in and out in one great frenzy, gave yourself over to the bliss of it, your face drunk with pleasure—you could forget the whole world in one blessed eruption. But sometimes they came in twos and threes, one right after the other. Those were the pleasures in life that didn’t cost a cent—it was the same, for example, with scratching your chilblains in the spring, when they itched so deliciously—and you scratched away fervently and brutally until you drew blood, just for the mad pleasure of it. And if you happened to see yourself in the mirror, there was a little demon looking back at you.

Obtuse Frau Stöhr went on and on in this way with ghastly thoroughness until the brief, if ample meal was over. The cousins now stepped out for their second walk that morning, a stroll down to Davos-Platz—Joachim was lost in thought the whole way. Hans Castorp groaned with the agony of his cold, and his rusty chest wheezed.

On the way home Joachim said, “Let me make a suggestion. Today is Friday—I have my monthly checkup tomorrow morning after dinner. It’s not a complete physical, but Behrens pounds around a little on you and has Krokowski jot down some notes. You could come along and ask him to use the occasion for a quick listen to you. It’s really absurd—if you were at home, you would send for

Heidekind. And here, with two specialists in the house, you run around and don’t know what to think, unsure how deep the problem sits, and whether it might not be better to take to your bed.” “Fine,” Hans Castorp said. “Whatever you think. Of course I can do that. And I’d find it interesting to be present at a checkup, too.”

And so they came to an understanding; and as chance would have it, upon their arrival at the sanatorium they ran into Director Behrens himself and took the opportunity to present their request on the spot.

Behrens was just emerging from the portico—tall, with protruding neck vertebrae, a bowler shoved to the back of his head, a cigar in his mouth, purple-cheeked and pop-eyed; he was at full swing in his daily routine, about to attend to his private practice and make calls in town, having just been on the job in the operating room, as he declared.

“Greetings, gentlemen!” he said. “Out hoofing it, I see? Having a grand time out there in the big, wide world? I’ve just come from a lopsided duel with knives and bone saws—great stuff, rib resections. Used to be that a good fifty percent of them would be left on the operating table. We’ve got it down better now, but it still happens often enough that we have to pack our bags mortis causa. Well, the fellow today knew how to take a joke, and he put up a good fight for a while. Crazy sight, a human thorax that isn’t one anymore. Mushy spots, you know, quite unseemly, a slight fuzziness of the ideal, so to speak. Well, and how about you? How are your admirable constitutions doing? Life really is more festive as a twosome, don’t you think, Ziemssen, you sly old dog? But why the tears, my good excursionist?” he said, turning now to Hans Castorp. “Tears are not allowed in public here. The rules of the house forbid it. Why, everybody would be in tears if we let them.”

“It’s sniffles, Director Behrens,” Hans Castorp replied. “I don’t know how it could have happened, but I’ve caught a nasty cold. I’ve got a cough, too, and a lot of congestion here in the chest.” “Really? I would suggest you consult a doctor.”

They both laughed, and clicking his heels, Joachim responded, “We were just about to do that, Director Behrens. I have my checkup tomorrow, and we wanted to ask if you would be so kind as to fit my cousin in at the same time. We’re concerned whether he will be well enough to travel on Tuesday.”

“N. s. s. t. d.!” Behrens said. “No sooner said than done. With pleasure. Should have done it long ago. Once you’re up here, you might as well take advantage of the place. But, of course, we didn’t want to seem pushy about it. So there’ll be two of you tomorrow, right after you’ve put on the feed bag.”

“Because I do have a little fever, too,” Hans Castorp added.

“You don’t say!” Behrens exclaimed. “And I suppose you think that’s news to me, do you? Do you think I don’t have eyes in my head?” And he pointed with one massive forefinger at his own two bloodshot, watery, protruding blue eyes. “How high is it, then?”

Hans Castorp modestly supplied the numbers.

“In the morning? Hmm, not bad. Not at all untalented for a beginner. Well, then, you can fall in, two by two, tomorrow. It will be an honor. And now, do go in and savor your taking of nourishment.” And with knees slightly bent and rowing with his hands, he began to trudge downhill, a trail of cigar smoke billowing behind him.

“Well, it’s all arranged just as you wanted,” Hans Castorp said. “We couldn’t have struck it luckier, and so now I have an appointment. He probably won’t be able to do anything more for me than prescribe some licorice syrup or a tea for my cough, but all the same it’s nice to have a little medical advice when you feel as bad as I do. But why does he always rattle on in that overenergetic, peppy sort of way?” he said. “At first I rather liked it, but after being here awhile, I can’t say I enjoy it. ‘Savor your taking of nourishment!’—what sort of gibberish is that? You can say ‘enjoy your meal,’ or even ‘bon appétit’ has a nice ring to it when you’re sitting down to your daily bread. But ‘taking of nourishment’ is basic physiology, and to tell someone to ‘savor’ it is pure sarcasm. I don’t like to see him smoking, either, it makes me uneasy somehow, because I know it’s not good for him and makes him melancholy. Settembrini says his merriment is forced, and Settembrini has a critical eye, is a man who forms his own opinions, one must grant him that much. I should perhaps form my opinions more, and not take everything just as it comes—he’s right about that. But sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticism, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it’s all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.” And he continued to mutter on, although he did not appear quite sure what it was he meant to say.

His cousin merely gave him a sidelong glance and said, “Till later.” Each then went to his room and sat out on his balcony.

“How high?” Joachim asked in a low voice after a while, although he had not actually seen Hans Castorp consult his thermometer.

And Hans Castorp replied nonchalantly, “Nothing new.”

In actuality, no sooner had he entered his room than he had picked up his recent fragile purchase from the washstand, given it a few vertical shakes to erase the 99.7, which had served its purpose now, and with the glass cigar in his mouth had taken to his rest cure like an old hand. But despite his rather soaring expectations and although he held the instrument under his tongue for a full eight minutes, Mercury stretched himself again just to 99.7, but no farther—which was indeed a fever, but no higher than it had been earlier that morning. After dinner, the little column rose to 99.9, but that evening, when the patient was very tired after all the excitement and novelty of the day, it held at 99.5, and by the next morning was even down to 98.6, only to return by noon to the high of the previous day. And that was how things stood as the hour neared for the day’s main meal and, once it was over, his appointed rendezvous.

Hans Castorp remembered later that at dinner that day Madame Chauchat had worn a golden yellow sweater with large buttons and pockets trimmed with braid—a new sweater, or new at least to Hans Castorp, as he watched her make her entrance, late as always, and, just as he had come to expect, stand there at attention, facing the dining hall for a moment. Then, as she did five times every day, she had glided to her table, taken her seat in a soft, fluid motion, and begun to eat, while chatting with her neighbors. And as always Hans Castorp had glanced past Settembrini—who sat with his back to him at one end of the intervening crosswise table—to get a view of the Good Russian table; this time, however, he had paid particular notice to the way her head moved as she spoke, to the arch of her neck and the limp posture of her back. As for Frau Chauchat, she had not turned to look around the dining hall even once during the entire meal. But when they had all finished dessert, and the tall clock, a pendulum and chain affair at the far end of the room on the right, struck two, it had happened—much to Hans Castorp’s puzzlement and shock. For as the clock struck, once, then twice, the charming patient had slowly turned her head, and a little of her upper body, too, to gaze plainly and openly over her shoulder at Hans Castorp’s table—and not just at the table in general, no, quite unmistakably and very personally at him, a smile playing on her closed lips and in her narrow Pribislav eyes, as if to say: “Well? It’s time. Are you going to go, Hans?” (Because when only the eyes speak, things become quite informal, although her mouth had never even once said “Herr Castorp.”) The incident had confused and shocked Hans Castorp to the depths of his soul; he had barely been able to believe his eyes and had first gaped in stupefaction at Frau Chauchat’s face, and then, raising his gaze above her brow and hair, had stared into space. Had she known that he had made an appointment for an examination at two o’clock? It had certainly looked that way. And yet that seemed quite as unlikely as her knowing that he had just asked himself, not a minute before, whether he should not have Joachim tell the director that his cold was already better and that he now thought the examination superfluous—a new plan whose advantages had withered beneath her inquisitive smile and that had suddenly become disgustingly boring. Barely a second later, Joachim had placed his rolled-up napkin on the table, signaled with raised eyebrows, bowed to the others, and left the table—and Hans Castorp, still sensing both eyes and smile directed at him, had followed his cousin out. His step was firm, his mind was reeling.

They had not spoken to one another about the day’s plan since yesterday morning, and even now walked on by tacit agreement. Joachim was in a hurry—he was already late for his appointment, and Director Behrens insisted on punctuality. The way led from the dining hall, along the ground-floor corridor, past “management,” and down the freshly waxed linoleum stairs to the “basement.” Joachim knocked on a door directly opposite the stairway—a porcelain sign declared it to be the entrance to the consulting room.

“Come in!” Behrens called, with a strong emphasis on the first word. He was standing in the middle of the room; he had on his smock and in his right hand he held a stethoscope—which he patted now against his thigh.

“Chop-chop!” he said, directing his pop-eyes at the wall clock. “Un poco più presto, Signori. We’re not here exclusively to serve you, good sirs.”

At the double desk beside the window sat Dr. Krokowski, looking pale against his shiny black smock—elbows propped on the desktop, a pen in one hand, the other buried in his beard. There were papers spread out before him, the patient’s records presumably, and as the two men entered, he looked up at them with the dulled expression of a distinguished personage who is there merely to assist.

“Well, hand over your report card,” the director said in reply to Joachim’s apologies. He accepted the temperature chart and looked it over while his patient quickly undressed above the waist and hung his garments on a clothes stand next to the door. No one paid attention to Hans Castorp. He stood there awhile, watching, but then sat down in an old-fashioned easy chair that had tassels on the arms and was placed next to a table with a carafe of water. Along the walls were bookcases filled with broad-spined medical works and bundles of records. There was no other furniture apart from a chaise longue, which could be cranked up or down and was covered with white oilcloth, except for a paper towel laid over the headrest.

“Point seven, point nine, point eight,” Behrens said, paging through the week’s chart, where Joachim had faithfully recorded the results of the measurements he took five times a day. “Still on the lambent side, my good Ziemssen, can’t exactly say you’ve gotten any sturdier of late.” (“Of late” meant in the last four weeks.) “Still toxic, still toxic,” he said. “Well, it doesn’t happen from one day to the next— we’re not sorcerers here, you know.”

Joachim nodded and gave a shrug of his bare shoulders, although he might have protested that he hadn’t arrived up here only the day before.

“And how is that little twinge in the right hilum, where it always sounds a little aggravated? Better?

Well, come here. Let’s give you a few polite thumps.” And the auscultation began.

Spreading his legs, leaning back slightly, and wedging his stethoscope under one arm, Director Behrens first tapped high up on Joachim’s right shoulder, flicking his right hand at the wrist so that the massive middle finger worked as a hammer, while the left hand provided support. Then he moved below the shoulder blade and thumped down the side of the middle and lower ribs; Joachim, well trained in all this, now lifted an arm and let him tap just below the armpit. And then the whole procedure was repeated on the left side; and having finished with that, the director ordered, “ ‘Bout face!” so that he could thump away at the chest. He tapped just below the neck at the collarbone, tapped above and below the breasts, first on the right, then the left. And when he had pounded to his satisfaction, he moved on to listening; putting one end of his stethoscope to his ear and placing the other end against Joachim’s chest and back, he now shifted it everywhere he had already tapped. Meanwhile, Joachim was required to alternate between deep breaths and coughs, which appeared to tax him a great deal, because he was soon out of breath and tears came to his eyes. Director Behrens, however, reported to his assistant at the desk everything he heard there inside, speaking in curt, prescribed terminology, so that Hans Castorp could not help being reminded of the procedure at the tailor’s, when a well-dressed gentleman takes your measurements for a suit, laying the tape measure in a traditional sequence here and there across your torso and along your limbs, and then dictates the resulting numbers to his assistant, who sits there bent over pen and paper. “Shallow . . . diminished,” Director Behrens dictated. “Vesicular,” he said, then once more, “vesicular”—that was good, evidently. “Rough,” he said and made a face. “Very rough . . . rattle.” And Dr. Krokowski entered it all like the tailor’s helper recording numbers.

Tilting his head forward and to one side, Hans Castorp followed the whole procedure, but was soon lost in thought as he regarded Joachim’s upper body, the way the ribs—thank God he still had all his ribs—rose under the taut skin while the stomach fell with each breath he took. It was a slender, yellowish-brown, youthful torso, with black hair at the breastbone and along the still powerful arms, one of which was encircled at the wrist by a gold bracelet. “A gymnast’s arms,” Hans Castorp thought. “He always did enjoy gymnastics, whereas I didn’t care much for them, and that was all part of his wanting to become a soldier. He always was concerned about his body, much more than I, or at least in a different way than I, because I was always the civilian, and more interested in a nice warm bath and good food and drink, when what he wanted were challenges and exploits. And now his body has stepped to the fore, but in a totally different way, declaring its independence and putting on airs—by means of illness. He’s lambent, still toxic, and doesn’t seem to get any sturdier, no matter how much he wants to be a soldier in the flatlands. Look at him, a perfect adult male, an absolute Apollo Belvedere, to a T. But inside, Joachim is ill, and outside he’s too warm—because of illness. Illness makes people even more physical, turns them into only a body.” And he was so taken aback by the thought that he rapidly shifted his searching glance from Joachim’s naked upper torso to his eyes, to his large, black, gentle eyes, with tears in them from all the forced coughs and deep breaths of the examination. Those eyes were gazing mournfully now beyond his audience, into space.

But Director Behrens had finished. “Well, that’s fine, Ziemssen,” he said. “Everything’s in as good shape as can be expected. By next time”—that would be in four weeks—“it’s sure to have improved a little all over.”

“How long, Director Behrens, sir, do you think—”

“Are you trying to push me again? You can’t bully recruits about in your lambent condition. I told you six months the other day—and you can count from then if you like. But that’s the minimum. Life’s not all that bad here, after all—and a little courtesy is in order. We’re not a prison ship, you know. We’re not a Siberian salt mine. Or are you trying to say that we resemble anything of that sort? So, that’s fine, Ziemssen. Dismissed! Next—whoever feels up to it,” he shouted, staring into the air. And extending one long arm, he handed his stethoscope to Dr. Krokowski, who stood up and grabbed it, so that he could perform his own little assistant’s post-examination on Joachim.

Hans Castorp had sprung to his feet as well, and with his eyes fixed on the director, who stood there lost in thought—legs spread, mouth open—he began quickly to get ready himself. He was in too much of a hurry and had trouble getting out of his dotted, French-cuffed shirt, which he slipped over his head. And there he stood—white, blond, and narrow-chested—opposite Director Behrens. His figure certainly looked more civilian than Joachim Ziemssen’s.

But the director, still lost in thought, let him stand there. Dr. Krokowski had sat back down and Joachim had begun to get dressed again, when Behrens finally decided to take some notice of the person who “felt up to it.”

“Ah yes, it’s your turn now!” he said; grabbing Hans Castorp’s upper arm with one massive hand, he shoved him into place and gave him a sharp look. But he did not look directly at his face, the way you look at another human being, but at his body. He spun him around, the way you spin an object around, and examined his back as well. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, let’s have a look at what you’re up to.” And he took up his thumping again.

He pounded everywhere, just as he had with Joachim Ziemssen, but kept coming back to certain spots. For a good while he alternated tapping a spot near the left collarbone and one a little below it, comparing.

“Hear that?” he called across to Dr. Krokowski. And Dr. Krokowski, sitting five paces away at the desk, showed he had heard by lowering his head—pressing his chin against his chest so earnestly that the tips of his beard curled to points on each side.

“Breathe deep! Cough!” the director commanded, stethoscope in hand once more; and Hans Castorp worked hard, for perhaps a good eight or ten minutes, while the director listened. He said not a word, but placed the stethoscope here and there and in particular repeatedly listened to the two places where he had lingered when tapping. Then he wedged his instrument under his arm, crossed his hands behind his back, and stared at a spot on the floor between himself and Hans Castorp. “Yes, Castorp,” he said—and this was the first time he had ever addressed the young man simply by his last name—“just as I thought, the situation looks rather praeter-propter. I can admit to you now that I haven’t liked your looks from the start, not since the first time I had the undeserved honor of making your acquaintance—and was pretty sure of my guess that you were secretly one of the locals, and would finally come to appreciate the fact yourself, as has many a man before you, who came up here just for the fun of it, looked around with his nose in the air, and one fine day discovered he would do well—indeed, mark my words, would do more than well—to remain on here, for reasons having nothing to do with the seductions of mere curiosity, for a rather more extended stay.” Hans Castorp had turned pale, and Joachim, who had been buttoning his suspenders, stopped right where he was and listened.

“You have a fine, sympathetic cousin there,” the director went on, nodding in Joachim’s direction and rolling back and forth between the balls of his feet and his heels, “of whom we hope someday soon to say that he was ill at one time, but even when that day comes, he will still have been ill— your fine cousin will. And that, as the philosophers say, casts a certain a priori light on your own situation, my good Castorp.”

“But he’s only a half cousin, Director Behrens.”

“Now, now, you’re not going to disown your own cousin, are you? Half or whatever, he is still a blood relation. On which side, actually?”

“On my mother’s side, sir. He’s the son of my mother’s half—” “And your dear mother is enjoying life, I hope?”

“No, she’s dead. She died when I was still small.” “Of what?”

“Of a blood clot, sir.”

“A blood clot? Well, it was long ago in any case. And your good father?”

“He died of pneumonia,” Hans Castorp said. “And so did my grandfather,” he thought to add.

“I see, him too? Well, enough of your forebears. As for yourself—you’ve always been rather anemic, am I right? But don’t really tire all that easily from physical or mental labor? Oh, you do? And your heart pounds sometimes? Has only started that of late? Fine. In addition there is apparently an active proclivity for catarrh in the upper respiratory system. Did you know that you were ill once before?” “Me?”

“Yes—I do mean you. Can you hear the difference?” And the director tapped again, alternating between a spot high on the left side of the chest and one a little lower.

“It sounds a bit more hollow there,” Hans Castorp said.

“Very good. You should become a specialist. That is what we call a muffled tone, and muffled tones come from old infections where calcification has set in, a kind of scarring, if you will. You are an old patient, Castorp, but we’ll not lay the blame on anyone for your not having known that before. Early diagnosis is difficult—particularly for my good colleagues in the flatlands. I certainly don’t claim that we have finer ears up here, although our special training does contribute something. But the air helps us to hear better, you see—the thin, dry air up here.”

“Of course, certainly it does,” Hans Castorp said.

“Fine, Castorp. And now listen to me, young man, I am about to utter several golden words. Please understand me now—if it were nothing more than muffled tones and scars on your Aeolus’s bellows there, merely some calcified foreign matter, then I would send you packing to rejoin your lares and penates, and not worry one whit more about you. You do understand that, don’t you? But as things stand and on the basis of my examination, and seeing that you are already here—it would not pay for you to return home, Hans Castorp. Because you would be back to see us in very short order.” Hans Castorp felt the blood rush to his heart again—it began to pound. Joachim just stood there, his hands resting on the back buttons, his eyes on the floor.

“Because apart from the muffled tones,” the director said, “you have some roughness at the upper left, which is almost a rattle and doubtless comes from a fresh area. I would not yet call it a focus for softening tissue, but it is certainly a moist spot. And if you were to continue your life just as before down below, my good man, the whole pulmonary lobe would go, willy-nilly, to the devil.”

Hans Castorp stood there stock-still, though his mouth twitched strangely and his heart hammered visibly against his ribs. He glanced across to Joachim and then back to the director’s face—with its purple cheeks, blue pop-eyes, and little skewed moustache.

“We find objective confirmation for this,” Behrens continued, “in your temperature: ninety-nine point seven at ten in the morning, which more or less matches our acoustic observations.” “I just assumed,” Hans Castorp said, “the fever came from my catarrh.”

“And the catarrh?” the director retorted. “Where does it come from? Let me tell you something, Castorp, and pay close attention now—you certainly have sufficient gray matter for that, as far as I can see. First and foremost: there’s the air up here. It’s good for fighting off illness, wouldn’t you say? And you’d be right. But it is also good for illness, you see, because it first enhances it, creates a revolution in the body, causes latent illness to erupt, and your catarrh—no offense intended—is just such an eruption. I don’t know if you were already febrile down in the plains, but in any case you had a fever your very first day here, and not because of any catarrh—that, at least, is my opinion.” “Yes,” Hans Castorp said, “yes, I truly believe that, too.”

“You felt tipsy right off, I presume,” the director said to prove the point. “That comes from soluble toxins released by the bacteria; they have an intoxicating effect on the central nervous system, you see—which gives you those flushed cheeks. And so first off, Castorp, we’re going to stick you in bed; we’ll see if we can’t get you sobered up with a few weeks of bed rest. And then we shall see what we shall see. We’ll take a pretty interior snapshot of you—it’s always fun to get a look at what’s happening inside your own body. But let me tell you right off: a case like yours is not healed just like that. We don’t promote ourselves with a lot of publicity about miracle cures. I knew at once that you’d be a better patient than visitor, with more talent for being ill than our brigadier general here, who tries to slip away the moment his fever goes down a tenth or two. As if ‘At ease!’ weren’t just as good a command as ‘Attention!’ A citizen’s first duty is to stay calm, and impatience never helps anything. And so I do insist that you not disappoint me, Castorp, or prove me wrong about my knowledge of human nature. And now, forward march!—off to the stall with you both!”

And the consultation was over, and Director Behrens sat down at his desk—a busy man like him had to make good use of what little time he had before the next examination by taking care of paperwork. Dr. Krokowski, however, stood up and strode over to Hans Castorp; tilting his head to one side and smiling so pithily that it revealed the yellow teeth under his beard, he placed one hand on the young man’s shoulder and with the other offered a hearty handshake.

CHAPTER 5

ETERNAL SOUP AND SUDDEN CLARITY

And now we have a new phenomenon—about which the narrator would do well to express his own amazement, if only to prevent his readers from being all too amazed on their own. The fact is, the account of the first three weeks of Hans Castorp’s stay with “the people up here” (twenty-one days at the height of summer, to which, by all calculation, it was supposed to have been limited) has consumed quantities of space and time that correspond only too well to what the author himself expected, and indeed half confessed; the coverage of the next three weeks of the visit, however, will require about as many lines—or words, or even seconds—as the first three weeks required pages, quires, hours, and working days. We can see it coming—we’ll have those three weeks behind us and laid to rest in no time.

That may well cause amazement—and yet it is perfectly in order and corresponds to the laws of how stories are told and listened to. Because both good order and the laws of narrative require that our experience of time should seem long or short, should expand or shrink, in the same way it does for the hero of our story, for young Hans Castorp, who quite unexpectedly has found himself impounded by fate. It may also be useful to prepare the reader for other wonders and phenomena that are connected with the mystery of time and that we shall encounter while in his company— quite apart from this striking instance. But for now it is enough for us to remind everyone how quickly a number of days, indeed a great number, can pass when one spends them as a patient in bed. It is always the same day—it just keeps repeating itself. Although since it is always the same day, it is surely not correct to speak of “repetition.” One should speak of monotony, of an abiding now, of eternalness. Someone brings you your midday soup, the same soup they brought you yesterday and will bring again tomorrow. And in that moment it comes over you—you don’t know why or how, but you feel dizzy watching them bring in the soup. The tenses of verbs become confused, they blend and what is now revealed to you as the true tense of all existence is the “inelastic present,” the tense in which they bring you soup for all eternity. But one can’t speak of boredom, because boredom comes with the passing of time—and that would be a paradox in relation to eternity. And we want to avoid paradoxes, particularly if we are to live with our hero.

Hans Castorp had been confined to his bed since Saturday evening, by order of Director Behrens, the highest authority in this world in which we are encapsulated. There he lay, his monogram on the breast pocket of his nightshirt, his hands clasped behind his head, in his clean, white bed—the American woman’s deathbed and probably that of many others as well—staring up at the ceiling with his ordinary blue eyes, watery now from a cold, considering this strange state of affairs. Which does not mean that if he had not had a cold, his gaze would have been clear and unequivocal, because that was not how things looked on the inside—and however ordinary he might be on the inside, things in there were also very murky, confused, uncertain, and only half-sincere. And as he lay there, one moment the wild laughter of triumph would convulse him, rising up from somewhere deep

within, and his heart would stop, aching with an expansive joy and hope he had never known before;

and the next moment, he would turn pale with fear and alarm, and the pulsing of his conscience became his heart banging against his ribs in a rapid, fickle rhythm.

Joachim had left him in peace the first day and avoided any long conversation. He stepped cautiously into the sickroom a few times, nodded to his cousin lying there, and out of courtesy asked if there was anything he needed. And he found it that much easier to acknowledge and respect Hans Castorp’s aversion to any discussion, because he shared it, and indeed considered his own situation even more embarrassing than his cousin’s.

But on return from his solitary Sunday-morning constitutional, he could no longer put off consulting his cousin about things that demanded immediate attention. Taking a position beside his bed, he heaved a sigh and said, “Yes, well, it’s no use. We have to do something. They’re expecting you at home.”

“Not yet,” Hans Castorp replied.

“No, but within a few days—Wednesday or Thursday.”

“Oh,” Hans Castorp said, “they’re not expecting me on any particular day. They have other things to do besides waiting for me and counting the days till I return. I’ll arrive when I arrive, and Uncle Tienappel will say, ‘So here you are!’ And Uncle James will say, ‘Well, have a good time?’ And if I don’t arrive just yet, it will be a good while before they even notice, you can be sure of that. Though it goes without saying that in due time they will have to be notified.”

“You can imagine,” Joachim said with another sigh, “how unpleasant the whole affair is for me. What’s going to happen now? Of course I feel more or less responsible. You come up here to visit me, and I introduce you to life up here, and now here you sit, and no one knows when you’ll be able to get away again and start your career. You must realize how terribly embarrassing this is for me.” “I beg your pardon,” Hans Castorp said, his hands still clasped behind his head. “What are you getting in such a stew about? That’s simply nonsense. Did I come up here to visit you? Yes, that too. But the primary reason, after all, was to take a vacation, on orders of Dr. Heidekind. Well, and now it turns out that I needed a vacation a lot more than he or any of us dreamed I did. I’m surely not the first person who thought he was just dropping by for a visit, and then had things turn out differently. Just think of Tous-les-deux’s second son, and how it turned out very differently for him, too. I don’t know whether he’s even still alive, perhaps they removed the body during a meal one day. I really am surprised to learn that I’m a little ill, but I’ll just have to get used to being a patient here, to actually being one of you, instead of merely the visitor I’ve been until now. But, then again, I’m not that surprised, either, because I’ve never really felt all that splendidly healthy, and when I think of

how both my parents died young—then where was such splendid health supposed to come from?

That you’ve got a little problem yourself—although it’s as good as cured now—why, none of us has ever pretended otherwise. So it may well be that it runs in the family a little—Behrens at least dropped a hint to that effect. At any rate, I’ve been lying here since yesterday asking myself just how I’ve always felt about it all, what my attitudes are, you know, about the whole thing, about life and its demands. I’ve always been rather serious by nature, with a certain aversion to anything loud or robust. We were speaking about the same thing here not long ago, about how I’ve sometimes almost wished I had become a clergyman, what with my interest in sad, edifying things—you know, like a black funeral pall with a silver cross and R.I.P. on it. Resquiescat in pace—that’s the loveliest phrase, and I find it personally much more appealing than something rowdy like ‘he’s a jolly good fellow.’ It all comes, I think, from my having a little problem myself and having understood something about illness from the start—which has all become apparent now. But since that’s how things have turned out, I can only say it was a lucky thing I came up here and got myself examined. You don’t have to reproach yourself for anything. You heard him say yourself that if I had stayed down below and continued my life just as before, it’s quite possible my whole pulmonary lobe would have gone, willy-nilly, to the devil.”

“You can’t be sure of that!” Joachim said. “And that’s just it—that you can’t be sure at all. He claims you had some spots before that no one paid any attention to and they healed by themselves, so that all you have left are a few unimportant muffled tones. The same thing might have happened with this moist spot you’ve got now if you hadn’t happened to come up to visit me—you just can’t be sure.”

“No, you can’t be sure of anything,” Hans Castorp replied. “Which is precisely why no one has any right to assume the worst—about how long I’ll have to stay on here at your spa, for instance. You say that no one knows when I’ll get away and start work on the docks, but you say it from the pessimistic point of view. And that, I think, is premature, precisely because you can’t be sure. Behrens mentioned no dates—he’s a prudent fellow and doesn’t want to play the fortune-teller. And I haven’t even had my picture taken with X-rays yet, and only that will give us an objective view of the facts. Who knows whether anything worth mentioning will even show up, or whether I won’t have rid myself of my fever by then and can bid you all adieu. I’m for not playing this thing up too soon, so that we end up crying wolf back home. It will be enough if we write a letter—I can write it myself with my fountain pen if I prop myself up a little—and tell them I’ve got a bad cold and a fever, that I’m staying in bed and won’t be traveling just yet. And then we shall see what we shall see.”

“Fine,” Joachim said, “that’s what we’ll do for now. And the rest of it can wait, too.”

“What rest of it?”

“Well, just stop and think! You arrived here with a steamer trunk packed for a three-week stay. You’ll need underwear, shirts, winter clothes, and some other footwear. And finally, you’ll need to have more money sent, too.”

“If,” Hans Castorp said, “if I need it.”

“Good, let’s wait and see,” Joachim said and began to pace the room. “But we ought not—no, we cannot allow ourselves to have any illusions. I’ve been here too long not to know what’s what. Once Behrens says that you have a rough spot, almost a rattle . . . But, of course, of course, we can wait and see.”

And that was how they left things for now. The regular schedule, with its weekly and fortnightly deviations, took its course. Even in his present situation Hans Castorp participated in it all—if not by direct enjoyment, then at least through the reports Joachim gave him when he visited and sat down on the edge of the bed for fifteen minutes.

His Sunday breakfast tea tray was decorated with a little vase of flowers, and they had not forgotten to send along some of the pastries served in the dining hall on Sundays. Later in the morning, things turned lively in the garden and on the terrace. With a fanfare of trumpets and screechy clarinets the fortnightly Sunday concert began, for which Joachim had joined his cousin in his room, taking a seat out on the balcony to listen. Hans Castorp sat half propped up in bed, his head tilted to one side and a blurry look of fond devotion in his eyes, and he listened now to the harmonies drifting in through the open balcony door—though not without a mental shrug at the thought of Settembrini’s babblings about music being “politically suspect.”

But, as we have noted, when it came to the rest of the day’s sights and events, he had Joachim provide him a report; he asked him about the festive outfits that had been brought out for Sunday, the lace peignoirs and such (although it had turned too cold for lace peignoirs); about whether there had been any afternoon carriage rides (there had indeed—the entire Half-Lung Club had left on an  excursion to Clavadel). On Monday, when Joachim looked in on him on his way back from Dr. Krokowski’s lecture and before his afternoon rest cure, Hans Castorp demanded to hear everything that had been said. Joachim proved rather closemouthed and reluctant to report on the lecture—but then, the two of them had not said much about the previous one, either. Nevertheless, Hans Castorp insisted on hearing details.

“Here I lie, paying full price,” he said, “and I want to get something out of what is offered, too.” He recalled his independent walk on Monday two weeks before and that it had not done him much

good; he even expressed a rather definite conjecture that it had created a revolution in his body and

caused his silent, latent illness to erupt.

“And the way the people up here talk,” he exclaimed, “the common people, I mean. It sounds so dignified and solemn, almost like poetry sometimes. ‘Fare thee well and much obliged!’ ” he repeated, imitating the woodsman. “I heard that up in the forest, I’ll never forget it as long as I live. That sort of thing gets caught up with other impressions and memories, you know, and just keeps ringing in your ears till the day you die. And so Krokowski spoke about ‘love’ again, did he?” he asked, grimacing as he said the word.

“But of course,” Joachim said. “What else? It is his topic, after all.” “What did he have to say about it today?”

“Oh, nothing special. You know yourself from last time the way he puts things.” “But what new ideas did he treat us to?”

“Nothing new, really . . . yes, well, he was selling basic chemistry today,” Joachim reluctantly and patronizingly reported. It was all about a kind of poisoning, about the organism poisoning itself, which, Dr. Krokowski had said, was the result of the decomposition of a certain, still-unidentified substance present throughout the body; the by-products of that decomposition had an intoxicating effect on certain centers in the spinal cord, not all that different from what happens when other poisons, such as morphine or cocaine, are introduced into the body.

“So that’s what causes flushed cheeks,” Hans Castorp said. “Think of it, that’s something worth learning. The things that man knows! He’s a regular fountain of information. Just wait, someday soon he’ll identify that substance present throughout the body, and he’ll manufacture those by- products himself, the ones with the intoxicating effect on the spinal cord. He can really get folk tipsy, then. It may well be that people knew the trick of it at one time. Listening to him makes you think there’s something to those stories about love potions and the other stuff they talk about in old sagas. Are you going now?”

“Yes,” Joachim said, “I really have to take my rest cure. The curve on my chart has been rising since yesterday. This problem of yours has definitely had its effect on me after all.”

And so Sunday, and Monday, passed. And the evening and the morning were the third day of Hans Castorp’s stay in the “stall,” a weekday with nothing to distinguish it—a Tuesday, the day of his arrival. He had been here for three weeks, and so he felt compelled to write a letter home and inform his uncle, however superficially for now, of how things stood. His pillows stuffed behind his back, he wrote on sanatorium stationery about how his scheduled departure had been delayed. He was lying in bed with a fever and a cold, which Director Behrens, being the overconscientious doctor he

was, had evidently refused to take all that lightly and instead saw within the larger context of his—

the letter-writer’s—general constitution. At their very first meeting, in fact, the supervising physician had found him very anemic, and in consequence of all this, it now appeared that the length of stay that he—Hans Castorp—had originally planned could no longer be regarded as sufficient. Further details as soon as possible. “Just right,” Hans Castorp thought, “not one word too many, and yet it takes care of things for a while, no matter what.” The letter was handed to the porter, who avoided the postal detour of a mailbox, and took it down to meet the next scheduled train.

This done, our adventurer felt he had put things in general good order and his mind was at ease; and although tormented by the cough and stuffy head of a cold, he lived each day as it came—each normal day, its established sameness divided into little segments, neither diverting nor boring, and always the same. Each morning there would be a robust knock on his door, and the bath attendant would enter, a sinewy fellow named Turnherr, with rolled-up sleeves and heavily veined forearms. In a gurgling voice with a serious impediment, he would address Hans Castorp—as he did all the patients—by his room number and then proceed to rub him down with alcohol. Not long after he left, Joachim would appear, already dressed by then, to say good morning and ask his cousin about his seven o’clock temperature and inform him of his own. While Joachim was eating his breakfast downstairs, Hans Castorp would sit up, pillows stuffed behind his back, and do the same, with the healthy appetite that a change in life can bring—and would be disturbed hardly at all by the bustling, businesslike invasion of the doctors, who by this time had passed through the dining hall and were now making their rounds, moving at double time through the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. His mouth full of jam, he would announce that he had slept “quite well” and gaze across the rim of his cup at the director, who was standing in the center of the room, one fist braced against the table, hastily scanning the temperature chart; he would respond in a calm, drawling voice as they wished him good morning and departed. He would light a cigarette, and before he had even realized that Joachim was gone, here would come his cousin, already back from his morning constitutional. They would chat about one thing or another, and the time until second breakfast, which Joachim faithfully used for a rest cure, was so brief that even a downright dimwit or lamebrain could not have managed to be bored, whereas it gave Hans Castorp an opportunity to feast on his impressions of the first three weeks up here and to meditate on his current situation and what it perhaps might lead to—so that he had almost no use for the two thick illustrated magazines from the sanatorium library that lay on his nightstand.

It was the same with the time required for Joachim’s second walk, this time down to Davos-Platz— another easy hour. He would look in again on Hans Castorp and, standing or sitting beside the

sickbed for a moment, tell him about whatever he had happened to notice on his walk, then leave to

take his noon rest cure. And how long was that? Again, just a brief hour. No sooner had you clasped your hands behind your head to gaze at the ceiling and pursue some passing thought than the gong sounded for those who were not bedridden or moribund to get ready for the day’s main meal.

Joachim would leave, and the “midday soup” would arrive—soup was the simplified, symbolic name for what came. Because Hans Castorp was not on a restricted diet—why should he have been? A restricted diet, short commons, would hardly have been appropriate to his condition. There he lay, paying full price, and what they brought him at this hour of fixed eternity was “midday soup,” the six-course Berghof dinner in all its splendor, with nothing missing—a hearty meal six days a week, a sumptuous showpiece, a gala banquet, prepared by a trained European chef in the sanatorium’s deluxe hotel kitchen. The dining attendant whose job it was to care for bedridden patients would bring it to him, a series of tasty dishes arranged under domed nickel covers. She would shove over the bed table, which was now part of the furniture, a marvel of one-legged equilibrium, adjust it across his bed in front of him, and Hans Castorp would dine from it like the tailor’s son who dined from a magic table.

And no sooner had he finished eating than Joachim would return; and then it would be almost two- thirty before he left for his balcony and the silence of the main rest cure settled over the Berghof. Not quite two-thirty, perhaps; to be precise, it was more like a quarter past. But such extra quarter hours left over from nice, round whole ones don’t really count, they are simply swallowed up along the way—at least that is what happens wherever time is managed on a grand scale, on long journeys, for instance, or on train rides that last for hours, or in similar situations when life is emptiness and waiting and all activity is reduced to whiling time away and putting it behind you. A quarter past two—that’s as good as half past; and half past two is the same as half till three, for heaven’s sake. Those thirty minutes can be regarded as a prologue to the full hour from three till four and that takes care of them. That is how it’s done under such circumstances. And so, in the end, the main rest cure was actually reduced to a mere hour—which in turn was abbreviated, contracted, and given an apostrophe, as it were. And the apostrophe was Dr. Krokowski.

Yes, Dr. Krokowski no longer circumvented Hans Castorp when he made his independent afternoon rounds. Hans Castorp counted now. He was no longer an interval or hiatus, he was a patient; he, too, was questioned, instead of being left lying there to his own devices, as he had been every day until now—much to his slight and secret annoyance. It was on

Monday that Dr. Krokowski had first materialized in his room—we say “materialized,” because that is the best word for the strange, almost terrifying impression it had made on Hans Castorp, no matter

how hard he tried to shake it that day. He had been lying there dozing for fifteen minutes or half an

hour, when he was startled awake by the sudden realization that the assistant was in his room, striding toward him, having entered not by way of the door, but from outside. He had not used the corridor, but had moved along the balconies, and had come in now through the open balcony door, creating the impression that he had materialized out of thin air. At any rate, there he had stood beside Hans Castorp’s bed—black and pale, broad-shouldered, stout, the hour’s apostrophe—and visible under his two-pronged beard had been a manly smile and yellowish teeth.

“You seem surprised to see me, Herr Castorp,” he had said in his gentle baritone; his consciously affected, drawling accent had an exotic, palatalized r—not a rolled r, but simply a single tap of the tongue just behind the upper front teeth. “I am merely fulfilling a pleasant duty in stopping by to see how you are doing. Your association with us has entered a new phase—overnight our guest has become a comrade.” (The word “comrade” had made Hans Castorp feel rather uneasy.) “Who would have thought it!” Dr. Krokowski had joked in a comradely voice. “Who would have thought that evening when I first had the pleasure of greeting you, and you responded to my mistaken view—it was a mistake at the time—by declaring that you were perfectly healthy. I think I expressed something of my doubts at the time, but I assure you that I did not mean this. I do not wish to represent myself as more perspicacious than I am. I certainly wasn’t thinking at the time of a moist spot, my intentions were quite different, more general, more philosophical. I was articulating my doubts that the words ‘human being’ and ‘perfect health’ could ever be made to rhyme. And even today, despite what happened at your examination, from my viewpoint—which is different from that of my distinguished supervisor—this moist spot here”—and he had lightly touched Hans Castorp’s shoulder with the tip of one finger—“cannot be regarded as the primary object of interest. It is merely a secondary phenomenon. Organic factors are always secondary.”

And Hans Castorp had flinched.

“So in my eyes at least, your catarrh is merely a tertiary phenomenon,” Dr. Krokowski had added very nonchalantly. “How is that cold, by the way? I’m certain bed rest will soon take care of it. Have you been measuring your temperature today?” And at that point the assistant’s visit had taken on the character of a rather harmless inspection, which continued to be the case in the following days and weeks. Dr. Krokowski would enter by way of the balcony at a quarter till four or a little earlier, greet the recumbent patient in his cheerful, manly way, make a few very elementary medical inquiries, bring the conversation around briefly to more personal topics, and make a comradely joke or two. And although these visits never failed to have a certain dubious aura about them, one can eventually become accustomed to dubious things—if they remain within limits. And Hans Castorp

soon found he had no objections to Dr. Krokowski’s regular “materializations.” They simply

belonged to the fixed schedule of a normal day, and ended the main rest cure with an apostrophe. And so by the time the assistant stepped back out onto the balcony, it was four o’clock—which meant late, late afternoon. Suddenly and before you even realized it, it was late afternoon, which would deepen now seamlessly into oncoming evening. And by the time tea had been taken, both in the dining room below and in room 34, it was very close to five o’clock; and by the time Joachim had returned from his third obligatory walk and had dropped in on his cousin again, it was so close to six o’clock that, once you rounded it off a little, the time left in the rest cure until supper was reduced to just one hour—and it was child’s play to drive such paltry forces of opposing time from the field of battle, particularly if you had thoughts in your head and an orbis pictus on the nightstand.

Joachim would look in before leaving for supper. His own tray would be brought in. The valley would long since have filled with shadows, and while Hans Castorp ate, it would grow discernibly darker in the white room. When he had finished, he would sit there propped up against his pillows, his empty dishes and his magic table before him, and gaze out into the quickly falling dusk—today’s dusk, which was hardly distinguishable from yesterday’s, or the dusk of the day before yesterday, or of a week ago. There was evening—and there had just been morning. The day, chopped into little pieces by all these synthetic diversions, had in fact crumbled in his hands, and turned to dust—and he would notice it now, either in cheerful amazement or, at worst, with a little pensiveness, since to shudder at the thought would have been inappropriate to his young years. It seemed to him that he was simply gazing, “on and on.”

One day, ten or twelve days perhaps after Hans Castorp had taken to his bed, there was a knock on his door at that same hour—that is to say, just before Joachim was due to return from supper and the evening social. And in response to Hans Castorp’s tentative “come in,” Lodovico Settembrini appeared on the threshold. All of a sudden the room was dazzlingly bright—because the visitor’s first gesture upon opening the door had been to switch on the ceiling lamp, and in a flash the room was overflowing with a sudden clarity that was reflected off the white of the ceiling and furniture. The Italian was the only person among the sanatorium’s residents about whom Hans Castorp had expressly asked during this period. All the same, every time Joachim sat or stood beside his cousin’s bed for ten minutes or so—and that happened ten times a day at least—he would report about all the little events and anomalies in the institution’s daily life, and if Hans Castorp had questions they were always of a more general, impersonal nature. Despite his isolation, his curiosity did not go beyond asking if new guests had arrived or any familiar faces had departed; and he seemed content to learn that only the former was the case. There was one newcomer, a young man with a greenish,

sunken face, and he had been given a place at the table to the cousins’ right, between Levi of the

ivory skin and Frau Iltis. Well, Hans Castorp could wait to see him with his own eyes. And so no one had left? Joachim replied curtly in the negative, his eyes lowered. But he had to answer the same question several times, every other day really, and finally, with some impatience in his voice, he tried to settle the issue once and for all, declaring that as far as he knew no one was planning to depart— people didn’t normally leave here that abruptly.

