The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  “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 improvisat
ion, 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 ch
arge 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.