But as for Settembrini, Hans Castorp had expressly asked about him, demanding to know what he had “to say about it.” —About what? —“Why, that I’m lying here, presumably ill.”

And, in fact, Settembrini had responded, although very briefly. On the day Hans Castorp vanished, he had approached Joachim and asked where their visitor might be, obviously expecting to be told that Hans Castorp had departed. And in reply to Joachim’s account, he had uttered just two words in Italian. The first was, “Ecco!” the second, “Poveretto!”—meaning “There you are!” and “Poor  fellow!”—you did not have to understand any more Italian than these young men to grasp the meaning of those two words.

“But why ‘poveretto’?” Hans Castorp had asked. “Here he sits with his literature, made up of equal parts of humanism and politics, but he can’t do much by way of improving the more mundane issues in life. He shouldn’t be so arrogant about pitying me. I’ll be back down in the flatlands before he is.” And now here stood Herr Settembrini in the abruptly illuminated room. Bracing himself on an elbow to turn toward the door and blinking into the light, Hans Castorp recognized him now, and blushed. As always, Settembrini was wearing his heavy coat with the wide lapels, a frayed turndown collar, and checked trousers. He had come directly from supper and, as was his habit, had a wooden toothpick between his lips. Under the handsome upward sweep of his moustache, the corners of his mouth were drawn into the familiar, delicate, dry, critical smile.

“Good evening, my good engineer. Do the rules allow my looking in on you? If so, we needed some light for it—please forgive my arbitrarily taking care of the matter,” he said, waving one small hand toward the ceiling lamp. “You are engaged in deep contemplation—I certainly don’t mean to disturb you. An inclination to ponder matters would be quite understandable in your situation, and there’s always your cousin if you wish to chat. You see, I am perfectly aware of just how superfluous I am. All the same, one lives in such close proximity, one senses a mutual regard, man to man, a certain sympathy, a sympathy of both the mind and the heart. It is almost a week now since we last saw one another. I had indeed begun to suspect that you had departed when I saw your place vacant down in the refectory. The lieutenant set me to rights—hmm, or should we say, set me to what was wrong,

if that does not sound impolite. In short, how are you doing? What are you doing? How do you feel?

Not all too depressed, I hope?”

“It’s you, Herr Settembrini. How kind of you. Ha, ha—‘refectory’? Another one of your jokes. Please, have a chair. You’re not disturbing me in the least. I’ve been lying here musing—and musing is probably an exaggeration. I was simply too lazy to turn on the light. Thanks so much, I’m feeling almost normal, subjectively at least. My cold is almost gone, thanks to the bed rest, but it’s apparently only a secondary phenomenon, or so I’ve been told. My temperature still is not quite what it should be—sometimes ninety-nine point five, sometimes ninety-nine point nine. That hasn’t changed in the past few days.”

“You’ve been measuring regularly, have you?”

“Yes, six times a day, just like all of you up here. Ha, ha—excuse me for laughing, I was just thinking about your calling our dining hall a refectory. That’s what they call it in a monastery, is it not? There really is some resemblance—I’ve never been in a monastery, but I can imagine it’s much like here. And I can rattle off the litany of the ‘rule’ and observe it quite faithfully.”

“Like a pious monk. One might say you’ve ended your novitiate and have taken your vows. My solemn congratulations. You’re already calling it ‘our dining hall,’ yourself. By the way—not that I wish to cast any aspersions on your masculinity—but you almost remind me more of a young nun than a monk, one of those innocent young brides of Christ, her hair newly shorn, with great martyr’s eyes. Whenever I happened to notice those sacrificial lambs, it was never without . . . without a certain flood of sentimentality. Ah, yes, yes, your good cousin has told me all about it. And so at the last moment you let them examine you.”

“Because I was feverish. What would you have me do about such a cold, Herr Settembrini? I would have consulted our family doctor down in the plains. And up here, with two specialists, where information comes from the horse’s mouth, so to speak—it would have been strange if . . .”

“Quite so, quite so. And you had been measuring your temperature, too, before anyone instructed you to do so. Although that was suggested to you right from the start. Nurse Mylendonk slipped you a thermometer, am I right?”

“Slipped me one? Since I needed it, I bought one from her.”

“I understand. Purely a business transaction. And how many months has the director saddled you with? Good God, I asked you that same question once before. Do you remember? You had just recently arrived. You were very cocky with your answers that day.”

“I certainly do remember, Herr Settembrini. I’ve had a great many new experiences since then, but I

can remember it as if it were yesterday. You were so amusing, even that first day. You turned Director Behrens into one of the judges of hell—Radames? No, wait, that’s somebody else.” “Rhadamanthus? It’s possible I might have called him that in passing. I don’t always remember everything that may burst from my lips.”

“Rhadamanthus, right! Minos and Rhadamanthus! And you even spoke to us about Carducci that first day . . .”

“If you will pardon me, my friend, we shall leave him out of this. His name sounds all too strange coming from you at the moment.”

“Fine with me,” Hans Castorp laughed. “But you have taught me a great deal about him, you know. Yes, back then I hadn’t the vaguest, and I told you that I had come for three weeks. How could I have known any different? And Fräulein Kleefeld had just whistled hello to me with her pneumothorax, and I was a little taken aback. Although I felt feverish from the start, too—because the air here is good not only for fighting off illness, but it’s also good for it, sometimes bringing it to eruption. Which is probably necessary in the end, if there’s to be any healing.”

“An alluring hypothesis. Did Director Behrens also tell you about a certain Russian woman whom we had here for five months last year—no, wait, the year before last? No? He should have. A delightful lady, of German heritage, married, a young mother. She came from somewhere in the Baltic region, anemic, lymphatic, there were perhaps more serious problems as well. Well, she spends a month here and complains of feeling very ill. Just be patient! A second month passes, and she continues to maintain that she’s not getting better, but worse. She is told that the doctor, and the doctor alone, can tell how she is doing; she can merely tell him how she is feeling—and that doesn’t matter much. They are satisfied with her lung. Fine, she says nothing, she continues her rest cure and loses weight with every week. She faints during her four-month checkup. That’s of no concern, Behrens says; they are really quite satisfied with her lung. But when by month five she can no longer walk, she writes her husband back by the Baltic, and Behrens receives a letter from him—the envelope is marked “personal” and “urgent” in a vigorous hand, I saw it myself. Yes, Behrens says now with a shrug, it has begun to look as if the climate here does not agree with her. The woman was beside herself. They should have told her that before, she cried, she had felt it all along, and now they had ruined her health entirely! We can only hope that she regained her strength once she joined her husband again by the Baltic.”

“Excellent. What a way you have with stories, Herr Settembrini—every word is absolutely graphic! I’ve laughed quietly many a time at your story about the girl who went for a swim in the lake and

then was given a silent sister. Yes, the things that happen here. Always something new. My own case

is still quite uncertain, by the way. The director claims he has found a little something wrong with me. There are some old spots, where I was sick once before without ever knowing it, I heard those myself when he tapped, and now he says he can hear a fresh one—ha, ‘fresh’ sounds quite peculiar in that context. But so far it’s merely a matter of acoustical observation, and we won’t have any real diagnostic certainty until I’m on my feet again and they X-ray me and take an interior snapshot. Then we’ll know for sure.”

“Do you think so? Did you know photographic plates often show spots that are assumed to be cavities when they are mere shadows, and that sometimes when something is there, it doesn’t show any spots at all? Madonna, the photographic plate! There was a young numismatist here who was feverish; and since he was feverish one could clearly make out cavities on his photographic plate. They even claimed to have heard them! He was treated for phthisis—and died. The autopsy revealed there was nothing wrong with his lungs and that he had died of some coccus infection or other.” “Now, listen here, Herr Settembrini, you’re already talking about autopsies. I don’t think I’m that far along just yet.”

“My good engineer, you are a wag.”

“And you are a dyed-in-the-wool critic and skeptic, if I do say so! You don’t even believe in exact science. Does your plate show spots?”

“Yes, it shows a few.”

“And you really are ill, aren’t you?”

“Yes, unfortunately I am rather ill,” Herr Settembrini replied and hung his head. There was a pause, broken by his cough. Hans Castorp looked up from his bed at his guest, whom he had reduced to silence. With two very simple questions, it seemed, he had dumbfounded him, refuted every possible argument, even the world republic and beautiful style. For his part, he did nothing to start up the conversation again.

After a while Herr Settembrini sat up with a smile. “But tell me now, my good engineer,” he said, “how has your family taken the news?”

“Which news do you mean? About the delay in my departure? Ah yes, my family. My family at home consists of three uncles—a great-uncle and his two sons, who are more like cousins to me. I have no other family than that, since I was orphaned very early. Taken the news? They really don’t know all that much yet. When I first had to take to my bed, I wrote them that I had a bad cold and could not travel. And yesterday, since it has been a little while now, I wrote again and said that in treating my catarrh Director Behrens had become interested in the state of my lungs and insisted I

extend my stay until we could achieve some clarity about that. They will have taken it all quite

calmly.”

“And your new position? You spoke of a course of practical activity on which you intended to embark shortly.”

“Yes, as an unsalaried engineer-in-training. I asked them to excuse me from my duties on the dock for now. You mustn’t suppose they are in any despair about it. They can get along without a trainee for as long as necessary.”

“Fine, fine. So that from that side, everything is in order. Composure up and down the line. People are generally detached in your native land, are they not? Although they can be energetic, too!”

“Oh yes, energetic, too, very energetic,” Hans Castorp said. From a distance now, he examined life in his homeland and found that his interlocutor had characterized it correctly. “Detached and energetic, you’re probably right there.”

“Well,” Herr Settembrini continued, “should you remain somewhat longer, I have no doubt we shall all make your good uncle’s acquaintance—I mean your great-uncle’s. He’s certain to come up and check on your situation.”

“Out of the question!” Hans Castorp cried. “Under no circumstances! Wild horses couldn’t get him  here. My uncle is very apoplectic, you see—stout, hardly any neck. No, he requires sensible barometric pressure. He would do worse here than the Russian lady from the Baltic region. He’d be in an awful mess.”

“What a disappointment. Apoplectic, you say? What good are detachment and energy in that case? Your good uncle is a rich man, I take it? And you are rich, too, aren’t you? People are generally rich where you come from.”

Hans Castorp smiled at Herr Settembrini’s literary generalization and from his bed he looked again into the distance, to the world at home from which he was now removed. He thought back, trying to judge impersonally, and found that distance helped him to do so.

“Some people are rich, yes,” he answered now, “and some are not. And if not—so much the worse. And me? I’m no millionaire, but what I have is well invested. I’m independent, have enough to live. But let’s leave me out of it. If you had said one has to be rich back there—I would have agreed with you. Because let us assume you are not rich, or stop being rich—you are in a sorry state! ‘Him? Does he still have some money left?’ they ask. Those are their very words, and that’s the face they make. I’ve heard those words often enough, and I realize now that they are engrained in my mind. And so they must have struck me as rather strange even though I was used to hearing them—otherwise they would not be engrained in my mind. Don’t you think? No, I don’t suppose that as a homo humanus

you would feel at home with us. Even for someone like me whose home it is, it all seems rather crude

sometimes—though I must add I’ve never personally had to suffer under it. If someone doesn’t make sure that the best, most expensive wines are served at his dinners, people simply don’t go, and his daughters end up old maids. That’s how people are. As I lie here now and look at it all from a distance, it does seem crude to me. What were the terms you used—detached and . . . And energetic! Fine, but what does that really mean? That means hard, cold. And what does hard and cold mean? It means cruel. The air down there is cruel, ruthless. Lying here and watching from a distance, it almost makes me shudder.”

Settembrini listened, nodding. He nodded again when Hans Castorp finished his critical remarks for now and fell silent. Then he heaved a sigh and said, “I will not attempt to gloss over the specific forms life’s natural cruelty takes in your society. Be that as it may—the charge of cruelty is a rather sentimental charge. You would hardly have been able to make it there among your own people, for fear of looking ridiculous even to yourself. You have rightly left the making of that charge to life’s shirkers. For you to make it now is proof of a certain alienation that I would not like to see take root. Because a man who gets used to making that charge can very easily be lost to life, to the form of life for which he was born. Do you know what that means, my good engineer: ‘to be lost to life’? I know, I do indeed. I see it here every day. Within six months at the least, every young person who comes up here (and they are almost all young) has nothing in his head but flirting and taking his temperature. And within a year at the most, he will never be able to take hold of any other sort of life, but will find any other life ‘cruel’—or better, flawed and ignorant. You love stories—let me supply you with one. Let me tell you about a young man, someone’s husband and son, who was here for eleven months, whom I got to know. He was a little older than you, I believe—several years older in fact. He improved and was released on probation. He returned home and was received with open arms by his family—not just uncles, but a mother and a wife. He lay around the whole day with a thermometer in his mouth and paid no attention to anything else. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You have to have lived up there to know how things really are. You people down here lack the basic concepts.’ It finally came to the point where his mother declared, ‘Go back up. There’s no living with you here.’ And he came back up. He returned to his ‘home.’ You do know, don’t you, that people call this ‘home’ once they’ve lived up here? He was a total stranger to his young wife, she likewise lacked the ‘basic concepts’—and decided not to join him. She realized he would stay on and find a lady friend at ‘home’ whose ‘basic concepts’ agreed with his own.”

Hans Castorp had apparently been only half listening. He went on staring at the incandescent clarity of his white room, as if gazing into the distance beyond. His laugh came a little late now and he said,

“He called it home, did he? That’s really rather sentimental, as you put it. Yes, you do know an

endless number of stories. I was still considering what we were saying about hardness and cruelty. I’ve been mulling over the same thing in one form or another for the last few days. You see, a person probably needs a rather thick skin to be in perfect natural agreement with the way people think down there in the flatlands, asking questions like ‘Does he still have some money left?’ and making those faces they make. I never found it all that natural, even if I’m not a homo humanus. It has always struck me that way, although I’ve only noticed it just now, after the fact. Maybe my own unconscious tendency to illness had something to do with my finding it unnatural. I heard those old spots myself, and now Behrens has evidently found a fresh minor problem. It was something of a surprise, I suppose, and yet I really wasn’t all that astonished, either. I’ve never felt all that robust, actually; and besides, both my parents died so young—I was orphaned twice as a child, you know.”

Herr Settembrini coordinated head, shoulders, and hands in a serene, polite gesture to illustrate his question: Yes, well? And what of it?

“You’re a writer,” Hans Castorp said, “a literary man. You really should be able to understand and appreciate how under such circumstances a person might not be so tough-minded or find it perfectly natural for people to be so cruel—normal people, you know, who stroll about and laugh and make money and stuff their bellies. I don’t know if I’m expressing myself . . .”

Settembrini bowed. “You wish to say,” he explained, “that early and repeated contacts with death give rise to a basic mind-set against the cruelties and crudities of life as it is thoughtlessly lived out in the world. Or, let us say, it makes one aware of and sensitive to its cynicism.”

“Precisely,” Hans Castorp exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. “You’ve put it perfectly, dotted the i and crossed the t, Herr Settembrini. Contacts with death! I know that as a man of letters you . . .” Laying his head to one side and closing his eyes, Settembrini held out a hand toward him in a very beautiful and gentle gesture of restraint, a plea to be heard further. He held this pose for several seconds, long after Hans Castorp had fallen silent to wait somewhat awkwardly for what was to come. Finally he opened his black eyes—those organ-grinder eyes—and said, “Permit me, permit me, my good engineer, to tell you something, to lay it upon your heart. The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. The ancients decorated their sarcophagi with symbols of life and procreation, some of them even obscene. For the ancients, in fact, the sacred and the obscene were very often one and the same. Those people knew

how to honor death. Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated

from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind.”

Herr Settembrini said no more. He had come to a halt at a generality, but had done so most definitively. He was very serious—he had not spoken in a conversational tone, had refused to allow Hans Castorp any opportunity to pick up the thread or contradict him, and had lowered his voice decisively to mark the end of his statement. He sat there with his mouth closed, his hands folded in his lap, one check-trousered leg crossed over the other, and he gazed sternly at his foot swinging gently in the air.

Hans Castorp was silent, too. Sitting up against his pillows, he turned his face toward the wall and drummed his fingertips lightly on his comforter. He felt he had been lectured to, corrected, even scolded, and there was a great deal of childish sullenness in his silence. This pause continued for some time.

At last Herr Settembrini raised his head again, and said with a smile, “Do you remember, my good engineer, how we once had a similar dispute, one could well say, the same dispute? Our conversation that day—I believe we were out walking—was about sickness and stupidity; and out of a respect for illness, you declared the combination of the two a paradox. I called that respect a gloomy notion that dishonored the very idea of humanity, and to my delight you appeared not all that reluctant to take my objections into consideration. We spoke about the neutrality and intellectual hesitancy of youth, of its freedom to choose, its tendency to experiment with all sorts of standpoints, and of how one need not regard such experiments as final, life-determining options. Would you allow me”—and here Herr Settembrini bent forward on his chair, and with a smile he placed both feet on the floor, tucked his folded hands between his knees, and thrust his head forward at a slight tilt—“would you allow me,” he repeated with some emotion in his voice, “to lend you a helping hand in your exercises and experiments and to play a corrective role whenever I see danger looming in the form of some pernicious fixation?”

“But of course, Herr Settembrini!” Hans Castorp was quick to abandon his uneasy, half-defiant attitude; he stopped drumming on his comforter and turned back to his guest with confused affability. “That’s extraordinarily kind of you. But I really have to ask myself . . . I mean, in my case it would be . . .”

“Quite sine pecunia,” Herr Settembrini quoted as he stood up. “A man can’t allow himself to be

outclassed.” They laughed. They heard the first double door open, and in the next moment they heard the latch of the inner one.

It was Joachim, back from the evening social. He blushed when he caught sight of the Italian, exactly as Hans Castorp had done; his tanned face turned one visible shade darker. “Oh, you have a visitor,” he said. “How nice. I was delayed. They made me play a game of bridge—at least they tell people it’s bridge,” he said, shaking his head, “but it turned out to be something quite different. I won five marks.”

“Just so its appeal doesn’t become a vice,” Hans Castorp said. “Yes, yes—Herr Settembrini has done a splendid job of helping me pass the time—though that’s a poor way of putting it. I suppose that could apply as well to your sham game of bridge. Whereas Herr Settembrini really did help me employ my time meaningfully. A respectable man should be trying with might and main to get out of here—particularly when he sees sham bridge games breaking out in his midst. But given the chance to listen often to Herr Settembrini and to have him lend a helping conversational hand, I think I almost might want to stay feverish indefinitely and just sit tight here with you all. It wouldn’t be long before they would have to give me a silent sister to keep me from cheating.”

“I repeat, my good engineer, you are a wag,” the Italian said. He took leave of them very courteously. Left alone with his cousin, Hans Castorp heaved a great sigh. “What a pedagogue,” he said. “A humanist pedagogue, admittedly. He just never stops correcting you, sometimes in the form of stories and sometimes more abstractly. And you end up talking with him about things—that you never would have thought you would talk about or even understand. And if I had run into him down in the flatlands, I’m sure I would not have understood them,” he added.

Joachim usually stayed awhile with him now, sacrificing two or three quarter hours of his evening rest cure. Sometimes they played chess on Hans Castorp’s bed table—Joachim had brought a set with him from down below. Later he would leave—lock, stock, and thermometer—for his balcony, and Hans Castorp would have to take his temperature one last time while soft music drifted up, now near, now far, from the night-enshrouded valley. At ten o’clock the rest cure would be over; he would hear Joachim stir; he would hear the couple from the Bad Russian table—and then Hans Castorp would turn over on his side, waiting for sleep to come.

The night was the more difficult half of the day, because Hans Castorp would wake frequently and often even lie awake for hours on end—perhaps because his overheated blood kept him alert or because his fully horizontal mode of life meant the loss of both the desire and the need for sleep. The hours of slumber were, however, animated with varied and lively dreams, and he could go on

indulging in them even while lying there awake. Divided as it was into little segments, the day

provided him with diversion, but the hours of night, as they marched past in their blurred uniformity, had much the same effect. And when morning drew near, he found it amusing to watch the objects in his room gradually grow visible, emerging from under a veil of gray, to see daylight kindle outside, sometimes only smoldering murkily, sometimes catching bright fire. And before one even thought about it, the moment had come for the robust knock of the bath attendant, announcing that the daily schedule was in force once again.

Hans Castorp had not brought a calendar along for his little excursion, and so he was never quite sure of the current date. Now and then he would ask his cousin to tell him, but he, too, was not always certain about the matter. All the same, Sundays, and in particular every second Sunday with its concert, gave Hans Castorp something to hang on to in his present situation. But this much was certain: September was fairly far advanced now, somewhere toward the middle. The gloomy and cold weather that had reigned in the valley outside when Hans Castorp had first taken to his bed had given way to splendid bright summer days, a whole series of such days, which seemed to have no end. Each morning Joachim would appear in his cousin’s room dressed in white flannels, only to find he could not suppress his honest regrets, which sat deep in his soul and young muscles, that Hans Castorp had to forgo such splendid weather. Once he even spoke softly about what a “disgrace” it was that he had to spend it this way—but then, to mollify him, added that he didn’t know himself how to take better advantage of it, since experience had taught him to avoid extensive exercise here. And, after all, the wide-open balcony door allowed his cousin to enjoy something of the warm shimmering light out there.

But toward the end of Hans Castorp’s prescribed retreat, the weather changed again. It turned foggy and cold overnight, the valley wrapped itself in wet, blowing snow, and the gentle, dry warmth of the radiator filled the room. And it was on that same day, when the doctors came by on their rounds, that Hans Castorp reminded the director that he had been lying there for three weeks now and asked permission to get up.

“What the—is your time up already?” Behrens said. “Let me think. I do declare, it’s true. Good God, how quickly we do get old. Not that your condition has changed all that much in the meantime. What? It was normal yesterday? Yes, except for the measurement at six in the evening. Well, Castorp, I don’t want to be like that, and so I’ll return you to human society. Arise, go thy way, my good man. Within the prescribed borders and limits, of course. We shall do a portrait of your interior here shortly. Make a note of that,” he said to Dr. Krokowski as they departed, pointing over his shoulder

with a giant thumb at Hans Castorp and training his watery, bloodshot, blue eyes on his pallid

assistant. And so Hans Castorp left the “stall.”

In rubber boots and with a turned-up coat collar, he accompanied his cousin again for the first time up to the bench beside the water trough and back. As they walked he could not help remarking that he wondered how long the director would have let him lie there if he had not himself mentioned the time was up. And Joachim, his eyes shifting about and his mouth opening as if to utter a hopeless “oh,” let his hand trail off in a gesture of immeasurability.

“MY GOD, I SEE IT!”

A week passed before Hans Castorp received orders from Head Nurse Mylendonk to report to the X-ray laboratory. He had not wanted to press the matter. It was apparent that this was a busy time for the Berghof, that the doctors and staff had their hands full. New guests had arrived in the last few days: two Russian students, both with heads of thick hair and high-buttoned black blouses without a trace of collar or cuff; a Dutch married couple, who were assigned places at Settembrini’s table; a hunchbacked Mexican, who terrified his tablemates with horrible asthma attacks, when he suddenly could not get his breath and would then grab his neighbor, man or woman, in the iron grip of one of his long hands, hold on tight as a vise, and drag his struggling, panicky victim, now shouting for help, down into the pool of dread with him. In short, the dining hall was already as good as full, although the winter season did not begin until October. And Hans Castorp’s case was hardly severe enough, high enough on the scale of illness, for him to have any right to claim special treatment. For all her stupidity and ignorance, Frau Stöhr, for instance, was without doubt much more ill than he, not to mention Dr. Blumenkohl. One would have to lack all sense of decorum or hierarchy not to have exercised restraint in Hans Castorp’s case—particularly since such sensibilities were essential to the spirit of the house. People who were only slightly ill did not count for much— he had often overheard conversations to that effect. They were spoken of disparagingly and considered inferior by local standards, not only by those of higher or highest rank, but also by those who themselves were only “mildly ill”—which allowed them to shrug off their own cases; while at the same time, by subjecting themselves to such standards, they were able to preserve and enhance their own self-esteem. Which is only human. “Oh, him,” they might say about one another, “there’s really not much wrong with him, hardly has the right to be here. Doesn’t even have a cavity.” Such was the spirit of the place—aristocratic in its own special way; and Hans Castorp greeted it out of an inborn respect for law and order of every sort. When in Rome, as the saying goes. Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honor are many and varied. Hans Castorp even showed a certain regard and consideration for Joachim—not so much because he was an old-timer here and had served as his guide and cicerone in this world, but more particularly because there was no doubt that he was “seriously ill.” But since this was how things were, it was only understandable if someone made as much of his case as possible, even exaggerated a little to be part of the aristocracy or at least get closer to it. Whenever his tablemates asked about his temperature, Hans Castorp, too, would add a few tenths, and he found it impossible not to feel flattered when they shook their fingers at him as if he were a particularly sly rascal. But even if he laid it on a little thick, he was still low on the ladder, as it were, and so patience and reticence were certainly appropriate behavior.

He had resumed the mode of life adapted in his first three weeks—the familiar, regular, and perfectly ordered life at Joachim’s side; everything went like clockwork from the first day, as if there had never been an interruption. And indeed it had meant nothing; he became aware of that fact when he first returned to his table. Joachim, who attached definite importance to such tokens, had of course seen to it that a few flowers adorned the returnee’s place setting; but Hans Castorp’s tablemates greeted him with little ceremony, with essentially no more interest than usual, as if he had been gone for three hours and not three weeks—not so much out of indifference to this ordinary, sympathetic fellow or out of self-absorption and preoccupation with their own interesting bodies, but because they were oblivious to the intervening time. And Hans Castorp had no trouble following suit, because when he took his seat again at the end of the table, between the teacher and Miss Robinson, it seemed as if he had been gone for a day at most.

And if the people at his own table did not make much fuss about the end of his isolation, how could anyone else in the dining hall have done so? Literally no one there had noticed his return—with the sole exception of Settembrini, who came over at the end of the meal to extend a friendly, witty greeting. Hans Castorp, of course, added one further exception of his own, though with what justification we shall have to leave undecided. He told himself that Clavdia Chauchat had noticed his reappearance—the moment she entered, late as always and having first let the glass door slam, her narrow eyes had rested on him, or so it seemed, and had met his own; no sooner had she sat down than she had looked back over her shoulder at him and smiled the same smile he had seen three weeks before, on the day of his examination. And she was so open, even brazen, about it— brazen in regard both to him and to the rest of the guests—that he had not known whether to be overjoyed or, in case it was a mark of disdain, upset. At any rate, his heart had shrunk beneath those looks—which in his eyes had contradicted and denied, in a most flagrant and intoxicating fashion, the reality that he and the sick woman were not so much as social acquaintances—had, in fact, shrunk almost painfully at the first rattle of the glass door, and his breath had come short and shallow as he sat waiting for that moment.

It should also be noted that Hans Castorp’s innermost relationship to this patient from the Good Russian table, the interest his modest intellect and his senses now took in this Kirghiz-eyed, softly slinking woman of average stature—in brief, his infatuation (and the word is apt, even though it is a word from “down below,” a word of the plains, and might imply that the little song about “how oft it thrills me” was somehow applicable here)—his infatuation, then, had made considerable progress during his isolation. A vision of her had floated before his eyes as he had watched early dawn slowly unveil his room and dusk thicken again come evening. (It had also been floating there very clearly the evening Settembrini had suddenly entered and set the room ablaze with light— which was why he had blushed at the sight of the humanist.) During each hour of his segmented day, he had thought of her mouth, her cheekbones, her eyes—whose color, shape, and placement cut deep into his soul—of her limp back, the way she carried her head, the neck bones above the collar line of her blouse, her arms a radiant illusion under flimsiest gossamer. And if we did not previously mention that this was how the long hours had passed so effortlessly for him, it was because we sympathize with the qualms of conscience that accompanied the terrifying bliss of these visions and images. Yes, terror and fear were bound up with them; hope, joy, and nameless dread could spill over into boundless uncertainty and total extravagance, but at times they could also suddenly press in on his young heart—that is, his heart in the genuine, physical sense—so that he would put one hand to that organ and the other to his brow, as if to shade his eyes, and whisper, “My God!”

For behind his brow were the thoughts or half-thoughts that first conferred true cloying sweetness to his visions and images, thoughts that centered on Madame Chauchat’s carelessness and brazenness, on the illness that accentuated and enhanced her body, the illness that embodied her very being and that he now shared with her according to medical dictum. The realization formed behind his brow that Madame Chauchat was taking utter license with those looks and smiles, totally disregarding their not being social acquaintances—as if they were not social creatures at all, as if there were no need for them even to speak to one another. And that was what terrified him, in the same way he had been terrified that day down in the examination room, when he had rapidly shifted his searching glance from Joachim’s naked upper torso to his eyes—the difference being that it was pity and worry that had been the source of his terror then, whereas other factors were involved here. And so now life at the Berghof—this blessed and well-regulated life on a narrow stage—resumed its steady pace. And while Hans Castorp waited to have a picture taken of his interior, he continued to share that life with dear old Joachim, doing exactly what he did, hour for hour; and close proximity with his cousin was probably good for the young man. It was a proximity based solely on illness; all the same, Joachim had a great deal of military integrity about him—though, granted, without his even being aware of it, that integrity was being increasingly satisfied by rest cures, to the point where they had become, as it were, a substitute for duties fulfilled in the flatlands, a kind of spurious occupation. Hans Castorp was not so dull that he had not noticed that much quite accurately, but he also sensed an inhibiting, restraining effect on his own civilian sentiments—indeed it may have been this proximity, the example he took from it and its supervisory aspect, that kept him from overt actions and blind adventures. For he could observe only too well how Joachim had to endure the daily, constant assaults of orange-scented handkerchiefs, round brown eyes, a little ruby, a great many unwarranted giggles, and an externally well-formed chest; and the common sense and love of honor, which enabled Joachim to avoid those assaults and flee from them, touched Hans Castorp, kept him under some control and prevented him from “borrowing a pencil,” as it were, from a certain narrow-eyed person—which experience taught him he would have been only too ready to do without Joachim’s disciplining proximity.

Joachim never spoke of tittering Marusya, which therefore precluded Hans Castorp from mentioning Clavdia Chauchat. He restricted himself to harmless, furtive exchanges at meals with the teacher on his right, teasing the old maid about her weakness for their supple fellow patient until she would blush, and all the while trying to maintain his dignity by imitating old Grandfather Castorp’s chin- propping method. He also pressed her in order to learn new and interesting details about Madame Chauchat’s private life—her origins, her husband, her age, the exact nature of her illness. Did she have any children? he wanted to know. Oh, certainly not, no children. What would a woman like her do with children? Presumably she had been strictly forbidden to have any—and then, too, what sort of children would they have turned out to be? Hans Castorp had to concur. It was probably also too late now, he suggested with rugged objectivity. There were times, he remarked, when Madame Chauchat’s face, in profile at least, looked rather severe. Was it possible she was already past thirty? Fräulein Engelhart violently contested the very idea. Clavdia, thirty? At the worst, twenty-eight. And as for her profile, his tablemate forbade him ever to say such a thing again. Clavdia’s profile was one of softest, sweetest youth—though it was, of course, a most interesting profile as well, not that of some healthy little goose. And by way of punishment and without even pausing, Fräulein Engelhart added that she knew for a fact that Frau Chauchat often entertained a gentleman caller, a fellow countryman who lived in Platz. She received him in her room every afternoon.

The shot was well aimed. Despite everything he could do, Hans Castorp’s face looked strained, and even phrases like “you don’t say” and “well, I never,” with which he tried to parry her opening move, sounded strained. Incapable of simply shrugging off the existence of this fellow countryman as he pretended to do at first, he kept returning to the topic. With twitching lips he asked: A younger man? Young and attractive, from everything she had heard, the teacher replied, although she hadn’t actually seen him to judge for herself. Ill? At most, a very mild case. Well, he did hope, Hans Castorp said, that collars and cuffs were more in evidence with him than with her fellow countrymen at the Bad Russian table. And still intent on punishing him, Fräulein Engelhart claimed she was sure they were. Then he admitted that it was a matter that one should look into and earnestly commissioned her to find out what could be found out about the comings and goings of this fellow countryman. But several days later, instead of providing him with more information, she had other, completely different news for him.

She had learned that Clavdia Chauchat was having her portrait painted—and asked Hans Castorp whether he knew about that, too. If not, he could nevertheless be certain that she had it from the very best sources. For some time now, Clavdia had been sitting for her portrait, posing for someone right here in the house. And who was that? Why, the director. Hofrat Behrens, who saw her for that express purpose twice daily in his private residence.

This announcement affected Hans Castorp even more than her previous news. He now tried making several forced jokes about it. Well, of course, it was well known that the director did oils—what did the teacher want, it wasn’t forbidden, everyone was free to do so. And in the director’s own widower’s apartments, had she said? Well, he hoped that at least Fräulein von Mylendonk was present for the sittings.

“But she doesn’t have the time.”

“Surely Behrens doesn’t have more time than our head nurse,” Hans Castorp replied sternly.

But although that seemed to be his final remark at first, he was not at all prepared to let the subject drop and almost exhausted himself asking questions about every conceivable detail: about the picture itself—its size and whether it was just a head or a seated portrait—about the hours when the sittings were held. Fräulein Engelhart, however, could not satisfy him about these matters, either, and had to put him off with assurances that she would make further inquiries.

Immediately after hearing this news, Hans Castorp took his temperature—it was 99.9 degrees. He was far more worried and pained by the visits that Frau Chauchat paid than by those she received. Her private life—as a topic in and of itself and apart from what happened in it—had already begun to cause him pain and worry, and those same feelings could only intensify once rumors reached him of what was actually happening in her life. Granted, it was perfectly likely that the relationship between the Russian visitor and his countrywoman was quite sober and harmless; but for some time now, Hans Castorp had found himself regarding sobriety and harmlessness as twiddle-twaddle— just as he could not convince himself that oil painting was anything but an excuse for a relationship between an overenergetic, garrulous widower and a narrow-eyed, pussyfooting young woman. The taste the director displayed in his choice of models corresponded all too closely to his own for him to believe there was anything sober about it—and to reinforce his opinion, he needed only to picture the director’s purple cheeks and bloodshot pop-eyes.

An observation he made quite by chance on his own during this same period had a different effect on him, though it also served to confirm his own good taste. At the table set crosswise on the cousins’ left, the one near the side door, where Frau Salomon and the gluttonous student with glasses sat, there was another patient—from Mannheim, Hans Castorp had heard—a man about thirty years old, with thinning hair, bad teeth, and a timid way of speaking—the same fellow who occasionally played the piano at their evening social gatherings, usually the “Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He was said to be very religious, which, as might be expected, was not uncommon among the people up here, or so Hans Castorp had been told. It was said he attended services down in Platz every Sunday and read devotional books during rest cure—books with a chalice or palm fronds on the cover. And, as Hans Castorp happened to notice one day, this fellow’s eyes were staring in the same direction as his own; like his own, they were fixed fondly—and shyly and insistently, if not to say fawningly—on Madame Chauchat’s supple body. Once Hans Castorp had noticed this fact, he could not help confirming it again and again. He would spot him standing among the other guests in the game room of an evening, gazing gloomily and forlornly at the charming, though flawed woman who was sitting on the sofa in the small salon and chatting with frizzy-haired Tamara (that was the droll-looking girl’s name), Dr. Blumenkohl, the man with  the concave chest, and the hunch-shouldered youths from her table. He saw him turn away and, as misery played across the upper lip, slowly sneak an over-the-shoulder look out of the corner of one eye. He noticed how he blushed and did not look up, and then did look up when the glass door slammed and Frau Chauchat glided to her seat. And several times he watched as the poor fellow took up a position between the door and the Good Russian table so that Frau Chauchat would have to pass by him at the end of the meal. She paid him no regard, but he devoured her at close range with eyes full of profound sadness.

This discovery also caused young Hans Castorp no little worry, although the Mannheimer’s sad, greedy looks did not trouble him as much as the private relations between Clavdia Chauchat and Director Behrens—a man very much his superior in age, character, and position. Clavdia paid no attention to the man from Mannheim—if she had, it certainly would not have escaped Hans Castorp’s sharpened instincts. And so it was not the nasty thorn of jealousy that pricked his soul in this case. But he did explore all the feelings that intoxication and passion can explore once they catch a glimpse of themselves in the world outside, feelings that are the strangest mixture of disgust and shared emotions. If we are to get on with our story, however, it will be impossible to fathom and analyze all of that. In any case, the added emotional experience of observing the patient from Mannheim was almost too much for a man like poor Hans Castorp to have to deal with all at once. And so eight days passed until Hans Castorp’s X-ray examination. He had not known how many days would have to pass, but one morning at early breakfast he received his orders from the head nurse, who had another sty now—it could not be the same one; apparently she was naturally susceptible to this harmless but disfiguring ailment. He had to report to the laboratory that afternoon—which made it eight days. Hans Castorp was to appear a half hour before tea, along with his cousin, since Joachim was also supposed to have a picture taken of his interior at the same time— his previous one being too old to be considered valid.

And so they both had cut short the main afternoon rest cure by a half hour, had “descended” the stairs to the pseudo-basement at three-thirty on the dot, and now sat in the little waiting room that separated the consulting and X-ray rooms. Joachim, for whom this was nothing new, was quite calm; Hans Castorp was a little feverish with expectation, since until now no one had ever taken a look into his organic interior. They were not alone. Several guests were already seated in the room, tattered illustrated magazines spread over their knees. They all waited together: a young, big bruiser of a Swede, who sat at Settembrini’s table in the dining hall and who people said had been so ill when he arrived the previous April that he had been admitted only with great reluctance, but who now had put on eighty pounds and was about to be released as fully cured; a woman from the Bad Russian table, a mother, a wretched soul; and her even more wretched, long-nosed, ugly son named Sasha. The three had been waiting before the cousins’ arrival and presumably had precedence on the appointment list. Evidently they were well behind schedule in the adjoining X-ray room, and a long wait appeared likely.

They were very busy in there—you could hear the director’s voice giving orders. It was a little past three-thirty when a technical assistant who worked down here opened the door to admit the lucky Swedish bruiser—evidently his predecessor had been let out by way of another exit. Things proceeded more quickly now. Ten minutes later they heard footsteps in the corridor—the stalwart stride of the fully cured Scandinavian, a walking advertisement for the climate and the sanatorium. The Russian mother and Sasha were admitted. As he had noticed previously when the Swede had gone in, Hans Castorp saw that semidarkness, a kind of artificial twilight, reigned in the X-ray room—just as it did in Dr. Krokowski’s analytical chamber. The windows had been blacked out, daylight banned, and only a couple of electric bulbs were turned on. Hans Castorp watched as Sasha and his mother were ushered in, and at the same moment the door to the corridor opened and the next scheduled patient arrived—a little early, since the lab was running late. It was Madame Chauchat.

It was Clavdia Chauchat who had appeared suddenly in the little room. Hans Castorp’s eyes stared wide when he realized who it was, and he could feel the blood drain from his face and his jaw go slack—his mouth was close to dropping open. Clavdia’s entrance had been so random, so totally unexpected—one moment she was not there, and the next she was sharing the little waiting room with the two cousins. Joachim gave Hans Castorp a quick glance and then not only lowered his eyes, but also picked up a magazine he had only just put back on the table, and hid his face behind it. Hans Castorp could not make up his mind to do the same. After first turning pale, his face was now very red, and his heart was pounding.

Frau Chauchat took a seat on a little round chair with rather rudimentary, stubby arms that stood beside the door to the laboratory; she leaned back, crossed one leg lightly over the other, and stared into space, although the nervous distraction of being watched gave a certain sly squint to her Pribislav eyes. She was wearing a white sweater and a blue skirt and held a book, a library book it appeared, on her lap; she lightly tapped out a rhythm with the sole of the shoe resting on the floor. Barely ninety seconds had passed before she shifted her position, looked around, stood up with a face that seemed to say she did not know what she was doing here or whom to ask—and began to speak. She asked something, directing her question to Joachim, even though he was still engrossed in his magazine and Hans Castorp was sitting there doing nothing at all. She formed the words with her mouth and there was a voice, too, coming from that white throat. It was the voice Hans Castorp already knew—not too low, pleasantly husky, and with a slight edge to it—knew both from a great distance and, once, from up close, when it had spoken words meant for him: “Glad to. But be sure to give it back to me after class.” Those words had been spoken in fluent German, however, and in a more definite tone; these now were halting and in broken German, a language to which she had no natural right, but was merely borrowing—just as Hans Castorp had heard her do a few times before, listening each time with a sense of superiority that was simultaneously cradled in humble delight. One hand in the jacket of her wool sweater, the other at the back of her head, Frau Chauchat asked, “Please, for what time is your appointment?”

And Joachim, glancing quickly again at his cousin and clicking his heels in his seated position, replied, “Three-thirty.”

She now continued, “Mine is for three forty-five. What time is it? It is almost four. Someone just went in, am I correct?”

“Yes, two people,” Joachim responded. “They were ahead of us. The lab is behind schedule. It looks as if everything has been moved back a half hour.”

“That is unpleasant,” she said and nervously patted her hair.

“Rather!” Joachim replied. “We’ve been waiting almost a half hour now.”

The two of them conversed, and Hans Castorp listened as if in a dream. For Joachim to speak with Frau Chauchat was almost the same as if he himself were speaking with her—though, of course, totally different, too. Hans Castorp had been offended by Joachim’s “Rather!”—it had sounded so impertinent, or at least oddly indifferent under the circumstances. But the main thing was that Joachim spoke, that he was able to speak to her at all and perhaps was even showing off a little for his cousin with his impertinent “Rather!”—just as Hans Castorp had himself showed off for Joachim and Settembrini when he had been asked how long he intended to stay and had said, “Three weeks.” She had turned to address Joachim, despite the magazine he was holding up in front of his face— because he was a long-term resident, of course, and so she had known him longer, at least by sight. Although there was that other reason, too: a polite social conversation, an articulated exchange was quite appropriate for them, because no savage, profound, terrible secret existed between them. Had someone brown-eyed, with a ruby ring and orange-blossom perfume, been waiting here with them, it would have been up to him, Hans Castorp, to speak up and say, “Rather!”—to stand across from her so sovereign and correct. Although he would have said, “Certainly, mademoiselle, rather unpleasant,” and perhaps have pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket with a little flourish and blown his nose. “Please, be patient. We’re in the same situation ourselves.” And Joachim would have been amazed at his easygoing manner—presumably, however, without seriously wanting to have changed places with him. No, given the situation, Hans Castorp was not jealous of Joachim, either, even though it was he who had spoken with Frau Chauchat. It did not bother him that she had turned to Joachim; she had taken the circumstances into account in doing so, thereby making it clear that she was aware of those circumstances. His heart was pounding.

After having been treated by Joachim so coolly—indeed, Hans Castorp sensed something of a gentle hostility in good Joachim’s attitude toward their fellow patient, a hostility that made him smile despite his own inner turmoil—“Clavdia” tried pacing the room; but there was not enough space for that, and so she, too, picked up a magazine from the table and returned to her round chair with its rudimentary arms. Hans Castorp sat there and stared at her, so long that he had to assume his grandfather’s chin-propping pose—which made him look absurdly like the old man. Frau Chauchat had again lightly crossed one leg over the other, and now the slender outline of the whole leg was visible under the blue fabric of her skirt. She was of only average height, which Hans Castorp found very agreeable, just the right size. But she had relatively long legs and was not at all broad in the hips. She was not leaning back now, but was bent forward, her forearms folded and resting on the thigh of the crossed leg, her back rounded and her shoulders hunched so that the bones of her neck stuck out—you could almost see her spinal column under the close-fitting sweater. Her breasts, which were not voluptuous and highset like Marusya’s, but the small breasts of a young girl, were pressed together from both sides. Suddenly Hans Castorp recalled that she was also here waiting to be X-rayed. The director was painting her, interpreting her external appearance with color and oils on canvas. But there in the twilight, he would turn rays on her that would expose the inside of her body. And at the thought, Hans Castorp turned his head to one side, and his face darkened with the shadow of respectability and assumed a look of discretion and propriety that seemed appropriate to such a vision.

The three of them did not have to wait long together. The staff inside was apparently in a hurry to catch up and had made short work of Sasha and his mother. Once again the technician in his white smock opened the door. Joachim stood up and tossed his magazine on the table; Hans Castorp followed him, although not without some apprehension, toward the door. Chivalrous scruples stirred within him, tempting him to address Frau Chauchat politely after all and offer to let her go first—perhaps even in French, if he could manage it. And he hastily searched his memory for vocabulary and syntax. But he did not know if such courtesies were usual here, if the schedule of appointments was not considered far more important than acts of chivalry. But Joachim would surely know, and it did not appear as if he were about to defer to the lady present, despite the troubled, earnest look Hans Castorp threw him. And so he followed his cousin past Frau Chauchat, who glanced up fleetingly from her hunched-over position, and they moved through the door to the laboratory.

He was so numbed by what he had just left behind, by the adventures of the last ten minutes, that he was unable immediately to realign his inner world as he crossed the threshold into the X-ray room. He saw nothing, or only general outlines, in the artificial twilight. He could still hear Frau Chauchat’s pleasant, opaque voice saying, “What time is it. . . . Someone just went in  That is unpleasant,” and the timbre of her voice caused a shudder of sweet excitement to pass up and down his back. He could see her knee outlined under her skirt, the back of her neck bent forward under the short, reddish-blond hairs that hung loose from the tucked-up braid, saw the neck bones sticking out—and the shudder passed over him once again.

He now saw Director Behrens standing in front of a cupboard or built-in cabinet, his back to them as they entered; he was inspecting a blackish plate that he held out at arm’s length against the dull light of the ceiling lamp. They passed him as they moved deeper into the room, and were themselves passed by the assistant, who was busy getting things ready for the procedure. There was a peculiar odor here—a kind of stale ozone smell in the air. The built-in unit jutted out between the two black- curtained windows, dividing the laboratory into unequal parts. You could make out clinical apparatus of various sorts: glassware, switch boxes, and tall vertical gauges, but also a camera-like box on a rolling stand and rows of glass photographic plates set along the walls. You couldn’t tell if you were in a photographer’s studio, a darkroom, or an inventor’s workshop and sorcerer’s laboratory.

Joachim began without further ado to strip to the waist. The assistant, a younger, squat, red-cheeked local in a white smock, instructed Hans Castorp to do the same—it would go fast, it would soon be his turn. While Hans Castorp was removing his vest, Behrens stepped out of the smaller recess and joined them in the larger part of the room.

“Hello there,” he said. “Why, it’s our Dioscuri boys—Castor and Pollux. Please, keep all screams of pain to a minimum. Be careful now, we’re going to look right through you both. I believe you’re afraid to reveal your insides to us, aren’t you, Castorp? You may set your mind at ease—our procedures are quite aesthetic. Look here—have you seen my private gallery?” And grabbing Hans Castorp by the arm, he pulled him over to the rows of dark glass plates; he flipped a switch. Illuminated now, the plates revealed pictures. Hans Castorp saw body parts: hands, feet, knees, thighs, calves, arms, pelvises. But the rounded living contours of these fragments of the human body were phantomlike and hazy; like a fog or a pale, uncertain aura, they enclosed a clear, detailed, and carefully defined core: the skeleton.

“Very interesting,” Hans Castorp said.

“Very interesting, indeed,” the director replied. “Useful visual aids for the instruction of the young. Illuminated anatomy, the triumph of the age. This is a female arm, you can tell by its dainty form, you see—the kind they hug you with on intimate occasions.” And he laughed, which set his upper lip and short-cropped moustache a little more askew. The pictures went dark. Hans Castorp turned away to watch the preparations for taking Joachim’s interior portrait.

These were under way in front of the built-in unit where the director had been standing as they came in. Joachim had sat down on a kind of cobbler’s bench, facing a panel, against which he now pressed his chest, hugging it at the same time with both arms. The assistant helped Joachim improve his position, pushing his shoulders farther forward and massaging his back in a series of kneading motions. He now moved behind the camera, and like a photographer, legs spread wide, bent forward to check the angle; he expressed his satisfaction, and stepping to one side he told Joachim to take a deep breath and hold it until everything was over. Joachim’s back expanded and stayed that way. At the same moment, the assistant flipped the appropriate switches. For two seconds the dreadful forces necessary to penetrate matter were let loose—a current of thousands of volts, one hundred thousand, Hans Castorp thought he had heard somewhere. Barely tamed for their purpose, these forces sought other outlets for their energy. Discharges exploded like gunshots. The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks crackled along the wall. Somewhere a red light blinked, like a silent, threatening eye, and a vial behind Joachim’s back was filled with a green glow. Then everything calmed down; the spectacle of lights vanished, and Joachim expelled his breath with a sigh. It was over.

“Next culprit,” Behrens said, and poked Hans Castorp with his elbow. “Now don’t pretend you’re too tired. You’ll get a free copy, Castorp. Just think, you’ll be able to project the secrets of your bosom on the wall for your children and grandchildren.”

Joachim had stepped away; the technician was changing plates. Director Behrens personally showed the novice how he was to sit and hold his body. “Hug it,” he said. “Hug the panel. Imagine it’s something else if you like. And press your chest up tight, as if it meant sweet bliss. That’s it. Breathe deep! Hold it!” he commanded. “Now smile, please!”

Hans Castorp waited, his eyes blinking, his lungs full of air. The thunderstorm burst behind him, hissing, crackling, popping—and fell quiet again. The lens had peered inside him.

He dismounted, confused and dazed by what had happened to him, although he had not felt anything at all during the penetration.

“Well done,” the director said. “Now, let’s have a look for ourselves.” Joachim, being an old hand at this, had moved back toward the exit door to take up a position at an adjustable frame. Behind him stood the broad structure of the apparatus, a glass retort extruding tubes and half filled with liquid visible on its top rear shelf. In front of him, at chest-level, a framed screen dangled from a series of pulleys. To his left, a red-globed lamp sat amid a panel with a switch box. Seating himself astride a footstool placed in front of the dangling screen, the director turned on the lamp. The ceiling lamp went out, and only ruby light illuminated the scene. With one quick motion, the master extinguished that as well, and the laboratory was wrapped in darkest night.

“Our eyes have to adapt first,” the director’s voice said in the darkness. “We have to wait for our pupils to get nice and big, like a cat’s, in order for us to see what we want to see. I’m sure you can understand that we can’t see properly, just like that, with our normal daylight eyes. For our purposes here, we first have to ban any rousing daylight scenes from our minds.”

“Oh, but of course,” Hans Castorp said, standing now behind the director. He had closed his eyes, because in the pitch-black night it made no difference if they were open or shut. “We first have to let darkness wash over our eyes to see anything—that’s obvious. I even find it quite appropriate for us to gather together beforehand, in silent prayer, as it were. I’m standing here with my eyes closed and feeling pleasantly drowsy. But what’s that odor?”

“Oxygen,” the director said. “That’s oxygen that you scent in the air. A gaseous product of our little parlor thunderstorm, if you will. Eyes open!” he said. “Let the exorcism begin.” Hans Castorp obeyed at once.

They heard a switch thrown. A motor started, its angry hum mounting higher and higher, but suddenly reduced again to a drone at the flip of another switch. The floor vibrated steadily. The little red light, a long vertical slit, stared at them, silent and threatening. A spark crackled somewhere. The milky glow of a slowly brightening window, the pale rectangle of the fluorescent screen, emerged out of the darkness. And before it sat Director Behrens astride his footstool—thighs spread wide, fists propped against them, snub nose close to the screen that gave him a view into the organic interior of another human being.

“Can you see it, my lad?” he asked.

Hans Castorp bent down over his shoulder, but first looked up once more into the darkness, to where he assumed Joachim’s eyes were staring out, gentle and sad, just as on that day at his checkup. “Do you mind?” he asked.

“Oh, please, go ahead and look,” came Joachim’s generous reply out of the blackness. And with the floor vibrating under him and great forces crackling and blustering at play around him, Hans Castorp peered through the pale window, peered into the void of Joachim Ziemssen’s skeleton. His breastbone merged with his spine into one dark, gristly column. The ribs at the front of his rib cage overlapped those at the back, which looked paler. The collarbone curved upward on both sides, and the bones of the shoulder, the joint where Joachim’s arm began, looked lean and angular against the soft halo of flesh. The chest cavity was bright, but one could make out a web of darker spots and blackish ruffles.

“Sharp picture,” the director said. “That’s the respectable leanness of military youth. I’ve had potbellies here—impenetrable, could recognize next to nothing. They still haven’t invented rays that can get through layers of fat like those. But this is clean work. Do you see the diaphragm?” he asked, and pointed a finger at a dark curve rising and sinking inside the window. “You see this knob here,

this little raised spot? That’s from when he had pleurisy at the age of fifteen. Take a deep breath!” he

commanded. “Deeper! I said deep!” And Joachim’s diaphragm quivered and rose as high as it would go. The upper parts of the lungs were brighter now, but the director was still not content. “Unsatisfactory,” he said. “Do you see the hilum there? Do you see those adhesions? Do you see these cavities here? That’s where the toxins come from that make him so tipsy.”

But Hans Castorp was preoccupied with something that looked like a sack, or maybe a deformed animal, visible behind the middle column, or mostly to the right of it from the viewer’s perspective. It expanded and contracted regularly, like some sort of flapping jellyfish.

“Do you see his heart?” the director asked, lifting his giant right hand from his thigh again and pointing an index finger at the pulsating pendant.

Good God, it was his heart, Joachim’s honor-loving heart, that Hans Castorp saw. “I can see your heart,” he said in a choked voice.

“Please, go ahead and look,” Joachim replied again, and he was probably even smiling meekly up there in the dark. But the director ordered him to be silent and not to exchange sentimentalities. He studied the spots and lines, the blackish ruffles in the chest cavity, while his fellow viewer gazed tirelessly at Joachim’s sepulchral form, his dry bones, his bare scaffolding, his gaunt memento mori. He was filled with both reverence and terror.

“Yes, yes, I see it,” he said several times. “My God, I see it!” He had once heard about a woman, a long-dead forebear on the Tienappel side of the family, who was said to have been endowed or cursed with a troublesome talent that she had borne in all humility and that had caused her to see anyone who would soon die as just a skeleton. Which was exactly how good Joachim now looked to Hans Castorp, although with the aid and under the auspices of physical optics—so that it did not really mean anything and was perfectly normal, particularly since he had expressly obtained Joachim’s permission. And yet he felt some sympathy for the melancholy fate of his clairvoyant great-aunt. He was deeply moved by what he saw, or more accurately, by being able to see it, but he was also stung by secret doubts whether it might not be somehow abnormal after all, doubts about whether it was permissible to stare like this amid the quivering, crackling darkness. A deep desire to enjoy the indiscretion blended with feelings of compassion and piety.

A few minutes later he himself was standing in the stocks while the little thunderstorm raged, and Joachim, his body closed from view again, began to dress. Once again the director peered through the milky pane, but this time into Hans Castorp’s interior, and from his mutterings—ragtag curses and phrases—it appeared his findings corresponded to his expectations. In response to much begging, he was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope.

And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever

intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness—and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear—penetrating, clairvoyant eyes—he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music—a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.

The director said, “Spooky, isn’t it? Yes, there’s no mistaking that whiff of spookiness.”

And then he put a stop to those great forces. The floor grew quiet, the spectacle of lights faded, the magic window wrapped itself in darkness. The ceiling lamp went on. And while Hans Castorp threw on his clothes, Behrens gave the young people some information about what he had observed, though with proper regard to their abilities as laymen to comprehend it. As for Hans Castorp’s case, the optical and acoustical results corresponded as precisely as one could ever demand of science. Both the old spots and the fresh one had been visible, and there were “strands” that ran from the bronchi well down into the lung itself—“strands with nodules.” Hans Castorp would be able to verify that for himself on the X-ray plate, a copy of which he would soon be given as promised. And so: rest, patience, manly discipline, food, thermometers, sleep—just grin and bear it. He turned his back to them. They departed. First Joachim, then Hans Castorp, who glanced back over his shoulder as they left. Ushered in by the technician, Frau Chauchat was now entering the laboratory.

FREEDOM

How did young Hans Castorp actually feel about all this? For instance, did the seven weeks he had demonstrably, indubitably spent with these people here feel like a mere seven days? Or did it seem to him just the opposite, that he had lived here now much, much longer than he really had? He asked himself those same questions, both privately of himself and formally of Joachim—but could not come to any decision. Probably both were true: looking back, the time he had spent here thus far seemed unnaturally brief and at the same time unnaturally long. It seemed everything to him, in fact, except how it really was—always presuming, of course, that time is part of nature and that it is therefore permissible to see it in conjunction with reality.

In any case, October was close at hand, might arrive any day now. Hans Castorp had no trouble figuring out that much; and besides, he heard mention made of the fact in the conversations of his fellow patients. “Do you realize that it’s only five days till the first of the month?” he heard Hermine Kleefeld say to two young men of her acquaintance, Rasmussen the student and the thick-lipped lad, whose name was Gänser. Dinner was just over, its odors still heavy in the air, and people were lingering among the tables, chatting and putting off their rest cure. “The first of October—I noticed it on the calendar in the management office. This will be the second one I’ve spent at this cozy resort. Well fine, summer, or what there was of it, is over—we’ve been cheated out of it, just as we’re cheated out of everything else in life.” And she sighed with her half a lung, shaking her head and directing her doltish, sleepy eyes at the ceiling. “Cheer up, Rasmussen,” she then said, slapping her comrade on one drooping shoulder, “and tell us some jokes!”

“I know only a few,” Rasmussen replied, his hands dangling chest-high like fins. “But I don’t tell them very well—I’m always too tired.”

“Not even a dog,” Gänser said between his teeth, “would want to go on living like this much longer.” And they laughed and shrugged.

Settembrini had been standing close by, too, a toothpick between his lips, and as they were leaving he said to Hans Castorp, “Don’t believe them, my good engineer, never believe them when they squawk—and there’s not a one who doesn’t, although they all feel very much at home here. Lead a free and easy life—and then demand you pity them. Think they have a right to bitterness, irony, cynicism. ‘At this cozy resort!’ Well, isn’t it cozy? I would certainly say it is, and in the most dubious sense of the word. ‘Cheated,’ the little minx says—‘cheated out of everything in life at this cozy resort.’ But send her back to the plains and her life down there would leave you in no doubt that her sole object was to get back up here as soon as possible. Ah yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer. Beware of it in general as an intellectual stance. When it is not employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice. And since the atmosphere in which we live provides very favorable conditions for this swamp plant to flourish, I may hope—or perhaps I must fear—that you do understand me.”

The Italian’s remarks were truly the sort that, if Hans Castorp had heard them down in the plains seven weeks before, would have been mere noise; but his stay up here had made his mind receptive for them—receptive in terms of intellectual understanding, though not necessarily in terms of sympathy, which perhaps is the more telling factor. For although in the depths of his soul he was glad that, despite everything that had happened, Settembrini continued to speak with him as he did, continued to teach, to warn, to try to influence him, his own perceptive powers had advanced to the point where he would criticize the remarks and withhold his agreement, at least to some extent. “How about that,” he thought, “he talks about irony in almost the same way he talks about music. The only thing missing is for him to call it ‘politically suspect’ the moment it stops being an ‘honest and classical means of instruction.’ But if ‘no healthy mind can for a moment doubt its purpose,’ what sort of irony is that for heaven’s sake, if I may ask?—assuming I am to have a say in any of this. That would just be dry pedantry!” (Such is the ingratitude of immature youth. It accepts the gift of learning, only to find fault with it.)

Nevertheless, he would have found it all too risky to put his insubordination into words. He limited himself to objecting to Herr Settembrini’s critique of Hermine Kleefeld, which seemed unjust to him—or which, for other reasons, he wanted to see as unjust.

“But the girl is ill,” he said. “She is truly, positively very ill and has every reason to be in despair. What do you want from her, really?”

“Illness and despair,” Settembrini said, “are often only forms of depravity.”

“And what about Leopardi,” Hans Castorp thought, “who explicitly despaired of science and progress? Or what about our good schoolmaster himself? He’s ill and keeps coming back up here. Carducci wouldn’t have been all that happy with him, either.” But aloud he said, “Fine fellow you are. The young lady may breathe her last any day now, and you call her depraved. You’ll have to explain that for me. If you had said that illness is sometimes a result of depravity, that would at least have been plausible, or—”

“Very plausible,” Settembrini broke in. “My word! So you would have agreed had I left it at that?” “Or if you had said that illness sometimes is made to serve as a pretext for depravity—I would have accepted that, too.”

“Grazie tanto!”

“But illness as a form of depravity? Which means, not that it arises from depravity, but is itself depravity? Now that’s a paradox.”

“Oh, I beg you, my good engineer, do not lay that at my door. I despise paradoxes. I loathe them. You may assume that everything I said about irony also applies to paradoxes, and more besides. Paradox is the poison flower of quietism, the iridescent sheen of a putrefied mind, the greatest depravity of all. By the way, I also notice you are coming to the defense of illness yet again.”

“No, what you say interests me. It reminds me of some of the things that Dr. Krokowski lectures about on Mondays. He, too, declares illness to be a secondary phenomenon.”

“No pure idealist, he.”

“What do you have against him?” “Precisely that.”

“Don’t you approve of analysis?”

“Not every day. It’s very bad and very good, by turns, my good engineer.” “How am I supposed to take that?”

“Analysis is good as a tool of enlightenment and civilization—to the extent that it shakes stupid preconceptions, quashes natural biases, and undermines authority. Good, in other words, to the extent that it liberates, refines, and humanizes—it makes slaves ripe for freedom. It is bad, very bad, to the extent that it prevents action, damages life at its roots, and is incapable of shaping it. Analysis can be very unappetizing, as unappetizing as death, to which it may very well be linked—a relative of the grave and its foul anatomy.”

“Well roared, lion,” Hans Castorp could not help thinking, as he usually did when Herr Settembrini uttered something pedagogic. But now he said, “We recently participated in some illuminated anatomy downstairs on the ground floor. That’s what Behrens called it when he X-rayed us.”

“Ah, so you’ve now scaled to that level, too. Well?”

“I saw the skeleton of my own hand,” Hans Castorp said, trying to recall the emotions that had stirred in him at the sight of it. “Have you ever had him show you yours?”

“No, I’m not the least bit interested in my own skeleton. And what was the medical finding?” “He saw strands, strands with nodules.”

“The imp of Satan!”

“You called Director Behrens that once before. What do you mean by it?” “You may be sure that I choose the term deliberately.”

“No, you’re not being fair, Herr Settembrini. I’ll admit that the man has his weaknesses. After being here awhile, even I don’t find the way he talks that congenial; there’s something so fierce about it, especially when you think of the grief that he felt at losing his wife up here. But what an admirable, respectable man he is all in all, a benefactor to suffering humankind. I recently met him as he was coming from an operation, a rib resection, a matter of life or death. And to see him like that, coming from such a difficult, practical task, made a big impression on me. He was still flushed and had just lit a cigar to reward himself. I was envious of him.”

“How very generous of you. And your sentence is?” “He did not mention any definite length of time.”

“Not bad, either. So let us go and lie down, my good engineer. Assume our positions.”

They said good-bye outside room 34.

“Well, go on up to your roof, Herr Settembrini. It must be more amusing to lie there in the company of others than alone. Do you find it entertaining? Are they interesting people, the ones you take your rest cure with?”

“Oh, nothing but Parthians and Scythians.” “You mean Russians?”

“Russians, male and female,” Herr Settembrini said, and a tightening was visible at the corner of his mouth. “Adieu, my good engineer.”

No doubt about it, he had meant something by that. Hans Castorp entered his room in confusion. Did Settembrini know what was going on with him? Presumably he had been spying on him for educational reasons, taking careful note of where his eyes were directed. Hans Castorp was angry at the Italian, and at himself, too, because it was his own lack of self-control that had provoked the gibe. He gathered up some writing materials to take out with him for his rest cure—because there could be no more delays, a letter home, his third, would have to be written—and went on being angry, muttering things about this windbag and quibbler, who was sticking his nose into things that were none of his business, but who hummed little songs at girls in public. By now, he no longer felt like taking up the task of writing. This organ-grinder and his insinuations had definitely spoiled the mood for it. But one way or the other, he had to have winter clothes, money, underwear, shoes— everything, in fact, that he would have brought with him had he known he would be here not for just three weeks at the height of summer, but . . . but for a still-undetermined period, which, no matter what, was sure to last into some of winter, indeed, given assumptions and circumstances up here, would very probably include the whole season. And that, or at least the possibility of it, would have to be shared with his family. It would require real work this time—making a clean breast of things and no longer pretending otherwise to himself or them.

And it was in this spirit that he wrote, making use of a technique he had frequently seen Joachim employ—sitting in his lounge chair, with his fountain pen in hand and a writing case against his raised knees. He wrote on sanatorium stationery, taken from an ample supply in his table drawer, to James Tienappel, the uncle to whom he felt closest of the three, and asked him to inform the consul. He spoke of an unforeseen vexation, of misgivings that had proved justified, of the necessity, on good medical advice, of spending a part of the winter, and perhaps all of it, up here, since cases such as his own were often more stubborn than those that began more spectacularly and since the important thing, really, was to intervene decisively and so arrest his case’s progress for good and all. Seen from this angle, he suggested, it was a stroke of fortune, a happy turn of fate, that he had

chanced to come up here and had occasion to be examined; because otherwise he would probably

have remained unaware of his condition much longer and perhaps have learned of it in a much more distressing fashion. As for the estimated time of his cure, one should not be surprised if he might have to make a winter of it and would be able to return to the plains hardly any earlier than Joachim. Notions of time here were different from those applicable to trips to the shore or stays at a spa. The month was, so to speak, the shortest unit of time, and a single month played no role at all.

It was cool; he was wearing his overcoat, had wrapped himself in a blanket, and his hands turned red as he wrote. At times he would look up from his paper, covered with reasonable and convincing phrases, and gaze out into the familiar landscape, which he hardly noticed anymore: the long valley, its exit blocked today by pale, glassy peaks; the bright pattern of settlement along its floor, glistening now and then in the sun; and the slopes, covered partly by rugged forests, partly by meadows, from which the sound of cowbells drifted. Writing came more easily as he went along, and he no longer understood how he could possibly have been afraid of this letter. As he wrote, he came to see that nothing could be more plausible than his explanations and that of course his family at home would be in perfect agreement with them. A young man of his social class and circumstances took care of himself when that proved advisable, he made use of facilities set aside expressly for him and people like him. That was only proper. Had he returned home, they would have sent him right back up here upon hearing his report. He now asked them to send the things he needed. And in conclusion he asked that necessary funds be sent regularly. Eight hundred marks a month would take care of everything.

He signed it. That was done. This third letter home was comprehensive, it did the job—not in terms of conceptions of time valid down below, but in terms of those prevailing up here. It established Hans Castorp’s freedom. This was the word he used, not explicitly, not by forming the syllables in his mind, but as something he felt in its most comprehensive sense, in the sense in which he had learned to understand it during his stay here—though that was a sense that had little to do with the meaning Settembrini attached to the word. And as he heaved a sigh, his chest quivered as the wave of terror and excitement that he knew quite well by now swept over him.

Blood had rushed to his head as he wrote, his cheeks burned. He picked up Mercury from the nightstand and took his temperature, as if he could not let this opportunity pass. Mercury climbed to one hundred degrees.

“You see?” Hans Castorp thought. And he added a postscript: “This letter has been quite an effort. My temperature stands at a hundred degrees. I see that for the time being I shall have to keep very quiet. You will have to excuse me if I do not write often.” Then he lay back and lifted a hand to the

sky, palm out, just as he had held it behind the fluorescent screen. But daylight had no effect on its

living form, the stuff of it grew even darker and more opaque against the brightness and just its outer edge shone reddish. It was the living hand he was accustomed to seeing, washing, using—not the alien scaffold he had seen in the screen. The analytical pit he had seen open up before him that day had closed again.

MERCURY’S MOODS

October began as new months are wont to do—their beginnings are perfectly modest and hushed, with no outward signs, no birthmarks. Indeed, they steal in silently and quite unnoticed, unless you are paying very strict attention. Real time knows no turning points, there are no thunderstorms or trumpet fanfares at the start of a new month or year, and even when a new century commences only we human beings fire cannon and ring bells.

In Hans Castorp’s case the first day of October was exactly like the last day of September. The one was just as cold and inclement as the other, and those that followed were the same. He needed his winter overcoat and both camel-hair blankets for his rest cure, and not just of an evening, but during the day, too. If he tried to hold a book, his fingers turned clammy and stiff, even though his cheeks were flushed with dry heat. And Joachim was very tempted to put his fur-lined sleeping bag to use, but then thought better of it, not wanting to pamper himself too soon.

But several days later, somewhere between the beginning and the middle of the month, things turned around again, and a belated summer burst upon them with absolutely astonishing splendor. Not without good reason, then, had Hans Castorp heard people praise October in these regions. For a good two and a half weeks a splendid sky reigned above mountains and valley, each new day outdoing the last for sheer blue purity; and the sun burned with such intensity that everyone found good reason to dig out his or her lightest summer clothes, the cast-aside muslin dresses and linen trousers; and even the large white canvas sunshade, which had no handle but was ingeniously fixed with a peg and several holes to the arm of the lounge chair, offered only inadequate protection from the midday glare.

“I’m glad I’m still here to enjoy this,” Hans Castorp said to his cousin. “It’s been so wretched at times—and now it seems as if we already had winter behind us and the nice weather lay ahead.” And he was right. There were few signs to indicate the true state of affairs, and even those were inconspicuous. Some maples that had been planted down in Platz, but were barely surviving, had long since despondently shed their leaves; otherwise there were no hardwoods here to give the landscape the characteristic look of the season—only the hybrid Alpine alders, which drop their soft needles like leaves, were bare and autumnal. The rest of the trees adorning the region, whether tall or stunted, were evergreens steeled against winter, the boundaries of which were so vague that it could scatter snowstorms across the whole year; and only several subtle shades of rusty red that lay over the forest told of a dying year, despite the blazing sun. To be sure, if you looked more closely, there were wildflowers that gently made the same point. Gone now were the purple orchis and bushy columbine, even the wild pink, all of which had adorned the slopes at the visitor’s arrival. Only the gentian and stubby meadow crocus were still in bloom, and they attested to a freshness hidden within the superficially heated air, a chill that could suddenly go straight to the bone as you lay there singed by the sun, like an icy shiver in the midst of fever.

Inwardly, then, Hans Castorp ignored the structure by which those who husband time measure its passing and divide it into units, counting and naming each. He had paid no attention to the silent onset of the tenth month; he felt only what his senses felt—blazing heat with icy frost hidden within and beneath it, a sensation that was new to him in this intensity and that suggested a culinary comparison: it reminded him, he remarked to Joachim, of an omelette en surprise, where ice cream lay wrapped in hot meringue. He often made such comments, letting them fall quickly and offhandedly, though with emotion in his voice, like a man who is chilled and feverish at the same time. To be sure, in between such moments, he could be silent, too, if not to say turned in upon himself; for although his attention was directed outward, it was focused on just one point. All the rest, whether people or objects, lay in a blur of fog—a fog that was engendered in Hans Castorp’s own brain and that Director Behrens and Dr. Krokowski would doubtless have declared to be the product of soluble toxins. He even told himself this was the case—not that the insight aroused in him the capacity or even the slightest wish to be rid of his intoxication.

For it is an intoxication that cares only for itself—nothing could be less desirable or more abhorrent than becoming sober again. It holds its own against all impressions that might suppress it, does not tolerate them out of self-preservation. Hans Castorp knew that Frau Chauchat’s profile did not flatter her, but made her look rather severe and not all that young—he had even mentioned it himself on occasion. And the result? He avoided looking at her in profile, literally closed his eyes if by chance, whether at a distance or up close, this was the view offered him—it pained him. And why? His reason should have jumped at the chance to assert itself. But we are asking too much of him. At second breakfast on each of these sparkling mornings, he would turn pale at the thrill of seeing Clavdia appear in the lace peignoir that she wore on warm days and that only added to her special fascination—late as always, slamming the door, smiling, both arms lifted slightly at different angles, standing there at attention to present herself to the dining hall. But he was thrilled not so much because she looked so charming, but because her looking that way only enhanced the sweet fog in his head, increased the intoxication that desired itself, that wanted only nourishment and self-justification.

An observer with a mind like Lodovico Settembrini’s would surely have seen such a lack of good intentions as depravity, as “a form of depravity.” Hans Castorp occasionally thought about the literary views that the man had offered on “illness and despair”—which he had found incomprehensible, or so at least he had pretended. He gazed at Clavdia Chauchat, at the limpness of her back and the way she thrust her head forward; he watched her arrive for meals, always very late, without reason or apology, but simply because she lacked the discipline and energy of good manners; watched how, because of that basic flaw, whether coming or going, she let every door slam behind her, rolled her bread into little pills, and occasionally gnawed at her cuticles. And the unspoken suspicion rose up in him that if she was ill—which she surely was, almost hopelessly ill, since she had been forced to come up here so often and for such long periods—her illness was, if not entirely, then at least in large part, of a moral nature, and was therefore, just as Settembrini had said, not the cause or result of her “carelessness” but in fact identical with it. He also recalled the dismissive gesture with which the humanist had spoken of the “Parthians and Scythians” with whom he had to share his rest cure, a gesture of natural, immediate disdain and disapproval that needed no explanation and that Hans Castorp had understood quite well at one time—back when he, a man who sat up very straight at the dinner table, had detested slamming doors from the bottom of his heart, had never felt tempted to chew his fingernails (if for no other reason than because he had his Maria Mancinis), had been deeply offended by Frau Chauchat’s lack of manners, and had been unable to throw off a feeling of superiority whenever he heard this narrow-eyed foreigner attempt his mother tongue.

As matters now stood, Hans Castorp had almost totally renounced such feelings, and instead it was the Italian who annoyed him with that conceited talk about “Parthians and Scythians”—without even specifying the Bad Russian table, where those students sat with heads of thick hair and not a trace of collar or cuff, arguing in their alien tongue, apparently unable to express themselves in any other, a boneless language that reminded Hans Castorp of a thorax without ribs, like the one Director Behrens had described recently. It was true—these people’s manners might very well arouse lively distaste in a humanist. They ate with their knives and made an unspeakable mess of their clothes. Settembrini claimed that one of these fellows, a medical student well advanced in his studies, had turned out to be totally ignorant of Latin and did not know, for example, what a vacuum was; and from daily first-hand knowledge, Hans Castorp was fairly sure that Frau Stöhr was not lying when she told her tablemates that the couple in room 32 were always still in bed together when the bath attendant came to give them their morning massage.

All of which might be true—yet it was not for nothing that a clear distinction was made between “good” and “bad” tables, and Hans Castorp assured himself that he could shrug off a propagandist for the world republic and beautiful style, who so snootily and coolly—especially coolly, even though he was feverish and tipsy himself—applied the designation “Parthians and Scythians” to both the good and bad tables. Hans Castorp understood only too well how it was intended; after all, he had himself begun to understand the connection between Frau Chauchat’s illness and her “carelessness.” But the thing was, as he told Joachim one day, you began with annoyance and distaste, and suddenly “something quite different comes up” that “has nothing whatever to do with forming opinions” and then it was all over with such rigor—and suddenly you were no longer receptive to pedagogic influences of the republican and eloquent sort. But what sort of dubious experience, we now ask—much in the spirit of a Lodovico Settembrini—can so paralyze and suspend a man’s ability to form opinions, even rob him of the right to form them, or better, induce him to waive that right in a kind of insane rapture? We are not asking the precise name of that experience— since everyone knows it. We are inquiring, rather, about that experience’s moral character—and, to be frank, do not expect a very cheering answer. In Hans Castorp’s case, its character was apparent not only in the extent to which he stopped forming judgments, but also in the way he began to experiment on his own with the style of life that so bewitched him. He tried out what it was like to let his back go limp and sit slumped in his chair at meals, and found it greatly relaxed the abdominal muscles. Moreover, he tried out going through a door without troubling to latch it behind him, but merely letting it close by itself; and that proved both convenient and easy—as an expression of feeling, it corresponded to the shrug with which Joachim had greeted him that day at the train station and which since then he had often noticed people use here.

To put it simply, our traveler had fallen head over heels in love with Clavdia Chauchat—we use the term “love,” whereas we have thus far spoken of infatuation, because we believe we have taken sufficient precautions to prevent any misunderstandings its use might cause. The constituent element of his love, therefore, was not the amiable, tender melancholy found in our little song. It was, instead, a rather reckless and unpolished variation of this folly, a fusion of frost and heat, like a man in a fever or an October day in these lofty regions. What he lacked was the emotion that might have united the two extremes. On the one hand, his love was caught up—and with such an immediacy that it could make the young man blanch and grimace—in Frau Chauchat’s knee, the contour of her leg, her back, the nape of her neck, her upper arms and the way they pressed her small breasts together, in brief, caught up in her body, her careless body, so accentuated and vastly enhanced by her illness that it was a second embodiment of her body. And on the other hand, his love was something utterly elusive and amorphous, a thought—no, a dream, the terrifying and infinitely seductive dream of a young man whose answer to certain, though subconsciously posed questions would have been only hollow silence. We have as much right as anyone to private thoughts about the story unfolding here, and we would like to suggest that Hans Castorp would not have stayed with the people up here even this long beyond his originally planned date of departure, if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.

In any case, being in love inflicted on him all the pain and all the joys that the condition brings with it the whole world over. It is a piercing pain that has something degrading about it, as does all pain, and is such a shock to the nervous system that it takes one’s breath away and can make a grown man weep bitter tears. But to do justice to the joys, they were countless, and although they arose out of trivial events, they were no less compelling than the sufferings. Almost any moment in a Berghof day might serve as their source. For example: as he is about to enter the dining hall, Hans Castorp realizes that the object of his dreams is behind him. He clearly anticipates what will happen—an exceedingly simple outcome, but one that nevertheless sends him into raptures and can even cause tears to well up. Eyes meet at close range, his own and her gray-green ones, whose slightly Asiatic shape and placement enchant his very core. He is barely conscious, but even in that state he steps to one side to allow her to precede him through the door. With half a smile and a low “merci” she avails herself of this perfectly conventional courtesy and walks past him into the dining hall. He stands there in the gentle breeze as she brushes past him, wild with the happiness of having encountered her and of knowing that the word her mouth has spoken, that little “merci,” was intended personally and solely for him. He follows her, staggers off to the right to his own table, sinks down into his chair, and realizes that as “Clavdia,” too, takes her seat, she turns around to look at him—with an expression, or so it seems to him, that says she is thinking about their encounter at the door. What an incredible adventure! What joy, what triumph, what boundless rapture! No, Hans Castorp would never have felt this intoxication of fantastic bliss if he had tried to catch the eye of some healthy little goose or other down below in the flatlands, to whom he might have “given his heart” in the legitimate, promising, calm fashion of that old song. With feverish high spirits he greets the teacher, a blush on her downy cheeks after watching it all—and now bombards Miss Robinson with English conversation of such inanity that the old maid, being inept at ecstasy, recoils and measures him with apprehensive glances.

On another occasion they are sitting at supper and the rays of a brilliant sunset fall directly on the Good Russian table. The curtains have been drawn across the windows and the doors to the veranda, but there is a gap somewhere. Cool, but dazzling red light has found a way through it and now lands precisely on Frau Chauchat’s head, so that while engaging her concave fellow countryman in conversation she has to raise her right hand to shield herself against it. It is a nuisance, nothing more; no one pays much attention, and the lady herself is probably not even aware of her discomfort. But Hans Castorp notices from across the dining hall—and he gazes at her for a while. He examines the situation and, following the ray, discovers its source at the arched window in the far corner on the right, between a veranda door and the Bad Russian table, some distance from Frau Chauchat’s seat and an almost equal distance from Hans Castorp’s own chair. And he comes to a decision. Without saying a word, he stands up. Still holding his napkin and working his way between tables, he walks across the room to the cream-colored curtains, folds one nicely over the other, satisfies himself with a glance over his shoulder that the sunset has been shut out and Frau Chauchat set free—and with a display of great composure, he starts back to his place.

An attentive young man, who did what needed to be done, since no one else noticed to do it. Only a very few people had paid attention to his meddling, but Frau Chauchat had felt the benefit at once and turned around—and held that pose until Hans Castorp had reached his chair again. Turning to look at her as he sat down, he saw her thank him with a smile of friendly surprise and a nod, or better, a thrust of her head. He responded with a little bow. His heart was inert, seemed not to be beating at all. Only after it was all over did his heart begin to pound again, and only then, too, did he notice that Joachim was keeping his eyes directed at his plate—and only afterward did it strike him that Frau Stöhr had nudged Dr. Blumenkohl and suppressed a giggle, while her eyes roamed over her own table and others in search of knowing glances and smiles.

We are describing everyday events; but even everyday events look peculiar if they grow in peculiar soil. There were moments of tension and of gratifying release of tension between the two of them— or if not between them (because to what extent Madame Chauchat was affected remains to be seen), then at least in Hans Castorp’s own fantasies and emotions. The beautiful weather held, and the majority of the hotel residents had got into the habit of moving from the dining hall out onto the veranda after their midday meal, to spend a quarter hour together there in the sun; and what went on was very like the scene at the band concerts held every other Sunday. The young people—totally languid, stuffed with roasts and desserts, all slightly feverish—chatted, joked, and flirted with their eyes. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam might sit on the balustrade—hard-pressed on one side by the knees of thick-lipped Gänser and on the other by the Swedish bruiser, who, although completely well now, had extended his stay for a little extra therapy. Frau Iltis had apparently become a widow—in any case, she had of late been enjoying the company of a “fiancé,” who had a melancholy, subservient look about him, and whose presence did not prevent her from simultaneously receiving the attentions of Captain Miklosich, a man with a hooknose, waxed moustaches, swelling chest, and menacing eyes. There were other ladies of various nationalities who took their rest cure in the common lounging areas—among them some new faces that had appeared since the first of October and that Hans Castorp would have had difficulty putting a name to. Mingling with them were cavaliers of Herr Albin’s sort: seventeen-year-olds with monocles; a young Dutchman with lots of diamonds, a pink face, and a mania for philately; various Greeks, with slicked-down hair and almond eyes, who tended to reach for things at meals; two almost inseparable dandies, nicknamed “Max and Moritz,” who were reputed to be great breakers of house rules. The hunchbacked Mexican, who, because he knew none of the languages represented here, wore the expression of a deaf-mute, was forever taking photographs—a comical figure nimbly dragging his tripod from one point on the terrace to another. Even the director might make an appearance in order to do his bootlace trick. The religious fanatic from Mannheim would be slinking about alone in the crowd somewhere, his profoundly sad eyes cast furtively in a certain direction—much to Hans Castorp’s disgust.

But to return to some examples of “tension and release of tension,” it could happen on such occasions that Hans Castorp might be sitting on an enameled garden chair, his back to the wall, conversing with Joachim, who had been forced to come along against his will, and there would be Frau Chauchat standing at the railing directly opposite, smoking a cigarette with a tablemate. He would speak loudly enough for her to hear him. She would turn her back on him. As is obvious, we have a particular occasion in mind  Conversation with his cousin had not satisfied his chatty affectation, and so he had intentionally struck up a new acquaintance. And with whom? With Hermine Kleefeld. As if quite by chance, he directed a remark to the young lady, and introducing both himself and Joachim to her by name, he pulled over a third enameled chair for her—the better for him to put on his show. Did she know, he asked, what a devilish fright she had given him that day when he had first encountered her while out taking a morning stroll? Yes, he was the one at whom she had whistled her heartwarming welcome. And she had achieved her purpose—he was perfectly willing to admit that he had felt as if he had been clubbed from behind, she needed only to ask his cousin. Ha, ha, whistling with her pneumothorax to frighten a harmless wanderer. A wicked game, that was what he called it—downright sinful abuse, if he did say so. He had every reason to be outraged.

Joachim sat there with his eyes cast down, well aware of his utilitarian role in all this, and Mademoiselle Kleefeld for her part took increasing offense as she realized from Hans Castorp’s roving, blank glaze that she was only a means to some other end—and all the while Hans Castorp sulked and played coy and turned fancy phrases and made his voice as melodious as possible, until he finally achieved his goal, and Frau Chauchat turned to look directly at the conversational exhibitionist, but only for a moment. And what a look it was: her Pribislav eyes glided quickly over him as he sat there with his legs crossed and came to rest briefly on his yellow boots with an expression of deliberate indifference that looked very much like disdain, precisely like disdain—and then those same eyes turned indolently away, with perhaps a trace of a smile in their depths.

A dreadful, dreadful calamity! Hans Castorp went on speaking feverishly for a while; but when he finally grasped the meaning of that glance at his boots, he broke off, almost in the middle of a word, and fell into silent grief. Bored and offended, Hermine Kleefeld went her way. Not without a certain petulance in his voice, Joachim remarked that they could probably go take their rest cure now. And a broken man with pale lips responded: Yes, they could.

The incident threw Hans Castorp into cruel agony for two long days, during which nothing happened that might serve as a balm for his smarting wound. Why that look? In God’s good name, why had she shown him such disdain? Did she see him as some healthy nitwit from down below, whose susceptibilities were of the most harmless sort? As some innocent from the country, an average fellow who strolled about laughing, stuffing his belly, and earning money—a model pupil in the school of life, who could conceive of nothing except the boring advantages of respectability? Was he just a shallow three-week visitor, a nonparticipant in her world? But had he not taken vows as a result of a moist spot? Was he not in their ranks now, one of them, one of “us up here,” with a good two months to his credit, and had not Mercury climbed to one hundred degrees again yesterday evening? But that, in fact, was what made his agony perfectly dreadful—Mercury was no longer climbing! Two terrible days of depression had a chilling, sobering, slackening effect on Hans Castorp’s nature, which, to his bitter humiliation, manifested itself in a very low temperature, barely above normal, and he came to the cruel realization that his worry and grief had accomplished nothing except to place even greater distance between himself and Clavdia’s being and nature.

The third day, the morning of the third day, brought with it gentle release. It was a splendid autumn morning, sunny and fresh, with silver-gray webs spun over the meadows. The sun and the waning moon both stood rather high in the pure blue. The cousins had arisen earlier than usual in order to honor the morning by extending their constitutional a little beyond its normal limits and continuing along the forest path beyond the bench beside the water trough. Joachim, whose temperature had likewise shown a welcome decline, had seconded this invigorating change of schedule and had not disagreed with Hans Castorp’s suggestion. “We’re recovered patients,” he had said, “rid of fever and toxins, practically ripe for the flatlands. Why shouldn’t we buck like colts?” And so, planting

their walking sticks firmly, they strolled off bareheaded—because since taking vows, Hans Castorp had, for God’s sake, complied with the local custom of not wearing a hat, despite his strong feelings at the beginning about how the practice contradicted his own civilized style of life. They had not yet covered the initial steep rise of the reddish path and were only at about the point where the novice had first encountered the pneumothoracic crew, when they caught sight of Frau Chauchat climbing very slowly some distance ahead—Frau Chauchat in white, in a white sweater, white flannel skirt, and even white shoes, her reddish hair glistening in the morning sunlight. More precisely, Hans Castorp had recognized her. Joachim was not aware of the situation until he felt the unpleasant sensation of being tugged or pulled along, the result of his companion’s having suddenly picked up the pace and moving ahead swiftly, after first having checked his step abruptly, almost coming to a halt. Joachim did not like being hurried, found it annoying and intolerable; he was soon short of breath, and he coughed. But Hans Castorp, with his eye on his goal and his lungs apparently working superbly, did not let that bother him much. And once Joachim became aware of the actual situation, he merely scowled, said not a word, and kept pace with his cousin—he certainly could not allow him to march ahead alone.

Young Hans Castorp felt invigorated by the beautiful morning. In his depressed mood, his inner energies had quietly recovered some strength, too, and his mind was illumined with the clear certainty that the moment had come to break the spell that had been cast over him. And so he stepped on ahead, pulling a gasping and generally reluctant Joachim with him, and by the time they reached the point where the path leveled out and turned off to the right, they had almost pulled even with Frau Chauchat. Hans Castorp now slowed the pace again so that he would not look too outlandish from his exertions when carrying out his plan. And just beyond the dogleg in the path, between slope above and drop-off below, among rusty-hued pines with sunlight filtering through the branches, it happened—everything worked out marvelously. Hans Castorp, walking on Joachim’s left, caught up with his adorable patient and began to pass her on the right with manly strides. At the moment when he was just even with her, he made a hatless bow and whispered, “Good morning,” in a low voice of reverent greeting (but why “reverent,” really?)—and heard her respond in kind, wishing him good morning in his own language; her eyes smiling, she acknowledged him with a friendly, not particularly surprised nod. And it was all so different, so totally and blissfully different from that glance at his boots—it was a stroke of good fortune, a turn for the better, indeed for the best, an unparalleled event almost beyond comprehension. It was the longed-for release.

On winged heels, blinded by irrational joy, the proud owner of a greeting, a word, a smile, Hans Castorp hurried forward at the side of maltreated Joachim, who went on staring in silence down the steep hill. It had been a prank, a rather brash one, and in Joachim’s eyes there was probably a trace of treachery and malice about it—Hans Castorp was well aware of that. It was not exactly the same as asking a total stranger for a pencil—indeed, it would have been almost rude to pass stiffly by a lady with whom one had been living for months under the same roof and not salute her. And had not Clavdia recently engaged them in a conversation in the waiting room? And so Joachim had to keep his peace. But Hans Castorp understood quite well the other reason why Joachim, with his love of honor, had turned his head away and was walking along in silence, whereas he himself was utterly, trace-kicking happy at his successful prank. No man in the flatlands could have been happier if he had “given his heart” legitimately, cheerfully, and with a promising view to the future to some healthy little goose, and had found success. No, such a man could not be nearly as happy as he over the bit of success he had pilfered and secured in one lucky stroke.

After a while, then, he pounded his cousin on the shoulder and said, “Say there, what’s wrong? The weather’s so beautiful. We’ll have to go down to the Kurhaus in Platz later, there’ll probably be a concert. Just think. Maybe they’ll play that aria from Carmen’. ‘Through every long and lonely hour, in prison there I kept your flower.’ What’s gnawing at your craw?”

“Nothing,” Joachim said. “But you look so flushed that I’m afraid we’ve seen the end of your lowered temperature.”

And it was the end. Hans Castorp’s humiliating depression had been vanquished by the greetings he had exchanged with Clavdia Chauchat, and strictly speaking, the real basis of his present satisfaction was his awareness that it had been overcome. Yes, it turned out Joachim was right: Mercury was climbing again! Home from his walk, Hans Castorp consulted him—and he promptly climbed to 100.4 degrees.

ENCYCLOPEDIA

Although some of Herr Settembrini’s innuendoes had annoyed Hans Castorp, there was no reason he should have been amazed by them—nor did he have any right to accuse the humanist of pedagogic spying. A blind man would have noticed how things stood with him; he had done nothing to keep it secret. Out of a certain generosity and noble simplicity of spirit, he was a man who tended to wear his heart on his sleeve, which at least distinguished him—to his advantage, if you like—from the love-sick Mannheimer with thinning hair and furtive ways. We would remind our readers that, as a rule, inherent in the condition in which Hans Castorp found himself is an urge, a compulsion, to reveal oneself, a need to be open and to confess, a blind prejudice in one’s own favor, and a rage

to fill the world with oneself—and the less common sense, reason, and hope apparently involved,

the more dismaying it is for those of us of a more sober temperament. It is hard to say how such people actually first come to betray themselves; they cannot, it seems, do or refrain from doing anything that does not betray them—particularly (as a certain gentleman who had no trouble forming opinions remarked) in the company of people who have only two things in their heads: the first being their temperature, the second their temperature. By the latter he meant, for instance, the question of who Frau Wurmbrandt from Vienna, the general consul’s wife, had decided would have to pay damages for her loss of fickle Captain Miklosich: the fully mended Swedish bruiser, or Prosecutor Paravant from Dortmund, or—a third possibility—both at once. Because it was certain and general knowledge that the bond linking the prosecutor and Frau Salomon from Amsterdam had, after several months, been broken by mutual agreement and that Frau Salomon, obeying the impulse of her years, had turned to a lad of a more tender age, thick-lipped Gänser from Hermine Kleefeld’s table, and had now taken him under her wing—or, as Frau Stöhr put it in her own rather picturesque legalese, had “procured.” And so the prosecutor now had a free hand either to do battle over Frau Wurmbrandt, or to come to an understanding with the Swede.

These were the kinds of suits pending among the residents of the Berghof, especially among its feverish youth; and apparently one major factor in all of them was the passageway along the balconies—where one slipped past glass partitions and kept to the railing. These proceedings, then, occupied people’s minds, they were an essential component of the local ambiance—and even in saying that, we have not really expressed what was going on. Hans Castorp, in particular, had the funny feeling that in this locale a basic fact of life—which is granted sufficient importance everywhere in the world, whether spoken of in earnest or jest—acquired an accent, a value, a pattern of meaning so serious, and by its very seriousness so new, that this basic fact was cast in an entirely new light, which, if not absolutely appalling, was at least appalling in its newness. Simply mentioning such things causes our own expression to change, and we notice that, although thus far we may have spoken of such questionable liaisons in a light and jocular tone, we did it for the same mysterious reasons people usually speak of them in that fashion—not that it in any way proves the subject to be a matter of levity and jest. And in the environs where we now find ourselves, such would be the case even less than elsewhere. Hans Castorp had believed his was a typical understanding of this fact of life, which normally serves as a favorite topic of jokes, and he may have been right in his belief. But he now realized that he had understood it very inadequately down in the flatlands, had actually been in a state of innocent ignorance. His personal experiences here—the nature of which we have attempted to indicate on several occasions—had forced him at certain

moments to cry, “My God!” But they also enabled him to perceive, understand, and internalize the

ever-intensifying accent on shock and indescribable adventure that people up here, both generally and individually, attributed to the matter. Not that people did not joke about it here as well. But to a far greater extent than down below, there was something inappropriate about the jokes, something to do with chattering teeth and shortness of breath, something that marked such jokes all too clearly as transparent disguises for the anguish hidden beneath them, or rather for the anguish impossible to hide. Hans Castorp recalled how Joachim’s face had turned blotchy and pale the one and only time he had tried to tease him in an innocent, flatland sort of way, by bringing the conversation around to Marusya’s physical attributes. He recalled the cool pallor on his own face the evening he had freed Frau Chauchat from the setting sun; and how, on various occasions before and since, he had seen that same pallor on many another face, usually on two at once—for instance on Frau Salomon’s and young Gänser’s of late, ever since what Frau Stöhr had described in her colorful way had indeed come to pass. We repeat, he recalled all this and realized not only that it would have been difficult not to “betray” oneself under such circumstances, but also that the attempt would hardly have been worthwhile. In other words, if Hans Castorp saw no compelling reason to restrain his feelings and make a secret of his condition, that was probably due not merely to generosity of spirit and guilelessness, but also to a certain encouragement he breathed from the atmosphere all around him.

Had it not been for the difficulty of making acquaintances here, a difficulty to which Joachim had immediately called his attention but the primary cause of which could be traced to the fact that the cousins were, so to speak, a couple or miniature clique within the sanatorium’s society and that soldierly Joachim, who was interested solely in regaining his health quickly, was fundamentally opposed to any closer contact or association with his fellow patients—had it not been for that difficulty, then, Hans Castorp would have had, and taken advantage of, many more opportunities to make his feelings known in his generous and guileless way. All the same, Joachim discovered him one evening at the usual social gathering in the company of Hermine Kleefeld, her tablemates Gänser and Rasmussen, and, as a fifth, the lad with the monocle and saltcellar fingernail; with his eyes glittering undeniably brighter than usual and with emotion in his voice, Hans Castorp had delivered an extemporaneous oration on Frau Chauchat’s peculiar and exotic facial features, while his audience exchanged glances, nudged one another, and tittered.

It was all very painful for Joachim; but the person who was the source of their amusement seemed insensitive to this revelation of his inner state. Perhaps he thought that if he had left it hidden and ignored, it would never have come into its own. He could be sure of meeting with general sympathy

and was willing to accept the schadenfreude that might come with it. Not just people at his own

table, but by now those at neighboring tables as well, took delight in watching him blanch and blush when the glass door banged shut at the start of each meal; and indeed he even found some gratification in attracting their attention, since it brought with it a certain external acknowledgment and confirmation of his intoxicated state, which somehow tended both to advance his cause and to encourage his own vague, irrational hopes—and it all made him very happy. It came to the point where people literally gathered to watch the infatuated young man—on the terrace after dinner or on Sunday afternoon when all the guests thronged the concierge’s desk to pick up their mail, which on that one day was not delivered to their rooms. It was generally known that he was tipsy as hell, a man in a highly lambent state, who did not care who noticed. And so Frau Stöhr,Fräulein Engelhart, young Kleefeld, her girlfriend with the face of a tapir, the incurable Herr Albin, the young man with the saltcellar fingernail, and various other sanatorium residents would stand there with mouths pulled down at the corners and snort through their noses as they watched him gaze in one particular direction—a forlorn and passionate smile on his lips, the same flush on his cheeks that had appeared his first evening here, the same glint in his eyes that had been enkindled by the Austrian horseman’s cough.

Given this state of affairs, it was actually a good thing that Herr Settembrini would sometimes approach Hans Castorp and start up a conversation, asking him how he was feeling; but it is doubtful whether the younger man knew what thanks he owed him for this humane broad-mindedness. It might happen, for instance, in the lobby on a Sunday afternoon.  The guests were pressing around

the concierge’s desk, hands stretched out for their mail. Joachim was up front with them. His cousin held back, busy watching it all in the state described above, trying to catch Clavdia Chauchat’s eye. She was standing nearby with her tablemates, waiting for the crowd at the desk to thin out. It was an hour when all the patients mingled, an hour of opportunities, and for precisely that reason an hour that young Hans Castorp loved and longed for. The week before, he had been so close to Madame Chauchat at the desk that she had bumped against him just the least bit and with a cursory turn of her head had said, “Pardon.”

And thank God, he had shown sufficient feverish presence of mind to reply, “Pas de quai, madame!” What a godsend, he thought, that you could be certain mail would be distributed in the lobby every Sunday afternoon. One can say that he consumed one whole week waiting for the return of that single hour every seven days—and waiting means racing ahead, means seeing time and the present not as a gift, but as a barrier, denying and negating their value, vaulting over them in your mind. Waiting, people say, is boring. But in actuality, it can just as easily be diverting, because it devours

quantities of time without our ever experiencing or using them for their own sake. One could say

that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him. Granted, such pure and unalloyed waiting practically never happens.

And so the week had been devoured, it was Sunday afternoon and the distribution of the mail was proceeding as if this were still the Sunday of seven days before. The procedure continued to provide the most exciting opportunities; each minute concealed and offered possibilities of coming into social contact with Frau Chauchat—and Hans Castorp let those possibilities squeeze his heart and make it flutter, but never actually let them become reality. Certain inhibitions stood in the way, some military, some civilian—which is to say, some that were due to Joachim’s honorable presence and Hans Castorp’s own sense of honor and duty; some, however, were based in the feeling that social contact with Clavdia Chauchat—a civilized relationship, with formal pronouns and bows and conversation in French perhaps—was not necessary, not desirable, not the right thing at all. He stood there and watched her smile and talk, just as Pribislav Hippe had smiled and talked in the schoolyard years before, her mouth open rather wide and her slanting gray-green eyes above her strong cheekbones narrowing to little slits. The effect was not “beautiful” at all; but it was what it was, and when a man is in love his aesthetic opinions are no more valid than his moral judgments.

“You are also waiting for dispatches, are you, my good engineer?” Only one person talked like that, one bothersome person. Hans Castorp winced and turned toward Herr Settembrini, who stood smiling before him. It was his delicate, humanist smile, the one with which he had first greeted the newcomer on the bench beside the water trough—and just as on that day, Hans Castorp now felt ashamed of himself. But despite the many times he had tried to push the “organ-grinder” away for bothering him in his dreams, the waking man proved a better person than the dreaming. The sight of that smile not only shamed and sobered Hans Castorp, but also awakened a sense of gratitude for needs met.

“Dispatches?” he said. “Good God, Herr Settembrini, I’m not an ambassador. There may be a postcard there for one of us. My cousin is checking right now.”

“That little limping devil up front already handed me my paltry correspondence,” Settembrini said, shoving a hand down into the side pocket of his ineluctable petersham coat. “Interesting matters. Matters of literary and social consequence, I cannot deny it. It is about an encyclopedia—to which a philanthropic institution has done me the honor of asking me to contribute. In short, a fine offer of work.” Herr Settembrini paused. “But what about your affairs?” he asked. “How are things in that

regard? How are you getting along with your acclimatization, for example? You have not been

residing here among us for so long now that, taken all in all, the question can be removed just yet from the agenda.”

“Thank you for asking, Herr Settembrini. As before, I am having my difficulties. I think it possible I may very well continue to have them until my last day here. Some people never get used to the air here, my cousin told me the day I arrived. But one gets used to not getting used to it.”

“A convoluted process,” the Italian said with a laugh. “A strange sort of naturalization. But of course, youth is capable of most anything. It may not get used to things, but it does take root.”

“And after all, this isn’t a Siberian salt mine.”

“No   Ah, you prefer Oriental metaphors. Quite understandable. Asia is devouring us. Tartar faces

in every direction you look.” And Herr Settembrini discreetly turned his head to glance over his shoulder. “Genghis Khan,” he said, “lone wolves on dusky steppes, snow and schnapps, whips and knouts, Schlüsselburg prison and Holy Orthodoxy. They ought to erect a statue of Pallas Athena here in the lobby—as a kind of self-defense. Look there—one of your Ivan Ivanovitches, without cuff or collar, has got into a fight with Prosecutor Paravant. Each claims he should be ahead of the other in the mail line. I don’t know who is right, but to my mind, the goddess fights on the prosecutor’s side. He’s an ass, of course, but at least he knows his Latin.”

Hans Castorp laughed—something Herr Settembrini never did. One could not even imagine his ever laughing heartily; he managed little more than a dry, delicate tightness at one corner of his mouth. He watched the young man laugh and then asked, “And the copy of your X-ray—have you received it?”

“I did indeed receive it,” Hans Castorp confirmed with importance. “Just recently. Here it is.” And he reached for his inside breast pocket.

“Ah, you carry it in your wallet. As a kind of identification, like a passport or membership card. Very good. Let me see.” And Herr Settembrini raised the little glass plate framed with black paper up to the light, holding it between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand—a gesture one saw quite frequently up here. As he examined the funereal photograph, a little scowl passed over his face with its black almond-shaped eyes—though it was not clear if his scowl was an attempt to see better or if there were other reasons for it.

“Yes, yes,” he said at last. “Here you have your legitimation—thank you so much.” And he handed the piece of glass back to its owner, but in sidelong fashion, passing it across his other arm and turning his face away.

“Did you see the strands?” Hans Castorp asked. “And the nodules?”

“You are aware,” Herr Settembrini replied languidly, “what store I set by these artifacts. You know,

too, that the spots and shadows inside you are for the most part matters of physiology. I have seen hundreds of pictures that looked about the same as yours, and the decision whether they are truly a ‘passport’ or not lies more or less in the eyes of the beholder. I speak as a layman, but as a layman of many years’ experience.”

“Does your passport look worse?”

“Yes, somewhat worse. I also know, by the way, that our lords and masters never base a diagnosis solely on such playthings. And so you propose to spend the winter with us, do you?”

“Yes, dear God, I’m beginning to get used to the idea that until my cousin leaves, I won’t be leaving, either.”

“Which means you’re getting used to not getting . . .You did put that very wittily. I hope you’ve been sent your winter things—warm clothes, sturdy footwear?”

“Everything. Everything nicely taken care of, Herr Settembrini. I informed my relatives, and our housekeeper sent it all express. I can manage here now.”

“That eases my mind. But wait—you’ll need a sleeping bag, one with fur lining. Where are our minds? This late-summer weather is deceptive. It can be deepest winter within an hour. You’ll be spending the coldest months here.”

“Yes, the sleeping bag,” Hans Castorp said, “that’s probably a necessary piece of gear. It has crossed my mind that we—my cousin and I—should go down into town sometime soon and buy one. It’s something I’ll never use again later, but it’s worth it, after all, for four to six months.”

“Yes, it is worth it, it is worth it, my good engineer,” Herr Settembrini said softly, stepping closer to the young man. “It is truly hideous, you know, the way you are throwing the months around. Hideous, I say, because it is so unnatural, so foreign to your nature, purely a matter of a receptive young mind. Ah, the immoderate receptivity of youth—it can drive an educator to despair, because it is always ready to apply itself to bad ends. Do not ape the words you hear floating in the air around you, young man, but speak a language appropriate to your civilized European life. A great deal of Asia hangs in the air here. It is not for nothing that the place teems with Mongolian Muscovites— people like these.” And Herr Settembrini pointed back over his shoulder with his chin. “Do not model yourself on them, do not let them infect you with their ideas, but instead compare you own nature, your higher nature to theirs, and as a son of the West, of the divine West, hold sacred those things that by both nature and heritage are sacred to you. Time, for instance. This liberality, this barbaric extravagance in the use of time is the Asian style—that may be the reason why the children of the East feel so at home here. Have you never noticed that when a Russian says ‘four hours’ it

means no more to him than ‘one hour’ does to us? The idea comes easily to mind that the nonchalance

with which these people treat time has something to do with the savage expanse of their land. Too much room—too much time. It has been said that they are a nation with time on their hands—they can afford to wait. We Europeans can’t wait. We have just as little time as our noble, tidily segmented continent has space; we must carefully husband the resources of the former just as we do those of the latter—put them to use, good use, engineer! Our great cities are the perfect symbol—these centers and focal points of civilization, these crucibles of thought. Just as land values rise in cities and wasted space becomes an impossibility, in the same measure, please note, time becomes more precious there, too. Carpe diem! An urbanite sang that song. Time is a gift of the gods to humankind, that we may use it—use it, my good engineer, in the service of human progress.”

Whatever difficulties certain phrases presented to Herr Settembrini’s Mediterranean tongue, he had expressed himself in the most delightful fashion—clearly, euphoniously, and, one may well say, graphically. Hans Castorp could only respond with the brief, stiff, and uneasy bow of a schoolboy on the receiving end of a critical lecture. What could he possibly have replied? This private homily, which Herr Settembrini had delivered surreptitiously, almost in a whisper, behind the backs of the other guests, had been too businesslike, too unsocial, too little like conversation, for him to have expressed approval in any tactful way. One does not respond to a teacher with: “You said that beautifully.” Hans Castorp had indeed done that on several previous occasions, if only to preserve some kind of social equality—but the humanist had never before spoken with such pedagogic urgency. There was nothing for him to do but swallow this scolding—like a schoolboy dazed by too much moralizing.

One could tell from Herr Settembrini’s expression that he was still busy pursuing his train of thought even after he fell silent. He was still standing so close to Hans Castorp that the latter was forced to bend back just a little. His black eyes were focused in a fixed, thoughtful stare at the young man’s face.

“You are suffering, my good engineer,” he continued. “And you are suffering in great confusion— who would not notice it just by looking at you? But your attitude to suffering should be a European attitude—not that of the East, which precisely because it is weak and prone to illness, is so amply represented here. The East treats suffering with pity and infinite patience. We dare not, we cannot, do the same. We were speaking of my mail. Look here . . . or even better, come with me now. This is impossible. Let us get away from this spot, we’ll step in there. I have something to disclose to you that . . . Come along.”

And turning on his heels, he pulled Hans Castorp out of the lobby and into the social room nearest

the main entrance, which was set up for reading and writing, but was empty at the moment. It had a bright, vaulted ceiling and was paneled in oak; its furnishings included bookcases, a central table covered with newspapers in holders and surrounded by chairs, and desks in nooks beneath window arches. Herr Settembrini strode across the room to a window. Hans Castorp followed him. The door remained open.

“These papers,” the Italian said, swiftly extracting a package from the pouchlike side pocket of his petersham coat—an oversize opened envelope, which contained several flyers and a letter that he ran through his fingers for Hans Castorp to see—“these papers bear a letterhead in the French language: ‘International League for the Organization of Progress.’ They have been sent to me from Lugano, where the league has a branch office. You ask me: What are its principles, its goals? I can tell you in two words. Working from Darwin’s theory of evolution, the League for the Organization of Progress advances the philosophical viewpoint that humankind’s innermost natural purpose is its own self-perfection. It concludes further that it is the duty of every person who desires to satisfy that natural purpose to cooperate in the cause of human progress. Many have followed that call; there are significant numbers of them in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, even in Germany. I, too, have the honor to be on the league’s membership rolls. A large-scale scientific program of reform has been drawn up, embracing all presently known possibilities for perfecting the human organism. The problem of the health of our race is being studied, including the examination of methods for combating its degeneration, which doubtless is one lamentable side effect of increasing industrialization. Moreover, the league is engaged in founding popular universities, in working to overcome class struggle by every means of social improvement that commends itself for the purpose, and, finally, in eliminating conflict between nations, war itself, by fostering international law. As you can see, the efforts of the league are high-minded and all-embracing. Several international periodicals bear witness to its activities—monthly reviews, which appear in three or four important languages and report in very exciting articles about the progressive development of civilized humankind. Countless local chapters have been established in various countries, their purpose being to inform and educate by means of public lectures and Sunday festivities. Above all the league endeavors to supply materials to progressive political parties everywhere. Do you follow me, my good engineer?”

“Absolutely,” Hans Castorp hastened to reply with some vehemence. As he said it, he felt like a man who has lost his footing but luckily catches himself just in time.

Herr Settembrini seemed satisfied. “I assume these are new and surprising vistas for you, are they

not?”

“Yes, I must admit this is the first time I’ve heard about these . . . these efforts.”

“If only,” Settembrini exclaimed softly, “if only you had heard of them before! But perhaps it is not yet too late for you to hear. Now, as to these flyers—you would like to know what they are about. I shall explain. This past spring the league was called together in solemn convention in Barcelona. You know, I’m sure, that city boasts of a special affinity for ideas of political progress. The convention lasted one whole week and included banquets and ceremonies. Good God, how I wanted to go, how I yearned to take part in its deliberations. But that scoundrel of a director forbade me, threatened me with death. What was I to do? Fearing death, I did not go. I was, as you can well imagine, in despair over the trick my imperfect health had played on me. Nothing is more painful than when our organic, animal component prevents us from serving the cause of reason. All the more intense, then, was my satisfaction upon receiving this letter from the office in Lugano. You are curious about its content, are you? I can well believe it. But first, some quick background information. Heedful of the truth that its task is to further human happiness, or in other words, finally to eradicate human suffering by combating it with practical social work; heedful, further, of the truth that this noble mission can be completed only with the help of social science, whose ultimate goal is the perfect state—the League for the Organization of Progress resolved in Barcelona to publish a multivolumed work, which is to bear the title The Sociology of Suffering and in which human sufferings of all classes and species will be treated in detailed, exhaustive, systematic fashion. You will object: What good are classes, species, and systems? And I reply: Order and classification are the beginning of mastery, whereas the truly dreadful enemy is the unknown. The human race must be led out of the primitive stage of fear and long-suffering vacuity and into a phase of purposeful activity. Humankind must be informed that certain effects can be diminished only when one first recognizes their causes and negates them, and that almost all sufferings of the individual are illnesses of the social organism. Fine! This is the purpose of our Sociological Pathology, an encyclopedia of some twenty or so volumes that will list and discuss all conceivable instances of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the large-scale conflicts of groups that arise out of class hostility and international strife. In short, it will list the chemical elements that serve as the basis for all the many mixtures and compounds of human suffering. Taking as its plumb line the dignity and happiness of humankind, it will supply for each and every instance of suffering the means and measures that seem most appropriate for eliminating its causes. Renowned scholars and experts from all over Europe—medical doctors, economists, psychologists—will participate in drafting this encyclopedia, and the general editorial offices in

Lugano will act as the reservoir into which all articles will flow. I can read the question in your eyes:

What will be my role in all of this? Let me finish first. This immense work does not wish to see belles- lettres neglected, either, at least to the extent that they speak of human suffering. Literature is therefore to have its own volume, which is to contain, as solace and advice for those who suffer, a synopsis and short analysis of all masterpieces of world literature dealing with every such conflict. And—that is the task with which the letter you see here entrusts your humble servant.”

“You don’t say, Herr Settembrini! Well, allow me then to offer my most heartfelt congratulations. What a spectacular assignment—simply made for you, I’d say. I’m not the least bit surprised that the league thought of you. And how happy it must make you that you can be helpful in eradicating human suffering.”

“It is a very complex task,” Herr Settembrini said, musing, “demanding much prudence and vast reading. Especially,” he added now, his gaze seemingly lost in the immensity of his mission, “especially because literature has regularly chosen suffering as its topic. Even masterpieces of only second or third rank have been concerned with it in one way or another. But no matter—all the better! However complex the task, it is the sort of work that I can manage even in this cursed place, if need be, although I would hope that I shall not be forced to complete it here. One cannot say,” he went on, stepping closer to Hans Castorp again and dampening his voice almost to a whisper, “one cannot say the same of the duties nature has imposed upon you, my good engineer. And that is my point, that is what I wanted to warn you about. You know how very much I admire your chosen profession, but because it is practical, and not intellectual, you cannot, unlike myself, pursue that profession anywhere but in the world below. You can be a European only in the flatlands—actively combating suffering in your own fashion, advancing progress, using time well. I have told you of the task that has come my way only to remind you of this, to bring you to yourself, to set your thoughts straight, which are evidently beginning to become confused under these atmospheric conditions. I urge you: Consider your self-respect, your pride. Do not lose yourself in an alien world. Avoid that swamp, that isle of Circe—for you are not Odysseus enough to dwell there unharmed. You will walk on all fours, you are tipping down onto your front limbs already, and will soon begin to grunt—beware!” While he whispered his warnings, the humanist shook his head urgently back and forth. He fell silent now, scowling, with eyes lowered. It was impossible to reply with a quip or some other evasion, as was Hans

Castorp’s usual method—though he did weigh the possibility for just a moment. His eyes were directed at the floor, too. Lifting his shoulders, he asked just as softly, “What should I do?”

“What I told you before.”

“You mean leave?”

Herr Settembrini did not reply.

“You mean that I should go back home, is that it?”

“I told you that the very first evening, my good engineer.”

“Yes, and at the time I was free to do so, although I thought it unreasonable to throw in the towel just because the local air was a little hard on me. Since then, however, the situation has changed. Since then I’ve gone for an examination, as a result of which Director Behrens told me flat out that it would not pay for me to return home, that I would have to come back in very short order, and that if I were to continue my life just as before down below, the whole pulmonary lobe would go, willy- nilly, to the devil.”

“I know, and now you have your membership card in your pocket.”

“Yes, and you say it so ironically—with the right kind of irony, of course, whose purpose cannot be doubted for a moment and which is meant to serve as an honest, classical device of rhetoric—you see, I do pay attention to your words. But after the results of the X-ray, after this photograph here, after the director’s diagnosis, will you take the responsibility for sending me back home?”

Herr Settembrini hesitated for a moment. Then he stood up tall, opened his black eyes wide, fixing them firmly on Hans Castorp, and responded with an emphasis that did not lack a certain dramatic, theatrical tone, “Yes, my good engineer. I will take the responsibility.”

But Hans Castorp’s posture had stiffened as well now. He had put his heels together and was looking just as directly at Herr Settembrini. The battle had been engaged. Hans Castorp stood his ground. He was “strengthened” by forces close-by. Here was a pedagogue—but just outside was a narrow- eyed woman. He did not apologize for what he now said, did not even bother to preface it with, “No offense.” He replied, “Then you are more cautious about yourself than you are about other people. You did not go to Barcelona against your doctor’s orders. Fearing death, you stayed here.”

There was no doubt that to some extent this had a disruptive effect on Herr Settembrini’s pose. He smiled, but not without difficulty, and said, “I can appreciate a quick answer when I hear one, even when its logic borders on sophistry. I loathe the idea of engaging in that disgusting contest so typical here, otherwise I would reply that my illness is significantly more serious than yours—indeed, I am unfortunately so ill that only by a little artistic self-deception can I eke out the hope of ever being able to leave this place again and return to the world below. Come the day it should be proved totally improper of me to maintain that deception, I shall turn my back on this institution and spend the rest of my days in private lodgings somewhere in the valley. That will be sad, but since the sphere of my work is of the freest, most purely intellectual sort, it will not prevent me from serving the cause

of humankind, from defying the spirit of disease to my last dying breath. I have already called to

your attention the difference between us in that regard. My good engineer, you are not a man to sustain your better self here—I saw that the first time we met. You reproach me for not having gone to Barcelona. I submitted to that injunction so that I might not destroy myself prematurely. But I did it with gravest reservations, under the proudest, most excruciating protest of my spirit against the dictates of my wretched body. Whether that protest still lives within you as well, seeing that you are following the bidding of the local powers—or whether it is not, rather, the body and its evil proclivities that you all too willingly obey . . .”

“What do you have against the body?” Hans Castorp interrupted quickly, staring at him with large blue eyes, the whites broken with bloodshot veins. He was giddy with his own foolhardiness, as was only too obvious. (“What am I saying?” he thought. “This is ghastly. But I’ve declared war on him, and if at all possible I’m not going to let him have the last word. He’ll have it, of course, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll use it to my advantage all the same. I’ll provoke him.”) And now he completed his objection by asking, “But you are a humanist, are you not? And if you are, how can you say such bad things about the body?”

Settembrini’s smile was not forced this time; he was sure of himself. “ ‘What do you have against analysis?’ ” he quoted, his head tilted to one shoulder. “ ‘Don’t you approve of analysis?’—You will always find me ready to provide you with an answer, my good engineer,” he said with a bow and a deferential downward sweep of his hand, “particularly when your objections show some wit. You parry my thrusts not without elegance. Humanist—certainly I am that. You will never find me guilty of ascetic tendencies. I affirm, I respect, I love the body, just as I affirm, respect, and love form, beauty, freedom, mirth, and pleasure—just as I champion the ‘world,’ the interests of life against sentimental flight from the world, classicismo against romanticismo. I believe my position is perfectly clear. But there is one force, one principle that is the object of my highest affirmation, my highest and ultimate respect and love, and that force, that principle, is the mind. However much I detest seeing that dubious construct of moonshine and cobwebs that goes by the name of ‘soul’ played off against the body, within the antithesis of body and mind, it is the body that is the evil, devilish principle, because the body is nature, and nature—as an opposing force, I repeat, to mind, to reason—is evil, mystical and evil. ‘But you are a humanist!’ Most certainly I am that, because I am a friend of humankind, just as Prometheus was a lover of humankind and its nobility. That nobility, however, is contained within the mind, within reason, and therefore you will level the charge of Christian obscurantism against me quite in vain.”

Hans Castorp waved this off.

“You will,” Settembrini insisted, “level that charge quite in vain, simply because in due time, noble

humanistic pride comes to see the tie that binds the mind to the physical body, to nature, as a debasement and a curse. Did you know that the great Plotinus is recorded to have said that he was ashamed to have a body?” Settembrini asked, and with such earnest expectation of an answer that Hans Castorp found himself forced to admit that this was the first he had heard of it.

“Porphyrius has recorded it for us. An absurd statement, if you like. But absurdity is an intellectually honorable position, and nothing could be more fundamentally pitiful than to raise the objection of absurdity when the mind attempts to maintain its dignity against nature and refuses to submit to her. Do you know about the Lisbon earthquake?”

“No . . . an earthquake? I’ve not been reading newspapers here . . .”

“You misunderstand me. Nevertheless, I would note that it is regrettable—though characteristic of the institution—that you have neglected to read what the press has to say. But you have misunderstood me, the natural phenomenon of which I speak is not a current event; it took place, incidentally, some one hundred and fifty years ago.”

“Oh, yes! Wait a moment—right! I read somewhere that Goethe said something in his bedroom one night to his valet—”

“Oh—I don’t wish to talk about that,” Settembrini broke in, closing his eyes and waving one little brown hand in the air. “Besides, you’re getting your catastrophes mixed up. You’re thinking of the earthquake in Messina. I’m talking about the one that ravaged Lisbon in the year 1755.”

“Beg your pardon.”

“Well, it was Voltaire who rose up against it.” “What do you mean ‘rose up’? What did he do?”

“He rebelled, that’s what. He would not accept this stroke of fate, the brutal fact of it. He refused to submit to it. He protested in the name of the mind and reason against this scandalous offense of nature, which destroyed three-quarters of a flourishing city and took thousands of human lives. That astounds you, does it? Amuses you? You may be as astounded as you like, but I shall make so bold as to rebuke you for the smile. Voltaire’s position was that of a true descendent of those ancient Gauls who shot their arrows against heaven. You see, my good engineer, there you behold the mind’s enmity toward nature, its proud mistrust of her, its greathearted insistence on the right to criticize her and her evil, irrational power. Because she is a power, and it is servile to accept her, to reconcile oneself to her—that is, to reconcile oneself to her inwardly. There you see the kind of humanism that absolutely does not become ensnared in contradictions, that is in no way guilty of a retreat into Christian toadying, even though it resolves to see in the body the evil force, the antagonist. The

contradiction that you believe you see is always one and the same. ‘What do you have against

analysis?’ Nothing, when it serves the cause of education, liberation, and progress. Everything, when it comes wrapped in the ghastly, gamy odor of the grave. It is no different with the body. One must respect and defend it, when it serves the cause of emancipation and beauty, of freedom of the senses, of happiness and desire. One must despise it insofar as it is the principle of gravity and inertia opposing the flow toward the light, insofar-as it represents the principle of disease and death, insofar as its quintessence is a matter of perversity, of corruption, of lust and disgrace.”

Settembrini had been standing very close to Hans Castorp as he spoke these final words in an almost flat tone of voice, hurrying to finish before reinforcements for Hans Castorp’s side arrived—Joachim had just entered the reading room, two postcards in hand. The man of letters said no more, and the ease with which he changed now to a light conversational tone did not fail to make an impression on his student—if one can call Hans Castorp that.

“There you are, lieutenant. You’ve probably been looking for your cousin—forgive me. We were deep in conversation—if I’m not mistaken, in something of a little dispute. He is not a bad quibbler himself, your cousin, certainly no harmless foe in a battle of words—when he wants to be.”

HUMANIORA

Dressed in white flannels and blue blazers, Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen were sitting in the garden after dinner. It was yet another of those celebrated October days, a day that was both hot and gentle, festal and austere, with a dark blue southern sky above the valley, whose meadows, crossed with paths and dotted with settlements, were still a cheerful green and from whose rugged, wooded slopes came the sound of cowbells—a metallic, serene, simple tone that drifted clear and untroubled through the quiet, thin, empty air and enhanced the gala mood reigning in those high regions.

The cousins were sitting on a bench in front of a circle of young firs at the far end of the garden. The spot lay at the northwest edge of the level, fenced-in area on which the Berghof was set, about 150 feet above the valley floor. They said nothing. Hans Castorp was smoking. In his mind he was quarreling with Joachim for not having wanted to join the others on the veranda and for having insisted instead, against his express wish, that they come out and sit here in the hushed garden before retiring for their rest cure. Joachim was acting like a tyrant. As far as that went, they weren’t Siamese twins. They could go their separate ways if they were of different minds. Hans Castorp was not here to keep Joachim company, but was a patient himself. He went on sulking like this—had no trouble sulking, really, since he had his Maria Mancini. His hands in the side pockets of his blazer, his feet shod in brown shoes stretched out before him, he had set the long, dull gray cigar in the center of his mouth, letting it dangle slightly, the first ashes still clinging to the blunt tip in this initial phase;

having just eaten a heavy meal, he was enjoying its aroma, which had come back in full force at last.

It might well be that getting used to things up here was simply a matter of getting used to not getting used to them—but as for his digestive chemistry and his sensitive, dry mucous membranes that tended to nosebleeds, the adjustment seemed complete at last. He had not even noticed progress in the making, but over the course of these sixty-five or seventy days, the comfort his whole organism found in well-rolled tobacco, whether as stimulant or narcotic, had returned. And he was delighted that he had regained the capacity. Moral satisfaction reinforced physical pleasure. During his period of bed rest, he had made sparing use of the stock of two hundred he had brought with him and so still had some of those left. But in his letter to Schalleen requesting underwear and winter clothes, he had also asked her to order five hundred more from his supplier in Bremen to make sure he wouldn’t be caught short. They came in beautiful enameled boxes with gilt depictions of a globe, lots of medallions, and an exposition hall with banners flying.

And as they sat, here came Director Behrens walking through the garden. He had joined the others for the main meal in the dining hall today, had sat at Frau Salomon’s table, his gigantic hands folded before his plate. After that, it would appear, he had spent some time on the terrace, adding a personal touch, perhaps showing off his bootlace trick for someone who had never seen it before. Now he came strolling down the gravel path, dressed not in his medical smock, but in a small-checked swallowtail coat, his bowler pushed back on his head, a cigar in his mouth, too—a very black one, from which he drew great, whitish clouds of smoke. His head, or better, his face, with its purplish, flushed cheeks, snub nose, blue watery eyes, and short-cropped moustache, looked small in comparison to his tall, slightly stooped, and skewed figure, with its oversize hands and feet. In a nervous state, he was visibly startled by the sight of the cousins, and even stood there in some embarrassment that his path had led him directly toward them. Employing his usual cheerful lingo, he greeted them with, “Behold, behold, Timotheus!” and expressed his best wishes for their metabolisms. They were about to stand out of respect, but he told them to remain seated.

“No need, no need. Let’s have no further fuss about a simple fellow like myself. Don’t deserve it at all, inasmuch as you are my patients—both of you now. You needn’t do that. No objection to the status quo.” And there he stood before them, his cigar held between the first and second fingers of his gigantic right hand. “How’s your cabbage-roll doing, Castorp? Let me have a look. I’m a connoisseur. Good ash—what brand of lovely brunette is she?”

“Maria Mancini, Poste de Banquette, from Bremen, Director Behrens. Costs little or nothing, a mere nineteen pfennigs, natural color, but an aroma that you don’t normally find at the price. Best Sumatra-Havana wrapper, as you can see. I have got very used to them. It’s a medium mixture, quite

spicy but light on the tongue. She likes you to leave her ash long—I knock it off twice at most. Of

course she has her little moods, but the quality control must be especially exacting, because Maria is very dependable and has an absolutely even draw. Might I offer you one?”

“Thank you, let’s exchange brands.” And they pulled out their cases.

“She has good breeding,” the director said, holding out his brand. “Vivacious, you know, vim and vigor. Saint Felix-Brazil, I’ve always stuck to that sort. Soothes one’s cares away, catches fire like brandy, but, all the same, she packs something of a wallop toward the end. A little caution is in order—you can’t light one from the other. Would take more of a man than I. But I’d rather have a hearty snack than a whole day of tasteless air.”

Each rolled his gift between his fingers, examining the slender body with expert eye—there was an organic, living quality about the even rows of raised and slanted ribs, the tiny pores along the edges here and there, the veins that seemed almost to throb, the little irregularities of skin, the play of light on surfaces and edges.

Hans Castorp put it into words. “There’s life in a cigar. It actually breathes. At home I came up with the idea of keeping my Maria stored in airtight metal containers, to keep out the damp. Would you believe it, she died! Within a few weeks she grew sickly and died—nothing left but leathery corpses.” They exchanged what they knew about the best way to store cigars, especially imports. The director loved imported cigars and would have most preferred to smoke heavy Havanas. Unfortunately they did not agree with him, and he told about two little Henry Clays he had taken a liking to one evening at a party and how they had come close to putting him six feet under. “I smoke them both with my coffee,” he said, “one after the other, thinking nothing of it. But no sooner am I finished than I have to ask myself what’s up. Whatever it is, I’m feeling very rum, stranger than I’ve ever felt in my life. I arrive home, no little problem in itself, and no sooner am I home than I think I’m about to pop my cork—you know, feet like ice, a cold sweat, you name it, face white as a sheet, heart doing crazy tricks, my pulse going from a thread you can barely feel to a helter-skelter, cross-country spurt, you know, and my brain in a tizzy. I was convinced that I was about to kick the bucket. I say ‘kick the bucket,’ since that’s the phrase that came to me then as the best description of my condition. Because actually I was feeling as euphoric as if this were some sort of shindig, although I was scared stiff, or better, I was out of my mind with fear. But fear and euphoria aren’t mutually exclusive, everybody knows that. Some scalawag who’s about to have a girl for the first time is afraid, too. So is she. But they simply melt together for euphoria. Well, I was close to melting myself, about to kick the bucket, my chest heaving away. But then Mylendonk’s ministrations broke the mood. Ice compresses, a rubdown with a brush, an injection of camphor—and so here I am still among the living.”

Hans Castorp had sat there listening in his role as patient, but now he looked up at Behrens, whose

blue pop-eyes had filled with tears as he told his tale. His own face mirrored a mind full of thoughts. “You paint sometimes, don’t you, Director Behrens?” he suddenly asked.

The director pretended to recoil in astonishment. “What’s this? Now where did you get that notion, my lad?”

“Excuse me. I’ve heard people mention it here and there. I just happened to think of it.”

“Well, then I’ll not go to the trouble of telling fibs. We’re all human and have our weaknesses now and then. Yes, it’s been known to happen. Anch’io sono pittore, as that Spaniard liked to say.” “Landscapes?” Hans Castorp asked. Circumstances contributed to his laconic, condescending tone. “As many as you like,” the director replied with embarrassed bravado. “Landscapes, still lifes, animals—a fellow like me shrinks from absolutely nothing.”

“But no portraits?”

“A portrait or two has probably slipped in now and then. Do you want to commission me for one?” “Ha, ha, no. But it would be very kind of you to show us your paintings if the opportunity should ever arise.”

Joachim, too, after first gazing at his cousin in astonishment, hastened to assure the director that it would indeed be very kind of him.

Behrens was so pleased and flattered that he was almost ebullient. He even turned red with delight, and by now his eyes seemed close to shedding actual tears. “Gladly, gladly!” he cried. “With greatest pleasure! Right here on the spot, if you’d like. Come along, come with me, I’ll brew us some Turkish coffee at my diggings.” And he took each young man by the arm and pulled them from the bench; linking arms with both, he now led them down the gravel path toward his residence, which, as they knew, was located in the nearby northwest wing of the Berghof.

“I’ve tried something along that line myself on occasion in the past,” Hans Castorp declared. “You don’t say. The real thing in oils?”

“No, no, I never managed anything more than a watercolor or two. An occasional ship, a seascape, childish stuff. But I like to look at paintings, which is why I’ve taken this liberty.”

Joachim, in particular, felt somewhat relieved and enlightened by his cousin’s explanation for his startling curiosity—and it was more for his sake than the director’s that Hans Castorp had called attention to his own attempts as an artist. They arrived—but here was no splendid portal flanked by lanterns like the one at the end of the driveway on the other side of the building. A few semicircular steps led up to an oaken door, which the director opened with a latchkey, one of many on his key ring. His hand trembled as he did it; he was definitely nervous. They entered a vestibule where you

could hang your things, and Behrens placed his bowler on its hook. Once they were inside the short

corridor, which opened on both sides to the rooms of his small private residence and was separated from the rest of the building by a glass-paned door, he called for the maid and placed his order. Then with several jovial phrases of encouragement, he admitted his guests through one of the doors on the right.

Two rooms furnished in banal bourgeois style, one opening into the other and separated only by portieres, looked toward the valley: a dining room done in “antique German”; a combination living room and office, with sofa and chairs, bookcases and heavy wool carpets, a fraternity cap and crossed swords hung above a desk, plus a small smoking alcove, done in “Turkish” style. There were paintings everywhere, the director’s paintings—the visitors’ eyes at once began courteously to wander over them, ready to admire. The director’s departed spouse was conspicuously present, in several oils and also in a photograph on the desk. She was a thin, somewhat enigmatic blond in diaphanous garments, who always held her hands folded against her left shoulder—not firmly clasped, but with just the fingertips lying loosely interlaced—her eyes either directed heavenward or cast down, hidden under long lashes that stood out at an angle from the lids. But the late wife never looked straight ahead at her beholder. Otherwise, the paintings were mostly Alpine landscapes—mountains draped in snow and evergreen, mountains with peaks veiled in mist, and mountains whose crisp, sharp outlines stood out against a deep blue sky and betrayed the influence of Segantini. There were also other themes: Alpine dairy sheds, dewlapped cows standing or lying in sun-drenched pastures, a plucked hen among vegetables with its twisted neck dangling over one side of a table, floral arrangements, local mountain folk, and so on—all of them painted in a kind of brisk, dilettante style, with brash clumps of color that often looked as if they had been squeezed onto the canvas directly from the tube and must have taken a long time to dry. The technique occasionally proved effective at covering bad mistakes.

They moved along the walls as if at an exhibition, accompanied by the master of the house, who would now and then provide a title, but usually said nothing, displaying the proud apprehension of the artist, enjoying it all, letting his eyes rest on each work along with those of the strangers. The portrait of Clavdia Chauchat was hung in the living room, next to the window—Hans Castorp had spied it with one quick glance as he entered the room, although it bore only a very distant resemblance to her. He intentionally avoided the spot, keeping his companions pinned down in the dining room by pretending to admire a verdant view of the Sergi Valley with bluish glaciers in the background; well aware that he was in command, he first steered them into the Turkish smoking alcove, which he likewise gave a thorough examination amid much praise, and then surveyed the

wall on the entrance side of the living room, sometimes urging Joachim to join him in his

complimentary remarks. Finally he turned around and said with measured puzzlement, “Why, I know that face, don’t I?”

“Do you recognize her?” Behrens wanted to know.

“Certainly, I’m surely not mistaken. That’s the lady from the Good Russian table, the one with the French name . . .”

“Correct. Chauchat. I’m pleased you see the likeness.”

“The lady as she lives and breathes,” Hans Castorp lied, less out of cunning than out of an awareness that if everything had been as it should be, he ought not to have recognized the lady at all, any more than Joachim had recognized her on his own—dear old outfoxed Joachim, for whom a light now went on, the real light and not the false one Hans Castorp had lit for him.

“Ah, yes,” Joachim said softly and set about helping Hans Castorp study the painting. His cousin had certainly known how to recover damages for having been kept away from the gathering on the veranda.

It was a bust in half-profile—somewhat smaller than life-size, with the neck bared, a veil draped across the shoulders and breasts—set in a wide, black, beveled frame edged in gold nearest the canvas. Frau Chauchat looked ten years older than she was—as usually happens when amateurs try to capture character. There was too much red in the face, the nose was very badly drawn, the hair color was wrong, almost that of straw, the mouth was askew; the special fascination of her features had not been brought out, was not even apparent, but only coarsened by exaggeration. The whole thing was a rather botched job, the portrait only vaguely corresponding to the model. But Hans Castorp was not all that scrupulous about the issue of resemblance. The relationship between Frau Chauchat as a person and this piece of canvas was enough for him. The painting was intended to be a depiction of Frau Chauchat, she had sat as the model for it here in this apartment—that sufficed for him.

“As she lives and breathes,” he repeated.

“Don’t say that,” the director objected. “I did a clumsy job. I don’t flatter myself that I handled it all that well, although I suppose we had twenty sessions at least. How can one handle an outlandish face like that? At first you think it will be easy to capture it, what with the swing of those hyperborean cheekbones and those eyes that look like cracks in a muffin. Yes, there is something special about her. You get the details right, and bungle the larger effect. A regular puzzle box. Do you know her?  It might be better not to have her sit, but to paint her from memory. You know her, then, do you?” “Yes—no—only superficially, the way one knows people here.”

“Well, I know her more internally, subcutaneously, if you get my drift. From her blood pressure,

tissue firmness, and lymph circulation, I pretty much know what’s what with her—and for good reason. The surface offers greater difficulties. Have you ever noticed the way she walks? Her face is just like her walk. She’s a slinker. Take her eyes, for example—I’m not talking about the color, although that’s tricky, too. I mean their placement, their shape. There’s a slit in the lid, or so you think, and it’s on a slant. But that only seems to be the case. The deceptive thing is the epicanthic fold, or a variation on it, that you find among certain races, an extra piece of skin that begins at the flat-bridged nose common among such people and falls like a pleat across the lid down to the inner corner of the eye. But if you pull the skin back taut toward the bridge, their eye is just like ours. A titillating little mystery, but not all that worthy; by light of day, the epicanthic fold turns out to be an atavistic abnormality.”

“So that’s how it works,” Hans Castorp said. “I didn’t know that, but it’s always interested me what makes their eyes look like that.”

“A mirage, a deception,” the director confirmed. “If you simply draw it slanted and slit, all is lost. You have to handle it the same way that nature does, create an illusion within the illusion, so to speak, and for that, of course, you need to know all about the epicanthic fold. Knowledge never hurts. Do you see the skin, the epidermis here? Is it lifelike, or not especially so, in your opinion?” “Terribly,” Hans Castorp said, “terribly lifelike skin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen skin so well painted. It’s as if you can see the pores.” And he brushed the edge of his hand across the skin left exposed by her décolletage, which stood out very white against the exaggerated redness of the face, like a part of the body never exposed to light, evoking, whether intentionally or not, an even stronger sensation of nakedness—a rather crude effect in any case.

All the same, Hans Castorp’s praise was justified. Where her tender, though hardly meager bosom lost itself under the bluish drape, its subdued shimmer of white seemed taken from nature. The bare skin had obviously been painted with feeling, and despite a certain aura of sweetness, the artist had been able to endow it with scientific reality and lifelike accuracy. He had used the grainy surface of the canvas under the oils to suggest its uneven texture, particularly where the collarbone delicately protruded. He had not failed to include a mole just where the breasts began, and between their soft swellings there was a hint of pale bluish veins. Under the beholder’s gaze, a barely perceptible shiver of sensitivity seemed to pass over this naked flesh—or to put it more boldly, you could imagine that you saw perspiration, the invisible vapors of life, rising from the flesh, that if you were to press your lips against the surface, you would smell a human body, not paint and varnish. We are simply describing Hans Castorp’s impressions—but although he was especially receptive to such

impressions, it should be noted that in fact Frau Chauchat’s bared skin was by far the most

remarkable piece of painting in the apartment.

His hands in his trouser pockets, Director Behrens rolled back and forth between the balls of his feet and his heels, regarding his work along with his visitors. “That pleases me, coming from a fellow artist,” he said. “It pleases me that you see it. It’s a good thing—certainly doesn’t hurt—if a man knows something about what’s what under the epidermis and can paint what cannot be seen. Or in other words, when a man’s relationship with nature is something different from the, let us say, purely lyrical. When, for example, he’s a part-time physician, physiologist, and anatomist with some intimate knowledge of life’s undergarments. It can work to his advantage. Say what you like, it is a certain plus. That human hide there is a matter of science. You can examine it under a microscope for organic accuracy. And you’ll see not just the horny and mucous layers of the outer skin, but along with them, the imagined reticular layer with its sebaceous glands, sweat glands, blood vessels, papillae. And beneath that is the layer of fat, the upholstery, you know—the foundation of fat cells that creates the gorgeous female form. And what a man thinks and imagines, that gets expressed, too. Those things flow into his hand and have their effect. It isn’t there and yet it is—and that makes for lifelikeness.”

The conversation stirred Hans Castorp’s blood—his brow was flushed, his eyes had an eager glint; he had so much to say that he did not know how he should begin to reply. First, he wanted to move the painting from the shadowy wall where it was hanging to some more favorable spot; second, he definitely wanted to develop what the director had said about the nature of skin, a topic in which he had an immense interest; but third, he wanted to try to express more general and philosophical ideas, which were also matters of high priority.

Laying both hands on the portrait to lift it off its hook, he began hastily by saying, “Yes indeed, yes indeed. Very good, that is important. What I want to say is . . . that is, you yourself said, Director Behrens, ‘when a man’s relationship with nature is something different.’ You said it’s good if there is something else besides the lyrical—I believe that was your word—or artistic relationship. In short, it helps to regard nature from another viewpoint, the medical viewpoint, for instance. That is terribly relevant—pardon me, sir—I mean, you are so colossally right about that, because we are not dealing with two totally different viewpoints and relationships, but, more precisely, with the same one in both instances, with mere variations on a theme. With shades of meaning, I mean, with modifications of the same general concern, of which artistic activity is merely one part, one form of expression, if I may put it that way. Yes, pardon me, I’m just taking the painting down, there’s absolutely no light here. I’ll move it over to the sofa there, you’ll see whether it doesn’t look quite different. I mean to

say: what is medical science concerned with? I understand nothing about it, of course, but its main

concern is with human beings. And jurisprudence, the making and executing of laws? With human beings as well. And philology, which is usually tied up with some pedagogic profession? And theology, the care of souls, the pastoral office? All of them with human beings. They are all merely shades of one and the same important, primary interest: that is, the interest in human beings. In a word, they are all humanistic professions. And if you want to study them, you first learn classical languages as the basis, do you not? As part of your formal training, as they say. You are wondering, perhaps, why I am speaking about all this, since I am merely a realist, a technician. But not long ago I was lying in my rest cure, and I thought: it’s really marvelous, a marvelous arrangement, the way every humanistic profession has the same formal basis, is grounded in the idea of form, of beautiful form, you know—which adds an extra nobility to it all, and emotion, too, in a way and . . . courtesy— so that interest in a given topic becomes something almost chivalrous. I mean—I’m most likely expressing myself very poorly, but one can see that matters of the intellect and beauty, or in other words, science and art, blend together because they have actually always been just one thing; so that artistic activity definitely belongs among the sciences, as a kind of fifth faculty if you like—is no less a humanistic profession, insofar as, to repeat myself, its main theme or concern is human beings. You must admit I’m right. Back when I was making youthful attempts at it, I painted only ships and water, but to my eye, portraiture will always be the most fascinating part of painting, because it has the human being as its subject. Which was why I asked right off whether you, sir, had done anything in that line. Wouldn’t it hang much, much better here?” Both Behrens and Joachim looked at him to see if he was not ashamed of himself for these impromptu babblings. But Hans Castorp was much too involved in his topic to feel any embarrassment. He held the painting against the wall behind the sofa and demanded they tell him if it was not considerably better lit there. At this moment, the maid entered with a tray of hot water, a spirit lamp, and coffee cups.

Pointing her in the direction of the smoking alcove, the director said, “Then your primary interest really ought to be more in sculpture. Yes, right, it does have more light there, of course—if you think it can tolerate that much . . . In sculpture, that is, because it deals in the purest, most exclusive form with human beings in general. But we mustn’t let our water boil away.”

“That’s very true, about sculpture,” Hans Castorp said as they moved away; and forgetting to rehang the painting or even to set it aside, he carried it with him, trailing it behind him into the adjoining area. “Certainly the humanist element is revealed most clearly in a Greek Venus or some athlete. When you stop and consider, it is, after all, the true, genuine humanist form of art.”

“Well, as far as little Chauchat goes,” the director remarked, “she’s probably more an object for

painting. I’m afraid Phidias or that other fellow whose name ends in that Hebrew-sounding way would have wrinkled up their noses at her sort of physiognomy. What are you doing there? Dragging my daubings around with you?”

“Yes, thanks, I’ll just put it here against the leg of my chair—it’s fine there for the moment. The Greek sculptors were not very interested in the head, it was more a matter of the body; perhaps that was the real humanistic element in fact. And the female form, that’s actually fat, did you say?”

“It’s fat,” the director said with finality as he closed a cupboard from which he had extracted the utensils for brewing coffee: a cylindrical Turkish mill, a long-handled pot, a divided bowl for sugar and ground coffee—all of brass. “Palmitin, stearin, olein,” he said, shaking coffee beans from a tin box into the mill as he began to turn the crank. “As you gentlemen can see, I make it all myself, from scratch. It tastes twice as good   What did you think it was? Ambrosia, perhaps?”

“No, I already knew it on my own. It’s just strange to hear it,” Hans Castorp said.

They were seated in one corner, between the door and window, in front of a low bamboo table that held a brass tray with Oriental designs, on which the coffee apparatus had been set in the midst of various smoking utensils—Joachim beside Behrens on an ottoman furnished with an abundance of silk pillows, Hans Castorp in a club chair on rollers, against which he had leaned Frau Chauchat’s portrait. A bright carpet lay at their feet. The director spooned coffee and sugar into the long-handled pot, poured water over them, and let the liquid come to a boil over the spirit lamp. It foamed up brown in the little onion-pattern cups. When they took a sip, it proved as strong as it was sweet. “Your form is, too,” Behrens said. “Your sculptural outline, if one can speak of it that way, is fat, too, of course, if not to the same extent as a woman’s. For our sort, fat normally is only a twentieth of total body weight; a sixteenth for women. Without our subcutaneous cell structure we’d all end up looking like some sort of wrinkly fungus. The fat disappears with age, of course, resulting in the unaesthetic sags we all know so well. The fat is thickest around the female breast and abdomen, the upper thighs—in short, everywhere you find a little something of interest for your hand and heart. And the soles of the feet, they’re both fat and ticklish.”

Hans Castorp rolled the cylindrical coffee mill between his palms. Like all the furnishings in the room, its origin was probably more Indian or Persian than Turkish—certainly the style of its brass engraving, the surface pattern shiny against the dull background, suggested as much. Hans Castorp studied the design, without making much of it at first. When he suddenly did make something of it, he blushed.

“Yes, that’s a tool for single gentlemen,” Behrens said. “That’s why I keep it locked up, you know. It

might ruin my little kitchen fay’s eyes. You’ll suffer no further harm, I’m sure. It was presented to me as a gift by a patient, an Egyptian princess, who honored us with her presence for one brief year. You see, the pattern is repeated on each of the items. Droll, eh?”

“It’s quite remarkable,” Hans Castorp replied. “No, no, it doesn’t bother me, of course. One can even view it in dead earnest if one likes—although, after all, it’s not exactly appropriate on a coffee service. The ancients are said to have decorated their coffins with things like this on occasion. The obscene and the sacred were more or less one and the same for them.”

“Well, as far as the princess goes,” Behrens said, “she was, I think, given more to the former. I also have some very lovely cigarettes she gave me, extra-fine quality, the sort you bring out on tip-top occasions.” And he fetched a bright green box from the cupboard to offer them one. Joachim declined with a click of his heels. Hans Castorp helped himself and smoked the unusually large, wide cigarette, imprinted with a golden sphinx—and it was indeed wonderful.

“If you would be so kind, Director Behrens,” he requested, “do tell us something more about skin.” He had picked up Frau Chauchat’s portrait again, balancing it on one knee. Leaning back in his chair, the cigarette between his lips, he regarded it now. “Not specifically about the fatty layer—we’ve learned what that’s about. But about human skin in general, since you’re so good at painting it.” “About skin? Are you interested in physiology?”

“Very much. Yes, I’ve always taken a great deal of interest in it. The human body—I’ve always had a singular fondness for it. Sometimes I’ve asked myself if I shouldn’t have become a doctor. In a certain sense, I think, I would not have done badly at it. Because if a man is interested in the body, he is also interested in illness—particularly in that—isn’t he? Not that it means all that much, by the way. I could have become any number of things. I could have become a clergyman, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sometimes I’ve had the fleeting impression that I would actually have been in my element there.”

“But then why did you become an engineer?”

“Purely by chance. External circumstances tipped the scale more or less.”

“Well, then—skin, you say? What should I tell you about your sensory envelope? It is your external brain, you see. Ontogenetically speaking, it has the same origin as the apparatus for the so-called higher sensory organs up there in your skull. You should know that the central nervous system is simply a slight modification of the external skin. Among lower animals there is no differentiation whatever between central and peripheral—they smell and taste with their skin. Just imagine it—the

skin is their only sensory organ. Must be quite a cozy sensation, when one thinks about it. Whereas

with highly differentiated beings like you and me, the skin’s sole aspiration is to be tickled. It is an organ that merely wards off danger, sends up signals, though it does keep a damned good eye out for anything that gets too near the body. It even sticks its tactile apparatus out beyond itself—as hair, body hair, which is nothing but keratinized skin that can sense something approaching before the skin itself is touched. Just among us, it’s even possible that the skin’s task of protecting and defending us may go beyond the merely physical. Do you know how you blush or turn pale?”

“Not precisely.”

“Yes, well, frankly, we don’t know all that precisely ourselves, at least not when it comes to blushing for shame. The process has not been totally explained, since so far we have been unable to locate dilating muscles along the blood vessels that are activated by the vasomotor nerves. Why the cock’s comb actually swells—or whatever other bombastic examples one might mention—remains a mystery, so to speak, particularly since psychological influences are involved. We assume that there are connections between the cerebral cortex and the vascular center in the medulla. And in response to certain stimuli—if you are terribly embarrassed, for instance—both these connections and the vascular nerves to the face come into play, which causes the blood vessels to dilate and fill up, so that you get a head as red as a turkey-cock’s—and there you are all swollen with blood till you can hardly see a thing. Whereas in other cases—God knows what awaits you, something perilously beautiful perhaps—the blood vessels of the skin contract, and the skin turns cold and pale and shrinks, and your emotions make you look like a corpse, with leaden eye sockets and a white, pinched nose. But all the while the sympathetic nerves keep the heart thumping right along.”

“So that’s what happens,” Hans Castorp said.

“More or less. Those are all reactions, you see. But since all reactions and reflexes, by their very nature, serve some purpose, we physiologists are almost forced to conclude that such secondary phenomena due to psychological factors are actually meant to protect the body, are defense mechanisms, much like goose bumps. Do you know how you get goose bumps?”

“Can’t say I know that exactly, either.”

“That’s a display put on by the skin’s sebaceous glands, which give off the skin’s oils, a kind of protein-rich, fatty secretion, you know—not exactly appetizing, but it keeps the skin supple, so that it doesn’t dry out and crack or break and remains pleasant to the touch. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to touch human skin without greasy cholesterol. The sebaceous glands have little muscles that can make the glands stand up erect, and when they do that, your skin feels like a rasp— just like the lad in the tale when the princess dumped a pail of minnows over him. And if the stimulus

is very strong, the hair follicles become erect, too—and your hair stands on end, on your head and

all over your body, like a porcupine defending itself. So now you can say you’ve learned what it means to have your flesh creep.”

“Oh my,” Hans Castorp said, “I’ve already learned that numerous times. I get the shivers rather easily in fact, on all sorts of occasions. What amazes me is that these glands go erect under such a variety of circumstances. When someone runs a stylus over glass, you’ll get goose bumps, but it can also suddenly appear at the sound of especially beautiful music. And when I first took communion at my confirmation, it came in waves—the tingling and prickling just wouldn’t stop. It’s really strange what all puts those little muscles into motion.”

“Yes,” Behrens said, “a stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn’t give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands stand up erect.”

“Director Behrens,” Hans Castorp said, studying the portrait across his knees, “I wanted to come back to what you were saying about the inner processes, the circulation of lymph and such. What is that about? I would love to hear more about it. Lymph circulation, for example, interests me a great deal—if you would be so kind.”

“I can well believe it,” Behrens replied. “Lymph is the most refined, intimate, and delicate mechanism in the human body. I presume that’s what you had in mind in asking. People always talk about the blood and its mysteries, that special juice, as it’s called. But the lymph, now that’s the juice of juices, the essence, you see, the blood’s own milk, a very rarefied liquid—a fatty diet will make it look just like milk, in fact.” And in high spirits, employing his special jargon, he began to describe how blood—turned crimson as an opera cape from respiration and digestion, saturated with gases, laden with the slag of waste, brewed out of fat, protein, iron, salt, and sugar, forced through arteries at a temperature of 98.6 degrees by the pumping heart, and keeping both metabolism and animal warmth, in a word, sweet life itself, running in our bodies—began to describe, then, how blood does not enter cells directly, but under pressure sweats an extract, a milky fluid, through the arterial walls and into the tissues, so that it oozes in everywhere, a histological fluid that fills every little crack, stretching and expanding elastic cell tissue. That was what was called cellular tension, or turgor, and in turn turgor was what caused the lymph, after it had exchanged materials with the cells and tenderly rinsed them clean, to be forced back into the lymphatic vessels, the vasa lymphatica, and from there into the blood—a liter and a half of it per day. He described the lymphatic vessels, the system of arteries and absorbent tubes; spoke about how breast milk was formed from lymph collected from the legs, abdomen, chest, one arm, and one side of the head; then went on to talk about how at various points in the lymph vessels there were delicate filters called lymph glands, located

along the neck, in the armpits, at the crooks of the elbows, the backs of the knees, and similar

intimate, sensitive spots on the body. “Swelling can occur at such points,” Behrens explained. “That’s what got us started on all this—thickening of the lymph glands, here and there, at the back of the knee or the crook of the elbow for instance, rather like the tumors associated with dropsy. And there is always a reason for them, though hardly a welcome one. Under certain circumstances, it may arouse more than a suspicion of tubercular congestion in the lymphatic vessels.”

Hans Castorp said nothing. “Yes,” he remarked softly after a pause, “it’s true. I could easily have become a doctor. The formation of breast milk . . .the lymph of the legs—it all interests me very much. The body!” he suddenly cried in a rapturous outburst. “The flesh! The human body! What is it? What  is it made of? Tell us now, this very afternoon, Director Behrens. Tell us, for once and for all, in precise terms, so that we may know.”

“It’s made of water,” Behrens replied. “So you’re interested in organic chemistry, too, are you? The human body consists of water for the most part. Nothing better, nothing worse than water—nothing to get excited about. The dry stuff is a mere twenty-five percent of the whole, twenty percent being ordinary egg white, or protein, if you want a little more noble word for it, to which just a little fat and salt is then added. That’s about all.”

“But what about protein? What is it?”

“Various elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur. Sometimes phosphorus, too. Your curiosity is becoming quite excessive, I must say. Some proteins are bonded with carbohydrates, mainly glucose and starch. As we age, muscles grow tough, because of increased collagen in the connective tissue—that’s the glue, you see, the chief component of bones and cartilage. What else should I tell you? There’s a protein in muscle plasma called myosin that coagulates in the muscle fiber and causes rigor mortis.”

“Oh, right, when the body goes stiff after death,” Hans Castorp said cheerfully. “Very good, very good. And then comes the autopsy, the anatomy of the grave.”

“But of course. And you’ve put it very nicely. Then everything gets a lot more diffuse. We evaporate, so to speak. Just think of all that water. All those other ingredients are not very stable without life. Decomposition takes over, and they resolve into simpler chemical compounds, into inorganic matter.”

“Decomposition, corruption,” Hans Castorp said, “but that’s really just a kind of burning off, isn’t it? It all binds with oxygen, if I recall.”

“Absolutely correct, oxidation.” “And life?”

“That, too. That, too, my lad. That’s oxidation, too. Life is primarily the oxidation of cell protein,

that’s where our pretty animal warmth comes from, of which some people have a bit too much. Ah yes, life is dying—there’s no sense in trying to sugarcoat it—une destruction organique, as some Frenchman once called it in that flippant way the Frenchies have. And it smells of dying, too, life does. And if we sometimes think otherwise, it’s because we have a natural bias in the matter.” “And so if someone is interested in life,” Hans Castorp said, “it’s death he’s particularly interested in. Isn’t that so?”

“Well, there’s a certain difference all the same. Life means that the form is retained even though matter is being transformed.”

“But why retain the form?” Hans Castorp asked.

“Why? Now listen here—there’s nothing the least bit humanist about a comment like that.” “Form is namby-pamby nonsense.”

“You’re in very bold and daring form today, yourself. Literally kicking over the traces. But I’m fading quickly here,” the director said. “I’m beginning to feel melancholy,” he added, rubbing his eyes with his gigantic hands. “It just comes over me, you see. I’ve joined you in a cup of coffee, and certainly it tasted good—but suddenly it just comes over me and I get melancholy. You gentlemen will have to excuse me. It was quite a special occasion. I found it great sport.”

The cousins had sprung to their feet. They apologized, blaming themselves for keeping the director so long. But he reassured them the contrary was the case. Hans Castorp hastened to return Frau Chauchat’s portrait to the adjoining room and hung it in its place again. They did not go back to their quarters by way of the garden. Behrens showed them the way through the building, letting them out through the glass-paned door. In the melancholy mood that had suddenly come over him, his neck vertebrae seemed to protrude even more than usual. He kept blinking his pop-eyes, and the skew of his moustache, caused by that hitch of his upper lip, gave him a mournful look.

As they walked along the corridor and started up the stairs, Hans Castorp said, “Now admit it—that was a good idea of mine.”

“It was a change of pace at any rate,” Joachim replied. “And you two certainly did use the occasion to discuss a lot of things, I must say. It was all a little haphazard for me. But it’s high time we went off to our rest cure—twenty minutes at most until tea. You’ll find it a little namby-pamby of me to insist on it, I suppose—now that you’ve taken to kicking over the traces. But then you don’t need your rest cure as badly as I need mine.”

RESEARCH

And so what had to happen happened, and Hans Castorp experienced what he would never have dreamed possible only a short while before. Winter was upon them, the local winter, with which Joachim was already familiar, because it had been raging at full force when he had arrived the previous year. Hans Castorp, however, had been somewhat afraid of its onslaught, although he knew he was definitely well equipped for it. His cousin tried to calm him.

“You mustn’t imagine it as all that grim,” he said. “It’s not exactly the Arctic. You don’t feel the cold that much, because the air is so dry and the wind is still. If you wrap yourself up well, you can stay out on the balcony until deep into the night without freezing. It’s all about temperature inversions above the fog line—it gets warmer at higher altitudes. People didn’t really know about that before. It feels colder, in fact, when it rains. But you have your sleeping bag now, and they’ll even turn on the heat a bit if worse comes to worst.”

And one certainly couldn’t have called it a sneak attack or a violent assault; winter arrived gently, so that at first it did not look all that different from many days that summer had brought with it. For two days the wind was from the south, the sun bore down, the valley seemed shorter and narrower somehow, the background of the Alps at its entrance looked near and stark. Then clouds pushed in from the northeast across Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn, and the valley turned dark. Heavy rains followed. Then it wasn’t just rain, but a whitish-gray mixture of snow and rain, and finally just snow that came in squalls that filled the whole valley. The snow continued for several days, and in time the temperature had fallen to the point where the snow could no longer melt. It was wet snow, but it stuck, and the valley now lay under a thin, damp, tattered garment of white that made the rugged evergreen slopes stand out black in contrast. The dining hall radiators were lukewarm by now. That was at the beginning of November, around All Souls’, and it was nothing new. It had been much like this in August, and Hans Castorp had long since disabused himself of the idea that snow was the prerogative of winter. No matter what the weather, winter was always in view, if only at a distance— remnants and traces of snow lay glistening in crevices and fissures of the craggy Rhätikon chain that seemed to block the entrance to the valley, and a constant snowy salute came from mountain majesties far to the south. But now both snow and temperature kept falling. The sky, low and pale- gray above the valley, dissolved into relentless flakes that fell without sound and in immoderate, almost disquieting abundance. It grew colder by the hour. Then came a morning when Hans Castorp found it was forty-eight degrees in his room, and the next morning it was only forty-three degrees. Winter’s icy chill had set in—in moderation, but it held. The temperature at night had been below freezing, but now it stayed there all day, from morning till evening; and with only brief interruptions, the snow continued a fourth, a fifth, a seventh day. Snow began to accumulate in earnest and present

difficulties. Both the path to the bench beside the water trough and the driveway to the valley were

kept shoveled clear, but were so narrow that there was no room for someone to move aside. When people met, one party had to step into the snowbank, sinking in up to the knee. All day a horse led by a man at its halter pulled a heavy stone snow-roller through the streets of the resort below; and what looked like an old-fashioned postal carriage on runners, with a plow mounted up front to push great masses of white to each side, commuted between the resort and Davos-Dorf, as the settlement to the north was known. The world—the high, remote, narrow world of the people up here— appeared padded and wrapped under heavy furs, not a post or pillar without its white bonnet. The stairs to the Berghof’s main door had vanished and were replaced by a ramp; everywhere massive, comically shaped pillows weighed down the boughs of pine, sliding off now and then in one great mass and bursting in a cloud of white mist that drifted off among the tree trunks. The mountains all around were snow-covered—a rugged blanket on the lower slopes, a softer layer across peaks jutting in various shapes above the tree line. The days were dim, the sun visible only as a wan glow behind the veil of gray. But the snow provided indirect, gentle light—a milky luster that suited this world and its people, even if noses were red under white or brightly colored woolen caps.

At all seven tables in the dining hall, the onset of winter, the “season” in these regions, was the major topic of conversation. A great many tourists and athletes, it was said, had already arrived, filling the hotels in Dorf and Platz. The snow accumulation was estimated at two feet, its consistency perfect for skiing. Across the way people were hard at work on the bobsled run—from the top of the northwest slope of Schatzalp to the valley below—and it was expected to be open within a few days; that was, if a warm foehn wind did not spoil everything. People were looking forward to the activities that healthy guests would soon be pursuing again in the valley below—organized races and contests, which they all planned to attend, even if it meant breaking the rules and playing hooky from rest cure. There was a new sport, Hans Castorp learned, an invention from the north called skijoring, a race in which contestants on skis were pulled by horses. That was worth playing hooky for. People talked about Christmas, too.

Christmas! No, Hans Castorp had not even given it a thought until now. He had found it easy to talk or write letters about his doctor’s discovery and having to spend the winter here with Joachim. But that also meant, as was now evident, that he would spend Christmas here, and without a doubt there was something unsettling about the idea, for he had never once spent the holidays anywhere but at home, in the bosom of his family. Good God—so that was part of the bargain, too. But he was no longer a child. Joachim seemed to have no trouble with the notion, had resigned himself to it without

whining—and after all, Christmas had surely been celebrated around the world under a great variety

of circumstances.

All the same, it seemed to him they were hurrying things, talking about Christmas even before the first day of Advent—it was still a good six weeks away. But people leaped right over those six weeks, devoured them there in the dining hall—a mental procedure that Hans Castorp had learned something about all on his own, although he was not yet used to practicing it with the cool grace of some of the old-timers among his fellow patients. Such junctures in the course of the year seemed to give them a hook to hang on to, functioned like a piece of gymnastic equipment for vaulting nimbly over the empty intervals in between. They were all feverish, with accelerated metabolisms, the whole physical organism working at a faster, augmented pace—which may well have had something to do with the way they drove time like a herd before them. He would not have been surprised if they had regarded Christmas as already over and started talking about New Year and Mardi Gras. But the people in the Berghof dining hall were certainly not so flippant and unsteady as all that. They pulled up short at Christmas—it was cause for worry, for racking one’s brains. They discussed the communal gift that, following an old institutional custom, would be presented to Director Behrens on Christmas Eve and for which a collection was being started. The previous year he had been given a traveling bag, according to the report of those who had spent more than one year here. There were advocates now of a new operating table, an easel, a fur-lined overcoat, a rocking chair, an ivory stethoscope with some sort of “inlay.” And when asked his opinion, Settembrini recommended a lexicographic work currently in preparation, entitled Sociology of Suffering; but the only person to second this suggestion was a bookdealer who had recently joined Fräulein Kleefeld’s table. There was as yet no consensus. There were difficulties in coming to an agreement with the Russian guests. The collection was now split in two—the Muscovites declaring they wanted to present Behrens a gift of their own. Frau Stöhr was in a state of terrible upset for several days because of a sum of money— ten francs—that she had been foolish enough to lend Frau Iltis to contribute, but which that lady had “forgotten” to repay. She had “forgotten” it—Frau Stöhr used a wide range of calibrated emphases when speaking the word, all of them displaying her profoundest disbelief in such forgetfulness, which apparently was weathering the storm of the many little innuendoes and delicate proddings that Frau Stöhr assured everyone she had employed. On several occasions, Frau Stöhr waived all claims, stating she would forgive Frau Iltis the debt. “I’ll pay for both myself and her,” she said. “Fine, the disgrace won’t be mine.” But at last she hit upon a way out, which she then shared with her tablemates, much to their general amusement. She had “management” refund her the ten francs

and add the sum to Frau Iltis’s bill. And with that, the reluctant debtor had been outfoxed and at

least that particular matter was settled.

It had stopped snowing. The overcast broke here and there; leaden-gray clouds parted to reveal glimpses of the sun, whose rays lent a bluish hue to the landscape. Then the sky turned clear. A bright, pure frost reigned, winter’s splendor settled over mid-November, and the panorama beyond the arches of the balcony was magnificent—snow-powdered forests, ravines filled with soft white, a glistening sunlit valley under a radiant blue sky. And of an evening, when the almost circular moon appeared, the world turned magical and wondrous—flickering crystals and glittering diamonds flung far and wide. The forests stood out black against white. The regions of the sky beyond the reach of moonlight were dark and embroidered with stars. The sharp, precise, intense shadows of houses, trees, and telegraph poles cast on the sparkling surface looked more real and significant than the objects themselves. Within a few hours after sunset, the temperature sank to twenty degrees, then seventeen degrees. Its natural squalor hidden, the world seemed to be under a spell of icy purity, trapped inside a fantastic dream of fatal enchantment.

Hans Castorp stayed out on his balcony, looking down on the bewitched valley until late into the night, even though Joachim went back in around ten, or a little after. His splendid lounge chair with its three cushions and neck roll had been pulled up close to the wooden railing, topped along its full length by a little pillow of snow; on the white table at his side stood a lighted electric lamp, a pile of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the “evening milk” that was served to all the residents of the Berghof in their rooms at nine each night and into which Hans Castorp would pour a shot of cognac to make it more palatable. By now he was availing himself of every possible means of protection against the cold, the whole paraphernalia. The fur-lined sleeping bag he had purchased in an appropriate shop down in town was buttoned all the way up his chest, and he had ritually wrapped himself in his two camel-hair blankets. He wore a short fur jacket over his winter suit, had a woolen cap on his head, felt boots on his feet, and thickly lined gloves on his hands, although those did not prevent his fingers from turning numb.

What kept him out there so long, until midnight and even later (long after the Bad Russian couple had left the adjacent balcony), was in part the magic of the winter night, particularly since until eleven it was interwoven with music drifting up, now near, now far, from the valley—but primarily it was languor and excitement, both at once and in combination: the languor and weary inertia of his body and the busy excitement of a mind that could find no rest in its preoccupation with the new and fascinating studies the young man had recently taken up. The weather was hard on him, the frost exacted a toll on his physical organism. He ate a great deal, attacking the sumptuous Berghof

meals—a roast beef course followed by a roast goose course—with an immense appetite not all that

uncommon here, particularly in winter it seemed. At the same time he was subject to fits of drowsiness, so that whether by broad daylight or on moonlit evenings he would often drop off as he thumbed through his books (of which more later), and after a few minutes of unconsciousness, resume his research where he had left off. And when he and Joachim would take their constitutionals in the snow, their lively conversations exhausted him—and he tended here, more than ever had been the case down in the flatlands, to get caught up in his own hasty, unrestrained, even loose chatter. Shivering and dizzy, he would be overcome with a kind of numb intoxication that left his head flushed and hot. Since the onset of winter, his fever chart had been curving upward, and Director Behrens had mentioned something about injections that he liked to give for chronic high temperature and which two-thirds of the guests, including Joachim, regularly received. But Hans Castorp was certain his body was generating increased warmth because of the mental excitement and turmoil that kept him sitting in his lounge chair until very late every sparkling, frosty night. Indeed, the books he was reading with such fascination suggested much the same explanation.

Quite a bit of reading went on at the International Sanatorium Berghof, both in the common lounging areas and on private balconies—this was particularly true of newcomers and short-termers, since residents of many months or even years had long since learned how to ravage time without diverting or employing their minds, had become virtuosi at putting time behind them, and declared openly that only clumsy bunglers in the art needed a book to hang on to. At most they might leave a book lying on their lap or within reach on a table—that sufficed for them to feel their reading needs were taken care of. The sanatorium library was a polyglot affair with many illustrated works—an expanded version of the sort of thing that serves to entertain patients in a dentist’s waiting room— and offered its services free of charge. People exchanged novels from the lending library down in Platz. Now and then a book or publication would appear that everyone fought over, and even those who had given up reading would grab for it, with only pretended disinterest. At the period we are describing here, The Art of Seduction, a badly printed booklet that Herr Albin had introduced, was making the rounds. It was translated almost word for word from the French, with even the original syntax perfectly preserved, lending a certain demeanor and titillating elegance to its exposition of a philosophy of physical love and debauchery, all in a spirit of worldly, life-affirming paganism. Frau Stöhr had soon read it and found it “stunning.” Frau Magnus—the woman who was losing protein— supported her unconditionally. Her husband, the brewer, claimed personally to have profited from reading it, but regretted that his wife had imbibed, since that sort of thing only “spoiled” women and gave them immodest ideas. His remarks significantly increased demand for the publication. Two

ladies from the lower common lounging area, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrialist, and a

certain widow Hessenfeld from Berlin, both of them recent October arrivals, became involved in a rather unedifying scene after supper; indeed they came to blows and one of them began screaming hysterically (it might have been Redisch, but could just as easily have been Hessenfeld), and finally, simply sick with rage, had to be taken to her room—all because each claimed she was first in line for the book. Hans Castorp observed the incident from his balcony. Young people were quicker to get hold of the tract than patients of more advanced years. They would study it, sometimes in groups, up in their rooms after supper. Hans Castorp watched the lad with the saltcellar fingernail pass it on to a young lady with blond hair parted neatly in the middle—Fränzchen Oberdank, a lady’s companion and housemaid, who was not all that ill and had only recently been brought up here by her mother.

Perhaps there were exceptions, people who spent the hours of their rest cure with some sort of serious intellectual pursuit, some rewarding study of one topic or another, even if they did so only to maintain contact with life on the plains or to give a little weight to time, a deeper draft to its keel, and prevent it from becoming pure time and nothing else. Perhaps besides Herr Settembrini struggling to eradicate suffering and honor-loving Joachim poring over his Russian textbooks, there were here and there people who did likewise, if not among the denizens of the common lounging areas—which was indeed very unlikely—then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp, at least, was inclined to believe it was so. As for himself, once he found that Ocean Steamships no longer had anything to say to him, he had requested that, along with his winter gear, his family send him a few books pertinent to his profession, works on engineering science and the technology of shipbuilding. These volumes, however, now lay neglected, replaced by others from quite a different department, textbooks from a field of study in which young Hans Castorp had developed a sudden interest. These were books on anatomy, physiology, and biology, written in various languages— German, French, and English—and sent him one day by the local bookdealer; evidently he had ordered them, on his own and without a word to anyone, while taking a walk down in Platz alone. (Joachim had had an appointment for an injection or was getting weighed that day.) His cousin was surprised to see them in Hans Castorp’s hands. They were expensive books, as scientific works always are. The prices were written both inside the cover and on the jackets. He asked Hans Castorp why, if he really wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them from the director, who surely had a fine selection of that sort of literature. But Hans Castorp replied that he wanted to own them himself—it was different reading a book that you owned. And besides, he loved to take his pencil

and underline at will. Joachim listened for hours to the sound coming from his cousin’s balcony: a

paper knife slipping through uncut pages.

The volumes were heavy, cumbersome. When reclining, Hans Castorp propped the lower edge on his chest or stomach, which hurt a little but was simply part of the bargain. His mouth hanging half- open, he would let his eyes glide down each learned page illuminated by the reddish light from his shaded lamp, though, if it had come to that, he could just as easily have read by the bright moonlight. His head would lower until his chin lay on his chest, and he would hold that pose awhile—lost in thought perhaps or musing in a doze—half-asleep, before lifting his head for the next page. While the moon followed its prescribed path across the high mountain valley glistening like crystal below, he would read, pursue his study of organized matter, of the characteristics of protoplasm, that self- sustaining, delicate substance that hovers intriguingly between synthesis and dissolution and whose basic forms have remained the same as when it first assumed rudimentary shape. He read with burning interest about life and its sacred, yet impure mystery.

What was life? No one knew. It was aware of itself the moment it became life, that much was certain—and yet did not know what it was. Consciousness, as sensitivity to stimuli, was undoubtedly aroused to some extent at even the lowest, most undeveloped stages of its occurrence; it was impossible to tie the emergence of consciousness to any particular point in life’s general or individual history—to link it, for instance, to the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animals had no nervous systems, let alone a cerebral cortex, and yet no one dared deny that they were capable of responding to stimuli. And you could anesthetize life, life itself, not just the special organs capable of the response that informs life, not just the nerves. You could temporarily suspend the responses of every speck of living matter, in both the plant and animal kingdoms, narcotize eggs and sperm with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself— ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.

What was life? No one knew. No one could pinpoint when it had emerged from nature and struck fire. Nothing in the realm of life was self-actuated or even poorly actuated from that point on. And yet life seemed to have actuated itself. If anything could be said about it, then, it was this: life’s structure had to be so highly developed that nothing like it could occur in the inanimate world. The distance between an amoeba—a pseudopod—and a vertebrate was minor, insignificant in

comparison to that between the simplest form of life and inorganic nature, which did not even

deserve to be called dead—because death was merely the logical negation of life. Between life and inanimate nature, however, was a yawning abyss, which research sought in vain to bridge. People endeavored to close that abyss with theories—it swallowed them whole, and was still not an inch less broad or deep. In the search for some link, scientists had stooped to the absurdity of hypothesizing living material with no structure, unorganized organisms, which if placed in a solution of protein would grow like crystals in a nutrient solution—whereas, in fact, organic differentiation was simultaneously the prerequisite and expression of all life, and no life-form could be proved that did not owe its existence to propagation by a parent. What jubilation had greeted the first primal slime fished from the sea’s deepest deeps—and what humiliation had followed. It turned out that they had mistaken a precipitate of gypsum for protoplasm. But to avoid one miracle (because it would be a miracle for life spontaneously to arise out of and return to the same stuff as inorganic matter), scientists had found it necessary to believe in another: archebiosis, that is, the slow formation of organic life from inorganic matter. And so they went about inventing transitional and intermediate stages, assuming the existence of organisms lower than any known form, but which themselves were the result of even more primal attempts by nature to create life—attempts that no one would ever see, that were submicroscopic in size, and whose hypothesized formation presupposed a previous synthesis of protein.

What was life, really? It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction. It was the existence of what, in actuality, has no inherent ability to exist, but only balances with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair. It was not matter, it was not spirit. It was something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above a waterfall, like a flame. But although it was not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and revulsion, it was matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without— existence in its lewd form. It was a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space. It was furtive, lascivious, sordid—nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature. Out of overcompensation for its own instability, yet governed by its own inherent laws of formation, a bloated concoction of water, protein, salt, and fats—what we call flesh—ran riot, unfolded, and took shape, achieving form, ideality, beauty, and yet all the while was the quintessence of sensuality and desire. This form and this beauty were not derived from the spirit, as in works of poetry and music, nor derived from some neutral material

both consumed by spirit and innocently embodying it, as is the case with the form and beauty of the

visual arts. Rather, they were derived from and perfected by substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh.

This was the image of life revealed to young Hans Castorp as he lay there preserving his body warmth in furs and woolens, looking down on the valley glistening in the frosty night, bright beneath the luster of a dead star. The image hovered out there in space, remote and yet as near as his senses— it was a body: dull, whitish flesh, steaming, redolent, sticky; its skin blemished with natural defects, blotches, pimples, discolorations, cracks, and hard, scaly spots, and covered with the delicate currents and whorls of rudimentary, downy lanugo. The body was leaning back, wrapped in the aura of its own vapors, detached from the coldness of the inanimate world, its head crowned with a cool, keratinous, pigmented substance that was a product of its own skin, its hands clasped behind the neck. Gazing out from under lowered lids, the eyes had a slanted look because of a racial variation in the formation of the lid; its mouth was half-open, its lips pouted slightly. Its weight was on one leg, so that flesh protruded where the bone of the supporting hip stuck out, while the relaxed leg was raised so that the knee bent a little to nestle against the inside of the supporting leg and the foot rested on just the toes. There the body stood, leaning charmingly, turning to smile at him, its radiant elbows spread wide in the dual symmetry of its limbs, of its corporeality. The night of its pubic region built a mystic triangle with the steaming pungent darkness of the armpits, just as the red epithelial mouth did with the eyes, or the red buds of the breast with the vertically elongated navel. Under the impetus of brain and of motor nerves extending from the spine, belly and rib cage stirred, the pleuroperitoneal cavity swelled and contracted; the breath, warmed and moistened by mucous membranes along the trachea and laden with secreted material, streamed out between the lips, now that oxygen had bonded with the hemoglobin in the blood deep in the air sacs of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body—with its mysterious symmetry of limbs, nourished by blood through a network of nerves, veins, arteries, capillaries, all oozing lymph; with its scaffold of bones, some of them tubes filled with marrow, some like blades, some like bulbs, some torqued vertebrae, but all originating in a gelatinous base that with the help of calcium salts and lime had grown firm enough to support the rest; with its joints made of tendons, cartilage, and slippery, well-oiled balls and sockets; with its more than two hundred muscles; with its central system of organs for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli; with its protective membranes, serous cavities, and glands pumping secretions; with its complicated interior, a network of pipes and crevices, including openings onto the world outside—understood that this self was a living entity of a higher order, far removed from those simple organisms that breathed, fed, even

thought, with just the surface of their bodies, that it was constructed, rather, out of a myriad of small

organized units, which all shared a common origin, but had multiplied by constantly dividing, had adapted and combined for various functions, and had then separated to develop on their own and germinated new forms that were both the prerequisite and the effect of its growth.

The body hovering before him, this individual, living self was therefore a huge multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing entities, which in the course of organic integration and specialization had forfeited their existence as selves to become anatomical elements, but with such a total loss of freedom and direct connection to life that some functioned only in response to stimuli like light, sound, touch, or warmth, whereas others could only cluster in new shapes or secrete digestive juices, and still others had been trained to function solely for defense, support, transport of fluids, or procreation. Relaxation of the rules unifying this organic multiplicity into a single higher self was permitted in some cases, and then a multitude of subordinate individuals would be collected in a loose, muddled way to form a higher living unit. The student brooded over the phenomenon of cell colonies; he learned about transitional organisms, algae, whose individual cells, wrapped in a coating of gelatin, were often widely dispersed, but nevertheless built multicelled formations, which, had they been asked, would not have known if they should be regarded as a settlement of single- celled individuals or as a single living entity, and in providing their answer would have vacillated strangely between the use of “I” and “we.” Nature here exhibited an intermediate state between the free individual existence of simple units and the highly social organization of countless elemental individuals such as tissues and organs within a dominant self—the multicelled organism being only one possible form life might take as it passed through the cyclical process leading from procreation to procreation. The act of fertilization, the sexual union of two cells, marked the beginning of the formation of each pluralistic individual, just as it marked the beginning of each successive generation of more elemental forms, and so always led back to itself. The effects of this act lasted through many generations, which could then multiply all on their own in constant repetition, until the moment came when these asexually produced offspring once again found they required renewal by means of copulation, and the circle was closed. A complex living entity, born from the merged nuclei of two parental cells, was in fact a cooperative venture of many generations of individual cells produced asexually; it grew as they multiplied, and the circle of procreation was closed only when sexual cells, individual units specialized for procreation, had been produced within it and now found their way to a new fusion that would propel life onward.

With a volume on embryology propped at the bottom of his sternum, our young adventurer followed the development of the organism from the moment when the sperm, out in front of many just like

itself and driven onward by the whipping motion of its tail, crashed headfirst into the gelatin coating

of the egg and bored its way through to what is called the mount of conception, a conical protrusion in the outer rim of the egg’s protoplasm formed in reaction to the approach of the sperm. In its serious pursuit of variations on this standard procedure, nature had employed every conceivable farce and grotesquerie. In some animal species the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. There were others where the male placed his arm down the gullet of the female to lay his sperm inside her; the arm, bitten off and vomited back up, now ran away on its fingers, long fooling scientists into believing it to be an independent life-form deserving a Greek and Latin name of its own. Hans Castorp listened to the learned argument between the ovists and animalculists, the former asserting that the egg contains a perfect little frog, dog, or human being and the sperm merely stimulates it to grow, the latter seeing the sperm as a living creature with preformed head, arms, and legs, which then found in the egg a medium on which to feed—until everyone finally agreed to grant equal merit in the process to egg and sperm, both of which had arisen out of what were originally undifferentiated reproductive cells. He watched the single cell of the fertilized egg transform itself into a multicelled organism that grew by cleavage and division, saw the cellular ball nestle up against the lamellae of the mucous membrane, saw the blastula fold in on itself to form a basin or cavity, which then assumed the task of receiving and digesting nourishment. This was the gastrula, the protozoon, the primal form of all animal life, the primal form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and inner, ectoderm and endoderm, turned out to be primitive organs, from whose folds and protrusions were formed glands, tissues, sense organs, the body’s appendages. One layer of the ectoderm thickened, folded to form a groove, then closed to build a nerve canal, became the spinal column, the brain. When gelatinous cells began to produce glutens in place of mucin, the fetal fluid solidified into fibrous connective tissue, to cartilage; and he watched as calcium salts and fats were extracted from the surrounding liquid to form bone. The human embryo lay there crouched and cowering, it had a tail—and with its monstrous abdomen, stubby shapeless extremities, and larval face bent down over a bloated belly, it was indistinguishable from an embryonic pig. And according to one branch of science, whose notions of reality were equally unflattering and lurid, the embryo’s development seemed to be a hasty recapitulation of zoological genealogy. It even temporarily had gill flaps, like a skate’s.

It seemed permissible, or necessary, to view these developmental stages as finding their logical conclusion in the less-than-humanistic picture presented by the finished product: primitive man. His skin was covered with thick hair and equipped with twitching muscles to ward off insects. The olfactory membranes covered an extensive surface; his ears stuck out and were movable, so that they

not only played a role in facial expression but also were more adept at catching sound than at present.

In those days, the eyes, protected by a third, blinking lid, were at the sides of the head—except for a third eye, of which the pineal gland was a vestige, that was able to patrol the upper air. Primitive man also had a very long intestine, several sets of milk teeth, and air sacs next to the larynx to enhance his roar; the male sexual glands were carried inside the abdomen.

Anatomy presented our researcher with human limbs skinned and prepared for study; it showed him both the surface and the deeper structure of muscles, tendons, and ligaments, those of the thigh, the foot, and especially the arm, the upper and lower arm; it taught him the Latin names that medicine—that adumbration of the humanist spirit—had nobly and chivalrously supplied to distinguish them; and it allowed him to penetrate to the skeleton, an illustration of which offered him new perspectives, revealing the unity of all things human, the interconnection of all disciplines. For here, in a most remarkable fashion, he found himself reminded of his own—or should one say, his former—profession and of the fact that on his arrival he had presented himself to whomever he met, from Dr. Krokowski to Herr Settembrini, as a member of the scientific caste.

In order to study something—just what had been quite unimportant—he had learned in technical college about statics, flexible supports, and loads, about how good construction was the functional use of mechanical materials. It would surely have been childish to think that the engineering sciences and the laws of mechanics had been applied to organic nature, any more than one could say that they had been derived from it. They were simply repeated and corroborated in it. The principle of the hollow cylinder dominated the structure of tubular bones to such an extent that static requirements were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid material. A structure, Hans Castorp had learned, conformable to the demands of tension and pressure put upon it and constructed of nothing more than rods and braces of a mechanically suitable material, will withstand the same weight as a solid made of the same materials. So, too, one could observe that as tubular bones developed, with each increase in solid surface material, the inner portion, which had become mechanically superfluous, was transformed step by step into fatty tissue, the marrow. The bone of the upper thigh was a crane, and in constructing its bony beam, organic nature had given it precisely the same shape and direction that Hans Castorp would have had to draw as lines of tension and pressure in the blueprint of a mechanism subject to similar stresses. He was delighted to see it, for he now realized that his relationship to the femur, and to organic nature in general, was threefold: lyric, medical, and technical. It came as a great inspiration. And these three relationships, he believed, were a unity within the human mind, were schools of humanist thought, variations of one and the same pressing concern.

And yet, for all that, the accomplishments of protoplasm remained quite inexplicable—it seemed

that life was prohibited from understanding itself. Not only were most biochemical processes unknown, but it was also their very nature to avoid examination. Almost nothing was understood about the construction and makeup of the unit of life known as the “cell.” What good did it do to uncover the components of dead muscle? The living tissue did not permit chemical analysis; the very changes that brought about rigor mortis were enough to make all such experimentation futile. No one understood metabolism, no one knew how the nervous system functioned. What made it possible for taste buds to taste? What made it possible for certain olfactory nerves to be stimulated by various odors? What, indeed, made something smell at all? The specific odor of animals or people resulted from the vaporization of substances that no one could identify. The composition of the secretion called sweat was poorly understood. The glands that excreted it also produced aromas that doubtless played an important role among mammals, but whose significance among humans no one was prepared to claim to know much about. The physiological significance of obviously important parts of the body remained shrouded in darkness. One could, of course, simply disregard the appendix, call it a mystery—except that the appendices of rabbits were regularly found filled with a pulpy substance, and no one could explain either how it ever got back out or was replenished. But what about the white and gray matter in the medulla, what about the optic thalamus and its connection to the eye, or the gray matter in the pons? Brain and spinal tissue deteriorated so quickly that there was no hope of determining its structure. What caused the cerebral cortex to shut down as one fell asleep? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself—which occasionally did happen with corpses? The answer people gave was: Life, a special immunity of living protoplasm—and acted as if they did not notice what a mystical explanation that was. The theory behind such a commonplace phenomenon as fever was self-contradictory. An increase in metabolism caused an increase in the production of body heat. But, then, why did the body not compensate, as usual, by releasing that heat? Instead, sweat production was retarded—was that because of a contraction of the skin? But that could be demonstrated only if a chill was also present—otherwise the skin remained hot. “Hot flashes” would indicate that the central nervous system was the seat both of whatever caused catabolism and of a skin condition we are content to call abnormal, simply because we do not know any better way to define it.

But even so, what was such ignorance in comparison with our confusion when confronted by phenomena like memory—or the even more astounding extended memory that allowed acquired characteristics to be inherited? Anything like a mechanical explanation for these achievements of protoplasm was completely out of the question. Sperm, which transferred the countless, complicated

individual and racial characteristics of the father to the egg, was visible only under a microscope;

and even the most powerful magnification did not suffice to determine its genesis or allow it to be seen as anything but a homogeneous body—for the sperm of one animal looked like that of every other. Such structural factors forced one to assume that a single cell was no different from the higher life-form of which it was a building block, that it, too, was a higher organism, yet another composite made up of discrete units of life, individual living entities. One progressed from the ostensibly smallest unit to something smaller still, one was compelled to split something elemental into yet more basic elements. No doubt just as the animal kingdom consisted of various species of animals, just as the organism of the human animal consisted of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so, too, the cell consisted of a new and diverse animal kingdom of elemental, submicroscopic living entities that grew independently, multiplied independently according to the law that each can only produce its own kind, and cooperated by division of labor to serve the next higher level of life.

Those were the genes, the bioblasts, the biophores—Hans Castorp rejoiced in the frosty night to make their acquaintance by name. But even in his excitement, he asked himself just how elemental they might appear under better light. Since they were bearers of life, they had to be organized, because life was based on organization; but if they were organized, they could not be elemental, because an organism is not elemental, but multiple. They were living entities below the level of the cell that they built and organized. But if that was so, despite their incomprehensible smallness, they, too, as living entities had to be built out of something, had to be organized, structured organically. Because to be a living entity was by definition to be built out of smaller, subordinate entities, or better, out of entities organized to serve the higher form of life. There could be no limit to such division as long as it yielded organic entities—that is, those possessing the characteristics of life, in particular the ability to ingest, grow, and multiply. As long as one spoke of living entities, any discussion of elemental units was dishonest, because the concept of an entity carried with it, ad infinitum, the concept of the subordinate, organizing unit. There was no such thing as elemental life—that is, something that was both already life and yet elemental.

But although it could not logically exist, ultimately there had to be something of that sort, because the notion of archebiosis—that is, the slow development of life from inorganic matter—could not be dismissed out of hand; and the gap in external nature between living and nonliving matter, which we vainly attempted to close, had to be filled or bridged somewhere deep within organic nature. At some point the division had to lead to “entities,” which, although composites, were not yet organized and mediated between living and nonliving matter, groups of molecules that formed a transition between mere chemistry and organized life. But when one looked at chemical molecules, one found

oneself at the edge of a yawning abyss far more mysterious than the one between organic and

inorganic nature—at the edge of the abyss between the material and nonmaterial. Because the molecule was made up of atoms, and the atom was not even close to being large enough to be called extraordinarily small. It was so small, in fact, such a tiny, initial, ephemeral concentration of something immaterial—of something not yet matter, but related to matter—of energy, that one could not yet, or perhaps no longer, think of it as matter, but rather as both the medium and boundary between the material and immaterial. But that posed the question of another kind of spontaneous generation, far more baffling and fantastic than that of organic life: the generation of matter from nonmatter. And indeed, the gap between matter and nonmatter demanded—at least as urgently as the one between organic and inorganic nature—that there be something to fill it. There must of necessity be a chemistry of nonmatter, of unsubstantial compounds, from which matter then arose, just as organisms had come from inorganic compounds, and atoms would then be the microbes and protozoa of matter—substantial by nature, and yet not really. But confronted with the statement that atoms were “so small they were no longer small,” one lost all sense of proportion, because “no longer small” was tantamount to “immense”; and that last step to the atom ultimately proved, without exaggeration, to be a fateful one. For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.

The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike center, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor—any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells.” A city, a state, a social community organized around the division of labor was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade. Was it illicit to think that certain planets of the atomic solar system—among all those hosts of solar systems in all those milky ways that constituted matter—that the state of some planet or other in that inner world might not correspond to the conditions that made the earth an abode of life? For a slightly tipsy young master of the muffling art with an “abnormal” skin condition, who was no longer totally lacking in experience when it came to illicit matters, this was a speculation that bore the stamp of logic and truth and, far from being absurd, seemed as perfectly obvious as it was illuminating. Once the cosmic character of the “smallest” bits of matter became apparent, any objection about the “smallness” of these stars in the inner world would have been quite irrelevant—

and concepts like inner and outer had now lost their foundation as well. The world of the atom was

an outer world, just as it was highly probable that the earthly star on which we lived was a profoundly inner world when regarded organically. Had not one researcher in his visionary boldness spoken of the “beasts of the milky way”—cosmic monsters whose flesh, bones, and brains were formed from solar systems? But if that was so, as Hans Castorp believed it to be, then at the very moment when one thought one had reached the outermost edge, everything began all over again. But that meant, did it not, that perhaps in inner world after inner world within his own nature he was present over and over again—a hundred young Hans Castorps, all wrapped up warmly, but with numbed fingers and flushed face, gazing out from a balcony onto a frosty, moonlit night high in the Alps and studying, out of humanistic and medical interest, the life of the human body?

He learned pathological anatomy from a volume he was now holding to one side to catch the reddish glow of his table lamp; the text, with a series of illustrations, discussed parasitic cell fusion and infectious tumors. These were tissue formations—and very luxuriant formations they were—caused by foreign cells invading an organism that proved receptive to them and for some reason offered favorable conditions (although, one had to admit, rather dissolute conditions at that) for them to flourish. It was not so much that the parasite deprived the surrounding tissue of its nourishment, but rather, in exchanging materials with its host cell, it formed organic compounds that proved amazingly toxic, indeed ultimately destructive, to the cells of the host organism. Researchers had been able to isolate and concentrate the toxins from several such microorganisms and were amazed to find that, if injected into an animal’s bloodstream, even tiny doses of such materials, which could be classified as simple proteins, produced the most acute toxic effects, leading to rapid demise. The external form of this contamination was a rapid growth of tissue, a tumor, pathologically speaking, which was the cells’ reaction to the stimulus of bacilli having taken up residence among them. The cells of the mucuslike tissue between which or in which the bacilli resided formed millet-seed-size nodules, some of which were very large indeed and extraordinarily rich in protoplasm containing numerous nuclei. This riotous living, however, soon led to ruin, because the nuclei of these monster cells began to shrink and break down, their protoplasm began to congeal and decompose; other tissues in the vicinity were affected by the same foreign stimuli. Inflammation spread to adjacent blood vessels; lured to the scene of the accident, white corpuscles now arrived; death by congealing proceeded apace. Meanwhile the soluble toxins from the bacteria had long since intoxicated the nerve centers; the organism was already feverish, and with heaving bosom, so to speak, it reeled toward its disintegration.

So much for pathology, the study of disease, with an emphasis on bodily pain, which at the same

time was an emphasis on the body, an emphasis on its pleasures—disease was life’s lascivious form. And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter—just as the so- called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward lust and death, was doubtless taken when, as the result of a tickle by some unknown incursion, spirit increased in density for the first time, creating a pathologically rank growth of tissue that formed, half in pleasure, half in defense, as the prelude to matter, the transition from the immaterial to the material. This was creation’s true Fall, its Original Sin. The second spontaneous generation, the birth of the organic from the inorganic, was only the sad progression of corporeality into consciousness, just as disease in an organism was the intoxicating enhancement and crude accentuation of its own corporeality. Life was only the next step along the reckless path of spirit turned disreputable, matter blushing in reflex, both sensitive and receptive to whatever had awakened it.

The books lay piled high on the table with the lamp, but one was on the floor mat next to his lounge chair and another, the one Hans Castorp had last been reading, lay across his stomach, its weight making it very difficult for him to breathe, although his cerebral cortex had sent no order to the appropriate muscles to remove it. He had read to the bottom of the page, until his chin rested on his chest and his eyelids fell over his ordinary blue eyes. He beheld the image of life, its voluptuous limbs, its flesh-borne beauty. She had loosened her hands from the back of her neck, and her arms— she spread them wide now, revealing the inner surface, especially the tender skin at the elbow with its blood vessels, two large bluish branching veins—her arms were of inexpressible sweetness. She bent toward him, bent down to him, over him, he sensed her organic aroma, sensed the lacelike pounding of her heart. He felt an embrace, hot and tender, around his neck. Melting with lust and dismay, he laid his hands on her upper arms, there where her grainy skin stretched taut over the triceps and was blissfully cool to the touch. He felt the moist suckle of her kiss on his lips.

DANSE MACABRE

Shortly after the holidays, the Austrian horseman died. Prior to that event, however, was Christmas, two days of festivities—or three, if you counted Christmas Eve—that Hans Castorp had awaited with some anxiety, shaking his head now and then, wondering what they would be like here, only to discover that they came and went like normal days with a morning, afternoon, and evening, with the usual whims of the weather (a slight thaw set in), and were indistinguishable from others of their sort, apart from a little external decoration and the mood that held sway in people’s hearts and minds for the time allotted to them, until the days moved on, becoming a recent, then distant past silted with a few novel impressions.

Director Behrens’s son, Knut by name, came for a holiday visit and lived with his father in the residential wing—a pretty young man, whose neck vertebrae already stuck out a bit too far as well. You could feel young Behrens’s presence in the air. Dressing with special care, the ladies were subject to little fits of laughter and temper, and their conversations were about encounters with Knut in the garden, in the woods, or down in the resort. He had visitors himself, several friends from his university found their way to the valley—six or seven students, who stayed in town, but took their meals at the director’s residence and roamed the region with their comrade in a closed troop. Hans Castorp avoided them. If necessary, both he and Joachim reluctantly made detours to avoid meeting these young people. A whole world separated those who belonged to the society of “people up here” from these warbling, walking-stick-swinging wanderers, and he did not want to hear or know anything about them. Besides, most of them seemed to be from the North, some even from his hometown perhaps—and Hans Castorp felt very shy about meeting anyone from Hamburg. He often wondered if someone from home might not suddenly show up at the Berghof, especially since Behrens had remarked that the city always provided the sanatorium with a handsome contingent. Perhaps there were some here already among the serious cases and the moribund, whom you never saw. Quite visible, however, was a hollow-cheeked merchant, said to be from Cuxhaven, who had been sitting at Frau Iltis’s table for a few weeks now. Whenever he spotted him, Hans Castorp was glad both that it was so difficult to come into contact with people who were not tablemates and that his hometown was a large one with many different social spheres. The merchant’s insignificant presence greatly reduced the worries he had about the possible appearance of natives of Hamburg. And so Christmas Eve came ever nearer, until one day it was only just around the corner, and the next day it had arrived. It had been a good six weeks away when Hans Castorp had first been surprised to hear talk about the holidays—as long, if you stopped to count, as his originally scheduled stay plus the period he had spent in bed, which, as Hans Castorp looked back on it now, had seemed a very long time back then, particularly those first three weeks, whereas the same number of days now appeared to add up to very little, almost nothing. The people in the dining hall had been right, he now discovered, to have taken the interval so lightly. Six weeks—why, that was not as many as a single week had days. And what was a week, when you stopped to consider? Just a little circuit from Monday to Sunday—and then it was Monday again. You had only to keep asking about the value and meaning of the next smaller unit to realize that taken together they would not add up to a sum, but rather that such calculations led to diminishment, obliteration, shrinkage, and annihilation. What was a day, measured for instance from the moment you sat down to your midday meal to the return of that same moment twenty-four hours later? Nothing—although it was twenty- four hours. And what was an hour, spent for instance lying in rest cure or taking a walk after a meal—which more or less exhausted the possibilities for using up such a unit of time? Once again, nothing. By their very nature, the sum of these nothings was not all that serious. Things did become serious, however, when you descended to the smallest unit—those sixty seconds times seven you spent with the thermometer between your lips so that you could extend the line on your chart. Those were extremely tenacious, important seconds—they stretched out into a little eternity, leaving extraordinarily dense deposits in the scurrying shadow of grand time.

The holidays proved incapable of disturbing the daily schedule of the residents of the Berghof. A tall, handsome fir had been set up a few days beforehand at the far right end of the dining hall, next to the Bad Russian table; and its piny scent, finding its way among all the aromas of rich food, occasionally reached the noses of the diners and awakened a kind of wistful look in the eyes of some who sat at the seven tables. By suppertime on the twenty-fourth, the tree had been gaily decorated with tinsel, glass balls, gilt cones, little apples in nets, and all sorts of candies; its colorful wax candles burned during the whole meal and for a while afterward. It was said that little trees with candles had been provided for the bedridden, too—one tree per room. A great many parcels had arrived over the last few days. Even Joachim Ziemssen and Hans Castorp had received packages from their distant, low-lying homeland, carefully wrapped gifts that they had then spread out in their rooms: cleverly chosen articles of clothing, neckties, luxury items in leather and nickel, as well as an abundance of holiday pastries, nuts, apples, and marzipan, in such quantities that the cousins gazed at them dubiously, wondering when they would ever find a chance here to eat it all. Hans Castorp was well aware that Schalleen had prepared his package, had even purchased the gifts after dignified consultation with his uncles. A letter from James Tienappel was included, typewritten, but on his heavy private stationery: his uncle sent his own and his father’s holiday greetings and best wishes for a speedy recovery. He also made practical use of the occasion to add felicitations for the New Year fast approaching—a procedure that Hans Castorp had himself adopted when from his lounge chair he had penned his own Christmas letter, along with a clinical report, to Consul Tienappel.

The candles on the tree in the dining hall burned, singeing needles that crackled and gave off a scent that reminded all hearts and minds of just what day it was. People had dressed for dinner, the gentlemen in evening clothes, the ladies in jewels, some of them probably sent up from the plains below by loving husbands. Even Clavdia Chauchat had exchanged her customary sweater for a gown with a hint of whimsy, or rather patriotism. A brightly embroidered, belted peasant outfit, in

a Russian, or rather Balkan, perhaps even Bulgarian style, it was trimmed with gold spangles, and its many pleats lent her figure an unusual soft fullness. It suited what Settembrini liked to call her “Tartar physiognomy” very nicely, in particular it went well with her “lone-wolf eyes.” The mood was very lively at the Good Russian table, where the first pop of a cork was heard from the champagne being served at almost all the tables. At the cousins’ table, it was the great-aunt who ordered it for her niece and Marusya, but she treated them all to some. The menu was well chosen, ending with cheese pastry and bonbons, and they finished off with coffee and liqueurs. Now and then a little spray of pine would catch fire, inspiring a moment of shrill, inordinate panic before the flames were put out. At the end of the meal, Settembrini, dressed as always and with a toothpick in his mouth, joined the cousins at their table for a while, teasing Frau Stöhr and offering a few remarks about a carpenter’s son, a rabbi to all humankind, whose make-believe birthday it was today. It was uncertain if he had ever even lived. But an idea had been born back then, which had continued to triumph down to the present, and that idea was the dignity of every individual soul, and the equality of all—in a word, individualistic democracy—and in honor of it, he would now empty the glass someone had passed to him. Frau Stöhr found his remarks “amphibious and unfeeling.” She stood up in protest, and since people were already moving to join the evening social, her tablemates followed her example.

This evening their gathering was given added dignity and vitality by the presentation of the gift to the director, who stopped by for half an hour with Knut and Head Nurse Mylendonk. The ceremony took place in the social room with the optical toys. The Russians’ special present consisted of a very large, round silver plate with the recipient’s monogram engraved in the middle—an object whose utter uselessness was immediately obvious. One could at least lie down on the chaise longue the other guests had given him, although it was covered with just a cloth, since it still lacked both cushions and upholstery. But the headrest was adjustable, and Behrens tried it for comfort, stretching out on it with his useless plate still under one arm; pretending to be Fafnir guarding his treasure, he began to snore like a sawmill. Cheers on all sides. Even Frau Chauchat laughed very hard at this performance, so that her mouth stood open and her eyes drew close together, exactly like Pribislav Hippe’s whenever he laughed—or so it seemed to Hans Castorp.

No sooner had the director departed than people sat down at the card tables. The Russian group withdrew, as usual, to their little salon. A few guests stood around the dining hall Christmas tree, nibbling at the ornaments and watching the stubs of candles flicker out in their little metal jackets. Widely scattered among the tables already set for breakfast, a few solitary souls sat, each frozen in a distinctive pose and private silence.

Christmas Day was damp and foggy. They were sitting in clouds, Behrens said—there was no such

thing as fog up here. But whether clouds or fog, the damp was penetrating. The surface of the snowpack began to thaw, turn porous and slushy. During rest cure, the numbness in face and hands was much more painful than on sunny cold days.

The evening of Christmas Day was marked by a musical presentation, a real concert with rows of chairs and printed programs, just for “people up here” at the Berghof. It was an evening of lieder, presented by a local professional soprano who also gave lessons. Two medallions were pinned at either side of the décolletage of her ball gown; she had arms like sticks and a voice whose unique toneless quality sadly revealed the reason why she resided up here. She sang:

I bear my song of love Within my heart.

The accompanist was likewise local. Frau Chauchat sat in the first row, but disappeared at intermission, so that from that point on Hans Castorp could listen to the music (and it was music, despite the circumstances) with a peaceful heart, reading the text printed in the program as each song was sung. Settembrini sat off to one side for a while, but he also vanished, after first making a few graphic, taut comments about the local’s tedious bel canto and adding a satirical remark about how delightful it was that they were all so cozy and snug here together this evening. Truth to tell, Hans Castorp was relieved that the two of them—the narrow-eyed woman and the pedagogue— were gone, and he was free to devote his full attention to the songs. He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings—probably even on polar expeditions.

The second day of Christmas differed not at all from a Sunday or even a normal weekday, except for the faint awareness of its presence; but once it was over, the Christmas holidays were part of the past—or, just as correctly, lay in the distant future, a year away. It would take twelve months until they would return anew, the circle complete—and after all, that was only seven months more than Hans Castorp had already spent here.

But, as noted, shortly after Christmas, even before New Year, the Austrian horseman died. The cousins learned about it from Alfreda Schildknecht, or Sister Berta as she was known, who tended poor Fritz Rotbein and stopped them in the corridor to inform them of the discreet event. Hans Castorp took profound interest in it all, partly because the signs of life he had heard from the horseman were among his first impressions up here—the first of several, or so it seemed to him, to contribute to the hot flush in his face, which had never left it since—but partly, too, for moral, or one might say, spiritual reasons. He kept Joachim there for a long while as he talked with the nurse, who

hung with happy gratitude on his every remark and question. It was a miracle, she said, that the

horseman had lived to see the holidays. He had long since proved what a tough cavalier he was—it was hard to know what he had used to breathe with toward the end. True, for days he had kept himself going only with the help of massive amounts of oxygen; had used forty demijohns yesterday alone, at six francs a bottle. That must have run into some money, as the gentlemen could well imagine, especially since his wife, in whose arms he had passed away, had been left quite penniless. Joachim expressed disapproval of such expense. What was the point of these tortures, of clinging to life in such an expensive, artificial way, when the case was hopeless? One could not blame the man for blindly consuming expensive gas keeping him alive, when they had forced it on him. But those treating him ought to have acted more reasonably and have let him walk the inevitable path, for God’s sake—regardless of the question of resources, or better, with considerable regard to them. The living had their rights, too, and so on. Hans Castorp disputed this emphatically—his cousin was talking almost like Settembrini, with no respect or reverence for suffering. The horseman had died in the end, and there was nothing funny about that; you could only show your concern, and a dying man deserved every kindness, every honor that could be bestowed on him, Hans Castorp insisted on that. He could only hope Behrens had not screamed at the man at the end and scolded him irreverently—he hadn’t, had he? No need to worry, Nurse Schildknecht declared. The horseman had made only one small, imprudent attempt to escape at the very end, by trying to jump out of bed; but a gentle reminder of the pointlessness of his intention had sufficed to keep him from attempting anything of the sort again.

Hans Castorp made a personal inspection of the deceased. He did so in open defiance of the institutional practice of concealment; he despised the egotism of all the others, who did not want to know, hear, or see anything, and hoped to reproach them with this act. He had tried to bring up the subject of this latest death with his tablemates, but had been met by a unanimous rebuff so sullen that he felt both chagrined and outraged. Frau Stöhr came close to being rude. How could he even mention such a thing? she had asked. What sort of upbringing had he had? House rules carefully screened them, the patients, from coming into contact with such matters, and now here came a greenhorn sounding off about it—and while they were trying to eat their roast and with Dr. Blumenkohl present at that, who could be taken any day. (This last was whispered behind her hand.) If it happened again she would lodge a complaint. Then and there, as a result of that rebuke, Hans Castorp had reached his decision, which he made known to the others, to pay his personal respects to their departed housemate and say a silent prayer beside his remains. He also prevailed upon Joachim to join him.

Through the good offices of Sister Berta they were admitted to the dead man’s room, which was on

the second floor, directly under their own. His widow received them—a small, disheveled blond, frazzled from long nights of watching, pressing a handkerchief to her lips and red nose and wearing a plaid winter coat with the collar turned up, because it was very cold in the room. The heat had been turned off, the door to the balcony was open. The young men said what had to be said in muffled tones, and then, waved forward by an agonized gesture, they stepped across the room with a reverential, forward rocking motion, the heels of their boots never touching the ground, and stood there regarding the dead man on his bed, each in his own way—Joachim at attention, half bowing in an official, reserved pose; Hans Castorp relaxed and preoccupied, his hands clasped before him, his head tilted to one shoulder, with an expression much like the one he usually wore when listening to music. The horseman’s head was still propped up so that his body—its long frame once the site of life’s ceaseless breeding—looked all the flatter,. almost like a plank, with a slight rise in the blanket from the feet at the other end. A wreath lay in the vicinity of the knees, with a palm frond projecting from it and grazing the large, yellow, bony hands folded across the sunken chest. The face, too, was yellow and bony, with a hooked nose, sharp cheekbones, and a bushy, reddish-blond moustache, so thick that it made the cheeks look even hollower. The eyes were closed unnaturally tight—pressed closed, Hans Castorp could not help thinking, not just closed. They called that the last token of love, although it was done more for the sake of the survivors than of the dead man. And it had to be done very soon, because once too much myosin had formed in the muscles, it was no longer possible, and then he would lie there staring—and that was the end of the sedate notion of “slumber.”

A skilled expert at all this, in his element in more than one sense, Hans Castorp stood piously beside the bed. “He looks as if he’s sleeping,” he said to be kind, although the considerable differences were obvious. And then in a masterfully subdued voice, he began a conversation with the horseman’s widow, making inquiries—which demonstrated both medical expertise and moral, religious sympathy—about her husband’s long years of suffering, his last days and moments, and the transfer of the body to Kärnten, which was yet to be arranged. The widow, speaking in a nasal, Austrian drawl interrupted occasionally by sobs, found it remarkable for young people to feel and show such concern for other people’s troubles. To which Hans Castorp responded that his cousin and he were themselves ill, after all, and that very early in life he himself had stood beside the deathbeds of close relatives, was an orphan twice over, and so death was an old acquaintance, so to speak. What profession had he chosen? she asked. He replied that he “had been” an engineer. —Had been? — Had been, insofar as his illness and a stay up here of still quite indeterminate length had interfered with his plans; this was a critical time in his life, perhaps even a turning point, one could not know

for sure. (Joachim stared, scrutinizing him in horror.) And what about his good cousin? —He wanted

to be a soldier down in the flatlands, was an officer’s candidate. —Oh, she said, military service was certainly one of the more serious professions, a soldier had to reckon with coming into close contact with death and certainly did well to grow accustomed to the sight of it early on. She dismissed the young men with her thanks, and her mood was now imposingly serene, given her anguished situation—in particular the stiff bill for oxygen her spouse had left her. The cousins returned to their own floor. Hans Castorp seemed satisfied with their visit and spiritually moved by the impressions it had left on him.

“Requiescat in pace,” he said. “Sit tibi terra levis. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. You see, when it comes to death, when one speaks to the dead or about them, Latin comes into its own. It’s the official language in such cases, which only points up how special death is. But it is not out of humanistic courtesy that people speak Latin in their honor. The language of the dead is not the Latin you learn in school, you see, but comes from a totally different sphere, from just the opposite direction one might say. It is sacred Latin, the dialect of monks, a chant from the Middle Ages, so to speak, a kind of muted, subterranean monotone. Settembrini would not be pleased with it, it’s nothing for humanists and republicans and pedagogues of that ilk. It comes from a different intellectual direction—from the other one. It seems to me you have to be clear about these two intellectual directions, or dispositions, as they might more accurately be called—the religious and the freethinking. They both have their good points, but what I particularly have against the freethinking one—the Settembrinian one, I mean—is that it assumes that only it truly represents human dignity. That is an exaggeration. In its own way, the other contains a great deal of human dignity, too, and contributes to moral conduct and decorum and noble formality, certainly more than ‘freethinking’ does—and always with an eye to human weakness and frailty. The concepts of death and corruption play an important role, too. Have you ever seen a production of Don Carlos—the way things were done at the Spanish court? When King Philip enters, all in black, decorated with his orders of the Garter and the Golden Fleece, and slowly doffs his hat—which looks very much like one of our modern bowlers—in a kind of wide, upward sweep, and says, ‘Ye may cover now, my lords,’ or something like that. Well, that’s up to the highest standards, let me tell you, not a hint of slipshod manners and simply letting things take their course—just the contrary. And then the queen says, “ ’Twas otherwise in my own France”—naturally, it’s all too correct and formal for her, she wants life to be more amusing, more human. But what does that mean, human? Everything is human. The Spaniard’s fear of God, his humility, his solemnity, his scrupulous austerity is a very worthy

form of humanity, I would say. Whereas you can also use the word ‘human’ to cover up all sorts of

weak-willed slovenliness. You do agree I’m right, don’t you?”

“Yes, you’re right,” Joachim said, “of course I can’t stand either slovenliness or weak-willed people. There has to be discipline.”

“Yes, you say that as a military man, and I must admit, the military understands these things. The widow was quite right to say your profession has something serious about it, because the military always has to reckon with the worst case, which can mean dealing with death. You have your uniforms that sit tight and proper and have stiff collars—that gives you your bienséance. Plus you have your idea of rank, your obedience to authority, and take pains to deal honorably with one another, and that’s part of the Spanish spirit, too—all out of a kind of piety, and deep down I respect that. It’s a spirit that ought to be more prevalent among us civilians, in our customs and conduct— I’d like that better, it would suit me. I think the world and life are such that people ought to dress mostly in black, with a starched ruff instead of your military collar, and deal with one another in a serious, muted, formal way, always keeping death in mind—that’s how I’d like it, that would be moral. You see, that’s another one of Settembrini’s conceited misconceptions—it would be good to bring it up with him sometime. He claims he’s the one true representative not only of human dignity, but of morality as well—what with his ‘practical, lifelong labor’ and his Sunday festivities in honor of progress, as if people didn’t have other things besides progress to think about on Sunday. His systematic eradication of suffering. You haven’t heard about that yet, by the way, but he gave me a nice lecture on the topic—wants to eradicate it systematically with an encyclopedia. And if the project seems downright immoral to me, what then? I won’t say anything to him, of course—he would talk circles around me with his graphic patter and say, ‘I am warning you, my good engineer!’ But a man can think what he likes—‘Sire, give thoughts their freedom.’ Let me tell you something,” he said in conclusion—they had arrived in Joachim’s room, and his cousin was getting ready for rest cure. “Let me tell you something I’ve decided to do. We live here right next door to dying people, next to awful tribulation and misery, and it’s not just that we all act as if it were no concern of ours, but we’re even protected, spared any possibility of coming into contact with it, or seeing it. And now they’ll sneak the horseman out while we’re eating supper or breakfast. I find that immoral. That Stöhr woman got huffy merely because I mentioned someone had died—how silly. And even if she is so ignorant that she believes ‘Softly, softly, holy air’ comes from Tannhäuser—she let that one slip just recently—she could at least show some moral emotions. They all could. I’ve decided that from now on, I shall show more concern about serious and moribund cases. It will do me good. Just this visit of ours did me some good. Poor Reuter, the fellow in room twenty-seven—I caught a glimpse

of him through his door one of my first days here—he surely joined his ancestors long ago, after

which they sneaked him out. His eyes were simply huge even back then. But there are plenty of others, the place is full of them, what with new arrivals every day. And Sister Alfreda or the head nurse or even Behrens would certainly help us strike up an acquaintance or two—it can easily be done, I’m sure. Let’s assume someone who’s moribund has a birthday and we learn about it—it’s not hard to come by that sort of information. Fine, we send the fellow, or the lady, whichever, a potted plant for his or her room, a little thoughtful remembrance from two anonymous colleagues, along with best wishes for recovery—which is, one would hope, always a courteous thing to do. And then our names get mentioned, of course, and as weak as he or she may be, we are permitted to say a friendly hello, just through the door, or are even invited into the room for a moment, perhaps, and we exchange a few humane words before he or she slips away. That’s how I imagine it. Are you agreed? For my part at least, I plan to do it.”

And Joachim did not have any great objection to these plans. “It’s against the house rules,” he said. “It would mean breaking them, more or less. But Behrens would probably make an exception and give you permission if you made it a point to ask. You can always claim it’s out of medical interest.” “Yes, that would be another reason,” Hans Castorp said, because, in fact, there were complicated motives behind this wish. His protest against the egotism prevalent here was only one of them. Likewise playing a role was his own spiritual need to take suffering and death seriously, to pay attention to them, a need he hoped would be nourished and satisfied by his getting closer to the seriously ill and dying, as a way of counteracting the numerous rebuffs such a need received daily, even hourly, wherever he turned—including some of Settembrini’s insulting pronouncements, which only reinforced his own craving. Examples of such rebuffs were far too numerous to count. If someone had asked Hans Castorp to name a few, he would probably have first mentioned those people at the Berghof who readily admitted that they were not seriously ill, but came up here voluntarily under the official pretext of not feeling well, whereas in reality it was because the style of life, the amusements, here appealed to them, as was the case, for instance, with Widow Hessenfeld, previously mentioned in passing, a lively lady, whose passion in life was betting on things: she would bet with the gentlemen about anything and everything, about the next day’s weather, about what the next course would be, about the results of people’s monthly checkups and how many months would be added to their sentences; she would bet on certain bobsledders, ice-skaters, or skiers at various athletic contests or championships, on the results of some nascent love affair among the guests, and on a hundred other, often totally trivial and insignificant things, wagering for chocolate or champagne or the caviar enjoyed on festive occasions in the restaurant, for money, for

movie tickets, even for kisses, both those given and received—in short, her passion for gambling

brought a great deal of lively excitement into the dining hall. Of course, young Hans Castorp could not see his way clear to take such carryings-on very seriously, indeed her mere presence seemed prejudicial to the dignity of this place of suffering.

For it was his sincere desire faithfully to defend and uphold that dignity in his own eyes, however difficult that might be after an almost six-month stay among “people up here.” The insights he had gained over time into their lives and doings, their customs and opinions, were not very conducive to such good intentions. There were, for example, the two skinny dandies, “Max and Moritz,” the one seventeen, the other eighteen years old, who offered the ladies much stuff for conversation by slipping out each evening to play poker and carouse. Not long before, about a week after New Year— and it must be kept in mind that while we tell our story, the silent, restless current of time sweeps on—news spread at breakfast that the bath attendant had found them that morning lying on their beds still in wrinkled evening clothes. Even Hans Castorp had laughed. But although that incident confounded his good intentions, it was nothing in comparison to the stories told about Herr Einhuf, a lawyer from Jüterbog, a forty-year-old with a goatee and hands furry with black hair, who had been sitting at Settembrini’s table for some time now, having replaced the cured Swede. He not only came home drunk every night, but indeed had also not even bothered to do that recently—and had been found outside in the snow. He was considered a dangerous rake, and Frau Stöhr could point to the young lady—engaged to be married down in the lowlands, by the way—who had been seen leaving Einhuf’s room at a very late hour, clad in a fur coat, under which she wore nothing more than bloomers. That was scandalous—not just in the general moral sense, but also personally scandalous to Hans Castorp, an offense to his own spiritual strivings. He could not think of the lawyer, moreover, without being reminded of Fränzchen Oberdank, the smoothly coiffed lady’s companion and housemaid who had recently been brought up here by her mother, a very dignified provincial lady. Upon admission and after her first checkup, she had been considered only a mild case; but whether she had not been conscientious in her rest cure, whether this was a case in which the air at first was not just good for fighting off illness, but for illness, or whether the young lady had become involved in intrigues or excitements that had not done her any good—in any case, four weeks after her arrival, she entered the dining hall upon returning from a new checkup, tossed her purse in the air, and cried in a clear voice, “Hurrah, I have to stay a whole year!” And the entire dining hall had burst into Homeric laughter. But fourteen days later the rumor spread that Herr Einhuf had behaved like a cad to Fränzchen Oberdank. That epithet, by the way, is ours (or better, Hans Castorp’s), because for those who spread such news it was hardly a novelty that required such

strong language. They shrugged, as if to say that it took two for such affairs, and that presumably

nothing had occurred against the wish or will of either participant. At least, to judge from her demeanor, that was Frau Stöhr’s moral reaction to the matter.

Karoline Stöhr was a dreadful person. If there was any one thing that interfered with Hans Castorp’s well-intentioned spiritual striving, it was this woman—her personality, her very existence. Her endless malapropisms alone would have sufficed. She called death the “grim ripper,” called people “impediment” if she wanted to accuse them of being too cheeky, and could talk the most ghastly nonsense about the astronomical causes for a solar eclipse. She called the deep snow-cover a “massive agglomeration”; and one day she caused Herr Settembrini no end of amazement by declaring that she had been reading a book from the sanatorium library that would interest him, entitled Benedetto Cenelli, in Schiller’s translation. She loved turns of phrases that grated on Hans Castorp’s nerves simply because they were clichés or the latest shabby slang—“Isn’t that the limit!” or “Bowl me over!” And since the adjective “stunning” had been used for “splendid” or “excellent” for quite some time now—was totally washed out, enervated, prostituted, and therefore obsolete— she had of late seized upon the word “devastating,” and now found everything “devastating,” whether in earnest or in jest: the bobsled run, their dessert dumplings, and her own body warmth, which sounded equally repulsive coming from her. And then there was her love of gossip—which was excessive. Nevertheless, if she reported that Frau Salomon was wearing her most expensive lace undergarments that day—because she had an appointment for a checkup and always donned fine lingerie for the doctors—there was probably something to it. Hans Castorp himself had the impression that checkups, quite apart from the results, were a source of entertainment for the ladies, for which they attired themselves in their flirtatious best. But what should one say to Frau Stöhr’s assertion that Frau Redisch from Posen, who was said to have tuberculosis of the spinal cord, was forced once a week to march naked back and forth in front of Director Behrens in his office for ten minutes? The claim was almost as scandalous as it was improbable, but Frau Stöhr swore it was so by all that was holy—though it was hard to understand how the poor thing could devote such zeal, vigor, and cantankerousness to gossip, when her own problems were giving her so much trouble. For from time to time she was subject to fits of anxious, whining panic, the result of her allegedly increasing “listlessness” and the upward curve of her fever chart. She would come to the table sobbing, tears streaming down her chapped red cheeks, and blubber into her handkerchief that Behrens wanted to order her to bed, but she wanted to know what he had said behind her back about her condition, about just how ill she was—she wanted to look truth in the eye. One day, to her horror, she found her bed had been turned with the foot toward the door, and the discovery almost sent her

into convulsions. Her anger, her dread, did not meet with ready understanding; Hans Castorp in

particular was slow to comprehend. Well? But so what? Why shouldn’t the bed be placed the way it was?

For God’s sake, didn’t he see?—Feet first! She set up a dreadful ruckus, and the bed had to be changed around at once, even though her pillow then faced the light, which was very disruptive to sleep.

None of that was really serious; it said very little to Hans Castorp’s spiritual needs. A horrible incident at a meal one day, however, did make an impression on the young man. A new patient, a teacher named Popóv, a gaunt, silent fellow, who now sat at the Good Russian table next to his equally gaunt, silent young bride, turned out to be an epileptic and right in the middle of a meal had a violent fit, falling to the floor with that demonic, inhuman shriek we have all often heard described, and lay there next to his chair, flailing arms and legs about in the most ghastly writhings. What made matters worse was that the fish course had just been served, and it was feared that Popóv might choke on a bone. The uproar was indescribable. The ladies, with Frau Stöhr in the vanguard—though Mmes. Salomon, Redisch, Hessenfeld, Magnus, Iltis, Levi, et al. hardly took second place to her—fell victim to a whole variety of “conditions,” with several of them coming close to imitating Herr Popóv. Shrieks rang out—everywhere, nothing but eyes squeezed tight, mouths agape, and twisted torsos. Only one lady preferred to faint quietly. Since they had all been surprised in the middle of chewing and swallowing, choking attacks were common. Some diners made for available exits, including the doors to the veranda, although it was very damp and cold outside. The whole incident, however, took on its own unique, scandalous character, quite apart from the horror of it, primarily because most people could not help associating it with Dr. Krokowski’s most recent lecture. In his address the previous Monday (dealing, as always, with love as a force conducive to illness), the psychoanalyst had made special mention of epilepsy, which in preanalytic days had been seen variously as a holy, indeed prophetic affliction or as a sign of demonic possession, but which he described in half poetic, half ruthlessly scientific terms as the equivalent of love, an orgasm of the brain—in brief, made it sound so suspect that his audience was now forced to see Popóv’s performance as an illustration of the lecture, a dissolute revelation, a mysterious scandal. The covert flight of the ladies was therefore also an expression of a certain modesty. The director himself was present at the meal, and it was he who, together with Nurse Mylendonk and a few stalwart young diners, carried the ecstatic teacher just as he was—blue, stiff, contorted, and still foaming at the mouth—from the dining hall to the lobby, where the doctors, the head nurse, and other personnel were observed working over the unconscious man for a while, after which he was carried away on

a litter. But within a very short time, Herr Popóv was seen sitting serenely beside his equally serene

young wife at the Good Russian table, and he finished his midday meal as if nothing had happened. Hans Castorp had sat through the incident with every outward sign of concerned horror, but ultimately—God help him!—not even this event seemed all that serious. To be sure, Popóv might have choked to death on his mouthful of fish; but, in fact, he had not choked to death and despite all his unconscious cavorting rage had evidently quietly managed to keep from doing so. And then there he sat cheerfully finishing his meal and pretending as if he had never carried on like a crazy drunkard gone berserk—presumably did not even recall what had happened. Nor was there anything to inspire greater reverence for suffering in his appearance; in its own way, this incident, too, bolstered Hans Castorp’s impression that he was being exposed up here, against his will, to frivolous slovenliness, and, counter to all local custom, he hoped to offset this process by paying closer attention to those seriously ill and moribund.

On the same floor as the cousins, not far from their own rooms, a young lady named Leila Gerngross lay dying, or so they were told by Sister Alfreda. She had suffered four severe hemorrhages over the last ten days, and her parents had come here with the idea of taking her back home while she still lived; but that did not appear to be a feasible plan—the director said that poor Fräulein Gerngross ought not to be moved. She was sixteen or seventeen years old. Hans Castorp saw a genuine opportunity to realize his plan to send a potted plant and best wishes for recovery. True, it was not Leila’s birthday, nor would she, in all probability, live until her next one, which Hans Castorp learned on inquiry was not until spring—yet that did not seem an obstacle to his mission of mercy. On a noonday walk with his cousin, he stopped in a flower shop near the spa hotel; he eagerly breathed in the moist, earthy, aroma-laden air and purchased a pretty potted hydrangea, which he instructed be delivered to the dying girl’s room, enclosing a card, left unsigned, on which he wrote, “From two fellow guests, with best wishes for recovery.” Pleasantly giddy from the odor of plants and the sultry warmth of the shop, which made his eyes water after the cold outdoors, he completed the transaction with a happy, pounding heart, construing his modest effort as bold, adventurous, and helpful, and secretly ascribing symbolic importance to it.

Leila Gerngross did not enjoy the luxury of private nursing, but was under the direct care of Fräulein von Mylendonk and her doctors; but Sister Alfreda looked in on her occasionally as well, and she reported to the young men how their act of thoughtfulness had been received. Despite her straitened, hopeless condition, the girl had taken childlike pleasure in the strangers’ good wishes. The plant stood beside her bed, she caressed it with her eyes and hands, saw to it that it was kept watered, and even during some of the worst coughing fits to which she was subject, she kept her tormented eyes

trained on it. Her parents, retired Major Gerngross and his wife, were likewise touched and pleased,

but since they had no friends whatever in the house, they could not even hazard a guess as to the givers. Under such circumstances, Nurse Schildknecht had no longer been able to refrain from lifting the veil of anonymity and disclosing the donors’ names. She brought the cousins the thanks of the three Gerngrosses—as well as a request that they might all meet. The next day, with the nurse leading the way, the two cousins tiptoed into Leila’s chamber of suffering.

The dying girl was a charming young thing—blond, with eyes the exact color of forget-me-nots— who looked fragile, but not all that pathetic, despite a dreadful loss of blood and only meager remnants of lung tissue still available for labored breaths. She thanked them, chatting in a rather monotone but pleasant voice. A rosy glow came to her cheeks and lingered there. After first offering an explanation for his actions—almost an apology, really, since he felt that was expected—both to her and to her parents, Hans Castorp now paid his tender respects in a hushed, emotional voice. It would not have taken much—the impulse was certainly there at least—for him to have knelt on one knee beside the bed; but he did hold Leila’s hand in his for a long time—a hot hand that was not merely damp, but downright wet, for the child was perspiring excessively, her sweat glands producing so much water that her flesh would have shriveled and dried out long before this had she not managed to keep pace with her body’s transudation by thirstily downing great quantities of lemonade, a full carafe of which stood on her nightstand. Grief-stricken as they were, her parents held up their end of the brief conversation, as good manners demanded, inquiring about the cousins’ own circumstances and making other conventional remarks. The major was a broad-shouldered man with a low brow and bristling moustache—a hulk, who quite obviously was innocent of his daughter’s susceptibilities and organic biases. It was apparent, rather, that his wife was the guilty party—a small woman with a decidedly consumptive look about her and a conscience evidently weighed down by the dowry she had brought into the marriage. When after ten minutes Leila showed signs of fatigue, or, to be more precise, of overexcitement—her rosy cheeks turned redder, her forget-me-not eyes took on an alarming gleam—and Sister Alfreda began to signal with admonishing glances, the cousins took their leave; Frau Gerngross accompanied them out into the hall, where she broke into self-recriminations that had an odd effect on Hans Castorp. In her remorse, she assured them that it was her fault, her fault alone; the poor child could only have got it from her, her husband was not involved, had played no part in it whatever. But she swore that she had been infected only temporarily, very slightly and superficially, for just a brief time as a young girl. Then she had got over it, had totally recovered, the doctors said—because she had wanted so much to marry, to live and to marry, and she had succeeded, had been completely cured, was perfectly

healthy when she married her dear, robust husband, who had never given a thought to such a thing

happening. But as unsullied and strong as he was, his influence had not been able to prevent this misfortune. How awful, then, that what had been buried and forgotten had reappeared in the child, who had not got over it, but was succumbing to it, whereas she, the mother, had escaped and lived on into mature adulthood. The poor little thing was dying, the doctors had given up all hope. And it was all due to her former life—she alone was to blame.

The young men tried to comfort her, said something about the possibility of a happy turn for the better. But the major’s wife merely sobbed and thanked them once again for everything, for the hydrangea, for diverting the child by their visit, for providing her a little happiness. There the poor thing lay in her lonely torments, while other young girls were enjoying life and dancing with handsome young men—no illness ever took away that desire. They had brought a ray of sunshine into her life—good God, probably the last. The hydrangea had made her the belle of the ball and a chat with two handsome cavaliers had been a nice little flirt for her—as a mother, Frau Gerngross had not failed to notice that.

Hans Castorp was embarrassed by this last remark, particularly by the word “flirt,” which Frau Gerngross pronounced incorrectly, supplying it with a German vowel so that it sounded like “fleert”—that annoyed him no end. Nor was he a handsome cavalier, but had visited little Leila out of medical and spiritual conviction, as a protest against the prevailing egotism of the place. In brief, he was a little disgruntled by the turn things had taken, or at least by what the major’s wife had to say, but otherwise very excited and pleased at having carried out his plan. Two things in particular lingered in his mind and heart: the earthy odor of the flower shop and Leila’s wet hand. And now that a beginning had been made, he arranged an appointment that very day with Sister Alfreda to visit her patient, Fritz Rotbein, who like his nurse was terribly bored, even though, to judge by all the evidence, he had only a short time left.

There was nothing for it—good Joachim would have to come along. Hans Castorp’s impulse for altruistic enterprise was stronger than his cousin’s reluctance—manifest primarily in Joachim’s silence and lowered gaze—because, barring an admission of a lack of Christian charity, he had no cogent explanation to offer. Hans Castorp saw that clearly, and used it to his advantage. He understood very well the military nature of that reluctance. But what if he himself felt excited and pleased by such plans, what if he found them useful? Why then, he would have to ignore Joachim’s silent resistance. He discussed with him whether they ought to send young Fritz Rotbein flowers as well, or perhaps take some with them, even though they were dealing with a moribund male. He wanted very much to do it; flowers, he said, were simply proper; he had been especially pleased by

his hydrangea gambit—the purple blossoms, the nice full shape. And so he decided that Rotbein’s

sex was offset by his terminal condition and that a gift of flowers did not require a birthday, particularly since a dying person surely ought to be treated as if every day were his birthday. And with that in mind and his cousin at his side, he again sought out the warm, earthy-scented air of the flower shop; carrying a dewy bouquet of fragrant roses, carnations, and wallflowers, he entered Herr Rotbein’s room, ushered in by Alfreda Schildknecht, who had first announced the two young men’s visit.

Barely twenty years old, but already graying and balding, the patient was emaciated, his skin waxen; he had large hands, large ears, a large nose; grateful to the point of tears for this diversion and their encouraging words, he actually wept a little out of weakness as he greeted them and accepted the bouquet. Almost immediately, however, in a voice close to a whisper, he turned the conversation to the European flower business and the current boom it was enjoying, especially the nurseries in Nice and Cannes, which daily exported flowers by mail and by the trainload in all directions, to wholesale markets in Paris and Berlin, even supplied Russia. For he was a businessman, and that was where his interests would remain as long as he lived. His father, who manufactured dolls in Coburg, had sent him to England for commercial training, he whispered, and it was there that he had taken ill. His fever had been diagnosed as typhoid in nature and treated accordingly, which meant a diet of broths that had caused him to lose far too much weight. They had let him eat up here, and he had certainly done so, had sat there in his bed, trying to nourish himself by the sweat of his brow. Except it had been too late; his intestine had also been infected, unfortunately, and all the tongue and smoked eel sent him from home had done no good—he could not digest a thing anymore. Now his father was on his way here from Coburg. Behrens had sent him a telegram—because they wanted to take more decisive action, a rib resection, to try it at least, although the chances for success were diminishing. Rotbein whispered all this in a very businesslike voice, viewing even the operation itself as a matter of business—as long as he lived he would regard things from that point of view. The total cost, he whispered, including the spinal anesthetic, would come to one thousand francs, since almost the entire rib cage was involved, six to eight ribs, and the question now was whether it could be seen as a promising investment. Behrens was trying to persuade him, but the doctor’s self-interest was only too clear—whereas his own interests seemed more ambiguous, and one could not be sure if it might not be wiser to die in peace with ribs intact.

It was hard to advise him. The cousins suggested that one must also take into consideration the director’s splendid talents as a surgeon. They finally agreed that the elder Rotbein, who was already chugging his way here, should have the last word. As they left, young Fritz wept a little again, and

although it was only out of weakness, the tears he shed stood in curious contradiction to the dry,

businesslike way he spoke and thought. He begged the gentlemen to visit him again, and they gladly promised they would—but never had the chance. The doll-manufacturer arrived that same evening, and the next morning the operation was performed, after which young Fritz was no longer able to receive visitors. Two days later, as Hans Castorp and Joachim were passing Rotbein’s room, they noticed it was being fumigated. Sister Alfreda had already packed her bag and departed from the Berghof, having received an urgent call to report to another moribund patient at a different sanatorium. Tucking the cord of her pince-nez behind her ear with a sigh, she had hurried off to nurse him—it was the only prospect that had opened up for her.

On your way to the dining hall or the outdoors, you sometimes saw an empty room, a “vacated” room, ready for fumigation, with furniture piled high and both doors flung wide open—a sight that spoke volumes, and yet was so normal that it said very little, especially when at some point you yourself had taken possession of just such a fumigated, “vacated” room and now called it home. Sometimes, however, you knew who had lived in a particular room, and that always made you stop and think—as was the case both on that occasion and eight days later, when Hans Castorp saw Leila Gerngross’s room in the same state. At first his mind rebelled against the commotion he saw inside the room. He was still standing there observing, perplexed and lost in thought, when the director happened by.

“Good day, Director Behrens. I was just standing here watching them fumigate,” Hans Castorp said. “Little Leila . . .”

“Hm yes—” Behrens replied with a shrug. After a period of silence, during which he let this gesture take effect, he added, “You did a proper bit of courting there at the end—got in just under the wire, didn’t you? I like that about you—taking on my little lung-whistlers in their cages, seeing as you’re in relatively robust health yourself. A nice trait. No, no—you cannot deny it, it’s a very pretty trait in your character. Would you like me to introduce you to some patients now and then? I’ve plenty of other caged finches here—that’s if you’re still interested. For instance I’m just about to look in on ‘Lady Overblown.’ Do you want to come along? I’ll introduce you as a fellow sufferer.”

Hans Castorp replied that the director had taken the words right out of his mouth, had suggested precisely what he had wanted to ask. He would gratefully accept the offer. But who was this woman, this “Lady Overblown,” and how was he supposed to take the name?

“Literally,” the director said. “No metaphors intended. You can let her tell you herself. “ A few steps, and they were at “Lady Overblown’s” room. Ordering his companion to wait, the director thrust his way through both doors. As Behrens entered, there was a burst of bright, merry laughter inside the

room, but any words were broken off as the door closed. The visitor was greeted by the same

laughter when, a few minutes later, he was allowed to enter and Behrens introduced him to a blond woman half sitting up in bed, with pillows stuffed behind her, her blue eyes gazing at him with curiosity. She seemed fidgety and laughed incessantly—a very high, silvery-bright, bubbly laugh that left her fighting for breath, which only made her seem that much more nervous, excited, and titillated. She also laughed at the director’s distinctive turns of phrase as he presented the visitor and then turned to leave. Waving good-bye, she called out “adieu” and “many thanks” and “see you soon” several times. She now sighed a musical sigh and laughed a silvery arpeggio, pressing her hands to her chest heaving beneath her batiste nightshirt—she was also apparently having difficulty keeping her legs still. Her name was Frau Zimmermann.

Hans Castorp knew her vaguely by sight. She had sat at the same table with Frau Salomon and the gluttonous student for a few weeks, and was always laughing. Then she had vanished without the young man’s paying much attention. She might have left the Berghof, he thought—that is, if he gave any thought at all to her disappearance. Now he found her here, under the name of “Lady Overblown”—and was still waiting for an explanation of that.

“Ha ha, ha ha,” she bubbled gleefully, her breast fluttering. “A terribly funny man, our Behrens, a fabulously funny, amusing man—laugh till your sides split. Do have a seat, Herr Kasten, Herr Carsten, or whatever your name was. You do have a funny name, ha ha, hee hee. You must excuse me. Do sit down on that chair at the foot of the bed, but pay no mind if my legs start kicking, I really can’t . . . ha ha, aaah”—she sighed with an open mouth and then went on bubbling—“really can’t seem to help it.”

She was almost pretty, had clear, rather too defined, but agreeable features and a little double chin. But her lips were bluish, and the tip of her nose had taken on the same hue, evidently from a lack of oxygen. Her hands were thin and looked very attractive against the lace cuffs of her nightshirt, but she could keep them still no more than she could her feet. Her neck was girlish, with dimples at the collarbone, and her breasts appeared soft and young under the linen sheets, kept in constant shallow motion by both laughter and the struggle for air. Hans Castorp decided he would send her a potted plant, too, or bring her a dewy, fragrant bouquet, imported from the nurseries of Nice or Cannes. With some misgivings, he joined Frau Zimmermann in her volatile, edgy good cheer.

“So you’re visiting high-ranking patients, are you?” she asked. “How amusing and kind of you, ha ha, ha ha. But you should know that I don’t rank very high on the fever chart—which is to say, I had almost none, really, until recently. Until this little adventure. Just listen, and tell me if it isn’t the

funniest thing you’ve ever heard in your life.” And now, struggling for air and laughing with many

a trill and grace note, she told him what had happened to her.

She had come up here only slightly ill—but ill, all the same, otherwise she would never have come; perhaps more than just slightly, but closer to that than seriously ill. Pneumothorax—the new surgical technique that had quickly gained such widespread popularity—had proved marvelously effective in her case. The operation had been a complete success; Frau Zimmermann’s condition had improved most gratifyingly. Her husband—for she was married, though she had no children—was told he could expect her home in three to four months. And so, just for the fun of it, she had made a little trip to Zurich—for no other reason than to amuse herself. And she had done so to her heart’s content; meanwhile, however, she became aware that she needed a refill and had entrusted a local doctor with the job. A nice, funny young man—ha ha ha, ha ha ha—and what had happened? He had overblown her! There was no other way to put it, the word itself said it all. He had meant well, too well, but had not really understood his task. The upshot was that she had come back up here in an overblown state, with constriction of the heart and shortness of breath—ha! hee hee hee—and Behrens had sworn like a trooper and sent her straight to bed. Because she was now seriously ill— not a patient of highest rank, but one whose case was botched and bungled. Ha ha ha—look at his face, what a funny face! And pointing a finger at Hans Castorp, she laughed so hard at the face he was making that her forehead began to turn purple. But the funniest thing of all, she said, had been the way Behrens had turned the air blue with his ranting and raving. From the moment she had realized she was overblown, just picturing what he would do had set her laughing. “You are literally hovering between life and death,” he had shouted, not bothering to mince words. What a bear he was—ha ha ha, hee hee hee—Herr Carsten really must excuse her.

It was not clear why the director’s comments had sent her into gales of laughter. Was it because he had “turned the air blue” and she did not really believe him—or that she did believe him, as she surely must, but found the state of “hovering between life and death” too funny for words? Hans Castorp had the impression that the latter was the case and that these sparkling trills and grace notes of laughter were due solely to childish giddiness and silly ignorance—and he did not approve. He sent her flowers all the same—but never saw gleeful Frau Zimmermann again, either. For after being kept under oxygen for several days, she had died in the arms of her husband, who had been called to her bedside by telegram. “A jumbo-size goose,” the director had volunteered in summary when he told Hans Castorp the news.

But even before her death, Hans Castorp—in a spirit of sympathetic enterprise and with the help of the director and the nursing staff—had made the acquaintance of other seriously ill patients in the

sanatorium, and Joachim had to come along. He had to come along to visit Tous-les-deux’s son, the

one still left her—the other’s room had long since been turned upside down and fumigated with H2CO. There was also a boy named Teddy, whose condition had recently turned so serious that he had been transferred here from a boarding-school sanatorium called the “Fridericianum.” Then there was a Russo-German insurance agent named Anton Karlovitch Ferge, a good-natured martyr; and the unhappy, but very flirtatious Frau von Mallinckrodt, who like the others received flowers and whom Hans Castorp had even fed porridge on several occasions, with Joachim looking on. By now they had gained the reputation of Good Samaritans and Hospitallers.

The day came when Settembrini broached the topic with Hans Castorp. “Zounds, my good engineer. I’ve been hearing the most curious things about your behavior. You have thrown yourself into deeds of mercy? Are you pursuing justification by good works?”

“Nothing worth mentioning, Herr Settembrini. Nothing to it, really, nothing to make a fuss over. My cousin and I . . .”

“Oh, leave your cousin out of this. Though you both may have become the topic of conversation, it is you we are concerned with, that much is certain. The lieutenant is a respectable fellow, but his is a simple temperament, not prone to spiritual dangers—the sort that never perturbs a teacher. You’ll not convince me he’s in charge here. You are the more important personality—and the one in greater danger. You are, if I may put it that way, one of life’s problem children, a fellow whom others must look after. And you did once tell me that I might look after you.”

“I most certainly did, Herr Settembrini. Once and for all. It’s very kind of you. And ‘life’s problem children’ is prettily put. The things you writers come up with! I don’t rightly know if I should consider myself flattered by the term, but it does sound pretty, I must say. Yes, well, I have been concerning myself somewhat with ‘death’s children’—that’s probably what you mean. Now and then, when I have time, just in passing, as it were, and not that I neglect my own rest-cure duties, I look in on the serious and critical cases—you know, the ones who come here not for their own amusement and a loose life, but to die.”

“It is written, however: let the dead bury their dead,” the Italian said.

Hans Castorp raised his arms and made a face that said that a great many things were written, on both sides of the question, and that it was difficult to decide what was right and abide by it. But of course, the organ-grinder would voice a disruptive point of view—that was to be expected. Yet even though Hans Castorp was prepared, as he had been all along, to lend him an ear, to consider his lectures worth listening to—quite noncommittally—and to let himself be pedagogically influenced, that in no way meant that, on the basis of a strictly educational point of view, he should desist from

his enterprise, which still seemed to have an important impact, to be beneficial in some vague way—

despite Madame Gerngross and her talk about a “nice little fleert,” despite the businesslike personality of poor young Rotbein or the foolish trillings of Lady Overblown.

Tous-les-deux’s son was named Lauro. He had also been sent flowers—violets from Nice, heavy with the scent of earth—“from two fellow patients, with best wishes for recovery”; anonymity, however, had now become merely a matter of form, and everyone knew from whom such gifts came. And so when Tous-les-deux—the pallid, black-clad mother from Mexico—happened to meet the cousins in the corridor, she expressed her gratitude, chiefly by a series of mournfully becoming gestures, and in her clanking French asked for them to receive in person the thanks of her son—de son seul et dernier fils qui allait mourir aussi. They did so at once. Lauro turned out to be an astonishingly pretty young man with glowing eyes, an aquiline nose with flared nostrils, and splendid lips above which sprouted a black moustache; but he carried on in such a dramatic, boastful way that the visitors— Hans Castorp no less than Joachim Ziemssen—were both happy to close the patient’s door behind them again. During their visit, Tous-les-deux—wrapped in her black cashmere shawl, a black veil knotted under her chin, her narrow brow creased by a frown, enormous bags of skin drooping under her jet-black eyes—had paced the room with knees slightly bent; now and then she would approach the two cousins sitting beside the bed and, with her careworn mouth turned down at one corner, repeat her one tragic, parrotlike sentence: “Tous les dé, vous comprenez, messiés . . . Premièrement l’un et maintenant l’autre.” Meanwhile, pretty Lauro had gushed on and on in surging, clanking, and unbearably high-flown French phrases about how he intended to die a hero’s death, comme héros, à l’espagnol, just like his brother, de même que son fier jeune frère, Fernando, who likewise had died a Spanish hero. And he went on like that—speaking with broad gestures, ripping back his shirt to expose his yellow chest to the fatal blow—until a coughing fit stifled his rodomontade, bringing delicate, rusty-colored froth to his lips and giving the cousins an excuse to withdraw on tiptoe.

They said nothing further about their visit with Lauro, and even in the quiet of their own rooms, they refrained from judging his behavior. They both enjoyed, however, their visits with Anton Karlovitch Ferge from Saint Petersburg, a fellow with a huge good-natured moustache and a protruding Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured; he lay there in his bed, recovering very slowly and with great difficulty from an attempted pneumothorax, which, Herr Ferge said, had come within an inch of costing him his life. It had been a severe shock to his system, a pleural shock, which was known to happen sometimes during the fashionable operation. His had

been an exceptionally dangerous pleural shock, a total collapse, an alarming swoon—in a word, so

severe that the operation had to be broken off and postponed for now.

Whenever Herr Ferge spoke about these events, his good-natured gray eyes grew wide and his face grew pallid—it must have been horrible. “With no general anesthetic, gentlemen. Fine, it’s not permitted in cases like ours, we can’t handle that—which is understandable, and so as a reasonable man you reconcile yourself to the fact. But the local does not go deep, gentlemen, it numbs only the outermost layer of muscle, you feel them make the incision, although only as a bruising pressure. I’m lying there with my face covered so I can’t see anything, and the assistant is holding me on the right and the head nurse on the left. It’s as if someone is pressing me, bruising me—it is the muscle tissue that they open up and hold back with clamps. And then I hear the director say, ‘So!’ And at that same moment, gentlemen, he begins to explore the pleural lining with a blunt instrument—it has to be blunt so it doesn’t puncture too soon; he explores to find the right place to make his puncture and let in the gas, but the way he does it, the way he rubs the instrument around the pleural lining—gentlemen, gentlemen, that’s what did me in. It was all over for me—simply indescribable. The pleural lining, gentlemen, should never be touched—it ought not, cannot, be touched. It is taboo. The pleural lining is covered by flesh, isolated, inaccessible—for good and all. And now he had exposed it, was exploring it. Gentlemen, it made me sick to my stomach. It was ghastly, gentlemen. I never in my life thought that such a totally hideous, filthy feeling could even exist, except perhaps in hell. I fainted dead away, fell into three faints at once—a green, a brown, and a purple. And it stank at the bottom—the pleural shock affected my sense of smell, gentlemen. There was the unbearable stench of hydrogen sulfide, just like hell itself must stink. And as I blacked out, I heard myself laughing—not a human laugh, but the most indecent, disgusting laugh I’ve ever heard in my life. Because when they explore your pleural lining, gentlemen, it’s as if you are being tickled in the most infamous, intense, inhuman way—that’s just what the damn, disgraceful torment feels like. That’s what pleural shock is, and may the good Lord spare you the experience.”

Anton Karlovitch Ferge came back again and again—and always with that same pallor of horror— to his “filthy” ordeal, reliving many of its torments every time he told about it. He had explained from the start that, being an ordinary man, “higher things” were utterly foreign to him. They shouldn’t make any special intellectual or emotional demands of him, and he wouldn’t make any of them. But once that was settled, he could tell some very interesting tales about the life he had led before illness wrenched him out of it—the life of a traveling fire-insurance salesman. With Petersburg as home base, he had traveled the length and breadth of Russia, visiting insured factories and ferreting out those in dubious financial condition—because statistics showed that fires occurred most

often in factories where business was going badly. Which was why he was sent to investigate each

factory on some pretext or other, and report back to his bank, so that they could have time to prevent serious losses by reinsuring or spreading the risk. He told about trips across the great empire in winter, about traveling all night in the incredible cold, stretched out in a sleigh under sheepskins, and when he awoke he could see the eyes of wolves glowing like stars out there in the snow. He had brought boxes of provisions with him, frozen cabbage soup and white bread, which he would thaw out and enjoy whenever they stopped to change horses, and the bread would be as fresh as on the day it was baked. The worst thing was if a sudden thaw set in—then the chunks of cabbage soup he had brought along would melt and leak.

And so Herr Ferge would tell his tales, occasionally interrupting himself to heave a sigh and remark how everything was quite fine now—if only they didn’t try to perform another pneumothorax on him. He never spoke of “higher things,” but simply stuck to the facts, and it was a delight to listen to him—particularly for Hans Castorp, who thought it useful to hear about the Russian Empire and the life lived there, about samovars, piroshki, Cossacks, and wooden churches with so many onion- shaped steeples that they looked like mushroom colonies. He also had Herr Ferge tell them about the people who lived there, people from the Far North—and so all the more exotic in Hans Castorp’s eyes—with Asia in their blood, prominent cheekbones, and a Finno-Mongolian set to their eyes. He listened to it all with anthropological interest, even asked to hear some Russian spoken as well; and the muddy, barbaric, boneless tongue from the East flowed swiftly out of Herr Ferge’s good-natured protruding Adam’s apple and from under his good-natured moustache. And youth being what it is, Hans Castorp felt all the more entertained because he was now romping in pedagogically forbidden territory.

They often dropped by to spend fifteen minutes with Anton Karlovitch Ferge. From time to time they also visited Teddy, the boy from the Fridericianum, an elegant, refined, blond fourteen-year- old, who had a private nurse and wore white silk tie-string pajamas. He was an orphan, but rich, as he himself admitted. He was waiting now for a serious operation—they hoped to remove some of his worm-eaten parts—but on days when he was feeling better he would sometimes leave his bed for an hour, put on a handsome, sporty outfit, and join the social whirl downstairs. The ladies liked to tease him, and he enjoyed listening to their conversations—when, for example, the talk turned to Einhuf the lawyer, the young lady in bloomers, and Fränzchen Oberdank. Then he would go lie down again. And so Teddy idled his time away elegantly, making it clear that he expected nothing more of life than this.

In room number 50 lay Frau von Mallinckrodt—Natalie was her first name. She had black eyes and

wore golden earrings; a flirt who loved her finery, she was nevertheless a perfect Job, a Lazarus in a female body, whom God had visited with every sort of affliction. Her organism seemed to be so inundated by toxins that she was ravaged by numerous illnesses, sometimes alternately, sometimes all at once. Her skin was a particular problem, great portions of it subject to a tormenting itch that erupted here and there into the open sores of eczema, even around the mouth—which was why she found it difficult to use a spoon. Frau von Mallinckrodt suffered by turns from various internal inflammations—of the pleura, the kidneys, the lungs, the periosteum, even of the brain, which would cause her to lapse into unconsciousness; a weak heart, the result of fever and constant pain, was her greatest worry, for it sometimes resulted in food becoming lodged at the top of the esophagus, making it difficult for her to swallow normally. In short, the woman’s life was a horror. She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children—as she freely admitted to the cousins— for another man (still half a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover. She now had no home, although she was not penniless—her former husband saw to that. She did not take herself seriously and therefore did not let false pride prevent her from making full use of his decency—or was it enduring love? Well aware that she was a faithless and sinful woman, she bore all the plagues of Job with amazing patience and poise, with a fiery female’s elemental powers of resistance; she triumphed over the misery of her dark-skinned body, even turned a white gauze bandage, which she was forced to wear wrapped around her head for some awful reason, into a becoming piece of attire. She was constantly changing her jewelry—beginning each morning with corals and ending each evening with pearls. She had been delighted by the flowers Hans Castorp had sent, regarding them as a gesture more of gallantry than charity, and she invited the two young men for tea at her bedside—drinking hers from a spouted cup; her fingers, including thumbs, were adorned to the knuckles with opals, amethysts, and emeralds. With golden rings dangling at her ears, she quickly told the cousins what had happened to her: about her respectable, but boring husband, her equally respectable and boring children, who had turned out just like their father and whom she had never especially warmed to, and about the half-grown boy with whom she had run off and whose poetic displays of affection she praised at length. But by ruses and coercion, his family had taken him away from her—and the lad had probably been. repulsed by her illness, too, which by then had begun to evidence itself in various violent eruptions. Were the gentlemen repulsed by it, too? she asked coquettishly; and her fiery femininity triumphed over the eczema covering half her face.

Hans Castorp felt only disdain for the lad’s allowing himself to be repulsed, and he let his disdain be known with a shrug. The poetic adolescent’s delicacy only served to spur him to take the opposite

course, to find occasion for paying frequent visits to unhappy Frau von Mallinckrodt and for

performing little nursing services that required no special training. He would arrive, for instance, just in time carefully to spoon her midday porridge into her mouth, to help her drink from her spouted cup if a bite got stuck in her throat, or to assist her in shifting position in bed—for, in addition to all her other problems, an incision from an operation made it difficult for her to lie down. He performed these little services when he would drop by on his way to the dining hall or after a walk, telling Joachim to go on ahead, that he was just going to check quickly on the case in room 50; and each time he felt his whole being expand with a joy rooted in a sense of helpfulness and quiet importance, but intermingled with a certain jaunty delight in the spotless Christian impression his good deeds made—an impression so devout, caring, and praiseworthy, in fact, that no serious objections whatever could be raised against it, either from a military or a humanistic-pedagogic standpoint.

We have not yet mentioned Karen Karstedt, although Hans Castorp and Joachim took special interest in her. She was one of Behrens’s private outpatients, and the director had commended her to the cousins’ charity. She had been up here four years now, was penniless herself and dependent on skinflint relatives, who had already taken her away once—she was going to die anyway—and had sent her back only when the director protested. She lived in an inexpensive boardinghouse in Dorf— nineteen years old, a slip of a thing, with smooth oily hair, eyes that shyly tried to hide a glint that matched the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a distinctively husky but sympathetic voice. She coughed almost incessantly and had bandages on all her fingers, the result of open sores from the toxins in her body.

The director had pled her cause to the two cousins—since they were such good-hearted lads—and they were now devoted to her. Flowers were sent, this was followed by a visit with poor Karen on her little balcony in Dorf, and then the three of them began to undertake special outings together. They attended an ice-skating contest, a bobsled race—for the winter sport season in our Alpine valley was in full swing. There was a festival week with any number of entertainments—sports events and performances to which the cousins had paid only occasional, fleeting attention until now. Joachim had been averse to all amusements up here. He had not come here for that sort of thing, was certainly not here to enjoy his stay by organizing his life around a variety of diversions, but solely for the purpose of detoxifying his body as quickly as possible, so that he could take up his duties in the plains below, real duties, not just the duties of rest cure—which, even though it was only a substitute, he was loath to slight in any way. It was forbidden to take part in winter sports, and he had no desire to play the gaping onlooker. And as for Hans Castorp, he felt himself to be, in a very restricted and

intimate sense, so very much a part of “the people up here” that he wasted not a thought or a glance

on people who saw the valley as a sports arena.

Their charitable interest in poor Fräulein Karstedt, however, brought with it several changes in this respect—and Joachim could not object without seeming un-Christian. On a splendid, frosty, sun- drenched day, they stopped for the sick girl at her modest apartment in Dorf and strolled with her past the elegant shops lining the main street of the English quarter, named for the Hotel d’Angleterre. To the sound of sleigh bells, the idle, pleasure-loving rich from all over the world, residents of the Kurhaus and the other large hotels, promenaded—bareheaded, clad in the latest sports outfits of the most expensive fabrics, and bronzed by the winter sun reflected off the snow. The trio now walked toward the bottom of the valley to the ice rink, which was not far from the resort and in summer served as a soccer field. There was music in the air, the hotel band was playing a concert from a little gallery on the wooden pavilion at the far end of the rectangular rink, behind which snowcapped mountains rose against a deep blue sky. They paid to enter, pushed their way through the crowd assembling on bleachers set up on three sides of the rink, and took their seats to watch. The skaters, wearing brief tricot costumes, the jackets trimmed with fur and braid, swayed to and fro, traced figures, leapt, and spun. A man and a woman, a pair of highly talented professionals ineligible for competition, executed a feat no one else in the world could do—to great applause and a fanfare. The contestants for the race, six young men of various nationalities, sped six times around the wide rectangle—bodies bent low, hands behind their backs, some with a handkerchief pressed to their mouths. A bell rang out while the music played on. From time to time, waves of encouraging cries and applause surged up from the crowd.

It was a very colorful gathering, and the three patients—the two cousins and their protégée—looked about, taking it all in. Englishmen with very white teeth and Scotch tams conversed in French with ladies drenched in perfume and dressed from head to foot in bright-colored wools, some even in trousers. American men, their hair plastered flat against their small heads, wore their fur coats skin- side out and smoked shag-tobacco pipes. Seated among the Germans and Swiss were bearded, elegant Russians, looking barbarically rich, and Dutchmen with traces of Malayan blood—all intermixed with a sprinkling of indeterminate sorts who spoke French and came from the Balkans or the Levant, a motley set of adventurers for whom Hans Castorp had a certain weakness but whom Joachim spurned as dubious and lacking in character. There were also various crazy contests for children, who hobbled across the rink with a snowshoe on one foot, an ice skate on the other. Little boys had to push little girls ahead of them on snow shovels. There was a race with candles—the winner was the first to arrive at the goal with her flame still burning. There were obstacle courses,

and races where the contestants had to carry potatoes on a tin spoon and deposit them in watering

cans set at the end of the course. High society cheered. People pointed out the richest, most famous, most charming children: the daughter of a Dutch multimillionaire, the son of a Prussian prince, and a twelve-year-old lad whose name was on the label of a world-famous champagne. Poor Karen cheered as well—and coughed each time. She clapped her hands for joy, despite the open sores on her fingers. She was so grateful.

The cousins also took her to the bobsled races. As it came down off Schatzalp, the run ended among buildings on Dorf’s western slope, not far from the Berghof, nor from Karen Karstedt’s lodgings. A little hut had been built at the finish line, and inside was a telephone that rang whenever a sled began its run. Steered by men and women in white wool and with sashes in various national colors across their chests, the low, flat frames came shooting down, one by one, at long intervals, taking the curves of the course that glistened like metal between icy mounds of snow. You could see red, tense faces with snow blowing in their eyes. There were accidents, too—sleds crashed and upended, dumping their teams in the snow, while onlookers took lots of pictures. There was music playing here, as well. The spectators sat in a little grandstand or thronged the narrow pathway shoveled free next to the course itself. Farther up, wooden bridges spanned the course, and they, too, were crowded with people who could watch the competing sleds hurtle by under them from time to time. The bodies from the sanatorium on the far slope whizzed down the same course, taking its curves, heading down to the valley, all in the valley, Hans Castorp thought—and remarked on the fact, too.

They even took Karen Karstedt to the Bioscope Theater in Platz one afternoon, because that was something she truly enjoyed. Being used to only the purest air, they felt ill at ease in the bad air that weighed heavily in their lungs and clouded their minds in a murky fog, while up ahead on the screen life flickered before their smarting eyes—all sorts of life, chopped up in hurried, diverting scraps that leapt into fidgety action, lingered, and twitched out of sight in alarm, to the accompaniment of trivial music, which offered present rhythms to match vanishing phantoms from the past and which despite limited means ran the gamut of solemnity, pomposity, passion, savagery, and cooing sensuality. They watched as a rousing tale of love and murder in the court of an Oriental potentate unrolled silently before them; scene after opulent scene sped past, full of naked bodies, despotic lust, and abject servility blind in its zeal, full of cruelty, prurience, and fatal desire—and then suddenly the film slowed to linger revealingly on the muscular arm of an executioner. In short, it had been produced with a sympathetic understanding of its international audience and catered to that civilization’s secret wishes. Settembrini, as a man who formed opinions, would surely have denounced this exhibition as a denigration of humanity, and with honest, classical irony would have

castigated the misuse of technology that made such cynical presentations possible—or so Hans

Castorp thought, and whispered as much to his cousin. Frau Stöhr, however, who happened to be sitting not all that far from the trio, had apparently abandoned herself to the film; her red, uneducated face was contorted with pleasure.

But, then, it was much the same with all the faces they could see. When the last flickering frame of one reel had twitched out of sight and the lights went up in the hall and the audience’s field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call. The actors who had been cast in the play they had just seen had long since been scattered to the winds; they had watched only phantoms, whose deeds had been reduced to a million photographs brought into focus for the briefest of moments so that, as often as one liked, they could then be given back to the element of time as a series of blinking flashes. Once the illusion was over, there was something repulsive about the crowd’s nerveless silence. Hands lay impotent before the void. People rubbed their eyes, stared straight ahead, felt embarrassed by the brightness and demanded the return of the dark, so that they could again watch things, whose time had passed, come to pass again, tricked out with music and transplanted into new time.

The despot was dispatched by a knife, his mouth opened for a bellow that no one heard. They now saw pictures from all over the world: the top-hatted president of the French republic reviewing a long cordon, then sitting in his landau to reply to a welcoming speech; the viceroy of India at the wedding of a rajah; the German crown prince on a barracks drill field in Potsdam. They observed the life and customs of an aboriginal village on New Mecklenburg, a cockfight on Borneo, naked savages blowing on nose flutes, the capture of wild elephants, a ceremony at the Siamese royal court, a street of brothels in Japan with geishas sitting caged behind wooden lattices. They watched Samoyeds bundled in furs driving sleds pulled by reindeer across the snowy wastes of northern Asia, Russian pilgrims praying at Hebron, a Persian criminal being bastinadoed. They were present at each event—space was negated, time turned back, “then and there” transformed by music into a skittering, phantasmagoric “here and now.” A young Moroccan woman dressed in striped silk and harnessed with chains, bangles, and rings, her swelling breasts half-bared, was suddenly brought nearer until she was life-size. Her nostrils were flared wide, her eyes full of animal life, her features vivacious; she laughed, showing her white teeth, held up one hand—the nails seemed lighter than her skin—to shield her eyes, and waved at the audience with the other. People stared in bewilderment at the face of this charming specter, who seemed to see them and yet did not, who was not at all affected by their gaze, and whose laughter and waves were not meant for the present, but

belonged to the then and there of home—it would have been pointless to respond. And so, as noted,

their delight was mixed with a sense of helplessness. Then the phantom vanished. A bright void filled the screen, the word Finis was projected on it, this cycle of entertainments was over, and the people left the theater in silence as a new audience pushed its way in, eager to enjoy another roll of the reels.

Urged on by Frau Stöhr, who had now joined them, they stopped by the Kurhaus café just to please Karen, who clasped her hands together in gratitude. There was music here, too. A little orchestra in red jackets was playing under the direction of a Czech or Hungarian violinist, who stood apart from the rest among the dancing couples, belaboring his instrument with ardent writhings of his body. This was the sophisticated life—people walked about with strange drinks in their hands. The cousins ordered refreshing orangeade for themselves and their protégée—it was hot and dusty in the room; Frau Stöhr, however, drank a sweet liqueur. Things were not in full gear yet at this time of day, she said. The dancing would get much more lively as the evening progressed; countless patients from the various sanatoriums and patients living brazenly on their own at the Kurhaus or other hotels would join in later in much greater number than now, and many a serious case had danced his way to eternity here, first tossing back the beaker of life and then hemorrhaging one last time in dulci jubilo. What Frau Stöhr in her ignorance did to the phrase dulci jubilo was quite extraordinary; she pronounced the first word as “dolce,” borrowing it from the Italian musical vocabulary of her spouse, but the second was more reminiscent of “yippee-ay-oh” or God only knew what—and at the sound of her Latin, the two cousins simultaneously made a grab for the straws in their glasses. This did not trouble Frau Stöhr. Instead, obstinately baring her rabbit’s teeth, she attempted by way of allusion and innuendo to get to the bottom of the relationship of these three young people, only one part of which was clear to her: that poor Karen, as she remarked, could not help enjoying the high life chaperoned by two such smart young cavaliers. The situation was much less obvious as regarded the cousins; but despite her stupidity and ignorance, feminine intuition allowed her a certain insight, if only a partial and vulgar one. For she understood, as she insinuated, that the real cavalier here was Hans Castorp and that young Ziemssen was merely his assistant; but since she was also well aware of Hans Castorp’s partiality for Frau Chauchat, she assumed he was chaperoning poor little Karstedt as a substitute for a woman he evidently did not know how to approach. It was a very inadequate insight, based on vulgar intuition and lacking real moral profundity, and so perfectly worthy of Frau Stöhr—which was why Hans Castorp replied only with a tired, disdainful glance when she expressed it in her coarse, bantering way. It was true, after all, that for Hans Castorp the relationship with poor Karen was a kind of substitute, a vaguely useful device—but that was true of all his other

charitable enterprises as well. Yet these pious works were, at the same time, an end in themselves,

and the satisfaction he found in feeding porridge to sickly Frau Mallinckrodt, in letting Herr Ferge describe his infernal pleural shock, or in seeing poor Karen clap her hands with joy and gratitude, despite the bandaged fingertips, was not only of a vicarious and relative kind, but also genuine and immediate. It arose from an intellectual tradition diametrically opposed to the one represented by Herr Settembrini’s pedagogy, but all the same one quite worthy of the designation “placet experiri”—or so it seemed to Hans Castorp.

The little house where Karen Karstedt lived was on the road leading into Dorf, not far from the brook and the train tracks, and so it was easy for the cousins to stop for her when setting out on their promenade after breakfast. Continuing toward the main street of Dorf, they saw Little Schiahorn directly before them, and on its right were three crags called the Green Towers, although they, too, now lay under snow glistening in the sun, and still farther to the right was the summit of Dorfberg. A cemetery was visible about a quarter of the way up its slope: the town cemetery, surrounded by a wall, presumably commanding a lovely view—of the lake, more than likely—which made it an obvious goal for a walk. And the three of them did hike up there one beautiful morning—all the mornings were beautiful now, calm and sunny, frosty yet warm, glistening white under a deep blue sky. The cousins, the one with a brick-red face, the other tanned bronze, walked along without overcoats, which would only have been burdensome in the glaring sun—young Ziemssen wearing sport clothes and rubber galoshes, Hans Castorp dressed much the same, though in long trousers, since he was not the sort who gave much thought to his physique. It was between the beginning and the middle of February of a new year. Yes, the last number in the date had indeed changed since Hans Castorp’s arrival up here; when you wrote the date, you added another year. One hand on the world’s great chronometer had ticked ahead one space—not one of the largest hands, not the one for millennia for instance, few people then alive would ever see that happen—not the century hand, either, not even the decade hand, no. But the year hand had recently moved one space (although Hans Castorp had not been up here even a year yet, only a little more than half a one), and like some large clocks with a minute hand that jerks only every five minutes, it now stood still and would not advance again soon. The month hand had to move ahead ten more spaces yet, a few more than it had since Hans Castorp had arrived up here. February, however, no longer counted, because once begun, soon finished—once the bill’s broken, the money’s soon spent.

And so the trio also walked to the cemetery on Dorfberg one day—this excursion, too, is recorded here for the sake of rendering a full account. The suggestion had been Hans Castorp’s, and although Joachim had some doubts at first because of poor Karen, he had yielded, admitting that it would

have been pointless to play hide-and-seek with her, shielding her out of anxiety, à la cowardly Frau

Stöhr, from anything that might remind her of her mortality. Karen Karstedt did not indulge in self- deception about even the final stages of her illness; she knew only too well how things stood and what the necrosis in her fingertips meant. She knew, moreover, that her skinflint relatives would hardly want to hear anything about the expense of transporting her home after her demise and that she would be allotted a modest plot up above for a final resting place. And so one might very well conclude that, as a goal for an excursion, it was more morally fitting than many others—the movie theater or the start of the bobsled run, for instance—particularly since paying a visit to those people up there was nothing more than an act of comradely respect, assuming, of course, that one did not regard the cemetery simply as one of the town’s sights, a standard goal for a standard walk.

They worked their way slowly up the path in single file, since it had been shoveled wide enough for only one person to pass, left behind the last villas set high on the slope, and, as they climbed, looked back down on the landscape in its winter splendor, opening again now in a slightly shifted perspective. The vista broadened to the northeast toward the entrance to the valley and included the lake, as expected—a frozen, snow-covered circle surrounded by forest. Beyond its farthest shore, several steep slopes appeared to meet, and above them were unfamiliar, snow-clad peaks, overtopping one another against the blue sky. Standing there in the snow beside the little stone gate to the cemetery, they took in the view and then entered, swinging aside the unlocked wrought-iron grill hinged to the stone.

Here, too, paths had been shoveled between railed-in, snow-covered mounds—gravesites, each containing a series of regular, properly made beds decorated with stone and metal crosses or little monuments adorned with medallions and inscriptions. But not another soul was to be seen or heard. The silence, the solitude, the serenity of the place seemed both deep and secret, in many senses of those words. Among some shrubbery stood a little stone angel or cupid, its snowy cap cocked to one side, its finger to its lips; it might have been taken for the genius of the place—that is to say, the genius of silence, but of a silence that, although it was certainly the antithesis and counterpart of speech, and so a silence of hushed voices, was in no way a silence devoid of substance or incident. This would probably have been an occasion for the two men to remove their hats, had they been wearing any. But they were both bareheaded, even Hans Castorp, and so they merely walked on ahead reverently, in single file behind Karen Karstedt, who led the way, placing their weight on the balls of their feet and making what looked like a series of little bows to the right and left.

The cemetery was irregularly shaped, beginning as a narrow rectangle facing southward and then opening into two more rectangles, one on either side. It had obviously had to be enlarged several

times by the annexation of adjacent fields. All the same, the enclosure seemed to be as good as fully

occupied at present, whether along the walls or in the middle, where the less desirable plots were located. It would have been hard to say where anyone else could be buried. The three strangers wandered discreetly for a while along the narrow channels and passageways between the monuments, stopping now and then to decipher a name, the dates of birth and death. The gravestones and crosses were unpretentious affairs placed there at no great expense. As for the inscriptions, the names came from every corner of the earth, were written in English, Russian or other Slavic languages, in German, Portuguese, and many more tongues. The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality—on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty. The field was populated almost exclusively by youth rather than virtue, by unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form of existence.

Somewhere deep in the press of resting places, toward the midpoint of the meadow, between two mounds whose gravestones were hung with artificial wreaths, was a flat, regular, unoccupied space, the length of a human body—and the three visitors stopped instinctively beside it. There they stood, the young girl a little ahead of her escorts, reading the tender message of the stones—Hans Castorp relaxed, his hands clasped before him, with open mouth and sleepy eyes; young Ziemssen at attention, not merely erect, but even leaning backward a little. The cousins, both at the same moment, cast stolen sidelong glances at Karen Karstedt’s face. She noticed, however, and as she stood there, bashful and demure, she thrust her head forward at a slight tilt and smiled affectedly with pursed lips, blinking her eyes rapidly.

WALPURGIS NIGHT

A few days passed, and young Hans Castorp had now spent seven months up here, whereas Joachim, who already had five months to his credit when his cousin first arrived, could now look back on twelve months, one round year—round in the cosmic sense, as well, for in the time since the small, sturdy locomotive had dropped him off up here, the earth had returned to its starting point, having completed one orbit around the sun. It was carnival time. Mardi Gras was upon them, and Hans Castorp inquired of the one-year-old what that was like up here.

“Magnifique!” responded Settembrini, who had happened to meet the cousins on their morning constitutional. “Splendid!” he said. “As rollicking as in the Prater. You’ll see, my good engineer. And now the dance is taken up, we play gallants most dashing,” he quoted, and went on shooting a volley of taut, satirical words, accompanying his satire with deft gestures of arm, head, and shoulder.

“What do you want? Even in the maison de santé they throw balls and galas now and then for the fools and cretins, or so I’ve read—why not here? The program includes various danses macabres. Unfortunately a certain number of last year’s participants won’t be able to appear this time, because the party is over at half past nine.”

“You mean . . . oh, I see now—how marvelous!” Hans Castorp laughed. “What a jokester you are! ‘At half past nine’—did you hear, cousin? Herr Settembrini is saying that it’s too early for some of ‘last year’s participants’ to spend a little time at the ball. Ha, ha, how spooky. He means the people who have finally put aside all ‘lusts of the flesh’—if you know what I mean. But I really am looking forward to it,” he said. “I’m all for celebrating holidays just as they fall; we should mark the passing of the year in the usual way, its turning points, I mean, so that the monotony gets divided up. Things would be just too strange otherwise. And so we’ve had Christmas, and we marked the New Year, and now Mardi Gras is coming. Then it will soon be Palm Sunday—do they bake special pastries here?—then Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost, which is only six weeks later, and then before you know it, it’s the longest day, Midsummer Night, you see, and soon you’re into autumn.”

“Wait! Wait! Wait!” Settembrini cried, lifting his face heavenward and pressing his palms to his temples. “Silence! I forbid you to play so fast and loose with time!”

“Beg your pardon, I really meant just the opposite. By the way, Behrens will probably decide sooner or later to use injections to try to detoxify me, because I’m constantly at ninety-nine point three, point five, point seven, even point nine. It simply never changes. I am and shall remain one of life’s problem children—not that I’m a long-termer. Rhadamanthus has never saddled me with any sentence, but he says it would be pointless to interrupt my cure too soon, especially since I’ve been up here for so long now—have invested so much time, so to speak. And what good would it do if he were to set a date? It wouldn’t mean all that much, because if he says six months, for example, that’s always a low estimate—you have to be ready for more. You can see that with my cousin here, who was supposed to be finished by the first of the month—finished in the sense of cured—but at his last checkup Behrens said it would take another four months for him to heal completely. Well, and where are we then? Why, Midsummer Night, just as I said—but not because I wanted to offend you. And then we start heading toward winter. But at the moment we’re about to celebrate Mardi Gras, of course. And as you heard I’m all in favor of that, of celebrating things as they come, just as the calendar dictates. Frau Stöhr mentioned that we can get little toy trumpets at the concierge’s desk, is that right?”

It was indeed. Already at breakfast on Mardi Gras morning—which was there before you had even got a good bead on it—already at breakfast, the dining hall was filled with the rattling and tootling

of all sorts of toy instruments. By noon, streamers were already flying at the table where Gänser,

Rasmussen, and Kleefeld sat, and several people—round-eyed Marusya for instance—were wearing paper hats, which were also on sale at the limping concierge’s desk in the lobby. And by evening both in the dining hall and the social rooms the festivities continued to grow until at one point . . . At this juncture we alone know to what these carnival festivities eventually led, thanks to Hans Castorp’s enterprising spirit. But we are not about to let our knowledge of what happened disrupt the deliberate pace of our narrative; instead, we shall give time the honor it is due and not rush into things—perhaps we shall even draw these events out a bit, for we share with young Hans Castorp the same moral scruples that for so long had kept him from precipitating such events.

More or less everyone made a pilgrimage to Platz that afternoon to see the carnival in the streets. There were people strolling in masks—Punchinellos and Harlequins, flicking whips that rattled— and flurries of confetti burst among the pedestrians and above the heads of masked passengers in the decorated sleighs jingling past. By suppertime, spirits were already very high at all seven tables, with everyone determined to continue the public gaiety in their own closed circle. The concierge had done a good business in paper hats, rattles, and sacks of favors, and Prosecutor Paravant made a start at keeping the buffoonery going by appearing in a kimono and wearing a false pigtail that belonged, or so someone shouted, to Frau Wurmbrandt, the general consul’s wife; he had also used a curling iron to turn his moustaches down, making him look every inch Chinese. Nor was the management taking a backseat to anyone. They had placed a paper lantern on each table, a colorful moon with a candle burning inside, so that when Settembrini entered the dining hall, passing close by Hans Castorp’s table, he had an appropriate quote at the ready:

Behold bright flames illuminated! A merry club has congregated.

As he said it, he smiled his delicate, dry smile, but kept on strolling toward his seat, where he was received with a barrage of fragile pellets that burst as they struck, dousing their victim in a spray of perfume.

To put it in a word: the festive spirit was very apparent from the start. Laughter reigned, streamers dangling from the chandeliers wafted in the breeze, confetti floated in the gravy, and soon the dwarf appeared with the first ice-bucket and hurried past with the first bottle of champagne. Lawyer Einhuf set the tone by mixing champagne and burgundy, and now they were all doing it. Once the lights were turned off toward the end of the meal and only the lanterns illumined the dining hall with the soft, colorful glow of a night in Italy, the perfect mood was set. There was general approval at Hans

Castorp’s table of a note that Settembrini passed to him by way of Marusya, who was decked out in

a jockey’s cap of green tissue paper, on which he had written in pencil: But bear in mind, the mountain’s mad with spells tonight,

And should a will-o’-wisp decide your way to light, Beware—its lead may prove deceptive.

Dr. Blumenkohl, who had been doing very poorly again of late, muttered something to himself— with a look on his face, or better, about his lips, that was peculiarly his own—that indicated the source of these verses. For his part, Hans Castorp felt that he ought to reciprocate tit for tat, that he had to respond by writing a jocular note of his own, though it could have been only some very lightweight quotation. He searched his pockets for a pencil, but could not find one, and neither Joachim nor the teacher had one to lend him. His bloodshot eyes wandered eastward for help, to the far left-hand corner of the dining hall. And it was at once apparent that what had been a fleeting notion had dissipated into a wider circle of associations—he turned pale and completely forgot his original intention.

There was reason enough for him to turn pale. Frau Chauchat had likewise dressed for the occasion and was wearing a new gown, or at least a gown that Hans Castorp had never seen on her—of thin, dark, almost black silk that sometimes took on a tawny shimmer; the rounded cut of the neck was small, almost girlish, barely deep enough to expose the throat or even a hint of the collarbone—or her protruding neck bones visible beneath a few stray hairs when she thrust her head forward in that special way. But it left Clavdia’s arms bare all the way to the shoulder—her arms, so tender and full at the same time, and cool, one could only presume—so that they stood out extraordinarily white against the dark shadows of silk. The effect was so overwhelming that Hans Castorp closed his eyes and whispered to himself, “My God!” He had never seen a dress cut like that. He was familiar with festive, yet formal ball gowns that revealed, as custom allowed, far more of the human body than this one, yet without causing the least bit of sensation. Poor Hans Castorp—what an error his earlier assumption had been upon first making the acquaintance of those arms through thin gossamer: that once bared, bared against all good reason, those arms would affect him less deeply without the seductive “radiant illusion” of fabric, as he had called it that day. An error, a fatal act of self- deception! The full, heightened, dazzling nakedness of the splendid limbs of a sick, infected organism turned out to be an experience far more potent than that day’s “illusion”—a phenomenon for which there was only one response: he lowered his head again and silently repeated, “My God!” A little later, another note arrived, on which was written:

A party to your heart’s desire,

With maids who long to marry,

And bachelors with hearts on fire, And hopes extraordinary!

“Bravo, bravo!” someone shouted. They were drinking their mocha now, served in little earthen- brown jugs, and some had liqueurs as well—Frau Stöhr for example, who simply loved to sip sweet spirits. People began to get up and circulate about the room. They visited one another’s tables. One group of guests had already moved on to the social rooms, while another stayed where they were in order to apply themselves to more burgundy and champagne. Settembrini came over in person now, coffee cup in hand, a toothpick between his lips, and made himself at home between Hans Castorp and the teacher.

“In the Harz Mountains,” he said, “are towns with names like Schierke and Elend—Imps and Misery. Did I exaggerate, my good engineer? Now here’s a holy mass, I do declare. But just wait, our mirth’s not yet about to fade, we’ve not yet reached our heights—let alone come to an end. To judge from what one hears, still further masquerades await us. Certain persons have already withdrawn—and therefore we are permitted to make all sorts of assumptions. You’ll see.”

And indeed new costumes arrived now: ladies in men’s clothes, their ample curves making them look as implausible as characters in an operetta, an effect accentuated by black beards drawn on their faces with burnt cork; and vice versa, gentlemen attired in women’s clothes, tripping over their skirts—including Rasmussen the student, who wore a black, jet-trimmed gown, its décolletage revealing a pimply chest and ditto back, both of which he tried to cool with a paper fan. A knock- kneed beggar appeared, leaning on a crutch. Someone had put together a Punchinello costume out of white underwear and a lady’s felt hat—the face powdered so white that the eyes looked quite unnatural, the lips emphasized in bloody-red lipstick. (It was the young fellow with the saltcellar fingernail.) A Greek from the Bad Russian table strutted about as a Spanish grandee or fairy-tale prince with a cape, paper ruff, and sword—and a pair of purple tights to show off his handsome legs. All these costumes had been hastily improvised after the meal. Frau Stöhr could no longer bear it just to sit there. She vanished, and a short time later reappeared as a cleaning lady, with apron and rolled-up sleeves, the ribbons of her paper hat tied under her chin; she was armed with bucket and broom, which she now put to use, thrusting the wet broom under the table and swabbing between people’s feet.

“And here alone comes Baubo now,” Settembrini quoted, and added the next line, too, in his clear, graphic voice—its rhyme was “sow.” Frau Stöhr heard that—called him an Italian turkey, told him to keep his “filthy jokes” to himself, and, availing herself of the license of carnival, used familiar

pronouns. But then, that form of address had gained general usage during the meal. Settembrini was

about to reply, when he was interrupted by the racket of loud laughter coming from the lobby. Everyone in the dining hall looked up.

Followed by other guests emerging from the social rooms, two curious figures now made their entrance—they had apparently only just finished with their costumes. The one was dressed in a deaconess’s black uniform, but with white horizontal stripes sewn onto it from collar to hem—short stripes, set close together, with a few longer ones here and there, like the markings on a thermometer. She kept one forefinger pressed to her pale lips and carried a fever chart in her right hand. The second person was costumed all in blue—eyebrows and lips tinted blue, the whole face and neck in fact painted blue, a blue woolen cap pulled down over one ear, and a case or slipcover of glazed blue linen, all one piece, pulled down over him, then tied with a string at the ankles and stuffed with pillows to round things off at the stomach. They recognized these two as Frau Iltis and Herr Albin. Both had paper signs hung around their necks, on which were written “Silent Sister” and “Blue Henry.” Paired together and moving in a kind of waddle, they circled the room.

To great applause—and clamoring cheers! Frau Stöhr, her broom tucked under one arm, put both hands on her knees and broke into unrestrained, vulgar laughter—her role as a charwoman gave her such license. Only Settembrini showed no response. He cast the winning costumes one quick glance, and then his lips grew very thin beneath the lovely upward sweep of his moustache.

Among those who had found their way back from the social rooms in the wake of Mr. Blue and Miss Silent was Clavdia Chauchat. Accompanied by frizzy-haired Tamara and her tablemate with the concave chest, a Bulgarian in evening dress, she crossed the room, moving toward the table where Gänser and Kleefeld were sitting—and brushing past Hans Castorp’s table in her new dress. She stopped now to chat, her hands behind her back, her narrow eyes laughing; her escorts, however, joined the allegorical spooks and followed them out of the room. Frau Chauchat had donned a carnival hat as well—not one she had bought, but the kind children make, a simple tricorn of folded white paper set rakishly to one side—and it looked quite marvelous on her. The skirt of her dark golden-brown silk dress reached only to her ankles and was slightly bouffant. We shall say nothing more about her arms—which were bare to the shoulder.

“Look closer now, my lad!” Hans Castorp heard Herr Settembrini say, as if from some great distance—his eyes were following her as she now left the dining hall by way of the glass door. “’Tis Lilith.”

“Who?” Hans Castorp asked.

The question delighted the man of literature. He replied, “The first wife Adam had. You’d best

beware . . .”

Besides the two of them, only Dr. Blumenkohl was still in his seat, at the far end of the table. The rest of the diners, including Joachim, had moved on to the social rooms.

“You’re full of poetry and verses this evening,” Hans Castorp said. “What’s all this about Lilli? You mean Adam was married twice? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“According to Hebrew tradition he was. Lilith then became a wraith who haunts young men by night—her beautiful hair makes her particularly dangerous.”

“Why, how disgusting! A wraith with beautiful hair. You simply can’t stomach things like that, can you? And so here you come and turn the lights back on, so to speak, so you can set young men back on the right path—isn’t that what you’re up to, Lodovico?” Hans Castorp said giddily. He had drunk quite a bit of burgundy and champagne.

“Now listen—that’s enough of that, my good engineer!” Settembrini commanded with a scowl. “You will please use forms of address appropriate to the educated West. No first names. Formal pronouns, if you please. What you are trying to do there doesn’t suit you at all.”

“But why not? It’s Mardi Gras! It’s common practice on an evening like this.”

“Yes, just to add a little uncivil excitement to things. For people to use informal pronouns or first names when they have no real reason to do so is a repulsively barbaric practice, a slovenly game, a way of playing with the givens of civilization and human progress, against both of which it is directed—shamelessly, insolently directed. Please, do not presume that in calling you ‘my lad,’ I was addressing you in that fashion. I was merely quoting a passage from the masterpiece of your national literature. I was speaking poetically, as it were.”

“So was I. And I’ll go on speaking more or less poetically, too—because the moment seems to call for it, that’s why I am speaking this way. I’m not saying I find it all that natural and easy to use familiar pronouns. On the contrary, I have to overcome my own resistance, give myself a poke just to be able to do it. But now that I’ve given myself a poke, I’ll go on using them quite happily, with all my heart.”

“With all your heart?”

“With all my heart, yes, please believe me. We’ve been up here together for so long now—seven months, if you stop to count—which isn’t all that much by our standards up here, but when viewed from down below, now that I think back on it, it’s quite a long time. Well, and so we’ve spent it here with one another, because life has brought us together here, have seen one another almost every day and had interesting conversations, some on subjects I would not have understood anything about

down below. But I certainly have up here—they were very important and relevant, so that whenever

we discussed something I paid strict attention. What I mean is, whenever you as a homo humanus were explaining things to me—because I didn’t have all that much to contribute, of course, given my previous inexperience, and could only feel that everything you said was well worth listening to. About Carducci—but that was the least of it. For instance, about how the world republic is bound up with beautiful style or how time and human progress are related—because if there were no time there couldn’t be any human progress, and the world would be just an old water hole, a stinking pond. What would I have known about all that without you! And so I’m simply addressing you with personal pronouns, I can’t really help it, you’ll have to excuse me—I didn’t know how to go about it any other way. I’m not good at that. There you sit and here I am speaking to you like this, and that’s that. You’re not just anybody, a face with a name, you’re a representative of something, Herr Settembrini, a representative here and now and at my side—that’s what you are,” Hans Castorp declared, slamming the palm of his hand on the tablecloth. “And now I want to thank you,” he went on, shoving his glass of champagne and burgundy up against Herr Settembrini’s coffee cup, as if to toast him there on the table, “to thank you for having been so kind as to look after me for the past seven months—a young donkey with all sorts of new experiences coming at me—for lending a helping hand in my exercises and experiments and trying to play a corrective role in my life, quite sine pecunia, sometimes with stories, sometimes more abstractly. I have the clear feeling that the moment has come to thank you for all that, and to ask for your forgiveness for the times I was a poor student, one of ‘life’s problem children,’ as you put it. I was very touched by your saying that, and it still touches me whenever I think of it. A problem child, that’s certainly what I’ve been for you and your pedagogic streak—you spoke about that the very first day. And of course, that’s one of the connections you’ve taught me about—between humanism and pedagogy. And I would come up with even more if you gave me a little time. Forgive me, then, and don’t think badly of me. To your health, Lodovico—I wish you long life. I empty my glass in honor of your literary efforts to eradicate human suffering!” he concluded, and throwing his head back, he downed his burgundy and champagne in two great gulps. “And now let’s go join the others.”

“My good engineer, whatever has got into you?” the Italian asked, his eyes full of amazement, rising to leave the table as well. “Those sound like words of farewell.”

“No—why should it be a farewell?” Hans Castorp said, ducking the issue, not just in a metaphorical sense with his words, but also physically, swinging his upper body around in a wide curve and taking the arm of Fräulein Engelhart, who had come to fetch them. The director was personally tapping a bowl of carnival punch that had been donated by the management, she reported. The

gentlemen, she said, would have to come with her at once if they hoped to have a glass of it. And so

they left together.

And indeed, there in the middle of his guests, all holding out their little punch glasses to him, Director Behrens was standing beside a round table with a white tablecloth, ladling steaming liquid from a large bowl. He, too, had spruced up his appearance a little for Mardi Gras, for in addition to his white clinical smock, which, as a man ever on professional call, he wore today as always, he had donned a genuine Turkish fez, scarlet red with a black tassel dangling over one ear—costume enough to lend his already striking appearance an even more curious and outlandish look. The white smock emphasized the director’s height; and if you took into account the arched neck and pictured him instead pulled up to full height, he seemed a man almost larger than life, topped by a small, colorful head with very peculiar features. At least Hans Castorp thought that face had never looked so odd as it did this evening under its foolish headgear: that snub-nosed, flat physiognomy, purplish and hectic, with blue, watery eyes bulging beneath very blond brows, and a pale, skewed, short-cropped moustache above the hitch of his lips. Bending back from the steam eddying up from the punch bowl, he let the brown liquid—a sugary arrack punch—fall in long arcs from the ladle into the glasses held out to receive it, gushing the whole time in his high-spirited jargon, so that the process was greeted by salvos of laughter all around.

“Old Scratch himself atop them all,” Settembrini explained softly, gesturing toward the director— and then was dragged away from Hans Castorp’s side. Dr. Krokowski was on hand as well. Short, stout, and stolid, his black shiny smock draped over his shoulders so that the sleeves hung empty in domino fashion, he twisted his wrist around and held his glass up at eye-level as he chatted merrily with a group of cross-dressed masqueraders. Music was struck up. The girl with the face of a tapir played Handel’s Largo on the violin, accompanied on the piano by the man from Mannheim. This was followed by a Grieg sonata—salon music of a Nordic nature, which met with polite applause, even from the costumed and uncostumed patients seated now, bottles in ice-buckets at their sides, at the two bridge tables that had been set up. The doors stood open, and several guests were standing out in the lobby as well. One group next to the round punch table was watching the director, who was introducing them to a parlor game. He stood there bent down over the table, but with his head held to one side so that everyone could see that he had his eyes closed, and drew blindly with a pencil on the back side of a calling card; and without any help from his eyes, his massive hand traced an outline, the profile of a pig—more simplified and slightly idealized than realistic, but it was undoubtedly a rudimentary pig that he managed to assemble under such handicapped circumstances. It was a clever stunt, and he did it well. The little squinty eye had ended up in

approximately the correct position, a little too far back from the snout, but more or less in place; and

the same could be said of the pointed ear atop the head or the little legs dangling from the rounded belly; and the opposing arch of the spine continued in the charming little spiral ringlet of a tail. When he finished, people cried, “Ah!” and crowded forward to try it, eager to emulate the master. The problem was that few of them could have drawn a pig with their eyes open, let alone closed. And what monsters were born! They lacked all coherence. The eyes landed outside the head, the legs inside the paunch, which did not come close to joining the rest, and the tail spiraled off alone into nowhere—an independent arabesque, with no organic connection to the amorphous body. They laughed so hard they almost burst. Others joined the group. The cardplayers took notice and came over now, curious, still holding their cards in their hands like fans. The onlookers watched the eyelids of each contestant, making sure there was no peeking, which several were tempted to try in their helplessness; they giggled and snorted while each candidate blundered blindly at the task, then crowed with laughter when he finally opened his eyes and gazed down at his absurd botched job. Seduced by overconfidence, everyone had to try his hand. The calling card, although large, was soon so full on both sides that the abortive attempts overlapped. But the director sacrificed a second one from his case, on which Prosecutor Paravant, after thinking the task through, tried to draw his pig in one continuous line—with the result that his failure exceeded all others. The decorative design he produced did not even vaguely resemble a pig—or anything else in this world, for that matter. Hulloos, laughter, and raucous congratulations! Someone brought a menu from the dining hall, so that several people, both men and women, could try at once, and for each contestant there was an audience keeping a close eye out and someone waiting to grab the pencil being used. There were only three pencils, belonging to various guests, and people snatched them out of one another’s hands. Having introduced his parlor game and seeing that it was a hit, the director departed with his aide-de-camp in tow.

Hans Castorp joined the crowd to watch a contestant, stood looking over Joachim’s shoulder, propping one elbow against it while holding his chin tight in all five fingers, his other hand braced at his hip. He talked and laughed. He wanted to draw, too, demanded loudly he be allowed to, and was given the pencil, already just a stump of a thing that you could barely hold between your thumb and forefinger. He cursed the pencil, raised his head toward the ceiling and closed his eyes; loudly damning the useless pencil again and cursing just in general, he hastily drew some atrocity on the paper, at one point missing it entirely and ending up on the tablecloth. “That doesn’t count!” he shouted amid well-deserved laughter. “How can I possibly draw with a thing like that—to hell with it!” And he tossed the offending stump into the punch bowl. “Who has a decent pencil? Who’ll lend

me one? I have to try again. A pencil, a real pencil! Does anyone have a pencil?” he called out to all

sides, keeping his left forearm propped against the tabletop, but raising his right hand and shaking it in the air. No one had a pencil for him. He turned around and walked back into the room, continuing to shout—headed directly toward Clavdia Chauchat, who, as he well knew, was standing just beyond the portieres in the little salon, smiling and watching the goings-on around the punch bowl.

Behind him he heard someone calling him—in melodious foreign words: “Eh! Ingegnere! Aspetti! Che cosa fa! Ingegnere! Un po’ di ragione, sa! Ma è matto questo ragazzo!” But he drowned out the voice by shouting even more loudly himself, and Herr Settembrini could now be seen flinging one hand above his head at the end of an extended arm, a common enough gesture in his homeland (but one whose meaning is hard to put into words). And uttering a long drawn-out “Ehh—!” he left the Mardi Gras festivities.

Hans Castorp, however, was standing in the brick schoolyard, staring from close up into a pair of blue-gray-green, epicanthic eyes above prominent cheekbones; and he said, “Do you have a pencil, perhaps?”

He was pale as death, as pale as on the day when he had returned from his solitary walk, still splattered with blood, to attend the lecture. Nerves controlling the blood vessels to his face were so successful at their task that the skin of his young face was drained of blood, turned pallid and cold, making the nose pinched and the area under his eyes so leaden that he looked almost like a corpse. But Hans Castorp’s sympathetic nerves kept his heart thumping so hard that regular respiration was out of the question, and a shudder ran over the young man, the work of his body’s sebaceous glands, which stood erect now, along with their hair follicles.

The woman in the paper tricorn looked him up and down—and her smile betrayed neither pity nor concern for his ravaged condition. Her sex knows no pity or concern when staring at the horrors of passion, an elemental emotion with which the female is apparently much more familiar than the male, who is not at all at ease with it—and if she finds him in that state, she never fails to greet him with mockery and schadenfreude. But then, he would certainly not have thanked her for either pity or concern, either.

“Do you mean me?” the bare-armed patient replied, in response to the familiar pronoun in his question. “Yes, I might.” At most, her smile and voice suggested the kind of excitement that comes when the first words in a long, silent relationship are spoken at last—a subtle excitement secretly incorporating into this one moment everything that has happened until now. “You are very ambitious . . . You are . . . very . . . eager,” she said, likewise using personal pronouns, continuing to

mock him in her exotic accent with its strange r and stranger open e, and stressing the word

“ambitious” on the first syllable, so that in her opaque, pleasantly husky voice it sounded like a word from her mother tongue. She rummaged in her leather handbag, peered down into it, first pulled out a handkerchief, from which she then extracted a silver pencil-holder, a slight, fragile trinket, never intended for serious use. That pencil long ago, the first one, had been more straightforward, handier. “Voilà,” she said and picked the little pencil up by the tip, holding it between thumb and forefinger and waggling it back and forth.

She both gave it to him and held it back, so that he took it without actually taking hold of it—raising his hand, very close to the pencil, his fingers ready to grasp it, but not actually grasping; and the gaze from his leaden eye sockets shifted between the object and Clavdia’s Tartar face. His bloodless lips were open, and they stayed open, unused, as he said, “You see, I knew it—I knew you’d have one.”

“Prenez garde, il est un peu fragile,” she said. “C’est à visser, tu sais.” And as they both bent their heads down over the pencil, she showed him the standard screw mechanism, from which emerged a very thin, hard needle of graphite that could leave no real mark.

They stood there bending toward one another. He had donned a formal, stiff collar for this evening and so could support his chin on that.

“A poor thing, but thine own,” he said, brow to brow with her, gazing down at the pencil, his lips never moving, so that the two labials were left unsounded.

“Oh, and you are witty, too,” she replied with a brief smile, raising her head now and letting him take the pencil. (Though God only knew how he had managed to be witty—with apparently not a drop of blood left in his head.) “And so go, step lively, draw, draw well, withdraw to draw.” She was sending him wittily on his way, too, it seemed.

“No, you haven’t drawn yet. You must draw now,” he said, leaving out the m in “must” and taking a step back to let her pass.

“Do you mean me?” she said again, and this time her astonishment seemed directed at more than his request. At first she stood there smiling in some confusion, but then, as if pulled by a magnetic force, followed him as he backed away toward the punch table.

But it turned out that the diversion had lost its appeal, was in its last throes. One person was still drawing, but had no audience. The calling cards were covered with nonsense, everyone having given it a helpless try—but the table was as good as deserted, particularly since a current was now flowing in the opposite direction. Once it became clear that the doctors had left, word quickly spread that there would be dancing. The table was shoved to one side. Scouts were posted at the doors to the

reading and music rooms and instructed to give the signal if the “boss,” Krokowski, or the head

nurse was sighted. A Slavic lad passionately attacked the keyboard of the little walnut piano. The first couples began to spin inside a little circle of spectators seated in chairs and on stools.

Hans Castorp waved good-bye to the table as it drifted away—“Farewell!” he said. He pointed with his chin first to some free chairs he had spotted in the little salon, and then to a sheltered corner just to the right of the portieres. He said nothing, perhaps because the music was too loud. He dragged one chair—this was for Frau Chauchat, almost a reclining throne, with a high, wooden-frame back and plush upholstery—over to the spot he had indicated in his pantomime, and for himself he selected a crackling, creaking wicker chair with scrolled armrests, on which he now sat down beside her, bending forward, his arms on the scrolls, her pencil in his hand, his feet well hidden under his chair. She, however, was forced to lie far back into the plush cushions, with her knees pulled up; nevertheless, she managed to cross one leg over the other and wiggled a foot in the air—her ankle, visible above the rim of her black patent leather shoe, was wrapped in a taut black silk stocking. The people seated in front of them would occasionally get up to dance, making room for those who had tired of dancing. There was a constant coming and going.

“You’re wearing a new dress,” he said, as an excuse for gazing at her. And now he heard her answer. “New? You are conversant with my wardrobe?”

“I am right, am I not?”

“Yes. I recently had it made here, by Lukaček, the tailor in the village. He does work for many of the

ladies up here. Do you like it?”

“Very much,” he said, letting his gaze pass over her again before casting his eyes down. “Do you want to dance?” he added.

“Would you like to?” she asked, her brows raised in surprise, but still with a smile. “I’d do it, if that’s what you want.”

“You’re not quite as well-mannered as I thought you were,” she said. When he dismissed this with a laugh, she added, “Your cousin has already gone.”

“Yes, he is my cousin,” he confirmed quite unnecessarily. “I also noticed a while ago that he had left. I’m sure he’s taking his rest cure.”

“He is a very rigid, very respectable, very ‘German’ young man.”

“Rigid? Respectable?” he repeated. “I understand French better than I speak it. What you mean to say is that he’s pedantic. Do you consider us Germans pedantic—us other Germans?”

“We are talking about your cousin. But it’s true, you are all a little bourgeois. You love order more than liberty, all Europe knows that.”

“Love . . . love. What is it, exactly? The word lacks definition. What one man has, the other loves, as

the German proverb puts it,” Hans Castorp contended. “I have been giving freedom some thought of late,” he continued. “That is, I heard the word mentioned so often, that I started thinking about it. I’ll tell you in French what it is I’ve been thinking. What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order—that’s the point!” “You don’t say! How amusing. Was it really your cousin who got you thinking such strange things?” “No, he is truly a good soul, his is a simple temperament, not prone to dangers, you understand. But he is not a bourgeois, he is a military man.”

“Not prone to dangers?” she repeated with difficulty. “By which you mean to say: a thoroughly steadfast nature, secure in itself? But your poor cousin is seriously ill.”

“Who told you that?”

“We all know about one another here.” “Did Director Behrens tell you that?”

“Possibly, when he let me see his paintings.”

“Don’t you mean, when he was painting your portrait?” “Why not? Did you think it successful, my portrait?”

“Oh yes, extremely. Behrens captured your skin perfectly, oh, truly quite lifelike. I would very much have liked to have been a portrait painter myself, if only to have had the chance to study your skin, as he did.”

“Please, sir, speak German!”

“Oh, but I am speaking German, even if I am speaking French. Painting is the kind of study that is both artistic and medical—in a word: it is, you see, a humanist pursuit. So what do you say, wouldn’t you like to dance?”

“Certainly not—how childish. Behind the doctor’s back. The moment Behrens returns, they will all throw themselves on their lounge chairs. How utterly ridiculous it all is.”

“Do you hold him in such high respect, then?”

“Whom?” she asked, pronouncing the word in a strange, clipped way. “Behrens.”

“Enough of your Behrens already! It’s much too small a space for dancing. And on the carpet besides

. . . Let’s just watch the others.”

“Yes, let’s do that,” he concurred, and with her beside him, he turned his grandfather’s blue, thoughtful eyes, framed in a pallid face, to watch the costumed patients skip about in the salon here and in the reading room beyond. Silent Sister was capering with Blue Henry, and Frau Salomon,

who was dressed like a gentleman in evening clothes—swallowtail coat, white vest, amply filled

shirt, monocle, and painted-on moustache—spun about on her little patent leather high-heeled shoes (which looked very out of place with her long, black men’s trousers) in the arms of her Punchinello, whose lips shone bloody red in his whitened face and whose eyes looked like an albino rabbit’s. The caped Greek moved his legs in their purple tights in perfect harmony with Rasmussen, whose black, low-cut dress sparkled. The prosecutor in his kimono, Frau Wurmbrandt, the general consul’s wife, and young Gänser were dancing as a threesome, their arms thrown around one another. As for Frau Stöhr, she danced with her broom, pressing it to her heart and caressing its bristles as if they were the hair on a man’s head.

“Let’s do that,” Hans Castorp said mechanically again. And so they went on speaking softly, their conversation covered by the piano. “Let’s sit here and watch, as if in a dream. It is like a dream for me, you know, for me to be sitting here like this—like an especially deep dream, for a man must sleep very heavily to dream like this. What I’m trying to say is: it is a dream I know well, have dreamed for a long time, yes, eternally, sitting here with you as I am now. Behold—eternity.”

“A poet!” she said. “A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet—behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!”

“I’m afraid we are not at all, not in the least, as we should be,” he replied. “Not in any way. We are perhaps life’s problem children, that’s all.”

“Nicely put. Tell me . . . surely it would not have been too difficult to dream your dream before now. It is a little late for monsieur to decide to address his words to his humble servant.”

“What good are words?” he said. “Why speak? Speech, discourse—those are nice republican things, I admit. But I doubt if they are equally poetic. One of our fellow residents, who has in fact become something of a friend, Monsieur Settembrini . . .”

“Who just let fly with a few words in your direction.”

“Be that as it may, he is no doubt an eloquent speaker, indeed loves to recite beautiful verses—but does that make the man a poet?”

“I deeply regret never having had the pleasure of making the gentleman’s acquaintance.” “I can well believe it.”

“Ah! You believe it.”

“What? But that’s just a phrase one uses, with no real significance whatever. As you’ve surely noticed, I barely speak French. All the same, I would rather speak with you in it than in my own language, since for me speaking French is like speaking without saying anything somehow—with no responsibilities, the way we speak in a dream. Do you understand?”

“More or less.”

“That will do. Speech—” Hans Castorp continued, “what a poor business it is! In eternity, people won’t speak at all. Eternity, you see, will be like drawing that piglet: you’ll turn your head away and close your eyes.”

“Not bad! You seem quite at home in eternity, know its every detail, no doubt. I must say I find you a very curious little dreamer.”

“Besides,” Hans Castorp said, “if I had spoken to you before this, I would have had to use the formal pronoun.”

“I see. Do you intend to use only the informal with me from now on?” “But of course. I’ve used it with you all along, and will for all eternity.”

“That’s a bit much, I must say. In any case, you won’t have the opportunity to use informal pronouns with me for much longer. I’m leaving.”

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